Healing Parkinson’s from the Inside Out: The Microbiome, Emotions, and the Power of Poop

WELCOME TO EPISODE 266

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Freddie Kimmel (00:01.461)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back for another episode of the beautifully broken podcast with Martha Carlin. How you doing this morning?

Martha Carlin (00:09.908)
I'm great. I'm great. Thanks for having me.

Freddie Kimmel (00:12.725)
We both have our cup of Joe, I assume. Are you drinking anything special this morning in there?

Martha Carlin (00:17.83)
I am actually having a milk thistle and hibiscus tea mixture.

Freddie Kimmel (00:24.641)
incredible, incredible. I'm trying this Life Boost coffee, which I absolutely love. It's a very clean coffee bean. One cup a day and it's just, she's doing me right right now.

Martha Carlin (00:34.968)
Mmm.

Martha Carlin (00:39.05)
good. I did have a cup of coffee earlier but I'm easing into tea for the rest of the day.

Freddie Kimmel (00:46.901)
Martha, I'm so excited to start the conversation today. I heard on one of your interviews that you are deemed the poop queens.

Martha Carlin (00:56.374)
Yes I am. am. I have spent a decade kind of combing through the poop.

Freddie Kimmel (01:06.217)
It's a perfect, perfect conversation starter for this morning. What got you interested in the microbiome and fecal matter?

Martha Carlin (01:16.59)
Well, it actually goes all the way back to 2002 when my 44-year-old husband, who was what I thought healthy, vigorous, marathon running person was diagnosed with Parkinson's. And I was like, how does a young person get an old person's disease? And so that at the time I was

working, I had a background in accounting and auditing, so was taught to never take anything at face value and always examine the evidence for yourself. And so I started looking at this disease that was, you know, kind of thrown at us saying, there's nothing you can really do. Here's a pill, you know, it's progressive. And I thought, well, there's got to be something you can do. And so I started trying to understand.

what are the factors that are contributing to Parkinson's and just digging into the science of food and environmental things. you know, fast forward 12 years later in the process of that search, I read a book called Missing Microbes from Martin Blaser and it mentioned the microbiome. And I was like, what's this? And so I'm reading it. And to me,

with an accounting background, it's like, that's kind of like the general ledger of your body that keeps track of, you know, what you've been exposed to and what's in and out. And then later that year, the first paper was published that showed you could divide the two different types of Parkinson's by the bacteria in the gut. And I was like, Eureka, that is it. And I quit my job. I started funding some research at the University of Chicago.

doing a time series sampling of poop of my husband and me over a six month period. And that was my first kind of digging into poop, looking at the data. And it was very early in that field. And I met through that process, Dr. Jack Gilbert, who was at the University of Chicago. he had a son who was autistic and we're looking at these microbiome samples.

Martha Carlin (03:38.504)
And there was some overlap in Parkinson's and autism. so through this process, I met another scientist, Dr. Suzanne Vernon, who was studying chronic fatigue for about 20 years. And there were some overlap there. we're like, what's holding back our ability to really find the answers. And Suzanne had worked at the CDC and she said, well, you really need a quality sample bank.

because a lot of times people do these collections, they don't collect the samples well, you have to throw them out or the data is invalidated, blah, blah. And so I said, well, let's start a research company and let's build a poop bank. And so our first six months was basically testing all the different ways that you can collect poop and how easy they were, how they were gonna...

affect the sample that was coming to you because we wanted to be able to ship it through the mail and have it ick free. And so we actually designed and patented this little hammock called the BioCollector. It this little white coated paper hammock that you stuck these two suction cups on the side of the toilet. You pooped and then you picked up the whole thing just by the arms and dropped it into a cooler with a

ice brick that you froze in your freezer and shipped it off to us. And then we took those, the whole, the whole shooting match and we would homogenize it and make it into these. We kind of joked and called them shitlets, but they were little vials of poop that we made available to scientists all over the world. And then we did sequencing and started to look at all of that. And as part of that, we were also building a larger.

Parkinson's stool bank, which has gone on to fuel some published research. We published research with Sarcos-Masmanian. Our paper was part of a meta-analysis last year that showed some connections to certain B vitamin deficiency in the microbiome. And I'm about to come out with a paper with Dr. Barry Nenem of Australia, who's a pioneer in looking at the glycocalyx and

Martha Carlin (06:03.809)
were able to connect basically the Parkinson's poop back to what's going on in the systems of the body. And one of the things we discovered in collecting the whole sample is that the people in our lab could tell if someone had Parkinson's just by looking at their stool.

Freddie Kimmel (06:23.655)
wow, tell me more about that. so what were the findings or what was that presenting as in a sample?

Martha Carlin (06:32.373)
Well, a Parkinson's stool, so when we would process the samples, we would homogenize them and then use a large syringe to put them into the little tubes. But with a Parkinson's sample, that was not feasible because the sample had the consistency of concrete. So we actually had to use a caulking gun.

who apply more pressure and nothing like that had ever been published. Now there's quite a bit of data connecting constipation and let's say severe constipation preceding a diagnosis of 10 to 15 years. But so that was back in 2016, 2017 that we discovered that like it's taken.

Freddie Kimmel (07:01.992)
Interesting.

Martha Carlin (07:28.895)
up to this point with Dr. Ninam, who's arguably the world's most renowned colloid scientist. Well, in soils, like hard packed soils, same thing with a hard packed stool or even with concrete. It was interesting because it went all the way back to my dad was a home builder and he was teaching me pouring concrete.

to get the concrete to harden in the wintertime, you would add 2 % calcium. So this tiny bit of calcium can make something harden. And that's what it's turned out, this electrolyte problem from the battle in the gut. A tiny bit of calcium comes out of the, you know, the bad bacteria kill the good bacteria, they spill out their potassium and calcium, and that calcium causes a concrete-like colloid mass.

that is incredibly difficult to pass. mean, and then it also affects the signal propagation for peristalsis, the potassium spilling, but that really large colloidal mass was what we found in our samples. We just didn't know the kind of underlying chemistry of what was going on until really in the last year of working with Dr. Nenem.

Freddie Kimmel (08:55.967)
So interesting. I want to go back just for one moment. You know, it's my understanding there's not a blood test for Parkinson's. Parkinson's is a story that we're saying this person is presenting with these symptoms. And so we're making, we're kind of clustering them into your group. As your husband was going through this process, what did you learn about Parkinson's and what it really is?

Martha Carlin (09:20.779)
Well, you know, it's really interesting to me over his 23 years with Parkinson's, neurologists never take blood work. They never take a blood sample, which is kind of mind boggling. So we went to functional medicine doctors and a lot of, so we found, I mean, there are a lot of factors that can contribute. It's a multifactorial disease that

John always called it a designer disease because this person over here may have these five symptoms and this person over here has these five symptoms, but maybe only two of them overlap. and I started kind of mapping the symptoms to different gut bacteria, looking at, okay, if this bacteria, what are the symptoms of an acute infection? And then what might be the symptoms of a low grade chronic infection and kind of

tying those pieces together, but heavy metals is another factor. There's lots and lots of toxicology research over the years of the effects of different metals. And John actually grew up in Cleveland, Ohio in the 60s and 70s when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. I mean, it was just a cesspool of pollution.

And so he was exposed to that through the air, probably through the water as well. And then he worked on a golf course. So I started kind of drawing a map. He was a caddy on a golf course for four years in high school and college over the summers. So lots of herbicide and pesticide exposure. He worked at a manometer company one summer, and that's a instrument that uses mercury. So he was exposed to mercury again there.

When he got out of college, he went to work in sales out in West Texas and was basically going out to sell on the oil rigs drill bits. And of course, then he's exposed to a lot of hydrocarbons. And then he went on to, he ran a very high end men's clothing store. So he was dressed in a suit every day. So he was exposed to dry cleaning fluid. So there's actually a new book out by Dr. Ray

Martha Carlin (11:43.992)
Dorsey and Michael O'Koon, called the Parkinson's plant. And they go through a number of the toxins that are implicated in Parkinson's. Paraquat is one of those, the TCE from the dry cleaning fluid. There's a whole host of these different compounds. What they don't connect in that book is how these different chemicals actually go into the

structures in our body, the glycocalyx, the membranes, and they change how those membranes work and propagate signal. And that's also part of what we're going to be showing in our Parkinson's paper that's coming out. So I started to learn about a lot of the different, I'll say external factors, but only in the last year I started working with

a nonprofit called Resolve Parkinson's that is run by Parkinson's patients. A lot of the nonprofits patients are kind of a sideline. And they actually came to me and they said, you know, we've seen a lot of your Parkinson's research. We've seen what you're doing. Like, can you tell us how do we get a seat at the table? And I said, who's table? Like, none of these people are curing Parkinson's. Set your own table. And so

We started talking about how to set our own table. And as a part of that, we wanted to bring the voices of Parkinson's to life for people. So we started a docu-series and we've done about 35 interviews. haven't, I've written about some of them, but we haven't released the actual interviews yet. But what we found in that process was

Freddie Kimmel (13:10.731)
Mm.

Martha Carlin (13:37.774)
the overwhelming majority, high 90%, there was some type of traumatic trigger that preceded the diagnosis. So a huge emotional shift or shake could be death of a parent, major illness with the child, loss of a job. John had a startup company that he had put everything into and it was the precursor

to text messaging through paging. And they basically got sort of screwed out of it by Motorola and he lost everything. And that, you know, these kinds of earth shattering changes or events have deep emotional effect on us. And we started to see in our interviews, especially with the men that they had shoved it down so they didn't have to feel it.

Freddie Kimmel (14:20.065)
Mm.

Martha Carlin (14:38.149)
And these, would start talking to us and the emotion would come up and some of them would cry. And we're like, okay, there's a big piece of this puzzle that no one is talking about, which, you know, is the fear and grief and sadness that really needs to be dealt with because it's trapped in the body. And the issue is in the tissue. I, you know, my massage and neuromuscular person has talked about that.

And I think that's really underappreciated in Parkinson's because they're holding in and holding on so tightly, they just get stiffer and stiffer and stiffer.

Freddie Kimmel (15:19.293)
Yeah, man, does that resonate with me? I feel that when there's times in my life when I've not been able to be a provider, I feel the low that is associated with that as a man that I'm like, I should be able to do this right now. What's the matter with me? And it really does hurt.

It's so interesting. You know, I can only assume how that generational programming has probably doubled down over generations. And now here we are, you know? Yeah, it's so wild. It's so wild. want to, I want to pivot back to the gut microbiome. And you said as we were up in Chicago and you're funding these studies to run sample collections from both you and your husband.

What did you discover apart? Now we've had quite a, it's pretty high level audience. You know, we understand there's different species and phylum and genus within the microbiome. So what did we really, what was the discovery?

Martha Carlin (16:21.355)
Well, I would get these spreadsheets, you know, down the left-hand column, all these names of these bacteria. And we were doing whole genome sequencing. So we had the bacteria, we had the fungi, we had the viruses, we had the parasites. But what I learned from that too is the data that you're getting is only as good as the databases of the information that have been curated.

But, you know, and then it would have all the samples across. So I just started, you know, going bug by bug down looking at what... It was 2015.

Freddie Kimmel (16:51.467)
That's right.

Freddie Kimmel (17:00.046)
Can I ask what year this is?

Right. Great. So no chat. GPT.

Martha Carlin (17:07.031)
So, no chat, even at that point, I was just discovering PubMed. And so I would go to PubMed and type in what the bacteria was. And I used Google a lot too. And I would read these papers or read the abstract. And then I started getting deeper and deeper into the paper. But I'm reading down and I see this.

virus called Pandora virus. And I was like, what is that? And so I called my bioinformatics person who was at the University of Chicago and I said, what is this Pandora virus? he tells me a little bit and says, here's the scientist who discovered it. His name is John Michel Clabaree. And so I started looking at his research and

He had discovered it in two places. One was in Chile and the other was in Australia. That was about 25 kilometers from a place John and I had stayed in 2009 when we went to meet a naturopath and a homeopath in Australia about some of their Parkinson's work. And when we got back from Australia,

John had been very, very sick. He lost 15 pounds. It sent us on this crazy, you know, four months of doing all this testing and scans. They found a spot on his kidney and enlarged spleen and they wanted, they did blood cultures. They couldn't find anything. And they ultimately said, well,

we're going to do a bone marrow biopsy. So while we're waiting for the results of the bone marrow biopsy, we're going to put you on this really powerful antibiotic. And so they put them on Levoquin for six weeks and it all cleared up and we had just said, okay, well it's, you know, cured. But like this Mimi virus, I think actually came from that trip and its natural host is an amoeba. So, you know, back to the parasite.

Freddie Kimmel (19:07.937)
Mmm.

Martha Carlin (19:26.433)
And so I communicated with the French scientist a bit and he went back over to Australia and did some samples, it never, I'll say it never went very far, but I did start digging later on into these, they're called giant viruses. And they use them sometimes in genetic engineering to, what's called a chassis where they can add different genes from different organisms to it. So.

It's a little bit creepy, actually.

Freddie Kimmel (19:59.196)
Yeah, it sounds like it sounds like we're into like a Warner Brothers summer blockbuster movie

Martha Carlin (20:03.573)
Yeah. Yeah. You know, and when you give it a name like Pandora, you're like, hmm, why'd you give it that name?

Freddie Kimmel (20:12.413)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Mildly nefarious. And so the patterns that you started to see and learn about both your and your husband's stool samples, like what was the big takeaway or some of your published work that you said you guys, everybody should really be looking at this?

Martha Carlin (20:35.959)
So, I mean, like early on, I was still kind of learning what are the differences in these different organisms. And what really helped me the most is in 2017, I brought on Dr. Raul Cano, who had been a professor of microbial ecology at Cal Poly for about 35 years. And I mean, he's just a world renowned scientist.

in microbiology. was part of the team that sequenced the first lactobacillus. He had an undergraduate work in mycology, so he understood fungi. He'd written textbooks on it. So he started to teach me about the different bacteria and gram-negative and gram-positive. And so then I was able to kind of categorize better and understand better. And I did start to see

that John had more of the gram-negative bacteria. And you say there's no blood test for Parkinson's. There is no agreed upon blood test for Parkinson's. But I would say after all these years of looking at this, that a good test of a marker would be serum endotoxin. And the reason I say that is these gram-negative bacteria, their cell wall

produces this lipopolysaccharide endotoxin that is highly inflammatory and we have brain inflammation. And so then I ended up kind of stumbling across a Parkinson's researcher who was proposing that endotoxin is actually one of the primary causes of Parkinson's. And so then I started looking and if you go to PubMed, there's 500 papers using endotoxin in animal models to drive Parkinson's like symptoms.

Well, okay. And so then from that, I started kind of connecting the dots across all these chronic diseases, which was, you know, our goal originally, once we started the poop bank was let's see what's in common across these. And endotoxin, if you just go to PubMed and type just about any chronic problem, and endotoxin, and you will see animal models or

Martha Carlin (23:02.315)
the cellular models of inflammation use endotoxin. And so that to me was like, okay, what are we going to do about these endotoxin producers and kind of bringing those down. And then I saw at a very low level, mycobacteria, which of course in the United States, people are like, man, nobody's got mycobacteria, but that actually led me. in 20,

I it was 2018, there was a paper published that showed that there's a gene in Parkinson's called LARC2, which they spent a decade just looking at that, because Sergey Brin's mother has that genetic mutation, she has Parkinson's. But it showed that that gene mutation was a negative regulator of tuberculosis. So I ended up down this deep rabbit hole of looking at

mycobacteria tuberculosis and then digging deeper into the Parkinson's samples, not finding tuberculosis, but finding other species of mycobacteria. And through that actually met Dr. Tom Dow, who does a lot of autoimmune research after retiring as an eye surgeon. And his work is in what's going on in the milk supply, the cows.

It's endemic in the milk supply, something called mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis. And it's connected to Crohn's and a lot of these kind of inflammatory illnesses. And, you know, nobody's really talking about it or looking at it. And so I sent samples to a bunch of different places looking specifically at mycobacteria and my husband's sample.

had the highest amount of mycobacteria reads from this one specialized work we did. It was not either the paratuberculosis or the tuberculosis, but it was a mycobacteria. But then I got connected to another researcher at the University of Georgia who had developed a new assay for looking for latent tuberculosis in people.

Martha Carlin (25:26.141)
He did that while he was at the CDC, but they never released it. So we actually sent blood samples of John's to him and he ran that test three times in triplicate each time. So nine tests and all three of those were positive for latent tuberculosis. you look, know, Parkinson's over time becomes what I would say is a chronic wasting, which is also what tuberculosis is. like getting

A clinical practitioner to agree with, you know, all of these different pieces of the puzzle is practically impossible. It is practically impossible. And, you know, I would say also in the fecal samples we did for different people, you know, we produce a 60 page report. People would try to take it to their doctor. The doctor would cross his eyes and say, I don't know what you're talking about. Sometimes

Freddie Kimmel (26:20.905)
Yeah.

Martha Carlin (26:22.082)
You know, sometimes they would call and talk to me, but I had one of John's friends with Parkinson's and I sat down with her and her brother who had a biology background and was showing that she had actually the highest level of proteobacteria I had seen in any of our samples. Like I want to say 12 or 15 % of her whole sample was proteobacteria. And that's a problem. And I tried, cause I knew her neurologist, I tried to help her.

get a referral to an infectious disease neurologist and he wouldn't see her. I mean, it's kind of wacky.

Freddie Kimmel (27:02.369)
Yeah. Well, you're, you know, obviously like what you're doing as what, know, you're a caretaker for your husband and an advocate for his health. You are very much, especially the timeline we're talking about 2012, 2014, 2017, you know, you're pioneering this. And it's like, you're saying, you know, you walk into an office and you, and you, make this discovery as a patient, you know, I'm not a doctor and you advocate for this thing. You're like this, there's something here. And like, to your point, your doctor kind of looks at you cross-eyed.

And be like, no, that's not either that's not scientific or it's not real or I don't care. I'm too overwhelmed. And so you really have to go out and do a lot of this stuff or you definitely did. I mean, it's a diff it's different today in 2025. I mean, the reports that you can get off of a stool diagnostic are incredible compared to like 2000 and you know, seven when I was first doing this, I mean, it's, I mean, not only is everything broken down into different categories, but now we have.

Martha Carlin (27:45.335)
It is.

Freddie Kimmel (28:01.109)
You know, we have better collection banks. have, we have a better understanding about these imbalances and what the downstream effects or impacts could be.

Martha Carlin (28:09.438)
And, and, you know, some of the tools give you can tell you what an organism is resistant to or not resistant to. that, mean, that's another, I had a friend who had an autoimmune issue, who was part of our sample bank and she actually was in the hospital and in the, intensive care unit where

Freddie Kimmel (28:18.955)
That's right.

Martha Carlin (28:38.806)
you know, they said she probably wasn't going to make it. And I was in her room and I looked on the wall of the antibiotics that they were giving her. And I was like, wait a minute, I have all this antibiotic resistance data in her fecal sample. And I pulled, I went home and got my computer, came back and told the doctor, I was like, she's resistant to every antibiotic you're giving her. You need to, you know, you need to give her this. And three hours later, she was fine.

Freddie Kimmel (29:08.053)
Wow, yeah, incredible. You have to find somebody that will listen to you.

Martha Carlin (29:09.614)
But I mean, you have to get somebody who will listen to you. You know, and who's this, you know, crazy, you know, the crazy poop lady.

Freddie Kimmel (29:19.777)
I'm, I'm wanna, I wanna go further into, um, things that we can do to help rebalance these things in the gut. before we do, I'd just love to know again, I'm just really, I, I, I've been on a very similar journey. You know, you, go to a hundred doctors and you're like, okay, I guess I'm doing this on my own. And what was that, you know, what did, what, what was that like for you guys to be in this seeker mentality and to stay?

the eye on the prize, right? To stay focused. I know you're probably met every six months with like, oh, you guys have to try this or it's this, or you got to talk to this person. Like the promise that like the next practitioner or therapy is going to bring resolve.

Martha Carlin (30:07.394)
Well, you what I will say is we did see in different things that we tried, not from a practitioner mostly, mostly from, you know, me studying and digging in. An occasional practitioner, you know, we found a great naturopath that helped with heavy metals, detox, and looking at the genetics and supplements. But, you know, for the most part, like at the very beginning,

I started looking at food and John had been drinking this soy protein shake from some multi-level marketing thing that he was getting from our neighbor and every day for two years. And I kind of went down the soy rabbit hole and he was drinking soy milk and so, you know, and I was like, no more soy. So we got rid of all of that and we got rid of as much as possible.

processed food. I was traveling a lot for my job, so sometimes he would go back to, you know, spaghetti and a jar of tomato sauce, but we saw pretty immediately a change in, like he had a tremor in his tongue and a tremor in his pinky. And when we changed the diet, both of those disappeared. The visual...

ability to see it. Now you could still feel, he called it an internal, it's like a shiver. Like you can touch them and you can feel a vibration, but it's not visible. But we saw the visible stuff go away. Then, you know, he found, went to the Cleveland Clinic and we learned about the work of Dr. Jay Alberts, who had been basically demonstrating that stationary bike cycling

at or what they called forced exercise at 70 to 80 RPMs or maybe it was 80 to 90 RPMs for an hour, three times a week could reverse the symptoms of Parkinson's by 35%. And so that improved him significantly. So we, you know, we would see these different things that were unexp... We tried the cycling and then we told his neurologist and he kind of rolled his eyes. Well, now all the neurologists, you know,

Martha Carlin (32:27.982)
all these years later, recommend the exercise in those programs. you know, they just, you know, there wasn't enough scientific evidence around that. then, you know, in looking at the microbiome, it was like, okay, well, how are we going to fix this? I really hadn't, I was, it was still pretty early in my process of trying to understand the microbiome. And I went to the World Parkinson's Congress with John in the

fall of 2016 in.

He was, so our youngest son had gone off to college. John had been the stay at home dad while I traveled and work. And so that kind of back to the emotional loss of, you know, last kid leaves the home, you know, what's my job now? Who am I? He was having a little more trouble then walking. So he was freezing more. He was walking with a walking stick. And at that conference,

they showed some research from a scientist in Israel that the sugar alcohol mannitol could stop the aggregation of the proteins in an animal model and actually pull them out of the brain and clear them. And I was like, wow, that's really interesting. So I came back and I bought this little mannitol chemistry book and started looking at mannitol. I'm like, this is really an amazing molecule because it's used a lot of ways in medicine.

But the first chapter of the book had a discussion of bacteria that ferment mannitol out of glucose and fructose. And of course, what do we have too much of in the Western diet? Glucose and fructose. I also knew my husband was a sugar addict and pretty much every Parkinson's person I met, or most of them, are sugar addicts. And I'm like, okay.

Martha Carlin (34:27.554)
how can we make a little factory of microbes and put them back in the gut to convert this glucose and fructose into mannitol so that we have a working system? And I had a friend who was a fermentation chemist and had spent 20 years in the probiotics industry. And we sat down and looked at how can we put together a team that will work together to do this?

He helped me quickly prototype and get a hundred bottles made by a contract manufacturer that he knew. And most of the time you couldn't get anybody to make you just a hundred bottles, but we did. And John started taking it and we were measuring his microbiome and it's getting moving back closer and closer and closer to a healthy human microbiome.

And he stopped walking with the cane and he stopped freezing. And so we're like, okay, there's something to this. And we just started like giving out samples to people, you know, not with Parkinson's. And they were like, this stuff is great. You know, it's more regular. I've got better energy. I'm like, how can it, you know, do all these things? And, you know, we still, we just kind of put it on our website as a sideline if people wanted to buy it.

started making, but we weren't really going to be a probiotics company. But with Raoul and all his knowledge of all these different microbes, I said, well, we've made this working system. Can we make working systems to put back these other functions that people have lost? so Raoul and I kind of locked ourselves into the whiteboard room at the lab for a couple of weeks.

Freddie Kimmel (35:51.871)
Yeah.

Martha Carlin (36:21.132)
And we just started mapping out, you know, what are these issues? Because when you start looking into microbes, they make everything. They can break everything down. I mean, they are amazing. And they are the workhorses of even like pharmaceuticals. They make these molecules in fermentation. So, you know, we just started mapping out, okay, if we wanted to support the immune system or we...

microbes to make like CoQ10 and help support nitric oxide for cardiovascular health or, you know, what about when people take antibiotics, how can we put together a team that's going to, you know, foster that or, you know, people who are stressed or, you know, can we make one that makes B vitamins or, you know, yada yada. So we mapped out like 25 different things and, you know, we still kind of set it.

to the side. And we had built a computational model that takes the genomes of the strains of those bacteria. And in the genome, that tells you what they're able to make or break down. It's kind of the toolkit that they come into the factory with.

So we started just kind of taking the models that the group of organisms that we had built, putting them in the model with their genomes and seeing how they would interact and are they going to produce what we want them to produce. And so we still kind of had that over here on the sideline because we were working on a giant poop slurry for a reference material from a grant we got from the NIH. And so we kind of worked through that into

late 2019 and then COVID hit and we're collecting, you know, poop samples with all the live organisms in them. And we were like, you know, this is probably not a great idea. And so we decided, we finished the grant, we decided to stop collecting samples and we said, okay, let's go back over here and look at the probiotics. And so we pivoted in

Martha Carlin (38:36.142)
2020 and started kind of working on our concepts around, okay, we have these solutions, let's bring the solutions to market. And so that's how Biotequest came to be. But, you know, back to my husband and his, you know, so we saw his microbiome improving, but he also improved something called the UPDR score, which is kind of, it's a subjective score that a doctor does.

And the higher the number, the worse off you are. Well, before he started taking the probiotic, he was at 35. And within a year, he was down to a 20. He stabilized there for four years until he had COVID. And then COVID, you know, I'd spent all these years looking at Parkinson's and COVID is just a wrecking ball. you know, I was then, you know, several more years down the

path of trying to connect, how is COVID causing additional damage that kind of overlays on top of all the kind of pieces that are already new in Parkinson's. And then John had a pulmonary embolism in September of 2024 and passed away. But it was all connected, but I didn't know enough then to...

really understand and nobody really did. Now there are a lot of doctors who are treating long COVID and you know starting to have some success with it but it's a it's a tough challenge to rebuild the membranes of the body that are in the microvasculature that is damaged by COVID.

Freddie Kimmel (40:22.163)
Yeah, it's a real, I had just had Dr. Evan Hirshon and that's primarily what he does. But it's, he's like, know, there's so many great therapies and we have to address this exposome, this total entire environmental burden, be it the metals, the chemicals, the viral overload. He's like, you gotta look at it all. You can't just do one thing.

Martha Carlin (40:45.164)
Well, one of the things I learned from Dr. Ninam, really in the last year since John passed away, was the dangers of cleaning products. So quaternary ammonium compounds that are in, they're surfactants that are in all the liquid soaps, everything that says antibacterial, all these sprays, know, things actually we were using at the lab too.

But things that we were overloaded with during COVID, and my husband was an obsessive, like, you know, hand sanitizer, wiping with Clorox wipes, all of that. Those compounds incorporate into the membrane structures and the glycocalyx, and they are immunosuppressants.

And so, you know, I think back now on how much of that, you know, if I had known that, you know, if I had known, you know.

Freddie Kimmel (41:51.33)
Look at the world. The world was dousing you with hand sanitizer. mean, literally, I had people pump it. like, I don't want that. It was wild. What a wild time.

Martha Carlin (42:01.571)
I know.

I mean, you know, get on the airplane, they're still handing you the wipe. And I'm like, you know, I don't want to that stuff in. so Dr. Nenem actually showed in 1985. He went to Procter & Gamble and showed them that it was immunosuppressant. And they escorted him to the airport and said, be careful on your travels, accidents do happen. And, you know, they went on about their way, making more and more and more products.

Freddie Kimmel (42:10.369)
Crazy. Crazy.

Freddie Kimmel (42:28.107)
Mmm.

Freddie Kimmel (42:32.617)
Yeah. Talk to me a little bit more about your findings of the, of these chemicals finding their way into the matrix of the membrane and changing its efficacy or how it functions. That's really just really interesting. I haven't heard that before. And let me ask you this, you know, are there timelines to these things? You know, is this forever changing the cellular makeup of the membrane? You know, we have a turnover, right? Like I am, Freddie today is not the Freddie that was a year ago.

Hopefully my net commitment to dry brushing and sauna and full body lymphatic drainage and all the things, hopefully I'm a little bit, you know, the expression, the genetic expression is I hope it's better all the time.

Martha Carlin (43:15.992)
Well, you know, that that's one of the discussions I've been having with Dr. Nenem because, you know, different chemicals and things that we've gone back and forth on, you know, he'll say it irreversibly changes the curvature. So a lot of his work is around curvature, the mathematics of curvature and, you know, the curvature, the structure is what drives the function. And so if you

if you permanently change or you stiffen these membranes, can't change and do what they need to do. The glycocalyx is what's called a bicontinuous structure and it is constantly changing based on what it's exposed to, whether that's electromagnetic fields, whether that is compounds that we are eating or being exposed to.

Freddie Kimmel (43:55.699)
Yes. Yeah.

Martha Carlin (44:15.18)
what we're breathing in. so when you do something that either damages that structure, so when it's in a cubic phase, it forms these tubes that are kind of sorting what comes in and out. if you damage those tubes, then things can't get in and out. Or if you change the structure and the...

Freddie Kimmel (44:33.28)
Yeah.

Martha Carlin (44:41.09)
the tube gets too small, then some things that need to get in can't get in or out. So, you know, it can have a lot of effects, but, you know, what he found was that the quaternary ammonium compounds, the surfactants had about a nine year, sorry, nine month life. Okay, so great, nine months from now it could be out of my body, except for you're exposed to it every single day. So if you're exposed to these,

soaps, detergents, shampoos, it's in some toothpaste. You you've really got to be vigilant in order to protect those structures. until we start to understand that, and we're also starting to look at, think there's, so bacteria also have a glycocalyx. And these things may also be affecting antibiotic resistance and the recognition of

structures there. but my question to him is, well, is how can it be irreversible if, you know, we break down and recycle our body and, you know, different cell types have a different life and, but one of the, I think one of the drivers there is, let's say you break down a cell that has some of these

chemicals incorporated into the membrane. If you don't have a process for removing them as they're broken down, they will get recycled and send their signals down the line to the next cell. so that, like hexane is one of those that they were talking about. hexane is used to process a lot of the oils. so like making sure

Freddie Kimmel (46:20.576)
Yes.

Freddie Kimmel (46:25.983)
Yeah, I mean...

Martha Carlin (46:38.25)
you know, anything you're coming in contact with is hexane free. Definitely do that because you don't want to like that one's a tough one to get rid of.

Freddie Kimmel (46:47.913)
Yeah, it's really interesting. know, I'm listening to this. First of all, Martha, I have to have you back on. I have to have you back on. There's so much.

Martha Carlin (46:53.239)
Okay.

Martha Carlin (46:57.858)
Well, can hit me back after I publish the paper, because we'll have a lot to talk about there.

Freddie Kimmel (47:02.015)
There's so much overlap in the work you're doing. then you have this community, very near and dear to my heart is the community struggling with chronic illness in the world of, we can say biotoxin illness. So that could be Lyme and Lyme's co-infections, or it could be mold. There's a lot of overlap in the conversations and I'm hearing, that ties in there, that ties in there. What's fascinating to me, a lot of times the camps don't talk to each other. So you have these people doing this incredible amount of work and I'm like,

Dr. So-and-so needs to hear this like right now, you know, and that's the, I love the innovation that happens in our space, but then there's like this capitalism. It's like driving, you know, you're going to do this work and you're going to skyrocket off here with this entity. And then this person is going to do this and no, but there's no intercommunication. I'm hoping that's what, as much as I loathe social media and AI taking over, I'm hoping that there will

be a broader sharing network that happens as a result of this communication that happens instantly.

Martha Carlin (48:05.775)
Well, so it's interesting you say that because like the neurological disease, you know, they're all separate too. But I had somebody tell me, Martha, you need to go to this ALS conference. And, know, she just was, you've got to go, you've got to go. It's patient led. They have all these practitioners. It's called Healing ALS. And so I was like, okay, I'll sign up for it. And so I went actually a week and a half ago and it was four

Freddie Kimmel (48:33.813)
Where was it?

Martha Carlin (48:34.839)
It was in Las Vegas. It was four days. And I mean, it was just incredible. So they have about 60 patients that they've reversed their ALS symptoms. And I met one of them who's a personal trainer who came.

Freddie Kimmel (48:49.823)
I wanna go to this next year.

Martha Carlin (48:52.227)
mean, it's incredible because they cover everything. I'll send you an email. They have this diagram that sort of starts in the center and then goes out and it has the toxic load. has the mental mindset. It has nutrition and the gut and the inability to uptake nutrients and what's going on in the microbiome.

that's affecting that. And then they do a lot of energy work and spiritual work and purpose. They talked about how important having purpose is. And so it was the most holistic conference I'd ever been to and just lots of incredible information. But a framework, because I was talking to them, I was like,

we need to like bring the Parkinson's people into this, you know, maybe have it together or at least use this structure and framework to have a similar conversation with Parkinson's. But the one thing I would say that makes, know, with ALS, people have a more urgent sense of needing to do something because there's nothing that they have that makes their symptoms better.

it's a much faster moving issue. And so they're more highly motivated to look at and try things where Parkinson's, you know, they have, we can mask this symptom and we can mask this. And it moves a lot slower. So it kind of divides up, would say, and John used to say it's the 80-20 rule, the 80 % who are just gonna stick with that conventional.

you know, the diagnosis they've got, they're not looking for other answers. And then there's this 20 % and it's usually the younger people who want to change the trajectory and do something. But the fact that there's a drug that can mask the symptoms makes them have less of a sense of urgency.

Freddie Kimmel (51:11.849)
Yeah, there's so much work to do. I would love that email. I would love that infographic just to see. I have something very similar in the course that the academy that I teach in. And I know how it all interrelates. I know how important it is. Let me ask you this. If only because we're coming to the end of our hour, we mentioned we just touched on, we just touched on a couple of times BioQuest, BioticQuest.

Martha Carlin (51:38.883)
Bye, out of-

Now we picked a name that's hard for people to say. Biotic Life Quest. Biotic Quest.

Freddie Kimmel (51:47.06)
Yeah. And so I tell me if I, I just want to, if I were somebody that come to come into the website and I just want to do something to, you know, up regulate and improve my gut. I'm constantly in a state of overwhelm, not only myself, but like every week there's a new, you know, I sat through a lecture. I sat through a lecture at, a four last year.

You know, and I listened to Peter Atiyah talk about, you know, pendulum is the only probiotic that's ever going to shift the gut that we all need this one acrobancia that, is literally priced at like a hundred dollars a bottle. It's very expensive and it's one strain. It's one pill. don't see anything again, I not to knock Peter or the product, but I look at this and I'm like, well, it's a single strain and.

Is this marketing spin? So I'm always very cautious. Now, have this space, right? Because you get a big budget behind a product and you can skyrocket it to the masses, just like athletic greens. I I think it's fine. Iterations have changed over time, but I'm always very cautious in the space. So how do we navigate this and tell us a little bit about BioticQuest?

Martha Carlin (53:06.231)
Okay, well, first I'll just say one thing about acrimansia. It's a very interesting organism, but it's a double-edged sword. So it's highly elevated in Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis. I have a LinkedIn post a week or so ago where I talk a little bit about discussions I had with Stephanie Sineff about acrimansia and hydrogen sulfide and kind of what all's going on in the gut. So,

Freddie Kimmel (53:12.667)
huh.

Freddie Kimmel (53:20.853)
Yes.

Martha Carlin (53:34.848)
I do caution anybody that has Parkinson's or MS or a neurological problem to be very, very careful and not take that product. But, you know, two things I would, I mean, we have six products, but the two products I typically recommend if people are, you said overwhelmed. So our newest product is called Perfect Peace and it's a product

that the microbial system that we put together helps support the calming neurotransmitter GABA production. So, and we actually have, I think it's on our Instagram, you can see about 20 minutes after taking it on the whoop, you can see the stress score just drop. And so I think, you know, for a just general like,

taking the edge off of this crazy world and being able to sit back into your own presence, that perfect piece is the perfect thing. And I take it when I'm about to have a stressful day or if I kind of feel the tension mounting, can just 20 minutes later I feel the edge come off. so that's a great product. But the Sugar Shift product,

You're not gonna feel it instantly like perfect peace, but that's the product I made for John that cleans up those proteins. We did a clinical trial in diabetes with that product and it moved all the diabetes markers, but we measured serum endotoxin. And at three months, it significantly reduced serum endotoxin and then we unblinded at the end of it and kept another group on for an additional 90 days.

And so at the end of that 180 day period, almost all of the endotoxin was gone. And what we saw in the change in the microbiome was it moved back to an anaerobic gut, which is what your gut is supposed to be. So it got rid of the facultative aerobic bacteria that can use the oxygen and

Freddie Kimmel (55:36.662)
Hmm.

Martha Carlin (55:57.132)
it fostered the coming back and the increase of bifidobacteria, Ficali, Prosnitzia and Rosburia that aren't even in the formula. So it's helping the whole ecosystem come back. But that's product you kind of need to marry yourself to for a bit, three, six, nine months, a year to reshape your gut and get it back in shape.

Freddie Kimmel (56:24.233)
Yeah, yeah, really, really, really good information. I just want to echo what you're saying is that it's not, when we have a deficiency of just bifido, it doesn't mean we need to dump bifido in the body. A lot of times it's thinking of this as a community, you know, and it's like, what are the players that we're going to put into this microbiome to send everything back into a more homeostatic balance?

I really like, just peeking at some of the formulas here, we've got different amino acids in some of these supplements here. We've got co-factors like inulin, so we've got like a chicory root as a prebiotic. And this is, again, this is another piece. A lot of times we take these supplements and we do not have, it's like you're putting kindling wood, there's no fuel on the fire to grow these things, whether that's from a dietary constraint.

Martha Carlin (56:54.987)
Yes

Freddie Kimmel (57:14.251)
but it's also timing around the probiotic is from my understanding when the prebiotic is ready to help these things grow and expand.

Martha Carlin (57:22.095)
Right. that's, you know, our whole thinking around how we put these formulas together was from an ecosystems approach. You know, these things don't work in isolation. They work as teams. If you put a team together that supports the function you're trying to put in, then you're going to get a better result. And so that's why like we get real results because we've designed a team and we really are the only people that design.

Freddie Kimmel (57:33.803)
That's right. Yeah.

Martha Carlin (57:51.385)
teams like this.

Freddie Kimmel (57:53.664)
Yeah, amazing. I cannot wait to try. If you told me to try one thing, I'm kind of geared toward, I'll tell you what my intuition says. My intuition says, I'm just trying to get this up here. Hold on, I gotta move the screen. My intuition says, I wanna try the total gut reset.

Martha Carlin (58:05.816)
Okay.

Martha Carlin (58:18.841)
That, well, you know, that actually the total gut reset, especially, you know, with a history of Lyme. So you've had plenty of antibiotics, you know, that, that it. Yeah. So it has the antibiotic antidote, which is, was designed specifically to, you know, set up a, a pH and an environment that fosters kind of the whole suite of bacteria so that you can restore after antibiotics.

Freddie Kimmel (58:27.787)
Three years solid.

Martha Carlin (58:48.065)
And then it has our ideal immunity, is super, I'll say it's pretty targeted to pathogenic bacteria, especially from food poisoning or so salmonella listeria E. coli. So that's a lot of those endotoxin producers too. And, and then it moves you into the sugar shift that is kind of overall metabolic health. And it has a, you know, the suite of

It's making different glycans that can support the glycocalyx and all the signaling and energy production. It's a stepped process for that. We actually just introduced that a few months ago because a lot of people have been exposed to a ton of antibiotics and they're not really sure how do I go through this process. That antibiotic antidote, we had formulated that but not brought it to market.

Steve, my advisor who originally helped me with the sugar shift formula, he came to me because his mother in her 80s had had appendicitis and had her appendix removed, got septic, was on IV antibiotics for a month and a half and then her gut was amassed and the doctor's like, that's just the way it is, know, there's nothing you can do. And he said,

don't you have that antibiotic formula? So we made a little batch so that she could have it. And she became this super fan and Steve just was scratching his head. said, I've been telling my mom about probiotics for 25 years. And so finally she takes your product and she's like, wow, this stuff is incredible. So it was kind of funny. Yeah.

Freddie Kimmel (01:00:27.349)
Yeah.

Freddie Kimmel (01:00:32.737)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. When the time is right, people will pick up the torch and run with it, but not until it's right. Not until it's right. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's been such a treat to have you on. I am going to, again, I'd love to have you on again in the future. I really appreciate the work you're doing. And I also, appreciate the work that your husband did in helping bring all this forward.

Martha Carlin (01:00:39.883)
Right. That's exactly right.

Martha Carlin (01:00:59.415)
Yes, in fact, I have a tribute to him in the paper because, I mean, he used to joke and say he was lab rat number one because he tried the no fun diet one through 20. But, you know, he was really a huge contributor to understanding the mechanisms and the science. I like, I know we're at the end, but one of the things that he actually

kind of drove home for me. I said, well, what does it feel like when your legs don't work? And he said, well, it feels like back when I was running marathons and I'm overloaded with lactic acid. And that was a whole nother metabolic clue for us that lactic acidosis is part of what's going on here. you know, he comes to me still with inspiration and, you know, he's the driving force behind what led me down this path.

I carry that love forward and trying to help more people.

Freddie Kimmel (01:02:04.639)
Yeah, beautiful, beautiful. Thank you for your time this morning, Martha. It was truly like a beautifully broken story and I can't wait to put this one out.

Martha Carlin (01:02:15.833)
Thanks so much for having me.

Freddie Kimmel (01:02:17.686)
Thank you.