 What you would now get to experience is what is it like to actually have that high energy, to not have brain fog, to have a resistant GI tract that allows you to eat the foods that you want to eat, to be able to have a better metabolism for the foods that you're eating. The solutions mentioned in this episode are not a substitute for seeking medical advice. It is important to first communicate with your doctor regarding any of the information you wish to put into practice, especially for serious illnesses. Okay, let's get started. Colleen, it's great to have you back. Thank you so much for having me. Great to see you again. Yeah, good to see you again. All right, so after that teaser, let's talk about this lesser known probiotic strain clostridium butrysum. What the heck is that? Well, as you know, there are thousands and thousands of strains yet to be uncovered and identified and named, but interestingly, this strain that we're going to talk about today, clostridium butyricum, has actually been known and used in Asia for quite some time for decades for a variety of different GI issues. It's only more recently that we started to really delve into its function and what it's doing and why it might be helping people with their gut health. As you might imagine from the name clostridium butyricum, it plays a role in butyrate production. So we're going to talk a little bit about that, I think. Yeah. Before we go any farther, a lot of my patients, when they see or hear clostridium, they immediately jump to the infamous clostridium difficile or C. diff, which is an incredible mischief maker in people who have taken doses of antibiotics and literally is a life-threatening colonization of the gut, which literally can cause your death. But we're not talking about that clostridium, right? We are definitely not talking about the clostridium that causes death. So yeah, within the clostridium family, there are different strains, clostridium difficile, the infamous clostridium difficile. Actually, many of us have it in our guts at very low levels. But when you take something like an antibiotic and all of a sudden this strain has no competition and it can start to propagate unchecked, it can cause a variety of problems. And part of the issue is that it's pathogenic. It has virulence factors encoded in its genome. So the clostridium that we're talking about, clostridium butyricum, doesn't have any of those pathogenetic or virulence factors encoded in its DNA. So it's actually one of the good ones. Yeah, so folks, there are good clostridium. So don't tune us off because you really need to know about this guy. All right. So I've written a lot about butyrate, about why butyrate is so important. For everybody who's just kind of tuning in, what is butyrate? What does it do? Why do we need it? Well, butyrate is a really important small molecule that your gut microbiome generates. And so we all know a high fiber diet is really good for us. We're supposed to eat lots of fruits and vegetables. And what happens after you eat those fruits and vegetables is that there is really no enzyme that your body encodes that allows you to digest them. There are microbes in your gut that help you to digest these certain fibers. And when they digest those fibers, they convert them into butyrate. And butyrate is a very important small molecule that helps you reap the benefits of fiber. And so one of the important things to know about the colon is that it is the only cell type in the entire body that uses butyrate as its source of energy rather than glucose. And so now you can see how important butyrate is in the role of the colon. Butyrate also plays a really important role in your gut barrier. And so this strain that we're going to talk about, clostridium butyricum that produces butyrate is known to produce increased mucin, which helps you with your gut barrier and tighten up those tight junctions. And so butyrate is an extremely important molecule for the colon because it's an energy source and it's also really important for your gut barrier because it's a source of production of mucin. So let's suppose you and I eat a high fiber diet. Does that mean that clostridium just happens to show up on the scene and takes advantage of this? Or is this another probiotic that begins to dissipate, particularly in the Western diet? Yes, as you know, it's not just important to have the right bugs in your gut but also to feed them the right prebiotics. And so if you are eating a high fiber diet, you're giving these strains the best chance at survival because you're feeding them. And then on a Western diet where you have less fiber in your diet, you're not giving them the food. And so many of us have clostridium butyricum and lose it over time. And so when you think about the idea that maybe you used to be, you could remember a timer, you used to be able to eat whatever you wanted to and nothing ever upset your tummy. And as you start to age, all of a sudden it gets a little bit more sensitive. You got to watch what you eat. When you travel, you got to watch what you're eating because you start to get some GI issues that you didn't used to have. And one of the things that can happen to your microbiome over time is that you start to lose these strains which are really important for helping you with your GI maintenance. And so that's why you start to experience more GI sensitivities as you age. And so if you can get this strain back and you can feed it the prebiotics that it needs to survive, you can now start to have less GI distress compared to when you don't have the strain. I think that's a really important point. Almost everybody remembers a time when they had a cast iron stomach and they could eat junk food and never gain an ounce and they never had GI upset. And then let's just choose, I turned 40 and all of a sudden I'm packing on the pounds and I eat a piece of pizza and I'm miserable or I have diarrhea. And I think your point is really well made. We now realize that a lot of times when we're young, kind of before the days of antibiotics, we had a really wonderful diverse microbiome and now that microbiome is being decimated every day. But more importantly, your work and others have shown that these very important probiotics, they taper off as we get older. And it really does explain why we have issues as adults that we didn't have as kids. Absolutely. I mean, I grew up in Georgia and I was never afraid to stop by any barbecue shack and try anything on the menu. But as I got older, I started to really be careful what I was picking. I don't know, what's the craziest thing that you used to be able to eat that now you worry about? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I also lived in Georgia for quite a while and I was a big fan of Louisiana food, particularly hot peppers. And my brother and I used to have competition of who could have the biggest Scoville unit hot sauce and it would never affect me. And then as I aged, holy cow, one bite of a habanero pepper and I was in the bathroom for a couple of days and going, what the heck? What happened? Yeah, you're right. Exactly. Exactly. Now you couldn't show your brother up anymore. So it's important to be able to do that by getting the right strains. You know, I never thought of it that way and boy, now I'm going to go back armed with pendulum life and say, okay, come on, let's do it again. Exactly. No, I think that's very important. In my first book, The Plant Paradox, I make a very strong argument that most of us, our gut microbiome, is one of the major defense systems against the foods we eat, including lectin-containing foods. There's actually a bug that enjoys eating gluten, believe it or not. And there are actually a number of societies, particularly in the Philippines, that use gluten as a food product. Cetan is pure gluten and they don't have any issues, but that's because they've still got these bugs that say, hey, we love to eat that stuff, we'll detoxify it for you. It's very interesting too because to that point, a lot of people will cut gluten out of their diet and then they'll find that they've become even more gluten-sensitive after that and it's because you're no longer feeding this to those certain microbes. So even if you started out a little bit depleted by not eating that food, you're really completely eradicating that strain. Yeah, they're interested in things they want to eat. And if you starve them, they literally, we could say they either die off or they just decide to leave because there's nothing to eat. And yeah, I made that point in the plant paradox and there is very strong evidence, particularly just staying on the subject, that when people stop eating gluten, which is a good idea in a lot of people's cases, those gluten-eating bugs that are gone and when they just get exposed to a little bit of gluten, it's like, holy mackerel, what happened? I feel it immediately. Yeah, you're right. You think the whole science of the microbiome, as you and I know, is so relatively new. I mean, 15 years ago, we didn't even know these guys existed. And you're right. There's eight to 10,000 strains that are identified so far and probably you're right. We're probably just scratching the surface of identifying and what each of these guys do. And also, you make a very good point we've talked before. We now know that there is intrabacteria communication, that one set of bacteria really need other bacteria and the things they do for them to actually accomplish what they're after. Can you spend a little time talking about that? I mean, how can one bacteria need another bacteria? Well, it's really a community. When you think about your community, there are different job functions that different people need in order to make sure that something works. So let's take, for example, God forbid, your house catches on fire. You need firemen who ride in a truck that tap into the fire hydrant to pour water on your house to put the flames out. So it's not just the firemen that are important. It's also the people who build the fire trucks and it's also the people who install the fire hydrants and it's also people that maintain those fire hydrants and it's the guy who builds the hose. So in that one thing where you just see a fireman putting out a fire, there are actually a lot of other things that are required to be functional for that to actually happen. And it's the same thing in your microbiome. While we may look at one strain and say, oh, wow, look at Acrimansia or look at Clostridium butyricum, such an important ketone strain, that's true. That fireman is a keystone part of this equation. But without these other strains that are in part of the ecosystem, that one strain actually cannot do its job functions. And so some of these other strains, what they do is they create small molecules that feed these strains. They create this ecosystem that allows them to thrive. And so I think it's really important that we note it is an ecosystem. And so you need all the parts of that community, even though we're highlighting these particular strains, those other strains are also important. All right. So let's get back to butyrate. Other than feeding a colonic cells, which is absolutely true, butyrate has a lot of other fascinating uses. And I spent a lot of time in unlocking the keto code, my new book, really explaining why butyrate is so important for many issues. Can you elaborate on, OK, it's feeding the colon cells? That's a good idea. And it's true that people who have low butyrate levels has been associated with an increased risk of colon cancer. And there's a lot of animal and human research to substantiate that. And that's a good thing to avoid, I would think. So what else can butyrate do for us? Well, I think in addition to making sure you have healthy colon cells and hopefully avoid going down the path of colon cancer, butyrate, as I was alluding to before, is very important for your gut barrier. And so when you think about the strength of your gut, it's really important to think about the lining of your gut and those tight junctions that keep that gut really as a true barrier for all of the small molecules being created inside of your body and all of the things that inside of your gut, sorry, and all the things outside of your gut that really shouldn't touch each other. And then also for all the receptors that sit in the gut line for them to be properly positioned and held in the place that they need to be held in so that they can serve as the right signaling molecules come along. The receptor can actually bind to the signaling molecules and then send signals outside of the gut. Butyrate is super important for helping to maintain that gut lining. And so it's known that if you're low in clostridium butyricum that you actually have less mucin. So actually putting clostridium butyricum back in can increase the mucin production, which is important for that gut lining. And some of the things that you might experience when you don't have the right mucin amount there, you don't have these good tight junctions there are GI distress, sensitivity to foods that you didn't use to have sensitivities to, but even the immune and inflammatory responses are related to this because what those receptors are doing the gut lining is signaling into your body the right immune and inflammatory responses to have. So when you don't have the right receptors and you don't have the right butyrate that's there to bind to those receptors, and you don't have the right gut lining holding them in place and bringing them together, you could have miscommunication on the immune inflammatory responses. And clostridium butyricum has been studied widely across the world in its role in both regulation of both the immune and the inflammatory responses. And so we the sort of underlying gut barrier is super important for a variety of different things that we experience. Yeah, I think what you're saying is what Apocrity said 2,500 years ago is that all disease begins in the gut. And that's right. The guy was right. And you know, I paraphrase that to say all disease begins with a leaky gut. And yeah, and you're exactly right. The other thing that I mentioned in unlocking the keto code is that butyrate and other short chain fatty acids are HDACI inhibitors, histone D carboxylase inhibitors. And cancer cells use histone D carboxylate to grow and divide and butyrate suppresses that ability. So, you know, let's get some butyrate in us for goodness sakes. Yeah, I think there's been a variety of new studies around different types of cancer, you know, beyond just colon cancer that are, you know, butyrate is showing to play an important role in and I'd like to maybe take a moment to make a point about butyrate itself, because there are a lot of butyrate supplements out there and you can just simply buy butyrate off the shelves. And so I just think it's important to know the difference between buying and ingesting butyrate versus ingesting a probiotic that is able to generate butyrate. And that has to do with localization. And so, you know, Dr. Gunjary, if I said I've got a million dollars for you, would you rather I brought it in a suitcase to your door and handed the suitcase to you with a million dollars in it, or would you rather me let you know that I just scattered it in one dollar bills all over Highway 101? And I'm sure you would rather have that suitcase delivered to you with all of the dollar bills inside of it. And that is the similarity of just taking butyrate, where if you just take butyrate, it's like scattering a bunch of dollar bills across the freeway. Every car is going to stop and they're going to take those dollar bills up before it ever makes it to your house. And so butyrate, because it is the primary source of energy for all the colon cells, when you just take that small molecule, it gets absorbed by all your colon cells, which is great for your colon cells, but doesn't actually get it to these receptors in the gut lining that are going to help give you these other benefits. So in contrast to that, when you take the microbe that actually generates butyrate and you get that microbe into the GI tract where it's supposed to live and it's sitting in there generating butyrate right at the site of the gut lining, that's when you're actually going to get the so-called suitcase delivery right to that door, the receptor, so that you get the benefits at the site you want it. No, I think that's a very, very important point. There are lots of butyrate supplements out there. You're right. They really never get to where you want the action to become and since you're going to give me a million dollars, could you put it on my yacht in the Cayman Islands so that, you know, and no, I don't have a yacht in the Cayman Islands. Exactly. Yes, you just tell me where to put it. It's just like the butyrate. I mean, that's why there are so many great applications of butyrate that have been shown in preclinical models that haven't translated into humans. And I don't think it's because butyrate is not important. I think butyrate is very important, but I think we haven't fully unlocked is how do we deliver butyrate properly and the microbiome and the science that the industry is doing right now is going to be that unlock for butyrate. Well, so what so what happens if your body doesn't have enough butyrate? I know we're kind of danced around this question. I mean, so what? I don't have any butyrate in me. So what I'm fine. Yeah, I think that you might feel like you're fine, but this is something in particular with aging that you used all of us start to realize as we're aging that certain things are more sensitive or don't operate as well as they used to. And so it can span the gamut from having less energy to having more GI sensitivity to having, you know, lower slower metabolism, all of these things that are happening to us. And we sort of shrug our shoulders and say, well, that's just something that young people get to have. And this is just part of aging. The truth is that the microbiome is a very important part to aging. And we know that over time and with stress and even changing time zones where you get circadian rhythm changes and for us women, we go through menopause. All of these things are associated with a depletion of your microbiome. And so it might not be a lost cause yet because what might be happening is that you're just losing certain microbes that if you were able to get them back, what you would experience, which you haven't experienced in a while, what you would now get to experience is what is it like to actually have that high energy to not have brain fog, to have a resistant GI tract that allows you to eat the foods that you want to eat, to be able to have a better metabolism for the foods that you're eating. And what we've observed with our customers is that many people are reliving a time that they didn't even know that they could. And they're having these experiences that they weren't even expecting. And one of the most amazing things that we've been hearing about is reduced sugar cravings. And I think this is really interesting because you might notice that you have more and more of these cravings as you get older. And there is this gut brain connection where your gut is giving your brain information that it has also to do with satiety and your cravings. And so by giving yourself these strains back, you have an opportunity to experience all of these improved things that till now, you know, science hasn't really known what to attribute them to. Yeah, that's a really good point. You know, in the in my last book, The Energy Paradox, I cite a fascinating Chinese study that they took volunteers and put them on a seven or a 14 day water fast. And one group got 100 calories of prebiotic fiber per day. And the other group didn't. And prebiotic fiber, we can't digest like you mentioned, but it feeds these good gut bacteria. And the fascinating thing is these folks on a seven to 14 day water fast who got the prebiotic fiber had no hunger, whereas the other the other group was pretty dog on hungry. And so you're right, there is, and I talk about this, you know, ad nauseam, there is this amazing control of our brain, of our emotions, of our hunger by the products of these gut bacteria, the postbiotics. And it turns out, butyrate is a postbiotic that our gut buddies, including clostridium, make for us. All right, most people, a lot of people know that butter is named for butyrate, butyric acid, shouldn't I just be having a couple sticks of butter a day, Colleen, come on. Well, I butter makes everything better. Certainly, I can't say that you shouldn't eat any butter since it's just good, good tasting stuff. I think if you want to really reap the benefits of butyrate, you have to have the right microbiome in order to do that. And it really does boil down to providing yourself with the right prebiotics that feed these bugs and then just seeding with the probiotics themselves. And so making sure that you are aware when you look at a label on a probiotic and you're looking for things that are butyrate producers and you're trying to consume the right prebiotics to feed those, it's all part of this system that works together. So, you know, I think we are heading into a world where we're really going to be able to distinguish for you what are the right butyrate producers to ingest that are going to help, that are going to seed in your microbiome that are going to help you with issues. And this is sort of a bigger thing that we're going after in pendulum, which is to say that there are a lot of kind of one-size-fits-all solutions out there for people with GI distress. And the truth is that many of us may have found a solution that works for us, but you might find that over time that thing stops working as well. And the reason for that is because your microbiome evolves, it changes over time. And so one of the things that we're very interested in at pendulum is what is it about a person that makes a product work for them for their gut microbiome, but then over time as they evolve, how do you evolve with them and bring them new functions to their microbiome that help them. And so we are actually launching this program which allows you to take a diagnostic survey about what your GI symptoms are and it's both kind of what you feel as well as behavior and get a baseline on yourself and then get a formulation from us and understand how is that changing your gut microbiome as well as your symptoms. And then if that product doesn't work for you, bringing you a new product that has additional functions so that we can start to work with you to figure out what are the functions missing so that you're not just taking every probiotic under the sun, but you're actually taking something that the minimum thing that you have to take in order to fulfill your microbiome. And so I'm very interested about in this program and it starts with Clostridium butyricum and the butyrate production. Well that, so but what about my other favorite strain in your favorite strain, acrimoncia? Where does that fit into this picture? Yes, it does fit into this program so as you're pointing out, acrimoncia is a very very important strain and acrimoncia is really interesting too because not only is it able to produce short chain fatty acids and lids resides in the in the mucin layer and helps with the the mucin regulation but in the genome of acrimoncia is the enzyme that up regulates GABA production. And so one of the things that I think is very interesting about acrimoncia that's different from Clostridium butyricum is this potential gut brain relationship and the production of GABA. And so when you think about these two strains, yes they do have some common ground in terms of being able to increase butyrate levels but they are different in that, you know, acrimoncia doesn't directly generate butyrate, you know, it generates other short chain fatty acids and that they're kind of acting in two different roles. So this gets back to kind of like the fireman and the truck, you know, you really want to be able to figure out are you just missing the fireman or do you need both the fireman and the truck? And so that's what this is really aimed at. So yes, good point acrimoncia is part of that program as well. So how, all right, so how do you get Clostridium uterusium? Can I eat butter? No, it won't work, right? Well, you know, you probably have some Clostridium butyricum in your gut much much like we have all these other strains and so what you're trying to do is to enhance the growth of it or if you've become depleted and getting it back and so of course at Pendulum we are really focused on how do you directly give your body the strain back and so we have figured out how to manufacture the strain. It's actually one of the hardest strains to manufacture because of where it resides in your gut. There are no, there's no oxygen there and so that requires us to manufacture this in a closed end-to-end system where no oxygen can get into the manufacturing of it and that's one of the reasons why it's not available on the market today very readily and certainly not at the concentrations that we're putting out on the market at and so we've been able to manufacture it, we've been able to demonstrate its viability and we've been able to show that when people take the strain you can see it show up in their gut microbiomes and their stool samples and so the fastest way to get this strain is to take it directly to take Clostridium butyricum and then to make sure you've got the prebiotics that are continuing to feed it. And I'll bet you you have a product that does just that. We do, we do, we have just launched actually today I believe on the website. I think last time when you and I spoke it was right when we had launched Acrimacia so somehow this timing is working out where you're catching us literally the day or the week that we're launching these products. So today we launched a product that has Clostridium butyricum and so you can try that to see if you're able to seed your microbiome with Clostridium butyricum and to reap all of these health benefits that we've been discussing here today. Neat. So that's now on your website pendulumlife.com. Yes pendulumlife.com and I believe there's also if your listeners want to go on and purchase it there's a discount code that they can use for specifically for your listeners and I think it's Gundry, Gundry 20. Gundry 20, you're right. Gundry 20. All right now another one of your products which I'm a big fan of and I make no mistake I'm a big fan of their products and we have no relationship other than the fact I'm a big fan. How's that? But glucose control so what's the difference between the product you're just releasing butyricum Clostridium butyricum and glucose control? The pendulum glucose control product has a formulation of five strains and the prebiotic that that inulin that feeds those strains in it and so it has different ingredients in it and it has the multi-step biochemical pathway required to metabolize fibrin to butyrate and it also contains acrymencia in it and it has been clinically shown to lower blood glucose spikes as well as A1C and so it was designed to help people metabolize sugars better and thus the name glucose control and has preclinical and clinical data to support that. Clostridium butyricum is really much more focused around gut health than it is around metabolism sugars and the clinical trials that exist out there in the world today that have been done on Clostridium butyricum have been primarily focused on GI symptoms as opposed to metabolism and so if you are trying to improve the way your body metabolizes glucose and you want a product that has clinical data behind it for that and was designed for that that's really pendulum glucose control if you feel like you are really targeting GI then acrymencia and Clostridium butyricum these would be the products that that would be more targeted for you. Gotcha you know I have I have a number of patients now on both of your products and two of my patients particularly we have the results after glucose control after three months and both of these patients husband and wife had really elevated slightly elevated hemoglobin A1C slightly elevated insulin levels and they're not overweight they're fit ones literally a professional dancer and yet had elevated blood sugar levels had elevated hemoglobin A1Cs and we've tried every trick and I suggested they try glucose control and they're good experimenters and they both had really impressive reductions in their hemoglobin A1Cs their A1Cs for people who watch TV and their insulin levels so that's my first two patients that I can actually report back on but yeah I think and you have human clinical data to prove that this is real this wasn't just a placebo effect for them and it certainly wasn't with my patient. Well that's fantastic to hear and I think that's really important Dr. Gungry for people to know that the different tools out there for them to use as we all know diet and exercise and then the variety of small molecule drugs that get prescribed to people for even pre-diabetes and then certainly for type 2 diabetes really the part that hasn't been studied or understood very well is the microbiome and I know that you have been doing a lot of work to educate people on the what the microbiome is and what its role is and so this is really pendulum glucose control is the only product the only microbiome intervention out there which was designed to help with the management of glucose and has the clinical data the peer review published clinical data from a double-blinded placebo controlled you know randomized trial and so we so our relationship is not just that you're a fan of pendulum but I am also a fan of yours and the education that you do to help people know and just have awareness that there's another tool that they can use out there that they probably haven't gotten a chance to try yet yeah and you know I hate to use the words this is all natural but it is you know this is what we should be doing to optimize this diversity of our microbiome and you know kudos to you guys I know you spent 10 years getting this accomplished and a whole lot of investment money because you're right this is this was the holy grail really of probiotics is how do you grow these guys and we've had a previous podcast about that and it's like it's impossible to to grow these guys and you guys have done the impossible so congratulations well it's been very exciting and you know for me it's very personal because I started this this whole journey with having a my first daughter was born prematurely almost by two months and when they're born that early they get put on antibiotics in the intensive care unit to prevent them from getting an infection and what we know now is that infants and children who are systematically in antibiotics which are decimating their microbiome as they get older they're really positioned with a depleted microbiome from the get-go and as she got older into elementary school she had real food sensitivities that the rest of us didn't have and I've had her on pendulum glucose control since we invented it now for several years and she will for better for worse the girl can now eat whatever she wants and so I myself have seen you know what it can do when you have a supplement to your microbiome that really is filling a gap and not to say I mean I'm not anti on antibiotics they've saved millions of lives people should take them when they have a bacterial infection but there are repercussions to taking antibiotics and many people feel that even the antibiotic associated diarrhea and so thinking about how to replenish your microbiome after going on antibiotics I think is super important and that's part of what we're trying to understand and learn to So are there any other particularly powerful strains that listeners should know about? Well I think you know right now the strains that we've been very excited about in talking about acromancea as well as clostridium butyricum there are some other strains that that we've really focused on bifidobacterium infantis so B infantis is another really important strain that's been studied from really birth through aging as an important strain and that's in our formulation as well and then there's two other strains clostridium bejorinchi as well as anaerobacterium halide maybe someday we'll deep dive on those strains together too but I think and we have a lot of other strains that that we're starting to learn about I think the important thing to keep in mind is that none of these strains that reside in this part of the gut have really been manufactured at scale and so that is a real breakthrough that we all have to figure out and then making sure that these things are safe they don't have virulence factors there are bad bacteria and so I'm gonna make sure that we're helping to keep those down but the more that you can provide your microbiome with these good bugs the less chance that those bad bugs can do what C. diff does and start to propagate unchecked and so thinking about what are all these good bacterial strains is something that we do a lot of and we'll keep talking to you and having you bring the latest and greatest strains to your audience and your followers as we learn All right yeah and you know I've posted about this the last time I went to Europe last fall usually I take several jars of my product lectin shield to tolerate the cheating that I do in France and Italy with poor food choices and they work very well and when I said what the heck I'm gonna put acrimoncia to the test so I took your acrimoncia with me and I left my lectin shield at home probably looking back was probably dumb but with just your acrimoncia I really had no gut issues on a 10 day trip and quite frankly it would have torn my insides out if I hadn't had lectin shield to guard me so this stuff works folks I've seen it in my patients I've seen it personally and that's why I'm such a big fan of you and everybody knows I don't recommend anything that I haven't tried and I haven't looked at the research and again kudos for you for going the distance for your daughter and now you're helping all of us with this so we thank you again thank you too and I think one of the things that is really hard for people to understand when they go into the grocery stores and convenience stores right now they're just shelves and shelves of probiotics and so how do people figure out what's the right thing for me and I think a big part of what you do is to help educate people on how to make those selections so I'm wondering if you when people must ask you this all the time hey doc what probiotics should I be taking how do you think people should be looking at probiotics and what should they be looking for well I think one of the big misconceptions that maybe you can clear up and I try to the vast majority of probiotics particularly in foods like yogurt or even sauerkraut never make it to their destinations most of them are destroyed by stomach acid you've got to have a system to prevent stomach acid degradation of these having said that as I talk about in the Unlocking the Keto Code there's very good work out of Stanford researchers that show that fermented foods which contain lots of prebiotic fiber actually promote a more diverse gut microbiome and a less inflammatory response than just prebiotic fiber in and themselves and I have a thing I think it is because of these short chain fatty acids that are in the ferment of foods and not so much the probiotics that they contain and so you know follow the evidence folks look at you know which grains have been tested make sure that's not in a test tube as I say what happens in a test tube oftentimes does not happen in a living body or particularly in a human being so just be a wise consumer and that's why you know we do these programs so you get some information that you can use all right Colleen I gotta let you go again it's great seeing you again you've already told people pendulumlife.com and you can use the code gundry20 on to get 20% off your first month on a subscription base correct yes absolutely thank you so much for having me on and having another fun discussion about the latest and greatest in microbiome science yeah so yeah these these guys it's it's not silliness it's not pseudoscience these these guys actually probably have far more importance to us than just about anything else and so again good work and we'll look forward to hearing your next greatest and best stuff thank you thank you for having me have a great day all right take care I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Gundry podcast make sure to check out the next one here what should a good poop look like well there's no absolute definition of you having a perfectly looking poop if you listen to my good friend Dr. Terry Walls when you have a bowel movement you should look into the toilet and see a giant coiled snake looking back at you