← Autism Parenting Secrets
Autism Parenting Secrets
The Microbiome CAN Be Rebuilt
00:40:44
Jason Klop from Novel Biome joins the show to discuss the powerful connection between the microbiome, the immune system, and neurological health. He explains how rebuilding missing microbes through microbiome restoration and fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) may help support healthier function throughout the body and brain. The secret this week is… The Microbiome CAN Be Rebuilt
Loading summary
Transcript34 lines
- [00:00]
A
It's like a forest, right? When you have a healthy forest, it controls itself. It doesn't require you to keep going in and like cutting trees out. No, it requires you to just let the forest do what the forest does. And that's the microbiome. And by doing a transplant, you're essentially like cleaning the field, putting in new and the full spectrum, not just a very defined by one or two different bacterias, the full spectrum, which would include healthy funguses, viruses, parasites.
- [00:29]
B
If you're a parent of a child with autism, you are being being called to rise with love, courage and clarity. This journey isn't easy, and most parents aren't equipped, but you can be. This podcast is your invitation to rise higher because how you navigate matters. I'm Len, and this is Autism Parenting Secrets, where you become the parent your child needs now. Hello and welcome to Autism Parenting Secrets. The gut brain connection. It is one of the most important and rapidly evolving areas in medicine today. And many children with neurological, immune, behavioral, and developmental challenges also show signs of significant microbiome disruption. And increasingly, researchers and clinicians are asking a deeper question. What happens when critical microbes are missing altogether, not just simply out of balance and not suppressed, but gone? And this has opened the door to a new way of thinking about the gut, the brain, and whether restoring missing microbes can help the body function better. And my guest this week is Jason Klopp. He's the CEO and founder of Novel Bio, a company focused on restoring microbial diversity through carefully screened FMT products and precision protocols. And the secret this week is the microbiome can be rebuilt. Welcome, Jason.
- [01:58]
A
Thank you. Excited to be here and looking forward to unpacking this journey that is the microbiome and the secrets that exist within it.
- [02:07]
B
Yeah, it's an interesting topic. And honestly, with my son, who was diagnosed about 17 years ago, fecal transplants, that concept was out there way back then. It was wildly confusing to me then. And I definitely would appreciate more clarity on how this has evolved and how this could be worked in for parents. And I guess maybe that's the best way of starting. If you think about parents who are listening to this podcast, if they're trying to understand why their child is struggling, what do you think most people still fundamentally don't understand about the microbiome and its role in neurological and overall immune health?
- [02:49]
A
Sure. Yeah. Great question. And I think just to provide a little context, in the context of autism and the microbiome is that I spent years treating patients, especially autism patients, using FMT or fecal microbiota transplants. And so we've treated hundreds of patients, but then I've spoken to probably thousands of families, and over that time, you start to see a bit of a trend. And then combining that with what's happening in the research, we get a better idea of what might be happening. But frankly, I think there's more unknowns yet as it relates to the microbiome, especially in the context of autism, but broadly as well. And so we'll cover what we do know. But generally speaking, I mean, kids with autism appear to have at least three times more GI symptoms than their neurotypical peers. And most parents, not all. And of course, there are kids that don't have GI issues, but most parents will observe that when their GI symptoms are worse, more constipated or more cramping or bloating or abdominal pain, like anytime their digestive problems are worse, they'll notice a worsening of behaviors. And so that connection is often already made. I've seen with most parents where they've drawn that line and they say, oh, well, if I feed my kid or my kid happens to get a hold of some particular kinds of foods that they know are not good for them, they then have more hyperactivity or anxiety or stimming or aggression, and the list sort of goes on. And so I think that's an obvious tie in. What's been more come to the foreground more is just the link between how the gut and the brain are communicating. And so through science, we've established that that's an obvious connection. But the reality is there's a connection between the gut and essentially every single organ system that exists. And we keep learning about more and more of these axes between these different organ systems that we weren't previously aware of. And so there's even a gut bone, a gut heart, a gut lung, a gut eye. I mean, all of these axes exist. And so how that's exactly happening is yet to be elucidated. Even in the context of the gut and the brain, we have ideas about how that's happening, but truly, it's not clear. It's not super obvious, but that is in part makes up what is this magical, amazing, and intricately designed system that, when manipulated appropriately, can lead to really outsized outcomes and results. And particularly in the context of the immune system. The immune system is so intricately interconnected with the gut and the gut microbiome. So there's this system called the gut associated lymphatic tissue. It essentially surrounds the whole length of the digestive tract. And so the immune system and the gut are really talking. And what can happen is if the gut and the microbiome become really dysbiotic, there's a lot of inflammation, It'll start pushing the immune system to be more overactive or having a disproportionate response to what otherwise would be a normal pathogen. And that was, you know, part of the context of how we met was at the MAPS conference. But PANs Pandas being a big part of that. Right. Like, why are these kids, a lot of them autistic, having these outside autoimmune type responses to a strep pathogens, like it's just not a natural response. And that same thing can happen with foods and all other types of things within the body and system.
- [06:17]
B
Sure. That would include my son's life threatening allergies to peanuts and soy and pretty much other foods. I mean, it's that immune response that can just be way overreactive, for lack of a better word. When you talk about the gut, though, just to take a step back, if a parent has a child with complex challenges and they're aware the gut's important and right, and we can talk at length about why, how the gut isn't in isolation, how interrelated it is to the entire body, particularly the brain. But if a parent's trying to get a sense of, hey, does my child have gut challenges, gut issues, you're right. Sometimes it's obvious and you can see it. But otherwise it's also possible that the gut can be a wreck without any overt signs. Right. Which is why sometimes testing and getting some data about what's going on can be quite helpful.
- [07:10]
A
Absolutely. Yeah. And I would say that most kids have obvious GI issues, but there are some. And, you know, it's hard to know, like, is it just a matter of time before a process present some GI issues? But oftentimes just from what I've seen and having looked at hundreds of these different tests for kids with autism, oftentimes the story is already there. Right. Like the combination of their medical history and how they came into this world combined with if you do testing, you'll start to understand, oh, wow, there's like a lot more going on, but it's just not reached a point potentially where it's severe enough or some triggers haven't happened that would cause it to result in express symptoms. But, you know, it was very, you know, I'd like to say roughly five to 10 kids, after speaking with hundreds, probably over thousands of families, had no early use of antibiotics. So early use of antibiotics is so common for different reasons. And you know, this is not to say antibiotics don't have a place. They absolutely do and can be life savings. But antibiotics are so disruptive to the microbiome, especially in those early years of development. And so when an antibiotic comes into play, you really change the development of the microbiome. And the development of the brain particularly is tied to the development of the gut microbiome. And so a delayed development of our gut microbiome will lead to a delay of the neurological tissues and the pruning and wiring of how things happen in the brain. And so development is a very broad thing that happens globally and it's all timed. And then that's partly why manipulating and improving the gut microbiome early on has a better chance at leading to some of these neurological changes and benefits that would improve behaviors and learning and speech and the list goes on.
- [09:03]
B
Sure, yeah. No, I'm listening to what you're saying and my mind constantly goes to root cause, root cause, root cause. And I feel like if parents get more information and have a better sense of what's going on with their child and reveal those root causes to focus on, so much becomes possible. So when I think about the gut generally, and again, I've been at this for almost 20 years just kind of being focused on this topic. It used to be that if the gut was an issue, right, it was leaky gut, or it was gut dysbiosis, or maybe it was some kind of pathogens, bad bacteria, whatever the case may be. And so those are all I know still at play, and those are all still real conditions. But I think the concept of depletion, of there just not being what needs to be there in a healthy microbiome, I do think that's kind of new. Correct. And so can you talk a little bit more from a root cause perspective? Yes, there's many. But what have you found to be new and interesting and, and very potentially game changing in terms of what root cause that you're focusing on?
- [10:13]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think all of those things are essentially linked to the gut microbiome. Right. Like just take leaky gut as an example. That is essentially because you don't have the right types of bacteria and other things within the gut that can reduce the inflammation that's then damaging the gut microbiome. And so the, the challenges. And we'll go back to the antibiotics or just being born via C section if you don't have the right microbes there, or you've had the microbes, but they've been displaced or totally eliminated with antibiotics, there's essentially no way to bring those back. So if a patient, or in this case a child is totally missing certain strains of bacteria, let's just say bifidobacterium or lactobacillus, using a synthetic source, it's just not gonna come back. You could take those. And I've seen this time and time again, so does the research validate this? But you could take the probiotics all day, and once you stop them and you wait a little while and retest, they're not gonna be present there again. And so even, you know, a lot of kids have oxalate issues, as an example. And there are some antibiotics that are more severe when it comes to degrading the bacteria that break down oxalates, like Oxalobacter is one of them. And so if that's completely missing now, the child starts having problems in breaking down oxalates. And so now they'll start to see, you know, pain with urination or, you know, the list goes on. That happens as a secondary effect to that. And so the only way then to rebuild those missing or imbalanced microbes is in that context, in the more severe case, to totally replace with a transplant this fecal microbiota transplant from a healthy screen donor and into the recipient. Now it can graft, stay there, and you're supporting that then further with the healthy, broad diet, and the list goes on.
- [12:05]
B
Okay, no, that makes it super clear. So to bottom line it a little bit. In some cases, adults, children, whatever the case may be, especially given the history, the antibiotics, the C section, whatever the health, whatever else might be of Clay trying to improve what's there may be futile or may just take an incredibly long amount of time. And at a certain point, it might be you just need to rebuild, which is where FMT comes in.
- [12:36]
A
Yes, and I think there's an important thing to be aware of for the audience as well is just that we're often focused, especially from a testing standpoint, on like, oh, what's bad? And the red yellow greens of a test report. And. And I think we spend a lot more time trying to go after the bad guys and say, well, if we can just get rid of X or Y bug, we're going to start to see a benefit. But the reality is those bugs are there because there's nothing else to displace them. Candida is another example, like a fungal overgrowth that can lead to a Whole bunch of symptoms as well, whether it's like laughing, giddy, drunk type of behavior. You can take herbal antifungals, pharmaceutical prescription antifungals until the cows come home. I mean, you can do that all the time. And some kids rely on that continuously. And if they get off of it, we're going to see huge behaviors. Now, the only way to permanently fix that problem is not by just killing. And I think that's the rethinking or reimagining of how we approach the microbiome is not to kill our way to health, but it's try to rebuild our way from the ground up so that this intelligent system can moderate itself. I mean, it's designed, when there's the right inputs to moderate, to prevent overgrowths of bad bacteria, of fungal overgrowths and all of these things. But if there's nothing there, it would be like tilling a garden, getting it ready to plant seeds, but then never planting seeds. What's going to happen? Weeds are going to come in, and those are not a bad thing, actually. You're actually preserving the health of the soil. Because if you just had a bare open field but never planted anything, the wind and the rain is just going to wash away all the topsoil and the nutrients and everything else. So in some case, we're actually preserving what little is left of the microbiome by having fungus and other potentially bad or overgrown bacterias. But they only, you know, it's a competition. It's like a forest, right? When you have a healthy forest, it controls itself. It doesn't require you to keep going in and like cutting trees out. No, it requires you to just let the forest do what the forest does. And that's the microbiome. And by doing a transplant, you're essentially like cleaning the field, putting in new and the full spectrum, not just a very defined by one or two different bacterias, the full spectrum, which would include healthy funguses, viruses, parasites, like it's a wild environment there, but definitely excluding for anything potentially pathogenic that could come through a transplant if you didn't do this in a very controlled manner.
- [15:07]
B
Yeah, so. So, Jason. Yeah, it would be nice if it was as easy as, okay, here's the bad thing to go after. Let's kill that and everything's going to be great. But obviously, as you alluded to, it's more complex than that. It is definitely more complex than that. And I think the idea of adding good bacteria. Right, which is why everyone went crazy with probiotics, right? Probiotics may be helpful in certain instances, but generally speaking, just adding billions of a few strains of good bacteria may seem well intentioned, but that actually could wind up creating even more of an imbalance within the gut. Right. So that's why it's not as simple as just popping some pills.
- [15:46]
A
Yeah. And I think it's important to understand, like, although there can be benefits from probiotics, so I'm not discouraging people from using them, it's just generally that they have a transient benefit. Like you get some benefit while doing them, while they're moving through the system, but they don't create a permanent engraftment. So the big distinction is probiotics don't engraft, they don't stay there, they don't become a permanent member of this microbiome. Whereas with an fmt, because you're giving a full microbiome and it's not a synthetic version and it's natural to the body and the habitat of the gut, it can stay there and it can stay there permanently, assuming that you continue to support it and avoid antibiotics and all of the things that we know would otherwise damage the gut.
- [16:32]
B
Got it. Could you go a little bit, bit deeper on the concept of engraftment? Because if you're thinking about the gut and you're thinking about introducing things to improve what's happening there, it's a term that I know I wasn't familiar with until recently. So can you just go a little bit deeper on what that term means?
- [16:49]
A
Yeah. Essentially the idea around engraftment is that unlike a probiotic that goes through and has a transient benefit but never takes up residence, engraftment essentially means that it goes through, finds a microenvironment that's habitable for it takes root, grows, stays there, and continues to be there for months, years, decades in time beyond that period. And so just imagine like post an FMT treatment a month later, for example, you could retest and what might have been missing on a test that you did pre treatment should still be there as a follow up. Now if you did it during a probiotic protocol or during an FMT protocol, it wouldn't truly represent what was engrafted and staying there. Right. Because it would just be catching what's in the stool sample or whatever you were using to test to begin with. And so that's really the distinction. You have to wait some time until treatment's been completed and then compare a pre and a post to see what's actually taken up residence, what's still there. And having A benefit. And on the point of engraftment, there's things that you can do to support engraftment and make sure that it actually, it has an environment to stay in. And so one of the parts of the FMT treatment approach is pretreatment. So it's actually clearing up and getting rid of a lot of overgrown, potentially pathogenic bacteria, fungi, just to make sure there's an actual environment there so that new microbes can coming in, have a place to take up residence. So again, the garden analogy, like, you'd want to get rid of the weeds beforehand, then do the fmt. And this might sound like a little bit of a, well, wait a minute. I thought we weren't killing things before. And generally, no, there's not a ton of benefit to that. But in the context of fmt, you do want to try to clean things up as much as possible, then go into the FMT so that there's actually a place for them to engraft, and there's not too much of an uphill struggle to fight for territory, so to speak. And so that's the general concept around engraftment. And then bacteria, like, they have their life, right? And so they need to be fed. And that's a big part of what you would do during the treatment and following the treatment to make sure they stay there. Just like a plant, you need to give it water or you need to be fertilizing. So you need to be giving bees, bacteria, food, essentially fibers across a diverse spectrum to ensure that all of these new bugs continue to grow and thrive. If you stayed on a very restrictive diet, you're not gonna get the full benefit of the transplant because a lot of those microbes will slowly die off because they don't have a fuel source, they have no food. And that's the purpose of the bacteria, is to digest fiber. But if they have nothing to eat and digest and break down and utilize throughout the body, they'll just eventually go away. And you may still be stuck with some microbes that will, you know, that you'll be getting from other sources of the diet. But that's the big goal is to expand the diet, get more fiber, support more of these microbes to stay, and positively impact the microbiome.
- [20:02]
B
Yeah, Jason, I think parents were listening. Everyone, including myself, was always looking for that silver bullet, the magic pill, something that's going to just kind of be introduced and kind of solve everything. And I really thought that was the case with FMT when I first heard about it. But what you're indicating is that, yeah, this is a piece and all those other things still do matter. You know, diversity in terms of the food, playing defense against toxins, all that stuff does still matter. But that if you prepare and get the gut ready for something like this, then you really stack the deck for success.
- [20:38]
A
Yeah, completely. And I appreciate you mentioning that. Like, it can appear like a silver bullet in some cases where it's such an obvious player in the child's current ailments, digestive issues, neurological, et cetera, but it works best as part of a, you know, broad, integrative, functional approach to health and healing. Like this is without a doubt the ground layer foundation of our health and well being. However, we need to continue to support that and we need to eliminate things that we know both damage the gut microbiome and the body in general. Right. Like you wouldn't want to keep ingesting toxins or living in a moldy home or all of these other things that we know are not beneficial to health and healing. So it is a part of a global plan and approach, but it's not a be all, end all. And I don't think anything exists out there that is. But for the right case, it can absolutely set a very strong foundation by which other therapies that a child previously didn't respond to or didn't appear to work can now begin to work. And just a quick anecdote in the context of cancer oncology, FMT's being used in that field to help those patients who have a drug they're not responding to, especially the immunobiologic. So the patient is not responding to a drug that they should for their cancer. They do FMT and they change their microbiome. They now begin responding to that drug. So it's a very interesting parallel where sometimes a parent will have tried a treatment that has worked for a lot of other kids, just using stem cells as an example, but then they try it and nothing changes or improves. And so by improving the gut microbiome, you may improve the efficacy and outcomes of other therapies and treatments.
- [22:34]
B
Great. Yeah, that makes sense. The questions that are popping into my mind now are in terms of like, how does this play out? Like, if somebody wanted to go down this road, can you talk a little bit about how it works, what the steps generally are involved? And particularly, I know I had in my head again about an early understanding of this, that if you were going to, let's say, look at this as an option for your child, that you might look to have A transplant from somebody in the family like that, it might be useful to have somebody in the family. And then I've heard arguments that say maybe that's not what you want. So can you talk a little bit about donors, how important that is, what you look for, and just what the overall process looks like?
- [23:18]
A
Sure, yeah. And I'm totally in agreement that the donors and screening is just a critical piece to ensure both safety and efficacy. So as a company, Novel Biome, we're licensed by Health Canada, which means we have what's called a drug establishment license. It's GMP drug level manufacturing standards that comply with Canada, the FDA standards and other jurisdictions that we sell products into. And so that's an important distinction. You want to make sure that you're excluding anything that could be pathogenic, infectious cause traits to go from a donor to a patient. And so our donor screening program is very rigid. Less than 1% of people that apply actually make it into the program. It includes their full medical history, their immediate family medical history, to remove any, you know, diseases that could be contributing to a weakened microbiome, say, for example, a sibling that had autism. That would exclude an otherwise healthy person who's applying to be a donor to even enter our program. And the list goes on and on. But we're looking at are they breastfed, vaginally born, their history of antibiotic use, we're looking at their vaccine history, we're looking at are they physically fit and active, what is their diet like? We do blood, urine, stool screening. That's a very exhaustive panel and that's repeated every 90 days. And so there's just a lot that goes into both the screening and acceptance of a donor and then as much or more into the actual manufacturing of the product. So being in a GMP environment, everything is controlled, there's no cross contamination, everything is tested from an environmental standpoint. There's finished product testing, there's documentation, there's shelf life stability studies. I mean, this is a very robust process to ensure again, the increased likelihood of efficacy and minimizing to as close to zero as possible, any likelihood for risk. And with my years of being in the space, I'm very glad to report that the safety profile is really phenomenal. Now, to your point on donors, I've heard the similar arguments around age matching or gender matching or even using a family member. What I've found a, from a practicality standpoint, we can't have and properly screen donors that are from around the world. But more than that, what we see and What I've seen, especially when I was still treating kids with autism, is that in many cases, and this isn't just in autism, this is broadly, in many cases, there isn't an ideal sibling or parent as a donor. Like in our case, for example, we don't accept donors over 30 years old. So that would exclude in most cases, most parents. And then as far as a sibling goes, we would never even accept a donor who has a sibling with autism because we know that potentially their microbiome being inherited could also not be an ideal microbiome. And so in the rough DIY world, you could in theory do something like that, but we don't advocate for that because to do all the appropriate screening and to do the manufacturing in the safest, cleanest way, that's hard to do in your bathroom or something. So I understand why people resort to that, but I just don't think it's, it's generally accessible. And based on everything we're seeing in the research that's not using a family member or an age matched or gender matched donor, it appears to have no obvious outcome on the impact of the treatment as it stands. So I don't see any reason to further complicate it in this space.
- [27:09]
B
It'd be easy to look around and it makes sense within the family doesn't make sense. If there are conditions that are creating the microbiome issues in the child, then it very well could be in the sibling things as well. But I think that screening piece that you mentioned is important because knowing who would be a healthy donor is, is a, is a very useful question and it might be easy to say, okay, well, I have a donor, somebody who, you know, lives a clean, you know, has lives very cleanly, doesn't eat processed food, lives in a non toxic environment. That must be, you know, that might be a good donor and that may seem reasonable, but otherwise, again, in terms of all the things to look for, that's where your process is extremely thorough to make sure what's being introduced is not in some ways making things worse. Right. Depending on what might be contained in that sample, Correct?
- [28:03]
A
Yes.
- [28:04]
B
All right, well that helps me understand in terms of the process and how the donor is really, really important in terms of the process. Is it for somebody who's doing this implantation and you're wanting to have engraftment, how long does it take? Does it take repeated efforts or is it a one and done? Can you just talk a little bit about what that process looks like?
- [28:28]
A
Yeah, great question. And that really does vary on the disease. I mean, I know we spend a lot of time today talking about autism. So especially in the context of autism, what we've seen, both in the data and just empirically through experience, is that shorter protocols don't appear to have a more permanent result in autism. Now, in the context of C. Diff, which is a pretty serious GI infection, a single treatment can totally reverse that disease, but that's a very acute illness that can require a short course of treatment in autism. You know, looking at Dr. Adams studies, they did an eight week protocol. I think later they shifted to a 12 week protocol. When I was still practicing and seeing patients, we were doing approximately a four month treatment protocol. So somewhere in that range, treating definitely longer than a few days, but into the several months, potentially there's no harm in treating too long or giving too much. And so there's really no downside outside of, you know, the longer you treat, potentially the more expensive the overall therapy and treatment is going to be. But generally speaking, the more chronic, the more severe, the longer one may need to treat. We don't have like really long term data in general on should this need to be repeated. We do know that as you age, you know, the health of your microbiome just does naturally decline. And so this is also being studied and used in longevity and performance and all of those areas. But assuming a healthy diet and lifestyle and avoiding things that would damage the gut microbiome, this is generally not something you continue to repeat. There may be use cases where you could. Just an example of an adult patient that comes to mind. The mom and dad shared the child in 50, 50 custody and when the child was with dad, horrible diet, didn't follow any supplementation, didn't do any of the stuff that mom was doing. And so what she found was just treating him once a week, giving him one pill once a week after the initial protocol was enough to keep his bowels consistent, having regular bowel movements and overall improvements in some of his anxiety and other challenges that he had. So, you know, there's always these unique situations and there's really no harm in repeating it again a year later or two years later, just depending on what other therapies and treatments may have been trialed during that period. But yeah, generally speaking as a concept, this isn't something we keep repeating.
- [31:02]
B
Got it. But the form is there's an initial process and then for however long you continue. It's mainly pill form, correct?
- [31:09]
A
Yeah, there's a few different treatment options as far as how to proceed if it's in a patient that can swallow capsules, essentially the whole treatment could be completed with capsules. In the case where it's a younger child or a child who can't swallow capsules, we also have an oral powder and that could be the treatment could be done completely with an oral powder that's substantially colorless, odorless and tasteless. We do also have like a rectal enema version or a colonoscopy version. And some clinics and doctors have a preference to use those as a starting point to sort of as a loading dose. But it really varies on the clinic or practice. I'm a huge fan of just treating orally. I mean, it's easy. It's very like from a compliance standpoint, it's easy and straightforward. So generally that's what we're suggesting. But there are some individual use cases where it could be beneficial to do a rectal delivery.
- [32:04]
B
Great. Now that clarifies things for me for sure. And I know you mentioned about in terms of conditions and if it's acute, it might be quick. If it's something like on the autism spectrum, it might be somewhat more lengthy. What about pans and pandas? Only because that is seemingly exploding in terms of the number of kids who are experiencing that. Would you say that's similar to being on the autism spectrum, where that might be a more lengthy process?
- [32:35]
A
I would say it would be similar. I mean, from my experience, it's very common that the pans pandas is happening in kids with autism. I know there are cases where they don't have autism. From my perspective, it was always really hard to tell, like, where did autism start and end, Understanding that it's a spectrum and where did pans pandas start and end? You know, there's just so much overlap with that said, generally we would put those kids that fit in the autism pans panda category onto a similar protocol and seeing sort of similar outcomes. So what we saw is definitely a reduction in the severity of the flare, a reduction in the frequency of the flares, and in some cases, kids just wouldn't go into flares over the, you know, months and years that I was engaging with these parents. So it's hard to say, like, was it completely cured? I mean, who knows? But I think there's an absolute possibility whereby appropriately reseeding the gut microbiome and retraining their immune system that they shouldn't have this autoimmune type reaction. So I think it's totally feasible that by realigning the microbiome with the immune system this shouldn't continue to happen.
- [33:49]
B
I know we talk about a silver bullet and magic pill and all that. Now I'm going to ask you for a crystal ball. If you just think about where this has been and where it is now, if you think 10 years from now, what is it like? What do you think mainstream medicine will understand that it's missing today with respect to the microbiome?
- [34:09]
A
Ah, great question. I think we'll understand more across conditions, broadly the real impact and importance of the microbiome. So I think that'll be happening for sure. In the context of fmt, I think we'll be much more precise about understanding how to be matching a donor to a patient and ideally identifying who would be a responder to FMT and who wouldn't be, and so that we can get more sort of precise about deciding who should or shouldn't go through treatment by appropriate screening of that patient. So right now, you know, we don't really know. We just have a sense like, okay, their microbiome is impacted, they're having in many cases, digestive issues. We think this could really work well for them. And the percentage of people that are responding makes that a very sound argument. But I think we'll get a much better sense as time progresses as to who is or isn't. And, you know, there'd be an ideal world where we didn't need to do fmt, where we could manipulate the microbiome without having to use a donor as the source material again and again and again. So that is a possibility in 10 years. But, you know, we've tried that with probiotics and it hasn't worked. And so I think it's unlikely. But that would be a great alternative where people could get access to something that was, you know, not as intense and invasive and expensive as having to go the route of fmt. And then I think, and I hope we could become much more proactive about the way that we address early signs of microbiome disruption. And so just quickly, there was a study in, I think it was Sweden or Finland, one of the Scandinavian countries, where they actually gave C section born infants as a part of their first feeding, a transplant from the mother, and at six months, their microbiome was indistinguishable from a C section delivered child. And so just imagine the lifetimes of chronic disease that we could potentially prevent simply by addressing the microbiome early. Another case point is Parkinson's. We know essentially about 20 years before the progression and development of Parkinson's, we're seeing changes in the microbiome, we're seeing digestive issues or ibs. And so if we could understand in hindsight now saying, okay, look, there's a clear tie here, what can we do early to assess who is at greater risk and what we can do to prevent them going down that pathway in the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years? So I think we'll become much more proactive, or at least I hope we will.
- [36:55]
B
Well, that sounds extremely exciting and hopeful and especially you mentioned about C sections, which is very relevant for my son and I think kind of a root of a lot of the challenges he had and continues to have. So, so exciting that if that's something that's in a history, that there might be something to be able to do about that. If, if. Because in many cases the C sections aren't optional. People, I know some people opt for them. In my wife's case, you know, it wasn't optional. And it'd be very exciting if you could do something soon afterwards to, to, to get those protective benefits of a natural delivery. So that sounds very, very exciting and hopeful. But I guess, Jason, if I'd ask you just the bottom line, you know, if you really wanted the listeners to take one thing away from this conversation regarding the microbiome, what would it be?
- [37:48]
A
I would say feed it. It's like a organism that we just take for granted as something that's just in our body, but it comes from nature, it comes from Earth. And so we almost have to think about it as another life living inside of us. And the only way to sustain life is give it the inputs that it needs. And so I would say just really respect the importance of it and appreciate the role that it can play when you put an emphasis on supporting it and you don't need to jump straight to FMT to do this, right. It's a big part of it is avoiding the things that we know damage the gut microbiome and then supporting it with the diet and being in nature. And I always joke, hug a tree, go swimming in a lake. The Earth is the original microbiome. And so if we can interact with the Earth, we're going to support our microbiome. And a huge belief that I have, and I think it's so important is we sustain the Earth's microbiome because without the health of the Earth microbiome, which we're damaging through how we're treating crops and everything else, it will in time have an effect on our microbiome. And I think we're seeing Today what happened years ago, right. We've inherited our microbiomes through the matriarch, right. And so mom, grandma, great grandma. So we're seeing today what we've done generations ago. And so I think to change course, we really need to think about how do we support ours and our kids microbiomes so that the next generation can be in a better place. And a big part of that goes to protecting the earth's microbiome. And so interact with nature, eat the foods that are out there that are meant to support the microbiome, try to, as a minimum, expand the types of foods that you're eating, even if it's just a small percentage. That small percentage can result in change within 24 to 48 hours. Like change happens fast in the microbiome depending on the inputs that you're giving it.
- [39:49]
B
Yeah, that's powerful and I appreciate your perspective. And yeah, I think my takeaway from what you're saying is that the microbiome is incredibly important and over time it's only going to be more important given the science, given the research and the studies that are being done. And the title of this episode, that the microbiome can be rebuilt is super exciting. And again, for parents listening, where might this fit in? This is all about just better informing you of this opportunity, of the importance of the microbiome. And Jason, I really appreciate you taking the time today.
- [40:22]
A
Awesome. Nice hanging with you, Len.
- [40:23]
B
Your child needs you running on all cylinders now. And the fastest way to rise is with personalized one on one support. Get started today. Go to elevatehowyou navigate.com sa.