Transcript for:
Understanding Probiotics and Gut Health

[Music] we should be teaching doctors probotics nutrition microbiome these Concepts that are absolutely integral to our life Dr Gregor Reed is the guy who actually helped author the globally accepted definition of the word probiotics I just want to make sure that we are not scared to try things these are not Magic Bullets but it should be part of our daily life I think to enhance our beneficial microbes today he decodes all things probiotic dispelling microbiome misconceptions and dissecting gut health facts from fiction how do we apply probiotics across our society it could be unbelievably impactful if people took probotics you could significantly reduce the use of antibiotics the time people are off work the respiratory infections we have been great at pushing chemicals and not great at helping beneficial microbes Prosper what is a probiotic why are they important and how do we distinguish a good probiotic product from a bad one we have a society that is terrific at plowing chemicals into the environment how do we get beneficial microbes into our [Music] [Music] systems today's episode is brought to you by the awesome organizations that make this show possible [Music] Gregor it's a pleasure to have you here today I'm so excited to talk to you we were introduced by ARA Catz the co-founder of seed I think at the top it's important just for the sake of disclosure and transparency to say that you're on the scientific Advisory Board of seed seed is a really great partner of ours here on the podcast so we have to just sort of make that disclosure but we're not here to really talk about seed we're here to talk about probiotics in general the science of probiotics and um so thank you for joining us today it's my honor happy to be here so let's start with some real Basics like when we're talking about probiotics what are we talking about what is a probiotic I know people don't like scientific definitions but the the definition that came out of that meeting in Argentina which was was actually set up because the argen government had heard people talk about probiotics and they said well what are they and they asked the FAO the food and agricultureal organization of the United Nations if they could get a panel together to tell them what it really was and the definition was live microorganisms that when administered in adequate amounts can fa a health benefit on the host so they have to be live they have to be administered and that to me was a very important word because because everyone thinks that you can only swallow a probiotic and it is only for your gut in fact it can be for your mouth it can be for your skin it can be for the Euro gental tract Etc inadequate amounts so and people always say well what's an adequate amount and you'll see companies say we have got 25 billion and we've got this you don't need 25 billion if you only need a billion and so you have to show what the adequate amount is confers a health benefit on the host so that means you have to prove it and it's not a case of oh I had some this morning and it's changed my life no no no no no how do you prove it so you need to have a study where it Compares something with a placebo or with a drug that you're looking at and unfortunately a lot of companies don't do this and so a real probiotic has had human studies if it's a probiotic for humans or if it's honeybees or another horse same thing and you have to show what you expect from this organism and so you have to define the organism now people get all confused with this cuz they'll they'll look in a shop and they'll say okay this is lactobacillus in it oh it must be probiotic well no and so the example I give is you and I um I've got a chance to go for dinner with George cloney tonight would you like to come and most people will say yes we get to the restaurant and it's an 82y old guy from Alabama his name is George Clin I didn't tell you who I was going to meet and so you have to Define that organism and then you have to prove that that organism or the collection of them do something and so people then ask me well which probiotic should I take I can't answer that question because I'd have to find out why is it they're taking it I wish I had a simple answer for you what is a probiotic but it's not as simple and yet it should be it should be that something that is named probiotic has been tested in humans it's been shown to have an effect and this is the effect you can expect if you take it it wasn't that many years ago that nobody had even heard of probiotics let alone were talking about them and now it's been so thoroughly commodified that all manner of consumer products uh have the word probiotic on their label not and not just Foods y we're going to get into the regulatory aspects of all of this but it's become so profuse that it is devoid of any meaning whatsoever and it leaves consumers even well educated or the most well-intentioned among us and I would include myself in that group like trying to make the right decision but really not being able to know who to trust or where to turn because there is no true oversight and because by its very nature this is so much more complex than meets the eye yeah if you are trying to confer a health benefit you have to be careful what organism you pick I mean I I went to a store here yesterday and I saw this product that had uh basilis strains and it said it was selected for Women's Health women don't have basilis in the vagina and why enough would you put these organisms in the vagina it seems to me that the the company had no rationale for picking the strains and and then they tell a story well it's okay to tell a story but tell it with here's the organisms here's what they do here's why you should be taking them here's the the expectation of what will happen and it's difficult because you don't want to go the I don't want it to see it go to the extent that there's a government overseer and uh then Things become super expensive to develop and and you can't say anything about the product I mean the European food safety tried to do that which I wasn't very happy with and we'll talk about later but it is difficult for a consumer to look at a product on the shelf and know it's very difficult now I've tried in my book to explain what it is you could look for there are websites like isap which is a wonderful organization that is has got blogs and uh information on it that helps people but if you do a Google search isup doesn't come up first the thing that comes up first is a company who's smart who knows how to get number one in sure it's whoever's paying for that placement it's and it's generally just products you're not going to get the best advice rising to the surface on the first page of your Google search yeah and unfortunately you don't get it from Harvard uh medical school or Cleveland Clinic either as I pointed out in my book I mean when you get well respected organizations like that why don't they get an expert on probotics to to talk about it and and help people as I say I go back to your very first question I don't think I answered it terribly well because there isn't just one sentence that says this is it mhm it must drive you crazy though when you're walking down the grocery aisles or Pharmacy Christy I remember an inter shop in New Zealand so you know knowing my knowledge on probotics and and I said by the way that product Oh No She says it's a wonderful probotics she said we had um a representative of the company in here talking about how wonderful it is and I said well actually if you look at the product itself and you look at the strains and you go to Hub Med and you put the strains in none of them are studied and then if you look at the references that that company has put on their website they're reviews or they're papers from me that have nothing whatsoever to do with the product and you want people to buy that the onus shouldn't be on the consumer to have to do all that heavy lifting though that's the thing you like dieticians and Physicians and Pharmacists and people in these health food stores but unfortunately they don't in many cases they don't understand it either yeah and maybe they've not taken the time to read it uh I'm not sure but if I was a shop owner and I got a product in that said probo I'd be like okay where's the data show me the data I'll put your product on the Shelf but that's not what drives it it's can we sell it and will people buy it and what's the profit I make so much of this I feel like can be traced to the fact that this is still in its infancy in terms of understanding and education and of course the commodification of all of it and one thing that comes across really boldly in your book probiotics a story about Hope is the you know Journey that you've been on for for decades where you've been budding up against the calcified medical establishment trying to get them to embrace and you know entertain the validity of probiotics in in the medical kind of landscape of treatment and health promotion and it's been a frustrating yeah many decades for you do you feel like that's changing I think some of it is correct uh because I think some products are not so worthy of being on the Shelf to be honest and that draws cynicism and I think there are clinical studies that show some probiotics don't work I think that's terrific cuz then we know not to use them but in general there was absolutely zero interest in a beneficial organism and I remember I joined Dr Andy Bruce in 1982 but in 1973 so you look how far away that was he did a study of the urogenital tract of women and he said that women who have a recurrent un tract infection they not only have EOL in the bladder they have them in the vagina and the perum because they come from the rectum and it's anatomy and it's that's it he looked at the controls that never had a UR trct infection he said well there's lact to basili there so if you look back in history everyone went after eoli can we develop a vaccine blah blah blah and it never worked and he said maybe they're protective so that took a physici and an observation and an openness to say let's investigate it I think there is more openness now and probably the microbiome project was partly to help with that because it opened people's eyes and so I think you find that there are more Physicians interested there's more prepared to try different things but we're not there yet in part because I think we need a lot more funding for the basic science to understand which strains how did they work let's get technology to find out how they work so for example you've maybe had the pillcam so the pillcam is a you swallow it it's got a camera at the end of it now why don't we have a a camera and then a little old device to take a a biopsy that's fine but then turn the thing around and have a delivery system that you can deliver organisms right to that site now that's an engineering project that's not a microbiology project and there's been this sort of lack of communication I think sometimes between the companies that could be really helpful and the companies that are making the product so donon or or a food company they're not going to go and develop a device like this but wouldn't it be amazing if you could have that type of Technology brought in to the delivery of food and dietary supplement or or drugs uh if there are probolic drugs which there aren't many at the moment but um I have a friend uh who my colleague who took over from me Jeremy Burton and he's looking at really complicated Imaging now can you follow a microorganism so if you take a prootic can you follow them through the gut well if you could imagine it would open our eyes to where they go what they do and he did it in an animal model and he he found some of the organisms at distant sites in the body well does that really happen in humans if it does we should know about it if they produce certain molecules in the small intestine or the large intestine shouldn't we find out what those molecules are and what they're doing for us so there's a lot of really cool stuff that we could be getting to and I we're just not there yet and part of it I think is funding and also the bringing together of different expertise and just a general openness possibility I think right well yeah don't talk about openness because uh I was number one in the Canadian Grant rejection panel I mean really it was ridiculous no one cared about probotics and ironically some of the people in the panel who rejected me ended up working on probotics but if you don't have an openness to fund some of these studies um how are you going to advance it the only way is maybe through industry and Industry unfortunately is not doing very much I don't think they could be doing an awful lot more on mechanistic Research one of the things that you said that really kind of solidified in my mind just how big this field is and how important it is was when you said humans are three things you know what I'm talking about right can you explain and elaborate on that I mean to me they're a skeleton and the tissues that surround them and microbes and we have completely ignored the third piece yeah we have no real intentionality around that third piece which is big how many microbes are we host to in terms of in in the ratio to human cells yep I mean some people say 10 times 100 times it doesn't really matter there's a lot and we don't know if we should have certain types I showed this slide of of a baby's development so you see you know the after a few weeks and the heart starts beating and then the the the brain starts functioning we haven't done anything to intervene in that or to understand that process now imagine if microbes through the things that they produce the metabolites are influencing that wouldn't we want to kind of know and and try and understand that I'm not saying manipulate it CU that that sounds terrible because then you say oh you're manipulating the natural development of a baby but we unfortunately have outcomes that are not positive for some babies now we're seeing you know a lot of autism and we're seeing s of cognitive function impairment and things like that well if there was an understanding of the development of the microbes in the human and what they produce maybe there's other ways that we can intervene with probotics and same in the elderly you know you start to see studies now talking about things that can manipulate cognitive function in the elderly or delay dementia Etc and they'll probably be a role for microbes and that as well it's not a Magic Bullet but the connection has to be there we're living in a planet that is a microbial Planet if we wipe ourselves out guess what microbes will still be here M they were here long before us we came from them yeah this under appreciation of the role that microbes are playing in dysfunction and optimal function I've just written this piece for the Royal s of Canada on one Health but they're interested in one Health one Health is essentially the the health of everything living in the planet but I wanted to look at the microbial role and I looked at humans and animals and with colleagues coral and honeybees Etc you have to understand that they're part of everything and if you go into to uh neonatal Intensive Care Unit which type of beneficial microbes are entering that unit none none and you look at the oceans and some of the poisons that we're pouring into the oceans which beneficial microbes are we putting in the oceans and so you can take any ecosystem and talk about wait a minute we're creating the disbiosis by what we're doing and so how do we reverse that and unfortunately we don't have many solutions and I mean a probiotic application like um to Coral which I think is super cool you go down and you inject probiotics into Coral now that's great in a small scale but shouldn't we be looking at a bigger scale than that and shouldn't we be looking at our waste treatment plants and some of the toxic compounds that are in there and some of the microbes and what would happen if more of us took fermented foods and probiotics and put more of beneficial microbes into the waste plants would we then do something positive for society I don't know but that's the thinking that we have to start looking at it seems like there would be solutions for those that are willing to to look given the role that microbes play and everything and it's so interesting and curious that what serves the micro serves the macro all the way from you know the very specific you know acute condition in a you know premature infant all the way up to you know ocean preservation yep and as humans what have we done we have and if you look at why the FDA was formed it was because of snake oil off the back of a covered wagons right but they're they're very good at looking at chemicals antibiotics and drugs and yet they're really not kind of used to and to some extent don't know what to do with beneficial microbes to be honest and so we have a society that is terrific at plowing chemicals into the environment many of them are beneficial I'm not s of saying we should wipe out stop all chemicals but we've forgotten what the side effects are and I remember in our hospital so this I don't remember how many years ago 15 20 years ago the two presidents of our local hospitals were sitting in the room and I said you have a crisis in this city of claustrum defil there are people dying in this city with this disease I said why don't you get feal microbial transplant why don't you get a a physician in here that can do that they thought I was an alien honestly they looked at me you nuts well guess what we got one The Cure ratees 90% now that's thinking outside the box that's saying antibiotics didn't work in fact they may have caused the problem how can we use microbes to try and sort it now we don't fully understand what the microbes do and that's a whole other topic but what I'm saying is you have to think outside the box and realize that we have been great at pushing chemicals and not great at helping beneficial microbes Prosper do you think that there's a bias against this type of intervention that might have something to do with the legacy of germ Theory where we decided that that you know basically any and all kind of invading microorganisms are a Potential Threat and so we then assume or approach this with greater trepidation because we perceive a threat level or a harm level that actually isn't rooted in truth or reality I'm sure that's part of it I remember watching a television show in the states many years ago and there was a woman she said this is terrible my baby is crawling on the carpet at the door oh my God we can't have that cuz they're picking up these terrible organisms well actually there's other places in your house with us organisms that maybe they shouldn't be picking up but why are you so scared of organisms I mean yes we should be scared of pathogens and especially now viruses are going to be a threat to our civilization but we've forgotten that we're carpet bombing when we give some of these antimicrobials and that's it's not good anywhere right we want wide exposure to a wide variety of environments pets you know dirty carpets y you know crawling around in the mud in the backyard or whatever all of this is serving the better health of the microbiome and the gut Flora Etc I mean we've created a society where a chicken probably has salmon L on it so um you can't have the baby crawl around if you've cut chicken right well we as a society created that why we do that why don't we have chickens that don't have salmonella and then we would have less to worry about again I look at things slightly differently from a lot of people but if you believe that microbes can be good for us the question is how can you integrate that feeling into your life and how things are are done in in the way that you go about life and that's from raising your kids to preparing meals to having more fermented food in your diet for example um or finding a fermented food that you actually enjoy because not everybody likes kimchi and kombucha but that comes from wait a minute microbes are good for us it's a mindset shift as much as anything else and that paradigm shift is going to be required in order to create that openness for raidar Education research Etc I said it in my book I gave a lecture to medical students and uh it was an elective so they never had to learn anything about about the microbiome and probotics but the 75 came to my class some of them were reading books in the background I don't know what they were doing but I was happy that at least they were open to it because if you don't teach it in medical school how are they going to learn right and then they canceled it because they wanted to have more mental health lectures which is fine mental health is important for medical students but why did you cancel my lecture why didn't you cancel one is salmonella we know what salmonella is right or some other thing that is Maybe not as important we should be teaching doctors nutrition microbiome probotics these Concepts that are absolutely integral to our life it seems like an exciting field to get into if you're a young doctor or scientist particularly with the Advent the the quickly progressing Advent of all these technological tools it would seem to reason that AI could be deployed to study these things because you have massive data sets and all these strains how do you make sense of all of these data sets and you know string the pieces together to come up with some kind of appropriate diagnostic so I had a a talk on this topic AI in medicine a few years ago and I said you don't have the data because the data you have are okay all the drugs I'm on you might get my dietary recall you'll get my genetics I never give you a poop sample I never give you a saliva a sample you don't know any of the microbes in my body how enough AI going to come up with answers if we haven't got that basic stuff and so that means we have to change clinical practice and I I again I said this probably 10 years ago in our hospital we should be collecting these samples and when a patient comes in we should be thinking how are we going to help this patient's microbiota instead what do we do nothing we give them drugs or we treat them and I remember I got a colonoscopy and I said said to the doctor okay you flushed out all my good organisms how are you going to get them back in for me he thought I was an idiot well that's that's common but in the concept of a hospital in our hospital at one point they told us that the daily food budget for a patient was like0 50 CS well wait a minute if you have a patient who's seriously ill shouldn't you be looking at beneficial microbes and nutrition to help them recover and studies I site in the book about in Germany they were doing that guess what they' less infections they were out quicker they had a better outcome in the patients so why aren't we following these protocols there's this recalcitrance there's this resistance that doesn't make sense to me within the hospital setup hey everybody today's episode is brought to you by seed gut health I talk about it all the time on the podcast you know it's important if you've even listen to a few of my podcasts I think I've maybe devoted I don't know a dozen two dozen episodes to the microbiome you got to take care of your gut health if you want to have Optimal Health how do you do that well your nutrition your lifestyle habits sleep all of these things play into that but it's also important to find a really good Prebiotic and probiotic how do you do that well there's a lot of nonsense out there so you got to follow the science and the best evidence-based product that I found out there is seeds ds01 daily symbiotic I've been taking it for I don't know over 3 years at this point every single day there's just a tremendous amount of science behind this product I urge you to check it out and right now it's a great time to do that because you can get 25% off your first month of seeds ds01 daily symbiotic hit the link in the description below to visit seed.com richol and use code Rich Roll 25 get on [Music] it um well let's dig a little bit more into the origins of that recalcitrance and the resistance and it's rooted in your origin story I mean what's so interesting about this book is I thought it was going to be this very dense science primer on probiotics and it really serves as part Memoir part partly a book about Golf and golf and life but it's also this letter to Young scientists and and medical doctors and you do that through telling your own story so yeah where did this interest in probiotics begin like walk me through the Journey Journey well as I said Dr Bruce had done this observation and I joined his lab in 1982 I did my PhD in New Zealand and I came to Canada and he really felt the lacab basilla had a role in protecting women against urog gental infections and if you think about it to this day for 50 years we haven't done anything for these patients the antibiotics that you get for an ecoli infection are not specific for eoli ideally they should be no they kill other organisms and so this concept of at least promoting The Beneficial microbes if not utilizing them to our benefit was really his idea and we started studying the organisms and of course if I bring that up till today those young scientists today that are coming up with pioneering breakthroughs that the rest of society or the community will say are ridiculous and if they really believe in them and if the data is supportive they shouldn't put off now I'll give an example in urology is a guy called Don coffee who's a brilliant scientist from Johns Hopkins and he was sharing an NIH panel he told us this story in drono and he said to the panel before I even look at the grants in front of me I'm going to tell you right now I'm going to take the craziest idea that has been put forward and I'm going to fund it he goes oh yeah yeah yeah yeah right so anyway this idea came up he says this is the one I'm funding ah no no no come on you're crazy this is a a simple experiment it's not going to work blah blah blah so he finally got the panel to do a visit to the lab and they eventually approved it this was CIS Platinum now that's a major cancer drug so it took that person to go against everyone else to take a shot at this and there aren't enough people like that and her story was the number of times who got kicked back and kicked back back and kick back and kick back and so it takes courage it takes uh belief which uh I was very fortunate to work with a surgeon and I think we need more scientists and surgeons and Physicians working together on this you know we worked in kidney stones and there geologists that maybe we should work on as well and so it was a long time and it shouldn't have been and I think we could have probably cut the time back in 10 15 20 years maybe we started in 1982 the definition was 2001 well that's that's 20 years later already and even after that it's taken another 20 odd years and we're still fighting to get uh grants that will help us understand this and uh companies that will invest back into the products but essentially some 40 odd years ago I wouldn't call it a light bulb moment but you have this experience where you realize that there is efficacy in treating UTI urinary tract infections with microbes and you're seeing great results with a condition that has been treated a certain way for a very long time with very poor results hence ensues a very long period of time of frustration because you're thinking like this is working why can't we implement this more broadly and perhaps even more more importantly we should be looking at the efficacy of microbial treatments to treat any manner of acute or chronic conditions prevention rather than treating okay prevention so we did look at treating uh in patients who were disabled and couldn't control their bladder and therefore had eoli sitting in the bladder and we tried to put lactobac into the bladder to treat them but in general it's for prevention but there are so many conditions that you can prevent so the the simple application of beneficial microbes was was just ridiculed I think one of the more profound examples of this is the efficacy of probiotics in treating necrotizing entro colitis which you have direct experience with NEC yeah explain what that condition is uh where it arises and why probiotics have proved effective right so again it's prevention so it started in 1992 my wife had twins uh I sat outside the delivery room my first baby rushed by me the next one rushed by me straight into the Intensive Care Unit they were there for 5 weeks thankfully they came out great but during that time another baby developed necrotizing andr colitis and the curtains went round the the baby and eventually it died which is awful so why did that baby get it well when you're born by cesarian section and you're premature by good 10 weeks or 15 weeks and you're low birth weight you can imagine the intestine is not being developed it's still got a long way to develop so in that room that NICU what beneficial microbes are getting in as I said earlier none can we give these babies some beneficial microbes no breastfeeding helps because breastfeeding and we showed uh we studied milk and we showed that there are beneficial microbes in human milk which is great but it's not enough so these babies get extremely sick they often have major surgery they may have their bows removed and there's a breathing problem that occurs is that correct well you get multi-organ failure the breathing problem that in fact our daughter had was solved by another invention called uh surfactant which was U miraculous it was like night and day my baby's whole body was going like this trying to breathe and then they get surfaced and wof and that was in invention by a colleague of mine at the University of Western Ontario but I said at the time can't we introduce beneficial microbes probotics to prevent neck well that was 92 nothing happened and then we had um a debate which is on YouTube it's gone viral as at least 500 views so like you two at the sphere yeah so I've debated with the physician who essentially is in charge of an ICU and it's it was his decision whether they introduced these or not right that's the system and I won the debate of course but nothing happened until a person in Montreal took this product um was called Flora baby and said let's try it so they tried it and lo and behold it started to prevent neck and so my colleague said right we'll bring it into London Ontario so this was 2014 2016 and and about two years ago I said to him look where's the paper cuz we have to study and see if this actually worked and he said well it was it was submitted and then it didn't get accepted and then nobody followed up I said right I'm going to look at this this needs to be published so we looked at it but not only looked at what happened back at that time but what happened since and so you can follow the rate of Nick and essentially we stopped neck from happening not totally what percentage of premature infants suffer from this condition well in our case it was about five 5 6% turns out in Canada there's a hospital that's at 15% that's one in six babies I mean that's Absolut ridiculous of course antibiotics aren't going to help they don't prevent it uh if you get infection you of course you have to treat with antibiotics but what have you done to the baby so it's never seen Mom's vaginal microbes or intestinal microbes it's in an environment where it's got tubes in it in lines and and it's got an intestinal tract that's not fully developed we have to find a way to help it develop and protect it from these pathogens that are everywhere and you know nurses carry um multi-drug resistant staff it's not their fault but they're in an environment where these organisms are prevalent so anyway we introduced it the rate plummeted and then just in the last couple of months we had this disastrous news there was a baby that died in the States from a completely different organism I don't know the case I don't know what happened but it was another case of my goodness a probiotic seems to have maybe killed this baby no I'm all for safety CU let's face it you're putting a live organism into a baby and so my thing would be let's find out the antibotic that can kill that organism just in case for some reason it takes over and causes infection I don't know if that was done or not but nothing is 100% safe we have to monitor carefully but the company that sold this product Flora baby said we're taking it off the market just reacting to that to that incident and just better to just pull it yeah well they said it's strategic and it's not that's not the reason and this was a product that essentially eradicated for the most part significantly preventing neck the Physicians and Alberto SAS saskat and Toronto Etc they're going to study it and make sure that was the case which is absolutely the way they should do it but in general it was and this physician who I debated sent me an email he say oh God please not go back to the rates that we had before we used this that would be terrible and I said in the book I mean you almost had to have the case where you sue because your baby died because they weren't given probotics now that's a horrible thing to think that sometimes that's what scares hospitals into saying okay we should look at it and all we're asking for is look into it consider it because your alternative isn't working and the situation now in Canada there's a product I think in Australia another one in Britain there are countries that are using this they're just like us and yet we're not so we're trying to get them into Canada otherwise the babies potentially could die what are some of the other major use cases for probiotics well there's obviously the intestinal things so uh diarrhea constipation which is kind of strange that you could have both but uh irritable Bell syndrome inflammatory Bell disease it can help prevent but now we've got such amazing drugs that uh biologics they call them that people are probably not going to use that as a first option they'll use the biologics in Crohn's disease probotics have not prevented or been useful for Crohn's my thing for that is it doesn't mean you don't take a prootic just cuz you have crones take the biologic but maybe the prootic can be useful for maybe side effects or something else or just general gut health it's not going to change your Crohns per se mhm there's studies shown that you can reduced respiratory tract infection rates we did a a paper Irene uh lenoard did this paper in Canada the US and I think she's done one in Europe and showed that if people took probiotics you could significantly reduce the use of antibiotics the time people are off work the respiratory infections and then it comes down to individual studies so I I don't like to kind of just say you know probotics will solve all IBS or they'll they'll solve all diarrhea or because it's too too broad a statement if you have the right strains in the right situation the products are made well uh and tested properly yeah there are applications to intestinal tract there's applications to skin there's applications to oral cavity and helosis there's applications to urog gental tract so it's different parts of the body it can affect what are some of the longer term or more moonshot oriented use cases that you can imagine like forecast yourself you know 50 60 years from now how are probiotics being used in a way that you would like to see well it's funny you said moonshop because uh I I think we need to have them in space if if you're going to go to Mars you better have some kind of organisms because you're going to get kidney stones and if we don't prevent kidney stones you don't want renocolic in a tiny little capsule heading to Mars I think we should learn how to create fermented foods or um prob body enhanced Foods in space but it probably in other diseases I I can see it complimenting drugs so my colleague did a study with FAL transplant plus an anti-cancer agent and the combination seem to be quite helpful and so maybe there are organisms that you want to Target what was it that that helped fight the cancer well it was a te- cell a special type of te- cell so then you get an organism or organisms that Target those te- cells upregulate them and then help the drug fight the cancer right so I can see a complimentary activity we also will I think see genetic manipulation um that's a longer time frame because there's all kinds of safety issues and ethical issues but if you know that an organism is capable of producing or blocking an agent imagine if they blocked amals or prevented dementia you'd want to take that organism so maybe we have to manipulate it for that to happen or maybe we'll get lucky and find in fact there's an organism that's that's doing that I see applications more targeted uh manipulated and in combination with drugs are there Labs that are doing this work looking at this is there somebody or a team at NIH for example who is giving this the the thought and focus that you think it deserves I think there are Labs I mean as I said my colleagues looking at complementing anti-cancer and did a study multiple sclerosis he's uh looking at other you know important and ch IC diseases I mean FAL transplant at the moment is very crude uh and uh my colleague Eman verco in gelf said why don't we instead of all these organisms and poop why don't we just take 33 or 24 or find out the right ones well the problem with doing that is you're guessing and they may not be the right ones and then when you take poop and it's a horrible thing to say but these organisms are are together for reason right I used to say that when I gave a lectures to students I said why did you sit next to that person CU every time I come in here sitting next to that person because they're a friend or because you know that they'll share their lunch with you I mean these things are happening in in in in natural ways and so the organisms are doing the same they're in collectives and they're there for a reason I I've actually proposed that we do studies to find out what's the codependencies why are you and I always in the same room right so when you take a 24 strains and you have to grow them separately and then essentially dry them and then put them all together they've missed all that connection so I think we need to somehow or maybe it's using huge chats where we grow them and they get to to be with the other organisms that are complimentary and then we put them in that takes well takes time and chats yeah yeah yeah I do admit to being fascinated by fecal transplants I can Envision a future in which there are very Tony salons that you would go into and you would get your very specific fecal transplant taken care of I mean are these capsules or are we actually inserting these yeah so through the rear end like how does this work and yeah and I understand like the complexities of it but you also mentioned in your book the idea of super donors like these people that just have the high-powered you know feal matter poop y that holds the power to you know prevent and maybe even cure disease I think fuel transplant has been terrific for S uh and I think that it's there's enough to show that there's other potential the problem is or in my view first of all to find a donor and we found that it was we got one donor out of 46 46 people that come and say I'm totally healthy and they weren't and so and then if your donor goes to Mexico in holiday and gets a GI disease then you've lost the donor so that's the first problem the second problem is the donor for C diff may not be the best one for you with chronic kidney disease and yet we're doing those studies we're taking that same super donor and testing them completely different disease multiple sclerosis has nothing to do with C diff and what I would like to see is okay let's Spike the fmt now you can't do that because then that becomes a drug and eth and everything is is all crazy so I say okay if you can't deal with if you can't Spike the fmt get the person to take a prootic at the same time as the fmt I'll give you an example uh chronic kidney disease is a huge problem worldwide and we've been finding that this compound called p cressel is is a toxic compound now if you have organisms in the fmt that reduce pesle that's great maybe when you give it to chronic kidney disease patients that's going to help them if your fmt doesn't have that signature why not take a prootic that does at the same time so that's complimenting and being much more specific about the disease that you're treating I think that's the way to go because as I said unless you get a big chemat that is is creating a Consortium that is now welldeveloped and then you're putting it in I don't think it will work very well and how do you give it uh we know give it with capsules our hospital I think's probably number one in Canada for fmt and so they we put it in these little capsules and you swallow them mhm horrible thought but yeah um you know there might be a little like education around that to get people comfortable with that notion yeah I mean I think it's 26 capsules I mean I I would find that tough but if you've got a nasty disease you'll do anything so and they don't burst and you know it's it's a perfectly good way to do it but that's laborious and guess what who pays for it Hospital doesn't pay for it grants don't pay for it the patient doesn't pay for it so that's a problem with the system again if you're introducing these things why shouldn't they be part of insurance plans they're not probotics aren't mhm yeah and so that again limits the type of people that are able to get that it's a new category it's not a drug it's not a supplement it's not a food and we don't have regulatory bodies that are oriented with experts to understand the landscape here so how do you even get out of the gate if we don't even have reputable people with the right amount of experience and education to even contend with how to make good decisions around this so in this Royal Society document uh you put in recommendations and one of my recommendations strong recommendation is that we have a completely separate Institute not the Canadian insute for health research not we have nirc it's an engineering research Council not NIH you have a completely separate Institute that starts to look at how do we apply beneficial microbes across one Health it could be unbelievably uh impactful across our society and they would be looking at things like okay what's the rules around fmt who should not get them who might benefit from them and you're not going to take all the strains and and isolate them and and show that you know they'll say oh this has got antibotic resistance and by giving this fmt you're passing that antibod resistance on and it could be terrible in the long run that's not going to happen but you have to sort of have a system that says this is an acceptable fmt and this is not mhm that's tough because you're looking at helping the patient today and one of the arguments has been that yes you've cured my C diff but now you've increased my risk of cardiovascular disease because of the organisms you just gave me we don't know that yet how would you do that well let's do some studies and maybe that person needs a completely different fmt in 10 years time or it needs a a supplementation with a probiotic that reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease you know but all of this is microbial right yeah and if if the people in charge of not only the legislation and the safety and the and the grant funding if they've not got their heads around that it's like gobbledygook yeah I mean are there enough qualified people to staff up something like that what are the barriers to getting an institution like that up on its feet I think there are because you would need people that are not just qualified in uh academic terms but who have experienced with public health issues and who have experienced with microbiology and who are open to these things see the Europeans to me went completely the wrong way when they started to adjudicate probiotics they went to this panel that had a million things on their mandate and they get thrown this to say all right go and mandate probotics there was maybe one person in the panel that knew anything about probotics I mean that's totally ridiculous nowadays I think there are young people who would love to be in this who have modern day skills on knowledge of Science and genetics and and microbiology and and medicine that would would drive this forward with some guidance from m so I I don't doubt that the people are there I think the willpower is not there and it's mostly because people of their head and their sand it's such a complex field our human brains want to think of this in binary terms I take this and this happens but we live in a holistic Matrix of you know an infinite number of permutations it's difficult enough with a particular drug to say this drug will do this we also have to appreciate all the downstream implications of that not just side effects but its impact across you know a multitude of of physiological systems within our body right but when you try to have this conversation around microbes it seems like it then goes up you know to a power of 10 in terms of complexity it does so a couple of things to that you know I watch CNN how many adverts come on for a drug so it starts off you see the person that're sick and then they get this new drug and then for the next 20 seconds it tells you all the things it could do to you including kill you and I'm thinking what you've just approved this drug but it can kill me or give me all these awful side effects so if we're prepared to do that and take a gamble why are you taking the gamble because you're hoping that the number of patients to treat is enough to to benefit and so the the risk is is low enough but the benefit's high enough so we could easily do the same with microbes and you pick things that are the easiest to monitor right I mean Clum defal in a way was an easy thing because the the downside is death or horrible chronic condition and the upside is they're back to normal and you could pick a few conditions that are not big risk CU you don't want people to die from the intervention and you could test them and this back again to one of my peeves about granting agencies if if you want a grant in microbiology you really should be doing Mouse workor which I think is a complete almost a complete waste of time people will criticize me but why not put it into human studies why not pile up human studies the more human studies we do okay it's a bit more expensive but there's some conditions you could do with uh low risk and then you get more information about the potential and and therefore you get the chance to start to see some of the concerns you know I mean I know the critics was oh well do you want to be a guinea pig right scary yeah it's scary but you're taking fermented foods how many organisms are you swallowing every day just from your saliva like we're taking lots of organisms every day so as long as there's some good signs behind it and we know a bit about the organisms it's probably not going to kill you and let's see if it helps you it seems like if the commercial incentives were adequate enough that that would expedite all of this so I can't help but wonder whether part of the resistance or the pumping of the brakes in this field might have something to do with it posing a threat to the pharmaceutical establishment is your a sense that there's resistance from Big Pharma to explore this because it would it would mean inroads on their core product line or you know why not one of those large pharmaceutical companies understanding that there's something to be learned here that could be of benefit so I obviously met with many pharmace companies when we were developing our strains and the thing that stood out to me is that there was Zero knowledge about microbes and so I get back to the point they didn't understand that we are skeletons tissues and microbes and so they were very comfortable with something they can chemically synthetize in a lab and show the structure and then develop it so you have to change the people in the companies secondly let's look at the price of drugs and Americans know this better than anyone the price is horrendous and they always say it takes 800 million or a billion dollars to develop a drug and therefore we need to charge huge amounts for it no no that's because you had so many failures that cost you a company lots and lots of money and why did you have all those failures many of them drug failures and the drugs that are coming out are often me E2 drugs they're not huge leaps and so unless they recognize wait a minute we're already wasting lots of money why not create a spin-off company within our company that just looks at this and that means understands the regulations that means potentially going to Congress and saying you had the Des act we need to upgrade this we need to change this completely CU guess what microbes can prevent disease but right now you're not allowing it to happen with the the system that you have so the regular system has to change but in terms of profit so the the company that I talked about with neck that company that originally uh sold Flora baby was sold for $291 million you don't think there's money in microbes of course there's money in microbes companies are making lots and lots of money in microbes they're just not investing it back into research I'm not sure Pharma is worried about microbiology I think they have been so set in their ways with chemicals that they're they've not made the big enough leap it seems like it's an inevitability at some point though absolutely with the right people because those companies are so large and powerful and they're lobbying arms basically hold sway over the regulatory landscape and the legislative landscape in Washington DC and you know governments around the world that if you want to change the regulatory landscape it's almost as if you're going to have to find a way to partner with these huge companies otherwise it's David and Goliath yeah I think there's already signs that they're they're coming in they're interested it's a totally different entity to a chemical uh there's all kinds of issues with I'm not saying that it's easy but we need the big companies with money because the potential is is huge and as I said to you I look at it as one Health not just humans I mean I had a case where friend of mine developed this um U essentially it's an alternative to fento without any of the side effects amazing right but he can't get he needs $200 million and so they're looking at Saudi Arabia because they're lots of money and there's many reasons but anyway one of the things the Saudi said oh it might help camels so camel racing is a big deal in Saudi Arabia um so there may be different ways that you get the money where is the motivation where is the motiving to the motivation yeah and and you know you look at horses most horses seem to die from colic imagine we haven't soled colic how crazy is that how many horses look at the Kentucky races and the money in racing in America huge why haven't we looked at microbes to solve that and the honeybee situation is is our food supply why the heck are we not plowing money into that so well you have looked at that I want to hear a little bit more about that CU I think that's super interesting yeah so we had a big project in Africa uh we essentially taught local mothers how to make prootic yogurt uh using this uh gr1 strain and uh we get some money from the K government I think it was at 260,000 people a day were getting this was amazing fantastic and what we had done was we empowered them we weren't Landing with a plane every week with this we we said here you do it we were going to revolutionize I think the value chain of food in Tanzania and the government approved their Grant and then Canada said oh no sorry we don't have money anymore you know they had money but what did that what did that value chain look like well the value chain in a way starts with honeybees if you don't have the food and the honeybees pollinating the food then guess what your value chain can die pretty quick and we did a study in Tanzania because I was there I looked at the lake so there's 40 million people living on Lake Victoria and and I knew that some people were trying to get gold out the streams and they used Mercury to try and capture the gold so I said I bet you there's mercury in the water and in the fish so sure enough my student Jordan found there was these small silver fish that everyone was eating had mercury in it so then we said wait a minute people are going down to buy these fish and they're eating them and then they're getting pregnant and they have high mercury levels in them so what if we gave a probor yogurt at the same time they took the fish would you have less uptake of the Mercury because lactus actually bind to Mercury so maybe the lactobac bind to it and then you poop it out anyway we did a a study and lo and behold we reduced Mercury and arsenic levels right so then I thought so that's Mercury as heavy metals well what about pesticides because I mean uh you've probably seen in the use isn't it China that's using parakeet I mean there's we we saw them all the time these guys they've got the pesticide in the backpack and they're spraying and these are toxic chemicals and I said could laob basill or prootic strains do something about pesticides so lo and behold we said well we'll do a few studies and honey bees and I colleague gr Thompson who's an expert I know nothing about honeybeast right so I had the idea and he came along he say well we'll try and we said right which strains of probiotic could we use so one of them we used because we did studies in drop dropil is a fruit fly it mimics some of the honeybee um anatomy and in the fruit flies we made them live longer by giving them some strains and what the pesticide did was essentially it wrecked the immune response so by bringing in this these lactobac strains we stop that so you no longer damaged the immune response and therefore you made them live longer and then uh we had a third strain that was indigenous to the honeybee so then then we said well how do you deliver those strains and test them in the field well it turns out in Canada certainly beekeepers use patties and it's uh because we have Winters I don't know if they use them in New Zealand but they use them in Canada so just before winter and and just after it and it's essentially sugar it's sort of sugar it's like a pancake but it's it's sugar and so why don't we put the probo strains in with it because then the bees will eat them well we did that lo and behold we got great results so then we said what about California almonds so there's a research group at UC Davis and we said can we do a study here yeah so let's do two things let's test the pad the I called it a biop Patty versus a spray so have the organisms in a spray and then you know you lift the the the um you see this is this is a much anob bees the whatever it is you the little spray can thing but no but you lift the um the honey thing that I'm sure there's a name for it the like drawer the dra screen yeah and you spray it with the organisms well we got great results again so the point being that the the honeybee populations are being decimated by pesticides and environmental toxins and without our pollinators the planet dies so this is to me like an unbelievable breakthrough and Discovery why is this not you know basically standard protocol and trying to help our be friends people have tried before to and unfortunately a lot of these products they called prootic but they're dead or they're not really designed properly and my phsd student Brandon daisley he's now an independent scientist and what he's doing I think is the right thing let's try and get the strains that we think are the best strains so we've shown the concept definitely works this is vario mites they little mites that come and attach to the bee as as well as uh this penicillus it's a pathogenic organism so we can counter them but are these the best strains so he's currently working on a few other strains but then my hope is that what you do is you dry them uh freeze dry them put them in all sachche which is what we developed for Africa for The Mamas cuz these mamas it's 50 cents for a sachche they put it in 100 lers of milk and they can make 100 lit of yogurt right so why not let the beekeepers have these old sashes they can put it in their Patty or they can put it in with liquid and spray it on whichever we think is best and the potential is fantastic you know again I go back to what we did with our prootic strains I I want to be sure the thing works before you start rushing to commercialization but I think it has a lot of potential [Music] every athlete I know is going to tell you that having the right gear is key to Performance if what you're wearing is poorly crafted it's just going to put distance between you and those goals you've set you owe it to yourself to invest in the best and the best is on I'm obsessed with the cloud Ultra right on the trails and I just got the new NextGen Cloud Stratus 3 for the road I'm loving those but on also has this incredible line of lightweight high performance apparel that but it's just beyond anything I've previously dawned it's like this second to none Second Skin I love to rock the sweat wicking Ultra te and the ultra shorts which have this pocket right at the base of the spine that perfectly anchors your phone no jiggle I'm just so proud to partner with an and I love their vision for the future where their gear is engineered for circularity so check out their amazing lineup of super comfortable sleek and durable pieces for yourself on.com it strikes me as just one of many use cases that could be deployed to redress all manner of environmental degradation I'm thinking about coral reef decline y I'm thinking about algal blooms in the Mississippi Delta Etc is there logic in looking at those problems from a different angle and trying to see if there's some way of approaching them from a microbial perspective as a solution I think the answer is definitely yes now there will be critics and I think it's fear concern to say we're not trying to uh replace the organisms that are beneficial in those environments because probotics don't colonize bees they don't colonize humans they don't stay so what we're trying to do is they don't colonize our gut either no and so what you're trying to do is get the niche back to normal and then you don't need the probiotic anymore right but in the meantime you do need it so you have to apply it now Raquel pako and she's from Saudi Arabia but she's done some neat work with coral which I could not have imagined would be possible she's she's sewing it is possible so if it's possible in Coral for goodness sake imagine what else is possible and the the amount as I go back to earlier the amount of toxins that are in our water supply so I have a slide that a Dutch group looked at the number of uh drugs in our water supply I think in Canada it's something like 100 now there's Trace elements so let's go back to the drug companies and say wait a minute I'm going to bring out okay say it's Viagra this is my Viagra and you know what's going to happen your lawyer is going to come to me right away and say no no no no we've got the patent in this you can't bring that out mm oh so you own the drug you know own V okay so you own it it's in our Waste Disposal system it's in our water supply it's your responsibility to take it out now imagine if we did that with every drug we would get them to say okay let's Trace what you're doing with these drugs and find ways to degrade them probably using microbes I mean it's a bit simplistic and it'll never happen but it gets back to lateral thinking and finding ways to use these microbes it seems like there should be an X prize in this category you know what the x prise is to motivate scientists like yourself and you know basically provide them with the incentive and perhaps the funding and the grant money to look at this to solve our biggest most existential problems that we face well I mean people have looked at microbes to degrade oil slicks so it's not like this is something new there are microbial ecologists out there um I don't think we've encouraged enough kids to go into that as a career path I don't think we've encouraged enough new ideas to get grant money to explore it and I don't think we have partnered with all the players and that includes Regulators because we have to be sure it's it's safe I mean you should never undercut safe safety and we have to ensure that it works and so all all of that takes a team we've never created these teams we're we're all in little silos and the government and then the regulators and the scientists and then the drug companies or other companies um it's slowly happening so uh it's funny if I have a pond and um I get lots of um these plants grow up in the pond that I I really don't want well there's a company in Calgary that sells a product of bacteria that degrades uh nutrients for these plants and so you can clear your pond using microbes I mean I think people are getting there with the idea of of using microbes rather than a you know a toxic uh chemical that you dump in the pond and it kills everything when we think of so many of the gut disorders like aler of colitis Etc um these autoimmune diseases my understanding is that there is a relationship between those or the rise of those and overprescription of antibiotics what are your thoughts on the role that antibiotics has played in terms of disregulated our microbial ecology in our bodies yeah so I do think there's a correlation and if you look at babies the number of antibiotics that babies especially for earaches Etc so we're putting a lot of antibiotics into young kids that uh I think is not particularly helpful and in fact there's studies that say if you've had X number of antibiotics is something like I don't know 15 20 antibiotics then this will have an impact in your life after 50 I mean I there is something about the static nature of the microbiome after a certain age right like the microbiome that that you're developing as an infant is kind of the microbiome that you're going to be living with yeah but if you've disrupted that then there's maybe ones you're living with it shouldn't be there you don't want them there they remain persistent yeah so I think there's that but I think there's also the food chain uh I remember living in Scotland in in August we used to go to this polical dial of cumur and I loved August because I could buy pieces of melon Canary melon and uh we did a study in Tanzania uh with a group of people and looked at the hunter gathers and that's what they do they eat seasonally well now I get Canary maelon every single day of the year and so we have globalized our food supply and we have uh unfortunately use a lot of processing and processed foods and fructose uh corn syrup Etc that I think is also contributing so I don't think antibiotics get the whole blame I think the food system needs a real change and you're slowly starting to see that happen where you would know more about this than me but where people are bringing out not just organic foods but things that are benefiting our microbes I would like to see more of that because and I think we also need to make it affordable because a guy in London Ontario did this study of this school in London that was in the poorest area and it had 43 fast food restaurants around it so what are these kids eating yeah they're eating fast foods yeah I mean that's a huge problem food deserts the most impoverished neighborhoods are the ones with the least access to healthy food and every microbiome gut health clinician that I've hosted on this show Tim Spectre Dr Robin shutan will bultz Dr will they all agree that from a dietary perspective the key thing is increasing the diversity of plants in your diet and in turn obviously increasing the amount of fiber that everybody is eating yeah but also we could make it simpler for people to make their own fermented food you can make your own yogurt but we can make it a bit more attractive a bit more easy to do where essentially you could have a little fermentor in your your house and you get all the yogurt you I mean yogurt is a simple thing it's easy to do but I feel that they're that we're not making it practical and easy I mean I did a cooking class in school I don't know if they still do that for all kids but I think that's a great thing why don't we teach kids because often parents are you often it's a single mother and of kids and and she's working two jobs and she just doesn't have the time for cooking elaborate meals but maybe there are ways that systems could help her as I said Yogurt fermented yogurt that's a whole other societal thing but it's back to the same philosophy how do we get beneficial microbes into our systems one of the questions I've always had that I'm not sure I've ever gotten a sufficient answer that satisfied me is when we go to the market and we're purchasing that yogurt or that kombucha and we're doing it because we know these have probiotics in in them and they're supposed to be good for us how do we know that those probiotics are even active live samples like if a kombucha has been pasteurized right or even flash pasteurized right do those microbes survive that like have you tested various brands of Kombucha like what are we actually drinking so first of all fermented foods are not probiotic so kombucha does not have probotics in it that might sound strange but in order for it to say it has probotics in it it would have to say what the strain is and and what viable count that strain has and why it's in that so it might have a lactobacilli in it but that's not a probiotic so there's a different stream fermented foods and probotics if it's been pasteurized it's really all the organisms are dead so in killing those organisms have they kept the supernatent and is that of value have people studied that they probably have I don't know that literature but I would take kombucha with live organism in it way ahead of those that are dead and I've seen London Ontario has a company uh bch and they had trouble getting their product on the Shelf because there was an American product that was cheaper easier to get and the organisms were dead so I don't think there's been enough studies to say that the viable count at end of shelf life should be known for yogurts uh it should be on all the labels of supplements but then if if you have 24 strains ideally it should say end of shelf life for each strain and it doesn't so on a very practical level if someone's going to the market and they're picking up a product a kombucha a yogurt uh you know what have you and they're looking at the nutrition facts panel label what do they want to see so I would say in a fermented food uh look at the viable count uh at the end of shelf life that should be helpful it's not ideal because it doesn't break down all the organisms that are in it what are some of the other common foods that someone would pick up at the market for gut health purposes well this idea that they contain yeah strains or probiotics well one of the problems I see is in prebiotics because uh prebiotics are now a big thing in labels and it seems like every product's got a Prebiotic in it I think there's even one in a Venus skin I don't know what that preotic does the thing about that is if you take a preotic in general you need about 5 G because the definition of preotic requires that it stimulates beneficial microbes to confer a health benefit if you take two nanograms that's not a preotic even if it's called inulin it's not a preotic because you're not it's not going to do anything right and unfortunately lots of products on the market have these preotic so I would look at the amount if you've got five grams in that product then that you can expect that that's going to stimulate the beneficial microbes in your gut mhm we mentioned earlier the colonization issue there's this idea that if we take this periodically we should be okay but what is the truth behind what happens when these microbes enter our intestinal tract are they taking root do they have to be replenished consistently forever how does that work yeah so so organisms that are resistant to bile and stomach acid that's a plus so more of them will get through to the small intestine and the large intestine not all organisms are resistant to stomach acid and bile there may be a a capsule or or a product that gets them past the stomach in which case you want to know that that exists they're then going to multiply they will produce byproducts and they'll probably leave um there's not a lot of uh studies showing that organisms stay around a long time and that's probably because the body has got its own normal microbes and it doesn't really want new ones to come in I still find that a little bit puzzling because I would have thought that some of these uh probotics would have the potential to become part of the Consortium but that we need more studies to find that out so they're going to pass through I understand the application of probiotics for preventing or perhaps even treating an acute condition MH we've talked about UTI or various you know gut disbiosis issues but what about the healthy person who just is trying to optimize their health like you go even if you find a great probiotic it doesn't necessarily mean that you feel any different um what is the argument that somebody who's had all their blood work done everything's great they're not at risk for anything they feel fine but they're just trying to be as healthy as they possibly can be yeah that's a it's a really tough question and you probably get different answers even from people in the prootic field my feeling is I think I'm healthy but how much do I really know that I'm healthy and if I give the example of pressol if for some reason the pressol levels are high in my body no one is detecting that but that's not a good thing so would I not like to be taking a prootic that reduces P cstle even though I feel absolutely nothing no difference so I like to take probotics that I feel the organisms have been tested and they do something even though I don't maybe feel it maybe I don't even need them but if I look at what's the alternative to not taking beneficial microbes cuz I'm pooping them out every day so how much am I getting in and I just like the concept of consuming more because I think in general it's a good thing have I proof no can I tell you I feel better I could tell you that I'd probably be more constitutive if I didn't take probotics and oats but that's about all I can tell you is there a way for the average person to test the quality of their microbes in their gut to know if there something is a Miss well there's companies that that do this honestly I'm not a fan of it so um this student and I uh we took a poop or each of our poop we did a microbial analysis and it comes out with patterns of the microbes that we have I actually got it with me I could hold it up and I would say to you okay who's the healthy one I don't know who knows which one is me and which one is him and and when you see these companies they then write back to the the donor and say okay here's here's what you should take and I looked at them things like pomegranate well okay I take pomegranate anyway pomegranate is great like they're not really telling me scientifically how to manipulate so that I get more of this now there might be exceptions for example aania aania is kind of a new prootic and my colleague Jeremy Burton did this study where acetate seems to be important for archimania so maybe in some patients that you want araman maybe we should all we should eat acetate right so maybe if there was direct correlation between the organisms in your stool and a food that you should take and then an outcome so again I go back to pesle if I could take something that would reduce my my pesle level I'm probably helping my kidneys but we don't we're not there yet I think that's going to take a bit more work MH I wouldn't send my poop off to get analyzed and then for somebody to tell me if I'm healthy or not I I don't think we know everybody's as different enemy there's been many studies in this field you have authored 600 papers right I don't even know how anybody could write that many papers uh you've been cited over 57,000 times I think but still there are so many questions that remain unanswered what is the study that you would most like to see done that could help resolve some of the question marks that are out there you know what do we need to understand to help us move forward and kind of open the door to the new possibilities that this world might have to offer us potentially there's so many different answers to that because it depends on the n you're looking at I mean you mentioned alal blooms imagine if you could use microbes that that solve that that would be absolutely spectacular the Seas off the coast of China are absolutely polluted and I was in a city there and they brought this fish on the table it looked absolutely beautiful and I'm like I'm not eating this fish I came from the most polluted Waters in the world imagine if you could somehow clean them up with microbes so I mean that's a huge type of experiment that change Lots right you almost need the otago study which is a study that's has followed I think it's a thousand people over the lifespan and that's again a longterm project where you looked at the fermented foods they consume uh their microbial patterns over time correlating with food and with the intake of say probotics prebiotics that would be very cool to to get a handle on it massive undertaking M they have started to look at microbiome in that aago study because it it started in' 70s maybe so the technology didn't come till later in terms of a disease and the ultimate trial I mean that's a tough one because there are some diseases that that you're not going to get better from and if you could have something that extended quality life that again would be phenomenal um I can't off the top of my head say this is the one I'd pick glol blastoma pancreatic cancer I mean there's there's some diseases that we just hope we never get but if we could design studies to see if microbiome had any role whatsoever then I think that would be informative I feel like this is another situation that technology is going to be very helpful with and I'm recalling something Tim Spectre shared uh about the Zoey platform and now all these people are on this app right and they're providing data so they're getting these massive data sets that relate to the microbiome in a historic like unprecedented way y so the more things like that that we have and then the greater computing power that we have to analyze that data and make sense of it feels like a path towards figuring out the relationship between the right microbes the right strains and the right deployment of them for I agree um you talked about the The Next Step that that there's always seems to be another question but that's science that's the excitement of Science and the young people that are coming through are incredible they're smart as hell and they're going to come up with things that I can't even imagine I just want to make sure that we are not scared to try things and that might mean uh pilot studies it might mean testing a strain even if it doesn't work I think if you wait for the ultimate you know the magic probor you're going to wait 10 15 years in the meantime all these people have died or suffered terribly and so I hope that we have a mechanism to be much more Interventional in humans with ideas uh so collect all the data you want but don't wait for eternity to try things I was very moved in your book with respect to the way in which you've kind of weathered resistance I mean there's a lot of people especially early in your career career who would just castigate you snake oil salesmen like the whole thing right so you're very much also this example of resilience and endurance in the face of you know obstacles to you know kind of get this message out and share the science that you were learning so what is your message to The Visionaries out there who are trying to do something different that contravenes kind of current protocols or the way that the world works yeah I mean I was told in primary school high school University I wouldn't make it and um that's I invented the middle finger which is I should get much more credit for that but um not only did he Define probiotics he invented the middle finger yeah and and so I was the type of person that would fight back partly came from so much determination maybe that was in my family that taught me that never give up if you're not that kind of person then it gets very difficult you need to be beside someone who has that determination as I said I think you need to keep testing along the way I mean we we never set out on day one to say we're going to make a prootic for Women's Health we were going step by step and step I think that you have to try and break it down into steps like we were Pioneers but we're not entrepreneurs I I didn't go and form a company that's not my strength I wasn't interested interested in it I get probably a lot of people slag me off say well he's not a real scientist cuz he worked with surgeons and he's he's not a great molecular biologist I know what I'm not good at but I make sure that I collaborate with good people who are good at that so you have to complement what it is you have with what other people have in order to answer the question that's in front of you and that way you you get inspired by your colleagues and that sort of picks you up when you're down because they're saying yeah yeah yeah we could this we believe in this and look what this showed if you don't have that reminder or that uh inspiration from others it's very tough mhm Andrew Bruce my colleague is a wonderful person he's positive and he's a fighter so that was easy for me to to fight with him oh so many times we should have given up or I would have given up but so young people have to believe in what they're doing test it and if it gets to the point where they say well you know what this isn't going to work then they have to have the courage to say okay it's not going to work we're doing something else you are a change agent what are the lessons that you can impart about you know how you go through difficult times and continue to persevere just generally it doesn't even have to have anything to do with probiotics I mean your journey is very much one of staying in the game and you know basically you you know maintaining this conviction having faith working hard there is this spiritual layer as well where you have this sense that you are being taken care of you know which I love and I appreciate and and relate to yeah I'm getting the stage where you have to you see these adverts in television about come and plan your funeral with us you know and uh there's a song that um I forgot the lady that's saying it he's always been faithful to me and uh whatever we call God whatever it is God's always been faithful to me I think you have to look for signs that you're on the right path sometimes that's not easy and it's not obvious but uh I've tried to do that when the days are tough I remember if I had a really you know people get at you and stuff I'd go and buy like three records you know LPS right that was my sort of thing do something positive for yourself because otherwise you'll be down all weekend or whatever and I've always wanted to help people and so that's a good thing to to drive you on and I remember because Dr Bruce the urologist he'd be in the operating room and I would go in the operating room with him to talk about research cuz he didn't have time otherwise you know I said dress up go in and the patients there and you think this is who I'm trying to help it's a person it's it's not a scientific experiment it's a person once you get that you're more determined and it's like people who are passionate about honeybees they love those bees and they're passionate they want to help them and so I think if you have that as a driving force it's amazing what can't stop you right you're a humanitarian I think it's fair to say at the end of the book there are all these sort of tales of travels that you've gone on and my first reaction when I got to that point was like what does this have to do with anything like why is he telling these stories but but I think what's instructive about it is that those travels and those experiences in so many communities in so many places of the world that most people don't don't visit has given you that sense of of being a humanitarian a level of empathy that comes with that type of travel that has made its way into your work it it it feels like that's the real why behind what you do like I I get the sense that you really deeply care yeah about people and the planet I do yeah I mean you go to Manza Tanzania I took my daughter when she was 14 and she remembers that the the roads I mean you're banging your head off the ceiling and it's I mean terrible these women dressed well and smiled every day and they had nothing if that doesn't impact you then nothing will and so I have a huge admiration for people you go to India MH India the women are beautiful in the songs they've nothing and so I I just it makes you want to help other people and and makes you think you're not better than anyone else and I like the surgical table example if you're a surgeon the person on that table you're not looking at their color their religion their sexual orientation you're looking at them because they have the same blood as you and the more the world starts to realize that we're all the same and we're all on this amazing Planet the more we should be trying to help the planet and help each other and so yeah that definitely drives me you know I've got some examples of meeting uh rock stars in my book at the end of the day they're just a normal person like you and I you have this yeah it's actually quite funny and sweet like you have a here's where I met Frank Zappa and here's where I met Diana Ross and I was like what does this have to do with anything but I was very Charmed by it well the thing was uh the Dana Ross was cuz I was at a conference in urology and so it was the science that took me there and then I'm of the opinion that let's do something really fun or creative because I mean science can be pretty boring and tedious life isn't so they make the most of life when I went to Victoria Falls I'd given a talk in Zambia I thought well Victoria Falls is right there why don't we go and you know and so I went to the Devil's Pool and it it was crazy but that that was part of that whole experience which started off as science right and then you learn you look look and you see other people and how they live and you you start to get ideas of uh of you know different things and for example I didn't know anything about the Muslim religion and prayers and things like that and uh a woman from Egypt asked if she could come to my lab I said sure you come as a fellow so she came in the lab and it turns out that before her Muslim prayers they would clean the teeth I didn't know this and she said that we use this thing called meswak and it's the bark of a tree to clean our teeth so I said I wonder if we could design a prootic mouthwash using meswak so sure enough we got the meswak we got some mint we got a lacab basili and we made a mouthwash and I learned so much not just about her and the practices but hey maybe this could be an inexpensive way for people to have better Oral Care in these countries so you just never know what's around the I've always been open to things and I think we have to be yeah following your interest and your curiosity from you know being a PhD student in New Zealand getting obsessed with microbes and leading you all the way to you know all the adventures that you've been on Yeah by staying true to that I think there's some real wisdom and Truth in that well being true to yourself as I said in the book Margaret Bruce always said be true to yourself that's tough but I like to do that speaking of Truth and wisdom I have uh a litmus test to discern real scientists from the naysayers or the real scientist from the costume scientists and that is when I present a question to a real scientist it's never quite the satisfying answer that you want because it's complicated and it's nuanced and it's about you know context and all of these different things that that is orthogonal to kind of the way our media culture and our culture in general operates so I'm interested in and you talk about this in the book like Truth versus the misinformation that gets propagated on social media and through the click baity headlines in in the media in terms of science reporting um that's a whole podcast I mean we we're driven to be successful there's pressure on scientists to be successful and to get the messages out I think sometimes the press releases are completely overblown and then the media picks it up because it's an easy cell probotics are useless no they're not probotics are many things it's like saying all drugs are useless we have to try and avoid that just the same as we have to avoid probotics will cure this and this and this no no certain strains will probably as scientists were learning uh when I really 1990 to 95 it was it's tough to get a scientist to talk to the media I think now uh social media is is making it easier and probably forcing a lot more interaction with the media and we just have to make sure this that what we're saying is factual and can be backed up by the experiments we perform and try not to have the sensationalization it's like I'm not going to sit here and tell you what probo you should take now that might be an easy sell because then you can go out and say buy this product no no no that's that's not going to happen because it's different things for different people and different reasons for it right there's something that goes on psychologically in our in our Reptilian Brain when we look at our phone and somebody's looking directly at us with great conviction and saying don't do this and do this that we just can't help but Respond to yep versus someone like yourself who's like well you know is it this or is it this and I'm not quite sure until I understand this and we're just we get flx and we're like well that guy doesn't you know like he's not guiding me so I'm just going to this guy seems sure of himself this is the way our culture operates for better or worse and I don't know what the antidote is but I do think that there is a place for teaching young scientists and medical students public speaking skills because I think uh it's just just because you're into science doesn't mean that you're going to be a gifted speaker or be able to communicate very complex ideas in a way that the public can understand but I think more and more there's a need for that to sort of rebut or contravene a lot of the the bad ideas that seem to get traction much more easily than the harder more truthful ideas I like to tell audiences when I speak don't believe me believe the data that's tougher because that means you have to look at the data but I could be super convincing and that's not right if it if there's no data to back it up in terms of speaking uh public speaking I think you're right um there are some people very good at it some people it's just they're uncomfortable with it but I was in a position of administration for that 1995 time and I would look at probably hundreds of Grants every year and they to put a lay abstract some of these lay abstracts I always say look can your grandmother understand that cuz if your grandmother can't it's not only abstract we have to learn how to to say things that people can understand and I know I'm not necessarily all that great at it because I you know when you first ask what's a prootic i i maybe didn't break it down into something that a grandmother could understand cuz they're not going to look at a definition but we have to try and not pull the wool over people's eyes and I think that happens a lot influencers and I've seen lots and lots of books and they say prob btics are insiders no they're not probotics are in fermented foods no they're not and so they're trying to make it simple but they're getting it wrong I give credited people tell them the truth don't don't try and simplify it and say it wrong if you can't simplify it don't say it the wrong way they're not insiders well said I want to end this discussion with some practical advice given the constraints and the nuances Etc that make it challenging but to provide people with perhaps a few things that they can take away in terms of thinking about probiotics prebiotics and what they can do to you know optimize their gut microbiome we all know about more fiber more diversity of plant Foods fermented foods Etc um what are a few other things that you might be able to share uh so there's a couple of websites that I put in the book uh prootic chart.com us prootic guide.com where a group of Physicians and pharmacists have looked at the literature and said there are papers in human studies on these products I think that's a good starting point for people because then if they have an issue with IBS or an issue with something else they can look and say okay here's three options and I could try these three now there's probably some products that are not in that guide one day they will be in the guide but they're not right now but that's at least a place that you're getting help without doing anything yourself uh I think there are probotics that as I say I take them every day and so I think that there's a reason to take them but if you're not taking them and you're taking fermented foods that's great too these are not Magic Bullets uh there's lots and lots we still need to find out about them but it should be part of our daily life I think to uh enhance our beneficial microbes because as I say how else are you getting them in your body what is the role that you play as scientific adviser to seed what does that entail well because I joined early on um it was to uh advise primarily Raja on uh the attributes to the organisms and to start to look at what they might do and that's led to some experiments in our lab it's led to them bringing on board some super super scientists from Boston who are now leading the primarily clinical trials because at the end of the day you need to do the human studies and so they're going to do that we've got papers coming out a a fantastic paper that's coming out and it's it's frustra waiting for it but so I can review it and uh advise and uh help the people writing it I had offers to to sort of do this with other companies they're just so talented and and they look at life differently I've never seen a company do what they do and so many creative people it's a joy to be part of it and um if I you know contribute a little bit then that's great but I also criticize I mean if I if I see something that I don't like I'll tell them and Raja welcomes it because you know there's no room for no there isn't and I get the sense that yeah he he wants that that's sort of why you're there and as a lay person I was just so impressed um with both of them uh and speaking to them on the podcast and the more that I learn about you know what they're attempting to do in a world that is so complex and and challenging I'm betting on them like they're the good ones in my opinion and I've as I said earlier I've interacted with many many companies that's nothing like what they're doing they are light years ahead of of the messaging I mean the Instagram accounts are on information it's not pushing the product it's information I think that's the way of the future I think these big companies could learn from that M you know yeah I agree I'm I'm really proud to be associated with them and that's great to hear that makes me even feel even better yeah say that I went yesterday and so and some of the creative people in that that firm they just it stimulates me I I'm a great admirer of people who are good at what they do and I love to learn from them I mean a guy someone designing something I want to know more about almost want to be part of it because it's so exciting and I'm not a designer so I'm I'm loving watching them and also learning from them so it's a stimulating environment I think microbes are our teachers and I think we have much to learn from them uh we've only begun to flirt on a very surface level with what I think they can teach us and you're certainly at the Vanguard of of making that possible so I appreciate the work that you've done and the message that you carry and for coming and sharing with all of us today well honored to be here but you know the message really is for the young people the Next Generation they've got the talent and the ability and the Technologies they're the ones that going to make an amazing difference and if if we've laid some ground work for that then that's fantastic but uh it's over to them and uh I think the future is going to be exciting here here um I think we did it did we leave anything out I don't think so I think we covered it the book is called probiotics a about Hope Gregor thank you again for your time it was wonderful to meet you it's a true honor uh and again I appreciate you thank you cheers peace plants [Music] microbes that's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at Rich roll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch my books Finding Ultra voicing change in the plant power way as well as the plant power meal planner at meals. ral.com if you'd like to support the podcast the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful and finally for podcast updates special offers on books the meal planner and other subjects please subscribe to our newsletter which you can find on the footer of any page at Rich roll.com Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameo with additional audio engineering by Kale Curtis the video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our 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