Following Your Gut Podcast #18, Exploring Gut Health Through Nature's Patterns

In this enlightening episode of the “Following Your Gut” podcast, host Roland Pankewich sits down with Jeff Thurston, an expert in the world of probiotics and microbiome research. They delve deep into the parallels between soil ecosystems and the human gut — insights that could revolutionize the way we understand nutrition and health. Thurston revisits the initial conversations with his business partner and founder, Randy Porubcan, where they found common ground in agriculture, marking the inception of their successful venture. He shares compelling connections between how plants absorb nutrients and how humans might better harness food’s full nutritional potential.

Throughout the discussion, emphasis is placed on the significant role of minerals in human health, identifying deficiencies as pivotal to long-term wellness. Thurston articulates a holistic perspective, advocating that the imbalances within modern agriculture mirror those inhibiting human gut health. By drawing on regenerative agricultural principles, he suggests a path forward not just for better crops, but for a healthier microbiome. The episode culminates in actionable advice on how individuals can optimize their gut health through the balanced consumption of enzymes, probiotics, and fiber, while maintaining a diversified diet.

Key Takeaways:

 Interconnected Ecosystems: Both the soil and the human gut rely on microbial interactions to enhance nutrient absorption and ensure health and productivity.

Mineral Deficiency as an Epidemic: Understanding and addressing widespread deficiencies in essential minerals can have profound ramifications for both human health and agricultural productivity.

Regenerative Practices: Transitioning to regenerative agriculture can vastly improve the nutritional profile of crops, paralleling efforts to restore gut health.

Role of Fiber and Probiotics: Diversity in diet and fiber intake is crucial for promoting a thriving microbiome, which in turn, supports overall health and nutrient uptake.

Proactive Health: Embracing sustainable, integrative approaches can lay the foundation for future generations, honoring the philosophy of considering the impact seven generations forward.

Notable Quotes:

•             “The greater diversity of the food fiber that you eat, the greater the diversity of the microbes are going to be in your colon.”

•             “We are not regulated by our total resources as much as we are limited by our scarcest resource.”

•             “If you feed the good guys the food that they need, the bad guys don’t stand a chance.”

•             “Health habits, knowledge, and understanding are part of what needs to be passed on.”

•             “You have to do what we need to do to put ourselves in the best position to take what food we are getting and getting the most out of it.”

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

Transcript

0:00:02 Roland Pankewich: Welcome back to the following your Gut podcast, where health science meets clinical wisdom. Today’s question, We’ve all heard that the gut is an ecosystem and the microbiome is kind of reflective of patterns in nature. But have you ever really delved into exactly what that means or how that all comes together? Luckily, my guest today who has been on before, seems to have a penchant for wanting to dig deeper and deeper into these patterns of nature as they relate to the human body.

0:00:31 Roland Pankewich: And we have the godfather of Probiotics himself, Mr. Jeff Thurston, because he wants to share some new insights that he’s been elucidating based upon the research he continuously does back at the lab. Jeff, welcome back.

0:00:45 Jeff Thurston: Thank you, Roland. It’s always good to be back.

0:00:47 Roland Pankewich: Oh, you and I always have great conversations, so I’m looking forward to another one.

0:00:52 Jeff Thurston: Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s when you get older, sometimes it’s a little bit easier to sit back and just look at things a little bit differently because you’re not under the same pressures.

0:01:00 Roland Pankewich: This is true. And you also haven’t had the same conditioning of being someone who scrolls through 10 second videos on social media, so you could focus a little bit longer and say, read an article. So today you have a few things that you want to talk about. And, and this is a nice coming full circle scenario because I know that you and Randy Company’s founders bonded over agriculture in the beginning and you’re kind of putting together a story of how this whole thing fits together, not only from a clinical perspective, but more from a perspective for humanity understanding the ecosystems and the interconnected nature of what’s going on in our bodies and what’s going on in nature. So I would love for you to do a little bit of a story time with some scientific tidbits here and there, if you could.

0:01:53 Jeff Thurston: Okay, that’s fine. It was back in the middle 90s that I met Randy Porubcan. We were both doing organic agriculture inputs. His was far more interesting to me because I’m basically a microbiologist and he was using microbes to increase the productivity of a plant with less fertilizer so he could get 10 to 15% more produce with 20% less fertilizer. And it was all by putting microbes back into the soil.

0:02:24 Jeff Thurston: And then we got to talking about how, you know, probiotics was such a good thing because he started out growing the NCFM strain of acidophilus back in the 1970s. So when we were at dinner, we were just going back and forth and just talking and having the best of Times. And in 2002, he called me up, said, you ready to start a business? And I said, yep. You know, we dropped everything, basically started it with our credit cards and, and, and here we are today. That’s how we got here.

0:02:56 Jeff Thurston: But that whole thing, upon reflection, sort of comes back. And then I’ve been also looking at minerals. I met a Dr. Ulrey, and he started talking to me about minerals, and I started going, hmm, you know, there’s, you know, they’re in the soil. How do they get to us? You know, and so I started looking at what’s going on in agriculture and in human health and how they kind of correlate. All right, so if you, if you take a. A plant, it with. Photosynthesis is making sugar. That sugar goes down into the ground, feeds the microbes in the ground, whether it’s actinomyces, bacteria, fungi, whatever, that’s their food source.

0:03:43 Jeff Thurston: They in turn, break down the soil and take the minerals and put them back into the plant. There’s very few things that a plant takes up by itself. NPK is what everybody knows. That’s what’s in all of your little fertilizers that we put in our gardens. So the minerals get into the plants, and then, you know, a lot of, you know, vegans might like, not. Not like this one, but I don’t recall any pictures of people walking around on their hands and knees eating grass back 5,000 years ago.

0:04:13 Jeff Thurston: Right. They were out there with arrows and spears, hunting animals. Well, the animals are eating the grass, getting the minerals. The minerals becoming conjugated, if you will, into proteins. And then when the human eats the proteins, they get the minerals and in addition to everything else. And minerals, to me, are really becoming a large part of. Of my thinking in terms of how we can improve health.

0:04:42 Roland Pankewich: Interesting. Could you dive into a little bit more about that mineral philosophy?

0:04:46 Jeff Thurston: Well, we’ve known since the 1950s that pregnant women who were deficient in iron were more likely. More likely. Don’t take that to mean likely. More likely to have a child with physical or mental disabilities. We’ve known that since the 1950s that minerals are that important. And it could be for a myriad of reasons, because most enzymes are many. I should say many enzymes require a mineral activator to make them efficient.

0:05:18 Jeff Thurston: So what you have is you have food back in the 1950s that had a lot of minerals in it. And if Popeye was eating the spinach today, his arms would look like mine instead of those powerful muscles that he got. When he was fighting Brutus, you know, so there’s. There’s just fewer miners. There’s less. There’s less iron, there’s less zinc, there’s less calcium, there’s less phosphorus in all the food that we’re eating.

0:05:45 Jeff Thurston: And why is that? Well, when we till the ground, you know, the roots. The roots in the. In a. In a field or a pasture probably go down into the ground 8 to 10ft. There’s plenty of minerals down there, right? And there’s a lot of organic material in those roots. And on all those roots, there’s this exudate from the plant that’s feeding the microbes. When you till the ground, you kill that. You’ve destroyed what’s going on underground.

0:06:16 Jeff Thurston: That whole concept of microbes putting minerals into the root hairs 10ft down in the ground has been destroyed. So what we have is we have plants that are only getting minerals from the top 12 inches of the soil that’s been turned over to expose everything to sunlight and oxygen and everything else that’s going on above the ground. Whereas in the ground, it’s very different in how it’s sequestered.

0:06:45 Jeff Thurston: So I started looking at that, and I’m saying this root hair is very much like a microvillus, only it’s working kind of in. In the opposite way. So you, you’ve. So I started to draw the line between how does a mineral get into a plant and then how does the mineral get into the human? And I started, you know, in my mind, drawing that line.

0:07:08 Roland Pankewich: It’s very interesting you say that, because widespread mineral deficiency, I believe, is an epidemic nowadays, and people. And you start to realize when you look at these interconnected systems, if one thing in the system is missing, the whole thing kind of falls down in terms of how well it works. So if I can draw a parallel here, and I want to dig into this with you a little bit, just to hear what your thoughts are.

0:07:34 Roland Pankewich: You’re saying that it’s the interactions of what’s in the soil, the microbes and the plants. It’s kind of like a triangle, if you will. And for a plant to be able to properly nourish itself, it’s the interaction point of the plant and the soil microbes to allow the microbes are doing the work to get the plants the nutrition correct. Are you saying, theoretically, what’s going on inside of the microbiome might also be dependent upon microbes in the microbiome able to break things down or extract nutrition from the foods that we eat in Conjunction with a healthy gut lining that allows the body to absorb minerals in the small intestine.

0:08:21 Jeff Thurston: Precisely. You know, you, you laid it out just right. It’s. There’s this one little triangle in the, in the gut, which is the same triangle that’s in, in, in. In the soil, only they’re rotating in opposite directions, if you will, plant, bringing up the minerals and then the microbes from the microbes, and then the microbes are putting minerals back into the human or, you know, on the other end. And in this go, in. What you said earlier goes back to an old law, if you will, called the law of the minimum.

0:08:52 Jeff Thurston: Now, it was called Liebig’s law of the minimum, but I think somebody else, you know, started talking about it earlier, but he, he got the credit for it. And it says that we are not regulated by our total resources as much as we are limited by our scarcest resource. So if you’re deficient in, say, zinc and everything else is perfectly fine, and you’re deficient in zinc, glutathione might not work quite as well if you’re deficient in iron, but you’re sufficient in everything else, Catalase may not work so well in oxidation and reduction.

0:09:29 Jeff Thurston: And there’s a lot of cascading things that go on from that. But just like a. A barrel, and you have one short stave in there. Doesn’t matter how big the barrel is, it only fills up to the. The length of the longest stave. So if we’re deficient in a mineral, then a lot of other systems start to break down. So it goes back to, we need to have that balance of everything. And if you’re, you know, if you’re deficient in something and you decide you want to take a supplement to overcome that balance, well, sometimes those minerals can overwhelm the transport systems in the gut.

0:10:13 Jeff Thurston: So the best way to get the minerals is in the way mother Nature intended, was to have it complexed either in a plant or an animal, then to have us have enzymes that break the food down, and then the microbes in our microbiome can take that nutrition and put it back into circulation so that we can utilize it throughout our body systems.

0:10:37 Roland Pankewich: A very interesting premise because there’s a very cause and effect relationship assumed with healthcare and supplements where if I’m deficient in something, I just have to take the thing and I should be fine. But what you’re saying is if the system, I. E. The body, the ecosystem of the gut, is not primed and ready to uptake A large amount of something that we’re supposed to have in small amounts that might actually not only not resolve the problem, it could create a bigger problem if someone is continuously trying to resolve something, not thinking about the order of operations or the steps in the process.

0:11:18 Jeff Thurston: Yeah, that’s, you know, that’s, that’s one part of it. The other part of it is to say if you’re deficient in iron, you can’t eat a pipe.

0:11:24 Roland Pankewich: You try, but your dentist will probably.

0:11:28 Jeff Thurston: Calcium it, can’t chew on bones. You know, it’s like the form that it’s in matters and the, and the natural form is usually combined in some complex, whether it’s a fiber complex, whether it’s a mineral complex. Right. Well, you.

0:11:45 Roland Pankewich: You and I have the same. You and I have the same philosophy here where, you know, Mother Nature doesn’t make mistakes. She does things in an idealized way, and humans try to do their best to replicate. But It’s a catch 22, because I agree with your statement. The, the deficiencies in food nowadays are almost to the point where you necessitate supplements to get everything that you need in a day. But supplement will never be as optimal from a nutrition source as the bioidentical forms of the vitamins and the minerals and the amino acids and the blah and the blah that you’re supposed to be uptaking.

0:12:21 Roland Pankewich: So it sounds like the point of. I don’t know if contingency is the right word, but we’ll go with it. The point of contingency here is it’s not what you’re putting in. It’s not the utilization. It’s that interface of where things are being absorbed and broken down. It sounds like the gut is the most important part of your theory. Just in the same way the soil is actually more important than the farmer or necessarily where the crop’s being grown on the planet. It’s the land, correct?

0:12:49 Jeff Thurston: Yeah, but in both cases, it’s, it’s. It’s organisms back to, you know, microorganisms and enzymes that are doing all the work at both ends. Words. And so we have. All right, let’s take a little example. You know, the CO2 is a little bit higher right now, right?

0:13:09 Roland Pankewich: Carbon dioxide for everyone.

0:13:10 Jeff Thurston: Right. We’re. We’re having a lot more CO2, so we’re getting a lot more growth in. In greenery. Right. And so when in a tree, that carbon dioxide is turned into sugar, that sugar goes down into the system and feeds the microbes, and the microbes then bring the nutrients back up into the tree, right? In agriculture, what happens is that, that CO2 is converted to sugar, right? But the roots don’t go down far enough to get the minerals. So the food we’re growing has more calories but less nutrition.

0:13:44 Roland Pankewich: Ah, it’s concentrating the glucose, but without the micronutrients, the carbon, you know, it’s.

0:13:49 Jeff Thurston: And so, you know, this, I think, to, to really start to solve a lot of the problems, we need to start looking at how we’re growing food. And it’s always, it’s been around for eons. You know, food is your medicine, right? That has to be good food. And then your systems have to be right. So you have to have, you know, you have to chew your food. You have to have good, you know, stomach acid. You have to have good, good, you know, good enzymes being produced by your pancreas. You got to have good bile coming out of your liver and, and all those things. You have to have good microbes in your small intestine because all the, all the, the carb, the carbohydrates and the minerals are absorbed in the small intestine.

0:14:31 Jeff Thurston: Fiber only works in the colon and we don’t make enzymes to break down fiber. So that has to come from the bacteria. And so it’s what you feed that makes the difference, you know, so if you have, you know, a good guy and a bad guy and they get into a fight, which one wins? The one you feed. The same thing happens in both, you know, the soil and in the human. If you feed them, the good guys, the food that they need, the bad guys don’t stand a chance.

0:15:04 Jeff Thurston: But conversely, if you feed the bad guys the food, the good guys don’t stand a chance.

0:15:12 Roland Pankewich: So in the context of the food choices, what you’re saying is the best possible scenario for a human would to be to get something organically grown, locally grown, in high quality soil, I. E. Get to know your farmer, get to know their practices so you can maximize the opportunity of investing in nutritious food.

0:15:33 Jeff Thurston: The opposite. Not quite. Because even in organic agriculture, they, they till the soil. Ah, so I’m looking more at regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture and, and biodiversity in, in, in your gut and in the soil are, are, are the same. You need to have biodiversity in, in my garden at home, I always plant marigolds and basil with my tomatoes. Right? Doesn’t interfere with it, the tomato, but they help it, you know, they, they, you know, so if you’re, if you can leave some of the native plant material that’s going down in the ground very deeply.

0:16:19 Jeff Thurston: And you’re just putting your plants in, in an area where they can grow and they can dominate. But all what’s going on under the ground is the communication between microbes from one plant to another is the same as the communication and necessities we have in our system. For example, bifidobacteria make lactate. It requires clostridia and eubacteria and others to convert it to butyrate, but only at the proper ph.

0:16:51 Jeff Thurston: So you have to have all these things both in the soil and in the human that are in balance for us to thrive.

0:17:01 Roland Pankewich: So that’s an interesting premise because the pattern of what I just understood there is if you’re growing food and you don’t till the soil and you respect the diversity of the ecosystem that you’re planting, you get the best possible outcome. If I take that in parallel and I try to reflect the pattern in a human’s digestive system or microbiome, the one thing that I bump, bump against in terms of a knowing is very few people have an unadulterated gut anymore. You know, you’ve put antibiotics, you’ve drank chlorinated water, you’ve eaten a multitude of Franken foods, you’ve lived a stressful lifestyle.

0:17:41 Roland Pankewich: So we can’t necessarily just simply rely upon assuming that if you leave someone’s gut alone, it will know what to do. In theory, it should, but there may be a lot of restrictions or blockages in the way. How can you take this theory and put it into a practical action or a guidance of how you can teach someone to regenerate their own internal ecosystem?

0:18:04 Jeff Thurston: Well, I mean, we’re all, we’re all kind of captured into the system is there’s only one place where we get food and it’s in a store. You know, if you’re growing your own, it’s a little different, but you have a short season, then you have to get into canning. And most people don’t have the time for these things, so you have to buy it from the store. So we’re, we’re kind of captured in that we have to do what we need to do to put ourselves in the best position to take what food we are getting and getting the most out of it.

0:18:30 Jeff Thurston: So that again, goes back to, you know, if, if you’re not digesting your food, food well, right. Then maybe a digestive enzyme is going to help release some of that nutrition that’s in the food into, you know, the kind, if you will, and then you have to have, you have, can take probiotics to help manage how well your, your, your, your systems are working as far as the lining of the small intestine in the colon. You know, probiotics can help improve those things.

0:19:03 Jeff Thurston: And then if you, you know, stop eating, you know, a, a donut and coffee with sugar in it in the morning and having a, a carbonated beverage at night, you know, if you stop doing those things, you can start to get some energy out of the foods that you, you know, that you’ve been eating. If you’re taking again, bringing in too much energy in one form, that farm’s just going to store it away and put it away or just eliminate it.

0:19:34 Jeff Thurston: So there’s, you know, there’s so many pieces and parts to this, but you can’t help doing things. And then most people have issues with the transport systems in their, in their GI tracts. So, you know, a systemic enzyme can help, you know, manage some of that. Those issues that are going on from too many things getting out of your system and into your bloodstream. There’s a little, there’s a lot of things that we can do, but then part of that’s going to be you got to exercise. You know, you got to walk every day a little bit.

0:20:07 Jeff Thurston: In my, in my age, you got to walk a lot, if you will, relative to, you know, what I used to do, you know, I started walking more, I started eating better, and, you know, here I am.

0:20:19 Roland Pankewich: You’re still rocking it. I mean, you’re still traveling, giving lectures, enjoying dinners and social events. So it’s, you know, there’s all the theoretical stuff, then there’s watching someone actually live out how the idealized scenario could be. And it’s really inspiring. But what I like about what you just said there is we talked about at the very beginning this idea of a triangle, right, and the triangle of the ecosystem. And it comes back to the, the three points of what you and Randy kind of established in the late 90s or early 2000s of enzymes, probiotics, and I guess, fiber. That’s. I wanted to ask the last question. You know, you mentioned fertilizer, and I didn’t get a positive connotation when you mentioned the kind of fertilizer that most people use.

0:21:11 Roland Pankewich: And I think there’s a parallel there. When it comes to the use of fibers, food is always best. I’m agreeing with you, but you talked about an enzyme to digest. You talked about a probiotic to help this lining ecosystem process regulation. You talked about an enzyme again, to Help with breaking down things that inhibit transport processes. What about throwing fertilizer into the microbiome using fiber?

0:21:36 Jeff Thurston: Well, sure. You know, I’ve read that there may be as many as 6,000 different enzymes that are required to break down the fiber that we eat. Those enzymes are like a key in a lock. If you just put an extra branch in there, you put an extra, you know, carbohydrate in that branch, you know, it’s going to take a different enzyme. And those enzymes we don’t make as human beings, they only come from the bacteria in our gut.

0:22:08 Jeff Thurston: So what you need to do is you need to eat a variety. The greater diversity of the food fiber that you eat, the greater the diversity of the microbes are going to be in your colon. And the diversity of, of metabolites, if you will, that are going to be coming out of that, the nutrition you’re going to get from that food. It, you know, it’s, you know, a simple example. I read that fecal bacteria and presiti significant butyrate producer apple pectin increases it. Orange pectin has a tendency to decrease it.

0:22:43 Jeff Thurston: So, you know, if you eat a lot of orange pectin, you may reduce that, but you’re going to feed something else. So. But you don’t know what that’s going to be. You know, we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in your gut when you eat this food because there’s a lot of competition.

0:22:57 Roland Pankewich: There’s also the unique process and the makeup of the individual. That’s why I think, you know, those kinds of elucidations, I would call them sometimes conditionally useful and oftentimes kind of useless in the sense that in a vacuum, yeah, sure, anything can be predictable. But it doesn’t mean that apples are good and oranges are bad. It just means that variety is going to induce a system wide change. And because we know so much less than I think we really believe that we do and so much less than we have yet to discover, the best strategy is rotate what mother nature gave us and then supplement your shortcomings. Because guess what?

0:23:36 Roland Pankewich: The practicality of life sometimes gets in the way of the idealism of health.

0:23:41 Jeff Thurston: Yep, absolutely. You know, Jeff, everybody has to do their, you know, walk their own path.

0:23:46 Roland Pankewich: Correct? And a lot of it is, you know, trial and error in terms of discovering what works for you and what doesn’t. But what I love about what you said today, Jeff, is you’ve elucidated a pattern that if it exists in nature, then Some aspect of it has to be reflected back in each one of us because we’re not separate from this floating rock thing that we live on called Planet Earth. And I’ve often said this, and I use it as an opportunity to say it again, the state of health of our planet will be reflected in the average state of health of the inhabitants of our planet.

0:24:21 Roland Pankewich: And right now, the human race ain’t looking good, by and large. I think that’s why the rise of health is so powerful right now in terms of its popularity, because there’s a calling to people to sort out the problems that they’ve created for themselves. And hopefully that creates a shift in where everything is going to go in terms of the health of the individuals and the planet itself. So, Jeff, I want to. I want to thank you for coming back on. I love our.

0:24:48 Roland Pankewich: Our deep dives, our short, not so short discussions. Any final things that you want to leave the audience with before we sign off?

0:24:56 Jeff Thurston: Yeah, there’s. There’s one thing that, that is really, really strong in my heart is that we need to. The indigenous peoples of this country used to say that any decision we make, we need to look at the impact it has on seven generations to follow. So if we, instead of looking at how much money I can make or whatever it is, we look at what impact is this going to have on my granddaughter? It changes your decision making.

0:25:36 Jeff Thurston: It’s looking at what we have to do to the future. And if we start now, we still have to wait seven generations to overcome what happened back in the 1940s and 50s. So, you know, but if you don’t start now, it will never start. So I’m just, you know, start thinking about what we do and what impact it’s going to have on your child, your grandchild, your great grandchild.

0:26:03 Roland Pankewich: I think that’s a wonderful insight. And I’ll add to that from a perspective of what we’re talking about today. Health habits, knowledge and understanding are part of what I think needs to be passed on. So if we can help, you know, generate a little bit of a momentum shift in that direction of people understanding, taking responsibility for their health, putting it into practice, and teaching the next generation who will hopefully pass on to the next.

0:26:30 Roland Pankewich: That’s a nice idea. That’s a nice outcome, theoretically, in my mind. So thank you for the. The words of wisdom, as you said, you know, when you get to a certain level of time on this planet, you start to see things a little differently and everything slows down. So we appreciate your thoughts and your insights and I know that it won’t be the last time that you’re on. So until next time, thanks for being here, Jeff. It’s been an amazing conversation.

0:26:54 Jeff Thurston: Thanks, Roland. Appreciate you.

0:26:56 Roland Pankewich: My pleasure. And everyone, we’ll see you next time on the following your gut podcast. As always, thank you for the support and look for some new great episodes coming in the future. Take care.