The Rich Roll Podcast - The Godfather of Probiotics on Facts Vs Fiction, The Microbiome, & The Power of Microbes To Heal

Episode Date: July 25, 2024

Dr. Gregor Reid is a world-renowned microbiologist, author, and the scientist who defined “probiotics” for the UN/WHO. This conversation explores the world of beneficial microbes and Dr. Reid’s groundbreaking perspective on health, emphasizing probiotics’ power to complement medical approaches. We discuss Dr. Reid’s journey, his scientific philosophy, the potential of probiotics in preventing various conditions, the importance of embracing microbial diversity, the role of fermented foods, finding solutions through microbial interventions, and many other topics. Dr. Reid is a visionary. This exchange is a masterclass in microbial science with far-reaching implications for human and environmental health. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors:  Bon Charge: Use code RICHROLL to save 15% OFF 👉 boncharge.com Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF your first purchase and get free two-day shipping with 3 six packs or more👉 gobrewing.com  On: Enter RichRoll10 at the checkout to get 10% OFF your first order 👉on.com/richroll Waking Up: Get a FREE month, plus $30 OFF  👉wakingup.com/RICHROLL  Meal Planner: For customized plant-based recipes 👉meals.richroll.com Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

It could be unbelievably impactful if people took probiotics. You could significantly reduce the use of antibiotics, the time people are off work, their respiratory infections. We should be teaching doctors probiotics, nutrition, microbiome, these concepts that are absolutely integral to our life. We have a society that is terrific at ploughing chemicals into the environment and not great at helping beneficial microbes prosper. How do we get beneficial microbes into our systems? Probiotic products are all the rage.

But what precisely is a probiotic? Why are they important? What do they do? And what use cases for them await discovery? And what do we need to know to distinguish a garbage product from an effective one? Well, who better to ask these questions than the guy who actually helped author the globally accepted definition of the word itself, the word probiotics. Dr. Gregor Reed is a microbiologist who has devoted his entire career to understanding

the microbiology of probiotics and developing applications for microbes to improve both human and planetary health. As the former president of the International Scientific Association of Probiotics and Prebiotics, as well as the current director of the Canadian R&D Center for Human Microbiome and Probiotics, his contributions to this field are extraordinary. I got a couple more things I would very much like to mention before we dig into this one, but first. And I devoted so many episodes of this podcast to the unreal benefits of an alcohol-free lifestyle. Why? Because even if you don't have issues with booze and suds, no amount of alcohol is good for you.

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and a team of craft nutrition coaches at the ready to guide you. And you get all of this for just $1.90 a week. So to learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. Okay. Today, Dr. Reed decodes all things probiotics. We dispel misconceptions and dissect facts from fiction on all things microbiome, gut health, and more. All of which is more thoroughly elaborated in his book, Probiotics, A Story About Hope, which I gotta say is a surprisingly fun and entertaining read. So place that slide under the microscope, focus the lens, and let the discovery begin. Gregor, it's a pleasure to have you here today. I'm so excited to talk to you. We were introduced by Ara Katz, the co-founder of Seed. I think at the top, it's important just for the sake of

disclosure and transparency to say that you're on the scientific advisory board of Seed. Seed is a really great partner of ours here on the podcast. So we have to just sort of make that disclosure, but we're not here to really talk about Seed. We're here to just sort of make that disclosure, but we're not here to really talk about seed. We're here to talk about probiotics in general, the science of probiotics. And so thank you for joining us today. It's my honor. Happy to be here. So let's start with some real basics. Like when we're talking about probiotics, what are we talking about? What is a probiotic? I know people don't like scientific

definitions, but the definition that came out of that meeting in Argentina, which was actually set up because the Argentinian government had heard people talk about probiotics and they said, well, what are they? And they asked the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization

of the United Nations, if they could get a panel together to tell them what it really was. And the definition was live microorganisms that when administered in adequate amounts confer a health benefit on the host. So they have to be live. They have to be administered. And that to me was a very important word because everyone thinks that you can only swallow a probiotic and it's only for your gut.

In fact, it can be for your mouth, it can be for your skin, it can be for the urogenital tract, etc. Inadequate amounts. And people always say, well, what's an adequate amount? And you'll see companies say, well, I've got $25 billion and we've got this. You don't need $25 billion if you only need a billion. And so you have to show what the adequate amount is. Confers a health benefit on the host.

So that means you have to prove it. And it's not a case of, oh, I had some this morning and it's changed my life. No, no, no, no, no. How do you prove it? So you need to have a study where it compares something with a placebo or with a drug that you're looking at. And unfortunately, a lot of companies don't do this.

And so a real probiotic has had human studies, if it's a probiotic for humans or if it's honeybees or another host, same thing. And you have to show what you expect from this organism. And so you have to define the organism. Now, people get all confused with this because they'll look in a shop and they'll say, okay, yeah, this has lactobacillus in it. Oh, it must be probiotic.

Well, no. And so the example I give is you and I, I've got a chance to go for dinner with George Clooney tonight. Would you like to come? And most people will say yes. We get to the restaurant and it's an 82-year-old guy from Alabama. His name's George Clooney. I didn't tell you who I was really going to meet. And so you have to define that organism.

And then you have to prove that that organism or the collection of them do something. And so people then ask me, well, which probiotic should I take? I can't answer that question because I'd have to find out why is it they're taking it. I wish I had a simple answer for you, what is a probiotic? But it's not as simple, and yet it should be. It should be that something that is named probiotic has been tested in humans, it's been shown to have an effect, and this is the effect you can expect if you take it. It wasn't that many years ago

that nobody had even heard of probiotics, let alone we're talking about them, and now it's been so thoroughly commodified that all manner of consumer products have the word probiotic on their label, and not just foods. We're gonna get into the regulatory aspects of all of this, but it's become so profuse

that it is devoid of any meaning whatsoever. And it leaves consumers even well-educated or the most well-intentioned among us, and I would include myself in that group, like trying to make the right decision, but really not being able to know who to trust or where to turn because there is no true oversight. And because by its very nature, this is so much more complex than meets the eye. Yeah. If you are trying to confer a health benefit, you have to be careful what organism you pick. I mean, I went to a store here yesterday

and I saw this product that had bacillus strains and it said it was selected for women's health. Women don't have bacillus in the vagina and why enough would you put these organisms in the vagina? It seems to me that the company had no rationale for picking the strains and then they tell a story. Well, it's okay to tell a story,

but tell it with, here's the organisms, here's what they do, here's why you should be taking them, here's the expectation of what will happen. And it's difficult because you don't want to go, I don't want to see it go to the extent

that there's a government overseer and then things become super expensive to develop and you can't say anything about the product. I mean, the European Food Safety tried to do that, which I wasn't very happy with and we'll talk about later. But it is difficult for a consumer to look at a product on a shelf and know. It's very difficult. Now, I've tried in my book to explain what it is you could look for.

There are websites like ISAP, which is a wonderful organization that has got blogs and information on it that helps people. But if you do a Google search, ISAP doesn't come up first. The thing that comes up first is a company who's smart, who knows how to get number one in the 10 group. Sure, it's whoever's paying for that placement. And it's generally just products.

You're not going to get the best advice rising to the surface on the first page of your Google search. Yeah, and unfortunately, you don't get it from Harvard Medical School or Cleveland Clinic either, as I pointed out in my book. I mean, when you get well-respected organizations like that, why don't they get an expert on probiotics to talk about it and help people? As I say, I go back to your very first question. I don't think I answered it terribly well because there isn't just one sentence that says, this is it.

It must drive you crazy though when you're walking down the grocery aisles or you're in the pharmacy. It drives me insane. I remember an inter-shop in New Zealand, so knowing my knowledge on probiotics and I said, by the way, that product, oh no, it's a wonderful probiotic,

she said. We had a representative of the company in here talking about how wonderful it is. And I said, well, actually, if you look at the product itself and you look at the strains and you go to PubMed and you put the strains in, none of them are studied. And then if you look at the references that that company has put on their website, they're reviews or they're papers from me that have nothing whatsoever to do with the product. And you want people to buy that? The onus shouldn't be on the consumer to have to do all that heavy lifting though. That's the thing. You'd like dieticians and physicians and pharmacists and people in these health food stores.

But unfortunately, in many cases, they don't, in many cases, they don't understand it either. And maybe they've not taken the time to read it. I'm not sure. But if I was a shop owner and I got a product and it said probiotic, I'd be like, okay, where's the data? Show me the data and I'll put your product on the shelf.

But that's not what drives it. It's can we sell it and will people buy it and what's the profit I make? So much of this I feel like can be traced to the fact that this is still in its infancy in terms of understanding and education and of course the commodification of all of it. And one thing that comes across really boldly in your book, Probiotics, A Story About Hope, is the journey that you've been on for decades, where you've been butting up against the calcified medical establishment,

trying to get them to embrace and entertain the validity of probiotics in the medical kind of landscape of treatment and health promotion. And it's been a frustrating many decades for you. Do you feel like that's changing? I think some of it is correct because I think some products are not so worthy of being on the shelf, to be honest. And that draws cynicism. And I think there are clinical studies that show some probiotics don't work. I think that's terrific because then we know not to use them.

But in general, there was absolutely zero interest in a beneficial organism. And I remember I joined Dr. Andy Bruce in 1982, but in 1973, so look how far away that was, he did a study of the urogenital tract of women. And he said that women who have a recurrent urinary tract infection, they not only have E. coli in the bladder, they have them in the vagina and the perineum because they come from the rectum and it's anatomy and that's it. He looked at the controls that never had a urinary tract infection. He said, well, there's lactobacilli there. So if you look back in history, everyone went after E. coli. Can we develop a vaccine,

blah, blah, blah, and it never worked. And he said, maybe they're protective. So that took a physician and an observation and an openness to say, let's investigate it. I think there is more openness now, and probably the microbiome project was partly to help with that because it opened people's eyes. And so I think you'll find that there are more physicians interested, there's more prepared to try different things. But we're not there yet, in part because I think we need a lot more funding for the basic science to understand which strains, how do they work. Let's get technology to find out how they work. So, for example, you've maybe heard of the pill cam.

So the pill cam is you swallow it, it's got a camera at the end of it. Now, why don't we have a camera and then a little device to take a biopsy? That's fine. But then turn the thing around and have a delivery system that you can deliver organisms right to that site. Now, that's an engineering project. That's not a microbiology project. And there's been this sort of lack of communication,

I think, sometimes between the companies that could be really helpful and the companies that are making the product. So Danone or a food company they're not going to go and develop a device like this but wouldn't it be amazing if you could have that type of technology brought in to the delivery of food and dietary supplement or drugs if there are probiotic drugs which there aren't many at the moment but but I have a friend, my colleague who took over from me, Jeremy Burton, and he's looking at really complicated imaging now.

Can you follow a microorganism? So if you take a probiotic, can you follow them through the gut? Well, if you could, imagine, it would open our eyes to where they go, what they do. And he did it in an animal model model and he found some of the organisms at distant sites in the body. Well, does that really happen in humans? If it does, we should know about it. If they produce certain molecules in the small intestine or the large intestine, shouldn't we find out what those molecules are and what they're doing for us? So there's a lot of really cool stuff that we could be getting to and we're just not there yet.

And part of it, I think, is funding and also the bringing together of different expertise. And just a general openness possibility, I think, right? Well, yeah, don't talk about openness, because I was number one in the Canadian grant rejection panel. I mean, really, it was ridiculous. No one cared about probiotics. And ironically, some of the people on the panel who rejected me ended up working on probiotics. But if you don't have an openness to fund some of these studies, how are you going to advance it? The only way is maybe through industry. And industry,

unfortunately, is not doing very much. I don't think they could be doing an awful lot more on mechanistic research one of the things that you said that really kind of solidified in my mind just how big this field is and how important it is was when you said humans are three things you know what i'm, right? Can you explain and elaborate on that? I mean, to me, they're a skeleton and the tissues that surround them and microbes. And we have completely ignored the third piece. Yeah, we have no real intentionality around that third piece, which is big. How many microbes are we host to in terms of in the ratio to human cells? Yep.

I mean, some people say 10 times, 100 times. It doesn't really matter. There's a lot. And we don't know if we should have certain types. I showed this slide of a baby's development. So you see, you know, after a few weeks, and the heart starts beating, and then the brain starts functioning. We haven't done anything to intervene in that

or to understand that process. Now imagine if microbes, through the things that they produce, the metabolites, are influencing that. Wouldn't we want to kind of know and try and understand that? I'm not saying manipulate it because that sounds terrible because then you say, oh, you're manipulating the natural development of a baby.

But we unfortunately have outcomes that are not positive for some babies. And now we're seeing a lot of autism and we're seeing cognitive function impairment and things like that. Well, if there was an understanding of the development of the microbes in the human and what they produce, maybe there's other ways that we can intervene with probiotics. And same in the elderly. You know, you start to see studies now talking about

things that can manipulate cognitive function in the elderly or delay dementia, etc. And there'll probably be a role for microbes in that as well. It's not a magic bullet, but the connection has to be there. We're living on a planet that is a microbial planet. If we wipe ourselves out, guess what? Microbes will still be here. They were here long before us. We came from them. Yeah, this underappreciation of the role that microbes are playing in dysfunction and optimal function. I've just written this piece for the Royal Society of Canada on One Health, but they're interested in One Health. One Health is essentially the health of everything living in the planet. But I wanted to look at the microbial role, and I looked at humans and animals and with colleagues, coral and honeybees, etc. looked at humans and animals and with colleagues, coral and honeybees, etc.

You have to understand that they're part of everything. And if you go into a neonatal intensive care unit, which type of beneficial microbes are entering that unit? None. None. And you look at the oceans and some of the poisons that were pouring into the oceans, which beneficial microbes are we putting in the oceans and some of the poisons that we're pouring into the oceans, which beneficial microbes are we putting in the oceans? So you can take any ecosystem and talk about, wait a minute, we're creating the dysbiosis

by what we're doing, so how do we reverse that? And unfortunately, we don't have many solutions. And I mean, a probiotic application like to coral, which I think is super cool. You go down and you inject probiotics into coral. Now that's great in a small scale, but shouldn't we be looking at a bigger scale than that? And shouldn't we be looking at our waste treatment plants

and some of the toxic compounds that are in there and some of the microbes? And what would happen if more of us took fermented foods and probiotics and put more of beneficial microbes into the waste plants? Would we then do something positive for society? I don't know. But that's the thinking that we have to start looking at. It seems like there would be solutions for those that are willing to look, given the role that microbes play in everything. And it's so interesting and curious that what serves the micro serves the macro

all the way from the very specific acute condition in a premature infant all the way up to ocean preservation. Yep, and as humans, what have we done? And if you look at why the FDA was formed, it was because of snake oil off the back of covered wagons, right? But they're very good at looking at chemicals, antibiotics and drugs. And yet they're really not kind of used to,

and to some extent don't know what to do with beneficial microbes, to be honest. And so we have a society that is terrific at plowing chemicals into the environment. Many of them are beneficial. I'm not saying we should wipe out stock of all chemicals, but we've forgotten what the side effects are. And I remember in our hospital, so this I don't remember many years ago, 15, 20 years ago, the two presidents of our local hospitals were sitting in the room. And I said, you have a crisis in this city of Clostridium difficile. There are people dying in this city with this disease. I said, why don't you get

fecal microbial transplant? Why don't you get a physician in here that can do that? They thought I was an alien, honestly. They looked at me, you nuts? Well, guess what? We got one. The cure rate's 90%. Now, that's thinking outside the box. That's saying antibiotics didn't work. In fact, they may have caused the problem. How can we use microbes to try and sort it? Now, we don't fully understand what the microbes do, and that's a whole other topic. But what I'm saying is you have to think outside the box and realize that we have been great at pushing chemicals and not great at helping beneficial microbes prosper. Do you think that there's a bias against this type of intervention that might have something to do with the legacy of germ theory, where we decided that, you know, basically any and all kind of invading

microorganisms are a potential threat. And so we then assume or approach this with greater trepidation because we perceive a threat level or a harm level that actually isn't rooted in truth or reality. I'm sure that's part of it. I remember watching a television show in the States many years ago, and there was a woman. She said, this is terrible. My baby is crawling on the carpet at the door. Oh, my God, we can't have that because they're picking up these terrible organisms.

Well, actually, there's other places in your house where there's organisms that maybe they shouldn't be picking up, but why are you so scared of organisms? I mean, yes, we should be scared of pathogens, and especially now viruses are going to be a threat to our civilization, but we've forgotten that we're carpet bombing when we give some of these antimicrobials, and that's not good anywhere. Right.

We want wide exposure to a wide variety of environments, pets, dirty carpets, crawling around in the mud in the backyard or whatever. All of this is serving the better health of the microbiome and the gut flora, etc. I mean, we've created a society where a chicken probably has salmonella on it. So you can't have the baby crawl around if you've cut chicken, right? Well, we as a society created that. Why did we do that?

Why don't we have chickens that don't have salmonella? And then we would have less to worry about. Again, I look at things slightly differently from a lot of people, but if you believe that microbes can be good for us, the question is how can you integrate that feeling into your life and how things are done in the way that you go about life. And that's from raising your kids to preparing meals to having more fermented food in your diet, for example, or finding a fermented food that you actually enjoy,

because not everybody likes kimchi and kombucha. But that comes from, wait a minute, microbes are good for us. It's a mindset shift as much as anything else. And that paradigm shift is going to be required in order to create that openness for greater education, research, et cetera? I said in my book, I gave a lecture to medical students and it was an elective. So, they never had to learn anything about the microbiome and probiotics. But the 75 came to my class. Some of them were reading books in the background. I don't know what they were doing, but

I was happy that at least they were open to it. Because if you don't teach in medical school, how are they going to learn, right? And then they cancelled it because they wanted to have more mental health lectures, which is fine. Mental health is important for medical students. But why did you cancel my lecture? Why didn't you cancel one in salmonella?

We know what salmonella is, right? Or some other thing that is maybe not as important. We should be teaching doctors nutrition, microbiome, probiotics, these concepts that are absolutely integral to our life. It seems like an exciting field to get into if you're a young doctor or scientist, particularly with the advent, the quickly progressing advent of all these technological tools. It would seem to reason that AI could be deployed to study these things because you have massive data sets and all these strains.

How do you make sense of all of these data sets and string the pieces together to come up with some kind of appropriate diagnostic? So I had a talk on this topic, AI in medicine, a few years ago. And I said, you don't have the data. Because the data you have are, okay, all the drugs I'm on, you might get my dietary recall, you'll get my genetics. I never give you a poop sample. I never give you a saliva sample. You don't know any of the microbes in my body. How enough is AI going to come up with answers if we haven't got that basic stuff?

And so that means we have to change clinical practice. And I, again, I said this probably 10 years ago in our hospital, we should be collecting these samples. And when a patient comes in, we should be thinking, how are we going to help this patient's microbiota? Instead, what do we do? Nothing. We give them drugs or we treat them.

And I remember I got a colonoscopy and I said to the doctor, okay, you flushed out all my good organisms. How are you going to get them back in for me? He thought I was an idiot. Well, that's common. But in the concept of a hospital, in our hospital at one point, they told us that the daily food budget for a patient was like 50 cents. Well, wait a minute. If you have a patient who's seriously ill, shouldn't you be looking at beneficial microbes

and nutrition to help them recover? And studies I cite in the book about in Germany, they were doing that. Guess what? They had less infections. They were out quicker. They had a better outcome in the patients. So why aren't we following these protocols? There's this recalcitrance, there's this resistance that doesn't make sense to me within the hospital setup. We're brought to you today by Bonn Charge. Closing in on 58, I have spent a lifetime in the sun without much thought to skincare, I got to admit. And when I hit 50, that was sort of a wake-up call. COVID-50, that was sort of a wake-up call. And although I may be late to this game of skincare health,

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I mean, what's so interesting about this book is I thought it was going to be this very dense science primer on probiotics. And it really serves as part memoir, partly a book about golf and golf and life, but it's also this letter to young scientists and medical doctors. And you do that through telling your own story. So where did this interest in probiotics begin? Like walk me through the journey. Well, as I said, Dr. Bruce had done this observation and I joined his lab in 1982.

I did my PhD in New Zealand and I came to Canada. And he really felt the lactobacillus had a role in protecting women against urogenital infections. And if you think about it to this day for 50 years, we haven't done anything for these patients. The antibiotics that you get for an E. coli infection are not specific for E. coli. Ideally, they should be. No, they kill other organisms. And so this concept of at least promoting the beneficial microbes, if not utilizing them to our benefit,

was really his idea. And we started studying the organisms. And of course, if I bring that up till today, there's young scientists today that are coming up with pioneering breakthroughs that the rest of society or the community will say are ridiculous. And if they really believe in them,

and if the data is supportive, they shouldn't be put off. Now, I'll give an example. In urology, there's a guy called Don Coffey. He's a brilliant scientist from Johns Hopkins. And he was chairing an NIH panel. He told us this story in Toronto. And he said to the panel, before I even look at

the grants in front of me, I'm going to tell you right now, I'm going to take the craziest idea that has been put forward, and I'm going to fund it. He goes, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. So anyway, this idea came up. He says, this is the one I'm funding. No, no, come on, you're crazy. This is a simple experiment. It's not going to work, blah, blah, blah. So he finally got the panel to do a visit to the lab and they eventually approved it. This was cisplatinum. Now that's a major cancer drug. So it took that person to go against everyone else to take a shot at this. And there aren't enough people like that. to take a shot at this.

And there aren't enough people like that. And our story was the number of times we got kicked back and kicked back and kicked back and kicked back. And so it takes courage. It takes belief, which I was very fortunate to work with a surgeon. And I think we need more scientists and surgeons and physicians working together on this.

We worked in kidney stones and there's geologists that maybe we should work on as well. And so it was a long time and it shouldn't have been. And I think we could have probably cut the time back in 10, 15, 20 years, maybe. We started in 1982. The definition is 2001. Well, that's 20 years later already. The definition is 2001. Well, that's 20 years later already. And even after that, it's taken another 20 odd years and we're still fighting to get grants that will help us understand this and companies that will invest back into the products.

But essentially, some 40 odd years ago, I wouldn't call it a light bulb moment, but you have this experience where you realize that there is efficacy in treating UTIs, urinary tract infections with microbes. And you're seeing great results with a condition that has been treated a certain way for a very long time with very poor results. Hence ensues a very long period of time of frustration

because you're thinking like, this is working, why can't we implement this more broadly? And perhaps even more importantly, we should be looking at the efficacy of microbial treatments to treat any manner of acute or chronic conditions. Prevention rather than treating. Okay. Prevention. So we did look at treating in patients who were disabled

and couldn't control their bladder and therefore had E. coli sitting in the bladder. And we tried to put lactobacilli into the bladder to treat them. But in general, it's for prevention. But there are so many conditions that you can prevent. So the simple application of beneficial microbes was just ridiculed. I think one of the more profound examples of this

is the efficacy of probiotics in treating necrotizing enterocolitis, which you have direct experience with, NEC. Yeah. Explain what that condition is, where it arises, and why probiotics have proved effective. Right. So, again, it's prevention.

So, it started in 1992. My wife had twins. I sat outside the delivery room. My first baby rushed by me. The next one rushed by me straight into the intensive care unit. They were there for five weeks. Thankfully, they came out great. But during that time, another baby developed necrotizing enterocolitis and the curtains went round the baby and eventually it died, which is awful. So why did that baby get it? Well, when you're born by cesarean section and you're premature by a good 10 weeks or 15 weeks

and you're low birth weight, you can imagine the intestine's not being developed. It's still got a long way to develop. So in that room, that NICU, what beneficial microbes are getting in, as I said earlier, none. Can we give these babies some beneficial microbes? No. Breastfeeding helps because breastfeeding, and we showed, we studied milk, and we showed that there are beneficial microbes in human milk, which is great, but it's not enough. So, these babies get extremely sick. They often have major surgery.

They may have their bowels removed. There's a breathing problem that occurs. Is that correct? Well, you get multi-organ failure. The breathing problem that, in fact, our daughter had was solved by another invention called surfactant, which was miraculous. It was like night and day. My baby's whole body was going like this trying to breathe and then they get surfactant and whoosh.

And that was an invention by a colleague of mine at the University of Western Ontario. But I said at the time, can't we introduce beneficial microbes, probiotics, to prevent neck? Well, that was 92, nothing happened. And then we had a debate, which is on YouTube.

It's gone viral. It has at least 500 views. So... Like you two at the sphere. Yeah. So I've debated with the physician who essentially is in charge of NICU. And it was his decision whether they introduce these or not, right? That's the system. And I won the debate, of course, but nothing happened

until a person in Montreal took this product. It's called Flora Baby and said, let's try it. So they tried it and lo and behold, it started to prevent neck. And so my colleague said, right, we'll bring it into London, Ontario. prevent NIC. And so my colleague said, right, we'll bring it into London, Ontario. So this was 2014, 2016. And about two years ago, I said to him, look, where's the paper? Because we have to study and see if this actually worked. And he said, well, it was submitted and then it didn't get accepted. And then nobody followed up. I said, right, I'm going to look at this. This needs to be published. So we looked at it, but not only looked at what happens back at that time,

but what happens since. And so you can follow the rate of NIC. And essentially, we stopped NIC from happening, not totally. What percentage of premature infants suffer from this condition? Well, in our case, it was about 5%, 6%. Turns out in Canada, there's a hospital that's at 15%. That's one in six babies.

I mean, that's absolutely ridiculous. Of course, antibiotics aren't going to help. They don't prevent it. If you get infection, of course, you have to treat with antibiotics. But what have you done to the baby? So it's never seen mom's vaginal microbes or intestinal microbes. It's in an environment where it's got tubes in it and lines and it's

got an intestinal tract that's not fully developed. We have to find a way to help it develop and protect it from these pathogens that are everywhere. And nurses carry multi-drug resistant staphylococcus. It's not their fault, but they're in an environment where these organisms are prevalent. So anyway, we introduced it, the rate plummeted. And then just in the last couple of months, we had this disastrous news. There was a baby that died in the States from a completely different organism. I don't know the case.

I don't know what happened. But it was another case of, my goodness, a probiotic seems to have maybe killed this baby. Now, I'm all for safety. Because let's face it, you're putting a live organism into a baby. And so my thing would be, let's find out the antibiotic that can kill that organism just in case for some reason it takes over

and causes infection. I don't know if that was done or not, but nothing is 100% safe. We have to monitor carefully. But the company that sold this product, Florababy, said we could take it off the market. Just reacting to that incident and

just better to just pull it? Yeah, well they said it's strategic and that's not the reason. And this was a product that essentially eradicated NIC for the most part. Well, it was significantly preventing NIC. The physicians in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Toronto, et cetera, they're going to study it and make sure that was the case, which is absolutely the way they should do it.

But in general, it was. And this physician who I debated sent me an email and he says, oh God, please not go back to the rates that we had before we used this. That would be terrible. And I said in the book, I mean, you almost had to have the case where you sue because your baby died

because they weren't given probiotics. Now, that's a horrible thing to think that sometimes that's what scares hospitals into saying, okay, we should look at it. And all we're asking for is look into it, consider it, because your alternative isn't working. And the situation now in Canada, there's a product, I think, in Australia, another one in Britain. There are countries that are using this. They're just like us, and yet we're not.

So we're trying to get them into Canada. Otherwise, the babies potentially could die. What are some of the other major use cases for probiotics? Well, there's obviously the intestinal things, so diarrhea, constipation, which is kind of strange that you could have both, but irritable bowel syndrome. Inflammatory bowel disease, it can help prevent,

but now we've got such amazing drugs, biologics they call them, that people are probably not going to use that as a first option. They'll use the biologics. In Crohn's disease, probiotics have not prevented or been useful for Crohn's. My thing for that is it doesn't mean you don't take a probiotic

just because you have Crohn's. Take the biologic, but maybe the probiotic can be useful for maybe side effects or something else or just general gut health. It's not going to change your Crohn's per se. There's studies showing that you can reduce respiratory

tract infection rates. We did a paper, Irene Lenoir did this paper in Canada, the US, and I think she's done one in Europe, and showed that if people took probiotics, you could significantly reduce the use of antibiotics, the time people are off work, their respiratory infections. antibiotics, the time people are off work, the respiratory infections. And then it comes down to individual studies. So I don't like to kind of just say, you know, probiotics will solve all IBS or they'll solve all diarrhea or because it's too broad a statement. If you have the right strains in the right situation, the products are made well and tested properly, yeah, there are applications to intestinal tract, there's applications to skin, there's applications to oral cavity and halitosis, there's applications to urogenital tract. So it's different parts of

the body it can affect. What are some of the longer term or more moonshot oriented use cases that you can imagine? Like forecast yourself, you know, 50, 60 years from now. How are probiotics being used in a way that you would like to see? Well, it's funny you said moonshot because I think we need to have them in space. If you're going to go to Mars, you better have some kind of organisms because you're going to get kidney stones. And if we don't prevent kidney stones, you don't want renal colic

in a tiny little capsule heading to Mars. I think we should learn how to create fermented foods or probiotic enhanced foods in space. But it probably, in other diseases, I can see it complementing drugs so my colleague did a study with fecal transplant plus an anti-cancer agent and the combination seemed to be quite helpful and so maybe there are organisms that you want to target what was it that that helped fight the cancer well it was a t-, a special type of T cell.

So then you get an organism or organisms that target those T cells, upregulate them, and then help the drug fight the cancer, right? So I can see a complementary activity. We also will, I think, see genetic manipulation. That's a longer timeframe because there's all kinds of safety issues and ethical issues but if you know that an organism is capable of producing or blocking an agent

imagine if they blocked amyloids or prevented dementia you'd want to take that organism so maybe we have to manipulate it for that to happen or maybe we'll get lucky and find in fact there's an organism that's doing that

I see applications more targeted, manipulated, and in combination with drugs. Are there labs that are doing this work, looking at this? Is there somebody or a team at NIH, for example, who is giving this the thought and focus that you think it deserves? I think there are labs. I mean, as I said, my colleague's looking at complementing anti-cancer. And he did a study in multiple sclerosis. He's looking at other important and chronic diseases.

I mean, fecal transplant at the moment is very crude. And my colleague, M. Alan Verko in Guelph, said, why don't we, instead of all these organisms and poop, why don't we just take 33 or 24 or find out the right ones? Well, the problem with doing that is you're guessing and they may not be the right ones. And then when you take poop, and that's a horrible thing to say,

but these organisms are together for a reason. I used to say that when I gave a lecture to students, I said, why did you sit next to that person? Because every time I come in here, I'm sitting next to that person because they're a friend or because you know that they'll share their lunch with you. I mean, these things are happening in natural ways.

And so the organisms are doing the same. They're in collectives. And they're there for a reason. I've actually proposed that we do studies to find out what's the codependencies? Why are you and I always in the same room, right? So when you take 24 strains and you have to grow them separately

and then essentially dry them and then put them all together, they've missed all that connection. So I think we need to somehow, maybe it's using huge chemostats where we grow them and they get to be with the other organisms that are complementary and then we put them in. That takes, well, takes time and chemostats. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I do admit to being fascinated by fecal transplants. I can envision a future in which there are very tony salons that you would go into and you would get your very specific fecal transplant taken care of. I mean, are these capsules or are we actually inserting these through the rear end? Like, how does this work? And I understand, like like the complexities of it, but you also mentioned in your book the idea of super donors,

like these people that just have the high powered, you know, fecal matter poop that holds the power to, you know, prevent and maybe even cure disease. I think field transplant has been terrific for C. diff. And I think that there's enough to show that there's other potential. The problem is, in my view,

first of all, to find the donor. And we found that it was, we got one donor of 46. 46 people that come and say, I'm totally healthy and they weren't. And so, and then if your donor goes to Mexico on holiday and gets a GI disease, then you've lost the donor. So that's the first problem.

The second problem is the donor for C. diff may not be the best one for you with chronic kidney disease. And yet we're doing those studies. We're taking that same super donor and testing them completely different disease. Multiple sclerosis has nothing to do with C. diff. And what I would like to see is, okay, let's spike the FMT. Now, you can't do that because then that becomes a drug and everything is all crazy. So I say, okay, if you can't spike the FMT, get the person to take a probiotic at the same time as the FMT. I'll give you an example.

Chronic kidney disease is a huge problem worldwide and we've been finding that this compound called P-crestle is a toxic compound. Now, if you have organisms in the FMT that reduce P-crestle, that's great. Maybe when you give it to chronic kidney disease patients, that's going to help them. If your FMT doesn't have that signature, why not take a probiotic that does at the same time? So that's complementing and being much more specific about the disease that you're treating. I think that's the way to go. Because as I said, unless you get a big

chemostat that is creating a consortium that is now well developed and then you're putting it in, I don't think it will work very well. And how do you give it? We now give it with capsules. Our hospital, I think, is probably number one in Canada for FMT. And so we put it in these little capsules

and you swallow them. Horrible thought, but yeah. There might be a little education around that to get people comfortable with that notion. Yeah, I think it's about 26 capsules. I mean, I would find that tough, but if you've got a nasty disease, you'll do anything.

And they don't burst, and it's a perfectly good way to do it. But that's laborious, and guess what? Who pays for it? The hospital doesn't pay for it. Grants don't pay for it. The patient doesn't pay for it. So that's a problem with the system.

Again, if you're introducing these things, why shouldn't they be part of insurance plans? They're not. Probiotics aren't. And so that, again, limits the type of people that are able to get that. It's a new category. It's not a drug. It's not a supplement.

It's not a food. And we don't have regulatory bodies that are with the right amount of experience and education to even contend with how to make good decisions around this? So in this Royal Society document, you put in recommendations. And one of my recommendations, strong recommendation, is that we have a completely separate institute. Not the Canadian Institute for Health Research, not we have NSERC, it's an engineering research council, not NIH. You have a completely separate institute that starts to look at how do we apply beneficial microbes across One Health.

It could be unbelievably impactful across our society. And they would be looking at things like, what's the rules around fmt who should not get them who might benefit from them and you're not going to take all the strains and and isolate them and and show that you know they'll say oh this has got antibiotic resistance and by giving this fmt you're passing that antibiotic resistance on and it could be terrible in the long run that's not going to happen but you have to sort of have a system that says, this is an acceptable FMT and this is not. That's tough because you're looking at helping the patient today.

And one of the arguments has been that, yes, you've cured my C. diff, but now you've increased my risk of cardiovascular disease because of the organisms you just gave me. We don't know that yet. How would you do that? Well, let's do some studies. And maybe that person needs a completely different FMT in 10 years time. Or it needs a supplementation with a probiotic that reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease. But all of this is microbial, right? And if the people in charge of not only the legislation and the safety and the grant funding, if they have not got their heads around that, it's like gobbledygook. Yeah. I mean, are there enough qualified people to staff up something

like that? What are the barriers to getting an institution like that up on its feet? that? What are the barriers to getting an institution like that up on its feet? I think there are because you would need people that are not just qualified in academic terms, but who have experience with public health issues and who have experience with microbiology and who are open to these things. See, the Europeans, to me, went completely the wrong way. When they started to adjudicate probiotics, they went to this panel that had a million things on their mandate. And they get thrown this and say, all right, go and mandate probiotics. There was maybe one person in the panel that knew anything about probiotics. I mean, that's totally ridiculous. totally ridiculous. Nowadays, I think there are young people who would love to be in this,

who have modern day skills on knowledge of science and genetics and microbiology and medicine that would drive this forward with some guidance from mentors. So I don't doubt that the people are there. I think the willpower is not there and it's mostly because people have their head in their sand. It's such a complex field. Our human brains want to think of this in binary terms. I take this and this happens, but we live in a holistic matrix of, you know, an infinite number of permutations. It's difficult enough with a particular drug

to say this drug will do this. We also have to appreciate all the downstream implications of that, not just side effects, but its impact across a multitude of physiological systems within our body, right? But when you try to have this conversation around microbes, it seems like it then goes up, you know, to a power of 10 in terms of complexity. It does. So a couple of things to that, you know,

I watch CNN, how many adverts come on for a drug. So it starts off, you see the person, they're sick and then they get this new drug. And then for the next 20 seconds, it tells you all the things it could do to you, including kill you. And I'm thinking, what? You've just approved this drug, but it can kill me or give me all these awful side effects. So if we're prepared to do that and take a gamble,

why are you taking the gamble? Because you're hoping that the number of patients to treat is enough to benefit. And so the risk is low enough, but the benefit's high enough. you're hoping that the number of patients to treat is enough to benefit. And so the risk is low enough, but the benefit is high enough. So we could easily do the same with microbes. And you pick things that are the easiest to monitor, right? I mean, Clostridium difficile in a way was an easy thing because the downside is death or horrible chronic condition, and the upside is

they're back to normal. And you could pick a few conditions that are not big risks because you don't want people to die from the intervention, and you could test them. And this comes back again to one of my peeves about granting agencies. If you want a grant in microbiology, you really should be doing mouse work, which I think is a complete, almost a complete waste of time. People will criticize me. But why not put it into human studies? Why not pilot human studies?

The more human studies we do, okay, it's a bit more expensive. But there's some conditions you could do with low risk. And then you get more information about the potential and therefore you get the chance to start to see some of the concerns. I mean, I know that criticals, oh, well, do you want to be a guinea pig? Right. Scary. Yeah, it's scary. But you're taking fermented foods. How many organisms are you swallowing every day just from your saliva? We're taking lots of organisms every day. So,

as long as there's some good science behind it and we know a bit about the organisms, it's probably not going to kill you. And let's see if it helps you. It seems like if the commercial incentives were adequate enough that that would expedite all of this. So, I can't help but wonder whether part of the resistance or the pumping of the brakes in this field might have something to do with it posing a threat to the pharmaceutical establishment. Is your sense that there's resistance from big pharma

to explore this because it would mean inroads on their core product line? Or, you know, why not one of those large pharmaceutical companies understanding that there's something to be learned here that could be of benefit? So, I obviously met with many pharmaceutical companies when we were developing our strains. And the thing that stood out to me is that there was zero knowledge about microbes. And so I get back to the point, they didn't understand that we are skeletons, tissues, and microbes. And so they were very comfortable with something they can chemically synthesize in a lab

and show the structure and then develop it. So you have to change the people in the companies. Secondly, let's look at the price of drugs. And Americans know this better than anyone. The price is horrendous. And they always say it takes 800 million or a billion dollars to develop a drug. And therefore, we need to charge huge amounts for it. No, no. That's because you had so many failures that cost you a company, lots and lots of money. And why did you have all these failures, many of them drug failures? And the drugs that are coming out are often Me Too drugs.

They're not huge leaps. And so unless they recognize, wait a minute, we're already wasting lots of money. Why not create a spinoff company within our company that just looks at this? And that means understands the regulations that means potentially going to congress and saying you had the deshay act we need to upgrade this we need to change this completely because guess what microbes can prevent disease but right now you're not allowing it to

happen with the the system that you have so the regulatory system has to change. But in terms of profit, so the company that I talked about with NEC, that company that originally sold Florababy was sold for $291 million. You don't think there's money in microbes? Of course there's money in microbes. Companies are making lots and lots of money in microbes. They're just not investing it back into research. I'm not sure pharma is worried about microbiology.

I think they have been so set in their ways with chemicals that they've not made the big enough leap. It seems like it's an inevitability at some point, though. Absolutely. With the right people. Because those companies are so large and powerful and their lobbying arms basically hold sway over the regulatory landscape and the legislative landscape in Washington, D.C. and governments around the world, that if you want to change the regulatory landscape, it's almost as if you're going to have to find a way to partner with these huge companies. Otherwise, it's David and Goliath. Yeah, I think there's already signs that they're coming in. They're interested.

It's a totally different entity to a chemical. There's all kinds of issues with it. I'm not saying that it's easy, but we need the big companies with money because the potential is huge. And as I said to you,

I look at it as one health, not just humans. I mean, I had a K-square friend of mine that developed this. Essentially, it's an alternative to fentanyl without any of the side effects. Amazing, right? But he can't get it. He needs $200 million. And so they're looking at Saudi Arabia because there's lots of money and there's many reasons. But anyway, one of the things the Saudis said, oh, it might help camels. So camel racing is a big deal in Saudi Arabia. There might be different ways that you get the money. Where is the motivation? Where is the motivation? Yeah. And you look at horses. Most horses seem to die from colic. Imagine we haven't solved colic. How crazy is that? How many horses? Look at the Kentucky races and the money

in racing in America. Huge. Why haven't we looked at microbes to solve that? And the honeybee situation is our food supply. Why the heck are we not plowing money into that? Well, you have looked at that. I want to hear a little bit more about that because I think that's super interesting. Yeah. So, we had a big project in Africa. We essentially taught local mothers how to make probiotic yogurt using this GR1 strain. And we got some money from the Canadian government. I think it was 260,000 people a day were getting this. It was amazing, fantastic. And what we had done was we empowered them. We weren't landing with a plane every week. We said, here, you do it. We were going to revolutionize, I think, the value chain of food in Tanzania.

And the government approved their grant. And then Canada said, oh, no, sorry, we don't have money anymore. You know, they had money. But what did that value chain look like? Well, the value chain in a way starts with honeybees. If you don't have the food and the honeybees pollinating the food, then guess what? Your value chain can die pretty quick. And we did our study in Tanzania. Because I was there, I looked at the lake. So there's 40 million people living on Lake Victoria. And I knew that some people were trying to get gold out the streams and they use mercury to try and capture the gold. So I said, I bet you there's mercury in the water and in the fish. So sure enough, my student Jordan found there was these small silverfish that everyone was eating had mercury in it. So then sure enough, my student Jordan found there was these small silver fish

that everyone was eating had mercury in it. So then we said, wait a minute, people are going down to buy these fish and they're eating them and then they're getting pregnant and they have high mercury levels in them. So what if we gave a probiotic yogurt at the same time they took the fish?

Would you have less uptake of the mercury because lactobacillus actually bind to mercury so maybe the lactobacillus bind to it and then you poop it out anyway we did a study and lo and behold we reduced mercury and arsenic levels right so then i thought so that's mercury as heavy Well, what about pesticides? Because, I mean, you've probably seen in the news, isn't it China that's using paracet? I mean, we saw them all the time. These guys, they've got the pesticide in the backpack and they're spraying, and these are toxic chemicals.

And I said, could lactobacilli or probiotic strains do something about pesticides? So, lo and behold, we said, well, we'll do a few studies. And honeybees, and I had a colleague, Graham Thompson, who's an expert. I know nothing about honeybees, right? So I had the idea, and he came along. He said, well, we'll try it. And we said, right, which strains of probiotic could we use?

So one of them we used, because we did studies in Drosophila. Drosophila is a fruit fly. It mimics some of the honeybee anatomy. And in the fruit flies, we made them live longer by giving them some strains. And what the pesticide did was, essentially, it wrecked the immune response. So by bringing in these lactobacilli strains

we stopped that so you no longer damage the immune response and therefore you've made them live longer and then uh we had a third strain that was indigenous to the honeybee so then then we said well how do you deliver those strains and test them in the field well it turns out in canada certainly beekeepers use paddies. And it's because we have winters. I don't know if they use them in New Zealand, but they use them in Canada. So just before winter and just after it. And it's essentially sugar. It's like a pancake, but it's sugar. And so why don't we put the probiotic strains in with it? Because then the bees will eat them. Well, we did that. Lo and behold, we got great results. So then we said, what about

California? Almonds. So there's a research group at UC Davis and we said, can we do a study here? Yeah. So let's do two things. Let's test the paddy, I call it a bio paddy versus a spray. So have the organisms in a spray and then, you know, you lift the, see this is a much known with bees, whatever it is. The little spray can thing. No, but you lift the honey thing that I'm sure there's a name for it. The like drawer, the screen. Yeah, the drawer, yeah. And you spray it with the organisms.

Well, we got great results again. The point being that the honeybee populations are being decimated by pesticides and environmental toxins. And without our pollinators, the planet dies. So this is, to me, like an unbelievable breakthrough and discovery. Why is this not basically standard protocol in trying to help our bee friends?

People have tried before to, and unfortunately, a lot of these products, they're called probiotic, but they're dead or they're not really designed properly. And my PhD student, Brendan Daisley,

he's now an independent scientist. And what he's doing, I think is the right thing. Let's try and get the strains that we think are the best strains. So we've shown the concept definitely works. There's var, I think, is the right thing. Let's try and get the strains that we think are the best strains. So we've shown the concept definitely works. There's varial mites, they're little mites that come and attach to the bee,

as well as this P. nebicillus, it's a pathogenic organism. So we can counter them, but are these the best strains? So he's currently working on a few other strains, but then my hope is that what you do is you dry them freeze dry them put them in old sachet which is what we developed for africa for the mamas because these mamas is 50 cents for a sachet they put it in a hundred liters of milk and they can make a

hundred liters of yogurt right so why not let the beekeepers have these little sachets they can put it in their paddy or they can put it in their paddy, or they can put it in with liquid and spray it on, whichever we think is best. And the potential is fantastic. Again, I go back to what we did with our probiotic strains. I want to be sure the thing works before you start rushing to commercialization, but I think it has a lot of potential.

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in the Mississippi Delta, et cetera. Is there logic in looking at those problems from a different angle and trying to see if there's some way of approaching them from a microbial perspective as a solution? I think the answer is definitely yes. Now, there will be critics, and I think it's fair concern to say,

we're not trying to replace the organisms that are beneficial in those environments. Because probiotics don't colonize bees, they don't colonize humans, they don't stay. So what we're trying to do is... They don't colonize our gut either. No. And so what we're trying to do is... They don't colonize our gut either. No. And so what you're trying to do is get the niche back to normal and then you don't need the probiotic anymore, right?

But in the meantime, you do need it. So you have to apply it. Now, Raquel Piaxoto, and she's from Saudi Arabia, but she's done some neat work with coral, which I could not have imagined would be possible. She's sewing it as possible. So if it's possible in coral, which I could not have imagined would be possible. She's showing it is possible. So if it's possible in coral, for goodness sake, imagine what else is possible.

And the amount, as I go back to earlier, the amount of toxins that are in our water supply. So I have a slide that a Dutch group looked at the number of drugs in our water supply. I think in Canada it's something like 100. Now there's trace elements. So let's go back to the drug companies and say, wait a minute. I'm going to bring out, okay, say it's Viagra. This is my Viagra. And you know what's going to happen?

Your lawyer is going to come to me right away and say, no, no, no, no. We've got the patent on this. You can't bring that out. Oh, so you own the drug? You own Vagra? Okay. So you own it. It's in our waste disposal system.

It's in our water supply. It's your responsibility to take it out. Now, imagine if we did that with every drug. We would get them to say, okay, let's trace what you're doing with these drugs and find ways to degrade them, probably using microbes. I mean, it's a bit simplistic and it'll never happen, but it gets back to lateral thinking

and finding ways to use these microbes. It seems like there should be an X prize in this category. You know what the X prize is? To motivate scientists like yourself and basically provide them with the incentive and perhaps the funding and the grant money to look at this to solve our biggest, most existential problems that we face. Well, I mean, people have looked at microbes to degrade oil slicks. So it's not like this is something new. There are microbial ecologists out there. I don't think we've encouraged enough kids to go into that as a career path. I don't think we've encouraged enough new ideas to get grant money to explore it.

And I don't think we have partnered with all the players, and that includes regulators, because we have to be sure it's safe. I mean, you should never undercut safety. And we have to ensure that it works. And so all of that takes a team. We've never created these teams. We're all in little silos.

And the government and then the regulators and the scientists and then the drug companies or other companies, it's slowly happening. And so it's funny, I have a pond and I get lots of these plants grow up in the pond that I really don't want. Well, there's a company in Calgary that sells a product of bacteria that degrades nutrients for these plants.

And so you can clear your pond using microbes. I mean, I think people are getting there with the idea of using microbes rather than a toxic chemical that you dump in the pond and it kills everything. When we think of so many of the gut disorders like ulcerative colitis, etc., these autoimmune diseases, my understanding is that there is a relationship between those or the rise of those and over-prescription of antibiotics. What are your thoughts on the role that antibiotics has played in terms of dysregulating our microbial ecology in our bodies? Yeah, so I do think there's a correlation. Yeah, so I do think there's a correlation. And if you look at babies, the number of antibiotics of babies, especially for earaches, etc.

So we're putting a lot of antibiotics into young kids that I think is not particularly helpful. And in fact, there's studies that say if you've had X number of antibiotics, something like 15, 20 antibiotics, then this will have an impact in your life after 50. I mean, I... There is something about the static nature of the microbiome after a certain age, right? Like the microbiome that you're developing as an infant is kind of the microbiome that you're gonna be living with.

Yeah, but if you've disrupted that, then there's maybe ones you're living with that shouldn't be there or you don't want them there. They remain persistent. Yeah. So I think there's that, but I think there's also the food chain. I remember living in Scotland in August.

We used to go to this place called Isle of Cumbria and I loved August because I could buy pieces of melon, canary melon. And we did a study in Tanzania with a group of people and looked at the hunter-gatherers, and that's what they do. They eat seasonally. Well, now I get canary melon every single day of the year. And so we have globalized their food supply,

and we have unfortunately used a lot of processing and processed foods and fructose, corn syrup, etc. that I think is also contributing. So I don't think antibiotics get the whole blame. I think the food system needs a real change and you're slowly starting to see that happen where you would know more about this than me but where people are bringing out not just organic foods but things that are benefiting our microbes i would like to see more of that because and i think we also need to make it affordable because a guy in london ontario did this study of this school in london that was in the poorest area and had 43 fast food restaurants around it. So what are these kids eating?

Yeah, they're eating fast foods. Yeah, I mean, that's a huge problem. Food deserts, the most impoverished neighborhoods are the ones with the least access to healthy food. And every microbiome gut health clinician that I've hosted on this show, Tim Spector, Dr. Robin Shutkan, Will Bulsiewicz, Dr. Will, they all agree that from a dietary perspective, the key thing is increasing the diversity of plants in your diet and in turn, obviously, increasing the amount of fiber that everybody is eating. Yeah. but also we could make it simpler for people to make their own fermented food.

You can make your own yogurt, but we could make it a bit more attractive, a bit more easy to do, where essentially you could have a little fermenter in your house and you get all the yogurt. I mean, yogurt's a simple thing. It's easy to do. But I fear that we're not making it practical and easy.

I mean, I did a cooking class in school. I don't know if they still do that for all kids, but I think that's a great thing. Why don't we teach kids? Because often parents are, often it's a single mother and they have kids and she's working two jobs and she just doesn't have the time

for cooking elaborate meals, but maybe there are ways that systems could help her. As I said, yogurt, fermented yogurt, that's a whole other societal thing, but it's back to the same philosophy. How do we get beneficial microbes into our systems? One of the questions I've always had that I'm not sure I've ever gotten a sufficient answer that satisfied me is when we go to the market and we're purchasing that yogurt or that kombucha and we're doing it because we know these have probiotics in them

and they're supposed to be good for us. How do we know that those probiotics are even active live samples? Like if a kombucha has been pasteurized or even flash pasteurized, do those microbes survive that? Like have you tested various brands of kombucha? Like what are we actually drinking? So first of all, fermented foods are not probiotic.

So kombucha does not have probiotics in it. That might sound strange, but in order for it to say it has probiotics in it, it would have to say what the strain is and what viable count that strain has and why it's in that. So it might have a lactobacilli in it, but that's not a probiotic. So there's a difference between fermented foods and probiotics. If it's been pasteurized, it's really all the organisms are dead. So in killing those organisms, have they kept the supernatant? And is that a value? Have people studied that? They probably have. I don't know that literature, but I would take kombucha with live organisms in it way ahead of those that are dead and i've seen london ontario has a company uh booch and they had trouble getting their product on the shelf because there was an american product

that was cheaper easier to get and the organisms were dead so I don't think there's been enough studies to say that. The viable count at end of shelf life should be known for yogurts. It should be on all the labels of supplements. But then if you have 24 strains, ideally it should say end of shelf life for each strain and it doesn't. So on a very practical level,

if someone's going to the market and they're picking up a product, a kombucha, a yogurt, what have you, and they're looking at the nutrition facts panel label, what do they want to see? So I would say in a fermented food, look at the viable count at the end of shelf life. That should be helpful.

It's not ideal because it doesn't break down all the organisms that are in it. What are some of the other common foods that someone would pick up at the market for gut health purposes? This idea that they contain strains or probiotics. Well, one of the problems I see is in prebiotics because prebiotics are now a big thing on labels and it seems like every product's got a prebiotic in it. I think there's even one on Avena Skin.

I don't know what that prebiotic does. The thing about that is if you take a prebiotic, in general, you need about 5 grams because the definition of prebiotic requires that it stimulates beneficial microbes to confer health benefit. If you take 2 nanograms, that's not a prebiotic.

Even if it's called inulin, it's not a prebiotic because it's not going to do anything. And unfortunately lots of products on the market have these prebiotics. So I would look at the amount. If you've got five grams in that product, then you can expect that that's going to stimulate the beneficial microbes in your gut. We mentioned earlier the colonization issue. There's this idea that if we take this periodically, we should be okay.

But what is the truth behind what happens when these microbes enter our intestinal tract? Are they taking root? Do they have to be replenished consistently forever? How does that work? Yeah. So organisms that are resistant to bile and stomach acid, that's a plus. So more of them will get through to the small intestine and the large intestine. Not all organisms are resistant to stomach acid and bile. There may be a capsule or a product that gets them past the stomach, in which case you want to know that that exists.

They're then going to multiply. They will produce byproducts and they'll probably leave there's not a lot of studies showing that organisms stay around a long time and that's probably because the body has got its own normal microbes and it doesn't really want new ones to come in i I still find that a little bit puzzling because I would have thought that some of these probiotics would have the potential to become part of the consortium, but that we need more studies to find that out. So they're

going to pass through. I understand the application of probiotics for preventing or perhaps even treating an acute condition. We've talked about UTIs or various gut dysbiosis issues. But what about the healthy person who just is trying to optimize their health? Like you go, even if you find a great probiotic, it doesn't necessarily mean that you feel any different. What is the argument that somebody who's had all their blood work done, everything's great, they're not at risk for anything, they feel fine, but they're just trying to be as healthy as they possibly can be? Yeah, it's a really tough question.

And you probably get different answers even from people in the probiotic field. My feeling is I think I'm healthy, but how much do I really know that I'm healthy? And if I give the example of P. cressel, if for some reason the P. cressel levels are high in my body, no one is detecting that. But that's not a good thing so would I not like to be taking a probiotic that reduces P. chrysal even though I feel absolutely nothing, no difference so I like to take probiotics

that I feel the organisms have been tested and they do something even though I don't maybe feel it maybe I don't even need them but if I look at what's the alternative and they do something, even though I don't maybe feel it, maybe I don't even need them. But if I look at what's the alternative to not taking beneficial microbes, because I'm pooping them out every day. So how much am I getting in? And I just like the concept of consuming more, because I think in general, it's a good thing. Have I proof? No. Can I tell you I feel better? I could tell you that I'd probably be more constipated

if I didn't take probiotics and oats. But that's about all I can tell you. Is there a way for the average person to test the quality of their microbes in their gut? To know if something is amiss? Well, there's companies that do this. Honestly, I'm not a fan of it. So this student and I, we took a poop, each of our poop.

We did a microbial analysis, and it comes out with patterns of the microbes that we have. I actually got it with me. I could hold it up. And I would say to you, okay, who's the healthy one? I don't know. Who knows? Which one is me and which one is him? And when you see these companies, they then write back to the donor and say, okay, here's what you should take. And I looked at them, things like pomegranate. Well, okay, I take pomegranate anyway. Pomegranate's great.

Like they're not really telling me scientifically how to manipulate so that I get more of this. Now, there might be exceptions. For example, acromantia. Acromantia is kind of a new probiotic. And my colleague, Jeremy Burton, did this study where acetate seems to be important for acromantia. So maybe in some patients that you want acromantia, maybe we should eat acetate, right? So maybe if there was direct correlation between the organisms in your stool and a food that you should take,

and then an outcome, so again, I go back to P. cresol. If I could take something that would reduce my P. cresol levels, I'm probably helping my kidneys. But we're not there yet. I think that's going to take a bit more work. I wouldn't send my poop off to get analyzed and then for somebody to tell me if I'm healthy or not.

I don't think we know. Everybody's just different anyway. There's been many studies in this field. You have authored 600 papers, right? I don't even know how anybody could write that many papers. You've been cited over 57,000 times, I think. But still, there are so many questions that remain unanswered. What is the study that you would most like to see done that could help resolve some of

the question marks that are out there? You know, what do we need to understand to help us move forward and kind of open the door to the new possibilities that this world might have to offer us? Potentially, there's so many different answers to that because it depends on the niche you're looking at. I mean, you mentioned algal blooms. Imagine if you could use microbes that solve that. That would be absolutely spectacular. The seas off the coast of China are absolutely polluted. And I was in a city there

and they brought this fish on the table. It looked absolutely beautiful. And I'm like, there and they brought this fish on the table. It looked absolutely beautiful. And I'm like, I'm not eating this fish. I came from the most polluted waters in the world. Imagine if you could somehow clean them up with microbes. So, I mean, that's a huge type of experiment that would change lots, right? You almost need the Otago study,

which is a study that has followed, I think it's a thousand people over the lifespan. And that's, again, a long-term project where you looked at the fermented foods they consume, their microbiome patterns over time, correlating with food and with the intake of, say, probiotics, prebiotics. That would be very cool to get a handle on it massive undertaking they have started to look at microbiome in that otago study because it started in 70s maybe so the technology didn't come till later in terms of a disease and the ultimate trial i mean that's a tough one because there are some diseases that that you're not going to get better from and if you could have something that extended quality life that again would be phenomenal I can't

off the top of my head say this is the one I'd pick glioblastoma pancreatic cancer I mean there's there's some diseases that we just hope we never get. But if we could design studies to see if microbiome had any role whatsoever, then I think that would be informative. I feel like this is another situation that technology is going to be very helpful with. And I'm recalling something Tim Spector shared about the ZOE platform. And now all these people are on this app, right? And they're providing data.

So they're getting these massive data sets that relate to the microbiome in a historic, like unprecedented way. So the more things like that that we have, and then the greater computing power that we have to analyze that data and make sense of it feels like a path towards figuring out the relationship

between the right microbes, the right strains, and the right deployment of them. I agree. You talked about the next step that there always seems to be another question, but that's science. That's the excitement of science. The young people that are coming through are incredible.

They're smart as hell. And they're going to come up with things that I can't even imagine. I just want to make sure that we are not scared to try things. And that might mean pilot studies. It might mean testing a strain, even if it doesn't work.

I think if you wait for the ultimate, you know, the magic probiotic, you're going to wait 10, 15 years. In the meantime, all these people have died or suffered terribly. And so I hope that we have a mechanism to be much more interventional in humans with ideas. So collect all the data you want, but don't wait for eternity to try things. I was very moved in your book with respect to the way in which you've kind of weathered resistance.

I mean, there's a lot of people, especially early in your career, who would just castigate you, snake oil salesmen, like the whole thing, right? So you're very much also this example of resilience and endurance in the face of, you know, obstacles to, you know, kind of get this message out and share the science that you were learning.

So what is your message to the visionaries out there who are trying to do something different that contravenes kind of current protocols or the way that the world works. Yeah, I mean, I was told in primary school, high school, university, I wouldn't make it. And I invented the middle finger, which is I should get much more credit for that.

But- Not only did he define probiotics, he invented the middle finger. Yeah, and so I was the type of person that would fight back. Partly came from so much determination. Maybe that was in my family that taught me that, never give up.

If you're not that kind of person, then it gets very difficult. You need to be beside someone who has that determination. As I said, I think you need to keep testing along the way. I mean, we never set out on day one to say we're going to make a probiotic for women's health. We were going step by step and step.

I think that you have to try and break it down into steps. We were pioneers, but we're not entrepreneurs. I didn't go and form a company. That's not my strength. I wasn't interested in it. Probably a lot of people slag me off, think, well, he's not a real scientist because he worked with surgeons

and he's not a great molecular biologist. I know what I'm not good at, but I make sure that I collaborate with good people who are good at that. So you have to complement what it is you have with what other people have in order to answer the question that's in front of you. And that way you get inspired by your colleagues

and that sort of picks you up when you're down because they're saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, we believe in this and look what this showed. So if you don't have that reminder or that inspiration from others, it's very tough. Andrew Bruce, my colleague,

is a wonderful person. He's positive and he's a fighter. So that was easy for me to fight with him. Oh, so many times you should have given up or I would have given up. So young people have to believe in what they're doing, test it, and if it gets to the point where they say, well, you know what, this isn't going to work,

then they have to have the courage to say, okay, if it's not going to work, we're doing something else. You are a change agent. What are the lessons that you can impart about how you go through difficult times and continue to persevere. Just generally, it doesn't even have to have anything to do with probiotics.

I mean, your journey is very much one of staying in the game and basically maintaining this conviction, having faith, working hard. There is this spiritual layer as well, where you have this sense that you are being taken care of, you know, which I love and I appreciate and relate to. Yeah, I'm getting to the stage

where you have to, you see these adverts in television about come and plan your funeral with us, you know, and there's a song that, I forgot the lady that sang it. He's always been faithful to me. And whatever we call God, whatever it is, God's always been faithful to me.

I think you have to look for signs that you're on the right path. Sometimes that's not easy and it's not obvious, but I've tried to do that. When the days are tough, I remember if I had a really, you know, people get at you and stuff, I'd go and buy like three records, you know, LPs, right?

That was my sort of thing. Do something positive for yourself because otherwise you'll be down all weekend or whatever. And I've always wanted to help people. And so that's a good thing to drive you on. And I remember because Dr. Bruce is a urologist, he'd be in the operating room and I would go in the operating room with him to talk about research

because he didn't have time. Otherwise, you know, I'd dress up, go in and the patient's there and you think, this is who I'm trying to help. It's a person. It's not a scientific experiment. It's a person.

Once you get that, you're more determined and it's like people who are passionate about honeybees, they love those bees and they're passionate. They want to help them. And so I think if you have that as a driving force, it's amazing what can't stop you, right? You're a humanitarian.

I think it's fair to say. At the end of the book, there are all these sort of tales of travels that you've gone on. And my first reaction when I got to that point was like, what does this have to do with anything? Like, why is he telling these stories? But I think what's instructive about it

is that those travels and those experiences in so many communities, in so many places of the world that most people don't visit, has given you that sense of being a humanitarian, a level of empathy that comes with that type of travel that has made its way into your work. It feels like that's the real why behind what you do. I get the sense that you really deeply care about people and the planet. I do. Yeah. I mean, you go to Mwanza, Tanzania.

I took my daughter when she was 14, and she remembers the roads. I mean, you're banging your head off the ceiling, and it's, I mean, terrible. These women dressed well and smiled every day, and they had nothing. If that doesn't impact you then nothing will and so i have a huge admiration for people you go to india india the women are beautiful in the sarongs they have nothing and so i just it makes you want to help other people and and makes you think you're not any better than anyone else. And I like the surgical table example. If you're a surgeon, the person on that table, you're not looking at their color,

their religion, their sexual orientation. You're looking at them because they have the same blood as you. And the more the world starts to realize that we're all the same and we're all on this amazing planet, the more we should be trying to help the planet and help each other. And so, yeah, that definitely drives me. You know, I've got some examples. I'm meeting rock stars in my book. At the end of the day, that's just a normal person like you and I. It's actually quite funny and sweet.

Like you have, here's where I met Frank Zappa and here's where I met Diana Ross. I was like, what does this have to do with anything? But I was very charmed by it. Well, the thing was that the Diana Ross was because I was at a conference in urology. And so it was the science that took me there. And then I'm of the opinion that let's do something really fun or creative because I mean, science can be pretty boring and tedious. Life isn't. So they make the most of life. When I went to Victoria Falls, I'd given a talk in Zambia. I thought, well, Victoria Falls is right there.

Why don't we go and, you know? And so I went to the Devil's Pool and it was crazy. But that was part of that whole experience which started off as science, right? And then you learn, you look and you see other people and how they live and you start to get ideas of, you know, different things. And for example, I didn't know anything about the Muslim religion and prayers and things like that.

And a woman from Egypt asked if she could come to my lab. I said, sure, you come as a fellow. So she came to the lab, and it turns out that before her Muslim prayers, they would clean their teeth. I didn't know this. And she said that we use this thing called meswak, and it's the bark of a tree to clean our teeth.

So I said, I wonder if we could design a probiotic mouthwash using meswak. So sure enough, we got the meswak, we got some mint, we got lactobacilli, and we made a mouthwash using meswak. So sure enough, we got the meswak, we got some mint, we got lactobacilli, and we made a mouthwash. And I learned so much, not just about her and the practices, but hey, maybe this could be an inexpensive way for people to have better oral care in these countries. So you just never know what's around the corner. I've always been open to things. And I think we have to be. Yeah, following your interest in your curiosity from, you know, being a PhD student in New Zealand, getting obsessed with microbes and

leading you all the way to, you know, all the adventures that you've been on. Yeah. By staying true to that. I think there's some real wisdom and truth in that. Well, being true to yourself, as I said in the book, Margaret Bruce always said, be true to yourself. That's tough, but I like to do that. Speaking of truth and wisdom,

I have a litmus test to discern real scientists from the naysayers or the real scientists from the costume scientists. And that is when I present a question to a real scientist, it's never quite the satisfying answer that you want because it's complicated and it's nuanced and it's about context and all of these different things that is orthogonal to kind of the way our media culture

and our culture in general operates. So I'm interested in, and you talk about this in the book, like truth versus the misinformation that gets propagated on social media and through the click-baity headlines in the media in terms of science reporting. That's a whole podcast.

Yeah, I mean, we're driven to be successful. There's pressure on scientists to be successful and to get the messages out. I think sometimes the press releases are completely overblown, and then the media picks it up because it's an easy sell. Probiotics are useless.

No, they're not. Probiotics are many things. It's like saying all drugs are useless. We have to try and avoid that just the same as we have to avoid probiotics will cure this and this and this. No, no. Certain strains will. Probably as scientists, we're learning. When I really, 1990 to 95, it was tough to get a scientist to talk to the media. I think now social media is making it easier and probably forcing a lot more interaction with the media. And we just have to make sure that what we're saying is factual and can be backed up by the experiments we perform and try not to have the sensationalization. It's like, I'm not going to sit here

and tell you what probiotic you should take. Now, that might be an easy sell because then you can go out and say, buy this product. No, no, no, that's not going to happen because it's different things for different people and different reasons for it, right? There's something that goes on psychologically in our reptilian brain when we look at our phone

and somebody's looking directly at us with great conviction and saying, don't do this and do this, that we just can't help but respond to versus someone like yourself who's like, well, you know, is it this or is it this? And I'm not quite sure until I understand this. And we're just, we get flummoxed and who's like, well, is it this or is it this? And I'm not quite sure until I understand this. And we're just, we get flummoxed and we're like,

well, that guy doesn't, he's not guiding me. So I'm just gonna, this guy seems sure of himself. This is the way our culture operates for better or worse. And I don't know what the antidote is, but I do think that there is a place for teaching young scientists and medical students public speaking skills. Because I think just because you're into science doesn't mean that you're going to be a gifted speaker or be able to communicate very complex ideas in a way that the public can understand. there's a need for that to sort of rebut or contravene a lot of the bad ideas that seem to get traction much more easily than the harder, more truthful ideas.

I like to tell audiences when I speak, don't believe me, believe the data. That's tougher because it means you have to look at the data, but I could be super convincing and that's tougher because it means you have to look at the data. But I could be super convincing, and that's not right if there's no data to back it up. In terms of speaking, public speaking, I think you're right. There are some people very good at it. Some people, it's just they're uncomfortable with it. But I was in a position of administration for that 1995 time,

and I would look at probably hundreds of grants every year, and they'd put a lay abstract, some of these lay abstracts. I always say, look, can your grandmother understand that? Because if your grandmother can't, it's not a lay abstract. We have to learn how to say things that people can understand. And I know I'm not necessarily all that great at it, because when you first asked what's a probiotic, I maybe didn't break it down into something that a grandmother could understand because they're not going to look at a definition.

But we have to try and not pull the wool over people's eyes. And I think that happens a lot. Influencers, and I've seen lots and lots of books, and they say probiotics are inside us. No, they're not. Probiotics are in fermented foods. No, they're not. And so they're trying to make it simple, but they're getting it wrong. I give credit to people. Tell them the truth. Don't try and simplify it and say it wrong. If you can't simplify it, don't say it the wrong way. They're not inside us. Well said. I wanna end this discussion with some practical advice

given the constraints and the nuances, et cetera, that make it challenging. But to provide people with perhaps a few things that they can take away in terms of thinking about probiotics, prebiotics, and what they can do to optimize their gut microbiome. We all know about more fiber, more diversity of plant foods, fermented foods, et cetera. What are a few other things that you might be able to share? So there's a couple of websites that I put in the book.

Probioticchart.ca is the Canadian one and usprobioticguide.com, where a group of physicians and pharmacists have looked at the literature and said, there are papers in human studies on these products. I think that's a good starting point for people, because then if they have an issue with IBS or an issue with something else, they can look and say, okay, here's three options and I could try these three. Now, there's probably some products that are not in that guide, but one day they will be in the guide, but they're not right now. But that's at least a place that you're getting help without doing anything yourself. I think there are probiotics that,

as I say, I take them every day. And so I think that there's a reason to take them. But if you're not taking them and you're taking fermented foods, that's great too. These are not magic bullets. There's lots and lots we still need to find out about them. But it should be part of our daily life, I think, to enhance our beneficial microbes. Because as I say, how else are you getting them in your body? What is the role that you play as scientific advisor to seed? What does that entail?

Well, because I joined early on, it was to advise primarily Raja on the attributes of the organisms and to start to look at what they might do. And that's led to some experiments in our lab. It's led to them bringing on board some super, super scientists from Boston who are now

leading the primarily clinical trials because at the end of the day you need to do the human studies and so they're going to do that. We've got papers coming out, a fantastic paper that's coming out and it's frustrating waiting for it, but so I can review it and advise and help the people writing it. I had offers to sort of do this with other companies. They're just so talented and they

look at life differently. I've never seen a company do what they do. And so many creative people, it's a joy to be part of it. And if I, you know, contribute a little bit, then that's great. But I also criticize. I mean, if I see something that I don't like, I'll tell them and Raja welcomes it because, you know, there's no room for bullshit.

No, there isn't. And I get the sense that, yeah, he wants that. That's sort of why you're there. And as a lay person, I was just so impressed with both of them in speaking to them on the podcast and the more that I learn about what they're attempting to do

in a world that is so complex and challenging. I'm betting on them. Like, they're the good ones, in my opinion. And as I said earlier, I've interacted with many, many companies. It's nothing like what they're doing. They are light years ahead of the messaging. I mean, the Instagram accounts are on information. It's not pushing the product. It's information. I think that's the accounts are on information.

It's not pushing the product. It's information. I think that's the way of the future. I think these big companies could learn from that. Yeah, I agree. I'm really proud to be associated with them. That's great to hear. That makes me even feel even better.

Yeah, I mean, I went yesterday in Soar and some of the creative people in that firm, it stimulates me. I'm a great admirer of people who are good at what they do. And I love to learn from them. I mean, someone designing something, I want to know more about, almost want to be part of it because it's so exciting and I'm not a designer. So I'm loving watching them and also learning from them.

So it's a stimulating environment. I think microbes are our teachers, and I think we have much to learn from them. We've only begun to flirt on a very surface level with what I think they can teach us. And you're certainly at the vanguard of making that possible. So I appreciate the work that you've done and the message that you carry and for coming and sharing with all of us today. Well, honored to be here. But, you know, the message really is for the young people, the next generation.

They've got the talent and the ability and the technologies. They're the ones that are going to make an amazing difference. And if we have laid some groundwork for that, then that's fantastic. But it's over to them. And I think the future is going to be exciting. Hear, hear. I think we did it. Did we leave anything out?

I don't think so. I think we covered it. The book is called Probiotics, A Story About Hope. Gregor, thank you again for your time. It was wonderful to meet you. It's a true honor. And again, I appreciate you. Thank you.

Cheers. Peace. Plants. Microbes. We're brought to you today by Boncharge. Go to boncharge.com slash richroll. Use code richroll at checkout for 15% off their entire range of wellness tools. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation.

To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment.

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love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.