2492: How Probiotics Affect Fat Loss, Muscle Building & Cognition with Dr. Zain Kassam

Summary

Podcast Summary: Mind Pump Episode 2492 - “How Probiotics Affect Fat Loss, Muscle Building & Cognition with Dr. Zain Kassam”

Introduction

In episode 2492 of Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth, hosts Sal Di Stefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews engage in an in-depth conversation with Dr. Zain Kassam, Chief Medical Officer at Seed Health. The discussion delves into the profound impact of probiotics on fat loss, muscle building, and cognitive performance, unraveling the science behind the microbiome and its symbiotic relationship with human health.

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1. Dr. Zain Kassam’s Journey into Microbiome Research [03:16]

Dr. Zain Kassam shares his fascinating journey from a gastroenterologist discovering the miraculous effects of fecal transplants to becoming a key figure in microbiome research. He recounts a pivotal case where a 93-year-old patient with a severe Clostridium difficile infection was successfully treated with a fecal transplant, sparking his interest in the microbiome's potential. This experience led him to Harvard for clinical trials training and later to co-found OpenBiome and Finch Therapeutics, ultimately returning to Seed Health to bridge rigorous biopharmaceutical science with consumer wellness.

Notable Quote:
Dr. Kassam: “That was one of the closest things to a miracle I’d seen in medicine.” [03:26]

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2. Understanding the Microbiome and Its Symbiotic Role [08:34]

The conversation shifts to the microbiome's critical role in various bodily functions. Dr. Kassam explains that the human body harbors nearly 100 trillion microbes that influence the immune system, metabolism, muscle growth, and even the gut-brain axis. He emphasizes the concept of "internal climate change," highlighting how modern diets and antibiotic usage have disrupted the microbiome, leading to numerous health challenges.

Notable Quote:
Dr. Kassam: “We have changed our diets pretty meaningfully... leading to a lot of different challenges that we’re now navigating.” [08:34]

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3. Fecal Transplants: History, Methodology, and Success Rates [03:26 - 32:14]

Dr. Kassam delves into the science and application of fecal transplants. He discusses the stringent criteria for stool donors, noting that only about 3% qualify due to factors like obesity, mental health issues, and pathogens. Fecal transplants have shown remarkable success rates, particularly in treating C. difficile infections with a 90% efficacy rate. Additionally, studies involving germ-free mice demonstrated that transplanting stool from lean individuals resulted in leaner mice, while those receiving stool from obese individuals became obese.

Notable Quote:
Dr. Kassam: “Only 3% of donors qualified. So it’s like the Olympic athletes of poop.” [07:30]

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4. Probiotics: Mechanisms and Benefits [24:53 - 36:27]

The discussion transitions to probiotics, highlighting their role in enhancing muscle mass and strength. Dr. Kassam references preclinical and clinical studies showing that probiotics, particularly those in the Lactobacillus class, can significantly increase grip strength and overall muscle mass. He introduces Seed Health’s probiotic product, DS01, which boasts 24 strains and over 30,000 bacterial genes, emphasizing the importance of diversity, delivery, prebiotics, and clinical data in effective probiotic formulations.

Notable Quote:
Dr. Kassam: “When someone comes to me and says, ‘Which probiotic should I take?’ I kind of have this 4D approach: Diversity, Delivery, Do Gooders, and Data.” [34:13]

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5. Seed Health’s Innovative Probiotic Solutions [36:13 - 46:26]

Dr. Kassam outlines Seed Health’s unique approach to probiotics, focusing on creating diverse, live, and clinically backed formulations. He explains the company's proprietary delivery system that ensures probiotics reach the intended part of the intestine alive. Seed Health’s VSO1, a vaginal probiotic developed in partnership with experts, exemplifies their precision in targeting specific microbiomes. The company's commitment to rigorous clinical trials and operational innovation sets it apart in the crowded probiotic market.

Notable Quote:
Dr. Kassam: “What it tells us is actually maybe, how do I think about picking a probiotic... the four Ds: Diversity, Delivery, Do Gooders, and Data.” [34:13]

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6. The Gut-Brain Axis and Mental Health [20:23 - 31:18]

Exploring the gut-brain connection, Dr. Kassam explains how the microbiome communicates with the brain through neurotransmitters like serotonin and the vagus nerve. He discusses studies showing that altering the gut microbiome can influence behavior and emotional states in mice, highlighting the potential for probiotics to impact mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression. This bi-directional relationship underscores the microbiome's role in cognitive functions and overall mental well-being.

Notable Quote:
Dr. Kassam: “We have a nerve that is interfacing between the nervous system that affects the brain... the vagus nerve.” [21:46]

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7. Probiotics and Antibiotic Usage [47:00 - 58:04]

Addressing the interplay between probiotics and antibiotics, Dr. Kassam emphasizes the importance of restoring the gut microbiome post-antibiotic treatment. He outlines Seed Health’s “Gut Reset” protocol, which involves taking probiotics during and after antibiotic courses to enhance barrier function and prevent issues like leaky gut. Dr. Kassam advises using narrow-spectrum antibiotics when possible to minimize disruptions to beneficial bacteria and underscores the role of probiotics in maintaining gut health during antibiotic exposure.

Notable Quote:
Dr. Kassam: “If you stop it, you get this spike back. But there might be ways to modulate that in a more natural way.” [62:18]

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8. Future Directions: Microbiome Therapies and GLP1 Medications [60:25 - 63:00]

In the final segment, Dr. Kassam discusses the future of microbiome therapies, particularly in relation to GLP1 medications like Ozempic. While acknowledging the benefits of GLP1s in weight loss, he warns of side effects such as constipation and sarcopenia (muscle mass loss). He advocates for integrating probiotics to mitigate these adverse effects, enhancing gut motility and preserving muscle mass. The conversation anticipates advancements in microbiome research that could offer holistic solutions for metabolic and autoimmune disorders.

Notable Quote:
Dr. Kassam: “For the right person, in the right context, GLP1s are excellent... but we have to walk, we have to monitor some of the constipation, motility issues as well as the sarcopenia issues.” [60:54]

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Conclusion

Episode 2492 of Mind Pump offers a comprehensive exploration of the microbiome’s pivotal role in health, emphasizing the transformative potential of probiotics in fat loss, muscle building, and cognitive function. Dr. Zain Kassam’s expertise sheds light on the scientific underpinnings and practical applications of microbiome-focused therapies, positioning Seed Health at the forefront of this burgeoning field. Listeners gain valuable insights into selecting effective probiotics, understanding the gut-brain axis, and navigating the complexities of antibiotic usage with a microbiome-centric approach.

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Key Takeaways:

• Microbiome Diversity: A diverse microbiome is crucial for overall health, influencing metabolism, immune function, and mental well-being.

• Probiotic Selection: Effective probiotics should embrace the "4D" approach—Diversity, Delivery, Do Gooders (prebiotics), and Data (clinical backing).

• Gut-Brain Communication: The microbiome interacts with the brain through neurotransmitters, the vagus nerve, and neuroinflammation pathways, impacting mood and cognitive functions.

• Antibiotics and Probiotics: Using probiotics during and after antibiotic courses can help restore gut barrier function and prevent dysbiosis.

• Future of Microbiome Therapies: Ongoing research holds promise for microbiome-based treatments targeting obesity, autoimmune disorders, and mental health conditions.

Notable Quotes:

• “Only 3% of donors qualified. So it’s like the Olympic athletes of poop.” — Dr. Zain Kassam [07:30]

• “We have to walk, we have to monitor some of the constipation, motility issues as well as the sarcopenia issues.” — Dr. Zain Kassam [60:54]

• “What we study is making sure that the bacteria are alive.” — Dr. Zain Kassam [46:26]

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This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the cutting-edge science of the microbiome and its profound effects on physical and mental health. Dr. Kassam’s insights provide a roadmap for leveraging probiotics to optimize health outcomes, making Mind Pump a valuable resource for fitness and wellness enthusiasts.

Transcript

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[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

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[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

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[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

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[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump Mind Pump with your hosts Sal Destefano, Adam Schafer and Justin Andrews.

[Sal Destefano]

You just found the most downloaded fitness, health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode we talk about probiotics and how they actually can affect fat loss and muscle building and cognitive performance. Today's episode we have Dr. Zayn Kassam on the podcast. He's the Chief Medical Officer over at Seed. It's actually the world's best probiotic company. Nonetheless, he's an expert researcher and we talk to him all about probiotics, what they do for your body, and why some probiotics work so well While others maybe not so much. Now this episode is brought to you by seed. You can get [e-mail] mindpump use the code 25mindpump and get 25% off. Also we have a brand new program, Launch Maps 15 Performance. You can train 15 minutes a day, build muscle, burn body fat, improve athletic performance. Because it's a brand new program, you can get $20 off plus an ebook for free and another program for free. So the program that we include for Free is a 30 day landmine training program. You get that included for free. Plus we have a seven day overtraining rescue guide. So if you feel overtrained, if you feel burnt out, follow the guide for seven days, get back on track. All of that is included for free. And again, it's also $20 off. If you're interested, go to 15performance.com and then use the code 15plaunch for the discount plus the free ebook and the free program. All right, here comes the show. Zane, welcome to the show.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Thank you. Delighted to be here.

[Sal Destefano]

Let's talk a little bit about your background before we get into the fascinating science of microbiome and probiotics and how they affect us. But what is your background?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Sure, today I'm the chief medical officer of Seed Health. But like my, the way that I met the microbiome is a kind of long and fortuitous route, kind of a five chapter story. I actually started with a patient because I'm a gastroenterologist by training and I met a patient, she was 93, she was British, she looked like the queen of England. And I saw her at 2 in the morning in the emergency department in Canada. She had a terrible case of infection called clostridium difficile. She was tied to the toilet. Awful. Exactly, exactly. She'd failed the most potent antibiotics and she was so frustrated she wanted her colon removed. And I saw her and we did something very experimental at that time, well over a decade ago called a fecal transplant, where we took the healthy stool that was filtered and put it inside her and two days later she was gardening. It was like incredible. It was the closest thing to a miracle I'd seen in medicine. So I asked my mentors, I'm like, why isn't everyone doing this? This is incredible. And he's like, go look at the literature. A very academic answer. And we did a huge kind of analysis to realize that it worked really well. It was very safe. But no one had done the clinical trials that changed hearts and minds of doctors, patients and key Stakeholders, we put a man on the moon, we have supercomputers in their pockets. But 50 years had gone by and no one really touched the technology. And so I said, that's what I want to do. Kind of took me down to Harvard to do my clinical trials training with the plan to come back and do all those clinical trials that change hearts and minds. And then I got distracted. A group at MIT said in my work after my clinical trial training and I ended up doing a postdoc in machine learning and artificial intelligence, which is unusual at the time for a physician to do. But at mit, it's kind of a very interesting place. It's not about the papers that you publish, it's about the companies that you start. And so I was coding side by side with a colleague of mine, Mark, who's a very talented PhD student. He said, zane, remember that patient you had in Canada? I'm like, yeah. He's like, it's really hard for you to find a stool donor. I said, yeah. He's like, you know, heaven forbid she got in a car accident, you wouldn't be asking friends and family to donate blood. Why is it like that for stool? Let's not start the Red Cross, let's start the Brown Cross effectively. So a company called OpenBiome, which ended up being a fecal transplant center. I was a co founder and chief medical officer and we treated about 6,75,000 patients across 1300 hospitals in all 50 states in about two and a half years. So very, very quickly published a lot of papers on the technology outside of C. Diff. But along the way I quickly realized that my dad was like, oh, you did all this machine learning stuff like why are we giving the entire community? Can you get to the precision microbiome? And so that's what we end up doing. Spun out another company, co founder, chief medical officer of a company called Finch Therapeutics for precision microbiome therapies. And we finished phase two trials in C. Diff, had a partnership program for inflammatory bowel disease and we took that company public on the nasdaq. And then actually I ended up returning back to Canada for some family health reasons before I got convinced to come back to the microbiome at Seed Health with this really interesting vision to be able to take the biopharmaceutical approach, that really rigorous kind of Harvard MIT science, and apply that to the wellness space, into the consumer oriented space. Because there's a huge opportunity to unlock in a fast way, in a highly evidence based way to unlock kind of Kind of complete care. And that's what brought me here.

[Sal Destefano]

So let's back up for a second.

[Adam Schafer]

So we gotta get back to the brown cross.

[Sal Destefano]

Yeah. So how do you. So essentially what you're doing, you're taking healthy people's stool. There's a filtering process which is fascinating, I want to get to that. And then you transplant it and then that person gets healthy, they suddenly get healthy. But this is a not, this is a very non specific approach. It's like, okay, healthy, you know, fecal matter and transplant. But we don't know exactly why it's healthy, what's in it, what it's doing. And what you're saying is you're trying to take, you know, biotechnology, AI technology, figure out what it is, what is it that's making this beneficial. First off, how do you pick? Where do you find healthy school? Like what are the qualifiers?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Great question. So we, we published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, you know, about only 3% of donors qualified. So it's like the Olympic athletes of poop.

[Justin Andrews]

Right.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Like completely incredible work where we got down the reasons, the main reasons why were obesity actually. Because obesity I'm sure we'll get into a little bit. And metabolic health has a huge driver on the impact on the microbiome. Mental health actually things like depression, anxiety ruled out a lot of people, as well as kind of pathogens in the stool that you wouldn't otherwise feel. Things like norovirus or rotavirus were very common that led to exclusion and very rarely some blood changes, like changes in your liver enzymes for example. So that's what ruled a lot of people out from the donation process. That's not what we're doing today here at seed. I think we have gone past that entire community. It's a nice search space problem. And when you're on death's door, like that 93 year old patient I talked about earlier, I think we're open to those kind of really innovative technologies that are nonspecific. But over time we can apply science to get to the precision biology, to get to the exact microbes that are driving an effect as part of what we're doing here at seed.

[Sal Destefano]

How important is the relationship between us and our micro? It's a symbiotic relationship, but what does it influence? What does it do for us?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Absolutely. So I think if you like zone out to the microbiome itself, it's the, it's the microbes that live in and on us. And there's nearly 100 trillion microbes that are in and on us. That's for the record. More stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Right. We're talking about a massive kind of set of biology that's happening that affects many aspects of our body and our health, whether it's the inflammatory cascade, the immune system, the metabolic system, the gut brain system, the muscles, which we can talk about like muscle growth, perhaps even we're talking about the gut muscle access. You know, Aristotle said that all disease begins in the gut. And he may not be a veteran.

[Sal Destefano]

How crazy is it that he was right?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, completely wild. So wild. And so it touches a lot of different biology pragmatically, but we have kind of come to this really interesting point in time. It's what we call at seed, the internal climate change, or the climate change of our insides. We've changed our diets pretty meaningfully as we've advanced as a community and a culture. We have exposure to antibiotics in a much more frequent way than we did way back in the day. And we've had this huge change in our gut that's leading to a lot of different challenges that we're now navigating. But it's not like CRISPR or anything, or really, it's an obvious way to change the supplement, the microbiome back. Very intuitive that we're knocking down our microbes that we need to kind of. We have to replace them and make sure they have the good microbes come back. And it becomes a really easy way for everyone to engage with scientifically because it's not super technical. It's not like CAR T therapy or these really kind of like esoteric science. It's something that makes sense intuitively but has a lot of science behind it as well. And those are the best pairings.

[Sal Destefano]

What are the connections between that we know of, between the microbiome and in the explosion of autoimmune disorders, in particular, food allergies? You know, when I was a, you know, a kid, it was pretty rare to know a kid with a food allergy. Now I have little. I have. I have small kids and there's entire tables at school that are like peanut free. And, you know, on planes, you have to be careful. Like, what's the connection between the two?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, absolutely. So there's this beautiful study that was done out of the UK and replicated in Scandinavia where they looked at children between 0 and 3 and their exposure to antibiotics. And when you have early exposure to antibiotics, when you're kind of growing, you're maturing your microbiome, you have A set of really significant downstream consequences and health consequences that come later, including food allergies, autoimmune diseases like inflammatory bowel disease, metabolic conditions including obesity and diabetes, as well as a number of other challenges like celiac disease and other autoimmune condition. And so we're seeing, seeing that the microbiome very early in development is critical in training the immune system and making sure it is well tuned. So, you know, we've gotten almost too clean as a society. You want to be playing in the dirt. And there's a great book called Let them Eat Dirt to be able to engage with the microbial environment early to train your immune system. So it doesn't get super hyper vigilant where it's attacking everything, it attacks yourself.

[Adam Schafer]

That was always my argument, getting the kids outside playing in the dirt. And also too, like I've heard pets are really great for that.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Great for your microbiome. The data has been incredible for that. Also the way you come into the world. So vaginal delivery versus C section.

[Sal Destefano]

Breastfeeding.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Breastfeeding, exactly. So there's these huge sectors early in life which drive a lot of health down the road. And so that's usually between early in life you have some unstable microbiome, especially in later in life and in the middle it's a little bit more resilient, but, but, but still, still, you know, fraught for error along the way as well.

[Justin Andrews]

Is there, is there hope for people that have these autoimmune issues? Like is, do we, do you think that we're going to come to a place where we'll be able to reverse most all of them? Do you think so?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

I think we're on the way. I think it's about moving towards preventative health care, not necessarily reactionary, to get to the root cause. We're still one step at a time. I think there's some really good treatments that are out there for today. I think there are new treatments. But if you talk about some of the best treatments that we have available to us, say for example, inflammatory bowels, Crohn's and colitis, the treatment efficacies are in the 30 to 40%. We have a lot of room to go. My dad has ulcerative colitis. I have cousins that have Crohn's disease. We have a lot of room to go, but we have some tools in our tool belt. Not enough yet. And then even beyond that, how do we get earlier? How do we prevent some of these conditions? And that's where we need to go.

[Sal Destefano]

Yeah, because a lot of the treatments now are in tamping down the immune system. Some of the treatments, I know for Crohn's, my godson has Crohn's and it's almost like a weak form of chemo to get his immune system to chill out a little bit, which isn't preventative. We're not really fixing the problem. How much of this is generational? Because I've read that you inherit much of your microbiome from your mom. So are we seeing problems now that we started two generations ago and it's just gotten worse because as we continue to inherit microbiome, it's less diverse. Less diverse. You know, for lack of a better.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Term, it's a, it's a conflation of a couple different factors. Right. So there's definitely, as I was mentioning, if you are born through your mom's birth canal versus skin, you know, through a C section, you pick up vaginal microbes as well as actually gut microbes. And then if you're born through the skin, you get a lot of skin microbes and have very different consequences. But the, what you eat, for example, fiber, fermented foods, they have a huge driver in our long term benefits. And as you said many, many moons ago, we had a very different diet, completely different diet. In particular fiber, which are the prebiotics, the good substrates for microbes to grow. And we've kind of wiped a lot of that out of our diet and that's been a big challenge which has led to these consequences. So generationally, I think it's less necessarily just your mom's lineage over time, but, but both environmental as well as kind of genetic factors.

[Sal Destefano]

You're the right person to ask this. The most fascinating thing that I've seen with fecal transplants are. Well, they'll take, I don't think they have human studies on this, but I know they've done this with animals. Will take a lean mouse and they'll transplant its, its, its feces into an obese mouse and the obese mouse will become lean.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sal Destefano]

What's going on?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, absolutely. Great study out of University of Washington, Pete Turnbaugh and, and others, Jeff Gordon, and beautiful study where they're germ free mice, mice that have not seen bacteria before. They actually take twins, humans, one human that is overweight and obese, one that is lean. They take those human stool and put these into these germ free mice and exactly as you said, Sal, the mouse that got the skinny stool but gets skinny, the mouse that gets the overweight stool gets obese. And, and if you actually cross them because mice eat each other's poop, the obese mouse becomes skinny after she gets the right microbes. And so the question becomes why? What's happening there? How is it happening? What's going on there? What's the reason to believe. I think there's probably two pathways to consider. One that was talked a lot about in the past and one that's emerging. So I'll give you two kind of paradigms. Paradigm number one is what was initially talked about is that there's certain microbes that you have that when you eat it just goes right through you. Right. You don't, your, your body doesn't actually pick up any additional nutrients that's broken down by the. Then you stay skinny. But if you have a different set of microbes, it's able to harvest those things that would otherwise go through most people to capture that energy and pass that to the host. And so that was one hypothesis that you're able to extract out more caloric intake essentially from things that would otherwise pass through your system that then can impact your body happiness compared to thumbless lean. That's kind of one paradigm. The additional other paradigm which is becoming much more refined is around the GLP1 pathway. Everyone's heard about Ozempic. Everyone's kind of wondering about what's the, you know, are there ways to kind of keep your muscle mass or lose weight throughout through that pathway, other natural forms to be able to deal with that. So there's something really special about the microbiome. It has this super molecule, some of the microbes that produce super molecule called short chain fatty acids. You may have heard about this in particular one called butyrate. Now butyrate is an amazing bioactive compound, has huge biological activity. We can talk about that. But one in particular factor is that that butyrate, short chain fatty acid compound that microbes produce are able to engage with G protein coupled receptor, fancy language to say a very specific pathway that hits the L cells that produce in your intestine that produce GLP1. So microbes produce butyrate that basically engage the cells that produce GLP1. So this is kind of where this world is going. That's another pathway. And so there are probably a couple different pathways that of course then GLP1 decreases your appetite. That works mostly through appetite suppressant pathway.

[Sal Destefano]

So they're probably eating less. That's right through that particular hypothesis.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Interesting.

[Sal Destefano]

Yeah, this is interesting because I'm wondering how much your Lifestyle will also influence that. Right. Like, what would make my body want to become more efficient with calories or less efficient with calories if I repeatedly starve myself, for example, Might be one theory. Now, the thing with this is that you mentioned, I mean, you said 100 trillion or trillions of microbes. The microbiome is so complex and its interaction with our metabolism, which is also extremely complex, it's almost impossible. It seems like an insurmountable, you know, impossible task of figuring this out. But this is maybe with where AI comes in to play, right? How are we using AI to kind of figure all this out? Because there's so many variables, I can't even imagine how they where they would.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Absolutely. So there's a couple ways. And actually we've done this at seed, where we're looking at. Or should we take a step back? The microbiome is not just gut microbiome. Right. I think that's one misnomer and maybe one myth to bust right now is that we think microbiome automatically our brain goes to gut health, but our microbiome is beyond just gut microbes or microbes in your vagina, in your nasal cavity, on your skin, everywhere. They kind of live everywhere. And one we see, we recently developed in partnership with Jacques Ravel, one of the leading experts in the vaginal microbiome, a product vaginal probiotic called VSO1. And talk about extremely effective science using machine learning in AI. We started with a data set of healthy women that had sequenced their vaginal microbiome every day for a long period of time. And we then use that entire large data set to look at the signatures using AI and machine learning, what microbes are being driving the effect? Right. What's actually associated with health versus not health. And then pick out the key microbes to test in a petri dish on what's happening to decrease the bad bacteria and to increase the acid and to be very stable over time. And then we're able to pull out those exact microbes that work together in synergy, using their genetic code to put into a product with some supportive ingredients that we put into a clinical trial, which is very cool. So we're using AI in a very like, there's so much data, you're saying, sal, we have to use AI to be able to get to actionable hypotheses that we can then test both in science on a petri dish, but also most importantly, which we can talk about in a clinical trial that shows an effect that we want.

[Sal Destefano]

What about the this was relatively recently discovered, the. The communication between the brain and the gut. And now we know that there's a. What do they call it? Like, a highway?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

There's a literal brain access.

[Sal Destefano]

Yeah. It's not like, as you know, we used to talk about how your brain can't be touched by anything, but now we're realizing that's actually not true. That pathway actually exists with the gut. How does that influence our brain and our things like anxiety, depression?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Great question. So maybe I'll take us back in time, but actually, I worked on one of the first papers in the gut brain axis back in 2011, but it's really gotten hot, and it advanced at an exponential levels. You're totally right, Sal. We're starting to unlock a lot more biology here. And I'll tell you about the study that we did back at McMaster with the group, and then I'll tell you about the biology. So it was wild. Similarly, a mouse study where there's just two sets of mice. One's a bulb sea mouse, it's quiet as a mouse. And another one's a Swiss mouse that wants, like, bite your face. Like, it's very aggressive. And if you actually cross their microbes, the Swiss mouse that was really aggressive becomes quiet. And the mouse that got the bulb C mouse that was really calm becomes really aggressive and much more adventurous. And so you can see that there's something here. Maybe we ask the question, why? How is it working? How are these connections possibly happening? There's probably three main ways in which the brain and the gut are connected. One is through neurotransmitters. It turns out in our gut, we have a ton of neuroactive compounds like serotonin. We have more serotonin in our gut than our brain, basically. Right.

[Sal Destefano]

There's receptors in your gut, too, for.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Exactly. It affects motility. In fact, one of our studies, we show that the impact of DS01 are symbiotic on serotonin in the gut and motility in an IBS study. So huge opportunity. Similarly, we know that these microbes are also affecting things like oxytocin. There's a great study that was done out of Baylor that looked at oxytocin, another neurotransmitter, neurohormone, the love hormone, the connection hormone. This was done in, effectively, autistic, like, mice. And so that's kind of one way that the gut and the brain are connected. The second is a nervous system. It's called the vagus nerve, the enteric nervous system. And so there's actually a nerve that, that is interfacing between the nervous system that affects the brain. And the third is actually neuroinflammation. So it turns out your gut can leak in, can let in very active compounds that can cross the blood brain barrier, things like P, Cresol and other. So if you have a nice tight junctions, a nice gut barrier that's going to prevent a lot of negative neurochemicals that can get to the brain and actually cause inflammation in certain parts of the brain. And so those are the three ways that we're starting to see this gut brain access kind of interface and affect things like memory, which we can talk a little bit about as well, and cognition as well.

[Sal Destefano]

What's the theory as to why they're connected? Why is because we. I mean it wasn't that long ago, a couple generations maybe where we looked at these systems and thought of them as being isolated, you know, the blood brain barrier. Right. The brain is the brain. It doesn't. Why would the brain and the gut be so. Because that's direct line. You mentioned three direct lines of communication. What's the theory behind why that even exists in the first place?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

It's evolution. We've just been with bacteria so long that we're finding this like symbiosis between the two worlds where there's the over time. We've just conferred benefits from the actual microbes themselves. And the microbes are obviously helping. We're helping them out too. Right. They're getting a nice cozy little place to live. And I think it's just time and evolutionary speaking that over time that we're getting to some of those advantages.

[Sal Destefano]

Is it crazy to say I've speculated this on the podcast that you have, you know, symbiotic, really like in fact, I'm talking about my son. He's super. I have a four year old, super into carnivorous plants.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Amazing.

[Sal Destefano]

And there's this one plant, it's. It's almost like a sundew plant. Right. So it's got sticky surface. There's a beetle that is covered in wax that doesn't stick to the plant. And the reason why it doesn't stick to the plant and the plant doesn't go after it is it kills bugs that are stuck to the plant so that it poops on the plant and it fertilizes it. And so I'm explaining to him symbiosis, like they benefit each other. Is it too crazy to say that bacteria can also influence our cravings to feed themselves? Do we see any bacteria or microbial influence on cravings making you crave more sugary food, salty food or anything like that.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

I think it's a really interesting place that needs further exploration. I think the hypothesis is an interesting one. It's not outside the realm of possibility to know that we just talked about GLP1 and that's definitely through the appetite pathway. Whether it's the level of specificity of certain things to eat I think is still to be determined. But I think your hypothesis is an interesting one that is ripe to kind of further explore.

[Sal Destefano]

Okay, and what about like muscle mass and athletic performance? I've seen studies connecting faster recovery and some studies that suggest that you can get stronger. Like it's like a performance enhancing supplement, if you will. What's that connection?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, so there's probably, maybe we'll break this down into what's the biology, what are the preclinical studies and what are the clinical studies. And I'll kind of give you a little bit of a taste of each of those. So, so the preclinical, sorry, the biology, what's the reason to believe there's kind of two pathways that we think that tie the microbes to muscle mass. So the first is anabolic pathways. And anabolic pathways are being speculated. Certain microbes can help optimize amino acid absorption through breakdown of additional more effective proteolytic breakdown. That's kind of one piece of it. The second piece of it is catabolic pathways to essentially have good bacteria out compete pathobionts or pathogenic bacteria that are inflammatory in nature. So that's kind of the other that are being speculated maybe to a lesser degree also another, maybe a mitochondria pathway. That's a little bit more speculative at this stage. Is that true? Well, let's go look at the preclinical data and then let's look at the clinical data. So the preclinical data. There's a couple of really interesting studies, but one that I think will be kind of interesting in particular is they took these same germ free mice, these mice that hadn't seen bacteria before, and they found elderly individuals that are high functioning, like strong and like high functioning, high performing and ones that are not high performing functionally. And they took that stool and put it into these germ free mice and they measured the mice in the two groups for like performance, specifically muscle, specifically grip strength, and the group that got the high performing stool from those humans. The grip strength of those mice, very high compared to those that got the Low performing stool wild. We've seen this also in mice with certain probiotic supplements, particularly in the Lactobacillus class. That's increased muscle mass, increased endurance in swimming, for example, and increased grip strength. But those are mice. What about humans? Right. That's what we care a lot about. And so really nice study that was done out of, out of the University of Liverpool. They aggregated about over 20 studies in humans clinical trials and tried to aggregate to see if there's any real effect of probiotics on muscle mass and strength actually. And it turned out it did that. Probiotics and this kind of meta analysis show that we're effective in increasing muscle mass in a meaningful way, in a clinically meaningful way, and also in increasing strength, specifically measured by grip strength. There was one study that looked at deadlift and bench press that also shows some additional benefit, but it was mostly driven by grip strength. And so to me, that's really interesting. You see the biology, you see the preclinical data. Now it's gonna fit in the clinical data that when you see those, like you see the hat trick, then you're thinking that something's there.

[Sal Destefano]

Yeah. And by the way, they use grip strength because it's a proxy for overall body strength. It's a really easy way to measure how strong you are overall. So there's nothing magical about grip strength. You know, I want to make sure I clarify.

[Justin Andrews]

Sain, Are you a sci Fi guy?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

A little bit.

[Justin Andrews]

Okay. I was just. You would be such a fun person to talk to. Like, what does the science fiction world look like based off of the science that you understand where we're going? Like, how crazy can this get? Or what are some possibilities of how we could potentially use this science in the future?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

There's just so much we can do. Right. Like things that we thought were impossible are becoming possible. I remember when I was a kid I had this like futures book and it was like, it would say like, oh, one day you're gonna. I was like 7 or 6. You're gonna be able to look on your like a device and like have a conversation. Not on a phone. I'm like, no way. And like we do that every day now. Right? Like, and so I think, I don't think anything is outside the realm of possibility. It just takes time and resources. And how much time are resources to deploy to kind of get well, what's.

[Justin Andrews]

The closest thing on the horizon that could be like a massive game changer for everybody. I mean, I think of I have psoriasis. So I think the autoimmune thing, thing to me is fascinating. The fact that is it potential that we could reverse some of that. I feel like I've tried everything on the sun, nothing's worked for me. And the ability to potentially maybe take a pill one day and be able to reverse that. Like what are some of the things that are right on the horizon for us of what we're learning right now?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, I think if you're. I think in the immune space is really interesting. I think the longevity space and the metabolic space are the three that are really, really interesting. You know, we know that microbes are driving a lot of immunology to give you. Not to go back. I don't think the answer is a fecal transplant, to be clear. But just to give you that as an example, I did the first double blind placebo controlled trial for fecal transplants and ulcerative colitis, a cousin of psoriasis, used some of the same medicines, very effective. Now there have been five trials like that. No approved drugs yet down that pathway. But it gives you that kernel of truth that there's. The microbiome is having this huge direct beneficial impact beyond what's happening with the therapies that you're likely kind of on or around. I think it's about taking a wider approach to the biology and that is something that's very interesting.

[Sal Destefano]

How do they filter, by the way, when you talk about fecal transplants, how do you filter that without getting rid of the good stuff?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, there's many ways to do it, but usually it's a 333 micron filter. So like.

[Sal Destefano]

Oh, like a literal filter.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Literal mechanical filter. Like this is. What's so interesting about that space is that it's not, not like rocket science. It's not like you don't need to go to like, you know, an Ivy League institution to figure out like this. It's incredibly operational, like innovation. It's an operational innovation that I think just got caught up in the like, I don't know, the feelings around stool. But you know, back in the day there was evil humors and like all kinds of things that we had feelings about. But we do blood transfusions now. Right. And so I think there's a little bit about. I mean, I think the psychedelic world is going through some of that of like perceptions versus biology. And I think if you stick to the biology, I think you have a chance to make really good.

[Sal Destefano]

You just reminded me of something because you said psychedelics. There's a Connection between probiotic use. They've shown benefit for depression anxiety.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

That's right.

[Sal Destefano]

What do you think? Do you think it has to do with neurotransmitters?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

I think it's multifactorial. I also think that depression is not just one condition but many conditions. We're likely going to more sub populations of what kind of depression that's kind of leading up to that needs to be treated. But it's likely being driven by neurotransmitters or even things like GABA for example, is a big one. I think GABA is a really interesting molecule that actually your microbes have a huge impact on.

[Sal Destefano]

Oh really?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, absolutely. Even like you talked about cravings. Maybe I'll flip it to addiction. There's a really nice study that was a microbiome study that showed differences in the microbiome based on addiction. In fact a study that was done again a microbiome interventional study done by Jasper Judge and VCU which showed that in a double blind placebo controlled trial, a microbiome intervention reduced alcohol cravings and addiction behavior. So we think through gaba that was the hypothesis at least. And so you can see this world starting to emerge where we're getting into these. How is this possible? Like some of it's like sci fi, like addiction and microbes. Get out of here. Like that sounds completely bananas. Bananas Yesterday is the reality today.

[Adam Schafer]

How would you compare like some of these fecal transplant success rate versus like the current treatment for a lot of these like autoimmune conditions? Like what does that look like? And then is this something you could see being more available to people?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, so I think so. The depends the condition. So for example, Clostridium difficile, the one that we mentioned at the beginning of the story, works about 90% of the time.

[Sal Destefano]

Wow.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

So pretty good. Less in some of the immune conditions. But these are people that have failed most of the immunotherapy or immune therapies even in cancer. There's great papers that looked at the microbiome transplants for people that have had refractory metastatic melanoma. They failed everything. And when they pair that with an immune therapy and a microbiome therapy, it works about 30% of the time.

[Sal Destefano]

Wow.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Remember the, the baseline is zero. Right. Like these people don't have any other.

[Justin Andrews]

Yeah.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

They don't have anything else for them. And it's getting, it's rescuing 30%.

[Justin Andrews]

Yeah. Huge actually.

[Adam Schafer]

What's the follow up with that? Like in terms of diet and protocol and you know, all that because I'm sure like initially maybe you get this initial success, but then does it trail off?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah. So the, the C. Diff is an infectious disease, like, you know, like a pneumonia, for example. So you don't need to kind of continue to take it. Some of the other conditions need to take it more frequently, like weekly, for example, or monthly. I think it also tells us a little bit about where we're going with probiotics. And I think this is where I think there's so much promise, where we're starting to learn lessons from fecal transplants to apply. You don't have to take a fecal transplant. Right. That's a search based problem. It's a good start to the biology. But can we get to the exact microbes that are driving?

[Adam Schafer]

So now you're targeting those effects.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Exactly. What it tells us is actually maybe how do I think about picking a probiotic, for example, like, what are the, like key aspects? Because the fecal transplant is very broad, it's quite diverse. And one of the good things we know in the gut is you want a diverse microbiome. So when I think through and I get this question a lot like, hey Zane, like I'm thinking about a probiotic, which one should I take and why? Right. I kind of have this like 4D approach. So first D diversity. Most of the time we want to have a very diverse gut bacteria. So you want to pick a probiotic that has as many bacteria as possible to cover that tree of life.

[Sal Destefano]

Is that because we see in the data that diversity is strongly correlated with health?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Correct?

[Sal Destefano]

Okay, absolutely correct. And then the opposite, like, exactly.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Poor diversity is associated with many health conditions.

[Sal Destefano]

Okay.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

And so you want. But most of the probiotics we see kind of it's like one or two strains.

[Sal Destefano]

It's like Lactobacillus.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah. It's like that's not enough. Whereas, you know, the product DSO1, which is one that I strongly believe in scientifically, has 24 strains and has the most broad kind of coverage, covers almost over 30,000 genes, bacterial genes. It's such a diverse armamentarium. That's what you want to look for. You want to look for a diverse microbiome and a diverse product. That's kind of the first D diversity. The second D is delivery. Many probiotics are dead off the shelf. They're not going where they need to go. I worry about the quality control on them. What you really want to make sure is it's getting to the right place and it's There alive, very important. These are live microbes. The DS01 product has a targeted delivery. It gets to the right part in the intestine. And we use kind of this kind of pharma grade quality control to make sure the bacteria are alive. That's the ones that we used in therapeutic land that we went down the FDA pathway because that's really important. Dead. It's probably not going to work. It's not going to have the same impact depending on the microbe. So second D delivery, third D, I call it Do Gooders. And you mentioned prebiotics. Prebiotics are these products that microbes eat. They're the food the microbes eat. And so you really want to have some of that. And so that's essentially what the DS01 product has. It has a very strong polyphenol prebiotic that helps enrich the microbes. And the last D is data. And the most important one perhaps is you want to pick a probiotic that's got strong clinical data, not all data is created the same. And making sure you see the clinical trials like we have, we've done as well. So that's kind of the way when someone comes to me and says, Zane, quite practically, I hear it's good. How do I think about picking the right one? Say the four Ds?

[Sal Destefano]

Now, when you take a probiotic, is it just transient? Is that why you have to take it every day? Or do we actually see that it changes your microbiome and you start to populate your gut with some of these bacteria, these ones.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

That's one of the biggest challenges compared to what I'll call live biotherapeutics. Some of the drugs that are in the microbiome space versus the probiotics. Probiotics are having a transient effect that impacts, it washes out over time. So if you stop it, unfortunately you go back to your normal microbiome, your baseline microbiome. And so you really do have to take it. And that's where this, that's why it's been studied that way more regularly compared to some of the live biotherapeutics.

[Sal Destefano]

Okay, now why is it not populating? It's just, we don't know.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, the colonization techniques are a little different. We don't completely know that's the gut. I will say the vaginal microbiome is different. We have, for example, our VSO1 product colonizes a little bit more, still has to be taken more frequently, but not nearly as frequently, not every day.

[Sal Destefano]

What's happening? So I Used to. I've taken probiotics for a decade at least and seed is the only one that I've been able to take long term, consistently, always provide benefit. With other probiotics I would get some benefit. And then it was almost like they were actually making things worse and I have to stop, try to switch to something else. But what was happening?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, it's a really interesting phenomenon. You're not the first person to say that people have some kind of ebbs and flows. I think our reactions are you want to get broad, right? And I think partly if you don't have that broad microbiome, things can kind of change because our diet changes. You're like opening little holes in the, in the like lifeboat and you want to plug different things over different periods of time. And so you kind of want to have that broad, broad kind of safety net. And when you have single strain organisms or two strains, you're missing that, that broad safety net. I think it's probably why what's happening.

[Sal Destefano]

With the, you mentioned earlier, the junctions in your gut. You know, when I was 20 years ago, I had a wellness studio and I had an individual that was very, she was like on the cutting edge of this kind of stuff and, and she would talk about leaky gut syndrome. And I remember I had doctors that I trained in that studio who would overhear that term and roll their eyes because it wasn't accepted. Well, now it's like, oh yeah, that's a real thing. What's happening and how can good bacteria or probiotics help that?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, let me give you a case example of this and maybe reframe the conversation to something that's practical and what you can do. So every dinner table conversation I get is, hey, Zane, I took a bunch of antibiotics. What should I take? It turns out antibiotics actually disrupt the gut barrier and it opens up that leaky gut for lack. Or epithelial barrier dysfunction. That's the more technical term, but it's the leaky gut. And so how do we restore that? How do we close up those tight junctions? Well, it goes to the fact that not all probiotics are the same. There's this really famous study that was published in a very prestigious journal called Cell and they did a probiotic study after antibiotics and it turned out it didn't work. It was 11 strains. They said doing nothing was better than doing this probiotic. But to me, probiotics is like saying the word medicine. Which one? Right. Like aspirin and Viagra are two very different medicines. They do Very different things. And so we looked at our data, we said, well, it's not broad spectrum enough. It's not delivering, it's not hitting the four Ds right. So we did a double blind plus placebo controlled trial of DSO on the seed product and we looked at the barrier function between the groups. And after getting broad spectrum antibiotics and lo and behold, big improvement in the barrier function after you take DSO1 compared to the placebo, up to 49% better on the gold standard biomarker, which is what we want. So from that we launched a product in Target now called Gut Reset to help optimize that, that barrier function, which we think is really, really important. And so it is a huge factor where we're having disruptions of the gut bacteria, the barrier function. And this is a way to kind of optimize. But not all probiotics do this. To our knowledge, this is the first to do this on the gold standard endpoint.

[Sal Destefano]

What does that space look like with probiotics? Is it just like people are like, there's not that much science in a lot of these and some of them put a lot. And it's just like, where are they getting this bacteria?

[Justin Andrews]

Wild, wild west or what?

[Sal Destefano]

Yeah, it's.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunism in the space because all this.

[Sal Destefano]

Data is coming out. So it was like, oh, probiotics, I got to take them.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, it's exactly right. I think it goes back to like, no, not all data is the same, not all probiotics are the same, not all strains are the same. Right. And we kind of talk through some of those as myth busting, but there's a ton of noise and it's really hard for the average individual to sort through that noise. There's so much noise. Right. So how do you tell which, which probiotic? Right. I think that's what you're really asking because there's, there's many probiotics that make a lot of claims, and some of those claims are off of somebody else's mouse study. And some of it's doing the double blind placebo controlled trials that we just talked about at what we call the biopharmaceutical approach to everyday health, where we go super deep. We looked at the microbiome, others are looking at the equivalent of the naked eye or maybe a magnifying glass. We're looking at the microbiome with the world's best microscope, 100 million read depths. And just because you're say you're science backed or clinical backed. Those are very different things. And so I think that's been a bit of a challenge and for us to kind of demystify is that, you know, not all of this is the same, not all probiotics are the same.

[Justin Andrews]

Talk a little bit about your peers and staff over at Seed. I remember when we first met you guys and I can't remember who he. I think he brought the lineup of everybody that works there and I we work with a lot of companies, right. Over the course of the 10 years we've probably worked with 50 plus different companies. I have never seen a staff like this of just brilliant individuals.

[Sal Destefano]

So tell us who's who of that of the world of like on another.

[Justin Andrews]

Level compared to any other, any company. So tell me a little bit about that and the experience of working with all those brilliant people.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Maybe two pockets. I'll tell you the science side and I'll tell you about the communication because both are brilliant in their own ways. So on the science side I'm partnered with the chief scientific officer Dirk Jevers, who is at the Broad Institute of Harvard, mit. He was the head of the microbiome division of Johnson and Johnson. An incredible, one of the top 1% cited individuals in the microbiome space. On the preclinical side. So I'm a clinical guy, he's a preclinical guy. Incredible. We have a team of over 12 PhD scientists from the who's who of institutions from Stanford to Princeton and everywhere between working extremely hard, just like we would on the life sciences side but in the consumer side because this is where the world is going. Pharma is becoming more consumer oriented and consumers becoming more research oriented. And I think with the collision the middle is going to be really, really important. And that's the type of group, incredible thought leaders from bioinformatics to immunology to microbiology and everything in between. I will say that the other thing that drew me to seed is the way that we communicate about science. Actually this is an interesting area that in life sciences we kind of or in clinical medicine we kind of shout clinical guidelines or it's like very holier than thou. We don't meet people where they are. And I think you guys are great examples of scientific communicators in a meaningful way to meet people where they are. And Ara, who's the CEO comes from a movie background, movie production background and some of our team is just really talented in finding the educational story work with many, many groups to find people where they are. And I Think that's an incredible learning lessons. How do you take the concept of streetwear, for example? Things that kind of go gets dropped. We apply that to real world. So right now, you've heard of the squatty potty. We have a seed equivalent of the squatty potty that's being dropped if you pass an educational series of seminars. Right. And so how do we help people get educated but take the hype and vibe of what's attractive and cool in the modern world? Whereas I think typically scientists and clinicians don't. Don't approach that. And I think the blend of both worlds making information kind of accessible. Ara likes to say science is not complete until it's communicated, of course. Right, right. And you guys know that you do, that you live. That I think is equally as important as the science creation itself. And I think those two together is really, really kind of like superpower.

[Sal Destefano]

Well, education's super important for the average person. It used to be important just to educate people on what good bacteria was. I mean, that was 15, 20 years ago when I started learning about this. Now, because the average person knows what a probiotic is, they. They're reading the headlines. Oh, my God. You know, you know, microbiome connected to this, connect to that, connect to this. Now the education's like, okay, it's not all the same. They're not all created equal. There's, you know, this stuff works over here. This, not so much. For example, you said you want to take live bacteria. I used to, 20 years ago. I thought that meant getting a probiotic that was refrigerated. That's how you know it's alive. That's not the case at all. How do you know you're getting live bacteria, for example? How do you guys keep yours alive? First of all, it's room temperature. I have some in my bag right now. How is it alive in there?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, it's a great question. So we've worked really hard to make sure the formulation is alive and to test the lots to make sure using something called a flow cytometry. So this is kind of the, like, this is what we had at the Broad Institute at Harvard and mit, that type of technology to make sure we know the microbes are there and alive. You can actually put microbes in a hibernation state. And that's what we've done. We've put them in a suspension state where then they can wake up when they get back to your gut through a capsule. So that is essentially how we've done it. And it doesn't have to be refrigerated, which is an incredibly difficult task for us to do when you have 24 strains. To keep all of them in the right state of heart hibernation and to make sure truly that they are not just saying they are, but they are. That's been a big breakthrough for us to make sure. Why you say not all probiotics are the same. We've put a lot of investment in time, energy, resources and brain power to solve that really, really hard problem. And so we're here to kind of like delineate some of that.

[Justin Andrews]

What does the breakthrough look like at the office? I mean, is there like a big gong you guys hit? What's the like you guys all high five each other. Like what are, what does it look like? What does it look like when a breakthrough happens like that?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

We got a lot of breakthroughs, so we're really always excited. We have an all hands meeting. I think it's usually kind of a general vision around that we're spread across the world to some degree. So there's no official gong, although we do have an office in New York and la. But we need to get an actual gong. That's the next step for us for sure.

[Sal Destefano]

Let me ask you this. What do you do to maintain gong? Good microbiome health besides take a good probiotic? Do you avoid certain foods? Do you stay away from things like artificial sweeteners? What are the things that you know to do that are good?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Three additional things in addition to kind of a healthy supplementation. Fiber in your diet. Super important. I try to get a high amount of fiber in my diet.

[Sal Destefano]

Are they all created equal or certain types of fiber?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Good question. So there's mixed data on the exact types, whether it's inulin or FOS or others. I think I don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Just get fiber in your diet. That's like the take home message. Try to target over time up to 40 grams. That's a lot. You don't want to do that right off the hop. But the data shows that's where you want to get to over time for colon health and beyond and to feed those healthy microbes. Those microbes are doing a lot of benefits. And so make sure that's number one. Number two, fermented foods. That's I'm a big believer in. Again, don't let your favorite. I like kimchi.

[Sal Destefano]

Okay.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

But don't let perfect be the enemy. Good. I like kefir in particular. The data is very good for Kefir. So don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Get fermented foods into your diet. Number three is don't reach the antibiotics so fast. I'm not saying you don't need antibiotics.

[Sal Destefano]

Yeah.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Always be an advocate for yourself and for your family on, do I need this specific antibiotic? Can it be narrower? Not broad, narrower. Can it be topical or any other way so it's doesn't hurt the consequences of the gut bacteria. And sometimes it's, you know, I'm a clinician. Sometimes it's easier instead of having a long and drawn out conversation about a respiratory tract infection. You know, we're humans. This for sure happens. Right. But you really don't. I'm not saying you don't need antibiotics. Antibiotics are extremely effective and are life saving. Don't shy away in the right context, but just be a little advocate for yourself. Does it need to be this one? Can it be narrower? Can it be another way?

[Sal Destefano]

Yeah. The vast majority of like respiratory infections or ear infections are viral.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah.

[Sal Destefano]

You know, I know this now, by the way. The attitude on antibiotics has changed. So I don't know how old you are, but I'm 45. When I was a kid, the attitude on antibiotics was so different. You went to the doctor with all through everything.

[Justin Andrews]

He threw everything.

[Sal Destefano]

Oh, yeah, we were putting on antibiotics, like left and right. Wasn't a big deal. Now they're much more judicious. In fact, earlier you brought up C. Diff, which is. That's an infection. Like if that gets in a care home, I mean, it kills people. It's very, very deadly. And it typically happens after antibiotic administration. What's happening? Why are these infections happening after people use antibiotics?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, absolutely. So turns out we have some Clostridium, or many people have some Clostridium difficile in them. And it's not a problem because you have a healthy, normal gut bacteria that out competes the actual.

[Sal Destefano]

So it's keeping it in check, basically.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

That's right. And then if you take an antibiotic, say for pneumonia or urinary tract infection, it wipes out the good bacteria. And this C. Diff can go wild because it wakes up, basically converts from a dormant state to an active state, and then produces toxin that hurt the colon and then cause diarrhea.

[Sal Destefano]

You think of like Mad Max. Like, everything's like, you know, anarchy and the bad guys. Now.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Colonization. It's like if you have the right bacteria. And in fact, that's why you want a diverse bacteria. Right? To like crowd out to out compete the pathological bacteria, the pathobions.

[Sal Destefano]

And of course the irony is that the C. Diff that survived is resistant.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

That's right.

[Sal Destefano]

To antibiotics. So you just left the bad guys that are now not going to be able to get killed by taking. Do you have any favorite antibiotics for your family? If your kid gets does get a bacterial infection, what's the. Let's say some common infections. Are there ones that you're like, I prefer amoxicillin over this or I prefer azithromycin. Is there anything that you.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Good question. I think it really depends on the source or why you're getting the antibiotics. It's quite variable. I think I go back to like, is there something that's more narrow spectrum you want to avoid too? Broad spectrum. For example clindamycin. It's a very broad antibiotic. It's often given by dentists. And so just ask is there something that could be a little narrower because that actually sets you up for seed.

[Sal Destefano]

So what do you mean by broad? Like anaerobic aerobic bacteria hits both gram.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Negative, gram positive anaerobes. The broader it goes, it feels right because you're covering your bases.

[Sal Destefano]

Yeah, but you're nuking the hell out of everything.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Once you get to the actual specific bug, whether it's cultured right out of the urine or from the source, try to get as narrow as possible just to hit that specific bug. Cause you'll have less knock on consequences. You won't kill all the good guys, you'll just kill the bad guy.

[Sal Destefano]

So when your kids are sick, are you like, oh, let's wait and see if this is. Or do you go for the culture?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

I tend to go to culture pretty quickly. I don't have kids, but in terms of like friends and family and my parents is like, you know, I try to culture, get to the very specific, you know, if it was, you know, for C. Diff, I think phenaxomycin, which is very narrow for C. Diff, for example, or other things and try to minimize the consequences and just try to get as narrow as possible.

[Sal Destefano]

Are probiotics. I've heard mixed messages on this. Are probiotics beneficial to take when you're on antibiotics or do you have to wait till you're done with the antibiotics to take them?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Great question. So the study that we did that set up the product gut reset. DSO1 gut reset. You took the probiotic DS01 through the antibiotic course. So like the seven days. Usually it's around seven days and then seven days after. So it's a 14 day pack.

[Sal Destefano]

So on when you're on and off.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

And then right immediately after. And we actually, remember I just said try to go narrow. Well, the study that we did, which both the placebo arm and the treatment arm got, was broad spectrum. It was the very, very broad antibiotics. And we wanted to make sure that we were able to kind of restore back the microbiome, which we did, and also improve that barrier function, which we did as well.

[Sal Destefano]

Well, you're the right person to ask this thing because you were, by training a gastroenterologist sibo. So small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Do you take probiotics if you have sibo or do you have to treat the SIBO first?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

I would treat the SIBO first and then follow it with probiotics.

[Sal Destefano]

Got it.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Clear out those negative bacteria, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth bacteria, and then make sure you replicate with kind of the host. Because often the way you treat your SIBO is antibiotics.

[Sal Destefano]

Antibiotics. Yeah. And so is a healthy microbiome prevent sibo.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

So I would say that data is still mixed at this stage because some.

[Sal Destefano]

People just get it repeatedly.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

That's right. That's right. And exactly. And so, you know, what you want to prevent is the consequence of the antibiotics and that cycle that you end up getting put on the data. Because the bacteria in your small intestine are a little bit more weird and wonderful than the ones in your colon. You have more bacteria in your colon. And so I said that data is still emerging, but I think it's. I can imagine over time that we'll start to populate that. But certainly after you wipe out your bacteria with your SIBO antibiotic, you probably want to repopulate.

[Adam Schafer]

So does the relationship with like the acidity play a factor in that with your SIBO and like trying to get that right?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, I think so. I think we're. I think there's questions on whether PPIs, which decrease acid as you know, or decrease amount of acid have put you at risk for sibo. I think there's some data to suggest maybe we don't have a great sense of what causes SIBO and why it comes back so big. Big unknown. Some great groups in California working on that problem. We don't really know what about the.

[Sal Destefano]

Relationship between bacteria and fungal infections. I noticed as a kid, if I was on an antibiotic, I almost always got athlete's foot.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah.

[Sal Destefano]

And we know that there's a connection between SIBO and sifo, which is small intestinal fungal overgrowth. What's the connection between those.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

It makes complete sense because your microbiome doesn't just bacteria. Exactly. So if you have. You're given an antibiotic, what is it gonna do? It's gonna wipe out the bacteria. What happens to the fungi? They got a lot of room to play. It's almost like the seed of stir. We talked about it earlier, Sal. It's like you've basically cleared out the actual bacteria, and so the fungi can play. And one area that I think bacteria can actually help decrease fungi in VSO1. So women get Candida infections, often yeast infections. In our study that we did with VSO1, we showed that VSO1 was able to, both in a petri dish and in a human study, decrease Candida, which we thought was really, really helpful. So the right bacteria can actually decrease fungi in the right context.

[Sal Destefano]

That's why you have studies, old studies, showing that women who ate, like, fermented foods were less likely to get yeast infections. Probably. Right?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah. It's an interesting kind of paradigm. I think we did show that the gut is a good place for reservoirs for infection, like E. Coli. So that might be that. Our study we looked at for VSA1 goes back to the story of, like, not all strains are the same. So, you know, a lot of the times people think Lactobacilli good, and I think that's true. But Lactobacilli is like saying Chihuahua and Great Dane. Those are both dogs, but pretty different. Right. And so, you know, there's many products that are given for, like Lactobacillus acidophilus for women's health products, but those are GI bugs. They're actually not, you know, vaginal microbes. And our product is a Crispatus product of Lactobacillus crispitis, which is a normal, healthy microbe that we did in that kind of machine learning data set. And it turns out oral microbes are not effective in changing the vaginal microbiome, but vaginal symbiotics, vaginal probiotics are. And so really interesting, kind of like delivery matters.

[Sal Destefano]

Is this a pill? Did they swallow it or is it.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

This one's not a pill. Suppository. We compared pill to suppository, and suppository worked. And pills did not work for vaginal health.

[Sal Destefano]

Oh, and so Seed's product for vaginal health is a suppository. Correct. Oh, wow. Interesting.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah.

[Sal Destefano]

Fascinating.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

So the oral, the gut product, oral. The pediatric product, oral. The vaginal product, vaginal.

[Sal Destefano]

Yeah. You know what's interesting about all I I love it when clinical trials kind of back up what I've noticed. I've noticed when my gut health is good, my performance in the gym is amazing. I'm not anxious, I'm in a good mood. I feel, I used to, I used to be thinking to myself, am I playing, you know, mind games? Is it because my gut's off that I'm in a bad mood? No, no. I could feel it's like my neurotransmitters off, like I'm just not in a good mood. And then the, the performance aspects of it, like I noticed with seed, it's the most consistent supplement I take besides creatine is, is your probiotic. And I just, if I take it consistently, I'm just better in the gym, just 100% faster recovery, feel better. Why do I take. Why is it recommended to be taken at night in an empty stomach? Is it because you guys are able to measure how it gets to the right place and that could disrupt that? Like what's the deal?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, I think there's, we did some model data where that's a little bit more beneficial. I will say don't let perfect be the enemy of good as we are in life. Right. And so I would, I would take it when in the morning or in the evening. I think that's, there's some model data that suggested that. I think your point about like performance is a real one. Like the number of comments we get and like feedback we get about. I feel better on recovery and performance is real. Right?

[Justin Andrews]

Yeah, sure.

[Sal Destefano]

Sleep too. That's another one.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

I don't treat numbers, I treat patients. Right. The words are really, really important. In fact, we heard so much on ibs, for example, that we then ran a double blind placebo controlled trial for irritable bowel syndrome with Tony Lembo at Harvard, which worked incredibly well. And I think it's the humans that actually inform some of the way we think about the studies we even do.

[Sal Destefano]

They drive the studies.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Exactly right. And so that's kind of the, the genesis of it all. And so it's, it's not a surprise for you, for me to hear that from you, because you're not the only one that says that.

[Sal Destefano]

How does it get delivered to the right place, by the way? Is it a time release capsule?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

It's a cap and cap system. So it's called a. We have a kind of a patent technology of a via cap solution where it's a large capsule followed by a smaller capsule and it has basically a specific proprietary release in the colon.

[Sal Destefano]

The way that I talk about you guys, I call you guys the world's best probiotic. And I see you guys are like, in a different universe. It's so true. Because everything I've learned from you guys in my own study, because it's an area I've been very fascinated with, just personally dealing with gut issues for most of my life and having family members with autoimmune issues and food allergies. When I see what you guys do and I see what other probiotic companies tell, like, this is. It's like Flintstone vitamins and like. Like it's a completely different universe. When you look at the landscape. Is it. Do you guys feel like, okay, this is not even.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

We're really excited about kind of being that, like, you know, galaxy class solution. I think that, like, there's a huge opportunity to help a lot of people. And, you know, we don't. We just want to emphasize on what to do. Right. You see a lot of noise, and we have to help people kind of see that because it's hard. It's like working with folks like, you guys are able to educate to show that there are big differences. That is the key place for us. For us, I think we win on the science, and we're working to help win on the educational piece to allow this to kind of scale and to really help a lot of people, because we think we are.

[Sal Destefano]

How's the success of the company been through the years? Have you guys just been able to just grow year over year?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

It's been incredible. We've been really privileged that the adoption rate has been so high or the number one probiotic in the US and the gut product, and really excited.

[Sal Destefano]

Are you guys number one now?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah.

[Sal Destefano]

That's great.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

We're really excited. We launched in Target, which has gone really, really well. So nationwide in Target, so been incredible. We launched on Amazon as well, which is a new aspect for us, also doing incredibly well. And so we're in a place where we're excited to kind of share the, you know, the access to folks in different. In places where. Beyond just D2C, which I think has been a really close pace for us. But now to kind of go to, you know, the average person in, you know, Idaho or wherever there's a Target. Right. I think it's a very different conversation.

[Sal Destefano]

How long have we been working with them, Adam? It's been a while now. Right. I think we were the first podcast for you guys to work with. If I'm not.

[Justin Andrews]

Yeah, it was.

[Sal Destefano]

It Was.

[Justin Andrews]

It's been six years, I think. Six, six, seven years.

[Sal Destefano]

Yeah, it's been awesome to see. Early.

[Justin Andrews]

It was early on. I mean, it goes all the way back to when Taylor was here.

[Sal Destefano]

So.

[Justin Andrews]

Yeah, so it's maybe even longer, actually maybe seven plus years now. It's been, it's been, it's been quite some time.

[Sal Destefano]

That's great.

[Justin Andrews]

Well, I wanted, I wanted to hear before we hang up, I do we kind of just. You mentioned GLP once. It's been a hot topic for us, I think when you talk for us, I feel like it's some of the most interesting science right now and how it's impacting, you know, just the obesity epidemic. What do you think about it? Are there. Do you have any reservations around people utilizing it in regards to like, gut and brain health? Do you think it's, do you think it's amazing? What are your thoughts on it?

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, I think, you know, there's no panacea in life. Everything has good and bad. And I think for the right person, in the right context, GLP1s are excellent. I think that we are starting to see some of the consequences as well. So one major consequence is constipation. I have countless, countless, countless amount of individuals that come to me and say, I'm on GLP1, I gotta back off on my dose. I'm having trouble with that. I'm having a ton of constipation. And I think that's where probiotics and other things can kind of help to kind of get the right modulation. That's one piece of it. The other one I think is probably near and dear to your guys's heart is sarcopenia. Yeah, muscle mass loss. Right. Those are the two areas that worry me. Not in a way that's like super scary, but, you know, as this goes into the zeitgeist and it's like almost recreational use or near recreational use, just things to kind of monitor. Because I think, you know, once you stop it, you get this, you know, spike back. But there might be ways to modulate that in a more natural way to some degree. And how do we increase that butyrate, for example, to make sure we kind of tighten that up. But those are the two areas that I think, look, there's huge benefits better than, you know, lap band surgeries, I suspect. Right. Like, I think that's very clear. But we have to walk, we have to monitor some of the constipation, motility issues as well as the sarcopenia issues. And muscle mass is just so important as we age right. For all kinds of things. And so we need to then have compendium solutions as well that kind of pair onto that in addition to lifestyle.

[Justin Andrews]

Do you think it's. It's extra important then for somebody who is. Because we do have a large audience and I know there's a lot of people that are taking GLP ones that they are also on a probiotic simultaneously.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

I think there's a lot of benefit from for especially if you're having constipation and or potentially sarcopenia really should. We talked about muscle mass particularly that we optimize that. I think a healthy diet as well and making sure the lifestyle, all the things that you guys preach and are very data driven are really important. There's a huge role for optimizing that extra little safety net from a probiotic perspective.

[Sal Destefano]

Yeah. DLP1s directly slow down motility and that's like one of the functions that it does. By the way, diarrhea can be a symptom of low motility as well. A lot of people think that's oh, it's high hyper motility. No, it could actually be low motility.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

It can also get overflow diarrhea. So you get so constipated you get a backflow and then it flows around. So there's all kinds of like motility.

[Cam]

Sounds awful.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

Yeah, it's not fun.

[Sal Destefano]

Well, good deal. Thank you for coming on the show. This has been super awesome.

[Dr. Zayn Kassam]

It's a pleasure. I'm passionate about this, as you can tell and I'm so excited to kind of share the story. Yeah.

[Justin Andrews]

Great to have you.

[Sal Destefano]

Thank you.

[Chris Gethard]

Thank thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB super [e-mail] the RGB Super Bundle includes maps, Anabolic maps, Performance and Maps aesthetic nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam and Justin to support systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Super Bundle is like having Sal, Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Super Bundle has a full 30 day money back guarantee and you can get it now. Plus other valuable free [e-mail] if you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five star rating and review on itunes and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support. And until next time, this is Mind Pump.

[Cam]

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[Unknown]

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