This Is Quietly Destroying Your Body... | Kiran Krishnan | DSH #1904

Summary

Digital Social Hour – Episode #1904

This Is Quietly Destroying Your Body... with Kiran Krishnan
April 6, 2026 | Host: Sean Kelly | Guest: Kiran Krishnan (Founder, Civ Care)

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Episode Overview

In this insightful episode of Digital Social Hour, Sean Kelly sits down with microbiologist and entrepreneur Kiran Krishnan to unravel the overlooked but critical role of gut health in nearly every aspect of human well-being. The discussion dives deep into how modern lifestyles—from late-night eating and overuse of antibiotics to chronic stress and dopamine addiction—are quietly undermining our bodies, accelerating aging, driving anxiety and addiction, and even impacting our skin. Krishnan brings a blend of cutting-edge research and practical solutions, providing listeners with actionable pillars to reclaim resilience and long-term health.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Gut Health Is the Foundation

• Gut as a Central System: The gut is not just for digestion; its health steers inflammation, aging, hormone production, mental health, skin, and more.
• Leaky Gut & Inflammation: Eating too much and poor food choices lead to leaky gut, which increases chronic low-grade inflammation—a major driver of diseases and accelerated aging.
  • “Leaky gut creates massive inflammation throughout the body. That inflammation accelerates the aging process.” (Kieran, 01:50)
• The Gut-Brain Axis: About 80% of messages on the gut-brain axis travel from gut to brain, impacting dopamine and serotonin, thus mental health and addiction tendencies.

2. Modern Life Is Anti-Microbial—and Anti-Human

• Sterility is Harmful: Unlike our ancestors, who had regular contact with dirt and microorganisms, our sanitized environments deprive us of essential daily microbe exposures.
  • “We live in an antimicrobial world, and yet we are a microbial construct. So essentially the world we’ve built around us is an anti-human world.” (Kieran, 26:42)

3. Meal Timing, Dopamine, and Sleep

• Late-Night Eating’s Hidden Damage: Eating close to bedtime disrupts cellular housekeeping and repair, impacts heart rate, and reduces sleep quality.
  • “You want to eat at least two hours before bed…if you eat too close to bed, your heart rate when you’re sleeping is a little bit elevated…your body cannot rest and recover and your sleep is not as deep as it should be.” (Kieran, 04:02)
• Dopamine Deficits & Modern Cravings: Many unhealthy behaviors—late-night snacking, endless scrolling, binge-watching—are driven by the need to stimulate dopamine. Poor gut health blunts natural dopamine responses, increasing the lure to “up the dose” for the same effect.

4. The Anxiety-Gut Health Feedback Loop

• Direct Gut-Mind Connection: Poor gut health, especially leaky gut, is highly predictive of anxiety and depression. Multiple studies—including a major Dutch cohort—demonstrate this startlingly clear link.
  • “If your gut is leaky, you have a 98% chance of having anxiety and depression.” (Kieran, 15:05)
• Antibiotics & Mental Health: Overprescribed antibiotics (e.g., for acne) can create gut dysbiosis and trigger panic attacks, depression, and long-term mental health struggles.

5. Probiotics, Diet, and the Myth of the Kitchen Sink

• Power of Probiotics Done Right: Krishnan developed the first patented probiotic for acne, proving that gut changes alone (even without dietary shifts) dramatically reduce skin inflammation.
  • “75% reduction in acne lesions from taking the probiotic…on par to any antibiotic for non-cystic acne.” (Kieran, 18:59)
• Quality > Quantity: Warns against “kitchen sink” probiotics with many strains and high CFUs (colony-forming units), especially refrigerated products unlikely to survive the stomach.
  • “If a product has 8, 9, 10, 15 strains…you really don't know how all those strains are going to interact with each other.” (Kieran, 19:45)

6. Five Pillars of Resilient Gut Health

• Food: High fiber (aim for 40g/day), polyphenols, roots, tubers. Each extra 10g fiber reduces all-cause mortality by 10%!
  • “Fiber…reduces your risk of dying from anything by 45%.” (Kieran, 36:13)
• Exercise & Sleep: Resistance training releases myokines for gut and mental health, while deep sleep is vital for brain and cellular repair.
• Exposure: Reduce harmful chemicals/plastics and increase positive environmental microbe contact—walks in nature, gardening, etc.
• Supplements: Only after pillars 1–4, high-quality, clinically-tested (preferably spore-based) probiotics and other targeted aids can help.
  • “You actually can’t out supplement bad choices in the first four pillars.” (Kieran, 44:37)

7. Ozempic, Looksmaxxing, and the Perils of Biohacking

• Cautions on Weight-Loss Drugs: GLP-1 agonists (Ozempic, etc.) may help the morbidly obese, but have serious risks for most—gut disruption, muscle loss, and health imbalances.
  • “30–40% of the pounds you lose are actually lean muscle…it has a lot of diminishing return for that category of people.” (Kieran, 46:10)
• Risky Youth Trends: “Looksmaxxing,” biohacking, and early steroid/peptide use in teens/20s have devastating long-term health and fertility impacts.

8. Mindset: Anxiety, Resilience & Health Philosophy

• Anxiety Hurts More Than Toxins: Chronic stress is more damaging than most environmental toxins, driving leaky gut and systemic diseases.
  • “Anxiety and the resulting leaky gut…is the number one cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide.” (Kieran, 27:43)
• Resilience, Not Perfection: Focus on making good choices 80% of the time and supporting natural system resilience instead of obsessively avoiding every possible toxin.
  • “My health goal is to be resilient…I want to make 20% bad decisions and still be okay.” (Kieran, 29:36)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the interconnectedness of gut and mind:
  “If your gut is really dysfunctional…your brain cannot elicit proper neurological responses like dopamine or even serotonin. This also increases your risk for then depression.” (Kieran, 12:31)

• On the illusion of modern self-improvement fads:
  “This is a new version of anorexia and bulimia. It’s just another psychosis that drives people to do things that are wholly unhealthy to achieve a goal they can never achieve in their mind.” (Kieran, 48:32)

• On antibiotics’ mental effects:
  “Some of the new generation antibiotics…side effect of those are panic disorders, anxiety. They're well established.” (Kieran, 16:45)

• On youthful priorities and health:
  “At some point, when you hit your 30s and you hit your late 30s and early 40s, those [appearance] things don’t matter as much. Now you’re really thinking about your health.” (Kieran, 53:45)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:01: Common digestive symptoms and why ignoring them is a mistake
• 01:50: How overeating and calorie timing relate to aging
• 04:02: Why eating close to bedtime undermines health and sleep
• 06:44: Late-night munchies as a dopamine/brain reward issue
• 11:56: How gut health shapes dopamine, addiction, and anxiety
• 15:00: The IBS–anxiety/depression connection and Dutch leaky gut study
• 18:59: Probiotics reducing acne—clinical trial findings
• 19:45: Red flags in probiotic industry products
• 26:42: Modern sterile living as anti-microbial, anti-human
• 27:43: How anxiety trumps toxins as a root cause of disease
• 30:55: Linking stress, leaky gut, and anxiety
• 35:03: The life-extending power of dietary fiber
• 39:31: How to taper up fiber and use it to curb late-night cravings
• 44:37: The five pillars of gut and whole-body health
• 46:05: The dangers of Ozempic and fast weight loss on muscle mass
• 48:32: Looksmaxxing—body image obsession, youth risk, and real health
• 53:45: Health mindset for the long run

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Practical Takeaways

• Eat higher-fiber, whole-food diets; avoid late meals
• Get resistance exercise and quality sleep daily
• Balance positive microbe exposures and reduce unnecessary chemical exposure
• Prioritize emotional resilience; accept 80/20 living
• Approach supplements wisely; avoid fads and “more is better” thinking
• For appearance-driven health: focus on underlying systems, not fleeting trends

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Host Sean Kelly and Kiran Krishnan wrap up this episode with actionable hope: healthy gut, body, and mind can be cultivated with small, foundational shifts—which, in turn, pay immense dividends for both your performance today and your well-being in decades to come.

Transcript

[Kieran]

You really want to avoid, in terms of timing, is eating too late. You don't want to eat too close to bed. You want to eat at least two hours before bed. Preservatives in your food, right? So it naturally ferments, and to a certain degree of fermentation, you would still consume it like our ancestors did. So you would get all these fermentation byproducts and additional microbes that way as well. The problem is the way we live today. Everything around us is antimicrobial.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, guys, got Kieran here today, founder of Civ Care. We're going to talk gut health, skin health, all the things health related. And thanks for coming on, man.

[Kieran]

It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[Podcast Host]

You've been on a good podcast, Ron, man, I've seen you on some big shows.

[Kieran]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Wanted to learn more.

[Kieran]

Thank you so much. It's been fun. I mean, there's so much good information now. We're living in this age where research is booming like crazy on root cause drivers of dysfunction and natural therapies and all that. So it's really great to be able to get out there and talk about it.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And your episodes are getting a lot of feedback and engagement, so it's. It seems like a lot of people are dealing with similar health issues right now, right?

[Kieran]

Yeah, exactly. Well, and, you know, we. We're learning not to ignore these things, you know, so if you think about simple digestive issues, right, Every time you eat, you get bloating, you get gurgling, you get indigestion to some degree, for the longest time, we just put these things off. Right. That. That's just how my system works. But now with all the information out there that people have access to, we're starting to learn that that's not normal.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Kieran]

And it could mean other things. Right. Like that gurgling you're feeling in your gut could actually mean you have a harder time putting on muscle as a result of that. Right. So how are those two things connected? It wouldn't be intuitive to know that. Right. But. But when you look at the research, it's pretty clear.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I definitely want to get into building muscle later. First, I want to ask, are people eating too much? Because Brian Johnson just made a viral tweet saying people are eating too much and eating actually causes aging. I don't know if you saw that.

[Kieran]

Yeah, a 100. Right. So as a microbiologist, one of the areas that I studied a lot was this issue of leaky gut. Leaky gut is where Your intestines become hyperpermeable, meaning the lining of the intestines lets too many things in. And as a result, you end up getting a lot of inflammation. And it's called chronic low grade inflammation. That inflammation has massive impact on all systems in the body. Right. And then we also know that aging is a disease process. Right. Aging is not just a time factor, it is a disease process. There's a term for it called inflammation, trauma, aging. Because inflammation drives aging and aging is a dysfunction in your cells. So when you think about how does eating too much, you know, relate to aging? Eating too much leads to obesity, metabolic syndrome. Obesity and metabolic syndrome go hand in hand with leaky gut. Leaky gut creates massive inflammation throughout the body. That inflammation accelerates the aging process. So it's absolutely true. Our caloric intake is way higher than it needs to be.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. So you gotta eat pretty anti inflammatory as well. Done.

[Kieran]

You do. You have to eat the right things and you have to eat the right amount. And then now we're also understanding the right time makes a difference, really. You know, like when you eat matters a lot.

[Podcast Host]

So like people say breakfast is important, for example.

[Kieran]

Yeah. And you know, breakfast can be important. I have for years skipped breakfast, at least a traditional time for breakfast. I push it out a little bit further. It's not necessarily the thing that everyone needs to do. Right. But you could push it out to 11 o', clock, noon, even as your first meal of the day. Perfectly fine. I always found that my body responded much better when I worked out in a fasted state. And there's lots of studies on this now. For some people that does increase fat burn. For others, it really doesn't make a difference. So you kind of have to try it out yourself and see what works well for you. But you don't necessarily need to eat first thing in the morning. What you really want to avoid in terms of timing is eating too late. Right. So that has been an old adage. You don't want to eat too close to bed. You want to eat at least two hours before bed.

[Podcast Host]

Got it?

[Kieran]

Right. There's a couple of main reasons for that. Number one, when there's food in the digestive tract during sleeping, it negates a lot of the housekeeping functions that your gut and your immune system and your body goes through. Right. Because it's directing its energy towards digesting and assimilating that food. When there's no food in the system, when you go to sleep, it turns on all these housekeeping genes that repair the cells Repair the mitochondria that turn over dysfunctional proteins. It cleans things up. Right. But it can't do that when there's food moving through the system. So you miss out on a lot of those repair mechanisms. Right? So that's one downside to it. The second downside to it is, and you'll notice this, if you wear like sleep trackers and all that, if you eat a little too close to bed, your heart rate when you're sleeping is a little bit elevated. It can be elevated by 10, 11, 12 beats. Right. If your heart rate is elevated, it means your body cannot rest and recover and your sleep is not as deep as it should be. And we all know now that sleep is one of the most important things for overall health. It doesn't matter what you're trying to achieve, whether it's business, it's fitness, it's looks, it's motivation, doesn't matter. Sleep is one of the most important things. So if you compromise your sleep on a regular basis, then you're going to suffer in all those areas. So the most important thing I would press for, people would eating and timing. Don't eat too close to bed. You want to have breakfast, fine. You want to have lunch, you want to eat, you know, your heaviest meal around 2, 3 o' clock in the afternoon, that's great. Just don't eat too close to bed.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, that's always been my issue. I get hungry late night. Yeah, late night munchies, totally. But now that I have the OURA ring and they sleep, I do notice

[Kieran]

what you, what you notice. And that data makes a difference, right? Because then it makes it more conscious for you to think about it. Now that, that later night munchies is also often a dopamine issue, you know, because one of the things that food does is it's, it triggers a dopamine response. Right? Because when we were, when we were, you know, living out of caves and all that, and it was really dangerous and a lot of work to go find food. We needed a biochemical motivation to do that. So dopamine is one of those hormones in your bodies that, that triggers that reward system in your body, which means every time you went out, you braved the wild, you picked things and you risked injury to go get food and you consumed it. Your body rewarded you with that dopamine kick. Right. And so what may be happening with a lot of people is you're not getting enough dopamine response throughout the day. We could talk about what you can do throughout the day. To improve your dopamine response so that throughout the night you're starting to get a little bit dopamine starved and you want to trigger it with certain things. So a lot of times people just scroll on their phone. Right. This is why scrolling on your phone in bed is so addictive.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Kieran]

You're getting little dopamine kicks. Right. And it's so hard to stop.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Kieran]

You might gain. Right. Some people will smoke weed, they'll do things like that. All of those things are dopaminergic or eating food. So we're all trying to get a little bit more of a dopamine kick to be able to relax after a long day and to be able to kind of wind down and feel like we're rewarding ourselves.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, right.

[Kieran]

So if you think about it for yourself, what is that eating late at night actually do for you? It makes you feel like you kind of rewarded yourself for a long day.

[Podcast Host]

Right. Working all day.

[Kieran]

You're working all day. It's like I get to sit down, I get to relax, I'm going to feed myself. I've been thinking about this thing I want to eat for most of the day. That's like a reward driven action. And so we just have to switch that a little bit and then either move it earlier in the day or find a different way to reward.

[Podcast Host]

That is interesting. So the brain still has that primitive mindset when it comes to stuff like that.

[Kieran]

Very much so. Especially if you've been working hard. Right. So. And I find that too, I struggle with that all the time. That my, it's. For me, it's not as much food. It's more about like winding down and watching something. Right. Like, I love mindless reality tv. You know, I, I'm looking at research all day. I'm presenting, I'm doing all this like very heavy mind work. And what I want to do is just kind of decompress and watch something that's silly and meaningless. And, you know, and I look forward to it, right. And I'm like, I gotta watch one more episode of that thing. But the problem is you're sitting there in bed and you're getting all this reward from that and you're watching three episodes, four episodes. Before you know it, you've sacrificed a couple hours of sleep and that's just not good.

[Podcast Host]

That's what happened to me yesterday, man.

[Kieran]

Yeah, I know. The ceiling.

[Podcast Host]

The shows are so addictive now.

[Kieran]

They're so. And they, the, you know, the producers are so good at cutting it and setting up the shows that leave you with that cliffhanger.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Kieran]

So that cliffhanger feeling is a dopamine kick. Right. So I. And I designed it. So I do a lot of talks, I do a lot of presentations. I probably do, you know, 150 talks a year.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Kieran]

Every two days, every. Every couple days, I'm doing a talk, whether it's online or in person in front of a big audience. Right. And. And I've kind of specialized in presenting especially complex scientific information to make it interesting and make it engaging people. Even if I'm talking to doctors, I still need to keep it interesting. Right. And so one of the things I realize is that if you create story arcs, even in science, then you leave people hanging. You give them glimmers of hope. Once you've shown them all the risks and all these things, it's. It triggers dopamine and it makes them pay attention to you, you know? And so the cliffhangers that. That the producers design are all to trigger that dopamine response. And you gotta have the next episode or you're just not getting that full dopamine response.

[Podcast Host]

That's brilliant.

[Kieran]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And a lot of people, would you say they're releasing too much dopamine on a daily basis?

[Kieran]

They're either releasing too much or they're. They're striving for it too much. Right. One of the things that these types of devices and all have done for us is that it makes it easy to get these small doses of dopamine throughout the day. And so we become addicted to that feeling. Right. And also because our systems are dysfunctional. So if your gut is leaky and your gut is dysfunctional, your dopamine response becomes blunted quite a bit. Right. So, for example, I'll give you a couple of scenarios in where your dopamine response actually doesn't work as well as it should, thereby you need even more stronger responses. Right. This, for example, speaks to addictive behavior. So we know now that addiction has a large dopamine component to it. So if your gut is really leaky, you've got lots of chronic inflammation, your dopamine receptors, both in your brain and the dopamine. A lot of dopamine is made in the gut, so you're not making as much dopamine in the gut as you should. You're not making the precursors to dopamine as much as you should, and the receptors aren't binding the dopamine as well. Right. So you're trying to do things to stoke enough of a response that you feel. But because your system is blunted by a dysfunctional gut, you don't get that physical feeling. So you need to do it harder and more intense. Right. So this is where people start then going down a rabbit hole of what used to be a level of trigger here no longer does anything for them. They built a resilience against it. Now they have to go way over here. Right. And so it could be using recreational drugs. For example, you. I have friends that used to be okay with 20 milligrams, right. They'll take a gummy 20 milligrams, you feel great. Then after a few years of doing that, they need 50, you know, they need 100 milligram gummy knockout, right? Yeah. I mean, 5 milligrams. And I'm like, what is happening? I'm paranoid, you know? And so dopamine is like that. It becomes a system that can become corrupted by your health. And as a result of that, your response is not as intense. And as a result of that, you need more intense triggers. Right. And so then we build on more and more and more things, you know, to try to stoke that dopamine response.

[Podcast Host]

That's how addiction.

[Kieran]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Starts.

[Kieran]

Right? That's exactly how it starts.

[Podcast Host]

So people should be monitoring that. And what's the counter to, I guess, not getting to that addiction part?

[Kieran]

So a big part of it is going to be, number one, improving gut health. And this seems counterintuitive to people. Right. And I could totally get it if you're listening to this and going, gut health and my dopamine and my addiction to the phone, like, how is all that tied? Right? The thing is, there's something called a gut brain access. Okay. The gut brain axis is a bi directional highway in where the gut is directly connected to your brain through the neurological system. The interesting about it being a bi directional highway is even though it's a two way highway, 80% of the signals go from the gut to the brain and only 20% go from the brain to the gut.

[Podcast Host]

Interesting.

[Kieran]

Right? Which means that if you look at those two systems in your body, the gut and the brain, a lot more information is coming to the brain than going from the brain. Right. So the brain is perceiving all these things that are happening in your digestive tract and then eliciting the responses as a result of it. Okay. So if your gut is really dysfunctional, if you've got that gurgling, that indigestion, there's lots of foods you can't eat, you get chronic diarrhea you get chronic constipation, like all of these symptoms. And then you also have things like leaky gut. What all of that indicates is that the signals from your gut to your brain are dysfunctional, which means that your brain cannot elicit proper neurological responses like dopamine or even serotonin. This also increases your risk for then depression. Right. So then you have two systems working against each other. You've got a dopamine system that's not as effective as it should be. So then you're trying to do more things throughout the day to trigger more dopamine. At the same time, that same dysfunction is increasing your risk for anxiety. So now you're anxious and you're not rewarded and that creates a double whammy. So now people are feeling, when they wake up in the morning, they're feeling anxious, they got kind of this basal level of anxiety throughout the day. You're spiraling, you're worrying about things that are three months away or six months away. Something may trigger you and it kind of heightens your level of restlessness. At the same time, the things you normally do to get, get happy or excited or feel a reward center aren't working the way they should. Right. That is a very common state for the standard American. You know, their level of anxiety is too high, their ability to stoke dopamine is too low. And then that sets you up for this chronic fighting anxiety and at the same time trying to, to stoke pleasure. Yeah, right. And we're fighting those all the time.

[Podcast Host]

That is interesting. So there's pretty much a direct link with gut health and anxiety. So if people were to focus on their gut health, it might help with their mental health.

[Kieran]

Yeah, exactly. So one, one statistic really illustrated this. Right. So if you look at people with ibs, Irritable bowel syndrome. Right. So a lot of the symptoms I talked about, the gas, the bloating and all that, if you have IBS, among IBS people, it's about 70%, 75% of those individuals have confirmed anxiety and or depression. Right. It's a huge percentage of them. If you look at the same age, people who are not IBS, it's less than 20%.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Kieran]

So you're almost three or four times more likely to have anxiety and depression if you have I.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Kieran]

Right. And you go, wow, that is direct correlation between gut dysfunction and mental health. There's also a study called the Netherlands Study on anxiety and depression. The country of Netherlands did a nine year long study because they had seen this epidemic of anxiety and Depression, especially among young people. Right. And what they found is they were looking at all of these markers, they're following people for nine years to see which markers were the most predictive of development and maintenance of anxiety and depression in individuals. They found a marker called lps. Lipopolysaccharide, which is a marker of leaky gut, was the one and only marker that was a 98, 99% high confidence predictive of the presence of anxiety and depression. Right. That was the one and only marker that they found. Which is crazy. So if your gut is leaky, you have a 98% chance of having anxiety and depression. If you fix that leaky gut, you have a 90% chance that, that anxiety and depression will go away. Yeah. Right. And at the same time, your dopamine system starts to work better. Now everything changes in your life. Right. You become more motivated, you become more focused. You have the ability to control urges that you weren't able to control before. Your interpersonal relationships improve quite a bit.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Kieran]

Right. Just imagine the kind of person you are when you're not anxious and you're not dopamine starved and how you interact with others. Right. All of that changes. And it all starts in the gut.

[Podcast Host]

Ye. Now that you're saying all this, I'm thinking back to my health journey. And when I was on Accutane, I had a lot of gut issues. Constipation and also acid reflux. And at the same time, my mental health was awful. But I never really linked the two at the time.

[Kieran]

Yeah. And that's a known side effect. So some of the new generation antibiotics, the broad spectrum antibiotics, which are needed for certain things, I would say for acne, there's probably better approaches to it, but if you have a life threatening infection, you need it. But the side effect of those are panic disorders, anxiety. They're well established.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I used to have panic attacks.

[Kieran]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

I would collapse to the floor.

[Kieran]

Totally. And that purely comes from the, from the antibiotic. Wow. You know, which is crazy to think that you, you, you take an antibiotic that disrupts the ecosystem in your gut and it screws up your brain. Right. And it totally doesn't take some time to recover from it.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, it took me years.

[Kieran]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I had some liver issues. I'm now allergic to penicillin.

[Kieran]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I don't know if it's from that, but I found that out recently because I took a lot of antibiotics growing up. Sure. That was like defaulting doctors would do when you get an infection.

[Kieran]

And unfortunately they still do. You Know, I developed a probiotic and I actually got a US Patent for this. For a probiotic? For a probiotic. It's the first probiotic to treat acne, that non cystic acne. Right. So it supports non cystic acne. And what I figured out in this and why we received a US Patent for it is that I figured out there's a small change that you can do in your gut. Gut. And the type of fermentation that happens in your gut. Right. So most people know when you consume fiber, for example, it gets fermented in your gut into byproducts that are really beneficial. Now, what we figured out is depending on the type of byproduct that is created in the gut, it has a massive impact on your skin and as a result on acne lesions. So it can reduce inflammation on the skin quite a bit. And so we did two clinical trials, and the second one was the largest probiotic acne trial ever done. And what we found found was that in a 12 week period, 75% reduction in acne lesions from taking the probiotic. Right. Which is on par to any antibiotic for non cystic acne. And my whole motivation for doing that, developing this and doing the study and doing all that was that to show that we can do a better job of reducing acne without destroying people's guts, mental health, immune systems for decades. Right. We can do better.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Kieran]

And. And as a result of that, now we've got thousands of people who have used a probiotic instead without all the issues. And the only side effect with the probiotic is your digestion improves. Because that same probiotic, we also have studies on it for leaky gut.

[Podcast Host]

That's so impressive because that's not even people changing their diet, that's just taking a probiotic.

[Kieran]

Yeah, yeah. In the studies, we didn't have them change anything, you know, and if you have acne, you really want to try to come off dairy and gluten. That's what the studies typically show. A Mediterranean style diet's the best for, for acne and inflamed skin. But even if you don't do that 100% and you just take the probiotic, that's how the studies were designed and the, the effects are profound.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah. I know a lot of. There seems to be a trend towards probiotics, but what are you seeing in terms of quality? Because everyone's selling now. Are there issues with some of the brands?

[Kieran]

There's a lot of issues, yeah. Unfortunately. Right, so. So as a microbiologist When I first got into the world of probiotics, I was looking at it specifically from the microbe perspective. Right. So looking at some of these formulas and going, that doesn't make any rational sense why you would put that formula together that way. So I'll just give you some of the red flags that I see that people should be aware of. Number one, if a product has too many strains in it. Right. If A product has 8, 9, 10, 15 strains in it, you really don't know how all those strains are going to interact with each other when you put them into the gut.

[Podcast Host]

That.

[Kieran]

Right. Because these are biological entities. It's not like having vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin D in a product. Right. Because these vitamins are very specific. They're small molecules. We know exactly what they do in the body. When you put numerous bacteria together, they all have thousands of genes and all these different capabilities. We've seen studies where you put two bacteria together, they compete with each other, and then they knock out each other's function completely. Right. Because they're complex, like living entities. And so companies just started mixing strains together and competing on how many strains they have and how many CFU you may have heard that term, right. 20 billion, 50 billion, 100 billion. You don't need that much. Right. And in fact, that could be too much. It could be triggering immune responses in your body you don't want to trigger. Many probiotics can be very inflammatory to people. So I would be very cautious of the probiotics that I call the kitchen sink probiotics, which they've just thrown 10, 15, 20 strains in it. That's one type. The second type is anything that needs to be refrigerated. If you go to many health food stores, they've got the highest end probiotics in the fridge. Yeah. And it's just so silly to me because when I first started researching probiotics a couple decades ago, I would go to these stores and I'd ask the people, I'd be like, why is it in the fridge? And they say, well, you want to maintain potency, and so you got to keep it in the fridge so it remains stable. And I said, well, okay, so if I buy and I keep it in my kitchen counter in my house, it's going to die. And they said, yeah, you want to maintain potency. So when you buy, put it in the fridge at home. And I go, okay, 70 degrees in my home, it can't survive that. It's 98.6 degrees in my body. Right.

[Podcast Host]

That's a good point.

[Kieran]

And I'm like, how is it going to survive that? Right. And the stomach, the acid in the stomach is so strong that if you could touch your stomach acid with your finger, it would burn off your fingerprints. Wow. Right. It's a ph of 1.2, 1.3. We have, as humans in the animal kingdom, have the same PH levels as like, say, a vulture. Wow. Right. Where our. Our stomachs are very acidic, so most of that stuff doesn't even get through. Most of it is dying in the stomach and you're just doing expensive poop, you know. And so I would be very cautious about those as well. And then you really want to know that the probiotic has studies on the finished formulation. One thing that companies tend to do is they say, we have a research probiotic. What they actually mean is they took individual strains that have studies on their own and then they mixed them together and said, here's a research probiotic. They never did study what happens when you mix them all together. Right. And that's a big intellectual gap, because you could have a vitamin and an amino acid and collagen, and you know what they do, and you mix them together and they'll do their own thing. But that's not true for biological entities. Right. And so as a result of that. But if there's no studies on the finished product, on the finished formula, then I would be cautious about that as well.

[Podcast Host]

That's good to know.

[Kieran]

Yeah. That was something that we try to change a lot. When I was. When I built and ran Microbiome Labs, which is a company I sold a couple years ago on our flagship probiotic, we had 18 published studies on it.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Kieran]

Because we need to know what it's doing.

[Podcast Host]

I know it's tough to get enough vitamins and minerals from just food alone these days. Is it the same with probiotics? Are you able to get enough through just fermented foods and yogurt and stuff like that?

[Kieran]

Yeah. Unfortunately, we can't. Right. So the biggest thing is that we don't live. We live in a very sterile world. Right. Everything around us is relatively sterile. If you think about our ancestors, not very long ago, we're talking a hundred years ago even, they lived within the land and off the land quite a bit, which means that they consumed dirt, they drank waters from rivers and streams. Their homes and huts and things like that were not sterile. They didn't have the sterile wipes and things like that, which means that they were in constant contact with microbes on a daily basis. And that constant contact is really important for your overall ecosystem. Your immune system, your metabolic system, your mental health. All of those things matter with the degree of contact that you have with microbes. The reason why I think probiotics can be important, especially particular types of probiotics, is to help undo some of the missing elements of not being in constant contact with microbes. Right? We're not getting enough off natural contact with microbes. If, if you went, sean, tomorrow, and you were like, you know what? I'm done with all this. I'm gonna go live on the side of that beautiful mountain out there and just, you know, live in a hut and camp, you wouldn't need probiotics, really? Yeah. If you forage for your food and you dug for roots and tubers and you picked berries and you didn't sterilize any of that stuff and you just consumed it, you would have plenty of exposure with microbes that would have a profound effect on your overall health. You would need things like probiotics, right? And the foods you kept would naturally ferment because you don't have refrigeration and antibacterials and preservatives in your food, right? So it naturally ferments, and to a certain degree of fermentation, you would still consume it like our ancestors did. So you would get all these fermentation byproducts and additional microbes that way as well. The problem is the way we live today, right? Everything around us is antimicrobial. And one of the things I always say is that we are an amazing microbial construct, right? Because we have more bacterial cells in our body than human cells by a little bit bit. We've got way more bacterial DNA in our body than human DNA, right? So we've got about 22,000 human genes. And that might sound like a lot, but keep in mind that a cockroach has 22,000 genes, right? And the earthworm has even more, almost 30,000 genes. So we're not that sophisticated in terms of our genetics, but we do have two and a half million microbial genes in our system. So so much of our capability comes from the genetics that our microbes provide to us, right? And remember, genes are codes for things, and our ability to do things are coded for in the microbes that live in us. And as those microbes start to diminish, because we live in a sterile world and we're consuming sterilized food and we're consuming antibiotics at too high level and all that, we start to lose some of those genes. And some of those functionalities. Right. And so we live in an antimicrobial world, and yet we are a microbial construct. So essentially the world we've built around us is an anti human world. Wow.

[Podcast Host]

That's kind of trippy to think about it.

[Kieran]

It's crazy. Right. And to think about how we were built, how we evolved and everything we've done since we became so modernized and. And all that goes completely against our physiology.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And now it's even going the other way with all the issues with glyphosate and microplastics. Exactly. We're actually like, hurting ourselves.

[Kieran]

We are, we're just adding more and more stress to an already stressed system. System. You know, it's, it's. For most individuals, it's not going to be one of those things that really throws them off. It's really the culmination of the exposure to all of that.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Kieran]

You know, and. And the thing is, like, my philosophy around a lot of those things is because it can be really anxiety driven. Right. Like, if you think about, like, you got to avoid all the seed oils, all the microplastics, all the chemicals and this, that and the other. And it's like, well, how do you live? Like, I gotta live in a bubble, like. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Johnson does.

[Kieran]

Exactly. Yeah. I gotta spend, you know, $3 million a year and living in a bubble with every possible knickknack and tool you can. I think of it the other way because that's not practical for most people. Right. And in fact, the anxiety that you get from it is actually even more damaging than any microplastic or toxin that you possibly exposed to. Right. The anxiety and what we should talk about how damaging anxiety is. Right. So There was a 2015 publication in a journal called the Frontiers of Immunology. And these were three researchers that reviewed a number of papers on the impact that anxiety has on the gut and the immune system and then what impact that has on your disease risk. Right. They concluded that anxiety and the resulting leaky gut. So anxiety is a big driver of leaky gut. Right. Was the number one cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide. What number one cause? Right. Anxiety from anxiety. Because you can very quickly trace anxiety to anxiety, heart disease, anxiety to osteoarthritis and joint dysfunction, anxiety to dementia and Alzheimer's. Right. And metabolic syndrome as well. Right. So diabetes, obesity, and all that anxiety drives risk of all of those conditions. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Did not know it was that powerful.

[Kieran]

It's one of the most potent drivers of disease pathology in the body. And now we know why. So we used to know that to some degree. Like we knew it would make you sick. Like, think about people who have been exposed to herpes simplex virus. They get cold sores, right? Often they get the sore pops up when they're anxious, when they're under stress and their immune system is compromised. Most people get sick when they're really anxious for a while, right? You lose your bowels when you're really anxious, right? You could have diarrhea as a result of that. Those are all just little clues to show you the kind of physiological effect that anxiety can have on your body. And so when we think about things like microplastics and all that, what I say to people is worrying about them is much more damaging to your system than they are themselves, right? So find a way to navigate through it where you don't have to think about this stuff 24, 7, right? Minimize, minimize as much exposure as you can. You're not going to eliminate things, right? We just live. We're too inundated in the world today. So you want to minimize it. But more importantly than minimize to me is do the things to upregulate the system so that your system can handle these things, right? So that's what I call resilience. So when people always ask me, what is your health goal? Right. Knowing all the stuff I know, I go, my health goal is to be resilient. I want to make, I want to make 20% bad decisions and still be okay. You know, I can never live like a Mike Johnson, you know, I'm not going to make a hundred percent perfect decisions. Yeah, there's a lot of fun and living that happens in that 20%, you know. And so I want to be able to live, make the right decisions 80% of the time and still be okay. And your body can do that. It's super resilient, right. If you allow it. The capability to do that.

[Podcast Host]

Would you link stress and anxiety pretty hand in hand? Because I track my stress on my Oura ring. It says I'm stressed six hours a day, which I know is not good.

[Kieran]

Totally. Yeah. So stress leads to leaky gut. Leaky gut, which is from that Netherlands study as an example, and there's lots of studies on that leaky gut is the number one driver of anxiety. So that's the number one risk factor to anxiety, right? So stress. So you have to think about anxiety and stress. They're like kind of the one and the same. They're, they're two different parts of A similar system. So. So stress is this constant triggering of your flight or fight response. Right. And it could be physical stress or psychological stress. Right. So it could be physical stress where your actual heart rate is elevated and your breathing is. Is shallow and so on. Right. And. And that could be the response that. That someone like yourself maybe gets. Yeah, some people, it's more psychological stress. They're just ruminating in their mind all the time. Right. But your ring can pick both of those up. The more of that you have throughout the day, the more leaky the gut becomes.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Kieran]

Right. And stress creates that leakiness. And when the gut becomes leaky, that toxin called LPS leaks through, accumulates in circulation. That LPS toxin and its presence is the number one risk factor for anxiety and depression as well. So the higher your circulatory levels of that toxin, LPS is, is the higher your risk of anxiety and depression. And it's so well correlated that they can. The researchers can predict your level of anxiety by looking at how much of that toxin you have in your system.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Kieran]

Right?

[Podcast Host]

That's crazy.

[Kieran]

It's crazy. And it's so common. And. And the thing is, it's not a toxin that comes in from the outside. It's called an endotoxin because it's made in your gut constantly by certain bacteria.

[Podcast Host]

I need to start measuring. Is this on a blood test?

[Kieran]

You can't measure it in a blood test commercially at all. But here's the thing. All the things you would do to reduce that toxin are actually things that are really good for your gut, really good for your immune system. So what I tell people is, assume you have elevated levels of the toxin, because the vast majority of people do. We've done studies. For example, we did the first study I did on leaky gut, which we published in a major gastroenterology journal. We screened what would be healthy normal college students. Right. So the average age is 22 or 23. These are people physically in the prime of their life. Right. No obesity. They're not on any medications. No chronic conditions at all. We screened them for elevated levels of this toxin, this LPS, and we found that over 55 to 60% of them had clinically significant levels that would lead to disease pathology. Whoa.

[Podcast Host]

And this was the healthiest pool size.

[Kieran]

This is the healthiest poolside. So if you're measuring people in their 30s, people who have of any sort of disease condition, like they have an autoimmune condition, they have allergies, they have asthma, they have anxiety, they have sleep disorders, they have eczema, acne, all of these things. So all of these things mean that you likely have a much higher risk of having elevated levels of this toxin, this lps. And this is called endotoxemia. That's the clinical term for the presence of this toxin in the blood. Right. So at the end of the day then the big question is, what do you do to stop that and what do you do to manage that on a day to day basis? It's simple. I have five pillars that I teach. I teach a microbiome course to consumers. It's called build your resilient gut. And I break it down into five pillars and they need to do at least one thing in each of these pillars. So gut health for people, which they should understand. It's not a single miracle pill. It's not one thing that you do. It's. It's a culmination of choices that you make that move the ecosystem in a direction. Right. So let's talk about what are some of the things you should do. The first pillar is food. Food has the biggest impact on your gut microbiome, on your gut health, on your skin microbiome and so on. Right. It's a massive impact. So when it comes to food, what you really need to do is increase fiber and polyphenol intake. Right. Your average American eats about 8 to 10 grams of fiber per day. Day. Right. Which is not a lot at all. If you look at the, the hunter gatherer tribes in Tanzania or the Hadza tribes or Papua New guinea tribes and all, they're eating upwards of 150 grams a day. Wow.

[Podcast Host]

How are they getting fiber?

[Kieran]

Through roots and tubers, things like cassavas and potatoes. And they eat of course, lots of berries and things that they pick. Right. They eat a lot of seeds and nuts as well, a lot of plant based foods that they consume. Right. You don't have to be vegetarian, you don't have to be plant based. You just need to make sure you get enough fiber. Here's the other thing about fiber. If I told you that I had a miracle thing, that if you took it every day, you would reduce your risk of dying from any disease by 45%. Right. It reduces all cause mortality by 45%. You would go, what the hell is that? And I want to take it every single day. Right. And then the second question you might have is like, that's a big claim that you can reduce your mortality almost by half.

[Podcast Host]

Half.

[Kieran]

So what's the level of data? That miracle thing is fiber. Right. So There are massive large scale studies. So one of the recent ones in 2021, 2022, was published over 900,000 subjects in this meta analysis, right? And what they found was that for every 10 grams of fiber you add to your daily diet, you reduce your all cause mortality by 10%.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Kieran]

And that's up to about 40, 45 grams. After that 45 gram, the impact, impact kind of tapers off. But you can reduce, starting today, your risk of dying from anything by 45%.

[Podcast Host]

That's incredible.

[Kieran]

Which is amazing. Just from fiber. Get 40 grams of fiber per day, right? And here's a, a really effective way to use fiber to get all kinds of other auxiliary benefits, right? Find a high viscosity fiber, right? So, so I use a product called Balance and it's a, it's a high viscosity soluble fiber. What's great about it is if you take it before meal, it acts like a GLP1 agonist, right? It's your natural, you know, WeGovy or any other GLP1 agonist, right. So what it does is it the fiber gets into the stomach and then it expands and as a result it slows down gastric emptying, which is the how long it takes for food to leave your stomach and go into the small intestine. It also expands in the stomach, so it expands the sensors in your stomach that detect the expansion so you actually feel full much faster.

[Podcast Host]

Interesting.

[Kieran]

Right? So going back to the fact that we're eating too much and we're eating too many calories, though, just taking 5 grams of a high viscosity fiber before a meal can reduce the amount of calories you consume in that meal by 30, 40%.

[Podcast Host]

Holy crap.

[Kieran]

Without even trying, right? Without him trying. And then the glucose response. We know insulin resistance is a massive issue for us, right? And we're seeing people being diagnosed with diabetes in their early 20s now. So we know that insulin resistance is a big problem. Insulin resistance also disrupts your hormones and muscle building and all of that. So what we see is you can reduce the insulin response or the glucose response to a meal by 40 to 50% just by taking that fiber beforehand, right? So you'll eat less, you'll feel more full, you'll reduce the insulin response and improve your metabolic health just by taking that fiber before the meal.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Kieran]

Right? So before each of your two or three meals per day, get 5 to 8 grams of fiber, high viscosity soluble fiber fiber. Do that 10 to 15 minutes before you eat. If you do that for two or three months, you'll see a massive change in your body. Really burning fat, shredding away fat. If you're measuring your blood glucose, A1C, Homer IR, all those things, you'll see massive improvements in insulin resistance markers and you'll see huge amounts of inflammation coming down. Right. And you'll start producing lots of short chain fatty acids and all that. That's incredible. Right. So you'll sleep better, anxiety levels go way down down. Right. And, and then overall, metabolically and energetically, you'll be much healthier. Now here's the part that people have to taper a little bit for most people because we don't consume a lot of fiber. If they go to 10 grams in one dose tomorrow, they're going to get a lot of gas and bloating and all that and they're going to be a little bit upset.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Kieran]

So you want to taper it up a little bit. Right. Start with, start with one gram, two grams even. Yeah. I would go slow just to get your body ready and used to utilize fiber. Then add in a probiotic to it. Because the microbes in the pro, in the right type of probiotic, like a spore based probiotic, will enhance your body's ability to use the fight.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Kieran]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

I'm gonna try this. I can't wait.

[Kieran]

You'll love it. It is game changing.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I know. Right now I barely eat any fiber because I don't eat much fruit or vegetables.

[Kieran]

Yeah. It's hard.

[Podcast Host]

Or nuts.

[Kieran]

Right? Yeah. And, and you think about like resistant starches that come in roots and tubers and potatoes. We're supposed to get, you know, 15, 20 grams of that per day. We very hard to get it for most people. And then the other thing for you that you should try with the soluble fiber is when you get that craving at night to eat late at night, take a big dose of the soluble fiber instead. It'll just shut down the cravings that you have because it turns on the mechanisms, what we call the satiety mechanisms in the body. It upregulates a hormone called leptin. That hormone tells your body, I got enough, I don't need food. Right. That's the hormone that finally kicks in. Once you go to like, let's say you go to a buffet or something, Right. And you overeat. And then food almost seems repulsive at that point. Right? Yeah. But before that it's like the greatest

[Podcast Host]

thing in the world.

[Kieran]

Now it's like, oh, it's this. I can't even look at it. Right. That difference is the function of leptin, that satiety hormone. And what we found in our studies on leaky gut. For example, when people had leaky gut, the leptin response was not working at all.

[Podcast Host]

All. Oh, so you don't know if you're full.

[Kieran]

You don't know if you're full. So you're easily overeating by 20, 30, 40% more calories because your body doesn't even know you've had enough.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. People are eating with their phone, watching

[Kieran]

videos also, they're not paying attention. Right. And so you're distracted while you're eating. And so we want to get that leptin functioning back again. That means stopping the leaky gut. You can use a probiotic that will help you with that and then adding that fiber in. Right. So that's just pillar number one. Pillar number two would be, I'll combine two pillars would be exercise and sleep. Right. So exercise is any kind of movement. But one type of movement that's really important for gut health is actually resistance training. So what people don't typically understand is that when you lift weights and you contract your muscles, the muscles release a set of chemicals called myokines. These myokines have a profound effect on your gut. They also reduce anxiety quite a bit. Right. So they are like a little pharmacy of happy molecules that are in your muscles that get released when you contract your muscles. Right. So exercise and resistance training can be really important. Sleep, as we mentioned before, sleep is like when your body fixes all the damage that occurred throughout the day. One big and important area for fixing is your brain. Right? So our brains, throughout the day, especially if you're stressed or if you're anxious, goes through massive inflammatory damage. Right? Because when you hit that fight or flight response, one of the things that your body does is it increases inflammation and blood supply to the brain. Right. That has a damaging effect on the brain. What you need to do then is be able to sleep enough that night so that your body releases something called bdnf, brain derived neurotropic factor. That's one of the things that helps your brain repair itself so that when you wake up the next morning, you wake up with the same brain you had the day before. If that doesn't happen every day, you're waking up with a brain that's slightly more damaged. And it gets to a point where the damage is enough, enough where you start to feel it and you start to feel it in the form of focus, memory, brain fog. Right. Those are all Things that shouldn't be ignored. It's a sign that your brain's not getting adequate repair each night when you're going to bed. The gut plays an important role in that. Brain derived neurotropic factors produced by healthy gut microbiome and leaky gut prevents that. So that as well comes back to the gut. So you want to sleep adequately. The pillar number four is exposure. What I mean by exposure is you want to reduce your exposure to harmful things, things we talked about, you know, microplastics and all that. As much as you can reduce that, right. It's better for you. And then you want to look at your personal care products. You don't want to use products that will damage your skin microbiome because you can end up with something called leaky skin. You don't want to use lotions and colognes and all that stuff that have all these chemicals in them. Right. So you want to try to minimize that. The second part of exposure is positive exposures. We talked about earlier how exposure to environmental microbes and all that are really beneficial. Right. For you, you're lucky. You've got amazing hikes not too far away from here, right. So going on an hour hike and sitting down in the dirt and eating something like bring a fruit or whatever it may be is so impactful to your ecosystem, in your body and your stress levels and your brain function and all that that it acts like a drug. Drug. It can be that powerful, right? So you want exposure to microbes in the environment, in natural environments, right. So that's pillar number four. Pillar number five is supplements. Supplements can help, right? But the thing I always tell people is I made pillar number five supplements and not in one of the first four pillars. Because you actually can't out supplement bad choices in the first four pillars, right? So make sure you're doing at least one thing in each of the four pillars. Either you're increasing fiber intake, you're managing stress to some degree, right. You're doing some mindfulness work, meditation, going for walks, exercising, you're getting adequate sleep. And then the supplements will really help move the needle.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. A lot of people like to skip

[Kieran]

straight to five, straight to five, because it's like, well, what's. Give me the easy button. Exactly.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. But now what's your thoughts on those? Epic. I see mixed things on it.

[Kieran]

Yeah, you know, it's, it's interesting. So I think there's a category of people that, that likely need it and the risk to benefit ratio indicate that for them it's A benefit. Right. If you're morbidly obese and you have been morbidly obese for years, your health is in a crisis. Right. If this drug can help you reduce weight and improve your overall metabolic health, then by all means do it, because the risk of continuing to be morbidly obese is way too high. Right. If you want to lose £25. £20, £30, it is too risky to do it through something like an ozempic. Right. There's. For a number of reasons. Number one, there's a side effect profile that to me is not worth the risk of trying to lose £20. Right. Or £25. Number two, it disrupts your gut and your gut microbiome quite a bit. It slows down your bowel to a point where there is a diminishing effect on your gut microbiome. Number three, there's risks with things like your pancreas and other health. And then, and then, number four, you lose too much muscle mass. Right. If you lose 30, 40% of the weight that you're losing is muscle mass, that disrupts your metabolic system. It's a lot. Right. So there are studies that show that upwards of 30 to 40% of the pounds you lose actually is lean muscle. Jeez.

[Podcast Host]

Which. It was all fat.

[Kieran]

No, it's, it's, it's, it's almost close

[Podcast Host]

to half lean muscle crop.

[Kieran]

Right. Which is, which is bad because. Yeah. You step on a scale and. And that number is lower or your clothes fit looser. But muscle is like the organ of longevity. Right. And muscle maintains your metabolic health. Then what happens when you come off the drug and now you have 30% less lean mass? Your caloric burn goes way down and it becomes so much easier to put on more fat afterwards. Right. So it's not great for people that want 20, 30, 40 pounds. Right. I would encourage them to really revamp their metabolic system.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. You could tell with certain people just even their facial structure, you can tell their heart on it totally to that point.

[Kieran]

Yeah. They say they call it OIC face. Right. It's very skeleton, like sunken cheekbones. You lose a lot of fat on your face as well. Fat on the face is, is part of face looking youthful.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Kieran]

You know, but, but yeah, it's, it, it has a lot of diminishing return for that category of people. And unfortunately, too many people are using it for that, you know, for the 20, 30 pounders.

[Podcast Host]

Well, there's a whole trend now, which I'm sure you're familiar with. Looks maxing.

[Kieran]

Yeah. Yes.

[Podcast Host]

So like people are taking GLP1s, peptides, OIC, Accutane, all sorts of stuff.

[Kieran]

Yep. They're using like the Wolverine stack and BPC and all these things. Right. I mean, when you think about looks maxing, like when I first heard about

[Podcast Host]

this,

[Kieran]

my first thought was, okay, maybe this, there's a little bit of merit to this. Maybe there's a good part to this. Right? And I have a toxic obsession of always trying to look at like the positive side of things. Right. And so I go, okay, well, so. So I don't think there's anything wrong with people trying to be the best version of themselves. I think that's great, right? Whatever way you can do that, as long as it's healthy. But with all this kind of stuff, especially given that it's about showing off in a way because they have that term mogging. So you want to mog other people on your looks and your lats and your hair and all that kind of stuff, then it becomes toxic fairly quickly, right? Which means that now you're starting to go down a route where you're doing things that are, that have a diminishing return to try to maximize your physical appearance. And I think there's a couple issues with that. Number one is that there's risk with those things. I mean, I hear people are breaking their bones with hammers like micro fracture, bone smashing, all of these peptides and all these things that people are taking. They're using GLP1 so become absolutely gaunt and have, have like 4% body fat. Right. They're using steroids to build muscles at the same time. So, so, so they're pushing the envelope on what's safe for the body to achieve an idealistic look. And the problem with that, we know that body dysmorphia kicks in very quickly for a lot of people, right. Which means that you will never be able to achieve the look you think you want. Right. This is where anorexia and bulimia and all that kind of come from, Right. This is a new version of anorexia and bulimia. It's just another psychosis that drives people to do things that are wholly unhealthy to achieve a goal that they can never achieve in their mind. Right? I absolutely. People should be trying to maximize, to create the best version of themselves, but within a healthy range. And it shouldn't be about showing off to other people. It shouldn't be about comparing yourself and all that. That, like to me, look at your blood work, you know, like, to me, I, I Care more about what my blood work is saying than how good my jawline is. You know, like you can have the best jawline in the world and be insulin resistant and highly inflamed and have massive risk for chronic disease. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Kieran]

And, and the thing, the thing about that, that, that people don't realize. And, and I think looks maxing is infectious among young people. Right. But young people are a little bit aloof to health issues because they're young. They don't quite have health issues yet. And so they don't realize the importance of that. What they will find out at some point is that the moment your health diminishes, nothing else matters. If you get a diagnosis that is scary. If you get a polyp in your large bowel that is pre. Right. You get something on your skin that is precarious, it's some sort of marker in your body that's indicating a disease state. All of that stuff goes out the window. You don't care what your hair looks like, you don't care what your jaw looks like, you don't care how big your lats are. None of that matters. All that matters is surviving.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Kieran]

You know, and so, so I think they're, they have the privilege of being able to maximize looks like that. But people are really taking it too far.

[Podcast Host]

Well, Clavicular has already self proclaimed that he's infertile. He's 21 years old. He's been on TRT since I think 17 or 18.

[Kieran]

Which is crazy. Right?

[Podcast Host]

There are consequences.

[Kieran]

There are absolutely. You know, and it's, and it's only going to get worse for.

[Podcast Host]

It might get to the point where one of these kids tragically passes away because they're just competing and it's getting really dangerous.

[Kieran]

For sure. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

You see people die from steroids pretty young all the time.

[Kieran]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

So.

[Kieran]

And, and the accessibility of these things is a big problem as well. Right. I mean like people. It's so much easier for people to

[Podcast Host]

get all you get in the mail now.

[Kieran]

Right. Which you could sit at home and get all this stuff just mailed to you. Which is crazy.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Nuts. You could get a TRT prescription on the phone and get it mailed to you. They don't even verify your age. Half of these companies.

[Kieran]

Totally. And, and then they're dosing it themselves. They have no idea how to do.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. They don't ask for your blood work. So it could actually exacerbate health issues. Right?

[Kieran]

Totally. Oh yeah. I mean testosterone replacement therapy can be very useful for people at A certain age of a certain free testosterone and SHBG level and all that. Right. Like there's a calculation that goes into it to look at the risk benefit ratio because testosterone in an elevated level is a risk, a health risk. Right. Just like estrogen that's too high is a health risk as well. Well, and so there's this really fine line that you want to tow where having too low of levels is a, is an issue and it, and it compromises muscle mass and libido and all that kind of stuff. But then having too high has a whole bunch of risk. Right. And so in order to understand what dose and if it's even appropriate, you have to do this really deep medical analysis without doing any of that. Taking any of it is important risk. Right. Even the smallest dose that people may be taking, without understanding where your blood levels are and free testosterone and all that, you're absolutely taking a massive risk.

[Podcast Host]

Absolutely. Anything else you want to close off with here?

[Kieran]

That was a fun episode. I think one of the things I want to press upon people is that they have a lot more control over their health outcomes than they think. And when you're younger, you probably have a lot of audience that's in their 20s, for example. Right. You're not necessarily thinking about your health per se, but you're thinking about your performance. You're trying to get as jacked as you can, you're trying to get as focused and maybe you're trying to do well in school or your career and all that. So you want that focus, that attention, you want your brain to function optimally. Right. You want your skin to look as good as it can, all of those things, you can pursue all of those things. But by pursuing health. Right. If you fix your gut health with the pillars we talked about and using the right type of probiotic, like a spore based probiotic, we have one at CivCare. And then you use a serum on your skin that balances out your skin microbiome. Right. Those are all added things to the other pillars that you can do that will not only improve your performance and how you show up in the world, but then you're banking and making deposits on your long term health.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Kieran]

As well. Right. Because at some point when you hit your 30s and you hit your late 30s and early 40s, those other things don't matter as much. Now you're really thinking about your health.

[Podcast Host]

Absolutely.

[Kieran]

You know, and you don't want to look back and go, I should have paid more attention to this.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Kieran]

You know, and so. So, yeah, you have a lot more control over your health than. Than you think.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. So click the link, guys. In the video, I think 20 off, right, dsh.

[Kieran]

Yep. For two things. We have a. The probiotic. And this probiotic was the one that was studied for acne that we talked about. About. And we also have leaky gut studies on this probiotic. So it's called a sieve bio imbalance within. And then the serum for the. For the optimal skin health on the outside, whether it's redness or hyperpigmentation or acne or any of that stuff, the serum works as well. So that's called Civ Biome Balancing serum. And it's 20 off for your audience.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I can't wait to try it. Yeah. Click the link, guys. If you're on audio, it'll be in the description. If you're on YouTube, it'll be in the description as well. Well, use code dsh. Thanks for your time.

[Kieran]

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[Podcast Host]

Check them out, guys. See you. Thanks for watching to the end, guys. Please comment below your thoughts on the episode, if you agree. If you disagree, I'd love to hear it. I read every single comment. Means a lot to me. Thank you so much.