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- [00:00]
A
This episode is brought to you by Just Thrive. Try Just Thrive Digestive Bitters and JustThrive Probiotic. Today at JustThriveHealth.com use code welcome for 20% off your order. That's JustThriveHealth.com code Welcome for 20% off your first order. Your body will thank you and so will I. Good afternoon. Michael Malice here. Let that be your welcome for the next hour, folks. I am very excited for the Just Thrive team to be back here again for. For your health special. Guys, Tina was on. Tina Anderson, who's the CEO of Just Thrive. We have Kiran Krishnan here, who's a microbiologist and a research scientist. When you have a podcast like I do, very often people try to do sponsored episodes and I always say no. Your. Your company is the only exception I ever did because I've been talking about gut health my entire life. For those who don't know, I grew up having stomach issues as a kid. It was a very debilitating thing because when you're talking about your stomach and digestion, it affects every aspect of your quality of life. So as a kid, they had to put me. I had to take those. Was that the barium enema? And then they go in one end, then they put me under and they go in through the throat. He. He has. He swallows too much air, he talks too much. Don't give him fatty food. Don't do this, do that. I, in fifth grade, got in major trouble because I had to. One of the techniques that they tried was no fatty food and you have to eat my lantern. You had to eat at certain times. And we would have like on Thursdays, I think it was, watch a movie. So I left the auditorium and I went next door to the lunchroom where it was empty. And I had my lunch at the right time. And they yelled at me and they go, well, just say you're sorry. And I go, I'm not sorry. And I will do it again because whatever. And they go, well, if you don't say you're sorry, you're gonna have to eat by yourself in the principal's office. And I was the valedictorian and I ate by myself at the principal's office. Cause I was not sorry. And I'm still not sorry. And so my teacher, you know, flipped out when she found out and made me do it. But this is something I struggled with until I was an adult. And you hear all these kind of wacky solutions, which I was very skeptical of. And then I met someone who had Crohn's. Right. And back then, Crohn's was much more serious than it is now. He was had like, stunt the growth. He had like a. Like, they took parts of his intestine. And he told me about probiotics. And this was 2004, 2003. And since this wasn't some, like, hippie dippy thing, I'm like, let me try it. And it was immediate and life altering because I did not have an adversarial relationship with food anymore. I didn't have to worry if I eat this meal, I'm going to have discomfort very quickly. To this day, I can't really eat cheese because I have this visceral kind of almost trauma response because this is what would set me off as a kid. And I think when people have issues like this, they think, well, this is how it's always been, so this is how it's always going to be. And when you find out that this answer is something that is very affordable, really easy, natural, not hard chemicals, no side effects. It sounds crazy. And this is something that affects, I think everybody, especially with AS RFK has been talking about, with our diets becoming more and more chemical induced, artificial, you know, straying away from kind of what people have been involved to eat. There's just so much here to talk about. So I'm excited to have you back, Tina, and talk to you, Kiran, about this, about your products, because it's. Let's just. Let's just, just. First of all, let's break down what probiotics are. Tina, can you please explain to people?
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B
Sure. So probiotics are the live microorganisms, when conferred in adequate amounts, confer a benefit onto the host, which is the body. So they're the friendly bacteria that are living in and on us, and they create major changes in our body. And unfortunately, in our intestines, they're really disrupted by the offense. You know the stuff you're talking about that RFK is talking about. All of these offenders that we're faced with on a daily basis are just wreaking havoc on our good probiotic, our good bacteria in our gut.
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A
Yeah. So it's something that everyone. This, I think this is something that people come to realize in the last 10 years, we all have this biome in our stomachs, which means there's microorganisms living in there because lots of things we, you know, despite what we learned in high school biology, we can't digest them on their own. Like, we need these other kind of symbiotic organisms to help us. And can you explain a bit about this sides there?
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C
And in fact, it goes well beyond that, right? So to put it into perspective for people, let's look at our genetic capability. So, so we know that genes confer us all these functions and all these capabilities as a human. When they did the Human Genome Project and the university where I was, one of the labs, was actually part of the Human Genome Project, where they were trying to sequence the entire human genome. And the idea was we're going to find a gene that does virtually everything in our body, and then we're going to find the gene for every disease, right? There's going to be an Alzheimer's gene, a heart disease gene. And so once they sequence the entire human genome, we found about 22,000 functional genes in the human genome. That may sound like a lot, but keep in mind that an earthworm has about 30,000 genes, right? So we're less sophisticated than an earthworm is in our genetic capability. So that left this big question, like, wait, how is it that we do all the things we do? We're so complex, right? Then the human microbiome project kicked off where they then discovered that we have two and a half million microbial genes in our system. So if you think about the wealth of genetic information in our body, that translates to function, Most of it, 90% of it, comes from microbes. So this microbiome that we talk about, which a large part of it lives in our gut, really is the code for how we function. And if we don't have them and they're not in adequate amounts, we can't function. Right? So it goes well beyond just digestion. It's everything in the body, right? We now have this whole gut, brain axis, gut skin axis, gut, liver axis, right? Everything is controlled by the microbes in your gut. So what you experience as a child is for one reason or the other, probably a multitude of reasons. You got a significant amount of dysbiosis, and we could talk about what that means, but you had a really significant imbalance in the microbial population, right? So now, just from that change in the microbial population, your digestive system is no longer functioning the way it's intended to, right? So that any part of the body where the resident microbes change for one reason or the other, that component of the body no longer functions the way it's supposed to. Because the way our system functions now is you have the organ, and the organ has certain physical capabilities, but the function of the organ is often dictated by the microbes that live there. So that's how important these microbes are. So now what probiotics are is introducing the right types of microbes that can go in and, and effectuate change in that dysfunction. Right. So that's what a true probiotic should be.
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A
So can you explain what causes these kinds of dysfunctions?
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C
Yeah, so a lot of it is our environment, right? So we think about human evolution. For 99.99% of human evolution, we lived one way. And then just over the last hundred years or so, the industrialized age, we've completely changed how we introduce ourselves to the world, how we interact with the world, and our systems haven't caught up yet. Right. Evolution will take some time to catch up. So a lot of it is just the overus of antibiotics, for example. Right. So we're killing off microbes at alarming rates. There's a great book by Martin Blaser, who's a microbiome researcher at nyu, called the Missing Microbe. And they talk about how this over sterilization, the overuse of antibiotics, of pesticides, herbicides, antimicrobials in our foods, everything is about killing microbes, right? And as a result of that, we're killing off a really important part of our ecosystem. And remember, we're killing off an important part of the genetic capability that we have. Right. So the overuse of antibiotics, the overuse of pesticides, overuse of herbicides, the highly processed foods which then don't feed the microbes adequately, the lack of fiber intake, all the personal care products that we have around us all have strong antimicrobials in it.
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A
Is that right?
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C
They do, yeah. Because they all have parabens, benzoates, phthalates, all of these things have strong antimicrobial. So if we look at, for example, our skin microbiome, right, for every skin cell, you've got about 35 bacteria. And the skin microbes dictate how your skin looks and functions. Then we throw lotions and soaps and, you know, fragrances and all that on it. All of that kills the microbes on your skin. And so the simplest way I put it is we are a microbial construct. We are what we call a holobiont, which is a superorganism.
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B
Right.
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C
We exist the way we exist because we have thousands of different species living together in concert. And these species have to work together to function as a whole. So we are a beautiful, elegant microbial ecosystem. We've taken this ecosystem and put it in an antimicrobial world. So the world around us over the last 50 to 100 years, we've created as an anti human world, right? So it's. It's no surprise that we have all the dysfunctions that we have.
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A
What I want. Go ahead.
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B
I always say that bacteria needs PR campaign because, you know, so much of our bacteria is actually beneficial to us. It's less than 1% is actually detrimental to us.
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A
Yes.
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C
And.
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B
Yeah, no, that's it.
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A
No, because when you hear like Lysol or whatever, this kills 99.9% or whatever. It's the assumption is always, if there's something that is microscopic, it's trying to kill you or hurt you, where a lot of times that's exactly not the case. You know, and it's actually. Maybe this is where my science nerd hat comes in. You know that there's a species of crab that is a deep sea crab that eats wood, and it eats wood from shipwrecks, and it can't digest it on its own, but it has in the gut, you know, whatever those bacteria is that convert. Was that glue? I know what trees are made of a.
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C
The bark. No, no.
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A
What's the substance the trees are made of that glucose. What's the.
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C
Oh, cellulose.
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A
Cellulose. They convert that to nutrition. So it's just fascinating what these microorgan, again, like lots of our food, if not for, you know, our gut health, our gut biome would be completely ingestible to us because we're basically in many cases, eating plastic.
- [10:53]
C
Yep, exactly. And. And the. A lot of it is also the. The secretion of our digestive juices and the movement of our bowels and all that are also dictated in part by microbes. And then. Then. Then the. The immune system. This is the part that's really interesting. This is where Crohn's colitis and other conditions come in, right? Even ibs. Because what's happening is imagine we've got an immune system who's trying to defend us from outside invading things, Viruses, bacteria, toxins and so on. Then we throw in a whole bunch of foreign compounds into our system called food and drink, right? And water. And the immune system goes, holy shit, what is all this stuff, right? Like, how do I deal with all of this? Like, what do I attack? What do I not attack?
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A
And.
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C
And the thing is, the immune system has no intelligence on this, right? So our immune system, our immune cells are born in our bone marrow and our thymus. So they're not born with an innate knowledge of what our environment is like, right, so keep in mind that, right? So it's the only system in our body that defends us. But if you move today from Austin and you move to Czechoslovakia for some reason and you live there for a period of time, I'd need a time machine, number one. You'd need a time machine? Yes. So. So that's not going to happen. But let's say it, right? Let's say you, you did that and you move somewhere very remote or different, you have a different environment right now your immune system has to go, how do I defend my host against all the new things in this area? And this happens in a 24 hour period. Even if you went to Mexico for a weekend, it has to adapt to that environment. Right. But the immune system doesn't have the innate information on what antigens or what harmful things are. And this part of the world or that part of the world, or even in Texas in the spring versus, you know, California right now, and so on, it learns all of that from the microbes, right? So the microbes are the first layer of information and they do something called tutoring the immune system. So when you go to a different location, you breathe in the antigens that are in the air. In this new location, it gets trapped in mucosal tissue, Right. Every part of your inside of your body is covered in mucosal tissue. In that mucosal tissue, you have microbes. The microbes look at the substance that you're breathing in and they help tell the immune system if it's something you have to go after or not. Right. This is in part why people that generally have a dysbiotic system, meaning their microbiome is off, they're much more susceptible to infection and viruses and bacteria and all that. There's also a lot of studies that show that if you took a course of antibiotics, it dramatically increases your risk of getting the flu or your body's ability to fight the flu. Because the microbes are now dismantled and the microbes are not signaling to your immune system that, hey, this is something you need to pay attention to. Right. So the relationship between how we function and the existence of these microbes goes so deep.
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A
Yeah, it, yeah. There's something I've, like, in a totally different context, I used to be very into saltwater aquariums. And saltwater aquariums, you have one type of bacteria to break down the nitrite, nitrogen, ammonia to nitrite and then nitrite to nitrogen, and then that you can remove with water changes. But when you medicate the tank, you Kill all that stuff. And it's often a huge. Just cluster.
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C
Totally.
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A
So it's just that this is the kind of thing where I think people realize it on an intuitive level, but they don't realize how pervasive it is. Tina, what I wanted you to talk a bit about is I think a lot of people have this idea that, like, oh, I'm just have a sensitive stomach, but we don't realize is this is something that's easily resolvable. And just because something's been your norm doesn't mean that's the way it has to be.
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B
Yeah, that's such a good point. Because what I think people are starting to see is like, oh, it's normal that I have bloating. It's normal that I have indigestion because my neighbor has it or my friends all have it. It's not normal. You know, we have to focus on being optimal in our health. And if you're bloated, if you have indigestion, if you have gas, if you have bloating, if you're not going to the bathroom on a regular basis, this is a problem. And it's a sign that you have some gut dysbiosis going on. But it, you know, and I think a lot of people already know that, that if you have like gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, you have some type of gut dysbiosis. But even like anxiety and depression, those are all signs that you have some issues going on with your gut. Because most of your neurotransmitt being produced in your gut. So serotonin, which is your happy hormone, 90% of it's being produced in our gut. GABA are calming hormones produced in our gut. Dopamine's produced in our gut. We know that there's a gut skin access. We know Karan just mentioned the immune system and the connection between our gut and our immune system. I mean, it's really hard to find any issue out there that's not associated with our. Our gut health. And so, yes, I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's really important to know that what everyone else is experiencing may be normal, but it's not optimal. And it's definite. Definitely a sign that there's some imbalance going on in our gut, but it's also avoidable.
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A
That's the thing. People also tell yourself, I'm just getting older. It's like not everyone who's getting older has this situation.
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B
Well, yeah, that's the exciting Part about the microbiome is that in your gut is that it can be healed, it can be fixed. And like. Yes. Just same, you know, with the probiotics. A great example. You're a great example of that. It's what we've seen with thousands and thousands of our customers. I mean, people feel better. And what's fun is that people will come to the product because they have some gastrointestinal issues, let's say. But then all of a sudden they say, you know, am I supposed to, like, lose a little bit of weight on this? And I'm like, well, yeah, because you. The way you're, you know, your fat burning is. Is all directly associated to you with your gut health. Or I'm. I have more energy. Well, yeah, when you're going to the bathroom regular, you're getting rid of those toxins. Yes. You're gonna have more energy. Or I'm sleeping better because I'm calmer. So all of these great things start to happen once you start to heal your gut.
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C
Yeah.
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A
Think about it. It's going to be a lot easier to fall asleep if you don't have some kind of distress. Because the thing is, human beings are so strong. Like, you have this kind of baseline level of discomfort you develop where it's almost like as if, like you kind of stubbed your toe. And. Okay, I'm walking around with a stubbed toe for a day or two, and it's just like, you don't have to live that way. This is what I learned. And, like, this is why I talk about this as much as I can. Because it's so. I. It's so scary to remember what it was like. And no one knew what was wrong with me, and I was just a kid and that the answer isn't some crazy surgery. It's just these little pills which are extremely affordable and with. No, it's not. Like there's a side effect.
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B
There's no. Like, the side effects are, like, better mood, better energy, better sleep, better weight management.
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A
Right. So can you talk? So what's the protocol for the just thrive probiotics?
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B
Yeah, so the probiotic antioxidant is our flagship product, and it's just one capsule with. So we just suggest that you take it with your largest meal of the day, because we have a study that showed that these strains actually proliferate in the presence of food. So it's like you're getting more for your money if you take it in the presence of food.
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A
They need to eat something too. Right.
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B
That's right.
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A
So can you explain what the process is internally or one of you like once you start taking just by probiotics?
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B
Sure. I could do it in the layman's term and I'll have Karan do it in the scientific term. So yeah, basically when you start taking it, they're dormant. When they're the spore means that they have this spore shell around an endospore shell around itself that allows it to stay dor. So and the key, the reason why that's so important is that when it hits the stomach, there's a lot of acidity in the stomach. It's meant to be the gastric barrier. So the spores actually are protected in the stomach where most probiotics would die in that acidic environment. The spores then get to the intestines and they take their endospore shell off and then they stay there for about 21 to 28 days and they're reading the entire microbial environment. So they do something called quorum sensing. And the quorum sensing is like looking to see, okay, do you have a lot of pathogenic bacteria here? We're going to take care of those. Do you have some good bacter we want and it's not really thriving. Let's bring it back to life. And so it's doing something different in all of our microbiomes because it's actually intelligent. These are intelligent bacteria that could read the microbial environment and clean up that garden or the ecosystem in your gut. And so like I said, they stay there for about 21 days. They start to the small intestine and work them their way all the way through the distal colon where they're making this true change in the intestines.
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A
So is it basically they're setting up house there and they're reproducing and then once they're there, like how long do people need to take it? Like what's that whole process like?
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B
Yeah, so the you it's a 21 to 28 day period where they're making change. But your our gut is being offended or is, you know, there's offenders to our gut every day we're being like onslaught at all these days, every day with like all these offenders to our gut health. So we would recommend just like our ancestors used to eat these strains off of the land, they would eat roots and tubers off the land. They would get these bacillus spores strains and that's what these are. And so they're meant to be consumed on a regular basis. So a lot of Times people will come to it because they have an issue, but then they realize, well, you know what, our gut's being offended on a regular basis. We're, you know, we're eating, you know, we got the red dyes, we've got the seed oils, we got all of these ultra processed foods, all these things that we're consuming. We want to make our bodies resilient. That's the goal. And so by taking them on a regular basis, you're able to become more resilient and your gut is able to handle some of these offenders that we're faced with.
- [20:15]
A
Yeah. I think the important thing for people to realize is this isn't a medication. Right. This isn't something that's like drastically the change in your stomach acid or the, or biology inside and you know, all this stuff, you're basically like having something that's like a hangnail, you're hitting you with a nuke and you're going to have some kind of crazy. Because our body's so interconnected, some crazy side effects. This is just basically restoring the microbiome to what it's supposed to be so you could digest foods normally. And the thing is, I think that when you have it dysregulated or whatever the term you're using, I'm sorry, it resolves pretty, you'll see results really quickly. You'll know if this is right for you. Is that correct?
- [20:52]
C
Absolutely right. Yeah. Because you know, the microbiome changes relatively quickly. Right. So within a 24 hour period of traveling somewhere and eating different foods, parts of your microbiome can change significantly. So as a result of putting something in that can drive change in the positive way, you could start to feel changes fairly quickly. Some people report with the first dose they feel, okay, I wasn't crazy when I had. You weren't? No, not at all. And that's the power of microbes and their ability to create a sea of change in the rest.
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A
Like if, like if I'm in the desert and I'm thirsty as hell.
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C
Yeah.
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A
That first glass of water, I'm going to feel it absolutely proportionally. Yeah, yeah.
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C
Because it's going to change everything that's been dehydrated. Right. Your eyes and everything. Yeah. So. So you're going to feel like it's miracle water, but it's just putting back things that your body needs. Right. So, and, and it's an important thing to note. So we, we've been talking about probiotics somewhat generally as well, but there's a vast difference between many probiotics out there. So just to give people a guide to really understanding, if you're looking at probiotics, why it's important to know certain things, right? So probiotics in general, the way most companies ended up formulating probiotics is they just throw a bunch of strains together and, and they went on this, this whole tirade of the more the better, right? So more strains, more CFU counts. So the, the potency of the probiotic. So they went 50 billion, 100 billion, 200 billion. And you'll see that on the store shelves. And then some people said, well, we got to refrigerate the probiotics because they're dying in the capsule. And so we're going to put refrigeration, we're going to do special coatings, all this stuff, right? The problem with it is all of that is virtually nonsense. Like, none of that helps and none of those products have been researched. And a lot of it's actually quite unnatural because it's quite unnatural for US to get 100 billion of these microbes that we were naturally born with, right? It's not normal for the system to get it that way. So when we were looking at probiotics, we go, how did humans normally interact with microbes? Right? What is the more evolutionary validated way of doing it? Well, humans ate off the land, right? We are foragers, we're hunters, we're gatherers. We dug for roots and tubers. So we ate stuff that had dirt on it. We drank waters from rivers and streams. And so we started looking at environmental microbes that could potentially act as probiotics. Now, vast majority of microbes in the soil or in the environment cannot act as probiotics because we have a very powerful digestive gastric system, right? Our stomach acid, it is basically like the second or third strongest in all of the animal kingdom.
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A
Oh, really?
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C
Yeah. The next one that's as strong as us or maybe a little bit stronger are vultures. Oh, because they eat dead stuff, right? And it needs to kill a lot of microbes. So humans being nomadic and foraging and eating a huge variety of things, we needed really strong stomach acids to, to protect the host from bad viruses and bacteria and all that could go in. And so as a result, we have this gastric barrier where the vast majority of microbes we consume cannot survive. But then here are these bacillus endospores that are ubiquitous in the environment and have a natural capability of surviving this gauntlet that kills 99% of all other bacteria so we started looking at them and going, why do they have this capability? Then you see that with that capability, not only do they survive, but when they get into the gut, they have this quorum sensing that Tina was talking about. Right. They can read the microbial signatures of all the other microbes in the area. They can find the dysfunctional bacteria, they can find the beneficial bacteria that can increase the growth of the beneficial and then kill off the dysfunctional bacteria. Right. There's been a prescription version of our probiotic in Europe and Latin America for 60 years now. Oh, wow.
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A
Okay.
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C
Right. As a treatment for travelers, diarrhea, and gut infections. So they're using a couple of billion CFUs of the probiotic spores to treat gut infections. And it does it completely differently than an antibiotic. An antibiotic is like an atom bomb for your system. Right. It kills everything.
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A
Yes.
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C
This is precision. This is like sending McElTeam 6 into your gut. They can find the culprit and kill them. Just the culprit. It. Right. So that's the magic of these bacteria. We didn't engineer them to do this. Right. I always say that we just have to be smart enough to know what nature has already created for us and then utilize it. We can't outsmart nature. So all this work around engineering microbes and all that stuff, it'll never amount to what is already present that has evolved over millions of years that we just have to put back into our system.
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A
So you guys also released this new product, these digestive bitters. Can you explain what those are and what they do?
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B
Yeah. So digestive bitters are, like, natural plant and herbal compounds that have been used for centuries as a digestive aid. So they've been used, and even now they're used in Asia and parts of South Africa just as a regular digestive aid. So things like dandelion root, bitter, melon, gentian root, those types of bitter foods are used as a digestive aid. And so what we have done is we've created a. A capsule form of, like, 12 different digestive bitters that are going and helping with the stomach and the small intestine, so helping with the whole digestive process. So one of the key things is, like, there is this whole movement now of, like, eating healthy. And it's awesome. And I'm so excited because I feel like we've been screaming this from the rooftops for the last 10, 11 years. And it's great that it's getting so much press and attention. But one of the big things is that we could be eating all these healthy foods. But if we're not absorbing and assimilating these nutrients that we're taking in, which we're not, because our guts are so inflamed and our guts are so unhealthy and our stomach is all messed up, we're not able to really absorb all of those nutrients. So the digestive bitters are really key at increasing stomach acid, which is huge, increasing our body's ability to produce digestive enzymes. So the ability to break down foods, also supportive of bile production, so supportive of our liver health. It also even increases our body's natural GLP1 production. So it's a really. Bitters have been used for centuries, trees. And we've been able to bring them in a capsule form to deliver. There's all these bitter receptors throughout our entire body.
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A
When I hear bitters, I always think of the alcohol.
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C
Yeah, the alcohol bitters, right? So very similar, very similar to that. And I want to tell a little bit of an evolutionary story of this because this is where it becomes really important, right? And when I'm thinking about product formulations, I'm a closeted evolutionary biologist. I never like to say that because those guys are massive nerds, right? And so us microbiologists are way cooler. But in the back of my mind, I'm always thinking about evolutionary biology. And so I'm like, what? How did we engage with things through the course of human evolution? So bitters are so important because humans, again, omnivores, right? We ate a huge variety of things. We ate a lot of roots and tubers and seeds and nuts and all that to survive through different climates and different regions. And as a result, our body developed defense mechanisms against potentially harmful chemistry that may be in plants. And also, they use these compounds, we call them alkaloids, in plants to trigger digestive processes, right? It goes back to what I was talking about, how we have so limited genetic capability, right? We only have 22,000 genes that's coding for our height and hair color and eye color and all that. We don't have enough genes to code for, hey, let's move the food along. Let's digest stuff. Let's secrete stomach acid it. So we use the environment to adapt change. So through the course of evolution, when we started eating all of these foods, we developed over 25 different types of bitter receptors, starting in our mouth, in our stomach, in our intestines, in our gallbladder, in our liver, and so on. It detects a number of things, right? So imagine our ancestors are Going, they're foraging, they start to eat food. Some of it could be toxic, right? That could be a poison in one of the plants. So when you put, put that into your mouth, the, the salivary, the bitter receptors in the mouth will trigger a response, a gag response, to make you spit it out, right? If you eat something that's really bitter, that's really astringent, you'll spit it out. That's a defense mechanism. At the same time, because you're potentially eating something that could be toxigenic, it upregulates your immune system to start to deal with and work with the food that's coming in, right. It also slows down the digestive process so that your body has time to decide what that food is and how it should deal with it, right? And then it starts secreting digestive secretions, enzymes and immunoglobulins and all these important things. Then on top of that, because most of the food we ate had digestive bitters, it also became the trigger to tell the body where the food is, right? So once we chew it and we swallow it, it's in the stomach. Now the bitters bind the bitter receptors in the stomach. So the body goes, ah, it's in the stomach. Quick, let's release more hydrochloric acid, and then let's start to release bile and pancreatic enzymes, because next it's going to the intestines, right? Then the food gets dumped into the intestines. The bitter receptors abound there. Now the body says, let's slow down digestion because we need time to break down this food and assimilate the nutrients. So it's using the bitters to signal all of that, right? So what we've done is we've removed bitters from our diet.
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A
It.
- [30:21]
C
Right. Nobody likes bitter stuff anymore, right? We, we have bread out of our crops and out of our fruits and all of that stuff. Bitter taste completely out. We, we are much more susceptible to liking sweet and savory or even bland taste, right? So crops don't have a very bland taste because then you can add flavors to them, artificial flavors to make it taste like anything. So we've removed these really important triggers from our digestive system that our digestive system requires. No wonder people have massive amounts of bloating and indigestion and constipation and low stomach acid, low bile acid, and so on, because we don't have the triggers that evolutionary we've developed to require. Right? So a lot of things you experience as a kid With a lot of the indigestion and the bloating and discomfort and all that were in part due to foods that weren't triggering those systems. Systems in your body.
- [31:17]
A
Yeah, I was eating a lot of wonder bread.
- [31:19]
C
Yeah, exactly. Right. And there isn't a single bitter compound in the wonder bread.
- [31:23]
A
Right.
- [31:23]
C
So your. But so that goes into your body. So think about it this way. These are this on and off switch.
- [31:29]
A
It's like your charms. Right. I'm thinking back.
- [31:32]
C
Yeah. When you think about all the fake stuff that's in there. Right. And there's no bitters in there. So this food, quote unquote food is going into your body. Right? Right. Your body doesn't even know it's there to a certain degree. Right. It's going, what the hell is this stuff?
- [31:47]
A
Right.
- [31:47]
C
And how do I deal with it? The triggers that it's evolved to have doesn't exist anymore, you know, so it's, it's. It's really confusing to the system.
- [31:56]
A
You're telling me that yellow moons, blue diamonds and purple horseshoes aren't food?
- [32:01]
B
Sorry, Michael.
- [32:02]
C
They were in Czechoslovakia. That place is gone. So now, yeah, us, it's. It's really crazy. Right? But that's so staple. We eat that stuff like most kids. That's what they eat.
- [32:13]
A
Yeah, right.
- [32:14]
C
Which is crazy.
- [32:15]
A
Can you explain? So how did these bitters work? Is it a conjunction instead of the just thrive?
- [32:22]
B
Well, they are the spore probiotics. Best friend.
- [32:26]
A
Okay.
- [32:26]
B
I mean, they work so well together because you want to think of the probiotic as taking care of the whole microbial environment. And more, even more. So the large bowel where like this, the bitters are really focusing on digestion, the stomach and the small intestine. So they work so beautifully together because the bitters are getting our digestion ready and then the spores are going in and taking care of that whole environment in there.
- [32:51]
A
Can you talk? So you also have another product called Just Calm. Right. And this seems very counterintuitive to me. Right. I'm sure to a lot of people. Because it's like, if you're focusing on gut health, health, what are you going to tell me about, you know, calming down and lowering anxiety? That seems very like out of left field. Can you break down that down for us, please?
- [33:08]
C
Yeah. So there's something called the gut brain axis. Right. So. So the brain being in your skull and then you've got the gut which is covered with something called the enteric nervous system. Okay. It's the second most dense neurological system. In the body more dense, with more nerve endings than the spinal cord, okay? And they're connected intimately by something called the vagus nerve. Nerve, right. So they're in fact actually two parts of the same system. So think of your gut and your brain as two parts of the same exact system. And there's a. It's a bi directional highway, meaning they're constantly communicating with one another. So as it turns out, a lot of how our brain perceives the world and whether it turns on panic, anxiety or calmness is comes from. From triggers from the gut, right? We've always said, intuitively, I have a gut feeling about things, right? People know that, right? We know that when you're really afraid and you panic, you lose your bowel systems, right? Like people can become incontinent or they become constipated, or they can have diarrhea. Like we literally say, you scared the shit out of me. Right? People that comes from somewhere. So when you encounter fear and you kick on this flight of fight response, your bowels go awry. There are also bacteria like Campylobacter, for example, right? If you get a Campylobacter infection, which comes from rotten chickens, one of the things that the Campylobacter can do is create panic attacks. So imagine a bacteria, a single bacteria in your gut can create a panic attack in you that could completely change your behavior. So there's a very intimate connection between the two. And Tina mentioned earlier that very important neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, gaba, that calms the system down are predominantly produced in the gut. So then you go, okay, well how can we affect the gut, gut? So it impacts the brain, right? There are these types of bacteria called psychobiotics. This was a term that was developed by an amazing research psychiatrist. He the psychobiotic is a bacteria that has a direct impact on your central nervous system, including your brain, right? And what these bacteria do is when they get into your gut, they produce a compound, a carbohydrate compound that is taken up by your immune cells that is then sent down your central nervous system and it calms your whole central nervous system down and it shifts you from sympathetic to parasympathetic. So sympathetic is a fight or flight response. Parasympathetic is the rest and digest response, right? So here's what's going wrong with humans. We've got a dysfunctional microbiome, most of us, right, where we have a lot of triggers to turn on anxiety, frustration and all that, right? So even Traffic, even driving to work. Work, just the, the, the irritation of the traffic. Right. Somebody cuts you off and you get really pissed, as if they've completely ruined your whole day. Why is that? Well, we're triggering a fight or flight response. Now, the problem is most animals in the animal kingdom, they trigger fight or flight response and then they can within minutes come down from it. Right. If I'm an antelope and I'm just eating grass and I hear rustling in the grass, it's going to panic me. I'm going to rush blood to my muscles, to my heart, to my brain. I'm going to run from the danger. But the moment it gets out of the danger zone, it's back to eating grass. It's calm, right? It's relaxed. Humans, not only do we have a fight or flight response that kicks in for lots of things that aren't actually life threatening, we have anticipatory fight or flight response. Right. We're the only species that does that. We're worrying about stuff down the road for tomorrow, right. In the future, we're worrying about that person and this person. And so that anticipatory stress keeps us in a fight or flight response. To turn that off, you actually need triggers from the gut microbiome that comes from microbes. They turn that fight or flight response off, put you back into rest and digest. This is where the just calm comes from. Right. This bacteria was discovered in the digestive tracts of really happy, well balanced old Irishwood.
- [37:12]
A
Really?
- [37:12]
C
That's where it comes from? Yeah, it's, it's fascinating.
- [37:15]
A
Right, So I need to pair this with whiskey.
- [37:18]
C
Absolutely, yes. You know, a little bit of Guinness and whiskey right. In the. And they're just common. You're good to go. It's a little Irish jig too. It helps once in a while, right. A little movement. But there's a, there's a. One of the largest microbiome research institutes in the world is at University College, Cork. It's in Cork Island. Right. And they took on this project to figure out what are the microbiome differences between people who were really anxious and couldn't sleep versus people that are really calm and relaxed.
- [37:46]
A
Oh, wow.
- [37:46]
C
Right, okay, what's the difference here? And so they started sampling microbiomes of different sets of people. And the one difference they found was the presence of this one bacteria called Biferobacterium longum. And in these really well balanced, happy, go lucky Irish women, they found this Bifidobacterium longum to be very prevalent and Then they started doing animal studies where they took anxious mice that are bred to be anxious, and they would put this longum bacteria in them and the mice would just calm down. Right. And would just relax them. They're not panicking anymore and all that. Right. They could induce stress in the mouse. The mouse would respond to the stress, but then relax afterwards. Right. So then they did about eight different human clinical trials, and we had the pleasure of working with them and then licensing this technology from them, which is where you find it in just calm. So it's really about just putting it back into your system. So over a short amount of time, over a few weeks, it modulates your microbiome. So now you have a microbiome that can actually bring down all the chemical triggers that puts you into the fight or flight response.
- [38:50]
A
And when you say fight or flight, that's basically what people experience is anxiety.
- [38:54]
C
Anxiety, exactly. Yep.
- [38:56]
A
This is fast. This is just mind blowing. So how, how long does it take to like, kind of kick like what's actually happening over that course of those. Those days or weeks?
- [39:05]
C
Yeah. So what's actually happening is the. You're taking it every day.
- [39:08]
A
Right.
- [39:08]
C
So the amount of that particular microbe, the Bifidobacterium longum, is increasing in your gut, Right. And then your immune system is starting to take up that microbe and then digest those unique carbohydrates it makes and then release it into the central nervous system. So as you build up the level of that unique carbohydrate in the central nervous system, your body can then utilize that carbohydrate to turn off the fight or flight response.
- [39:32]
A
Wow.
- [39:32]
C
It's a very important trigger to turning off. Right. So there's an off switch for the fight or flight response, which is where we are missing it as a evolved species. All the other animals have that, right. They don't have the corruption of their microbiomes that we do. So they can experience fight or flight anxiety where it's needed, but then they can come down from it. We can't come down from it. So when something triggers us, we stay in that elevated fight or flight state state throughout the day. Now, here's where it becomes really important, right. When you're in the fight or flight state and, and the average American is in constantly in the fight or flight state. Right. Especially if we think about all these inputs that we have from social media and all that. Right. All of that is not great for us. And as a result of that, we have a lot of inflammation. So one of the ways in which your body goes into fight or flight is it increases inflammatory markers to your brain and to your heart. Heart and your central nervous system. That's how it gets blood to rush to that area. Right. So now you've got an inflamed brain and an inflamed heart. Most of the day that inflammation is damaging your brain. Right. And it's damaging your heart. And so every night when you go to bed, what's supposed to happen if you have a healthy gut, is that inflammation is supposed to come down and then you're supposed to trigger things like bdnf, brain derived neurotropic factor, which goes and fixes all the inflammatory damage. So you wake up the next morning with the same brain that you had the day before. Right. That's not happening because our guts are messed up. We can't come down from the fight or flight response. That same messed up gut is also not building bdnf, it's not building gaba. So we're not repairing the damage that's occurred throughout the day. We are ending up with a brain that's slightly more damaged the next morning. This happens over years. What ends up happening, you end up with dementia.
- [41:22]
A
Oh, wow.
- [41:22]
C
And Alzheimer's. So the anxiety you feel today, the mechanism that creates anxiety you feel today is the earliest stages of dementia and Alzheimer's.
- [41:32]
A
You know, I used to live in New York before I moved to Austin. And I think people in cities especially, they just expect to have this low level, constant anxiety as their background music.
- [41:42]
C
Yep.
- [41:42]
A
And it's kind of like again, it's not. There's no way that's going to be good for you.
- [41:47]
C
No.
- [41:47]
A
Like just imagine living on edge like for decades. It's like you're not going to have to pay some price for it. That makes no sense.
- [41:53]
C
Yeah. Everything in your system falls apart.
- [41:55]
A
Right.
- [41:55]
C
Because not being able to sleep adequately as a result of that. Right. Just think about how many people need some sort of white noise or the TV on and all that to sleep. Right. Why is that? Well, that's because our nervous system is used to a certain level of stimulus in our fight or flight response. That becomes our baseline. Right. And if it goes below that level of stimulus, meaning the room is really dark, really quiet. Right. We go a little bit cuckoo.
- [42:20]
A
Right.
- [42:20]
C
We don't know how to calm down from that level. So what this kind of microbe helps you do is actually helps you over time, over a matter of weeks to months, start to bring down your basal level of activation because it Allows you to go up when you need to, but come back down, which is really key.
- [42:37]
A
This is such a better approach than, you know, SSRIs and all these things which affect brain chemistry. And I know don't. I don't care what anyone tells me. They don't know inside and out how it's going to affect every individual. And when you start messing with the brain, like for some people it's going to get crazier and crazier. So it's so much better. Just like nip it in the bud in as organic a way as possible. It's just amazing how so much of like I'm feeling stressed, you know, Take these brain chemicals for the rest of your life, regardless of the answer.
- [43:10]
C
Yeah, well.
- [43:10]
B
And I feel like it doesn't even help so many people. I mean so many people are on them and it's not really doing anything for them.
- [43:15]
A
Right. Yeah. Or it's like if I like if, if I broke my leg, just give me a crutches the rest of my life. Yeah, that's really the ideal solution. But we're being basically told, you know, that's just the only way about it or. Yeah, it's just very, very scary. So. So these are also the kind of things where. Because this is so kind of like organic. I hate that word. But natural. I'll say this isn't something that has like negative side effects for anyone. Right, right, right.
- [43:44]
B
That's the beauty of all of these. I mean they just really. The. The probiotic is. We were meant to consume them on a regular basis and the bitters are. We were. Are consuming them on a regular basis. And then the. We know that this 1714 strain that's found in just calm is something that's naturally found in happy Irish women. So we want to make sure that we're, you know, consuming these on a regular basis so that we could, you know, maintain our health and be resilient.
- [44:10]
A
I think people also don't appreciate this stuff. Is really not expensive at all. Can you give us the prices?
- [44:15]
B
The probiotic is 49.99.
- [44:17]
A
Okay.
- [44:18]
B
But you know, if you do a subscription, there's like a better price with that. And then the bidders are only like 29.99. I mean there's the great price and the. I think the just columns like 44.99. So yeah, not expensive at all. When you think about the my, you know, the amount of impact they have on your life.
- [44:33]
A
It's. I swear by this stuff. And you gave it to Me some. My nephew has grown. He takes it. It helps him. So this isn't just. This is something where I'm putting my money, where my mouth is, and it's just. It has such a profound effect. And I. I just really want to stress for people how much this is something that can help anyone because they really don't appreciate to what extent things are suboptimal, and they just. We just take it for granted that this is how it's going to be.
- [45:00]
C
Yeah.
- [45:00]
A
And it. You don't have. You don't like, you don't have to live. Your slogan for your company should be, you don't have to live like this.
- [45:05]
C
Right, Right. Yeah.
- [45:06]
B
That's a great idea.
- [45:07]
C
It's true. I. And I get, you know, I. I do a lot of education, both on social media and talks and all that. I do 50, 60 talks a year. Right. And. And so often I hear from people, it's like, no, my. My system is fine as long as I don't eat this, this, this, this. And they've eliminated 80 of food, right. And they're like, then I'm fine. And I'm like, yeah, no, you're not fine. You know, you're supposed to be able to eat these things, right? Not the lucky charms and all that, but you're supposed to be able to eat. Eat some vegetables. You're supposed to be able to eat meats. You're supposed to be able to eat normal food and be okay. You know, you have to have that resilience. And we've lost resilience. We're so fragile now. Right. And every little thing puts us into disarray. And then we have a pill to try to overcome that, and then we have another pill to overcome the side effects of that pill. And again and again and again. Right. 60% of American adults have at least one chronic illness.
- [46:03]
A
Oh, is it really?
- [46:04]
C
Yeah, 60%. Right. It's crazy. 50, I think it's 32 million Americans over the age of 18 have osteoarthritis. Right. Some form of osteoarthritis in your knees, fingers, hips or so on. Right. Once you hit the age of 60 and above, it's over 50% of every adult has some form of arthritis in their system. And it's the number two cause of disability for people. Right? So then as you get older, you start, like you had mentioned earlier, people say, well, I'm getting older. That's why, you know, my knees hurt, my elbows hurt, my hands hurt, I don't have grip strength anymore. Because I'm getting older. Well, it shouldn't be, right? Just because you're 50 doesn't mean your knees should be hurting going up and down the stairs, Right? It doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to go down to the mailbox and get your mail or run around with your children or grandchild. Those are all inflammatory related aging issues. And the gut becomes the number one source of inflammation in the body, and so fixing the gut becomes so important.
- [47:03]
A
So you're a microorganism researcher, right?
- [47:04]
C
Yeah.
- [47:05]
A
Every field has another field that they look down on.
- [47:09]
C
Yeah.
- [47:10]
A
So who do you guys hate? Who do you guys look down on? So.
- [47:13]
C
So for me, and I have some friends that do this work, but I think one of the scientific fields that has probably hurt us the most as a population is food science. Okay, right.
- [47:28]
A
Food scientists, clowns.
- [47:30]
C
They're crazy.
- [47:31]
A
Okay?
- [47:32]
C
But here's why. Here's why. Now this is not nutritional science. This is not people who study nutrition, who study the impact of foods on diet and all that stuff. This is food science. Now why has food science hurt us so much? Well, because what a lot of food scientists do, they spend their time figuring out how to make foods hyper palatable. Okay. They figure out how to make foods last forever. Right? They figure out how to make foods more complicated. Right? So if you look at just even McDonald's fries, right, there's. There's been memes going around where they showed the ingredient list on McDonald's fries, like 50 years ago compared to today. 50 years ago, I think it had something like six ingredients in it. Now there's over 40 ingredients. Really? Yeah. In just French fries.
- [48:15]
A
Really?
- [48:16]
C
You would think French fries are just potatoes, batter, which should be like some sort of starch and then fried in oil. They don't. They have like 50 ingredients in it, Right. There's batters and coatings and attachments and flavor ingredients and emulsifiers. All of this crazy stuff to give it shine, to make it not get soggy in the oil, to keep it standing up straight in the, in the packaging, like all kinds of crazy stuff.
- [48:41]
A
Did you do this?
- [48:42]
B
No, I didn't know that.
- [48:43]
C
That's crazy. Easy. And so all of that is engineering of the food to meet some sort of visual or palette goal. Yeah, right. And all of those goals are bad for us, right? So this whole thing of ultra processed foods that last forever that we can't use, our body doesn't digest, all of that comes from food science, right? And so that, and, and it's not necessarily the, the fault of the food scientists, it's that the food companies, this is how, this is who they pay, right? This is what they've encouraged the study to become because they're hiring food scientists. You have foods like Kraft Foods and all that. They have hundreds of food scientists as their R D department, and they're constantly coming up with, how do we make this potato chip more crispy, last longer, have more of this flavor, that flavor and so on. Right. And it's just like, like that's what's killing us as a big part of the negative effects on our system.
- [49:41]
A
I just have one more question for you as a scientist. West Virginia, just recently, I had a big argument with a friend of mine. West Virginia just recently passed a law banning artificial coloring in their food. So the Fruit Loops are just going to be colored with like, blueberry and raspberry. I hate that because I want my food to look like it's from the future. Maybe this is why I need just thrive. Do you think this is a good idea, bad idea, or, like, pointless?
- [50:05]
C
I, I think in, in part it's pointless.
- [50:07]
A
Okay.
- [50:08]
C
Because I, I think at the end of the day, if we don't change the education around this, right. That, that it won't really affect people. It's no different than going from smoking to vaping.
- [50:20]
A
Okay?
- [50:21]
C
Right. Because they're, they go, well, cigarettes are bad. We finally got people to convince you to understand that cigarettes are bad. Hey, but then the industry came up with vaping. It's so much better. It's cleaner vaping, a lot better because
- [50:33]
A
you're not having that.
- [50:34]
C
It's not. That's the problem. Right. So vap have all of these other risks and issues with vaping. Right. And the problem with vaping is it's now introducing a habit to people who would have never smoked. Right. So vaping. Only a portion of people who vape are ones that are trying to get off cigarettes. But a huge percentage of people who vape are people who have never smoked because they have this false mindset that this is a cleaner way of smoking.
- [51:01]
A
Isn't vaping less carcinogenic than tobacco?
- [51:03]
C
It's less carcinogenic because you're not getting a lot of the chemicals and the burning. But there's a lot of other risks on vaping because there are other chemicals still in there. And then there's a lot of lung damage data coming out. Vaping can create lung damage. Right. And then one of the, one of the biggest risks to me for vaping is the infections that you can get in your lungs as a result of it, very sadly. I had a friend who's an industry friend and his granddaughter, on New Year's Eve Eve, right, when she turned, I think 19, was vaping, and she was a vaper. Normally, from that particular vape that she did, she ended up getting some sort of lung infection. Spent the next two years in. In a hospital with transplants and all kinds of things, and then finally passed away. Right? All from that. All from that process. Now, they never said that it was that as an issue, but that was the. She ended up with a lung infection as a result of that. Right? So. So you can't necessarily say that that's a safe, safe alternative. So. So the. What you really need to do is you need to educate people to go, you don't need any of that, right? Why do you need that addiction to nicotine?
- [52:10]
A
Right.
- [52:11]
C
Why do you need that hit? Right? Your. Your dopamine production is off, right? So anytime you're addicted to anything, whether it's porn or it's food or it's, you know, alcohol, it's a dopamine issue, right? You're not getting enough dopamine to stimulate activity, and so you're triggering things. You're triggering dopamine response through outside things. Why are you not getting enough dopamine? It's because your gut is unhealthy. Most of the dopamine is produced in your gut. And if your gut is leaky, even the dopamine you produce, you can't bind it in your brain. So. So there's an underlying health revolution that we need where it won't matter if we have foods with artificial stuff and all that in it, right? Because people will be smart enough or knowledgeable enough to go, yeah, I'm not going to eat that. You know, you can't legislate those choices, you know, and that. That's part of the thing. I'm going, okay, there's going to be some impact here with the new environment, which is good, but I think the awareness is the best, the biggest impact.
- [53:07]
A
Folks, if you head over to JustThriveHealth.com, use promo code welcome, you get 20% off the product. This is something I use and take. It has positively impacted my life and my adorable nephew's life and my not so adorable nephew's life as well. Sorry, Zach. You're not as good as Lucas. Thank you so much for coming back on the show. And. And this is something, again, that I feel this 20 years over, that has been, like, life changing for me. And the fact that it is instant, easy, no side effects, like, you'll feel. You'll feel normal. And people are so used to thinking this is just how it has to be. And it's not how it has to be. Tina, we're running out of time. What has been your favorite part of this interview?
- [53:48]
B
Czechoslovakia, for sure.
- [53:50]
A
You are welcome. Foreign. This episode's been brought to you by Just Thrive. Please try Just Thrive Digestive bitters and Just Thrive probiotic today@justthrivehealth.com use code WELCOME for 20% off your first order. That's justthrivehealth.com code WELCOME for 20 percent off your first order. Your body will thank you.