The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
Martha Carlin: Gut Health and Chronic Disease Connection
Martha Carlin, a visionary in microbiome research, joins us to unravel the intricate connections between gut health and chronic diseases like Parkinson's and Diabetes. Inspired by her husband's Parkinson's diagnosis, Martha embarked on a groundbreaking quest that led to the founding of BiotiQuest and the development of Sugar Shift. She shares her incredible journey and how her innovative probiotic product demonstrated a remarkable 14% reduction in HbA1c levels over 180 days in a clinical trial in Cuba.
Episode Highlights:
- Discover how gut bacteria influence conditions like diabetes, Parkinson’s, and even mood disorders.
- Learn about Martha’s innovative probiotic, Sugar Shift, designed to reduce sugar cravings, stabilize blood sugar, and support overall gut health.
- Martha shares the latest results from her clinical trials, showing the positive effects of Sugar Shift on blood glucose, insulin resistance, and the reduction of harmful endotoxins.
- Understand how processed foods, antibiotics, and stress shape our microbiome and what we can do to restore balance.
- Martha’s mission, inspired by her husband John’s battle with Parkinson’s, reminds us of the power of commitment in pioneering health solutions.
Listen now to uncover the secrets of a healthy microbiome and discover how small changes can lead to powerful results.
P.S. Martha has generously offered a special promotion for our listeners: Buy two of her top-rated products, and get the third free! Go here: https://biotiquest.com/pages/kicksugar
Start your journey to a healthier microbiome today!
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Welcome everybody to an interview today with Martha Carlin. Her bio is so long that I've actually been sort of struggling to figure out what highlights I want to hit with you. But I want to basically start by saying that in 2014, martha discovered some groundbreaking research that showed that there's a connection between gut bacteria and Parkinson's disease and this, for her, was a turning point in her quest to find a solution to her husband's diagnosis of Parkinson. She has a background in systems analysts, scientists she's a citizen scientist. Now she's CEO of a company called BiotiQuest that has a premium line of probiotics and her line is so well respected in the field that actually our keynote speaker on the last day of our summit, dr William Davis, who's the author of the book called the Gut Solution that's absolutely brilliant mentions Martha. In fact, martha was saying that off camera 50% of the time.
FLORENCE:Anytime he's on a podcast he talks about Martha, her research, her products. We truly have a leading expert in the field of the microbiome and what we're understanding about it and its linkages to all kinds of health, mental health conditions and some of the cutting edge interventions we're doing to repair, to restore, to optimize gut health. So, martha, let me just say there's one more thing I wanted to add. Oh, she's also doing actual research with her products, so her most her bestseller product is called Sugar Shift which is how I found out about Martha because it's a product that helps our gut microbiome convert some of the sugar in our diet to. I think it's malt she's going to tell you about maltitol, which is not at all which is excreted from the body.
FLORENCE:So she thought well, hey, maybe we could actually give this to individuals with diabetes. Do like a, a gold standard research study on it, which she did, and they've got the results back and they're being published, so she'll talk about that. But I also want to say this that her innovative approach, her research, her, her thought leadership in this area has earned her recognition from the National Institutes of Health and the White House Microbiome Initiative, making her now a key feature in the microbiome research field. So welcome, martha.
MARTHA:Thanks so much, Florence. It's good to be back with you.
FLORENCE:So, gosh, I know you've got some research that you want to share with us. Do you want me to just turn it over to you and you can kind of take it away?
MARTHA:about that. Let's see if we. Okay, that will get me over here, and so I'm actually using the presentation from let's see if it's. Is it coming up? It is, yeah, you bet. So we did our clinical trial in Cuba at Hospital Hermanos well, the American hospital in Havana, cuba.
MARTHA:I'm not good at speaking Spanish, but I'm using the presentation that was done by Dr Giselle Garcia-Menendez, who led our research project in Cuba. I was not able to redo the presentation and perhaps it's better just to see her work anyway. So we did a clinical trial in type 2 diabetes and of course we know from all our focus on sugar how serious type 2 diabetes and what a significant problem it is globally. It's also a pretty significant problem in Cuba because they eat a very high carbohydrate diet. They don't have a lot of other choice food, choice, proteins, that kind of thing. So that also made it interesting from a clinical trial perspective because we weren't getting people with a lot of variety in their diet and we weren't getting people who were changing their diet in the process of being involved in a clinical trial. So let's see if I can get this to advance. So this trial was with our Sugar Shift product. As you said, that's our best-selling product and that is the product that I originally designed for my husband, john, based on some Parkinson's research that showed that that sugar, alcohol, mannitol could actually stop the aggregation of the proteins that are a hallmark in Parkinson's. And so we came back and we made a small batch. Well, we came up with the concept of this eight strain formula that would work together as a team to produce mannitol, to produce some short chain fatty acids that help the gut lining and reduced glutathione. And we just did a one person trial with John and had with John and had these fantastic results with him in terms of at the time he was walking with a cane. Within a month he was no longer walking with a cane and we were looking at his microbiome data and it was moving back in the direction of the healthy human microbiome. So you know, we started just having other people try it, and not just people with Parkinson's, but people with metabolic problems, people with blood sugar issues, and we were getting all this feedback. So we ultimately launched the product in 2021, in 2021, like late 2021.
MARTHA:And because of the feedback we were getting related to people with sugar cravings and diabetes and issues with blood sugar, we felt like that would be an easier clinical trial for us to do, because you have clearly measurable endpoints in something like diabetes. So you know, the general hypothesis is these short chain fatty acids are promoting the beneficial bacteria in the gut. So that's improving the whole terrain of your gut terrain of your gut and by doing that it's shifting how sugar is handled and changing over time. We thought that it would stabilize and reduce HbA1c. We only did the trial for 90 days and it did not move HbA1c. But I have some data I'll show you at the end of this presentation where we went on to follow some of the subjects for another 90 days and so at the end of 180 days we had a 14% drop in HbA1c.
MARTHA:So this was the study design. You know it was a 12-week study. You know we don't need to go into the technicals of that, but it was randomized N of 64, and that was split between the control group and the placebo. And the placebo they actually took the fiber mixture that is in the sugar shift formula, inulinumonatol and inulin and some cellulose in the sugar shift formula overall with the eight strains of bacteria. And so the people in the control group got that mixture of inulin, mannitol and cellulose and there were some benefits to that and we do know that there are benefits to reshaping the microbiome through the use of fibers. But it was not as beneficial as the overall data, I mean the overall results with the eight strains in the formula. So you can see the placebo, the increasing over time, the fasting, blood glucose was increasing and with the sugar shift formula we did have a slight rise as the microbiome was shifting, and then a decline, which you'll also see declined further into the 180-day period. And then the same thing happened in the postprandial blood glucose. What we saw was in the placebo group that was taking that fiber, we started to see an increase in their numbers as opposed to a trending decrease with the sugar shift.
MARTHA:But one of the things I really wanted to talk to you about today was this serum lipopolysaccharide Florence, because lipopolysaccharide is the cell membrane of gram-negative bacteria and it's what's known as an endotoxin. And it's an endotoxin. That is, there are animal models using lipopolysaccharide endotoxin to study depression, to study Parkinson's, to study diabetes, to study MS. You can just go into PubMed and type in LPS animal models and you'll just be shocked at the number of disease models that use this endotoxin. And so we wanted to measure the serum LPS and, as you can see here this was day one of the trial what the endotoxin level was, and this was after day 84. Now you can also see in the control there was also a decrease in endotoxin. It just wasn't as significant as it was with the sugar shift. Um, and these are at like, not statistical, and statistical is what these references are. So our uh was statistically significant.
FLORENCE:Shift in the lps endotoxin can I ask you a question about that, Martha Sure? Yeah, I might be too in the weeds here. I know we need to kind of keep us at a high level, but I'm curious to know why the sugar shift random group had such a higher percentage of the endotoxins.
MARTHA:Well, if you look here, so this the black line in the middle is is actually that's, uh, the average. Oh so the average of the two are closer, but there were some larger outliers oh some, thank you, got it.
FLORENCE:That makes sense, got it, yep the randomized.
MARTHA:Um, yeah, and it was interesting too. In groups we had people who were taking insulin not everybody, so it was a mixture of people who were already on therapies for diabetes, whether that was something like metformin or metformin and insulin. So and this is just showing you from the microbiome data that we had in the group, the significant reduction in all of these different. So lipid A is a component of the lipopolysaccharide. These are each of the components that make up the different cell wall components of the lipopolysaccharide. And the red is day one how much of that was present in the microbiome. And the blue is after the sugar shift. Wow, that's just showing you what the molecules look like, which we don't need to get into. And then this was an insulin resistance measurement, which I believe this is the HOMA-IR. We don't day 84 in the sugar shift group. I won't explain what these little fiddle lines mean.
FLORENCE:Sounds good.
MARTHA:So, then, this was the open label study of the 10 subjects who stayed on the product for another 90 days and the dynamics of, okay, so the changing dynamics from day one to day 84 to day 180 in the fasting glucose.
MARTHA:So you can see the band, those purple kind of squatty looking. You're starting to get a much tighter band reading of all of these dynamics. And this is where the HbA1c came in and actually improved here. And then we also got improvement in triglycerides and it doesn't it actually doesn't show it on this in her presentation, but there was a present. There was a improvement also in triglycerides with the fiber so so these are those stats and the. I won't, in the interest of time, dig too deeply into that, but so she's just going into the experimental design here of the. So I'll just zip through these because.
MARTHA:But what we saw here was changes in the microbiome in these different groups of bacteria, so Lachnospiraceae, which is a family that helps with that beneficial fatty acid production, and then a significant increase in bifidobacteria. And that was of great interest to me and may have explained in part why it helped. John was because people with Parkinson's this is also people with COVID also have very low bifidobacteria and I think Alzheimer's as well. Bifidobacteria is a really important group of organisms that we've lost a lot of them in our babies because we don't breastfeed or you know the changes in the way we feed our babies and these are just so important to longevity and immunity and brain health. So you know, the statistically significant increase in bifidobacteria was pretty exciting for us. And then this Fecalibacterium prosnicia, that's what's known as a keystone gut species and it's one of the main producers of the short chain fatty acid butyrate, which is what feeds the cells that line the gut that are protecting us from leaky gut. So that's just more. So this was also.
MARTHA:These are also some key markers that we found in the microbiome data and you know, for me some of the most exciting ones were detoxification related. So this cytochrome P450 family, which is a detoxification pathway, had a 900% increase in the genes in that pathway that were being expressed after the sugar shift. And 4-ketoreductase is also a detoxification pathway. So both of those. It doesn't show it in here, but we actually have a strain of bacteria in this formula that helps break down glyphosate and we think that's also part of how it is protecting the microbiome, because glyphosate is so toxic to the microbiome. So but this bacteriopharotin also is helping with the turnover and recycling and availability of iron and you know this iron uptake with the turnover and recycling and availability of iron, and you know this iron uptake enzyme as well.
MARTHA:So let's see, wow, so the let's see the one in red, that 4-ketoreductase, that is actually the enzyme that's converting the fructose to mannitol, and I think we talked about the fructose-mannitol relationship maybe in last year's.
MARTHA:You know, fructose is such a it's such a problem because there's so much in our diet.
MARTHA:But you introduced me to Richard Johnson last year which was, you know, just kind of a mind blower for me because of his work showing that we actually produce fructose in our gut when we're under stress.
MARTHA:And that's actually been a really key thing in talking to customers. And just, you know people who talk to me about the gut microbiome, who are maybe eating low carb and have been for a long time and they don't understand why they still have blood sugar issues and that can be because they've gone so low carb that they've created a stress level in their body that they're actually producing fructose, which is kind of an interesting dynamic. So these two, let's see, it's promoting iron homeostasis, which I said, those two, that's this bacteriopharotin and the iron uptake system and that's alleviating the insulin resistance. And then this acyl-CoA acyl-CoA alkyl transferase that's a real mouthful, but it is involved in lipid metabolism and lipid transformation, which I think, if you go back to our details, we showed an improvement in triglycerides, and so that this is this is our publication that we already have out on the clinical results, and we are currently working on the microbiome paper. So with that, I'll back out of there and maybe, maybe it'll bring me back there I am.
FLORENCE:Thank you. That's so interesting because my little layperson perspective on this is that okay. So we didn't see a significant A1C reduction in the short term, but we started to see that trend in the long term when people are supplementing with targeted synergistic probiotics synergistic probiotics but what we did see is an increase in bacteria that helped detoxify the body, that helps sort of balance lipid levels, like there's, so so that one little tiny marker isn't the only thing to consider. Do you know what I'm saying? Like there's I know that for my clients cause I recommend this to all my clients is that a lot of them will say I either sleep better, I digest better and I don't have constipation anymore. It's really made a difference. Why does it improve constipation for some people?
MARTHA:Well, so mannitol is an osmoregulator, anatol is an osmoregulator. So often what you have in GI transit problems is a problem with water in the stool. But you know, just to take a step all the way back to Parkinson's again in our at the BioCollective, you know, we started nine years ago collecting fecal samples in our bank and one of the things the people in the lab who were processing the samples told me that they could identify a person with Parkinson's solely by looking at their stool and it was like concrete, and so that data has never been published. We looked everywhere to see if there was anything on it, and over the past nine months I have been working with the Australian scientist, dr Barry Nenum. He's a physical chemist and we're actually working on a Parkinson's paper which will include part of this explanation. Is these the gram negative bacteria? So those are the bad guys who are producing that LPS at physiologic temperature in the body. You know, when your body temperature or slightly above it will produce this enzyme called urease that will kill the good bacteria and then the good bacteria spill out all their potassium and calcium and it makes concrete what it makes a concrete, and it throws the electrolytes out of balance and that. So you know, through the process of explaining to him what we observed in the lab and then him really digging down to understand what was going on, is this battle in the gut.
MARTHA:For you know people who have really severe constipation I don't think the doctors understand what they're talking about. And then you know people who have really severe constipation. I don't think the doctors understand what they're talking about. And then you know, if you have a stool that is the consistency of concrete it's very difficult and painful to pass. And so then you know your, your body's reacting to that. So the so the way it works to help to help the constipation is one it's lowering those gram-negative bacteria that are producing the LPS. So you have less of that and you have less of thosenitol is that osmoregulator that can pull fluid into the colon and allow, you know, the stool to pass out more easily.
MARTHA:That's so interesting and really I tell people that, like going to the bathroom every day is so important. And it's interesting to me because I talked to a lot of people with Parkinson's or with other things who have constipation, and you know they'll say well, I talked to my doctor about it and you know I say only go, like you know, two or three times a week and the doctor says, oh, that's normal, you know, don't worry about it. And it's like no, that's not normal. And it's like no, that's not normal, right, I mean, it's normal, but it's not healthy. Also, maybe more people are doing that now and they think it's normal, but it's not a healthy normal.
FLORENCE:Right, right, right. And so what happens is what we're seeing is ultra processed foods are coming into our bodies in well in excess of what they can handle, are coming into our bodies in well in excess of what they can handle. It proliferates, it feeds the bad bacteria that have always been there, but they've been really low levels and they live part of a healthy, balanced ecosystem. But all of a sudden they're getting all this fuel. They proliferate and then they create these endotoxins that kill off the good guys. They proliferate, they proliferate and then people wind up with things like SIFO and SIBO and IBS and constipation or diarrhea or like all these digestive issues, leaky gut, and so obviously, obviously, we need to stop eating the ultra processed foods or really minimize them. And then we need to figure out how are we going to repair and rebuild this microbiome. And so we've got people in the trenches with the really nerdy trenches, like taking stool samples and really analyzing what's in there and how do we put them together to try and rebuild this microbiome? And so that's what Martha has been doing for us. That and all of her scientists from around the world. She's the citizen scientist, but they're like PhDs and doctors and such. But yeah, so how does this all tie together? That's how it ties together, so we need to understand that.
FLORENCE:I saw a study, martha, that I think it was done in rodents, or maybe it was done in humans, I can't even be sure now. Seven days was all it took of eating sugar and processed junk foods for them to show a noticeable decrease in the friendly bacteria that we know that we want in high numbers and a significant, statistically significant increase in the pathogenic ones that are harming us. Seven days of eating sugar, that's it. Can you imagine if we're doing this day in and day out? You're in and you're out, decade in and decade out.
MARTHA:Yeah, absolutely. But the good news is seven days to turn it around if you cut that off Now. You know the sugar addiction is very hard. It is a very, very difficult I mean you deal with people about this all the time but you can start to turn your microbiome around in a very short period of time and that's like you know. We went along for several decades with all this stuff about the human genome and we're going to do this. But like we are more microbial than we are human, like the magnitude of genes in our microbiome is like 300 times more than the human genome, it's doing all these things for us and it's malleable. It is something that we can actually impact by the choices that we make the way we live our lives, and you know what we do to take care of our ecosystem.
FLORENCE:Yeah, it's really hopeful. Now I've also heard that some antibiotics wipe out friendly bacteria essential to us and that they can never come back. Is that true or is it they just never come back?
MARTHA:naturally we have to sort of supplement or Well, so Dr Martin Blaser is really one of the main pioneers in looking at the impact of antibiotics on the microbiome and actually his book is what sparked me to get in this in the first place. He has a book called Missing Microbes and he does have some research that the microbiome never recovers from what are called macrolide antibiotics. So and I, off the top of my head, I can't remember some of the like brand names you would remember, but the and the macrolides are also associated with problems with Parkinson's. So there are, you know, some antibiotics that shift the microbiome in such a way that it doesn't recover back to its previous state. You know there are others where you can take an antibiotic and you'll get. You know you'll get some. You get recovery, you know.
MARTHA:But if you are constantly under assault by antibiotics, it's just going to be a lifelong challenge of holding steady your terrain because there's been so much damage from the antibiotics. And then, of course, you know we're exposed to a lot of antibiotics as food preservatives. So people who think they're eating something healthy by, you know getting fresh packaged, you know getting fresh packaged. You know, in the refrigerator section, whether that's, you know, cut vegetables or hummus or you know any of these kind of fresh packaged things. They put anti-enzymatic food preservatives and of course those enzymes are what help us digest our food, and so if you put anything that's going to attack those enzymes or those microbes and keep them from being able to do what they need to do, then you're going to have digestive problems and it's antibiotic.
FLORENCE:Wow, so crazy. Such a good argument again, just to stick with the whole healthy foods.
MARTHA:Yeah, I mean, you know, make your own guacamole, make your own hummus if you want to, although you know, I would actually say, be very careful with hummus in general, because chickpeas actually are one of the most contaminated with glyphosate.
FLORENCE:Really yeah, so you've got to eat them organic.
MARTHA:You've really got to eat them organic.
FLORENCE:Okay, oh, I didn't even know that Amazing. So is there anything else you would like to share? So thank you for sharing that data. It's so interesting because if I just looked at the study and said, oh, there was no difference, I think you know those probiotics, just like they said, they don't really help. No, there's so much more going on in terms of the subtleties of the endotoxins and the immune ones and feeding the friendly bacteria and like, yeah, it's so complex. So, yeah, is there anything else you want to add on the topic of what we need to know or understand about probiotics, like even just high level?
MARTHA:Well, sorry, my camera was going out there If you have a compromised microbiome you know I think there's also this misconception by people if I take a probiotic you know today or you know I take it a couple of times you know the way we have compromised our systems you really do have to have some level of discipline to get it back to where it needs to be. So if you say, okay, back to our 180 days, it took 180 days to move the HbA1c because that's the measure of turnover of your red blood cells, which is about 120 days. So you're not even going to see a difference for 120 days until you're actually staying consistent, just like you're staying consistent with not eating the sugar and not eating the wheat. So it's not a magic bullet like I'm gonna take a capsule of sugar shift and tomorrow, miraculously my blood sugar, my HbA1c, like everything's gonna to be, you know, magically fixed. It's a means of helping to shape your terrain and rebuild the good bacteria and the good ecosystem to be able to then have these longer term impacts.
MARTHA:Now, do you need to take it forever? You know, I like to think that most people would not have to take it forever, but you know it does have the glyphosate remediating capability and because there's so much glyphosate in the food, you know maybe you do have to take it at least periodically for some kind of a cleanup. You know that's our, that's our best selling product. But you know, on the antibiotic side we do have one that is designed specifically for somebody who has taken antibiotics and that's called Antibiotic Antidote and it was designed to help that restoration process, you know, for a month or two after you've taken the antibiotics. And you know we have a sleep product, we have a cardiovascular product and we have one for immunity called Ideal Immunity. That's very effective at foodborne pathogens like listeria and salmonella and E coli. I don't know about Canada, but we've had a few more outbreaks here in the United States, and we use a lot of recycled wastewater in the production and irrigation of our crops that are consumed raw.
FLORENCE:So, right, right, right, right. I'm glad you mentioned that. Yeah, this is not your only product. There's so many.
FLORENCE:So if you go to, if you go to Martha's website, it's it's going to be under the show notes, it's bioticquestcom, and Martha is actually going to allow you to order two products and get the third one free, so you can order them all sugar shift and give yourself a nice stretch of time to try and rebuild the friendly bacteria that we need to be breaking down, turning fructose into mannitol, to be supporting sleep, constipation, digestion, etc. But if you want to try, you know different products. She's allowing you to do that so we'll have that code on the website. Really good products, really good products. Really good research. Really good reviews Like actually, I think there's 50,000 4.5 star reviews on her website for sugar shift. Like really good products.
FLORENCE:So if you've damaged your microbiome, you've been on antibiotics, you've been eating too much sugar, chances who hasn't been eating too much sugar, who hasn't eaten at least seven days of too much? Like most of us are needing to sort of do a little repair work with the gut. Some of us are needing to do significant repair work. She has tons of information on her website so you can also dig in there and learn a bit more. And there's William Davis as well. There's lots of people who are talking about gut, but not so many people building the products that are really going to move the needle. So that's where Martha comes in. Is there any final words you'd like to share, martha, before we wrap up today?
MARTHA:Well, I thought about whether I wanted to say something about this, but you know, I did all of this.
MARTHA:I started this company, I did all of my research and started the work because of my husband, john.
MARTHA:So my husband, john, had Parkinson's and he passed away last week and so I just, you know, I want to dedicate this and the education of people to John, because he continued to help us like all the way to the end and one of the things that was kind of a shocking learning uh, in the process John got a pulmonary embolism. So it wasn't people don't think of that as Parkinson's, but, as it turns out, lps that we talked about earlier, from those gram negative bacteria can actually cause a pulmonary embolism. So you know the importance of managing your microbiome and keeping those endotoxin producing bacteria low. You know, I just can't overstate that because there are so many different illnesses that are tied to this endotoxin and that inflammation that so many people have is this low grade endotoxemia and it's that LPS. So you know, let's get off the sugar, let's, you know, take something like sugar shift and work on reducing those gram negative bacteria and let's lower our inflammation and let's get healthy.
FLORENCE:Thank you, Martha. I know John's looking down right now and he's saying you listen to her, you listen to us. This is real. These junk foods kill and we need to be really smart and dedicated and committed to getting our bodies repaired so they can thrive. Thank you so much, Martha.
MARTHA:Thank you so much for having me and all the work you do. I you know you just do a fantastic job of educating people.
FLORENCE:Thank you so much. Thanks everyone for tuning in today.
