Viruses and the Gut Biome Connection with Kiran Krishnan

Kiran Krishnan joins the two-time guest club on The Beautifully Broken Podcast! In this fascinating conversation, Kiran and I discuss how our gut connects to the current COVID pandemic, three simple actions you can take to improve your gut, and why fit doesn’t mean healthy. You will get actionable takeaways from this episode to improve your health!

Kiran is a Research Microbiologist and has been involved in the dietary supplement and nutrition market for the past 17 years. He comes from a strict research background having spent several years with hands-on R&D in the fields of molecular medicine and microbiology at the University of Iowa. 

He left University research to take a position as the U.S. Business Development and Product Development lead for Amano Enzyme, USA. Amano is one of the world’s largest suppliers of therapeutic enzymes used in the dietary supplement and pharmaceutical industries in North America. Kiran also established a Clinical Research Organization where he designed and conducted dozens of human clinical trials in human nutrition. 

Kiran is acting as the Chief Scientific Officer at Physician’s Exclusive, LLC. and Microbiome Labs. He has developed over 50 private label nutritional products for small to large brands in the global market. He is a frequent lecturer on the Human Microbiome at Medical and Nutrition Conferences. He conducts the popular monthly Microbiome Series Webinars through the Rebel Health Tribe Group practitioner training program, is an expert guest on National Radio and Satellite radio and has been a guest speaker on several Health Summits as a microbiome expert. He is currently involved in nine novel human clinical trials on probiotics and the human microbiome. Kiran is also on the Scientific Advisory Board for five other companies in the industry. 

Episode Highlights

1:45 - The role of the inside and outside world in our gut bacteria

7:52 - How are bodies fight off new viruses (and the true reason you feel sick)

18:04 - Why fit does not mean you are healthy

23:09 - Some of the major disruptors in your gut that can make you feel bad

27:23 - Three simple steps to improve your microbiome

31:42 - It's possible to incorporate foods you used to love back in your diet!

36:07 - Microbiome's new gut test

41:50 - An example of a healthy diet that can actually inflame your gut

44:50 - Building a test you can take action on

47:27 - The role you can play in protecting yourself from COVID

53:31 - Kiran's one tip to incorporate in your wellness journey

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (00:02.274)
Welcome to the Beautifully Broken Podcast brought to you by AmpCoil. I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel, and on this show, we discuss the common threads survivors share after walking through the fire, the practitioners making a difference, and the treatment modalities that deliver healing back into the hands of the people who need it most. Witness the inspiration we gain by navigating the human experience with grace, humility, and a healthy dose of mistakes. Because part of being human is being beautifully broken.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (00:34.735)
Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the beautifully broken podcast. I'm so happy you can join us today. We have a very special guest who is a repeat offender, one of three in the history of the podcast. We have Kiran Krishnan here from research, a microbiologist microbiome labs, and he has been involved in the dietary supplement and nutrition market for

15 years, 20 years has been a while. And he comes from a strict research background, having spent several years on research and development in the field of molecular medicine, microbiology, also has a focal prowess in virology. So Kieran, welcome to the show again. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be a repeat offender. Yeah. It's a good time to have a chat anyway with what I was going on. It's a good time. found I have

better access to pretty much any guests I want right now. So I've definitely been taking advantage. Yeah, we're not going anywhere. We're stuck in front of the computer. I know. So it's a great time to pool resources. I'm going to be respectful of your time. I do have an agenda here on this interview. One thing that I'm trying to build for people is a roadmap to security, safety, feeling from a place of intuitive love that we're not acting out of fear. you know,

part of the platform you work from is looking at the microbiome, the microbiome, the viral biome. I want to touch on all those. But can you tell people a little bit about your findings, your background, what you see to be the role of the interaction between the outside world and the inside world between our gut bacteria? Yeah. And that's one of the most important pieces of translational biology that we really have to wrap our heads around, right? So as it turns out,

Our body responds to the world around us in a variety of ways, and that includes our immune system. There are defensive mechanisms, there are learning mechanisms, there are processing and metabolic mechanisms and so on. As it turns out, vast majority of all of those have the microbiome involved in some way or the other. Just to give you a handle on why that would be, in part it's because as a species, we are wholly inadequate to conduct all of the functions that we need to conduct.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (02:57.77)
Right. Just to illustrate that we've got about 22,000 functional genes in our own cells. And that may sound like a lot, but then when you compare that to like an earthworm or rice plant that has 38 or 40,000 functional genes, it becomes really clear and evident that we are wholly inadequate in terms of our genetic material and capability to function as a human.

You know, before the human genome project mapped out the entire human DNA, the estimation was that we would have somewhere around a couple hundred thousand functional genes. And as it turns out, we've got one tenth of that. So then the question is, how is it that we perform all of the very complex mechanisms that we perform on a daily basis, which includes our metabolic processes, our immunological processes, neurological processes, everything, just even movement, just your skeletal muscle, your heart beating, everything.

that occurs, all of the thousands of chemical reactions that occur in your body every minute of every day in order to sustain this shell as a human. How do we sustain all of those functions when we have such little genetic elements or genetic code in our system? As it turns out, we've got about 150 to 200 times more microbial DNA in our system than human DNA. You know, we have over three and a half million microbial genes.

in our system, compare that to 22,000 human genes, right? So the predominance of genetic material that tells us how to function and provides us the codes on all of those complex reactions that we do as a human comes from microbes. so microbes account for potentially 90 plus percent of all metabolic function that makes us human. And that includes

everything in the context of responding to the world around us, right? So everything that enters the body, whether, it's predominantly through the gastric system, which is what, that's the biggest source of exposure to the outside environment. But things enter through your eyes, your nose, your ears, even through your skin, if it can penetrate through your skin, everything that enters the body goes through a mucosal system. The mucosa is the largest surface area in the body. We used to think of the skin,

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (05:18.402)
the outer part of the skin as the largest organ in the body. When it's not the mucosa somewhere around 100 to 150 times more surface area than the outer part of your skin. It lines every part of the inside of your body. So anything that's going to come in contact with cells within your body or your circulatory system or your immune system first goes through a mucosal layer. That mucosal layer is a site of interpretation and sampling. That's when your body decides

how it's going to react to what's entering your system. Whether it's a food particle or an environmental particle or a pathogen like a virus or bacteria and so on, all of that decision making starts in the mucosa, right? So think about that mucosal sampling layer that's all over in your body covering your entire digestive tract around every organ. Every part of your body has a mucosal layer. Even if you go through the skin,

once you break through the top layers of the skin, you're going to enter a mucosal layer. Right. And the important thing about understanding that part of your physiology is that the mucosal layer in your body, especially in your gut is covered in microbes. So the commensal bacteria that live within your system all live within this mucosal layer. Their ability to help your immune system and your body interpret what's entering the system.

determines how your body responds to the world around you. So that crosstalk between the microbes that live inside your body in that mucosal system and your immune system and your endocrine system and your neurological system and so on, that crosstalk where the microbes help us interpret what we're being exposed to, that's the critical part in maintaining homeostatic function. As soon as that starts breaking down, you can trace back

the vast majority of chronic illnesses and dysfunctions to the breakdown in that part of the communication. Incredible. I'm kind of thinking, do you remember, did you play Oregon Trail when you were in high school? Do you remember that game on an Apple computer? did not, Okay, well, Oregon Trail was where these very, very old desktop Apple Mac computers and you take the disk and you put the disk in the game loaded up in a machine. So I'm kind of envisioning this mucosal barrier.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (07:37.282)
as more or less it's this interface where the computer gets the programming, where there's information inserted in the system, what the body decides to do with that information is why we get a varying degree of responses. Exactly. So that's super helpful to visualize it this way. And then we can also, from that, it really leads to this truth where everybody is saying back to 2000 years that to heal the body, we heal the gut, we work on the gut.

And the other thing that I think is neat that you kind of reminded me of is between the mouth and the anus, it's really outside. totally. It's still outside. It's still outside. It's a tube that goes to about the anus. So we've got this interface where we're food, pathogens from the air, and we want to maximize that mucosal barrier and really upregulate it, especially in times like these when we're all so worried about a regulated immune response.

Can we talk a little bit about the mucosal barrier in a healthy state, how that can help mitigate what we're hearing about in the news, you know, the cytokine storm, the overreaction of the immune system to a particle, pathogen, a viral particle, if we couldn't just touch on that for a little bit. Yeah, this will help kind of explain where we lose the homeostasis and where the immune system goes awry, right? So this is a...

illustration that I use a lot in the lectures that I do. So this is the homeostatic state. You've got, and this is specifically in the gut that we're talking about. And the gut is considered the central command center for the rest of the mucosal system in the body. There's evidence that shows that when the gut mucosa responds to a particular item, like a pathogen in a particular way, then that response is translated very quickly to the rest of the mucosal tissue in the body.

So think of the gut mucosa and the gut immune system as being the central command for the battle that we face all day long in this world, especially against pathogens and so on. So homeostatic state like this, what you tend to have is two distinct layers of the mucosa. You've got an inner part of the mucosa that is, I call the inner sanctum, it's called mucin two, and then this mucin one layer, which is where most of the microbes exist.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (09:57.684)
Now this is the intestinal epithelium which makes up the gut lining, which is a single cell layer thick. And within this intestinal epithelium, there's lots of immune cells, L cells, cells, and so on that respond to signals that come in from the top, from the microbiota and things that are allowed to penetrate through. Now this inner part of the mucosal layer is supposed to remain relatively sterile, right? Meaning most of these bacteria do not

exists in this part because this part is supposed to remain relatively clear and sterile so that signals that come through can easily be interpreted by the immune system. If all of these microbes are penetrating through, the signals become too confusing here and the immune system gets confused in how it's supposed to respond to things. So let's say in this homeostatic state, virus, a new virus enters the system. So it enters the system, it goes through

When the virus gets into this area, some of the commensal bacteria are already signaling to the immune system that, hey, something new has entered this area, right? And then your immune system, the cells here will start secreting more antibodies like secretory IgA with the hope that the IgA will coat the virus and thereby inactivating the virus, but still leaving it recognizable by the immune system.

then that virus coded with IgA may get to migrate into this inner area where immune cells will come quickly to start to recognize it and understand what this virus is. Then the immune system will gobble up parts of the immune system will gobble up the virus and present different components or antigens of the virus to other parts of the immune system, the adaptive part of the immune system. So this is where the learning happens. The virus gets tagged, if you will, by microbes within the

microbiome, that tagging and activation of the immune system releases more secretory IgA that hopefully neutralizes the virus. This neutralized virus shows up here. This is where the microbiome, the immune cells send in macrophages and dendritic cells to swallow it up. And then when they swallow it, they present portions of the virus to the rest of the immune system, in particular the T cells and B cells.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (12:18.977)
who will then mount a really strong adaptive immune response to that virus by up regulating antibody producing cells. So now you've got these IgM antibody producing cells and IgG antibody producing cells that have recognized components of the virus and will start producing those antibodies and circulating it all throughout the body so that anywhere that the virus enters, the virus can get neutralized by those antibodies, right? But that's how it is supposed to work.

If your system looks like this, where this inner part of the mucosa has been basically decimated and you get constant translocation of bacteria, viruses, most of them are commensal bacteria, but still. And for those at home, the mucosal barrier is, where it's this fluffy blue cloud, there is nothing and it goes right into the gut wall where we see a passage from the outside world directly into the body. Directly, without the benefit of having this sampling section.

Right? So what tends to happen here is now because these things are translocating and flooding close to the intestinal lining, you start to get a chronic inflammatory response by the intestinal lining immune cells, because the immune cells are always alerted to an invasion coming through. So now they are hyperactive in that first phase of the immune response, the inflammatory phase.

Right. So imagine now it's, it's reacting to everything that's entering this area with an inflammatory response that includes your own commensal bacteria and viruses and also food particles that may migrate through. Hence you start developing food intolerances, right? So all of those loss of tolerances occurs because you get this influx of things that, that are migrating too close to the intestinal lining and the immune cells in the lining.

without the benefit of that slow sampling that occurs in the mucosa. Now imagine in this scenario, a new virus enters, right? So a new virus enters, it's entering into an already inflamed state, right? This state is already undergoing constant inflammatory response rather than the adaptive learning response. So now a virus comes in and it's mingling among all of the other things that are driving the immune system crazy.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (14:40.17)
And it in itself starts eliciting more inflammatory response to that area. The inflammatory response in this area damages adjacent areas and drives inflammation there, damaging the next adjacent area and so on. So this continuous expansion of inflammatory response and lack of appropriate sampling and adaptation to the new pathogen

leads to a systemic inflammatory response in the presence of that path. So this is called loss of tolerance and an abundance of pro-inflammatory mediated immune response. You lose that tolerance response, you lose that learning, and you lose the ability for your body to mount the adaptive part of the immune response, which is what will eventually take care of the virus. The inflammatory response makes you feel really sick

and eventually starts damaging your own tissue, like it occurs in the lungs, in the heart, in the gut, in the case of this COVID-19. That's where the cytokine storm becomes a problem because the immune system keeps stoking that inflammatory fire, not because it's misreacting to this pathogen in itself, it's because its state to begin with was more like this, right? So you're basically sending in

a new offender into a hostile environment where there's constant inflammatory response already going on, that new offender is just going to elevate your inflammatory response to the next level. So imagine that it's normal for the body to have some degree of inflammatory response throughout the day, right? That's perfectly normal because we're encountering all kinds of new things all the time. But the inflammatory response should be short acting and should be then attenuated

and then followed by this adaptive learning response, which doesn't give you the inflammation, doesn't give you the symptomology associated with being sick. So if you've got this kind of low basal level of inflammatory response and a new pathogen comes in, your response might go from this low basal level up here. So you'll feel sick for a period of time, but then your adaptive immune system will take over and bring it back down to this. But if you're already up here,

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (16:56.589)
every single day because of how your gut is and the dysfunction of the gut. Then when a new pathogen comes in, you're thrown up here and now you are in a potential for a cytokine storm and a real severe adverse reaction to the presence of this new pathogen. So keep in mind that the thing that makes you feel sick, all the symptomology that you feel with this virus or any virus or anything that infects you is the response to it, not the virus itself.

The fever that you feel is a turning on of these, the compounds that actually increase your body temperature. The fatigue that you feel is a shutting down of energetics and mitochondria in other parts of your body to focus energy on the immune system. The redness, the pain, all of those things are your immune's response to the presence of the virus, not the virus itself. So that's a really important thing. So how you feel, how your body responds to it,

depends completely on how your immune system responds to it and how your immune system responds to it depends completely on where your baseline immune response is when you get exposed. That's amazing. So a couple of things. You know, we're talking about this mucosal lining. I want to I just want to pose the question. I mean, how many people do you think are aware that they have a disturbed gut lining to some degree in

in this modern economy, you you and I are both aware that, you know, if it's not organic, if it's not clean food, it's probably it could potentially be a disruptor to this mucosa lining. Do you do you have any thoughts on that as far as percentages? Because we keep hearing about these people. Well, I thought that person was relatively healthy, but here they are and they're immediately put on a ventilator. Doesn't look like they have any problems.

but it's possible maybe something was going on under the surface as a low level inflammation. So that's a key point. You know, we we conflate all the time appearance and fitness with health, right? You could have somebody that is totally ripped with six pack abs and four percent body fat. It doesn't mean they're healthy by any stretch of the imagination. They might be fit. They might be able to do one hundred and fifty push ups and do fifty pull ups. But

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (19:15.59)
Fit doesn't necessarily mean healthy because plenty of athletes, plenty of people who perform at very high level have significant leaky gut and significant chronic low grade inflammation, suppressed immune systems. So all of those things are what denotes health and resilience. It's not physically necessarily how you look, right? So you see younger people, you might see someone who looks perfectly fit and is 20 years old.

encounter this virus and then are fighting for their life just a few days later. And we're seeing this more and more with this virus. We're seeing a younger and younger age group being put on in critical care because it exemplifies how internally sick we can be. And we're not necessarily focusing on the right things in order to ensure health and resilience. Again,

You can be perfectly ripped and fit looking and have a very leaky gut and be super inflamed and have very low tolerance. I talk to people all the time, you know, and they say, Oh, I feel perfectly fine as long as I don't eat this, this, this, this, and they have 16 things that they can't touch or they'll feel really sick. And in my view, it's like, Oh, that's not health. That's not resilience. You know, if, if to feel normal, you have to avoid 17 different things.

And if you get any exposure to those things, you feel really sick for a few days. That's not resilience. That's not health. And so when we did our first leaky gut study that published in 2017 in healthy normal individuals, this is the FDA's definition of healthy normal, which means they have no known chronic illness. not on medication for anything. They're not being treated or managed for any illness. So they have nothing. They're in perfect health by societal standpoint. They have normal body weight and so on.

55 % of them had very significant inflammatory response to eating food. And this is in leaky gut. They would get this huge post-crandial, meaning after a meal, inflammatory response and leaking through of endotoxin to their system. And all of the inflammatory markers would go up five, six fold, right? So they would be in this chronic inflamed state inside their body. It's subclinical, meaning you don't feel it necessarily.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (21:39.742)
But they will remain in that state for most of the time until they eat the next meal. So it will start to taper down again and then the next meal, boom, will kick up the inflammatory state again. It'll taper down and then boom, the next state gets picked up. Now, when you're in your 20s and your body is functioning really well, your mitochondria, your cells are functioning well, your immune system is a little bit more robust, you can keep trying to recover from those states, right? But as you keep that up,

chronically than in your early 30s and 40s, that all amounts to significant disease. It's no different than, I mean, you we could both relate to this when you're young and you go out for a night with your friends and you do shots and you're drinking and you're having fun, you know, you're going to feel like crap the next day, but you can rally and recover pretty quickly, right? You might even go out the very next day again, after just having like a big breakfast and taking a nap. Now, you know, as you get older, you can't do that.

so much. You do that one night and you're done for two days. You're not even thinking about going out for several days. Why is that? Because your body becomes, it becomes harder and harder for your body to recover from stress. So think about that leakiness in the gut is constant stress on your system. When you're younger, you might be able to bounce back and recover faster. But as you get older, that chronic leakiness and the chronic stress continues to damage it and becomes harder and harder to repair. So it stays unrepaired.

for a longer period of time. Can we talk about some of the major disruptors of that mucosal barrier lining and how people can identify some things and pull those triggers out possibly? Yeah. So the biggest thing is dysbiosis, right? So what do we mean by dysbiosis? Dysbiosis is a term used to describe a dysfunctional microbiome. But there's really two things that really illustrate dysbiosis.

Number one is loss of diversity in the microbiome. So diversity is a really important marker of health in the microbiome. So as you start losing diversity, you already start losing the functionality of the mucosa. The second part is the presence of certain keystone strains, strains like acromansia mucinophila, Ficulum bacteripraznitzi, Brumnicoccus, Bifidobacterium anomalis. These are really important bacteria that maintain

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (24:04.892)
the structure within your lining. So a lot of the mucosal structure maintenance is done by bacteria. It's not necessarily done by our own cells. We have a cell in our lining called the goblet cell that produces the mucin. So it reproduces the mucin forest, but in order for it to produce the mucin, it requires two things from the microbiome. One is a signal or turning on of a gene called the muc T gene. That muc T gene signal comes from bacteria.

in the microbiome, in particular acromansia, fecal and bacteria, prosnitzite. And then the second thing it needs is short-chain fatty acids like butyrate in order to provide the energetics in order to produce the mucin layer. Then there's a third thing it needs, which is amino acids, which you get from your diet. So that's an important thing to note is that the maintenance of that mucosal lining is dependent on bacteria.

So the thing that really drives the mucosal dysfunction, the breaking down of that layer, the loss of appropriate immune response in that part of the system, which then screws up your immune response throughout the body, is dysbiosis. Now, how does dysbiosis occur? What causes lack of diversity, lack of keystone strains? A bunch of things. Number one, any course of antibiotics you would have taken in your life will have a very negative impact on your microbiome.

Some antibiotics are needed, absolutely, and they will save lives. I don't want to just demonize antibiotics, but what we forget is the importance of trying to recover from the use of antibiotics. So that's where we, as a society and as a science and medicine society, we've forgotten to, or we just didn't realize that we need to focus on that. So that's one. All of the things in your drinking water, chlorine and fluoride in your drinking water constantly disrupt and cause that dysbiosis. All the preservatives.

that you find in processed foods also cause dysfunction and dysbiosis within your microbiome. Roundup is one of the worst because the pesticides and herbicides actually selectively kill good bacteria and allow bad dysbiotic bacteria to grow. Poor diet, so low diversity in your diet drives low diversity in your microbiome and starts to hurt the keystone strains, not getting enough soluble and insoluble fiber and resistant starches.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (26:24.917)
Those are three really important things to feed those keystone strains that maintain the mucosal structure. Stress. Stress is a big driver of dysbiosis. So stress that you feel will actually increase the virulence of pathogens in your gut and create a lowering diversity and create lower numbers of the keystone strains. So those are just some of the things that people are exposed to on a regular basis that create a disruption in their gut.

I wish we could have done a subjective study on gut function pre-COVID and post. Because I mean, I've had so many people reaching out to me and be like, my digestion's a wreck. I feel terrible, I'm constipated, I'm bloated after every meal. mean, of course we could correlate that. Yes, I also agree, it would be amazing if we could just pose like a recovery pack that went along with your Z-pack that you thought you needed to get from your doctor.

My big question is, so would you recommend people take a peek at what's going on on a cellular level as far as the microbiota, the viral, the microbiology in the gut? Or do you think they should just start willy-nilly taking probiotics? And I mean, I suppose there's two ways, but what are your thoughts on kind of taking a peek at the gut through a gut test before we go changing things? Yeah.

So there are certain universal beneficial things you can do for the gut, no matter what state your gut is in, right? And those things should be incorporated right away by everybody. So for one, improving the diversity in your diet, that's an easy part for people to start incorporating. So, and when I say diversity, especially the plant-based side of your diet, you you can increase the variety of meats that you eat, that's totally fine as well. But what really feeds a lot of those keystone strains of the big

part of the population in the colon, large intestine, are the plant-based types of food. the roots and tubers and nuts and seeds and complex carbohydrates and so on, polyphenols, flavonoids, all of these things are really critical for those bacteria. each week taking, making it a specific task to add in one or two unique foods that you've never really eaten before and don't eat much.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (28:47.168)
that in itself can change the diversity in your microbiome quite a bit. That you can start doing no matter where your starting point is. Or if you already have a healthy gut, you just want to maintain a healthy gut or even improve it to certain degree. It's something you can start doing right away. The other thing that's of universal benefit is fasting. A little bit of intermittent fasting actually improves the diversity within your microbiome, upregulates some of the housekeeping mechanisms within the microbiome to clean up

the mucosa, clean up all the dead and dysfunctional cells, and then it helps turn on mitochondrial cleanup and cellular cleanup in the body itself, right? So doing 14 to 16 hour intermittent fast on a regular basis, and most of it overnight, you can do 10 to 12 hours of it overnight and then just kind of push when you start your first meal of the day. So getting a little bit of fencing in there really helps. Using a score-based probiotics, that's what we do all our research with.

We've shown that the spore-based probiotic stops the leakiness in the gut within 30 days. It dramatically reduces all the inflammatory response associated with leakiness in the gut. We've also published a study last year that showed that it increases the diversity within the microbiome. So just those few things alone, the increasing of diversity of your diet, adding in some fasting, using a spore-based probiotic, some moderate exercise. Exercise actually

brings down the inflammatory state in the gut. And I'm talking about moderate exercise, really high intensity exercise increases leakiness in the gut, which is fine to do. But when you're already in a compromised state and all that, you don't necessarily need to add stress to it. So some weightlifting, you know, in fact, muscle activation really has an impact on the gut and the microbiota and can bring down inflammatory response. So doing some weightlifting, doing some movements throughout the day. And we're talking about

10 minutes, 15 minutes, don't have to be at the gym working out for an hour, right? And then a little bit of mindfulness work because your stress response creates dysbiosis in the gut and opens up the gut barrier. In fact, the 2015 publication of Frontiers of Humanology said that stress, based on their review of a whole bunch of studies, said that stress is the biggest driver of mortality and morbidity worldwide, and it does it through making the gut leaky.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (31:11.594)
increasing permeability and allowing the translocation of all of the microbes into this inner sanctum, this illustration that I showed here, allowing this to happen is the biggest driver of mortality and morbidity worldwide, they concluded. these are some of the things that you can do no matter where your baseline is with your gut microbiome, no matter if you had 50 courses of antibiotics throughout your life or you've never had one.

It doesn't matter. Those are all universal benefits that people can do. Beautiful. That's a great advice. think, again, I'm really looking to give people a pathway through and just, we're going to come into this period here where we will start to reintegrate as a society and a community, hopefully, not too far in the distant future. And I think it's, all of a sudden we see the value in feeling safe and going grocery shopping.

I mean, obviously this is a world I've lived in the health and wellness trying to maximize my health to be able to live my life the way I want to live. And now I just, feel like this extra sense of security, I know that I'm managing my gut lining. I'm taking my Megaspore, I'm taking my mucosal barrier building supplements from microbiome labs. it's, mean, since our last podcast, it's pretty shocking. It was a year ago actually.

Was it a year? Wow. was a year. It was a year. And I was so nervous to our first podcast. So funny. I was like looking back. I was looking back on my notes. I was like petrified. So and here we are like, you know, like 70 episodes later. And it's like, you know, I'm looking back at my notes and I had calmed a majority of my symptomology in my gut. So I wasn't reacting to foods, but I was still avoiding half the foods that anyone would see in a grocery store.

Since then I've been able to incorporate eggs, bacon, goat cheese. That's a great test. dude, I mean, now listen, I've done bacon, eggs and goat cheese for about three months, cause this is new staples and I was like, forgot how amazing. And along with the bacon, eggs and goat cheese comes like a layer of like six pounds of visceral belly fat, which now I'm now I'm extending my fast, but it's, so, I never thought I would, I never thought I would be there after.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (33:31.493)
after the lime and the mold, because my diversity was just awful. My gut test people were like, oh my goodness, but I've just continued to supplement, continued to do fasts. I've done some extended, I've done a couple 48 hours. find great benefit in that, great benefit in the bone broth. And it's really, it's moved forward. Now it's been a year, it's not overnight, but.

I've got to be honest, if you think and I hear this a lot from people, I'll never be there. I'll never be able to eat these foods again. And it's not true. It just takes time because I'm 42 years old. probably took me 20 years of dysfunctional environmental toxins to get to that place. And that's a really important part of your message is that, you know, there is a sense of hopelessness when people's guts are really dismantled. Obviously, in part because a dysfunctional gut actually leads to

depressive and anxiety anxious thoughts and feelings, right? There's a deep connection there between the gut and the brain and a lot of the dysbionic type of bacteria in the gut will actually produce neurotransmitters that give you panic and anxiety feelings. So there, so it's totally connected. So as your gut becomes more and more dysfunctional, it actually becomes harder to have hope and have a perspective because these microbes are driving anxious thought and anxious behavior.

in your system, but just keep in mind that these are all ecological issues. It's not like something is wrong with your body that cannot be fixed. You're an ecosystem and something is wrong with the ecology. And like any other ecology, it can be fixed with the right forces, with the right things being added to it, the right forces being added to it. But it does take time, you know, and I think one of things you said is really important. This is one of the things I try to emphasize to people is it takes a lot of little steps.

that you do every single day and you stick with it. And eventually you'll feel like, wait a minute, I've come a long way in a relatively short amount of time, right? It's not overnight progress. It's not one day you feel, you know, like crappy and next day, all of a you feel great. It's small incremental steps, but you will get there and you'll probably get there faster than you think. I think it's important to pull out and take the bird's eye view. And it's like, you know, your day to day fluctuations in health.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (35:52.206)
If you're gonna base your mood on that, it's so limiting. Cause you're gonna have highs and lows. You're gonna fall back two steps for every one you move forward. It's, know, look at a three month picture, look at a six month picture and do some goal setting for yourself is what usually the advice I give to people. Karen, I noticed that you guys are now carrying a new gut test through microbiome labs. Can we talk about that test and how it differs from other things that are out there on the market?

Yeah, absolutely. It's one of the most exciting things that I've gotten to work on as a microbiologist. It's my super nerd fantasy of what a test would be like if you could accurately test the microbiome, right? So it's really important to note that there are a couple of different types of technologies available to sequence bacterial DNA in the microbiome to try to identify bacteria.

the first type of sequencing technology that became available is something called 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing. And basically what we're looking at is these hypervariable regions that each bacteria have, six or seven regions. And when you can find each of those regions, you can say that with a certain degree of confidence that you found this particular bacteria, right? So because most people listening are not geneticists or microbial ecologists,

Let me use an analogy to explain this. So think about it this way. Think about we were trying to identify a person. Then we're trying to identify the person by looking at snapshots of different parts of that person's body, a snapshot of the back of their head, a snapshot of their shoulder, one of their knee, one of the tip of their nose, and so on. So you're putting together these six or seven snapshots of different parts of their body, and you're trying to ID the person, right?

Now, you can tell by the different parts of the snapshot, can narrow it down to what kind of person it is. You could say, oh, based on the back of the head, this is a lady or man with dark hair. It's not a blonde. So you know that you can eliminate all the blonde. You can look at the skin tone from the shot on the face and say, okay, it's a Caucasian or this is an African-American. You can identify what race they might be in. You might be able to tell from the shoulder picture or the face parts of the face picture that it's man or a woman.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (38:12.762)
You know, so you can narrow it down, but you can't accurately ID exactly who that person is. So then at that point, once you've narrowed it down to a smaller subset of the type of person it could be, you might make an educated guess that, okay, this is this person based on all of the evidence I see here, but you're not a hundred percent sure. So the existing technology on bacterial sequencing is that same way of doing things.

You're looking for these specific regions in the bacteria's DNA, and you will never find all six or seven of the regions. So if you find three out of the six or four out of the six, then the computer algorithm makes a guess as to which bacteria that is. And that's how the algorithms are written, right? So it's a guess. Now, the American Gut Project and the Human Genome Microbiome Project has come out and said, this 16S technology cannot be used to accurately identify

bacteria to the species level. It's pretty good at identifying bacteria to the genus level. It's really good for identifying bacteria to the family level, but not at the species level. It has a very high error rate for that type of identification. And so in looking at that, to me, it really bothered me that the vast majority, if not all of the microbiome tests out there, the school tests use the 16S sequencing technology.

because in order for the stool test to be really useful, you have to be able to accurately identify bacteria to the species level, right? Because what determines how your microbiome function is who are all the players involved in your microbiome. And not only who are the players, not only who's there, it's who else is there. That's one of the most important things about microbiome ecology, right? Just because there's a pathogen in your gut.

does not at all mean that the pathogen is problematic. So looking at the presence of that singular pathogen is meaningless. The question is, what is the relative abundance of that pathogen to the other microbes? That's what tells you if that pathogen is a problem or not. So that kind of mapping can only be done if you have very accurate species level detection and you have the capability of mapping out the whole ecosystem.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (40:34.34)
So those were the things that were lacking in all of the other tests, which are basically series of guesses versus having really accurate information that's well mapped and then looking at functionality. So that's what we wanted to change with the microbiome. So we started working with a group that was founded by Rita Caldwell. Rita Caldwell is probably the most decorated scientist in this area of microbial mapping and sequencing and so on. You know, she's got...

80 honorary degrees, including the couple of PhDs that she's earned herself. She's got honorary degrees on top of that. She's published over 600 public papers in peer-reviewed journals. 600. That's a massive number by any standards. She is the most decorated person in this field. We started working with her and her lab and their expertise and really mapping out the microbiome. Because what we want to tell you about your microbiome

is the tendencies that your microbiome has in terms of response. What does it tend to do functionally and what does it tend not to do functionally? Because that's really at the end of the day what gives you an idea of how your gut is functioning and responding to the world around you. I'll give you an example of that which no other test will tell you, but we want to be able to tell you. For example, looking at groups of bacteria that all sulfate reducers.

Sulfate reducing bacteria do a very interesting metabolic reaction. They take sulfates that are coming in from foods and they convert them to hydrogen sulfide in the body. Now, when you start getting excessive amounts of hydrogen sulfide, it becomes very inflammatory to the large bowel. In fact, elevated hydrogen sulfide is correlated with a significant risk for colorectal cancer and inflammatory bowel disease. Now, foods that have high levels of sulfate in it,

are seemingly healthy foods, right? Foods like certain types of meats and fish and eggs and leeks and onions and all these different types of foods that we would normally think of as being healthy foods. For a certain person with high levels of sulfate-reducing bacteria, those foods can actually have a really detrimental effect in their gut unless they balance out their sulfate-reducing bacteria, right? Most people would assume a high protein diet is a good thing, right? But if you have

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (42:57.978)
high ammonia producing bacteria, you're going to convert more of that protein metabolism into ammonia, which elevates the pH in your gut, making it more hospitable for pathogens and less hospitable for your commensal bacteria. And in fact, put significant stress on your liver and becomes a big problem. But you would never know that unless you had a functional microbiome test to tell you that, hey, your ammonia producing bacteria are way above what the normal healthy population levels are.

So we would recommend a lower protein diet for you. Same thing with your sulfate-reducing bacteria and a whole bunch of other functionality. So those are the kinds of nuts and bolts functionalities that we want you to understand about your gut. So that's the new Biomeffects test. It's the first functional stool test that really looks at your specific microbiome and the relative abundance of all of the different functional groups within your microbiome.

to give you a proper understanding of how your microbiome tends to react to the world around you. And here's the thing, everything that we test in that particular test has an actionable step to it. That was another thing that really frustrated me about a lot of the microbiome test is it just kind of give you data, highs and random highs and lows without any instruction of what do do about it, right? So like if you get your test back and it says, Klebsiella is high.

Okay, well, what do I do about it? Where's my anti-glycemic pill that I can take to bring it down, right? What is my action that I can take from it? So we wanted everything that we test to have not only a diet action that you can take, there's a lifestyle action and a supplement action as well. So there's at least three things that you can do to balance out that dysfunction within the death. So that's a new Biomefx tool test. Amazing.

So is that something that you feel like people could act from doing the test, they would be able to act on the information well enough alone to be able to get some direction moving forward? Yeah, that was the idea behind it. We do want people to work with a health practitioner so that there's a more comprehensive approach to everything that they're doing. If they can do that, we want them to work with a health practitioner. But it is designed to be able to easily be interpreted by an average consumer. You you're basically reading a report

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (45:20.863)
on the personality of your microbiome. It's almost like a personality test, if you will, that gives you very specific instructions on if this is high, if this is low, here are some things you can do that have been shown with publications to improve this function or reduce this function. Well, it sure does take the guesswork out of it. And I know at the end of the day, one thing you can't put the value on is somebody's time. So for my money, you know, when I'm

coaching somebody, always try to move them to just, let's take a snapshot of the gut. Let's see what's going on and let's make a more educated decision on what foods we are or are not going to incorporate and then how we're gonna supplement to move forward. Exactly. And it's all about getting as many pieces of the puzzle together so you can really understand what's happening in your system, right? The stool test by itself is not gonna be enough.

as the be-all end-all. It's going to be a really important part of the clues. And then your own symptomology, your own history, your understanding of the things that have affected you and then affected you in a negative way, things that have been beneficial to you. All of those things. And then if you're working with a practitioner and getting lab tests done, organic acid tests and blood tests, all of those things are going to be parts of the puzzle. But the way we wanted to do it is we wanted to make this microbiome test

pretty easy to understand, pretty explanatory and very actionable. And that's really the key behind it. And none of that matters if the test in itself is not accurate. So we went away from that 16S type of sequencing into what they call next generation sequencing, which is whole genome sequencing. So going back to my analogy of trying to identify a person by six random snapshots of different parts of their body, this is like taking a HD full frontal picture of the individual.

So there's no mistaking who they are. We sequence the entire bacteria's DNA from end to end. That's the only way you can identify bacteria on the virus. I love it. I can't wait to get my family member on some of these stool tests. It's gonna be amazing. I just wanna ask one more question to close out. Being a microbiologist and having this unique insight into virology, when you look at the body, how much do you view the picture as?

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (47:41.872)
You know, we can look at germ theory, we can look at the bioterrain. You know, is it from your experience in the world and all the clinical studies you've done, is it looking at the one microbe or the bug, or is it, do you find more benefit from examining the whole picture, the whole bioterrain when trying to move somebody forward? Yeah, and that's critical. And that was the old debate, right, between pasture and I can't remember the other guy's name,

Yes. Exactly. And so, you know, I think the world as we know it in our body or the inner part of our world is a bit of a mix of both. The individual organism does not matter as in reference to the terrain. So the terrain can dictate what this organism does. Right. If this organism wasn't present, that its function is completely nonsensical. It doesn't matter. Right. For example,

with the COVID-19, with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, if it's not there at all, then there's no point talking about it. It's not going to cause an issue. But if it is there, if it's present, then it has many of ways that it can cause dysfunction of the body. But the ways in which it can cause dysfunction or how it responds, creates a response in the body depends on the terrain that it enters. So the presence of the pathogen is important, but how the pathogen elicits a response depends on the terrain that it

So it has its boat. And so what we can do as a species and this is including in this current health crisis is we can minimize our risk for exposure to pathogens, right? We but we can't stop it at some point. We have to get out at some point. We have to go back to words being normal at some point. Many of us will actually encounter this particular virus inadvertently, you know from somebody who's asymptomatic passing it on or

walking to a room where somebody who is a carrier coughed or just touching our own faces and eyes and mouth and all that after touching surfaces, we will come in contact with it just as we've come in contact with thousands of other viruses and pathogens in the past. The question is, you cannot control that part, but you can control your terrain, right? And that's the part that's going to dictate how the response is to this particular path.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (50:04.123)
So both are important. The presence of the pathogen has to be there. It has to be true, but the response is dictated by the terrain. And the only thing we can control with absolute right now is our terrain, because we have to get out. We have to get exposed at some point. And here's the good news about it. Still with all of the different things we're learning about this particular virus and so on, the thing that has held out to be true is still the vast majority of people respond pretty easily to it, right?

It's not a horrific pathogen like an Ebola kind of pathogen. So the vast majority of people still have a pretty mild response and your immune system is able to take care of it. Then you've got people with higher degrees of risk of having severe adverse response. And it's becoming more more clear that the risk factors that drive an adverse response are just basic health parameters, right? Diabetics have four to seven times higher mortality rate with COVID-19.

than non-diabetics. So just that normal prevalent health dysfunction is a big driver of adverse effects. People with hypertension, same thing. People who are overweight, same thing, right? People who have inflammatory statuses, same thing. Two new studies show, one, people with low vitamin D status have a more unfavorable response. And most recently, people with low K2 status, K2-7 status, have a more unfavorable response.

So basic nutrients become really important in how well your terrain is going to respond to the presence of this pathogen. So I don't think people need to be scared of it. I think what people need to do is just be aware that the virus attacks our vulnerabilities. It attacks a dysfunctional terrain. And when the terrain is dysfunctional, the virus has a chance of really causing an adverse response. You could be a hundred years old

And we have hundred year old people who have recovered from this, right? We've actually had 104 year old that's recovered from this. But if your terrain is intact and functioning and diverse, then you'll be just fine. And you'll build some degree of immunity to it and we'll go about life. This will probably become endemic. We'll have seasonal increases in COVID-19. We'll have effective medication for those with the most severe responses.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (52:29.809)
our health system is learning better how to deal with it. We used to think early on that the best response was the ventilator. Now we know that, wait a minute, it may not be the acute respiratory distress. It's maybe more of a hypoxic response and maybe we don't need to ventilate everybody. So all those things are evolving pretty quickly and we're learning how to deal with this. Ultimately, biggest control and the biggest response, the biggest control within how you responded within your own terrain.

So I'm glad you asked that question because it's both, but the thing we can absolutely control is what our terrain looks like. And that's empowering to me. know, I don't, as far as like somebody managing their own, my own interaction with the outside world, there's so many things that I can control my lifestyle choices, what I eat, when I go to bed. We all know it's one hour off of your sleep at night is a massive reduction in your killer T cells functionality the next day. So.

There's so many things that we can do. Last question for the podcast. You've already answered what it means to be beautifully broken. I'm gonna give you a magic wand. You can wave it. And if there's one thing you could bestow on the listeners that they would start incorporating into their wellness paradigm tomorrow, what would it be? Yeah, that's a great question. There's so many things I can think about that are so powerful and quite simple. And at the risk of sounding...

really commercial, I would say that add in a good probiotic. It's so amazing when you have the right probiotic, the kinds of support it can provide your system. And you want to do it in context of trying to improve lots of other things as well. I wouldn't say just go about doing everything that you've been doing that's not good for you and then hope the probiotic will fix it. But adding the spore-based probiotics

that really makes such a big difference in your system. And we've proven it by endless clinical trials. And of course, we have tens of thousands of doctors that use it regularly. You know, so we've got lots of empirical, lots of clinical evidence to the the benefits. And the thing is, it's not anything special that we've done, we've only gone as far as being able to understand what nature has provided for us, and then harnessing and utilizing that right, because

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (54:53.733)
The probiotic is really something that's out there ubiquitous in the natural environment that we're supposed to get exposure to, we just don't get exposure to it. So being able to harness that, put it into a dose form that you can take every day that helps you, that helps your microbiome in so many different ways, it's a very powerful step towards you fixing your terrain. I'll just throw out one more simple thing then also is the fasting part.

To me, one of the lifestyle choices I've made that I think has the biggest impact on my health, both physical, immune and mental health, is the fasting. And I do a regular intermittent fasting. I do a 14 to 16 hour fast every day. And I find that when I'm on vacation, for example, and I'm not fasting because you're eating all the time and my family loves eating breakfast. So where it was go down to the nice breakfast at the hotel and so on, my body feels

different and it feels like, you know, I mean, for lack of better term, crap. and I, when I come back from vacation, one of the first things I'm looking forward to doing is re-incorporating the fasting regimen. two simple things, both can make a huge impact on your outcome. I love it. Well, it's always a treat and the information is next level. I just, I just, again, unlimited gratitude for you being here again, Kieran, and we'll, we'll have you on again. Thank you. It'll be a pleasure to be back.

Thank you for getting all this info to people. think this kind of empowerment is priceless for people because having this kind of knowledge and your ability to change your own outcomes is really key to the future of our health and wellness in the world. So, and especially this time with this kind of crisis looming. So thanks for having me. Of course. Till next time. Namaste. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, you made it to the end of the podcast.

Now in a world with average attention span is less than 10 seconds, we just spent almost an hour together. And I think this is the beginning of something really beautiful. Now one way to support the podcast is to head over to freddysetgo.com and check out my newly launched page, Freddy's Faves, where I've linked every five star product and healing modality you hear about on the show. Most offer significant discounts by clicking the link. And please know it doesn't cost you anything extra.

Freddie Kimmel and Kiran Krishnan (57:19.023)
and at the same time, they support the show through affiliation. So check out Freddie's faves on freddysecko.com. This episode of the beautifully broken podcast was brought to you by our sponsor, AmpCoil, upgrading the vibrations of hearts, minds and bodies all over the world. Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's show, head over to iTunes and leave a five star review. Grabbing a download is like giving this virtual thumbs up that we're doing it right.

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