 Some people are aware of sulfites, some of the things we use to keep wine from going bad. What's the difference and why is sulfur different than sulfites and should we be worried about all these different forms of sulfur? Very good question. So you'll hear two words commonly now and they're demonized. It's sulfites and sulfates. Switch the eye for an A. Sulfates, the only difference between a sulfate and a sulfite molecule is that a sulfate has four oxygen atoms attached to a sulfur and a sulfite has three oxygen atoms and like you said we use them as preservatives frequently in foods, personal care products, many of the surfactants you know soap a long time ago used to not foam. It foams now because we use sulfates and sulfites. The the problem though those two ingredients actually are not bad for you. They're not carcinogenic they but there are individuals who are sensitive and some individuals who are actually allergic to them and so it's it's sulfite and sulfate are actual molecules containing sulfur. Sulfur is a completely separate thing. You need sulfur to live your body's made of it so they're too completely and along that line as well you know there are people who have you know allergies to sulfide drugs. Right. Trimethoprim, sulfamethoxazole is one of them and you know that once again that has nothing to do with the sulfur atom. It's the actual drug. Gotcha. And guess what he was talking about? Insulin resistance. And he said you know when you have insulin resistance and you have high blood pressure. Donald fact that's a condition of a group of conditions we call that metabolic syndrome. It always is pre-diabetes. Well we looked at all of this literature and we made the hypothesis which is not a big leap of faith that pre-diabetes is diabetes it just hasn't gotten the diagnosis yet and guess what diabetes is pre-heart disease 80% of diabetics die of heart disease. So when we looked at the literature that Raven had done which was basically the same thing he spent his career identifying this insulin resistance as a causal central cause for diabetes and the entire cardiovascular metabolic stuff towards the end of his life and his end of his research he said I wonder what else is insulin resistance is related to and he basically did what crafted he took everybody and he put them in categories and once again cancer lung disease kidney disease there was not a disease that it wasn't linked to. And Dr. Gundry we put our book out the great cholesterol myth late last year and we basically say insulin resistance is the cause of heart disease now let me put the caveat in the asterisk there obviously it doesn't it doesn't explain every case of heart disease in the world there are three year olds who were born with heart disease it but it tracks with heart disease as well as cigarettes tracked with lung cancer. I mean a lot of cigarettes don't account for every lung cancer case in the world there are people who get lung cancer who don't smoke and there are people who smoke a lot and don't get lung cancer but it sure is a good tracker it counts for like 800% increased likelihood and it's the same thing with insulin resistance. So we wrote our book we said insulin resistance we think it's the cause of heart disease with that caveat. A couple months later a great doctor that great admiration for Dr. Jason Fong he's the father of intermittent fasting comes out with a book called the cancer code and it says guess what insulin resistance is the cause of cancer and two months later a PhD I never heard of who's brilliant named Dr. Benjamin Brickman writes a book called why we get sick and guess what he thinks insulin resistance is the cause of everything else. So we've got these three independent I don't even know work man I met Fong once we've got these people who are kind of coming to the same conclusion which is insulin resistance is at the core of everything we know it's at the core of obesity and diabetes and heart disease and then the take home for this is that high blood pressure pre diabetes diabetes obesity heart disease shall I go on there all the same related conditions and when I realized that and I said holy moly if we could do something about insulin resistance we'd be wiping out the basis of half of these pre-existing conditions but I was puzzled I thought I don't really know if there's and what about lung disease kidney disease and liver disease because those are big pre-existing ones conditions also and I spent them no more than a morning on PubMed on the National Institute of Health Medicine thing trying to find a relationship between insulin resistance and lung can't a lung disease and kidney disease. It's right there there's a literature this long it's underlies all of them. So we really feel this is such an important thing I I have actually talked to others in the low-carb clinicians network about a political action committee to literally lobby the medical authorities to pay attention to insulin resistance and to teach people that you can turn around insulin resistance you can prevent it you can treat it you can you can reverse it with diet alone. I'm so excited to have you on today to talk about one of my favorite gut buddies. Let's let's start by telling my listeners what is acrimansia mucinophilia 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 this strain acrimansia mucinophila this strain is really emerging as a keystone strain that people who are healthy have been 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 or gut lining our mucin lining and you may have heard the phrase leaky gut and the idea behind leaky gut is that you you could think of your your intestinal wall like a fence. So you know you have a I have a wooden fence in my backyard and when you look out in your backyard you first buy your house you got this beautiful wooden fence with all these planks everything 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 an acrimansia is one of these strains so when you have less acrimansia 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 two 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. When you look at the range of contaminants that are in water and they, it's over a hundred. Not that they're in every municipal supply but among these hundred and fifty contaminants you've got some of them, okay? And it really takes a lot of expertise and they change and etc. But for your audience who is very, who may spend a thousand dollars a month or more on supplements, okay? And exotic new things, NAD and AMPK and things to improve their activator mitochondria, your audience needs to know like, hey, you shouldn't have any contaminants, they're more serious than you understand. And so I tell them, look, there's point of entry that refers to doing your whole house water, that's the term, POE, point of entry, your whole house to protect you while you and your family while bathing and shower. And then there's point of use, that is to make your drinking water, the water for beverages, the water for cooking. You need both for your audience. And almost, almost every point of use system out there that's, that's well accepted, is capable of removing trihalomethanes. But not necessarily all the other ones, like not many can remove fluoride from the water. And most of your audience probably wants fluoride out of the water. That's a very tough one. So of these hundred and plus contaminants, I tell them, there are only two technology categories capable. There's only two technologies capable of removing every category of contaminant. And those contaminants, everything from arsenic to heavy metals to synthetic organic chemicals like glyphosate to volatile organic chemicals like benzene to pharmaceuticals that find their way into the water supply to disinfection by products like trihalomethane. And I can go on, but it's enough. There's a lot of contaminants. A lot of stuff in there. What can you do to know you're going to get them all out? Only two, distillation plus activated carbon and reverse osmosis plus activated carbon. That's it. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. Because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you.