Martha Carlin: Exploring Gut Health and the Sugar Connection

Ever wondered how the tiny organisms in our gut can profoundly impact our health? In this podcast episode, I sat down with Martha Carlin and delved into the intricate connection between gut health, sugar consumption, and our overall well-being.

Martha Carlin's journey from a systems analyst to the founder of The Biocollective, a company focused on microbiome science, is nothing short of fascinating. Her groundbreaking research on probiotics and their potential role in diabetes management is altering the course of scientific discourse.

During our conversation, we examined how our gut microbiome and sugar consumption interplay, influencing our overall well-being. Martha weaves together an engaging narrative of how pathogenic bacteria can affect nutrient absorption, drive our cravings, and produce harmful metabolites.

Martha also shares about her Sugar Shift formula, a pioneering initiative aimed at managing glucose levels, inspired by her husband's battle with Parkinson's. The promising results from clinical trials on diabetics paint an optimistic picture for the future.

In conclusion, understanding our microbiome's role in our health is essential. Through the pioneering work of scientists like Martha Carlin, we are gradually unraveling the mysteries of our gut. Their research can potentially lead to improved health outcomes and the development of innovative treatment methods for various diseases.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Welcome to the Kick Sugar Coach podcast. Join me each week as I interview experts who will share the science of sugar, sugar addiction and different approaches to recovery. We hope to empower you with the information and inspiration, insights and strategies you need to break up with sugar and fall in love with healthy, whole foods so you can prevent and reverse chronic disease, lose weight, boost your mood and energy. Feel free to go to my website for details on my coaching programs and to access free resources KickSugarCoachcom. Welcome everybody today to an interview with one of our keynote speakers, martha Carlin.

Speaker 1: 0:46

Martha is a leader in the research and dissemination of information about the microbiome and how the microbiome influences all areas of our health. She took her background actually as a systems analyst and applied it to the mystery of the microbiome and how we can understand it and how we can use this emerging field of science to support the reversal, as well as the prevention, of disease. She started a company called the Biocollective and it's an internationally collaborative organization. Is it an actual non-profit or is it a profit company? It is a profit company. It's a profit company. Yeah, she works with scientists all over the world and she's considered a citizen scientist working with all of the emerging, like open sourcing the information that we're all learning about the microbiome and then making it practical. She's created this phenomenal line of probiotics, which we'll talk about in the interview today, that touches on different aspects of our health and they're all synergistically designed and it's very, very interesting.

Speaker 1: 1:56

Let me see what else to share about her. She will share her story about how she became interested in the microbiome and how she came up with a targeted probiotic line. And, oh, it's also to mention that she has done some research about the role of probiotics in diabetes and the potential reversal of diabetes, and she just finished a study that she's going to tell us about. Her work has been recognized by the National Institutes of Health and the Human Microbiome Project. She's considered to be a leader in this space and I'm so pleased to welcome Martha to talk with us today. Thanks so much, barnes. So, for people who aren't familiar with you, what got you started on being interested in the microbiome?

Speaker 2: 2:48

Well, I actually came to the microbiome after almost a little over 10 years of studying many different areas of science, but a lot of it related to food and its impact on our health, because my husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at the age of 44. And I looked at the dietary connections and some things that he had been eating a lot of sort of leading up to that time, which, you know, he was very addicted to sugar and a lot of processed foods and those kinds of things. And when the microbiome, when I became aware of it was through Dr Martin Blazer's book called Missing Microbes that came out, I think, in 2013 or 2014, and it was talking about his research showing the connection between this generation that we live in, that grew up in the age of antibiotics, and how antibiotics have destroyed certain aspects of this thing called the microbiome the trillions of bacteria, fungi and viruses that live in our bodies, and that that was leading to an increase in what he called noncommunicable diseases but these chronic diseases. And it really resonated for me because I knew my husband had a history of infections, and strep throat in particular, but other ones as well, and so he had taken many courses of antibiotics and so from that I actually just started digging into this new area and it was kind of just coming out of a five year government funded project, you know from that ended in 2012 called the Human Microbiome Project, and I started looking at it and talking to scientists and later that year the first paper was published that connected the microbiome to Parkinson's.

Speaker 2: 5:01

There's two primary types of Parkinson's one where they are tremor dominant and the other where they have more bent over posture and trouble walking posture and gate, and they could divide those groups by the gut bacteria. And I said that's it. The gut is the general ledger. You know, going back to my accounting training, you know it's got a balance and the information is in the general ledger. And so I stopped what I was doing and founded the bio collective to look not just Parkinson's but to look across the microbiome, because the other thing I learned in talking to scientists who had been looking at other diseases was these common elements across the microbes in our gut that are leading to inflammation in different parts of the body. And you know, maybe it's, maybe it's not that we have diseases, it's that they manifest. You know, the symptoms manifest out of the microbiome differently and different people.

Speaker 1: 6:09

So Right, right, and just a little bit that I know from the microbiome like I think that neurosurgery would be less complicated. It just seems like it's so there's so much, there's so many different strains, and like there's so. Anyways, as you started out on this journey, did your head start to spin and did you just start to go oh, my goodness, this is. There's such complexity and depth here.

Speaker 2: 6:36

Well, you know, for me I've always been fascinated by complexity and I'm a systems thinker, so I really like looking at those interconnections. And you know, one of the things I had on my wall is the, the. You see it sometimes in functional medicine doctors, but it's sort of the biochemistry flow of in the human system and I don't think it's fully comprehensive, but it's a. You know, it's this giant map of this, creates this and all these arrows and, and you know, every time I would learn a new piece of connecting the microbiome to this on the human side. You know, I would go over with my little Sharpie and write these colors and notes and sort of make my own map. So it's kind of how my brain works. But yes, it's complicated, but sometimes in the very complex there are also some simple things and I would say, along the way, learning that one of those simple things is carbohydrates, sugars, and how sugars feed through that complex system and what they do to shift the microbiome.

Speaker 1: 8:00

Because there, what did you learn about? How carbohydrates and simple sugars? What do they do to our microbiome?

Speaker 2: 8:08

Well, you know, with the, the sad American diet is really quite heavy in glucose and fructose and in the last 20, 30 years very heavily laden with fructose. And these sugars that you know are metabolized differently in the body and they they also feed more of the pathogenic bacteria. So you know I use streptococcus a lot of times as an example because that was kind of one of my early bugs I was looking at and it likes glucose. So if you're eating a lot of glucose, you're you're feeding that particular microbe and there's many researchers who also show. You know, when you're putting this high carbohydrate diet in place and you're feeding certain microbes, they're making molecules that are sending signals to your brain to tell you to eat more of that. And of course you know you do a lot of work with helping people kind of understand how to control and overcome those addictions. But there's a biochemistry going on in the gut with those bacteria when they're fed those sugars and what they produce and signal to your brain.

Speaker 1: 9:31

You know, what just occurred to me is that I and I imagine the exact Well, or the same thing is happening that once you get on, hooked from the refined carbohydrates, you're on a whole food diet. You're eating lots of whatever the whole foods are. You're eating that, you start starving out the pathogenic bacteria, viruses and fungi, right, and they start to die off, even though they're screaming at you Hello, Give me, give me the donut donut. No, not the scrabble day donut. And they're screaming at you. No, you didn't hear me, I don't want the salad. And but yet, if we, just if we, if we have support to get over that hump, when we start eating whole foods and our microbiome starts to shift, then I imagine that the bacteria that love and thrive on the whole foods will start sending messages eat more salad, like does. Does that stand to reason?

Speaker 2: 10:22

It does stand to reason and there is research showing I think it takes about 30 days to transform the microbiome by dietary changes alone and you'll start to see those early on. But a lot of times people won't stick with it because when you're in that remodeling period, as you're saying, when you have the die off of the bad guys or what, the LPS producing gram negative bacteria that like those sugars, as those start to die off, they release, they release toxins and sometimes you don't feel so good. So a lot of times in that transitional period, without the right support, people don't have the stick to it. If this to get beyond and they say oh well, you know that diet made me feel terrible or that you know our probiotic. Sometimes in that first week or so of transition you know your gut is changing and you'll notice that it's changing.

Speaker 1: 11:33

And I guess that that makes sense for those of us that have got over the 30 day hump or the 90 day hump or whatever. It is where you start to feel like, oh, my body feels better. My body, I'm not hearing those voices. Go eat the doughnut. Now I'm hearing that let's go have a salad and some salmon. Right, and it's easy and it's effortless and it feels like almost shocking that used to think a doughnut looked like deep fried potato starch and rancid oil, like what I used to eat, that Like what, right, it's just so baffling.

Speaker 1: 12:05

But I could see I never thought about how the microbiome and those met that feedback loop, that conversation that the bacteria, fungi and viruses are having in our guts. You know how that, how that can shift to them, make make it easier to stay on the path. So there's a couple of questions that you sent over to me that I want to read because they're actually yeah, they're, they're they kind of sort of wow, that sounds deep. So, from your microbiome research, what connections have you made through data to disrupted metabolism and insulin signaling? I'm not even sure what that means, so I'm hoping you can answer it.

Speaker 2: 12:45

Sure, well, um, you know the microbiome is a metabolic organ, and so again back to that signaling. That's going on when you're feeding sugar and fructose in particular, how that's changing the microbiome, and it's actually so. Fructose, as an example, it's a key lates minerals and in particular, has a very high preference toward chelating copper. Copper is a trace mineral that we need a very small amount of. The current recommendation, I think, is 2 to 3 milligrams a day, if I'm correct. And then that's really essential to many of the molecules that get made from neuropeptides. So again back to that brain and that metabolism. You need a small amount of copper with a scorebate to make these really important neuropeptides and hormones and signaling molecules in the body.

Speaker 2: 14:09

So if you don't get these minerals, not only are you as a human depleted of them, but the microbiome is also depleted of them, and so you have these little battles going on in the metabolism of your body for nutrients. So nutrients that we need, nutrients that the microbes need. So when we have a nutrient dense diet that, say, doesn't have anything like high fructose corn syrup in it, we're more able to digest and receive the nutrients and the microbes in our gut are also more able to access what they need to be healthy and to make all these vitamins for us. So there's a really interesting paper on the efficiency of the microbiome and metabolism, and the gut bacteria are the primary producers of most of our B vitamins, and so that goes back again. B vitamins require a small amount of copper. Most of those are copper dependent vitamins and it's in this Krebs cycle of energy production that's going on in the gut and we also have that in our cells.

Speaker 1: 15:32

Oh my gosh. Fascinating. And I know most of us think, oh, when we eat our vegetables, we're getting our B vitamins. It's like, yeah, but there's a middle step. We eat the vegetables that feed our bacteria that make the vitamins Right, Because there are vitamins in these vegetables, but it's not. It is that we're absorbing those. But it's even more significant that they feed a certain kind of bacteria that then convert the food that we eat into B vitamins as well. Is that right?

Speaker 2: 16:02

Yes, and if you think about it too, the name vitamin is vital mineral. There's a you know there's a book I love. It's called the life bridge. I think it's out of print but you can still get it on Amazon and it's called the way to longevity through probiotic nutrients. It essentially talks about how microbes make inorganic matter into living matter.

Speaker 2: 16:33

So these inorganic minerals, they make them more bio available to the body and they use as an example in their nutritional yeast and selenium. So you know, if you go out and you get a USP bottle of selenium as a supplement, it's not going to be very bio available for your body to uptake, but if you get nutritional yeast that has a seleno protein in it, it's going to, your body is able to use that selenium. I think what they showed in the study was it's something like 250 times more bio available to the body, which again also goes back to you know, thinking about the whole foods diet and you know, microbial access to providing us the ability that you know they help break down and enable us to absorb those nutrients you know, versus a shelf full of, you know, 20 different nutrients that we're taking capsule by capsule that aren't delivered in a whole back to a whole system and how the system works together.

Speaker 1: 17:47

Right, wow, wow. So bacteria play, or make or buy in place such a profound role in our breaking down of the foods that we eat and turning them into forms that are very bio, available to our system?

Speaker 2: 18:00

Yes, and even you know I was actually just reading in paper this morning about the vitamin D receptor in our body and how certain bacteria affect kind of the switching on and off of that receptor and our ability to process vitamin D.

Speaker 1: 18:18

And that makes sense to me, because I mean, vitamin D is like whoa the vitamin de jure, right, everyone's talking about vitamin D, but why, suddenly, did so many of us become so vitamin D deficient? Right, and there's some evidence to suggest that sugar is impacting the absorption or use of vitamin D. Do you know anything about that?

Speaker 2: 18:39

Well, again, that sugar is going to impact the bacteria that are in your gut, and those bacteria are, you know, turning on and off these switches, so to speak. So that makes a lot of sense to me that's the epigenetics piece.

Speaker 1: 18:53

So we eat nutrient deficient foods in the form of refined carbohydrate, sugar, processed junk food. Not only does our body not get the nutrition it needs, but the bacteria don't get the nutrition they need, so the ones that we really that rely on the whole foods to feed them and they're robust and thriving and converting, you know, our food into a form that our body can bioabsorb it. But so that's not happening. We're not getting the nutrition, they're not getting the nutrition, and then what happens is the pathogenic bacteria start to proliferate and those are the ones that just drive on sugar and they send off signals to the brain to eat more, eat more and they also send off toxins. Can you talk a bit more about the toxic um metabolites of these pathogenic bacteria? Can you speak to that at all? Sure.

Speaker 2: 19:48

So actually one of the areas I've looked at quite a bit is related to something called lipopolysaccharide and that is the cell wall of the, you know, the membrane of a gram negative bacteria. Um and um, I actually just wrote a blog on I have a Martha's quest blog where I write about Parkinson's a lot and I just wrote a piece called Rethinking Parkinson's disease. All about, um, microbial LPS toxins. Uh, because there are actually in both diabetes and Parkinson's. There are hundreds of papers with animal models that use the endotoxin lipopolysaccharide to induce the symptomology and outcomes of, you know, parkinson's and diabetes. And it's like I mean, I found 550 papers using the LPS mouse model of Parkinson's disease and you know, I asked myself a lot of times when I look at these research papers it's like, okay, well, we know we developed this model to make the disease in an animal. Like, why are we not asking ourselves how this is actually happening in a real human? So these gram negative bacteria, um, lps. Like the first time we're infected with a LPS producing bacteria, the immune system responds in a highly inflammatory state. But there is something that develops over time called LPS tolerance, and the more LPS tolerance we have, the less our immune system is focused on kicking them out. And so you know, over time you can get a buildup of this endotoxin. And I actually, back in 2015, I think 20, somewhere around there, I found this researcher at Hebrew University who had a hypothesis about other diseases after you've had an infection. I mean it's sort of a mouthful, but it's called a post-infectious sequela of bacterial lysis. So basically, after the bacteria are killed, what symptoms do you get after infection? And he goes through this very complex model. But what he's showing is that the body isn't fully able to clear up the LPS and you know there are some other ones besides LPS and so you get circulating endotoxin in the bloodstream and it can go to different places in the body and cause inflammation in different places and that comes out as subsequent other symptoms or disease diagnosis which may actually relate back to a previous infection. And you know I read his paper and there were so many connections in there to what I saw in Parkinson's and I had several conversations with him. He was in his 90s. He actually just passed away about a year and a half ago. I was still writing papers about this subject all the way up to then, so I became very focused on this in my in making the sugarship product Part of one of the mechanisms that I thought it would help with was reducing this, these lipopolysaccharide producing bacteria.

Speaker 2: 23:27

Of course you know as you're transitioning you do get a die off, but you can't go to say a quest diagnostics or lab core and just ask for an endotoxin test. There is an endotoxin blood test but it's not on the lineup of regular blood tests you can get. But because we were doing a scientific study, we did a clinical trial in a diabetes cohort and I just asked the researchers. I said can we measure serum lipopolysaccharide before and after to see if we have an impact on that? And so we were able to purchase that assay and do it, and that was one of the most significant things that dropped over time in our study was serum lipopolysaccharide. So we're clearing out those bacteria and the endotoxins that are associated with them. Now I'd love to study more how that mechanism works, but right now we're just very excited to have shown in our in our clinical trial, that it has an impact on lipopolysaccharide.

Speaker 1: 24:43

Wow, that's fascinating. So lipopolysaccharide suggests to me fat and carbs. Like why is it called that?

Speaker 2: 24:52

So it is it's a? It's a fat and multiple sugar, you know. So lipos, fat, poly, as many saccharitis sugars.

Speaker 1: 25:04

These are like so we eat the sugar, the pathogenic, the not so friendly bacteria kind of thrive. They start to like how do what do you Well, they make that that is what their cell wall is made out of.

Speaker 2: 25:20

So their cell wall is made out of lipids and sugars.

Speaker 1: 25:25

Okay. So then that the LPS starts to proliferate in our bodies, which is considered toxic to our system, and you can see in serums that that possibly, that metabolite is toxic to the system and it can show up, it can be implicated in different diseases like diabetes, parkinson's, right. So every time I interview you, martha I mean, this is the thing about Martha's we get interviewer every day for the next 30 days and we will always learn something new always. And the thing that always freaks me out about my interviews with you is that I'm a child that had tons of antibiotics tons and then, when I was in my 20s, I was a sugar I eat sugar all day long, literally and I wound up with cystic acne, acne, rosacea. I was always having infections. So I my longest stretch.

Speaker 1: 26:22

I took an antibiotic every day for nine months, every single day for nine months, and then I wound up having chronic UTIs and I took all the really bad like I can't remember the names of them, but they're like just as long as you were never on those, I was like dozens, right.

Speaker 1: 26:38

And so I'm always like, oh my gosh, thank God there's people like Martha who can come in and say it's okay, take a deep breath, lawrence. I'm working on some strains. We've got some solutions coming in, so so if you're like me and you're like oh man, I've been on so many different antibiotics and I can only imagine you know how disrupted my microbiome has been and how profound a role it's played in my own health challenges. There's gonna be some good news here, because Martha has been, and her team and these scientists all over the world are helping this figure this out for us. I've been putting together these collections of bacteria and certain combinations that can help us with various different malfunctions in the microbiome, but the very first one I wanna talk about is sugar shift and how you use that in a studies with diabetics and what was the outcome. So tell us about that combination, sure.

Speaker 2: 27:31

So I actually originally made that formula for my husband with Parkinson's because some research was published that showed that the sugar alcohol, manitol, could stop the aggregation of the proteins in a mouse model and actually pull them out of the brain and clear them. And so I came back and I studied. Actually here's my book with all the flags I pull out periodically. You know, manitol is a really interesting molecule. It's the most abundant sugar in nature. It is a sugar alcohol but it behaves differently than the other sugar alcohols in the polyol pathway. But I looked at how to make a formula that we could put into the gut that would convert sugars like glucose and fructose into Manitol, which humans don't use. It doesn't spike your blood glucose and you eliminate it through your urine and your feces. So we came up with an eight-strain formula and there are three primary Manitol producers in the formula, but in combination. When we added some of the other organisms to the formula, we were actually able. You know the sum is greater than its parts. It actually does a better job as a team than if we individually looked at how those converters would work by themselves. So in that process that was our primary focus and then we started to see how, by doing that, we were reshaping the microbiome and we were changing glucose metabolism potentially. And I made it for John also, partly because he was a sugar addict and he was able. It took him three years but he was able to get off sugar from that.

Speaker 2: 29:43

So from that we looked at Parkinson's has difficult end point measurements for doing a clinical trial because of you know there are no known like blood chemistry tests or anything they do on that and it's typically more subjective testing that's done. So we looked at diabetes because we had customers who had told us the product had changed their blood sugar and anyway. So we did a clinical trial. You know, 30 subjects on sugar shift, 30 controls for 90 days and we measured fasting blood glucose, post-prandial blood glucose, insulin, homa-ir, which is a measure of insulin resistance but typically isn't measured in the US, neither is insulin, and we did the serum LPS and HBA1C and so there was a clear statistical difference in the controls and the sugar shift, in changing the trend of post-prandial and fasting blood glucose. There was a reduction in insulin, the improvement in the HOMA-IR.

Speaker 2: 31:07

The number one thing that shifted in that 90 day period was this serum, lipopolysaccharide, and in the 90 day window we did not get a statistically significant drop in HBA1C. But at the end of the study we unblinded the group and then we took 10 subjects and kept them on for additional three months, so for a total of six months, and that group that was on product for six months had about a 14% drop in HBA1C. Wow, that's significant. So it was very exciting. But the LPS for me was the most exciting because, even though that's not a clinical measurement in Parkinson's, I actually did find a Cambridge researcher who's proposing an endotoxin hypothesis of Parkinson's and I reached out to him and said hey, I saw your paper while I was writing my blog and we have this product and maybe we could look at doing a study.

Speaker 1: 32:10

So oh, martha, it's unbelievable. That's such an incredible story. So did the group that were diabetic and the group that were control. Was their diets the same?

Speaker 2: 32:23

That was well what's so interesting. So we actually did our clinical trial in Cuba. My chief scientific officer, raul Kano, was born in Cuba, came to the States in his teens but has developed a relationship with the hospital back there. So in Cuba they don't have a lot of diet variety and they have fairly high carbohydrate diet because they don't have a high level of income and that higher carbohydrate diet is more affordable than and oftentimes they can't even get a lot of protein. So it was a pretty consistent much more consistent, I think, in diet wise than you would see here in the States.

Speaker 1: 33:11

Totally, totally makes sense to me, absolutely. And did the group that was taking sugar shift? So just to clarify sugar shift is the? Is it 11 different bacterias that come together? Eight, sorry, eight. So there's eight that come together in this synergistic blend. That has done, I mean, this product is gobsmacking to me. For me, because I've been off sugar for so long, I didn't notice a shift in cravings, but I don't have them to begin with, but I did notice it made a difference in terms of bloating regularity. Yeah, phenomenal, like a phenomenal products, and I hear every, all of my clients get a free bottle for me and they all like swear by it too that it absolutely has helped them with cravings and digestion and elimination and other things as well. So this group that was taking sugar shift, did they notice a change in their diet? Like did they start to sort of eat less junk, refined stuff and more whole foods? Like did that show up?

Speaker 2: 34:17

Well, we didn't do a study on that per se. They had a wellbeing survey and there was this general overall better wellbeing that they reported and some people did report losing weight, but we didn't, as part of the study, really focus on the food or diet.

Speaker 1: 34:44

I mean, and that's incredible, right? Because people would say, oh, I bet you that the group that was taking the product was eating. But no, they were eating the same. It was not a food intervention, a nutrition intervention. This was a microbiome intervention, right? Like that's the thing that's so incredible.

Speaker 2: 35:03

So there was and I'm off the top of my head, I'm not gonna remember what measure it is. It might have been triglycerides, I can't. But in the control group and the sugar shift group there was one category where they both showed improvement and we know that is largely due to the fibers. So the fibers that they got by themselves. And then we have the fibers, but in addition to the fibers we have live bacteria that are doing more things metabolically with those fibers and with the other foods that you're eating.

Speaker 1: 35:41

Right, right, so interesting. So you've since gone on. So this was the first product you put together for your husbands with Parkinson who, quick update is doing well, is doing very well. In case you're wondering, that was John in the back, we heard. And then from there you've put together a whole bunch of other different blends. And what inspired that?

Speaker 2: 36:07

Well, so initially we actually went into a room, raul and I sat down and mapped out kind of, what are all the problems people are having and how do those tie back to the microbiome? And we mapped out, I would say anywhere from 25 to 30 different things. And we had also talked to different companies early on who are interested in our platform and maybe having us help them, and so we have a computational model that we can also predict how microorganisms will behave together in a system. And so we had looked at some of that and we spent about a week mapping out all these problems and what are the microbes that produce this vitamin or that vitamin? There's a huge body of literature about what these microorganisms do and how they're used actually in industry to produce a lot of supplements. Plus, dr Conno is encyclopedic. He was a professor of microbiology for nearly 40 years and really a pioneer in bio-remediating oil using microbes. He really knows how to work with them as a system. He went away and did his magic and came back and we mapped out what these were and ran them through our computational system and tweaked them a bit. Then we said, okay, what are the ones we should start with? We started with ideal immunity and heart centered on top of our sugar shift.

Speaker 2: 37:49

You mentioned antibiotics. We have one called antibiotic antidote. That was one that actually came to be after a paper was published by the Weizmann Institute showing that this 11-strain formula was not beneficial after taking antibiotics. We looked at that and Raoul said well, I would never put those 11 strains together because it's going to make the body too acidic. It'll make it too difficult to colonize a broader population. We worked on a formula to help the terrain of the ecosystem, enabling restoration of a broader set of bacteria. We had that one on the shelf but we hadn't made it.

Speaker 2: 38:36

One of my advisors, steve Cosme, who's a fermentation chemist. He'd been in the probiotics business for 25 years. His mother had appendicitis. She's in her 80s. She had to have her appendix removed and she got sepsis. She was on IV antibiotics for about a month. Coming out of that. She was talking to her doctor I'm not regular, I don't feel good, my bowels are all messed up. They weren't helping her.

Speaker 2: 39:08

Steve came to me and he said when are you going to make that antibiotic antidote? My mother needs it. I said well, let me look and see. I know we have a lot of proprietary strains and then we have suppliers for the ones that aren't proprietary to us.

Speaker 2: 39:26

I was able to get the handful of strains that we were missing for that formula. I said I'll just make a small batch, we'll make 200 bottles, we'll see if our customers want it and you'll have some for your mom. We did that. She came back we actually have a review from her on her website and she said it was so amazing to her how she felt restored. Her bowels were back to normal, she had energy again. And Steve kind of laughed because he said I've been talking to her about probiotics for 20 years and she never listened to me. She thinks like this is the greatest thing. Is it a magic bullet for all antibiotics? Probably not, but it's definitely a step in that direction of restoring your internal terrain, to get you back on track. So then you could take one of the other formulas after you're back on track.

Speaker 1: 40:24

Got it Amazing. They got these things, that you're doing this research and helping us figure this all out, because you've got quite a number of different products there. Tell us about your products. There's sugar shift, which is really to help us improve our glucose metabolism. The carbohydrates foods that have glucose or fructus in them are converted by bacteria into mannitol, which is food for them, and the rest is just passed through the system. Then you've got heart centered. Is that for people who've been diagnosed with cardiac conditions?

Speaker 2: 41:04

Probiotics are for healthy people. They're not for conditions from the FDA, but it's really to support overall cardiovascular health. The bacteria are designed to produce CoQ10 and nitric oxide. Those are metabolites that are supportive for the cardiovascular system.

Speaker 1: 41:32

Oh, I didn't know that. Okay, interesting, then you've got sweet slumber.

Speaker 2: 41:37

Simple slumber. Although it is sweet slumber, simple slumber came. We had so many customers talking to us about their sleep problems. Sugar shift actually does help people with improved sleep. I had looked a lot at tryptophan metabolism and tryptophan, of course, is involved in sleep hormone production. We looked at a formula of bacteria that could work together to produce tryptophan and bacterial melatonin for about seven hours so that you don't wake up groggy. That we released last summer. Let's see how people like it. We didn't advertise. That actually quickly became our second best-selling product because there are so many people who have sleep problems. It is one where you can take sugar shift and also take simple slumber. We tell people to take them apart from each other. You don't need to take all five of our probiotics. We're not trying to.

Speaker 1: 42:49

No, in fact, I think, as I was going to be. My next question is how do we stagger these? I remember last interview you were like don't take them at the same time, no, just finish a bottle, give it, then let that do what it needs to do to help with restoration, let your body work with that and then bring in the more. The other thing about tryptophan and I'm learning this from Dr Chris Palmer's book called Brain Energy is how? No, yes, it's either his book or Dr Lustig's book, hacking of the American Mind I forget where I heard it. He talks very much about how tryptophan ties in with the serotonin system and how it isn't just good for sleep, but it's also very much essential to the restoration of our serotonin system, which is what makes us feel happy.

Speaker 2: 43:37

Exactly. Those microbes are very intricately involved in tryptophan metabolism. One of the connections there sort of back to my early looking at food is that glyphosate actually disrupts tryptophan metabolism. How do we know that?

Speaker 1: 44:03

How do we know the science of that? For sure, I've heard it, but then I've had other people say no, there's no science on that.

Speaker 2: 44:09

Oh, I would pull it out. I think it's down in the basement though. I have a book on all the metabolites of the chikamate pathway. There's a whole section on tryptophan and the tryptophan metabolites. Bacteria have that chikamate pathway. Plants have that chikamate pathway, as they say. Humans don't have that chikamate pathway. It's not a problem. Actually, I've been deep into a mind-boggling paper on amino acids. One of the things I was looking at there is part of what delivers glucose to the brain is out of the urea cycle. Recycling, going through a pathway to get glucose into the brain is phosphoenolpyruvate, which is a metabolite that is affected by glyphosate. And then and we're looking at triosphosphate, which is back to a copper dependent enzyme that glyphosate chelates copper. Also, fructose and glyphosate are both chelating copper. So these tiny little things that make a difference and they disrupt things like tryptophan and serotonin metabolism and, of course, the microbiome in general. So triosphosphate does select for a more pathogenic profile of bacteria in the gut.

Speaker 1: 45:53

Really. And the foods at glyphosate show up on pretty much non-organic produce, right Grains and fruits and vegetables.

Speaker 2: 46:01

Well, you know, I'm sad to say, it's probably worse than that. I mean, you want to be on an organic diet as much as possible, but even better, you want to just know your farmer. You possibly can. I actually just read an article by the CEO of I think the company is Nutiva Nutiva, I think, and he was talking about their organic chia seeds that 80% of the product that was coming across to him. He was testing everything and 80% of that product had periquad in it, different herbicide but similar problems and connection to Parkinson's. And it's virtually impossible because of the way water flows and the herbicides and pesticides that flow into the irrigation systems and the water. And then you know, if you have an organic farm here and a conventional farm here and they're both pulling water from the same stream, you're going to get those residues and then back I think it was 2008,.

Speaker 2: 47:10

Tom Vilsack, who came from, I think, iowa he was the governor of Iowa, if I'm correct, became the head of the US Department of Agriculture and he may be back in there now, but he was during the Obama administration actually approved the use of conventional manure in organic agriculture and of course these conventional cattle are fed a lot of the GMO laden. Well, not just the cattle, the poultry as well. And we ended up doing some. We're still doing some research with Dr Don Huber looking at the impact of poultry manure that has about eight-tenths of a pound of glyphosate per ton. Oh my God, oh no. So these organic farms use the manure, and they may use anywhere from two to four tons an acre. So they're actually maybe applying more glyphosate than they don't realize it either.

Speaker 2: 48:18

So the food chain let's just say the food chain has some problems. Organic is typically better, but not always. I mean, you're almost better off if you can find a local farmer who is growing produce and get in a CSA and ask them like what do you use? When do you use it? You?

Speaker 1: 48:42

know how do you grow this food? That's so depressing, wow. You just think you're a little bit safe, and now they've found a way, all right, okay, so so much here. So we've got these different product lines so we can take the sugar shift in the morning and we can take the simple slumber at night. But if you've been on antibiotics, perhaps start with the antibiotic antibiotic antidote. Let that complete itself, let that sort of try and push out some of the pathogenic bacteria, help the proliferation of the good and friendly ones, and then maybe we could start with sugar shift and the slumber one, and then maybe down the road we could try the heart one. And is there another one as well?

Speaker 2: 49:22

Well, so we have ideal immunity, which is it's an interesting product. It has a unique strain of bacteria that has so their bacteria make these. They're called bacteriocins. They're little peptide sequences that are very targeted against other bacteria, and so we happen to have one in there that is 100% effective in all our testing against listeria and then some of the other food pathogens almost 100% effective. So salmonella E coli, the end.

Speaker 2: 50:00

So we sort of recommend people take that, like maybe when you're traveling.

Speaker 2: 50:04

So if you think you're going to get exposed on foreign travel or if you're somebody who eats out in restaurants a lot might be a good idea to pop one of those in before you eat at the salad bar or you eat restaurant food, because it's got those protective bacteria sense.

Speaker 2: 50:26

I do have people who take it every day. I have a doctor in Hawaii who actually got sick from one of his patients in the 1970s who returned from the Amazon jungle and he never got well and so he had chronic severe diarrhea from the 1970s until like three years ago when he found our ideal immunity. He had tried all kinds of probiotics he had tried. You know he was taking lomotil and anti-diarrheal medications multiple times a day to no effect and his daughter found ideal immunity and for him he has to take it all the time and if he stops taking it the diarrhea comes back. So there's something about how it's taming the ecosystem in a way that you know, maybe it's the wolf in the system that keeps things in check, but that one's a very interesting mixture and supportive of your overall immune system, right, got it.

Speaker 1: 51:32

And that is very, very interesting. So if you have a client who has that problem chronic diarrhea and nothing, nothing, nothing helps, like I mean she can even have it while she's fasting, right, like it's just, yeah, really chronic, I mean eventually, of course you know she clears out and she's got, there's nothing left to release. But so she said she was told that she has some sort of bile uptake something, something to do with not being able to handle bile or something.

Speaker 2: 52:05

So that's that's interesting. Also, it's interesting because you know, there's so many connections to bile and there's some research going on at the University College Cork and Ireland on bile related to the microbiome and also to Parkinson's. I can't, off the top of my head, sort of pull that out, but yeah, that's really interesting to me. So there is, I do have.

Speaker 2: 52:42

This is like I have things stuck all over my walls at the lab and I have this, you know flip chart paper that's been on the back of one of the doors for a long time. That came actually from a paper about animals I think it was in cattle and the use of antibiotics and what it did to different populations of bacteria in the gut. And there's something on that drawing I can't pull out of my brain right now but that is related to bile. But it impacts hydrogen production and bile acid production and, depending on what the antibiotic is, of course you're going to have changes in population, but it really changes the gut bacteria in the cattle and even though we don't have a room in, it's going to do similar things to us.

Speaker 1: 53:39

Sure, sure, yeah, I'm going to send her a bottle. It will be my gift to her soon as we're off this call. So you have put together some really generous offers for people who are like, oh, I want to try this. So you've got a 15% off coupon, which we will put the URL under your keynote speaker, like when they go to check out your video, so it'll be right below this video they're watching. And then you're also going to do some draws, so do you want to tell us a bit about those draws?

Speaker 2: 54:08

Sure. So we're going to give away a combination of the sugar shift and simple slumber. So there'll be three giveaways of that. And then we actually do something called the sugar shift challenge, which is just a support kind of go along the path. We do ask people to measure some things if they are able to, but they can participate without measuring. We do the sugar shift challenge and we're kicking that off after your kick sugar summit and we're going to give away 10 sets of two free bottles and then a 20% discount on the remaining four bottles. So the sugar shift challenge is a six month challenge and we'll have 10 of those and then we'll have our sugar shift, simple slumber combo giveaways.

Speaker 1: 55:08

Amazing, so generous. So, taking off my interview viewer hat right now, you should totally make sure they get those markers. I mean, what an amazing opportunity for you. You know what you should find yourself a graduate student to say, okay, gear up, let's get you in here, figure out what you need to know, and let's use this as some sort of like soft sort of research.

Speaker 2: 55:30

That's a great idea because we've done it a couple of times. The first time we did it, we actually did it with Dr Bill Davis. This is an inner circle group and he did a great job of staying on top of his people to get them to do the blood glucose measurements. We did one last year and we didn't really have somebody who was staying on top of that, so I'm looking at a way to be able to do that. So I think a graduate student working on a study project would be a great idea for that.

Speaker 1: 56:07

Thanks, Lauren, yeah, you're welcome and you know what I just remembered. I have a client named Brenda who started this journey about a year, year and a half ago. Well, she's kind of been sort of unhooking from sugar, but didn't really fully till we connected, or maybe it was slightly before, but we connected. She's in my program, that's how I know her, and I recommend Sugar Shift to all my clients and in fact I offered to buy them a free bottle. And she recently got back to me to say, oh, I just decided randomly after a year to just put on a CGM to see how I'm doing. And she goes and it wasn't working. It was like literally broken. Nothing would change my blood sugar levels. And I'm like, oh, that's so weird, she goes. So of course I bought another one. I said this one isn't working, so I got another one on Same.

Speaker 1: 56:49

She's like what's happening? She said I had a peach. I just wanted to see what happened, if I could handle a peach, because mostly she just eats berries, because I just want to see if I can have a peach without spiking my blood sugars into diabetic ranges, like it used to no change. So then she ate two peaches. She's like no change, my blood sugar is so stable and so flat Like she goes. Don't get me wrong. I'm not using this as a license to go back and start binge eating sugar and you know what. She's been on sugar shift and I wonder if, now that there's enough bacteria grown that are colonized, now that that stuff's just being converted and she's not getting these blood sugar swings and she's lost over 100 pounds and it's phenomenal what's happened for her?

Speaker 2: 57:38

That's a fantastic story.

Speaker 1: 57:39

Yeah, I should send her. I'm going to get her to connect to you, maybe because your graduate student will have tons of those stories, martha. And when you combine your products with people who are willing to sort of unhook from sugar and fall in love with whole foods and by fall in love I now mean the bacteria will love them and send messages, eat more of those, or they will love them too we will all love them. What a powerful combination of transformation potential.

Speaker 2: 58:08

Yes, one thing I do. I'll have sometimes asked people oh, can I keep eating sugar if I take this? Well, for us, philosophically, that's not who we're trying to help. We're trying to help people who want to make a change in their life and their long-term health, and this is a tool to help them do that.

Speaker 1: 58:35

Oh, thank you for saying that Right. Yeah, this isn't the pill that allows you to go out and continue to eat your donuts and Doritos. No, because for all kinds of other levels, there's still impact being done, much of which we talked about, that there's no nutrition in there and that sugar will still feed pathogenic bacteria. So you're not getting ahead. You're just going to spin around. Yeah, you're putting good bacteria in there, but you're feeding the ones that are the bullies that have these LPS problems and on. Yeah, I think they get it. Enough said.

Speaker 2: 59:06

Is there any final words you'd like to share today, martha, before we wrap up today, Well, I'd just like to thank you for having me again and thank you for all the work you do and the people I learn about through you, who are putting all these pieces together, because I've connected with a number of fantastic researchers, richard Johnson being one of my favorite, and actually we're doing a book club and reading his book next month, and in November he's going to come talk to my little book club. So, anyway, I thank you for everything you do and I'm just happy to have an opportunity to tell people about the work we're doing and how to help them make the shift and kick sugar.

Speaker 1: 1:00:01

Thank you so much. I hope one day it's people like you truly. I hope one day it's people like you and Dr Johnson and these pioneers that are like spending hours in the deep end of the weeds of those nerdy little journals that you held up right, that you get the Nobel Peace Prizes in medicine, Because these are the unsung heroes like Martha. Anyways, thank you for your time, your products, your brain that can handle all of this depth of information that's appreciated back.

Speaker 2: 1:00:30

Thanks so much, boards.

Speaker 1: 1:00:35

Thanks for tuning in this week. If you would like more interviews, more information and more inspiration on how to break up with sugar, go to my YouTube channel, kicksugar Coach or my website KicksugarCoachcom. See you next week.