Pod Insights The Rich Roll Podcast The Godfather of Probiotics on Facts Vs Fiction, The Microbiome, & The Power of Microbes To Heal About this episode Dr. Gregor Reid is a world-renowned microbiologist, author, and the scientist who defined “probiotics” for the UN/WHO.
This conversation explores the world of beneficial microbes and Dr. Reid’s groundbreaking perspective on health, emphasizing probiotics’ power to complement medical approaches. We discuss Dr. Reid’s journey, his scientific philosophy, the potential of probiotics in preventing various conditions, the importance of embracing microbial diversity, the role of fermented foods, finding solutions through microbial interventions, and many other topics.
Dr. Reid is a visionary. This exchange is a masterclass in microbial science with far-reaching implications for human and environmental health. Enjoy!
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Transcript 17,753 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Speaker 00 It could be unbelievably impactful if people took probiotics. You could significantly reduce the use of antibiotics, the time people are off work, the respiratory infections. We should be teaching doctors probiotics, nutrition, microbiome, these concepts that are absolutely integral to our life. We have a society that is terrific at plowing chemicals into the environment and not great at helping beneficial microbes prosper. How do we get beneficial microbes into our systems?
0:34 Rich Roll? Probiotic products are all the rage, but what precisely is a probiotic? Why are they important? What do they do? And what use cases for them await discovery? And what do we need to know to distinguish a garbage product from an effective one? Well, who better to ask these questions than the guy who actually helped author the globally accepted definition of the word itself, the word probiotics? Dr. Greger Reed is a microbiologist who has devoted his entire career to understanding the microbiology
1:14 Rich Roll? of probiotics and developing applications for microbes to improve both human and planetary health. As the former president of the International Scientific Association of Probiotics and Probiotics, as well as the current director of the Canadian R and D Centre for Human Microbiome and Probiotics, his contributions to this field are extraordinary. I've got a couple more things I would very much like to mention before we dig into this one, but first. Eating well rarely falls apart because of one big failure. It's the daily question that wears you down, like, what am I actually going to make tonight? What's in the fridge?
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2:56 Rich Roll? Okay. Today, Dr. Reed decodes all things probiotics. We dispel misconceptions and dissect facts from fiction on all things microbiome, gut health, and more, all of which is more thoroughly elaborated in his book, Probiotics: A Story About Hope, which I gotta say is a surprisingly fun and entertaining read. So place that slide under the microscope, focus the lens, and let the discovery begin.
3:33 Rich Roll? Gregor, it's a pleasure to have you here today. I'm so excited to talk to you. We were introduced by Ara Katz, the co-founder of Seed. I think at the top, it's important just for the sake of disclosure and transparency to say that you're on the Scientific Advisory Board of Seed. Seed is a really great partner of ours here on the podcast. So we have to just sort of make that disclosure. But we're not here to really talk about Seed. We're here to talk about probiotics in general, the science of probiotics. And so, thank you for joining us today.
4:08 Speaker 00 My honor. Happy to be here.
4:11 Rich Roll? So let's start with some real basics. Like, when we're talking about probiotics, what are we talking about? What is a probiotic?
4:20 Speaker 00 I know people don't like scientific definitions, but the definition that came out of that meeting in Argentina, which was actually set up because the Argentinian government had heard people talk about probiotics, and they said, "Well, what are they?" And they asked the FAO, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, if they could get a panel together to tell them what it really was. And the definition was live microorganisms that, when administered in adequate amounts, can fair a health benefit on the host. So they have to be live. They have to be administered. And that, to me, was a very important word because everyone thinks that you can only swallow a probiotic and it's only for your gut.
5:05 Speaker 00 In fact, it can be for your mouth. It can be for your skin. It can be for the uregent, et cetera. In adequate amounts. And people always say, "Well, what's an adequate amount?" And you'll see companies say, "We have got 25 billion and we have got this." You don't need 25 billion if you only need a billion. And so you have to show what the adequate amount is. Can fair the health benefit on the host? So that means you have to prove it. And it's not a case of, "Oh, I had some this morning and it's changed my life." No, no, no, no, no. How do you prove it? So you need to have a study where it compares something with a placebo or with a drug that you're looking at. And unfortunately, a lot of companies don't do this.
5:47 Speaker 00 And so a real probiotic has had human studies, if it's a probiotic for humans or if it's honeybees or another host, same thing. And you have to show what you expect from this organism. And so you have to define the organism. Now, people get all confused with this because they'll look in a shop and they'll say, "Okay, yeah, this has lactobacillus in it. Oh, it must be probiotic." Well, no. And so the example I give is, "You and I, I've got a chance to go for dinner with George Clooney tonight. Would you like to come?" And most people will say yes. We get to the restaurant and it's an eighty-two-year-old guy from Alabama. His name's George Clooney.
6:29 Rich Roll? Right.
6:29 Speaker 00 I didn't tell you who I was really gonna meet. And so you have to define that organism. And then you have to prove that that organism, or the collection of them, do something. And so people then ask me, well, which probiotic should I take? I can't answer that question, because I'd have to find out, why is it they're taking it? I wish I had a simple answer for you, what is a probiotic? But it's not as simple. And yet it should be. It should be that something that is named probiotic has been tested in humans. It's been shown to have an effect. And this is the effect you can expect if you take it.
7:04 Rich Roll? It wasn't that many years ago that nobody had even heard of probiotics, let alone were talking about them. And now it's been so thoroughly commodified that all manner of consumer products have the word probiotic on their label. And not just foods.
7:22 Speaker 00 Yeah.
7:23 Rich Roll? We're gonna get into the regulatory aspects of all of this. But it's become so profuse that it is devoid of any meaning whatsoever. And it leaves consumers, even well-educated or the most well-intentioned among us, and I would include myself in that group, like trying to make the right decision, but really not being able to know who to trust or where to turn, because there is no true oversight. And because by its very nature, this is so much more complex than meets the eye.
7:56 Speaker 00 Yeah. If you are trying to confer a health benefit, you have to be careful what organism you pick. I mean, I went to a store here yesterday, and I saw this product that had Bacillus strains. And it said it was selected for women's health. Women don't have bacillus in the vagina. And why enough would you put these organisms in the vagina? It seems to me that the company had no rationale for picking the strains. And then they tell a story. Well, it's okay to tell a story, but tell it with, here's the organisms. Here's what they do. Here's why you should be taking them. Here's the expectation of what will happen.
8:36 Speaker 00 And it's difficult because you don't want to go, I don't want it, to see it go to the extent that there's a government overseer and then things become super expensive to develop and you can't say anything about the product. I mean, the European Food Safety tried to do that, which I wasn't very happy with, and we'll talk about later. But it is difficult for a consumer to look at a product on a shelf and know. It's very difficult. Now, I've tried in my book to explain what it is you could look for. There are websites like ISAP, which is a wonderful organization that is, has got blogs and information on it that helps people.
9:18 Speaker 00 But if you do a Google search, ISAP doesn't come up first. The thing that comes up first is a company who's smart, who knows how to get number one in.
9:26 Rich Roll? Sure, it's whoever's paying for that placement. And it's generally just products. You're not gonna get the best advice rising to the surface on the first page of your Google search.
9:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, and unfortunately, you don't get it from Harvard Medical School or Cleveland Clinic either, as I point out in my book. I mean, when you get well-respected organizations like that, why don't they get an expert on probiotics to talk about it and help people? As I say, I go back to your very first question. I don't think I answered it terribly well because there isn't just one sentence that says, this is it.
10:01 Rich Roll? Mm hmm. It must drive you crazy, though, when you're walking down the grocery aisles or you're in a pharmacy.
10:09 Speaker 00 I remember entering a shop in New Zealand, so knowing my knowledge in probiotics. And I said, by the way, that product, oh, no, she says, it's a wonderful probiotic. She said, we had a representative of the company in here talking about how wonderful it is. And I said, well, actually, if you look at the product itself and you look at the strains and you go to PubMed and you put the strains in, none of them are studied. And then if you look at the references that that company has put on their website, the reviews or the papers from me that have nothing whatsoever to do with the product. And you want people to buy that?
10:47 Rich Roll? The onus shouldn't be on the consumer to have to do all that heavy lifting, though. That's the thing.
10:52 Speaker 00 You'd like dieticians and physicians and pharmacists and people in these health food stores, but unfortunately, they don't, in many cases, they don't understand it either.
11:01 Rich Roll? Yeah.
11:02 Speaker 00 And maybe they've not taken the time to read it. I'm not sure. But if I was a shop owner and I got a product and it said probiotic, I'd be like, okay, where's the data? Show me the data and I'll put your product on the shelf. But that's not what drives it. It's can we sell it and will people buy it and what's the profit I make?
11:19 Rich Roll? So much of this, I feel like, can be traced to the fact that this is still in its infancy in terms of understanding and education and, of course, the commodification of all of it. And one thing that comes across really boldly in your book, Probiotics: A Story About Hope, is the journey that you've been on for decades, where you've been butting up against the calcified medical establishment, trying to get them to embrace and entertain the validity of probiotics in the medical landscape of treatment and health promotion. And it's been a frustrating
12:03 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:04 Rich Roll? ...many decades for you. Do you feel like that's changing?
12:08 Speaker 00 I think some of it is correct, because I think some products are not worthy of being on the shelf, to be honest. And that draws cynicism. And I think there are clinical studies that show some probiotics don't work. I think that's terrific, because then we know not to use them. But in general, there was absolutely zero interest in a beneficial organism. And I remember I joined Dr. Andy Bruce in 1982, but in 1973, so look how far away that was. He did a study of the urogenital tract of women, and he said that women who have a recurrent urinary tract infection, they're not only have E. coli in the bladder, they have them in the vagina and the perineum because they come from the rectum and it's anatomy and it's, that's it.
12:53 Speaker 00 He looked at the controls that never had a urinary tract infection. He said, well, there's lactobacilli there. So if you look back in history, everyone went after E. coli. Can we develop a vaccine, blah, blah, blah, and it never worked. And he said, maybe they're protective. So that took a physician and an observation and an openness to say, let's investigate it. I think there is more openness now, and probably the microbiome project was partly to help with that because it opened people's eyes. And so I think you'll find that there are more physicians interested, there's more prepared to try different things. But we're not there yet, in part because I think we need a lot more funding for the
13:36 Speaker 00 basic science to understand which strains, how did they work? Let's get technology to find out how they worked. So, for example, you've maybe had the pill cam. So the pill cam is a, you swallow it, it's got a camera at the end of it. Now, why don't we have a camera and then a little device to take a biopsy? That's fine. But then turn the thing around and have a delivery system that you can deliver organisms right to that site. Now, that's an engineering project, that's not a microbiology project. And there's been this sort of lack of communication, I think, sometimes between the companies that could be really helpful and the companies that are making the products.
14:16 Speaker 00 So Danone or a food company, they're not going to go and develop a device like this. But wouldn't it be amazing if you could have that type of technology brought in to the delivery of food and dietary supplement or drugs, if there are probiotic drugs, which there aren't many at the moment. But I have a friend, my colleague who took over from me, Jeremy Burton, and he's looking at really complicated imaging now. Can you follow a microorganism? So if you take a probiotic, can you follow them through the gut? Well, if you could imagine, it would open our eyes to where they go, what they do. And he did it in an animal model and he found some of the organisms at distant sites in the body.
15:00 Speaker 00 Well, does that really happen in humans? If it does, we should know about it. If they produce certain molecules in the small intestine or the large intestine, shouldn't we find out what those molecules are and what they're doing for us? So there's a lot of really cool stuff that we could be getting to and we're just not there yet. And part of it, I think, is funding and also the bringing together of different expertise.
15:24 Rich Roll? And just a general openness to possibility, I think, right?
15:29 Speaker 00 Well, yeah, don't talk about openness because I was number one in the Canadian grant rejection panel. I mean, really, it was ridiculous. No one cared about probiotics. And ironically, some of the people on the panel who rejected me ended up working on probiotics. But if you don't have an openness to fund some of these studies, how are you going to advance it? The only way is maybe through industry, and industry unfortunately is not doing very much, I don't think. They could be doing an awful lot more on mechanistic research.
16:01 Rich Roll? One of the things that you said that really kind of solidified in my mind just how big this field is and how important it is was when you said, "Humans are three things." You know what I'm talking about, right? Can you explain and elaborate on that?
16:19 Speaker 00 I mean, to me, they're a skeleton and the tissues that surround them and microbes. And we have completely ignored the third piece.
16:28 Rich Roll? Yeah, we have no real intentionality around that third piece, which is big. How many microbes are we host to in terms of, in the ratio to human cells?
16:40 Speaker 00 Yep. I mean, some people say 10 times, 100 times. It doesn't really matter. There's a lot. And we don't know.
16:50 Speaker 00 If we should have certain types, I showed the slide of a baby's development. So you see, you know, after a few weeks and the heart starts beating and then the brain starts functioning. We haven't done anything to intervene in that or to understand that process. Now imagine if microbes, through the things that they produce, the metabolites, are influencing that. Wouldn't we want to kind of know and try and understand that? I'm not saying manipulate it because that sounds terrible because then you say, oh, you're manipulating the natural development of a baby. But we unfortunately have outcomes that are not positive for some babies. And now we're seeing, you know, a lot of autism and we're seeing sort of cognitive function impairment and things like that.
17:35 Speaker 00 Well, if there was an understanding of the development of the microbes in the human and what they produce, maybe there's other ways that we can intervene with probiotics. And same in the elderly, you know, you start to see studies now talking about things that can manipulate cognitive function in the elderly or delay dementia, et cetera. And there'll probably be a role for microbes in that as well. It's not a magic bullet, but the connection has to be there. We're living in a planet that is a microbial planet. If we wipe ourselves out, guess what? Microbes will still be here.
18:09 Rich Roll? Hmm.
18:10 Speaker 00 They were here long before us. We came from them.
18:13 Rich Roll? Yeah, this underappreciation of the role that microbes are playing in dysfunction and optimal function.
18:22 Speaker 00 I've just written this piece for the Royal Society of Canada on One Health, but they're interested in One Health. One Health is essentially the health of everything living in the planet. But I wanted to look at the microbial role and I looked at humans and animals and with colleagues coral and honeybees, et cetera. You have to understand that they're part of everything. And if you go into a neonatal intensive care unit.
18:47 Speaker 00 Which type of beneficial microbes are entering that unit?
18:51 Rich Roll? None.
18:52 Speaker 00 None. And you look at the oceans and some of the poisons that we're pouring into the oceans. Which beneficial microbes are we putting in the oceans? And so you can take any ecosystem and talk about, wait a minute, we're creating the dysbiosis by what we're doing. And so how do we reverse that? And unfortunately, we don't have many solutions. And I mean, a probiotic application like to coral, which I think is super cool. You go down and you inject probiotics into coral. Now, that's great in a small scale, but shouldn't we be looking at a bigger scale than that? And shouldn't we be looking at our waste treatment plants? And some of the toxic compounds that are in there and some of the microbes?
19:35 Speaker 00 And what would happen if more of us took fermented foods and probiotics? And put more of beneficial microbes into the waste plants? Would we then do something positive for society? I don't know. But that's the thinking that we have to start looking at.
19:49 Rich Roll? It seems like there would be solutions for those that are willing to look, given the role that microbes play in everything. And it's so interesting and curious that what serves the micro serves the macro, all the way from, you know, the very specific, you know, acute condition in a, you know, premature infant, all the way up to, you know, ocean preservation.
20:15 Speaker 00 Yep. And as humans, what have we done? We have, and if you look at why the FDA was formed, it was because of snake oil off the back of a covered wagons, right? But they're, they're very good at looking at chemicals, antibiotics and drugs. And yet they're really not kind of used to, and to some extent, don't know what to do with beneficial microbes, to be honest. And so we have a society that is terrific at plowing chemicals into the environment. Many of them are beneficial. I'm not saying we should wipe out, stop all chemicals, but we've forgotten what the side effects are. And I remember in our hospital, so this I don't remember many years ago, 15, 20 years ago,
20:58 Speaker 00 the two presidents of our local hospitals were sitting in the room. And I said, "You have a crisis in this city of Clostridium difficile. There are people dying in this city with this disease." I said, "Why don't you get fecal microbial transplant? Why don't you get a physician in here that can do that?" They thought I was an alien, honestly. They looked at me, "You nuts?" Well, guess what? We got one. The cure rate's 90%. Now, that's thinking outside the box. That's saying antibiotics didn't work. In fact, they may have caused the problem. How can we use microbes to try and sort it? Now, we don't fully understand what the microbes do, and that's a whole other topic. But what I'm saying is, you have to think outside the box and realize that we have been
21:40 Speaker 00 great at pushing chemicals and not great at helping beneficial microbes prosper.
21:47 Rich Roll? Do you think that there's a bias against this type of intervention that might have something to do with the legacy of germ theory? Where we decided that, you know, basically, any and all kind of invading microorganisms are a potential threat. And so we then assume or approach this with greater trepidation because we perceive a threat level or a harm level that actually isn't rooted in truth or reality.
22:16 Speaker 00 I'm sure that's part of it. I remember watching a television show in the States many years ago. And there was a woman, she said, "This is terrible. My baby is crawling on the carpet at the door. Oh, my God, we can't have that because they're picking up these tail-bore organisms." Well, actually, there's other places in your house where there's organisms that maybe they shouldn't be picking up. But why are you so scared of organisms? I mean, yes, we should be scared of pathogens. And especially now viruses are going to be a threat to our civilization. But we've forgotten that we're carpet bombing when we give some of these antimicrobials. And that's not good anywhere.
22:59 Rich Roll? Right. We want wide exposure to a wide variety of environments, pets, you know, dirty carpets, you know, crawling around in the mud in the backyard or whatever. All of this is serving the better health of the microbiome and the gut flora, et cetera.
23:16 Speaker 00 I mean, we've created a society where a chicken probably has salmonella on it. So you can't have the baby crawl around if you've cut chicken, right? Well, we as a society created that. Why did we do that? Why don't we have chickens that don't have salmonella? And then we would have less to worry about. Again, I look at things slightly differently from a lot of people. But if you believe that microbes can be good for us, the question is, how can you integrate that feeling into your life? And how things are done in the way that you go about life? And that's from raising your kids to preparing meals, to having more fermented food in your diet, for example, or finding a fermented food that you actually enjoy.
24:01 Speaker 00 Because not everybody likes kimchi and kombucha. But that comes from, wait a minute, microbes are good for us.
24:09 Rich Roll? It's a mindset shift, as much as anything else. And that paradigm shift is going to be required in order to create that openness for greater education, research, et cetera.
24:21 Speaker 00 I said in my book, I gave a lecture to medical students, and it was elective. So they never had to learn anything about the microbiome and probiotics. But 75 came to my class. Some of them were reading books in the background. I don't know what they were doing. But I was happy that at least they were open to it. Because if you don't teach in medical school, how are they going to learn? And then they canceled it. Because they wanted to have more mental health lectures, which is fine, mental health is important for medical students. But why did you cancel my lecture? Why did you cancel one with salmonella? We know what salmonella is, right? Or some other thing that is maybe not as important. We should be teaching doctors nutrition, microbiome, probiotics,
25:03 Speaker 00 these concepts that are absolutely integral to our life.
25:08 Rich Roll? It seems like an exciting field to get into if you're a young doctor or scientist, particularly with the advent, the quickly progressing advent of all these technological tools. It would seem to reason that AI could be deployed to study these things because you have massive data sets and all these strains. How do you make sense of all of these data sets and string the pieces together to come up with some kind of appropriate diagnostic?
25:37 Speaker 00 So I had a talk on this topic, AI in medicine, a few years ago. And I said, you don't have the data. Because the data you have are, okay, all the drugs I'm on, you might get my dietary recall, you'll get my genetics. I never give you a poop sample, I never give you a saliva sample. You don't know any of the microbes in my body. How enough the AI are going to come up with answers if we haven't got that basic stuff? And so that means we have to change clinical practice. And I, again, I said this probably 10 years ago in our hospital. We should be collecting these samples. And when a patient comes in, we should be thinking, how are we going to help this patient's microbiota?
26:22 Speaker 00 Instead, what do we do? Nothing. We give them drugs or we treat them. And I remember I got a colonoscopy and I said to the doctor, "Okay, you flushed out all my good organisms. How are you going to get them back in for me?" He thought I was an idiot. Well, that's, that's common. But in the concept of a hospital, in our hospital, at one point, they told us that the daily food budget for a patient was like 50 cents. Well, wait a minute. If you have a patient who's seriously ill, shouldn't you be looking at beneficial microbes and nutrition to help them recover? And studies I cite in the book about in Germany, they were doing that. Guess what? They had less infections, they were out quicker, they had a better outcome in the patients. So why aren't we following these protocols? There's this recalcitrance, there's this resistance
27:07 Speaker 00 that doesn't make sense to me within the hospital setup.
27:25 Rich Roll? Well, let's dig a little bit more into the origins of that recalcitrance and the resistance. And it's rooted in your origin story. I mean, what's so interesting about this book is I thought it was going to be this very dense science primer on probiotics. And it really serves as part memoir, partly a book about golf and golf and life. But it's also this letter to young scientists and medical doctors. And you do that through telling your own story. So where did this interest in probiotics begin? Like, walk me through the journey.
28:04 Speaker 00 Well, as I said, Dr. Bruce had done this observation and I joined his lab in 1982. I did my PhD in New Zealand and I came to Canada. And he really felt the lactobacillus had a role in protecting women against uro gentle infections. And if you think about it, to this day, for 50 years, we haven't done anything for these patients. The antibiotics that you get for an E. coli infection are not specific for E. coli. Ideally, they should be. No, they kill other organisms. And so this concept of at least promoting the beneficial microbes, if not utilizing them to our benefit, was really his idea. And we started studying the organisms. And of course, if I bring that up till today, those young scientists today that are coming
28:49 Speaker 00 up with pioneering breakthroughs that the rest of society or the community will say are ridiculous. And if they really believe in them and if the data is supportive, they shouldn't be put off. Now, I'll give an example. In urology, there's a guy called Don Coffey, he's a brilliant scientist from Johns Hopkins. And he was chairing an NIH panel. He told us this story in Toronto. And he said to the panel, "Before I even look at the grants in front of me, I'm going to tell you right now, I'm going to take the craziest idea that has been put forward and I'm going to fund it." And he goes, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right." So anyway, this idea came up. He says, "This is the one I'm funding."
29:33 Speaker 00 "Ah, no, no, come on, you're crazy. This is a simple experiment, it's not going to work, blah, blah, blah." So he finally got the panel to do a visit to the lab. And they eventually approved it. This was cisplatinum. Now, that's a major cancer drug. So it took that person to go against everyone else to take a shot at this. And there aren't enough people like that. And our story was the number of times we got kicked back and kicked back and kicked back and kicked back. And so it takes courage, it takes belief, which I was very fortunate to work with a surgeon. And I think we need more scientists and surgeons and physicians working together on this.
30:15 Speaker 00 You know, we worked in kidney stones and there's geologists that maybe we should work on as well. And so it was a long time and it shouldn't have been. And I think we could have probably cut the time back in 10, 15, 20 years, maybe. We started in 1982.
30:33 Speaker 00 The definition is 2001. Well, that's 20 years later already. And even after that, it's taken another 20-odd years, and we're still fighting to get grants that will help us understand this and companies that will invest back into the products.
30:56 Rich Roll? But essentially, some 40-odd years ago, I wouldn't call it a lightbulb moment, but you have this experience where you realize that there is efficacy in treating UTIs, urinary tract infections, with microbes. And you're seeing great results with a condition that has been treated a certain way for a very long time with very poor results. Hence ensues a very long period of time of frustration because you're thinking like, this is working. Why can't we implement this more broadly? And perhaps even more importantly, we should be looking at the efficacy of microbial treatments to treat any manner of acute or chronic conditions.
31:41 Speaker 00 Prevention rather than treating.
31:43 Rich Roll? Okay.
31:43 Speaker 00 Prevention. So we did look at treating in patients who were disabled and couldn't control their bladder and therefore had E. coli sitting in the bladder. And we tried to put lactobacilli into the bladder to treat them. But in general, it's for prevention. But there are so many conditions that you can prevent. So the simple application of beneficial microbes was just ridiculed.
32:08 Rich Roll? I think one of the more profound examples of this is the efficacy of probiotics in treating necrotizing enterocolitis, which you have direct experience with, NEC.
32:21 Speaker 00 Yeah.
32:21 Rich Roll? Explain what that condition is, where it arises, and why probiotics have proved effective.
32:29 Speaker 00 Right, so again, it's prevention. So it started in 1992. My wife had twins. I sat outside the delivery room. My first baby rushed by me. The next one rushed by me, straight into the intensive care unit. They were there for five weeks. Thankfully, they came out great. But during that time, another baby developed necrotizing enterocolitis. And the curtains went round the baby and eventually it died, which is awful. So why did that baby get it? Well, when you're born by cesarean section and you're premature by a good 10 weeks or 15 weeks and you're low birth weight, you can imagine the intestine's not been developed. It's still got a long way to develop.
33:11 Speaker 00 So in that room, that NICU, what beneficial microbes are getting in? As I said earlier, none. Can we give these babies some beneficial microbes? Now, breastfeeding helps because breastfeeding and we showed, we studied milk and we showed that there are beneficial microbes in human milk, which is great, but it's not enough. So these babies get extremely sick. They often have major surgery. They may have their bowels removed and...
33:40 Rich Roll? There's a breathing problem that occurs, is that correct?
33:42 Speaker 00 Well, you get multi-organ failure. The breathing problem that, in fact, our daughter had was solved by another invention called surfactant, which was miraculous. It was like night and day. My baby's whole body was going like this, trying to breathe, and then they get surfactant and whoof. And that was an invention by a colleague of mine at the University of Western Ontario. But I said at the time, can't we introduce beneficial microbes, probiotics, to prevent nec? Well, that was 92, nothing happened. And then we had a debate, which is on YouTube. It's gone viral, it was at least 500 views.
34:23 Speaker 00 So I...
34:24 Rich Roll? Like U2 at the Sphere.
34:25 Speaker 00 Yeah. So I debated with the physician who essentially is in charge of NICU. And it was his decision whether they introduce these or not, right? That's the system. And I won the debate, of course, but nothing happened until a person in Montreal took this product, it's called Flora Baby, and said, "Let's try it." So they tried it, and lo and behold, it started to prevent NIC. And so my colleague said, "Right, we'll bring it into London, Ontario." So this was 2014, 2016, and about two years ago, I said to him, "Look, where's the paper? Because we have to study and see if this actually worked."
35:07 Speaker 00 And he said, "Well, it was submitted, and then it didn't get accepted, and then nobody followed up." I said, "Right, I'm going to look at this. This needs to be published." So we looked at it, but not only looked at what happens back at that time, but what happened since. And so you can follow the rate of NIC. And essentially, we stopped NIC from happening, not totally.
35:29 Rich Roll? What percentage of premature infants suffer from this condition?
35:33 Speaker 00 Well, in our case, it was about 5%, 6%. Turns out, in Canada, there's a hospital that's at 15%. That's one in six babies. I mean, that's absolutely ridiculous. Of course, antibiotics aren't going to help. They don't prevent it. If you get infection, of course, you have to treat with antibiotics. But what have you done to the baby? So it's never seen mom's vaginal microbes or intestinal microbes. It's in an environment where it's got tubes in it and lines, and it's got an intestinal tract that's not fully developed. We have to find a way to help it develop and protect it from these pathogens that are everywhere. And, you know, nurses carry multi-drug resistant staphylococcus.
36:17 Speaker 00 It's not their fault, but they're in an environment where these organisms are prevalent. So anyway, we introduced it, the rate plummeted. And then, just in the last couple of months, we had this disastrous news. There was a baby that died in the States from a completely different organism. I don't know the case. I don't know what happened. But it was another case of, my goodness, a probiotic seems to have, maybe, killed this baby. No, I'm all for safety, because let's face it, you're putting a live organism into a baby. And so my thing would be, let's find out the antibiotic that can kill that organism just in case, for some reason, it takes over and causes infection. I don't know if that was done or not, but nothing is 100% safe.
37:02 Speaker 00 We have to monitor carefully. But the company that sold this product, Florababy, said, "We're taking it off the market."
37:09 Rich Roll? Just reacting to that incident and just better to just pull it?
37:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, they said it's strategic and that's not the reason.
37:17 Rich Roll? And this was a product that essentially eradicated NIC for the most part.
37:22 Speaker 00 Well, it was significantly preventing NIC. The physicians in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Toronto, et cetera, they're going to study it and make sure that was the case, which is absolutely the way they should do it. But in general, it was. And this physician who I debated sent me an email and he says, "Oh, God, please not go back to the rates that we had before we used this. That would be terrible." And I said in the book, I mean, you almost had the case where you sue because your baby died because they weren't given probiotics. Now, that's a horrible thing to think, that sometimes that scares hospitals into saying, "Okay, we should look at it." And all we're asking for is look into it, consider it, because your alternative isn't working.
38:06 Speaker 00 And the situation now in Canada, there's a product, and I think in Australia, another one in Britain, there are countries that are using this. They're just like us, and yet we're not. So we're trying to get them into Canada. Otherwise, the babies potentially could die.
38:23 Rich Roll? What are some of the other major use cases for probiotics?
38:28 Speaker 00 Well, there's obviously the intestinal things, so diarrhea, constipation, which is kind of strange that you could have both, but irritable bowel syndrome. Inflammatory bowel disease, it can help prevent... But now we've got such amazing drugs, that biologics, they call them, that people are probably not going to use that as a first option. They'll use the biologics. In Crohn's disease, probiotics have not prevented or been useful for Crohn's. My thing for that is, it doesn't mean you don't take a probiotic just because you have Crohn's. Take the biologic, but maybe the probiotic can be useful for maybe side effects or something else, or just general gut health.
39:11 Speaker 00 It's not going to change your Crohn's per se. There's studies showing that you can reduce respiratory tract infection rates. We did a paper, Irene Linwar did this paper in Canada, the US, and I think she's done one in Europe, and showed that if people took probiotics, you could significantly reduce the use of antibiotics, the time people are off work, their respiratory infections. And then it comes down to individual studies. So I don't like to kind of just say, you know, probiotics will solve all IBS, or they'll solve all diarrhea, or, because it's too broad a statement.
39:51 Speaker 00 If you have the right strains in the right situation, the products are made well, and tested properly, yeah, there are applications to intestinal tract, there's applications to skin, there's applications to oral cavity and halitosis, there's applications to the ureteral tract. So it's different parts of the body it can affect.
40:12 Rich Roll? What are some of the longer term or more moonshot oriented use cases that you can imagine? Like, forecast yourself, you know, 50, 60 years from now. How are probiotics being used in a way that you would like to see?
40:29 Speaker 00 Well, it's funny you said moonshot, because I think we need to have them in space. If you're going to go to Mars, you better have some kind of organisms, because you're going to get kidney stones. And if we don't prevent kidney stones, you don't want renal colic in a tiny little capsule heading to Mars. I think we should learn how to create fermented foods or probiotic enhanced foods in space. But it probably, in other diseases, I can see it complementing drugs. So my colleague did a study with fecal transplant plus an anti-cancer agent. And the combination seemed to be quite helpful. And so maybe there are organisms that you want to target.
41:13 Speaker 00 What was it that helped fight the cancer? Well, it was a T cell, a special type of T cell. So then you get an organism, or organisms that target those T cells, upregulate them, and then help the drug. Fight the cancer, right? So I can see a complementary activity. We also will, I think, see genetic manipulation. That's a longer timeframe because there's all kinds of safety issues and ethical issues. But if you know that an organism is capable of producing or blocking an agent, imagine if they blocked amyloid or prevented dementia, you'd want to take that organism. So maybe we have to manipulate it for that to happen. Or maybe we'll get lucky and find, in fact, there's an organism that's doing that.
41:56 Speaker 00 I see applications more targeted, manipulated, and in combination with drugs.
42:04 Rich Roll? Are there labs that are doing this work, looking at this? Is there somebody or a team at NIH, for example, who is giving this the thought and focus that you think it deserves?
42:17 Speaker 00 I think there are labs, I mean, as I said, my colleagues looking at complementing anti-cancer. And they actually, they do a study in multiple sclerosis. He's looking at other, you know, important and chronic diseases. I mean, fecal transplant at the moment is very crude. And my colleague, Emma L. Verco, in Guelph, said, why don't we, instead of all these organisms and poop, why don't we just take 33 or 24 or find out the right ones? Well, the problem with doing that is you're guessing, and they may not be the right ones. And then, when you take poop, and that's a horrible thing to say, but these organisms are together for a reason.
43:02 Speaker 00 And I used to say that when I gave a lectures to students, I said, why did you sit next to that person? Because every time I come in here, sitting next to that person, because they're a friend or because you know that they'll share their lunch with you. I mean, these things are happening in natural ways. And so the organisms are doing the same. They're in collectives, and they're there for a reason. I've actually proposed that we do studies to find out, what's the co-dependencies? Why are you and I always in the same room, right? So when you take 24 strains and you have to grow them separately and then essentially dry them and then put them all together, they've missed all that connection. So I think we need to somehow, or maybe it's using huge chemostats, where we grow
43:47 Speaker 00 them and they get to be with the other organisms that are complementary, and then we put them in. That takes, well, takes time and chemostats.
43:57 Rich Roll? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do admit to being fascinated by fecal transplants. I can envision a future in which there are very tony salons that you would go into and you would get your very specific fecal transplant taken care of. I mean, are these capsules or are we actually inserting these?
44:13 Speaker 00 Yeah.
44:14 Rich Roll? Through the rear end? Like, how does this work? And I understand like the complexities of it, but you also mentioned in your book the idea of super donors, like these people that just have the high-powered, you know, fecal matter poop.
44:29 Speaker 00 Yep.
44:30 Rich Roll? That holds the power to, you know, prevent and maybe even cure a disease.
44:34 Speaker 00 I think fecal transplant has been terrific for C. diff. And I think that it's, there's enough to show that there's other potential. The problem is, in my view, first of all, to find the donor. And we found that it was, we got one donor out of 46, 46 people that come and say, "I'm totally healthy," and they weren't. And so, and then if your donor goes to Mexico on holiday and gets a GI disease, then you've lost the donor. So that's the first problem. The second problem is the donor for C. diff may not be the best one for you with chronic kidney disease. And yet, we're doing those studies, we're taking that same super donor and testing them completely different disease.
45:17 Speaker 00 Multiple sclerosis has nothing to do with C. diff. And what I would like to see is, okay, let's spike the FMT. Now, you can't do that because then that becomes a drug and everything is all crazy. So I say, okay, if you can't do that, if you can't spike the FMT, get the person to take a probiotic at the same time as the FMT. I'll give you an example. Chronic kidney disease is a huge problem worldwide. And we've been finding that this compound called P-cresl is a toxic compound. Now, if you have organisms in the FMT that reduce P-cresl, that's great. Maybe when you give it to chronic kidney disease patients, that's going to help them.
45:58 Speaker 00 If your FMT doesn't have that signature, why not take a probiotic that does at the same time? So that's complementing and being much more specific about the disease that you're treating. I think that's the way to go. Because as I said, unless you get a big chemostat that is creating a consortium that is now well-developed and then you're putting it in, I don't think it will work very well. And how do you give it? We now give it with capsules. Our hospital, I think, is probably number one in Canada for FMT. And so we put it in these little capsules and you swallow them. Horrible thought, but yeah.
46:37 Rich Roll? There might be a little education around that to get people comfortable with that notion.
46:42 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think it's about 26 capsules. I mean, I would find that tough. But if you've got a nasty disease, you'll do anything. And they don't burst and it's a perfectly good way to do it. But that's laborious. And guess what? Who pays for it? Hospital doesn't pay for it. Grants don't pay for it. The patient doesn't pay for it. So that's a problem with the system again. If you're introducing these things, why shouldn't they be part of insurance plans? They're not. Probiotics aren't. And so that again, limits the type of people that are able to get that.
47:17 Rich Roll? It's a new category. It's not a drug. It's not a supplement. It's not a food. And we don't have regulatory bodies that are oriented with experts to understand the landscape here. So how do you even get out of the gate if we don't even have reputable people with the right amount of experience and education to even contend with how to make good decisions around this?
47:43 Speaker 00 So in this Royal Society document, you put in recommendations. And one of my recommendations, strong recommendation, is that we have a completely separate institute, not the Canadian Institute for Health Research, not we have N-Circus, an engineering research council, not NIH. You have a completely separate institute that starts to look at how do we apply beneficial microbes across one health? It could be unbelievably impactful across our society. And they would be looking at things like, okay, what's the rules around FMT? Who should not get them? Who might benefit from them? And you're not going to take all the strains and isolate them and show that, you know, they'll say, oh,
48:27 Speaker 00 this has got antibiotic resistance. And by giving this FMT, you're passing that antibiotic resistance on, and it could be terrible in the long run. That's not going to happen. But you have to sort of have a system that says, this is an acceptable FMT and this is not. That's tough because you're looking at helping the patient today. And one of the arguments has been that, yes, you've cured my C. diff, but now you've increased my risk of cardiovascular disease because of the organisms you just gave me. We don't know that yet. How would you do that? Well, let's do some studies. And maybe that person needs a completely different FMT in 10 years' time. Or it needs a supplementation with a probiotic
49:10 Speaker 00 that reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease, you know? But all of this is microbial, right?
49:17 Rich Roll? Yeah.
49:17 Speaker 00 And if the people in charge of not only the legislation and the safety and the grant funding, if they have not got their heads around that, it's like gobbledygook.
49:27 Rich Roll? Yeah. I mean, are there enough qualified people to staff up something like that? What are the barriers to getting an institution like that up on its feet?
49:37 Speaker 00 I think there are because you would need people that are not just qualified in academic terms, but who have experience with public health issues and who have experience with microbiology and who are open to these things. See, the Europeans, to me, went completely the wrong way. When they started to adjudicate probiotics, they went to this panel that had a million things on their mandate. And they get thrown this to say, all right, go and mandate probiotics. There was maybe one person in the panel that knew anything about probiotics. I mean, that's totally ridiculous. Nowadays, I think there are young people who would love to be in this, who have modern day skills on knowledge of science
50:22 Speaker 00 and genetics and microbiology and medicine that would drive this forward with some guidance from mentors.
50:32 Speaker 00 So I don't doubt that the people are there. I think the willpower is not there and it's mostly because people have their head in their sand.
50:40 Rich Roll? It's such a complex field. Our human brains want to think of this in binary terms. I take this and this happens, but we live in a holistic matrix of, you know, an infinite number of permutations. It's difficult enough with a particular drug to say this drug will do this. We also have to appreciate all the downstream implications of that, not just side effects, but its impact across, you know, a multitude of physiological systems within our body, right? But when you try to have this conversation around microbes, it seems like it then goes up, you know, to a power of 10 in terms of complexity.
51:22 Speaker 00 It does. So a couple of things to that. You know, I watch CNN. How many adverts come on for a drug? So it starts off, you see the person there is sick and then they get this new drug. And then for the next 20 seconds, it tells you all the things it could do to you, including kill you. And I'm thinking, what? You've just approved this drug, but it can kill me or give me all these awful side effects. So if we're prepared to do that and take a gamble, why are you taking the gamble? Because you're hoping that the number of patients to treat is enough to benefit and so the risk is low enough, but the benefit's high enough. So we could easily do the same with microbes.
52:04 Speaker 00 And you pick things that are the easiest to monitor, right? I mean, Clostridium difficile in a way was an easy thing because the downside is death or horrible chronic condition and the upside is they're back to normal. And you could pick a few conditions that are not big risks because you don't want people to die from the intervention and you could test them. And this comes back again to one of my peeves about granting agencies. If you want a grant in microbiology, you really should be doing mouse work, which I think is a complete, almost a complete waste of time. People will criticize me. But why not put it into human studies? Why not pile up human studies?
52:48 Speaker 00 The more human studies we do, okay, it's a bit more expensive. But there's some conditions you could do with low risk. And then you get more information about the potential and therefore you get the chance to start to see some of the concerns. You know, I mean, I know that critics will say, oh, well, do you want to be a guinea pig?
53:07 Rich Roll? Right, scary.
53:08 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's scary, but you're taking fermented foods. How many organisms are you swallowing every day just from your saliva? We're taking lots of organisms every day. So as long as there's some good science behind it and we know a bit about the organisms, it's probably not going to kill you. And let's see if it helps you.
53:29 Rich Roll? It seems like if the commercial incentives were adequate enough, that that would expedite all of this. So I can't help but wonder whether part of the resistance or the pumping of the brakes in this field might have something to do with it posing a threat to the pharmaceutical establishment. Is there a sense that there's resistance from Big Pharma to explore this? Because it would it would mean inroads on their core product line? Or, you know, why not one of those large pharmaceutical companies understanding that there's something to be learned here that could be of benefit?
54:08 Speaker 00 So I obviously met with many pharmaceutical companies when we were developing our strains. And the thing that stood out to me is that there was zero knowledge about microbes. And so I get back to the point, they didn't understand that we are skeletons, tissues and microbes. And so they were very comfortable with something they can chemically synthesize in a lab and show the structure and then develop it. So you have to change the people in the companies. Secondly, let's look at the price of drugs. And Americans know this better than anyone. The price is horrendous. And they always say it takes 800 million or a billion dollars to develop a drug. And therefore, we need to charge huge amounts for it. No, no, that's because you had so many failures
54:52 Speaker 00 that cost you a company lots and lots of money. And why did you have all these failures, many of them drugged failures? And the drugs that are coming out are often me too drugs, they're not huge leaps. And so unless they recognize, wait a minute, we're already wasting lots of money. Why not create a spin off? Company within our company that just looks at this. And that means understands the regulations. That means potentially going to Congress and saying, you had the DASH Act, we need to upgrade this. We need to change this completely because guess what? Microbes can prevent disease. But right now, you're not allowing it to happen with the the system that you have. So the regulatory system has to change. But in terms of profit.
55:35 Speaker 00 So the company that I talked about with NEC, that company that originally sold Florababy was sold for $291 million. You don't think there's money in microbes? Of course, there's money in microbes. Companies are making lots and lots of money in microbes. They're just not investing it back into research. I'm not sure pharma is worried about microbiology. I think they have been so set in their ways with chemicals that they've not made the big enough leap.
56:06 Rich Roll? It seems like it's an inevitability at some point.
56:10 Speaker 00 Absolutely.
56:10 Rich Roll? With the right people. Because those companies are so large and powerful and their lobbying arms basically hold sway over the regulatory landscape and the legislative landscape in Washington DC and governments around the world. That if you want to change the regulatory landscape, it's almost as if you're going to have to find a way to partner with these huge companies. Otherwise, it's David and Goliath.
56:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think there's already signs that they're coming in. They're interested. It's a totally different entity to a chemical. There's all kinds of issues with. I'm not saying that it's easy. But we need the big companies with money because the potential is huge. And as I said to you, I look at it as one health, not just humans. I mean, I had a case where a friend of mine developed this. Essentially, it's an alternative to fentanyl without any of the side effects. Amazing, right? But he can't get, he needs $200 million. And so they're looking at Saudi Arabia because there are lots of money and there's many reasons. But anyway, one of the things the Saudis said, oh,
57:20 Speaker 00 it might help camels.
57:23 Speaker 00 So camel racing is a big deal in Saudi Arabia. There may be different ways that you get the money.
57:30 Rich Roll? Right. Where is the motivation?
57:31 Speaker 00 Where is the motivation?
57:32 Rich Roll? Appealing to the motivation.
57:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, and you know, you look at horses. Most horses seem to die from colic. Imagine we haven't solved colic. How crazy is that? How many horses? Look at the Kentucky races and the money in racing in America. Huge. Why haven't we looked at microbes to solve that? And the honeybee situation is our food supply. Why the heck are we not plowing money into that?
57:55 Rich Roll? So. Well, you have looked at that. I want to hear a little bit more about that because I think that's super interesting.
57:59 Speaker 00 Yeah, so we had a big project in Africa. We essentially taught local mothers how to make probiotic yogurt using this GR1 strain. And we got some money from the Canadian government. I think it was 260,000 people a day were getting this. It's amazing. Fantastic. And what we had done was we empowered them. We weren't landing with a plane every week with this. We said, here, you do it. We were going to revolutionize, I think, the value chain of food in Tanzania. And the government approved our grant. And then Canada said, oh, no, sorry, we don't have money anymore. You know, they had money. But what did that, what did that value chain look like? Well, the value chain in a way starts with honeybees.
58:44 Speaker 00 If you don't have the food and the honeybees pollinating the food, then guess what? Your value chain can die pretty quick. And we did our study in Tanzania because I was there. I looked at the lake. So there's 40 million people living on Lake Victoria. And, and I knew that some people were trying to get gold out the streams and they used mercury to try and capture the gold. So I said, I bet you there's mercury in the water and in the fish. So sure enough, my student, Jordan, found there was these small silver fish that everyone was eating had mercury in it. So then we said, wait a minute. People are going down to buy these fish and they're eating them. And then they're getting pregnant and they have high mercury levels in them.
59:29 Speaker 00 So what if we gave a probiotic yogurt?
59:34 Speaker 00 At the same time they took the fish, would you have less uptake of the mercury? Because lactobacilli actually bind to mercury. So maybe the lactobacilli bind to it and then you poop it out. Anyway, we did a study and lo and behold, we reduced mercury and arsenic levels, right? So then I thought, so that's mercury, that's heavy metals. Well, what about pesticides? Because, I mean, you've probably seen in the news, isn't it China that's using Paracetamol? I mean, there's, we saw them all the time, these guys, they've got the pesticide in the backpack and the spray and, and these are toxic chemicals. And I said, could lactobacilli or probiotic strains do something about pesticides?
1:00:18 Speaker 00 So lo and behold, we said, well, we'll do a few studies. And honeybees, and I had a colleague, Graeme Thompson, who's an expert, I know nothing about honeybees, right? So I had the idea and he came along, he said, well, we'll try it. And we said, right, which strains of probiotic could we use? So one of them we used, because we did studies in Drosophila, Drosophila is a fruit fly. It mimics some of the honeybee anatomy. And in the fruit flies, we made them live longer by giving them some strains. And what the pesticide did was essentially it wrecked the immune response. So by bringing in these lactobacilli strains, we stopped that.
1:01:00 Speaker 00 So you no longer damaged the immune response and therefore you made them live longer. And then we had a third strain that was indigenous to the honeybee. So then, then we said, well, how do you deliver those strains and test them in the field? Well, it turns out in Canada, certainly, beekeepers use patties. And it's because we have winters, I don't know if they use them in New Zealand, but they use them in Canada, so just before winter and just after it. And it's essentially sugar, it's sort of sugar, it's like a pancake, but it's, it's sugar. And so why don't we put the probiotic strains in with it? Because then the bees will eat them. Well, we did that. Lo and behold, we got great results. So then we said, what about California?
1:01:45 Speaker 00 Almonds. So there's a research group at UC Davis and we said, can we do a study here? Yeah. So let's do two things. Let's test the paddy, I call it a bio paddy versus a spray. So have the organisms in a spray and then, you know, you lift the, the, um, see this is, this is how much an albat bees, whatever it is.
1:02:06 Rich Roll? The little spray can thing.
1:02:07 Speaker 00 But no, but you lift the, um, the honey thing that I'm sure there's a name for it.
1:02:12 Rich Roll? The like drawer, the.
1:02:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, the drawer. Yeah. And you spray it with the organisms. Well, we got great results again.
1:02:19 Rich Roll? So. The point being that the, the honeybee populations are being decimated by pesticides and environmental toxins. And without our pollinators, the planet dies. So this is to me like an unbelievable breakthrough in discovery. Why is this not, you know, basically standard protocol in trying to help our bee friends?
1:02:39 Speaker 00 People have tried before to, and unfortunately, a lot of these products, they're called probiotic, but they're dead or they're not really designed properly. And my PhD student Brendan Daisley, he's now an independent scientist and what he's doing, I think is the right thing. Let's try and get the strains that we think are the best strains. So we've shown the concept definitely works. There's vario mites, the little mites that come and attach to the bee as, as well as this pinipiscillus, it's a pathogenic organism. So we can counter them, but are these the best strains? So he's currently working on a few other strains. But then my hope is that what you do is you dry them, freeze dry them, put them in a little sachet,
1:03:21 Speaker 00 which is what we developed for Africa, for the mamas. Cause these mamas, it's 50 cents for a sachet. They put it in a hundred liters of milk and they can make a hundred liters of yogurt, right? So why not let the beekeepers have these little sachets? They can put it in their paddy or they can put it in with liquid and spray it on, whichever we think is best. And the potential's fantastic. You know, again, I go back to what we did with our probiotic strains. I want to be sure the thing works before you start rushing to commercialization, but I think it has a lot of potential.
1:04:07 Rich Roll? It strikes me as just one of many use cases that could be deployed to redress all manner of environmental degradation. I'm thinking about coral reef decline.
1:04:22 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:04:23 Rich Roll? I'm thinking about algal blooms in the Mississippi Delta, et cetera. Is there logic in looking at those problems from a different angle and trying to see if there's some way of approaching them from a microbial perspective as a solution?
1:04:41 Speaker 00 I think the answer is definitely yes. Now, there will be critics, and I think it's fair concern, to say, we're not trying to replace the organisms that are beneficial in those environments. Because probiotics don't colonize bees. They don't colonize humans. They don't stay. So what we're trying to do is-
1:04:59 Rich Roll? They don't colonize our gut either.
1:05:01 Speaker 00 No. And so what you're trying to do is get the niche back to normal, and then you don't need the probiotic anymore, right? But in the meantime, you do need it. So you have to apply it. Now, Raquel Piaxoto, and she's from Saudi Arabia, but she's done some neat work with coral, which I could not have imagined would be possible. She's sowing it is possible. So if it's possible in coral, for goodness sake, imagine what else is possible. And the amount, as I go back to earlier, the amount of toxins that are in our water supply. So I have a slide that a Dutch group looked at, the number of drugs in our water supply. I think it counted something like 100. Now, there's trace elements.
1:05:46 Speaker 00 So let's go back to the drug companies and say, wait a minute. I'm going to bring out, okay, say it's Viagra. This is my Viagra. And you know what's going to happen? Your lawyer is going to come to me right away and say, no, no, no, no. We have got the patent on this. You can't bring that out.
1:06:01 Rich Roll? Hmm.
1:06:02 Speaker 00 Oh, so you own the drug? You own Viagra? Okay. So you own it. It's in our waste disposal system. It's in our water supply. It's your responsibility to take it out. Imagine if we did that with every drug. We would get them to say, okay, let's trace what you're doing with these drugs and find ways to degrade them, probably using microbes. I mean, it's a bit simplistic and it'll never happen, but it gets back to lateral thinking and finding ways to use these microbes.
1:06:36 Rich Roll? It seems like there should be an X Prize in this category. You know what the X Prize is? To motivate scientists like yourself and, you know, basically provide them with the incentive and perhaps the funding and the grant money to look at this to solve our biggest, most existential problems that we face.
1:06:59 Speaker 00 Well, I mean, people have looked at microbes to degrade oil slicks. So it's not like this is something new. There are microbial ecologists out there. I don't think we've encouraged enough kids to go into that as a career path. I don't think we've encouraged enough new ideas to get grant money to explore it. And I don't think we have partnered with all the players, and that includes regulators, because we have to be sure it's safe. I mean, you should never undercut safety and we have to ensure that it works. And so all of that takes a team. We've never created these teams.
1:07:40 Speaker 00 We're all in little silos and the government and then the regulators and the scientists and then the drug companies or other companies. It's slowly happening. So it's funny, I have a pond and I get lots of these plants grow up in the pond that I really don't want. Well, there's a company in Calgary that sells a product of bacteria that degrades nutrients for these plants. And so you can clear your pond using microbes. I mean, I think people are getting there with the idea of using microbes rather than a toxic chemical that you dump in the pond and it kills everything.
1:08:24 Rich Roll? When we think of so many of the gut disorders like ulcerative colitis, et cetera, these autoimmune diseases, my understanding is that there is a relationship between those or the rise of those and over-prescription of antibiotics. What are your thoughts on the role that antibiotics has played in terms of dysregulating our microbial ecology in our bodies?
1:08:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, so I do think there's a correlation. And if you look at babies, the number of antibiotics that babies, especially for earaches, et cetera, so we're putting a lot of antibiotics into young kids that I think is not particularly helpful. And in fact, there's studies that say if you've had X number of antibiotics, something like, I don't know, 15, 20 antibiotics, then this will have an impact in your life after 50.
1:09:23 Rich Roll? There is something about the static nature of the microbiome after a certain age, right? Like the microbiome that you're developing as an infant is kind of the microbiome that you're going to be living with.
1:09:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, but if you've disrupted that, then there's maybe ones you're living with that shouldn't be there or you don't want them there.
1:09:42 Rich Roll? They remain persistent.
1:09:43 Speaker 00 Yeah, so I think there's that, but I think there's also the food chain. I remember living in Scotland and August, we used to go to this place called Isle of Cumbry, and I loved August because I could buy pieces of melon, canary melon. And we did a study in Tanzania with a group of people and looked at the hunter-gatherers, and that's what they do. They eat seasonally. Well, now I get canary melon every single day of the year. And so we have globalized our food supply. And we have unfortunately used a lot of processing and processed foods and fructose, corn syrup, et cetera, that I think is also contributing.
1:10:27 Speaker 00 So I don't think antibodies get the whole blame. I think the food system needs a real change. And you're slowly starting to see that happen where you would know more about this than me, but where people are bringing out not just organic foods, but things that are benefiting our microbes. I would like to see more of that because, and I think we also need to make it affordable. Because a guy in London, Ontario, did this study of this school in London that was in the poorest area and had 43 fast food restaurants around it. So what are these kids eating? Yeah, they're eating fast foods.
1:11:04 Rich Roll? Yeah, I mean, that's a huge problem. Food deserts, the most impoverished neighborhoods are the ones with the least access to healthy food. And every microbiome gut health clinician that I've hosted on this show, Tim Spector, Dr. Robin Shetcan, Will Bolswitz, Dr. Will, they all agree that from a dietary perspective, the key thing is increasing the diversity of plants in your diet and in turn, obviously, increasing the amount of fiber that everybody is eating.
1:11:37 Speaker 00 Yeah, but also we could make it simpler for people to make their own fermented food. You can make your own yogurt, but we could make it a bit more attractive, a bit more easy to do, where essentially you could have a little fermenter in your house and you get all the yogurt. I mean, yogurt's a simple thing, it's easy to do, but I fear that we're not making it practical and easy. I mean, I did a cooking class in school. I don't know if they still do that for all kids, but I think that's a great thing. Why don't we teach kids? Because often parents are, often it's a single mother and they have kids and she's working two jobs and she just doesn't have the time for cooking elaborate meals, but
1:12:20 Speaker 00 maybe there are ways that systems could help her, as I said, yogurt, fermented yogurt. That's a whole other societal thing, but it's back to the same philosophy. How do we get beneficial microbes into our systems?
1:12:36 Rich Roll? One of the questions I've always had, that I'm not sure I've ever gotten a sufficient answer that satisfied me, is when we go to the market and we're purchasing that yogurt or that kombucha, and we're doing it because we know these have probiotics in them and they're supposed to be good for us, how do we know that those probiotics are even active live samples? Like if a kombucha has been pasteurized, or even flash pasteurized, do those microbes survive that? Like, have you tested various brands of kombucha? Like, what are we actually drinking?
1:13:16 Speaker 00 So first of all, fermented foods are not probiotic. So kombucha does not have probiotics in it. That might sound strange, but in order for it to say it has probiotics in it, it would have to say what the strain is, and what viable count that strain has, and why it's in that. So it might have a lactobacilli in it, but that's not a probiotic. So there's a difference between fermented foods and probiotics. If it's been pasteurized, it's really, all the organisms are dead. So in killing those organisms, have they kept the supernaten? And is that of value? Have people studied that? They probably have.
1:13:57 Speaker 00 I don't know that literature, but I would take kombucha with live organisms in it way ahead of those that are dead. And I've seen, London, Ontario has a company, Buch, and they had trouble getting their product on the shelf because there was an American product that was cheaper, easier to get, and the organisms were dead. So I don't think there's been enough studies to say that. The viable count at end of shelf life should be known for yogurts. It should be on all the labels of supplements. But then if you have 24 strains, ideally, it should say, "end of shelf life for each strain," and it doesn't.
1:14:38 Rich Roll? So, on a very practical level, if someone's going to the market and they're picking up a product, a kombucha, a yogurt, you know, what have you, and they're looking at the nutrition facts panel, label, what do they want to see?
1:14:55 Speaker 00 So I would say in a fermented food, look at the viable count at the end of shelf life, that should be helpful. It's not ideal because it doesn't break down all the organisms that are in it.
1:15:07 Rich Roll? What are some of the other common foods that someone would pick up at the market for gut health purposes?
1:15:13 Speaker 00 Well.
1:15:14 Rich Roll? This idea that they contain
1:15:15 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:15:16 Rich Roll? strains or probiotics.
1:15:17 Speaker 00 Well, one of the problems I see is in prebiotics, because prebiotics are now a big thing on labels, and it seems like every product's got a prebiotic in it. I think there's even one in Avena Skin. I don't know what that prebiotic does. The thing about that is, if you take a prebiotic, in general, you need about five grams, because the definition of prebiotic requires that it stimulates beneficial microbes to confer health benefit. If you take two nanograms, that's not a prebiotic. Even if it's called inulin, it's not a prebiotic, because it's not going to do anything, right? And unfortunately, lots of products on the market have these prebiotics. So I would look at the amount.
1:16:01 Speaker 00 If you've got five grams in that product, then you can expect that that's going to stimulate the beneficial microbes in your gut.
1:16:08 Rich Roll? We mentioned earlier the colonization issue. There's this idea that if we take this periodically, we should be okay. But what is the truth behind what happens when these microbes enter our intestinal tract? Are they taking root? Do they have to be replenished consistently forever? How does that work?
1:16:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, so organisms that are resistant to bile and stomach acid, that's a plus. So more of them will get through to the small intestine and then large intestine. Not all organisms are resistant to stomach acid and bile. There may be a capsule or a product that gets them past the stomach, in which case you want to know that that exists. They're then going to multiply, they will produce byproducts, and they'll probably leave. There's not a lot of Studies showing that organisms stay around a long time.
1:17:10 Speaker 00 And that's probably because the body has got its own normal microbes and it doesn't really want new ones to come in. I still find that a little bit puzzling because I would have thought that some of these probiotics would have the potential to become part of the consortium. But that we need more studies to find that out. So they're going to pass through.
1:17:35 Rich Roll? I understand the application of probiotics for preventing or perhaps even treating an acute condition. We've talked about UTIs or various gut dysbiosis issues. But what about the healthy person who just is trying to optimize their health? Like you go, even if you find a great probiotic, it doesn't necessarily mean that you feel any difference. What is the argument that somebody who's had all their blood work done, everything's great, they're not at risk for anything, they feel fine, but they're just trying to be as healthy as they possibly can be?
1:18:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's a, it's a really tough question. And you probably get different answers even from people in the probiotic field. My feeling is, I think I'm healthy, but how much do I really know that I'm healthy? And if I give the example of Pea Cressel, if for some reason the Pea Cressel levels are high in my body, no one is detecting that. But that's not a good thing. So would I not like to be taking a probiotic that reduces Pea Cressel, even though I feel absolutely nothing, no difference? So I like to take probiotics that I feel the organisms have been tested and they do
1:18:56 Speaker 00 something, even though I don't maybe feel it, maybe I don't even need them. But if I look at what's the alternative to not taking beneficial microbes, because I'm pooping them out every day. So how much am I getting in? And I just like the concept of consuming more because I think in general, it's a good thing. Have I proof? No. Can I tell you I feel better? I could tell you that I'd probably be more constipated if I didn't take probiotics and oats. But that's about all I can tell you.
1:19:30 Rich Roll? Is there a way for the average person to test the quality of their microbes in their gut? To know if something is amiss?
1:19:39 Speaker 00 Well, there's companies that do this. Honestly, I'm not a fan of it. So this student and I, we took a poop, each of our poop. We did a microbial analysis and it comes out with patterns of the microbes that we have. I actually got it with me, I could hold it up. And I would say to you, okay, who's the healthy one? I don't know.
1:20:02 Rich Roll? Who knows?
1:20:03 Speaker 00 Which one is me and which one is him? And when you see these companies, they then write back to the donor and say, okay, here's what you should take. And I looked at them, things like pomegranate. Well, okay, I take pomegranate anyway. Pomegranate's great. Like, they're not really telling me scientifically how to manipulate so that I get more of this. Now, there might be exceptions. For example, Akkermansia. Akkermansia is kind of a new probiotic. And my colleague Jeremy Burton did this study where acetate seems to be important for Akkermansia. So maybe in some patients that you want Akkermansia, maybe we should all, we should eat acetate, right?
1:20:43 Speaker 00 So maybe if there was direct correlation between the organisms in your stool and a food that you should take, and then an outcome. So again, I go back to Pea Cressel. If I could take something that would reduce my Pea Cressel levels, I'm probably helping my kidneys. But we don't, we're not there yet. I think that's going to take a bit more work. I wouldn't send my poop off to get analyzed and then for somebody to tell me if I'm healthy or not. I don't think we know. Everbee's is different anyway.
1:21:18 Rich Roll? There's been many studies in this field. You have authored 600 papers, right? I don't even know how anybody could write that many papers. You've been cited over 57,000 times, I think. But still, there are so many questions that remain unanswered.
1:21:37 Rich Roll? What is the study that you would most like to see done that could help resolve some of the question marks that are out there? You know, what do we need to understand to help us move forward and kind of open the door to the new possibilities that this world might have to offer us?
1:21:57 Speaker 00 Potentially, there's so many different answers to that because it depends on the niche you're looking at. I mean, you mentioned alcohol blooms. Imagine if you could use microbes that solve that. That would be absolutely spectacular. The seas off the coast of China are absolutely polluted. And I was in a city there and they brought this fish on the table. It looked absolutely beautiful. And I'm like, I'm not eating this fish. I came from the most polluted waters in the world. Imagine if you could somehow clean them up with microbes. So, I mean, that's a huge type of experiment that would change lots, right? You almost need the OTAGO study, which is a study that has followed, I think it's
1:22:37 Speaker 00 1,000 people, over the lifespan. And that's, again, a long-term project where you looked at the fermented foods they consume, their microbial patterns over time, correlating with food and with the intake of, say, probiotics, prebiotics. That would be very cool to get a handle on it. Massive undertaking. They have started to look at microbiome in that OTAGO study because it started in 70s, maybe. So, the technology didn't come till later. In terms of a disease and the ultimate trial, I mean, that's a tough one because there
1:23:20 Speaker 00 are some diseases that you're not going to get better from. And if you could have something that extended quality life, that, again, would be phenomenal. I can't off the top of my head say, this is the one I'd pick. Gleoblastoma, pancreatic cancer. I mean, there's some diseases that we just hope we never get. But if we could design studies to see if microbiome had any role whatsoever, then I think that would be informative.
1:23:49 Rich Roll? I feel like this is another situation that technology is going to be very helpful with. And I'm recalling something Tim Spector shared about the Zoe platform. And now all these people are on this app, right? And they're providing data. So they're getting these massive data sets that relate to the microbiome in a historically unprecedented way.
1:24:12 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:24:13 Rich Roll? So the more things like that that we have, and then the greater computing power that we have to analyze that data and make sense of it, feels like a path towards figuring out the relationship between the right microbes, the right strains, and the right deployment of them.
1:24:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, I agree. You talked about the next step, that there's always seems to be another question, but that's science. That's the excitement of science. And the young people that are coming through are incredible, the smart as hell, and they're going to come up with things that I can't even imagine. I just want to make sure that we are not scared to try things. And that might mean pilot studies, it might be testing a strain, even if it doesn't work. I think if you wait for the ultimate, you know, the magic probiotic, you're going to wait 10, 15 years. In the meantime, all these people have died or suffered terribly. And so I hope that we have a mechanism to be much more interventional in humans with
1:25:15 Speaker 00 ideas. So collect all the data you want, but don't wait for a tendency to try things.
1:25:21 Rich Roll? I was very moved in your book with respect to the way in which you've kind of weathered resistance. I mean, there's a lot of people, especially early in your career, who would just castigate you, snake oil salesman, like the whole thing, right? So you're very much also this example of resilience and endurance in the face of, you know, obstacles to, you know, kind of get this message out and share the science that you were learning. So what is your message to? The visionaries out there who are trying to do something different that contravenes kind of current protocols or the way that the world works.
1:26:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, I was told in primary school, high school, university, I wouldn't make it. And I invented the middle finger, which is I should get much more credit for that.
1:26:17 Rich Roll? Not only did he define probiotics, he invented the middle finger.
1:26:22 Speaker 00 Yeah. And so I was the type of person that would fight back. It partly came from so much determination. Maybe that was in my family that taught me that. Never give up. If you're not that kind of person, then it gets very difficult. You need to be beside someone who has that determination. As I said, I think you need to keep testing along the way. I mean, we never set out on day one to say, we're going to make a probiotic for women's health. We were going step by step and step. I think that you have to try and break it down into steps. Like, we were pioneers, but we're not entrepreneurs. I didn't go and form a company. That's not my strength. I wasn't interested in it. I get probably a lot of people slag me off, saying, well, he's not a real scientist because he worked
1:27:07 Speaker 00 with surgeons and he's not a great molecular biologist. I know what I'm not good at. But I make sure that I collaborate with good people who are good at that. So you have to complement what it is you have with what other people have in order to answer the question that's in front of you. And that way, you get inspired by your colleagues and that sort of picks you up when you're down because they're saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, we believe in this and look what this showed. If you don't have that reminder or that inspiration from others, it's very tough. Andrew Bruce, my colleague, is a wonderful
1:27:48 Speaker 00 person. He's positive and he's a fighter. So that was easy for me to fight with him. Oh, so many times we should have given up or I would have given up. But so young people have to believe in what they're doing. Test it, and if it gets to the point where they say, "Well, you know what? This isn't gonna work," then they have to have the courage to say, "Okay, if it's not gonna work, we're doing someone else."
1:28:11 Rich Roll? You are a change agent. What are the lessons that you can impart about, you know, how you go through difficult times and continue to persevere? Just generally, it doesn't even have to have anything to do with probiotics. Your journey is very much one of staying in the game and, you know, basically, you know, maintaining this conviction, having faith, working hard. There is this spiritual layer as well, where you have this sense that you are being taken care of, you know, which I love and I appreciate and relate to.
1:28:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm getting to the stage where you have to, you see these adverts on television about, "Come and plan your funeral with us," you know? And there's a song that, I forgot the lady that sang it. "He's always been faithful to me." And whatever we call God, whatever it is, God's always been faithful to me. I think you have to look for signs that you're on the right path. Sometimes that's not easy and it's not obvious, but I've tried to do that. When the days are tough, I remember if I'd really, you know, people get at you and stuff, I'd go and buy like three records, you know, LPs, right? That was my sort of thing. Do something positive for yourself, because otherwise you'll be down all weekend or whatever.
1:29:28 Speaker 00 And I've always wanted to help people, and so that's a good thing to drive you on. And I remember, because Dr. Bruce, a urologist, he'd be in the operating room, and I would go in the operating room with him to talk about research, because he didn't have time, otherwise, you know, so I'd dress up, go in, and the patient's there, and you think, "This is who I'm trying to help." It's a person. It's not a scientific experiment, it's a person. Once you get that, you're more determined. And it's like people who are passionate about honeybees, they love those bees, and they're passionate, they want to help them. And so I think if you have that as a driving force, it's amazing what can't stop you, right?
1:30:11 Rich Roll? You're a humanitarian.
1:30:14 Rich Roll? I think it's fair to say, at the end of the book, there are all these tales of travels that you've gone on. And my first reaction, when I got to that point, was like, what does this have to do with anything? Like, why is he telling these stories? But I think what's instructive about it is that those travels and those experiences in so many communities, in so many places of the world that most people don't visit, has given you that sense of being a humanitarian, a level of empathy that comes with that type of travel that has made its way into your work. It feels like that's the real why behind what you do. Like, I get the sense that you really deeply care about people and the planet.
1:30:58 Speaker 00 I do, yeah. I mean, you go to Mwana, Tanzania.
1:31:04 Speaker 00 I took my daughter when she was 14, and she remembers the roads. I mean, you're banging your head off the ceiling, and it's terrible. These women dressed well and smiled every day, and they had nothing. If that doesn't impact you, then nothing will. And so I have a huge admiration for people. You go to India. India, the women are beautiful in their wrongs. They have nothing. And so it makes you want to help other people and makes you think, you're not any better than anyone else. And I like the surgical table example. If you're a surgeon, the person on that table, you're not looking at their color, their religion,
1:31:48 Speaker 00 their sexual orientation. You're looking at them because they have the same blood as you. And the more the world starts to realize that we're all the same and we're all on this amazing planet, the more we should be trying to help the planet and help each other. And so, yeah, that definitely drives me. You know, I've got some examples of meeting rock stars in my book. At the end of the day, that's just a normal person like you and I.
1:32:12 Rich Roll? You have this.
1:32:13 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:32:14 Rich Roll? It's actually quite funny and sweet, like you have a, here's where I met Frank Zappa, and here's where I met Diana Ross.
1:32:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:32:19 Rich Roll? And I was like, what does this have to do with anything? But I was very charmed by it.
1:32:23 Speaker 00 Well, the thing was, uh, the Diana Ross was because I was at a conference in urology. And so it was the science that took me there. And then I'm of the opinion that let's do something really fun or creative because, I mean, science can be pretty boring and tedious. Life isn't. So they make the most of life. When I went to Victoria Falls, I'd given a talk in Zambia. I thought, well, Victoria Falls is right there. Why don't we go and, you know? And so I went to the devil's pool and it was crazy. But that, that was part of that whole experience, which started off as science, right? And then you learn, you look and you see other people and how they live. And you, you start to get ideas of, of, you know, different things.
1:33:05 Speaker 00 And for example, I didn't know anything about the Muslim religion and prayers and things like that. And a woman from Egypt asked if she could come to my lab. I said, sure, you come as a fellow. So she came to the lab and it turns out that before her Muslim prayers, they would clean their teeth. I didn't know this. And she said, we use this thing called mezquak and it's the bark of a tree to clean our teeth. So I said, I wonder if we could design a probiotic mouthwash using mezquak. So sure enough, we got the mezquak, we got some mint, we got lactobacilli and we made a mouthwash.
1:33:45 Speaker 00 And I learned so much, not just about her and the practices, but hey, maybe this could be an inexpensive way for people to have better oral care in these countries. So you, you just never know what's around the corner. I've always been open to things and I think we have to be.
1:34:04 Rich Roll? Yeah, following your interest and your curiosity from, you know, being a PhD student in New Zealand, getting obsessed with microbes and leading you all the way to, you know, all the adventures that you've been on.
1:34:17 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:34:17 Rich Roll? By staying true to that. I think there's some real wisdom and truth in that.
1:34:21 Speaker 00 Well, being true to yourself, as I said in the book, Margaret Bruce always said, be true to yourself. That's tough, but I like to do that.
1:34:30 Rich Roll? Speaking of truth and wisdom, I have a litmus test to discern real scientists from the naysayers, or the real scientists from the costume scientists. And that is when I present a question to a real scientist. It's never quite the satisfying answer that you want, because it's complicated, and it's nuanced, and it's about, you know, context, and all of these different things that is orthogonal to kind of the way our media culture and our culture in general operates. So I'm interested in, and you talk about this in the book, like, truth versus the misinformation that gets propagated on social media,
1:35:14 Rich Roll? and through the clickbaity headlines in the media in terms of science reporting. That's a whole podcast.
1:35:22 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, we're driven to be successful. There's pressure on scientists to be successful and to get the messages out. I think sometimes the press releases are completely overblown, and then the media picks it up because it's an easy sell. Probiotics are useless. No, they're not. Probiotics are many things. It's like saying all drugs are useless. We have to try and avoid that, just the same as we have to avoid probiotics will cure this and this and this. No, no, certain strains will. Probably as scientists, we're learning. When I, really, 1990 to 95, it was tough to get a scientist to talk to the media.
1:36:03 Speaker 00 I think now, social media is making it easier, and probably forcing a lot more interaction with the media. And we just have to make sure that what we're saying is factual and can be backed up by the experiments we perform. And try not to have the sensationalization. It's like, I'm not going to sit here and tell you what probiotic you should take. No, that might be an easy sell because then you can go out and say, "Buy this product." No, no, no, that's not going to happen because it's different things for different people and different reasons for it, right?
1:36:39 Rich Roll? There's something that goes on psychologically in our reptilian brain when we look at our phone and somebody's looking directly at us with great conviction and saying, "Don't do this and do this," that we just can't help but respond to.
1:36:54 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:36:54 Rich Roll? Versus someone like yourself who's like, "Well, you know, is it this or is it this? And I'm not quite sure until I understand this." And we're just, we get flummoxed and we're like, "Well, that guy isn't, you know, like, he's not guiding me, so I'm just gonna, this guy seems sure of himself." This is the way our culture operates.
1:37:10 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:37:11 Rich Roll? For better or worse. And I don't know what the antidote is, but I do think that there is a place for teaching young scientists and medical students public speaking skills because I think, just because you're into science doesn't mean that you're going to be a gifted speaker or be able to communicate very complex ideas in a way that the public can understand. But I think more and more, there's a need for that to sort of rebut or contravene a lot of the bad ideas that seem to get traction much more easily than the harder, more truthful ideas.
1:37:49 Speaker 00 I like to tell audiences when I speak, "Don't believe me, believe the data." That's tougher because it means you have to look at the data, but I could be super convincing and that's not right if there's no data to back it up. In terms of speaking, public speaking, I think you're right. There are some people very good at it, some people it's just they're uncomfortable with it. But I was in a position of administration for that 1995 time and I would look at probably hundreds of grants every year and they'd put a lay abstract.
1:38:25 Speaker 00 Some of these lay abstracts, I always say, look, can your grandmother understand that? Because if your grandmother can't, it's not a lay abstract. We have to learn how to say things that people can understand. And I know I'm not necessarily all that great at it, because I, you know, when you first asked, what's a probiotic, I maybe didn't break it down into something that a grandmother could understand, because they're not going to look at a definition. But we have to try and not pull the wool over people's eyes. And I think that happens a lot. Influencers, and I've seen lots and lots of books, and they say, probiotics are inside us. No, they're not. Probiotics are in fermented foods. No, they're not. And so they're trying to make it simple, but they're getting it wrong.
1:39:07 Speaker 00 I give credit to people. Tell them the truth. Don't try and simplify it and say it wrong. If you can't simplify it, don't say it the wrong way. They're not inside us.
1:39:17 Rich Roll? Well said. I want to end this discussion with some practical advice, given the constraints and the nuances, et cetera, that make it challenging. But to provide people with perhaps a few things that they can take away in terms of thinking about probiotics, prebiotics, and what they can do to, you know, optimize their gut microbiome. We all know about more fiber, more diversity of plant foods, fermented foods, et cetera. What are a few other things that you might be able to share?
1:39:54 Speaker 00 So there's a couple of websites that I put in the book. probioticchart.ca is the Canadian one, and usprobioticguide.com, where a group of physicians and pharmacists have looked at the literature and said, there are papers in human studies on these products. I think that's a good starting point for people, because then if they have an issue with IBS, or an issue with something else, they can look and say, okay, here's three options, and I could try these three. Now, there's probably some products that are not in that guide, but one day they will be in the guide, but they're not right now. But that's at least a place that you're getting help without doing anything yourself. I think there are Probiotics that, as I say, I take them every day.
1:40:39 Speaker 00 And so I think that there's a reason to take them. But if you're not taking them and you're taking fermented foods, that's great, too. These are not magic bullets. There's lots and lots we still need to find out about them. But it should be part of our daily life, I think, to enhance our beneficial microbes. Because as I say, how else are you getting them in your body?
1:41:02 Rich Roll? What is the role that you play as scientific advisor to seed? What does that entail?
1:41:07 Speaker 00 Well, because I joined early on, it was to advise primarily Rajah on the attributes of the organisms and to start to look at what they might do. And that's led to some experiments in our lab. It's led to them bringing on board some super, super scientists from Boston who are now leading the primarily clinical trials. Because at the end of the day, you need to do the human studies. And so they're going to do that. We've got papers coming out, a fantastic paper that's coming out and it's frustrating waiting for it. But so I can review it and advise and help the people writing it. I had offers to do this with other companies.
1:41:53 Speaker 00 They're just so talented and they look at life differently. I've never seen a company do what they do. And so many creative people, it's a joy to be part of it. And if I contribute a little bit, then that's great. But I also criticize. I mean, if I see something that I don't like, I'll tell them and Rajah welcomes it because, you know, there's no room for bullshit.
1:42:20 Rich Roll? No, there isn't. And I get the sense that, yeah, he wants that. That's sort of why you're there. And as a layperson, I was just so impressed with both of them in speaking to them on the podcast. And the more that I learn about, you know, what they're attempting to do in a world that is so complex and challenging, I'm betting on them.
1:42:43 Rich Roll? They're the good ones, in my opinion.
1:42:44 Speaker 00 And as I said earlier, I've interacted with many, many companies. It's nothing like what they're doing. They are light years ahead of the messaging. I mean, the Instagram accounts are on information. It's not pushing the product, it's information. I think that's the way of the future. I think these big companies could learn from that.
1:43:07 Rich Roll? Yeah, I agree. I'm really proud to be associated with them. That's great to hear. That makes me even feel even better.
1:43:13 Speaker 00 Yeah. I mean, I went yesterday in Soha, and some of the creative people in that firm, it stimulates me. I'm a great admirer of people who are good at what they do. And I love to learn from them. I mean, someone designing something, I want to know more about it. I almost want to be part of it because it's so exciting. And I'm not a designer. So I'm loving watching them and also learning from them. So it's a stimulating environment.
1:43:41 Rich Roll? I think microbes are our teachers, and I think we have much to learn from them. We've only begun to flirt on a very surface level with what I think they can teach us. And you're certainly at the vanguard of making that possible. So I appreciate the work that you've done and the message that you carry and for coming and sharing with all of us today.
1:44:02 Speaker 00 Well, I'm honored to be here. But you know, the message really is for the young people, the next generation. They've got the talent and the ability and the technologies. They're the ones that are going to make an amazing difference. And if we have laid some groundwork for that, then that's fantastic. But it's over to them, and I think the future is going to be exciting.
1:44:22 Rich Roll? You're here. I think we did it. Did we leave anything out?
1:44:25 Speaker 00 I don't think so.
1:44:26 Rich Roll? I think we covered it. The book is called Probiotics: A Story About Hope. Gregor, thank you again for your time. It was wonderful to meet you. It's a true honor. And again, I appreciate you.
1:44:37 Speaker 00 Thank you.
1:44:38 Rich Roll? Cheers.
1:44:38 Speaker 00 Peace.
1:44:39 Rich Roll? Plants. Microbes.
1:44:53 Rich Roll? That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voice of Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. Supporting
1:45:38 Rich Roll? the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated, and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media
1:46:19 Rich Roll? assets courtesy of Daniel Salis. Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Tractor Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.
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