Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2492: How Probiotics Affect Fat Loss, Muscle Building & Cognition with Dr. Zain Kassam

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

How Probiotics Affect Fat Loss, Muscle Building & Cognition with Dr. Zain Kassam Dr. Kassam’s background in the space. (1:42) How important is our relationship with our microbiome? (7:01) The connection between our microbiome and the explosion of autoimmune disorders. (8:47) Are these problems inherited? (11:56) Two pathways to consider why obese mice get skinny when getting the right microbes. (13:02) How are they using AI? (16:31) Why does the gut influence our brain? (18:40) Can our microbiome influence our cravings? (22:11) Our microbiome’s connection to our muscle mass. (23:22) How can we use this science in the future? (26:25) The 4 D’s of picking a probiotic. (32:05) The transient effect of taking a daily probiotic. (34:41) How can we restore a ‘leaky gut’? (36:30) Not all probiotics are created equal. (38:42) Science is not complete until it’s communicated. (40:00) How do you know you’re getting live bacteria? (43:26) How does he maintain good microbiome health? (45:13) Understanding antibiotics. (48:49) Are probiotics beneficial to take while on antibiotics? (50:11) Probiotics effect on performance. (54:48) Galaxy class solution. (56:31) His take on GLP-1s. (58:54) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Seed for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Promo code 25MINDPUMP at checkout for 25% off your first month’s supply of Seed’s DS-01® Daily Synbiotic** Limited Launch Promotion: MAPS 15 Performance public launch price: $87! ** Code 15PLAUNCH for $20 OFF. Free Bonuses: 30-Day Landmine Workout + 7-Day Overtraining Rescue Guide. ** December Promotion: MAPS Aesthetic | MAPS Symmetry 50% off! ** Code DECEMBER50 at checkout ** Antibiotic exposure and ‘response failure’ for subsequent respiratory tract infections: an observational cohort study of UK preschool children in primary care Altering mix of gut microbes prevents obesity, but diet remains key factor Microbial-based treatment reverses autism spectrum social deficits in mouse models Muscle strength is increased in mice that are colonized with microbiota from high-functioning older adults Impact of probiotics on muscle mass, muscle strength and lean mass: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials VCU receives $11.5 Million NIH grant to study the vaginal microbiome and its relevance to disease, genetics and the environment Post-Antibiotic Gut Mucosal Microbiome Reconstitution Is Impaired by Probiotics and Improved by Autologous FMT Seed-Science Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources  

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Ontario. We're doing business differently here in Manitoba at the Stu Clark Graduate School. It's an energy, a feeling, a buzz. You feel it in our professional services, on our work placements, in the connections you make with business leaders. It's unique, something you won't find anywhere else. This is the graduate experience at the Asper School of Business,

where you can master your business career. If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, we talk about probiotics and how they actually can affect fat loss

and muscle building and cognitive performance. Today's episode, we have Dr. Zain Kassam on the podcast. He's the chief medical officer over at Seed. It's actually the world's best probiotic company. Nonetheless, he's an expert researcher and we talk to him all about probiotics, what they do for your body, and why some probiotics work so well while others maybe not so much. Now this episode is brought to you by Seed. You can get them at seed.com forward slash mind pump. Use the code 25 mind pump and get 25% off. Also we have a

brand new program launch. Maps 15 Performance. You could train 15 minutes a day, build muscle, burn body fat, improve athletic performance. Because it's a brand new program, you can get $20 off plus an ebook for free and another program for free. So the program that we include for free is a 30-day landmine training program. You get that included for free. Plus we have a seven-day overtraining rescue guide. So if you feel overtrained, if you feel burnt out, follow the guide for seven days, get back on track. All that is included for free and again it's also $20 off. If you're interested go to 15performance.com and then use the

code 15PLaunch for the discount plus the free ebook and the free program. All right here comes the show. Zane welcome to the show. Thank you delighted to be here. Let's talk a little bit about your background before we get into the fascinating science of microbiome and probiotics and how they affect us but what is your background? Sure today I'm the chief medical officer of Seed Health, but the way that I met the microbiome is a kind of long and fortuitous route,

kind of a five chapter story. I actually started with a patient, because I'm a gastroenterologist by training. And I met a patient, she was 93, she was British, she looked like the Queen of England, and I saw her at two in the morning in the emergency department in Canada. She had a terrible case of infection

called Clostridium difficile. She was tied to the toilet. So awful. Exactly. Exactly. She'd failed the most potent antibiotics and she was so frustrated. She wanted her colon removed. And I saw her and we ended up something, did something very experimental at that time, well over a decade ago called the fecal transplant where we took the healthy stool that was filtered and put it inside her and two days later she was gardening. It was like incredible. It was the closest thing to a miracle I'd seen in medicine. So I asked my mentors, I'm like, why isn't everyone doing this? Like, this is incredible. And he's like, go look at the literature, very academic

answer. And we did a huge kind of analysis to realize that it worked really well. It was very safe, but no one had done the clinical trials that change hearts and minds of doctors, patients and key stakeholders. We put a man on the moon, we have supercomputers in their pockets, but 50 years had gone by and no one really touched the technology. And so I said, that's what I want to do. Kind of took me down to do, to Harvard to do my clinical trials training with the plan to come back and do all those clinical trials that change hearts and minds. And then I got distracted. A group at MIT cited my work after my clinical trial training.

And I ended up doing a postdoc in machine learning and artificial intelligence, which is unusual at the time for a physician to do. But at MIT, it's a kind of very interesting place. It's not about the papers that you publish, it's about the companies that you start. And so I was coding side by side with a colleague of mine, Mark, who's a very talented PhD student, he said, Zane, remember that patient you had in Canada? I'm like, yeah. He's like, it's really hard for you to find a stool donor. I said, yeah. He's like, you know, heaven forbid she got in a car accident, you wouldn't be asking friends and family to donate blood. Why is it like that for stool? Let's not start the Red Cross, let's start the Brown Cross effectively.

So a company called OpenBiome, which ended up being a fecal transplant center. I was a co-founder and chief medical officer, and we treated about 75,000 patients across 1,300 hospitals in all 50 states in about two and a half years. So very, very quickly published a lot of papers on the technology outside of C. diff. But along the way, I quickly realized that my dad was like, oh, you did all this machine

learning stuff. Like, why are we giving the entire community? Can you get to the precision microbiome? And so that's what we ended up doing. We spent another company, co-founder, chief medical officer of a company called Finch Therapeutics for precision microbiome therapies. And we finished phase two trials in C. diff, had a partnership program for inflammatory bowel disease.

And we took that company public on the NASDAQ. And then actually I ended up returning back to Canada for some of my family health reasons before I got convinced to come back to the microbiome at Seat Health with this really interesting vision to be able to take the biopharmaceutical approach, that really rigorous kind of Harvard MIT science, and apply that to the wellness space and to the consumer-oriented space, because there's a huge opportunity to unlock

in a fast way, in a highly evidence-based way, to unlock kind of complete care. And that's what brought me here. Let's back up for a second. So we're going to go back to the brown cross. So essentially what you're doing, you're taking healthy people's stool. There's a filtering process, which is fascinating. I want to get to that.

And then you transplant it and then that person gets healthy. They suddenly get healthy. But this is a very non-specific approach. It's like, okay, healthy, you know, fecal matter and transplant. Well, we don't know exactly why it's healthy, what's in it, what it's doing. And what you're saying is you're trying to take biotechnology, AI technology, figure out what it is. What is it that's making this beneficial? First off, how do you pick, where do you find healthy school? What are the qualifiers

for that? Great question. So we published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, about only 3% of donors qualified. So it was like the Olympic athletes of poop, right? Completely incredible work where we got down. The main reasons why were obesity actually, because OPCC, I'm sure we'll get into a little bit, and metabolic health has a huge driver on the impact on the microbiome. Mental health actually, things like depression, anxiety, ruled out a lot of people, as well as kind of pathogens in the stool that you wouldn't otherwise feel.

Things like norovirus or rotavirus were very common that led to exclusion, and very rarely some blood changes, like changes in your liver enzymes, for example. So that's what ruled a lot of people out from the donation process. That's not what we're doing today here at Seed. I think we have gone past that entire community. It's a nice search space problem. And when you're on that's door, like that 93 year old patient I talked about earlier, I think we're open to those kind of really innovative technologies that are non-specific.

But over time, we can apply science to get to the precision biology to get to the exact microbes that are driving an effect as part of what we're doing here at Seed. How important is the relationship between us and our micro? It's a symbiotic relationship, but what does it influence? What does it do for us? Absolutely. So I think if you zone out to the microbiome itself, it's the microbes that live in and

on us, and there's nearly 100 trillion microbes that are in and on us. That's, for the record, more stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. We're talking about a massive set of biology that's happening that affects many aspects of our body and our health, whether it's the inflammatory cascade, the immune system, the metabolic system, the gut brain system, the muscles, which we can talk about, like muscle growth perhaps even. We're talking about the gut muscle access. Aristotle said that all disease begins in the gut and he may not be a better one. How crazy is it that he was right? Yeah. Completely wild. It's a wild. It touches a lot of different biology pragmatically, but we have kind of come to this really interesting point in time. It's what we call at Seed the internal climate change or the climate change of our insides.

We've changed our diets pretty meaningfully as we've advanced as a community and a culture. We have exposure to antibiotics in a much more frequent way than we did way back in the day. And we've had this huge change in our gut that's leading to a lot of different challenges that we're now navigating. But it's not like CRISPR or anything, right? Or like really, it's an obvious way to change the supplement, the microbiome back. It's very intuitive that we're knocking down our microbes that we need to kind of rep,

we have to replace them and make sure they're have the good microbes come back. And it becomes a really easy way for everyone to can engage with scientifically because it's not super technical. It's not like CAR-T therapy or these really kind of like esoteric science. It's something that makes sense intuitively but has a lot of science behind it as well. And those are the best pairings. What are the connections between, that we know of, between the microbiome and what, in the explosion of autoimmune disorders, in particular food allergies. When I was a kid, it was pretty rare to know a kid

with a food allergy. Now, I have small kids and there's entire tables at school that are like peanut free and on planes you have to be careful. Like what's the connection between the two? Yeah, absolutely. So there's this beautiful study that was done out of the UK and replicated in Scandinavia, where

they looked at children between 0 and 3 and their exposure to antibiotics. And when you have early exposure to antibiotics, when you're kind of growing, you're maturing your microbiome, you have a set of really significant downstream consequences and health consequences that come later, including food allergies, autoimmune diseases like inflammatory bowel disease, metabolic conditions, including obesity and diabetes, as well as a number of other

challenges like celiac disease and other autoimmune condition. And so we're seeing that the microbiome very early in development is critical in training the immune system and making sure it is well tuned. So, you know, we've gotten almost too clean as a society. You want to be playing in the dirt and there's a great book called Let Them Eat Dirt to be able to engage with the microbial environment early to train your immune system so it doesn't get super hypervigilant where it's attacking everything and attacks yourself.

That was always my argument, getting the kids outside, playing in the dirt. immune system so it doesn't get super hyper vigilant where it's attacking everything and attacks yourself. That was always my argument, getting the kids outside, playing in the dirt. And also too, I've heard pets are really great for that. Great for your microbiome. The data's been incredible for that. Also the way you come into the world, so vaginal delivery versus C-section. Breastfeeding. Breastfeeding, exactly.

So there's these huge sectors early in life which drive a lot of health down the road And so that's that's usually between early in life. You have some unstable microbiome Especially in some and later in life and in the middle It's a little bit more resilient, but but but still still, you know fraught for error along the way as well Is there is there hope for people that have these autoimmune issues? Like is do we do you think that we're going to come to a place where we'll be able to reverse most all of them? Do you think so?

I think we're on the way. I think it's about moving towards preventative health care and not necessarily reactionary to get to the root cause. We're still one step at a time. I think there's some really good treatments that are out there for today. I think there are new treatments, but if you talk about some of the best treatments

that we have available, say for example, inflammatory ballots, Crohn's and colitis, the treatment efficacies are in the 30 to 40%. We have a lot of room to go. My dad has ulcerative colitis, I have cousins that have Crohn's disease. We have a lot of room to go, but we have some tools in our tool belt, not enough yet. And then even beyond that, how do we get earlier? How do we prevent some of these conditions?

And that's where we need to go. Yeah, because a lot of the treatments now are in tamping down the immune system. Some of the treatments, I know for Crohn's, I have a, my godson has Crohn's, and it's like almost like a weak form of chemo to get his immune system to chill out a little bit, which isn't necessarily preventative,

we're not really fixing the problem. How much of this is generational? Because I've read that you inherit much of your microbiome from your mom. So are we seeing problems now that we started two generations ago and it's just gotten worse because as we continue to inherit microbiome, it's less diverse, less diverse, for lack of a better term? It's a conflation of a couple of different factors. So there's definitely, as I was mentioning, if you are born through your mom's birth canal

versus skin, through a C-section, you pick up vaginal microbes as well as actually gut microbes. And then if you're born through the skin, you get a lot of skin microbes and they have very different consequences. But what you eat, for example, fiber, fermented foods, they have a huge driver in our long-term benefits. And as you said, many, many moons ago, we had a very different diet, completely different diet, in particular fiber, which are the prebiotics, the good substrates for microbes to grow.

And we've kind of wiped a lot of that out of our diet. And that's been a big challenge, which has led to these consequences. So generationally, I think it's less necessarily just your mom's lineage over time, but both environmental as well as kind of genetic factors. You're the right person to ask this. The most fascinating thing that I've seen with fecal transplants are, I don't think they have human studies on this,

but I know they've done this with animals, where they'll take a lean mouse and they'll transplant its feces into an obese mouse and the obese mouse will become lean. Yeah. What's going on? Yeah, absolutely. Great study out of, you're seeing Washington, Pete Turnbaugh and others, Jeff Gordon and

a beautiful study where they're germ-free mice, mice that have not seen bacteria before. They actually take twins, humans. One human that is overweight and obese, one that is lean. They take those human stool and put these into these germ-free mice. And exactly as you said, Sal, the mouse that got the skinny school, but gets skinny, the mouse that gets the overweight stool gets obese. And if you actually cross them, because mice eat each other's poop, The obese mouse becomes skinny after it gets the right microbes. And so the question becomes why? What's happening there? How is it happening? What's going

on there? What's the reason to believe? I think there's probably two pathways to consider. One that was talked a lot about in the past and one that's emerging. So I'll give you two kind of paradigms. Paradigms number one is what was initially talked about is that there's certain microbes that you have that when you eat, it just goes right through you, right? You don't, your body doesn't actually pick up any additional nutrients that's broken down by the, and then you stay skinny. But if you have a different set of microbes, it's able to harvest those things that otherwise go through most people to capture that energy and pass that to the host. And so that was one hypothesis that you're able to extract out more caloric intake, essentially,

from things that would otherwise pass through your system that then can impact your body happiness compared to some of this lean. That's kind of one paradigm. The additional other paradigm, which is becoming much more refined, is around the GLP-1 pathway. Everyone's heard about Zempik. Everyone's kind of wondering about what's the, you know, are there ways to kind of keep your muscle mass or lose weight through that pathway? Are there natural forms to be able to deal with that? So there's something really special about the microbiome. It has this super molecule. Some of the microbes that produce super molecule called short chain fatty acids.

You may have heard about this. In particular, one called butyrate. Now butyrate is an amazing bioactive compound, has huge biological activity. You can talk about that. But one in particular factor is that that butyrate short chain fatty acid compound that microbes produce are able to engage with G protein coupled receptor. Fancy language to say a very specific pathway that hits the L cells that produce in your intestine that produce GLP-1.

So microbes produce butyrate that basically engage the cells that produce GLP-1. So this is kind of where this world is going. That's another pathway. And so there are probably a couple of different pathways that of course, and GLP-1 decreases your appetite, or that's the case, we're supposed to do an appetite suppressing pathway. So they're probably eating less

through that particular hypothesis. Yeah, this is interesting because I'm wondering how much your lifestyle will also influence that, right? What would make my body want to become more efficient with calories or less efficient with calories? If I repeatedly starve myself, for example, might be one kind of theory. Now, the thing with this is that you said 100 trillion or trillions of microbes, the microbiome is so

complex and its interaction with our metabolism, which is also extremely complex, it's almost impossible. It seems like an insurmountable, impossible task of figuring this out, but this is maybe where AI comes in to play. How are we using AI to figure all this out? Because there's so many variables, I can't even imagine where they would start. Absolutely. So there's a couple ways, and actually we've done this

at Seed where we're looking at, well, should we take a step back? The microbiome is not just gut microbiome, right? I think that's one misnomer, and maybe one myth to bust right now, is that we think microbiome, we automatically, our brain goes to gut health. But our microbiome is beyond just gut microbes,

they're microbes in your vagina, in your nasal cavity, on your skin, everywhere. They kind of live everywhere. We recently developed in partnership with Jacques Revelle, one of the leading experts in the vaginal microbiome, a product, vaginal probiotic called VS01. And talk about like extremely effective science using machine learning and AI. We started with a data set of healthy women that had sequenced their vaginal microbiome every day for a long period of time. And we then used that entire large data set to look at the signature using AI and machine learning, what microbes are being driving the effect, right?

What's actually associated with health versus not health, and then pick out the key microbes to test in a Petri dish on what's happening to decrease the bad bacteria and to increase the acid and to be very stable over time. And then we're able to pull out those exact microbes that work together in synergy using their genetic code to put into a product with some supportive ingredients that we put into a clinical trial. So we're using AI in a very, like there's so much data you're saying, Sal, we have to use AI to be able to get to actionable hypotheses that we can then test both in science and

a Petri dish, but also most importantly, which we can talk about in a clinical trial that shows an effect that we can then test, both in science and in a petri dish, but also most importantly, which we can talk about in a clinical trial that shows an effect that we want. What about the, this was relatively recently discovered, the communication between the brain and the gut, and now we know that there's a, what do they call it, like a highway, there's a literal... Gut-brain access, yeah. Yeah, like it's not like as, you know,

we used to talk about the How your brain can't be touched by anything, but now we're realizing that's actually not true The the that pathway actually exists with the gut How does that influence our brain and our things like anxiety depression? Great question So maybe I'll take us back in time But actually I worked on one of the first papers in the gut brain access back in 2011 But it's really gotten hot and it advanced at an exponential level. So you're totally right Sal, we're starting to unlock a lot more biology here. And I'll tell you about the study that we did back at McMaster with the group and then

I'll tell you about the biology. So it was wild. Similarly a mouse study where there's two types of mice, one's a bulb C mouse, it's quiet as a mouse. And another one's a Swiss mouse that wants to bite your face. It's very aggressive. And if you actually cross their microbes, the Swiss mouse that was really aggressive becomes quiet.

And the mouse that got the bulb C mouse that was really calm, becomes really aggressive and much more adventurous. And so you can see that there's something here. And so maybe we asked the question why, how is it working? How are these connections possibly happening? There's probably three main ways in which the brain and the gut are connected.

So one is through neurotransmitters. So it turns out in our gut, we have a ton of neuroactive compounds like serotonin. We have more serotonin in our gut than in our brain, basically. Right? And so there's receptors in your gut too. That's right. Exactly. It affects motility. In fact, one of our studies, we show that the impact of

DSL-1 are symbiotic on serotonin in the gut and the motility in an IBS study. So huge opportunity. Similarly, we know that these microbes are also affecting things like oxytocin. There's a great study that was done out of Baylor that looked at oxytocin, another neurotransmitter, a neurohormone, the love hormone, the connection hormone. This was done in effectively autistic-like mice. And so that's kind of one way that the gut and the brain are connected. The second is a nervous system. It's called the vagus nerve, the enteric nervous system.

And so there's actually a nerve that is interfacing between the nervous system that affects the brain. And the third is actually neuroinflammation. So it turns out your gut can leak in, can let in very active compounds that can cross the blood-brain barrier, things like P. creosol and other active compounds. So if you have a nice tight junctions,

a nice gut barrier, that's gonna prevent a lot of negative neurochemicals that can get to the brain and actually cause inflammation in certain parts of the brain. And so those are the three ways that we're starting to see this gut brain access kind of interface and affect things like memory, which we can talk a little bit about as well,

and cognition as well. What's the theory as to why they're connected? Why is, because we, I mean, it wasn't that long ago, a few couple of generations maybe, where we looked at these systems and thought of them as being isolated. Yeah. You know, the blood brain barrier, right? The brain is the brain. It doesn't, why would The brain is the brain.

Why would the brain and the gut be so... Because that's direct line. You mentioned three direct lines of communication. What's the theory behind why that even exists in the first place? It's evolution. We've just been with bacteria so long that we're finding this symbiosis between the two worlds where there is... Over time, we've just conferred benefits from the actual microbes themselves. And the microbes are obviously helping, we're helping them out too, right? They're getting a nice cozy little place to live. And I think it's just time and evolutionary speaking that over time that we're getting to some of those advantages.

Is it crazy to say, I've speculated this on the podcast, that you have symbiotic, in fact I'm talking about with my son, he's super, I have a four year old super into carnivorous plants. And there's this one plant, it's almost like a sundew plant, so it's got sticky surface. There's a beetle that is covered in wax that doesn't stick to the plant, and the reason why it doesn't stick to the plant

and the plant doesn't go after it is it kills bugs that are stuck to the plant so that it poops on the plant and it fertilizes it. And so I'm explaining to him symbiosis, like they benefit each other. Is it too crazy to say that bacteria can also influence our cravings to feed themselves? Do we see any bacteria or microbiome influence on cravings, you know, making you crave more sugary food, salty food, or anything like that. I think it's a really interesting place that needs further exploration. I think the hypothesis is an interesting one.

It does not, it's not outside the realm of possibility to know that. We just talked about GLP-1 and that's definitely through the appetite pathway. Whether it's the level of specificity of certain things to eat, I think is still to be determined. But I think your hypothesis is an interesting one that is ripe to kind of further explore. Okay. And what about like muscle mass and athletic performance? I've seen studies connecting faster recovery and some studies that suggest that you can get stronger.

Like it's like a performance enhancing supplement, if you will. What's that connection? Yeah. So there's probably maybe we'll if you will. What's that connection? Yeah. So there's probably, maybe we'll break this down into what's the biology, what are the preclinical studies and what are the clinical studies? And I'll kind of give you a little bit of a taste of each of those. So the preclinical, the biology, like what's the reason to believe? There's kind of two pathways that we think that tie the microbes to muscle mass.

So the first is anabolic pathways. So anabolic pathways are being speculated as certain microbes can help optimize amino acid absorption through breakdown of additional, more effective proteolytic breakdown. That's kind of one piece of it. The second piece of it is catabolic pathways to essentially have good bacteria outcompete pathobionts or pathogenic bacteria that are inflammatory in nature.

So that's kind of the other that are being speculated, maybe to a lesser degree also another maybe a mitochondria pathway that's a little bit more speculative at this stage. So is that true? Well, let's go look at the preclinical data and then let's look at the clinical data. So the preclinical data is there's a couple of really interesting studies, but one that I think will be kind of interesting in particular is they took these same germ-free mice, these mice that hadn't seen bacteria before, and they found elderly individuals that are high functioning, like strong and like high functioning, high performing, and ones that are not high performing functionally.

And they took that stool and put it in these germ-free mice, and they measured the mice in the two groups for performance, specifically muscle, specifically grip strength. And the group that got the high-performing stool from those humans, the grip strength of those mice, very high compared to those that got the low-performing stool, wild. We've seen this also in mice with certain probiotic supplements, particularly in the lactobacillus class, that's increased muscle mass, increased endurance in swimming, for example, and increased grip strength. But those are mice. What about humans? Yeah.

Right? That's what we care a lot about. And so really nice study that was done out of the University of Liverpool. They aggregated about over 20 studies in humans, clinical trials, and tried to tell, tried to aggregate to see if there's any real effect of probiotics on muscle mass and strength actually. It turned out it did. Probiotics and this kind of meta-analysis show that we're effective in increasing muscle mass in a meaningful way, in a clinically meaningful way, and also in increasing strength, specifically measured by grip strength. There was one study that looked at

deadlift and bench press that also shows some additional benefit, but it was mostly driven by grip strength. And so to me, that's really interesting. You see the biology, you see the preclinical data, now it's going to fitting the clinical data that when you see those like, you see the hat trick, then you're thinking that something's there. Yeah. And by the way, they use grip strength because it's a proxy for overall body strength. It's a really easy way to measure how strong you are overall. It's nothing magical about grip strength.

You know, I wanna make sure I clarify. Zane, are you a sci-fi guy? A little bit. Okay, I just, I mean, you would be such a fun person to talk to, like, what does the science fiction world look like based off of the science that you understand where we're going? Like how crazy can this get or what are some possibilities of how we could potentially

use this science in the future? There's just so much we can do, right? Things that we thought were impossible are becoming possible. I remember when I was a kid, I had this like futures book and it was like, it would say like, oh, one day you're going to, I was like seven or six. You're going to be able to look on your like a device and like have a conversation, not on a phone. I'm like, no way. And like we do that every day now. Right. Like, and so I think, I don't think anything is outside the realm of possibility.

It just takes time and resources and how much time our resources deploy to kind of get to the closest thing on the horizon. That could be like a massive game changer for everybody. I mean, I think of, I have psoriasis. So I think the autoimmune thing to me is fascinating. The fact that is a potential that we could reverse some of that. I feel like I've tried everything on the sun. Nothing's worked for me and the ability to potentially maybe take a pill one day and be able to reverse that. Like, what are some of the things that are right on the horizon for us of what we're learning right now?

Yeah. I think if you're, I think the immune space is really interesting. I think the longevity space and the metabolic space are the three that are really, really interesting. You know, we know that microbes are driving a lot of the immunology to give you, not to go back. I don't think the answer is a fecal transplant to be clear, but just to give you that as an example, I did the first double-blind placebo control trial for fecal transplants and ulcerative colitis. A cousin of psoriasis, we used some of the same medicines, very effective. Now there have been five trials like that. No approved drugs yet down that pathway, but it gives you that kernel of truth that there's

the microbiome is having this huge direct beneficial impact beyond what's happening with the therapies that you're likely kind of on or around. I think it's about taking a wider approach to the biology and that is something that's very interesting How do they filter by the way when you talk about fecal transplants? How do you filter that without getting rid of the good stuff? Yeah, it's a there's there's many ways to do it, but usually it's a 333 micron filter So like the literal filter literal mechanical filter like this is what it's so interesting about that space Is that it's not like rocket science? It's not like you don't you don't need to go to like, you know an Ivy League institution to figure out like this

It's incredibly operational like Innovation it's an operational innovation that I think just got caught up in the like I don't know the feelings around stool But you know back in the day there was evil humors and like all kinds of things that we had feelings about but we do Blood transfusions now, right? And so I think there's a little bit about, I think the psychedelic world is going through some of that, of perceptions versus biology,

and I think if you stick to the biology, I think you have a chance to make a really big impact. You just reminded me of something, because you said psychedelics. There's a connection between probiotic use, they've shown benefit for depression and anxiety. That's right. What do you think has to do with neurotransmitters?

I think it's multifactorial. I also think that depression is not just one condition, but many conditions. We're likely going to more subpopulations of what kind of depression that's leading up to, that needs to be treated. But it's likely being driven by neurotransmitters or even things like GABA, for example, is like a big one. I think GABA is a really interesting molecule. That's actually your microbes have a huge impact on. Oh really? Yeah, absolutely. Even like you talked about cravings, maybe I'll like flip it to addiction.

Like there's a really nice study. There was a microbiome study that showed differences in the microbiome based on addiction. In fact, a study that was a microbiome study that showed differences in the microbiome based on addiction. In fact, a study that was done, a microbiome interventional study done by Jas Bajaj and VCU, which showed that in a double-blind placebo-controlled trial, a microbiome intervention reduced alcohol cravings and addiction behavior. We think through GAVA. That was the hypothesis, at least.

You can see this world starting to emerge. We're getting into these, how is this possible? Like some of it's like sci-fi like addiction and microbes got to here. Like that sounds completely bananas. Bananas yesterday is the reality today. How would you compare like some of these fecal transplant success rate versus like the current treatment for a lot of these like autoimmune conditions. Like what does that look like? And then is this something you could see being more available to people? Yeah, so I think so the depends the condition

So for example clustered even difficile the one that we mentioned the beginning of the story works about 90% of the time Wow, so pretty good less in in some of the you know immune conditions But these are people that have failed most of the immunotherapy or immune therapies. Even in cancer, there's great papers that looked at the microbiome transplants for people that have had refractory metastatic melanoma. They failed everything. And when they pair that with an immune therapy and a microbiome therapy, it works about 30%

of the time. Well, remember, the baseline is zero, right? Like these people don't have anything else for them and it's rescuing 30%. Yeah, that's huge actually. What's the follow up with that in terms of diet and protocol and all that? Because I'm sure initially maybe you get this initial success, but then does it trail off? Yeah. So the C. diff is an infectious disease like a pneumonia,? Yeah, so the seed if isn't infectious is he's like, you know, like a pneumonia for example

So you don't need to kind of continue to take it some of the other conditions Need to take it more frequently like weekly for example or monthly I think it's absolutely tells us a little bit where we're going with probiotics And I think this is where I think there's so much promise where we're starting to learn lessons from fecal transplants to apply You don't have to take a fecal transplant, right? That's a search space problem, it's a good start to the biology, but can we get to the exact microbe that are driving

biology? Exactly. What it tells us is actually maybe, how do I think about picking a probiotic, for example? What are the key aspects? Because the fecal transplant is very broad, it's quite diverse, and one of the good things we know in the gut is you want a diverse microbiome. So when I think through, and I get this question a lot, like, hey, Zane, I'm thinking about

a probiotic. Which one should I take and why? I kind of have this 4D approach. So first D, diversity. Most of the time, we want to have a very diverse gut bacteria. So you want to pick a probiotic that has as many bacteria as possible to cover that tree of life. Is that because we see in the data that diversity is strongly correlated with health? Correct. Absolutely correct.

And then the opposite? Exactly. Dysbiosis is associated with many health conditions. Okay. And so you want to... But most of the probiotics we see kind of it's like one or two strains. Yeah, it's like lactobacillus. Yeah, it's like that's not enough, whereas the product DS01, which is one that I strongly

believe in scientifically, has 24 strains. As the most broad kind of coverage, covers over 30,000 genes, bacterial genes. It's such a diverse armamentarium. That's what you want to look for. You want to look for a diverse microbiome and a diverse product. That's kind of the first D, diversity. The second D is delivery. Many probiotics are dead off the shelf. They're not going where they need to go. I worry about the quality control on them. What you really want to make sure is it's getting to the right place and they're alive.

Very important. These are live microbes. The DSO-1 product has targeted delivery. It gets to the right part of the intestine and we use kind of this kind of pharma grade quality control to make sure the bacteria are alive. That's the ones that we use in therapeutic land that we went down the FDA pathway because that's really important. If it's dead, it's probably not going to work. It's not going to have the same impact, depending on the microbe.

So second D, delivery. Third D, I call it do-gooders. You mentioned prebiotics. Prebiotics are these products that microbes eat. They're the food the microbes eat. And so you really want to have some of that. And so that's essentially what the DSO-1 product has. It has a very strong polyphenol pre-biotic that helps enrich the microbes.

And the last D is data. And the most important one, perhaps, is you want to pick a product that's got strong clinical data. Not all data is created the same. And making sure you see the clinical trials like we have, we've done as well. So that's kind of the way. And when someone comes to me and says, see, quite practically, I hear it's good, how do I think about picking the right one, say the 4Ds?

Now, do, is there, when you take a probiotic, is it just transient? Is that why you have to take it every day, or do we actually see that it changes your microbiome and you start to populate your gut with some of these bacteria? These ones, and then that's one of the biggest challenges compared to what I'll call live biotherapeutics, some of the drugs that are in the microbiome space versus the probiotics.

Probiotics are having a transient effect that impacts, it washes out over time. So if you stop it, unfortunately you go back to your normal, your baseline microbiome. And so you really do have to take it, and that's why it's been studied that way more regularly compared to some of the live biotherapeutics. Okay. Now why is it not populating? It's just we don't know. Yeah, the colonization techniques are a little different. We don't completely know. That's the gut. I will say that the vaginal microbiome is different. We have, for example, our VSO1 product colonizes a little bit more, still has to be taken more frequently, but not nearly as frequently, not every day.

What's happening? So I've taken probiotics for a decade at least, and seed is the only one that I've been able to take long-term consistently, always provide benefit. With other probiotics, I would get some benefit, and then it was almost like they were actually making things worse, and I'd have to stop, try to switch to something else. What was happening? Yeah, it's a really interesting phenomenon. You're not the first person to say that.

Okay, good. People have some kind of ebbs and flows. I think our reactions are you want to get broad, right? And I think partly if you don't have that broad microbiome, things can kind of change because our diet changes. You're opening little holes in the lifeboat and you want to plug different things over different periods of time. And so you kind of want to have that broad kind of safety net. And when you have single strain organisms or two strains, you're missing that broad

safety net. I think it's probably why. What's happening with the... You mentioned earlier the junctions in your gut. When I was 20 years ago, I had a wellness studio and I had an individual that was very, she was like on the cutting edge of this kind of stuff and she would talk about leaky gut syndrome. That's right.

And I remember I had doctors that I trained in that studio who would overhear that term and roll their eyes because it wasn't accepted. Well now it's like, oh yeah, that's a real thing. What's happening and how can good bacteria or probiotics help that? Yeah. Let me give you a case example of this and maybe reframe the conversation to something that's practical and what you can do. So, every dinner table conversation I get is, hey Zane, I took a bunch of antibiotics,

what should I take? It turns out antibiotics actually disrupt the gut barrier and it opens up that leaky gut for lacora, epithelial barrier dysfunction. That's the more technical term, but it's the leaky gut. And so how do we restore that? How do we close up those tight junctions? Well, it goes to the fact that not all probiotics are the same. There's this really famous study that was published in a very prestigious journal called Cell, and they did a probiotic study after antibiotics, and it turned out it didn't work. It was 11 strains. They said doing nothing was better than doing this probiotic. But to me, probiotics is

like saying the word medicine, which one, right? Like aspirin and Viagra, two very different medicines. They do very different things. And so we looked at our data. We said, well, it's not broad spectrum enough. It's not delivering, it's not broad spectrum enough. It's not delivering. It's not hitting the four Ds, right? So we did a double-blind placebo control trial of DSO on the seed product. And we looked at the barrier function between the groups after getting broad spectrum antibiotics. And lo and behold, big improvement in the barrier function after you take DSO-1 compared to the placebo, up

to 49% better on the gold standard biomarker, which is what we want. So from that we launched a product in Target now called Gut Reset to help optimize that barrier function, which we think is really, really important. And so it is a huge factor where we're having disruptions of the gut bacteria, the barrier function, and this is a way to kind of optimize. But not all probiotics do this. To our knowledge, this is the first to do this on the gold standard endpoint.

What does that space look like with probiotics? Is it just like people are, like there's not that much science in a lot of these, and some of them put a lot, and it's just like, where are they getting this bacteria from? Wild, wild west or what? Yeah. Yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunism in this space. Because all this data is coming out.

So it was like, oh, probiotics, I got to take them. Yeah, it's exactly right. And I think it goes back to not all data is the same, not all probiotics are the same, not all strains are the same. And we kind of talked through some of those as myth busting. But there's a ton of noise. And it's really hard for the average individual to sort through that noise.

There's so much noise, right? So how do you tell which probiotic, right? I think that's what you're really asking because there's many products that make a lot of claims and some of those claims are off of, you know, somebody else's mouse study, right? And some of it's doing the double-blind placebo control trials that we just talked about at, you know, what we call like the biopharmaceutical approach to everyday health, where we go super deep. We looked at the microbiome. Others are looking at it with the equivalent of the naked eye or maybe a magnifying glass. We're looking at the microbiome with the

world's best microscope, like 100 million read-ups. And just because you're, say, your science back or clinical back, those are very different things. And so I think that's been a bit of the challenge and for us to kind of demystify is that, not all of this is the same, not all probiotics are the same. Talk a little bit about your peers and staff over at Seed. I remember when we first met you guys and I can't remember who, I think he brought the lineup of everybody that works there.

And we were a lot of companies, right? Over the course of the 10 years, we've probably worked with 50 plus different companies. I have never seen a staff like this of just brilliant individuals. So tell us. It sounds like the who's who of the world of. Like on another level compared to any other company.

So tell me a little bit about that and the experience of working with all those brilliant people. Absolutely. Maybe two pockets. I'll tell you the science side and I'll tell you about the communication because both are brilliant in their own ways. So on the science side, I'm partnered with the chief scientific officer, Jerk Jeevers,

who is at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. He was the head of the microbiome division of Johnson & Johnson, right? Like an incredible, one of the top 1% sighted individuals in the microbiome space on the preclinical side. So I'm a clinical guy, he's a preclinical guy, incredible. We have a team of over 12 PhD scientists from the who's who of institutions from Stanford to Princeton and everywhere between working extremely hard just like we would on the life sciences side, but in the consumer side.

Because this is where the world is going. Pharma is becoming more consumer oriented and consumer is becoming more research oriented. I think with the collision, the middle is going to be really, really important. That's the type of group. Incredible thought leaders from bioinformatics to immunology to microbiology and everything in between. I will say that the other thing that drew me to Seed is the way that we communicate about science. Actually, this is an interesting area that,

in life sciences, we kind of, or in clinical medicine, we kind of shut clinical guidelines, or it's like very holier than thou. We don't meet people where they are. I think you guys are great examples of scientific communicators in a meaningful way to meet people where they are. And Ara, who's the CEO, comes from a movie background,

movie production background. And some of our team is just really talented in finding the educational story. We work with many, many groups to find people where they are. And I think that's an incredible learning lessons. How do you take the concept of streetwear, for example, things that kind of go, gets dropped, we apply that to real world.

So right now you've heard of the squatty potty right now you have heard of like the squatty potty. We have a seed equivalent of the squatty potty is being dropped if you pass an educational series of seminars, right? And so how do we help people get educated, but take the like hype and vibe of like, you know, what's attractive and cool in the modern world. Whereas I think typically scientists and clinicians

don't approach that. And I think the blend of both worlds making information kind of accessible, Ara likes to say, science is not complete until it's communicated. Of course. Right? And you guys know that. You do that. You live that.

I think it's equally as important as the science creation itself. And I think those two together is really, really kind of like superpower. Well, education is super important for the average person. It used to be important just to educate people on what good bacteria was. I mean, that was 15, 20 years ago when I started learning about this. Now because the average person knows what a probiotic is, they're reading the headlines, oh my God, you know, microbiome connect oh my god, microbiome, connect to this, connect to that, connect to this.

Now the education's like, okay, it's not all the same, they're not all created equal, there's this stuff works over here, this not so much. For example, you said you wanna take live bacteria. I used to, 20 years ago, I thought that meant getting a probiotic that was refrigerated. That's how you know it's alive. That's not the case at all How do you know you're getting live bacteria? How do you guys keep yours alive? First of all, it's room temperature

I have some on my bag right now. How is it alive in there? Yeah, it's a great question So we've worked really hard to make sure the formulation is alive and to test the lots to make sure Using something called flow cytometry So this is kind of like, you know This this is what we had at the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT, right? That type of technology to make sure we know the microbes are there and alive. You can actually put microbes in like a hibernation state. And that's what we've done.

We've put them in a suspension state where then they can wake up when they get back to your gut through a capsule. So that is essentially how we've done it. And it doesn't have to be refrigerated, which is an incredibly difficult task for us to do when you have 24 strains to keep all of them in the right state of heart hibernation and to make sure truly that they are not just saying they are, but they are. That's been a big breakthrough for us to make sure why you say not all probiotics are the same. We've put a lot of investment in time, energy, resources, and brain power to solve that really, really hard problem. And so we're here

to kind of delineate some of that. What does the breakthrough look like at the office? I mean, is there like a big gong you guys hit? What's it like? You guys all high five each other. What does it look like? Yeah. What does it look like when the breakthrough happens like that? We've got a lot of breakthroughs. So we're really always excited. We have a kind of all hands a meeting I think it's usually kind of a general vision around that and we don't have we're we're like spread across the world to some degree Okay, so there's no no official gong. Although we do have an office in New York and LA But we need to get an actual gong Let me ask you this what do you do to maintain good microbiome health,

besides take a good probiotic? Do you avoid certain foods? Do you stay away from things like artificial sweeteners? What are the things that you know to do that are good? Three additional things, in addition to a healthy supplementation. Fiber in your diet, super important. I try to get a high amount of fiber in my diet.

Are they all created equal or certain types of fiber? Good question. So there's mixed data on the exact types, whether it's inulin or FOS or others. I think, I don't like perfectly the end of me of good, just get fiber in your diet. That's like the take home message. Try to target over time up to 40 grams.

That's a lot. You don't want to do that right off the hop, but the data shows that's where you want to get to over time for colon health and beyond beyond and to feed those healthy microbes. Those microbes are doing a lot of benefits and so make sure. That's number one. Number two, fermented foods. I'm a big believer in, again, don't let perfect be good.

I like kimchi, but don't let perfect be the enemy good. I like kefir. In particular, the data is very good for kefir, so don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Get fermented foods into your diet. Number three is don't reach that antibiotic so fast. I'm not saying you don't need antibiotics. Always be an advocate for yourself and for your family on do I need this specific antibiotic?

Can it be narrower, not broad, narrower? Can it be topical or any other way so it doesn't hurt the consequences of the gut bacteria? And sometimes it's, you know, I'm a clinician, sometimes it's easier instead of having a long and drawn out conversation about a respiratory tract infection. You know, we're humans, this happens, right?

But you really don't, I'm not saying you don't need antibiotics, antibiotics are extremely effective and are life saving. Don't shy away in the right context. But just be a little advocate for yourself. Is it, does it need to be this one? Can it be narrower? Can it be another way?

And that would be all. Yeah, the vast majority of like respiratory, you know, infections or ear infections are viral. Yeah. You know, I know this now. By the way, the attitude on antibiotics has changed. So I don't know how old you are, but I'm 45. When I was a kid, the attitude on antibiotics

was so different. You went to the doctor with almost everything. Through everything. Through everything. Oh yeah, we were put on antibiotics left and right, wasn't a big deal. Now they're much more judicious. In fact, earlier you brought up C. diff,

which is, that's an infection, like if that gets in a care home, I mean it kills people. It's very, very deadly, and it typically happens after antibiotic administration. What's happening? Why are these infections happening after people use antibiotics? Yeah, absolutely. So it turns out we have some clostridium, or many people have some clostridium difficile

in them and it's not a problem because you have a healthy, normal gut bacteria that out competes the actual- So keeping it in check basically. That's right. And then if you take an antibiotic, say for pneumonia or urine tract infection, it wipes out the good bacteria and this C. diff can go wild. Because it wakes up, basically converts from a dormant state to an active state and then produces toxin that hurt the colon and then cause diarrhea. It makes me think of like Mad Max, like everything's like, you know, it's anarchy and the bad guy

is now contending over because nobody's there. That's totally right. It's called colonization resistance. It's like if you have the right bacteria, in fact, that's why you want a diverse bacteria, right? To like crowd out, to out compete the path of pathological bacteria, the path of violence. And the, and the, of course the irony is that the

C. diff that survived is resistant to antibiotics. So you just left the bad guys that are not going to be able to get killed by taking it. Do you have any favorite antibiotics for your family, if your kid gets, does get a bacterial infection, what's the, let's say some common infections, are there ones that you're like, I prefer amoxicillin over this, or I prefer azithromycin?

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

seed. So what do you mean by broad? Like anaerobic, aerobic bacteria, gram negative, gram positive, anaerobic. So the broader it goes, it feels right because you're covering your bases. Yeah, but you're nuking the hell out of everything. Get to the actual specific bug, whether it's culture right out of the urine, or from the source, try to get as narrow as possible just to hit that specific bug, because you'll have less knock-on consequences.

You won't kill all the good guys, you'll just kill the bad guy. So when your kids are sick, are you like, oh, let's wait and see if this is, or do you go for the culture? I tend to go to culture pretty quickly. I don't have kids but in terms of like friends and family and my parents is like you know I try to culture get to the very specific you know if it was you know for C. diff I think fadaxamycin which is very narrow for

C. diff for example or other things and try to minimize the consequences and just try to get as narrow as possible. Our probiotics, I've heard mixed messages on this, are probiotics beneficial to take when you're on antibiotics or do you have to wait until you're done with the antibiotics to take them? Great question. So the study that we did that set up the product gut reset, DS01 gut reset, you took the probiotic DS01 through the antibiotic course, so like the seven days, usually it's around seven days and then seven days after. So it's a 14-day pack. So on when you're on and off.

And then right immediately after. And we actually, remember I just said, try to go narrow? Well, the study that we did, which both the placebo arm and the treatment I got, was broad spectrum. It was the very, very broad antibiotics, and we wanted to make sure that we were able to kind of restore back the microbiome, which we did, and also improve that barrier function, which we did as well. Well, you're the right person to ask this thing because you're, you were, you know, by training a gastroenterologist, uh, SIBO, so small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Do you take probiotics if you have SIBO or do you have to treat the SIBO first?

I would treat the SIBO first and then follow it with probiotics, clear out those negative bacteria, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth bacteria, and then make sure you replicate with kind of the host. Because often the way you treat your SIBO is antibiotics. Antibiotics, yeah. And so is a healthy microbiome prevent SIBO? So I would say that data is still mixed at this stage. Because some people just get it repeatedly. That's right. That's right. Exactly. And so what you want to prevent is the consequence of the antibiotics and that cycle that you end up getting put on. The data, because the

bacteria in your small intestine are a little bit more weird and wonderful than the ones in your colon. You have more bacteria in your colon. And so that data is still emerging, but I think it's, I can imagine over time that we'll start to populate that. But certainly after you wipe out your bacteria with your SIBO antibiotic, you probably want to repopulate. So does the relationship with the acidity play a factor in that with your SIBO and trying to get that right? Yeah, I think so. I think there's questions on whether PPIs, which decrease acid as you know, or decrease

amount of acid, have put you at risk for SIBO. I think there's some data to suggest maybe. We don't have a great sense of what causes SIBO and why it comes back. So big unknowns, some great groups in California working on that problem, we don't really know. What about the relationship between bacteria and fungal infections?

I noticed as a kid, if I was on an antibiotic, I almost always got athlete's foot. Yeah. And we know that there's a connection between SIBO and CIFO, which is small intestinal fungal overgrowth. What's the connection between those? It makes complete sense, because your microbiome doesn't just bacteria.

Exactly. So if you're given an antibiotic, what is it going to do? It's going to wipe out the bacteria. What happens to the fungi? They got a lot of room to play. Okay. It's almost like the C. diffster we talked about earlier, Sal.

It's like you've basically cleared out the actual bacteria and so the fungi can play in one area that I think bacteria can actually help decrease fungi in this, in VSO1. So women get Candida infections, often yeast infections. In our study that we did with VSO1, we showed that VSO1 was able to, both in a petri dish and in a human study, decrease

Candida, which we thought was really, really helpful. So, the right bacteria can actually decrease fungi in the right context. That's why you have studies, old studies showing that women who ate fermented foods were less likely to get yeast infections, probably, right? Yeah. It's an interesting kind of paradigm. I think we did show that the gut is a good place for reservoirs for infection, like E. coli. So that might be that. Our study we looked at for VS1 goes back to the story of not all strains are the same. So, a lot of the times people think lactobacilli is good. And I think that's true. But lactobacilli

is like saying chihuahua and Great Dane. Those are both dogs, but pretty different, right? And so there's many products that are given for lactobacillus acidophilus for women's health products, but those are GI bugs. They're actually not vaginal microbes, and our product is a chryspotis product, lactobacillus chryspotis, which is a normal healthy microbe that we did in that machine learning data set. And it turns out oral microbes are not effective in changing the vaginal microbiome, but vaginal symbiotics, vaginal probiotics are.

And so really interesting kind of like- Is this a pill? Did they swallow it or is it a suppository? We compared pills to suppository and suppository worked and pills did not work for vaginal health. Oh, and so seeds product for vaginal health is a suppository. Correct. Oh, wow.

Interesting. Fascinating. So, the oral, the gut product, oral, the pediatric product, oral, the vaginal product, vaginal suppository. Yeah, you know what's interesting about all, I love it when clinical trials kind of back up what I've noticed. I've noticed when my gut health is good, my performance in the gym is amazing.

I'm not anxious. I'm in a good mood. I used to think to myself, am I playing mind games? Is it because my gut's off that I'm in a bad mood? No, no, I can feel it's like my neurotransmitter's off. I'm just not in a good mood. And then the performance aspects of it, like I noticed with Seed,

it's the most consistent supplement I take besides creatine is your probiotic. If I take it consistently, I'm just better in the gym. Just 100% faster recovery, feel better. Why does it recommend it to be taken at night in an empty stomach? Is it because you guys are able to measure how it gets to the right place and that could disrupt that? What's the deal?

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

I don't treat numbers, I treat patients, right? The words are really, really important. In fact, we heard so much on IBS, for example, that we then ran a double blind placebo control trial for irritable bowel syndrome with Tony Lembo at Harvard, which worked incredibly well. And I think it's the humans that actually inform some of the way we think of it, the studies we even do. They drive the studies. Exactly, right? And so that's kind of the genesis of it all. And so it's not a surprise for me to hear that from you because you're not the only one that says that. How does it get delivered to the right place, by the way? Is it a time-release capsule? It's a cap-and-cap system. So it's called a vi- we have a kind of a patent technology of a

via cap solution where it's a large capsule followed by a smaller capsule and it has basically a specific proprietary release in the cold. The way that I talk about you guys, I call you guys the world's best probiotic and I see you guys are like in a different universe. It's so true because everything I've learned from you guys in my own study, because it's an area that I've been very fascinated with, just personally dealing with gut issues for most of my life and having family members with autoimmune issues

and food allergies, when I see what you guys do and I see what other probiotic companies do, like this is, it's like Flintstone vitamins and like it's a completely different universe. When you look at the landscape, do you guys feel like, okay, this is not even fair? It's, we're really excited about kind of being that like, you know, galaxy class solution.

We think that like, there's a huge opportunity to help a lot of people. And, you know, we just want to emphasize on what to do right. You see a lot of noise and we have to help people kind of see that, because it's hard. It's like, working with folks like you guys who are able to educate to show that there are big differences. That is the key place for us.

For us, I think we went on the science and we're working to help win on the educational piece to allow this to kind of scale and to really help a lot of people because we think we are. How's the success of the company been through the years? Have you guys just been able to just grow year over year? It's been incredible. We've been really privileged that the adoption rate has been so higher. We're the number one probiotic in the US on the gut product,

and we're really excited. Are you guys number one now? Yeah, we're really excited. We launched in Target, which has gone really, really well. So nationwide in Target. So been incredible. We launched on Amazon as well, which is a new aspect for us, also doing incredibly well.

And so we're in a place where we're excited to kind of share the access to folks in different places beyond just D to C, which I think has been a really close pace for us. But now to kind of go to the average person in Idaho or wherever there's a target, right? I think it's a very different conversation. That's awesome. That's super-sense. How long have you been working with them, Adam? It's been a while now, right? I think we were the first podcast for you guys to work with, but I'm not sure I did.

Yeah, it's been six years, I think. Six, seven years. Yeah, it's been awesome to see. It was early on. I mean, it goes all the way back to when Taylor was here. Wow. Yeah, so it was maybe even longer, actually. Maybe seven plus years now. It's been quite some time. That's great. Well- I wanted to hear, before we hang up, I do, we kind of just, you mentioned GLP once. It's been, it's been, it's been quite some time. That's great. Well, I wanted, I wanted to hear, uh, before we hang up, I do, uh, we kind of just, you mentioned GLP once it's been a hot topic for us.

I think when you talk for us, I feel like it's some of the most interesting science right now, uh, and how it's impacting, uh, you know, just the obesity epidemic. What do you think about it? Are there, do you have any reservations around people utilizing it in regards to like gut and brain health? Do you think it's, do you think about it? Are there, do you have any reservations around people utilizing it in regards to like gut and brain health? Do you think it's amazing? What are your thoughts on it?

Yeah, I think, you know, there's no panacea in life. Everything has good and bad. And I think for the right person in the right context, GLP-1s are excellent. I think that we are starting to see some of the consequences as well. So one major consequence is constipation. I have countless, countless, countless amount of individuals that come to me and say, I'm on GLP-1, I got to back off on my dose. I'm having trouble with that.

I'm having a ton of constipation. And I think that's where probiotics and other things can kind of help to kind of get the right modulations. That's one piece of it. The other one I think is probably near and dear to your guys is hard on sarcopenia. Yeah. Muscle mass loss, right?

Yeah. Those are the two areas that worry me, not in a way that's like super scary, but you know, as this goes into the zeitgeist and it's like almost recreational use or near recreational use, just things to kind of monitor, because I think, you know, once you stop it, you get this spike back, but there

might be ways to modulate that in a more natural way to some degree. And how do we increase that butyrate, for example, to make sure we, we kind of tighten that up. But those are the two areas that I think, look, there's huge benefits better than, you know, lap band surgeries, I suspect, Ray, like I think that's very clear.

Um, but we have to walk, we have to monitor some of the constipation, motility issues, as well as the sarcopenia issues. And muscle mass is just so important as we age, right, for all kinds of things. And so we need to then have compendium solutions as well that kind of pair onto that, in addition to lifestyle. Do you think it's extra important then for somebody who is, because we do have a large audience and I know there's a lot of people that are taking GLP ones, that they are also

on a probiotic simultaneously. I think there's a lot of benefit for, especially if you're having constipation and or potentially sarcopenia really, should we talk about muscle mass particularly, that we optimize that. I think a healthy diet as well and making sure the lifestyle, all the things that you guys preach

in our very data-driven are really important. There's a huge role for optimizing that extra little safety net from a probiotic perspective. Yeah, DLP1s directly slow down motility. And that's like one of the functions that it does. By the way, diarrhea can be a symptom of low motility as well. A lot of people think that's, oh, it's hyper motility.

No, it could actually be low motility. Yep, it can also get overflow diarrhea. So you get so constipated, you get a back flow and then it flows around. So there's all kinds of like motility challenges. Sounds awful. Yeah. It's not fun. It's's all these sounds awful yeah well

good deal thank you for coming on the show this has been super awesome I know our audience is really educational from this. It's a pleasure I'm passionate about this as you can tell and I'm so excited to kind of share the story. Great to have you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance check out our discounted RGB Super Bundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Super Bundle includes maps anabolic, maps performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam, and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels,

and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Super Bundle is like having Sal, Adam, and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Super Bundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com. The And until next time, this is Mind Pump. The mysterious death of a toddler. The gruesome killings of prominent billionaires. The cold case of two murdered women. Death in a small town. The billionaire murders.

40 years cold. I'm Kevin Donovan, and This Is Suspicion, a podcast from the Toronto Star. Listen for a new season with a new case, early 2025. Meanwhile, look for new bonus episodes of Billionaire Murders at thestar.com or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.