Sex With Emily - Want Better Orgasms? Fix Your Gut First

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

Better sex starts in your gut—who knew? Microbiologist Kiran Krishnan joins me to break down the gut-sex connection, from how digestion impacts libido and orgasms to why stress and diet could be killing your pleasure. We’ll get into what “leaky gut” actually is, how it messes with your hormones, and the simple, science-backed habits that will boost your energy, balance your body, and supercharge your sex life. In this episode, you’ll learn: How your gut health affects your sex life—from libido to orgasms and even erections. Why stress wrecks your gut and lowers your desire (plus how to fix it). Five simple gut-friendly habits to boost energy, balance hormones, and have better sex. Show Notes: More Kiran Krishnan: Instagram Try Just Thrive Probiotic Today! Go to justthrivehealth.com and use promo code "SEXWITHEMILY" to save 20% at checkout. Buy Smart Sex New Paperback Cover Now! Join the SmartSX Membership: Access exclusive sex coaching, live expert sessions, community building, and tools to enhance your pleasure and relationships with Dr. Emily Morse. Yes! No! Maybe? List & Other Sex With Emily Guides: Explore pleasure, deepen connections, and enhance intimacy using these Sex With Emily downloadable guides.  SHOP WITH EMILY! (free shipping on orders over $99) The only sex book you’ll ever need: Smart Sex: How to Boost Your Sex IQ and Own Your Pleasure Want more? Visit the Sex With Emily Website  Let’s get social: Instagram | X | Facebook | TikTok | Threads | YouTube Let’s text: Sign up here Want me to slide into your email inbox? Sign Up Here for sex tips on the regular. See the full show notes at sexwithemily.com

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You're listening to Sex with Emily. I'm Dr. Emily and I'm here to help you prioritize your pleasure and liberate the conversation around sex. Did you know that your gut health could be the key to better orgasms, higher libido, and even stronger erections? Yeah, me neither. I didn't know any of this until I sat down

with microbiologist Kiran Krishnan. He's a gut health genius and formulator of Just Thrive. In this episode, we're diving deep into the gut sex connection, how leaky gut might be best seen gut-sex connection, how leaky gut might be best seen with your hormones and what leaky gut actually is, and simple science-backed ways to heal your microbiome for better sexual and overall wellness. Get ready because this one is going to blow your mind and maybe improve your bedroom gain. Please rate and review Sex with

Emily wherever you listen to the show. It just helps get the show out to more people like you. Find me at all social media it is at Sex with Emily and check out our YouTube channel and don't forget to check out my new articles Valentine's Day gift guide the ultimate pleasure journey and penis enlargement what works what doesn't and what's actually safe. Alright, enjoy this episode. Let's get real. Vaginal health matters. And with Valentine's day around the corner,

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when they ask where you heard it, tell them sex with Emily sent you. So before we get into my interview with the brilliant Kiran, when we talk about better sex, gut health probably isn't the first thing that comes to your mind, but it should be. And I've learned now that everything like your libido, your orgasms, even your erections, can be traced back to what's going on in your gut. And I thought it was important to have an episode that is about your gut health because it's so important to understand that it's more important than what we even learned

in the past. In fact, I'm kind of mad we weren't taught this sooner. We've always had a gut, yet no one told us it was the key to feeling amazing in our bodies. And I've been studying this gut stuff for a few years, but it just became clear because I made some real changes in the last year, and so that's why I'm so passionate about it, because if you think about it,

your gut controls way more than digestion. It regulates hormones, impacts stress and anxiety, plays a huge, huge role in energy and mood, and if you've ever felt constantly tired or stressed or just walking around feeling like like why am I so off? It might not be in your head, it could be in your gut and really it probably is. And when your gut is inflamed, it can lower your sex drive like directly mess with your orgasms and lead to erectile challenges.

Like that's what's up. I think for so long I was trying to do everything else, but I didn't realize that the gut is responsible for way more than we realize. Like the foods we eat, the medications we're taking, you can't just think your way through this. You gotta really focus on the gut and then everything else makes more sense

and you'll feel healthier. I've seen this in my own life and as you'll hear in the episode, one of the top tips is eat more real, diverse, unprocessed foods. Now that didn't happen for me overnight, but now I'm in the habit of like, okay, if it comes in a plastic bag,

it's probably not the best choice. And now I splurge on organic fruit and veggies. You know, that's where all the experts say where to start. And the more I learned about it, it makes sense. Like there are pesticides in the other foods and we absorb our fruits and veggies in a certain way that if they're more toxic, that's going to have a direct impact in your gut.

So that's one change I've made with the food I eat. And then, okay, I started to change out the daily products I use. And the hardest was switching to a natural deodorant. It took a few weeks. To be honest, I didn't smell great. Like you're like, oh my God, really? But now I've made the switch and yes,

I use natural deodorant and it's way better than the other ones. And all my products, like my toothpaste, my laundry detergent, they're all non-toxic, healthy ingredients, and therefore will not disrupt my gut. Another thing I did is take a daily probiotic. This was a game changer because I attribute this

to giving me more energy, improving my digestion, and the Just Thrive probiotic was the best thing I added to my life in the last year. And that's how I found our guest today. Because once I started taking my gut probiotic, I noticed so many changes. Because one month I wasn't great and I stopped taking the probiotic because I'm not always regular with things.

And I noticed that I was less regular and I had less energy and my cravings came back. So while taking Just Thrive, I do have more energy, I sleep better, I don't have the cravings, I'm way more regular and I did feel a difference in my libido. Because listen, when your gut is happy, your brain is happy, your body is happy and that means better sex.

And that's why I brought in Kiran Krishnan. He's a microbiologist, he's a gut health expert to explain exactly how gut health affects our sex lives and specifically what to do about it. He gets into the gut-brain connection, how toxins and stress are wrecking our libido, and just science-backed ways to heal your gut for better all sexual wellness. All right everyone, let's get into the episode. Kiran Krishnan is a research microbiologist whose focus is on the human microbiome and wellness.

He's been called a gut health genius and the formulator of Just Thrive products and several others. So thank you for joining us. Of course, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm so excited you're here because I do kind of geek out now on the microbiome and the gut-brain connection.

And I just think we should start basic here because you've said the microbiome is the foundation for everything related to health and wellness, including longevity. And so maybe we could just start with like, what is the microbiome? Why do we care? How does it affect our sexual health? Yeah, absolutely. So the microbiome is defined as the totality of microbes, so all the microbes that exist in and on your body and all their genetic elements as it relates to

the host. Now that second part, the genetic elements part, is where the rubber really hits the road to get people to understand why the microbiome is so important and then we can do a deeper dive on its impact on sexual health as well. So you've got somewhere around twice as many microbial cells in your system than human cells, right? But when it comes to genetics, it's far greater than that. The human chromosome has somewhere around 22,000 functional genes. Now that might sound like a lot of you're not familiar with genetics, but keep in mind that an earthworm has about 30,000 functional genes, right? So we're less sophisticated than an earthworm is in terms of our

genetic capability. So then the question is how is it that we do all of these various complex things? We do you know hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions in our body and make proteins and enzymes and all these beautiful things that occur, where is all that capability coming from? The Human Microbiome Project helped us discover that we have roughly 150 times more microbial DNA in our system than human DNA, right? So about two and a half million microbial genes compared to 22,000 human genes. And remember, genes code for functionality. And so, so much of our functionality comes from the genetics that the microbes

within our system house and provide. We use some of those genes directly, and in many cases, they use the genes to produce things for us that we require. Where is this microbiome that we're all talking about? Where do we find it? So, you know, we have microbes all over our body, right? Even in our brain and our blood circulation and our cerebral spinal fluid, basically everywhere. Nothing is really sterile in our system, but around 35-40% of all the microbes in your body are actually in your gut, in your digestive tract. Now,

what's really important about that is, of course, you about 75-80% of all your immune tissues also in your gut, right? So the majority of microbes in your body and your gut and the majority of your immune cells are in your gut. So there's a very close relationship between those two. And that starts to dictate how the rest of the body functions including sexual health. It feels like so recently like we've always known about the gut but now that's all we hear about is like the gut-brain connection and our mental health like it's all related to the gut. What do we do about our gut? Like that's what we got to be looking at right with sexual health we're thinking it's so many other things but like where do we start? The good news is here is that these topics can be really

esoteric and complex, but there are some very simple solutions for people to keep in mind, right. But let me say why the gut becomes so important in sexual health, brain health, hormone balancing, all of it, right. So think of the gut as your central command center for how the rest of the body functions, right? The body functions based on inputs, like your brain functions a lot based on inputs on sensory inputs, right? From what you see, what you hear, what you smell, and so on, your brain interprets it and then causes actions as a result of it. The same thing

happens with the chemistry and the biology inside your body, where a lot of the inputs on how your body responds to things comes from the gut. And the reason for that is a gut has the largest surface area in your body, right? If you unveiled all of the surface area in your gut, you've got the size of almost a professional tennis court, almost 4,000 square feet in your gut,

right? So that's a massive amount of surface area. And it's constantly sampling the environment around you. It's sampling everything you breathe in, everything you swallow, everything you drink, everything that enters your body largely goes through your gut. So your gut, through your function of your immune system and your microbiome, is trying to understand the world that you live in, the state that you're in, and how to respond as a result of that. So let me give you a really poignant example of that. So leaky gut. I'm sure a lot of people have heard of this term before. What this actually means is that the intestinal lining is permeable,

and it's allowing things to leak through that it shouldn't normally allow to leak through. So normally, it's supposed to allow food particles to come through, right? So vitamins and minerals and fatty acids and proteins and things like that. If the lining of the gut becomes leaky, it means it's allowing through things like toxins

from the bacteria that live in the gut or the bacteria that come in, environmental toxins that you may breathe in, toxins from your food and so on. It's letting those things come through into your circulation that it's not supposed to allow. Now the barrier of the gut to prevent this is controlled by the microbes within the gut microbiome. So if your microbes go haywire, right, you've had antibiotics, you had poor dietary choices and all that, your gut becomes leaky. And as a result of that leakiness,

you end up with chronic inflammation throughout the body. Now that is an input where your brain goes, wait a minute, you're sick because you've got chronic inflammation. And as a result of that chronic inflammation in the male brain, the brain starts shutting down testosterone production. And so when your body thinks you're sick,

there's an evolutionary adaptation that you are not fit to spread your seed, if you will. So your brain goes, oh, he's sick. He should be laying down in the cave and resting. He shouldn't have erections running around and procreating. So we're gonna shut down testosterone production. So that's one way in which a dysfunctional gut causes leakiness, that leakiness causes inflammation.

The brain reads that inflammation as the individual is not fit, not well enough to procreate, and it starts shutting down testosterone production. And that has a huge impact on male sexual function, desire, and so on. Right. And fertility as a result of that. Oh my God. Okay.

So my brain just exploded. I feel like I've just finally understanding all this is solid waste. So first off, there've been so many studies that we blame so much of fertility challenges on women, but I just read a study that it's like half of the men, like half of the spurt. At least it's because of half men's sperm, not their fault like it could be the toxins in the environment which is why we've seen testosterone levels drop in men. I think you were born after 1989 or something testosterone levels drop because I think it's toxins in the environment

or whatever it is but there's a lot of different reasons. So that's how that affects men's sexual health. I also want to ask you about what we see in women. Do we see the same kind of decline in their sex hormones and estrogen and, and all the things? What have we found? Yeah, that's exactly right. So, but let me add one more thing to men. So not only is that in constant inflammation, then causing the pituitary gland to tell the gonads, don't produce testosterone, we're gonna produce stress hormone instead because the body's under stress and we're gonna try to fix it. So then the testosterone levels go down.

In addition to that, because the gut is leaky and it means that the gut microbiome is dysfunctional, it also increases a process called aromatization in men where the testosterone that you do have is actually converted to estrogen in your body. So not only are you reducing testosterone, so it's harder to get erections, it's harder to feel aroused, it's harder to have energy, you don't put on muscle and all that, you also start to get an increase in estrogen, which means that you get gynecomastia. So you start getting what they call man boobs, right, if you will, and then you start getting more weight. I just heard they're called moobs lately.

Moobs, right, exactly. Someone just told me the other day, I'm like, I didn't know that. Okay. Right, they're getting emotional distress and all of those things that completely counteract not only sexual desire, but sexual function, the ability to get erection, and fertility. because the same thing that reduces testosterone in men, this leakiness in the gut and chronic inflammation, also damages sperm. So sperm count is going down dramatically. In the last 50 years in men, average sperm count levels have gone down 1% every year. 50 years ago we had 50% higher sperm count and it's going down 1% every year, which means in 50 years, if something doesn't happen,

we will likely have such low sperm count that men won't be able to reproduce, right? Which is insane. What would you say is the reason why there's been such a sharp decline in sperm count for men? So it all starts in the gut to me. It's because of this dramatic increase in gut dysfunction. So you see this, for example, with a dramatic increase in

prevalence of IBS, right? So take IBS as a very common gut issue. Over the last several decades, we keep seeing the prevalence rate of IBS going up. You take an average man with IBS, he has four times higher likelihood of ED than a man the same age without IBS. Right? So it goes hand in hand with gut dysfunction, our guts are dismantled in a dramatic way. And we'll talk about how and why that happens. And then of course, most importantly, what you can do about it. You know, but let me connect it for women as well, right? So women, there's a couple of aspects in a woman's gut that are really important for arousal, sexual function, and health of the vaginal canal,

and even things like dryness or lubrication, and just overall health of the vaginal canal. So number one, in women, they can also have the same kind of dysbiosis. They can also get leaky gut. When they get leaky gut, what tends to happen is inflammation increases and they start to get a lowering of dopamine and serotonin production. Now men experience this too.

It can be more dramatic in women. Then as a result of a lower level of dopamine, which is the reward hormone and the reward center and serotonin, which is the happy hormone, that has a direct impact on sexual desire and ability to orgasm for women. For women, as we know, orgasm, sexual desire is very cerebral. If your brain is not functioning with the happy hormone, the reward centers of the brain aren't working. It's really hard for women to have sexual arousal. Estrogen is another thing that's incredibly important for sexual arousal and function in this case because estrogen will help dictate what the vaginal microbiome looks like

and whether or not she can get appropriately lubricated and so on, what happens in a dysfunctional gut that's leaky is estrogen levels start to drop because there's a group of microbes in a woman's gut called estrobalome, whose job it is, is to take estrogen that's being sent out of the body through the liver, through bile and back into the gut and reactivate that estrogen and allow some of it to get reabsorbed. So that way your estradiol levels can maintain high,

can remain high and increase over time, right? If your gut is dysbiotic as a woman, your estrogen levels slowly decline and as a result of that declining, you start to see a loss of sexual function, sexual desire as well. So for women, it also stems right from the gut. How do we know if our gut is leaky? And then also what is causing it? Yeah, and in fact, and two other things with both men and women in the leaky gut case. In both of those cases, leaky gut activates HPA axis, the hypothalamic-perturitary-adrenal axis,

which increases cortisol and increases anxiety. Right? And we have a counteracting system that when you're anxious, you cannot get aroused. And when you're anxious, right, you cannot get, you know, for men, this is a horrific thing of performance anxiety, right? A lot of men will have that even in the bedroom. But generally, if you're depressed or anxious, you're not going to be aroused.

And the leaky gut increases that as well. I love this as another culprit because so many years it was like we just studied the brain, right? Like even like in the present, we're like, it's about the brain. You have a chemical imbalance in your brain, right? We know so much more now, but it's not even about the brain. It's literally about our gut, the foods we're eating, the environment we're in. And so there's just so many factors that it's interesting because when I started doing this 20 years ago, you really never heard from young men

that often they had erectile dysfunction. It was mostly older men, men in their 40s, 50s. And again, we didn't know as much 20 years ago, but I would think like, okay, well, it's because you're having a drop in testosterone that happens to men and they're like 40s, late 40s. Then when I started hearing from men in their 20s, we're like, oh, well, is it porn? Are they watching porn? Are they, you know, with women, I could say, well, maybe it's the antidepressant, you're on the birth control pill. So there's a lot of different factors, right?

If 10 people have erectile dysfunction or 10 women can orgasm, there's a lot of different reasons why, which is what I'm always helping people to sort of figure it out, right? So I think about the food you eat and if you've had any trouble with your stress or your anxious, anxiety,

you can't live in the place of arousal. But like when we're talking specifically about the gut and the leaky gut and the foods we eat, like I know for me, and this is how we're connected, like I understand like my non-negotiable, I take a probiotic. I didn't know the right kind until I met Just Thrive and they have their very specific scores that I know that you've been a part of gets your gut. That feels good to me. But like, how do we know if this is really the culprit? Have we been barking up the wrong trees, so to speak? Like are there, how do we know? One underlying factor in all of those things, right? Like you mentioned, so in some cases, let's say in one person, it's because of heightened anxiety and another person is because of too much progesterone, not enough estrogen. In one

individual, it could be just inflammation and their receptor sites are blocked for androgen receptors and so on. So there's lots of different mechanisms, but at the end of the day, in all of those mechanisms, there is an underlying gut issue that probably needs to be addressed, right? So to me, that's foundational.

No matter what you're experiencing from a sexual dysfunction perspective, whether it's desire, function, infertility, whatever it may be, you have to address the gut because the gut is at the root of all of those dysfunctions. And so your gut is either the driver of most of those dysfunctions, or it's preventing you from repairing those functions appropriately because your gut is functioning the wrong way. This is one of the things that's becoming quite apparent in just wellness care and holistic cares like it starts in the gut. We'll be back after a short message

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could do these changes. Like it's not just genetic. You absolutely can. That's the exciting part about it. That's the good news. That's the good news, right? You don't have to live with any of these issues and couples who are growing old together, they might both be experiencing

sexual dysfunction for slightly different reasons, but both of them, it's their gut is involved in it. So there are things you can do together as couples and so on that will improve both of your guts in a dramatic way to revert some of these conditions, right? So let's talk about what we can do. And actually, to answer your question about how do you know you have leaky gut and how do you know your gut is at the primary cause of this. In the studies we've done, we find that the vast majority of even healthy individuals, young individuals, average age of 23.

So we did a lot of screening of university students and all that. So healthy individuals, no reported dysfunctions, healthy body weights and all that. So healthy individuals, no reported dysfunctions, you know, healthy body weights and so on. 55% of them have severe leaky gut, right? Because of the environment that we live in, right? So imagine all the packaged and processed foods we eat have pesticides, herbicides, antimicrobials, you know, anti-fungals and all of these growth agents and so on, all of those things kill beneficial bacteria in your gut.

Most individuals walking around have probably had a dozen courses of antibiotics throughout their life, right? Now, antibiotics are important in many cases, but they do create significant damage to your gut microbiome. Most people are still drinking water with fluoride in it, right? We now know that fluoride is a strong antimicrobial. It disrupts your oral microbiome, your gut microbiome, and so on. Stress is so prevalent in our society. Stress is a huge inducer of gut dysbiosis or gut dysfunction. In fact, there was a study in 2015 in the Frontiers of immunology, they showed, and this is what we call a meta-analysis

study, right? So it's a study that reviews a bunch of studies on the topic to come to consensus. They concluded that stress-induced changes in the gut microbiome that lead to intestinal permeability, which is what I talked about earlier, was the number one cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide. It's the number one cause of death. And they finally figured out how, because, you know, we've always known that stress is bad for you. You know that when you're stressed, you're more likely to gain weight. You know when you're stressed, you're more likely to get sick.

You know, all of these things, right? When you're stressed and anxious, you don't want to have sex either. You don't want to have sex. It hurts your relationship. You're not going to have orgasm, right? Exactly, right? So, then what is the molecular connection You don't want to have sex either. You don't want to have sex. It hurts your relationship. You're not going to have orgasm. Exactly. So then what is the molecular connection between stress and all of these dysfunctions? Because stress seems like a brain thing.

So how is it affecting your immune system and all that? Well, as it turns out, stress causes pathogens in your gut microbiome to grow faster than beneficial bacteria. And the reason for that is pathogens that live in your gut naturally are typically controlled by beneficial bacteria, right? There's a good amount of competition in there.

So the good bacteria say, hey, the pathogens cannot grow. They compete against them. Now, when you're in a stress state, what tends to happen is that these pathogens see that as an opportunity, so they are considered opportunistic pathogens, to really express all their virulence factors and their toxins and all that, because they know when the host is in a stressed state,

the host's immune system is suppressed. So they read the stress signals from the host, the cortisol levels and so on, and as a result of reading that, they go, oh my God, this is the right time to proliferate. And they go nuts trying to multiply and they out-compete the beneficial bacteria. So every dose of stress is like a little dose of antibiotics you're taking that's improving the growth condition of the dysfunctional bacteria. So stress in itself is a big driver, right? So we have a lot of drivers for why our gut microbiomes are dismantled.

The other driver is our diversity in our diet. We are horrific at eating a diverse diet, right? So there's lots of very stringent diets. There's carnivore, there's paleo, there's this, there's that. So people are going really minimal on their diet, even if they're not in a mindset of minimizing their diet deliberately, people are on the go. They're not eating a huge array of foods.

Our ancestors ate upwards of 600 different types of foods annually, right? That's the feeding that our microbiome got to develop the diversity that it has. The average Westerner eats like 12 different types of foods annually. Right? So these are all the factors. What do you think? I mean, I know friends are like only on the carnivore diet or on the vegan diet. Like, is it more like just have variety?

Variety is the key, right? So my rules of it, the data supports this without a doubt. And large scale longitudinal studies and all that. The two biggest types of dietary components that are most well studied that have the biggest impact on your overall health and your gut. Number one is a Mediterranean-like diet, which is a diverse diet. So lots of polyphenols, lots of lean proteins, lots of healthy fats, right? A good diversity. And then one of the things about the Mediterranean diet is a large amount of diversity. And then the second one is fiber. Fiber is not super sexy, if people don't get all excited about fiber, but fiber is arguably one of the most important things you can consume in your diet. In fact, up to a million subject

meta-analysis study just a couple years ago came out and they showed for every 10 grams of fiber you add to your daily diet, it reduces your all-cause mortality rate. So that means dying from all causes by 10%. So you want to, your risk of dying by 50%, eat 50 grams of fiber every day. Right? It's so impactful. And why is fiber so impactful, right? Because we don't digest it ourselves. We don't pull any nutrients out of fiber. All of it is going to feed your microbiome. And the vast majority of microbes within your microbiome need plant-based fibers to proliferate. And then they convert those plant-based fibers

into really important compounds like short-chain fatty acids. Short-chain fatty acids have a huge role in intestinal permeability. So they seal up the lining of the gut. They reduce systemic inflammation. And they repair tissues. In fact, short-chain fatty acids increase in women, for example, increase androgen receptors in the vagina, in erogenous zones and all that,

which will increase your sensitization during sexual encounters, right? So then things just feel better. How do we get the short-chain fatty acids? Where do we get those from? So the short-chain fatty acids come mostly from microbes in your gut producing them by digesting fiber. So you have to eat the fiber. I got it. So the fiber is the key. When you talk about the kids, the young people in their 20s who were healthy otherwise,

but you still found that, what was it, 55% of them still had a leaky gut. I used to think that when I took an antibiotic, you had to wait to take probiotics till after I've learned that that's different now. But also so many times I never did. Like I've probably been on points a year I was on an antibiotic for many, many years. It never comes back. Is that true? Like you take one or few rounds. It's always a little bit like it affects, it affects your microbiome, it affects your gut. And then you never, if you don't ever do anything to remediate that, and then they just build on each other, right? Yep. And what you said is the key. So you have to do something to remediate the damage, and you can.

If you don't do something effectively, then you will remain in a damaged state, and then the next round of antibiotics you take, maybe years later Will further progress the damage right to a point where your gut is so imbalanced and so dysfunctional that you're not getting a whole lot of the beneficial effects of the gut So so you do need to remediate it but you can and that's that's part of the beauty of of the gut because it's an Ecological problem, right? It's not a genetic problem. It's not like your genes are messed up, which means you can't change your genes. It's an ecosystem problem, no different than if your garden out back is messed up. You have tools that you can do to terraform your garden. You can absolutely do that with your gut. And we could set, you know, say, I like to think of it as five pillars of things you have to do. You

have to do something in each one of these pillars, work cumulatively, then you'll have a profound effect on changing your gut. So the five pillars are... This is what we can all do for a healthier gut and healthier sex life. Yep, absolutely. And it'll help you in every aspect of your life, right? Because the gut controls virtually everything. So pillar number one is food. So like we just talked about with diet, what you want to do is number one, eat more real food. So less packaged stuff, less ultra processed stuff. And I think most people agree and understand that.

But try to diversify your food source, right? Try to get as many fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds and meats and all that into your diet as much as you can. And then get fiber, right? Now you don't want to go from, you know, two or three grams of fiber, like most people eat a day to 50 grams right away. You want to add it in slowly because it takes your gut

some time to get used to the increased amount of fiber. So my rule of thumb is each week add about one or two grams per day of fiber to your diet, right? And one of the easiest way to do it is you can either Google like high fiber foods and add those foods in or I use psyllium husk, you know, like this like organic India and these other companies make some really great organic pure psyllium husk, right? And then just mix it in a glass of water. That's about seven to eight grams of fiber. Drink one of those a day and then the next week drink one and a half of them, and the next week drink two.

So just slowly increase the fiber and diversity. So that's the food side of it. The second pillar is exposure. We need and we are designed to have constant microbial exposure, and that's one of the things we don't do anymore, right? So imagine for the vast majority of human existence, our ancestors live in the land, off the land, with the land, right? And there's a lot of microbes in the environment, in the dirt, in the rivers and streams, in the foods they picked and so on. So we have this relationship where we're constantly putting out and shedding microbes and picking up microbes from the outside world. We now spend 90% of our time in relatively sterile homes and cars and offices

and so on. So getting outside and gaining exposure is really important. My tip for people on that is combine your exercise with being outside as much as you can, you know, go for a walk or run or whatever and trails and all that. And here's a way to enhance that effect. Eat when you're outside, right? So this is like the most intimate and profound way we interact with our environment. Bring a fruit or something with you, whatever you'd like to eat. If you go for a walk outside

and then just sit down in the dirt, don't use hand sanitizer on your hand. Just grab your food and eat it within the environment and be grounded within the environment, right? You will pick up lots of microbes during that it helps your microbiome. So we've got diet. We've got exposure The third one is exercise Right and and you might not understand the connection between the exercise and the microbiome But number one if you do cardio exercise or movements outside, it's gonna help your microbiome. But here's a little tip and trick.

Muscle contraction releases a set of compounds called myokines. These myokines actually have a profound effect on diversifying your gut microbiome, reducing inflammation and sealing up the lining of the gut, right? So myokines are released when you contract your muscles. So do some weight training.

That's really important. So that's number three. Number four is reduce exposure to things that harm your microbiome. So try to clean up your personal care products. Go to a cleaner deodorant and then go to a cleaner lotion. You don't need to sterilize your home. Most surfaces on your home can be clean with a rag and water with a little bit of essential oils.

You can sterilize your toilet if you get chicken juice on your counter, sterilize it. But most surfaces don't need to be sterilized. And then the last pillar are supplements, right? So probiotics, prebiotics, polyphenols, they can all be dramatically helpful. But the key to gut health is doing something in all of these categories. The cumulative effect is what gives you the most profound change and they are not hard things to implement, right? Do that and you will

have a profound change in all kinds of things including your sexual health and function. Are there any things that you say that would avoid that are like, just don't eat these foods or don't do this thing because this has a direct impact on the gut? I mean, I know that it's everything, but anything come to mind?

I gotta tell everybody to stop doing blank. What are you gonna stop doing? Yeah. Yeah, so a couple of things would be, as much as you can avoid non-organic produce. With you. Right? That has an impact. If I would like parents about this, they're like, we're 80 years old, we've gone this long, we don't need organic. I'm like, I'm telling you, it's so important. Yeah. It's so important because what does that do? Well, what that does is it

reduces your exposure to something called glyphosate or Roundup, right? And similar compounds. I actually did, I was part of an in vitro study with King's College in London, where we studied the impact of cheerio levels. So this is like what the EPA designates as safe levels of exposure of these pesticides that are found in cereals, in common breakfast cereals, on a child's microbiome, right?

And this was like a three-year-old pristine microbiome. And what we saw is in three weeks of exposure, this microbiome, instead of looking like a healthy, diverse functional microbiome, started to look like the microbiome of someone with inflammatory bowel disease, right? In three weeks. And imagine if people are eating this stuff with inflammatory bowel disease, right, in three weeks. And imagine that people are eating this stuff forever, for decades, right? So the impact

is very, very significant. And if you can just reduce that, and on top of that, I'll just throw in a second one, reduce your stress, right? So your mindfulness work is going to be really, really important. As I mentioned earlier, stress has one of the biggest effects on your dysbiosis. Right. And so stress management can become really, really important as well for your microbiome. This is mind blowing, Kieran. Thank you so much for all the work you're doing. I'm wondering, is there anywhere in the world or any cities that you can point to that you

think are doing this right? They're like, well, we found that they have healthiest guts in these microbiome and less fewer cases of leaky gut in these parts of the world, or anywhere to look to. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we can delineate them into two different types of cities. So if you look at hunter gatherer tribes today

that still exist, so the Hadza tribe in Tanzania, the Papua New Guinea tribes and all that, this is how our ancestors lived. They have incredibly diverse microbiomes, they have very high oxytocin levels, they have virtually no gut issues, they don't have IBS, IBD, reflux, any of these things that we tend to deal with in the modern world. Those are good examples of how, you know, living with the land, eating more organic, in their case, it's just food, you know, eating a high diverse diet and all that exemplifies an improvement in the gut microbiome. But of course, most people are

not going to go and live like that. So then what's a modern example of that? Two examples. One is in the Mediterranean area. So Sardinia, Italy, is a great area where they have one of the highest rates of centenarians. These are people that live above 100, right? And part of the attribution to why they have such really healthy outcomes late in life is they tend to have microbiomes that are highly diverse. They can look at a 90-year-old's microbiome there, and it looks like the diversity of a 30-year-old's microbiome in the developed world. And it has to do with their diet. It has to do with their purpose, their community,

all of those aspects. And one more area as a big city example is Japan. Japan has some of the most healthy populations, even in really hustle and bustle cities like Tokyo. And here's why. There's a few attributions to it. Number one, a lot of movement. Japanese people are very big on movement, exercise, and so on. Number two, they eat small meals.

They don't overeat a caloric intake. Number three, they eat quite diverse meals. They eat, of course, a lot of fish as we would imagine, but they eat a lot of seaweed, a lot of nuts, a lot of vegetables, a lot of those huge diversity in the diet. And then number four, they have a lot of purpose. Now in the Japanese world, the purpose is about work

and productivity and all that. It's kind of like the blue zones, right? It's kind of like the blue zones, yeah? It's kind of like the blue zones, yeah. And you know, when you look at all the blue zones, I actually was part of producing a docu-series a number of years ago, about six years ago, called the Human Longevity Project. And we actually sent crews to all the blue zones. And part of it was live with them for a period of time and kind of understand all of the behaviors that they have that we're attributing to their longevity. And the thing is, all the behaviors that you can

attribute to the longevity have to do with things that improve the diversity and the health of their microbiome. At the end of the day, if we can just start realigning a little bit of a focus on we have this complex ecosystem that we need and we require to function properly. We need to think about that ecosystem and feed that ecosystem, you know, which is an important part of us. That's gonna start changing people's outcomes quite dramatically, right?

And the five pillars that we talked about, it's not hard to do things within those five pillars, right? We're not asking them to revamp their entire life. You just do one thing in each of those and you'll have a significant impact. Well, I like the way you really break it down because I'm always trying to bring people information here because there's so many ways. Yeah, you could buy a toy, you could do a certain sex position, all the other things, but if you're not getting outside, you're not eating foods that are healthy, you're not taking care of your gut, we're not paying attention to, you know,

even connections, the emotional connection and intimacy and all the things that are gonna combat anxiety, which is the biggest killer of our sex drive and the biggest killer of our gut and our gut health. So this is just really helpful, the work you're doing. Thank you so much for bringing all of this. It's my pleasure. I mean, we are sexual beings.

If we start losing the sexual drive capability, functionality and all that, that really compromises the species. So it's existential for us. So I was very excited to have the opportunity to come and talk about this on your program. And thank you for all the work you're doing on educating people on this side of the coin. Thank you. Well, I think this is just one of the first of many conversations we'll have and I really appreciate you. I'm going to go stand outside for a minute and I'm like, okay, of the coin. Thank you. Well, I think this is just one of first of many conversations we'll have. And I really appreciate you.

I'm gonna go stand outside for a minute and I really am. I'm like, okay, what haven't I done today yet? I'm gonna go outside and feel better in my body and my gut. Thank you so much. My pleasure. And if you wanna try out this game-changing probiotic, just head to JustThriveHealth.com

use promo code, SexWithEmily to save 20% off site-wide. That's Justthrivehealth.com. Use promo code SexWithEmily for 20% off site-wide. Thanks again for joining me today, Kieran. That's it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to Sex With Emily and be sure to like, subscribe and give us a review wherever you listen to the podcast and share this with a friend or a partner. You can find me on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter or X and Facebook.

It's all at Sex with Emily. Oh, and I've been told I give really good email. So sign up on SexWithEmily.com and while you're there, check out my free guides and articles for more ways to prioritize your pleasure And if you'd like to ask me about your sex life dating or relationships call my hotline 559 talk sex That's 559-825-5739 or just go to sexwithemily.com slash ask Emily was it good for you email feedback at sexwithemily.com email me at feedback at sexwithemily.com. All right, Valentine's Day is coming and if you're wondering what to get, don't worry,

I got you. I put together a special Valentine's Day gift guide filled with my top picks for pleasure, connection, and of course, unforgettable nights that you can have all year round. Whether you're shopping for a partner, a friend, or yourself because, you know, self-love always in season, these are the absolute best gifts to have. Head to SexWithEmily.com and check it out now or just click the link in the show notes. Happy Valentine's Day!