 Hello everybody! Thanks for joining us this afternoon. We are live and here with Rachel Fresco. I love Rachel because she is such an innovator and someone who thinks outside the box and has really brought to us clinicians some incredible tools that we will talk about today. She has been the founder of Biobotanical Research and the creator of Biosidon. You can find her in her products at Biosidon.com. But what I love is just she's got this great mind to think outside the box. And Rachel thank you so much for joining and taking the time today. I'd love to hear your story on how you got started and how you founded the company. Like way back what happened and how did that all come about. Thanks Jill. It's great to be here with you again. And for those who haven't heard the story it was it was sort of one of those kismet things. I was just finished acupuncture school and had taken my state boards sort of waiting for my license to arrive in the mail as it were. And meanwhile I was working at a Chinese herb company as a technical consultant helping the doctors learn about the Chinese herb formulas. And I was doing veterinary acupuncture on the side and working with very some very tricky cases with another veterinarian. And we started to see that there was there were situations where the drug therapies hadn't been working but the botanicals were really working in some difficult to treat infections in animals. And so meanwhile back at the herb company I'm getting phone calls from doctors in San Francisco that are seeing the beginning of AIDS patients. And those patients had diarrheal diseases, they had opportunistic infections, they had thrush, they had all kinds of things and there really weren't any treatments at that point yet. And so the doctors were looking sort of for any tools they could use to support these patients health. And so I had mentioned that the herbs I had been using had been useful in some very difficult infections in animals and let's try them out. So some of the doctors started using them and giving me good feedback. And then one of the doctors, unbeknownst to me, sent the formula to Great Smokies Diagnostic Labs which is now Genova Diagnostics. And so the owner of this lab calls me up. Now you gotta remember I'm an acupuncturist and I don't know anything about comprehensive digestive stool analysis or anything else like that. You know my training's in Chinese medicine. But the owner of the lab calls me up and he's like I don't know who you are or what this is, but it kills everything. I'm like well that good? And he's like well yeah you know this, we've tested it against all these different bacteria and fungal and and yeast species and we want to put it on our panel. I'm like well okay you can do that. So so they did and over six year period they tested 250,000 or more patient samples and the biocytin came up as the most highly sensitive agent. So you know if you were looking at like a petri dish of something growing like candida and they tried different remedies on the dish both natural and drug therapies the biocytin was always the most effective one. So many many doctors started hearing about it and contacting me and so I basically had to start a company to deal with demand for the formula and then as I saw the need I started to think about well how do we support the system while people are taking these herbs? What else do they need? Do they need to bind toxins? Do they need to support their good flora? Do they they need to work on on viral conditions too at the same time? Like what what is it that we're seeing clinically? And so it's sort of journey for me into functional medicine. So I was at the very first IFM meeting way back when with biocytin and so it's interesting how my life just took a turn into being sort of a specialist in biofilms and infection and I never did become an acupuncturist though. But we are so grateful Rachel you bring the brilliance to us clinicians and you support us by I always say you know in allopathic medicine I trained as a medical doctor and our toolbox is really small. I'm really glad I learned it because it gives me a great foundation on which to build but my toolbox was medications and surgery and they're appropriate at times but like you said a lot of times when someone has SIBO or SIBO these bacterial infections or the fungal overgrowth of the gut or parasitic infections or viral infections which we'll talk about all those today that drugs don't cut it in the sense of they're laser sharp and they have a plethora of side effects so say I give an antibiotic for SIBO I'm going to cause a yeast to be worse. So what I love about the herbal combinations is often they're multi-fasted, multi-targeted so you might do one product in it actually can have activity against bacteria, fungi and yeast or viruses even right. Right and that's what we found you know when we started to do the research when you really started to dig into PubMed and you look at the different studies that have been done on a lot of the ingredients that are in the biocide we've got 17 different ingredients in there many of them are are antimicrobial and multi-targeted and some of those are additionally immune modulator or anti-inflammatory or supporting the liver or detoxification pathways so when you put that whole combination together you get something that doesn't throw people off balance like if you took one single ingredient for example my experience has been if you use something like straight oregano oil it's a great killing agent but it also can throw people off balance and they might not be able to tolerate it long term and most of the people I think you'd agree who are coming to their functional medicine practitioners have chronic issues you know they've had these things maybe they've been going on for more than five or ten years even so the path to healing is going to take time you know changing their diet looking at all the different systems and most importantly balancing the gut and dealing with you know dysbiosis or disordered environments and so that's what's been exciting for me and the first time I lectured to a group of MDs on biofilms I asked them to raise their hands how many of you understood chronic infections and biofilms and only like like less than 10 of them raised their hands and then after the lecture a lot of them came up to me like this makes so much sense now I get it like the sinus infections why they keep coming back the kids with the ear infections the urinary tract infections these gut issues there's a reason why we need to think more holistically you know we need to we need to think about the biofilm issue we need to think about the multi microbe issue we need to modulate the immune system at the same time and then look at the causative factors and in other areas of the patient's lifestyle so I love that you're saying this love that we're starting with biofilms because I want to say my clinical experience same thing is these persistent like bacterial overgrowth in the small bowel also called SIBO you've probably listeners have heard of that or maybe you've been diagnosed with that SIFO fungal overgrowth this chronic sinus infections even chronic lung issues like persistent old mycoplasma old chlamydia pneumonia these are atypical pneumonia so I can kind of come up and down and back and forth those biofilms are key and I'll tell you my experience we find something in an in our mold patients called marcons and it's really about the biofilms because the biofilms that bacteria creates destroy pituitary hormones like MSH so that's a lot of complex biochemistry but all that to say those biofilms in the sinuses I always describe them as like pond scum so it's like yummy kind of stuff that hides all the infections and they actually by themselves the biofilms create damage to the hypothalamic pituitary access so all that to say what we found years ago we threw heavy antibiotics some of them that caused hearing toxicity at this marcons and then we've shifted to now just treating with biofilm agents alone and finding we can get rid of the infection so it makes perfect sense to me and these chronic lung term patients with gut issues I think biocide which is your namesake product that we can talk about all the different uses for one of them is gut we use this in kids adults all ages there's a liquid form that we can use there's a liposomal form that's a little more systemic and if I have any errors here Rachel you can correct me but that liquid form really good has been for decades for gut issues and now we have we've even put it into neti pots and things where patients with the instructions of the clinician can use it to get those biofilms out all that to say sometimes all we need to do is treat the biofilm and it eradicate infection what's your thoughts on that and biofilms would be maybe a primary target well here's my thought it's hard to say with biocide and you know it's definitely breaking the biofilms because we've done the research on that a couple of different university studies on biofilms where we saw it break apart any type of biofilm whether it was yeast or bacteria we even looked at line biofilms looked at biofilms in the mouth Rachel I always add it to my line protocols I'm just going to say that right out front I use drugs I use herbs I use all kinds of protocols almost everyone I see that has lime or co-infections is on a form of biocide yeah I agree I think it's really useful that way so I think that that if you just break the biofilm maybe your immune system can kick in enough to kill those infections but I think it's helpful to use something like biocide that's going to do both it's going to break the biofilms and it's going to address the infection as well we actually did some studies before and after on patients with marcons I don't know if you saw but no I didn't totally cleared yeah I love and now we're doing we did a study with 40 patients with the OAT test on mycotoxins oh yes so we're going to be publishing that soon and we've got a SIBO trial starting up it's interesting the doctor who's doing the SIBO trial is the head of the College of Integrative Dermatology Dr. Raj Sugamani do you know how yeah I heard yes yeah so Raj was telling me that so many patients that have SIBO have eczema and I'm like well of course because in Chinese medicine the long large intestine and the scanner are part of the same system that makes perfect sense and they all have endotoxemia so that's when the gut bacteria the coatings called LPS they cross over into the immune system and that whole endotoxemia LPS thing which is again just for simplicity say bacterial coatings cross over the enterocytes the lining of the gut into the blood and create havoc and they are the most potent inflammatory trigger known to man they underlie heart disease obesity diabetes insomnia mood disorders even as such as bipolar and schizophrenia they underlie testosterone deficiency in men they underlie autoimmunity so this is a huge swath of things and this LPS is at the root and this is one of the things that biocide would target is that excessive bacteria right and so that's what we've seen is the LPS can be found you know causing the the amyloid plaque to build up in the brain because the body's trying to protect itself from this toxic endotoxin and everywhere else in the body I had a client one-time call us who was a local practitioner she had tested her stool and had four plus club Ciela pneumonia she had rheumatoid arthritis and she would have these flares the only thing that showed up in her lab work was the club Ciela and I'm like well let's do a cleanse we'll throw the whole you know the biocide and program we used everything on our in our comprehensive program for her let's do I said let's do it for eight weeks and then go back and retest and sure enough in eight weeks no more club Ciela and she didn't have another RA flare and I'm like this is good let's keep going now at maybe a maintenance dose and then I want you to check in with me every three months for the next year and then one at the one year mark I want you to do one more month of full-on treatment again I've been keeping up with her she never has had another flare so I think for a lot of people it's not that simplistic but in her case that one gram negative bacteria right that's causing the endotoxin issue was was the culprit for her I am not surprised at all Rachel because I've seen I do a ton of Crohn's and colitis patients which are severe inflammatory bowel disease a little bit different from SIBO and CFO in the sense of it's inflammatory it's usually lifelong they considered incurable which is funny because 20 years ago I was diagnosed with Crohn's and I don't have it anymore I'm cured by all of the stuff we're doing today talking about today but club Ciela I have seen more than once I would say dozens of times as a massive trigger for inflammatory bowel now not all inflammatory bowel is triggered by the same bacteria so this is not a one size fits all but there's been enough of them that I've seen that club Ciela you think of it we see it enough that we think of it as kind of like a not super awful player but just like your case with the rheumatoid arthritis I see it as a big deal and I always seek to eradicate it if it's present well especially if there's four plus that's the high level exactly we had an autistic child too that the only thing that showed up was the club Ciela and after he was cleared of that all of a sudden his speech came back he was able to go into the normal class at school when he had been a special ed class and his parents wrote us a letter about that and told us the story so I think that it's a good idea to get these kind of tests run if you have any issues to see if there's any bad players in there and then work up you know a protocol that that you can that you can easily do so I love this because we start about the gut which is so core let's talk a little bit about the lungs right before we got on you mentioned we're getting new research on the lung gut connection and I know like you said in traditional Chinese medicine the colon and lungs are connected I would love to hear a little bit about what you're seeing or reading about the lungs especially now that we have COVID and it doesn't it affects the whole body not just the lungs but primarily these respiratory viruses can clearly affect the lungs what's your thoughts on that and what should we be thinking about as clinicians well I tell you the person who would be the best to talk about this is Dr. Jocelyn Strand who just did an article on this for Carefit's Gerald's website but but what I understood from the research was is that they used to think that the lung was sterile yes but then you're finding no it has a microbiome and if you just like the gut if you have disordered you know microbiome in the lungs if you have an oral cavity full of pathogens that the most impact on the lungs is going to be from the mouth and so anything you can do to protect your oral care is going to positively impact your lungs ability to fight infection to not succumb to viruses so there's good research that taking care of the oral lung microbiome could be a main a mainstay of prevention and it's interesting because when we did the studies on the biocide and toothpaste which is called dental siden um we saw up to 35 different pathogens hiding out like in a root canal cavitation and then after using our program with the liposomal oral rinse as well as the toothpaste those pathogens came down to only three and also studies that can data in the gut can be reduced by 50 percent just by brushing your teeth more after meals well this is so relevant so i definitely want to talk about your dental products because this is the area where most clinicians are not thinking about and yet it's absolutely profoundly affecting our patient's health and i mean you literally like you said we've done the test i've done them myself so i have two actually lacking teeth here the third um molar back i can't remember the numbers there your dentist out there i'm sorry but um i remember this is probably been eight years ago i looked at the acupuncture meridian charts on these teeth and they were related to pancreas colon and breast and i looked at my health history i had pancreatic insufficiency i had Crohn's disease and i had breast cancer i thought oh my goodness those were my two root canal teeth i went the next day called the dentist my biological dentist that i need to get these out of my mouth and at the time i had psoriasis i don't have psoriasis anymore within seven days of pulling those two teeth my psoriasis was gone so for me that was a very personal testimony to how big a deal this is in your mouth so you showed me the data on this you know because we can pull the teeth or we can swab and look at the dna from all the organisms and like you said there was 20 30 of them and after was it four weeks with the dental side and toothpaste yeah they're definitely like three and some of the ones in there you just don't want to think about having in your mouth like hpv and amoebas and it's like it's really scary and the dentist um that we're working with now and the hygienist um she's called the queen of dental hygiene barbitrids and anybody wants to look her up she's very cool and and she showed me the um phase contrast live microscopy of going into a patient's pocket just like a four millimeter pocket in the office taking a sample putting it on the slide and then watching everything that was in there and you would see rods and spirochetes you'd see all these things swimming around and then applying the dental side and then going back and taking another swab 10 minutes later they were all gone and so she thinks that this is like this is going to be groundbreaking for people's oral care the fact that we can actually strongly impact the microbial balance in the mouth and stop the the biofilms the plaque from developing so so this is really key and i'm really excited next year to to be working with that more i am too and i used your dental side and i use in there's an oral rinse as well and i'm going to show you guys a sneak peek i've never shared this publicly but because i found it really easily check this out rachel you'll find this pretty cool too so this is my sample from my root canal tooth on the right side i don't know how many years ago maybe six or eight years ago this is what grew micro this so i'm sorry this is dna pcr so this is pcr 15 in the tooth strep provotella tropomonat there is protozoa here there is clearly bacteria here there is all kinds of things here and you can you believe and red is bad red is significant look at this so this is what was in my mouth in my root canal now my immune system has never been great so no surprise no shock that i have a lot more organisms than maybe the average person but this is a big deal like i said from personal experience is it any wonder that those bacteria they have direct access to your bloodstream i had psoriasis i no longer have that as soon as that was out of my mouth just like that r.a patient with clebsiella it went away isn't that amazing i'm so glad i found that but and of course i love using that frequently now because um and i've also used like a water pick and put the biocide in the water so i take i take the well so what my dentist is doing now she's doing a study with us so she's she's using this in the scaling fluid with the hydro they do the sonic scaling yeah she's using this in the fluid mixture and then having the patients like do a like an oil pull with it at the end and then go home and put this in their water pick and use it every day in addition to the toothpaste and we're seeing pocket proven depths coming down in half we're seeing the number of pathogens just like practically disappearing so i'm hoping that we can actually interest a dental school into doing a full double-blind study about this because this is really groundbreaking if you can make that much impact just by doing something so simple and the cool thing about the biocide is that unlike the things that dentists normally use like gentemiacin and uh it doesn't kill the beneficial floor we're doing a study right now john if you've heard this sun genomics is doing a study for us on the whole genomic sequencing of the gut for patients on biocide and what we found is is that the keystone species the acrimansia bacteria which is the baseline for all the beneficials is going up in every single patient so it's it's not heart hurting the good floor in fact it's increasing the diversity and number of beneficials so we can only assume that that's the same with the mouth you know it's all part of one system right absolutely okay this is really exciting because i teach a lot on the gut and i've done a lot of the research on the probiotics and stuff and as your company has one of the few spore probiotics same thing they're the ones so these spores and it's bioflora correct to my say thank you i'm so sorry proflora for our right for your probiotic and it's a spore so let me tell you real quickly if you're listening about the spores so again we've used lactobacillus bifidobacter you might look at your bottle in your fridge and see eight or ten strains but what happens is we have hundreds if not thousands of strains in our actual gut and the postulate was that could we be actually be creating monoculture meaning like a less diverse culture by giving a four or eight or ten strain probiotic for years i think the answer could be yes and what i saw in clinical practices patients with SIBO and SIBO actually did not usually tolerate not usually but sometimes i'll clarify sometimes they didn't tolerate these lactobacillus because they already had too much in their small bottle so i started shifting to spores and i'll tell you rachel years ago when i had no idea what a spore was i found this one strain called bacillus coagulans i had no clue what it was but this is when i had crones and was healing and all i knew was it was the one probiotic that worked for me i didn't know anything about it scientifically just that my body liked it and then as i come to find out the spores they are the only ones that now have studies to increase acromance here these keystones and increase diversity and diversity is king so having this diverse milieu especially the keystones two of the common ones which are funny long names are acromancia and fecal bacteria and prusnitsky and these keystone strains if you have them present in good amounts in your gut they actually indicate diversity just by being there so the fact that rachel you're saying that you've seen increased numbers after the use of this and then i've seen that with the spore studies and your product in particular these are really powerful so i'm a huge fan of spore probiotics i love them too and i love the fact that by adding the quercetin to the pro flora this this particular quercetin called q995 is 17 times more bioavailable than regular quercetin so so many patients with cibo or cfo have bloating and gas and they can sometimes get exaggerated yes yes but the the addition of the quercetin there really calms that mass cell response down maybe you can talk about that more and it helps seal the tight junctions which are the root of the leaky gut issue so that's why i added that to the spores so that we kind of had a one two for the calming down the inflammation and and then supporting the good bacteria yeah and that's where you're so brilliant because again you take that background and traditional chinese herbs and you know it takes a village right like what we'll just like you said in the beginning just we have these individual ingredients and they can work and i combine them a lot of times but your formulas all contain the thought out process of what else might actually modulate this and i feel like that product is really good for calming that inflammatory response because of the quercetin and marshmallow and was there a third ingredient too oh yes okay and aloe soothing coating and good for healing good for just keeping the bowels moving all that good stuff so that's a great product we don't have a ton of time left but let's talk a little bit about immune system because everybody's worried about that we're going into flu season on top of covid what do you use and what's your favorite tips and tricks for for people well the thing that we have that we study is the throat spray version of the biocidin so we did a study with a university and they found a 66 increase in immune response in the upper respiratory tract wow so i mean with with each dose you're you know you're you're raising your body's ability to protect you and you've got the antimicrobial activity of this so what i do is i have one of these in my car in my purse whenever i'm going to go in or out of a store or expose to people i just use this daily make sure to use it at least three times a day and then extra times if i'm going out and then of course i'm using vitamin d zinc c i'm looking at you know i'm getting in the summer i never used to like to be in the sun now i'm going and laying out on my back porch because we're all home with covid anyway but i have a tan now and um so you know i think i think that's important um diet is going to be really critical right now and so it's you know the nice thing about being home is we do have a little bit more time to do to prepare healthy food and sometimes if i do get busy you know i'll order the uber eats to bring me celery juice you know and just healthy things and i think that helps too what do you think gosh i love that i love i never thought about uber eats in my mind oh it's kind of like basu but it's not you can get some really clean stuff i never thought about ordering celery juice that's an awesome idea i love a huge one and it'll last me all day long i love it there's a company called clean juice and everything they have is organic and so you can i get it with cucumber added because it's a little extra hope that sounds so delicious i'm i'm totally writing that one down because i love those pearls yeah and it's funny because years ago i did insta card and kind of got my grocery's delivered and it was this big secret well of course now everybody i mean that's great that we can all get it um and get it easily i have the Costco delivery because it was large like pellegrino cases that i don't want to carry and epsom salts which i get from Costco so if you're a bath person i just had 10 boxes of salts sitting outside my door last night because i didn't want to carry them and i had them delivered and it was great because if you hear me talk about epsom salt baths which is a great detox thing you can do at night i get the six pound bags and put a half of the bag in the bathtub because you want that saturation so that it goes into your skin but yes i have my biocide spray in the fridge i actually made a nasal spray homemade i can't really advise you over the public here but if you uh there are there's a way that you can create a spray so that you can you know if you're going to do that use the regular biocide liquid because the throat spray has too much alcohol and that would be burning but you know i've done this myself too and you know we can't give medical advice but what i've done for myself is put about 10 or 12 drops in an ounce of saline and then you want to use that up within a couple of days you know because it's not preserved so um that has really helped uh thank you for sharing what you do i would very similar and i found too and especially with the mold i know you presented a case study of a young girl who had mycotoxins in the urine she was going to a daycare with mold and they pretreated with um i think it was a four to eight week i don't know the exact time frame but a short time frame with a nasal spray and the mycotoxins completely were gone and i would use the gid tox at that point too i know you like this product gel because it's a binder and anybody with mycotoxin issues or lps issues um anybody who's using biocide and suspects that they're having some die-off should be using a binder thank you it's i can't believe i forgot that because that is everybody gets gid tox in my office so let's talk really quickly about that so gid tox is an incredible i'll let you read the ingredients in a second here but it's an incredible mixture of binders binders have synergies so i love charcoal i love clay and i love the combinations but when you get several binders together they have different infinities so i find it works much better putting multiple binders together because they each grab on to different toxins slightly differently so tell us exactly what's in the gid tox so you got the the zeolite and the activated charcoal and then you've got silica which was going to bind to metals more and then the apple pectin and the humic acid and folic acid which work on xenobiotics as well so you know that you're kind of covering a lot of bases with this yeah you've done a great great job that is literally my favorite binder and the humic folic acid many people don't know is antiviral so it has some antiviral effect um we'll use that sometimes in other formulas but i love that it's in there because it's got a really gut it actually um some of the studies showing decreased permeability in the gut as well so it's got other little cool things about it that that are powerful a very quick story so last night i ordered dinner to be delivered from a local fish restaurant and i've ordered dinner from there before and it's always been really clean and fine but i ordered some some oak grilled oysters and some salmon and vegetables how mean how bad that could could that be right i don't know why but i went into a full like ibs episode i was like crying like i swallowed up like a drum i was like doubled over i was running to the bathroom i i was like emptying my guts in the last 10 years and i'm like oh my god what just happened and then i remembered oh my god this happened once before when i ate oysters i don't know if suddenly i've become allergic to oysters what a weird thing to become allergic to but anyway so i thought about it was like what am i going to do right now right the second to get me out of pain i'm like doubled over my dog's looking at me like mommy what's wrong um i took like six gid talks like on the spot and laid down on the massage table and put some essential oils on my stomach and gently rubbed them and did the um infrared pad just laid on it to stop the spasm i was just full on spasm and then once i felt a little bit better i got up and took like three or four more and within an hour it was completely over and usually if i have those kind of bouts i don't know about you do you get that sometimes where you eat something bad and you just it's not fun if anybody helps has that it's really not it's very painful and so this is a good thing to have in a medicine cabinet if you eat something bad if you're exposed to mold um anytime you know if you're traveling this is a really good one to have on me i always have it in my travel bag and i feel it literally i remember a guy sat next to me was having one of those episodes not this is when we were traveling a couple years ago like if you trust me you know he would try this and he was like what did you give me 30 minutes later you felt amazing so i couldn't agree more with you it's my travel trick really because if you get bad food too much alcohol now i don't drink but if you are drinking excessively it's good for that too so there's a lot of and of course food poisoning or any kind of weird bad food it'll just mop it right up um rachel i knew this was going to happen because we could talk for like two hours so we're going to have to have you back on thank you so much for your time today i know i mean the listeners are just like wow this is great they want more information so we'll be assured include links to your site and your products and all that information and then we'll do this again in a few months but thank you so much for joining me it's great to be on and see you again