 Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. What loves to munch on your mucus while protecting you from those pesty plant lectins? Hang tight, you're about to find out. Now if you take probiotics, you're probably familiar with common strains like lactobacillus. But unless you've read my books like the longevity paradox that tout their incredible properties, you may not have heard about this incredible lifespan-boosting bacteria. First identified in 2004, acrimoncia musinophilia, which literally translates to mucus-loving, is a species of bacteria that helps to maintain our gut lining. And until now, it's never been available as a supplement. Enter pendulum life, the first company to offer acrimoncia in a pill form. I'm so excited to have scientist Colleen Cutleff on as CEO and co-founder of pendulum to tell us all about it. We're going to talk about this bacterium's benefit and why acrimoncia is so unique. So hold tight. We've got an exciting deep dive into the latest in microbiome discoveries that will help you and your loved ones live to a ripe old healthy age. Colleen, welcome to the program. I'm so excited to have you on today to talk about one of my favorite gut buddies. Let's start by telling my listeners, what is acrimoncia musinophilia and why is it so important for not only your gut health but overall health? Well thank you so much for having me on and I would be happy to share all of the new and exciting science that's coming out of the microbiome, one of which is the strain acrimoncia musinophilia. This strain is really emerging as a keystone strain that people who are healthy have in vast abundance but people who are sick appear to be lower entirely missing this strain and it turns out that it plays a really functional key role in our gut layer, our gut lining, our musin lining. And you may have heard the phrase leaky gut and the idea behind leaky gut is that you could think of your intestinal wall like a fence. So I have a wooden fence in my backyard and when you look at it in your backyard, you first buy your house, you've got this beautiful wooden fence with all these planks, everything's strong but over time with sun and rain and seasons those planks can start to deteriorate and some of them can start to fall down and now you have all of these holes in your fence and now all the outside elements that are supposed to be on the other side of that fence are now coming into your yard and this is what the gut lining is like and you have these certain strains which are important for making sure that those planks say polished and strong and keep that lining and that fence barrier up the way it's supposed to be and acrimoncia is one of these strains. So when you have less acrimoncia, you have a less strong fence and now all kinds of things can make their way in and out of your gut that become really problematic and show up in things like obesity, type 2 diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease and other GI issues. Yeah, not only GI issues but if you believe apocrates like I do that all disease begins in the gut and all disease begins in a leaky gut. So you and I think the same thoughts. So can you tell me a little bit about what started you down this path to researching gut health? I think it started with your daughter, right? Well, that was definitely an important part of what got me interested but really I was working at a DNA sequencing instrument company called Pacific Biosciences and we developed an instrument that allowed you to do DNA sequencing in a different kind of way than the other technologies out there and at the heart of the microbiome and at the heart of microbiome science is DNA sequencing technologies. So probiotics and yogurts and things like that have been on the shelves for decades but only recently with the advent of DNA sequencing technologies can we actually sequence and begin to understand the different components of the microbiome and that's how you start to identify novel targets and functions and link it together in a systems biology kind of an approach. And so I started this coming with two co-founders. The three of us have very deep sequencing understanding and knowledge from working at Pacific Biosciences together. I'm a biochemist, Jim is a biostatistician, John is a physicist and really between the three of us we understood the science opportunity of the microbiome and we believed that you could apply pharmaceutical drug development tools to microbiome science to create an entirely new kind of product that had the efficacy of a drug but the safety of a probiotic. And so as I started to learn more about the microbiome, I realized that I had a personal connection to the space which is through my daughter. So my first daughter was born almost two months prematurely and when you have a baby born that early you get to hold them for a couple of seconds and then they get taken away from you and she spent the first month of her life in intensive care hooked up to all these machines and monitors and receiving multiple doses of antibiotics which is protocol not because they have an infection but preemies are at risk of infection. And there was a study that came out that showed that children who were on antibiotics systematically before six months of age were also more prone to obesity and type two diabetes as they got older. And sure enough, my daughter, she was an elementary school. She had food sensitivities that the rest of the family did not have. She had to really think about how her body metabolized foods. And I thought, Oh my gosh, it's because this early start to life or her entire microbiome was decimated. We could create products that could help millions of people, including my own kid. And that really became the no brainer for at least trying. And I'm saying you have you have a second daughter who didn't go through this and she doesn't have the the same problems. That's right. You know, genetically, they're you know, both sisters, same parents and growing up in the same household with the same foods. And really, when you looked at the two, they're only two years apart from each other, the two girls, their metabolisms were very different from each other at that time. So why did you hone in on a product that featured Ackermansia over other strains? I know your product also has other strains, but let's let's stay focused on this bug for a moment. Sure, we're really at the heart of how we chose all of the strains, including Ackermansia was data that we generated and actually many other labs generated around the world, where people were investigating what is the difference between people that have metabolic syndrome. So obesity, prediabetes and diabetes, what's the difference between those people and people who are ostensibly healthy? And what was found was that there were what we found in our research and was corroborated by others is that there were certain functions that healthy people had a vast abundance of that people who had metabolic syndrome had, you know, low or entirely missing. And it was really boiled down to two key things. One was the ability to metabolize fiber into short chain fatty acids in particular butyrate. And then the other was this particular strain Ackermansia musinophila, which is associated with the mucin layer and involved in mucin regulation. So mechanistically, it made a lot of sense to us that these two pathways we depleted in people who were unable to metabolize foods. And Ackermansia in particular was first discovered by Dr. Kaplan at Harvard MGH. I flew out to Boston met with him and said, Hey, you know, we've also discovered Ackermansia looks like it's pretty interesting here. We talked a lot about it and about the opportunity to really give this strain back to people in a very specific way and see whether you could start to reverse disease with it. So you know, in in my book, The Longevity Paradox, I talk a lot about this particular bug. And certainly there's some fascinating studies, particularly in mice, that you give Ackermansia to mice and their inflammation dramatically decreases. And you mentioned the musin layer. And I want to just double down on that for a minute. We normally should have this big coating of mucus on our gut wall, on our fence, if you will. And that coating of mucus, folks forgive me, but it's mucus is what comes out of your nose. It's snot. And you should have a generous pile of mucus that among other things actually traps sugar seeking proteins like lectins, one of my favorite subjects, and doesn't allow these proteins to get to their target, which is actually the fence wall that you talked about. And so there's there's tremendous data that the thicker this mucus layer is, the more you cannot get things past this fence wall. And as I talked about in the Longevity Paradox, it may be at the at the end game, that as long as your wall in your gut is intact, you're not going to age and you're basically not going to die. But it's the gradual decline of that fence wall getting warped or damaged that facilitates aging and diseases. Is that a good summary? Absolutely, absolutely. And I would say it's a little bit of a Goldilocks problem, you know, you can't have it too thick, you can't have it too thin. And really, there are these strains whose job it is to make sure that that fence is exactly the way it's supposed to be. And you're right, there's been a lot of studies, you know, not just around that gut lining depletion being problematic for variety of different illnesses, but also your ability to simply metabolize glucose. And that's very much and we'll get into this, but that's very much tied into having a properly functioning set of strains, including acromancia keeping that wall. And I would say just to build on, you know, the importance of that fence. The other thing is the the receptors that exist at that lining that serve as a way to communicate what's happening inside the gut and what's happening outside. And so you have small molecules inside the gut that need to be able to get to these receptors that are lodged into your fence, they need to be able to access them and get to them so they can then send signals outside the body. And the other role of acromancia, you know, is to hypothesize that it helps keep those receptors in the right place and available for the signal when it comes their way. Yeah, you know, as all of this research progresses, we realize that these single cell organisms actually are probably the most important communicators to our immune system to our brain. And I talk a lot about that in my new book, The Energy Paradox. And these are in general called postbiotics. And you've their gases, their short chain fatty acids like butyrate. And there is this tremendous trans kingdom language that we're now discovering between our microbiome and and us. And who knew? Absolutely. I mean, we've co evolved with these strains since the beginning. And it's only very recently that we've created products that try to get rid of them and kill them off. And I think what we're starting to experience is the repercussions of those incredibly potent antibiotics, antiseptics, all these things that have entered people's daily lives that are really killing off things that we've co evolved and actually depend on for many aspects of our health. Yeah. So acromancia, if you look at the literature, like obviously you have and I have, it's been kind of the holy grail of probiotics. And I think you're probably not the first to attempt to get acromancia swallowed in number one and to get it past the gastric acid. And number three, have it actually set up shop. And can you can you take me through both the laboratory and the human studies that got you where pendulum glucose control is now, which is the name of your product, by the way. Yes, thank you for that plug. Yeah, you know, the manufacturing of acromancia at a small scale, you know, many people have been able to do and to run these these pre clinical studies on. But but actually manufacturing this strain at a larger scale is quite tricky. Because if you can imagine, it lives associated with this mucin layer in a very specific part of your GI tract. And that is how it's evolved to live it needs those particular nutrients that are housed there in order to survive. Well, we have this issue in the United States, which is that you cannot grow a strain in any sort of media that has things that would be considered like beef byproducts and your mucin layer has as many of these such things. And and that's result of actually mad cow disease, which is sort of interesting that the repercussions that mad cow disease had on, you know, our own rules and regulations around safe manufacturing. So you have to figure out a way to be able to grow this strain in a purely vegetable based media, if you want to be able to sell in the United States. And and that's really the challenge is figuring out how to grow it and how to grow it at scale in an environment that is very different from how it was, you know, it's natural inhabitant, and to have it be active. And then to say now I figured out how to grow it and have it be active at the end of that. And now I need to, as you say, deliver it. And we use these enteric coated capsules in order to make sure that it gets through the stomach acid, and then to where it needs to get to. But but I would say the other component of this is the microbiome is an ecosystem. None of these strains exist by themselves. They exist with other strains and they exist with prebiotics that feed them. And so in fact, when we did our preclinical studies, we found that when you try to deliver individual strains by themselves or subsets of the consortia that we've decided, you know, work together to help metabolize fibers and and to in mucin regulation, if you separate them, you actually get reduced and sometimes no efficacy. And really importantly, if you separate the prebiotic from the strains, you don't see any efficacy. And so I always say it's like if I'm going to be dropped off on an exerted island, I'd love to be dropped off with a cooler filled with sandwiches and beers. And that's really the prebiotic or the sandwiches and beer. So by co delivering them and having that proximity when that capsule dissolves of the strain right next to the prebiotic, that's also a key part this the so called symbiotic relationship. We took advantage of that and found in our in our preclinical and in vitro studies that they really need to function together. And then by the time we got into clinical trials, we really had, you know, a couple of formulations that we thought were going to be really impactful and showed in a placebo controlled double blinded randomized trial that in fact, if you took pendulum glucose control, your compared to placebo, your A1C was lowered by 0.6% and your blood glucose spikes lowered by 34%. And for anybody who wears a continuous glucose monitor, you'll know that's pretty substantial. And so we're very excited by this because it showed that we could and of course we did microbiome analyses. It showed that we were able to deliver these strains, they were able to produce butyrate, and they were able to ultimately reduce glucose spikes and A1C, which is very exciting. Yeah, so just I'm sure everyone has heard I got my A1C down on a commercial on TV. But just for all of our listeners, hemoglobin A1C is a pretty reliable way of looking at how you are handling sugars and proteins for six weeks, two months, two and a half months average looking back in time. And so when you see a drug advertised on TV, I got my A1C down. What you're saying is with your product, you're having comparable results by using number one organisms and number two, the food that these organisms need to have, which are the prebiotics delivered with a capsule, and you don't have to shoot yourself up every day or once a week, and read all the warning labels. Yeah, and I think that's really the huge opportunity of the microbiome. It really is to create products that have the efficacy of a drug, but the safety of a probiotic. And, you know, I don't want to make it seem like it was easy to do this. We spent almost a decade as purely an R&D and clinical organization, you know, developing these strains and developing these formulations and making sure that we're creating something that worked. So there's still it's still very early in the science in the microbiome. But I think we're just the cusp of an entirely new world of products that we don't have to read all those labels and the side effects and worry if I'm taking this, what else is it doing to my body? These are things that you naturally have. And interestingly, you know, many of these strains and functions you have in your youth, like we can all remember a time when we could eat or drink whatever we wanted to, we didn't have to worry about it. And what happens over time through aging and stress and circadian rhythm changes, like when you go to a different time zone, or for us women, we go through, you know, our menstrual cycle and menopause, you start to lose many of these functions. It is like the weathering of a fence. And so what we're doing is we're basically giving people back things that they probably once had, but lost along the way. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I want to there's so many things that I've written about and others that have contributed to this decline of our microbiome. And like you mentioned before, a broad spectrum antibiotics were introduced in the mid 1970s. I was actually in medical school. I remember it was miraculous. And we had no idea, of course, that when we swallow these things, we were throwing napalm on our on our, you know, teropical rain forest microbiome, and none of us, we didn't know that this was happening. And we didn't know that when we gave broad spectrum antibiotics to our animals, our beef, our chicken, our pork, our fish, that these antibiotics would be in their flesh. And so we've been, we've had an entire generation that's been continuously exposed to, you know, wiping out their their microbiome that they're supposed to have. Absolutely. And one of the things that I learned, you know, through this was that, you know, farmers have been giving antibiotics to their cattle for decades, because they observed that they became more obese when they gave them antibiotics. And to understand that that is not just true in cattle, it's also true in us humans, you know, really starts to unravel a lot of things about what these antibiotics are doing, especially early in life. And to be clear, I'm not an anti antibiotic. So antibiotics have saved millions of lives, people should take them when they have a bacterial infection. But, you know, they, but you should ask, you know, what are do I need to take this antibiotic? And what are the longer term repercussions? And how can I preserve my microbiome afterwards? Okay, people often ask me, let's suppose they've been given antibiotics appropriately, not for a sore throat, or not for most coughs and runny noses. But let's just take a urinary tract infection, a bad one. And they go to the grocery store, and they buy some yogurt. And why not just go to the grocery store and buy some yogurt? Why, why do I need pendulum glucose control? Let's start there. Yes, well, you know, again, there are these keystone strains and functions that are important for your microbiome for any health condition. And it's been pretty widely shown that acromancia is one of these strains. And, you know, you're, you're ahead of the curve and already, you know, publishing and knowing about that and spreading the good word about it. But also the metabolism of fibers and debuterate. So we all know a high fiber diet is good for us, we're supposed to eat lots of fruits and vegetables. But we actually genetically don't encode for anything that can metabolize those healthy fibers. It's entirely our microbiome that metabolizes them. And so if you don't have these microbes, the fiber eating is literally going right through you. And that fiber is good for a variety of reasons. But one of them is the production of these short chain fatty acids that help you metabolize glucose and insulin, you know, ultimately. And so I would say that, you know, it's, it's many people do take yogurts and probiotics to help them. And certainly I believe there's a very strong placebo effect. I mean, it's not that I believe that there's plenty of science studies showing that. But if you want something that scientifically founded, and is premised on functions that you need, that you're missing, then you have to look to not just what is the strain, but what is it doing? What is it delivering? And, you know, I take pendulum glucose control, my mom takes it, my kids take it, my husband takes it, because ultimately these are keystone functions that you need in your body. It's like, if you had a cold, and I said to you, Hey, just go take some vitamins. No, we don't say that we say go take some vitamin C. And I think that the microbiome and probiotic space just hasn't gotten to that level of sophistication yet where it's not go take some probiotics, it's go reconstitute your acromancia, go reconstitute your butyrate producers. And we're going to get to that level of sophistication, but we're not quite there yet. Alright, so the next question that always comes up with my patients and people who listen to me is, Okay, I believe you, I'm going to take a probiotic that's enteric coated that gets through my gut. And I believe you that probably more importantly is I got to give prebiotic fiber to these guys, it's what they eat. And if I don't give it to them, they're going to starve to death. But okay, I swallowed these guys and I'm eating prebiotic fiber. Why do I have to keep swallowing these guys? Aren't they down there now? Aren't they reproducing? Yeah, and it's a great question. And the truth is that you may not have to keep doing that. The the microbiome is an ecosystem where there are a lot of pressures on that ecosystem. And so what you might realize is you have the microbiome that you have for a wide variety of reasons, including your diet, your exercise, your level of stress, as the other things we talked about before, you know, aging and all of these things. So there are a lot of things in your environment that have led you to have the microbiome that you have, and the depletions that you have. And so if you give these strains back, yes, they're going to be able to survive for some amount of time. But if the ecosystem is an unfriendly one that doesn't allow that to grow, then you're going to have to keep replanting. It's like you have a garden and already existing garden, and you're trying to introduce a new plant. Well, the rest of that environment can't be growing over it so it doesn't get sun. It can't be absorbing all the water so it doesn't get rain. So you have to keep reseeding and replanting unless there's something fundamental that changes about your ecosystem. So, you know, for example, some people really can change their diet and stick to a new diet for, you know, long periods of time. I personally am terrible at that. I can't diet. I just, it's very hard for me. I have the things I like to eat and I like to eat them. And so if you're not going to change the environment of your garden, then you're going to have to keep replanting these seeds. Well put. Plus, you know, I think a lot of these probiotics that we do swallow are not native, and they go on vacation for a few weeks in our gut and then leave. And I think that's another very useful argument that says, you know, a lot of these guys aren't supposed to live there, or at least they can't set up shop the way we would want them to and just put some more back in. Absolutely. I like that. The vacationers, they don't speak the language. So, you know, you know, you've obviously mentioned glucose control and diabetes and pre-diabetes. But I think fundamentally you're just scratching the surface of what these microbiome do. And, you know, like I mentioned before, I and others, including apocrates, thinks that all disease begins and ends in the gut. So where else are you seeing application for your product? Yeah. Well, you know, starting with glucose control, it's really not just about type two diabetes and pre-diabetes. As you know, and I've seen your write-ups on this, the ability to metabolize glucose and to have control over your glucose spikes is fundamental to your health. And so one of the interesting things that we've found when people have taken our product is that they come back and they say things about parameters that we never measured in our clinical trial. So things like I've had better digestion. I have less sugar cravings. That's one of the huge things we hear from 70% of our customers. And, you know, that one is a very interesting one because the idea that your gut and your brain are connected, of course, is very interesting. And there's a lot of reasons we say, when I'm nervous, I get butterflies in my stomach. That was my gut instinct that told me to do that. We know, actually, that our gut and our brain are tied together. And we're just starting to understand the science behind that connection. And so when you think about if your body is unable to metabolize something, that it is sending signals to your brain to tell your brain, give me more of that. And when your body can now metabolize their sugars better, if your gut is now sending signals to your brain to potentially say, you don't need to have as many sugars like we got it under control now. And so that connection is very interesting to us. And so we have really been looking into that as a kind of next product line, as a collaboration with Dr. Pasrecha over at Johns Hopkins. And what we're really interested in is the signaling from particular gut microbes, these neurotransmitter signaling to the brain, and, you know, where you can really start to develop new product lines there. And I'll tell you, you know, I started my career in pharma, we were developing small molecule drugs for Parkinson's disease. And we were so obsessed with the brain and the plaques in the brain and developing these assays on how to get rid of them. And the new emerging data around the gut is that, you know, you have these neurons actually in your gut. And unlike the ones in your brain where you get what you get and as you kill them, you can't get them back. The ones in your gut are constantly regenerating. And they are sending, you know, log orders higher of neurotransmitters to your brain. And so, in fact, the plaques that you see in Parkinson's disease show up earlier in the gut. And so, it's possible that if you could figure out how to improve that neuro generation in the gut, that you could actually prevent the misfiring from the gut to the brain that could be perpetuating diseases like Parkinson's. It's a super fascinating new field. And we're just really excited by that opportunity as well. Yeah, the, you know, the classic finding in Parkinson's is the Lewy body, which is a dead neuron surrounded by glial cells. And those were found in the wall of the gut long before they actually appeared, you know, in the brain. And so I agree with you that, you know, Parkinson's and I think actually all dementia begins with leaky gut and the problem with the gut rather than the other way around. So, you know, good for you. That's, that's where we have to go with all this work. So, you know, I love transformation stories and you obviously get feedback from your users. And you've seen blood sugars come down. You've seen hemoglobin A1C come down in a placebo controlled trial. I mean, some people got your supplement and other people got a fake. And you could, you know, you didn't know and they didn't know. And so you can't fool it. So what you got a great transformation story from a user you'd like to share? Yes, I'd love to. We get them all the time and I absolutely love all of these stories, but maybe I'll share. There's two with you that I'd love to share if I could do two. One is from an individual who diabetes runs in his family. And so he grew up around this disease and he sort of talks about remembering at Thanksgiving after Thanksgiving dinner, all of his uncles sitting around measuring their, you know, giving themselves insulin shots, measuring their blood glucose and sort of talking about it and thinking to himself, I do not want to end up like that. And so eight healthy exercise, try to do all the right things. And as he started to age, he started to A1C started to climb up and he was really just appalled, ashamed, all of these things where you feel like I'm doing everything I can. How could I be on this path that I really have been wanting to avoid? And he tried to get his blood glucose control and was able to get his A1C down out of the pre-diabetes range into healthy. And for him, it was such a victory to not move into that category that he had seen his whole family was in in terms of taking drugs. The other story I'll share with you is from a woman who similarly, diabetes ran in her family and her grandmother who raised her had diabetes that was so poorly controlled that she lost first a toe, then a foot, then a leg, then the other leg. And this woman actually ended up having to quit college to come home to take care of her grandmother and really watch this whole kind of horrifying deterioration. And so she also made this vow that I'm not going to go through that and has been eating well and exercising and started to see her A1C creep up. She read about the microbiome, understood that there were these certain strains and especially butyrate producers in her garage began to try to grow these strains and dose herself. I mean, this woman is amazing. She didn't even finish college and she's basically a PhD microbiologist in her garage. And when we got introduced to her, she got introduced to us, she realized that we had made something that she had been trying to make a beautiful reduction in her A1C, as well as her blood glucose. She's not, doesn't have type 2 diabetes now. And so these stories for people able to reverse or these stories where people are trying everything and they just haven't tackled their microbiome quite yet, those are really, those are beautiful. So if you've been trying lots of things and you don't understand, welcome if that person eats the same thing I do on the same result, you know. No, it's absolutely true. Now, I understand that your product is pretty pricey. Can you talk about why that is? Are you just out to make a lot of money? Come on. 100%. No, I'm just kidding. You know, there's two important things. The first is that we actually manufacture the strains in that product ourselves. We actually tried to outsource. There are a lot of manufacturers of probiotics, but they were unable to manufacture the strains and the reason is actually something very fundamental to the gut in your gut. There's actually where these strains live. There's actually no oxygen. It's what's called anaerobic and all of the strains that are on the market today are able to grow in the presence of oxygen. So where where these things actually live, there is no oxygen at all. That's what they need to live and that if you want to manufacture them, you need to create a closed end system where no oxygen can get into it at all. And there are not manufacturers that have built that system up, and so we ended up having to build it ourselves. So it's very expensive to grow them because in order to keep oxygen out of an end to end system means that you have to constantly pump in other gases to keep the oxygen out. So it's expensive to grow them. The second thing is that they are room temperature and heat sensitive. So everything has to remain cold. Everything has to remain refrigerated, refrigerated for the entire process, including the delivery. It shows up at your door, you put it in your refrigerator. And so these are expensive to make. They are actually, I'd probably be terrible to admit this, our investors will be mad, but for the first probably six months, we sold product at a loss. That's how expensive it was to make them. Now there are economies of scale. As we get customers in, we're going to be able to take advantage of that, and I do believe the price will come down as we figure out efficiencies on our end. But right now we're literally practically just breaking even. You're keeping the lights on. We're keeping the lights on, yes. Okay, so for those on a budget, what kind of foods or lifestyle changes can you suggest to help boost your acrimoncia in the gut lining? I've written a bunch of tricks, but I want to hear from you. Yes, well I'll just say the best way to boost your acrimoncia is to simply take acrimoncia, and you are going to be the first person who's going to hear about this, and your listeners will be the first to hear about this, but we are just releasing an acrimoncia only product. So it will be at a lower price because it's just the single strain. That strain we've actually figured out how to get at room temperature stable. So it will also cost less and can be on your shelves in your pantry. So we will be able to deliver people just acrimoncia if that's what you're trying to get. Of course the other way to try to increase acrimoncia is to increase the foods that boost acrimoncia growth. And so I would say there have been a lot of different things that people have talked about, but some of the things that have the most evidence behind them, I would say probably first and foremost are polyphenols. So things with polyphenols in them, you know, cranberries, grapes, those sorts of foods are really helpful. Things that increase short-chain fatty acids are also helpful. Those have been associated with acrimoncia. So fibers like inulin, Jerusalem artichokes, there are certain foods that are very high in those kinds of fibers. So there are foods you can eat, but it's not the same as delivering the actual strain itself. Right. And you heard it here first. New product coming out. Now in your research what are the worst foods and drinks can you eat or drink that will kill off acrimoncia? Well now you're getting into places where I don't like to go because some of these are my favorite things. Well, you know, I would say first of all the most potent way to kill acrimoncia is through antibiotic use. And so first and foremost, if you have to take antibiotics, fine, but don't go out asking for them or taking them unnecessarily. That's the biggest way you kill your acrimoncia. But generally speaking I think that it's sort of the when you fill your diet with things that are feeding acrimoncia that's great. And so if you're not filling your acrimoncia that's problematic. There have been some studies to show that there are things like red meat and again I really hesitate to go down this avenue because I'm definitely going to be practicing what I preach but I do think probably the most important thing to know about acrimoncia though is that there are many factors that are not actually under your control that are leading to your depletion of acrimoncia and this is where I think it's important to know that you may not be doing anything that's depleting your acrimoncia. Aging stress, we've all been living through a very stressful two years now and going to be longer. All of these things have been correlated with depleted acrimoncia. So if you're aging or you have stress you're probably depleted in acrimoncia. Another thing I'd add which is a great trick that I've written about in the longevity paradox and the energy paradox is time restricted eating or fasting actually has been shown to dramatically increase acrimoncia counts because they're one of the few bugs that can actually live on mucus and if all you got is mucus they're going yeah okay everybody else is gone I'm going to feast. Okay so besides this exciting new product where are you going in research on the microbiome after all this? Well as I said we're doing this collaborative work with Johns Hopkins around the gut brain and I think that the gut brain doesn't just show up for things like Parkinson's and dementia but it also shows up for things like IBS and maybe if we stay on the mental health side of things and go younger I think there's really also a lot of opportunity in autism and there are quite a few people who have observed themselves that when they change diet you can really start to relieve some of the symptoms of autism and when you change diet one of the things you're most certainly changing is your microbiome composition and so trying to understand what the difference is between kids that have autism and kids that don't I think is really important and interestingly one of those differences is the ability to produce short chain fatty acids where it's depleted in kids with autism and so you can imagine that some of these pathways that we're going out for glucose control because they are fundamental to the system could also be applied in other diseases but you know we're really teeing up for going after things beyond just metabolic syndrome so stay tuned all right where can people find you in pendulum life and all the work that you're doing people can find out about us directly on our website pendulumlife.com and you can read about the clinical studies that are there you can see the ingredients in the product and all of the literature that is behind the product and of course you can purchase the product there and you know one of the important things that we offer is not just the pills but also education about the microbiome we offer free A1C testing every three months if you get the membership because we want you to see if the product is working for you or not we offer free nutrition consultations those are really helpful to know it's not just it's sort of like your body is a car it's not just about the fuel you put in your car it's about the engine you've got under the hood and so you could be giving yourself great great fuel and if you don't have the right microbiome or engine you've got a problem in vice versa so we're really tying all that together and helping people and we have a money back guarantee we are not here to fleece people we want to develop products that work and so if you take this and it doesn't work for you that's a really important principle of the company we're really on a health mission we believe the microbiome is a way to help you but if it's not we don't want to take your money I'm good for you and I understand for the Dr. Gundry podcast listeners you've been kind enough to offer a special deal for them to try pendulum what is it yes we're we want to give love to the Gundry listeners and so if you listen to this and you're excited about trying pendulum glucose control you can go to pendulumlife.com and order it and put in Gundry 20 and that will get you a discount that hopefully will help you get a chance to try the product it's a 20% discount is that what is it yes exactly great all right well thank you very much that's a great offer and I really really hope folks will take you up on it and like for instance with Gundry MD products we offer a money back guarantee it's not working for you you know send it back even if the bottles are empty and good for you I appreciate that about you and your company yes and maybe we'll be a Gundry MD product too hey all right let's work on that so thanks for joining me today Colleen your work is really quite impressive and I appreciate hard work and how many years it takes to bring a good idea to market I understand personally how hard that is and I'm excited to see that people are going to benefit from your research and development because I think the microbiome and the gut wall is where it's at and good for you so thanks for joining me and follow up on this folks and we'll keep you posted thank you take care time for the audience question this is from the Luke Hills on Instagram hi Dr. G for someone avoiding new 5GC is beef collagen safe well so new 5GC is actually a part of the lining of blood vessels in cows sheep and pigs lining of blood vessels in us in chicken and in fish we have new 5AC so beef collagen you just kind of quite frankly throw a bunch of beef and scraps and get the collagen out but if you're going to take a collagen product and you want to avoid the potential of new 5GC then just stick with fish collagen marine collagen or poultry collagen and you'll be perfectly safe using those products instead so great question okay now it's time for the review of the week from Madison E Hebert on Apple podcast now I know what polyphenols are exclamation point before hearing Dr. Gundry talk about polyphenols I've never heard this word anywhere else not only have I learned about the benefits of polyphenols but I have been able to watch how the plant paradox diet changed my mother's life and an extension changed mine after having a concussion that completely stripped away her quality of life she knew enough was enough and started reading books with Dr. Gundry's plant paradox program being one of them she was completely changed by it and still continues to share the good news with everyone around her well thanks Madison E it's notes like this as you know that number one keeps me going in my research keeps me going bringing you the Dr. Gundry podcast and please if you like what you hear either in today's episode or subsequent ones or past ones please drop us a note it really charges me up to read this and thanks again for telling me about this because I am Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you we'll see you next week