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 (00:34.734)
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. 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?