Optimizing Your Gut Microbiome, Probiotics, and the Center of Your Health – Episode

Empowering You Organically – Season 6 – Episode 45
Title: Optimizing Your Gut Microbiome, Probiotics, and the Center of Your Health
Hosts: Jonathan Hunsaker, TeriAnn Trevenen
Guest: none
Description: What is the center of your health? The gut. Tune in to learn the quiet signals your body sends to let you know something is off in your microbiome. We also dive into why probiotics are helpful and how to get them naturally and with supplementation. And be sure to listen for our simple, yet solid, tips you should use while shopping for a probiotic supplement.

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The Gastrointestinal Microbiota and Why You Should Care About What That Is

• Probiotics, along with a host of other microorganisms are so crucial to your health that researchers have compared them to a newly-recognized organ.
• Your microflora, a term used to describe the bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microbes that make up your microbial inner ecosystem impact far more than your digestive tract.
• It’s the center of our body in the sense that it impacts our immune system, and our immune system impacts everything that goes on in our body and how healthy we are.

Some of The Areas Where Gut Bacteria Plays A Key Role

• Behavior – A study published found that mice lacking in gut bacteria behaved differently than normal mice, engaging in what would be referred to as high-risk behavior. This altered behavior was accompanied by neurochemical changes in the mouse brain.
  • Your gut serves as a second brain – It produces more of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is known to have a positive influence on your mood than your brain does.
  • Emotions are negatively affected by an unbalanced microbiota.
  • Mental illness
• Gene expression – A probiotic-rich beverage has been shown to influence the activity of hundreds of your genes to help them express in a positive disease-fighting way
  • Epigenetics – you may have certain genes, you may have certain DNA, but the expression of those genes can be highly-influenced by your lifestyle choices.
• Diabetes – According to a study from Denmark, bacterial population in the gut of diabetics differs from non-diabetics. According to the authors, the results of their study indicate that type 2 diabetes in humans is linked to compositional changes in intestinal microbiota. A healthy diet, which is low in sugar and grains, high in whole, raw foods and fermented foods, allows your beneficial gut bacteria to flourish.
• Autism – Establishment of a normal gut flora in the first 20 days or so of life is critical in appropriate maturation of your baby’s immune system. Hence, babies with abnormal gut flora have compromised immune systems and are particularly at risk for developing ADHD, learning disabilities, and autism, especially if they are vaccinated before restoring balance to their gut flora.
• Obesity – Probiotics may help fight obesity. Restoring your gut flora is therefore a crucial consideration if you’re struggling to lose weight.
  • You don’t have to be obese either, or you could be a very thin person who’s extremely unhealthy when it comes to your gut as well.

How to Know If You Should Take A Probiotic

• You can’t seem to lose weight.
• You’ve got a lot of belly fat, and no matter what you try, you can’t get rid of it.
• You may have digestive issues, bloating, cramping, and gas after eating, constipation, diarrhea.
• Your skin is itchy or broken out.
• You crave sugar, refined or processed foods.
• You feel blue or moody.
• You feel tired during the day and aren’t sleeping soundly at night.
• You seem to catch every bug going around.

Antibiotics

• Affects your body’s own ability to fight and get rid of sickness, bugs, disease in your body.
• If you’re going to take an antibiotic, you should definitely follow it up with a probiotic so that you can get your gut health back in check, because it definitely will throw it off.
• The antibiotic doesn’t care if it’s a good bacterium or a bad bacterium.

Getting Your Gut Right (TeriAnn)

• I think getting your gut right takes a lot of work and a lot of effort and a lot of information.
• There are so many amazing things out there.
  • There’s a test called, I believe it’s Viome, where you can get your gut tested to know what’s optimal for your gut.
• I had to reset my whole system.
  • I did juice cleanses.
  • I did an elimination diet.
  • I detoxed my body.
    • Juices, detox baths, all those things
  • I slowly started adding supplements back.

“How Should I Take supplements?”
You should start by taking one at a time and see how that impacts you. If that’s great, then go to the next one. But if you take two at a time, how do you know how each one is benefiting you?

Fermented Foods

• One of the most natural and effective ways to get your gut back to a healthy place and continue on that journey of keeping your gut healthy.
• Kombucha

Benefits of Fermented Foods

• Some fermented foods are outstanding sources of essential nutrients, such as vitamin K2, which helps prevent arterial plaque buildup and heart disease.
• Optimizing your immune system – 80 percent of your immune system is actually located in your gut.
• Detoxification – fermented foods are some of the best chelators available.
  • The beneficial bacteria in these are highly potent detoxifiers capable of drawing out a wide range of toxins and heavy metals.
• There’s a natural variety of microflora – as long as you vary the fermented and cultured foods you eat; you’ll get a much wider variety of beneficial bacteria than you could ever get from just one supplement.
• Cost-effectiveness – because it contains so many of the good beneficial bacteria, just adding a little bit into your meal, at every single meal that you have, can have long-term health effects in a positive way on your health, all the different bacteria that you’re exposed to.

How to Know If A Probiotic Supplement Is Good

• Refrigeration – The challenge is, is the supply chain from where the probiotic is created, and encapsulated, or bottled, staying cool all the way until it hits the health food store or until it hits your front doorstep. The chances of that staying refrigerated from the place of manufacturing until it gets in your hands, it’s slim to none.
• It contains freeze-dried cultures that are clinically proven to wipe our digestive pain.
  • Freeze-drying is the process of removing all of the water out of the substance.
  • The best probiotics are freeze-dried, which keeps them dormant until they make contact with the water again. As soon as the probiotics get hydrated, they spring back to life.
• Make sure that they are using high-quality advanced plant-based vegetarian capsules.
  • Old-school probiotic capsules dissolve and release live flora or good bacteria in the wrong place. On average, probiotic capsules take about 5-6 minutes to dissolve, and they release the live flora in your stomach, where most get killed instantly by your stomach acid. So, they never get to your colon where they’re needed.
  • Plant-based capsules help reduce oxidation and keep more bacteria alive. They also have a thicker coating than traditional capsules. This means that a higher percentage of the live probiotics will survive your stomach acid and reach your intestines.
• Make sure that you have a single-strain probiotic.
  • Many manufacturers combine the wrong strains. They mix together a bunch of strains and never analyze where the strains may compete and work against one another.

Probiotixx+

• NEW! Improved formula.
• Freeze-dried.
• A specific strain, lactobacillus plantarum.

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Episode 45 – Optimizing Your Gut Microbiome, Probiotics, and the Center of Your Health

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Episode 45 – Optimizing Your Gut Microbiome, Probiotics, and the Center of Your Health

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Jonathan Hunsaker: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Empowering You Organically. I’m your host, Jonathan Hunsaker, joined by my cohost, TeriAnn Trevenen.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Hey, everyone.

Jonathan Hunsaker: Today, we’re going to talk about your microbiome, and also about probiotics. So, TeriAnn, you want to kick us off here?

TeriAnn Trevenen: Sure. So, we’re covering this topic today because we get a lot of questions about probiotics and why we need to take probiotics. Why is this such a hot topic right now? So, the first thing I want to talk about today is the gastrointestinal microbiota and why you should care about what that is.

Probiotics, along with a host of other microorganisms are so crucial to your health that researchers have compared them to a newly-recognized organ. Your microflora, a term used to describe the bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microbes that make up your microbial inner ecosystem impact far more than your digestive tract.

We’re learning more and more about the gut and our gut health. We’ve talked about this in previous podcasts in how important our gut health is, and really, it’s the center of our body in the sense that it impacts our immune system, and our immune system impacts everything that goes on in our body and how healthy we are.

And so, as more research comes out, there are more and more things that we’re learning about, just how important our gut is, the bacteria in our guts, those good bacteria, those bad bacteria, bacteria that do different things. There’s just so much information out there. So, we’re going to cover a few things about our gut today and why probiotics are so important.

Jonathan Hunsaker: I think it’s just—it’s an overlooked area. It’s not getting as overlooked as it used to be. So, there’s a lot more awareness about out gut, understanding the bacteria, understanding that it’s really like a second brain. We always hear the expression, “Your gut instinct,” and “Trust your gut.” And we’re finding out more and more that there’s a lot more going on inside of there than we ever thought did in the past.

And so, some of the areas where your gut bacteria plays a key role, one of the big areas is in your behavior. A study published found that mice lacking in gut bacteria behaved differently than normal mice, engaging in what would be referred to as high-risk behavior. This altered behavior was accompanied by neurochemical changes in the mouse brain.

In fact, your gut serves as a second brain, which we talked about earlier. It produces more of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is known to have a positive influence on your mood than your brain does.

I just find it fascinating that, I don’t know, you think about your moods, you think about different things. A lot of it we internalize and think that it’s coming from your brain, “I’m feeling this way,” and “thinking this way.” But there’s a lot of it, it’s just developed in your gut.

TeriAnn Trevenen: We learn more and more on how much our health impacts our emotions, our behavior the way our mind works. And we just don’t talk about that enough, you know? There’s a lot of things, I’m just going to go out there and say it, there’s a lot of things impacting our emotional health nowadays, there’s a lot more mental illness. It’s running rampant.

And I think that there’s definitely a conversation to be had about how serious mental illness is and that there are people who truly suffer from it. It can be genetic and other things that go into it. But also, we don’t talk enough about the things we’re putting into our body and the health of our body, our gut, our immune system, that can dramatically impact how we feel and our emotions, our cognitive function, and the way that we behave. And our gut is linked to that more so than we’ve ever known before in the past. And so, I think it’s conversation that needs to be had more often.

Jonathan Hunsaker: Absolutely.

TeriAnn Trevenen: The second thing is gene expression. We just did a podcast on telomeres, and we talked a little bit about gene expression, DNA, aging, and how to stay healthy through the aging process. But gene expression is also something that’s impacted by our gut health.

A probiotic-rich beverage has been shown to influence the activity of hundreds of your genes to help them express in a positive disease-fighting way. Our genes are really important, not only for fighting disease, but for aging and the way that our body functions. And so our gut being healthy can really impact our gene expression in a positive way to keep us healthy longer and throughout our lives.

Jonathan Hunsaker: I mean that’s really the study of epigenetics, right? And that’s what’s becoming more and more popular, is just understanding that, yes, you may have certain genes, you may have certain DNA, but the expression of those genes can be highly-influenced, whether that’s your lifestyle choices, exercising, what you eat, what your parents ate, or your mom ate when she was pregnant with you. There’s so much more of this that we’re learning. And the gut is no different, right? We’re just learning that that makes a big difference in your gene expression.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Another place where it can impact you is with those who suffer from diabetes. According to a study from Denmark, bacterial population in the gut of diabetics differs from non-diabetics. According to the authors, the results of their study indicate that type 2 diabetes in humans is linked to compositional changes in intestinal microbiota. A healthy diet, which is low in sugar and grains, high in whole, raw foods and fermented foods, allows your beneficial gut bacteria to flourish.

And, you know, we’re talking about diabetes here, but it just goes for everyone overall. I don’t think it matters what you suffer from, a healthy gut benefits a healthier lifestyle and it helps you to combat all sorts of chronic illnesses and disease. I’m not saying that it can get rid of diseases you may be suffering from, but it can certainly help to make sure that you are as strong as you can possibly be as you face some of these health issues you might be up against or overcome some health issues. I think there’s both sides on that conversation.

Jonathan Hunsaker: Yeah, and I find it fascinating. I mean I think there’s been a lot of experiments going on with the human population when it comes to GMOs, when it comes to RoundUp and glyphosate, and things like that.

TeriAnn Trevenen: We’re all big science experiments.

Jonathan Hunsaker: We are all a big science experiment. You have to think. I mean we’re spraying all of these plants with pesticides and herbicides. And then, we’re ingesting them. And what’s happening inside of our gut is it’s going in there and it’s killing off all of these different organisms that are living in our body that could be the organisms that are helping us not be—have diabetes, or that may improve our mood, or do all of these other things.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Not just killing them but altering some of the things in our gut as well, some of that bacteria. Like think about all the changes to the food that we’re eating, and the chemicals we’re eating, and then it goes into our body. Like we talk about why so many people are facing chronic disease and mental health issues and emotional and behavioral issues. Those chemicals are toxic and poison to our gut health.

Jonathan Hunsaker: When you start eating—I mean you start having these bacterial strains that are super strong in hospitals, right, that are antibiotic-resistant, and things like that. Well, what’s happening inside of our gut when it comes to glyphosate and RoundUp, and is there different bacteria that’s becoming resistant to those different pesticides and herbicides. And how strong is that, and can you reverse it? I mean it’s, it’s just another reason why we’ve got to look at organic, look at non-GMO, and really pay attention to our gut microbiome.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Absolutely. Another place that, that our gut can impact is something that is a hot topic right now, it’s controversial conversation, but we are going to touch on it briefly, and that’s autism. Establishment of a normal gut flora in the first 20 days or so of life is critical in appropriate maturation of your baby’s immune system. Hence, babies with abnormal gut flora have compromised immune systems and are particularly at risk for developing ADHD, learning disabilities, and autism, especially if they are vaccinated before restoring balance to their gut flora.

So, we’re not here today to tell anyone what you’re supposed to do with vaccines, how you should do things with your own child. There’s a lot of information and research out there about whether you should vaccinate or not, delayed vaccinations.

There’s so much out there, so I challenge you to go and research that for yourself and really find the facts and the information. But you should know that there are research and case studies behind vaccinations and gut, and how it impacts your gut, especially in young children, that are out there, that you should be aware of and check those out if you want more information on those.

Jonathan Hunsaker: Absolutely. The final thing is obesity. Probiotics may help fight obesity. Restoring your gut flora is therefore a crucial consideration if you’re struggling to lose weight.

I mean I think this is, I don’t want to call it a no-brainer, but I mean a lot of times, we become obese, and I was obese, from having poor diet. I was eating a lot of sugars, I was eating a lot of grains, I was consuming alcohol, I was doing all of these things that were just destroying my microbiome. I mean it was just feeding it all of the wrong foods and all of these other things were flourishing.

So, I would imagine that I’m in a much better place now, now that I’m more fit, not consuming those kinds of foods. And it wasn’t just diet and exercise that fixed the obesity, but getting my microbiome a lot more balanced, to be able to process and release all of the hormones and do all of the other things that helped me be healthier and be more fit.

TeriAnn Trevenen: For sure. And I think there’s something to be said for obesity and how it impacts your body and your health, but I think there’s another side of this conversation. You don’t have to be obese either, and you could be a very thin person who’s extremely unhealthy when it comes to your gut as well. I know for myself and my journey of health, I’ve shared this on podcasts before, and being extremely sick and then getting health again.

There is no doubt in my mind that cleaning up my diet, adding the right supplements in, getting my gut in check, has dramatically improved my health, my energy, how I feel, my skin, my hair and my nails, how strong I am when I’m working out in the gym, how much better I sleep, all of those things.

So, it’s certainly important to have the conversation around obesity, because that is not a way of life to live, and it’s definitely hard on your body when you are obese. However, you don’t have to be obese to have health issues. You could be a thin person and have extremely poor diet and very poor-performing gut that can impact your health as well. So, I think everyone has to be mindful of this and how it may be impacting you.

Jonathan Hunsaker: Yeah, I mean in this next section we’re going to talk about is how to know if you should take a probiotic. I think that most of our listeners are going to be able to check off one or more of these things on our checklist. And probiotics, I mean are just a very powerful way to help restore balance to your gut.

Not the only thing, it doesn’t mean that you should still go out there and consume a bunch of crap and say, “Hey, I took my two probiotics today, so now everything’s fine.” But probiotics can help get you on the right path, along with good diet choices, along with fermented foods, and some other stuff we’ll talk about a little later in the podcast.

TeriAnn Trevenen: For sure. So, I just want to quickly go through a list of some things where, if you’ve got bad bacteria and things in your gut that are throwing your gut off and may be signs that you need to get your gut health back in check. So, a few of those things. I actually want to save our first one for last, so I’m going to skip over this one, we’ll go back to it last. But here’s a few of the things, before we get to that one.

You can’t seem to lose weight.

You’ve got a lot of belly fat, and no matter what you try, you can’t get rid of it.

You may have digestive issues, bloating, cramping, and gas after eating, constipation, diarrhea, and especially if this is happening on a consistent long-term basis, there is something absolutely wrong.

Your skin is itchy or broken out.

You crave sugar, refined or processed foods.

We talked about this earlier, emotions and your mental health. You feel blue or moody.

You feel tired during the day and aren’t sleeping soundly at night. I just talked about this with myself. Like I sleep better than I’ve ever slept before, and I have more energy than I’ve ever had before, and I really think gut health has so much to do with that when it comes to my own health.

Let’s see. The other one is if you seem to catch every bug going around, look to your gut first for help. So, we talked about your gut health being directly tied to your immune system and how strong it is. It is, I said this earlier, it’s the center of your health. It really is your gut is the center of your health, and we’re learning that more and more. So, if you find yourself getting sick over and over and over and over again, you need to look at strengthening your gut health. That’s one place where you can start to really improve your immune system and fight off all those bugs that are going around.

Last thing, that I skipped over earlier, is antibiotics. Now this is a big topic of conversation when it comes to health, and there’s definitely a time and place for modern medicine and what we have access to now, and antibiotics, in my opinion, and this is just opinion, not fact, this is for everyone to take the information and do with it what you will, I think you have to be extremely careful with antibiotics.

Your body’s own ability to fight and get rid of sickness, bugs, disease in your body. I also think there’s a time and a place for something like this. But if you’re going to take an antibiotic, you should definitely follow it up with a probiotic so that you can get your gut health back in check, because it definitely will throw it off.

Jonathan Hunsaker: Well, the antibiotic doesn’t care if it’s a good bacteria or a bad bacteria.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Absolutely.

Jonathan Hunsaker: It just goes in there and it wipes everything out.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Right.

Jonathan Hunsaker: You know? It’s funny. I remember my oldest daughter, Alivia, was about a year and a half ago, she got a splinter in her foot and it wasn’t coming out easily, and it was looking a bit irritated. I know we had a visit to the pediatrician anyway. He took a look at it, and then was like “Well, let’s just put her on antibiotics, just to be safe.” And I’m thinking “Are you high? Like she has a splinter. Let’s not put her on antibiotics just to be safe. It’s going to kill off everything in her gut, right? This is a splinter. Your body’s going to work it out. We’ll find a way to get it out.”

And so, I think, and listen, I am not anti-antibiotics. They have changed our life expectancy, they have totally shifted the world that we live in, having that technology, and I think it’s absolutely necessary for certain diseases, certain bugs, certain whatever to heal. And I think that we have to be extremely cautious when we take the antibiotics, because again, they don’t care if it’s a good or bad bug that’s in you. It’s going to go in there and it’s going to kill everything.

And yes, you may get better, but once you’re better, then what? Are you back to eating pizza and sugar and crap? And if you are, now you’re just feeding the bad guys, so to speak, and they’re becoming stronger and more prevalent everywhere, as opposed to after your antibiotic, taking a probiotic, eating some really good greens, eating some fermented foods and different things like that, so you get the good bacteria to be the strong bacteria in your gut.

And I think it’s just amazing. I don’t think we realize it. Like you might take an antibiotic and then you don’t eat healthy, now all of a sudden, you are moody and you’re feeling depressed, and you’re feeling this. It’s like you don’t understand, I don’t get it. Maybe you didn’t go to the gym for a couple weeks. And it’s like who knew that this would all come back to possibly your gut and the antibiotic that you took? And I just think it needs to be something that we are a lot more intentional with and a lot more present to, our gut and how we’re treating it on a regular basis.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Yeah, absolutely. And I just I want to touch on something on a personal note. I was just having a conversation the other day with a close friend who’s been experiencing issues with her health. And shared a little bit about my story of getting healthy again. I think getting your gut right takes a lot of work and a lot of effort and a lot of information. There’s so many amazing things out there. There’s a test called, I believe it’s Viome, where you can get your gut tested to know what’s optimal for your gut.

The other thing, too, as I was talking to this friend, and going back a little bit to my health journey, is I had to reset my whole system. So, I did juice cleanses, and sometimes I’d done 7 and 14-day juice cleanses. I did an elimination diet, where I cut everything out and started all over after I cleansed my body out and detoxed my body. I did juices, detox baths, all those things. And then also, slowly started adding supplements back.

And one thing I say to people all the time is like we’re talking about probiotics specifically, but people all of a sudden are like “I’m going to throw all this stuff at my body.” And it’s like how do you even know how this one impacted your body over that one? And I get this question a lot through Organixx. Like “How should I take supplements?”

You should start by taking one at a time and see how that impacts you. If that’s great, then go to the next one. But if you take two at a time, how do you know how each one is benefiting you? There is so much that goes into getting your body clean and right again, and then fortifying your gut, it doesn’t just come from like “I’m going to take a probiotic. Now it’s all going to be better.”

You, typically, if your gut is out of whack, you spend a lot of time getting it there, and it takes a lot of reversing and a lot of hard work and being committed to your health to get it back to a good place. And you have to test a lot of things, and you have to work through a lot of things.

And I recommend doing one thing at a time. Just like an elimination diet, you add one thing back at a time, and it’s a slow, tedious process, but here, I am two to three years out from where I was extremely sick, and I’ve never felt better in my life, and it’s been a hard road and a hard process, but you’re not going to reverse issues in your gut, which we talked about being so critical to your health, in one day, or through one supplement.

There’s so much that goes into it. And that’s what we’re going to talk about next. So, when you know your gut’s out of whack, some natural ways that you can reinforce your gut and help you gut to be healthy again, and get some of these probiotics we’re talking about, is through fermented foods. We don’t eat fermented foods a lot anymore, but it’s one of the most natural and effective ways to get your gut back to a healthy place and continue on that journey of keeping your gut healthy. So, let’s talk about that a little bit.

Jonathan Hunsaker: Yeah, and I don’t think that—we don’t consume enough fermented foods. I just started getting some kimchi to start eating that, because, yes, I take probiotics and all of that, but I think that there’s a place for natural diet, getting probiotics that way. I’m starting to drink a lot more—I just drank one. What is the drink that I just had?

TeriAnn Trevenen: Is it kombucha?

Jonathan Hunsaker: Yeah, it’s kombucha. And so, I’m just trying to get—just get it naturally than always from supplements, you know. And the way that we used to preserve our food, right? We used to can it and we would ferment it, and it would preserve the food a lot longer. So, we were eating a lot more fermented foods.

TeriAnn Trevenen: No one does that anymore.

Jonathan Hunsaker: We have refrigerators, right?

TeriAnn Trevenen: Yeah, no one does that anymore.

Jonathan Hunsaker: And everything comes in a box, and it’s some sort of fake food that we call food now.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Yeah.

Jonathan Hunsaker: But so, I think fermented foods is a phenomenal way to start getting your body back.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Absolutely. And there’s so many benefits to fermented foods. It’s not just “Hey, let’s talk about the gut health,” but there’s other benefits too, as well. All of this will benefit your gut, but it will benefit other aspects of your body as well.

So, some of the things that go along with consuming fermented foods, you get really important nutrients. Some fermented foods are outstanding sources of essential nutrients, such as vitamin K2, which helps prevent arterial plaque buildup and heart disease. So, so many nutrients come from fermented foods. It’s so important to have some type of fermented food in your diet.

I love that you mentioned kombucha. There are so many companies selling kombucha now that are also USDA-certified organic. It’s become something that’s back in the forefront of people’s minds, our gut health. And the fact that so many people are selling kombucha now, and it’s so easily-accessible, just proves that the world recognizes this is an issue, and we’re trying to get people healthier again.

So, anyway, important nutrients, optimizing your immune system. 80 percent of your immune system is actually located in your gut. Again, we’ve said this time and time and time again, the gut is the center of your health. Why? Our immune system is what helps to keep us healthy and combat all of the disease and this sickness that can come our way. So, keeping our gut healthy through fermented foods will optimize your immune system and make your immune system stronger.

Also, one of my favorite things is detoxification. I love ways to detoxify your body. This is one of the big ways I got back on my road to health, and being healthy again, was detoxification. And fermented foods are some of the best chelators available. The beneficial bacteria in these are highly potent detoxifiers capable of drawing out a wide range of toxins and heavy metals. So, these are your detoxification friends, and you should be detoxifying your body regularly, with all the toxins we’re exposed to.

Jonathan Hunsaker: Well, and that’s just it. I mean we think about doing a detox. So, it’s like “I’m going to do a juice cleanse.” “I’m going to do a water fast.” “I’m going to do this.” “I’m going to start taking some colon cleanse.” When detoxification happens on a daily basis. Every time you sit down on the toilet, you’re detoxifying in one way or another.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Absolutely.

Jonathan Hunsaker: When you sweat, you’re detoxifying. When you exhale, you’re detoxifying. So, you’re breathing in good fresh, clean air, and then exhaling out the bad. These are all ways that our body—our bodies naturally detoxify. The question is, is are you taking in more toxins than you’re eliminating? And so, by taking in some fermented foods, you know that you’re helping your body eliminate some of those toxins.

So, listen, we’re all not living perfect lives, right? We’re not all “Little House on The Prairie,” growing all of our own food, all organic, staying away from air pollution and noise pollution, and all the other pollutions and toxins out there. So, we have to just add more things into our daily regimen that allows us to stay detoxified. Yes, I still believe in doing a quarterly detox. I still believe in doing an annual detox.

TeriAnn Trevenen: You can detox other ways every day. Green juice detoxes your body.

Jonathan Hunsaker: Absolutely.

TeriAnn Trevenen: So yeah, there’s so many ways to do it.

Jonathan Hunsaker: Exactly.

TeriAnn Trevenen: And it’s something that people should definitely focus on when it comes to their health. It can reinforce the strength of your gut and your immune system.

The last two things that come—go along with fermented foods and getting them into your diet, there’s a natural variety of microflora. So, as long as you vary the fermented and cultured foods you eat, you’ll get a much wider variety of beneficial bacteria than you could ever get from just one supplement.

And the cost-effectiveness. So, because it contains so many of the good beneficial bacteria, just adding a little bit into your meal, at every single meal that you have, can have long-term health effects in a positive way on your health, all the different bacteria that you’re exposed to.

So, what if you’re not getting fermented food in your diet all the time, and it’s not easily-accessible for you and something that you have access to all the time? That’s why we’re talking about probiotics today, and why we get so many questions around probiotics.

Probiotics are a way that we can help reinforce our gut and get that good bacteria back in our gut. All these things we’ve been talking about today, if you’re struggling with your gut health and you’re hearing some of this, and you’re like “I think my gut might be off,” a probiotic supplement is a powerful way to start reinforcing your gut.

Now again, I talk about my health journey. You’re not just going to all of a sudden start taking one supplement, it’s going to fix everything. You have to do all of these things to benefit your gut. But a probiotic is a powerful step in the right direction, to make sure your gut is healthy.

Jonathan Hunsaker: It really is. And it’s the same conversation we’ve had over and over. It’s a supplement, right? So, we’re not saying to never eat fermented foods again. We’re not saying to not look at how can you make changes in your diet. That should be first and foremost.

And it’s not always enough. We just don’t live in a world where it’s always easy, or we have the time, or—we have the time, we just don’t create the time to ferment the foods or buy the fermented foods. So, a probiotic is a great addition to healthy lifestyle changes. But you have to look at what kind of probiotic are you getting?

TeriAnn Trevenen: Yeah, we talk about this all the time in supplements. There’s so many ways to know if you have a good supplement or a bad supplement, and a checklist to look at.

Jonathan Hunsaker: For sure. And one of the things that a lot of people look for is it’s like is it a refrigerated probiotic? The challenge with that is—and I agree that refrigeration can help preserve the probiotic. The challenge is, is the supply chain from where the probiotic is created, and encapsulated, or bottled, or whatever it is, staying cool all the way until it hits the health food store or until it hits your front doorstep. The chances of that staying refrigerated from the place of manufacturing until it gets in your hands—

TeriAnn Trevenen: Not realistic.

Jonathan Hunsaker: It’s slim to none. And so, yes, you may have bought it in the refrigerated section of your natural food store. Chances are, though, it didn’t stay cool the whole way there, and you’re getting a fraction of the probiotics that are advertised on the bottle.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Yep, absolutely. Another thing is that it contains freeze-dried cultures that are clinically proven to wipe our digestive pain. Freeze-drying is the process of removing all of the water out of the substance. The best probiotics are freeze-dried, which keeps them dormant until they make contact with the water again. As soon as the probiotics get hydrated, they spring back to life.

Jonathan Hunsaker: Yeah, and I mean this is—so how do you combat the refrigeration portion? You make sure that it’s a freeze-dried probiotic.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Absolutely.

Jonathan Hunsaker: We actually just changed our formula up, that we’re going to talk a little bit about, for our probiotic. But one of the big things that we’ve done all along is we’ve always freeze-dried. See, what happens a lot of times is the, the amount of probiotics that’s being marketed on that bottle is at time of manufacture.

But then it’s slowly dying until it gets to you, whether it’s refrigerated, whether it’s—they claim that it doesn’t need to be. By the time you get it, it’s a fraction of what it was. But when it’s freeze-dried, it keeps everything intact.

And quite frankly, by the time you take that probiotic and it wakens back up once it’s connected with water with your saliva, with all of that, it can actually produce more probiotics than when it was created. And so, you get an even bigger effect.

So, you’ve got to make sure, one, I highly recommend, unless they’re making a probiotic down the street and you’re picking it up from the refrigerated manufacturer, to not get a refrigerated probiotic. Make sure that it’s freeze-dried cultures. That’s the only way it’s going to stay healthy getting to you.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Absolutely. Another thing that you should look at is to make sure that they are, your manufacturer, wherever you’re getting your probiotic from, is using high-quality advanced plant-based vegetarian capsules. And quite frankly, for any capsule products you’re taking, you should have these types of capsules. So, make sure you’re looking at that.

But specifically when it comes to probiotics, this is important. Old-school probiotic capsules dissolve and release live flora or good bacteria in the wrong place. On average, probiotic capsules take about 5-6 minutes to dissolve, and they release the live flora in your stomach, where most get killed instantly by your stomach acid. So, they never get to your colon where they’re needed.

Plant-based capsules help reduce oxidation and keep more bacteria alive. They also have a thicker coating than traditional capsules. This means that a higher percentage of the live probiotics will survive your stomach acid and reach your intestines.

So, think about this for a minute. You pay for a probiotic, you don’t have the right type of capsules, and you’re wasting your money, because you’re literally—your stomach acid’s literally eating your money. So, you need a probiotic that has a plant-based vegetarian capsule so that it lasts longer and can make it to where it needs to go, and you’re actually getting your money’s worth out of your probiotic.

Jonathan Hunsaker: Exactly. I mean definitely steer clear of the bovine gelatin caps as well. It’s like what you’re talking about. It’s the old-school. It just hits your stomach acid, boom, it’s gone, and it’s not making it to any of the right places.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Yep.

Jonathan Hunsaker: And these are—again, these are places that a lot of manufacturers cut corners, because you can save money on it, and there’s nobody in there saying, “Well, how efficacious is this?” “Well look, it has a good strain in it. So, it’s got to be good.” Well, if it’s not making it far enough into your digestive tract to actually—to get to where it needs to go, then who cares what was inside of that capsule?

TeriAnn Trevenen: Yeah, absolutely. The last thing that’s really important to look at when it comes to your probiotic is making sure that you have a single-strain probiotic. Many manufacturers combine the wrong strains. They mix together a bunch of strains and never analyze where the strains may compete and work against one another. And if you don’t know this, how do you know how it’s impacting your health, and if it’s even working the way that it should? Are you using a formula with competing strains that ultimately kill each other? It’s a big question you should be asking yourself when you’re looking at a probiotic and taking a probiotic. [0:30:57]

Jonathan Hunsaker: It really is. I mean and in full transparency, when we created our first probiotic, we used a multi-strain probiotic. And it was like “Hey, these are all different strains.” We were working with top formulators. And the reality is, is yes, these were all strong strains, but there weren’t tests on how did they play together, right?

And I was on another podcast as a guest, and I was talking about pharmaceuticals. There’s tests on pharmaceuticals for a single pharmaceutical, but when you start combining the different ones, you get all kinds of adverse reactions. Now I’m not comparing probiotics to pharmaceuticals, but it’s that same concept of are there be—are there tests being done on all of these different blends of strains to see, are they killing each other off, are they helping, are they hurting, are they even making it to where they need to go, all of that stuff?

And so, we actually changed our formula to use a single-strain, super Navy Seal strain.

And the other thing that I like about single-strain probiotic is now you’re not having a bunch of different little strains going into an unhealthy gut that may lose to the bad guys, right? You might have so much bad bacteria in your gut that you have a bunch of these little guys coming in to fight it, and they’re just killing them, right? It’s just not even enough to make a difference.

Whereas if you do a single-strain probiotic, then it can go in there with all of the armed forces on one side fighting against the smaller bad bacteria, and it can kill those off and replace it with the healthier probiotics. So, that’s—for me, I think that’s a big difference. I think it makes a big difference.

And the strain that we’re using, it’s a specific strain, lactobacillus plantarum. And again, you want to make sure that this is freeze-dried. You want to check it and see how much is in each capsule. It’s not a refrigerated version. And we put a lot of literature on it, on the site. But I just want to talk about a single-strain being so much more effective, in my opinion, and a lot of other people’s opinion that I researched this on when we decided to make the change, as being the most efficacious.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Absolutely. And just a few comments I want to make here. We’re not going to go into detail about our new probiotic because all we’re here for is to educate you and give you information. What you choose to do with it is up to you. Obviously, we offer a probiotic supplement. If you want to go and check it out, you can go to Organixx.com and look at it and read more information on it. But overall, we just wanted to educate people on how important our gut health is and why probiotics are important to our gut health.

I just want to direct everyone to EmpoweringYouOrganically.com as well. We have done previous podcasts with other guests where we talk about gut health. This has come up a few times. Because it’s so critical to our health. So, if you want to know more about gut health and how it impacts your health overall, we also have resources, docuseries, and information from those that we’ve talked to in the past. We’ll link them in show notes for other people who we’ve talked about gut health with, so you can check that out.

Learn more about your gut, what your gut does for you. Probiotics obviously help to improve your gut health, but why is your gut health so important? You can go back and listen to old podcasts and find out information about exactly what it is that our gut does overall for our health, and then also, like I mentioned, you can check out our probiotic if you’re interested in the new version, our newly-released probiotic, which is an upgrade and a much more powerful product and probiotic than we had in the past.

As always, we’re trying to work and improve our existing products to make them even better than ever before, which is what we’ve done with our probiotic.

Jonathan Hunsaker: Yeah, I suggest reading about it, we put a lot of literature together. It’s called ProBiotixx+. It’s our new version. Listen, I’m not afraid to say, we’re going to constantly be upgrading, looking to make things better. The current formulas that you see now, in two years, will probably be slightly tweaked to make them better. As more research comes out, as we learn more things, we’re going to constantly make them better. This is one of those.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Cleaner, higher-quality, organic, better. And just so you know, you said ProBiotixx+. So, if you’re looking for it, you can also get the information in the show notes.

Jonathan Hunsaker: Yeah, definitely go to the website to find it.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Yeah, help you find it.

Jonathan Hunsaker: For our fun spelling.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Yes.

Jonathan Hunsaker: The last thing, I’m just going to close this off with here, because a lot of people are listening, and they’re thinking, “Well, I’m eating yogurt, right? I’m getting my yogurt; I’m getting all my probiotics from there.” Here’s the test to know if you are. If your yogurt is sweet, then you’re not getting any benefit from it. Because the bacteria eats the sugar. And so, if your yogurt, when you open it up, is sweet, then enjoy it for what it is. It’s a treat.

TeriAnn Trevenen: It’s a dessert.

Jonathan Hunsaker: It’s a dessert. It is not getting you the probiotics that you need. Although the advertisement tells you that it is, it’s really not. And so, and we’ve published a lot of information about this too, on the website, to really figure out what are the good foods to eat, what are the different things to look for in a probiotic, all of that stuff. So, I will leave you with that.

Go to EmpoweringYouOrganically.com for all the show notes, all the Cliff notes, all the research links, all of—anything that we’ve said here, we’ll link to it on the show website. [0:36:02] Go to Organixx.com, subscribe to us on iTunes if you liked this episode and you don’t want to miss any of our future ones. Our podcasts are always free. Go to iTunes and subscribe.

And I hope you’ve enjoyed it. I love doing these podcasts. I feel like I learn more and more every day, just from the fact that we have to do these podcasts and teach. And so, there’s research that’s done around it, and we’re really learning more. So, I’m enjoying doing them.

TeriAnn Trevenen: I don’t even feel like we have to do it, I feel like we get to do it.

Jonathan Hunsaker: I agree.

TeriAnn Trevenen: And I love doing it all the time, so that we can educate you. It’s been powerful and we love hearing your feedback, hearing how it’s impacting people and changing their lives. So, thank you for letting us be a part of your health journey.

Jonathan Hunsaker: Absolutely. Thanks, everyone, for listening. Thank you, TeriAnn.

TeriAnn Trevenen: Thank you. Have a great day, everyone.

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Episode 45 – Optimizing Your Gut Microbiome, Probiotics, and the Center of Your Health

Empowering You Organically Podcast on Gut Health

Organixx Articles on Fermented Foods

Organixx Articles on Probiotics

Organixx ProBiotixx+

Probiotics

Gastrointestinal Microbiota

Research on Probiotics

The Gut-Brain Connection

Study on Mice and Gut Bacteria and Behavior

Serotonin

Gene Expression

Epigenetics

Intestinal Bacteria and Diabetes Study

Pesticides/Herbicides and Gut Bacteria

Newborns and The Development of Gut Microbiota

Gut Bacteria and Obesity

Kombucha

Fermented Foods

Detoxification