Martha Carlin's quest to research The general ledger of our Health and Longevity

Greetings, everyone. This is the Sound Health Radio Show, where we talk about the crossroads of the environment, our health, and longevity, with Richard Talk-To-Me Guy and Sherry Edwards is off working on the Sound Health Portal. I would suggest going to the soundhealthportal.com, scrolling down just a bit, and clicking on the Watch How button. You'll see a short video explaining how to record and submit your first recording. Then go back to soundhealthportal.com, scroll down to current active campaigns such as cellular inflammation, biodiet, neuroplasticity, or memory, and choose one that is of interest for you. Click on that campaign and click free voice analysis and the system will walk you through submitting your recording. You receive an email with your report back, usually in one to two hours. To hear and share replays of this show, 50 to 60 minutes after you hear the outro music, go to talktomeguide.com, scroll down that page, and you'll see this show at the top of the episodes page. There are also hundreds of shows available there as well. There is a microphone icon at the bottom right corner of all the show notes. If you would like to leave me a voice message with a question for a guest or a guest idea for a show, you can do that directly from the site and I will be notified. With that... When Martha Carlin's husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2002, she transformed herself into a self-taught scientist, mastering chemistry, microbiology, and genetics to understand the crucial connection between gut health and chronic disease. As founder of the BioCollective and BioRequest, Martha has developed groundbreaking research and products that are changing our approach to wellness. Her work has earned her scientific publications, patents, a $1.2 million NIH grant, and recognition as a Colorado Titan 100 CEO. Martha's remarkable journey from concerned spouse to microbiome specialist, exploring the vital connection between soul health and our gut microecosystems. She will talk about how environmental toxins in everyday health and our gut micro-ecosystems. She will talk about how environmental toxins in everyday products disrupt our gut bacteria and affect brain health, and examine the complex relationship between our environment and chronic diseases. Martha will also discuss exciting emerging trends in microbiome research that could revolutionize how we approach health and healing. microbiome research that could revolutionize how we approach health and healing. Martha has spoken at the White House Microbiome Initiative and delivered a compelling TEDx Boulder Talk, advocating for systems-based medicine. She's been featured in the Scientist Journal as a citizen scientist making waves in this field. Martha Carlin, a visionary connecting the dots between the microbiome and human health. Welcome, Martha. Thanks so much for having me today, Richard. I'm looking forward to our conversation. 

I want to start by asking, how is your husband, John, today? Well, I probably should have talked to you about this beforehand, but at the end of 2021, John had a on the effects of COVID on the microbiome, both the infection itself and the vaccine having an effect on bifidobacteria in the gut, which is already low in people with Parkinson's. And in the COVID, there's a lot of longer-term cardiovascular issues, and John actually had a pulmonary embolism in September and a heart attack and passed away. Oh, I'm sorry. Wow, it's just amazing how many people I know that are working on still recovering from long COVID. Yes, and the, you know, the bifidobacteria connection, of course, was something I had already been looking at a lot in Parkinson's and in some of the other microbiome samples that we had looked at. And there's actually a research group that is focused on something called plasmalogens, which are very important to brain health. And bifidobacteria produce plasmalogens. And it's also got a connection to what's called the glycocalyx, which is the protective coating of our vasculature and really all of the cells in the body. So we're just at the very tip of the iceberg of understanding what's going on here. But there are just many, many people suffering from the long COVID effects and more people developing Parkinson's. And I think they are interconnected actually through the microbiome. Right. And so is the glycocalyx somewhat related to the myelin sheath on our nervous system and those kinds of structures? It is somewhat related to the myelin sheath as well. We're really just at the beginning of starting to understand how all these pieces interconnect and connect with what's called the glymphatic system, which is our waste removal system. So when we're sleeping, it's a system that kind of pulses. And when you're in that deep sleep, that's how the trash is cleaned out of the body. And sometimes I have explained to people with Parkinson's, the protein that aggregates in Parkinson's, and there's another protein that is similar in Alzheimer's, those are what are called antimicrobial peptides. So potentially they are encapsulating and trying to deal with pathogens that we have in our body, but it's like getting backed up on the freeway when there's a stoplight, if you will. So you're not getting that quality sleep that allows you to clean out that trash. Then you get a backup of the debris and many downstream effects. I'm pausing because I'm trying to think which road I must go down because there are so many possibilities. I will ask this question first. Do you think that this benefit to something like, there's this very simple device that's been around for decades called the rebounder, which is a small personal trampoline. And the idea of it is that you get, now there's a whole industry of people dressed up kind of like Jamie Lee Curtis from the days when she was at the gym and doing those kinds of movies, but you bounce on it gently. And for me, the idea of what it benefits is the lymphatic system. So I can go out because I stand at a workstation all day. I don't, I'm not a sitting person. I'm a standing person. So I go out every other hour or so and bounce for five to 20 minutes because I'm getting my lymphatics moving and keeping my lymphatics moving. That's actually, that's a great idea. And there has been some research in Parkinson's using what's called a shake plate. I think it's called a power plate, which is a similar thing where you get a vibration that is moving the lymph. But it's also, I think there's a connection to some research I've been working on with a Dr. Barry Ninnam in Australia, who is a physical chemist. And one of his areas of expertise is something called nanobubbles. So actually, when we breathe in, in our lungs, the lung surfactant encapsulates oxygen O2 and N2 into these little nanobubbles. And when they are stable, they actually are protective. So these little bubbles are moving through the glycocalyx, and they can actually destroy pathogens and keep the glycocalyx, which is that protective layer, glycocalyx, which is that protective layer in pristine shape, if you will. But when you start to have issues with nanobubble production or the collapse of the nanobubbles, that collapses the glycocalyx and then you get leaky barriers, if you will. So that could be, you know, leaky gut or leaky brain or leaky blood vessels. And so those shake plates or the trampolines, my guess is that they are somehow facilitating metabolism in the body with those gases and, you know, helping to facilitate the nanobubbles. And that's what happens when you walk, of course. When you walk, you're creating a vibration on the ground, which is vibrating the fluids in your body. And getting the benefit of breathing fresh air, theoretically. Yes. And there's also a connection. I think maybe people don't know that much about bacteria, but when you're growing a culture, say you want to grow a volume culture in a flask, you will often put it in a shaker incubator that is gently shaking the solution that the bacteria is growing in and producing some of those oxygen and nitrogen bubbles. And I can't remember, I don't think it was with William Davis. I can't remember who it was, but we were talking, it was part of the Blue Zone study. I forget the name of the book right now. When I interviewed them, we talked about they weren't doing anywhere near the microbiome research that you're at the level of. You seem to be the leading expert in poop, but we'll get back to that in a second. a second, that people who travel a lot tend to have slightly more diversified and slightly, I'll say stronger, but that's in air quotes, microbiome, because they go other places and get exposed to other beneficial things that their body takes in. And so they have a more, I guess what I would say was a more diversified microbiome. Does that make sense? Does that? It does make sense. And that can be both good and bad, I'll say. So, you know, many people have experienced going to Mexico, say, and getting something that makes them very ill. makes them very ill. And so really depending on your immune system and its ability to deal with what you're exposed to has a lot to play in there. And as I started to learn more and more about the microbiome through founding the BioCollective, it actually occurred to me all the way back, my mother had multiple sclerosis, but she was originally diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which of course is related to lymph, but she had gone to Mexico for a family wedding when I was four years old and gotten ill while she was there and never really fully recovered. So she had IBS, irritable bowel. They had a different name for it back then. But for many years before she was diagnosed with the lymphoma and then a few years later, the MS. And there's now a researcher, I think at UC San Francisco, Sergio Baranzini, who has found a connection between lymphoma and MS. And it connects through the microbiome. So while it can be beneficial to travel and expand your microbiome, you know, it can also be detrimental if you don't have a strong immune system that can deal with those sorts of things. All right. This is I wasn't going to go here, but I have to go here now. All right, this is, I wasn't going to go here, but I have to go here now. How do we deal with our total toxic load? I'll just refer to my archenemy glyphosate. I first started talking about, I did, I've probably done about a half dozen shows with Stephanie Seneff and was one of the first people to interview her when she wrote her Toxic Legacy. And what I heard on one of the last shows that I did with her when she was talking about, I forget what the country was, but in some country where they use corn to produce biofuels, and they're using GMO corn. And so if it's GMO corn, that means it's probably, it's 90%, I'll say, odds that it's sprayed with glyphosate., odds that it's sprayed with glyphosate. And so if it's sprayed with glyphosate, when you then take that and turn that into ethanol, the glyphosate doesn't go away. So what we now have is automobiles delivering aerosolized glyphosate out of the fuels they're producing from GMO corn. So that being said, how do we deal with the amount of toxins that I have a phrase, total toxic load, that I've used for years? And it just blows my mind. I'm old enough that as a child, I was sprayed by DTT planes because I was driving through the Salinas. Well, I wasn't driving. My parents are driving us through the Salinas Valley to go visit my grandparents in Silicon, what is now Silicon Valley. And you'd stick your head out the car window to be dusted by the crop dusters flying over the highway one because it was so cool. Wow, man, that's totally cool. And I realized years later that was probably DET. So all the way from my childhood, and plus I grew up in aggy areas, which are kind of toxic unless they're organic or biodynamic. How do we... I don't know that I don't have a perfect question there because it always blows my mind when I think about it. Our total toxic load just blows my mind between eating food that's not clean or not organic. How do we, are there products that you designed that can help us with that alone besides changing our diet? There are actually, so the microbes are really what deal with toxins all over the environment. And in fact, my chief scientific officer, Dr. Raul Cano, was an early pioneer when he was at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo working with microbes to clean up oil spills. working with microbes to clean up oil spills. And he did that in part by shaping the terrain to support the microbes that could break down the oil spills. And we use that same concept in the design of our probiotic formulas and glyphosate actually was, you know, one of the early things I started looking at when John was diagnosed back in 2002. It was, you know, it was very early times, but I, you know, that's been a focus of mine for the entire 23 years I've been looking at this. But in our, in looking at Parkinson's, there is an animal model that produces Parkinson-like symptoms in a mouse that uses endotoxin, which is a cell wall component of gram-negative bacteria. That same endotoxin has been used in studies of depression and in diabetes. And I think multiple diseases, if you go into the PubMed database and look at endotoxin animal models, you will see that it is used to induce a lot of different types of chronic illness in an animal. And it's highly inflammatory. So an inflammation is what drives a lot of our chronic issues. And we developed our sugar shift formula, not specifically focusing on endotoxin, but found through our clinical trial, I wanted to see if it could lower endotoxin load. And so we measured serum endotoxin in the blood. And then we did a before and after microbiome study and showed that 100% of the people who took the sugar shift formula had a reduction in endotoxin. And as a whole for the study, it was clinically significant. And so that was a real kind of light bulb moment for me about the mechanisms of how it works. But we also have a particular strain of lactobacillus plantarum that we brought to market that breaks down glyphosate without producing AMPA. And a lot of people probably won't know what AMPA is, but it is a metabolite that occurs when a lot of bacteria break down glyphosate, but they don't fully break it down. And that particular metabolite can actually be more toxic to the brain than the glyphosate. So our plantarum breaks that most lacto and bifido are actually killed by glyphosate. So you get a reduction in your beneficial bacteria if you are chronically exposed to glyphosate, you're getting a shifting terrain in your body. And so what we found was our formula could lower that load and reduce the number of gram-negative bacteria that are producing those endotoxins and increase the bifidobacteria that are so beneficial. And I think fermented foods are another great way. You know, people are always asking me, okay, are you, you know, are you just selling probiotics? Well, you know, fermented foods are these working systems where the microbes work together. microbes together and see how they will support each other. And in a vibrant, diverse ecosystem, that's how things work. Keeping things in balance is that, you know, the waste of one microbe is the fuel of another microbe. And so what we need to do is stop exposing ourselves to this high load of waste that is creating all these toxins. And of course, you know, I'm talking about endotoxins, but there's also exotoxins and there are mycotoxins. We're actually doing some work with our agricultural company, Ancient Organics. Right now, we're doing a small study in Hawaii in some coffee testing to see if one of our formulas can actually reduce the mycotoxins in the coffee. mycotoxins in the coffee. Wow. That could be revolutionary in the sense of Dave Asprey of Bulletproof Coffee. When he first started talking about coffee, that was his primary thing to get people to understand that when you put coffee beans into a shipping container and get it here, by the time it's here, it's probably moldy. Yes. And that's the case with a lot of grains too. I often wonder if a large part of our grain issue isn't the mold toxins that are produced in the storage process of the long-term storage of those grains. And there's a woman named Susan Gagne that I, you should try to interview her. She's really, really knowledgeable about mycotoxins and has a antifungal, antimicotoxin diet that she's developed. She has a background in nutrition. And this all came out of her son who had very severe issues as a baby. And she started kind of digging into where was it coming from and started really finding the mycotoxins in all these different foods. And once she got him on a mycotoxin-free diet, he was significantly better. And I'm trying to think there was an aflatoxin, I think. There used to be a, I used to do, because we were talking backstage, I used to do a lot of work with ozone. And I had some farmer friends of mine that were growing corn, non-GMO corn. And they would store it in a silo. And they would have guys go into the silo and they'd pass out and have to be dragged out. And it was because there was so much mycotoxin being produced. Because corn is such a simple sugar that given the right atmosphere, moisture and warmth, it's going to go crazy. And so we were trying to figure out a system of venting with ozone passing through the corn to stop that. But I mean, the idea of corn and mold, because they are most grains are simple sugars to a certain extent, makes sense to me. Well, it's interesting, you talk about the ozone and that, so, you know, you're talking about oxygen to kill the mycotoxins. And I wonder, I mean, I'm just speculating here after hearing you say that, but in many of the studies of the human dysbiotic gut, it has become oxygenated. And I'm wondering if that's a reaction to try to address mold toxins. But in the process, the gut is supposed to be anaerobic. Right. And so then you have this flourishing of these facultative anaerobes or aerobic organisms that are more pathogens and things like the bifidobacteria that is so important. things like the bifidobacteria that is so important. Bifidobacteria is killed by oxygen. So you have this perhaps system in your gut that's trying to deal with two different types of pathogens and causing wreaking havoc kind of across the board. Well, the action of the ozone, oxygen is a diatomic molecule, meaning it always wants to be two. But when you produce ozone, you frequently produce ozone by passing it through an electrical field, or passing oxygen through an electrical field, and that dis're just single oxygen molecules. But at some point, they bond. And oftentimes, that one single oxygen molecule is so desperate to be bonded, it will bond into O3, which is Oso. So that oxygen molecule, then O3, is that one single oxygen is desperate to mate. I'll just say it that way. desperate to mate. I'll just say it that way. And it has a high redux potential, which means electrical field potential. So when it contacts a pathogen, it typically explodes the cell wall of that pathogen, and then the O3 is gone. That single oxygen molecule is gone. So it's been used, when I was first studying medical ozone, I came from looking at medical ozone into agricultural and industrial applications. And I would go to Mexico and study, because down there, this was back when the United States, it was illegal for doctors to do ozone protocols. And it's still questionable, not in what its effect is, but in its legality. So I went to Mexico and all the clinics were using it in one form or another, and having great results. And that leads me to think that, so you're pumping more oxygen into the body. You might do an insufflation, which is a rectal application of ozone, or you could do it in an IV. And so the idea is that we're pumping more oxygen into the system, and that single oxygen molecule is killing pathogens at the same time. I don't think I can make that into a question. I'm just observing. Wow. Based on what you're saying about oxygen. That's interesting. Well, it's interesting, too, because back to the nanobubbles of oxygen. Yes. There's some research. It's very old research. I think it's from the 1930s, maybe. Mark Adams did research essentially showing that shaking water, just shaking the water and then the nanobubbles that are produced in the shaking of the water does exactly what you're saying is it damages the cell walls of the pathogens and the viruses and can sterilize the water, essentially. Well, that's what, if we try and replicate what's happening in the streams, that's what the streams do when the water comes down through the rocks. That water is being impacted and affected and basically shaken up. It just doesn't look like it. Yes. That's why water at the end of the stream is so delicious, is because it's purified by coming down that mountain of rocks. It's being shaken, and it's delicious. I don't have a better way of saying it. Although, you know, our streams are not as clean as they used to be. No. And that's, again, back to all the chemicals, not just glyphosate, but there are a lot of chemicals used in farming and they wash off in the rain into the streams. Sure. off in the rain into the streams and you know our water treatment the design of the water treatment plants was primarily focused on the pathogenic organisms in the water not on the chemicals and so you have the chemical load of agriculture flowing into the water now. And then you also have all the pharmaceuticals that people are taking that are getting into the water supply. And, you know, there's no mechanism in our current water treatment to address those. And, you know, that's a, that's an area that really needs some focus. The Environmental Working Group back in 2012 actually did some studies in a number of the major cities, and I'm not really sure why they haven't continued to do that work unless they got a lot of pressure. But they showed the highest pharmaceutical load in each of these major cities. Well, it's back to, I'll make this very short. A long time ago, one of the things that started me in the world of talking about environmental issues was in the Wayback Machine. There was a cover of, I believe, the National Enquirer. And on the cover was a picture of an alligator, and the thriller side of the story was they were talking about alligators having issues in Florida breeding because the male alligator's penises were getting smaller. So that was the headline. That was the big like, oh, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. But the reason that was happening is because of the amount of, partially I believe, from the amount of toxins or estrogen mimickers that were in the waters that the alligators were living in. And I feel that that's partially from birth control pills. I'm not anti-birth control pills. Birth control pills, the excess hormones are going to the waters, along with everything now we know about plastic and everything that's in our waters, these animals are swimming around in, since they tend to hang out in the same pond all the time. If that pond has too many estrogen mimickers in it, well, of course, they're going to have some sort of factor going on. So now we are here almost 40 years later, and I can't even imagine what the hormone disruption is happening from our water. Sure. Well, I don't know if you're familiar with atrazine, but that's another agricultural chemical that's pretty widely used. And there's a researcher from UC Davis, Tyrone Hayes, and he did some early research in amphibians. That was his area of expertise. And the atrazine was changing the sex of the frogs. And they didn't want him to continue publishing. There's actually a nice article in, I think it's New Yorker magazine, back in 2014, about how Syngenta used sort of a PR machine to try to destroy his reputation and harass him, harass his family. his reputation and harass him, harass his family. And that's basically a method that has been used against many scientists who have, you know, just wanted to study things and tell people the truth. But these big chemical companies don't really want people to understand that. But, you know, Don't really want people to understand that. But, you know, people are interested in exploring more. You can look up Tyrone Hayes, New Yorker, 2014, I think. And it's a great, very long form article about how that whole process works. And atrazine is specifically an endocrine disruptor. Wow. There's a group called Moms Across America. I love them. and she's always looking for glyphosate. And she found it and she wrote an article that she published online. And within 24 hours, she was attacked. Moms Across America was attacked by some group, air quotes, stating, you know, just basically trying to dish everything possible on them, that there's nothing to dish. You know, that they were a lie and it was a thing and it was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it was because she published this article talking about impossible markers having glyphosate tested positive for glyphosate. That's actually, I don't know if you know who Carrie Gilliam is, but I think she wrote the book Whitewashed, maybe. And she's been a long investigative journalist in glyphosate. And she had an article, I think it was last month when all the USAID stuff came out. And there was basically funding from the U.S. government to a PR firm that was actually building a database of people who were advocates for education and information about all of these chemicals and glyphosate in particular. And in these databases that they're building, you know, they're putting your family's information, all your private information, and essentially helping people figure out how to target you and target your family. And, you know, that just, that's, to me, is just so mind-boggling that people would feel good about themselves working for an organization like that, that is trying to harass people who just want to help humanity. It's, it just kind of boggles my mind. Yeah. I know my name is on a list somewhere. I've talked to enough people down through the years. I'm certain somebody's like, who is this guy? He keeps talking to all these people. But I'm too off-grid to be much harassing. And I don't care. There's that. But back to waste. The BioCollective, you revolutionized with the BioCollective, you really revolutionized the study of poop. We did. It was very early. So we founded the company in 2015 and we had a very grand vision because we we thought, oh, everybody's going to want to collaborate and share and do all this stuff. So but our kind of first step was we need to collect a big bank of poop from, you know, all different people, not just Parkinson's. bank of poop from, you know, all different people, not just Parkinson's, but that, you know, was certainly one of my focuses. And my co-founder, Dr. Suzanne Vernon, had worked at the CDC for about 17 years. And one of the things that she pointed out was how many large-scale studies they had had to throw out the data because the samples were either inconsistently collected, improperly collected, or stored improperly so that the results were suspect. And so she really was the visionary behind developing a method to collect the whole stool from someone's home to our laboratory and maintaining a consistent temperature so that the sample would be well preserved by the time it got to us. And so we developed the bio collector, which was this little hammock that you sat over the toilet and with these little suction cups, it was like a little hammock. And you just went into the hammock that you sat over the toilet. And with these little suction cups, it was like a little hammock. And you just went into the hammock, picked up the arms of the hammock, stuck it in this bag, and we had a large box with a very large freezer brick that maintained refrigeration temperature. And then it came to our laboratory. And then we processed the whole stool into these little aliquots, little tubes, and we made the samples available to researchers around the world to do early research in whatever disease area or health or diet. We did some vegan and omnivore sample collection. And in the process of doing that, we also discovered that in our lab, they could tell if someone had Parkinson's just by looking at their stool. No other information. People with Parkinson's had a very different stool. And it had parts of the stool, sometimes all of the stool, that was the consistency of concrete. And that had never been published anywhere. And people with Parkinson's, maybe 75, 80% of people with Parkinson's suffer from severe chronic constipation. But I don't think that the traditional medical community really understands what that means and how the physical chemistry inside the body is creating that concrete actually through the battle between the microbes. And that's something I'm working on a paper with Dr. Nenum to explain that. But that was a real epiphany was that we could identify a Parkinson's sample just by looking at it. And, you know, frankly, there's a number of cases of IBD or Crohn's, if you will, where you can identify it just from looking at the sample because it'll be mostly mucus and not much of what might look like a typical stool. And I was trying to think of how you could be testing waste from a waste management company. But that's not really what you, that's not the direction you go. You're getting, your bio collective is the largest collection of stool samples, I'm thinking, in the world. Well, you know, it early 2020 when we finished up our grant from the NIH where we made a large pooled sample to be used as reference material. But after COVID, we decided for safety reasons, we closed our lab and stopped collecting samples. And there have been a few other people who have contacted us about the kit and trying to build out a bank. But we were really early in that process and there just wasn't a large enough market for the samples. And, you know, people didn't want to share data. So I'm sure there are biobanks with a larger volume of samples. But what I would say is for the most part in the biobanking system, many of those come from hospitals and they're not collected in any kind of a consistent way. And so there's going to be a bias or potential contamination from a lot of the hospital pathogens that are more prevalent there. So it's still, I think, an area that needs someone to focus on it. but from a financially viable business, we actually had to stop doing it because it's really quite expensive to collect that sample, process it, do the sequencing. I think we determined it was in the neighborhood of $1,000 to $1,200 a sample for us to do that. for us to do that. Wow. But the data you now have is mind-blowing. That's my view. It is. And I'm actually working with a scientist friend of mine who does a lot of work with blood, but he has our Parkinson's samples and some blood samples, and he's continuing to do work in the genetic bioinformatic information from the sample bank that we have. And it is available. You know, we collaborate with people from time to time who want to look at some of that data and try to see what connections they can come up with through that very rich data set. I think it's about 14 terabytes of data. Wow. That's a lot of data. It's a lot of data. It's a lot of data. And we, you know, we had it stored in the cloud, which was also very expensive. So we have offloaded it and stored it in a different secure manner. a backup system that is eight terabytes. But at 14, you know, now, I mean, you could have that in a bookshelf backup system. That blows my mind as I say that. There was a time when 14 terabytes was unbelievable. You'd never had that much data. Now it's like, oh, yeah. It took us a long time to get it downloaded off the cloud. Yeah. So it was a major undertaking. Wow. And from the BioCollective, this is a chicken or the egg question. Did you start making products and that led to you doing the collective or was the collective or did they all sort of happen concurrently? The collective was first. So collecting the samples and looking at the patterns and the data was really what informed our thinking about building out. First, our concept was, OK, let's isolate microbes and build out a bank of microbes where we know we have missing microbes. And so we started to do some of that in conjunction with the sample collection, not only from human samples, but also from the environment and fermented foods and things like that. And then actually the first formula that we made, the sugar shift that I talked about that was in the clinical trial, that was a, I'll say fortuitous. I went to a Parkinson's conference and there was a researcher there or a research group from Israel called Clinic Crowd that was talking about some data in an animal model where the sugar alcohol mannitol had been shown to stop the aggregation of the proteins in the animal and then actually help clear them out of the brain. And I came back and bought this little mannitol chemistry book and started reading it. And I was like, wow, this is an amazing molecule. It's, you know, it's on the list of the World Health Organization's essential medicines. It's used in brain trauma and a lot of different, with pharmaceuticals to help improve the delivery of the pharmaceutical, all these different mechanisms. But in the one of the early chapters in the book was talking about microbes that make mannitol from primarily fructose, but also glucose. And that there's just a handful of microbes that make mannitol, but a lot of microbes use it as a carbon source to grow on. And so I sat down, I had a friend and advisor who had a background in fermentation chemistry. And I said, can we like, can we make a formula that can do this? And so we started kind of working on some gave it to my husband, John, and he had some pretty remarkable results. And we could also see because we were testing his microbiome over time and we could see that it was moving back to closer to the healthy human microbiome profile. closer to the healthy human microbiome profile. And we're like, oh, wow, you know, maybe this, there's something to this. And so that's about the time we started developing the computational models. So we put it into a computational model to see how they were all working together. And we just started giving samples out to people and, you know, healthy people, people with all kinds of different things would come back and say, wow, this has really made a difference in my digestion and my energy and my sleep. And so we said, OK, well, maybe we should bring it to market. And we initially just kind of made it as a sideline on our BioCollective website. BioCollective website. And then I sat down with Dr. Kano, who I mentioned had the microbial ecology background one day. And I said, you know, there's all these issues that people have, you know, B vitamins aren't working or they've got immune problems or, you know, they need support for the cardiovascular system or, you know, vitamin A production. And we listed out like 25 different things that people could use help restoring the function in the gut that makes these things. And we sort of mapped that out over a week, and then he went back, and with his very deep knowledge of microbes, of having been in microbial ecology for like 40 years, he came back with some of the concepts, and then we started running them through our computational model and tweaking them a little bit. So, you know, we, I mean, we have quite a few more formulas that we haven't brought to market yet. We're bringing one for basically to help you with mood improvement and support there called Perfect Peace. We're bringing that out later this year. And we have one for healthy aging microbe that we're looking at bringing out later this year as well. But that whole concept just came out of sitting in a room saying, okay, how can we solve some of these problems by putting together teams of microbes that we can put back into the gut that help each other produce what we've lost? And so that was a lot of fun. And then from that, I'd say maybe six to eight months later in talking to Raul, I said, you know, okay, we've got these formulas, but we're going to be pushing a string up a hill if we don't solve the agricultural problem. And so then we sat down and worked on our paleo power formula, which breaks down glyphosate, restores respiration to the soil, increases yield, and does a number of different things, and started testing that. And that was, that's probably been six years now. We have a lot of different studies with that as well. And so it all started from the poop. And sort of this grand concept of if we understand what's going on there, then we can start to help to reshape the terrain at the same time bringing in the team players of microbes that can also be terrain shapers. That's a baseball cap. I look forward to getting one of those in the mail from you. Okay. Terrain shapers are us. That's a great one. It's better than being poop expert. I like the idea of a baseball cap saying poop expert, but I've always been on the darker side of humor. Well, my kids didn't really like claiming the fact that their mother was the poop queen. When you're in high school and college, you don't want to tell people your mother's the poop queen. It's not so funny. What's your mother do? She's in poop. Yeah. Okay. It's not so funny. What's your mother do? She's in poop. Yeah. Okay. And in studying for the show, I read or heard, because it's all a blur by now, something about one of your formulas or you were extrapolating out the possibility of one of the formulas being looked at for benefit for people with opiate issues. And since that seems to be so pervasive. Is that correct? So we do have a formula that we worked on. I talked to somebody initially who was interested in us developing a formula for opioid abuse. And so we do have a formula we designed for that, but we have not brought it to market. And I actually need to follow up with the gentleman who asked about it and see if he's ever gotten any backing to do a study with that. But there's so much connection to the gut and the brain there's a great book called psychobiotic revolution by john cryon and did so that but the the neurochemistry of um what the brain chemistry speaking to the microbes in the gut and the gut chemistry speaking to the brain. And this, you can get into these sort of vicious loops, but that's a great book to read about some of those connections. And of course, addiction and dopamine is a big piece of that puzzle, which also connects to Parkinson's. And there are a number of microbes that actually eat up your dopamine. So the H. pylori, which is one of the best known microbes for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, actually feeds on dopamine. Feeds on dopamine. Wow. Or L-DOPA. so when you have L-DOPA, it will eat the L-DOPA. So then you get, you can get a higher up with the right kind of grid, but I mean, it's an amazing grid that you have. What the BioCollective gave you was this amazing resource of endless information, from my view, of the work you're doing. It's amazing. Well, it gave me, well, I've always had kind of a big picture view. I took a very big picture view of Parkinson's also, but the microbiome even opened up that aperture even larger. And it was really the map of how I'm able to see all these different connections to what these environmental stressors are. And one of those things, kind of back to glyphosate for a moment, is something called the shikimate pathway, which, you know, most people aren't going to know what it is, but humans don't have it. And so that's why initially they said, OK, glyphosate is not going to harm humans because they don't have a shikimate pathway. are three amino acids, the aromatic amino acids, tyrosine, tryptophan, and phenylalanine, that are very, very, very critical to our brain health, our membrane health. I mean, essentially critical to life. And we don't make them. We get them from food or we get them from microbes in our gut that are making them. And glyphosate attacks that shikimate pathway. So, you know, the food that's exposed to glyphosate is, you know, likely going to be lower in those aromatic amino acids and all the downstream metabolites and the same thing with the gut bacteria. And there are something like 8,900 downstream metabolites in that pathway that are essential to everything from thyroid health to the production of melanin and, you know, many other things. Is taking an over-the-counter probiotic going to benefit us, have some benefit on some level? It is going to have a benefit on some level. It really depends a lot on what your issues are and what product you're looking at, for example. And, you know, widely available commercially, there's maybe a dozen strains that are widely available in the market. So if you go to a store and you're looking on the shelf at what's up there, most of the products there are going to be pulling from the same three suppliers and that dozen or so strains that are out there. There are, there's more variety, you're starting to see a bit more variety in what are called the soil-based organisms. Microbiome Labs Megaspor was one of the early pioneers pioneers with that. And they've had some good success with people who have very difficult gut issues. And they also have a strain called HU58, which I think is also beneficial in SIBO situations. And then, you know, our products are designed for very specific, like the sugar metabolism, energy, all of that. We have one for sleep. So like a basic general probiotic or one strain of bacteria is probably not going to do a whole lot if you've got major disruption in your microbiome. And it really needs to be a concerted effort of understanding what you're eating and how that's shaping your terrain, what your stress level is and how that's shaping your terrain, and coupling that with the right kind of probiotic. I mean, we do, we have something called the Sugar Shift Challenge, which is essentially an educational format where every other week I do an interview or just people talking to me out of our customer base who've joined the Sugar Shift Challenge. And we're educating people on what are these other things that have an impact on our terrain and how do we balance the toxic load that we're dealing with in our environment today? And what are some factors that we haven't thought about, whether that's the blue light exposure, which is starting to kind of come up more and people starting to understand that that also affects the microbiome and you know diet certainly if you're eating a diet that is laden with a lot of these agricultural chemicals you're going to be disrupting the microbiome on a regular basis. So it's really, a probiotic's not going to solve everything for you. You've got to really understand what your diet and lifestyle is doing to shape your internal ecosystem, back to that terrain shaping. And this leads me to ask about fermented foods. Somewhere, again, I don't know the where, but somewhere you talked about or I read about beet kvass, which is a fermented product, which is, I love, but I love all things fermented. Is that something beneficial that we could be doing things fermented. Is that something beneficial that we could be doing for our terrain is to, I eat a lot of kimchi. I like spicy food. I get a kimchi that is locally produced. It's not pasteurized, so it's a whole food plant. And I throw a large spoonful on every plate I eat because it's nothing big. I believe that it's going to do nothing but beneficial things for my gut. That is a great solution. I tell people all the time, even if you don't love sauerkraut or kimchi, just have a little spoonful with every meal because they produce a lot of the enzymes that you need to break down the food, and you're going to get that working system of microbes kefir is also great and you can do a water kefir or a dairy kefir and there's a an Australian nourish me organics cribbin I hope I get his last name, Govner, I think is his last name. He has, he also has a podcast and he was having some very severe depression issues. This might have been about a decade ago. He was actually in the food industry and someone told him about kefir, or some people call it kefir, but, and he started making and drinking kefir. And within a week, his outlook and attitude had changed dramatically. And so he's a big proponent of that. And that's a very, very complex mixture of bacteria and yeast that I think is really underappreciated. But, you know, I say if you're going to make something like that, you really need to focus on the quality of your milk source. Because, of course, a lot of our cows are being fed GMO feed. And so the milk is going to be impacted by the glyphosate in the GMO feed that they have as well. Well, and I will toss in, because I can't help myself, I have a history in the food world. I was a chef for 20 years. And in all the restaurants where they know me, they're accustomed to me asking weird questions about the food. And one of them is, and this has to do with what you just said about dairy products, when you order beef in a restaurant, if you're looking for grass-fed, the other half of the question is grass-finished. Because there's a lot of marketing out there about grass-fed beef. But they say grass-fed. They don't say grass-finished. And that gives them the window, the opportunity to be giving them grains. And in the industrial world of cattle raising, that's going to be a JMO grain of some kind. So you really want to get grass-fed, grass-finished. It's going to be more expensive, but it's going to be as clean as you can possibly find. And I'm always that same way about dairy products. I only use organic dairy products and mostly from farmers that I know because they go to the farmer's markets. So I think that, you know, the idea of making kefir or kefir is a great idea. I love it. I make it myself. And I also make yogurt. So I got into the yogurt making actually from Dr. Davis and all of his super fans who started making, they started making yogurt with our sugar shift formula, but you can use any of our probiotics and make a cultured dairy out of it. Or some people do coconut milk or other nut milks. So I got into doing that myself. So I make my sugar-shipped yogurt, and then I also make Dr. Davis's root-a-rye yogurt. And that's sort of a part of my normal routine. Yes. Anything, as I say, I think variety is a good good thing that's why it's not like i only eat kimchi i eat other fermented foods but i'm always having some kind of fermented food with most most particularly dinner when i'm sitting down i'm going to sit down and have something that has just maybe a spoonful i like more than that because i like the flavor i like the acidity i like the crunch of all of those fermented foods. But just even the idea of the, back to the beet kvass, which I think is a salt, water, beet fermentation. Is that correct? Yes. So you just chop up a couple of mineral salt and about a quarter cup of whey. And then you fill it with distilled water and sit it on the counter for two or three days and it'll start to bubble and fizz. And then you can put it in the refrigerator and just have a shot of it daily. In fact, I need to make a new batch. And then I also make, one of my favorite things is something called fire cider or fire water. And that's, that's many different. So it's got garlic and ginger and horseradish and turmeric, lemon. I mean, it has all kinds of things in it i i have a recipe for it on the biotic west blog but that is great for getting your digestive juices going so if you want to take a shot of that before you eat that'll acidify your gut to help break down proteins and um help your digestion and it's great if you feel like you're coming down with a cold or something. And so that's one of my favorites as well. But I'm also, I have this book. It's about 20 years old. It's called The Life Bridge, The Way to Longevity with Probiotic Nutrients. And I talk a lot about how this book talks about how the microbes basically make inorganic matter. So those minerals, they turn them into living matter. And so it's this great partnership between the microbes and the minerals. book, it has about 10 pages of different fermented foods from around the world, names that you've probably never heard of. And it's pretty crazy. And then it talks about which microorganisms have have been found in these different fermented foods around the world. And many of them are, so one of the key players in a number of our formulas is a leuconostoc mesenteroides, which a lot of people won't be familiar with, but that is in a lot of the fermented foods around the world. And bacillus subtilis, which is also in all of our formulas, that's also in a lot of the fermented foods around the world. And Bacillus subtilis, which is also in all of our formulas, that's also in a lot of the fermented foods around the world. And, you know, people may be familiar with things like natto. That has Bacillus in it. And it also has, I think, a fungus that is beneficial. A fungus that is beneficial. So anyway, there's just, if you start to research fermented beverages and fermented foods around the world, you'll just be fascinated by all the different things that they ferment, including meat. So a lot of your meats can be fermented. Yeah, the finisher bacon to fermented fish. It's an acquired taste, even for myself. It's an acquired taste. Like, I don't know, that might be pushing the envelope too far. It's pretty close. Yeah, it's not for me. Yeah. Natto is something you can get in some Japanese restaurants, and it's fermented soybeans. And it's, again, an acquired taste, but I like the taste. I like the quality. And I happen to be fortunate enough that locally I have a company that makes organic soybean natto that comes in a little cup, and you pour the wasabi on top and some soy sauce, and it's delicious. It's really great on rice. It's also an excellent anti-inflammatory and has specific benefits to help break down the cholesterol in the arteries. But that's a different show. Yeah. Microbes are just amazing. I love them. And, you know, we've had so much pushed at us to be afraid of microbes, but really, we are more microbial than we are human. And we need to think about that and treat our microbes with loving care and make an environment that enables them to be healthy so that we can be healthy. Oh, that's great. That's a great—we're moving to the close. That's the perfect close. So excellent. We need to make friends, be allies with our microbes. They're our allies. Let's enroll them in our story. And that's what you've done, which is amazing. And you wanted to give our audience a discount coupon. Would you say that? And then I'll also put it in the show notes. Sure. So on checkout, if you put in all caps, talk to me, and you'll get 20% off your order. Great. And where can people find out more about your work? And I will put your blog in the show notes because it's a phenomenal resource of great story and great information. Sure. So you can find the probiotics on our BiotiQuest website. That's B-I-O-T-I-Q-U-E-S-T dot com. And you can also find us on Instagram. We'd love it if you follow us at biotaquest. And I have a Parkinson's blog where I write about the microbiome and Parkinson's and alternative health supportive things you can do for stress management and diet. And that is Martha's Quest without an apostrophe. So it would be M-A-R-T-H-A-S-Q-U-E-S-T dot com. And then if you just want to know about the history of poop collection, you can go to thebiocollective.com. That was great. That was very fun. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. And everybody else, have a great rest of the weekend and we'll see you next week. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. And everybody else, have a great rest of the weekend, and we'll see you next week. Bye-bye. Bye.