 Hey everybody, thanks for joining us today. I am so excited to have my friend and brilliant entrepreneur, Kiran Krishnan here from Microbiome Labs, and we're going to talk all things gut health and probiotics today. And you guys have heard me now for many, many years talking about spores. What's interesting is I'm going to introduce Kiran in just a moment, but I want to tell you really quick how my history relates to this because 20 years ago I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, and I didn't have a clue at the time. I remember my doctor telling me I had to have surgery, steroids, immune-modulating drugs, and he said, Jill, diet has nothing to do with it, right? And I remember I was a third year medical student, so I didn't know a whole lot, but I knew like that didn't feel right. That was like, didn't make sense. And again, I didn't feel like I had all the answers, but I was going to find them. And I dug deep, came across specific carbohydrate diet, and I made some changes in within two weeks. My fevers, my symptoms were gone. Now, it took me probably two years to heal from Crohn's, and I consider myself today completely healed 100% like cured, not in remission. I'm cured. And people kind of bulk at that because they're told it's incurable, but I'm living proof. Now, what does this have to do with probiotics? Well, Kiran, I don't know if you even know this, but back in the day I remember Bicillus coagulans, and I was like, I don't know what this is, but this is the only probiotic I can tolerate. And back then there was not many on the market, right? And I remember thinking, okay, whatever the Bicillus thing is, this is the one. And I literally for 20 years have been on spores, and it has been a game changer in my health and in my whole gut. And I always now, even on the toughest guts, I always go to spores. Now, we're going to dive in today. I cannot wait to talk all things spores and the latest research. But I wanted to kind of set it up because I have always been a fan of yours. I've always been such a big proponent of mega spore, spoke for you guys continue to share the word. And of course, we sell your products. I'm such a fan partially because of my own story of healing is so integrally related to spores. So I wanted to share that. And let me introduce my guest, Kiran Christian is a research microbiologist and has been involved in the dietary supplement nutrition market for the past 18 years. He comes from a university research background having spent several years with hands on R&D in the fields of molecular medicine and microbiology at the University of Iowa. Kiran established a clinical research organization where he designed and conducted dozens of human clinical trials in human nutrition. He's also co founder and his partner in the new science trading LLC, a nutritional technology development research company. He's also co founder and chief scientific officer at microbiome labs. He's a frequent lecture and the human microbiome at the human microbiome at medical and nutritional conferences. I've heard him, we've been in the same circles for quite a while now. And an expert guest on national and satellite radio. He's appeared in several international documentaries and a guest speaker on several international health summits as a microbiome expert. Kiran, you're one of my favorite people to talk to because you just bring it down, bring the research like what I'm seeing in clinical practice. You kind of bring the pieces I always like when I hear your lectures or we talk. It makes so much sense because it fits in a clinical practice. So first of all, welcome. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me here. I'm glad it's an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor. I adore you. I'm a big fan of yours as well and always enjoyed listening to you speak. So I jumped at the opportunity to have this conversation together in front of other people. So it's super exciting and it's an exciting time that we live in. There's so much going on in the world today and there's so much behind medicine and health that it's mind boggling. For nerds like us, it's the day you wake up and you're like, what the hell is this? We just discovered this. It's mind boggling to me what's going on in the world today. And the probiotic researchers exponentially, I mean back a decade ago, well, two decades ago when I started into it, there was not that much and it's just exploded. And on the fronts of you and I know how it relates to heart and obesity and diabetes and mood disorders and sleep disorders and testosterone deficiency, things that you would never think. But the science is just now catching up with what we've seen and known to be true and there's so much out there. What I want to start with before we dive into spores and what's the latest is how did you get into this? I obviously had a research background, but tell us your story about how microbiome labs came to be and what was your role in that? Yeah. And I never, I always kind of played a role behind the scenes because I did research for companies. I consulted for a lot of companies, helped them formulate products, helped them put together the science always in the background. Never did I think we would have a brand of our own that's out there in the marketplace, but it really was born out of a need that existed. So we were actually hired by a large multinational company who's in the dietary supplement space back in around 2010. So they hired our research technology development company and their goal was for us to identify for them what is the next generation of probiotics, right? What is working in the industry? What's not working? Do they need to be refrigerated? Do they not? Is it $100 billion? Is it $200 billion? Where is all of this stuff going? And they really wanted us to boil down which of the approaches in the probiotic side made sense and which didn't. And so we went through two and a half, three years worth of study on the probiotic marketplace. We tested products. We looked for survivability of the products that are sitting there on the shelf or in the refrigerator, whether or not they can make it through the gastric system. We looked at efficacy studies. We looked at all kinds of things and we did a deep dive on the research to figure out is there a rationale for going $100 billion, for example, right? A new product just came out and it's now $150 billion. What's the rationale behind that? Why is it 15 strains? Why not one? Why not two? And so we dug into all of that and really what we came out with was there was a lot of nonsense in the industry, to put it lightly, right? And companies were being driven by market. And the way they came up with $100 billion is the closest competitor had $80 billion and they wanted to be $20 billion more, so it looks better, right? And the way they came up with 15 strains is the closest competitor had $12 billion. And so it just became a race to up the mountain for the biggest and baddest kind of product in that sense. And then the refrigeration thing was a difficult thing because most of the refrigerated products didn't even really survive through the gastric systems or didn't really matter. There were so many issues like that. And then we started thinking, okay, if there's a lot of issues with what people are using as probiotics, are there actual probiotic bacteria out there that meet the definition? The scientific definition of a probiotic is it's a live microorganism when administered in adequate amounts confers a health benefit to the host. So it has to meet all of those criteria. It has to meet a, live organism, b, administered in adequate amounts so you have to be able to dose it specifically, and then it has to confer a health benefit to the host. Most probiotics in the market fail the first step, which is not live organism, right? There was no dosing criteria that made it in sense. And then most companies didn't prove that their finished product had any health benefit to the host. So we said, well, what kind of bacteria could actually act as a probiotic? And then me being a closeted evolutionary biologist, even though I didn't study evolutionary biology, I always looked at nature and go, okay, where in your ancestors did bacteria from? What did they eat frequently? They give them microbes. And you come to find out that they ate dirt really, right? They ate off the land. They didn't sterilize their food and water and all that. So they got a lot of microbial exposure from their environment. That, however, is too simplified because then what makes you conclude is, oh, okay, soil-based organisms. Let's just grab a bunch of those. And that's now a probiotic. Well, it's not that simple because the vast majority of organisms in the soil cannot survive through the gastric system, right? Because the gastric system is there, acting as a barrier to prevent that from happening. And so we started going in and going, what organisms are ubiquitous within the environment that we would accidentally swallow every day, but also had the unique capabilities to survive through the gastric system and make it into the intestines alive. So we can meet at least that first part of the definition. And that's where we came up with the spores because they have this really unique coating around them, the spore code, that protects them from harsh environments like the outside world and through the gastric system. And so we said, wow, okay, these are amazing. These are endopacillus endospore forming bacteria. They meet the biggest part of the criteria. You know, humans have been consuming them for millions of years, so we've got a commensal relationship with them. They survive through the gastric system. We can document dosage of these even upwards of a couple million years ago. And we started digging into it and we found they've been using the pharmaceutical industry since 1952, right? One of the first prescription probiotics launched was a basillus quasi, which is still in the market today since 1952, used for treating dysentery and upper respiratory tract infection. And so we're like, okay, amazing. Nobody's using these in the US supplement industry. This is the next generation of spores. And we went through and figured out all the right spores and where to get them and all of that. And then we came back to the company. This is two and a half, three years later, and we said, okay, guys, we figured it all out, right? All this stuff is nonsense here. Here's all the reasons why it's nonsense. Here's your new generation of probiotics. In fact, we basically handed them the formula from Megascore and said, this is the next big thing. And here's the studies we would do. Yeah, right. And then they want to be sure and get you said, did you say two years or was it longer? It was about two and a half years. Yeah, close to three years at that point, right? So it was really kind of 2010 to about middle or end of 2012. We came back and at the time, it seemed extremely disappointing. But they said, you know what, we just got acquired by a large company. And this is really interesting stuff. But no, thanks, what I'm doing with it, right? And we're like, what the hell? It's so important, right? And then we became so impressed about it because now we knew that most of the stuff people are buying is just crap. It's not doing anything, right? And this could really help them. So somebody, please do something with it. We called up all of the companies I've worked with, the large companies in our field, in the retail side, and one after the other, they kept passing. The biggest thing that companies couldn't wrap their head around, which they had a really hard time is we were recommending a dose of $4 billion CFUs a day, right? And they're like, how am I going to sell $4 billion? Right? My top selling probiotics is $30 billion. How am I going to tell my consumers, you have to pay the same from $4 billion? And we're like, because it's not the quality. It's irrelevant. It's irrelevant, right? And they're like, no, we can't do that. It doesn't make any sense. So everyone kept passing on it. And then we were like, okay, you know, I guess nobody's going to launch it. We'll go on to the next project. But Tom and I, my business partner, we kept going back and forth and going, this is too important. We can't not get this out there. And so one day we just did it. Tom, through the research, you've known him for a long time, like how did you? Yeah, at that point, I'd known Tom, I think for about five or six years. And actually, this kind of through research, because in my other company, I was working with a gentleman, he's a doctor, his name is John Abernathy. He's a seasoned research professional, associate of the University of Florida. And John and I have been working together for like 10 years before that doing studies together. And John always told me, he's like, my good buddy from high school, Tom lives in Chicago, you guys got to get together. You guys think about things in the same way. And, you know, so similar and bubbly, he kept encouraging us. So finally, Tom and I got together for lunch. And immediately we're like, all right, we get it. You know, I think we're going to do the same mindset. Yeah, same mindset, same motivations, right. And we worked on a few projects together, didn't really go go anywhere. But then when we had the spore thing, where we were both like, this is too important. And Tom, you know, being a practitioner at the time, he was practicing almost full time. He's like, I can't use any of the probiotics now. Now that I know, I know, he's like, I'm done. I'm done. I'm just going with the post biotics. He was using that Sagan stuff all the time, the expensive post biotics. So that's all he was focusing on. And so we decided together, we're like, all right, we just get it, we just got to do this, you know, it's, it may, it'll probably fail. We don't know what the hell we're doing, you know, ourselves, right. And we're like, we're going to give ourselves, we basically had $80,000 to start the company. Oh, I love it. Right. That's all we had. And so we sat together and go, okay, how do you market a product? Like, what do you do? You know, like you buy a Super Bowl commercial? Yeah. Yeah. Right. And so we said, okay, let's go to what we know. We know Tom's a chiropractor, right? So we were like, okay, we know chiropractors. We know how they think we know how to talk to them. So let's just go to chiropractors shows and do lectures and start to get the chiropractors excited about this new concept. And, and then the only place in the US where chiropractors have to be in a seat for to get their CEs is in Florida. Right. So every other state in the country, they can do it online. And so the shows aren't well attended. So we honed it on Florida and chiropractors. That's it. Right. And so our very first show, the Florida Chiropractic Association, we got a booth and, you know, we had, we had this nice display and we're standing there two guys trying to talk to people, his attention, right. People just walking by. I don't know what the hell we're talking about. None of it's making sense to people. So we decided, all right, we got to do a lecture. And of course, nobody knew who we were. So we couldn't get under on the actual speaking roster. So we said, let's do a lunch sponsored lecture. Right. Let's invite some of these pyros to lunch, wait for the whole thing. And, and then the FCA said, okay, fine, you guys can do one lunch sponsored lecture. So the first one sponsored lecture we did, we spent about $6,000 on the whole thing, right? That's like almost 10% of our entire budget. Right. And we showed up, we're all excited. Two people showed up to it. Right. We're like, oh crap. So soon. But here's the good news about that. We did the lecture and one out of two bought into the product right away and got it and all that. We're like 50% conversion. Totally. We're super excited. He was our first customer and he still buys products to today. Almost regularly, almost every two weeks. And so then we're like, nope, this is the right move. Let's go to the next show. Let's do a sponsored lecture. Let's get people to the place. Let's run around the show just roping people in the lecture. So the second one we did, we had about 12, 13 people. And then the third one we did in July, we had about 15, 25 people. And then people started talking about it, because we were doing a very compelling lecture that was titled, Forget What You Think You Know About Probiotics. Oh, I love it. Yeah. Disrupting. And I just want to comment about knowing U.S. from the outside and we've known each other a long time, your sense of integrity is always there. Your sense of purpose and drive by the right things and people are drawn to that. Like that's what I love about you. Love about the company. And then the other thing is you had amazing science behind you, right? Like you knew you knew you had a hole in one. It was just a matter of getting that information to the public. You can keep going. Want to comment. So people listening know what I've always seen. And that's one reason why I've aligned and like spoke for you guys all over the place, because I still believe in your mission, your product, and who you are as human beings. Thank you so much. And we wanted to change the game. One of the things that bothered us the most about most probiotics out there that people had access to was that companies just didn't do research on their finished product, right? And that was mind boggling to me how I wouldn't want to do studies to know what your product does, right? You have to know that. And so we were actually we couldn't wait to sell enough so that I could work out a deal with the university and get a study going and get our first study done. So we just kind of follow through that way. We went to every show we could afford to go to. We did lectures anywhere we could. We did dinner lectures around Chicagoland area. And it just kind of swelled. It was a very grassroots effort. We never took an investment money or any of that. It was completely grassroots. We went from the 80,000 to much more than that in a few years. Just following through with passion to teach people that there's a better option out there and that this approach is not really working. And we got to look at things differently. And then of course, it became extremely exciting for us when we could start partnering with people like yourself who could get the word out there, people that are known and recognized and respected. So I mean, it's been a really mind-boggling journey. And we think back just like three years. Even three years ago, I think we had something like 36 employees. Now we have like 110. It's been crazy. But it's given us the opportunity to invest in research. We've now published, I think, 12 studies. And we've got about six others ongoing right now. And we're initiating five new studies. So it's amazing. We're living the nerve fantasy dream. I'm so excited. And I love here, because I've never really heard your whole journey, because I jumped in probably about 15 or 60, I don't know when it was, but somewhere in the middle there. And so I love that. And again, the beautiful thing is your passion, the truth behind your product that it really worked. And then clinical efficacy, like all of us who are out in the field, we know, because we see all of a sudden there's something different, just like my Crohn's experience 20 years ago. I don't know what this thing is, but it's different. I had no idea. Now I'm like, which again, is why I'm so partner with you and with your mission, because I knew before I knew what it was, there's something different about this probiotic. So let's talk about, well, first of all, your Keystone product, Megaspore has been such a great hit. I mean, so many of my patients take it successfully. Let's talk just a little bit about like the, one of the things that always struck me as I'm teaching and when I saw your data on the diversity. So I always say diversity is king. If you're listening here, you don't know it, I always talk about, you know, back in the Ireland potato famine where there was this blight and all the potato crop was wiped out all across the land. It was because all the farmers chose one seed was the best yielding product. They planted all the same thing. And then that blight wiped everything out. And the same thing with your gut flora, if you don't have diversity, if you don't have number of species and lots of different diversity, that creates resilience. And that really is the core of overall health and resilience is diversity in the microbiome. Now we're going to talk about spores in a second and how they affect that. But what I want to say is there's been things that have been led leading up to this, like the chemicals in our soils, like our soils are a reflection of the microbiome. I come from a farm and my brothers are all still on that farm and we always reflect of how the dysfunction and the depletion of the soils actually start to reflect the microbiome. So often our babies are born into the world with a less diverse microbiome and they're just at a disadvantage. So when I think about what can increase diversity, of course, foods and variety can, but let's talk a little bit about megaspore and how it affects diversity because this is something no other probiotic that I've ever known can talk about or can claim. Yeah, absolutely. And we were very thrilled when we were able to show and prove that it did, right? We hypothesized for a while that it did, but until we have the data, it was hard for us to really go out there and really talk about it. The idea behind probiotics helping with diversity always came from this idea of seeding the gut with all of these vector that are in these in the capsule. And so people kept saying, well, that means you just need more of the different bacteria in the capsule. Then you're going to get more and more diversity. And the response to that is, no, because you're talking about one genus here, right? Lactobacilli, typically, or bifidobacteria. Your gut has 200, 300 different genuses. What about all those microbes, right? So really how we came about the idea that there's a likelihood that the spores can impact diversity is because of the way the spores function within the gut microbiome. They have this unique modulatory effect where they can go in, they can read the environment within the gut, and they understand where to start tweaking balances among organisms, right? If there's an overgrown and problematic organism, they know how to sit around that organism and bring it down. And they do it differently with different pathogens. So I'll give an example. Let's say it is something like strep, and there's an overgrowth of strep within the gut. The spores will sit around the strep and actually produce an antimicrobial that the strep can't handle, right? So it'll actually bring down the growth level of the strep. Now, let's say it's CDIP, and we did a study on claustridium difficile with Cleveland Clinic. What we found was that the spores will sit around the claustridium, and they don't create an antimicrobial because they don't have an antimicrobial that will affect the claustridium. Instead, they chelate iron away from the claustridium, right? But they use a chelating agent that they produce. They secrete that into that microenvironment, and it starves the claustridia because the claustridia needs iron for its metabolic function. And it's mind-boggling when you think about that, right? If you think about this bacteria going in, first of all, being able to identify problematic bacteria in a sea of trillions, right? And then honing on that one, and then knowing based on what bacteria that is, what tool to employ in order to control it, right? So because it has that kind of intelligence, the kind of intelligence that we don't have on our own gut, right? Our immune system finds it hard to do that kind of modulation, right? We hypothesize that if they can know which microbes to control and bring down, they can likely do the opposite where they can understand the underrepresented organisms and find ways to bring them up, right? And sure enough, they do that. So diversity is not only a factor of how many organisms there are, but it's the uniformity among the organisms as well, right? And depending on how you measure diversity, some indexes will try to favor really low represented organisms so you can get a better diversity score. Others will just look at, if you're below a certain prevalence level, they don't even count you as an organism, right? And so if the organisms are really low levels, they're almost like they're not there because they're not functional. So then the spores get in, they see these poor organisms trying to struggle and raise their levels up. They'll sit around them and they'll produce compounds that help them grow. At the same time, they'll compete with the organisms that are competing against them. So they'll change the environment and they'll modulate it and do all of this amazing orchestration to bring back diversity within the microbiome. And you think about like, okay, why the hell do they do that? Like, how do they do that? And why do they do that? It's a really mind boggling thought that they can do this for us. And it comes down to something called symbiogenesis, right? So symbiogenesis is a force co-evolution of different species that coexist and are forced to coexist. And so they find a symbionic way of functioning. Is that the realm of when we talk about quorum sensing? Because that's the word that's kind of my same idea. And that's, you want to describe what that is to our listeners? Yeah. So quorum sensing is how the microbes can actually read each other's sentences. So that's one of the ways that the bacillus will know who is there and what number. Kind of like a business card or something, right? Change their numbers and like, hey, who are you and what are you doing here? Totally. And not only can they tell who's there, they can tell how many, right? It's quantifiable for them too. So they can, for example, look and go, oh, okay, there's a pathogen there, but there aren't too many of them. So we're not going to bother with those pathogens, right? And in fact, individual strains use quorum sensing as a way to mount a attack, for example, take listeria. Listeria is a foodborne illness factor, listeria monocytogenes. But you can get exposed to listeria and not get sick because you didn't get exposed to a threshold level, right? So if you get exposed to a certain given level, once the listeria gets in the gut, they all start talking to each other and they go, okay, guys, are there enough of us here? Yes, there are. Okay, now everyone turn on your virulent genes, right? Turn on your toxin genes because there's enough of us and we stand a chance, right? If they're not enough of them, they don't turn it off and they're reading each other's chemical signatures so they know exactly how many of them are there. So that quorum sensing is a really important language that the bacteria have. And then there are some researchers that are trying to figure out how to listen in on the quorum language. Conversation, right? Totally, yeah, because there are a lot of conversations happening. One thing you mentioned that for people who are listening, maybe aren't super into the microbiome like you and I are, I want to go back to clostridia. So if you're listening, you may have heard someone with a C. diff colitis or some sort of a clostridia infection. What this is is basically as we take antibiotics and destroy some of the good guys in the gut, the clostridia, we all have some of them and some of them are very good and healthy, but there's certain strains like C. diff or clostridia difficile that can actually cause a colitis or a severe illness. I mean older people often die of this illness and it usually is antibiotic induced or iatrogenic, we call that like doctor induced because they've been given too many things and it depletes the diversity so badly. And spores, I always call them like tulip bulbs. When people are talking about spores, it's like bulbs. They like sit dormant in the winter and then they blossom. So the spores, and I want you to talk the more technical terms about how this spore actually like doesn't need refrigeration and why. But again, in my simplistic form, I tell patients it's like tulip bulbs because they stay dormant. And again, in my very simplistic non-research mind, I'm like well spores and spores are going to be the best instigators of warfare against each other. So if we have a spore clostridia and antibiotics are it's resistant to antibiotics and so it stays there and causes illness, why not use a healthy good spore like some form of bacillus to actually be the counter attack there. And it sounds like that's what you're saying. One other interesting thing is as we have like lots of glyphosate and roundup in our environment, glyphosate preferentially kills some of the good guys. The other probiotics like lactobacillus, bifidobacter species and actually allows clostridia to proliferate. And we've seen this in both horses and pigs and other animals cows in their guts where they actually have like a cow version of cedive colitis because of the roundup and the glyphosate on their feet. So we're seeing that in humans as well. So two things I want to talk just a little bit about like why don't they need to be refrigerated and if that makes sense on the clostridia of like you were saying of why that might be a more helpful beneficial. And can these be like if someone's taking an antibiotic, are they somewhat resistant to antibiotics? Yeah, the bacillus, right? So yes, they are. They're resistant and not in the traditional sense where they have these antibiotic resistance. They're resistant in that the environment around them is not ideal for growth like there's an antibiotic around. They go in and they stay in the spore form and they just lay dormant and they wait, they're not metabolically active. And then when the levels come down, then they come out and start functioning. So when you have a bottle that's on your shelf, are they fairly dormant until they get into the human body? Is that correct? So that's okay. Yeah, so if you took the megaspore bottle that dried powder in the capsule, you could let it sit on the shelf for probably 200 million years and it will still be exactly how it is until someone consumes it and it goes in and hits a small intestine, right? And there's evidence of that. Where did I come up with that insane number? Well, some of the oldest bacteria ever found was found actually in the in a deep cave in Southern California and salt crystals, right? So what scientists have been doing, looking for clues of how to work around antibiotic resistance genes, have been looking for new bacteria that humans have never discovered before, because bacteria have new have capabilities of producing antibiotics. That's where most antibiotic part come from after after penicillin. And so they were in these caves, they were sampling things, try to find new bacteria, and then they got these salt crystals out of the cave and then they melted the salt crystals out and they could plate out all these bacteria that were in there. And the only bacteria that was still living in there that they could plate out were these mycelus spores and they were 250 million years old, right? Just sitting there dormant for that long and they could still grow them in the plate. They were still alive. There was another example of it where there was a fossilized honeybee in amber, you know, like in Jurassic Park, that little mosquito, they got fossilized right in amber. But this was an ancient, a whole ancient honeybee and this is in South America and they were able to drill in and pull out substance out of the honeybee's gut. And they found in the honeybee's gut, mycelus probiotic bacteria that were about 50 million years old and still alive in that honeybee's, ancient honeybee's gut. So these organisms have been here way before we have, right? They were here before the dinosaurs were here. In fact, they may be the origins of cellular life here on Earth because there's a theory called panspermia that looks at where did the cellular components come from, right? Where did amino acids come from and proteins? Where did nucleic acids come from and so on? And when you sample meteorites that come in from outer space, they have nucleic acids on them, their proteins on them and so on. So a bunch of scientists and studies to see are there microbes that live on Earth today that could have traveled interstellar on a meteorite and actually make it on Earth? And sure enough, mycelus subtilis was able to survive seven years and interstellar travel. Wow, this is like science fiction, it's real. So mycelus subtilis, I love that. Okay, that's your new H-258. Again, it's not, it's an old, it's a 250 million-year-old product, but new here. But I want to talk a little bit about that because I recently posted on some research you had shared on antiviral activity, which is, so do you want to mention just a little bit about the power of, you talked a little bit about his antimicrobial activity, but specifically viral, I was really impressed. Yeah, so the the mycelus has this amazing repertoire of capabilities in the human body. You know, it's known for its antimicrobial capabilities, defending the body against pathogens. In fact, the NIH published a study about three years ago on 460 patients or so, where they sample people who had MRSA colonization throughout their body, right, the really dangerous antibiotic-resistant staff. And so what they found was that in anyone in the big population that they looked at, and this is the Thailand population that did not have MRSA, what they had instead was mycelus subtilis. And if they did not have any mycelus subtilis, they had MRSA growing, right? So that was the only organism they found on these individuals that was associated with not having MRSA. If you had adequate colonization in and on your body by mycelus subtilis, you had no MRSA. And so they published a study and said, this could be a very important probiotic to combat some of these important drug-resistant bacteria, right? So then on top of that, so now they can protect us against all kinds of drug-resistant bacteria. On top of that, they have a number of antiviral compounds. And they have antiviral compounds that have been shown to fight against things like influenza, you know, not COVID-19, but other coronaviruses they've tested. They've looked at a number of different respiratory viruses and so on. So they produce these like leavens, they produce these surfactants when they're in and on you that have direct antiviral activity. So they're protecting the host the whole time. So that's where that symbiogenesis relationship comes from, where there's this beautiful, you know, mingling of the two different kind of organisms, which is us, the host and then them. So for millions of years, we've said, okay, we're going to eat you. We're going to give you a home. Our immune system doesn't attack you. So we're letting you be, but you need to do some things for us in turn. Exactly. And they go and then the spores went, okay, we're going to clean up the house, right? We're going to do all the housekeeping work. We're not going to let any other bugs come in here. We're not going to let viruses, bacteria invade the host. We want the host healthy because the host becomes their home. That's how they know to increase the diversity in the host. That's how they know to find and fight against problematic organisms, even defend this against things like viruses. And most recently, help us detoxify things like poisons that are in our system, right? Bacillus septilus has been shown to be able to break down organic-based pesticides like I'd say, like Roundup. And most recently, that was a article I just sent to my team showing that arsenic and other heavy metals can be actually sequestered by these organisms. And then plastics can be broken down by these organisms. And so they have a whole host of protective effects. Oh, another one, D-O-N, which is a really powerful mycotoxin, right? And that has all kinds of autoimmune implications for people. It's a massive trigger. Bacillus septilus is at least two studies showing that it protects against the effects that D-O-N creates. I mean, you have the sky's the limit in getting clinical practice. So I'm a clinician. I see patients every day. And that's where the rubber meets the road, right? You can talk research all you want. And I love that. But then I'm like, okay, is that going to work? So my clinical experience, Megasphor's five strains, love it. It's amazing. And what I've seen in people with CFO and CFO, and for those of you who don't know, this is bacterial overgrowth in the small bowel. Many, many causes. I won't go into that all today. And CFO is fungal overgrowth and very, very common now to have either both or at least one or the other. These patients often don't tolerate the old probiotics. The other types that are lactobacillus, bifidobacter-based, they don't do well. They do worse. That was me 20 years ago with Crohn's. I didn't do well with any of those. And I didn't know why. Well, now I know why. But they almost always tolerate Megasphor's my first go-to. But even if they don't tolerate that in the initial phases, the bacillus septilus I love because even my most sensitive patients, I don't think I have had one in my clinical experience that hasn't tolerated the H-U-58. It's currently what I'm on. I don't know the secret. I love it. And the other thing that's so interesting is just it really does help with CFO and CFO. And like I said, that often I see the mole patients. So I feel like they do a lot better. Now, one of their just thought, I have no clinical experience with this, and I'm going to step outside the box and ask you if you've seen anything. I have these patients with colonization up here with bacteria and fungus and everything. And I'm wondering, have you seen any research or do you think it's possible to do some research on a nasal rinse with the bacillus septilus? Because it makes perfect sense to me that it would help with the MRSA and then in the sinuses. You're 100% correct. In fact, we're working with an ENT group in Canada right now, where we are setting up a nasal rinse study using our bacillus. So when you get it out, I publish it because I want to. Absolutely. And when you're talking to the ENT group, they said it's all strep and staff. Exactly. And we know that bacillus does a fantastic job of competing against strep and staff and then not only competing against strep and staff as bacteria one-to-one, but they also enhance the immune system's ability to recognize those organisms. So bacillus has this amazing immune activation role. They can activate something called tolite receptors and tolite receptors activate something called pattern recognition receptors. So what that means is in the simplistic form is that bacillus will come and it'll find a, let's say a bacteria here that's problematic and it'll tag that bacteria for the immune system to go, hey, you got to pay attention to this and learn what this bacteria looks like, right? That's a process called immune tutoring. And in fact, we count on bacillus to do that in early stages of life because there are studies that show that babies who are exposed to bacillus actually develop the gut associated lymphoid tissue much more profoundly than babies. Listen, that's dirt. So babies and children who actually play in the dirt or need to carry it out of the garden, this is the training of the immune system. I have a friend who, you know, hand sanitizer, well, of course nowadays hand sanitizer, this is before our pandemic and her poor children were sick all the time because they'd never touch dirt. So it makes all the difference in babies and what happens to them long term, right? The risks for allergies, asthma, all of these things increase and increase more. And in fact, there's a finished allergy study that really illustrated this for them. There was a big problem occurring in Finland where like in the U.S., asthma and allergies were becoming an epidemic among kids, right? In the U.S., it's somewhere around 10 million kids that suffer from pretty bad asthma. And so same thing was happening in Finland. However, about 100 something kilometers down the road was a town in Russia. So almost the same geography and they had much lower allergy rates there. So then Finland said, well, what the hell is going on? You know, we need to do a big study to figure out what are the differences. So they went through everything and some of the big things they found that made a huge difference in the rates of allergies in the two areas is in the Russian town, they kept the doors and windows open a lot more. So they got a lot more of the outside air into the house. They did not sterilize their surfaces, right? They did not have that clean is associated with that bleachy smell, right? And they did the opposite in Finland, right? The lot more doors and windows closed, more air conditioning, more sterilized surfaces and that in itself made a huge difference. And then because, you know, you can do this in these kind of progressive places, Finland said, okay, this data is clear enough where daycares need to have dirt pads. And so they started building daycares with gardens and just dirt pads and made it mandatory for kids to play in the dirt throughout the day for X number of hours, right? And they started comparing those kids to kids who were through the normal daycare setting, and they started to see a massive change in the allergene asthma rate, right? Just that simple. And again, it's just becoming, it's just coming back to the basics. And that's how we looked at probiotic development, right? I told you, I went back to my evolutionary biologist positive days and said, what is the simple way that we get exposed to organisms and where can we find these organisms? So it's really mind-boggling when you think about how simple some of this stuff can be, but we've very much complicated it, you know, but we need to make sure. And because of that, there have been products in the market to soil-based and there have been a few concerns about safety. Tell us for the people asking that question, because your strains are researched and but tell us the difference between just regular soil-based with like funds of things we don't really know. And there could be, because I have seen some of that too as well, where there could be an issue because it's contaminated. Totally. And you know, and it's very hard to mimic natural soil, right? You really can, because also the question becomes, what soil are you moving? Right? The soil over here in your front yard is completely different than the soil, you know, in the woods when you go for a walk. And so what and what layer of the soil? What level of the soil? All of that. So the simplistic approach of let's just grab a bunch of bacteria in the soil and then use that as a probiotic just doesn't work because we don't know what those microbes are. We don't know what happens when you dose it like a supplement, right? Versus just getting benzene exposure to it in the soil. So that's the problem where we've seen soil-based organism products that don't have a well-caraparized, you know, list of bacteria. And there are some in there that'll produce toxins and there are some in there that can be dangerous. And so you want to be careful by ingesting those. Now nature, if you're using nature's soil and you're going out for a walk in the woods, that area has been primed by millions of years of evolution with the ecosystem around it, right? So it's a different thing than trying to imitate that in a capsule. Concentrated and capsulated and yeah. Exactly. It's the same thing to mean like the analogy I give, it's like baby formula, right? Since the mid-1800s, companies have been spending hundreds of millions up to billions of dollars trying to mimic mother's milk. And they've never been able to, right? Even today after billions of dollars and hundreds of years of research, the biggest companies in the world, Johnson and Johnson's and all that, cannot imitate mother's milk. Mother's milk is mammalian food that's perfected by evolution. It's incredibly complex. It has over 200 different prebiotics in it. It has upwards of 600 different microorganisms in it. It's so complex that there's no way we can try to imitate that. And that's why if the baby does a nurse and the baby does bottles instead, you know, for most of the of the first year, you see a big difference in the health of the baby, right? So by that same way, we cannot imitate the soil. So what we did instead was try to hone in on at least one component of the soil that would have a direct probiotic effect and then and then look and see is that going to really, you know, move the needle for us. Yeah. Amazing. So in the last few minutes, what are some of the cutting-edge new things that are coming out? Tell us about either new products, new new research. What's the latest that would be interesting to know? Yeah, you know, so one of the areas that we're really big on, which actually is quite relevant right now is the whole area of mood and sleep, right? So stress management, you know, improving theta waves in the brain, like how can we do that? How can we put people in a better state of mind and deal with stress? Obviously, we can't do anything as a company to remove stress for people, right? Stress is a normal part of life. But the question is, can we deal with it better? Can we put them in a state that helps them deal with it better? Can we put them in a state where the stress is not so detrimental to their health? And then, can we also put them in a state that allows them to sleep better in the evening and so they can recover from the day's worth of stresses and all of that? So that's a big component and that's a gut-brain connection issue. Now, we have been focusing on the spores with LPS, lipopolysaccharide and endopoxemia. That type of leaky gut is a big driver of mismanagement of stress, right? Because LPS interferes with serotonin binding, dopamine binding, it increases inflammation in the dorsal vagal complex, so it screws up the communication between the gut and the brain, so it's a big menacing issue in dealing with stress, mood and leading to things like anxiety and depression and disrupting sleep as well. So we said, okay, we've got that part covered, but there's another component. There's another component that's called elevated basal inflammation, which is stress-induced inflammation, right? So this is stress, this is inflammation that comes about from short bouts of stress throughout the day, right? That is, you're driving a car and somebody cuts you off and you're like, you honk the horn, you throw the finger at each other, right? You get that elevated stress. That single bout of stress actually will make a measurable change in your microbiome for a short period of time and that single measurable change will actually lead to activation of macrophages, release of NF cap of B, activation of the HPA axis, release of cortisol, activation of the sympathetic system. This whole cascade occurs and every time that occurs, it primes the body for more stress response, right? And so we were thinking, okay, is there a microbiome solution to reducing that impact and reducing that release of cortisol when you encounter a stressful situation? And sure enough, there is. We got to work with a fascinating strain. It's called bifurobacterm longum 1714. What's unique about this bifurobacterm that you don't find on any other bifurobacterm longums is that it has a outer layer called a exopolysaccharide. And again, there's a theme here, right? So we love the scores because of their weird little score code, but this bifurobacter is unique because it has this coating on it called an exopolysaccharide. And as it turns out, that exopolysaccharide component has the ability to dramatically reduce basal stress-induced inflammation. And so what the studies are shown, and they have a number of published studies from the most well-renowned gut-brained research institute, which is in Cork Island, that they've got a number of studies showing that when you take this species, you dramatically reduce cortisol release. In fact, increase data waves in the brain, you actually improve sleep. So you shorten the time to sleep, you increase the duration of sleep, and you improve the quality of sleep. And it dramatically improves the ability to deal with stressful situations. Right? So then when you- It's interesting because as a practitioner, we're thinking like hospital steering, magnolia, all these things. And now you're saying, no, actually, probiotics might be our next game changer for reducing cortisol. That's exciting. Is this not in the market yet? So it will be. We're going to have it in the market by the end of May. So we've been chugging forward really hard on this because we're like, people need this. People really, really need this. Especially now. Right? We've all gone through this highly stressful one and a half years or more. And hopefully things are getting back to normal, more normal. But the world is a stressful place to begin with. And what the studies show is that those short bouts of stress really activate macrophages. And those activated macrophages create this long-term inflammatory response in the brain that keeps triggering the HPA axis. Right? So we keep releasing these glucocorticoids and keep forming cortisol. And that's why for people, it becomes harder and harder to deal with stress. Right? So remember when you were younger, you could deal with stress a little bit better. Then as you get older and as time progresses, things stress you out much easier. Right? And it becomes- The stress for billions goes down. Yes, exactly. Totally. 100%. And that's because our system keeps rotating and keeps climbing towards the glucocorticoid cortisol release mechanism. Right? And the studies show that we can actually bring it back. I would say it's like ruts in the old wagon wheel ruts that are bringing ruts. And then our wheels just go into the rut. And we do the same path over and over and over again until something changes. So potentially May. Well, we'll stay tuned. And you guys, if you listen here, I'll be sure and share. Do you have a name for it yet? Or is that- Yeah, we have two. So there's two versions of the product. The zen biome cope and zen biome sleep. Right? So the sleep one is formulated with things that help you sleep as well. Not melatonin, but other herbals. And then the cope is the daytime stress management product. And it's profound, right? And then you combine it with the scores where you're already dealing with the health test between the two. It's an amazing one, two points. They could give them the patience. They could take them both. No problem. Absolutely. Take them both. And we really want to improve people's state of mind because that to us is a critically important role of a company like ours. And we want to give them that at the foundational level, right? There's lots of people that can train you how to deal with stress and all that. Like you probably give your patients lots and lots of tools of how to manage and mitigate it and all that. What we want to do is do it at the foundational level where the stress gets turned on and start turning that switch back the other way. So that one is super exciting for us. And nowadays we need all those. We need the mind, body, the meditation, the walking in nature, and then also the probiotic. This is so exciting. Now we didn't even get to bovine immune globulins and all these amazing stuff. I'll be sure. And if you're listening here, any platform will link up to all the great products. Maybe we could just end with, I've been a huge fan of bovine immunoglobulins. Do you want to say a bit about that and about the power of what is that? You've got MEGA IgG, MEGA mucosa. Tell us just a little bit about bovine immune globulins. Yeah, I love those. So it's an amazing array of IgG antibodies that you get to have. What's been happening is the cows have been working, their immune system has been working very hard to produce a array of IgG antibodies against all kinds of stuff that they encounter in the outside world. So against mole toxins and environmental toxins and viruses and bacteria, all of these things that trigger toxogenic response and inflammatory response in us. So then if we get the serum from the cows and then we spin out and we purify the immunoglobulins, we've got a bunch of these amazing antibodies that we can now take and what they do is they'll go in and they coat the gut and then they start binding and neutralizing all of these things in the gut. New studies with H. pylori and viruses and other bacteria, name it. I don't know what all, I mean, I've seen for sure H. pylori and other bacteria, other viruses, but they really have a power to neutralize these, don't they? They do. They neutralize it and take it out of the system through defecation. So those things don't trigger inflammatory responses in your system. And what really excited me about this particular product and the way we even met the company that we partnered with for it is they were involved in a number of HIV studies because the NIH published a paper back in 2014 showing that the biggest driver of mortality in HIV was leaky gut or they called it HIV interopathy. So that's the increased permeability in the gut lining and they, in fact, show that you can measure mortality risk better with how permeable their intestines were versus how much of the virus they had, which is mind boggling that the NIH published a study. And so they put out a challenge for HIV researchers saying you need to find solutions to deal with this massive permeability issue that occurs in this disease. And so this company jumped in and they did two or three really well done studies with one of the top HIV researchers here out in the Midwest, Dave Asimuth, I think is his name. And what they showed is even under very stressful compromise conditions like HIV that have really bad leaky guts, this immunoglobulin was able to neutralize and bring down inflammatory responses and help those guts actually heal. And so the lining of the guts, re-established lining of the gut. So under that kind of condition, if it can help, under the kind of condition that most of us are facing from just the toxins that I think were exposed to, it really does a profound job. So it's one of my products that I could never forget to take. There's really two or three things that I'm always on and the other things I keep forgetting and need to take it back. But the immunoglobulins, the megaspore or the HE-58, I switch between the two and then the K2, I take K2 all the time. But I agree with you, the Myomax and the HE-58 and the IGTR, my three, I totally agree with you. So when ZenBio comes out, I'm going to be on. I know. Oh, Kiran, I was excited about this, but this is even I'm so excited about your new product and I am just so grateful. I know our listeners have so many comments, questions, people are really excited to hear this. And so when we get your new product out, I will, if you're listening here, I'll be sure you'll find it. Wherever you find me, you'll hear about it. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your dedication and all your work to this industry. You've really moved the needle in the probiotic industry. And that's exciting to think about. That's really not that many years to have done the change, made the impact that you have. And what you've given is for someone like me in clinical practice, you've created a tool for me to help many more people. So thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the work you've done. And thank you for taking time to talk to me today. It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for all your continued support. We look forward to doing more things together. I'm super excited for you guys, for you and your, your patience of pride, the new products coming out and, you know, happy to come back again anytime you want me. So that's what it is. We'll be sure and link that, but you can actually say it if you're listening. Yeah, microbiomlabs.com. If people want to come, there's a lot of resources on there as well. And then, you know, we sell our products only through healthcare practitioners like Dr. Jill. And so you can gain access to the products through your healthcare practitioner. But you can come to our website. There's lots of resources on there to learn about the microbiome. Yeah, there's a great, this website is amazing. So if you want more information, microbiomlabs.com, and I will put link products, you can get those at Dr.JillHealth.com. There's MEGA Spora AG58, MEGA IgG, MEGA Prebiotic, MEGA Mucosa. And now the other one we're going to talk about, but I'll leave with us on the MEGA Omega. I love this, the anti-inflammatory fish oil. So check that out, MEGA Omega. Kieran, thank you again. What a pleasure it's been. Thank you so much.