Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #59 Afif Ghannoum

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

Description: CEO of BIOHM Health, a microbiome company, Afif Ghannoum is a named inventor on multiple patents, and has licensed a technology to one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, that’s now a product sold in over a 100,000 stores in the US and Canada. He drops by Onnit studios to discuss the gut biome, 4 things that play a role in a healthy microbiome, ways we can improve our gut bacteria and things we can do with diet and supplementation to control our microbiome. Check out BIOHM | https://biohmhealth.com/ Connect with Afif: Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/afifghannoum/ Twitter | https://twitter.com/afifghannoum?lang=en Facebook | https://bit.ly/2zMoJjk Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk Get 10% off at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/podcast/ Connect with Onnit: Twitter | https://twitter.com/Onnit       Instagram | https://bit.ly/2NUE7DW Subscribe to Human Optimization Hour Itunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY  

What up on it fam? We've got a big announcement. Free shipping is finally here. It's taken a lot of work to get all the pieces working well enough to make this possible. But now, for a limited time only, with any order over $125, before applying discounts, you pay nothing to have it shipped to you. This excludes fitness equipment. I think it goes without saying we have not mastered shipping cannonballs with handles on them yet. But bottom

line is for a limited time only, free shipping on all orders over 125 bucks. Pretty easy to do. Really pumped that we have this now. Take advantage today. Go to onnit.com slash podcast now for 10% off all foods and supplements. Hello, hello. Welcome to the show today. We have Afif Ghanoum. Afif is a leader in microbiome research. He's a part of a company that he and his father have started. His father wrote a thesis on candida and candidiasis like 40 years ago. They have a fascinating fucking story, incredibly insightful into what the microbiome is, what the research is showing, how we can affect it positively, and just everything included. It was an awesome podcast, top to down. I know you guys are going to dig it.

We have, I think our second microbiome specialist. Is that right? We had Dr. Michael Ruscio on. He just wrote a book. He's an alternative medicine doctor, functional medicine doctor, has a wealth of knowledge, helped me dial in some different things. I've also worked with Dr. Grace Liu from the Gun Institute, who's been instrumental in teaching me different ways to pay attention to this. But I told your father, who is absolutely incredible, like he did his thesis on candida,

correct? Yeah, one of the most intelligent people in the world on fungal and the microbiome. And I'd used a number of different tests, and none of them quite compared to yours. So I wanted to get you guys on. Obviously, we will likely be doing something in partnership with you guys here at Onnit. Yeah. And there's just so much to this that we had to sit down together and really iron out some details because this is a field that's not new, but it's fairly unknown. And there's a lot of things going on, a lot of changes happening. And even we'll discuss a little bit later, but with the microbiome and kids with epilepsy,

there's a lot that can play into that through ketogenic diet and GABA potentiation and things of that nature. So much to discuss today. For sure. I'm thrilled to have you here. And it's Afif Ghanoum, is that his name? Ghanoum, yep. There we go. All right, brother. And just give us a quick background on you and your father. If you wouldn't mind, tell the story, dude. I love this story.

So it's pretty wild. So my dad is an interesting character. He's considered one of the foremost experts in medically important fungi. It's called mycology. And he's actually the scientist that named the mycobiome, the fungal community in our body. But what's wild about him is he has just an insane personal background, right? So first he, parents never learned to read or write. He grew up in Lebanon and he actually went to school in a UN refugee camp. And the first time he got supplementation was from a United Nations refugee school, giving him extra milk and fish oil. And I actually wrote for Forbes about that. And that, that really, even at that age, he realized how much this stuff is really important. And so he ended up going to England. He met my mom. They met twice and they got married a week later.

And they've been married, you know, 40 something years. And they moved to Kuwait and I was about two months old. And we lived there from 1980 to 1990. And it was an awesome place. Like Kuwait's about the size of, you know, it takes about an hour to drive across it, like very small place. And so we're actually on vacation in England and guess what happens? Saddam Hussein invades. So my dad, we,

and this is like pre-digital anything, right? So there's no birth certificates, there's no pictures, there's no nothing, right? Even my parents' savings were in gold because, you know, that's how the Middle East rolls. Like there's no such thing as stock, right? So my parents' savings were in gold because that's how the Middle East rolls. There's no such thing as stock, right? So my dad said to my mom, I got to go back, right? So he flew. He ended up getting into Baghdad. And the only way into Kuwait was on a bus full of Iraqi soldiers. So we didn't hear anything from him for months. But he literally got into war-torn Kuwait. This is like a PhD scientist, you know what I mean? Just a dude who's like, I got to do this for my family. And he ended up getting back out of Kuwait about four days before the Allied offensive in a Pepsi truck he stole. And he drove that back

across the Middle East into Lebanon. And so we did not hear anything from when he had left England till Lebanon called back. And then we're kind of stuck. And my dad said, I got a ticket to a conference in DC. And we had gone to America. He'd gone for conferences, but really had no connection to the US. So my dad went. And he had a one-way ticket to dc and he's like i'm gonna get a job so um i'm sorry is this this is too much detail this is exactly what i mean

this is fucking when you told me this originally i was blown the fuck away so please drop dollars drop details okay okay cool you know i've been to baghdad uh i first met my wife in quait in iraq oh i didn't know that fucking insane was that insane. We stayed in Saddam's palace. We were on a tour for the troops. And I've been to Kuwait probably six times on tours for the troops. Okay. Yeah. So please, indulge.

Yeah, yeah. So he gets to D.C. And he's at this conference on garlic, of all things, medical uses of garlic. And he starts saying, like, I need a job. And they tell him, look, this is kind of like a working scientist meeting. There's this conference in LA. That's where you need to be, but it's next week. And like, my dad's eating apples out of the lobby

type thing. Like he has no money. There's no sort of like, okay, I'll just buy another ticket, no credit card. So he's like feeling totally despondent and he's walking in dc and he sees this travel agent so he just rolls in and uh and it's a black guy and he says to this guy i i need you you know he had one ticket back to england right and he's like i need you to change this to la and i can't pit you and the guy's like i i can't do that right so my dad's like look you're afro-american you understand struggle i'm struggling. I need your help. I need you to do this.

And he told him the whole story over a couple hours. Just some dude rolls in on the street. And the guy took his wallet out, and he paid for my dad's ticket. Wow. My dad gets to LA, and he gets two job offers, one in UCLA and one in Detroit. Because now I'm an adult. I'm about the age when he was doing this. I can't even imagine that stuff, you know? So he's like a tiger when it comes to just will, you know what I mean?

And it's so cliche at this point, we talk about, oh yeah, I will. And just, you know, make it happen. You didn't even just do it. We're hearing about now with all this stuff. And, you know, so to me, it's just, as an adult, it's hard for me to understand. Like I grew up hearing these stories, but but as an adult with kids of my own. So yeah, we ended up going to UCLA. So from 91 to 96, we were in LA.

And then my dad got a job in beautiful, sunny Cleveland. That changed the scenery. Oh, dude, we went from like desert nomads to, you know, Cleveland. And my mom who had never, like her father was in the Normandy invasion for the Royal Navy. She had never been out of England, you know, and she's just rolling with her road dog, like Kuwait, let's do it. You know, like US, let's do it. And, you know, so that's one of the things to me that's always been critical is just you've got to do what you've got to do. And so he comes to Cleveland the entire time, this entire time he's publishing.

And so now he has – and so he's been at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine since 1996. And so now he's published over 400 papers. He's been funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1991 continuously. I think he's had like 50 million in NIH funding, all to study medically important bacteria and fungi. And his work's been cited just about 20,000 times in the medical literature. And he still can't order through a know, through a drive-through window at McDonald's. He's got like a really thick accent. He's just, it's, uh, you know, he's just an affable guy, but he, um, yeah, so that's, you know, that's a little bit of the background story.

And so I, I stayed, so what happened is how I got into, you know, actually the whole entrepreneurial game is I was a lawyer and, uh, I was doing corporate law at a big law firm in Cleveland and my dad was starting to get some really cool patents and he was super excited. He's like, they want to start a company. I'm like, oh, that's awesome. You know, what's one of the things you ask as an entrepreneur, like how much equity are you going to have? And so he's like, I'm going to have 1%. And I thought, what? It's your business. Like you're a patent. You know, and when I realized he's just a scientist and he was getting ripped off so i said okay like you know let's roll like i left big law and we

started a business and neither of us had ever developed any sort of products so that was 2010 that was 2010 and uh since then we've launched about 12 products, about 27,000 stores. We've licensed a product to a mega global pharma company that's in a product that's in about 100,000 stores. And then how that all tied back into the microbiome was my father, again, is continuing to this day to do research. He did a very big study on Crohn's patients and their microbiome. And what he discovered was that bacteria and fungi actually work together in the gut. And everybody knew, obviously, there was bacteria. Some people had been talking about fungi, but no one had put together that bacteria and fungi actually work collaboratively

to protect each other. And they were causing really sticky lining to go against our guts called biofilms. So biofilm, some people have probably heard of it that are listening, but the biofilm most people are mostly familiar with is dental plaque. So plaque in your mouth is a biofilm. And the reason you worry about plaque is because a plaque is this dense, thick matrix that really protects these pathogenic organisms underneath. So that's what causes like, you know, gum disease, that sorts of things. When you're removing the plaque,

you're really exposing these germs that are causing all the issues. The same dynamic is happening in the gut. So when you look under these like 5,000X electron microscopy photos, bacterial biofilm, you know, very thin. Fungal biofilm, very thin. The bacterial fungal biofilm is massively thick.

So what he found for Crohn's patients, there were three different organisms that were working together, a couple of bacteria and one fungal, that were causing these massive biofilms in Crohn's patients. And so they identified it as a possible exacerbation of Crohn's patients.

Because I don't know how much you know about Crohn's. Yeah, I have a friend with Crohn's and ulcerative colitis. Yeah, yeah, related. Autoimmune is through the roof right now. Oh, it's insane. So what was crazy, though, was that he published this research. Like, Scientific America picked it up.

A lot of people started writing about it. And he got thousands of people across the world with Crohn's reaching out and saying it was very scary to hear like people like my daughter is about to get her, you know, half her intestine removed. Is there anything you can do? And one woman in particular in Sweden, she had two really healthy teenage boys and within two years because of Crohn's, they were basically dying. So she said, can you test what's going on with my sons? And my dad felt kind of hopeless. He's doing this really amazing research, but kind of in an ivory tower. And your average person

dealing with this on the ground could not access that type of testing. And even if they could, they didn't know what to do with it, right? The other thing that we realized when we started looking around is everybody's talking about bacteria. And you hear about it all the time. Good bacteria, this, bacteria in your gut. But no one was talking about fungi, right? And just ironically, my dad had just written and done a big presentation at NIH talking about, look, you're funding all this bacterial research. You're ignoring fungi. And it's the other half of the equation.

And when you look, it's really wild. When you look at microscopic photos of what's going on in the gut, there are more bacteria. And people will say this, oh, but there's tons more bacteria in the gut than there are fungi. But it's like looking at the sun surrounded by planets. The fungi is about 10 times bigger than bacteria in the gut. So you're ignoring this massive thing. And guess what happens? What do you hear women say when they take antibiotics?

They have yeast infections, right? What's yeast? It's fungi. So what's happening is you're blasting all this bacteria. You're allowing the fungi to go insane, right? So what we realized was everybody's starting, this is a couple of years ago now, everybody's starting to talk about, they're definitely talking about gut health. Microbiome, they're kind of starting to talk about, but it was all about bacteria. Somebody was saying, well, how can you balance your gut? And there's all these products talking about like balance your gut and know what's going on in your gut, but it was all about bacteria. So my dad's saying, well, how can you balance your gut? And there's all these products talking about like balance your gut and know what's going on in your gut, but it's all about bacteria. You know? So we said, well, there really is an opportunity here for two things, right? One, letting people figure out what the hell is going on in their gut, right? Because, you know, there are no influenza survivors of America, you know, like societies,

like people deal with like a cold and they just take medicine, they move on. Right. But gut issues we found out are very personal to people, right. Whether it's Crohn's or IC or even frankly bloating, you know, these are issues that cause people a lot of heartache, right. But they, but it's very hard to understand what is going on in your gut. The other thing we said, like, is that everybody's talking about bacteria, but they're really not taking our total approach to gut health. So we thought, you know, what if we could do something to look at both bacteria and fungi in the gut? So I feel like, so I feel like I've been, you know, it's really important. Um, you know, my wife and I had like huge, and we'll get into my analysis since we got the report back here in a

minute, but I ran this 50K ultra and was training twice a day for it. And I used to train two or three times a day in fighting. And when I finished the ultra, obviously very taxing, I was one of the few people that didn't have a camelback backpack. So I'm fucking super dehydrated and I'm not a distance runner. I had done like maybe a handful of half marathons prior to that 50K. And I could train twice a week and I would still get sick. I'd get sick regularly. The immune system was shot and I looked at my stool and saw that I had the highest amount of candida possible. And also I had the highest amount of blastocyst hominis parasites possible. So it just exacerbated what was probably already

going on in a smaller issue, but you know, you get dehydrated, you're pulling fluids from the gut and the intestines, and that can cause leaky gut and a number of issues. And that's a problem. People, people ask us all the time. Oh, well I have Canada. Is that a problem? No. Right. You, you hit a really key thing is that the problem is you, it's like the ocean, right? Sharks, you would not want to be in a pool with a shark, but if you get rid of sharks, it's going to have a big devastating effect throughout the entire ecosystem, right? Exactly the same dynamic in your gut. You, you actually want good and bad organisms. The problem is if you have a slight elevation or you have something that's out of

control, if you do something to impact that like high stress event, or you change the way you're eating or just a tremendous amount of just general life stress, it can really end up causing big problems, right? I bet my, I just got back from Burning Man a couple of days ago and I'm willing to bet my microbiome is fucked right now. I'm sure. Lack of sleep, all the, all the things, I'll just leave it at that. Right. Yeah. You know, and I was going to test my telomeres prior to, prior to going there since I've done some intravenous stem cells and NAD treatments and things of that nature. But I think I got to hold off for a couple of months, get my rest back, get restored. Well, the good thing about your microbiome, especially your fungal community in your gut,

it will turn around in 24 hours. Wow. Yeah, that's a really interesting thing about fungi is it is super dynamic and will change very quickly if you optimize it. The reverse, if you do something to impact it, it can turn around pretty quickly. All right, you're touching on some things

that I really want to dive into. Let's break down my results and then let's talk about how we optimize things, what's typically found in your research among other people, and what are the best practices? What leads us down the rabbit hole in the wrong direction and what digs us out of that hole? For sure. So let's take a step back, right? When people talk about not only gut health, but general health, there's some general rules of thumb that why you're so interesting is you literally hit what if you took out a sketch pad and you said, what's the ideal probably way to live your life, right? You exercise obviously a lot. You at least, I don't know if you do practice meditation or mindfulness but you're at least aware of it right take consistently yeah yeah yeah you you obviously eat well and and i know you do keto sometimes and and other times you're at least keeping you know you're not at at carl's jr right like you're you're doing what you the average american would say you should really be doing, but yet you have some gut issues, right? That's the reason. The reason is your gut is affected. And when I say gut, like your

microbiome, it's multi is what we call multifactorial, right? So people don't realize that. And this is, you know, it's why we have weight loss pills, right? Like a lot of times people expect a one size fits all solution. It just doesn't work that way, right? So really your gut's dynamic. There's four big things that will affect it. One, your genetics, right? That's why some people who have perfect gut health, but I'm sorry, perfect sort of gut practices, but they're susceptible because they have Crohn's,

it doesn't matter. Like they have a genetic predisposition, like a lot of other health issues, right? But then your diet is a massive other factor. The other thing is your lifestyle, sleep, stress, massive impact on the microbiome. Now, this is where it gets interesting because a lot of these things we're still learning, but we do know that there's a correlation, right? So what I mean about that is anybody who tells you black and white, this is causing that we don't we don't

know that yeah right but what we do know is that when you have correlated high stress you have an usually an imbalance on the microbiome what is interesting we're starting to see that it could be that that dysbiosis in your gut imbalance is actually causing stress yeah the old chicken or the egg right what's coming so this is where we're probably, over the next decade, is going to be fascinating because what's becoming clear, and we talked about it just before we went live, right? Epilepsy, Crohn's, you know, even gut-brain axis. There's so many. It's almost easier to find things that are not impacted by the gut microbiome.

It's just connected to so many different things. But we are still figuring out what exactly. So anybody who says like, oh, this strain is tied to that condition, that's out there, right? That's not real, right? But what we do know is the more diverse your gut is, way more tied to better health, right? So as a general rule, that's what you need to be doing. So with that kind of background, you specifically, right? What we saw work and we're going to look at my notes here as we're talking about this is overall, you're doing pretty good, right? So there are a few things that are out of balance, but like, let's talk about bacteroides and firmicutes, right? They're normal. Those are two of the big bacterial phyla. So the way to think of when you're looking at, you know,

your gut, there's phyla, which is kind of the families of bacteria, families of fungi, right? Then there's actually the strain level. So when we're looking at your results, we're trying to get a general idea, like how are you doing overall compared to normal, right? So what's normal? Now, this is another debate, right? Normal is going to be, now we look at it based off thousands and thousands of samples that we've looked at in our testing. So what we'll find is that people fall into, about 98% of people will fall into a number of different gut profiles, right? So as much as we think every person's individualized, it's like everything, right? Chances are you're falling

into a different profile. What we find from those profiles is that, um, you know, they're tied to overall things like high inflammation category or high stress, or you're like a generally low, uh, fiber type diet. So, so it's funny, like people do more than you realize fall into these interesting dynamics. And I'll give you a specific when it comes to people who are high exercisers, right? There was maybe six months ago, we started seeing a lot of women that you would look at them, they look like a Lululemon model, right? Like they take care of themselves, they eat well, all these things, but they had this very high count of this very aggressive type of fungi called zygomycota, right?

So typically when my dad was seeing this, he's like, oh, it's kind of interesting. When we first started seeing it, he's like, it might be undiagnosed autoimmune disorder, like even could be cancer or something like that. But there were so many of them, we thought, you know, that's odd. It would be unusual, right? Well, when we peeled back and we looked at their diet, what were they doing? They're cutting out carbohydrates. They're cutting out dairy, right? That can be a problem because those are very strong prebiotic foods, probiotic foods, right? So one of the things that we're seeing is extremes in diets, right? So like even ketogenesis would be considered like an extreme diet, right? But people will cut out all sorts of glutens. They will completely try and cut out carbohydrates. You know, we hear all the time, oh, I don't eat dairy, right? What we're finding is that people are kind of self-sabotaging

themselves because unless you have an actual diagnosed or very high susceptibility, like you've always had issues with dairy, you really shouldn't be cutting out those things unless you really have to. Why? Because it's going to have an impact on something else. Now, again, if you're truly lactose intolerant, well, yeah, you may have some GI issues with that. And there's ways around that stuff. I don't know if you're familiar with Dr. Stephen Gundry's book, The Plant Paradox. He talked about the difference between Holstein cows producing A1 casein and these Southern European cows, Brown Herefords, things like that, that will produce the A2 protein.

It's a little easier to break down on the body. We've switched to like this moon cheese from Whole Foods that's made with goat's milk, but it's not like a cream cheese. It's more solid. And everyone in our family loves that. No snottiness, no phlegmy, you know, just feels good in the body. It's like everything. I had a woman one time who just screamed at me like,

you're telling people eat dairy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she was vegan. And I said, listen, you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. If you look at the amount of- You just told the whole story though. You said she was vegan. She's dogmatic about her approach, right? Right, right, right. Vegan is a form of fasting. Keto is a form of fasting. They're all forms of cutting something out that we've evolved to eat. Right, right. So what I was trying to make the point to her, but she's screaming and pointing a camera in my face as she was saying this was your average american probably eats you know i'm making this up but like 10 times the amount of dairy they should eat right yeah that's

not great you should not do that right and it's not good i mean ideally we'd have raw grass-fed no no 100 in jersey cow it's the amount of anything like the reality is you can eat just about anything. You know, I'm sure some people take issue with that, but you know, it's like the old trite thing. No one wants to hear it. Just be reasonable, right? Like, but again, a lot of times people feel like

if I'm not doing it, if I'm not being extreme, right? Like I'm not doing, you know, it's not just I need to be doing intermittent fasting. I need to be doing 12 hours a day, right? Yeah, yeah. Or I don't eat gluten and then I'll have an entire pizza or a giant plate of pasta. Right, on a cheat day, right?

Where it's just like, no, I'm going banana. And like, well, no, that's not what people mean when they're saying, you know. So a lot of these things are kind of self-inflicted and easily remedied is the good thing, right? But the thing is, you need to kind of know that's an issue to even look for, right? Because the, take Zygomycota, right? The analogy I always use is if I have thing, right? But the thing is, you need to kind of know that's an issue to even look for, right? Because take zygomycota, right?

The analogy I always use is, if I have glasses, right? If I went to a doctor and said, you know, something's going on with my eye, they would not look for glaucoma. I'm too young. I don't fit the profile. Now, it doesn't mean I couldn't have glaucoma, right? It's just highly unlikely.

Zygomycota is kind of like that, right? If you just went and you were complaining of you know gi issues that's like issue 970 they would check for right but if you're getting a chance to actually look okay well then you can see oh unexpected let's see what we're doing to kind of impact these things right so that's the other thing with the microbiome is a lot of people want to treat it like a panacea that if i know exactly what's going on, my microbiome, it will solve everything. And this is not real.

You know what I mean? So it's like, it's like a cholesterol test, right? If you get a cholesterol test and it says you're a 200 and you go to your doctor and you say, okay, great.

What do I do? He's going to say, I have no idea. Do you eat pizza every day? Do you have family history? But it's a, it's a really useful tool as a starting point, right? Because then you can make some decisions based off that information. Microbiome is the

exact same thing, right? So in isolation, just looking at your results, it's almost meaningless, right? Even comparing to normal, kind of meaningless. Because again, you have, like, if I didn't know what you look like and I didn't know, it's okay. Well, this dude probably has to exercise and do, you know, that would be useless information for you. Right. Yeah. But having the context of your actual background, well, then you can start making some decisions. Right. But you have this tool that previously has been very hard to get that sort of information.

Right. Does that make sense? Yeah. That makes complete sense. Yeah. So it's funny with, so going back to your? Yeah, that makes complete sense. Yeah. So it's funny with, so going back to your, uh, your results in particular, a couple of things are interesting, right? So, um, first on the fungi side, everything's pretty normal. Your saccharomyces

a little low, that's kind of considered like the King of the, you know, good fungi. So you kind of want to see that a little more, but that's easy to do. You can get that, you know, and, and, uh, there's a number of supplements that you can do that and you can increase it just by increasing your overall diversity that will start to level up your uh canada is actually normal it's what you said before uh it's through the roof yeah so did you do something specific to adjust that yeah i had i had done um i had worked with a product called Scram. I think it's by Health Forest Naturals. It uses forms of garlic, wormwood, clover.

But you didn't adjust your diet? What's that? No, I mean, I've been in ketosis, in and out of ketosis here and there too, which starves them. Yeah, yeah. I think that certainly helped. But taking the supplements that would actually kill them off and and a lot of digestive enzymes to break open that protective yeah shield they put up you know when they go into hibernation right people think like oh you know i

feel better after two weeks and i'm all good and then fucking these guys there's guys that are just hanging around waiting to come out they're waiting for carbohydrates they're waiting for the right setting and then bang that is a critical thing you just brought up. A lot of people say this to us. Okay, so I just take a probiotic and then that's it. It's like, no, no, no, no. Again, it's like your teeth. I really like the analogy of oral care to the stomach.

Why? For two reasons. One, your mouth is completely dynamic. You have saliva. You're eating. There's a lot going on. It's not like skin, right? Where, yeah, you can keep a wound pretty clean or it can be non-impacted. There's a lot going on in your

mouth. Same with your gut. There's constantly stuff passing through it. It's subject to stress. So your microbiome is constantly getting challenged, right? So the way I like the analogy with the mouth is no one brushes their teeth and you're like, dude, your teeth are, you know, kind of rocking. What's going on? You're like, oh no, I brushed my teeth last month, right? Like I don't have serious oral. No, you brush them every day, twice a day, right? Why? Because we've just learned that it's a routine. I need to keep doing this, right? Now, some people in a week of not brushing will have all sorts of serious issues. Other people will just have like fuzzy, you know, yellow teeth, right? Same with your gut. You need to keep maintaining it, right? So what does that mean?

Through your diet, through your lifestyle, through supplementation for some people, some people not, right? But it's keeping track and keeping, you know, the gut train headed towards a North Star, right? If you do constant little optimizations, it's a lot easier than waiting until you have like a serious issue. Because a lot of times you won't have a serious issue until you come under a high stress situation or you really, you know, like you're saying you're at Burning Man, you just blow it out for a week. And then, you know, for weeks after you're just not yourself, right? Your gut's just a mess, right right so if you're constantly doing kind of maintenance and understanding what you need to be concentrating on it's going to make your life a lot easier right

so one of the things i noticed in your results is that um you seem and we can get into the details here yeah totally okay okay i'm just making sure yeah i'm about to do blood work and go into a podcast on that so i don't mind okay mind a little deeper dive into the insides. Like we're taking the magic school bus ride into my intestines right now. And we're going to go up to the anus. What does your proof say about you? Exactly. Exactly.

And so actually, do you think it's worth me explaining like how we even got the sample and all that stuff? Fuck yeah. Yeah. Okay. And I got to tell you real quick, just to jump in from comparing it to a comprehensive stool analysis and a lot of the other tests that have taken easiest fucking test i've ever taken easiest test most convenient very very easy to get the sample get it in there because it's kind of gross when you got to spoon

in your own feces into like four different fucking vials that are pretty wide and open with a giant spork right and just to be clear we don't have sporks for a giant anything, right? So look, you just hit on a very critical paradigm when you're doing consumer health, which is you can have the best product in the world, but if it's either terrible to use or hard to use, people won't do it. It doesn't matter how good, you know, we used to work in, um, do a lot of other products in germ remediation, like, you know, the hand sanitizer world. And what we found was, you know, when we were looking at airborne germs, that problem's already solved. You know, it is where a mask, guess what? People don't want to wear a mask, right? Like in Japan, they will us, you know, you're like, look at that geek with a mask, right? Like no one will do it. Right.

So the problem is that consumer paradigm, it's not's not fixed right so when it comes to gut testing it's the same thing there's two problems with gut testing one as much as people don't want to do it the most accurate way to understand what's going on your gut it's through a fecal sample right you're literally your poo so we knew if people were going to do this we had to make that as painless and as private and as easy as possible right Right. So how do we do that? We send, and this is what we do with you, right? We sent you a kit and then really four or five step instruction, right? Because people do not want to, you know, like I took one of these ancestry tests. I own a genetic sequencing company and it was hard for me to do it right like it was just a lot of moving

parts right so we said look you need to have four or five steps that's second is we just need a little bit right so just kind of a coloring of the swab then you send that back to the lab and that's actually what we're doing we extract the dna from that sample and then we actually run it through what's called 16s for bacterial sequencing and then its for fungal sequencing right so a lot of people will look at the bacterial like there's a lot of people doing that but it's really that like i went back to before you it's like saying hey i checked your front two tires you're good to go you're like what about the back two you're like no no we're a front two tire store we just did you know if that's extra and those guys are not you know it's useless right

so we don't have back tire guys actually in house We don't have Bactire guys actually in-house. Right, we don't have that in-house, but like we know someone, right? So that's the way we look at it, right? You really want a whole picture of what's going on because we know the science shows black and white that these things interact. So how can you look at just bacteria and not look at fungi or, you know, or vice versa. Right. So, um, so then you, you know, so you send your, uh, sample back and then we sequence it. And then the other part is it's gotta be easy to understand, right? Because if you do an ancestry test and you're like, I'm 80% Irish. Okay. Awesome. That's kind of the utility of that test, right? Like, okay, neat. I assumed I wasn't from Kenya, right? But that's kind of cool to

know that, right? If I tell you, you have high back toroides, that doesn't mean anything to 95% of people. And out of context, it doesn't mean anything to basically everyone, right? What you're really asking is what's going on with my gut, right? How can I optimize my nutrition? How can I optimize my lifestyle? Do i even have a gut issue because we see that we actually have a candida test our number one complaint with that test is what do you mean i don't have candida like that's you don't have candida no no i know i have candida you know i mean like in people it's it's people self-diagnosing yeah yeah they're just and they're angry everything we're angry and we're like i have nine out of ten of these symptoms i know You know what I mean? Like, people, it's- People self-diagnosing on Google fucking looking through everything.

Yeah, yeah, they're just, and they're angry. They were angry, and we're like, listen- I have nine out of 10 of these symptoms. I know, and I'm, it's, you know, for us, we don't want people to be not happy. But we're like, I'm not going to tell you you have it when you don't. And, you know, for 60% of people, they won't have it, right? So that's, so people need to be able to easily understand what is going on from the results, right? So that took a long time.

We actually talked about it, right? So like iteration one of our tests, we show you what's going on in your gut and we show normal and people would say, well, what do I do with this, right? So we actually have nutritionists that you can talk to. Our report actually walks you through what we call wellness recommendations and we make it very black and white. Look, here are your results. If you really want to understand that, great. But we think it's more, and what we've seen is people look at it like they look at a credit report,

right? Just tell me how I'm generally doing. Is it red, yellow, or green, right? Like, let me know, oh, okay, I'm in good shape. Awesome. Maybe I'll look at the results, but I'm okay, right? Vast majority of people, that's what they kind of want to know. Now, if you're yellow or red, okay, now you understand like, what can I do to optimize my gut, right? Vast majority of people, that's what they kind of want to know. Now, if you're yellow or red, okay, now you understand, like, what can I do to optimize my gut, right? So then we'll show you actually what's going on at the strain level. Just like your credit report, we'll show you, like, that one time in 2008, you didn't pay a gym bill and it dinged you. Okay, that detail is there if you really want it. But most people just kind of want to know what's going on in their gut. But then we actually give them recommendations on three fronts.

One, dietary. Like, what do you need to be doing, right? So you will fill out a questionnaire and you tell us, you know, all the demographics and all the things that are going to be helpful for us to help. Because again, if we don't know about you, we can't give you recommendations. Anybody who tells you the results by themselves will tell you that. It's not accurate. It's not real, okay? So once we have a chance to see that, we can tell you, you know, very actionable things like, look, you're not eating enough vegetables, which we saw with you. Right. So one of the things we also noticed is, and you will tell us like your symptoms is that it seems like you experienced bloating, right? Do you notice that happening when you eat any specific type of food? If I go hard, hard to the paint with cruciferous. Okay. And I've noticed

that more recently, I used to eat a lot of sauerkraut and did fine with it. Now, every time I eat sauerkraut, I get the runs. So I've avoided it like the plague and get away with some really high end pickles. But I was hoping you would say that because you know what you're doing? You're, you're making it worse, right? So what's happening is your body is telling you, listen, I need this. We're going to use the hell out of this and they're going to ferment it and you're, and you're getting gas, you're bloating. Right. And the problem is you probably don't have enough of the digestive enzymes you need to really process that because you've been avoiding it. Right. So what you probably have to do is work through that and really but you're going you know like you said

you're going harder than that like you're going straight to like fermented foods just start with like cooked vegetables right something like really easy on your system and build up to it and what you need to get to is probably like nine cups of vegetables a day okay but don't go again this is like classic we'll see where it's like twice a week i make a marxist and giant big ass salad you know and that's like it'll be mixed greens or and it's all like a week i make a marxist and giant big ass salad you know and that's like it'll be mixed greens or and it's all like baby spinach kale arugula different things like that we'll usually cut up uh broccoli and uh different mushrooms shiitake you know you know saute those in a pan season them then toss that into the salad so how will you feel

after that i feel good i feel good with that I can do well with broccoli. Um, yeah, I do really well with broccoli and most cruciferous, even cooked cabbage. I'll get a little gassy, but it doesn't give me the runs the way that the, uh, sauerkraut does. Yeah. So your system is probably like you're, you're going to like the high horsepower stuff and it's, it's bothering your stomach, right? Because you're just not consistently. And I saw you pound two acai bowls. Like the, you know, you were going to. I did the Greek yogurt bowls today. I'm trying to, I know I need to rebuild some shit after that.

Yeah. Yeah. You're just starting. Right. Literally rebuild some shit after that week in Burning Man. But like, instead of like two giant goes at it a week, you should really kind of be going slower daily. Every day. Yeah. And then then over time just build back up but what you're doing is you're like shocking your

system and your system like oh my god this is great let's let's digest the hell out of this and it's overwhelming your system you're seeing bloating and then you're feeling bloated you're like i'm gonna avoid that because i make i don't feel good after right so it's a cycle right um so really what you need to be doing is allowing your system to really build back up the digestive enzymes that – you know, firmicutes, bacteroides will start to really help. Because you really – what you want to be producing are short chain fatty acid producers. Because then that's helping you break down. It's going to help you control inflammation. You know, exactly. Right. So one of the things you have elevated levels of proteobacteria

often tied to inflammation, at least through your gut, but probably throughout your system. Now, on top of all that, you exercise very vigorously, which is just, again, you know, this obviously that that's going to put a lot of inflammation on your system additionally. So that, you know, we actually see that quite a bit. We have a lot of people that are bodybuilders have terrible GI issues. Why? Because their system's constantly under attack. They're highly regimented with their diets. They're exercising like crazy. They think they're actually doing something good for their body, but it can be very destructive, right? So in those cases, we'll have them like cycle on and off. And that, you know know it can get tricky with competitions and all those things but it's more about knowing what is going on and then you can figure out a protocol to work around it but the key is you know what's going on

now for some people genetically they're in great shape doesn't bother them at all like i'm like that right i the last time and actually the only time i've worked out the on it gyms i laid on the ground for about 40 minutes after aubrey put me through a workout and he and my dad my dad's 68th birthday he and aubrey were just rocking they're going having smoothies i'm laid out on the ground and my only rule was like they will totally get it you're the chunky guy who's out of shape no one will forgive you if you poop your pants in the on a gym so, but after that, I dusted myself off and I, you know, we had some big seafood meal after. It didn't bother me at all.

Right. So like for me, I just have a steel trap for a stomach. Right. Okay. Genetically, I'm in great shape. Right. So, but the key is I know what's going on in my gut and then I can do something and same with you.

Right. So like even that little thing, like you would have probably forever, you know, just thought, Oh, I don't know if I'm allergic, something's going on, but sauerkraut doesn't sit well. Yeah. I've even heard that, that one of the things, one of the reasons when, and if you have like some intolerances to gluten and you cut it out completely and add it back in, one of the reasons you're so far worse off when you add it back in is that the bacteria that breaks that down, I think it's bifido, is damn near gone. And I have very low levels of bifido for some time now

in all my testing. But I almost like, oh, I like gluten, but I don't necessarily need to have it if there's any other way to build bifido that'd be better. That's the key, right? So you can do it through a probiotic. The other thing too, which are frankly way under-emphasized are prebiotics, which is essentially a fancy name for dietary fiber. That's really important because it does two things. One, it's like fuel for the probiotic. The simplest way to think about it is it's food for the probiotic, right?

The other is actually lowers a pH level in your gut, which is really good for good bacteria to grow and really bad for the bad, bad guys. Right. So you can actually attack it a couple of different ways. Right. Um, but yeah, no, the key is if you stop needing to utilize it, those will not grow. Right. Yeah. As you're, as you're saying, what are, what are some of the things, uh, you guys like with prebiotic fiber and have you taken a look at some resistant starches and how those impact the body? You know, for us, we are way more heavy in the probiotic game with prebiotics. We stick to kind of the basics, as long as you're taking a basic prebiotic.

Again, and it's part of the world we're in with wellness, is that everybody's trying to go after some neat angle on these things. But the key is for 95% of people, just take a basic prebiotic. We will get people. The analogy I like to use is everybody has been stuck in traffic between behind that dude on a carbon fiber bike wearing a state-of-the-art helmet lycra suit and that dude is a hundred pounds overweight and it's like before you're buying the carbon fiber bike and wearing the lycra suit you need to lose some weight that will make you way more aerodynamic, right?

We will get people testing their gut, and they will call, you know, I've been doing this, I'm using these products, and blah, blah, blah, and they're even trying to use our products. And then we're like, dude, you're going to McDonald's, you're putting in your questionnaire, you're going to McDonald's twice a week. Like, you don't even need this test. Stop eating McDonald's.

Stop doing that. Now listen, I know my way around McDonald's drive-thru, like shout out, it's nothing about McDonald's. Stop doing that. You know, now listen, I know my way around McDonald's drive-thru, like shout out. It's, it's nothing about McDonald's, but it's more like there, everybody, it's, you know, it's the same old game, right? Everybody wants a magic bowl, right? It's not about like, you know, just, just do the basics, hit singles and doubles with this stuff. And frankly, 95% of people will be fine. You're a little different because you are, you know, really kind of living an optimized lifestyle. And, you know, I may say that you actually are right. So there, now you're talking about like percent change here, percent change, they are going to make a big difference for you. The vast majority of people like making some basic

changes will make a massive difference. Yeah. Yeah. That makes perfect sense. Let's see. We got, we got a little bit of time left. I wanted to ask you about this study that, that came out recently. Obviously this podcast is going to air, um, a couple of months from now, but, uh, there was a wonderful study on ketosis and they've been studying the ketogenic diet with children with epilepsy since the 1920s. Uh, we recently had Dominic D'Agostino on and he works with the Charlie Foundation, which was created, I think, at Johns Hopkins, you know, just to research this stuff, to see like what do ketones do? What do different things do to help with that? But they know there is a link between the microbiome and the brain. And a lot

of our neurotransmitters, the vast majority are produced by our microbiome, right? And there's very specific ones. There's very specific changes that happen in a ketogenic diet where the body will produce more GABA than glutamate. And that shifts that pathway from excitatory to more rest and digest and relax, less anxiety, and just really tunes people in. I've never felt better than when I'm on a ketogenic diet and I've been in it for a couple months, consistent. Obviously, that can change some other things around with the microbiome as you're not eating many carbohydrates and hopefully still getting enough fiber. Right. That's a key. And for you, that was another

point. When you're cycling in and off of keto, especially when you're in, you still have to keep up the veggie game, right? So obviously, you're going to be trying of keto, especially when you're in, you still have to keep up the veggie game. Right. So obviously you're going to be trying to cut it down, but that's going to be important for you. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about that. We read this thing and I think it's a company that's actually licensed it from UCLA. Okay.

And they're going to look at specific bacteria. Right. That help aid in GABA production. Right. And potentially what they're claiming is that it'll fix epilepsy in a lot of people. Yeah. So all these trials are going to be really interesting, right? So we're actually going to be doing a trial in autism.

Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. We actually just received our IRB approval. And we have actually a – so this is actually – do you mind if I – No, please do. Because this is actually really cool. This is one of the awesome things about what we're doing. Right. So we started seeing this probably like six, seven months ago,

started noting this thing. Wow. A lot of people are taking this test for their children who have autism. And when we started looking at results, we said, you know, there's quite a bit of interesting things going on in these children's guts. Right. So we did a survey of our customers. We reached out and said, look, we're thinking about doing a clinical trial here. Are you interested in it? Totally, right?

And there's, when you look and you're seeing this in a lot of different health areas, autism, big focus on the microbiome. But what do we see? There are trials that are like 50 people, 35 people. They're not big trials, right? So one of the things that's really exciting is with our platform, we're able to get, I think our waiting list to do the autism trial is in, you know, 1700 person waiting list, right? So we literally got our IRB approval at Case Western School of Medicine. So we're going to be rolling

out that test and it's going to be the same with a test looking at the epilepsy, right? These are interesting trials, right? Because again, and I was saying this before we went on air, it's not as simple as, okay, it's likely this one strain is causing the issue. Let's adjust that and everything will be fine. There's so, it's multifactor, so many different issues, right? So how these trials have been done, and my dad did this with Crohn's patients, is what you do is you take the person suffering, let's do autism, right? You have someone with autism. You'll take a family member that doesn't have autism. Why? Because not

only is a genetic connection there, but there's a dietary connection. They're living in the same household. They're doing a lot of the same things. They're probably going to bed around the same time. They're eating similar foods, right? Especially if it's children, right? The parents are controlling what they're eating. And then they'll test a non-family member, non-autism. Why? Because you want to start getting a baseline of what does a similar person without this condition, what does their microbiome look like? So then you can start piecing together, what are the differences? What are the similarities?

And then you're probably 10 years away from truly understanding exactly what's going on. But it's these critical insights are laying the foundation for therapeutics a decade from now. Right now, our view on medication is, let's just blast your system, and hopefully that will take care of it, right?

And again, that's a little bit of an overgeneralization, but now we're talking again very targeted therapeutics, right? So I think what's going to end up happening is these are going to be combination approaches to dealing with conditions, right? So ketogenesis, not ketogenesis, epilepsy, right? I am not of the opinion that it's going to

be if you adjust the microbiome you're going to be all set but controlling the microbiome could be a massive factor in at least controlling the condition right same with crones right but you're never gonna i don't think you're gonna curehn's or a condition by controlling the microbiome, but you may, you know, for their life, not lifestyle, what it's called, kind of quality of life. Yeah, you could mitigate a lot of that. A tremendous amount of it, right? Because again, you really, Crohn's is an issue when you're dealing with flare-up, and I'm way oversimplifying it, but like I've seen what people deal with

when it's flare-up, it's devastating, right? So I think it's going to be the same with epilepsy trial. I think the thing that's going to be interesting is you can't, these are going to have to be longitudinal studies. And I think they have to be with massive numbers, right? Because there's going to be so many different factors. We're still seeing like geographically, like there are geographic areas where the type of water you're drinking can impact the microbiome of that area. So how can you compare those people versus someone across the country with the same condition?

There's going to be a lot of these factors that have to be controlled for us. It's going to be fascinating, but I think it's critical that they're starting to do these studies. Hell yeah, brother. Yeah. You knocked it out of the fucking park.

Thanks, dude. Where can people find you and your products? Obviously we're going to talk, uh, you know, in the intro and the outro, I'm going to talk a bit about, uh,

where they can find it through on it.com. Yeah. But, um, where can people look you up personally and where can people look into your father's work and everything you guys have going on? Yeah. So if you want to be one of my hundreds of followers,

just look at me at a thief, Ghanoum, a F I F G H a N N O-M. And look, I can't respond to all three people who comment, but I will try. Biome is our company, B-I-O-H-M-Health.com. And we have an awesome blog. We're putting all sorts of content. My dad, we feature a lot. He actually has a book coming out next year called The Mycobiome Diet. Awesome. Yeah Which is about really how, if you control the fungi, you can make a big impact in your diet. So yeah, check us out. Awesome brother. It's been great having you on. Thanks for having me. We're running back. Awesome. Thank you guys for listening to the show. If you enjoyed it,

go ahead and leave us a five-star review. It lets everyone else know about our show. So it's important to grow the show and I would appreciate it if you told your friends, your mom, and everybody else you know to listen. Thanks for listening. And also, onnit.com slash podcast, 10% off supplements and food products.