Understanding Your Gut and Its Role In Your Mood and Cravings
Welcome to the Satiated Podcast, where we explore physical and emotional hunger, satiation and healing your relationship with your food and body. I'm your host, Stephanie Mara Fox, your Somatic Nutritional Counselor.
To quote Hippocrates, "All disease begins in the gut." We have learned this more and more through research showing how pivotal the optimal functioning of your gut can be. About 95% of serotonin is made in your gut, making it a crucial part of your experience of joy and happiness. The gut has been called a second brain because of its connection to overall health and we know that there is a nervous system in your gut called the enteric nervous system. Your gut and your brain are in constant communication with one another, creating the gut-brain axis, and they send messages to each other through the vagus nerve. Your gut is home to trillions of bacteria that impact immunity, mood, and inflammation. With my own history of digestive issues and that digestive diseases run in my family, I have been fascinated with the gut for a long time. It led me to write my published thesis on cultivating a relationship with the gut brain.
Today, I talk about the gut and the microbiome with Martha Carlin. Martha is a pioneering force in microbiome research, on a deeply personal mission to revolutionize how we approach health, gut science, and chronic diseases. After her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2002, Martha taught herself chemistry, physics, microbiology, and genetics to understand the world of the microbiome and how whole-body wellness is tied to a healthy gut. She founded The BioCollective, a microbiome research company, and BiotiQuest, a probiotic brand designed to restore gut health. With numerous scientific publications and patents under her belt, Martha’s work is shaping the future of how we view health and disease prevention. She was named a Colorado Titan 100 CEO in 2020 and is a respected voice in the microbiome field. Martha was a speaker at The White House 2016 Microbiome Initiative launch, and has addressed industry events worldwide. She also spoke at TedxBoulder, advocating for a more holistic, systems-based approach to medicine. We chat about the importance of understanding the microbiome, the connection between Parkinson's and gut health, the impact of food and stress on the gut and mental health, and where gut research may be heading with probiotics, fecal transplants, and nutrition. If you've been loving the Satiated Podcast and want to give back, please click on the link in the show notes to use one of my affiliate links or donate to the show.
Now, welcome Martha! I am so looking forward to this conversation today. I find gut health so fascinating. I know many people here know about my history with struggling with digestive issues in my early 20s, which led me in deep into a fascination of the mind body connection and gut brain connection. And so I'm really excited to have you here, and would first just love to get started with how you got into the work that you do.
Martha Carlin 03:46
Well, I'm excited to be here, Stephanie and a little bit of my story. My background actually was in accounting and business turnaround systems, but I was trained, actually very early on in my career as an auditor, which is never take anything somebody tells you at face value, like examine the evidence for yourself, and this process of how to look at a business as a whole system. And then in 2002, my 44 year old husband, who was a quote, healthy, marathon running, athletic 44 year old was diagnosed with Parkinson's, and I looked at the way they diagnosed it, and kind of gave an outlook to him that was not very promising. And I thought, you know, this is a systems problem. And so I started to teach myself about the system. And from my background, the way that you do that is you sort of map out everything that's flowing through the system, and, of course, in the human body, that really starts with food. And so I started on this journey back then to look at the food, what we had been eating, what he, in particular, had been eating as a endurance athlete, which, you know, there's a lot of things in that whole profile that are not always the healthiest. And along the way, made this shift to try to look at more organic, but also back in 2002 there wasn't a lot of organic so then I started to examine more, okay, what is the food system that we have? What's in it and and what do we have to work with? And about a little more than a dozen years later, I learned, you know, the term the microbiome, which I had not heard before reading Dr. Martin Blaser's book, Missing Microbes.
Stephanie Mara 05:45
Love that book.
Martha Carlin 05:46
Yeah, about the rise of chronic disease in the age of growing up with antibiotics. And I knew from over the years, every time I met someone with Parkinson's, I would kind of do this little life interview of their story, and many of them had had repeated infections and courses of antibiotics as children for strep infection or for acne treatment or dental work or that kind of stuff. And so I knew this connection to the antibiotics. And I was like,oh, this microbiome seems very important. And later that year, the first paper was published that showed that they could split the two primary symptom profiles in Parkinson's by the bacteria in their gut. And I was like, that's it. So I actually quit my job and founded a company called theBiocollective to start collecting samples, not just from people with Parkinson's, but across the population, and sequencing it and building tools to examine not just as single diseases, but what was happening to our guts at a population level. So we could start to think about, okay, how do we restore the ecosystem. And so that was back in 2015 and it's been a long journey of looking at people's poop and looking at a lot of data and then eventually building a line of systems based probiotics that restore some functions to the gut.
Stephanie Mara 07:19
Oh my gosh. That is fascinating. It's just amazing how much like, I know that we're mostly made of bacteria, but we don't really know much about our bacteria and how it actually affects us, or, you know, changes our personality, or how we function, or how our body changes over time. And so I just hear in your journey, the same fascination that I have experienced with our gut microbiome, and how much it does play affect of what expresses itself in our body.
Martha Carlin 07:52
I think it is in a lot of ways in charge of things, the signals it gives us for certain foods that we maybe crave because there are certain organisms in our gut, but it makes hormones, neurotransmitters, vitamins, so if it's not functioning properly, we're not getting all of those things to be the well balanced human that we want to be.
Stephanie Mara 08:18
Yeah. So in starting that business, and looking at lots of people's poop and learning more about the gut microbiome, could you say more of what you discovered?
Martha Carlin 08:28
Well, as we were going along, of course, I did have the interest in Parkinson's, so we were collaborating a lot on that, but we found across age groups, this imbalanced dysbiotic gut was pretty prevalent all the way down to the, you know, people in their 20s, many people in their 20s, all the way up to older people. And you know, we started to see loss of functions. So in the early research, it was all about like, who's there, what organisms are there. But as things started to advance, it was less about, you know, who's there, but like, do you have the function to break down carbohydrates into what you need to or do you have the function in your gut to make the three amino acids that we don't get or that we can't make ourselves, so, phenylalanine, tyrosine and tryptophan, or what functions have you lost in terms of being able to digest fat, break down fats or break down proteins? Because if you look, there's a nice little triangle I have that shows different kinds of bacteria and sort of what their preferred foods are and all bacteria like sugars, and they can all grow on sugars. But there are these specialty performers that can deal with proteins or deal with fats, and so it's a loss of some of that specialty cohorts that deal with proteins and fats that can often be an issue, and then many of the more pathogenic bacteria that can grow on those sugars can out compete good bacteria. So, you know, you end up with these imbalances, oh, in large part too, that goes back to our Western diet that is very highly processed and often contains sugars in the foods that, you know, people wouldn't even imagine that there is, you know, sugar in bacon or something like that. So I think there's definitely a rising awareness of that, but that was very visible in the data that we could see, and there was this focus to try to define what a healthy gut was. And I would often have people ask me, you're looking at this data, and we had people who reported being healthy, but you know what I would say is, looking at it is, you know, probably not very many people are 100% healthy. They may not be presenting with a obvious symptom, but there's some imbalance in their gut.
Stephanie Mara 11:08
Yeah, and as you kind of saw, like you said, there's systems that started to just not function. I'm curious if you found, like, oh, when this dysbiosis happened, and I get that some of your research was on, like, oh, this is going to contribute to Parkinson's, I'm wondering if you found something else when, like, this dysbiosis happens. Oh, we're going to see more of this happening.
Martha Carlin 11:31
Well, what was interesting is, over, you know, 20 years of looking at Parkinson's and 10 years of looking at the Parkinson's microbiome, I've been working on a publication with a scientist in Australia who's a physical chemist, who has been able to translate what's happening in the battle in the gut and how that affects the physiology of the body that ultimately drives the pieces that affect the brain from what's going on with mineral deficiencies and how those specific effects affect the microbiome, and then the microbiome creates an environment that then changes kind of the whole metabolic cascade that's going on. And so, you know, it's nice to start to be able to connect those dots. But even today, with all the interest in the microbiome, a lot of it is still, you know, very focused in a narrow bandwidth and not opening up that lens to look at the bigger picture of symptoms. You know, in Parkinson's, for example, there's dozens of symptoms that people have much sooner than they actually get diagnosed with Parkinson's. When they look back, they go, oh, well, you know, I had severe constipation, or I had this for many decades, and constipation was actually one in our collecting of samples, we collected whole stool, and what we found in the lab was that we could actually tell if someone had Parkinson's just by looking at their stool, because there were parts of the stool that were like concrete. And people with Parkinson's often described to a doctor that they are having constipation. But I think a doctor has no real understanding of exactly what that means, and understanding this physiology of what's going on and how it turns into a colloidal type, concrete sort of mass, and then what that drives in the GI tract, in terms of, you know, slow motility and toxin load that they're carrying and all these other downstream effects.
Stephanie Mara 13:48
Yeah, thanks for naming all that. You know, I've been starting to do a little bit of research specifically on, like, is there any correlation between gut bacteria and binge eating? And of the little bit that I found so far, you know, that some researchers are pointing to, like, there's one, probably going to butcher the name, is called, like, Akkermansia, or something like that, that is less usually in someone's gut that is struggling with binge eating behaviors. And so I think it's just another example of, there's, like, curious if you've seen this in even the Parkinson's world, that you know, sometimes there's so much shame, like personal shame of like, oh, I didn't take care of myself well enough, or I did something wrong, or this or that, and it's just like, okay, and no, there was something going on in your body that was out of balance that what is externally that we're seeing now is actually just internal information of something that is happening inside of your body, and your body is having a response to that, that I know, that I see with binge eating, that it's like it's a response to something that's happening in your body, not that like, you're doing something horribly wrong that's like making this happen.
Martha Carlin 15:03
Right. Well, stress, actually, I've learned a lot over the years of how stress impacts so many different disease pathologies. It's such a trigger, and it's a big driver, actually, of what happens in the microbiome, and it's not just mental stress, so it's mental stress, it's physical stress, it's light stress, it's emotional stress, it's nutritional stress, because our food is not as nutrient dense as it used to be. So all of those different stressors then affect the internal ecosystem, or, you know, it affects our brain chemistry, so that we start to create stress hormones, and then those stress hormones feed the bacteria in the gut that ask for more. You can get in these vicious loops. There's actually a book called Psychobiotic Revolution by John Cryan and Ted Dinan that talks a lot about their research in that arena, in understanding what's going on with the brain hormones and the gut hormones and that communication that drives a lot of this, but so much of it is the external stress environment that we start with way back here, that sort of cascades. And I talk to people with Parkinson's now, a lot about the importance of learning how to manage stress in positive ways, and learn how to stop and catch yourself and listen to the message your body is giving you because it's telling you something about what's going on in order to help you. It's just, you know, we're in such a fast paced, busy world now, like stopping to listen is often the hardest thing to do.
Stephanie Mara 16:56
Yeah, I completely agree with that. It is so hard when our external environment, like you just beautifully listed, gives us so many cues of lack of safety that it isn't something that even like you're stressing yourself about, but it's also all the constant input that isn't feeling, you know, grounding, safety producing, nourishing and like, yeah, there's just so many different layers to this that we do get to meet the individual with so much compassion and get curious about like, how can we support your whole system in thriving more.
Martha Carlin 17:36
Yes, and like, I experienced actually myself really profoundly. I was just telling you, before we got on here, I just went to a two week Ayurvedic panchakarma retreat. I mean, I was pretty much in seclusion for two weeks with very limited technology and just out in nature, very peaceful. And then I had this day long journey from California back home, changing planes and going through all this really intense lighting and stressful environment in the airport, and as I was going through and noticing the physical impact on me, and then when I got home late that night and got into bed, I could, like, feel the change in the vibration in my body and the tenseness. And I was laying there thinking, okay, is this actually what my typical day is more like, and I've become so accustomed to it that I'm not even paying attention to these stress cues that my body is giving me. I was like, wow.
Stephanie Mara 18:41
Yeah, I totally know exactly what you are referencing. And it is when we go away for like, something, like a vacation, it is such a, like, a stark realization of, like, oh my gosh, is this how my body feels on a day to day basis, that I'm so in it that I may not even realize, like, how exhausted or depleted or stressed my body is feeling?
Martha Carlin 19:02
Yes, and that's not just us. That's we're two times more microbial cells than we are human. So it's not just our human self. It's the microbial self too that is trying to figure out what's going on.
Stephanie Mara 19:17
Yeah, I'm even curious, just in your research, if you were able to see the difference, like if someone started to increase self care acts, or maybe eat more of a diverse array of food. You know, I like to stay away from terms like healthy, non healthy, because it's like your gut microbiome needs, just like a diverse array of nutrients and nutrition, and like focusing on that diversity that comes into our body, I'm wondering if you saw like a change in gut microbiome, maybe as someone changed their external behavior.
Martha Carlin 19:52
So we didn't do time series or dietary studies, although I have followed and read many of these, it's interesting how even many of those studies are kind of biased. But we actually did a project it's interesting how even many of those studies are kind of biased. But we actually did a project with the National Institute of Standards and Technologies to build these reference materials of vegans and omnivores, and looking at the difference between the microbiome in a vegan and an omnivore. And I also have done a lot of work with people who have found relief from their inflammatory issues on a ketogenic diet. And so I really started to look for more detailed microbiome research in the ketogenic space. But what I actually found in the research paradigms that were out there is that the data that they have really doesn't reflect what a true ketogenic diet is, because most of the diets they're doing in mice and they're feeding them like the high fat diet consists of a lot of oils, and it's not, you know, sort of the standard animal fat or ghee and butter and dairy and some of the things that you often will see someone eating ketogenic than what is actually in the study. I actually had a hard time finding good quality data to connect the gut microbiome in people who are eating on a ketogenic basis. But one of the interesting things I learned in that process, because we know that fiber is important for feeding some of these important colonic bacteria, is that you know, you think like a ketogenic diet has no fiber in it, but that's actually not true, because it's very high in hyaluronic acid. And hyaluronic acid is actually a fiber that's very important to the lining of all the cells in the gut in the body. So you know that also explained to me there's a Dr. Natasha Campbell McBride, who's done a lot of work in restoring the gut and the GAPS diet, and she starts out with a lot of bone broth and things that are going to be very high in hyaluronic acid and amino acids that are going to help you rebuild those tissues in your gut, and stays away from the inflammatory foods. So, you know, I've learned a lot, but, you know, I can't give you kind of the microbiome map of what that means, but...
Stephanie Mara 22:30
Yeah, as you did your research, I'm imagining that with your husband, you two started to make some changes, and I'm curious, like, what those changes were, yeah, and what you've noticed change as you maybe made those.
Martha Carlin 22:46
Very early on, going back to 2002 when we kind of first were confronted with this, I was traveling a lot for my work, and we had young children, and, you know, he with the bachelor mentality coming into a marriage, you know, they don't really know how to cook. And so he ate a lot of pasta, and, you know, spaghetti with spaghetti sauce out of a jar and that sort of stuff. And so we started to, well, we kind of tossed everything out of the cabinet, and started over, working toward Whole Foods, freshly cooked meals. And, you know, just a set of simple meals that that he could cook. And what was interesting, in the very beginning, he started out with tremor dominant, and when we changed his diet, the tremor in large part, went away. And so that was pretty interesting. But over the years, as I learned more about different foods and how to deal with foods and tried different things, I mean, he used to laugh, okay, this is my no fun diet number 21 and some worked well. Others did not work well. And one thing that I actually learned, I think, late in the process, so people with Parkinson's, what I found is there was often a craving for sugar, and that can be a small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Those bacteria sort of driving the desire for sugar. But also, there's what's called type three diabetes, or insulin resistance of the brain, which they've also connected to both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. And I think part of the craving of the sugar is also the brain wanting fuel, the brain and the red blood cells. And because there's that resistance, it's not getting in. And in the last year, so John actually had a pulmonary embolism and passed away last fall, but what I learned from a nutritionist about six months before that was really examining if, you know, some of the periods of time when he was crashing or, you know, not able to move as well, if it was actually a hypoglycemic episode and that there was not enough glucose getting into the system. That was a big learning for me too, because I went back and looked at some data I had from a large hospital system that showed that both hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia are comorbidities that are often present with Parkinson's. So if I think back into looking at what's going on in the small intestine, that can often be what happens in SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, is the small intestine gets colonized by the colonic bacteria, and they are basically eating up your nutrients. That's where you do a lot of the absorption of nutrients, and you'll also absorb the glucose that goes first to the brain and the blood cells. And so if there's this competition going on in the small intestine for those nutrients, then you're also very likely malnourished.
Stephanie Mara 26:02
Yeah, I mean something I really hear in that first, I find that when there's such a struggle in relationship with food, that sometimes it can be difficult to see that food is magic and how much it does for us and how much it fuels us and feeds us and helps us function, and that there's a process of what I find, even when you have a maybe a broken relationship with food, is having to heal that to like, see the magic in food again, of how much it could support you in whatever it is that you're navigating. And what I also hear in that is that even a sugar craving is bodily information. Sometimes, if we can just view the sugar craving with curiosity that we get to see, like, okay, what is my body trying to communicate with me through having this sugar craving around what it needs? And I hear something that you're pointing to that you found with your husband, it just needed more a diverse array of whole food nutrition that was coming in.
Martha Carlin 27:05
Yes, and you know, the B vitamins also are made in the gut by bacteria. And that imbalance in the gut, those B vitamins needed for energy, you know, those are very important to energy production, and that's a lot of what is lost. I mean, there are literally 1000s of papers now on the Parkinson's microbiome, and a recent meta analysis of multiple studies that was put together came back to a couple of the key B vitamins. I think it's was b6 and b9 or I think that's it, but a couple of these key B vitamins are missing. And that, to me, it didn't really go in the headlines. Didn't go into the fact that those are made in your gut by bacteria, you know, because they were talking about, oh, like, you can simply take a vitamin to solve the problem. And that's not really getting to the core of the problem, which is you have an imbalance in the gut of the bacteria and also what they need as raw materials in your nutrition to be able to produce those B vitamins for you.
Stephanie Mara 28:10
Yeah, so I'm curious what you have found start to like, shift our gut microbiome, both with food and maybe supplementation, because when I started looking into the gut brain, I mean, I was doing research on this through my graduate school, I experienced more from like a somatic, emotional lens. But I'm curious about, like, what you maybe have found over the past 10 years of maybe updated research. I feel like when bacteria got popularized, or that we have a gut microbiome, it was like everyone should just take a probiotic. But it's kind of this blanket suggestion where you don't know how much bacteria you need, you don't know if you're even taking the strains that your unique body needs, and we don't, actually, I think still even know today what all strains even do in our body. I think more of that research is starting to come of starting to connect, oh, this behavior to this strain. But that's still even being discovered.
Martha Carlin 29:14
Yes, well, so 10 years ago, when we started collecting samples and looking at stuff, and we were trying to figure out, okay, you know, how can we start to think about repair, if you will. And I was very fortunate a scientist came to work for me, Dr. Raul Cano, who had been a professor of microbial ecology at Cal Poly for about 35 years, and he started out early on, was a pioneer in using bacteria to clean up oil spills, and like, building teams of bacteria that work together to do that. And so we thought about these concepts of, like putting a team back into the gut. I mean, originally, the first product I made was just to help my husband, and he had such remarkable results, and we were measuring his microbiome all along the way, and we could see, within 30 days, it was starting to shift back to a healthier profile. And all the way up to we measured through 120 days, we could see this continuous shift. And I mean, it was seven years later that we actually did a clinical trial in people with diabetes, so we could see, okay, what's the before and after? What are some of the clinical measures? But one of the key things that I wanted to look at, because even though it was a diabetes group, it has implications in depression and Parkinson's and all these other things, was, can we shift the gut back to an anaerobic environment, which is what it's supposed to be. Can we lower the load of endotoxin producing bacteria? Because the endotoxin, something called lipopolysaccharide, is actually a driver of depression. It's used in animal models to induce Parkinson's. It's used in animal models to induce diabetes. It has all these implications in inflammatory disease, and so that was one of the primary markers we looked at in the microbiome and in the blood that we did see that over the course of 90 days, we could move the gut back to an anaerobic environment, lower the load of these endotoxin producing bacteria, and see that result in the microbiome that brought back organisms that weren't in the probiotic, but actually raised what are called some of these keystone species, like roseburia and faecali prausnitzii, that came back up and it lifted up the bifido bacteria. And what we also see across the population, but in particular in Parkinson's, is a loss of bifido bacteria that are very, very important to our overall health. Our babies are losing it because they're not breast many of them are not breastfed, and then we as a population have lost it, and those are some of the people who also had the poorest outcomes with covid were people who had very low bifido bacteria. So, you know, we showed with our the product is called Sugar Shift, but it's designed to convert those sugars in the small intestine. Before that you can create all these problems and to start to address that small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and also restore the production of those B vitamins and that kind of stuff, so you get, you know, more energy and kind of a return to a and healthier overall ecosystem, because it's anaerobic.
Stephanie Mara 32:41
So fascinating. I'm so glad that you brought in the conversation of covid as well, because I know that more research is coming out also around how much covid disrupts the gut microbiome. And I even talked to a doctor, I mean, this was probably a year ago, that their I think it was their husband got long covid was really struggling. Their gut felt destroyed, and they did a fecal transplant, and it almost cleared, like entirely, all of his long covid symptoms. And so I think that there hopefully will potentially be more research now that we're seeing a very strong correlation between long covid and gut microbiome disruption, of how we can support individuals in healing from long covid with fecal transplants, probiotics, all sorts of strains of like, yeah, just disrupted your balance, and we need to bring that back into balance.
Martha Carlin 33:39
Well, I think, you know, the fecal transplants are really quite interesting. And I have a friend who does a lot of trials in the fecal transplant space and has had great success, but that's also one of those areas where you need to know that what you're transplanting is healthy, that you know, the person's sample that you're using to transplant. And there's a company called Openbiome that was one of the earliest pioneers for doing fecal transplants, and they have this very rigorous screening process. Part of it is microbiome, but part of it is all these other health parameters that they measure, and only about 3% of people actually qualify to be a donor in their pool. And they've also showed from fecal transplants that you can transplant obesity. So you know someone who was thin who got a transplant from an overweight family member actually ended up becoming overweight. And then they showed in mice that they could transplant skinniness or obesity through the microbiome. So that goes back again to our relationship to food and not beating ourselves up too much in starting to understand, okay, there's something going on with the microbes that are driving some of this behavioral stuff, and how can we kind of work together to rebuild a team that's going to be on our side.
Stephanie Mara 33:59
Yeah, just in terms of that, like, emotional piece you said earlier about how much even the microbiome can kind of dictate how we feel in regards to, like, depression, or, you know, feeling just joyful. I'm wondering if you could say more about that of what have you found? I know that a lot of people who struggle in their relationship with food, sometimes there's a correlation between feeling really depressed and then turning to food to feel better, but then it doesn't really address that there's like something going on in the body, and sometimes that is emotional. I talk a lot about trauma here, but sometimes it is, there's something in your body that is out of balance that is maybe sparking that depression.
Martha Carlin 35:56
So, I think I said that the endotoxin from the gram negative bacteria is highly inflammatory, and they've shown in studies that they can induce depression in somebody in under 30 minutes by injecting endotoxin, which is kind of crazy. But so there's a entrepreneur, gut health researcher, the gut guru from Australia, Kriben. He owns Nourish Me Organics and he had become very depressed himself, and was actually really struggling. And he found kefir, or kefir, you know, people pronounce it different ways, which is a fermented dairy beverage. And within a week of starting to take kefir, he started to feel emotionally much more stable. Well so there's also Dr. William Davis here in the United States. Wrote book Super Gut, and he's probably done the most research of anybody looking into a species of bacteria called Lactobacillus reuteri, which a lot of people make, into yogurt. And we actually have a yogurt starter, or a culture starter. Technically, you can't call it yogurt if it doesn't have strep thermophilus in it. But anyway, he has a kind of a whole cult following of people who make the reuteri yogurt, or they use my sugar shift and make a yogurt. And what they've found with reuteri is it helps increase oxytocin, and oxytocin is our love hormone, and it's the hormone that kind of sits at the top of the hierarchy that helps us feel safe and warm, and it also makes us more tolerant of people with different opinions and all of that stuff. So I love talking about the positive microbe, which is, you know, the lactobacillus reuteri, and the fermented foods and kefir, and what a difference that has made for a lot of people, because it's a very complex microbial system. So like we build our formulas, like a system that's almost like a fermented food, but it's a team that works together. But you know, if you get a sauerkraut or a kimchi or a kefir, those are going to be a complex system of microbes that are working together as a team to support each other, and in that process, they're also recycling waste. You know, you don't get this over build up of one substrate or another that can cause these imbalances and problems, because it's kind of this just working self balancing system. You know, that's what I love about fermented foods, and that's kind of what I love about the way we make our formulas, is thinking like we're putting together team that's going to work together for your benefit.
Stephanie Mara 38:49
Yeah, you know what I'm just kind of hitting on right now, as you're talking of just what naturally happens in the gut. I think it's so taps into how much our body wants to be in balance and wants to find homeostasis, and that even if we make one small shift, and I hear you talking about making small shifts in, you know, the way we eat, and are making small shifts and bringing in more fermented foods, or making small shifts and eating kefir, and that, like even decreasing our stress levels, or navigating our stress in more regulating ways that it does kind of lead to, okay, anything that you do for your body is going to start to shift your gut microbiome in a different direction, and then it will at some point, take over and be like, okay, we got this. We're gonna erase this. We're gonna try to do that. I just think that that's just like the reminder of also just the brilliance of the body to do that, also all on its own. You know, there's so much pressure and kind of diet culture, wellness community, of like, all the things that a person has to do. And it's like, actually, it's these small little things that, if you even just, you know, spend more time breathing, taking in a fresh breath of air, that even just these tiny little things you can do for yourself will actually make a huge difference.
Martha Carlin 40:11
They will. It is truly, truly the little things that we the little choices and the little, small steps that we take each day that make a huge difference in one direction or another. So, you know, we can take a tiny positive step, or we can take tiny negative steps, and without awareness. The next thing we know, we've dug a hole. So I think awareness about the choices that we're making and the steps that we're making, that we do those things consciously, understanding that it has this wider impact on our ecosystem, and ultimately our mental health and well being.
Stephanie Mara 40:52
Yeah, I mean, it's so fascinating. I really appreciate you just also bringing in of just that connection with also our mental health. Is that like, yeah, there's so much that is now connected to the gut. I know when I was originally doing my research, just even finding out that connected to the gut. I know when I was originally doing my research, just even finding out that about like, 95% of our serotonin is made in our gut, and how much this gut brain connection works with each other to send messages to each other about our wellbeing. And so sometimes, yes, it's addressing maybe what's going on in our brain, and, you know, working with people and thinking differently to send different messages to our gut that might shift our gut microbiome, but we can also work with the gut that's also going to make shifts in how we feel and how we express ourselves. So I really appreciate you bringing that in.
Martha Carlin 41:38
Back again, just for a moment into Parkinson's, the one of the things that I learned kind of early on in the process, there was a researcher at Harvard that was looking at, basically, the medicine that people take for Parkinson's is an L dopa, which is a dopamine but that actually feeds a certain bacteria in the gut. That is a problem. So like, if you have that h pylori in your small intestine and you're taking that medicine, and you start to have more off time, it may actually be that that bacteria is eating your medicine. So the more medicine you take, the more bacteria you know, it ends up, it's just so interconnected, we have to start thinking about that. And I think doctors, you know, they haven't learned about the microbiome in medical school, so it's going to take, you know, probably another decade for doctors to really start to understand and incorporate that. We have a lot of health coaches and alternative health practitioners nowwho are learning and well trained in how to look at the gut and use some of the tools that are out there. Genova Diagnostics and Doctors Data and Microbiome Labs and different places have tools now that you can use to start to understand and help but I think we're still a long way from going into the traditional medical system and having them really understand the connection to your gut. So that's the other thing is, I tell people, you've really got to educate yourself about the gut and understand your own gut and how things are affecting you, and start to build your own awareness around that, because that's not something you're going to get a lot of help with externally. You know, right out of the gate, in the current medical system we have.
Stephanie Mara 43:27
Yeah, I completely agree. I have done on my own several stool samples just to assess what is currently going on in my gut. And I wish it was more mainstream. I feel like just as much as our annual physical, where we're getting blood drawn and we're looking at what's going on in our body, like every single time it should include a stool sample to check out what's also happening in our gut, just as much as we're checking out what's happening in our blood.
Martha Carlin 43:55
Well, I was having a conversation this week about Parkinson's with someone. So in 23 years of John having Parkinson's, once at the neurologist, did they ever take blood work. And of course, they don't look at the stool. And you know what I've learned over these 23 years is that there is a very deep metabolic component that is driven by what's going on in the gut. And I think, wow, if we had had, you know, 20 years of all of this data, we probably have a lot of the answers right in front of our face. But neurologists never do blood work.
Stephanie Mara 44:33
Yeah, it comes back to we've created a system where also, thank goodness there are a lot of specialists, but then those specialists don't communicate with each other, so it's like you have to be going to someone who specializes in gut health, and then a person who specializes in, you know, your brain and a person and it's not looking at what I hear, the whole system of like, well, how is this all interconnected like I found that in my own long covid healing journey and just being like, okay, all of this is connected, but there wasn't really a person who was connecting it all. I had to keep working with different people to be like, okay, this is happening and that's happening, and I had to kind of learn how these two things are connected to each other.
Martha Carlin 45:20
In some ways, it's bad, but in other ways, I think it's good. In some ways, because it is forcing people to start to listen to their own bodies and to learn and to think about how things affect them, and you know, what is making something better or worse, and learn how to kind of put the words around it and frame their own understanding, which maybe isn't an easy path, but I think that's actually the path back to health is really starting to understand what is impacting me, what was going on. Then, you know, how did all of these pieces fit together into the whole system that is me.
Stephanie Mara 46:02
Yeah, I'm curious just as we move towards wrapping up two things, one, how would you say people could start to educate themselves more about what they maybe could be looking out for in their gut, or how to learn about their gut, and then any baby steps that you would offer someone in how to maybe nurture and care for their gut microbiome.
Martha Carlin 46:23
So well, we do a lot of educational material. So we have a YouTube channel, and we also have what's called the Sugar Shift Challenge. People can join that. And we do educational calls every two weeks where we have experts that talk about different topics that affect the gut and the gut brain, kind of across the spectrum. Martin Blaser's book, I always recommend that people kind of look at that and think about it from even though it's an older book. And Psychobiotic Revolution is also, I think, maybe 2017 but it's a great book for people to kind of understand those bigger pictures and that connection to gut brain. Also Emeran Mayer, he's got a book about the gut brain, and he has a blog and an email where he really does a lot of food education and kind of teaching you the step by step around that, and I think that's a great tool. Probably the biggest change you could make initially is really trying to remove the processed sugars and emulsifiers, which people don't understand how detrimental emulsifiers are but like salad dressings that you get in a bottle, where the oil and the and the water, like liquids, are all blended together, anything that has an emulsifier is actually going to have a really significant impact on your gut. So just kind of cutting back as much as you can those process things that have ingredients like that, is going to be one big step in the right direction. And just when you go out to a restaurant trying to be mindful of looking at the menu and making the healthiest choice that you can make at the moment that's on the menu, because those are the little things that kind of confront us every day that we kind of mindlessly do. And if you can start to be a little more mindful with each of those steps, that'll start to help your gut more. And I think you'll you'll even know, you'll start to notice, and you'll go, oh, you know, I feel better. Why do I feel better? And it's like, because I've made these three little choices that I really didn't think were detrimental to me that actually worked.
Stephanie Mara 48:50
Yeah, you know, something I hear in that is, there's a lot of different places we can choose food from. You know, sometimes I even explore like, if we bring in like parts work. You know, we have our inner child. We have our inner teenager. You know, sometimes they're going to choose our foods. You know, sometimes we're choosing foods out of pleasure or play or celebration. And you know, something that I hear in that is, like, if you went out to a restaurant, even being curious with the question of, like, if I was going to choose a meal that was going to feed my gut microbiome today, what meal would I choose? Because there's a lot of different places that we can choose food from, and not that one place is better than another, but sometimes it just shifts things internally. When it's like, oh, I really want to, like, feed my gut microbiome. Like, that's the intention that I want to go into this meal might just guide the decision making food process a little bit differently.
Martha Carlin 49:42
Yeah, exactly. And a lot of that will depend on how sensitive your gut is, because, you know, the complex carbohydrates will feed the colonic bacteria, but if you have imbalance in your small intestine, that's actually going to cause a lot of distress for you if you do order those complex carbohydrates. And so, you know, for somebody like that who's dealing with those kind of issues, you know, you're probably better off making some ketogenic choices until you can deal with those problem causers in the upper GI tract that if you eat the fibers are also going to feed them and cause those problems.
Stephanie Mara 50:24
Yeah, it's so multifaceted. And what I hear in that is also like, what works for one person isn't going to work for another person. It has to be unique to your body and what's going on in your gut and is going to bring you into balance. And, yeah, sometimes we have to do a little bit of digging to find out what that is going to be. So I so appreciated everything that you shared today, and I'm curious how individuals can keep in touch with you and the work that you're doing.
Martha Carlin 50:50
I had a great time with you, Stephanie, and to get in touch with me. So I have a Parkinson's blog that I write called Martha's Quest. I write about the gut, specifically in Parkinson's and alternative health things there, and then our Biotiquest website, that's B, I, O, T, I, Q, U, E, S, T.com, that's where you can find our probiotics. We have a blog there where we do a lot of educational content, and that's also where you can write to us and join the sugar shift challenge if you want to get on those biweekly educational calls and meet some of the great experts that we bring in to talk to people and educate.
Stephanie Mara 51:30
Thank you so much for sharing all of that. I will put all of those links in the show notes and just thank you so much again for being here and sharing your wisdom and just the amazingness and fascination and brilliance of our gut.
Martha Carlin 51:44
Well, I appreciate you having me and letting me tell the story of our friends the gut bacteria.
Stephanie Mara 51:53
Oh, I love it. Well to everyone listening, thank you so much for being here. If you have any questions, as always, reach out to me at support@stephaniemara.com and I hope you all have a satiating and safety producing rest of your day. Bye!
Keep in touch with Martha:
Website: https://www.thebiocollective.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-biocollective/
BiotiQuest: https://biotiquest.com/products/sugar-shift
Books recommended:
The Psychobiotic Revolution by Scott Anderson
Super Gut by William Davis
Missing Microbes by Martin Blaser
The Mind-Gut Connection by Emeran Mayer