The Accountant Who Cracked the Parkinson's Code Using Gut Bacteria - Martha Carlin

Martha Carlin wasn't a scientist when her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's at 44. She was an auditor — trained to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and to never take anything at face value. That discipline took her somewhere medicine hadn't yet looked: the gut.

What she found over the next two decades reframes how we understand not just Parkinson's, but chronic constipation, cancer, metabolic disease, sleep, cravings, and the quiet collapse of human health since World War II. The microbiome isn't a side conversation — it may be the whole conversation.

This episode traces one woman's obsessive, rigorous, grief-fueled investigation into what's really living inside us, what we've done to destroy it, and whether we can get it back. The answers are more specific — and more actionable — than you might expect.

BIG IDEA

The gut is not a digestive accessory — it is a pharmacological ecosystem that governs your brain, your immune system, your cravings, and possibly the trajectory of every major chronic disease you will ever face.

Contact Information: Martha Carlin
Websites:
Biotiquest - https://biotiquest.com/
The Bio Collective - https://www.thebiocollective.com/
Open Biome - https://openbiome.org/

Books from Martha Carlin :
"Connected" - https://amzn.to/4eMHNmL
"My Search for the Perfect Poop" - https://amzn.to/492PJwx

References:
"Missing Microbes" by Martin J. Blaser: - https://amzn.to/4wwyIEK

WEBSITE: Stay Off My Kitchen Table

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If you’re struggling with low energy, stubborn weight, or feeling like “healthy eating” isn’t working… this book shows you exactly how to fix it.

• Learn how to reset your gut
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Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings

Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from Dr. Philip Ovadia.

Transcript

0:58

Welcome back, folks. It is Stay Off My Operating Table with Dr. Philip Ovadia. Our guest today is going to appeal to some of you, but not all of you. If you don't have a digestive tract or you don't have any body parts between your throat and your waist, you're probably not gonna be interested in this particular episode. For the small fraction of you remaining who do have that, I think this one is going to be fascinating, very informative, and I already know that I personally am going to benefit from it for reasons we may or may not get into later. Our guest is Martha Carlin. Phil, take it from me. Yeah. I think you said it right, Jack. Those of us in the audience that are human, we're probably gonna benefit from this conversation, and those of you that are not, maybe we can have some other discussions around. But you might even benefit from it. Really excited to have this conversation today with Martha. Martha is a citizen scientist turned, I guess, we'll say entrepreneur. Now has a company, BiotaQuest and we're gonna talk a little bit about what that is. But really I think it's the story behind what led to BiotaQuest that I am most interested in and I think our audience will be most interested in. I'm gonna start just by letting Martha give a little bit of that background, how she became a citizen scientist, and then we can dig into all the good stuff that she's been learning and teaching people about. Sure. So this journey started for me back in 2002. So my background and training from school is I was trained as an accountant. Came out of school and went to work for Arthur Andersen, trained as an auditor. Never take anything at face value. Examine the evidence yourself. I love it. And they also trained us in a way to look at business risk called transaction flow review, where you would essentially map everything flowing through a business on these big flow charts, and who touches it and what they're supposed to do, and then, you would have to go in the summertime and observe and make sure they did all the things that it said they were doing. And so in 2002 my husband, 44 years old, marathon running, looked totally healthy, was diagnosed with Parkinson's. And- it just w- it's like one of those just stop you in your tracks. What do you mean somebody that looks healthy and is 44 years old has an old person's disease? And, I just, because of the way I had been trained to think, I wasn't gonna take anything at face value, and so I started examining the evidence myself. I started with food. John had been drinking soy protein shakes every day for about two years prior to that, and this was, So in the late 1990s is when all the GMO GMO soy came to market, and and glyphosate. And I spent about 10 years looking at the food supply and all of the things around what we had done to our food supply and changing diet and lifestyle for John, and his tremor went away. I mean, he was als- he also started to take medication, but his tremor went away before he even started taking medication. And then in 2014, I read Martin Blaser's book called Missing Microbes. I'm not familiar with that one. And he's a infectious disease doc. He was at NYU at the time, and he was actually one of the pioneers in discovering the connection between H. pylori and ulcers. So had used a lot of antibiotics to treat people, and, but his book was actually about growing up in the age of antibiotics, which all of us have done- ... and the rise of chronic disease, and this thing called the microbiome. I'm like, "What's that?" It's the trillions of fungi, vi- viruses, bacteria, protists that live in and on our body, and they're functioning as an internal pharmacy. We're actually more microbial than we are human by two cells microbial to every one human cell. I'm like, "Okay the, wow, that's a real mind shifter." And six months later, they published the first paper that connected, They could divide the two types of Parkinson's b- by the gut bacteria. So there are people... Most people would be familiar with the tremor in somebody who has Parkinson's, but there's another primary type called posture and gait, and that's where they're sort of bent over in a penguin posture and their feet freeze, and they had very distinct microbiome profiles. And I was like, "That's it. The gut is the general ledger." I quit my job, started funding research at the University of Chicago, and that's where I met my co-founder, Dr. Jack Gilbert, and went on to found the Bio Collective, and basically- Connecting poop, collecting poop in a box. And I mean, like the whole thing. And so We started by collecting people's samples and homogenizing it, and making it into these little tubes that we laughingly called shitlets. And we sold them to scientists all over the world, and we did sequencing on them, so we built this big data set and we're, trying to look across the population. We were... Obviously I had a big focus on Parkinson's, but we were getting, people across the population. And Jack's son had autism. We saw some overlap in the external literature, but also in our own data in the Parkinson's autism microbiome. And my other co-founder came with a background in chronic fatigue, and there was some interesting overlap there. So we started thinking about,"Okay, we're missing... We've basically lost a lot of these functions because of all the destruction we've done to the microbiome through antibiotics and all these chemicals and, processed foods and not eat... the way we eat and all the, all these different things." And so we started thinking about, like how we might start to fix that. But the real first aha that came in that department was at the World Parkinson's Congress. There was a group there who was showing some research from a s- scientist in Israel, who showed that the sugar alcohol mannitol could stop the aggregation of the proteins involved in Parkinson's, and pull them out of the brain of a mouse. And I was like,"What?" So I came back- put that in English Like mannitol is a sugar alcohol that's often used in diabetics as a substitute for glucose and fructose, and it's a neutral molecule. I mean, I could go into a lot of explanations about probably why that works, but this study, they had, they fed the mice mannitol, and it stopped the aggregation of the proteins. Some protein aggregation is pH related, so the the, a change in pH will change the production of protein. And mannitol is neutral, so it's gonna keep a neutral. But that's not the point.'Cause I actually came back and I bought this mannitol chemistry book, and in the beginning of the book... first of all, I was like, "Wow, this is used a lot in medicine, s- it's a really interesting molecule." But the first chapter of the book was about specific bacteria that produce mannitol through fermentation of glucose and fructose. And, I was like, "Oh, so maybe we could put a factory back in the gut because people are eating way too much glucose and fructose, and we could convert that to mannitol, which we don't use, and you would just... It goes out in your urine and your stool." And so that's where the idea for the first probiotic came from, which we made for my husband at the time, and we had all this microbiome data for him, and we could see his gut moving back closer and closer to a healthy human microbiome profile when he took the probiotic. And even more remarkably, though, he was walking with a cane at that time, and within 30 days he was no... He no longer needed the cane. And he became stable. His Parkinson's score improved significantly, and then it was stable for about four years until he had COVID. So that was a long story. No, that's a great story, and just it's always interesting to hear, how people that come from non-medical, non-science backgrounds, right? But their their training in whatever field they're in your case, business analyst can be applied and can lead them, to think differently about some of these medical problems that, quite frankly, the healthcare system sort of gets locked in on one way of thinking, and that oftentimes, I think i- is a barrier to true innovation. So we love hearing stories like that. I'd like to start with some, maybe a little bit of the basics about the microbiome, right? So I think everyone, probably in the audience will be aware that we have these, microbes that live in our gut live in our intestinal system, in our mouth and they have some influence on our health. But they may not understand why or how, they influence our health. So what are some of the basics about how the microbiome impacts our health, and why people who are thinking about various health issues, should be thinking about their microbiome? Probably f- first and foremost, it's this incredible factory for very important molecules, hormones, neurotransmitters, your vitamins. So a lot of your B vitamins, vitamin K are produced in the gut by bacteria. Your serotonin, about 80 to 90% of your serotonin is made in the gut. So- A lot of these really important things to our mental health that, there's this gut-brain axis where the microbes are making things that are communicating with your brain, and your brain is also communicating with the microbes. That's also, on the negative side, where cravings come from. So if you, say, you're eating a high sugar, high carbohydrate diet and you're feeding a certain profile of bacteria that really like those simple sugars, that's where a lot of those signals will come from when... if you try to stop eating simple sugars or carbohydrates, is those microbes will put out molecules that are sending this signal, feed me." And so that's another kind of reason why it's hard for people to break that, we call it the sugar loop. In fact, we have a PDF download that p- people can get that sort of explains how that sugar loop works and how to break it. And that, interestingly enough, that Sugar Shift product that I made for John actually ended up it ends up, it helps break that sugar loop and break those cravings. Wow. And, i- is there is there an ideal microbiome, right? Is there one microbiome that everyone essentially should be having or aiming to have? Or are our microbiomes, more individualized? They're very individualized. I mean, there's been a lot of work around trying to put them in categories of certain phenotypes but, if you look at the research around the globe, there's, there's different microbiome pro- profiles on different continents. In particular, one of my advisors showed in some of her research people in India were in contact with a lot more pathogenic organiz- I mean, they had just much more robust immune systems, but a lot more diversity than, say, we have here. There's research showing there's a population, the Hadza in Africa, where they've shown, the microbiome in the in the se- they have a wet season and a dry season, and I don't remember which is which, but one of them they're only eating meat, and the other one they're eating tubers and honey and stuff like that, and the microbiome is shifting back and forth. The research has shown that we get a fairly stable- microbiome by the t- by the age of three. So there's a, it's really important in children to preserve microbiome health, to breastfeed, to really try to avoid antibiotics if you can during that period of time, 'cause it's a critical shaping of when those microbes are talking to the immune system and learning to distinguish self from other. And so in that really critical period, you wanna be very mindful of a child's microbiome. But each of us has an individual microbiome, and when we're healthy, we can disrupt it and it will return back to its core. But, when we become un- unhealthy or we do a lot of things to disrupt it, it starts to not be able to come all the way back down to its kind of essential state. And there are some key indicator, they call them keystone species, but butyrate production, that's a short chain fatty acid that actually feeds the cells that line the gut. And so that's one of the key indicators of gut health is do, do you have those butyrate producers? Also, in both babies and centenarians, and we collected poop from 100-year-old people bifidobacteria is very important for longevity and for that training of the immune system. I don't even know where to start. What's the... What's the, w- what's the indicator or w- what are some of the indicators? What are the primary indicators that y- you're, you've got a messed up microbiome? I'll give you the top one that connects to Parkinson's too. So chronic constipation can precede a diagnosis of Parkinson's by 10 to 15 years. So this is something I talk to people about a lot because you've got to get it going because I think if people can recognize that's a real risk for them and s- start to address that so that they have regular bowel movements, maybe they never get Parkinson's. But if you think about it, when waste is sitting in the body, then there's a lot of things recirculating. So there's a lot of the gram-negative bacteria produce something called serum l- or, sorry, they produce something called lipopolysaccharide endotoxin, and that's highly inflammatory. It's associated with diabetes, with Parkinson's, with M- you name the... With depression, all kinds of things. And so you don't want that sitting in your GI tract. And that was actually something i- in the lab when we were collecting samples that my team came and they said, "You know what? We can tell if someone has Parkinson's just from their stool because it's not like anyone else's. It's like concrete. Parts of it l- are like concrete." And now that was back in 2016, I think, that they t- 2016, 2017, that they told me this. And it, it took until really the last two years working with a col- Oh, rats. Martha, your signal has completely frozen up they kill each other. It's- Hang on just a minute. Martha, we lost your signal there for, oh, 10 or 15 seconds. So you said it was about two years ago, and then we lost you. Okay. Oh, about two years ago in the lab they told me that they could actually tell just by looking at the stool someone has Parkinson's, and that was because it was like concrete. So we would... I said, we homogenized the sample and made them into those little aliquots using a syringe. The Parkinson's samples could not, they couldn't use a syringe. They had to use a caulking gun. Good Lord. Because they were concrete. What happens in the gut in this battle between the bacteria is they can spill calcium, and a tiny bit of calcium can make a concrete-like colloid sus- substance. It took me g- 10 years or more to really put all those pieces together with Dr. Nenem from Australia on, who helped me with the Parkinson's paper I just wrote. Actually, we wrote it together, but... Does that- So, Just circling back to what you said earlier about, microbiomes are fairly individualized how do you start to analyze, in, in that context okay, we have someone with condition X, Parkinson's, heart disease, whatever it might be and we think that there's some relationship between their microbiome and the disease. How do we start to analyze what, might be those common disruptions in the microbiome if everyone's sort of starting from this a different place? Microbes have multiple capabilities, I'll say. And what we've started to see in more recent time is really looking at the function of the microbiome as opposed to- who's there, more like what are they doing? And I think that's where we're starting to see more meaningful information. And, as an example of that, in Parkinson's there was a recent meta-analysis that is showing l- disruption or loss of some of the B vitamin production. That function is not there that should be there. There is research out of Finland in Parkinson's showing disruption in sulfur metabolism, and there's some longitudinal studies looking at that as well. And, the sulfur metabolism actually ties to an area I've been working on with Dr. Ninnem based on a body of his research around the glycocalyx, which surrounds all our cells, our gut lining, our blood vessels, everything. And it's it has these little hairs that stand up, and they're s- they're sulfated polymers, so disruption of sulfur metabolism is going to disrupt the body's ability to, feed an- that surface layer that is really important for our protection. I'll confess I didn't understand hardly any of that. Okay. I'm sorry. I found it fascinating. But yeah I think what you're trying to say is, w- more so than looking at the individual bacteria, that might be in the microbiome, you're really focusing on what that microbiome is supposed to be doing in a healthy state, producing things like B vitamins. And then in these disease states, what is it not now able to do? And you're starting to find some commonalities again, among people that maybe the, various ratios of the different bi- bacteria may not look the same, but the end product of they're not producing enou- enough of substance X, or they're producing too much of substance X, is really how we start to figure out what role the microbiome might be playing in these diseases. Absolutely. That's a... That was perfect. And then I, I would say on the colorectal side, they are actually starting to pinpoint some specific organisms that are very tightly connected to colorectal cancer. And that's Fusobacterium nucleatum, which comes from the mouth, so the oral microbiome is also important, and a organism called Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis, which is pretty endemic in the milk supply. And those are pretty tightly correla- correlated there. And some of that work is also connected to Crohn's. Expand on the milk supply,'cause that's a thing that it seems to be coming more and more in the public consciousness. W- okay. Cows have a disease that's very similar to human Crohn's, and it's called Johne's disease. And that in cows was identified as being caused by this Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis. And, over time it has spread throughout the dairy herds, and it's pretty well known that it is endemic in the cattle. And y- here's an example. I'm actually doing a clinical trial with Dr. Tom Dao because we're bringing a s- specific strain of bacteria to market later this year that's effective against that Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis, which for simplicity we call MAP. But they're doing a clinical trial in Bahrain, and Bahrain had no Crohn's disease at all until they imported dairy cattle from the United Kingdom that had MAP. Interesting. Fascinating really. So at a high level do you think we are headed towards a future where microbes can be equivalent to pharmaceuticals, right? Our traditional approach in the medical system and, this has its positive and its negatives, right? But we identify a disease and the pharmaceutical company goes in search of the drug that can treat the disease, right? Or treat the symptoms of the disease. It sounds you're saying that if most of these diseases emanate from the disruption in the microbiome, we might be able to prescribe a microbe, right? And figure out, we want more of this microbe or less of this microbe and, modulating the microbe in a similar way we use pharmaceuticals to modulate our body chemistry is a viable approach to disease treatment or hopefully cure, right? Ideally. I mean, there's two ways I think about that. I mean, we think about it as putting s- teams together. So we have a computational model- Where we can put together a team of microbes to put back a function. Because in a lot of cases, one bug is not gonna do it in a whole complex ecosystem. But if you put a team that's working together, then you're, more likely to get that. And then the other kind of angle of that is the fecal transplant, which sounds crazy. But a fecal transplant from a healthy person, there's been a lot of research on it. I mean, it was done 4,000 years ago in China with healthy babies. Really? Yes. It was called yellow soup. Now, I've never heard that before. Please unpack that story. That's- They, and when people had gastrointestinal problems, they used health- healthy baby poop, and they made something called yellow soup, and that was, part of the therapy. Now, And that was, the and we understand that what that was doing was restoring a healthy- The health- set of microbes- Yeah... back into the digestive tract. And it's, it's got a whole complex system. And so just to give you an example. So here in the United States now, I think C. difficile infection is the only approved where by the FDA that you can have a fecal transplant. But there are a lot of ways that doctors are doing N-of-1, I'll say clinical trial type work. They have to go through and file a lot of paperwork. But in Europe, there was a clinical, there were two clinical trials using fecal transplants in Parkinson's, and one came used the bottom up, sort of an enema style fecal transplant, and one came from the top down. And I don't remember if it was capsules or if it was, a nasal tube that went... But the one that came from the top down was actually more successful. And I think, based on my own 20 some odd years of looking at Parkinson's, quite a bit of the issues are in the small bowel. And so when you're doing a transplant from the bottom up, you're not getting into the small bowel. And that's another sort of interesting area on the pharmaceutical and the bug side. So Parkinson's, w- the drug that most people take is a dopamine drug, and there's H. pylori in the gut actually- Feeds on dopamine. And so the more medicine you... If you have H. pylori, the more medicine you take, the more the H. pylori will eat it and grow and disrupt your medicine. But I think fecal transplants actually have a lot of promise. I do know there have been some, even some fecal transplants in cancer with some pretty remarkable results. And you could go out and search PubMed and you'd be surprised at how many things that's been used to treat. What does that imply about cancer that, that a fecal transplant has been successful? Cancer's a metabolic j- I mean, all of these things are metabolic problems, and you guys talk about meta- We've had Thomas Seyfried on a couple of times. We've... Yeah. A lot of me- metabolism is going on in the gut with these bacteria. And so I think if you're restoring an ecosystem to some sort of balance, then maybe, it... it's putting back the whole metabolic system with flexibility. And I, I think I think cancer is sort of one side of the razor's edge and Parkinson's is the other. And in fact, there was one of the early microbiome conferences I attended, there was a couple there that was looking for a microbiome therapeutic for cancer, and they were looking to up- upregulate this one protein they were talking about. And I was like, "Wait a minute, that's highly upregulated in Parkinson's." Maybe you don't... so a fecal transplant is a whole healthy ecosystem that's got things in balance, because if you're properly screening the person that you're getting the material from, and you know they're very healthy, then you're putting back a system that's working well. There was a company called a nonprofit called OpenBiome that did a lot of the early fecal transplant material, and I think only 3% of people who went through their screening were ever approved to be a donor, which says there's not a whole lot of people with healthy gut. Yeah. And that kind of goes along with the data we have around just metabolic health in general- right? That, 7% is the number we throw around of people that are actually metabolically healthy. What, So what are some of the things in people's daily lives that they may not realize are impacting their microbiome? Stress is probably the number one thing that, people are gonna go, "What do you mean my stress affects the microbes in my gut?" But- Stress, whether that's mental, emotional stress or nutritional stress because you're not getting enough nutrient-dense food or, there, there's just electromagnetic stress, all kinds of lack of sleep. All of those kind of pieces of the stress model impact hormones and neurotransmitters that a- again, are communicating with those microbes and shifting your microbiome. So stress is a huge piece of that puzzle. Water. I tell people, like when people ask me "If there was just one thing I could do," I'm say, clean up your water." People don't realize that our public water systems were designed 100 years ago to deal with, bacteria. They haven't changed to deal with all of the pharmaceutical pollution that goes down into the sewers. And if you look at the Environmental Working Group, I think back in, it's been a while, but I think it was around 2012, they did something like 25 major municipalities and the pharmaceuticals that were in the w- tap water, and that's because our systems aren't designed to take that out. Yeah. Filtering your water I think is really important so that you're not taking your neighbor's whatever. But then if you do that, the water has no minerals in it because you've- ... taken all that out, so then you've gotta add back minerals. So th- that's two really big things. And then, your diet, y- what you're eating a whole foods diet. It is so important to eat whole foods and to avoid herbicides and pesticides, so I talk about that a lot. There's so much chemical residue on our foods now, and people are probably not aware, but about s- there's about 60 crops now that use glyphosate at the end of harvest to dry the crop. And of course, that leaves even more residue on the crop than if it was sprayed sometime during the growing season and not at the end. And th- so that's, I think, why a lot of people have trouble with legumes. So all of your beans and lentils and things like that, many of those crops are in that category. All the grains are in that category. And you know- That's one of the main problems I think people have with these foods is, maybe 100 years ago they didn't have problems with these foods 'cause they didn't have all these chemicals. And those, glyphosate is an antibiotic that actually destroys the beneficial bacteria that are doing those things like producing B vitamins and vitamin K and things like that, and leaves behind pathogenic bugs that make those endotoxins. This is almost too simple. And I don't mean that in a pejorative way. It's just it makes so much sense given what I've seen happen to the population during my adult life. I can remember when I graduated from high school what the average human being looked like. Yeah. And the average human being was not fat. Not so chunky. And was actually relatively slender, even the big people- Were... And I watched and I'm... in my mind, we were just talking about this earlier this week, in my mind it correlates exactly with the rise of low fat diets. But, that's part of it... the idea that the stuff they've all eating all the time, which may or may not even be good food, but if they're spraying it with chemicals that are antibiotic, that are killing the good bugs in our guts, I'm thinking as I'm talking as you can see, that if we will, A, stop ingesting those, and B, re- replace, resupply the good stuff, our bodies will then from that point kinda take care of the problem. Am I oversimplifying this? And I'm asking both of you,'cause Phil, this is as much your specialty as hers. Y- yeah, my perspective is, these are all different aspects or different, angles that we can look at the problem from, right? But they keep leading us back to the same place. I mean, eat whole real food that's hopefully is minimally processed and treated is the answer you come back to, whether you're, and many people arrive at this from it's, the diet is too high carb. And others arrive at it from, we need to avoid these pesticides, right? And others are looking at the seed oils, right? And the honest truth is I don't think we're ever gonna figure out, it's one of these things. But it's just interesting to me how all these different people coming at it from all these different aspects are ending up at the same place. We probably should get back to eating food as close to the way that we used to eat it, two and three generations ago. Not to speak about, ancestrally how we used to eat it. And that's where the answer lies. I would agree with you. I mean, most of these chemicals came into our farming system after World War II because they- Sure ... produced all of these things to make bombs and do all these... And then it's okay, gases, mustard gas, okay, what are we gonna do with this? Okay we're gonna put poison on our food? That's just not very smart. I mean, and one of the things that I have learned over this 20 years is we're actually not that different than an insect. And- Say more. There... if you look at like how some of these chemicals target the insect's system there's a, i- in the c- in the GMO corn they engineer a toxin in there, and it's called the BT toxin. That BT toxin pokes holes in the gut of the caterpillar, and the caterpillar gets sepsis. I'm sorry, but part of what we're seeing kind of population-wide is a lot of people with holes poked in their guts and kind of a low-grade infection which, isn't septic enough to kill them, but it- is that leaky gut? Is that what that is? It's putting them in a chronic inflammatory state. So th- that's one example of it. I looked at another one where they, they were targeting- Like respiration or something. And I, so that kind of went down the rabbit hole of looking at how their respiratory system works and how is... It's we're not that different. I mean, these chemical signals and things they're just not that different. Thinking that what we're doing out there to an insect we're not doing to ourselves is just a fool's game. Ooh. Yeah. It's it's very interesting when we think about that, right? And just again, we lost some of that connection. A- and at many different levels, right? You can look at the chemicals that are being sprayed on, on our crops to try and, protect them from the insects. And you look at just something simple like we've talked about before in this show, right? The reason that they feed cattle or pigs grains is because they want them to get fatter quicker, right? So they can get them to market and they're bigger. And, and we don't stop to think about if we're eating those same grains, we're probably gonna get fatter quicker as well. And just some of the, the- Ah ... I guess the plot lines that we have lost eh, when it comes to our food supply. So I wanted to circle back, microbiome. Okay, we've acknowledged it's important in our health, and we've identified disruptions that, have linkages to certain diseases, and now we want to start how do we fix that, right? So part of the story which you've been laying out is, okay, there are these things in there, your environment, that are attacking your microbiome, and you want to start to pull those out. But the second part of the story may be we need to give our we need to support our microbiome, and this leads to the discussion of probiotics. And again, we're gonna be transparent. You have a company that sells probiotics. It, but your approach to probiotics I noticed is a lot different than a lot of other companies selling probiotics. Y- a lot of companies that are in the probiotic business, they have their probiotic mix, and everyone should take it. You your company is targeting certain diseases or, certain systems, right? You're not treating diseases. You're not a pharmaceutical company. But, you're looking at certain aspects of people's health that may be missed, and you're suggesting that there might be different- microbiome teams, I think you called it before that can help with this. So talk a little bit about that different approach of, just everyone should take the same probiotic versus this approach. Sure. Maybe first I'll say, okay, probiotics have been around for a long time. But we're just now emerging into this deeper understanding of what they can do. And most of the probiotics, if you look online or you go to a store, most of them are coming from just three suppliers. So most of the strains, there's about s- 12 strains that are used widely in what you find on the shelves, and those come from three major companies, one of which was a spin-off from DuPont. And so they're just repackagings. So it's an illusion of variety, and there's really-... not a lot of variety. But w- what we did... first of all, that, the one that I mentioned that I made for my husband, we made that as a team, and then we saw how well it worked, and we had computational biology, which, is a fancy word for computers, that look at the genes of the bacteria and predict how the team is. So if you wanted to equate it to your, w- what is it when you do the football picks and everybody's picking their team? Draft. Yeah. You're doing the, whatever your fake draft is. I mean, that's sort of what, how we looked at it, is okay, we're gonna draft the right players with the right genes, and we're gonna put them together in a team, and we're gonna see how they play. So we simulate and see, okay, can they produce what we want them to produce, and are they gonna use what we want them to use? And so that first formula, which is really our most researched and best-selling formula, it's called Sugar Shift, and it's for metabolic health. Turns out about 60% of people with Parkinson's have some known or diagnosed level of insulin resistance. And so we, we took that concept and we did a clinical trial in diabetes and showed that we could move the gut back to an anaerobic state like it's supposed to be, restored butyrate producers that feed the cell lining, and lowered the markers of diabetes, like fasting blood glucose, postprandial insulin, HOMA-IR. All of those improved- We also measured serum LPS and that dropped and at six months it was almost gone. So we unblinded at the end of the study and kept some people on so that we had six-month data. And and this was done in Cuba in a population that's eating a high carb diet because they don't have the, they don't have the dietary choices we have here. It was, pretty interesting. And we've had a lot of customer feedback on that. But we took that concept and we said, "Okay, what are other problems people are trying to solve?" And we made a product for sleep. So it's a team of bacteria, and most people won't know, but bacteria produce melatonin just like we do. And so we have a team of bacteria that produce bacterial melatonin and tryptophan. And tryptophan is one of the amino acids that also is disrupted by glyphosate because bacteria ... So we don't get the aromatic amino acids, tryptophan, tyrosine, and phe- phenylalanine. We can't make those. We get them from our diet or from the microbes in our gut. So anyway, that sleep formula is essentially supporting the metabolic pathways for tryptophan and bacterial melatonin to support sleep. And then we made a product for, it's called I- Ideal Immunity, and it has a strain of bacteria that we got out of our sample base from a healthy person called Lactobacillus ruminis, and it keeps... it's very effective at killing the foodborne pathogens like L- Listeria, Salmonella, E. coli, those types of things. And so it's a great, team to take with you if you're going on foreign travel or if you've had if you've had food poisoning. We had a doctor, we have a doctor in Hawaii who got something from one of his patients who had been to the Amazon jungle and had c- had chronic diarrhea for 40 years. And it was the f- first thing that reversed his diarrhea and stabilized his system. We have one for stress back to that we're all suffering from too much stress, and that helps support k- calming neurotransmitters, GABA production. And I can typically feel that in about 20 minutes of taking it. I'll sort of feel the edge come off. But if you have a tracker, you can see the change in your stress score with that product. And I d- have customers with the sleep product who have seen, Like one of them sent their Oura Ring data, and I think they doubled their deep sleep in about a week. Yeah. And then we h- and then we have another one for restoring the gut after antibiotics, and I've, I've been working with some dentists on that because they're, they prescribe more antibiotics than I think anybody out there. Really? And they're starting to realize, okay, this is pretty disruptive maybe we need to be giving people a little support after we put them on antibiotics. Wow. And you do talk a lot about that this, these are not, We shouldn't really be thinking of these in the same way that we do pharmaceuticals, where the advice is generally just take the thing, just take the pharmaceutical and it's gonna make your condition better and you don't have to think about, your diet and lifestyle stuff. I, I know that you're a strong advocate that this is a tool to combine with, cleaning up your diet and changing some lifestyle stuff. Exactly. So that, that Sugar Shift formula, I mean, we talk to people all the time. This is a great tool for you to overcome those cravings, to make that shift away from th- that high carb diet and the processed food because you need a tool to help remodel those microbes so they'll stop screaming at you. And the the other g- so our latest research on that formula is actually it helps break down glyphosate and the by- the, there's a byproduct of glyphosate called AMPA. It breaks down both of those, and we did a study in the lab looking at 1,000 times the allowable limit in an ingredient, and that formula broke down 27% of it in 24 hours. So that's another kinda good way to support your, or s- protect yourself from this exposure that we're, that's coming at us from all over. So if, even if you're trying to eat as healthy as possible, if you go out and eat in restaurants, I guarantee you're being exposed to glyphosate. It's just plain and simple. Awesome. You've you've alluded to a few kind of success stories with this. What are some other good stories you can help people with? Oh, I had... So this, I love this woman's story. So we used to, we ran the Sugar Shift Challenge where we would get people to get off of sugar, and I had this woman who was I mean, I can't even imagine this. She was drinking seven lattes a day. Can you imagine how much sugar that is? Not to mention the caffeine. But within- A week, she was down to half a latte, and in two weeks she lost 15 pounds. No wonder. She wasn't drinking seven lattes. So that was just a r- a remarkable story for me. I get a lot of I get a lot of people with chronic constipation who it's, they've solved their constipation and they've, they feel so much better, y- for the first time. But lots of people call or write us about the sleep, and that they've been taking melatonin for a long time, and this... no grogginess. They just sleep so much better. And melatonin is one of those things where it can push the system at the wrong time, I'll say. But that, that, that was one of my favorite ones, is it was the woman with the lattes. So Sugar Shift helps decrease cravings for... Sugar... for sugar. And this is the one that, that converts the glucose and the fructose into the thing we were talking about at the very beginning- Yep ... where I was completely lost. Yes. Okay. The, all of that i- is, triggers all kinds of questions for me, but I think what I'd like to... I want to follow up on this, Phil. Phil, can you explain why if the fructose and the glucose gets converted to, what's the other thing, Martha? Mannitol, it's called. Mannitol. Why does that reduce cravings? That I'm not, I don't follow that. So a lot of the bacteria that crave glucose and fructose are those pathogens that produce those signals. So when you start converting the glucose and fructose, you're removing that. You're removing the thing that starts the, that makes the food call. That starts that. But mannitol is actually, it's a prebiotic food, but it feeds a broader group of microbes. So you get a healthier, broader profile, whereas the glucose and fructose is a little more selective for some of the... Streptococcus is one of them that it's it, that it feeds. But it's sh- you're just shifting, you're shifting the whole ecosystem away from the simple sugars, glucose and fructose. And so by doing that, the bugs that love that kinda die off, and then you're left with It's like getting rid of the bad guys in your neighborhood Right And then everyone's happy. Yeah. No I was thinking of it exactly the same way and I can't say this is something that I have deep scientific knowledge about or have really looked into, but the bottom line is glucose and fructose are toxic, right? In many ways to our body. And the way that I was thinking about it is the bacteria that survive being bombarded with glucose and fructose probably aren't the ones that we want around, right? And probably aren't the ones that are, have been there again, thinking ancestrally, right? We never had such high levels of glucose and fructose consumption as we do now. And the bacteria that are, that can survive that and then thrive on it are probably not the ones that we really want in our microbiome. So that, that's how I would frame that in my mind. I guess, some people might be hearing this and thinking it sounds almost all of our problems can be tied to our microbiome." Yeah. And so maybe the answer is just finding the right combination of these things to really be able to fix it, which may or may not be, known yet. I mean, I guess are there certain things that you have encountered that, this kind of approach has not been applicable to? Or is there something, what are the way, what are the things that people should be thinking about, if this isn't, this isn't quite fixing the problem for them? How should people be thinking about that? I think across the spectrum, by focusing on your gut health, you're going to improve your overall health, no matter what is problem you're dealing with. Yeah ... and focusing on your gut at the core... I mean, yes, I have a probiotics company, but at the core, focusing on your gut involves focusing on the food you're putting in your body. First and foremost, what are you feeding yourself? Because when you're feeding yourself, you're feeding your microbes. And that, I think, is a- Just across the board, you're gonna improve your health if you focus on gut health. Yeah. I mean, I would agree. And I'll just say not known to Martha even, that, that is the underlying thesis in my new book. This and again, this isn't something we really arranged in advance but I have come to the same conclusion. And it's interesting, that I find myself as a heart surgeon concerned about heart disease now talking about the gut, maybe more so than I talk about the heart anymore. I mean, s- sadly my husband actually passed away from a pulmonary embolism. And people would think,"Okay, none of that is really related to this." But it is all, it's all connected. And he had c- so his Parkinson's was very stable but, Parkinson's has a big core gut health. And then I mentioned something called the glycocalyx, and that's when Jack said "Flags up. That's enough." But you know, that, what's going on in the gut is very much involved with whether or not that system is healthy. And then my husband had COVID, and that damages that, it damages the glycocalyx, it damages the gut, it damages all of that. And so it puts you in a much more s- susceptible state and in your cardiovascular system. And so it's all connected. And I also, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make another plug because I have a book coming out in June, and it's called Connected. I don't know if you can see it. Awesome. Yeah. But you know, it talks about my 20-plus-year journey with John in trying to put all these pieces together. And I'm excited that you have come to the same conclusion of the importance of the gut because it's incredibly important. And there was a study from the European Microbiome Project that, I think it was 2,500 people or something, and they had, all these different things that they were able to pull from the people's medical records and everything, and in the top 10 of the prediction of longevity and health was basically your number three was your bowel regularity. So I mean, a just a very simple way to know if you need to do some work. This is probably an unfair question, but you'll understand the reason. My dad had a complete... he had some sort of serious colon issue in his early 30s- ... and had a colostomy, and lived without a colon for 40-some years, and in his last I saw it happen over at least a 15-year period. Might have been longer than that. He developed serious tremors. I don't know if he was ever diagnosed with Parkinson's, but he definitely had these tremors, and I often have wondered how much his incomplete digestive system was related to these other kind of health issues that I saw him deal with. Since you have particular experience with Parkinson's, I was hoping you might be able to address that. But he passed from Yes. I would- ... a few years ago,... s- I would say yes, that is, I'm not gonna say most definitely, but that is probably the case because, without a colon, there are a lot of things that are fermented and made in the colon by these bacteria, so that's, s- something that would have been a little bit different. And then without a colon, though, he's probably dealing with more of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, which a lot of... is related to a lot of issues, and that's where the, the bacteria are coming up into the small intestine, which is where we're supposed to absorb nutrients, and there's not supposed to be a lot of colonic bacteria in there. And so when they get in there, they're actually stealing nutrients from us, so that can have a lot of downstream impacts as well. Oh, my God, this is just fascinating. I'm I assure you, I am immediately going onto your website and ordering some Sugar Shift. This is not intended to be a pitch, folks. I just finished a round of antibiotics because I had a sinus infection, and it's just nice to know that I can take some effective positive steps to counteract. Okay. If you took antibiotics for your sinus, look at the c- Total Gut Reset. It's a s- kind of a step-by-step if you took antibiotics of what to do. Oh, okay. Cool. Total Gut Reset. Consider it done. Okay. Perfect. Yeah, and let's let's give the link to the website. I will say a- again you know- Yes, you're selling something, but you have a lot of great educational resources on that site for people to learn about, the gut and the microbiome and some of these different conditions. So I, I do highly encourage people to check it out even if you're not going there to order something. So let's give the link to the website and also give another plug for your new book. Okay. So the other thing you can find on the website is I have a lot of recipes for fermented foods, and so you can get your probiotics through fermented foods, but I don't know if you can s- yeah. Yeah. It's a little blurry 'cause I have my background blur on, but

it's called Connected: 58:27

Love, Loss, and the Unseen Forces Behind Chronic Disease, and that's coming out June 23rd. And then I have a book out that's already out called- Oh... my Search for the Perfect Poop, that's a little blurry which is really- It's a little blurry just stories about bowel movements and problems with it- ... and how important it is to your health. And, it's humorous and it's actually interesting. It has some stories in here that you'll go, "Wait, what?" Should I send a copy of that to my nine-year-old grandson? Will he love it? Oh, yeah, he mi- well, he might. Yeah, he might.'Cause, every- yeah, everyone's seen the Everybody Poops book that you give to the little kids when they are learning to be- go potty train. And, actually constipation can go all the way back to that potty training battle. Yeah, it's probably a whole nother issue That's a whole nother issue we won't get into. We won't get into that one. Our guest has been Martha Carlin, founder of The Bio Collective. That is... You can read all about that at thebiocollective.com. I guess it's... I spent a good bit of time on there and it looks deep, folks. If you're one of those people who likes to get into the gory details, I think you're gonna find it there. This is amazing stuff. Thebiocollective.com. And then the website for the probiotics is bioquest.com. Sounds spelled just like it sounds. And I'll make sure that links to all of this is available in the show notes. Phil, any last words before we say goodbye to Mar- Martha? No, just thank you for a fascinating conversation. And it's amazing to see the work that you have done. Again, this is not, this is not what your career was intended to be. And we love when people, are able to make those shifts and keep up the great work. Look forward to talking again in the future about all of this. Thank you so much- Okay ... for having me. I enjoyed it. Very good. Thank you so much for joining us, folks. For Dr. Philippa Ovadia, this has been Stay Off My Operating Table. We'll talk to you next time