#428: Poop, Peptides & The Power of Microbiome | The Secret Longevity Organ With Dr. Grace Liu

Welcome to Longevity. I'm your host, Natalie Knidham. I'm a nutritionist, a human potential and epigenetic coach, and I created this podcast to bring you the latest ways to take control of your health and longevity. We cover it all, from new technology and ancestral health practices to personalized interventions and a very special interest of mine, peptides and bioregulators. Enjoy the show. Welcome to the show, folks. I'm Natalie Knidham, your host. Today's episode starts with a sentence I never thought I'd really say on this podcast. Poop might be one of the most powerful longevity tools in our possession. Dr. Grace Lu is back, and we're unpacking the idea that your gut isn't just about digestion. It is literally shaping your immune system, your brain development, your lifespan, and your health span. We talk about the surprising science behind fecal transplants and how they've been shown to extend lifespan in animal models, why your gut bacteria are training your brain from birth, and how modern life from antibiotics to ultra clean environments is quietly wrecking your microbiome. Now, you may have heard of Dr. Grace Lu before as the gut goddess, and she still is. She is the founder of the Gut Institute, where she markets some incredibly powerful tools to address microbiome imbalances. Now, if you want to check them out and some of Dr. Grace's signature probiotic blends, we have a link in the show notes for you, and you'll be able to use code NAP10 there and save on your order. Next up, we're going to thank a couple of sponsors that make this show possible, and then we're off. I take my sleep pretty seriously. It's basically my favorite longevity tool. But even with a solid routine, cool room, no late caffeine, blue light blockers, the whole nine yards, there's still nights when travel stress or a late workout can throw things off just enough to notice. And this is where Trozy from transcriptions has earned a spot in my nighttime stack. I'll use a trochee about 30 minutes before bed when I want to really lock in deep restorative sleep. It dissolves between your upper gums and cheeks so it works fast and fits seamlessly in my wind down routine. It's much more than melatonin. It's actually very low in melatonin. Trozy is physician formulated with compounds like honokial and agaricon to support GABA activity, plus adenosine and cordycepsin to enhance sleep drive and deep sleep. The CBD, CBN, and 5TP rounded out for full spectrum relaxation. Each trochee is scored into four so you can dial in your dose, quarter, half, or full. Sometimes a little goes a long way. It all depends on what your body needs that night. So if you want to protect and optimize your sleep, not just fix it, head to transcriptions.com and check out Trozy. And you can use code NAT10 for 10% off your order. There are some good tools in longevity that are powerful, but quite impractical for daily life. Ozone therapy is one of these. The research is compelling, but most people aren't going to clinics multiple times a week or setting up equipment at home. And honestly, you shouldn't need to. That's why I was so curious when WizardScience has launched Oracle. It's their first ozonated oil in a capsule designed to be used daily. No machines, no appointments. Just a simple addition to a routine that's already working. What makes it so interesting is its delivery. Oracle uses an acid protected capsule. So the ozonated oil reaches the small intestine intact. That matters because ozone doesn't work like a typical antioxidant. It acts as a signal, encouraging your body to increase its own antioxidant production, support immune balance, and improve cellular communication. And because it's delivered through the gut, you're supporting the system where immunity, detoxification, and energy regulation all begin. If you're looking for a smarter, more practical way to support resilience at the cellular level, you can learn more about Oracle at wizardsciences.com and make sure to use code NAT15 for 15% off your purchase. Dr. Grace Lu, finally we get you back on the show. Welcome back. Thank you for having me again. Can't wait to talk all poop and longevity and regeneration. They are linked. They are absolutely linked. It's all, you know, at the end of the day, everybody says it, but really it's just about the poop. And it's the evidence. So where I thought we would start, and folks, we've done at least one, if not two other episodes together. So we'll put the links in the show notes to previous episodes. But today, one of the things we're going to talk about is gut health as a hallmark of aging. And we know that, you know, there is a hallmark of aging that's directly, yeah, dysbiosis, right? Dysbiosis number 12. So when we talk about those hallmarks of aging, people think, I mean, they talk about their mitochondria, telomeres, zombie cells. Talk to us about why the gut deserves a position on that list. So just like the authors of that hallmark study or review about the hallmarks of aging, adding in the three extra hallmarks in the 2023 publication, it's wild because gut touches every aspect of senescent, zombie cells, growth, regeneration, healing, healing soft tissues. Where does BPC come from? The gut. We love BPC 157 in general, like not for mass cell or SIRS clients, but we love it. You know, we love all the gut peptides. Who doesn't like GLP one? I mean, I'm in love with that peptide, small molecule. So it's probably, but yes. Yeah. And then my colleagues, you know, physicians, pharmacists and other colleagues, like they're appalled that poop can heal people, but it can. We even give it like in quarter cup, half a cup dosages to heal clostridium difficile colitis. And certain other conditions can really benefit actually. There are some FMT studies in old rats, old rodents and mice. They took young poop, you know, poop from young rodents and stuffed it into like the older one. And they got younger. Their telomeres extended. There was lifespan expansion. Yeah. And healing, right? But I think the flip, but I want to, yeah, because I want to speak to the dark side, right? Because as it is super powerful. And when you find something that powerful, if there's a dark side, it's going to be as powerful. So FMT fecal matter, it's fecal. Is it fecal matter transplant? Yeah, fecal microbiota transplant. Right. Fecal microbiota transplant. That's what FMT stands for for anybody. Yes. Yeah. A poop transplant. It's a poop transplant. And so therapeutically, it has been shown. And I know that I've even read things about autistic kids sometimes or like really crazy cases. But talk to us a little bit about why you shouldn't destroy this at home. Yeah. Don't start feeding yourself poop like from random donors or your dog. They need to be younger. But we get, you know, if you have pets, you are getting many FMT micro doses from your cat or dog already. So, and your housemates or partners, you know, we share a lot. If you've had little kids, you know, they touch the button and touch every doorknob in the house. Like we're all getting micro doses. And it's part of our immune education, right? It's part of the immune system. And I think that, you know, maybe what we could talk about a little bit, because one of the things I want to touch on is, you know, is it possible for that gut to age faster than the rest of the body? Like is it possible for the gut to be driving either accelerated or decelerated aging? Like does it have that lever? And one of the things I'd love you to touch on is that link to the immune system. Because the immune system to me next to the gut is one of the most powerful systems in the body that literally affects everything, like from your mental health to your heart disease risk. And so they work in tandem, right? You're so right, exactly. And I will be talking on more stages about like the brain mapping. But you're right. At every stage of our birth and development and growth, if the bacteria aren't there, our brain doesn't develop. That's why we see so much autism and spectrum and ADHD and depression, anxiety, social phobias and everything. And literally, if they can put the bacteria there at the right timing, those conditions don't develop. We're at a place now where one out of seven, one out of 10 child born has autism. We didn't have that. We didn't have that 10 years ago. It was much less. And we didn't have that definitely 20 years ago or 50 or 100. So post-industrial, you know, a lot of things break our gut. We know living in these hyper-hometically sealed homes, the mold kills our gut, they make antibiotics, so they kill our gut. We're in this antibiotic era, right? Millennium. And that kills the gut. C-sections and formula. We're not feeding the flora at the right stages. Our brain breaks. Literally, our brain breaks and nervous system can't heal. And then we're weird. We're like distracted. We're not happy. We're not grounded. So the gut flora stages all of our development and our healing. And they trigger all that. There are main defense systems. So some people don't really understand that. But let's say I travel and there's like Bali, Belly, or Indian, you know, gastroenteritis and Montezuma's revenge, you know. But when I take my probiotic, I make a probiotic, right? And if I take it, especially a lot, I don't get sick. In fact, I'm actually compliant and actually my health gets better. I lose five or 10 pounds. I can start eating anything again. Also, I'm usually not in the USA if I'm doing that. Right. Yeah. Well, and I mean, what you're really doing is crowding out the bad guys with the good guys, right? It's, it's... There's a lot that they do. Yeah. They're, they're mapping our brain. They're, they're turning on our natural killer cells, lowering IL-6 and TNF alpha and all the immune factors that get turned on to heal. We get, we get better healing with less fibrosis. I love the regenerative studies. So I don't know if you're familiar with Michael Levine, Dr. Michael Levine Tufts and then, yes. And other, you should get them on a show. I should. I wish I did. Yeah. And other people in that field, like they, they're, they're terrible. They kind of do these Frankenstein experiments, you know, with frogs and chop their legs off. But I love these experiments. I just was a big fan of Mary Shelley and I love Frankenstein. But they do it in the most humane way. Like they have anesthesia and it's as healthy as possible and pain-free. But some people in the regenerative medicine field, when they blasted frogs and gave them antibiotics and then chopped the leg off, compared to control, they did not regenerate the limb. Because frogs have to regenerate. They regenerate. Well, older ones don't. Only tadpoles do. And then certain, you know, salamanders and others naturally do. But frogs are a great model for us because we don't regenerate very well. We regenerate, we regenerate with a lot of scarring unless we're a fetus or a toddler. Okay. We have those high hormones and high regenerative capacity, right? But yeah, they found really interesting things about the microbiota and nuclear receptors, which I've always been into, like P par alpha, P par gamma and P par delta and the FXR, PXR, and bile acid receptors, you know, from our gut. So what do they do? And these are, tell us, tell us about, well, when they're, yeah, when they're dysregulated, like if we don't get enough omega three and the right fats, they get dysregulated and then they don't do what they're supposed to, which is nutrient sets and turn on our regeneration. Interesting. They turn on our regeneration in the best way possible without scarring or fibrosis, which is what we want. We don't want excess fibrosis because that means plaque. It means amyloid plaques in the brain, scarring, you know, it's like in the liver. Yeah. Yeah. So what are those nutrients you mentioned, omega three? Yeah. What else? And try butyrate. Butyrate. Butyrate is one of the biggest factors for both P par alpha and beta, I mean P par alpha delta and gamma. Okay. Yeah, butyrate. And butyrate comes from half of our microbiome. Literally 40, 50, 60% of our microbiota in the stool make butyrate if they're fed well. I was going to say whole plate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They cook resistant starches. That's called type three. We've cooked them. We don't eat, it's unnatural to eat raw starch. It may turn on certain things, but they also, raw starch will feed yeast and E. coli, citrubacter, all things that turn on autoimmunity. I've seen some cases flare with raw starch. So what are the, and I know you didn't, we're not going to talk about this long because I'm going back to my, is it can the gut age faster than the rest of you? But can we give people a list of, because now that we've kind of opened that little trap door, what are the five, what are the starches that people might be, might be told are good for them that they should probably think about staying away from and what would be a better form of that starch? Like basically people are looking for shortcuts, right? So we know, yes, yes, yes, yes, potatoes cooked and cooled rice, asparagus, like all of these things give us resistant starch that feeds the gut bugs appropriately. But then people want to get it out of a bag. So what are the exactly? Yeah, we always want shortcuts. Like I would love a shortcut, right? I'll tell some shortcuts. Okay. So, and sexually humans cooked and roasted, fire roasted tubers, underground tubers, and under USOs, underground storage, you know, starches. And when we heat things, they change their configuration and they're not carbs for humans, they're carbs for the, they're resistant carbs, they're fiber to the bacteria. And what further modifies them is stomach acid. Okay. And changes with like temperature. So like going cold, cold and hot, cold and hot, it change each time there's a cycle, it changes their configuration and it makes it less and less glycemic index. So it's low, low, low glycemic index, which is what people want. But if we make plenty of stomach acid, which if we have good gut flora, we do. And that's one of the first things to go as we age. But when people take like Bifidomulti-String probiotics like ours, they actually will start making their acid again and get good pancreatic digestive enzymes secretion again. And we can see this as their body temps go up, like everyone should have sort of a normal body temp. That's part should be one of the hallmarks of aging to 98.6 Fahrenheit or as high as we can get it. Without hitting a fever. Yeah. Yeah, without hitting fever. But sometimes when we're ill, we stay at 95, 96, 97. Well, guess what? There's no stomach acid, you're going to have to take B-chain HCl. And there's no pancreatic enzyme. They may be present, but they're not active. They're temperature regulated. So with every half a degree or degree of body temp, the enzymes are exponentially more active because they're meant to be active. They're home through evolution for millennia to be active at 98.6, 37 Fahrenheit. Okay. Yeah. And yeah, so getting back to your question, like what are the best starches? Well, there's really great Israeli data on microbiome. We have six taxa that are important for carb digestion. They have all the enzymatic machinery to help us break down carbs plus our own pancreatic enzymes. There's six taxa. And these are mostly like bifidose, like our like bifidose in here. And they're all butyrate makers. So that's known as the Kastridi-Aulas group. Literally half of our gut should be there. But when I check 16S data, like by-track, I know you love by-track, you funded them. I hope to fund them. I love them. Love them. Love them. Baby fund. Yeah. I'm sure they love your contributions because they're growing and thriving. I love them. So I track on there what if those taxa are available and usually they're not. And these are the people that have to go carnivore or they keto, whatever, whatever, because starches will trigger. They don't have the flora to help turn on our own machinery and their ability to break down the carbs. So if we get them back in there, which takes just training them and expanding with the core biome, core microbiome that should be there, then they can support the b-rate makers to anchor and stay. So then you can switch. In the beginning, I don't have, if someone's really effective, we don't do that much starches, but we start within a week or two, a few bites every couple days. And we add on some lorazotide to tighten the gut, which is that level up, they can use your code or limitless use your code. And we sell, you know, testing like toxins kill our gut flora. So people can do all kinds of protocols, but if they're full of toxins, it kind of doesn't, it hits the wall in the distance and stick. Yeah. Yeah. Cause the toxins are all antimicrobial. They'll keep prevent the bifidose from hanging in there. Yeah. So the best starches is a, you know, depends on the person, but eventually we want to get a diet that's ancestral. So that may be you know, if we look at centenarians that are eating their ancestral diet around the world, whether it's Italy or Sardinia or Icarios or Costa Rica, which I know you go to a Dominican Republic, you know, where you go to often and have retreats, you know, it's usually very rice and bean base is a lot of cook type three resistance. And if they have, and they have good acid, stomach acid, and they have the tubers too, but, and they have tubers, tons of Peruvian and Central American potatoes that are all different colors, a lot of antioxidants. Yeah. But I think what's really important to say is that that's what works for them because that's where they're from. And that's their ancestral diet. And I think I find sometimes we get into trouble because we read about, Oh, these people in that place halfway around the universe have this amazing diet and they live to be a hundred years old. Well, if it's good for them, it's going to be good for me. And I think that what we forget is we come from a different lineage. We have a different ancestry like I'm Mediterranean. There is no way that a Japanese diet is necessarily going to be optimal for me. And I think, you know, and what you said a minute ago, when it comes to those starches, first of all, you got to go slow because if you don't have the right guys in the gut, you're just going to know because you'll be looking three months pregnant, whether you're a man or a woman, which is right. Exactly. And embarrassing because you've got the wrong guys breaking down that starch and producing all this other stuff. Right. Exactly. But I think that the other thing I really would love you to talk about a little bit is what's happening on social media right now is people are pushing really hard on certain sources of starch and fiber that and I mean, unfortunately, people find out the hard way, right? Like they find out they they're like, oh my god, I mean, that sounds amazing. It's going to do this, this, this and this for me. And they start dumping, let's say, for example, potato starch or and I'm curious what you I'm also curious what you think about green banana because I know that eating bananas that are greener gives you more of a certain type of starch, which is good for some people in the right context at the right time. But then you can buy a bag of green banana powder. And I'll bet you that if you start dumping that into too many things, and you're not the right person with the right environment, things are going to start going sideways pretty quickly. So do you want to just speak about those? I can. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was like a little fad thing. Usually a fad thing means it's not really based on that much science or ancestral and natural science, right? And translating the science of translation is really important, as you're saying, so many things don't translate to humans. We're not simple creatures. We have a big brain, we have a big vagal nerve, and we're complex, so complex. That's why we have become the apex predators on earth, right? Yeah. So what studies show is with raw starch is that it turns on so many, it does turn on butyrate, but it also will turn on so many pathogens. And when it's compared, like one, you know, head to head against other fibers, there are some problems. Like just because you have butyrate doesn't mean it's going to be healing and anti-inflammatory. Because if you're turning on pathogens that are present, they create dysregulation. And that's what I've seen in clients, as well as some of the studies when you read it, there's not really benefit outside of butyrate. And there's natural ways to get butyrate, eating ancestral starches that your ancestry, your genetics might navigate a lot better. Like, and as you're right, like, I'm not like Eskimo, I would not eat a keto diet, but they evolved and where babies will actually have problems if they don't have, you know, the right amount of glucose and ketones. And, you know, there's a lot of problems because they've evolved and they are very keto based in their metabolism. So you can't, we can't translate what they eat to other humans. And you're Mediterranean, you grew up with vegetation, your ancestors had vegetation that had sunlight all year round. So you're used to that transferred energy from sun and photons to the plants. And your body thrives on that. And the starches in that area, some melina and beans and rice and everything, fava beans, everything else, your glucose six PD. Yeah. And I'm Asian, like the Mediterranean diet, I love it, but I don't eat it every day. I don't, I don't, I don't process. I like rice. Yeah, I mean, if I, I, I, rice makes me diabetic. Literally, it sends my blood sugar to the moon, which makes me very sad because I love rice. But it's not like, I know. Yeah. Well, there are other starches in Mediterranean. And, you know, we, I would look at your viatrack, you know, the shotgun as well as 16 s and track those species, you'd be surprised, you might add to the edge of carb digestion, focusing, having a strategy to get those species in there. Some, some people don't, you know, it's, it's, it's a, it's a complex protocol to get those species back in there. Yeah. And it, but temp has on genetics too, like if you're at two, or you have ATG 16L, which promotes more proteobacteria and E. coli, you know, we definitely push more Bifidose when any of the mutations are present because you're kind, your kindred may have grew up with so much fiber. It didn't matter that they lost the ability to have fiber in their gut. Like FET2 makes fiber for good fluoridistic around Bifidose to stick around. But if I'm negative, I'm, I'm, I'm mutated. Right. So I got to eat high fiber, which is a pain in the ass. Unintended. Yeah. Yeah. Like literally, you know, and I'm rebuilding my gut. I was telling you, I had gastroenteritis a couple of months, a couple of weeks ago, and I'm rebuilding and like, I'll get gut pain. I'm like, because I'm pushing all these prebiotics. I'm like, oh, yeah, I got to rebuild all this and get it. Because, okay. So the favorable five fibers, if someone is getting on the healthy trajectory is looking at your ancestral diet, wherever your kind and kindred came from, and adopting those kind of macros, protein oils, fats and carbs, everything, polyphenols are the most important. They feed all our good gut flora. All the keystones eat polyphenols. So all the bitters and persiling from the Mediterranean, you know, is that the green, that's a little bitter, the bitters, right? So many Mediterranean, they're so good for the gut flora. And I, assiling extract, yeah, berry extracts, and these, these guys are sour. They're hard to eat, right? And they're not always tasty, but that's, you know, wherever our kind grew up, that's what we are adapted for. And the flora are adapted to. So, so for carbs, whatever macros, you know, that are sustainable at the time, when depending on what's going on and what's the composition of the gut flora. For feeding the biphydos, we need actually a minimum of 15 to 20 grams of FiveMaps, GOS, XOS, FOS, and Yellen. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, the minimum. And even if I go off that, like I'm FUT2, double negative, homozygous. So I don't feel so great. I start getting little autoimmune signs and symptoms, like if I'm really pounding gluten and I'm not taking my LeRazatide around the clock, you know, I'll get a little psoriasis on my knuckle. Interesting. Or elbow crease, whatever. You know, I have all these signs. I track KPIs. Everyone's body's different. I love labs, you know, you asked about what is the GI track aging marker. So, you know, pulling the Vi track and looking at the inflammatory markers, you know, and other testing we do, like you can use NAT10, your code, you know, we have the GI map, we can look at SIGA, so Secretory IGA, we can look at EPX, we can look at SoniaLyn. All these markers, if you're aging well, these will be minimal unless you have increase. So centenarians and super centenarians, these are studies done by BIGI and a lot of the longevity researchers, Odomaki and Wang and Kong. These are all published, like really similar articles in 2015 and 2016 on the gut microbiome and longevity. You know, they look at the gut flora and they have the ABCs in the super centenarians. These are people who lived 105, 110, 115. Semi super centenarians are centenarians and super centenarians. And they all have the ABCs. These are all anti-diabetic species, Bifidoo, Acrimansia and Christiancinella. Interesting. Nobody talks about Christiancinella. So there's two things we can touch on here. Acrimansia, again, it's another one. Yes. It's the Cinderella, it's the Cinderella bug. Because I don't know if it's Cinderella, I may be getting my... But it won't live unless people have this at all. Well, number one, and the other thing is, if you have none, that's no good. And if you have too much, that's also no good, right? And it's... Acrimansia is the one that really, really drove home to me, the message, don't just blindly pour stuff and feed them, right? Because I've heard your story so many times. Yeah. And because... It can hurt you. Well, I mean... Even ours, if someone isn't in a good trajectory, if they take too much of ours, they will be in bed. Or worse, like, oh my God, like have to go to the doctor or something. Yeah. So... It's all about timing and trajectory. Yeah. So anyway, so I guess the short answer is yes, your gut can be... I mean, if your gut is accelerated, is aging at an accelerated rate, there's a really good chance you're aging at an accelerated rate. Like, I don't think... I don't think... Well, sometimes we can have like a good thyroid or a good brain and that will compensate. But don't you think that a dysbiotic gut fundamentally... That's... I know, it's so huge. It's so large of it. It might not show up right away, but eventually it's going to start to show up in a million different ways. So... Totally. Totally. You know, your fountain of aging and your fountain of youth probably live in the gut. Yeah. Like, what is our biggest organ? Okay, well, some men might eat their penis, right? It's actually the gut. The gut. More than the skin. Not the penis. No, definitely not the penis. Oh, is it because of the villi and the microvilli? So it's more... And I think if it's perforated, it's probably even larger. It's probably a football field if it's perforated. Oh, wow. Okay. I... You know, surface area just changes, right? Yeah. But if it's healthy and good, apparently the microvilli and the small intestine, it's as large as a tennis court. Even our brain, which is so varied and convoluted and the surface area is high for memory, it's not as big as the small intestine. But they're like... With the skin, it's important. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So... And it has as many... It doesn't have as many barriers as the skin. We have like seven, eight million layers, right? Like seven, eight, three years of oxygen. Well, because we're really trying to keep the outside out through the skin, whereas the gut is designed to allow the outside in appropriate. Exactly. Right. Right. That's part of its function. So you trained as a pharmacist, right? So like... Yes. That's your... And I love pharmacists because I always... I know, yes. Pharmacists are the people that get pathways more better than pretty much anybody else. Like there's nobody that gets pathways like you guys. And so very often when I have like knowledge breakthroughs, it's because I'm talking to one... Someone like you. I'm talking to you. And it's like, oh my god, who knew? Like, you know, like you blow my mind. Someone asked for your idea. No, but because you guys have been like studying all these pathways. So there's a deeper level of mechanistically getting what's going on. So what made you start looking at the gut, not just as digestion, which frankly, even as a pharmacist, you maybe might have looked at the gut maybe for pathway things, but not digestion, but really looking at the gut as a control center for longevity. Like what made you kind of... What made that spiritual? Yeah. I was in pharmacy. Yeah. And I was like seeing just outrageous healing in clients. Like I was a CDE certified diabetes educator. So I'm really into what breaks down carbs and how to have good glycemic regulation. And yeah, some of my functional medicine friends are like, oh my god, you should really get into microbiota. I'm like, oh my god, poop. Last thing I want to do is like study poop. So I studied everything else, like advanced cardiology and lipid lipoprotein, afractionation, and... But everything's affected by the gut. Yeah. Like all the coronary calcifications are affected by oxalates. And what breaks it down? Well, you have to have... We have six species that break down oxalates. And those are important because if they are proliferating, they're going to harden all your arteries, your organs, your immune system, your gut, your brain, everything's going to classify and you're dying younger. So I had my own health issue. That's usually what brings us to the forefront of our transition from dysfunctional medicine to functional. And I come from a big family of doctors and healthcare people, like total, pharma-driven people. And so it's a little unheard of to leave as the black sheep and everything. But I had my own health thing. I was healing ancestral trauma apparently. I didn't know that. And then I had super bad black mold toxicity along with mercury. Like we apparently probably had a bill and drill, drill and bill dentist. So every time we went in, we had like multiple quadrants with mercury. And even now, every few years, I have to detox and chelate mercury. Yeah. And I probably... We joke in functional medicine, what's the best way to detox mercury? Or any toxin? Have a baby? Which men can't do. Unless you change in transgender. Because a lot of it, depending on your snips and mutations, 50, 80% will go to the baby. That's not great. That kind of sucks. Yeah, I know. But they're young and they're usually okay and healthy. And they can dump it themselves. Yeah, they can eventually dump it. Yeah, I know. So I had to heal from that took many years. And then I realized like, wow, no one's talking about the gut. I'm going to share about it and then develop the probiotic, which is just game changing, life changing for so many people. And I kind of took a break, you know, and then I'm kind of getting back into it again. Yeah. So I'm really excited. You know, and then I studied, we were supposed to go to the conference, I learned all about Cavinsen. I'm so excited you didn't make it. But I met Cavinsen and his wife, Svetlana, Trophy Mova, and learned so much about the peptides. And then I studied every podcast you've had on peptides on your platform. Yeah, and now you've like... Oh my God! You've gone into the strategy on me. That's for sure. Sometimes I'd like to make them. I know, let's do it. Let's do it. You know, they're powerful, but they also can switch things. Like I saw also a lot of cases, people getting fucked up with BPC 157, you know, all these things and no one talks about it. So now, and we have no human studies, there's only two retrospectives. I actually remember back when people were first starting about talking about peptides. There was a guy, our friend, JF, our mutual friend, who talked about there were a couple of human studies that were done in Croatia. Remember he used to talk about those? I could not dig them out. You know why? Because they broke the rules. What happened was they did human studies that showed amazing things, but they had to be taken down because they didn't follow protocol. They didn't precede them by animal studies. And so, which is so interesting, right? Like the system was so crabby with them, they're like, no, we don't care how valuable this is. You didn't follow the rules. And so, we're taking your studies down. And I guess they must have been up at some point. That's why they're not on PubMed. Yeah, that's funny. I go to Croatia now often. I might have to go visit those labs and see who's there. There's some great scientists out there, right? Like they're really great stuff. So, okay, so let's get back to our regularly program program. And let's get back to good. I know all the tangents are fun. No, but I think, look, I mean, peptides are always, I'm sure there's a bunch of people listening to this going, what are you doing? No, keep going down the peptide trail. And we'll come back to peptides. And Dr. Grace, Grace just dropped a couple of bombs here. Number one, lorazotide is your BFF for sealing the gut. And we know that because it specifically seals the tight junctions. BPC 157 is amazing too. But it's more of a generalist, right? It's got other draws it might do in the body. And as a result, for the wrong person, it might flip the wrong switches on the wrong day. So, going back to the gut, if we frame gut health alongside the classic hallmarks of aging, right? Where do you think it intersects most powerfully or is it equal across all these things? Like is it inflammation, immune regulation, nutrient sensing, mitochondrial function? Or would you say it's all of those? Like there's no, there's no greater effect on any of these. That's what it's all about. That's why the gut is... Okay, I have to admit, I haven't dug into all those studies yet to talk, like, with familiarity. Even the gut as an aging organ, I'm not all familiar with all the studies and references there yet. Sorry, I wish I could state more. Well, that's because your AI brain hasn't gotten there yet. But you're... Yeah, I got to like... You gave me homework now, at least. So, give me a week or two or a year or two. Okay, I'm not at your speed. Okay, but I'll try. Yeah, but yeah, I think our gut can... Like the studies that Ortez talked about in his review and the other authors there, it touches everything. And I really think what immunologists feel too is like 80, 90, 100% of our immune system is the GI tract and the flora there. And they're not even understanding all the roles each keystone species has. But it's really scary because I co-relate diseases, childhood, toddler, infant, teen, 20s, or 30s to the species. And we can see the trajectories of what the gut microbiome composition is and what's missing in that signature. Yeah. The bankruptcies. Yeah, so that can be problematic. I mean, and that's the next question. So you can go down that road. Like, how does the gut change as we age? Yes. So, we have some... Yeah, so, Biagi in 2015, 16, and 18, she and their team and the whole lab, which includes a lot of really cool people like Marco Castano and really cool people. And they looked... They were able to take data and they could see as we age into 30s to 70s, like there's a lot of decrease. Like these are our full years and there's a decrease in everything and an increase in pathobines. Okay. So instead of symbiotes... So we're losing the good guys? Yeah, we're losing the good guys. Yeah, probably, it's modern living, modern pollution, low fiber SAD diets, and no one's supplementing. And it's important what you supplement. Like, certain supplements, they're high in strep. I wouldn't touch that. I wouldn't go... Strep triggers so many autoimmune diseases. No kidding. Yeah. Every autoimmune disease, pandas, everything, neurologic, skin, vaginal, like prostate, strep is on our skin. So we can have good versions, but we often will have bad ones after stress or antibiotics or things that kill it off. Like, I'm not a fan of all the biohackers doing ebou and methylene blue. You know, like there's a point where high dose methylene blue was shown to increase proteobacteria in all these pathogens. Yeah. It's just like antibiotics. Yeah, I think high dose methylene blue is... Again, if you're doing high dose methylene blue, it's got to be because you're working with someone, there's a reason for it. And it's a very short... Like it's an intervention. It's a little bit like going carnivore or going keto or going vegan. It's an intervention for a reason at a specific period of time. You know what I mean? Like it's not some willy-nilly, oh, I read methylene blue is amazing for mitochondria. So I'm going to pound it every day and sit in front of my red light and think that I'm going to get super mitochondria. Like it's just not... Well, just like you're talking about, we don't know about all these molecules, right? And we really don't know what they do, but we know it's a methylene blue is an MA inhibitor. Like who's not depressed? It's an antidepressant. It's our oldest class of antidepressants. People feel great. Well, yeah, because you just had an antidepressant effect and it's temporary. And now you also... If you barely had Bifidoh, you don't have the ABCs that we just talked about, the signature of longevity, acrimansia, Bifidobacteria, Bifidobacterial Longum and the butyrate makers and Christian Sunella, you're fucking your microbiome and your longevity and you don't know it because you feel good. People go by how they feel. Well, that doesn't tell you nothing. It doesn't tell you about your telomeres or DNA methylation or things like that. Right. And that's a powerful point, right? Because what you're conflating is how you feel right now with what is happening long-term under the surface and what you're talking about, which is such a powerful statement is that both function and dysfunction build over time. And so just because what you're doing right now feels good to you right now, if you don't have a good grasp of what's actually happening under the surface, what deficits you could be building up while you're to produce this feel good, you could be robbing your future to pay. And there's a cost when you're agnostic to what's in the microbiome. If you haven't done a vi-track and using your code and tracking like are the signatures... I don't have a code to vi-track anymore. You've mentioned it a couple of times. Vi-track is a really powerful task, guys. But Vi-track has made a very powerful decision in order to keep that test powerful. They've stopped going direct to consumer. The only way you really can get a Vi-track now, I believe, is to work with a practitioner, which is the right way to use that test. I don't know. Because the information you're getting is so nuanced and sophisticated that they... I think in order to provide the value that they really wanted to do, like Dr. Shadozie, he's like, I can't dumb it down. It doesn't make sense for me to dumb it down so that the consumer can maybe get a glimmer of information. I would rather train practitioners to really deep dive into this information so they can powerfully help the consumer. That makes sense. Because I don't even look at the front review. I pull the taxonomy from the back end and then I track what's going on. That makes sense. The scary thing is, unless you're doing 15, 20 grams of FODMAPs, so the GOS, XOS, FOS, Inulin frequently with good probiotics, people will not have the signature of longevity. Pre-pandemic, this was not the case, Natalie. Something has happened post-pandemic. Our guts are fucked. I don't know if it's the vaccine. Some people believe the spike protein is a bacterial phage. That means it targets and kills Bifidose, which makes sense because all the FLCC, so that's the front-line chronic COVID caregivers, they push Bifidobase probiotics. Bifidobase dominant multi-stream probiotics are the best to combat long-haul COVID as well as prevent future COVID infections. We need our Bifidose and we're vulnerable to COVID every time we travel or go to the gym or touch a doorknob because if we don't have the Bifidose, they are the key to our immune system. They literally unlock our longevity and muses. Bifidobacterial longum, they call it longum because they only find it in centenarians at high amounts. Short-lived people don't have it. We could say that Bifidose are critical to longevity. Very critical. Everything they do, they kill proteobacteria, they maintain our skin, our hair, our brain, they are anti-mold. Their cell wall literally binds black mold toxins and we poop them out. They also chelate. The cell wall of lactobacillate like rhamnosus and soil probiotics which is in our, we have spore-based soil probiotics in microbiome mojo. We're disconnected from nature. We should go to Sardinia or Icarus and hang out there for a month or two or three. I'm in. Let's do it. And we'll dance until 7 a.m. with other ladies that are 100, 105, 110 years old and drink their wine. So the wine is so special apparently. It's very vinegary, kind of like maybe Persian wine and others. So it's got good short chain fatty acids and fermentation. So even if we don't make it, we can drink it. Yeah. So probably I would do better because I'm Mediterranean and you might have to. You're Mediterranean. You might have to drink it. I could rice with you. Okay. Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So back to the, and I do want to say one last thing. I want to mention FODMAPS because you've mentioned FODMAPS a bunch of times and very often people hear FODMAPS in a negative light because people have lost tolerance to the FODMAPS because of a gut and balance. And so now they have to be on a FODMAP diet that excludes FODMAPS. Exactly. Even big academic centers, Cleveland Clinic and Mayo, they push the anti-FODMAP diet. What I'd love you to touch on, right, is for someone who might be on a FODMAP diet, my sense is that shouldn't be the end of the story because what the goal should be is to work to rebuild the gut population so that you can go back to breaking down those FODMAPS. Exactly. You need them for longevity gut. Right. Yeah. So FODMAPS stands for like mono saccharides, disaccharides, trisaccharides, whatever, like short carbs, as well as also sweeteners, artificial sweeteners. But our diet is, if a healthy ancestral diet has a rich amount, even beans, they have something called ROS, raffinose, oligosaccharide. It makes people fart. But if you have plenty of lactobacilli in your gut and you soak in and ferment your beans, you're not very likely to have a lot of gas or bloating or anything. And also your kindred likely had eight-bees all day long. It's like a great way to get nitrogen and protein before, or I mean, after industrially, I mean, with agriculture and less hunter-gathering. So we've lived with this for tens of thousands of years. It's just what happened the last 50-hundred years, we had antibiotics, which would kill our carb digesters and FODMAP digesters. So what study shows that with FODMAP intolerance, there's high bilofila, wadsworthia, it says, B-S-T-E-S, that makes a lot of gas. But when I look at clients and we do surveys as well as certain testing, like tapillomic testing, not by-track, but we do oat organic acid, they have high fungal overgrowth. Yeah, arabinosis high and all the effus, like ferroic acid and others, that are produced by black mold, aspergillus and fusarium and other species. So they compete for the real estate. And we want to, our gut is like a garden. And by gardening it, we can extend the telomeres, the lifespan. One really interesting, it's really amazing you brought up the age of organs because there's one FMT animal study. And there were some reasons just looking at the ovary age of these animals. But they did the FMT and the ovary and age extended. And there was also overall telomere extension and lifespan. I'll send it to you if you're interested. I'm also in a study, like it's really looking at female gonads. And then they're going to do a male one and look at male gonads and the aging of those organs. And one of the CEO founders, she's already gone through our weeding, seeding, feeding, prokosh. She's like, Oh my God, Grace, all my numbers are better. And I'm like, Yeah, of course, like we're fixing everything. Our gut is everything. I've become a lot more skeptical about supplements over the years. Doesn't mean I don't use them, but it means I ask a lot more questions. Bottom line, if I'm going to be putting something into my body every single day, I need and want to know what's in it, not just hope for the best. And if I'm going to be recommending it to you guys, then I double need to know. So that's what actually made me pay attention to Puri. Their collagen CP one is third party tested for more than 200 contaminants. And they publish the results of every single batch online. You just scan the QR code on your shipment and see it for yourself. That level of transparency is rare. And the product itself is incredibly simple, just pure collagen peptides, no additives, no flavor. So I mix it into coffee or a smoothie, no weird taste, just the benefits. Also just put it into my yogurt bowl. It's pretty easy to use. Now collagen isn't just about appearance either. Here's the thing, it plays a foundational role in your joints, your connective tissue and overall structural support in the body. And since natural collagen production declines with age, this is one of these things that just makes sense to stay on top of. If you want a collagen, you can actually trust and stick with try this one. Use code NAT at puri.com forward slash Nat get 32% off CP one when you start a subscription. And even if you don't start a subscription, you still save a ton of money. Go to P U O R I dot com slash Nat and use code NAT at checkout for this exclusive offer. If the gut is permeable and LPS and improper proteins are getting across the gut, let's talk about really, that'll probably draw have an impact on, let's say, inflamaging, right? Because there's going to be an immune response. Like, let's talk a little bit about how that that microbiome signaling and leaky gut is going to put might potentially feed into immune imbalances as we are aging. Yes. Oh, absolutely. Because there's a lot of energy that goes to tighten the keeping as much as the body can tight for the gut because we eat three times a day and snack and forage and blah, blah, blah. Forage. Yeah. Well, forage in my kitchen, yeah, the pantry. Yeah. Sometimes I get crumbs off the ground, but whatever. Just on how hungry I am. I'm like a dog. But yeah, the permeability, what studies show is when we have leaky gut, we have bacterial translocation and mungle translocation. So all the pathogens that are wherever they are, they start to migrate and they're like, wow, it's a field day. I'm going to go have fun and party. The worst condition is dementia. We know it as type three diabetes, Alzheimer's to Parkinson's and dementia. And when they did autopsies on dementia cases, there was fungi mold and candida in the brain. Wow. And so this would get age match autopsies. They did not. Yeah, it's just translocation. And that's why GLP ones work so well and other and gut healing. So when I, when we work with clients at the guns to wheels do in parallel healing, we heal the brain. Literally, I do concussion protocols with even the simplest gut permeability cases. We heal the brain and the gut in parallel because whatever's in the gut ends up everywhere. Study shows in the breast tissue for women, it's in prostate testicular tissue for men, whatever's in the gut ends up in the breast milk. And I bet if we did it, if we had autopsies, well, we do have the, you know, the dementia, you know, some of the studies, but they're not looking at the gut. But without a doubt, whatever's in the gut is probably also in the brain. I see for women, I do a lot of vaginal protocols with women because whatever's in the vagina is in the gut, whatever's in the gut is in the vagina, which sounds terrible. So we do tongue to tail test, you know, sort of like presumptions and then medical translation from animal studies. And then we do protocols. So we are healing sinuses and the whole ear nose, throat and sometimes eyeballs if needed. Sinuses are so dear to tear ducts, optic nerve, I it'll have shit there. Like we know the placenta is not sterile, whatever's in the meconium and amniotic fluid and placenta, it's from mom, it's in there, it goes to the baby. This is how we get the lineage, the legacy from our grandmothers all the way many generations back, what kept them healthy, strong and resilient. We get every man and woman. You get the mitochondria, right? And we get the mitochondria exactly. Mitochondria are everything. Mitochondria are from rickettsia, from intracellular bacteria. So when we treat our mitochondria, well, I'm so lovely. I love to hearing all your mitochondria peptides, I, broadcast, I love so much. And I love SS 31, you know, because our mitochondria are synonymous to our microbes in the gut. So when we, when they're healthy and happy, our microbes are generally healthy and happy too. Whatever we do for our microbes makes our mitochondria happy and better too. Yeah. So they're, they're in parallel and our brain, our brain is huge, but when we get permeability, we have leaky brain. So it's known as the BBB blood-brain barrier. It gets leaky. Yeah. Well, right along with the gut, right? I mean, that you know that those people will say, if you have leaky gut, you most likely have leaky brain. And that's exactly it's being invaded. And so the immune system automatically becomes activated. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And people, people have like eye issues or ear, nose, throat issues, you know, ear infections, they have leaky ear, nose, throat, they have leaky tonsils, they have leaky thyroid, parathyroid, they have leaky joints. Okay. Women, we get so many things, right? We're really literally, you know, permeable to the world through the vagina, you know, we get leaky ovaries, leaky cervix, leaky endometrium. So if we can, if we heal the gut and we heal those parallel organs, the whole body is going to regenerate and heal well. Okay. So let's, let me get back to Michael Levine for a second. Because he uses antibiotics, he uses methylene blue. He loves like the ionic channel benefit because he, he doesn't apply electricity, but he, you know, he likes the bi, bi-electric effect. So there's a lot of drugs, you know, and calcium channel blockers that, that they shift our electricity in the body. So when he's methylene blue or another antibiotic, he had less regeneration. He also omitted vitamin D. A new flap and whole limb appeared after chopping it off. It had a beautiful limb and it worked. This is an attack hole, right? This is an adult grown adult frog. Generally they don't regenerate. So it's an adult grown frog. And he used these antibiotics and he didn't, he used vitamin A, retinol, acid, but no, no vitamin D. They didn't have a bone and they didn't have the full, full, functional regeneration. Wow. Yeah. So he fucked the flora. And then he also did not have one of the very important nuclear receptor agonists, vitamin D. Wow. Well, and that's, that's great. That's amazing that the bone and, you know, I think what that speaks to is that these things we call vitamins like vitamin D three, which most people would say really it's a hormone. But beyond that, it's a signaling, it's a powerful signaling molecule, you know, and some of the things that fall under this, like for example, so vitamin D three, so much more than just one thing. Melatonin is another one, right? Melatonin. People talk about melatonin for sleep, but it's an antioxidants. It's anti, like it's so many different things. And, and we were again, we were talking about this before the podcast that there's so many pathways in the human body linked to these molecules that we're just still learning about. It's so incredibly powerful. Exactly. It's so powerful. Right. Yeah. I'm a data horror scientist, right? I have like hundreds of clients, you know, we've put on vitamin D and you'll see their thyroid get better. You'll see their testosterone go up for women, they get more fertile or fully fertile, their progesterone, whatever goes up. Yeah. Like, no vitamin D, we're, we're, unless you're in Antarctica or like way, way south, you know, we get vitamin D all day every day. Like it's a signal our ancestors in Kindred have had since the dawn of time on earth. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's immensely powerful. Well, and, you know, we live in indoors, right? So at the end, yeah, ultimately, we're being, most people are deprived of vitamin D. And so do you have an opinion on supplementation versus using a light? Like I have a, I have a panel upstairs that produces UVB that and the specific wavelength of UVB that will support my body's ability to produce vitamin D3. Do you have? I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm all into like whatever works. Yeah. I have one of those too, but it has a timer. So I didn't know I had a timer and it goes off every five minutes. So I can't, I get annoyed to like, well, no, you, well, the timer, so the timer's there because your program is running based on your skin type. And so in order to change the time, you need to, and over time you would increase your exposure and you would be measuring your labs. But I think what's really important, and I've heard this from a couple of people, they've overridden somehow the timer and they've burnt the daylight. Oh yeah. You can, you can cause cataracts. Yeah. You can cause really big stress. Especially if your stress is high or you're on steroids, you're going to be at risk for cataracts too and skin, skin issues. Yeah. I mean, the microbes have, speaking of vitamin D, the microbes have also hijacked vitamin D. So cryptococcus and mold and a lot of mycobacteria and other bacteria, they, who create, they create systematic infections. They increase calcitriol. And normally we, doctors don't measure it. Clinicians and coaches like us, we don't measure it, but I track it on everybody. The microbes have cracked that code. So they're calcifying our soft tissue and we don't feel good. You can't just take a sub, a vitamin D supplement or be in the sun all day long. You're, you're adding to it. But if we do weeding, seeding, feeding, you know, we lower the burn of those systemic and, you know, subclinical, low grade infections. It all normalized. The one, it's called 125 OH2 D2 calcitriol. It's the active vitamin D. Nobody checks it. You really should. And some people, a precursor. Well, in some people's pathway is blocked, right? Genetic, like I don't convert that very efficiently. So if you're measuring my precursor and it's normal, you have no idea what my active is. Or, and then there's another marker. There's another gene that regulates how efficiently you clear the active. And if you've got a stopgap there, you could be building toxicity by pushing the front end too hard. It's, it's really interesting, all this stuff. And you know, if you think about it, coming from a very sunny, like my ancestry coming from the sun, there's protection mechanisms built into my system that are working against me because now I live in a northern climate. Exactly. Right. I have that too. I'm so, I'm in the summer, I'm like, black, I'm dark. Like, and I checked my vitamin D. I had the lowest, that's when I got diagnosed. I had only a level of 19. And the second I started supplementing, I felt great. My parodontal disease went away. I had asthma and well went away and a couple other things. Crazy. Yeah, you're right. We have all these feedback mechanisms because of where our kindred evolves. Yeah, yeah. That's your, it's your genetic program. It's so interesting, right? Okay. Did you want to say anything else about D3? Otherwise, I'm moving us on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So for healing, whenever we turn on, you know, all the nuclear receptors and the right, you know, healing pathways and hormones to heal the gut the fastest, we want peak hormones without estrogen dominance or any kind of weird dominance, DHT dominance. We want low stress. So like lobe sympathetic burden and high parasympathetic where we rest and digest and regenerate without fibrosis without fibrosis. That's the key. Yeah. And then the third is just some basic gardening. Like I don't have a garden, I live in a condo, but we didn't theoretically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like modern living has created a lot of problems in the gut because we've overweated, right? Not enough fiber and not enough composting and fertilizer and we've used way too much antibiotics, like way, way, way, you know, so some of the centenarian studies, if we emulate them, you know, these people, they grew up, there was like no sewage because there was like no running water. So they got a really great gut from their grandmas, moms, you know, that whole lineage, the mitochondrial lineage, and then they didn't have damage. Yeah. And they may have, you know, a lot of the theories too are that they had really great quality water, so high minerals. Right. And probably even deuterium depletion water. Yeah. I'm drinking that these days. I know. You told me, I think that's amazing. Awesome. I think that also with those guys, that population, probably there was not, you know, when we talk about antibiotics, folks, we're not only talking about the ones you get from the drugstore, there's the antibiotics that are coming in through your food. And they would not have, like that, their early years at least would have been, would have been very, there'd been no antibiotic really in their food, particularly, I don't think, I don't know. And it kind of like, yeah, exactly. And kind of like the Amish, they were probably around a lot of horses and horse stalls and farms and pigs, cows, chickens, literally there's poop everywhere. Yeah. Right. Which is a good thing. Yeah. And these aren't predators. So they're not like carnivores, not stinky poopy, but like herbivores, like you could literally make your house out of bricks of poop. Yeah. Like that's what happens. Yeah. And they did. Right. It's called modern living. I mean, back then, to 50,000. 50,000. I can meet your tent any day. I have a dung. Yeah. I have a dung. Yeah. Yeah. And, and you know, they were, they were hungry. Like they found a lot of trepanema in Burkina Faso and Tanzania and Hunter Gathers. They had great guts. I don't know about their longevity, you know, but they did a lot of their anti-inflammatory. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But a lot of their anti-inflammatory markers are pretty good. Right. And if we, if they, they were probably eating worms and larvae and termites, because trepanema is part of the carb digesting factory of these insects. And so during wet seasons, they would have a change in diet, eat high protein from worms and larvae and things like insects. And then when, you know, dry season came, you know, their diet kind of changed. But while they're in wet season, their, their diet and their microbes that as a consequence actually supplied all the good stuff that they, and replaced the good stuff and, you know, pathways that they would normally have on their own in their dry seasons. So fascinating and interesting. Yeah. And then the modern gut, we only have like 200, 300, 400 species, but these, you know, healthy people, Amish, you know, Hunter Gathers and Centenarians, they have a very diverse gut. They sometimes will have like 600, 800, 1000 species in their gut. Yeah. So what studies show over and over for longevity is that the lower the diversity, the higher the morbidity mortality. Not very good. But if we just build diversity with prebiotics, postbiotics and probiotics and, you know, mimicking an ancestral lifestyle to inhabit some things and not kill off too many things, you know, we, we can, we can, I see in clients, we see their telomeres extend pretty quick, like in three, four, five months. Yeah. Yeah. And all their inflammatory markers go down. It's, it's just a matter of the protocols. So what I love to do is like, we start low dose with probiotics, but especially if they can get soil based with regular multistrain, avoid all strep and yeast because it's already such a big problem. Yeah. Some people even have antibodies to yeast and candida and strep and staff. Like because they usually have a problem. Yeah. Such a problem. So much permeability. Their body's trying to eradicate it, eliminate it. So they make antibodies to it just like it would for gluten. But if someone's gluten out allergic, would I give them gluten three times a day or three times a week? No. So I presume we've done testing. People have high yeast and Aska, which is saccharomyces antibodies. We don't let them touch any yeast flakes, yeast, nothing. Yeah. So first thing is like probiotics. And then a really great leaky gut protocol is tributary and ten a day, make an ITG ten a day and SPM ten a day. Ten caps. So the funny thing about ten, ten, ten. But if we, yeah, right out of the gate, but if we're just doing peptide intensive only, then we do lorazotide. And then depending on where they are in the spectrum of immunity, if they don't have any mastoid issues, we do a lot of Wolverine or clover or glow. Okay. Yeah. So clover is KPV, GHK, TB4 and BPC. I like to add in TA1 as well. And I add an extra TB4. Right. BPC is a little problematic. So I don't push the dose on that, but a lot of TB4. I feel like the clover and glow tend to be deficient in TB4. Like they have to, they sacrifice. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, they sacrifice. Those stacks are, they're built for convenience, not necessarily for function. And I'm sure you sit there and supplement. Yeah. And they don't put TA1, TA1 so expensive, but it's so amazing. Well, and TA1 is not always, I mean, let's, we can talk a little bit about TA1, which is thymus and alpha one, which is an immune modulating peptide, but it is immune modulating to a point. Like it really does support and push the innate immune system. And maybe Grace, this is a good time for you to talk a little bit about how that might, it's a little bit like acromantia. Like if it's what you need, it's magic. And if it's not, it's going to turn on you in a, in a hurry. And so... Yeah. You have to look at someone's mast cells, cells and immune functioning. Yes. It can, it can be way too much for some people. Right. So if you're innate immune system is already over active, then I'm just an alpha one could actually really push you the wrong way. And I think that's really important for people to understand. And it's the reason why I think that working with a practitioner, someone who's looking under the hood is a really important point. I think with lorazotide, you kind of can't go wrong. Because if you don't have leaky gut and you take lorazotide, I don't, I don't imagine it's going to do much harm. But when it... Actually, I can trigger, they're just, they're just sensitive to everything. I don't know what it is. I don't understand totally. It's their job. I don't understand. Yeah. I think it's their job. They're sentinels. It's also not homologous to human bioidentical hormones. Like it's, we don't make it. It's from Vibrio. It's a very toxic bacteria. But, but... Oh, well, there you go. There you go. Yeah. So... So it's a small molecule that's been designed to fix a problem, but it's not in dodging. Yeah. Pull out for human use. Yeah. Which is... It's not in dodging this. So we have to get, you know, a little careful. And so that's important, right? It's an important fact that people don't necessarily know. Because for the most part, most of the peptides that people talk about are either the full or a fragment of something that's already naturally occurring in the body. And you were talking about this before we started recording. And I think this is another important point to make is that the further away we get from the, from the source molecules. So for example, you're looking at growth hormone secretoglyce, which all are a fragment of growth, natural hormone in people. And you were saying, and I'd love you to speak to this a little bit, the further away we get from that original molecule, the more kind of interesting different types of reactions people are showing up with. And maybe you want to speak to that? Yeah. Oh, totally. Like a friend was telling me like, he can't take any of the Tessa, Ipich, CJC, he'll get a panic attack. And I'm like, holy fuck, dude, I feel so bad. And yeah, I get puffy if I'm really insulin resistant at the time. You know, but that's bad. Like, yeah, because also super foreign, like it is not homologous to any, anything we make. And so that is the more quiet, it's also like breast, it's like breast implants. It's like, you know, total nip, total knee or hip replacement, you know, like, I had dental implants, I had to have taken out like, seriously, like I had to get the thing ripped out at pay cash. I was like, oh my God, and the doctor cannot believe it. You know, surgeon was like, whatever. But the second was taken out, I lost five, 10 pounds of Prusul edema and it just got better and better. And then, you know, it also just reps meridians. But yeah, anything foreign, you know, unless we're in a good immune state, you know, it may backfire. So it doesn't mean they're bad, but it does mean you have to proceed with caution. So I think that's really important. Do you want to, I mean, we're going to run out of time and I do want to touch on peptides and bioregulators. When you're doing repair work with your patients, right? Where do peptides fit? Like, do they come in the beginning? Do they come in the middle? Do they come at the end? Oh, no. And like, where, where are you bringing them? Okay, if they're not, yeah, anyone on the mass cell is MCAS, you know, chronic immune reaction syndrome spectrum, we don't do too much. Everything is like very, very minimal. You know, if we do peptides, it might be topical or on the tongue or nothing's jabbed in the beginning. But if they're generally kind of healthy, we can, we can just run and go. So it'll be clover or glow or Wolverine right from the get go. I know you like the Vitastream company, I think. Yeah. No, I'm not, I'm more of a profound health girl. But okay. Yeah. Okay. I love profound. That's where the conference will natally. Yeah. Well, I like natures marvels are great. I love Phil. Well, and I think what I like about natures marvels is you get to build your own stacks. Nobody's doing it for you. Right? Right, right, right. That's yeah. And then Phil's gonna, they're opening something in the US so access will be a lot. Hopefully. Good, good soon. Yeah. Yeah. Right now it's only practitioners that may obtain it and sell it. Yeah. So, so Kevin said a whole bunch of bioregulators, stomach is great. Or what's this, what's it called for the stomach one? I can't remember the name. Well, there's Stomachort or I mean, Stomachort, Stamachort. And the other nice thing about sorry about natures marvels is just says stomach, they don't bother with. Yes. Right. Which is a bit of a yes. Yeah. So sometimes it's hard to get penetration. So it's great to add in either injectable vestige or ventfort, the oral um, by regulator, yeah, blood vessel to, to, I find it decalcifies. That means somehow it's doing something with oxalates. Interesting. Yeah, I don't understand the mechanism, but people feel great. We want to open things up so we can get more penetration because with any kind of chronic inflammation, our chromosomes get cro, you know, has heterochromatization, they, they're condensed and hard to open and translate and transcribe to proteins and enzymes and everything. So we want to like decalcify a bit. We decalcify with oxalate degrading probiotics, there's six species in both. So we want to get the oxalates down. I sometimes do antifungals because where do oxalates come from outside of oxalate containing foods like kale and spinach? Well, they come from mold and candida. They pump the fuck of oxalates into our body. And then with the right pH, PKA, like they crystallize. So when oxalates bind with mercury, these never dissolve. Interesting. The dissolution quotient is like 10,000 compared to oxalate with magnesium. Right. So they're the super bad guys. Yeah, oxalates like crystallize, like women will have cysts and fibres in their boobs and ovaries. That's bad. That's not fun. That's not great. Okay. Men will have prostate testicular problems, brain, brain fog, dementia, pre dementia, whatever, social phobia, anxiety, mood, that's oxalates in the brain without a doubt. So we want, we want to start like doing the in parallel brain and biome healing. So we want to look at the oxalates and weed a little bit. So there's like really gentle, you know, burb ring based products. You don't want high, high doses. So once a day, maybe only five days at a time. If they have pets or had pets somewhere in their life, we do parasites treatments. Everyone's got parasites. No test picks it up, including by Trek shotgun. They don't pick it up. Nobody picks it up. But how do we know, like one of my parasite mentors, you know, someone asked him like, Oh, who has parasites? Well, let them put a finger on their pulse. Do they feel a pulse? They got a parasite. Okay. But isn't there a narrative that says that some parasites we are, we have, they're good. Yeah, right. We don't want to wipe them all out. Yeah. It's like our car, like it's always going to get wear and tear and dirt. Clean it. Yeah. You know, you gotta clean your car immaculately. Why, you know, it's going to get used. And also, they're, they're sometimes good. Yeah. You know, they're, they're serving a purpose. Colleagues, yeah, they actually initiate parasites through the skin and they live like, I don't know, 30, 16, 90 days. And then they die off and they really shift the immune system in a good way. We're meant to live with some parasites. Okay. No. All right. So back to the peptides and my regulators. So, so, so, so, so now this company, Vitastream, you might want to, you know, get to know them. They're great. They're pre on free. They had, they take three, four months to extract and it's all very safe and, you know, kind of Kavinsen protocols and everything. So Kavinsen probably had peptides he used with his own internal private clients, Putin and others, who knows, right? So one is, is one is called gastrogen. It's a small intestine, mucin peptide. And it's not made by profound. It's not trade. It's probably trademarked somewhere, but it's not out in the public domain. So Vitastream has that. I love it. Both the stomach cord and the gastrogen can really help heal the gut. Even if people don't do the other extreme protocols, like weeding, seeding, whatever, and, you know, tribute or an SPM and everything. Like sometimes these two and with a mass cell client, like someone dealing with mold or Lyme or any kind of, you know, high degree of inflammation in their body, we do tiny pinhead amounts three times a week to start tiny. And if they had reflux or hyaluronia or even barisophagitis, it'll be symptom free in five to 10 days. Wow. Yeah. That is the magic of peptides and bioregulators. I mean, not so much bioregulators. Usually peptides is that it seemed, they just seemed to cut healing time, like results. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And I learned all the about the stacking from you, you know, stacking five, eight at a time is great. I find. Yeah. Most people do three to five. I know Bill Lawrence and many, you know, his audience. Well, he'll cycle through stuff. Like I'll do, I'll work through eight or nine, but over the course of a month, like not at the same time. Yeah, me too. Yeah. I'm lazy. Like it just depends what's on my counter, you know, like what I pick up. That's you yourself. That's different. Yeah. Okay. So, but as you know, like Bill Lawrence, like many of us will do like 50 boxes a year or 80 boxes a year. You know, like I love the combined ones where there's six in one. Yeah. Yeah. That to me is the key, you know, put them all in one pill. I can do it. It's easier for sure. Yeah. So all the peptides help the gut. Every one of them, GLP ones help the gut, low dose, micro dose, high dose, whatever. Every peptide, like C-lank is my favorite peptide. They jabbed it into animals and they improve Bifidone. That's crazy. It's crazy. Amphatogens went down. Viruses went down. And so how do you think that is? Do you think it's because it impacts the nervous system or do you think it actually has a direct impact? Okay. So our gut microbiome, 100 trillion bacteria, they make a boatload of antimicrobial peptides. I think many of these are also regenerative. We just don't know, right? Like I told you, the Michael Levine and other labs who did regenerative studies, we don't give enough kudos to our microbiome and the peptides they make and other chemicals they make. They are regenerating us every time we feed them, you know, offer them food and prebiotics. They're regenerating us every day, all the centenarians, every person who lives in a blue zone. We just have to learn how to co-op with them and keep them happy. You know, we're synergistic and it's about reciprocity. We have to be grateful for them and say, thank you. Some people don't like the smell of their poop. I'm like, who cares? Like make it better. You know, like we grew up with poop. If you have a dog, you're picking it up every day or whatever. You have a cat, you're scooping it. We have to honor our poop. Well, it's part of our ecosystem, really. Yeah. So honestly, I don't know the mechanism for peptides, but every study I look at, if they have a microbiome study or an in vitro pathogen peptide study, the peptide will crush the fuck out of the pathogen. Interesting. Literally. Yeah. Yeah. And so- And GLP-1's too. There's a larygoutide study and then there's one or two semi-glutide studies. There's not many, but they improve bifidose and other good species. And then they lower- there's less pathogen. Also because they're also starving a little, right? But like, there's a reduction also in the pathogen profile. Well, I think we're still learning about how these GLPs are really doing because, you know, there's resistance obviously from the companies that created these because they want them to be just one thing. And I think what we're seeing clinically from people like you working with these small molecules like the GLP-1's and two's- Three's is that they're impacting so many other systems in the body. And we know this, obviously. But, you know, and you're seeing it with people that are using it with patients in microdoses to manage autoimmune conditions, to manage inflammation, and then all of a sudden, their brain fog lifts or they are functioning better or and now you're saying and what I'm seeing in these microbiome tests is I'm seeing an improvement in the composition of the gut microbiome. And how is it doing that? Because all of a sudden they're not eating as much or they're not eating eating as much junk or their inflammation's down and it allows different species. Like, who knows, right? Like, we don't know yet. But the point being that you're seeing novel stuff that nobody else is looking at. Yeah. And it's backed by science. If I dig hard enough, there's always a study that speaks to it for the translation, right, from the animal. And I'm so grateful to have these studies to back up all the protocols, right? Like, we know there's a mass cell study now. Okay. Serves study. Oh, that, yeah, I just thought about that today. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It came out last October, November, I've been speaking about it wherever I can. You know, they had like 47 people, men and women, they all had serves. So mold, lime, blah, blah, blah, everything, right? Candida, overgrowth, everything. And there's some are bedbound. Well, our mass cells have benzodiazepine receptors on it. This is why people love Allium and Ativan and all those great, you know, sleep agents. Because mass cell serves, it makes you crazy. Yeah. And you take that and then you're like calmer, right? It makes sense. There's GLP1 receptors. Crazy. On mass cells. Crazy. So the study, they did use kind of hard as they ramp people up fast. But I mean, it was a retrospective series. But at least 47 people, 79% had reduction in nearly every mass cell serves sign within one week. That means one dose. That's crazy. And they maintained it. Yeah. And if they lost weight, they just continued as they titrated the dose. You know, some many lost like 20, 30, 40 pounds, whatever. But a lot of it's water weight, you know? Yeah, but that's gonna make them easier. It's immune, immune weight. Yeah. And that's gonna make them easier. Yeah. Yeah. Right. But we can't be on GLP1's weekly forever. You know, like I get off it every time I, you know, I do cycles and I see where I'm at, you know. And but if someone's dealt with toxins and biotoxins, it's a great tool and it's going to help support healing the gut. But there's also a lot of side effects. It will slow motility for some people. It will like absolutely trash your gut if you don't have a good gut biome. And then there's all the other problems. I believe it can contribute to cancer probably somehow because we've seen it in animals. And yeah, peptides, we just don't know. I mean, GLP's don't contribute to cancer. Isn't there like almost... There's a conjure indication with thyroid medullary cancer in animals. I know. It was like, oh, they weren't sure about the stats, but our thyroids are kind of funky. But rat thyroids have a density of GLP receptors that human thyroids don't. Oh, I didn't know that. Okay, that's really... They're very, very dense in GLP receptors. Whereas the human thyroid is nowhere near as dense. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, because I think at this point, I mean, obviously, anybody with a history of thyroid cancer out of an abundance of caution... I mean, yeah, maybe genetically they have more GLP1 receptors there for some reason. Right? So we're also genetically uniquely different. Yeah. So, but... But there's a lot of black box warnings like gastroparesis. Like once people stop, it doesn't go away. Yeah, you don't want to mess with that. You don't want to mess with gastroparesis for sure. Yeah. Okay. So, okay. Was there something else or am I going on? That's gut health 101 and peptide 101. Okay, so we're going to just do a couple of quick fire questions to kind of wrap it up for people. Do you see gut peptides becoming mainstream in longevity medicine? Dr. Great. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yes. Heck, heck, heck, yeah. Yeah. What research excites you most in microbiome aging in that space? Like the link between the microbiome and how we age. Oh, yeah. Lately, I've been getting into the secondary bile acids. Like it's so weird, but it's all poop. You know? Like, never could understand like why people love coffee edimus and stuff, but now it makes more sense. You know, it's all our post digestion bile acids and how they hit these nuclear receptors actually, which is very important for longevity. Yeah. And do you think that we will one day measure biological age at least in part through the gut ecology, like through the diversity of the microbiome? Or do you think you're already doing that? I mean, all of the studies for longevity do point to diversity and even like gut health and immune health. Like we need good diversity, not of pathogens, but diversity of the good beneficial symbiotes. So I think so. Yeah, I'm you're so far ahead of the curve now, to even talk about this. Yeah, absolutely. No, and maybe we'll get more specific. You know, I think that there's still a lot of questions about what is the perfect gut microbiome or what would be the and either we're going to get more specific or we're going to finally concede that it depends. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's going to be unique. Yeah. All right. Some core. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Here's our rapid fire round. Dr. Grace, here we go. What's the most underrated gut longevity biomarker? Oh, biomarker, I think amount of bipidose, how much percent in your gut? Because usually people's E. coli or staph or strep or pseudomonas or clostridium or homophilus, whatever pathogen is outnumbering this guy, which is terrible. So that's the guy. I just cringe and cry and you know, breaks my heart when I'm reading those vitracks. Love it. What's the most overhyped gut trend that you're seeing right now? Oh, good trend. Probably the eboo or methylene blue. Yeah. What's a peptide or bioregulator that just makes you so excited? What's your favorite? I was sharing with you the SS 31, which is so sad, right? Because now we have some restriction here. I know. And it's a mighty, without a doubt. It's a mighty. Yeah. And centenarians have three times more than average. Come on. Yeah, I did not know that. That's why we love it. They have three times more human in three times more. It makes sense. It totally makes sense. Because their mitochondria is working. One gut habit that moves the longevity needle the fastest that people could start doing tomorrow. Oh, that's harder. What gut protocol? Oh, have it. People could start doing tomorrow that would probably have the greatest impact on their longevity. Okay. So I struggle with this, but getting in 10,000 steps a day, you know, like when I work a lot, like I don't, I don't get out like more than more than diet. Yeah, our body hacks a lot for diet. Like I've, I've, I've practiced this. Natalie, I'm expert. I can't crap. And like, yeah, so perfect Bristol for, but the walking, like, like I just start going to shit if I don't do yoga and running, walking, so moving 10,000 steps a day. Yeah. And it raises our body temp. So, you know, we're talking about core body temperature. Like we just don't function well. Like I used to have low thyroid. I used to be morbidly overweight. I struggle with body temps. Okay. So yeah, yeah, great question. Thank you. So Dr. Grace, please tell people where they can find you, where they can access your products, where they can access your testing. And even if you have any courses or practice, you know, people, somebody wants to work with you or another practitioner that you've trained. Yes. Just come to the gutinstitute.com. We have headers, you can, or just reach out to us at info at the gutinstitute.com. And Nat has a code Nat 10, I believe. You can use it on any products and there's a link in the show. No program. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Thank you. Always a fun time. Always wildly educational. And I can't wait till the next time we do it again. Thank you. I can't wait either. Thank you so much for having me on. Such so much fun. Hey, folks, just a quick reminder that all of the information presented in this podcast is for information purposes only. No medical advice, no diagnosing, no treatments suggested here. Before you try anything that you hear about or learn about here, make sure that you check with your medical provider.