What are Probiotics?

Did you know we’re made up of 98% + bacteria? We are literally MORE bug than we are HUMAN. Before you freak out, read on…these bugs, when leveraged correctly and if taking the correct forms of probiotics, can literally mean the difference between being Superhuman or Supersick. Microbes in our bodies and in the environment play a very important role in day-to-day function and regulation of the other microbes and the system.

Ideally we are made up of good, friendly bacteria that can actually modulate your immune system, control the presence of bad bacteria and enhance the growth of good bacteria. Here’s a few critical things to understand:

• About 33% of births don’t come through the womb. They come through the C-section. This prevents baby from the natural inoculation that occurs through vaginal birth. Baby is born with a compromised immune system, since these microbes are critical for the development of so many things.
• Our microbial environment that really controls 99% of all our metabolic activity, our immune function, our endocrine system, everything.
• Genes are NOT the primary driver, as we have been lead to believe. Probiotics, aka microbes control 99% of who we are; only 1% of who we are is controlled by our own genes that were passed on from mom and dad. The microbes control everything else.

TOP 5 Reasons You need a Probiotic

#1 Our Soil is Deplete & the Standard American Diet Lacks Nutrients

• In the USA, our soil has been so engineered that we’ve lost 98-99% of the original microbes that once provided life to the plants we consume
• We once at around 600 different types of foods in a year for 99.999% of human evolution. It’s just in the last 150 years that figure really started to shrink, and then more so in the last 25 years down to about maybe 15 or 20 foods for somebody that eats really well; 5 to 6 for most Americans (soy, corn, wheat, dairy, commercially raised meat, vegetable cooking oils, trans fats, sugar) which are largely the pro-inflammatory GMOs that are creating a lot of disease and symptoms.

#2 You have Leaky Gut and Inflammation Causing Disease

• 95% of Disease is Caused by Inflammation (including depression)
• It’s estimated that 80% of the population has Leaky gut (the birthplace of virtually every disease today)
• Most Americans indulge in ‘treat meals’ at least once per week, which typically involves some sort of fast food. In a soon to launch study, whereby college kids received ONE fast food meal, it was determined that it took the body almost two weeks to recover from that single meal in terms of the amount of inflammation and toxicity it caused.

“About 55% of college kids surveyed has the leaky gut syndrome. And then when you look at people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and so on, and then if you have any symptoms that are associated with leaky gut, things like allergies, asthma, sleepless nights, diabetes, heart disease, any inflammatory conditions that show up on the skin like eczema, psoriasis, acne, just random rashes, any type of dermatitis, all of these things actually are symptoms that your gut is leaky. That is fueling these inflammatory conditions that just spiral and get worse and worse and worse. You might start off with a dairy sensitivity. It might start off with an allergy to fat. It might start off as a seasonal allergy. Those things can snowball into much bigger problems like autoimmune disease, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. That’s why we’re seeing the prevalence of these conditions go through the roof in people in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s.”

#3 We live in a toxic soup and live a stressed lifestyle (which kills our good guys)

Chemical stress is perhaps the greatest epidemic and assault to our bodies today!

There are literally over 85,000 chemicals that are damaging your gut every single day; some of the most common things are:

• estrogen mimicking substances in personal care, beauty & cleaning products
• chlorine in the drinking water
• fluoride in the drinking water
• fluoride in the toothpaste
• the paint in your house
• the off-gassing from the paint in your house
• the off-gassing from the carpet in your house
• the off-gassing from your pillows and mattresses (especially if you’re sleeping on a foam pillow or a Memory foam mattress).
• flame retardants, especially in your car.

EMOTIONAL stress is a factor as well:

When we induce stress upon ourselves, whether it’s our lifestyle or personal relationships or work, we increase of expression of things like norepinephrine and epinephrine. Those things actually allow for increased virulence factors among microbes and viruses that are are dormant within the body. That cortisol and stress chemical increase wakes up the virus to be more virulent and start a new infection. That’s how connected emotional stress is to microbes to our immune system.

#4 To SAVE MONEY on vitamins you don’t need…

…because the right probiotics aka gut bugs can make them. Save $, Swallow Less! In addition, the right strains of probiotics can ensure your gut is healthy enough to absorb the nutrients you’re consuming in food.

It’s a HUGE myth in the nutrition industry: “You are what you eat.”

It’s not, “You are what you eat.” It’s “You are what you absorb.”

You can be taking THE BEST food and supplements all day long, but if your digestive track is not healthy enough to break down that food, assimilate it and pull the nutrients into your system or even take the nutrients from a capsule in a supplement that’s been isolated, and absorb that, you’re just not going to get the benefit of it.

So, a good probiotic will do two things. Number one, it will reduce the inflammation, so it helps your body absorb more nutrients. The second part is the good probiotic should actually produce nutrients for you. One of the microbes in Megaspore produces 12 different carotenoids in your intestinal tract. Most beta-Carotene and lutein supplements for example cost, $35, $40 for the month’s supply, of which you’re going to absorb less than 2% or 3% of that, assuming dysbiosis. A good probiotic will produce carotenoids, hence you shouldn’t need to spend $35 on 12 different carotenoid/antioxidant supplements like alpha-Carotene, beta-Carotene, astaxanthin, zeaxanthin, lutein, lycopene.

Hmmmm, a $500 per month savings? 😉

#5 To detox Xenoestrogens, which cause weight gain, PMS, cancer, and…

• Painful, heavy, clotty and/or long periods (this used to be me)
• Facial hair – especially above the lip
• Pre-menstrual tension including emotional upset, frustration, anger, headaches, breast distention, nose bleeds, sinus issues, bowel irregularities that occur from ovulation (up to 2 weeks prior to the period arriving)
• Mood swings – anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue
• PCOS
• Endometriosis
• Ovarian cysts
• Acne
• Weight gain OR inability to lose weight
• Menopause (Yes, estrogen drops around 50, but is it too high compared to progesterone – these 2 must coexist in the perfect balance):
• Migraines
• Breast Cancer
• Hypothyroid
• Hair loss

We need a strong population of gut bacteria to help detox estrogen and synthetic estrogen and hormone metabolites. When there isn’t enough of the right type of strains of probiotics in the gut, estrogen dominance ensues which will result in:

• Weight gain, gynecomastia, cancer – in men.
• Bloating, PMS, skin issues, depression, PCOS, cancer – in women.

…just to name a few. The solution = there’s this constellation of bacteria and their associated genes in the gut— the estrobolome—that’s designed to get rid of the excess estrogen.

About the Microbiome Expert, Kiran Krishnan

 

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hello beautiful warriors. Happy, happy Sexy Belly Series. We are going today to talk about one of the most important topics that you probably have not heard much from your doctor about.

And a lot of people today want six-pack abs. It’s a crazy movement. I was a bodybuilder at one time. I am the founder of DianeKazer.com. I am actually a former pro soccer player and a bodybuilder. But I have now turned functional diagnostic nutritionist and personal trainer and yoga teacher and gut lover.

I love my gut, I love your gut, I love following my gut feeling and I love talking about everything that involves the gut, including bacteria and how we are like 98% bacteria, and we weigh almost 5 lbs of bacteria in our body, which is super crazy, 5 lbs. to 7 lbs.

So, the next time you are bench-pressing or curling weight—I hope you’re not bench-pressing 5 lbs. I hope you’re bench-pressing more than that. And I hope you’re doing something to press, to build your body, to build your shoulders. People talk about bodybuilding all the time, but they’re not talking about bacteria that build their muscles.

So, we’re going to talk about some really nerdy things today, but we’re going to super make it fun. And the next time you’re bench-pressing or, like I said, curling about 5 lbs., I want you to think, “Man, my bacteria weight this much. This is pretty crazy.”

And so why does that even matter to you? We’re going to talk about that today with one of my favorite guys who talks about the gut. He is the modern day Hippocrates. And Hippocrates said many, many years ago that all death begins in the bowels and all disease begins in the bowels.

And so we’re not going to get too nerdy today. We’re going to get straight to the point of the top five things that you need to look for when you are going to buy a probiotic, and the top five reason why both Kiran and I think that probiotics are the number one thing that you should be considering taking in your day-to-day if you want any of the following—a better booty, a better body, better beauty, a better brain and as we talk about in Eat. Play. Sex., my podcast with Dr. Cat Meyer, a better boner.

And I mean everything. I’m talking about sexual health. I’m talking about energy. I’m talking about sex hormones. I’m talking about sleep, all the things that the majority of America is having the most problems with.

So, number one thing is dysbiosis. That means that there are more bad bacteria than good bacteria. It’s very common today with the prevalence of antibiotic overuse, chemicals, toxic air we breathe in, toxic water and just a really packed schedule.

So, I’m going to introduce, before I do, Kiran Krishnan, one of the top nerds of the Microbiome Project and one of the creators of one of the best formulators that I know of gut-healing probiotics.

So, dysbiosis, I want to ask you guys, any of the following… Is this you? And are any of these you:

And if they are, then you’ve got to listen to today’s video. It’s going to be about 30 minutes long.

If you have frequent gas or bloating in most days of the week or if you have brain fog or anxiety or depression, so any kind of a “not you” feeling mood;

Food sensitivities that maybe had even come up all of a sudden;

Missing micronutrients, things like vitamin D, magnesium, vitamin C, B. A lot of these things are very, very common today as deficiencies. Even if you take a lot of these vitamins, you may not be absorbing them;

Chronic bad breath. Are you buying gum all the time? That so used to be me. And if you’re eating a lot of garlic, that’s a different story;

Loose stool or other gastrointestinal issues like constipation. If you’re not pooping twice a day, you got to listen to today;

IBS or any other kind of diagnosed bowel disease;

A history of food poisoning or stomach bugs or the chronic back-and-forth between constipation and diarrhea;

A history of prolonged probiotics for a number of different reasons—chronically sick, lady issues, infections, acne—that was also me. I took Accutane. It destroyed my body. Please consider listening to this before you take any of those medications because there are alternatives. And I wish I knew this, 20 years ago—or sinusitis, ear, nose and throat issues;

Carbohydrate tolerance, if you feel like you have an insulin issue, diabetes (which is like almost half of America right now), fatigue, low energy, acid reflux, autoimmune disease, sinus congestion, sexual dysfunction.

I can go on and on and on and on, but those are all signs. These are all telltale signs of not having enough good bacteria and having more bad bacteria which is driving you. And so those are those crazy microbes in the gut.

So Kiran, thank you for being here today. Let’s get to it.

Kiran Krishnan: Yeah, thank you for having me. I’m very excited always to be in your presence.

Diane Kazer: Presence. I wish, it was in person, but you know…

Kiran Krishnan: I know.

Diane Kazer: Technology presence.

Kiran Krishnan: Your e-presence, I guess.

Diane Kazer: E-presence, #epresence. I know you’re getting ready to go on a pretty big tour. Where are you going tomorrow? What country are you going to?

Kiran Krishnan: Well, actually today, I’m going to Dallas. And then right after that, I am going to Seattle for the biggest meeting of HIV researches. We’re doing a lot of work on HIV and leaky gut because the number one killer of HIV+ patients is actually leaky gut, which is really interesting. So probiotics and microbiome come into play.

And then, I’m heading off to Hawaii for a talk, which was nice to be invited there; and then New York and Dublin. And it just goes on and on and on.

Diane Kazer: Do you see how important Kiran is when it comes to the gut? He’s in high demand because this topic is high demand. It’s something that is not talked about very much. And you might think to yourself, “Why isn’t it talked about so much?”

So I guess we’ll start the heavy hitter, Kiran. Why isn’t it talked about very much? Why aren’t doctors leading with this when someone comes in and says, “I have whatever symptom,” like the ones that we just mentioned?

Kiran Krishnan: The main reason is that they don’t know anything about it. It’s hard for them to talk about anything that’s something that they don’t know anything about. They never got any of this training in medical school. Of course, we know that. But a lot of this information is really only about five years old.

Diane Kazer: Wow! A kindergartener.

Kiran Krishnan: Yes, it’s really new. And so what’s interesting about that is if you think about the way doctors and health professionals, a lot of times, get their information and education, it comes through drug companies. If there’s a drug for something in the space, there are drug reps that are going to the doctor’s offices. They’re going to conferences sponsored by the drug companies, so they’re learning about the science behind it.

But since this is all natural stuff, this is probiotics, this is dietary changes, these are lifestyle modifications, all these things have had a huge impact on your health and wellness, they’re never going to learn about it unless they actively seek it.

Now, what’s really good about that good news is that they are actively seeking it slowly.

So last year, I was invited to speak—I think I spoke at 50 conferences.

Diane Kazer: Wow, one a week.

Kiran Krishnan: Yeah, it’s almost one a week. And even this year, I think I’m booked all the way through the end of September for conferences, including ones in Europe and other parts of the world.

And so the good side about that is that they do want to learn about it, and that’s why they’re having people like me come out and do talks on the topic.

So people, you’ll start hearing about it from your doctors four or five years from now as they really start to grapple with the issue. But the beauty of things like what you’re doing is you’re bringing the information right to them. They don’t have to wait for their doctor to go to a conference to learn from me and then come back and talk to them about it; they have access to it directly from you.

So, I applaud you for doing that.

Diane Kazer: Oh, thanks, Kiran. It’s important. And it’s important because I myself saw amazing results when I started taking probiotics—the right kinds of probiotics too. It’s like going through a lot of men to find—you kiss a lot of frogs before you get to the prince. And I believe the same to be true for probiotics.

We all hear a buzz word, and then we might hear from our doctor, “Oh, go take this probiotic,” and it’s the only one that they know of and it’s the one they’re trained on, but it’s not backed by science—it’s backed by a lot of money.

Kiran Krishnan: The market.

Diane Kazer: Yeah, exactly. And I want you guys to feel like a million bucks, but that normally means that the companies that are backing it are making the million bucks and you’re not feeling as well.

So, it’s just like in the dating and love world, one probiotic may not be the right one for you. You’ve got to find one that works for you.

And across the board, the one that we’re going to talk more about toward the end of this is the one that I actually have seen—across the board, I have not seen anybody have any negative side effects (and there are a couple of them that I didn’t want to talk about). If you are having side effects with a probiotic, what could that mean because there are a lot of myths out there?

And yesterday, I posted something on my Facebook because I heard from one of my cardiologist friends—he’s an interventionist cardiologist—and he said, “I’m a doctor, and I feel the medical field has a lot of work to do to catch up to ancient knowledge, which has taught the basics of nutrition, mindfulness and love that result in true health. And so much is done to treat symptoms of problems and these are problems brought about from following the ego instead of the self.”

So there’s a little bit of spirit in there, but it was refreshing to hear that some of these doctors are really on top of it. They want to learn more, but sometimes they can’t or maybe they’re funded by people who are—there’s not much science behind it.

So, let’s just get into it because I want to know first the top five reasons why we should consider taking a probiotic and having that as part of our daily life for the rest of our lives. Maybe we can talk about the soil first, what it used to be versus now.

Kiran Krishnan: Yeah. We used to have a really close relationship with mother earth. And as hippie-ish as that sounds, there’s a lot of science to back that up.

Basically, once we’re born and we come through the womb—hopefully, we come through the womb. About 33% of births don’t come through the womb. They come through the C-section.

Let’s assume we’re going through the womb. We’re getting a huge swathe of microbes from mom. And then if we’re being breastfed, we’re also getting lots of microbes from mom. And then, close interactions with mom and dad in the first couple of years of life really start to set up our microbial environment that really controls 99% of all our metabolic activity, our immune function, our endocrine system, everything.

So, these microbes control 99% of who we are; only 1% of who we are is controlled by our own genes that were passed on from mom and dad. The microbes control everything else.

And so, once those particular microbes have established themselves, the rest of our lives, we’re exposed to microbes and the environment. And as it turns out, microbes in the environment play a very important role in day-to-day function and regulation of the other microbes and the system. That’s our ecology. That makes up the human body.

And so, the soil is teeming with numbers of good, friendly bacteria that can actually modulate your immune system, that can control the presence of bad bacteria, that can enhance the growth of good bacteria. And then of course, the soil is supposed to be a source of nutrients.

A lot of the good microbes within the soil are supposed to break down things like plant matter, decaying animals and things like that and release the nutrients, release the carbon sources back into the soil. So we get it when we eat plants and produce that are grown in the soil.

But all of that has been disrupted. Everything in our world is engineered. The soil is engineered. There’s nothing natural about the soil that they use in most farms. And even the soil that you buy at the store to grow in your own garden is engineered.

So, everything has now been precisely put together for profit motive and to increase yields and reduce cost and things like that, so we’re just not getting that exposure to these really important environmental friendly bacteria.

And there are so many studies that prove this. Microbiologists have gone out and followed tribes who still live an ancient hunter-gatherer lifestyle, who live in and among the dirt, and they find that those tribes seem to have much more diverse healthy microbiome.

They don’t have the chronic disease that we see. They don’t have things like allergies and asthma and Crohn’s and colitis and all these issues that we tend to see in the Western world.

They’re getting so much of the good bacteria from the soil. We don’t get that anymore.

Diane Kazer: Yeah. What percentage of the soil do we even know? What percentage of the life in a soil has been degraded by way of engineering in Monsanto and Roundup and things?

Kiran Krishnan: So, I would say if we look at the soil that we are regularly exposed to, it’s probably somewhere around 98%, 99%.

Diane Kazer: Wow!

Kiran Krishnan: It’s different of course if we go off into the wilderness, an area that has not been touched by man. That’s a different story. But how often are we in those places?

If we just look at the concrete jungles that we live in and exist in between our homes and our workplaces and the parks that we go and do our recreation in, those are sewed. It’s all engineered grass. It’s all engineered bushes. So, none of that gives us the kind of nature that we really need.

Diane Kazer: Yeah. And hey, let’s be honest, I love my hair, it’s been engineered too. So there are some fun things that have come out of science, but this is not one of them.

And when we think about it, we’re eating the plants from this deplete soil and we’re eating the animals that eat the plants of this depleted soil and it’s like this whole upstream battle of deficiencies of micronutrients and vitamins all over the place.

And people are always like, “Oh, why do we need to take supplements and get all my nutrients from food?” But it takes five heads of broccoli to get the same nutrients that we used to in one, and apples are the same.

So, I know there was one study that you did. I think that you talked about this in one other show. Our ancestors ate like 600 different types of food every year and now, we eat 20.

Kiran Krishnan: Yeah. I mean the diversity of our diet has shrunk a tremendous amount. So, we used to be hunter-gatherer/forager type of people. We gathered and foraged more than we hunted for the most part. And what that led to is just being out of necessity, just eating anything that you find and everything that’s in season and anything that’s around.

And humans really are omnivores. We survive by being able to eat many, many different things. And because our ancestors were eating seasonally and because they were foraging and hunting and gathering, they would eat many, many different forms of food and macronutrients throughout the year.

And the estimates are around 600 different types of foods in a year for the 99.999% of human evolution. It’s just in the last 150 years that that really started to shrink, and then more so in the last 25 years down to about maybe 15 or 20 for somebody that eats really well.

Diane Kazer: For sure, yeah.

Kiran Krishnan: There are a lot of people that eat five or six different types of foods.

Diane Kazer: Yeah. And most of those are the pro-inflammatory GMOs that are creating a lot of disease and symptoms.

And I guess that’s number two I’d like to move on to. Being that the inflammation is the root cause of disease and being that most of our portfolios, so to speak, or diet is more like having—

I used to be a financial planner, and I would diversify eight different kinds of segments in the portfolio—emerging markets, international, large cap, small, real estate. And it’s akin to having all of your money in one stock and hoping that it will grow and then being upset when it tanks.

And that’s when you have a diagnosis of cancer or something, to kind of compare that so people can really get a grasp of how important that is to diversify and to see the gut, which is what we’re going to get into a couple of bullets down.

But I know you made a study. It was like the McDonald’s study where you guys talked about how college kids, you fed them a McDonald’s diet, what happened two weeks later?

Kiran Krishnan: Well, the effects were immediate. But then also, you would see the effects as long as two weeks later. So this was a single meal. It was a breakfast item.

And basically, what you do is you bring college kids into the fast food state, and then you give them what we call a challenge meal. That was a McDonald’s breakfast. And then the second phase of the study, we did with a frozen pizza from the gas station. Both of them had equally bad responses.

What we basically saw was that in at least 55% of the kids—and mind you, these are young, healthy symptom-free, no disease, not obese, all of that, people who we think are in the prime of their lives, in their physical life at least.

And so what we were able to see is that when you give them this meal over the next five hours after the meal, you see a six-fold increase in endotoxemia.

Endotoxemia is toxicity in the body. And that endotoxemia comes from the gut bacteria that are out of balance.

Because the bacteria are not balanced, it’s not controlling the barrier function of the intestines. So the intestines are supposed to act as a barrier to separate the inside of your body from all of the stuff that’s coming in from the outside.

And so right behind the intestinal barriers is the blood system, the circulatory system. So you don’t want food products, particles and bacteria and viruses all getting into this system. And because of that, the intestinal barrier acts as a really, really important stopgap for everything.

What we’re seeing is when you eat a meal like that, a high caloric, a high fat meal, you’re basically opening up the barrier and allowing all these toxins to go in. That takes the body almost two weeks to recover from that single meal in terms of the amount of inflammation and toxicity.

Diane Kazer: Yeah, I think about border patrol and what leaky gut is, which I think you’ve mentioned before, like 80% of us now (or pretty much almost all of us at this point) have leaky gut.

Kiran Krishnan: Yeah. And these were young healthy kids. So, about 55% of them had the leaky gut syndrome. And then when you look at people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and so on, and then if you have any symptoms that are associated with leaky gut, things like allergies, asthma, sleepless nights, diabetes, heart disease, any inflammatory conditions that show up on the skin like eczema, psoriasis, acne, just random rashes, any type of dermatitis, all of these things actually are symptoms that your gut is leaky. That is fueling these inflammatory conditions that just spiral and get worse and worse and worse.

You might start off with a dairy sensitivity. It might start off with an allergy to fat. It might start off as a seasonal allergy. Those things can snowball into much bigger problems like autoimmune disease, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis.

That’s why we’re seeing the prevalence of these conditions go through the roof in people in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s.

Diane Kazer: Yeah, that’s why I say to anyone—anyone, clients or not—they’re like, “Oh, I can just have one cheat meal. I can just have one.” I’m like, “No, because if you’re having one treat meal every other week, then you’re just continuing that inflammatory state.” And we’re wondering why we’re depressed.

They stated that 95% of the depression is because of inflammation, not because of a mood issue. But inflammation starts in the gut. So yeah.

Kiran Krishnan: And anxiety as well.

Diane Kazer: Anxiety.

Kiran Krishnan: A lot of people suffer from anxiety and panic disorders. Those are all related and it starts in the gut.

Now, I do want to make an important point that this effect of this leaky gut, this endotoxic effect does not just come from the bad fast foods. In fact, people are susceptible to this even if you eat healthy foods. You do get some of this endotoxic response just because the barrier function of the intestines is just not working.

The response is not as high as it is if you just go out and eat a hamburger or cheeseburger and French fries from a fast food joint. But even if you ate chicken breast that was cooked in coconut oil and some broccoli and things like that, it will still give you some endotoxic rise.

So, it becomes really important to fix that gut barrier function.

Diane Kazer: Yeah, for sure.

Kiran Krishnan: And the good news is certain probiotics can actually do that.

Diane Kazer: Yeah. I can’t wait to talk about that part because people, everybody at this point is probably like, “Okay, all these things, for me, I get it.”

Any symptom really is a symptom of the gut because it’s where it all begins and these are symptoms of inflation pretty much. I’ve got some clients who are like, “Yeah, can we eat five foods?” That means that the gut has been in bad shape from potentially even the get-go. Maybe they are fed soy, formaldehyde. Maybe C-section, mom had problems. Or the gut microbes of our parents who have passed them down to us, they might have had bad bacteria. So we’ve inherited that. So there are things within our control.

But you guys, like Karin says, it’s 1% of our genes. So you guys have so much more control, which is the good news.

The number three—and we’ll start moving through these a little quicker, so we can get to the solutions part—the things that do create this situation of leaky which are all these chemicals, 5000+ that we are now exposed to since, like you said, the 1950s and beyond.

So the things that kill the good guys the most, I know antibiotic overuse and what we’re being prescribed, in the water, with animals that we’re eating and birth control, the amount of stress and the chemicals that our brains release that attack the lining of our intestines.

So, why is that? And number three (and not in a particular order), why do we need to take probiotics everyday with those things? If you could elaborate on those.

Kiran Krishnan: Yeah. So to me, this is one of the things I talk to people about all the time. They say they live a fairly healthy lifestyle and they eat well and all that, so they shouldn’t need the probiotic. Well, the problem is there’s a war going on in your gut every minute of every day.

So, your gut is this really complex and unique ecology. And this ecology is being bombarded by things every single day.

The best way to think about this is let’s think about a garden. You’ve got a backyard. You’ve got a garden in the back. And you’re trying to preserve this garden that you worked so hard to grow, a good variety of plants.

Let’s say there are a thousand different plants in there, and you’re trying to maintain the health of the garden, health of the soil. Every single day, there are people coming around and dumping chemicals into your garden. There’s acid rain going on. There’s liquid that’s contaminated going to the garden. There are weed seeds being thrown into your garden every single day.

So, every single day, there are 101 things that are assaulting your garden. Think about all the work you have to do to keep running out there, pulling out the weeds, cleaning the soil, re-fertilizing, removing the chemicals and the damaged part of the soil and replacing it with new soil. I mean, it would be mind-boggling, but that’s what’s happening every minute of the day in your gut.

So, the gut is an ecology. And the stability of that ecology is absolutely paramount to your health.

There are literally over 85,000 that are damaging your gut every single day, but let’s talk about some of the most common things:

Fluoride in the drinking water, fluoride in the toothpaste, chlorine in the drinking water, the paint in your house, the off-gassing from the paint in your house, the off-gassing from the carpet in your house. The off-gassing from your pillows and mattresses (especially if you’re sleeping on a foam pillow or a Memory foam mattress, things like that). All of the formaldehyde and the glue in the things that are stuck together all over your house and your shoes, for example. Things like flame retardants, everything is now covered in flame retardants, especially in your car.

Diane Kazer: It’s by law.

Kiran Krishnan: Yeah, it’s by law.

Diane Kazer: To protect us.

Kiran Krishnan: Yeah, flame retardants are devastating to the microbiome and to your neurological system and your endocrine system and your immune system. All of those things assault your gut every single day.

And then of course, you add in antibiotic use, low diversity in your diet, preservatives in the food, artificial colorings in the food, high salt in the food. I mean, we could go on forever.

Personal care products, things that mimic estrogen or inhibit estrogens like xenoestrogens or phytoestrogens, all of these things that are found in your surrounding no matter how healthy of a lifestyle you think you’re living.

Just walking around modern society is exposing you to stuff that you would never know you’re being exposed to (the only difference is if you’re a hermit and you are living on the side of a mountain and foraging for food in nature every day).

So, it doesn’t matter if you live in the beautiful part of San Diego that seems really nice and manicured and clean and you’re buying organic foods and all that, you’re still getting exposure to crazy amounts of chemicals that are actually killing your gut bacteria or, at the least, disrupting the balance every single day.

Diane Kazer: Yeah, crazy. And then also even our toxic mind, the raciness, the cortisol, the extra hormones and having this much stuff to do in a day, we create our own chemicals that attack self too, like the parts.

Kiran Krishnan: Absolutely. One of the things is that our gut bacteria influence us in many, many different ways, but we can influence our gut microbes as well.

So, studies have shown that if we don’t have enough mindfulness, any time we are stressed, when we induce stress upon ourselves, whether it’s our lifestyle or personal relationships or work, whatever it may be, the moment we feel stress, we increase of expression of things like norepinephrine and epinephrine. Those things actually allow for increased virulence factors among microbes and viruses that are just sitting there right within the body.

So, you might have Epstein-Barr for example, EBV, which is a common chronic viral infection that a lot of people have. But it sits dormant for the most part because the immune system tries to control it. It’s trying to hide from the immune system, so it just lays dormant.

Now, you have a stressful argument at work with somebody or your spouse or your partner.

Diane Kazer: …or kids.

Kiran Krishnan: And that increases your cortisol, increases your norepinephrine and epinephrine. That increase actually allows that virus to become more virulent and start a new infection. That’s how connected it is.

I’ll give you another example of that. Something called, EMFs, electromagnetic flux, which are generated by WiFi, your laptop, exactly, phones. In fact, I have a really, really good EMF cover on my phone, which is extremely important. It makes a big, big difference to health and wellness.

But as recent studies just published—I just talked about Epstein-Barr virus, EBV—talking on the phone for a few minutes will release about 15 megahertz of EMF. And just that release, that exposure alone can increase the virulence factor of the chronic virus.

So, this virus is sitting there dormant. You can have a conversation on your phone. That radiation is enough to get it to restart a new infection.

Diane Kazer: What about ear buds? Is it the same thing?

Kiran Krishnan: It’s the same thing because the proximity—I mean it’s not the same. I would say it’s better. Ear buds are definitely better than having the phone directly up against your head. But proximity to devices like this will also give off enough radiation. Just a WiFi in your home alone is giving off enough radiation.

And then a lot of people will sleep with their phone next to their bed, on the night stand all night long. This thing is bombarding your head and your immune system with radiation.

So, you got to remember we live in a very toxic environment. We need good microbes in there fighting for us every single day.

Diane Kazer:: Yeah. We need our own little version of the marines in there and the air force and the army. And it’s just like you said, there’s a war going on, and it is up to us to provide the good guys to fight off the bad ones.

And to cover the last two, I know one of the things that I learned from you years ago that I was just blown away by and I’ve seen the actual upstream effects of this, like we talked about earlier, there are so many common deficiencies like vitamin D and the minerals, but yet, people, especially when they come to me, that’s after years and years of doing it the wrong way.

They’re spending hundreds of dollars every month or thousands of dollars every year on supplements and things that they’ve been told that they need or maybe they read in a magazine or seen on Dr. Oz or the doctors. And they end up with this big huge like library of pills, many of which have expired, some of which they don’t like swallowing and then also, many of which, they’ve never been tested at all. So that’s going to be one of the tough things that we’re going to talk about with regard to picking the gut probiotic because it’s an unregulated industry.

So, having the right probiotic and the right microbes in our gut more specifically, how can that benefit us in our checkbook, our pocketbooks, our investment accounts being that we may save more money by having less to take because the microbes manufacture their own vitamin store?

Kiran Krishnan: Right. And that’s really important point. I mean one of the things that has never really been addressed well in the whole nutrition field and all the recommendations and supplements and vitamins and all that is the absorption factor. I always tell people the old saying of “You are what you eat.” It’s not, “You are what you eat.” It’s “You are what you absorb.”

You can be taking all of the good food and supplements and all that all day long, but if your digestive track is not healthy enough to break down that food assimilate it and pull the nutrients into your system or even take the nutrients from a capsule in a supplement that’s been isolated, and absorb that through, you’re just not going to get the benefit of it.

Remember, we talked about the intestines being the barrier. And the barrier works two ways. In some cases, the barrier is just too leaky and then it allows too many things to leak through into the blood system. But the barrier, the small intestine can also be too stringent and too inflamed and too damaged. The inflammation part of it really prevents the absorption of nutrients.

So, a good probiotic will do two things. Number one, it will reduce the inflammation, so it helps your body absorb more nutrients. That’s a very simple fact of a good probiotic.

The second part is the good probiotic should actually produce nutrients for you.

So, a lot of how we acquire these micronutrients, the vitamins and small molecules, things that you find in herbs and things like that, actually come from the micros being able to produce them for you in your gut.

One of the microbes that I work with produces 12 different carotenoids in your intestinal tract for you. So, when talking about things that people spend millions of dollars on—alpha-Carotene, beta-Carotene, astaxanthin, zeaxanthin, lutein, lycopene. You might go to your eye doctor and your vision might be going off and your eye doctor will say to you, “You better get some lutein and some beta-Carotene in you.” Or you go to a dermatologist, a beauty expert, and you’re trying to improve the look on your skin, you might get some alpha-Carotene, astaxanthin, zeaxanthin, all these important antioxidants.

Diane Kazer: Heart disease and yeah, lycopene.

Kiran Krishnan: These all play a huge role in that.

The problem is you go to the store and you get a beta-Carotene and lutein supplement. Each one of them is going to be about $35, $40 for the month’s supply. You’re going to absorb less than 2% or 3% of that.

Diane Kazer: Yeah.

Kiran Krishnan: And there are studies that have done this to look at this. All the while, you could have this single microbe sitting in your gut producing all of those for you and already A-levels, at the recommended daily allowance levels, and 100% of it is being absorbed because it’s being produced right at the site of absorption.

In fact, the way this particular microbe was discovered is the scientist was studying animals that express a lot of carotenoids on their skin like flamingos being pink or the pink color of salmon or the orange bands of shrimp. All of these animals express really high levels of these antioxidants on their skin.

And the question is how did they get it on their skin? They don’t eat fruits and vegetables. They don’t take supplements. They discovered that these organisms have microbes within their gut that produce high levels of these antioxidants for them.

And then, they started studying whether or not humans have the capability of absorbing carotenoids both from food and supplements in an effective way. And it turns out we don’t. Even from fruits and vegetables, it’s hard for us to pull those colored carotenoids off of it because they’re bound in fibers and phytates and there are anti-nutrients and things like that in it.

So, it’s really hard for our body to pull those nutrients and absorb them. We actually count on good microbes again to produce all of these things for us.

Diane Kazer: Yeah, especially with autoimmune disease being one of the fastest growing diseases right now. And I know we started this, we kicked this off by saying that you are going to go to a convention and talk about HIV and how viruses—

And I had a couple of viruses, years ago, that almost took me out. And the doctors told me that I wouldn’t be able to get rid of them and that I would need to take an antibiotic every day for the rest of my life. That’s when I just went, “Wait. What?”

This doesn’t make sense. I don’t like to be caught up on anything for the rest of my life. But that specifically, I was like, “But doesn’t that kill everything?” I thought it doesn’t sound right.

And it could have been so much different if someone just said, “You take a probiotic and maybe you’ll never see this virus again. Maybe you put that fire-breathing dragon right now into remission, and you never get to see it again unless you wake it up with your own stress levels of some kind—emotional, spiritual, chemical.

So, what of these gut bacteria is potentially healing a lot of the issues that are creating immune disease?

Kiran Krishnan: Yeah. So, the immune system is obviously the only system in your body designed to protect you on a daily basis. We’ve got the endocrine system which produces hormones. We’ve got the vascular system. We’ve got the neurological system that helps communication between all parts of the body. The vascular system of course transports all kinds of things all over the body. There’s only one system in the body that’s designed to protect you, and that’s the immune system.

Now, what’s interesting about the immune system that most people don’t really realize is the immune system is full of capability, but has almost no knowledge. So when you’re born and your immune system starts to develop, you get all of these immune cells, all of this equipment, if you will.

So, if you imagine it’s an army, you’ve got all of the soldiers, you’ve got the tanks, you’ve got the missiles, the bombs, the airplanes, all of that stuff, but you’ve got no plans. You’ve got no general. You’ve got nobody dictating who the enemy is, who the enemy isn’t and how to go about functioning.

So, that would lead to all kinds of anarchy if you had an army that was just wandering the streets, not sure who’s the bad guy, who’s the good guy and just shooting random people. That would be a disaster. And that’s exactly what’s happening in the body.

So, autoimmune disease comes about from the immune system falsely recognizing your own tissue as being foreign and starting to attack it.

Diane Kazer: It’s like a blind sniper.

Kiran Krishnan: Totally, yeah. In the same way –

Diane Kazer: Well-trained, but it’s blind.

Kiran Krishnan: Exactly! In the same way, that same dysfunction has the opposite effect of not recognizing viruses and bacteria and things that it should attack and allowing them to remain dormant and allowing them to remain in your system forever.

Now, the viruses and all that have many tricks that they use to trick the immune system, things like molecular mimicry and all that. But in general, your immune system, if it’s functioning properly, should be able to overcome these issues and should be able to learn who the bad guys are, figure out how to attack and remove them out of the body and neutralize them to some degree.

All of that learning comes from exposure to good friendly bacteria.

So, it’s something we call immune tutoring. And it starts right after you’re born. Exposure to good, friendly bacteria in the outside environment and from the ones that you get from your mom tutors the immune system to act as a general to train your immune system how to function.

So, your immune system has two different parts: it has the innate immunity, which is the more immediate, first line of protection; then it’s got the adaptive immunity, which is a long-term understanding of the bad guys and good guys, long term protections. That’s what we call immunization.

Now the innate immune system turns over fairly quickly. All the equipment it has, in order to recognize bad viruses coming in, bacteria and things like that, is lost within a fairly short amount of time (meaning every few months, it loses its capability to recognize all the bad things that you’re exposed to). So it needs that re-tutoring. It needs that re-enhancement of its capabilities. That’s done by these important types of bacteria. A lot of those bacteria that do that are environmental bacteria.

So, it becomes really important to get the exposure to this environment of bacteria as probiotics, so that you have constant immune tutoring and your immune system is always primed to defend itself.

Diane Kazer: Yeah, it’s like being prepared for a boxing match. Do you want to go in after you haven’t fought for a while and haven’t trained for a while or do you want to go and be ready to go?

And most people today, it’s all over the place. They’re sick, they’re congested. Their head, their ear, nose and throat, they can’t get rid of the biofilms that you’re talking about. They’re lining the same things that are lining our small intestines that are preventing absorption.

And this is why I want to talk about the whole concept of this—theirs is a thing called leaky vagina? It sounds awful, but we’re going to talk about that in the Shebiome Series—I’m not sure what I’m going to call it yet, but very much so—because antibiotics and antifungal prescriptions are just the thing that’s going to perpetuate these problems. Our immune system constantly goes, “Hey, what about us? Do we ever get to be taken out for a date?”

So yeah, pretty crazy, but very truthful things.

And so, let’s get to the last one. And I’ve just decided since there’s so much to cover, I’m going to do a second video and we’ll do a part two on to the top five things to look for in a probiotic and the myths that we hear like we need to have refrigeration and high amounts and great numbers of strains, et cetera. So we’ll make that a separate video after this last one.

The fifth bullet point is we need a strong microbiome. We need a strong population of gut bacteria to help detox estrogen and synthetic estrogen and hormone metabolites.

And this is where a lot of people are getting a lot of misinformation because you talked about it earlier, Kiran, about how estrogen dominance is super common and we get that from not our own hormones, but exogenous, outside of us, coming from the water, coming from our environment, coming from our personal care products, coming from hormone replacement therapy. And these are all things that are very toxic to us because our liver and then our gut has to metabolize them and get them out of the body, but it’s just not happening fast enough.

So, one of the constellations in the gut is called the estrobolome. And it’s pretty cool. I know that’s another one of those probably kindergarten concepts or is that like a Terrible Two, the estrobolome? Isn’t that pretty …

Kiran Krishnan: Yeah, it’s like a Terrible Two.

Diane Kazer: Or like a littlie baby.

Kiran Krishnan: Yeah.

Diane Kazer: So, it’s kind of new, but the whole concept is really interesting to me, especially considering that if you go get a blood test, your doctor is not going to be able to see these estrogens because they’re synthetic, they’re not naturally made. So you might walk away going, “Well, my hormone results said I’m fine, but I don’t feel fine. I feel very estrogenic.”

And I’ll link a blog below where you guys can read about what that even means because guys have it, women have it, and kids have it. That’s why we’re getting early periods and things and women having or teenagers having awful PMS and it’s debilitating them. And then obesity, overweight, diabetes, et cetera.

We’ll have a separate video about metabolism and burning fat and body-shaping. But for now, let’s just answer this one:

What does our gut bacteria do to help us metabolize these synthetic estrogens? And why is that so important, Kiran?

Kiran Krishnan: Yes. So estrogen dominance leads to just dozens and dozens and dozens of issues and symptoms that women deal with all the time. Some of the more –

Diane Kazer: And men.

Kiran Krishnan: And men too, yeah. I mean if you look at a lot of men who start to gain weight, who are eating—like I have some vegetarian friends who will gain weight, but they’ll end up with gynecomastia. Gynecomastia is the development of male breast. That male breast issue actually comes from an overabundance of estrogen in the diet that comes from phytoestrogens like lignans and soy, flaxseed, even sesame. All those things can actually act like estrogen in your body.

And so a lot of the PROCEED healthy eating can be problematic if you’re overdoing it.

And so even simple things like bloating—a lot of women, when I talk to them, complain about being bloated all the time. And that bloat can come from estrogen dominance.

Diane Kazer: Yeah. They’d say, “Are these my ovaries? Or is it my small intestine? What’s going on down there?”

Kiran Krishnan: Exactly! It’s uncomfortable. It’s cosmetically or physiologically not pretty-looking for them. So they have a lot of issues with it.

Diane Kazer: And they don’t want to be touched in the bedroom or anything because they feel insecure.

Kiran Krishnan: Exactly! And so, at the end of the day, the problem with estrogen dominance is the estrogen and then the phytoestrogens and things like that are not being cleared out of the body soon enough. They’re not being broken down, metabolized and eliminated.

And it turns out that there’s this constellation of bacteria and their associated genes in the gut—that’s what you mentioned, the estrobolome—that’s designed and supposed to be there to do this very job, to get rid of the excess estrogen.

And if those bacteria aren’t there because you’ve killed them off by lifestyle choices, being exposed to too many chemicals, a few rounds of antibiotics, all of that stuff, that disruption alone can allow you to end up in an estrogen dominance situation.

But the problem is the more dysbiotic you get, meaning the more imbalanced the gut bacteria is, the worse the estrogen symptoms are. And the worse the estrogen symptoms are, the more it impacts the gut. So it becomes a cycle.

And so you have to, at some point, stop and really take an aggressive approach to fixing the gut part of it, so that you can stop the cycle that continues to perpetuate itself.

Diane Kazer: Yeah. I’m going to call my business Aggressive Nutrition. It sounds silly, but it’s so true. We’ve got to fight chemicals with more power for our immune system or our body to fight these things off.

So, let’s get into the part two. But before we do and take a break, I would love to ask this question. And the question is:

Kiran, when you see people who when they hear all this and they go to the light side and they start taking probiotics and focusing on their gut health, what is the one thing that you constantly hear people say about it?

Do they look back and they go, “Wow”? Is it like, “I wish, I would have known this stuff a long time ago?” What did they say? What do you heawr people say?

Kiran Krishnan: The thing that I get a lot—which I think is a message that I also try to spread as much as possible—is they had no idea that it could be that simple.

These problems that they’re suffering from seem extremely complex—and it’s not to say that they’re not. They’re not always as straightforward. But the solutions to them can be quite simple.

And the medical community may make it seem extremely complex. If you’ve got an autoimmune condition, for example, in many ways, they have no answers for you. They have more questions than anything else. And the medical community just doesn’t understand autoimmune disease, how it comes about, what is actually happening in the body.

The best they can do for you right now is to try to suppress the immune system, which suppresses all functions of the immune system. It screws something else up.

And so it seems really daunting and complicated that there’s this huge chronic illness and defect in your body and your body is messed up and it’s never going to be right again and so on when a couple of small changes in your lifestyle and what you’re eating, what you’re taking can reverse the whole thing. It really blows people away.

Diane Kazer: Yeah, including me.

Kiran Krishnan: They couldn’t believe that it could be that simple when they were preparing themselves for a life of complication.

Diane Kazer: Yeah, based on our genetics and the things that WebMD says that it’s a condition which cannot be cured in the ideology of which we are unfamiliar with, and so therefore, take these drugs literally forever. It’s a lifetime of suffering that doesn’t have to happen.

And so what we want to do for you guys is, warriors, let’s move on to part two.

You’ve all heard the top five reasons today as to why taking a probiotic on a regular basis and feeding your gut is critical. So let’s move on to part two where we’re going to talk about the top five things to look for.

If you’re going to grocery store or if you’re online looking, there are so many options you’re going to see. But let’s move on to part two, which is the top five things to look for when purchasing a probiotic.