Feed Your Microbiome to Support Your Hormones (& Poop) with Colleen Cutcliffe Ph.D

Colleen Cutcliffe explores the microbiome's role during menopause, focusing on the estrobolome and gut bacteria's interaction with estrogen. She emphasizes the importance of gut health, particularly Acromantia, and discusses the negative impacts of birth control pills and antibiotics. Along with Dr. Mindy, they highlight essential microbes, dietary changes, and probiotics for wellness, and examine the long-term effects of weight loss drugs on the microbiome. Lastly, they stress measuring health through energy levels and the four pillars of well-being: nutrition, exercise, mental health, and the microbiome. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep271 Colleen Cutcliffe is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Pendulum. She has more than 15 years of experience leading and managing biology teams in academia, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology. Prior to starting Pendulum, Colleen was the senior manager of biology at Pacific Biosciences and a scientist at Elan Pharmaceuticals. Colleen completed her postdoctoral studies at Northwestern's Children's Memorial Hospital. Colleen received her Ph. D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Johns Hopkins University and her B. A. in Biochemistry from Wellesley College. Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/. Please note our medical disclaimer https://drmindypelz.com/medical-disclaimer/.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Mindy Pelz?

  On this episode of the Resetter Podcast, I am bringing you Colleen Cutcliffe. Now, this is one of those conversations, I know I say this all the time, but there are certain conversations that I'm like, "Y'all need to hear this. This is important. I've been trying to find the right person to bring to you." So let me give you a little background here. So Colleen Cutcliffe is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Pendulum. She has over 15 years of experiencing leading, managing biology teams in academia, pharmaceuticals, biotech, and her latest passion is the microbiome.

• 0:43Mindy Pelz?

  She considers herself a scientist, which is how she introduced herself at this dinner party that I was at. She's completed her postdoctorate studies at Northwestern Children's Memorial Hospital. She has a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from Johns Hopkins, and a BA in biochemistry from Wellesley College. So brilliant woman, incredible discussion, and it's all around the microbiome. So here's what you're going to hear, and here's what I want you to listen to. If you've been following me for a while or reading my books, you know that I've talked a lot about the oestrogolone. The oestrogolone is the set

• 1:23Mindy Pelz?

  of bacteria that help you take estrogen and metabolize it. What that means is it'll break down estrogen and make it usable to your cells so that your cells can activate estrogen into your system. But one of the challenges I saw in clinical practice, and one of the challenges I see with fasters and with women going through menopause, is that things like poor diet, stress, antibiotics, birth control pill, certain medications destroy your microbiome, and then you pop on HRT, you go through the perimenopausal experience, and your hormones go on a wild ride. So what Colleen is going to bring to this discussion

• 2:07Mindy Pelz?

  is what can we eat, how do we Grow our microbiome. What is made up of this estrobolome? And are there key bacteria that we need to focus on not only for great hormonal health, but that will make fasting easier, that will help us lose weight? There's a whole discussion in here about GLP-1 hormone. So if you're somebody who's been on those drugs and you want to get off of those drugs, you want to hear this. If you're somebody who is struggling with weight loss, you're going to want to hear this because so much of where we get stuck, especially as women over 40, where we get stuck with our health can be boiled down to an imbalance in the microbes.

• 2:49Mindy Pelz?

  So Colleen is going to make this very simple and clear and easy and action oriented so that you can benefit from a repaired microbiome. Really cool discussion. She also has a product and you can decide to dive into it or not. I'm here to just bring you great information. There are discounts on these products that we will leave in the show notes. But more importantly, I want you to never feel like your health crisis is your problem. Because in this day and age, there is so much working against us and understanding how to repair your microbiome is pivotal for your journey, especially your menopausal journey, especially your weight loss journey. So I am so proud and honored to bring you, Colleen,

• 3:34Mindy Pelz?

  and this incredible discussion around your microbiome and how to get it back on track. So I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to the Resetter Podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you.

• 4:07Mindy Pelz?

  Okay, Colleen, I know you've been excited about this interview, but like literally, it was like two sentences in at a dinner party when I asked you what you did, and you told me that I, my brain was like, I need to know more. So I want to start by welcoming you to the Resetter Podcast and just letting everybody know this is going to be an incredible conversation. So I appreciate you taking the time to do this.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. And I know sometimes you have those dinner conversations where you're like, I could just do this for several more hours. So I'm glad we're getting to do this together.

• 4:38Mindy Pelz?

  Agreed, agreed. And then you have the other dinner conversations where you're like, is it time to leave? So here's where I want to start this discussion. I've been studying the microbiome for years. I used a ton of supplements in my clinic. And along my path, one day, I found this term, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna mispronounce it. In fact, I'm probably gonna mispronounce most of the stuff today. So, you know, feel free to, to correct me. But I found this term called the oestrogalome. And I was like, the oestrogalome, wait, there's a set of bacteria that are specifically named and designated to break down estrogen? And then I went from there to, okay, well, what are those bacteria? Which one is what makes up the oestrogalome?

• 5:19Mindy Pelz?

  And I've never been able to find the set of bacteria. So to fill, so we can start everybody on the same part of the conversation. Can you explain to everybody what the oestrogalome is? And, and do you know what bacteria make it up?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Well, yes, let's dig in. So first of all, we are talking about a subset of the gut microbiome. So the gut microbiome, of course, has these trillions of different bacteria and viruses and fungi. They play all kinds of different roles. And there's, I always think of it as like this really big factory. And there's one department, the oestrogalome, and these are the microbes that interact with estrogen. And like you, you know, I got really excited about the idea that the microbiome plays a role in increasing a lot of our hormone levels, and that maybe estrogen, you know, there was an opportunity here. So I sat down one day, and I actually said, I'm gonna read, I'm just gonna start reading about the microbiome and menopause, because I wanted to understand more about that particular phase. And first of all, you'll be very disappointed to know that it only took me one day to read

• 6:19Speaker 01

  every paper that was out there.

• 6:20Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  There's really so much research left to be done here. There's so much untapped knowledge that it's an exciting time where these things are starting to, you know, get a light shed on them. We have a lot more advocates for this kind of research and I'm just really excited about what we're going to find out. Here's what we know today, which is not a whole lot. So the ostrombolum is this group of microbes that are able to interact with estrogen. We know that there's a very specific enzyme that these strains carry and that enzyme has the capability to kind of, at the end of the day, increase your free estrogen. So essentially, when your ovaries create estrogen, or you know, your adrenal glands to much smaller degree, this estrogen has two paths it can follow. One is that it's just sort of free circulating estrogen.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  The other is that it can become conjugated. And when it gets this conjugation added to it, it actually signals for it to go be secreted out of your body. And so that reduces your free estrogen. Well, on its way to being secreted out of your body, it passes past the gut microbiome. And in the microbiome, there are these microbes which can actually deconjugate and then make that estrogen now free circulating estrogen and send it back into free circulating estrogen. And so there's sort of this opportunity, when these estrogen molecules that are conjugated goes through the microbiome, for them to get deconjugated and increase your circulating estrogen. And so maybe one of the most interesting things to know is that before we go through menopause, you could take the microbiome of a person and you could know with really high certainty, did this come from a man or did it come from a woman?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  And the reason you know whether it came from a man or woman is because of the ostrombolum. After we go through menopause, we lose all these strains and actually post-menopause, if you were to take that same microbiome from that person, you would not be able to tell if that was a man or a woman. In other words, we start to look more like men after we go through menopause because we lose the ostrombolum. We lose these strains which are interacting with estrogen. And so there's this really cool opportunity to bring them back and sort of have a natural way to increase our estrogen. Okay, that was a lot, but that's.

• 8:18Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I was like, oh my God, my brain is going crazy. Okay, why would we lose them? Like. So I my next book that I'm researching right now and really deep into is that I strongly believe that menopause actually is working for us, not against us. And it actually, there's a reason we live 42.5% of our life in post-menopause. So if where I go with why would we lose these bacteria, why would we lose the oestrogolone through menopause? Is it that they're not needed? Or was there something we did in the menopausal process that made us kill them?

• 8:55Speaker 01

  So fundamentally, I think the answer is we don't know. We don't know why we lose them. And I would say there's some really cool microbiome studies where people will go look at different populations around the world. And sometimes you see different patterns in different populations. So in the more like so-called advanced, you know, communities like ours, there might be a different trending than if you were to go into the middle of the Amazon and look at how their microbiomes function. And so to answer your question, that's the kind of study that will help us answer that. Because if you actually have things that you're doing that are causing that that are different from your natural microbiome evolution through time, that's where you would start to see that difference. But no one's ever done that study.

• 9:33Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, because I'm wondering if they just aren't needed. But but this, the when you talk about conjugated and unconjugated, I want to go back to that idea. The way that I have explained it is that estrogen, you know, everybody's all about, I need more estrogen, I need more estrogen, I'm losing estrogen. And we always talk about the hormone itself, but we don't talk about the fact that a hormone has to be reformatted in order for our cells to be able to use that. My understanding is the oestrogolone is a part of that reformatting process so that we can and it sounds like we go from conjugated unconjugated. Is that right to be able to be accessible to our cells?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. That's right. And so and also just to like reiterate, there could be the opposite set of reactions happening. They've just never been discovered before. But I think it's particularly interesting to think about these things which are able to, you know, increase the circulating estrogen and do this deconjugation.

• 10:26Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. So, okay, so that leads me to another thing we talked about at the dinner party, and something that I gathered for Eat Like a Girl, which is one of the major destroyers of a woman's microbiome is birth control pill.

• 10:41Mindy Pelz?

  And that when we take the birth control pill, it actually changes our whole microbial makeup. And what the research I found is that actually then it leads to specifically those microbes that help to make, take our food and be able to turn them into B vitamins and other, other, other vitamins and minerals that we need. So my first question is, is that right? Does the birth control pill change our microbiome? And is there anything we can do as we go into our perimenopause and menopausal years to help bring the health of the oestrogolone back so that we can actually be able to metabolize the little bit of estrogen that we're still being given? How do we use that so we can metabolize it and use it for our own good?

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're asking the heart of all the questions that we want answered. So, I mean, the first is that I, I just feel like there's such a paucity of reproducible data out there. So the idea that birth control pills can affect your microbiome is logical. It's definitely logical. And there are, that's, that's part of a whole slew of publications that have shown that different medications are like, that we've been taking for a long time and thought they were fine, are having this, you know, negative effect on our microbiome. I also think that one of the things we talked about at dinner party is that your microbiome is inside of you and entirely dependent on what you choose to expose it to.

• 12:03Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  And so when you think about, you know, the exposure of these hormones to your microbiome, it really is changing and selecting for and de-selecting for different microbes. You know, the one hypothesis could be that when you're on birth control and you're changing kind of artificially your different hormone levels, now these microbes that are needing to interact with those hormones become depleted because you're essentially mucking with the natural system. And so I think that hypothesis has played out with other interventions, other pharmaceuticals. And so that wouldn't be surprising if that fed into that same theme. I think the big opportunity is what you pointed out, and that's something that we are now really deeply investigating, which is can you enable your oestrogolone to be

• 12:45Speaker 01

  sustained throughout menopause in order to continue to increase your free circulation? Getting estrogen naturally and what are these microbes? And I think the there's the theoretical, which is strains that have genes that are able to do this deconjugation and there's only a handful of them. There's a very short list and it's nothing you've ever heard of before. They're not on the market today. They're not packaged up out there. So they're totally novel microbes that really need to be investigated and studied from the lab all the way through humans before we'll feel like they can actually do that work. But the the good news is that you can also think about what are the foods that you can be eating that will help these strains grow. And so I think, you know, a couple of the well, a couple of these are interesting

• 13:28Speaker 01

  because there are known kind of high fiber foods that can actually help them to grow. And so I I think, but you know, I'm I'm sort of stumbling in my words here because I'm hesitant. I don't want to put out misinformation, but if there is an exciting like small list of strains I think could be capable of doing this.

• 13:43Mindy Pelz?

  Okay, so I'm going to go back to guessing what kind of foods they are. And I'm going to bring one food that I have decided is the hero menopausal food. And I found this food because it's incredible for supporting progesterone, which progesterone typically is the first hormone to decline in the 30s, as you know. But I've been deep in understanding for my next book, The Grandmother Hypothesis, which is the transformation that happens to women into these post reproductive years. So if we go back to our hunter gatherer days, the post menopausal woman, what she did is she used this new energy that she wasn't spending on her her reproduction and she used it to go forage for tubers, specifically sweet potatoes.

• 14:28Mindy Pelz?

  So now I'm like, wait a second, there is like, like, like the earth created sweet potatoes as a gift for women. I am sure of it. So is one of the foods sweet potatoes?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  It totally is. I I cannot believe I cannot believe that you've come at that from this other angle. That is really amazing. That's really amazing.

• 14:48Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, yeah. I because here's so Colleen, oh, my God, you're the perfect person to talk about this with. Because nothing that the body does is by mistake. So there is a Season for menopause. And when we go back and we look at this evolutionary place that we lived in, it was the grandmother that was able to forage for food. And they say that the her renewed energy was she was the only one left at the cave when the men were off hunting. She was the only one strong enough to reach down and pull these tubers out. Then I went on and found a very interesting study that was saying that a lot of times when the men came back with a kill, it was other men that got fed first. It was children.

• 15:31Mindy Pelz?

  And then it was the fertile women and oftentimes it was the grandmother or the post reproductive woman that had to go without food or eat her tubers that she had already pulled out of the ground. So there is something in the frickin tuber, the sweet potato that is magical to women. And now you're saying it feeds a microbe that we're still learning about.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  It it does. And I love I love that because I think that in some of our investigations, I love that because in some of our investigations, we'll need to be looking at what are the foods and what are the, you know, essentially the prebiotics that will help these strains to grow. And, you know, I'm very curious to understand if there's something about sweet potatoes and the composition of that that we'll want to break down and look at because I think that, you know, there's this something that's always I get asked a lot and you probably get asked it too, which is, hey, is it better to just take like a fiber supplement or to eat the foods? And, you know, I'm sure you say the same thing I do, which is that of course, it's always better to eat the foods because there's this composition of the different, you know,

• 16:35Speaker 01

  components of that food that are meant to work together and work with your, you know, you're getting multiple things in once in one thing as opposed to if you go to prebiotic, that's sort of, you know, one very specific additive. And so I wonder if there's something in the sweet potato, some composition of things that are actually incredibly powerful for the astroblum.

• 16:52Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Okay. When you find out, will you let me know?

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. I mean, I, I'm, I, this, this research is so exciting because I think that we've, you know, for so long, just sort of been stuck with injecting ourselves or supplementing ourselves with hormones. And it's just an opportunity to do it ourselves.

• 17:08Mindy Pelz?

  That's right. And that is, that's the big thing that I, and you and I chatted about this, like, I'm really disappointed in the way that the menopausal conversation is going right now. Because the, what women are hearing is you're suffering because you didn't get a patch, you didn't get a cream. And when we look at how sensitive these bacteria are in our gut, if we look at all the magic that they do, and we look at the way most lifestyles are, there's a destruction of this gut that's not being addressed. And it's not, for some women, it's not as simple as rubbing creams and patches on them. There's a whole lifestyle that needs to change here. Which, yeah, go ahead and comment if you have a thought on that, because I have another huge question for you.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  I, I, I absolutely, I agree with you. And I was gonna say that it's interesting, because as, you know, we go through menopause, there are, of course, a variety of different things that are happening to our bodies that are, that are changes that start way before you're actually, you know, in the middle of menopause. And I think that the, the whole estrobolome and the free estrogen hormone circulation, you know, that whole system has a real parallel in the GLP-1 hormone system. And so the way that our microbiome can stimulate GLP-1 hormone, and we, of course, know that as we go through menopause and as we age, that our ability to, to kind of regulate the GLP-1 hormone and our metabolism is also something that everyone's trying to like, you know, hit at from different angles. But there is like this, you know, microbiome solution. And, and so I think to your point

• 18:28Speaker 01

  about lifestyle changes that can modify your microbiome to optimize it for these hormones meant to do, is, is a big opportunity.

• 18:36Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. So you, you nailed it. That, so the next thing I was gonna ask you is about GLP-1 hormone, because it's made by our bacteria, our microbes. Is that correct?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  That's right. There have actually only ever been two microbes ever published to be able to stimulate GLP-1. But a lot of people don't realize these drugs are actually a chemical mimic of a hormone that your body naturally makes that is stimulated by your microbiome. And moreover, the food that you're eating, the lifestyle that you have can help you to increase these strains and get that GLP-1 regulation back into your system.

• 19:07Mindy Pelz?

  Exactly. So what the research I saw was that it was fats that was destroying the GLP-1 hormone. So I dove into the studies to try to figure out what fats. And I couldn't find what fats. They just clumped them all together. But my hunch is it's the inflammatory fats that have been dished out to us by the Western standard diet that has destroyed these microbes, which has destroyed the GLP-1 production that happens within our gut. So of course, now we're gaining weight. So we need to be able to have these, you know, add these medications in to replace what the microbes should have done. Is that an accurate line of thinking?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  I think I might think about it. I might turn that on its head and sort of say, I think about it from the angle of what are we not feeding these microbes? And so you could say, well, here's what I am eating. But I think the question is really to focus on, well, what are you not eating? Because again, the foods that you eat that can feed these particular microbes is pretty well-known and well-defined. And it's not going to be surprising to anybody, you know, high fiber and high polyphenol are actually really good for these microbes and have been clinically demonstrated to be able to increase their levels. And so I think one of the, you know, kind of dietary trends that you're talking about that we're all moving to is also this massive depletion in the amount of fiber that we should be intaking every day. And if you're able to increase your fiber, your

• 20:23Speaker 01

  daily fiber, you'll actually be feeding these microbes that are then responsible for stimulating GLP-1. And a really cool paper just came out, sort of showing, it came out in Cell just a couple of weeks ago, showing that there are actually these groups of microbes that are really important for our health and our metabolism, and they are fed by fibers. They are literally the group that metabolize fibers. So if you're not eating fibers, you're not getting those guys that can stimulate GLP-1.

• 20:50Mindy Pelz?

  And do we have any sense how much fiber that we should be eating?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. What is the recommendation right now? Is it 30 grams a day?

• 21:00Mindy Pelz?

  I can't remember what I've so I'm trying to get women out of counting anything because we were counting calories and then we counted the scale and then we counted macros. So what I've been telling my group is that what we should be doing is having fiber with every meal and fiber should be first. So super interesting study that I found was that if you eat fiber first and then protein and then carbohydrate, you actually start to see the production of GLP-1 hormone go back up. Is that you?

• 21:27Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. And that gets to another conversation we're having, which was around fasting or more specifically the breaking of the fast. And, and that's really speaking to what you're saying, which is that you've got all these microbes sort of living inside of you, waiting to see like, what are you, who are you going to feed first? And so, you know, you can feed the men first and then the pregnant women and then, but here we're.

• 21:50Mindy Pelz?

  Back to the old, the primal days. I got where you're going. That's awesome.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Back to the primal days. And so to feed those microbes first that are involved in fiber metabolism, you are giving yourself sort of this head start in the GLP-1 production because those are the strains that stimulate GLP-1 production. And the reason you want that is because GLP-1, one of the most important things that this GLP-1 hormone does is as soon as you stimulate it, it tells your brain that you're full and you don't need to eat anymore. So you don't overeat, you get, you feel satiated by your food. You don't get weird cravings at weird hours of food you know you don't need. And so, you know, breaking your fast with fiber, starting your meal with fiber, this is all a hundred percent the way to essentially hack the system and get the GLP-1 jump started before everybody else.

• 22:31Mindy Pelz?

  Amazing. I hope people hear that because I, you know, we, we are such a culture of give me the pill, give me the shot, let me do it. And what I see is that we just are getting further and further away from the, our own natural way that, that we do things. So that makes perfect sense to me. Okay, let's go back to fasting because the other thing you and I talked about was that fasting got a bad rap for killing microbes. And when I dove into the studies, what I saw is yeah, it, it creates an environment in the gut where your microbes that are not healthy are no No longer welcome. And so the body, this whole microbial shift that happens while fasting is actually,

• 23:11Mindy Pelz?

  yes, it's a breakdown, but if you bring fibery foods, prebiotic, probiotic rich foods into that first meal, you get this explosion of new bacteria. Can you speak a little bit on that? Because this is the most common criticism that I have gotten by professionals. These aren't the everyday person by colleagues and professionals is that fasting kills the microbes. And I keep saying there's more to the conversation than you need to know about.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, as you know, I fall on the exact opposite end of that argument. I think that fasting is great for microbes. For a lot of the same reasons why it's great for your other cells in your body. And moreover, we know that with our microbes, they can go into dormant states. They can, they know how to survive periods of not eating because I mean, they've co-evolved with us. And so I think there's two important things to note, you know, one is that you're kind of killing off microbes. It's not like they get depleted and they can never come back. They're sort of they've evolved to be able to go into dormant states. But the second thing is that you can, by choosing to starve everybody. Again, this is what gives you the opportunity to replenish the specific strains that you want to replenish.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  And there's a big kind of misconception in the microbiome field, which is that diversity is king. That diversity is the most important thing in your microbiome. And that is not true. It's actually, there are certain things that, certain functions that you want to have an abundance of. And there are other functions that you could just do without. And so it is an ecosystem in which there are certain, you know, so-called guilds that you want to have more of. And there are certain guilds that you want to have less of. And so it's not just about overall diversity. It's about a certain kind of diversity.

• 24:56Mindy Pelz?

  But how would you, and so this is the, this is where the conversation gets dark really quick. Because I think like, how do you know what your diversity of your microbiome is? And I've looked at every stool test. We used to do a ton of stool tests in my office and I finally gave up on it because I was like, this is a moving target. The microbiome is changing every couple of days. So is there a way for us to actually understand what our actual balance of our microbes are?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Well, I think, you know, first of all, there's sort of two pieces to this. One is actually measuring your microbiome and the other is you're measuring your symptoms and how these things change because your microbiome is, does affect a lot of things outside of just, you know, what you can measure and a lot of it is stuff that you feel. So things like food cravings, sleep, energy levels, all these things are, your microbiome literally is sort of giving you a feedback loop of what's working and not working. Your poop, like I always tell, the best diagnostic marker of your microbiome in the world for all time is it's just your poop. So, you know, there's this weird phenomenon when you ask people, well, I'll ask you, have you ever pooped and then looked back in the toilet bowl to see what you look like?

• 26:05Mindy Pelz?

  Every day. Every day. Every time I poop, I look. But, and I have a, I have a thought of what it's supposed to look like, but I would love to hear your, your opinion on it.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Well, that's right. You have a thought of it specifically, but you're looking every day and like you get annoyed if there's too much toilet paper because you're like, oh, I can't see my poop. And there's, there's like a very kind of built in framework of like, look at your poop, look at your poop. And, you know, for your listeners, I would say, are, you know, think about it. Are you looking at your poop? Are you annoyed when there's too much toilet paper? And then ask the question, what are you looking for? Why are you looking at it? And I think most people don't know why they're looking at it. It's like, well, I don't know, I'm just still compelled to see what my poop looks like. And what you're looking for, what your brain is, is clocking in is baseline. It's baseline of what does your poop always look like? And when your poop looks weird, there's like a freak out, you know, like, oh man, that's not what my poop's supposed to look like, that's not what it's supposed to feel like. And that is a natural system baked in of what's happening inside of you is showing up as

• 26:57Speaker 01

  what's coming out of you. And so I, not to get too gross and not to be a non-scientist.

• 27:03Mindy Pelz?

  No, go for it.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Their poop is pulling you a lot.

• 27:05Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Okay, so what should it look like?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  So, in the end, like the kind of the, the most healthy poops are probably more around how frequently you're going. So you don't want to be going seven times a day, but you don't want to be going every other day. So, you know, one to three times, you know, a day, I think is a pretty normal cadence. You don't want it to feel like too runny. I mean, you don't want it to feel then also like it's hard to poop. So kind of the, if you, if you have a dog and you watch how fast they poop, I mean, it's amazing. They just get out there, they get their business done and they're done. And that's how we're supposed to poop. You're not supposed to be out there for half an hour, you know, with predators all around you pooping. And so, you know, I think the more important thing, the consistency, the consistency is linked to it is how frequently you're doing it and how quickly it happens for you. And I think that those are important. So it should look, you know,

• 27:51Speaker 01

  roughly like a, you know, stool, not, not, you know, too watery and then, and, and it should be pretty easy to poop. It shouldn't take you and half an hour to, to poop unless you're doing other

• 28:02Mindy Pelz?

  stuff. Yeah. You're right. Unless you brought your phone in there and now you're putting yourself in sympathetic state and, and pooping is a parasympathetic activity.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 28:12Mindy Pelz?

  You know, when I was in clinical practice, it shocked me how many people don't have a daily bowel movement. And I just want to point out that that is massively important because it is how your body detoxes itself. So do you have any, if somebody doesn't have a daily bowel movement, are there some just tried and true things we should be doing to make sure that we can actually and effortlessly poo?

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the kind of, I was just at a brunch yesterday and someone had made these homemade, you know, jams and jellies. And one of them was peaches and the other one was prunes. And I said, everyone be careful when you spit prune jam, because if you're not used to eating prunes, it can be very potent for you. And so, and that's what it does. It unclogs the system and, and it's very real. So if you are feeling back up, you know, prunes, I think are a really great way. And then, and then fiber. I mean, really, this is one of the things that, you know, Metamucil has been around forever and it's one of those tools that people can use. Fundamentally though, there is a strain that is a emerging as a keystone strain in your, in your gut microbiome

• 29:18Speaker 01

  that appears to play a role in actually having, you know, this helping with this regulation. And there, and, and it sort of works in a consortium with other strains, but there's one strain, Clostridium butyricum. And actually, it's been used in Japan for a long time for IBS symptoms and even IBD. And it really helps to regulate kind of your, your bowel movements. And it works with this other strain, which is emerging as a keystone strain called Mancia, mucinophila, and that's also a really important strain. And both of these strains are often depleted when you start to look in people who are aging. And then just to get back to your other question about how can you really survey the microbiome? I think it's really challenging with all these, like, there's a new company offering a new test every single day.

• 29:59Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  But as a practitioner, you have the ability to get your patients access to, I think, what I think are two of the good tests out there. One is Genova Diagnostics has a really good gut test. And the other DSL has a really good GI MAP test. Both of those, I think, are really good microbiome tests. But the key is that you can't think about the microbiome as a single point in time. You have to be taking longitudinal tests and getting your baseline. Because, yes, there are things that will change from time to time, but there you do have kind of like a baseline core microbiome that that becomes the key part.

• 30:28Mindy Pelz?

  So, okay, that actually brings up a study that are, it was more like a paper that was written by National Geographic many years ago. And it was about a journalist in UK that went to Africa and he lived with a tribe for three days. Do you know, do you know the story?

• 30:42Speaker 01

  I don't know this story. No, but I've heard other people doing this. Yes.

• 30:45Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. So they measured his gut microbiome and then they sent him to go live with this tribe. And he ate and did everything that the tribe did. One of the biggest things they ate was porcupine. So it was like new food, new environment, then he flew back. And they'd seen in three days that his, like, a majority of the microbes in his gut had actually changed because his environment had changed, which really, what, and this study was done, I mean, this article was done like 10 years ago. And what came out of that was a discussion about how quickly we can change our microbiome. So do we have any indication, like, if somebody's listening to this and they're like, oh, my God, I don't, I don't have a daily bowel movement. I haven't even been eating enough fiber and they want to make a shift to their microbiome. How quickly can we see changes in the microbiome?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Super fast, super fast. You can see a difference in your microbiome, depending on how depleted it is. But I will, like, I'll get, everybody here probably knows an example of when you traveled somewhere and within 24 hours, you felt a change to your bowel movements. And so I think that that tells you that is how quickly, when you change your environment, when you change your food, you can dramatically change your Microbiome even within 24 hours. And so I think that's the, that's the beauty of the microbiome. Because we know that there are a lot of things that are happening to us throughout our lives, causing our microbiome to become depleted. We know those depletions are linked to a wide variety of diseases, even including, you know, getting to the brain, you know, Parkinson's disease have these links now to the microbiome. But the beautiful thing about the microbiome is unlike your genes where you sort of get what you get,

• 32:15Speaker 01

  you can change your microbiome and we are changing it accidentally all the time. And so if you're doing it purposefully and thoughtfully and deliberately, you can change your microbiome really quickly and see these immediate health outcomes. And which is really, you know, amazing. And then I would say the other thing too is like, because you're doing it naturally, it does depend on how depleted you are. So you can sometimes see some things very quickly and then other things it does take a second. And so, but, but you can change your microbiome within 24 hours, super fast.

• 32:43Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. So encouraging, so encouraging. So that leads me to the other spark of conversation we had at the dinner party, which was about this acromansia. And one of the comments I think that I had made to you was what a fan of fermented foods I was. And, and then somewhere along the conversation you brought to my attention that actually some microbes can't be, we can't introduce through fermented foods. We can't necessarily, the way I heard is we can't necessarily feed them. There are key microbes that deplete as we age. Can you talk a little bit about that? And then specifically about acromansia? Because I literally took all my supplements in my clinic. Once I identified fasting and breaking the fast and we got rid of them all for, for the microbes.

• 33:27Mindy Pelz?

  Because for, for the gut bacteria, because I was like, here's a lifestyle solution. But then you offered me a very different way to, to look at this, that some of these microbes that are so important are, are depleting as we age and we may need to add them back in.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Yes. So it starts with kind of where are we talking about when we talk about the gut microbiome? So when you think about it, you eat food, it goes into your stomach, there's all this acid there. And then it goes into your, you know, GI tract. And when you get all the way to the end, the distant end of that GI tract, there's the distal colon. That's where all the action is. That's the, when we talk about the gut microbiome, that's where it's all happening. And by the time you get to the distal colon, there's actually no oxygen. There. And so there's this really interesting kind of like sub area of your body that has no oxygen in it. And as a result, a bunch of these microbes that live there, they are what's called strict anaerobes. And that means that they can live in the absence of oxygen, but also a subset of them, the strict anaerobes, they can't live, they actually can't even survive if there's any oxygen around.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  So they're not, you're gonna find them on fermented foods, you're not gonna find them out and about anywhere because they can't live in oxygen. And so the, one of the amazing strains, Akkermansia, which, you know, plays a really important role in the structural gut lining, and also is one of the only strains that's ever been shown to stimulate GLP-1, has never been found on a single food or beverage. It's only ever been found in one place, and that's mother's breast milk.

• 34:48Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, of course, of course. The most perfect food.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  The most perfect food. And so there's this whole idea that you get my, this Akkermansia strain, which is so important for your overall health, you get it in mother's breast milk, and then you just spend the rest of your life trying not to kill it.

• 35:03Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, my God.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  And so the problem is, so you can increase Akkermansia levels through your diet, 100%, because we know that there are a lot of clinical trials showing that if you increase your dietary fiber, you increase your polyphenols, that can increase Akkermansia. There are things that we do that can cause you to entirely kill your Akkermansia, like take an antibiotic. So you took an antibiotic, now you've completely decimated, now it doesn't matter what you're feeding your microbiome. Akkermansia can never grow because it's completely gone. And so this is where it becomes important to, because you can't get it anywhere else, to actually replenish your body with a microbe itself, and then to have the, the foods and the nutritional, you know, benefits to it. And that's how you're gonna get that one-two punch of getting a microbe back. And if you don't do that, you, there's, you can never get your Akkermansia levels back up.

• 35:48Mindy Pelz?

  Okay, so what happens if you were born by C-section? You were never, you were never breastfed, and you've been on multiple rounds of antibiotics?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  This is a huge area of research. We know that babies who are born by C-section, they are not exposed to that initial microbiome that they're supposed to be having. If they are not given mother's breast milk, they're not getting all these microbes and the prebiotics that are super important for seeding the gut. And that that initial seeding is incredibly important for long-term health. And then you add in throw in these antibiotics, you've got an additional issue there. And in fact, my first daughter, one of the inspirations for me starting this company, was premature by almost two months. And when she was in intensive care, they gave her multiple doses of antibiotics, not because she had an infection, but because she was four pounds and super fragile. They didn't want her to get an infection. And this was 17 years ago. And so at that time, I didn't know anything about the microbiome.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Because if I had, I would have said, no, please don't give her those antibiotics. Because what has been shown, this was, there's a 2012 study that came out from Marty Blaser at NYU, and he showed that, I think he looked at 22,000 babies, and showed that babies who were on a lot of antibiotics were more prone to chronic illnesses later on in life, including obesity and type 2 diabetes. The Mayo Clinic repeated that study and showed that if you're under two years old and you're on a lot of antibiotics, you're more prone later on in life, not just to obesity and diabetes, but also to allergies, asthma, ADHD, celiac disease. And so the question is, what is happening? Well, what's happening is that in this early life start, you're starting off, you know, 20 feet behind everybody else in the race because you don't have these microbes. And what happens is that these microbes are tied to your immune system,

• 37:27Speaker 01

  your inflammatory system, your metabolic system. And so when you don't have them, you're not developing in the right way. And so then later on in life, it shows up as these chronic illnesses because of this early problem of having a depleted microbiome.

• 37:41Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, so well said. And then my brain is thinking about the food system and the way it continues to destroy the microbes even more. And then the chemicals in the food system add these obesogens into our system that hijack our stem cells, and our stem cells start making fat cells. And when you start looking at connecting all the dots, you see why we have, you know, childhood obesity challenges. And you see why learning disabilities are through the roof. Like, the picture becomes very clear when you realize the power of not- Not eating the right foods and not doing some of these, you know, what I guess we would call it ancient strategies, like delivering babies naturally and breastfeeding. So, you know, I hope anybody listening who's dealing with a chronic problem can see that there's a lifestyle that could either lead you down a path of health

• 38:26Mindy Pelz?

  or lead you down a path of disease based off of what, how well you're taking care of these microbes.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And again, just to reiterate the promise or the hope is that you can actually modify your microbiome. So you have a chance, no matter how far along you are, all these things that have happened, you have a chance to reset your microbiome and kind of get the microbes that you need.

• 38:46Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. So talk a little bit about what acromancia does. Like, is it, does it have a role? Or is it just this pivotal bacteria that gets depleted and throws the whole balance of the rest of the microbes off?

• 39:00Speaker 01

  It has important roles in addition to kind of being part of the ecosystem. But it's actually, the reason it's a key stone strain is because of what it actually does and not just sort of the interaction with other strains. So the first thing it does is it's important for the structure of your gut lining. And so we think about our gut lining as sort of like a wooden fence where you have these, you know, planks, these wooden planks, and they're held together by glue. And what can happen over time through wear and tear is that that glue weakens, a plank falls, and now you have a hole in your fence, you know, a leak in your fence. And so your gut lining is literally exactly the same way. You have these epithelial cells, they're lined up next to each other. And then you have glue, which is called mucin, that holds them together. And it's important to have a thick mucin layer of, you know, fresh glue.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  And what acromancia does, it's the only strain we know of to date, that it sits there in the glue and it strips away the old glue when it gets old and puts up new glue. And so it is constantly regulating the glue, which keeps all of your cells able to be together and have these, you know, so-called tight junctions. And when you are low in acromancia, that mucin layer, that glue layer is really thin. And then you start to get these gaps between your cells. And now you have what some people call leaky gut. And all that's saying is that when these cells aren't right next to each other and they have holes in them, these gaps will allow things that are inside the microbiome to infiltrate into the bloodstream and things in the bloodstream to make their way into the microbiome. And that's when all hell breaks loose.

• 40:20Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  And so if you've got, you know, inflammatory issues, random immune responses that you're like, what's going on? It's because all these signaling molecules are now misplaced. They're in the wrong area. And that's because acromancia is not keeping these cells together. And so that's one of the reasons it's keystone. So you'll find in a wide variety of diseases ranging from GI issues, even as I said, to neuronal issues to even osteoporosis. These people are depleted in acromancy because you've lost the fundamental structure of your gut lining. So that's one of the most important things that acromancia does.

• 40:50Mindy Pelz?

  Um, I had a couple of years back, I had Stephen Gundry on here when his book, The Energy Paradox came out. And I asked him what the number one reason is for low energy. And he said, leaky gut, exactly what you just said. Um, and you know, then, so you can just see the ramifications of all of that. And I'm thinking, well, so acromancia is a little bit like a construction worker. It keeps that, it keeps that, that tight junction working for you.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  And I'll tell you about Stephen Gundry also because he shared with me, and this is all publicly, it's on his podcast, but he shared with me that he did an experiment where he traveled and he said, when I travel, I've always got like my supplements that I travel with to make sure that my GI and my, you know, I don't get this leaky gut problem. And he did an experiment where he only took one with him and it was, you know, pendulum to acromancia. And he said, it worked great. And so this structure of your gut lining, I think is so, we, we don't know how important it is, but it really shows up in all these really negative ways when you don't have it in place.

• 41:47Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Well, and you know, I did it many years back. I did a whole research on the Human Genome Project. And it's shocking to think that we didn't really know what genetics were or what they mapped to till like the 1990s. I think that project came out, maybe 1980s. But what's interesting is that what followed that was the Human Microbiome Project. And I don't know if it's still going on, but when you stop to think that we're just learning about genetics and we're just learning about microbes, I don't even know how well we have like mapped those two together. This is so new.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  It's so new. And in fact, if you go to PubMed, which is the resource for all the publications that are out there, and you type in the keyword microbiome, what you'll find is that before 2010, it's like a flat line of zero papers. And then, once DNA sequencing technologies became available, you see this exponential growth in our knowledge in the microbiome. But when you think about the context of knowledge, it's only in the last 10 to 20 years that we even know what this thing is, much less how to tackle it. And the biggest discoveries that have happened over the last 100 to 15 years is like, holy shit, this thing's important.

• 42:54Mindy Pelz?

  Yes, right. Yeah, pretty much. I love, like, okay, this is what we learned. Like, this is kind of the beginning of all of your health, or all of your disease, depending on what happened here. So with your product with Pendulum, and do you recommend that people go on it for like 90 days and then get off? Like, it's, you know, one of my belief systems is we should be able to use lifestyle to kind of keep the momentum of our health going. So how do you see people, or how have people been using your product? And then, what kind of results are they seeing? And my guess is it's wide range, depending on where the deficiency was.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Yes. So I, so the first thing is, you know, what do people see? And then how do they kind of sustain those benefits? So our flagship product is Pendulum Glucose Control. This was designed for people with type 2 diabetes. And it's the, there's a trial that is published in BMJ. It was a placebo-controlled, double-blinded randomized trial, in which we showed that when people were on this product for 90 days, compared to placebo, their A1C went down by 0.6, and their blood glucose spikes went down by 33%.

• 44:01Mindy Pelz?

  Crazy.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  That's as good as a drug. But this is a natural formulation.

• 44:05Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  And it's stimulating your body's natural GLP-1. And so that product, you know, that's the clinical trial data behind it. And people who have gone on that have also shared out not only A1C and blood glucose drops, but you know, CGM data, fasting blood glucose improvements. And then moreover, one of the interesting things about the microbiome interventions is that unlike drug interventions, where your long list of side effects are all terrible things, your long list of side effects, when you improve your microbiome, are actually all beneficial. Official things. So what we hear back from people is, oh, man, now my digestion is better. I have better energy, like sustained energy throughout the day, better sleep. I don't get that post lunch brain fog. And so you have all these additional benefits that kind of come along with improving your, your microbiome. And so that's pendulum glucose control. Then we have, if you don't have diabetes, but you're trying to, you know,

• 44:51Speaker 01

  optimize your metabolic health, we have metabolic daily. And that's literally just a dilution, a lower dose version of pendulum glucose control. And then we also sell the individual strain acromancy. If you've taken a gut test and you're just like, I'm just missing this one keystone strain. That's all I want to take. So we have those three. I always tell people, give it 90 days to see a result. I mean, first of all, it takes 90 days for your A1C cells to turn over. So that's the only way to actually see a signal that you can believe in. But give yourself 90 days to see a difference. If you don't see a difference, maybe there's nothing wrong with your microbiome. Like that's perfectly fine, too.

• 45:21Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, that's an okay answer for sure.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  That's an okay answer. Yeah. I'm not a hammer where everything's a nail. So that might not be your issue. And that's, you know, that, that, that tells you the answer. If you give it 90 days and you don't see anything. Pairing the probiotic interventions with a dietary change is also, it is this one two punch. So if you can be feeding them with high fiber, high polyphenol foods, then you're really going to be getting, you're giving them the best chance of colonizing and having activity. After 90 days, I agree with you, and it's terrible if any of my investors are listening to this.

• 45:50Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, right.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  You don't have to stay on the pills for the rest of your life. You can, if you can sustain and colonize them through the foods that you're eating, that ought to work. Now, you may go through some lifestyle change where you had to take an antibiotic. Then you might want to do another, like, okay, replenish and then, you know, go back into sustain mode. But there's not really a reason, if you can get that lifestyle change and you can be feeding them through the foods that you're eating, there's no reason you have to be on the pills for the rest of your life.

• 46:15Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I mean, that's my philosophy on all supplements. They're supposed to supplement in something you don't have. But if you use your lifestyle to build these things back up, then they become like doses. And the way I would look at something like that is maybe twice a year, you go on a 90 day program. Maybe depending on how much it's been decimated, maybe three times a year. But going in and out could be really, really helpful. Which leads me to my next interesting question, which is, One of the things we've done because we've seen millions of people fast is I've asked myself why some people in the fasting window are more hungry than others. And I ended up seeing a study that made me really think that is it the human that's hungry? Or is it the microbes that are hungry? And so as I'm hearing you talk, I'm like, wait a second.

• 47:00Mindy Pelz?

  In January, we're going to take, we do this every January. Last year, we had 100,000 people worldwide that we took through a three day water fast. What I would love to chat with you guys about is could we either do an observational study? Or some kind of experiment to see if we took a group, we don't have to take all 100,000. But if we took a group of people and gave them one of those products or a combination of those products and see how it would affect their fasting experience? Because you're now getting the microbes what they need. So outside of pleasing your investors, what do you think about the logic from a scientific point to all of that?

• 47:40Speaker 01

  I, I love that. And we, I think that experiment sounds awesome. And you wouldn't, you'd want to do like a 50 50. You'd want some people to do it and some people to not do it. So you could see if there was a difference. And I think you would want to start them 90 days or, you know, 60 to 90 days before they do the fast so that they can get a chance to colonize the, the strains as they're going into the period of fasting. And I think that would completely make sense that you are already seeding your microbiome with these things that should be helping you with satiety. You know, the other big thing, of course, because, you know, always it comes back to hormones. It could just simply be like, well, if you decided to fast during a certain time of the menstrual cycle, you might be having more cravings.

• 48:18Mindy Pelz?

  Yes. Yeah, we, I'm usually pretty good about pointing that out. And I also, there's like, you know, the, the, it gets a little, especially if you're new faster, it can get a little mentally taxing. And if you've been using food as a way to soothe yourself, you don't have that as a tool now. So there's a lot of, lot of different experiences. The last thing that I'm very curious about and one that I've really struggled to wrap my head around are the new weight loss drugs. There is a lot of comment about how they're changing the microbiome for the better, which is changing people. Cravings for food. In fact, the New York Times Magazine just put out a whole article recently that everybody keeps sending me that they're finding all these people who are on the

• 49:01Mindy Pelz?

  weight loss drugs are not actually choosing anymore the toxic food and it's affecting big food right now. Do we have any evidence that these weight loss drugs are a long term solution for microbe changes? Do we know what they're doing to our microbiome? And could something like this acromancia be a really interesting solution to being able to regulate your appetite, to bring your blood sugar balance back and to lose weight without having to pay $800 to $1,000 a month for the drugs?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's a, well, so you know, we're right on the cusp of doing a mass population study with these drugs. As so many people are taking this, we're going to learn a ton over the next decade. But I think in order to kind of address your question, and the short answer is yes, there's an opportunity. So people want to, you know, not listen to the rest of what I'm saying. That's the short answer. The long answer is really, if you get it, how does your natural GLP-1 get produced versus what are these drugs doing? Then you start to be able to tease apart, you know, what is the difference here? So the natural way that this is supposed to work is you eat food, you have these trillions of microbes in this whole factory that are metabolizing that food. You have this one department. Here, this is the GLP-1 stimulating department. And when they metabolize your food, they stimulate GLP-1, it goes up in your bloodstream. When GLP-1 goes up in your bloodstream, it signals

• 50:20Speaker 01

  for your insulin response, which metabolizes the sugar you just ate. And it also tells your brain, we just ate, we're not hungry anymore. It hits the satiety part of your brain. And then GLP-1 will go back down and you'll get hungry again, and you'll eat, and then it'll stimulate GLP-1 to go back up again. So GLP-1 in your blood is supposed to be kind of like your glucose. Like it's, it's supposed to be up and down.

• 50:40Mindy Pelz?

  Up and down, yeah.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  What the drugs are doing is you're injecting into your bloodstream directly, a chemical mimic of that GLP-1 hormone. So it looks like GLP-1 to your body, but it can't be metabolized in that same way. And so essentially what you're having is just high levels of GLP-1 consistently. That's why they're so impactful. You get this immediate like, oh my gosh, because essentially what's happening is this massive signal of metabolize the sugars you just ate, we're not hungry, metabolize the sugars you just ate, we're not hungry. And that's all the signal. And some people get nauseous within hours of their first nose because there's just this massive signal. So, fast forward that, you know, long term, I always, I think of that GLP-1 kind of consistent, really loud signal as if I was talking to you through a megaphone, you would definitely be able to hear me more clearly at the onset, but after a while,

• 51:25Speaker 01

  you would go deaf. And that literally happens in your body. Your beta cells can go deaf. And that's a lot of the reasons why, over time, people have to keep increasing their doses of these medications in order to get the same responses, because you literally are deafening your body by having these really high signals all the time when it's supposed to be cyclical. And so that's the, the big difference. And so the opportunity of the microbiome is to be able to stimulate your body's natural GLP-1 hormone. The downside is it's not going to feel like the drugs because you're not going to have this constant, you know, really loud thing. Uh, but then getting back to the upside again, you're probably not, you're not going to make your systems go deaf. I, I think that, that's really the big opportunity of the, the microbiome with the GLP-1 hormone. One of the most interesting things about this hormone is that apparently the signal that it sends to your brain to

• 52:10Speaker 01

  say, we're not hungry anymore, appears to count for other things that you're now no longer hungry for. And so it looks like this hormone, when you have the right regulation of it, can also decrease other cravings that you have beyond food. And that includes alcohol, other addictions, basically think of any addiction a person can have. So there's food, there's alcohol, there's drugs, there's gambling. And so one of the interesting things that's starting to come to light is that when you have this signaling to your brain that you, it's, it's truly satiety that you don't have these other cravings. And so there might be a big opportunity to intervene on addictions. And I think, you know, if you were to pair this kind of concept with the lifestyle changes that you often recommend, that you might be seeing improvements on addiction on. It's all happening through this pathway.

• 52:54Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. And then so in that, we would need to bring Akkermansia back. Like in that would need to be a 90 day dose of Akkermansia. And mix, like when I first heard about the weight loss drugs, I'm like, that's a fasting lifestyle. People stop getting hungry, they lose weight. I knew that it changed the microbes. I'm like, you can do that for free. I don't, I don't understand, but there was the food addiction piece. So could we potentially say that you would start to build a fasting lifestyle, learning how to switch in and out of your sugar burner system and your fat burner system through fasting and eating? Add in a 90 day, do that for 90 days. And in that, add in Akkermansia. And make sure you are adding in fiber with every meal.

• 53:39Mindy Pelz?

  Try that for 90 days and then if nothing's switched, see then if the drug would be necessary. Would that be a logical way to approach this?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would be, and I would recommend rather than starting with just the single strain of Akkermansia to start. And it's, I know it's an investment, but to start with the formulation of glucose control and, and give it 90 days. And if you see something, then you can kind of minimize down to just Akkermansia and see if you're still getting the same benefits. And to your point, you know, this can be an in and out thing where you're on and off of it. Because you're supplementing with this lifestyle of, of eating the foods that are feeding those microbes. But I would start with the formulation. I think that is a hundred percent away. And I'll tell you, one of the most interesting things for us was we hadn't been thinking about food cravings. Like that paper that's published in BMJ, we didn't even look at food cravings. We were looking at A1C and blood glucose spikes. And then we started to hear from our customers, you know, I'm just not as hungry anymore. Like the holiday party came around and I'm usually the person who eats all the cookies on the plate. And I walked right by and didn't have a single one.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  And so it was those, that kind of feedback. And I, I even noticed for myself, and I didn't know that any of this stuff was related. I just thought it was part of aging.

• 54:41Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  I wasn't waking up first thing in the morning famished. Like I used to literally wake up to dreams of, you know, eggs. And so I, I just sort of assumed, well, this is part of aging. You just don't wake up starving like you do when you're, you know, younger. But I. That getting all of that information from our customers is what led us to do a food craving study where we use the food cravings inventory, that diagnostic test for food cravings. And we found that after being on these microbiome interventions for six weeks, and now not even the 90 days, for six weeks, 91% of people saw a reduction in their food cravings inventory. And they saw it across all four major food cravings types. So the inventory buckets you into four different types of cravings, sugar, carbs, fast foods, and high fat foods. And all four of them were decreased in 91% of people.

• 55:24Mindy Pelz?

  Wow.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  And so that really shows you that there is a way that you can, within six weeks even, 91% of people, that's the majority of people, can have a reduction in food cravings.

• 55:33Mindy Pelz?

  That's amazing. Amazing. Well, okay, so I feel like I was just given a shiny new tool to play with millions of people.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 55:40Mindy Pelz?

  So I want to talk more about how we can use your product and test it with our fasters. But we'll do that off camera. For the listeners, how do they find this? I know you guys are giving them a discount code. Like, I really want to stress that, one, I don't bring products on for any other reason than to help my people. And I really heard that at the dinner party. I was like, there's something here. I really need to think about how we could use this as a fasting lifestyle. So talk a little bit about how people find the product and how, what kind of discount they can get.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, I'm super excited to do research with you. We invest pretty heavily in trials and understanding, you know, how to optimize for different people. But I would love for anybody to go to pendulumlife.com. We have a lot of content on there. We also run a lot of trials if you're interested in participating. And just check it out. And it would be awesome if people wanted to give, you know, do the 90 day challenge that we talked about here and really try it out and see if you could see a difference. And we are, in order to help lower the barrier, make it easier to buy, you know, as a follower of Mindy, if you use the code resetter, you'll get 20% off your first model. And we even, for all the products we just talked about, we do a 90 day, so you could buy a 90 day membership and then pause it after your 90 days and then come back to it later when you want to. So all of that is set up.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  And actually, the 90 day is the least expensive because we really do want people to do the 90 day trial. So if you do pick that one and you add your resetter discount code, hopefully That gives everyone the motivation to at least try it.

• 57:06Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, you know, it's funny when I did when I was doing one on one coaching with patients, I always said we would try every supplement for 90 days. I'm like, you can't try it for 30. It's not enough 90 days is enough time. So I love that that you guys are in that same alignment. And thank you for the discount and I can't try it, please, everyone. And then let's, let's see what kind of magic happens. Okay, my last question, and this one, I think, is really fun because everybody answers it very different. What for you personally, Colleen, how, what, what is health to you? Like, what do you, how do you know if you're healthy? How do you measure health? What is how, what does health represent for you?

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Well, I think about health, there's four pillars to health that I think about. One is nutrition. The second is exercise. The third is mental health and the fourth, of course, is the microbiome. Yeah. And so I think when you've got all four of these pillars really operating well, and there are different tools to make sure you've got all four of them working. But when all four of those are working, you're healthier. And, and the way that I know that I feel healthier is truly just energy. It's energy levels. And, and when you're eating the right foods and you're, you've got your great exercise that's fit for you. You've your mental state is in a great place and your microbiome is healthy. For me, there's just energy from the minute I wake up to the minute I go to bed. It's just, and I'm probably driving everyone else nuts, but it's high energy.

• 58:23Mindy Pelz?

  Well, you and I, you and I should hang out together because usually people are always like, how do you, how do you have so much energy? And I feel like I've been playing these principles, like things we've been talking about here. Everything I teach, I've been doing on myself. So I think energy is a very good marker of how your lifestyle is working for you. So I 1,000% agree. So, well, thank you. This was, I mean, if nothing else, this was a personal, personally satisfying conversation because I've really spent a lot of time thinking about the microbiome on, you know, and how it turned, how it helped my patients and what need to change. And then, of course, in the fasting world. So thank you, Colleen, for today. This was great. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you.

• 59:08Mindy Pelz?

  If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.