interview with kiran krishnan - humanlongevityfilm.com · interview with kiran krishnan there are...

Interview with Kiran Krishnan

There are two terms that are used interchangeably, microbiota and microbiome. Often they're confused. Microbiota is actually the microbes, the population of microbes including viruses and bacteria and all that exists in any given part of the body. For example, the skin has a totally different microbiota than gut, and different parts of the gut have different microbiota. The eyeball has a different microbiota. The placenta does. Those are the population of bacteria, viruses, and other organisms that exist. Microbiota is a totality of microbes and all the genetic elements. That's where things change, because the genetic elements of the microbes really determine health and wellness in many ways.

One of the things that's really important to note with a human being, we have to really change the way we look at ourselves. We used to think of ourselves as Homo sapiens sapiens, this amazing creature that moved up the evolutionary ladder, the food chain, and we're just so awesome. We look at our chromosomes, we've got 22,000 functional genes. Sounds like a lot, but you compare that with a rice plant or an earthworm that has double the amount of genes, we don't start to look that cool anymore. How do we conduct all the functions that we do on a daily basis with such limited number of genes?

As it turns out, the microbial gene within our body amount to about 3.3 million in total. We've got 150 times more bacterial viral DNA in our body than human DNA. It's looking like 99% of metabolic function, things that we do on a daily basis that make us human are coded for by bacterial and viral DNA. We can barely do anything for ourselves. We

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need the microbial DNA to conduct necessary function to live, to digest food, to breathe. Even how our emotions and view of the world are concentrated and how they're characterized are dependent on the types of microbes and microbial DNA we have in our system.

I love the view of a human being as a whole biome. A whole biome is a super organism. We're really a walking, talking ecology. We're like a walking, talking rainforest. There's a massive amount of structure to the ecology. Different parts of the body, different ecologies within the body have to communicate with one another. We require all of their help in order to be human. We didn't exist and thrive as a human in isolation. We thrived as a human because we were able to pick up organisms from our environment and create this super organism.

With the mindset that we are highly dependent on our ecology, our body's ecology in order to perpetuate health and even conduct basic functions as a human being, we now know that we really can't even start to think about longevity and how we're going to live into our hundreds for example without disease, without being propped up by medication, without really addressing the ecology of our body, and all of the things that we're doing to destroy ecology on a daily basis.

We now know that that's a new view of disease. Disease can be perpetuated by small perturbations in our ecology. One small change in our ecology can amplify itself into a really serious condition. Autoimmune disease for example can be started by a simple course of antibiotics, or another environmental trigger. Being exposed to certain things like glyphosate or other weed killers and pesticides can start causing perturbations in the ecology, which will then amplify itself into this dysbiotic system called a disease.

One of my big focus is as always, what are the things that we're doing in the modern world that our ancestors never did which allowed them to evolve to give us this opportunity to exist in the world today? Some of the things that they really avoided and they had actually no opportunity to do was to kill off microbes in a large scale on a daily basis really for no good reason. One of the things we've done is we've demonized microbes. You'll see in all of these products that they sell stores for household


cleaning and use on personal care products. They'll say it kills 99.9% of bacteria.

That has gotten into the psyche of the average American consumer or the Western consumer, is that we need to sanitize and sterilize our environment. That includes our own body. That's a really dangerous thing because the microbes on our skin play a critical role of the health of our skin. Not only the heath our skin, but communication between our skin, our gut, our brain, our immune system, and so on.

Every time we use an antimicrobial soap or a hand sanitizer and we kill off these really good commensal bacteria within our skin, we're setting up the process of disease. That turns into things like acne, dermatitis, psoriasis, eczema, it can even turn to something as simple as just dry skin which then breaks easier. Then you can get more microbes getting into the surface of the skin. The barrier function of the skin doesn't work anymore. Then we end up with MRSA infections and things that could be really serious. All of that just starts with simple perturbations of the ecology of our skin for no good reason.

When we look at our skin cells, and we've got a lot of skin cells, all we see is skin. We've got about 50 bacteria cells for every one skin cell that's on our dermal layer. We are far more bacterial on our outer shell then we are human skin cells. Yet every day we're trying to perturb and cause disruption in them. One of the things that people just don't realize, any time we use antimicrobial products, what we're doing is selecting for more virulent and more pathogenic and more harmful organisms. Less than 2% of microbes ever discovered are harmful to humans. That means 98+ percent is actually beneficial or benign. The best way to control that 2% is let the 98% flourish.

One of the interesting studies recently on interaction with the environment and the resulting health effects has come from a study that Finland has funded on trying to identify why they're having actually an epidemic allergies of asthma and new dysfunctions within the country. Now, what's interesting is that a geographic proximity to a town in Russia read by the border Finland. They're just a couple hundred kilometers apart. Their environment, the temperature, everything seems to be about the same. Yet the people that live in this part of Russia have far


lower incidence rates of things like chronic sinusitis, asthma, upper respiratory infection, and all of the things that go along with those kind of immune dysfunctions. Yet in Finland it's much higher.

They're trying to figure out, what is the difference between those two populations? As it turns out, when they look at the Russian population, the diversity and the presence of microbes, even pathogenic microbes, what we would consider pathogenic microbes are much more abundant in their dust, in their air, in their household services and so on. And they go outside more and they interact more with the dirt. They interact more with the outside environment rather than the people in Finland.

That one change in how they live with regards to the environment has caused I think it was a two or threefold increase in prevalence of asthma, allergies, chronic rhinosinusitis, conjunctivitis, and all these upper respiratory diseases. That's all the difference. They live a couple hundred kilometers apart. Yet their disease prevalence rates are so different because one population doesn't interact with the environment as much and the other one does. That's a great example of how just in the last 40 years things can change so drastically just with a simple exclusion of dirt.

There are studies now that have shown the human circadian rhythm that we know a lot about actually matches up with what we call our microbial or micro-biome rhythm. It has its own circadian rhythm. We called a diurnal system because it has a night phase and a daytime phase. A lot of it is actually dictated by the amount of calories coming in and the foods that we're eating. During the nighttime phase hen we're, we have different types of microbes that start to flourish. They do things like they eat some of the mucus layer and they stimulate reproduction of the mucus layer, which is a very important protective barrier that separates the outside of the world from the inside of our body.

These types of bacteria are like akkermansia muciniphila, which is a mucin-loving bacteria, does well during the fasted state. The moment we start feeding ourselves all these calories and foods, their level start to go down. What we're starting to see is that all these metabolites and functions within the body are cyclical. You can't have the same bacteria always abundant at the same time. There's just not enough space. With it being an ecology, things are going to fluctuate. We now know that


nighttime increases of these types of bacteria, the fasting type of bacteria will actually increase healing, will increase be something called autophagosomes, which actually will clean up DNA debris, dead cells, damaged tissue, and things like that.

That nighttime phase of bacteria becomes extremely important. We destroy that by eating too frequently, and then we're going into a real fasted state. There's also some linkages now to sleep, cycling, and the production of things like GABA BDNF with the nighttime nocturnal type of bacteria. There's a great synchronicity between our own circadian rhythm and our microbes. We'll probably come to find out that our microbes control our own circadian rhythm. If we're not sleeping well, if we're not recovering well, all of that probably has to do with not allowing certain microbes to flourish at that time of day.

I talk to people all the time about microbiome and microbiota. We're very quick to jump to these precise solutions. We want to affect this bacteria in some way or eliminate this bacteria, grow this bacteria. We still don't know exactly is doing what. What we know right now with fairly good certainty is general themes. The theme that more diversity improves health in general is a very solid theme. We know that. Want to do things that increase bacterial diversity. Prevotella is really bad or actinobacteria is really bad or firmicute species of bacteria are really bad. We want to bring that down and increase this up. Clostridium is really bad.

We're not there yet. We're literally at the tip of the iceberg of understanding this highly complex ecology. The thing that makes it really hard is it's different in everybody. The most unique things about you is your microbiome. No two individuals in the world have the same microbiome, not even identical twins. They have exactly the same DNA. Everything about their genes is exactly the same. Their microbiome could be up to 30% different. That means they have 30 trillion organism difference within the microbiome. That completely changes their body, their physiology, their health, their wellness, even their view on the world. We're really at the infancy, and we have to be very careful when jumping in too quickly and trying to do precision therapeutics when it comes to the microbiome.


I like to always look back at evolution and see, what did our ancestors do to support our microbiome that led us to this phase where we are right now, where we are the top of the food chain, top of the evolutionary ladder? Just going back to the basics, playing in the dirt, eating a diverse diet, getting rid of all these chemicals we know that harm us seems to make the most sense right now.

The birthing process and even gestation is a really important time for starting to develop the microbiome and the child. We used to think of the whole womb and the birthing canal all that as fairly sterile. Now we know that the womb especially in utero is not a sterile environment. We actually find mom's gut bacteria in amniotic fluid and even in the core blood. There's indication that there are immune cells that go and pick up Mom's good bacteria from her git and actually transport it into the fetus in utero through the core blood, through the amniotic fluid to get the baby exposed to certain types of microbes before the baby even comes out.

Then the next step is the breaking of the water. The breaking of the water actually plays a significant role because it unleashes and disrupts all the microbes that are sticking and adhered to mom's birth canal and releases them and make them open for transfer. There's a significant process in that. As the baby's moving through the birth canal, he or she's picking out huge amounts of microbes not only on its skin, but also in its mouth and its nose, eyes, oral cavity, and so on.

It's interesting when you look at mom's vaginal bacteria, because the vaginal bacteria microbiome is actually one of the areas where you don't want a lot of diversity. There are five specific strains, lactobacillus strains have actually, are predominant in the vaginal microbiome. If you start to see lowering amounts of those five strains, you start to get disruptions of the vaginal microbiome like BV, bacterial vaginosis, or chronic UTIs or yeast infections.

What happens by the second trimester being pregnant is a particular bacteria called lactobacillus johnsonii starts to gain high prevalence in the vaginal canal. That's really interesting because lactobacillus johnsonii, one of its main functions is digesting milk. Women are not digesting milk in their vaginas all the time. The only reason for that bacteria to


increase in prevalence is to inoculate the babies. The baby has a significant amount of lactobacillus johnsonii, so he can start digesting mother's milk right off the bat.

It's a wonderful, beautiful system to see how the body changes different parts of the microbiome, how the ecology can change in preparation for this really important event, which is delivering a child. From an ecological standpoint and from an evolutionary standpoint, that is extremely important. That is the whole issue with perpetuating our species is can we do healthy live births? Once a baby passes through the vaginal canal, gets inoculated with all the bacteria, then after the period of inoculation, then there's something we call succession. That's the bacteria start to specialize in their specific regions.

If you take a newborn baby and you swab the baby's eyes, ears, mouth, vaginal canal if it's a girl, skin, all those microbes resemble mom's vaginal bacteria. About six months after the baby's born, you swab the skin, gut, mouth, and so on, it starts to resemble mom's skin bacteria, vaginal bacteria, gut bacteria. They start specializing in their role. That becomes a really important way of inoculating getting the baby started with their microbiome journey.

Breast milk is one of the most amazing natural compounds or foods that you can find. I always say it's the only mammalian food that's been perfected by evolution. Woman 'til this day are still making breast milk because it's absolutely necessary. Despite how much research has been poured into infant formula since the early 1800s, they still today cannot match mother's milk. We have some of the best scientists and biggest companies working on this for over 100 years, and they still cannot match the nutrient potency of mother's milk.

Now, one of the aspects of mother's milk that's really important is the fact that it contains 600 to 800 different species of bacteria. Mother's milk is loaded with microbes. It's one of the most microbial dense foods. Then the other thing it contains is up to 200 different oligosaccharides, which are prebiotics. These prebiotics, babies can't even digest for energy. It's there purely to help seed the microbes that the baby has been exposed to and that's coming in from mother's milk. The composition of mother's milk and the exposure to mother's milk is extremely important.


We now know that bottle-fed babies versus breast-fed babies have a higher prevalence rate of metabolic disease, have a higher prevalence rate of allergies, asthma, even things type II diabetes, obesity, and so on. We know that that impact of not having mother's milk is something that can be realized for the lifetime of the child. It can start early. The child can develop allergies, asthma, and all that early on. Or the child can end up being obese in their teens and later 20s and so on. All of that stems from just not getting the right microbes through mother's milk.

When you really understand the importance of the natural birthing process of through that birth canal, the fact that the US today I think it's still around 33% of births are C-section. Of course, some of them you can't help. The baby's breach, or there's other complications. Many of them are still elective. In fact, a lot of doctors will encourage their patients to get elective C-sections because it's easier to schedule. In our modern world being scheduled and having everything on a calendar, that just seems to be the easier thing. The problem is that is babies that are born from C-section don't pass through that birth canal that evolution has designed for us to perpetuate as a species. You end up getting exposure to very different types of microbes.

What you see in babies that are C-section born is the initial microbes they get exposed to that are predominant in the body or things like staphylococcus, streptococcus rather than bifidobacterium, lactobacillus, and all that are known to be good, commensal bacteria. Those C-section babies tend to have a much higher prevalence rate of immune dysfunctions, allergies, asthma, psoriasis, eczema, higher incidence rate of things like ear infections, which means that then they're getting more antibiotics early on in life. More antibiotics early on in life will cause a trickle-down effect of disrupting their health and wellness down the road as well. It's the start of a process that really messes up their ecology and causes much increased risk for disease for disease down the road.

As a microbiologist, I've always secretly been an evolutionary biologist on the inside. Because I love bacteria and I love digging into how we interact with bacteria, the good and the bad, and how they shape the lives that we live and shape our bodies. The simplest way to really dig into the impact of microbes and how we can live a longer, healthier, really good


life is by going back to the basics. Going back to how we interact with nature.

We have created this amazing symbiotic relationship in our bodies. There was this, a microbiologist that won a Pulitzer Prize. He actually written a book that said there were three species in the world that would survive almost any catastrophic event that happened on Earth. Those are ants, termites, and cockroaches. The reason for those three is because they are community organisms that work together really well. No matter what the stressors are, they do a really good job of working together as a singular community to perpetuate the health of the whole. That's exactly what our human body is. We are a community. We're a walking, talking rain forest. Anytime we do anything to disturb or perturb that community, we're really setting up disease.

If we look back at our ancestors and how they lived, their interaction with the dirt, their lack of sterilization, consuming huge, diverse amounts of foods, not eliminating entire categories of foods because of fancy diets that they hear about. Those are simple basic things that we can adopt today that will make a huge change in our microbial community and then perpetuate health and wellness. We got to go back to basics. That's the simplest thing we can do today. It's so highly effective.

Like birth control, that's a simple one to go after. Because we look at it and we go okay, did our ancestors use birth control and estrogen pills and progesterone pills and so on? When you think, no they didn't, so if we are using it at a high prevalence rates, probably creating issues within our body. Then comes a study that was published and connected by Harvard University. What they showed is that women who are on birth control have a 300% increased risk of Crohn's disease, which is a gastrointestinal disruptive disease. It's a progressive disease. It's autoimmune. It causes really horrific lifetime changes. That just comes from the use of birth control pills.

Then when you really dig into the science, you can figure out exactly why that happens. There's a constellation of bacteria called estrobolome that's responsible for metabolizing estrogen within the body. It seems like we're screwing up that estrobolome by utilizing birth control pills.


Estrobolome doesn't just metabolize estrogen. It also controls a lot of the immune reaction in the lining of the intestines.

They don't just do one job, they do multiple jobs. When we mess them up by utilizing synthetic hormones as a daily regimen for no really good reason, then we start disrupting their function in other areas too. We develop Crohn's disease, which then requires us to go into all kinds of steroid treatments and scopes. It's just a perpetuating system of leading us down the wrong path and really disrupting longevity. All we have to do is look back at our ancestors and go, did they use birth control? No. We probably shouldn't be using birth control. It can be that simple.

The immune system is a really interesting system in the body. First, it's important to note that it's the only system in the body designed solely to protect us. That's it's one and only function. However, the immune system is the hardest working system in show business I always say because they have to encounter so many different things on a daily basis and figure out whether that thing is friend or foe. That includes the hundreds of trillions of microbes that are sitting in the gut right on top of the immune tissue.

Imagine the job of these innate immune cells, like the first line of defense of cells, things like dendritic cells and macrophages. Their job is to move around in the sea of microbes and flip around each one, tap them on the shoulder if you will and have them turn around and figure out whether they're friend or foe. This is what they're doing on a daily basis. Now, what's really interesting as we come to understand the immune system is our microbes within our gut. The microbes within the environment are the ones that train and tutor the immune system.

I always describe the immune system as like an army with all of the equipment. They have the soldiers, they have the tanks, the planes, the bombs. They have no general and they have no plan. We're not born with an understanding from the protective of our immune system of what the world looks like, of what to attack and what not to attack. We have to learn that. Learning is called immune tutoring. We come to find out that the microbes in our environment are the key trainers of our immune system to develop something called oral tolerance. The


microbes will actually show the immune system what to attack and what not to attack.

The moment we start eliminating our exposure to these microbes, our immune system becomes more and more naïve. When the immune system is naïve, it attacks everything it sees. That can be as simple as things like peanut protein, dairy or ragweed or pollen, and cause really irritating things like allergies. Or it can be as severe as an autoimmune disease. It starts attacking your own intestinal cells. It starts attacking your own joints. It starts attacking your own brain tissue. It causes severe chronic diseases. All of that comes from the immune system just being naïve and not getting enough exposure to the right types of microbes to train itself.

As you're developing, one of the things that's extremely important is how you train your immune system. Part of training your immune system is getting sick. That exercises all the capabilities of the immune system. Things like warranting the infection, being able to exercise the right cells to be able to neutralize the infected cells or get the viruses and bacteria that are causing the infection to also sequester infections and prevent them from spreading within the body. All of the chemical signatures that go into recruiting more immune cells into that space or even cells that repair the damage that's being done. All of those things are learned by practice. Also, the next time you're exposed to the same thing, you get a much better response to it.

A fever for example is something that our body creates. When you are first exposed to something, part of the defense system is the creation of fever. The creation of fever increases the body temperature which actually makes it harder for viruses and bacteria to grow and proliferate within the body. That's a defense mechanism. It's your first line of defense, so that's like your general response to any sort of virus bacteria that your body sees. Now, once it's learned about that virus and bacteria because it's attacked it once, the second time around you probably never even get the fever because we don't need the first line of defense. The immune system goes, oh, we've seen this before. We know how to deal with it. Let's send in the specialists who are now designed to attack that very particular bacteria or virus.


The process of getting sick is that kind of training. You actually exercise your and system and make it more intelligent just by getting sick. We get really scared of kids picking up colds and flus and we want to vaccinate them against the flu and we want to give them medications and all that to prevent colds and viruses exposure, of course sanitation, all of these things. All of that is such an important part of training the immune system.

With the lack of exposure to illness, which means that we have a lack of training of the immune system, what happens is the immune system becomes more and more naïve. As it becomes more naïve, it really starts to exercise its capability in the wrong way. That can be something as simple as starting to attack its own cells or your own commensal bacteria within your gut. This whole prevention of exposure to things that could possibly make a child sick early on in life can actually lead to very naïve immune system in their late and early 20s that's now attacking their own intestinal cells and causing thing like colitis or Crohn's or other autoimmune type conditions.

It becomes extremely important for people to continuously exercise their immune system and allow it to learn the environment around itself. Because when it doesn't know the environment around itself, when it's not exposed to the microbes that we inevitably breathe in and are exposed to and so on, then it becomes perturbed and becomes reactionary. It starts to attack things that it shouldn't attack because it doesn't have the knowledge. A lot of that can be prevented by just kind of being a little dirty. Allowing kids to pick their nose. Allowing kids to play in the dirt and not sanitize them afterwards.

You go for, and I see this all the time. I try to go out in the woods as much with my kids and hiking and playing in the dirt and so on. You see the moment they're done with that hike and they sit down and eat a sandwich and they're squirting all the antimicrobials to clean off all of that wonderful earth that's on their system. You need to get that kind of exposure to continue to train their immune system. A vast majority of diseases we look at today can be attributed to disruption in the immune response. That includes things like diabetes, heart disease, cancers, and of course every one of the autoimmune diseases as well.


One of the things, and this actually came out of a really funny incident. I was at the park with my son who was at that time, I think he was three and a half or four. He made some friends who are around the same age. They were talking. It was funny listening to kid conversations. They're so pure and natural. One of the things they were talking about is boogers. There were going, "I eat my boogers. I eat my boogers." They were all sharing with each other that they eat their boogers. It got me to think that okay, we all did that as kids. It just seemed like such a normal, natural thing. You'd pull out this gross, slimy thing out of your nose and your instinct is to put it in your mouth, which is completely crazy when you think about it as an adult.

We all did that. Every culture around the world does that. What is that instinct to eat your boogers? Then I started thinking about, what is a booger? A booger is actually a natural oral vaccine. On a daily basis, you're inhaling microbes all over the place because for example, a bird could fly by your house. That bird will shed microbes as it's flying by, or it lands on your roof. It sheds microbes as it's sitting there. Those microbes get sucked into your air vent system and gets blown out through your air conditioning. In the air you've got huge amounts of microbes that are all floating around that you're sucking in on a daily basis.

Once that microbe gets sucked into your nasal system, then your mucus layer basically covers it. What's inside your mucus layer are immune cells and antibodies and all that that basically tag those microbes. Then when you take that booger and you swallow it, it presents that microbe along with the immune factors to something called the Peyer's patches in your small bowel. The Peyer's patches can then amplify the immune response against it.

You're basically immunizing yourself to the world around you. It becomes such an important thing. It still exists today, likely because it was very important of the evolutionary development of the human species. We have to inoculate ourselves with the environment in order to teach that. A booger is an oral vaccine. Don't let your kids not eat their boogers. Don't discourage them from doing it. In fact, if they want to have booger parties, let them have booger parties. The more, the merrier.


Oftentimes people will call the gut the second brain. I think it's debatable whether it's the second or the first brain. They're both about two and a half pounds. If you take the full load of microbes within the gut, it weighs about two and a half pounds. When you look at the brain, it's about two and a half pounds. They're very interesting. The gut is only the part of the body that can function independent of the brain because it has of course its own ecology, its own metabolic system. It can perpetuate without the brain being involved. Every other organ in your body requires a brain to signal it to function.

Then we start looking at influences of the brain from the gut itself. As it turns out, the bacteria within the gut have a direct connection to the brain. It's a two-way system. That's through the enteric nervous system. The enteric nervous system basically covers the entire digestive tract from the mouth all the way down to your bottom. There's more nerve endings in the enteric nervous system than in your spinal cord itself. It's a very dense neurological system.

That enteric nervous system, which the bacteria in your gut have direct access to, connects to something called the vagus nerve which goes right to the brain. Imagine this, that bacteria within your gut can actually produce chemicals like neurotransmitters, peptides, things that could influence your thought and the way you react to the world around you and directly send it to your brain through the vagus nerve and the enteric nervous system. Your brain can then communicate directly with your gut as well try to get help from the bacteria in many ways. For example, in hormones.

Hormone signaling is a two-way mechanism. Our gut microbiome makes basically every hormone that our endocrine system can make. Our endocrine system through our brain can talk to our gut and say hey, we need more of this hormone or more of that hormone. Whether it's serotonin, dopamine, any of the stress hormones, even testosterone is being made in the gut we now understand. That gut-brain connection is something that we're really starting to understand and we're really starting to understand that our bacteria will determine so much of how our brain works, even more than how our brain can influence what our bacteria is doing.


The best explanation for what the appendix is, is really it's a reservoir for bacteria for you. It is post-gastric, meaning it's past the stomach acid. Most of those microbes that live in the appendix would actually be fairly a sensitive to stomach acid, especially as an adult. The appendix is post-gastric. It's there to start continuously inoculate the microbes within the intestinal lining because of course naturally we do thing that kill off the bacteria.

The idea of removing this organ because they didn't really understand what it did was just kind of crazy. There are parts of the body that exist today that they weren't sure what it was for, but evolution has selected for that part to remain. Going through and cutting out that part of the body seems to cause a significant amount of issues down the road. Of course as appendicitis, people get inflammation appendix. It can burst. There are dangers with that.

For the most part, we should really be trying to preserve that appendix because it contains our really unique flora. That's like the seeds for our actual flora. Cutting out important parts of the body like that are really, it's an amazing thing to think about that we would just go and lop it off, and then not assume that it's going to cause significant amount of problems down the road.

Tonsils play really important role as draining cavities really for your immune system. We've got all these glands all over the body that are real sites of action. For example, if you get something going, an infection going on in upper respiratory system, tonsils are a really important gland where the immune response to that is being basically structured. If we start removing these kind of glands, we're really suppressing our bodies ability to actually go after infections, viruses, bacteria and so on.

Now we know that we've got this issue with chronic viral infections in places like our upper respiratory system, in the dorsal root ganglia, in our jawlines, in places like that like Epstein-Barr virus, cytomegalovirus that can remain there forever. Because our immune system just is not what to go after them. Part of that could be because we've removed these key immune glands out of our system. Once they're not there, we can't conduct the functions that we need to go after these guys.


Stress is probably one of the number one things that causes long-term chronic illness in our society. The mechanisms for which now are much more clearly understood than even five years ago. A recent review published in 2015 in the Journal of Immunology showed that stress related endotoxemia, and we'll talk about what that is, is probably the number one cause of morbidity and mortality in the developed world. Stress-induced endotoxemia. It's amazing to think how much of an impact stress can have.

The two areas where stress can really destroy health and wellness longevity is one, in the increase in permeability in the intestines. We now know that stress and the response to stress which is a release to stress hormones can actually increase the permeability of your intestines, which allows for more toxins that should be sequestered in your digestive tract to leak into your bloodstream on a regular basis. When it's leaking into your bloodstream on a regular basis, what we're doing is we're inducing a chronic activation of the inflammatory part of our immune system on a regular basis. It never goes away. It never subsides.

Even though that momentary stress is gone, the leakiness of the gut the remains. The effect of that stress is there for the next several days, weeks, maybe even months. Then of course the next time you get stressed again, it reopens up and you start having those issues. That's what we call endotoxemia. It comes from leaky gut. Endotoxemia is basically toxins that are produced from your own good commensal bacteria that are supposed to be sequestered in your digestive tract and then excreted out through defecation is now basically entering your bloodstream and causing huge amounts of immune activation. The same kind of immune activation that has been shown to start the process of heart disease, start the process of obesity, type II diabetes, cancers, autoimmune disease, and so on.

All of that starts with opening up of the tight junctions, the leakiness of the gut, and all of those toxins coming in. How does stress make you gain weight? That's how it is. Because that kind of endotoxemia promotes obesity. How does stress affect the heart? That endotoxin starts up the process of inflammation in the vessels. Same thing with diabetes and so on.


Now, the other place that stress can actually cause further issues is we now know that the increased expression of stress hormone increases the virulence of fairly dormant but yet opportunistic viruses and bacteria. Take Epstein-Barr virus or cytomegalovirus or even certain strains of E. coli or clostridium within the gut that are just there, normal parts of the gut. They're not infective, they're not causing any problems. In some cases they're actually doing some beneficial things. The moment you get stress and you have all this release of stress for hormone, it actually makes them more virulent and make them infective. It gives them the opportunity to become pathogenic at that point. That's another way that stress can create this long-term chronic infection that your body, that causes significant disruption in your body.

I just did a talk at a conference this last weekend. It was a focus on autoimmune disease. One of the things we know about autoimmune disease is that you have to have some sort of genetic predisposition, which most of us actually do. Then the second part is you have to have some sort of intestinal dysbiosis. Then the third part is an environmental trigger. I went through this thought experiment of how a single cell phone call could create lupus in your body. Follow me on this.

You get a stressful phone call from your partner or your boss or whoever it may be. You put the phone to your head and you start talking. The stress from the call alone starts the body into an inflammatory process, starts leaky gut that we've talked about, starts the inflammatory system and the immune activation. 15 MHz of EMF from your cell phone for just a few minutes is enough to trigger Epstein-Barr virus or cytomegalovirus to start becoming more infective. It actually increases the opportunity for those viruses to become infective.

Those viruses stepping up their infectivity will actually cause your immune system to start attacking tissues around where those viruses are. Inevitably they start attacking your own tissues. You're on a phone, you're having a stressful call that's already setting up inflammation. The EMF from the phone is increasing the virulence of these viruses. Then you put down the phone, and now your body is dealing with increased infective viruses, and then now it's dealing with inflammation coming out of your gut. Those two things are enough to set your body down a cascade of autoimmune disease.


That can translate into lupus. It can translate into rheumatoid arthritis. It can translate into one of the hundred of autoimmune diseases that we know about today. We know that these EMFs can at least affect the pathogen's that live within the body. There's more work coming on how it can possibly affect the microbiota. Right now we know that they can at least affect the pathogens.

When we look at population that tend to be really healthy and live long lives and actually have a really good cognitive function and they deal with stress well, they're relaxed, you find that most of these do their own gardening. In fact, gardening has been so powerful, and it's being realized now that people are actually utilizing gardening therapy for people that suffer from mood disorders, emotional disorders, and all that. There's a calming effect in that gardening. You see that in such great prevalence in the societies where people who live longer, healthier lives.

There's of course numerous things when you're own clean food. There's no pesticides and all that on them. Now we know that within the soil itself, there are certain microbes that actually affect our psyche in a significant way. Recently we've discovered a bacteria called mycobacterium vaccae. mycobacterium vaccae is a common garden soil organism that when you're exposed to it, it gets on your skin and it gets into your nasal cavities and into your mouth eventually, it actually is one of the most potent stimulators of serotonin within your gut. Serotonin, our happy hormone, is produced largely in our gut.

We now know that biochemical or the microbiological reasons for why gardening can actually make you happy. These societies have known that hundreds of years and they've just been growing their own stuff, playing in the dirt and getting exposed to that dirt. Now we know that at least there's this one bacteria that can get into your system and stimulate the production of happy hormone. It's so significant just to get in there and get in your dirt and make your own food.

One of the most exciting things to figure out is how you microbiome allows you to adapt to your environment. Again, our chromosomes are limited. We don't have enough DNA in our system to really conduct the day-to-day functions that we require, certainly not to adapt to a new environment. Two great examples of that is if you look at the Inuit


Indians, they have a diet largely based on seal fat. Their microbiomes have changed to a point where they can actually do that kind of diet and actually consume that kind of diet in a healthy way without all the inflammation associated with having a really high fat diet. Their microbiomes have done that for them.

Another great example is Japanese people. If you look at the species of bacteroides within Japanese gastrointestinal tracts, the bacteroides within the Japanese population has the ability to produce an enzyme called beta porphyranase. Beta porphyranase is a enzyme that breaks down seaweed. They have this because they eat a lot of sushi, which has seaweed on it. Now, the beauty of where this enzyme can from and the DNA for this enzyme, it actually comes from the fish itself, the bacteria in the fish, because it's raw fish. They're not sterilizing it, which is a smart way to do it. They're getting actual live bacteria from the fish entering their system. The bacteria that live on the fish have the capability to produce this enzyme, because the fish are eating seaweed.

Now the Japanese population's guts have picked up this capability for them to break down seaweed, because they're eating a lot of it. Their microbiomes have adapted them to that environment and the things that they tend to be exposed to. In the Western population, most of us don't have the ability to create this enzyme beta porphyranase because we don't eat seaweed that much.

It's amazing to look at how different parts of the world, people's microbiomes have allowed them to adapt to their specific environment. Another very simple thing is I come from India. I was born in India and grew up in India until just before high school. When I was in India I could drink the tap water in India and be perfectly fine. Having lived here now for over 25 years, if I go back to India and drink the tap water I will probably get very sick.

The difference there is my microbiome has changed significantly from moving to the Western world. The microbiome you live in India has developed resistance and capabilities dealing with those types of microbes that you see on a daily basis versus now the microbiome that I have in my gut is completely different. It's wonderful to see how the


microbiome can allow you to adapt to your environment if you allow the microbes from the environment to come into your system.

When we're looking at people that live in these zones where they tend to live over the age of 100 years old, they tend to live much longer than most Western populations. What's really interesting is that they all have their own varied diets and lifestyles. If you take one of them from one place and implant them in another place, they probably won't do as well. The commonality between all of them is their insistence on interacting closely with their environment and not separating themselves from their environment like we do today.

The water that they drink comes from rivers and streams in their natural environment, which means that they're getting all the microbes that are coming in from animals that bathe in the same water or even defecate in that water, urinate in that water. Or the soil organisms that get pulled into the water after a rain. They're getting exposure to all those environmental microbes that allow them supremely adapted to that environment that they live in.

The example of the Japanese people with their ability to produce that beta porphyranase enzyme is a great example where they're pulling back capabilities from their environment. If Japanese people took fish and only cooked the fish, they would likely not have that capability. They're eating raw fish, so they're getting that environmental bacteria coming in. The one commonality among all of these areas where people tend to live much longer, happier, better lives in general is that they allow themselves to be exposed to the environment in a very great degree.

One of the things we know is that lack of sleep can really disrupt the ecology of our microbiome. One main reason for that is our sleeping process actually encourages the growth of certain types of microbes within the body like akkermansia. Akkermansia is a very important bacteria that actually improves our metabolic system, improves the excretion of damaged DNA in cells and things within the body, reduces inflammation in a drastic way. That type of bacteria does really well during the sleeping process. If we're shrinking our sleeping window, we're not allowing those kinds of key bacterias to flourish.


When they're not flourishing, then we find the physiological effect of them with increased inflammation, increased stress, inability to deal with stressful situations that come up in life. Then just the lack of stress management because of the sleep, because of the disruption of the ecology of the gut then increases the pathogenicity of viruses and bacteria and all that. It's like this snowballing effect where a few nights of lack of sleep will disrupted the ecology of the microbiome. Because the ecology of the microbiome is disrupted, we can't deal with stress as well. Because we can't deal with stress as well, the viruses and bacteria that could be harmful to us start to do well in the body and create disease.

One of the most important things with perpetuating a healthy microbiome, which means a healthy life and longevity is interactions with other humans. Not just humans but other species of animals as well. We now know that there's a centralized kind of microbiome cloud if you will. We're all familiar with the cloud where we can upload and download stuff. It happens with the microbiome as well. There's this community of genes or genetic elements or community of microbes that exist around people. You can measure it in households. Having a good social community, that interaction, hugging people when you see them rather than just handshaking or high-fiving makes a big difference because we're exchanging bacteria, we're exchanging DNA, we're exchanging genetic components as well that play a big role in how healthy we are.

An example of the negative side to this where we can show a perturbation in the system is I was privy to a lecture that's being, a research study that's being done I believe at Johns Hopkins. This was at a conference I was speaking at on the microbiome early this year. The study hasn't been published yet but the data is fascinating. What they were able to show is that they were following households where one individual of the household had to go through a course in antibiotics, and then they followed that individual's microbiome over six months after the antibiotics.

What they showed was that the individual's microbiome remained perturbed up to six months after the antibiotics. They could show the dysbiosis. What was really crazy about it is they found that the people that live in the same household, whether they're intimate partners or not intimate partners, even platonic partners who are not sleeping in the


same bed had the same disruption in their microbiome without taking antibiotic. They could measure this even up to six months after the one individual was done.

When you're living in a household with other people, you've got a microbial community. When one person disrupts the community by taking course antibiotics, it actually disrupts the microbial community of everyone in that household. It can be measured. That's what's crazy about it. Community is extremely important. One of the things I always tell people is I see this all the time. When a baby is born and family members come to visit the baby, the first thing everyone is forced to do is sanitize their hands. They have the biggest jars of hand sanitizer I've ever seen in households where newborns are born because everyone that walks through the door has to go through sanitation step.

That's really defeating the purpose of interaction with the baby, with the friends and family and neighbors and so on. It's actually extremely important for people to come along, hold the baby, kiss the baby, hug the baby, do all those things and exchange those microbes. We get so scared with each other with our microbes. What we don't realize is as a collective, we become healthier if we share our microbes. That's our collective strength comes from our microbes. When we let the microbes interact with each other, it perpetuates the whole species.

One of the key components in immunology is something called Toll-like receptors. Toll-like receptors are really interesting because we've known that the microbes line the gut lining. That's where most immune tissue, so 80% of your immune tissue is in your gut. It's in the intestinal lining. We also know that that immune tissue is covered by trillions and trillions of bacteria.

The question has always been, how is it that the bacteria interact with the immune system on a daily basis without causing inflammation and immune reaction that would be similar to immune reaction against disease? Which would be devastating to the system on a daily basis. How is it that these microbes can talk to our immune system on a regular basis without enacting an immune response, if you will? Then the discovery of Toll-like receptors helped explain that.


Toll-like receptors are these really interesting receptors that are expressed in many of our cells, including of course our immune cells that are expressed in response to the presence of certain types of bacteria. The bacteria allow the Toll-like receptors to up-regulate, which will recognize patterns on those microbes themselves. They will recognize patterns on both pathogenic organisms so that our immune system knows, oh, this Toll-like receptor is activated. That means it's a bad bacteria. Or these Toll-like receptors are activated, which means it's a fine, friendly bacteria. In this case we don't start eliciting an immune response. In this case we do elicit an immune response.

It's a really interesting communication tool between our commensal bacteria and the rest of our immune system. What we start to find is that when we have low levels of expression of certain types of Toll-like receptors, we become overactive in our immune system and start to attack everything. We have no way of actually perpetuating the expression of our own Toll-like receptors. We count on bacteria to do it. Lack of exposure to bacteria or perturbations in our ecology will disrupt the expression of Toll-like receptors, and then key communication, what we call cross talk between the microbiome in the immune system.

One of the most complicated things in the world is our own ecology, our own body's ecology. One of the things that really has confused scientists and medical doctors is the presence of microbes and viruses that we think of as being pathogenic and harmful. If they're there, should we kill it? Should we go after it? A great example is the systematic attack of H. pylori. Helicobacter pylori is an important bacteria that's actually quite commensal to your stomach and your upper G.I. tract. However, some H. pylori can cause ulcers.

Now what they've done over the last 25, 30 years is anytime they see H. pylori on a test, that it's there, it's positive, they hit it with antibiotics. Oh, it shouldn't be there, it can possibly cause ulcers, let's get rid of it. Now further studies have shown that the systematic eradication of H. pylori actually increases your risk for gastroesophageal cancer. H. pylori was playing a really important role in maintaining some form of homeostasis within the body where it reduced our risk for cancer and inflammation associated that drives cancer.


This systematic attack of microorganisms that we look at as bad actually causes more disruption down the road. Because again, we have to think of ourselves as an ecology. They all play a role. Clostridium is thought to be really bad. If you have high levels of clostridium, then we got to attack it with antibiotics and get rid of that clostridium. No, actually high levels of clustering is low associated with lower incidence of allergies, asthma, psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, and so on. Clostridium play a really important role in training the immune system how to function.

The thing that we have to realize is we don't know what we don't know. There's so much to know. There's so many things we don't know that we don't even know the information that we're missing. The ecology of our body is extremely complicated. Anytime we start to do these precision attacks on microbes, we tend to create more problem than solution.

Microbes have to talk to one another. They have to understand who's within their environment. That's part of their competitive nature, but also part of the way that they communicate with each other. Let's give you a pathogenic example of that. Listeria is a known bacteria that is a food contaminant that can cause disease in the body. Listeria at certain concentrations is completely benign. They don't attack, they don't start expressing their toxin producing genes. The way until they reach a certain threshold in order to start expressing it because the bacteria knows that if we start expressing now, we're going to alert the immune system. We're not strong enough to cause any problems, and we're just going to be suppressed.

The way they communicate with each other so they know what their concentrations are is through this process of quorum sensing. Each bacteria in the world excretes a chemical signature of itself that other microbes within its same species can read. They send out this chemical signature. That's how they communicate with each other saying hey, we're at a billion now. We're at 10 billion, we're at 100 billion. When they get to that certain threshold event, then they all synchronize their gene expression and they express toxins.


Now, on the good side of that is the same thing. Microbes will communicate to one another in the microbiota and they will understand what microbes are there in abundance and what microbes are there and are suppressed. Certain microbes like bacillus endospore for example that are environmental bacteria that can police the gut will go in, they have the capability of reading all the bacteria signatures and figuring out who's there and who's there at too high concentrations and who's there at low concentrations. They will actually find overgrown and harmful bacteria. They will get into that space and will produce up to 25 different antibiotics to kill that group of overgrown bacteria.

Then they'll go over here where bacteria are under grown using quorum sensing to read that environment, and they'll produce prebiotics to regrow that bacteria. They're going in and shaping the microbiome by reading microbial signatures that are being excreted out into the environment. What scientists are trying to do is figure out how do we interpret some of this speaking among bacteria? Can we use quorum sensing for the good? Can we take bacteria language and cause that to affect changes within the microbiome?

We're far away from that. That part of nature is actually a little more complicated than we are smart right now. We allow major microbes to do that for ourselves, like the microbes in the dirt like the bacillus species. They'll get in and do that all that work for us. They'll use quorum sensing to fix our microbiome.

One thing that's so interesting is the ability of microbes which are prokaryotic cells, a whole different kingdom of species that can communicate with eukaryotic cells, which is what we are. This is something called inter-kingdom communication. When we look at our dog, the ability of us to communicate with us to communicate with our dog is really limited. We can train our dog to do certain things. If a dog spoke English, we would be fascinated. That would be the most famous dog in the world. Maybe the most famous organism in the world. Imagine that different organisms or different kingdoms can actually speak the same language. A plant cell can speak to our cells. A bacteria cell can speak to our cells. They do this through chemicals that they produce.


There are a few different ones. One is called OMVs, outer membrane vesicles. These are really interesting. They're little nano-capsules that bacteria can produce. In the capsule they'll put things like neurotransmitters or little peptides or micro RNA. These capsules have what we call a tropism, or affinity for certain parts of the body. Imagine a bacteria in your gut can release one of these nano capsules with a neurotransmitter in it. That nano capsule is designed by the bacteria to have an affinity for our brain. It'll surpass all of the other parts of the body and make a beeline for our brain and release the neurotransmitter in the brain. That's how amazing their ability is to communicate with the rest of our body.

These micro RNA that they can release will actually go and interfere with our own gene expressions. Imagine a bacteria within your gut can create a piece of micro RNA that can stop the expression of certain genes within your own cells or will enhance expression of certain genes within your own cells, or even more crazy, will change what the gene is supposed to make.

The gene let's say is designed originally to make a particular protein to help your body conduct some metabolic activity. Because of the microRNA that the bacteria sent, that now changes the type of protein that that gene is making. They can control every part of our genetics, whether it's in our mitochondria or whether it's in our cytoplasm, whether it's in our chromosomes, and plant cells can do the same thing as well. We communicate, our cells communicate with plants that we eat through this same kind of system.

When we think of our diet and we think of consuming plants of fruits and a diverse set of vegetation, even roots and tubers that grow in different environments, we think of it more from a macronutrient standpoint. The fiber content, the fat content, the carbohydrate content. What we're forgetting is all of these really important chemical signals that we absorb from these foods that actually affect the type of DNA expression that we have, and how our cells function on a day-to-day basis.


Imagine a plant that you consume besides the fiber and all that that you get have phytochemicals in it. Plant-based chemicals that can actually get in and affect the expression of genes within our body. We all now know that these polyphenols that come from plants can actually affect things like cancer risk or immune dysfunction risk. How do they affect it? There's the oxidative stress component to it. We also know that they could probably change gene expression in our own body.

Our communication, our ability to commit with the world around us is far more prevalent, specialized, and amazing that we can ever understand. To think that plants that we eat can communicate to ourselves to not become cancerous is amazing. The implications of that are phenomenal. Then when you think about plants, they're grown in different areas. A root, a tuber is grown in the dirt.

Their environment, what they're exposed to, the types of RNA that they would have would be completely different than a fruit that's hiring a higher up on the plant exposed to air in a different way, exposed to bird sitting on it and other types of animals that basically interact with that fruit, versus the ones in the earth where there's earthworms and other things that aren't found at this higher level. Our opportunity as a species is to get much exposure to all of this stuff in order to perpetuate our ecology. That's where we falter. We do not allow ourselves to get enough exposure to all of these amazing things within our environment to perpetuate our own health and wellness.

One of the biggest things we do that perturbs our gut on a daily basis is food. We eat a significant amount. In fact, we eat far more than we really need to. Our sense of our caloric needs is completely off in the Western world. In fact, we push this on our kids too. One of the things that kids it's a great example is that they eat when they're hungry and they stop when they're full. Their systems of communication between their microbiome, their brain, and all of the organs involved in digestion of food works extremely well. We put upon them this system is eating where they have to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If they skip lunch for some reason, we get worried. Oh my God, they didn't eat today. Yet they're bouncing off the walls. They have endless amounts of energy.


What that indicates, should indicate to us is that our feeding systems, our timing of these meals having breakfast, lunch and dinner every single day and snacks in between may be not the right thing to do. It's probably not evolutionary supported. Humans ate when they were hungry. They didn't eat when they weren't hungry. One of the things we're starting to understand is caloric restriction in our diet has huge benefits, health benefits and implications through our the body. Because one of the biggest and most toxic things we do on a daily basis is eating food. Just the process of bringing in food, digesting it, all the release of bile acids and hydrochloric acid and the breaking down of the food matter, all this stuff causes massive amounts of bacteria die off in our gut.

When the bacteria die, they release their endotoxins and things like that. Now, if our gut is leaky at the same time, all of that stuff is getting into our circulatory system and causing inflammation. Being able to leave our microbiome alone and not feed it for a period of time is one of the healthiest you can do for your microbiome, and in fact increases the diversity of the microbiota. That's completely counterintuitive.

We think in order to get our diversity to the microbiome, we got to keep feeding it food. We're feeding the biome, but no. In fact, it turns out the more we fast and the more we restrict calories, the more diverse our microbiome turns out to be, and the more healthier we are. You would look at hunter gatherer tribes and humans that live an ancestral life right now. They fast quite a bit. They don't eat a lot. They restrict calories, but not on purpose. Just because they're following signals from their microbiome.

One of the ways that we can look at the impact of overfeeding and high caloric meals on the microbiome and the satiety is we did a study on leaky gut. We call it metabolic endotoxemia or postprandial endotoxemia. What we were really studying is how the process of eating induces that leaky gut, the opening of the tight junctions, and the leaking in of all the toxins from the intestinal lining into the blood system. What we did is we took about 100 healthy college kids. These are people in the prime of their lives, physically they look perfect. They're low body fat, not obese. No frame disease. None of them had any diagnosed or disease or illness. They were just normal healthy college kids.


We screened them all for this metabolic endotoxemia, or leaky gut syndrome. What we did is we had them come in fasting. When they were fasted in the morning they came in and we took blood samples of what's called endotoxins in the blood. We're looking at intestinal derived toxins in the blood. What we find is a very low basal level of these toxins. Not really causing any problems, not really causing any issues. Then what we call give them what we call a challenge meal. In this case it was a fast food meal, a fast food breakfast. It's a muffin and hash browns and orange juice. Then three to five hours later we measured the same amount, the same toxin in their blood. We saw on average a 600% increase in toxicity in the blood.

The University that we worked with previously did the same study where they showed that a single meal takes about two weeks to recover from. The inflammation and the immune activation that comes as a result of that one single meal and a 600% increase in toxicity takes two weeks to recover from. Imagine we're doing this every single day two or three times a day, so we never really recover from it.

What's significant about that is that that same toxicity, that same increase in inflammatory cytokines and markers are the exact same markers that are associated with heart diabetes, autoimmune disease, and so on. It's that process of eating and that generation of leaky gut endotoxemia especially from fast foods and highly processed foods that seems to be perpetuating this condition.

One of the other things we found in this particular study is we were looking at a hormone called ghrelin. Ghrelin is a number hormone. One of the things that really doesn't work well in Western societies, because it causes us to overeat when the hunger is expressed continuously at high levels. In this college kids, what we had is we measured the ghrelin levels when they came in fasted. It was pretty high as we would expect. Because they're in fasted state. I think the minimum was about an eight hour fast. The ghrelin levels were high.


Now, we gave them a 2000 calorie meal. For most people, that's more than a day's worth of calories. After that meal the ghrelin levels stayed almost as high as when they were in a fasted state. The communication between the gut saying hey, we've got plenty of calories in here, shut down the hunger hormone and the brain and the endocrine system that's making that hormone is totally lost. We're not getting that communication. What's really fascinating is that we give them the bacillus endospores for 30 days. These are again environmental bacteria that you would pick up from the environment if you interact with your dirt. We gave them those as probiotics.

30 days later they came back, we did the same exact test. They came in fasted, we give them this challenge meal, we measure the toxicity level in the body. We also measure this ghrelin hormone. Sorry, what we found is that the ghrelin hormone dropped by over 50% after eating a meal. Now just in 30 days of being exposed to these bacteria, all of a sudden the microbiome is communicating to our brain that we're full, we don't need any more calories, stop eating. Versus 30 days prior to that, that communication was completely lost. It's absolutely fascinating to think that a simple bacteria can restore that important communication between our gut, our brain, and all the endocrine system that produces these hormones.

There's been some good population studies that have looked at the differences in changes in microbiota over a course of a 12 month period between Western populations, and then also more native populations who eat seasonally. In fact what they were able to show is that the microbiota starts to change as the seasons change in anticipation of different food coming in. Now, that change is totally disrupted in the Western world. We stopped seeing that change any longer because we basically eat the same things all year round. We have access to foods shouldn't be in season, artificially now are in season. So our microbiota gets confused.

At any time we mess up the cyclic effect of the microbiota, we mess up the metabolites they produce. We mess up the types of DNA, either enhancement or suppression that they do. All of the things that we know to be important metabolic functions of microbiota get suppressed because we suppress their natural cyclical function. We know in healthy populations that there's a significant seasonal change in the microbiota.


One of the most important functions of the microbiota is the production of metabolites and other ingredients for us. There are numerous things that we don't really get from food in high abundance that when we give them the substrate, the microbiota can produce for us. Take B vitamins for example. We've got all of this talk about methylation deficiencies and the fact that we can't methylate our B vitamins that are coming in from food. It's so important to supplement with methylated forms of B vitamin.

The difference there is that increase or the presence, the high prevalence of this methylation defects within our body is likely not evolutionarily important because bacteria do the methylation for us. Genes that have significant impact on human wellness and health tend to get eliminated through the process of evolution. Certain genes that are very prevalent that disrupt the absorption and function of micronutrients that aren't as important because our microbiome does the same thing for us can remain in high prevalence in a population.

Let's talk about the vitamins that the microbiome produces. What we do is the microbiome produces the full array of B vitamins within our gut, and they produce the methylated forms of B vitamins which are the most useful forms to us. A healthy microbiota can actually produce so much B vitamin that less than 30% of it is actually require to utilize within the human body itself. They can do that in such great abundance for us that we don't really need to be supplementing these all the time. What we need to be is just allowing the microbiome to get diverse, feeding a microbiome a diverse source of macronutrients so that they can do the work for us. We've outsourced this work to the microbiomes.

They produce so much B vitamin that less than 30% is actually absorbed and utilized by the cells. The rest of it is actually being converted into things called coronoids and other methylation agents that actually go onto affect our DNA expression. At the same time, we know that our microbiome produces every form of quinols, so CoQ10, ubiquinol, things that we look for in supplements and spend a lot of money for in supplements. Even things like carotenoids, antioxidants, beta-carotene, alpha-carotene, astaxanthin, zeaxanthin. All of these amazingly


important micronutrients are producing high levels in a healthy microbiome.

The beauty of it is all being produced right at the site absorption, right in the microvilli where things need to be sucked right in. We don't have to worry about it going through the gastric system, going through production and encapsulation and all that stuff. Vitamin K-27 is a very important vitamin produced by the microbiome. So much of the essential nutrients within our system are produced by microbes within the microbiome.

Yeah, one of the things that we do that really perturbs our microbiome and causes imbalances which then can lead to significant disease is really narrowing our dietary intake of macronutrients. It's very trendy in the Western world to go into certain types of diets, whether it's Paleo or FODMAP diet. All these things that we love to put a label on. What it does is it causes us to eliminate whole categories of foods. One of things that we know that human is humans were omnivores. We survived and we perpetuated through the course of evolution because we ate everything. There's not a lot of species on planet Earth that are omnivores.

If you look at for example a lion, a lion is an obligate carnivore. It depends on the population of things like gazelles and wildebeests in order to survive. Think about the ecology of the lion for example. It's sitting there in the sub-Saharan Africa. Let's say there's a drought. Its one or two food sources, the wildebeest or the gazelle is really low in numbers because a drought has taken away their vegetation. Now the lion is totally oppressed from a health perspective because its one food source is not present. It's not like the lion can go and eat a bunch of berries and get by. It's not like the lion can dig for roots and tubers and get by. In fact, if they eat anything plant-related they get sick.


The same thing with the herbivores that the lion feeds on. They're very dependent on certain types of vegetation in order to perpetuate their species. Humans have evolved because we can eat everything. If there's no roots and tubers, we'll go pick some fruits. If there's no fruits and vegetables, we'll go kill a baboon and eat a baboon. We will eat insects. It doesn't matter. We can eat so many different things. Our microbiomes afford us that capability. The diversity in our microbiome is directly correlated to the diversity in our diet. If you look at early humans, and even if you look at tribes like the Hadza tribe in Tanzania right who mimic early human dietary intake, they eat upwards of 600 different types of foods on an annual basis. They tend to have very diverse and robust microbiomes.

We eat 15 foods on an annual basis. That has really shrunk capacity of our microbiome. Everything we feed our body selects for certain classes of bacteria. If we only feed our bodies of certain categories of foods, we only select for certain bacteria. The thing about the ecology of the gut that's important to understand is that not about good versus bad. It's about imbalance. When we feed ourselves just a narrow number of things in our daily diet, we're causing imbalance. Imbalance leads to disease. That's how we affect our health in general.

One of the things we think of is we go to a high-protein diet and we're so stuck on that, so we eat a lot of meat. One of the things you realize from evolutionary biology is that meat was kind of a delicacy in most human diets because the amount of work it took to go and chase down an animal and kill it and eat it was significantly greater than just picking a fruit or picking a plant or digging for a root and tuber. Our microbiomes evolved to occasionally see meat.

Of course, that meat supports the growth of certain important criteria. If all we're doing is eating a large amount of meat with every single meal, if you look at the average American plate, it's the meat. Then the greens are accents around the side of the meat. That really perturbs the microbiome. It causes the overgrowth of prevotella species and certain species of clostridium. Even things like enterobacter do better in meat conditions rather than plant-based foods. What we're doing is causing an unnatural in balance in the microbiome that now has been associated with disease as well.


The other thing is because a lot of us will have leaky gut, the saturated fat that comes from meat, and I don't want to demonize fat in general. What happens is the saturated fat that comes from meat is incorporated by the bacteria in your gut. They produce their endotoxin using the saturated fat in the meat. It just so happens that the endotoxin they produce from using fat from the meat is far more toxic than the endotoxin that we'd produce from using oils let's say from seeds, or from olives and things like that. That saturated fat causes a much higher degree of toxicity in the endotoxin that they produce. Now not only are we perturbing the appropriate balance within our microbiome, but we're causing the microbes to produce more toxic versions of their natural endotoxin that they produce.

One of the things about globalization is it's lost upon us what we're really adapted to consume. If we look at the North American diet, coconuts are not really a big part of the North American diet. How many of us actually live near coconut, natural coconut trees? But we love fats and we love darlings of health industry. Coconut oil has become one such darling. Same thing with palm oil and same thing with any sort of trends that we adapt. For a while, soy was the darling of the health industry. It was perpetuated as being much healthier to eat a soy burger versus a regular burger, a beef-based burger. Or it was healthier to eat a soy burger than eating something that would be considered high carb like a vegetable or a fruit.

Now we know that over-consumption of soy actually has hormone implications within our body. They are phytoestrogens, and they can cause significant hormone imbalances. Same thing with coconut oil. Coconut oil inherently is not bad, but our abuse of these things, we start gargling with it, we start doing oil pulling, we're pulling it in every kind of food. We're adding it to our beverages, our coffee, and things like that. We're putting it on our skin. One of the things people don't realize is that coconut oil has a lot of long chain fatty acids. These long chain fatty acids are very strong antimicrobials. When you consume high amounts of coconut oil, those antimicrobials are killing off bacteria at fairly large amounts. When the bacteria are killed off, they release their endotoxins.


These same endotoxins are the ones that trickle into your circulatory system and end up causing chronic immune activation. Same thing with coconut oils tending to have a lot of saturated fat in them. Saturated fat produces more toxic levels of endotoxin rather than unsaturated fats. This abuse of what we call darlings of the health industry really causes more problem than benefit. One of the things we have to look at is what is environment naturally like and what are we supposed to be consuming on a natural basis? What did North Americans this far north of the equator, what were they consuming to perpetuate our evolution to bring us here today? How are we disrupting that by allowing the globalization and the availability of all these things to mess up what our balance should really be?

One of the most I think harmful words we've developed is the word carb. We categorize everything as carbohydrates. Anything that's not meat or not fat or protein is carbohydrates. We would put French fries in the same category as celery. Because they're all carbohydrates. The whole perpetuation of this notion that are hybrids are bad for you, we all should be a low-carb diet is actually causing a significant amount of perturbation and illness within the microbiome itself.

In fact, the vast majority of bacteria in our microbiome, the good, healthy bacteria that we need to have in high abundance require carbohydrates as their primary source of food. Sure, there's simple carbohydrates that are made up of fructose, sucrose, glucose, and simple monomers or sugars that will increase the insulin response of the food and cause metabolic distress. The vast majority of fruits and vegetables don't do that.

Even rice, people were staying away from for a long period of time because they're saying it was so high glycemic. Rice has this really beautiful structure of carbohydrates that are branched chains, that have significant different bindings to them, that feeding different types of microbes within the gut. For example, xylans 01:20:28, fructans, arabinogalactans are all really interesting bonds and linkages that you find in carbohydrates that feed very specific types of bacteria.


I'll give you a great example of this is Kiwi. We're now looking at this kiwi fiber that's really interesting. We're finding that this kiwi fiber can specifically increase the growth of faecalibacterium prausnitzii. This is a very important bacteria that's supposed to make up about 5 to 7% of our microbiome. That's 5 to 10 trillion organisms is what this is supposed to make up. In the Western population, this bacteria is really low. Low levels of this bacteria is associated with high risk of colitis, Crohn's, and other gastrointestinal disease including colon cancer.

The thing that feeds these bacteria are really interesting linkages that you find on certain types of foods. On the Kiwi, if you take a golden Kiwi, a green Kiwi, that linkage is found on the actual peel of the Kiwi. Even when we do eat the fruits and vegetables, we mess it up by taking the kiwi, slicing open and nicely and neatly scooping out the inside part and leaving the beautiful fibrous prebiotic parts of the outside of it. We get so specific. We become so ready demonize foods and demonize whole categories of foods to the actual detriment of our microbiome.

The carb notion that carbs are bad for you is a complete myth. Carbohydrates from plants, fruits, vegetables are extremely important for the health and wellness of our microbiome. If we eat a low carb diet, we're actually reducing the diversity of our microbiome and eliminating certain microbes that should be there in high amounts.

Yeah, bread is an easy one to demonize. You start seeing people going to fast food restaurants ordering a hamburger and saying, "Oh, I don't eat the bun so it's totally fine." They're eating that piece of thing that we can probably barely call meat, and then they're omitting the bun and saying that's healthy. The vast majority of the populations of the world eat some form of bread. In fact, in many places it's a staple part of the diet. Whether it's a tortilla, or in the Indian culture we eat naans and parathas and chapatis which are all breads. In the Middle East, they eat a huge amount of breads.

All of these are produced by a wide variety of grains. The thing is, grains have linkages in them that can feed very specific microbes within our gut. For example, take barley. Barley has high levels of beta-glucan. Beta-glucan is a very specific prebiotic that feeds specific types of microbes within the gut that other sources of foods just cannot feed.


Taking grain, natural good grain and processing it into bread which is an easy way to eat the grain is actually a normal part of how humans evolved. The demonization of bread will actually lead us to eating substitutes that are actually much worse.

Now we have grain-free breads and these things that are actually where they replace the carbohydrate portion with more fatty portions. That actually perturbs our intake of macronutrients and also messes up the microbiome. It's not about the bread itself. It's about our body's ability to handle the bread and the kind of bread we eat. If we're making bread from regular old good whole grains, it's totally fine. In fact, it feeds the microbiome in a very positive way.

One of the most important things of the diet of modern humans is understanding where our food comes from. We're so quick to categorize foods into good and bad categories. I know a lot of people that don't eat any cruciferous vegetables or they say, "Oh, I can't handle nightshades." These are huge categories of food that have tremendous nutritional value to not only our bodies, but of course the microbiome which controls virtually everything within our system.

You are far better off eating a good varied diet where you know where your food is coming from and you know it's free of pesticides and growth enhancers and artificial ripening and of course chlorine-based cleaners that are used to wash a lot of the produce and things like that. If you have some sense of traceability for your food, you know where it's coming from, that becomes the important thing you can do in your diet. Rather than looking at whole categories of foods that you want to eliminate from your diet with the false notion that you're going to be perpetuating health, it's better to look at how clean your food is. What is the quality of my food? Should I be eating a fruit that's not currently in season that has been artificially ripened to be in season and then shipped across the country to be able to eat it here?


Having that seasonal aspect, having that ability to look or the focus to look at the quality of the food that you're consuming is a far better thing to do in terms of dietary lifestyle changes to enhance health than just eliminating whole categories of foods. Same thing with meat. To me, I will rarely eat meat that I don't know where it came from. If I know that it's a chicken that's free range and healthy, then okay, I'm going to enjoy the chicken. If it's just a chicken breast sitting in some sandwich in some cooler somewhere, I don't know where that chicken came from, how it was raised, or what it was fed during its life, then I'm not going to put it into my body because that has far more implication on my health than eliminating something like I'm not eating meat anymore or I'm not eating carbohydrates anymore or fats anymore.

Understanding where your food comes from is absolutely most critical thing you can do for your life and your health and wellness. When you look at communities that have a great amount of longevity and tend to live over the age of 100 and so on, one of the thing you start to realize is they really understand where their food comes from. In many cases, they make their own food. Many of these people are growing their own food in gardens. They get a lot of their vegetables and carbohydrates and roots and tubers and seeds from their very own vegetables. They may even keep animals of their own. Pigs, chickens that they rear and they grow and they slaughter for their own consumption.

That is the next, the evolution of how humans eat. The funny thing about it is it's really coming back to basics. We've gone so far from that. Then we now understand that how far we've gone from that interaction with our food sources can cause significant disease. Even things that are packaged as being quote unquote healthy, they have all the bells and whistles to them. You'll see meat that'll say it's grass fed, free range, GMO free. That's nice, but how is it processed? All of these things.

They'll add for example in meat products, they will impregnate them with starches. The reason they impregnate them with starches is as they go through the cooking process, it retains more water so the bite is juicier, the weight is retained. That impregnation with starches, then putting them through high-pressure treatments because of that perturbs and disrupts the amino acid profiles within the meat itself. Or you look at vegetables, one of the first thing that any vegetable goes through in our typical food distribution system is it gets chlorine washed.


Everything that's picked and processed gets chlorine washed. Then they put them through these ammonia baths and things like that that are actually supposed to kill off microbes. Then they mill them down, they put them through high heat pasteurization.

All of these processing things that can actually disrupt the molecular structure of the food. It's that molecular structure of the food that's so critical to feeding the right microbes. Processing will disrupt the total quality of the food. It basically negates the impact of the food on our body. That impact comes from the food being able to feed the microbes in the right way.

Alcohol is really interesting because we were actually working with a wine company that was trying to look at how do we enhance the health benefits of alcohol and make claims associated with health? They were warned immediately that you will be shut down within minutes if you're trying to make any sort of health claim related to alcohol. Alcohol, if you look at the history of it, comes from fermentation. It is one of the oldest foods that man has actually developed. It started inadvertently of course with fruits getting naturally spoiled by fungal overgrowth and then animals eating the fruits, humans eating the food.

Then we of course we refine our process of fermentation. Alcohol, even though it has a bad name, true pure alcohol fermentation produces a beverage that's really high in polyphenols. Then the alcohol content actually tends to be high in organic acids. A lot of these organic acids that are really beneficial to the body that can reduce inflammation, actually support the growth of good bacteria, reduce the pH in the gut which is another very important aspect of it, actually are retained well in the alcohol component of it.

Even when you separate the polyphenols out of the red wine for example, the polyphenols themselves have benefit, but the alcohol portion contains all these wonderful organic acids. One healthy alcohol that most of us know about but don't really realize it's an alcohol is kombucha. We know of kombucha to be this darling of the health industry. It's so popular and it's loved by people with the health industry. Kombucha is really alcohol fermentation. During the process of making


kombucha, it does produce alcohol. We just stop it at a certain point so that the alcohol content is very low, below certain regulatory amounts.

As the yeast is producing the alcohol, it's also producing all these amazing organic acids. That's really what giving you the health benefit of it. Polyphenols that you can get from things like red wine and of course even like coffee, good coffee has high degrees of polyphenols. Teas have high degree of polyphenols. Then the alcohol side of things with the organic acids has even more enhancing benefits.


interview with kiran krishnan - humanlongevityfilm.com · interview with kiran krishnan there are...

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