Dr. Kenneth Brown: The Benefits of a Diversified Diet & Keeping Our Microbiome Young

Today, in the Scheer Madness Podcast, Rachel interviews the hosts of the Gut Check Podcast, Dr. Kenneth Brown (MD) and Eric Rieger (CRNA). Ken is a board certified gastroenterologist that turned his private practice into a hotbed of innovation. He has long been intrigued on how to best care for his patients. He challenged big pharma and developed an all natural solution (Atrantil) for bloating and symptoms of IBS. 

Eric is Ken’s business partner and actually met Ken while delivering anesthesia to his patients in 2012.Eric enjoys science and research swell, and has a passion for helping people find sensible means to take care of themselves, but always armed with the best information. 

The trio discuss the importance of keeping our microbiome young and what this entails for our overall health, diversifying our intake to enrich the gut’s good bacteria, and the role microbial diversity plays in our gut health.  

Here is my 10% discount link for Atrantil: https://atrantil.com/?rfsn=2452322.bf5041850

For more information about working with our team at Rachel Scheer Nutrition, book a free 30-minute call at www.rachelscheer.com/application  

Listen ON:

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scheer-madness/id1490423541 

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5OLd9BtesW7Oe4nSH0QF9W 

Chapters:

• 00:00 Intro
• 03:20 Keep your microbiome young
• 09:58 Socialization: Why people tend to live long 
• 13:58 Microbiomes break down what we eat
• 18:46 How do we select the right kind of foods?
• 22:20 How probiotics work
• 25:45 Migrating to a healthy lifestyle
• 31:00 The short-term diet – a healing protocol
• 34:32 Microbial diversity
• 37:40 Circadian rhythm
• 41:39 What would your microbiome say?
• 44:50 How to diversify your diet
• 49:09 Artificial sweeteners wreak havoc in the gut

Check out Gut Check Project:

• https://www.instagram.com/kbmdhealth/
• https://www.facebook.com/KennethBrownMD/
• https://kennethbrownmd.com/ 
• Gut Check Project

Connect with Rachel:

Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

 

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00] Dr. Kenneth Brown: Pharmaceutical companies are filing for patents to try and do postbiotics and things like that. Yeah. In fact, shearing labs and Nestle have both stuck a flag in the ground trying to claim fecal microbial transplant as a drug. Really? Really? Yeah. Like poop pills. It’s exactly poop pills.

[00:00:19] Rachel Scheer: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, but if you are ready to level up your life and get results that truly matter in your health, business, mindset and relationship.

Then this is the podcast for you. Welcome to Sheer Madness, where we have unscripted real conversations with the world’s top athletes, entrepreneurs, and coaches discover real world and tactical advice from the best in the business. Let’s go. Welcome back to another episode of Sheer Madness. We are doing a threesome podcast today, but our second guest is not with us.

I’m gonna be walking in any minute here, but I have a return guest coming on this show here today, Dr. Kenneth Brown. He is a world renowned gastroenterologist and he actually helped me a lot with my gut issues when I was struggling. Helped me go through some different SIBO protocols. Actually found out that my entire.

I think it was large intestine, small intestine was like falling throughout my gastrointestinal tracts. So all this being said, he really helped me in the beginning journey of healing my gut and he really bridges the gap between Western medicine and functional medicine by taking more of a holistic approach, but of course looking at the gut because the gut plays the biggest role in our overall health.

He’s also the co-host of the Gut Check project, which I just had to honor. Yes, I’m going on that show.

[00:01:54] Dr. Kenneth Brown: So if you are watching, which, which I’m just gonna interrupt. Here was the best episode we’ve ever done. Thank you. Oh really? You so much. Yes. Fantastic episode. Yeah. Loved it. Thank you for coming on. Yeah.

So

[00:02:04] Rachel Scheer: those who are watching on YouTube, if you notice the backdrop, it’s the gut check project here, and he’s just an awesome human and. Incredibly grateful to have him on the show, Dr. Brown, thanks for coming on.

[00:02:16] Dr. Kenneth Brown: No, Rachel, thank you so much. And, uh, my return on the Sheer Madness podcast. It’s been a little bit, been a few years.

It’s my honor, I’m, I kind of, I kind of miss our little buddy that we had last time. Your little puppy at the time. Yeah, we had

[00:02:28] Rachel Scheer: a little Lily on the podcast last time and she was probably, I think like seven months old. She sat on my lap. She slept the whole time. It was awesome. And I think that was also too, when I, I was just starting my podcast, so that was maybe like the fourth or fifth episode that I’ve done.

Um, but it was actually one of the best episodes to be completely transparent that we’ve done talking about gut health, um, with going so much into SIBO and how the gut and the brain are interconnected. So I’m really excited to dive more into gut health here today, and I wanna talk about. Why the food we eat plays such a big role in our gut and therefore our mental health.

Um, but also why the gut is so essential for longevity. Cuz I know that’s a hot topic right now. So let’s start first with the nutrition side.

[00:03:23] Dr. Kenneth Brown: Yeah, for sure. So a little bit of my background, so as Rachel said, I’m a gastroenterologist and my initial research was in the pharmaceutical industry where we were looking at these different ways to treat various diseases and that’s how I ended up getting more into the functional side and looking at supplements since then.

So that was about six years ago when we launched our, our product. Since then, we’ve been dealing with a lot of different scientists around the world and this movement of how important the microbiome is, a lot of people are finally starting to get there. In fact, to the point where the microbiome.

Basically should be treated like a separate organ. Mm-hmm. , you have your heart, your brain, your microbiome. The microbiome. Everybody probably has heard the term a bunch of times. It’s the a hundred and you know, a hundred trillion microbiota described as the bacteria and the genes that they have. Those genes interact with your body, specifically your brain and your immune system.

And we are now seeing that one of the most important anti-aging things that you can do is keep your microbiome young. So if your microbiome gets old, you get old. What does that

[00:04:35] Rachel Scheer: mean? Keep your microbiome

[00:04:36] Dr. Kenneth Brown: young. Exactly. So if you can keep your microbiome young, meaning if you keep microbial diversity, if you keep the good bacteria greater than the bad bacteria known as reversing dysbiosis and all these other terms.

So the simplistic thing is keeping it young will keep you young If you. Don’t treat your microbiome well, and it actually has significant dysbiosis. Think of it more like a parasite inside of you as opposed to something that can help you. So this is the really exciting thing. We see these anti-aging experts, Peter Atilla, Rhonda Patrick, um, these, uh, Davidson, Sinclair, these people that are out there, you know, writing books and discussing great things, and they talk about these cellular mechanisms, the mTOR, the A M P K pathway.

You know, they look at looking at sirtuins and different things like that. But the reality is very few of them are talking about the microbiome as something that you can manipulate. You have your genes. , and we know that the microbiome has about a hundred and fifty four, a hundred fifty fold more genes than you have.

So it has an influence that you can actually manipulate a little bit as opposed to the fact that, well, I’m this height, I can’t change it. Yeah. This is what my genes are. So that’s the really exciting thing, and it’s just in the early cusp of it. So when you say, how do you keep your microbiome young? Well, that’s kind of the whole talk then that that becomes the whole conversation going forward.

Yeah. So getting people to understand how important it is, is the key. And the only way to really do that is to lead a certain lifestyle, which keeps it young, and we can get into each one of those aspects, but also to feed your microbiome what it wants, and that’s where the nutrition aspect comes in, and that’s the control that you have.

Jump on in. You can jump in. We got air. Oh, we have a special guest, everybody. We are now. So she did introduce this as I did introduce you as the Sheer Madness Threesome podcast. Mm-hmm. ,

[00:06:35] Eric Rieger: it is the Sheer Madness now threesome podcast.

[00:06:39] Rachel Scheer: And Eric is a model, obviously astronaut here, jumping in.

[00:06:45] Eric Rieger: Not anymore. Not in the Van Allen’s belt anymore, but I’m, I made it back.

No, but he,

[00:06:48] Rachel Scheer: he’s actually the co-host to the Gut check project as well. What’s a little bit of your background?

[00:06:55] Eric Rieger: Uh, I’m an anesthesia provider. That’s how I met Ken. Um, but I was an astronaut. I just didn’t get to launch for discrepancies that we don’t need to address here publicly. And, um, but, uh, yeah, other than that, uh, Altron Gut health is a passion of mine.

And that’s, that’s pretty much it. All right.

[00:07:15] Rachel Scheer: Well, we were just talking about how keeping the gut microbiome. Young is essentially the key to staying young, overall, avoiding things like dysbiosis, I’m assuming leaky gut, intestinal permeability, just anything that caused the microbiome diversity to be low really affects everything

[00:07:37] Dr. Kenneth Brown: well, everything.

And so let’s just look at some of the research that’s out there right now. You and I, and I know it’s gonna seem weird when I say this, but are 99% identical genetically, but our microbiomes could be 90% different, which could explain why when you have family members, one person develops cancer, one person may have cardiometabolic disease, one person has one thing, the other one doesn’t.

They lead similar lifestyles. So it has been shown that if your microbiome is in tune and you have a healthy microbiome, meaning broad microbial diversity. So what we know is as we age, The microbiome shrinks in its diversity, meaning you have more, you go from this bell-shaped curve to more of a peak, right?

In one area, frequently or almost exclusively in all animal studies and human studies, you end up having decreased diversity and you have a shift from good bacteria to more bad bacteria. The one place where that is different is our super centenarians. So when they looked at the microbiome of people that make it past a hundred, they actually have a microbiome similar to a teenager.

So then the question is, did they become 105 because of their microbiome or are they 105 in their microbiome? Is that good? It’s the chicken and the egg kind of thing. Mm-hmm. . But looking at it very clearly, if you can protect your microbiome and keep the ratio of good bacteria to bad bacteria better and keep microbial diversity, meaning you have lots of different kinds, then you produce anti-inflammatory metabolites.

And that gets back to what we have talked about and you have talked about on, on your social media, that inflammation equals aging, otherwise known as inflamm aging. And so that’s where I think it’s really exciting that we’re starting to have these scientists start looking at how do we manipulate the microbiome to.

Live a longer, healthier life, otherwise known as healthspan. I think

[00:09:53] Rachel Scheer: that’s interesting that you talk about the centenarians, right? Mm-hmm. like they having a healthy microbiome almost like a teenager, and how there’s that connection with a robust, diverse microbiome and optimal health essentially. But it almost kind of makes sense that, you know, like the lifestyle component too, cuz you can imagine that these centenarians people who are living past a hundred, they’ve had to live, you know, a relatively healthy lifestyle with their diet, with nutrition, with what they’re putting in their body, stress levels, all of that to allow them to live to a hundred.

So that really makes me think, you know, is it because of the lifestyle that led to a healthy microbiome that led to them living longer? Or was it just like, okay, as we get older, the microbiome. ends up getting lower in diversity and that’s what leads to the longevity being shortened.

[00:10:52] Dr. Kenneth Brown: Yeah. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. Uh, 100%. When I’ve talked about different aspects of the microbiome and longevity, and that’s why you said, how do you keep your microbiome young? Because this is the great part, all the things that we discuss. So if you look at the blue zones where they have looked at how people tend to live longer, there are certain things about this.

One of the things is socialization. Mm-hmm. probably one of the key components that we don’t focus on. They are social. So social like relationships are social. They interact with people, they are with each other. They are networks. Networks, yeah. Family

[00:11:27] Eric Rieger: units. Bears are strong.

[00:11:28] Dr. Kenneth Brown: Yeah. And it’s it all these different blue zones.

There are daily habits. , which involves movement, which involves ritual. Yeah. If you look at Okina Japan, it’s tea. If you look at Sardina, if you do this, they have coffee, they get together, and as they do this, they share. So every time that we sit there and meet, we actually slowly share our microbiome together, because in proximity with other humans, you actually do share some of your microbiome with each other.

Socialization is one of the. Under-recognized aspects. And, you know, we’ve joked about this, that there’s the studies of fecal microbial transplant, you know, with the fat mouse to the skinny mouse mm-hmm. , and then the, you know, the skinny mouse becomes fat and vice versa. Which is real, by the way. Which is a hundred percent real.

Yeah. So when, when we look at this, when we look at, uh, microbiome manipulation, there is something called fecal microbial transplant that is really fascinating for the, for the general media. They love to bring this up. They always talk about, you know, fecal transplants. And we know that when you do this, you can have consequences.

You can take somebody. So I personally have had twins. One person had ulcerative colitis and the parents chose to do a microbial transplant into the ulcerative colitis twin. It actually cured her ulcerative colitis. She actually developed some of the other issues that the other twin had. Mm-hmm. , which was some polycystic ovary, obesity, things like that, that the other one didn’t have.

And so clearly these genes are being transmitted also. Yeah. And that brings up that whole, um, thing of a joke that if you’re gonna go on a dating app, you should at least inquire about somebody’s microbiome in there. You know, we can actually see your microbial diversity panel. Before we go into the,

[00:13:17] Rachel Scheer: I only got microbiome test, let look at all of your microbial diversity.

Yeah. And I’d say most people have a very low diverse microbiome, and especially after. Testing everybody at Rachel Share nutrition. Um, more people are very low in diversity or if not moderately low in diversity. So I’d love to talk about like some tactical ways to work on diversity, increasing that, um, you mentioned socialization, but like the nutrition, the food that we’re eating too, and how the foods that we eat actually create those short chain fatty acids or those postbiotics and how that actually is the key to

[00:13:55] Dr. Kenneth Brown: longevity.

Yeah, so what we know is that the, the microbiome itself, one of the things that people don’t realize is that your microbiome breaks down the products that you eat, specifically polyphenols and fibers. Those things are not well absorbed, and when they get to your colon, where the majority of your microbiome should be, if it isn’t, then that’s where we have dysbiosis, meaning that you’ve got, you know, bacteria growing where it shouldn’t be, but when you.

Eat something like vegetables, which are high in polyphenols, or you have a supplement which is poorly absorbed, like many supplements that people don’t realize. Quercetin and turmeric and green tea extract all of the above. They’re poorly absorbed. They get to the colon resveratrol and I can go on and on and on, and if you have the right microbial diversity or the right microbiomes to be able to break them down, then they cleave these large molecules and other bacteria break them down, and then smaller compounds are kicked off.

And a lot of those are the key anti-inflammatory compounds, anti-cancer compounds and anti-aging compounds that go through your body and work as antioxidants, and they also kill aging cells. One of the reasons why we age is because there’s, there’s methylation of the dna and then there’s like basically you’ve got a cell that is growing badly.

These molecules go, oh, your. Kind of old and non-functioning. Why don’t you just go away? Mm-hmm. , and that’s autophagy and mi autophagy. Getting rid of the mitochondria, getting rid of the cell. And these are the type of products. Super fascinating because we’ve worked with several researchers where through a digestive process, uh, Dr.

Sylvia Mulino was able to show that when you take polyphenols, like Cabra and Chestnut specifically, because those are the molecules that we work with, she showed that. When you go through a digestive process and then ferment it, putting, putting it with human microbiome and then put it through what’s called a gas chromatograph.

It was fascinating to see the hundreds of compounds that came out. For instance, the cabra and the chestnut actually kick off Quercetin. They kick off grammeric acid, they kick off green tea. These are all things that people go to a store and they buy when actually large, stable, uh, polyphenols, if you have the right microbiome can produce them for you.

Urethane Han B, which cause autophagy, mihay, and then all these other postbiotics, which include the short chain fatty acids and then these short chain fatty acids like butyrate. I always kind of talk about the short chain fatty acids. I mean, the example I give, it’s cuz I’m old. Is like maroon five where everybody thinks of Adam Levine, that’s butyrate, but there’s a bunch of other people in the band and things like three proponic acid mm-hmm.

cross the blood brain barrier and decrease neuro inflammation. And so it’s almost like you cannot reproduce this in a lab. And Eric and I talk about this all the time because guess what’s happening right now? Pharmaceutical companies are filing for patents to try and do postbiotics and things like that.

Yeah. In fact, shearing labs and Nestle have both stuck a, a flag in the ground trying to claim fecal microbial transplant as a. Really? Yeah. Like, like poop pills. Uh, well, like, wait, I think the process, it’s, it’s, it’s exactly, yeah. It’s exactly poop pills. Yeah. But they’re, they’re, they’re claiming their proprietary blend of poopoo pill Yeah.

Is superior. But it doesn’t matter because what they’re doing is they stuck a claim with the FDA trying to block anybody else from doing this. Don’t even wanna get in. Oh, oh, oh. This pissed me off. I’m sorry. Um, I just saw that there was a file by David Sinclair’s company where they’re trying to make nmn, N m n.

So have you ever heard of nicotine? Amide Riboside? Yeah. So then David Sinclair figured out that if you go one step closer mm-hmm. , which is an mn nicotinamide mono nucleotide rib side mono. Anyways, one of those things, He was showing in yeast that that was more effective than nicotinamide rib side. Just saw that they filed with the FDA that it, that it should be considered a drug much like they did with N Naac.

N a c Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like they did with that, which is just an amino acid, which is, and this is just a, a, a smaller version of the nicotinamide rib side. Whole separate discussion, but it just gets into the fact that Big Pharma is just trying to figure out a way to get into this. Yeah, they want to control the microbiome.

But let, let’s,

[00:18:46] Eric Rieger: I, I think this is really cool just from this perspective in that, Rachel, I think this plays in really near and dear to the way that I know that you coach your clients, which is. How do they make the correct decisions on, and then how do they select the right kinds of foods, uh, before they even get to supplementation or the ancillary choices?

And that’s important because the body more often than not really wants the supplements, or, I’m sorry, the supplements, but the elements, the nutrition from Whole Foods long before you get ’em from some broken down, spun down, pharmaceutical made available, not really in a natural way for it to be delivered modality for the body to use it the right way.

So really you need to find the right kinds of foods that, just like what you talk about, how to support your health, how to make wise decisions on when you eat and what you eat, and what kind of whole foods give those supply, because that’s going to do far more for your colon to get the diversity and nurture that diversity rather than trying to find.

The little quick fix that’s going to, to plug those already holes. Yeah.

[00:19:54] Rachel Scheer: And I know I’ve heard you say before like if probiotics worked and fixed all of the gut issues, then you’d be out of a job before you’d be out of a job. And I think that’s like really why addressing the nutrition and the full picture is so essential.

Because like supplements help and I, I love a ultra till your guys’ product that has, you know, a lot of the polyphenol blends in there because there is a lot of studies about polyphenols and how those are incredibly beneficial for supporting the microbiome. And I think when we combine, you know, supplements, polyphenols, cetin, resveratrol, I forget the word one that’s in your guys’ supplement.

The, what’s it called? The Cabra. The Cabra. That’s the one I can never remember. Plus, you know, having a diet that’s full of a lot of insoluble fiber resistant starches, high quality animal protein, good healthy fats, mono polyunsaturated fats, that’s essentially gonna be the best thing you can do for your microbiome.

But just pop in a probiotic and. , this is the fixing my gut issues. Or for some people, making it worse is really not the answer. 95% of your body’s serotonin is produced by the bacteria that resides in your gut. And this explains why when my gut was a wreck, or when clients come to work with me at Rachel Sheer Nutrition, they don’t just suffer from things like bloating, constipation, diarrhea, but they also have symptoms of anxiety, depression, and brain fog, because our gut and our brain are highly interconnected.

And as Hippocrates says, All disease begins and ends in the gut, and this is the exact reason why I am so passionate about taking a functional root cause-based approach for any chronic health condition, gut issues, mental health, illness, autoimmune conditions. Stubborn weight loss, you name it. Me and my team do a comprehensive analysis looking at all these different systems so we can test instead of just guess, and then develop a customized nutrition plan in protocol to address these root causes and balances in the body and restore function.

If you wanna book a free 30 minute call with anyone from my team, click the link in the show notes or visit rachel

[00:22:19] Dr. Kenneth Brown: shear.com. Yeah, and I’m not, you know, not real black and white with the probiotics, but what we do know is, in my literature, and I know that a lot of people have probiotics and they make a lot of money doing it, but in my literature, when we look at the six month data, it appears that probiotics consistently are equivalent to placebo.

when coming to gut health and other things like that, which says, okay, well why is that? And when they looked at different studies, animal studies and such about, does the probiotic make it all the way to where it should be, which is the colon? And we’ve talked about different stuff. On our podcast for instance, there was a group of scientists that what they did is they took, and they wanted to see the difference between a traditional probiotic, a lactobacillus, and a spore based biotic in combination with a polyphenol.

And then they wanted to see what would happen afterwards. And so the first thing they did is that they did coffee polyphenols, and they brewed it. They put it through a digestive tract, a synthetic digestive tract, and they then, um, put it through a fermentation process, which would be the microbiome. And they looked at all the polyphenolic compounds, the antioxidant potential in all of that.

And then they said, okay, well now let’s see what happens when you do a probiotic. And so then they brewed the probiotic. And through the brewing process, they found out that 0% of the probiotics survived. Yeah. So they said, okay, well now that makes sense. Maybe it was too hot. So then let’s just take room temperature.

Coffee with this probiotic and they put it in the stomach and then they checked sandwich till the probiotics survived. 0% of the probiotics survived. They said, okay, well let’s do it just in the small bowel. 0% survived. So when you look at something like that, you’re like, okay, well wait a minute. In these models we’re seeing that it’s probably not even making to where it should be.

Then they took a spore based biotic, and the spore based biotic, they found out like 99% survived the boiling process, and then it remained 99% till it got to the colon. At which point, um, it, it opened up, it comes out of its spore, uh, based. And much to their surprise, they found out that the phenol compounds.

Exponentially increased and the antioxidant potential exponentially increased. So what that means is, is that when you have the ability for organisms to break these polyphenols down, then you can actually increase that tremendously, which is why we started getting into the whole spore based biotic, combining it with Tron.

And that’s how we have Tron till Pro now. But we were working with the scientists at Microbiome Labs of Kirin, Krishna and those other PhDs over there, that they figured out that there are certain spore based biotics that live in the soil, polyphenols are in plants, and then the combination of the two allow this to happen.

And so that got us thinking about why certain people, when they take out tru, maybe they get real bloated from it, but when they take out Tru Pro, they don’t then take a step back. That gets back to the diet that you’ve probably seen a bunch of times when somebody has traditionally eaten very poorly. And then they, January 1st they decide to make a resolution, and then they come to you and you’re like, I’m eating great.

I’m doing Mediterranean diet or plant-based, and I’m feel like crap. Mm-hmm. , I see

[00:25:43] Rachel Scheer: that a lot actually. Yeah. I see people who’ve been eating white bread and the pastas and, you know, more of those processed type foods and that they’ve, don’t get me wrong, they don’t feel good, but then all of a sudden they start eating, you know, a diet full of lots of veggies and broccoli and asparagus and all of this.

They’re like, I am so bloated. Mm-hmm. , I feel way worse. Yeah. Even before, so let’s, let’s break it down. What is happening there?

[00:26:09] Dr. Kenneth Brown: Go ahead.

[00:26:09] Eric Rieger: Oh, I, I think that’s fascinating because if you don’t have the right kind of micro. Diversity biodiversity in the colon, more than likely, you just simply don’t have the right enzymes to break down these new foods, these new healthy foods that you’re now introducing to your colon.

So specifically, polyphenols are tannins. Many times people who are taking in more polyphenols in the course polyphenols are not just found in Tron teal, but they’re also found in the colorful things that make up fruits and green tea. Yes, fruits and vegetables. It’s so when you’re trying to migrate to this healthy lifestyle, by the time those compounds make their way to the colon, and if they’re not being adequately broken down, it’s going to result in bloating or a lack of appropriate digestion, and you’re not kicking off the the butyrates and the other postbiotics that you, that you’re seeking.

So the next approach is how do I number one, repopulate my colon with the right kind of bacteria that’s going to have something that breaks down polyphenols. Most notably tan ace, which polyphenols are tannins. So tan ace is an enzyme that

[00:27:12] Dr. Kenneth Brown: breaks down tannins. Let’s, let’s, let’s clarify that one thing here.

Sure. So the polyphenols are huge class of molecules. Yeah. Yeah. Correct. And they start out as small phenolic compounds, and as they get bigger, they become something called pro anthocyanins, which is what most of the researchers study. Right. And when you combine multiple pro anthocyanins together, it becomes a tannin.

So in other words, a tannin is mother nature’s most stable. And most complex Polyphenol. Polyphenol, yeah. That hides all the other ones. So when I said that she did a gas chromatograph and the one study that Dr. Molina did, all these other smaller phenolic compounds that you’re familiar with, quercetin and you know, the green tea extract and all that.

So yeah. All, all of those, they’re hidden in here because they’re so, it’s just no. Yeah. So I’m just saying that the tannins are the largest, and when you eat a broad diet, you’re gonna take in tannins. Yep. Mm-hmm. and your body may not be able to break that down.

[00:28:06] Eric Rieger: And, and thinking about the importance of tannins, it’s actually, it’s, it’s a protective mechanism.

It’s protecting those polyphenols, getting down to the colon for the same reason that like, um, what are the gigantic tree? Uh, the sequoia, the sequoia tree that grows, it’s the biggest tree in the, in North America, I guess in the world, but in California. Where the hell yeah. Yeah, they, the Sequoia National Forest.

Did you know that? That’s a conifer, meaning that they have cones and the only way that those cones will open is because of a forest fire. It’s the only way that a new. Tree can be born. But the reason why that’s okay is the tannins on that tree protected from Bernie. So it’s okay for the forest fire to occur and it won’t take out the main tree.

It’s the same principle. By the time it gets to our bodies, those tannins are protecting those polyphenols to get down to the colon where they can be safely disassembled and then used. So it’s, it’s an, it’s an applicable protection mechanism.

[00:29:01] Rachel Scheer: So it’s safe to say the polyphenols mm-hmm. that we intake through diet as well as supplementation are gonna be way more effective than taking any kind of a probiotic supplement, essentially.

[00:29:12] Eric Rieger: Yes. Well, but they have to be the right probiotic that number one could make the journey and then be armed with the right kind of enzymes to do that kind of breakdown.

[00:29:19] Rachel Scheer: Yeah. And that’s where we talk a little bit about like the spore based probiotics essentially

[00:29:23] Dr. Kenneth Brown: in there. That’s, yeah. So that’s where that is.

And so in some of the research that’s been actually been done fascinating to me, um, there was a study that was actually published where they were looking at, okay, well we have this. This ability for these polyphenols to create these postbiotics to in, you know, the, let’s, let’s look at the butyrate level.

Let’s look at different things. But let’s not compare it to a probiotic. Let’s compare it to the gold standard. Inulin. Inulin is a thing that most people consider as the prebiotic that feeds bacteria. Shockingly, uh, the studies shown in gas chromatograph that the amount of butyrate being produced just one of the postbiotics was exponentially higher than inulin, which kind of shows.

And we’ve done, we’ve looked at several different articles on the show where the body really makes the postbiotics from these polyphenols. Mm-hmm. , the fibers are also there to do different things. They work in conjunction. Fibers help you go to the bathroom, fibers draw water in and these different things.

But the bacteria really, if you have the right microbiome, I keep getting back to the same thing. If you have the right microbiome, you can take advantage of this. So I see the same thing that you see in my practice. People will go in these massively restrictive diets. And as they try and expand it, they find out that they feel really bloated.

And I, I look at them and I say, okay, well, we need to keep expanding it because in the long run you need your microbiome to be young, to have the diversity. You being on this really restricted diet, whether it’s FOD Map or Elemental or whatever, you can only do that so long. At some point you gotta start breaking through and, and you gotta start growing your microbiome.

And I

[00:30:59] Rachel Scheer: actually, we do some of those protocols within practice FOD Map, we’ve actually done Elemental with great success. And I think that’s where just the main distinction that people need to understand is that’s a very short term diet. Exactly. It’s a healing protocol. Um, FODMAP was actually something that wasn’t meant for people to do long term, but then I have people who go to gastroenterologists and they’re like, just get on low FOD mat

And they just stay on it for the rest of their life and it’s such a disservice. Dude, I

[00:31:25] Dr. Kenneth Brown: don’t understand how gastroenter, it’s so hard to get. My colleagues to jump on board, but for some reason, same FOD map, they just, I’ve actually asked them, I was just like, you have a FOD map handout, what does FODMAP stand for?

But I dunno, man, just FOD maps. Just put ’em on FOD map. I like saying it. FOD map and you’re like, damnit. Yeah. But William Chey outta University of Michigan showed, if you’re on that for more than three months, you’re gonna have micronutrient deficiency. You

[00:31:47] Rachel Scheer: will mm-hmm. . Yep. And then you’re gonna decrease the diversity in your gut in the long run.

And then these people try to add the foods back in and they’re like, oh, I’m still not tolerating the. Well, what actually happened here is one, we probably decreased the diversity in our gut even further. And yes, we did remove a lot of the fermentable carbohydrates for a short period of time that were feeding the bacteria.

No gas was being produced or, or maybe just minimal amounts, and so we felt better. But this is that person who gets stuck and they’re like, oh, I thought you fixed my gut issues. No, we didn’t fix any of your gut issues. We gave you a bandaid, which was essentially putting you on this diet. And where those diets I find can be effective is, Hey, let’s put you on low fo map.

Maybe let’s do Ament for a short period of time so we can then. Target, maybe some of the core issues, whether that is like you have a lot of bacteria overgrowth or we support the gut lining. And then from there, that’s where we can focus on repopulating the gut, like slowly adding in some of these foods.

So adding in some of those fibers. And that’s where I find people do have a lot more success, kind of pulling them out for a period of time. Eradicating maybe if there is some bacteria overgrowth, supporting the gut lining, bringing down inflammation. Cuz also you’re cleaning up the diet quite a bit there too.

And then, okay, let’s slowly, you know, whether it’s after one month or two months, add some more of these fibers back in. But now we really have to focus on building a robust and diverse microbiome because we haven’t really healed, or we haven’t even stepped into gut health until we get to that stage there.

And I think more people need to notice, know that distinction between gut healing and gut. Um, and we wanna get to that place of gut health. That’s what’s gonna be more preventative in the

[00:33:29] Dr. Kenneth Brown: long run. I love how you say that, because you’re exactly right. If you view it like that, if you view, we need to get to this place of gut health and ultimately gut health.

is a, a broad microbial diversity, but in the meantime, getting there can sometimes be a bit of a struggle. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. For a lot

[00:33:45] Rachel Scheer: of people who’ve really damaged their, their gut microbiome from their diet, from toxic relationships, from, you know, stress, whatever it may be, or toxic relationships. Yeah. , , you can’t help.

I laugh, but seriously, you know, that plays a huge role. And that’s cause of the emotional stress piece Yeah. Of it all. I, I’m

[00:34:07] Eric Rieger: no longer toxic to Ken or Rachel. Thank you. He’s

[00:34:09] Rachel Scheer: going through a divorce. No, well passed through in middle. Yeah.

[00:34:14] Eric Rieger: It’s almost

[00:34:15] Rachel Scheer: over. Okay. Yeah. But seriously, like

we laugh here, but you know, I truly think toxic thoughts, toxic relationship, toxic food, you know, toxic en environment, all of these things are what’s really wreaking havoc on our gut. So how do we begin to heal the gut? We need to remove. The toxic things from our

[00:34:37] Dr. Kenneth Brown: life. Yeah. So my big thing, so if I had an, we’re discussing all this toxic stuff and we’re discussing life and microbial everything.

The thing that would be my massively transformative goal, the thing that I want to do in life is I want to cure dementia. That would be the thing. Because as we’re sitting here, it would suck If you’re, you know, a certain age and you don’t remember an event like this where we’re, you know, talking about toxic relationships and things like that, how could we forget?

Yeah. No one’s gonna forget. But, so when we’re looking at this, the beauty of having a microbial diversity is we’re able to track the inflammatory process in the. Which in my opinion is probably the most important thing that we need to do is protect the brain, because as we age, we do, you know, dementia is an epidemic.

And there, there was a couple recent studies that came out of Harvard where they looked specifically at people with dementia and they retrospectively looked at what was different between the people that had dementia and not mm-hmm. . And interestingly, they, they found out that, oh, the people that didn’t have dementia ate berries.

What are those berries? Those are prota. Sinin. Those pro anthocyanins are the precursors to the tannin. So it’s the almost to a tannin. And so the conclusion was those people that ate berries, and it was dose dependent. Mm-hmm. had decreased risk of dementia, a significant decreased risk. There’s so much berries every day.

I know. And it’s fantastic to eat berries, but also, um, you can take polyphenols in different ways. Mm-hmm. . And so that’s one of the reasons why the blue zones tend to have less dementia as well. If you have less dementia, then you. Remember to go meet your friends. You remember to have coffee, remember to do these different things.

And I bring this up only because you’re a huge exercise person and you’re a big advocate for that. Another study just came out about six months ago looking at flavonoid intake, and these are all interchangeable terms for polyphenols. And these articles make it somewhat confusing because even the researchers don’t particularly understand when they’re using these different terms.

Mm-hmm. , because they’ll say, flavanoid didn’t take it. I’ll read the article and be like, yeah, you’re talking about a prota sign, itin, but that’s okay. Or I’ll be like, oh, you’re actually talking about this regardless. Let’s just say polyphenol going forward. There was the article that that looked at, um, they were looking at elderly populations, intake of polyphenols, followed by exercise, and then they measured the cognitive ability.

Of those that had the polyphenols. Those that had polyphenols and exercise and those that didn’t, and they found that there was significant improvement in cognitive memory scores when you ate right and you exercised, ate, right. Exercised, yeah. The body knows what it’s doing. I mean, like you can’t overthink it.

Mother nature knows what she’s doing. Eat right, exercise, socialize, sleep. Don’t even get me started on circadian

[00:37:39] Rachel Scheer: rhythm. Yep. Super important. Don’t you see sunlight? Like our G bugs need all of the, the sun, just like we do literally for mental health. I’m very dependent on the sun. I feel like my mood.

Super influenced

[00:37:52] Dr. Kenneth Brown: by all, unfortunately, you know, some of our, some of our heroes, like healthcare workers that work overnight, you know, firemen, police, um, military, they actually sacrifice quite a bit doing shift work. Yep. And one of the things they, that they kind of disrupt is their microbiome. And I have a lot of patience, um, police officers, uh, firefighters, they’ll come to me and they’ll, they probably come to you as well because they’re struggling with their weight.

And then you find out that they got, that they’re doing a different shift or they’re doing whatever, and then suddenly it’s hard. Then they go back and they can’t quite get back to that. And it has to be something with the microbiome. So I

[00:38:28] Eric Rieger: almost feel like that when we look and we talk about the people that happen, let’s just, let’s just take exactly the group that you just said, the firemen, the nurses, whoever works shift.

we can already acknowledge that they already have a disruption in their sleep. Probably the people who should be hyper-vigilant around all the other things that you can do to offset what you’re compromising. If you’re changing in sleep habits, try not to be the one that falls into also diet, making poor diet decisions.

You really should be the one who’s hypervigilant about doing the other things. The other pillars to make up for this deficit, and I say that because everything has somewhat of a symbiotic relationship. When we’re talking about socialization earlier, not only is it allowing us to mix up our microbiomes with each other, but there is, there’s fortune and there’s satisfaction from personal interaction, so it feeds amongst itself.

If you were to cut one off, , you don’t want to make it make it worse for you and not continue to eat well and not continue to sleep. So for the same token, if you’re, if you’re wanting to power through and, and, and take one of the noble professions, do it for yourself and do it for those that you’re trying to serve.

Pay attention to the other things that you can control. If, for instance, shift work happens to be something you’re

[00:39:43] Dr. Kenneth Brown: compromising, our own bacteria have their own, um, circadian rhythm. Mm-hmm. , and it has been shown when they looked at mouse studies and all these different things that when they disrupt that, that the microbial diversity decreases and then they do the whole thing where they give them the high fat, high sugar diets and the ones that are, uh, shift working, they end up putting on a whole lot more weight.

And Sure, when they analyze their stool, it’s because there’s a dramatic shift in the stool. So, Getting proper sleep, getting sunlight, the whole circadian rhythm. Not only just proper sleep, but telling your whatever it is, where you get out there and it tells you, oh, there’s a sun. Yeah, we’re third eye, we’re up.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. .

[00:40:19] Rachel Scheer: Yeah. Yeah. So you guys, what they’re really talking about is all of the different areas that help increase the diversity in your guts. And first foremost is gonna be your nutrition, your lifestyle habits, getting adequate sleep, getting sunlight every single day. That is incredibly essential.

But if you are someone. Starting to eat healthy and you’re struggling, there may be some healing that has to be done with the gut, essentially. And that’s where, you know, it is taking a little bit slow. I always give the example about like gut healing and gut health. It’s over, it’s like an overlap a little bit here.

It’s not like you just go from one to the other, but if you’re noticing gut symptoms, that’s usually a sign, in my opinion. There needs to be gut healing there, first and foremost. But the goal is to get to this place where we can build up a very diverse microbiome. Because just like you said, um, you know, low diversity is connected with.

You know, dementia, um, Alzheimer’s, mental health issues, anxiety, depression. So that’s why I’m such a big believer in, you know, taking a gut centric approach to overall health because we start to see everything improve when we improve the gut. But it has to be more than just here. I’m gonna pop a probiotic.

It is really, you know, that holistic picture of everything there. Yeah.

[00:41:39] Dr. Kenneth Brown: And this is, and I’m trying not to, I’m just trying to be science based. Yeah. Like there was a study that, um, Also a fascinating study where they really looked at the inflammatory cytokines of people, and it was a conjoined study. I think it was m i t and Harvard that actually did this, where it was super detailed.

That was the one where I threw the slide in that you were like, oh, , I had to, I was supposed to give a talk on this and I got the flu a couple weeks ago, and Eric, with about two hours notice, had to go on stage and give this talk . I’m like, well, here’s some slides. See what you can do with it. , it’s okay, . Um, but what they did is they looked at.

They wanted to see, well, if we’re gonna say that inflammation is a root cause of many things, the least of which is aging inflammaging, then how do we actually look at that and have a quantitative value to it? So they looked at people and they took two large groups of people and they analyzed their inflammatory markers and they coincided with the, with the diseases that they had.

And what they showed is that those people that had high levels of TNF alpha, interferon, gamma, interleukin six, all these markers that we know are like super inflammatory. Mm-hmm. , they had a very poor. Microbial diversity. And then they looked at their microbial metabolites and they had very few metabolites.

Mm-hmm. and these people that had pro anti-inflammatory markers, which would be like, I don’t remember exactly, but it’s like, it’s like I L 20, like this ones that we hardly ever talk about. Cause we always talk about inflammation, but there was multiple ones, uro, lithium, for instance. They looked at butyrate.

Butyrate was one of ’em. Um, they had markedly higher amounts of anti-inflammatory stuff. And their microbial diversity was very broad. And then they looked at both groups. So they started with, what are your inflammatory markers? Mm-hmm. , what does your microbiome look like? And then, oh, by the way, what kind of diseases are you dealing with?

So they worked their way back to that. Yeah. They didn’t say those with heart disease, where you at? And those people with inflammation. Just, it’s all the shit that you can think about. It’s the metabolic obesity, the the diabetes, the coronary artery disease, all the stuff and early onset dementia. So we know that the inflammation is the key to this.

How do we keep that down? We’ll, clearly in this particular study, it comes down to the metabolites of the microbiome, and if you have a narrow microbial diversity, you will not produce those metabolites, which is why I’m wearing a bracelet that says, what would your microbiome say? So

[00:44:17] Rachel Scheer: that is You got mine on too.

Yes. For those who are watching

[00:44:20] Dr. Kenneth Brown: that is to remind me that when you’re doing something that maybe can disrupt your microbiome, if you’re like, ah, it won’t kill me, but what would your microbiome say? So if you’re sitting in line at McDonald’s in the drive-through, that’s where it’s at. If you happen, what would your microbiome say?

What would your microbiome say? Yeah. If you’re in a toxic relationship,

[00:44:41] Rachel Scheer: I can’t do every time. , what would your microbiome say? What would your microbiome say? Yeah, some things that we definitely need to start thinking about. So what are some tactical things, in your opinion, that people should be doing to increase their diversity?

And I know we’ve mentioned a few. We talked about socialization, we’ve talked a bit about polyphenols. What else helps with that diversity? Whole

[00:45:06] Eric Rieger: Foods. Whole Foods. Whole foods without doubt. Um, I, I, and something else that it seems to be somewhat of a hot topic and you’ve already referenced it. Uh, I would say that you would probably fall on the same side of thought that Ken and I do, and that is Healthy animal protein.

Mm-hmm. . Um,

[00:45:22] Rachel Scheer: there’s, that’s so demonized right now. A daze though. It’s so funny you

[00:45:26] Eric Rieger: bring that up. So I went to fci, uh, which is the, the Dietician’s Conference, and it was hosted in Orlando this year. And this is the first time that they’ve had one since 2019, which was pre pandemic. And this year was one third of the, approximately of the normal attendance.

And probably the same for the vendors, but something that Ken and I have talked about, and that many of the dieticians, especially the old Guard that have been around a while, were disappointed with. Was there was a, an obvious element push for an acceptance of only plant-based diets and then where certain types of people had really not much representation back in even 2019, like the, the, uh, high inflammatory oils such as safflower and canola, et cetera.

They had booths. They had booths at the dietetics conference, which is somewhat infuriating. Knowing that we have data that talks specifically that what we’re, what we’re addressing here is inflammation, and these things cause inflammation. The imitation meets are made from these exact oils and, and compounds.

We call those Franken foods. They, and they are, most of the fortified vitamin B foods, which are plant-based are, they’re, they’re sourcing that vitamin B from a different animal protein. Anyway. That’s how they’re getting a lot of the vitamin B to be. fortified in all of these various foods. The fact is, it’s my belief you need healthy animal protein.

[00:47:01] Rachel Scheer: Yeah, I would agree with that wholeheartedly. And I think that’s a point for a lot of people to hear because you, they talk a lot about how plant-based diets are essential with all of the fiber for building a healthy microbiome. And my philosophy is, yes, a plant-based diet with animal protein, That’s gonna be the best diet at the end of the day.

Plant-based with animal protein, meaning we wanna eat real whole food. We want to eat as much leafy greens as possible. I say like, be like Kermit the crab. Eat as much leafy greens as you can. Um, eat a ton of bright colored fruits and vegetables, berries we talked about because they have a ton of polyphenols.

Matcha green tea, a great source of polyphenols. I’m a big fan of dark chocolate. That’s my favorite polyphenol to get in. You do? Mm-hmm. . . Yeah. High quality animal protein, salmon, grass fed beef, bison. I love wild pastures. That’s actually where I get all of my animal protein sourced from. Nice. So we’re not talking about going into McDonald’s and going and get a hamburger and eating that type of animal protein that is poor animal protein.

Not good for your gut. What we’re talking about is high quality grass fed and finished red meat. We’re talking about pasture raised chicken. We’re talking about wild caught fish, you know, that have good, healthy fats in them, that our body needs. Um, cholesterol, they, they demonize quite a bit too, and we know that cholesterol is actually essential, definitely for our overall health.

Like it’s the backbone to all of our hormones. So I know I’m sick and tired of. Demonizing fats. I get vegans who, like, I gotten death threats literally for before ’em. You’ve gotten death threats. It’s, it’s literally a cult. It it’s a cult, you know, and I think it, it’s pushing a, a certain agenda and that’s a whole nother podcast and of itself.

We can bring Dr. Gabrielle Lion, my good friend on, and she’ll talk all about muscle centric medicine and, you know, her philosophy about all of that. But I think, you know, ultimately it’s getting back to like the roots of what we were intended to eat. You know, essentially like hunter and gatherers, kinda like that paleolithic type diet in a way.

We

[00:49:05] Dr. Kenneth Brown: have these sharp teeth for a reason. Yeah. Yeah. I actually, uh, so we did a whole show where Eric and I, we, we cooked a meal and we did the full, um, nutritional value of it, which ended up being grass-fed, grass-finished beef, spinach. Garlic. Remember we did the whole thing? Yeah. Mm-hmm. and I base that because I heard Gabrielle on uh, Dr.

Sandino’s podcast and she basically said, well, this is, this is what I eat. Do this. I’d make one big thing in, in a week. And I did that and I honestly loved it. I hate it every single day. The only reason why I quit doing this cuz my kids were like, ah, come on. Yeah. . Mm-hmm. , come on something else. You know, weirdo.

But it’s filling and it’s delicious. Oh no, it feel good. Awesome. It felt good and it’s totally, it’s totally. And appetite suppressant, you increase your leptin. You know, because the, alright, let’s not even get into that whole aspect. I’m not trying to turn this into a how to do this, but when we sit there and talk about like trying to maintain your weight, if you have a high amino acid profile, it does, you have neurons yes in your intestines that send a signal back and it can turn on the leptin, which is the full hormone, and it says, Hey, this is a nutritious meal.

We’re good. You don’t need to keep eating. We’re gonna get everything we need out of this. Now if we look at processed foods, open up a package, tons of emulsifiers. Yes. High fructose corn syrup, all this stuff, they actually damage the micro nerves in the intestines. Mm-hmm. . And not by accident. I have a ton of patients that work for large corporations nearby that make packaged food, and they’re brilliant.

They’re PhDs, they’re food scientists. They know exactly what it’s doing. These are not dumb people. I, I asked one and I was just like, yes. So why do you guys actually add that? Is that more of a stabilizer? It’s like, well, we know that we don’t really have such a robust leptin response. When that happens, I’m like, you’re gonna eat more.

So what you’re saying is the growling goes up and you’re going to eat more and you’re like, you’re, you’re gonna eat more

[00:51:08] Eric Rieger: chips and you’re gonna have more crap calories that you’re taking

[00:51:11] Dr. Kenneth Brown: in. Yeah. And so some of that is not even, it’s not even your brain. It’s literally your brain’s not getting the signal that says Yeah, you’re here.

Let’s, let’s talk really briefly about hyper tres corn syrup. Oh. When, when we look at y you know, when we were talking before and you said in your body building days, that a lot of times I’ll g get into a whole separate hot topic that eventually we need to do a whole podcast on, which is artificial sweeteners.

Mm-hmm. , non-nutritive sweeteners and it’s effect on the microbiome. Cuz it’s, it’s kind of, it’s a moving target right now. Yeah. It appears

[00:51:41] Rachel Scheer: that’s huge in the fitness industry. Oh. But I actually did a, a post about, um, artificial sweeteners and how they re havoc on the gut microbiome. And I don’t know if you know Lane Norton,

[00:51:54] Dr. Kenneth Brown: but, so Bio Lane, I saw, you know, he’s kind of a fan of Yeah.

He was just on Huberman. Mm-hmm. , he’s a, uh, an influencer of a smart guy. Mm-hmm. , I mean, these, these are all, I love the fact that well, you’re one of ’em. I mean, you’ve become this huge influencer. I love the fact that sciencey, really intelligent people walking the walk are out there doing it. Yes. I mean, you’ve got, uh, Thomas DeLauer, the biochemist who just, you know, jacked and he’s living the life.

You’ve got, uh, bio Lane, you know, Dr. Lane Norton, who’s doing that, and you know, you’ve got Andrew Huberman and these people that are, um, so Bilan is funny because he’s kind of a, he did a post because there was a recent article by Elon Ele OV out of Israel about a month ago, looking at four different artificial sweeteners and the effect on the microbiome, and more importantly, on the effect of glucose tolerance.

And basically their results were, Not very good. And then he came out with this whole post where he was kind of breaking down the research of how it wasn’t that good. I, I thought it was really interesting cause it was like point, counterpoint. Sure. Um, and his logic, and I went back through some of his videos.

That’s how I found him, is that, look, if you’re, if you’ve got that sweet tooth, you know, you’re better off doing one of these, you know, SP Splendas or something like that. I, you know, whatever. But let’s, but we do know that certain ones are really bad. Like the ones that we know are chemicals mess up your microbiome, they f up your microbiome pretty bad.

So if you’ve got the, you know, as Peram and those kind of old school ones, a lot

[00:53:32] Rachel Scheer: of his theory, you know, is that the, the studies have only been done in rats and with like large quantities of artificial sweeteners. So it’s not actually the same with humans in the microbiome. What is your thoughts about that?

[00:53:48] Dr. Kenneth Brown: Well, the one that he was trying to defend was the first human study that came out out of ovs. I think his name is Dr. Ov. Um, lab. He’s been on Dr. Ronda Patrick’s podcast a couple times and he was kind of critiquing the study structure as somebody who’s done research a lot of it as somebody who’s in the throes of it, you can always look back, hindsight’s 2020 and how you would like to do something better and everything.

He was definitely defending his position even though it was a human study that show. What the mouse studies were doing. Yeah. And so he was really trying to defend it, like his, well, this study wasn’t that good because of X, Y, Z. Yeah.

[00:54:24] Rachel Scheer: And I know from personal experience, because I, I’ve talked a lot about artificial sweeteners and how they re havoc on the gut, and I saw a lot about that.

And he actually commented back on one of my posts about it. But when I Was she

[00:54:37] Dr. Kenneth Brown: powerful, if you guys get into Instagram war I know,

[00:54:39] Rachel Scheer: I know. But I, in my body building days, like my diet, I know from personal experience, you know, I, I don’t know if I was, I have any like, Canola oils or vegetable oils. I was pregnant cognizant of those types of foods, but what my diet was full of was a ton of artificial sweeteners.

And they were in all of my pre-workouts, my post-work workouts, you know, all of the foods that I was eating, and it wreaked havoc on my gut. And I pulled him out for a while. And along with some other things, my gut got better. And then I tried to reintroduce them again after my gut got better and I still ended up with some issues thereafter.

And if you look at the side effects on like the back of a lot of these artificial sweeteners, you will see side effects. Exploding, constipation, diarrhea. You’ll literally see that on the side effects of it there. So that’s interesting that you do speak a lot about the artificial sweeteners, cuz that’s a lot of what my philosophy

[00:55:35] Dr. Kenneth Brown: is about it.

Yeah, we, I, I’m trying to gather all this data on this because even, um, if you look and when people sit there and say that there’s no data, that’s the one thing that, um, it’s everything becomes a treasure hunt and you just pull it up and you just go, okay, what exists here? And a lot of times there’s confounding data and a lot of times people say there’s no human studies.

Cause I looked at that and I was like, oh, wait a minute. There are some human studies. There are out of China. They’re from 2012 or whatever. You can look em up, but you really have to go looking for this kind of thing. And even some of the stuff that we believe is non caloric, not GU gum, but what’s the other thing that’s in Oh gum.

The Xantham Gum. Mm-hmm. , yes. That’s in everything. Mm-hmm. , that is supposed to be inert. You saw that study, I take it. They

[00:56:21] Rachel Scheer: actually, in SIBO studies, they would give people purposefully five grams of xanthe gum, right. To try to stir up the bacteria to then treat it with Xin. So the bacteria was live and flourishing, so the antibiotic would work more effectively.

I read a lot of those studies when I was struggling with my gut issues, because also I was using Xantham Gum because in a lot of recipes they’ll say, add Dham gum. Mm-hmm. to your shakes, because what is, what does X anthem gum do? It makes your protein shake nice and fluffy and thick, and the ice cream. So it’s a thickener.

It’s a thickener. And that was also a big piece in my diet there at the time. And it’s so interesting finding those studies and being like, they’re literally giving people’s anthem gum to try to stir up the bacteria to cause the bloating. So therefore they can treat it better with Suboxone and it was

[00:57:13] Dr. Kenneth Brown: more effective.

Yeah. So that was, that was a study where it, where the bacteria we’re trying to break it down. Here’s what’s interesting in the study I’m referencing is actually where they then show that the bacteria that breaks it down in your microbiome mm-hmm. , they convert in, I’m 99.9% sure. It’s the xantham gum that I’m talking about.

It’s the thing, it’s the thing that, that they use in binders that they say is A is net calorie zero. It’s in everything. Right? Yeah. Well, guess what? Your microbiome cleaves a couple things, then it becomes glucose and the glucose gets absorbed. Yep. You actually end up converting that to a nutritive thing and you think that you’re not taking calories in.

Right. And so even that, it’s like we’re trusting bottom line is, you said it before Whole Foods, if you’re opening a package, you’re risking some consequence. Well, you know,

[00:58:01] Eric Rieger: a weird thing in, uh, you, you referenced earlier that one of his excuses for using an artificial sweetener was, um, If you have a sweet tooth.

But the truth is I think that that’s actually not a, probably not a positive characteristic of where you are with yourself if you’re trying to improve your health. So maybe it’s a quick fix. Kinda like what you said, Rachel, when you said that there are gut fixes or gut healing diets, but then of course there’s the long-term gut healthy diet.

And so if someone had a sweet tooth and they needed to lean on one of these sweeteners, which I still wouldn’t be in favor of, but if you did, it should only be temporarily, you really should be trying to achieve. Mm-hmm. a status where you’re not having sugar cravings. Having sugar cravings is not a good characteristic of a healthy overall diet.

And as someone who had one when he was in his twenties, you have to overcome that. And then you do, you basically retrain your body to the healthier foods, healthier choices. And then you find, believe it or not, more happiness and. You feel

[00:59:06] Dr. Kenneth Brown: better. So I threw in really briefly the high fructose corn syrup.

The one thing I wanna say about this is that that gets hidden in a lot of things, and there was a study that came out that looked at how high fructose corn syrup, because it has to be converted in the liver. , um, into a usable sugar. Mm-hmm. , and, you know, that leads to fatty liver and all these other things.

Sure. The brain can’t use it, can’t use the high fructose corn syrup directly. And so when you eat high caloric foods, your body is struggling to digest it, but your brain, and that was the stud that, that was the podcast we did in high fructose corn syrup. We got contacted by the, um, libertarian party running for president and vice president, and they were having a rally, and Spike Cohen wanted to come on our podcast, so we did a mobile podcast down there, but we had to wait for him to get done.

So we decided to do one on, uh, high FRS corn syrup before we did that. But we were in a bar doing it. It was really funny because it was our first mobile bar thing. But anyways, during that, what we discussed was the fact that if the brain doesn’t, can’t use that sugar, but there’s signals coming from the liver.

It’s like we got food. , but the brain can’t get it. Yeah. Then they realized that that results in what is called a foraging response, and the foraging response turns up neural activity to seek nutritive foods. Mm-hmm. , but you just ate a big ass bag of whatever, you know, jelly beans or whatever it was. So you are sitting there, your liver’s going, there’s no satiety.

There’s no satiety. The brain’s going, we need something. And then they realized that leads to the neural. Activity related to adhd, all the way to autism spectrum disorder. Yep. So when you are having this situation and then what does it lead to? It leads to this desire for more of something and it just becomes this neural activity.

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s just like running around. And it was fascinating to see the scientists describe it as foraging technique, which if I’m, I like to, I like to fast. I know you fast, you fast. And so I’m pretty much a somewhat intermittent, faster 99% of the time, discovering when the time is. But what I have found personally is that if I, looking back at medical school and things like that, where you show up to the morning rounds.

Yeah. When you have a donut, a glazed donut, and a cup of coffee. I was an effing wreck two hours later. Yeah. Wreck if I delay eating and then I end up having Gabrielle Lyon’s little recipe. I’m a machine. Yeah, I just, I’m just, I’m full. I’m with it. I’m cool. And all it was was just a bunch of amino acids and a bunch of polyphenols.

Yep. There you

[01:01:48] Rachel Scheer: go. A bunch of amino acids and a bunch of polyphenols in cutting out the processed food, the artificial sweeteners, the emulsifiers. If it comes in a bag and a box, probably don’t want to

[01:01:58] Dr. Kenneth Brown: eat it, except if the box says aran except if the box .

[01:02:03] Rachel Scheer: So where can people learn more about what you guys do?

Because Aran is a product that I’ve used quite a bit with my practice. It’s a polyphenol blend. It’s was created for treating essentially methane predominant bacterial overgrowth in the gut.

[01:02:19] Dr. Kenneth Brown: Did we tell you about North? Yeah, so this, I don’t think anybody knows about this yet. In fact, I just came back, uh, American College of Gastroenterology, Northwestern University, Dr.

Darren b Brenner, who’s a world renowned functional medicine doctor. They decided to look at Tron Till Yeah. And they, we didn’t pay for it or anything, and they came out with pretty amazing positive results. Uh, looking at a very, Open label study where people came in. Bottom line is it really helped people, um, with methane predominant, uh, constipation of abdominal pain, which is an abdominal bloating, which is fascinating because now it’s starting the, the exciting thing is very top tier institutions are starting to realize there’s natural alternatives to help some of these people.

Mm-hmm. , that’s what’s really cool. And so we’re gonna be doing that so they can, you can go to atra teal.com, attr A n t i l.com. More importantly, we want them getting it from you. Yep. We’ll put the link in

[01:03:15] Rachel Scheer: the show

[01:03:15] Dr. Kenneth Brown: notes. Yeah. But don’t, but we want to make sure, because you’re gonna give your listeners a discount with, um, an affiliate link.

Correct. And that’s probably the best place to get it, because you can help, you can help your listeners, you can help your Instagram follow. . And, um, that is a way that you can sit there and help and we can give people a discount. That’s, that’s the key to that. And then Altron Till Pro is a physician only line, but we are offering it on our, our website.

My website, because I’m a physician and I want to be able to help some of my patients. The Altron Till Pro has a spore based biotics that’s at KB md Ken Brown md health.com, where you can get Altron till Pro. But we want people going to your affiliate page to get altron. All right, we’ll

[01:04:05] Rachel Scheer: put all of that in this show notes and it’s been awesome having you both, ah, my podcast here today, getting to nerd out on all things gut health, diving into some of these studies.

[01:04:15] Dr. Kenneth Brown: Yeah, that’s awesome. And if, if we’re dealing with any type of toxic relationship, where should they go for help on this one? ,

[01:04:23] Eric Rieger: Rachel, Eric, where should they go? Well first go to your friends and get on their podcast and see how it makes you feel to talk about it. Ladies, be

[01:04:32] Rachel Scheer: single.

[01:04:33] Eric Rieger: Soon enough . Soon enough

[01:04:36] Rachel Scheer: Alright guys, thank you so much. Thanks Rachel. Share this episode in your Stories tag Share Madness tag Dr.

[01:04:45] Dr. Kenneth Brown: Kenneth Brown. Yeah, I think what? What is our Instagram? We’re slowly getting in social media. We’ll put in the show notes. KB MD Health. Yeah.

[01:04:51] Eric Rieger: Hashtag Toxic Relationships. .

[01:04:56] Rachel Scheer: Please put that also as you shared in your stories.

This is Ben, your madness.

[01:05:01] Dr. Kenneth Brown: Love it.