Following Your Gut Podcast #1, Meeting host Roland Pankewich

In this first episode, host Roland Pankewich gives an introduction to this new podcast that will dive deep into the world of digestive health, gut microbiome research, and holistic wellness. Each episode features engaging conversations with top experts, nutritionists, doctors, and everyday people who’ve transformed their health through better gut care.

From probiotics and enzymes to the latest breakthroughs in microbiome science, The Following Your Gut Podcast unravels the mysteries of your gut and explores how it impacts every aspect of your life—from energy and immunity to mental clarity and longevity.

Whether you’re a health enthusiast, a professional, or someone seeking solutions to gut issues, this podcast is your go-to source for practical tips, science-backed insights, and inspiring stories.

Tune in to learn how to nurture your gut, optimize your digestion, and thrive from the inside out. Don’t just listen—transform your health, one episode at a time.

TimestampSummary
0:02Merging Health Science and Clinical Wisdom Through Podcasting
1:03From Fitness Enthusiast to Holistic Nutrition and Functional Medicine
5:14Exploring Gut Health and Functional Medicine
6:55Reviving Critical Thinking in Digestive Health and Wellness
13:31Empowering Health Responsibility Through Podcast Conversations
16:01Founders Share Their Remarkable Company Story

“The microbiome of our digestive tract is like the soil of our body."

Transcript

0:00:02 - (Roland Pankewich): Welcome to the first episode of the follow your gut podcast. The podcast where scientific health meets clinical wisdom. And I want to tell you a little bit of a story about how this podcast came to be, but I should probably introduce myself first. My name is Roland Pankewich and I have had the extreme pleasure of working with master supplements and us enzymes in a collaborative way for over the last five years.
0:00:27 - (Roland Pankewich): And in the last five years we have gone on this incredible journey together. And this journey has been literally what the tagline states, the the merging of health science and clinical wisdom. Because the ethos of the company is to be of service to people who are on their journey to regaining back optimal health. And the reason this podcast came to be it was a natural evolution of essentially what this has all entailed. So where I come into the picture is my background to what has led me to this place has been quite diverse and a little atypical from the average person in the health industry.
0:01:03 - (Roland Pankewich): I was a health obsessed kid, partially out of necessity, given the experience I've had with personal and family health challenges, but also out of the sheer fascination with elite athletics, elite human performance and things of that nature. Being an aspiring athlete myself. And this led me to getting into the fitness industry. I was 16 years old and training people without a certification. But we won't, you know, mention that for the people of the past.
0:01:35 - (Roland Pankewich): And it just, it hooked me. It made me absolutely fascinated to know what the human body was a capable of doing, but also the pliability and the malleability of what the body could change into based upon the conditions and circumstances that it experienced. And me being me, the status quo was never enough. It got to the point where I sought out to do a mastery level study in the field of exercise mechanics. And I had this incredible mentor and his one ethos surrounding everything with exercise was the concept of questioning everything. It was borderline neuroses, but probably in the most optimally placed way, because you started to realize that when you question the things that you were told, you would elucidate information you would never otherwise think about if you just accepted exactly a fact as truth.
0:02:26 - (Roland Pankewich): There's an old saying that the word belief has the word lie right in the middle of it. And you know, our beliefs do shape our reality. So for me, it allowed me to understand the personalization aspects of exercise and thus to some degree, the beginnings of the personalization of health, which led me to the next chapter in my life, which was being a little bit stifled and frustrated in the world of exercise, creating this, call it glass ceiling.
0:02:52 - (Roland Pankewich): At the time, someone said to me, why didn't you just become a nutritionist? I mean, people ask you health advice all the time. And I just remember pausing and going, that is a wonderful idea. So the options of what to do were the thing that I dived into next. And it led me to the world of holistic nutrition, which was not quite a typical dietetic style university course or college program, but rather a privatized course that was far more than just theoretical knowledge of information, that is facts and books.
0:03:26 - (Roland Pankewich): It was practical aspects of listening to the wisdom of practitioners who are also teachers while being in clinic as professionals. And it entirely opened up my world to a multitude of things, especially a keen interest in the digestive system, because upon graduation, I was asked to be a teacher, which was not only an honor, it was highly stressful at the time because academia as the model student was never my forte because of things like, oh, add and being always wanting to know beyond what was being taught, which has served me well, but it was challenging in some regards.
0:04:02 - (Roland Pankewich): So I remember thinking as I was teaching, you know, this is amazing, but we're only working off of symptom analysis and these theoretical constructs. What if I could test. What if I could figure out how to test an individual and figure out what their challenges were? Like a doctor, but not being a medical professional. And this was back in 2014, 15 and up in Canada. The world of functional medicine was never all that popular in the early days because in a socialized country, we don't have the same opportunities for privatized healthcare.
0:04:37 - (Roland Pankewich): But I remember coming across functional medicine, it was almost guided to me. And I had this. This cornucopia, if that's the correct word, of opportunities that stemmed up from the ability to just test individuals and get objective data to back up the subjective information that they would bring in. And the tests that I always gravitated towards were things like urine, organic acid metabolites, where you can look at all the different metabolic markers that are discoverable through the urine, or at least what's been elucidated. And a lot of those things trace back to conditions of fungal overgrowth, microbial overgrowth, what have you.
0:05:14 - (Roland Pankewich): And then there was stool testing, which is a very, very fun and slightly awkward conversation to have with a client who has to be given instructions on how to do it. I've had some interesting stories there. And then things like regular blood panels and advanced micronutrient analysis. It gives you a sense of what's going on systemically. And holistically in the person. But there is a very digestive centric focus, because you'll come to realize in some of the episodes that we do here and some of the things that I will talk about in the future.
0:05:45 - (Roland Pankewich): The digestive system is many things. It's the last line of defense of the outside of our bodies. And you might be thinking, well, it's inside of our torso cavity. Yeah, that's true. But why I'm saying that is the gut barrier is the last physical barrier between what systemically circulates to all organs, tissues, and cells in the body and something that can be eschewed from potentially getting in there. Which I believe that the chronic issues of gut barrier permeability is why we see all of these conditions being traced back to various gut issues that has been elucidated and continues to be elucidated in modern health science research.
0:06:26 - (Roland Pankewich): So now I'm at this point to where I'm studying functional medicine. I'm doing all these things, and now I'm building the clinical aspect of what I want to focus on, digestive wellness, people with high performance needs. And that has kind of given me this wonderful background of having scientific training and knowledge and understanding, but also the practical experience of dealing with someone. Because another mentor of mine always used to tell me, you know, where the rubber meets the road.
0:06:55 - (Roland Pankewich): That's really what dealing with a client is like. Because the research can tell you what may happen, what should happen, or could happen. But the reality is research is playing the law of averages. And when it comes to knowing how to affect people on a practical or one to one basis, sometimes you need to go beyond just the research, and you need the art of critical thinking to come back, which I do believe is a little bit of a lost art that I'm hoping to revive, or not even revive, but to continue to stimulate and support its existence in this world of health. Because as things become more protocolized, we lose the individual aspect of what actually helps a person get better.
0:07:38 - (Roland Pankewich): And there are some things that transfer over to other people, but ultimately we're focusing on dealing with a person as they are. And that leads me to the next part of the story, which is where this podcast came from, or maybe better said, how this podcast came to be in the early days of my working with master supplements, who are the key sponsors of this podcast, and what they make is, in my opinion, highly biased. But that's okay.
0:08:02 - (Roland Pankewich): There's the highest quality supplements that focus on all things digestive wellness and beyond. So the early days were very classical in educating about supplement facts, mechanisms of action, translating complex research for people to understand in more subtle and practical ways. And that evolved into eventually going more deeply and understanding how the gut was connected to various other body systems. As mentioned before, the gut brain axis, the gut lung axis, the gut immune axis, all of these things started to build this framework of understanding the interconnectedness of the body.
0:08:46 - (Roland Pankewich): And that then evolved to examining different body systems and then different clinical aspects that can be affected while trying to treat someone with digestive or various health issues. So this has been a very natural run up to basically continue the conversation on helping individuals understand, level up and continuously develop their knowledge base as practitioners, or their knowledge base as individuals and health warriors, their clinical acumen and their clinical efficacy as practitioners, or potentially a new direction or starting point for someone who's trying to take it upon themselves to heal themselves through their own health journey.
0:09:31 - (Roland Pankewich): And the podcast was, you know, the next iteration of taking this beyond just making something available for the internal benefits of the current practitioners and individuals who are already in the know about the companies. We want to get the word out to people who are looking for this information that they don't know exists and simply hasn't found them yet. And that does bring me to the last part of the story of saying, who is this podcast for?
0:10:02 - (Roland Pankewich): Well, I did kind of mention it before. We want to connect with people who are helping to heal others directly, whether they are in the medical field and they have opened their practice to supplements. Classic allopathic practitioners who are adding a breadth to their scope of practice, Medical doctors who have moved away from allopathic medicine more towards a naturalistic green way of practicing. I don't know if that's the best way to describe that, but I think it's pretty self explanatory.
0:10:33 - (Roland Pankewich): And all other health practitioners that are along that spectrum that utilize high quality healthcare supplements as catalysts to helping their patients bodies heal themselves, naturopaths, osteopaths, chiropractors, acupuncturists, all the way up to energy medicine practitioners. The tools of the trade in the health and wellness world beyond the classic lifestyle and diet modifications usually fall into the realm of supplementation.
0:11:03 - (Roland Pankewich): And there are a lot of elements of the products that we have that are unique to us that make the efficacious nature of them far more powerful and therefore, in my opinion, far more pertinent to people who are really needing change. It's a really interesting thing we'll get into probably with one of the founders, Jeff Thirst, as we talk about things like probiotic strain designations, unique patents that the founder, Randy Perupkin, who was a microbiologist, actually created out of his own thoughts, and the things that we hang our hats on today to stand by the claims that we make, to make sure that the products that we sell to people are incredibly powerful and efficacious.
0:11:48 - (Roland Pankewich): So that's essentially why we're here. You know, this is the merging of two things. It's the merging of the statement that the company is always gone behind, which is, you know, honoring science. And science is always changing. So it allows us to make a statement of historical continuity, but also being open to the adaptations and adoptions of new research, and how those things can be even more insightful in explaining what we're trying to affect within the digestive system, in the body as a whole, and also the clinical aspect. And I think this is where.
0:12:26 - (Roland Pankewich): This is where the true value is for the practitioner, because most practitioners who have incredibly busy practices. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with people over the last few years. There's a tipping point, and that tipping point usually involves when they get busy. They go from aggressively growing and accumulating knowledge to servicing the clients that come in. And the thing that becomes the biggest compromise is time, specifically the amount of free time they have for themselves. Not only is people who may have families and other extracurricular activities, but to develop themselves as professionals beyond simply just learning anecdotes from dealing with people individually. I would love to be a voice of education and a resource for those people if they have a free 30 minutes, you know, here and there to pop up and pop on, rather an episode, learn something new, and then see if that piece of information or that insight has any clinical validity for the people that they're working with.
0:13:31 - (Roland Pankewich): And the wonderful aspect about what I just said in terms of working alongside those people is those people are going to be our guests. And this is where the health warriors and the individuals benefit from is you're getting the war stories from being in the trenches because you never learn more about what does and doesn't work than from working and trying them on people and figuring out what kind of feedback you get from these processes. So it is a really nice way to try to appeal to an incredibly wide audience.
0:14:03 - (Roland Pankewich): And then we leave it open to interpretation, because nothing in life stands still. The podcast will grow. The evolution of it will be, and this is pun intended, very organic in the sense that based upon the content we create, the listeners that we Amass and the feedback that we get, it helps us create a better product, ultimately reaching you guys, providing service to be of service to humanity. Because now more than ever in 2025, I think a big shift is happening in the world. We're going to see some massive changes.
0:14:34 - (Roland Pankewich): And people have had enough of being told what to do about their health. And I think there is a certain renaissance of taking responsibility back for their individual health, which I entirely get behind. Because there's no one that's going to come and save you. You have to take it upon yourself to facilitate change. Because unless change comes from within, forcible change outside of you is never lasting.
0:15:00 - (Roland Pankewich): And I don't think that is never more true than when it comes to turning around your health. The first thing you need to do is accept all that has happened to create the issue that you're in. Because once you have done that, you open up the catalyst for change in the long run. So that's the podcast, the intention, the story of how it came to be in the ethos. In a very quick nutshell, these episodes are going to be rather short, 30 minutes, maximally in length. And if I'm doing individual episodes, possibly less, because talking to myself isn't as much fun as talking to another human being. Because, you know, it's only a problem when they say you answer your own questions.
0:15:38 - (Roland Pankewich): So I want to thank you for being here. If you're listening to this, thank you for being on this journey with us and being open and I guess, vulnerable to making change in your life. Because change is not something that's inherently easy for most people. There's going to be a flow. There's going to be an incredible, as mentioned, diversity of different kinds of guests, different kinds of segments and spots that we're going to do.
0:16:01 - (Roland Pankewich): And the next episode, rather than have a professional on, is, well, they're professionals, but not classical practitioner professionals. They will be the actual founders and owners of the company. Because I believe understanding their story and understanding their why behind everything that they've done to build this company is really important for people to understand where their heart is and why their beliefs in what it is they've done. Because what they have done is quite remarkable.
0:16:28 - (Roland Pankewich): And it's time for the story to get out there for other people to understand. So look for that episode next. And the fun part is if you want to remember their names, I mentioned it in the episode. Just simply remember Jeff, and you're good. They're both Jeff, which only makes it confusing when we're at board meetings. They both look your way when you say Jeff, but that is essentially that I want to thank you for being here. Thank you for the opportunity to introduce myself, to share the intentions with this podcast.
0:16:56 - (Roland Pankewich): And we look to connect again in the future with some great content, some great episodes. Stay tuned.