What are postbiotics? Here’s the scoop. | Ep153

[Music] welcome to the dr gundry podcast today we're going to talk about my new favorite subject post-biotics you're not going to want to miss with this one because most of you have probably never heard about postbiotics but they may be one of the most exciting things that you never heard of that affects your health every day post biotics so here we go all right so most of us know about probiotics those are quote the friendly bacteria that inhabit our gut and most of us know about probiotics because we've been told ad nauseum that we need to eat yogurt because it's loaded with probiotics we need to take probiotic capsules and we need to look at how many billion counts of these probiotics are there and maybe you know 100 billion is more important than 4 billion and me may even need to look at the types of these probiotics so these are great but what most of us don't realize is the vast majority of probiotics never make it into your intestines and the vast majority of probiotics that you swallow are not part of our normal gut flora but instead they basically go on vacation in your gut for a few weeks and then they leave they don't become a part of your permanent flora so if they aren't that important what next well what's next is prebiotics so prebiotics are the food that your gut buddies eat that your if you will your probiotics need to eat and grow uh i like to explain prebiotics to my patients who live in palm springs as let's suppose i sell you some grass seed out in the desert and you come back a month later and say you sold me bad grass seed because it didn't grow and i'd go well did you water it and they said well no you didn't tell me to and i go well did you give it any fertilizer did you give it any mulch and they go well no you didn't tell me to well i said well of course it's not going to grow because it has to have nourishment and it has to have water and yet we make the mistake thinking that our gut buddies don't need water and nourishment to grow and that's in fact what prebiotics do prebiotics in general are fibers that we can't digest they're indigestible by our enzyme systems we can't break them down and so they arrive as long-chain sugar molecules that our gut buddies primarily in our large intestine think is the best thing in the sense excuse the expression sliced bread it'll be lectin free sliced bread but like sliced bread india and this is what they want to eat now that's great we now feed our gut buddies what they want to eat they multiply and they do all sorts of wonderful things well for years we know we knew that our gut buddies were incredibly useful for us we knew that they liked prebiotic fiber to eat we knew that the more prebiotic fiber we gave them the more of them they would make and quite frankly the bigger our bowel movements would be but what we didn't know was that these guys were making compounds that are now called post biotics and these are actually why you want probiotics you want prebiotics to feed the probiotics because it's the post-biotics that these guys make in manufacturer that make all the difference in your health and part of my new book the energy paradox is introducing everybody to postbiotics one way to think about postbiotics is basically the the bowel movements of the bacteria themselves the bacterial farts if you like so these are what comes out of the bacteria fermenting the prebiotic fiber that you give them and the entire science of postbiotics is dramatically new let me let me take you back a number of years as many of you know i make it a point of attending and presenting talks at multiple probiotic prebiotic cinnamon seminars around the world microbiome seminars one of my favorites is the world congress of microbiota which is put on usually every year in paris obviously last year it was a virtual event but uh one of the chairmen of that program is a professor from paris by the name of marvin edis and years ago he and i were talking after one of my presentations and he says you know that probiotics the microbiome actually talks to mitochondria talks to the brain talks to our dna and i said well yes i accept that but why haven't we discovered the language that this communication is occurring i said why can't we find the text messages that this occurs and he says well we know it exists he says it'll just be a matter of time before that language is deciphered and lucky for all of us that that language has been deciphered in fact a few years ago it won the nobel prize for medicine with the discovery of how nitric oxide actually works we now know that there are a host of what are called short chain fatty acids and postbiotic gaso messengers or gaso transmitters that is the language in which the microbiome talks to our mitochondria talks to our dna talks to our brain and who would have guessed that simple compounds that we produce as gas every day by our microbiome are so essential to actually tell our mitochondria to make energy how much energy to make to tell our brain what kind of mood we ought to be in and it's all from this newly discovered language of postbiotics so the important thing about that is yeah you got to have a great microbiome probiotics but you got to feed the microbiome what they want to eat which is prebiotics they in turn will make postbiotics which is actually why you need the other the other two okay so this is truly a language and the breaking of this code i describe in the energy paradox is really equivalent to the breaking of the enigma code in world war ii the enigma code was the german code where all german troop movements all german plane movements were directed by a code that was unbreakable we could listen in and hear the code but the code was so complex that years were spent trying to break the language of that code and there's even a famous movie about the enigma code the point of all this is the language exists we just didn't know how to interpret the language and that's what's so exciting about postbiotics so just to go really nerdy for a minute most of you have read my books know that mitochondria which are the little energy producing organelles in most of our cells are actually ancient engulfed bacteria about 2 billion years ago bacteria were actually engulfed by another cell and in exchange for living inside that cell and getting nutrients from that cell the bacteria produced energy atp and in that exchange it became really the precursor for all living life forms on earth the eukaryotic cell now why why that's so exciting and why the microbiome is so exciting in its communication with these engulfed bacteria is we inherit our dna to make mitochondria from our mothers our dad doesn't give us any mitochondrial dna and so mitochondria because they're ancient bacteria can actually grow and reproduce without the cell that they live in dividing because they have their own dna and the really cool thing is we get our initial microbiome from our mother by exiting her birth canal her vagina and she as we joke literally takes a crap on us and gives us our microbiome so our mother gives us the ancient bacteria in all our cells the mitochondria and she gives us our own microbiome and as we've talked about many many times the microbiome is sisters to the mitochondria and now we know that these sisters talk to each other via postbiotics so if this is if the girls down in the microbiome are happy they're well fed they're given what they need to eat they in turn pass this information on to our energy producing mitochondria that things are great down below make some energy take care of this organism that's taking care of them and so everything is actually in the end interconnected to feeding our microbiome what they want in turn the microbiome then literally sends out text messages in the form of short chain fatty acids like butyrate like acetate and sends out gases literal gases like hydrogen gas the gas in the hindenburg by the way like hydrogen sulfide which is the rotten egg smell like methane like carbon dioxide and like nitric oxide and i can guarantee you that as time goes on we'll find other gases that the microbiome is also producing that has an effect let me give you one of the most startling examples that i use in the energy paradox the japanese researchers looked at the microbiome of people with parkinson's and for a number of years we've known that the microbiome of parkinson's patients is very different than the microbiome of people who don't have parkinson's and there's a lot of evidence that parkinson's begins in the gut not in the brain but in these with these researchers they looked at what sort of gases the microbiome of the parkinson's patients were making versus normal and they found that the parkinson's patients did not have a microbiome that was producing hydrogen gas whereas the normal people had a microbiome that was producing nitrogen gas hydrogen gas sorry so they got the clever idea well what if we give the parkinson's patients hydrogen water and you can make hydrogen water it is literally hydrogen molecular hydrogen dissolved in water and they gave these patients hydrogen water to drink every day and lo and behold their parkinson's symptoms got better why well it turns out hydrogen is an essential component in how your mitochondria produce energy hydrogen contributes protons which are essential to manufacturing generating atp and so part of what we now realize our microbiome was actually doing was giving substrates to mitochondria to produce energy and if they didn't provide those substrates those mitochondria that affected the dopaminergic neurons died and that's why these people developed parkinson's disease interestingly um when i was writing the longevity paradox you may remember i got really fascinated with the naked mole rat and naked mole rats just to bring you up to speed are the longest living rats by far uh most rats live about two years naked mole rats can live 20 to 30 years and yet they're a rat and they live in colonies in the sub-saharan desert in africa and long story short people figure trying to figure out whoa how the heck do these guys live so much longer and one of the interesting things that became evident is that the naked mole wrap produces a lot of hydrogen sulfide by eating underground tubers eating underground roots eating mushrooms and the hydrogen sulfide gas can actually be used by mitochondria to produce energy particularly if oxygen levels are low which they are um deep in these tunnels so i got the crazy idea that humans are very long-lived as an animal and i wonder if one of the reasons we're so long-lived is that we have a lot of hydrogen gas so i decided to look at the literature to look at the amount of hydrogen sulfide gas in naked mole rats in their blood and the amount of hydrogen sulfide in our blood and lo and behold humans and naked mole rats have the lowest hydrogen sulfide gas levels in blood of most any other animal and i was crestfallen and went oh man so much for that theory and then of course i slapped myself on the head and said well of course we have extremely low levels because our mitochondria are using that gas as an energy substrate just like the naked mole rat is and in fact very good evidence shows that there is a sweet spot what i call the goldilocks rule where hydrogen sulfide production by your microbiome a postbiotic gas is incredibly important for keeping your mitochondria healthy healthy and active ah if that wasn't enough there is a short chain fatty acid called butyrate now butyrate believe it or not butter is named after butyric acid butyrate and there is a little bit of butyrate and butter not very much not as much as my good buddy dave asprey would want you to believe but there is a little bit of butyrate in butter but butyrate is produced by fermentation of fiber and butyrate number one is the preferred energy source of all the colon cells and about 10 percent of butyrate is not used by colon cells and enters our circulation where butyrate actually has been shown to affect weight loss has actually been shown to affect energy levels and it's even been shown to affect mood so the more butyrate you produce by eating fibrous foods by eating prebiotic fiber the better everything happens quite frankly you can get so much more butyrate by eating oh things like asparagus things like jicama things like jerusalem artichokes chicory having some inulin sprinkled on whatever you're planning to eat that's sweet you will make the butyrate rather than eating a stick of butter to get a little tiny bit of butyrate the other thing that's exciting about butyrate and all of these gasotransmitters is that they actually tell your immune system to not get so excited to basically stand down and relax and there's a very fascinating short chain fatty acid that's not well known that actually now we know tells the immune system to not go cause autoimmune disease to not attack your own cells and these short chain fatty acids are only produced by your microbiome when you eat prebiotic fiber or resistant starches now we've talked about resistant starches over and over again but let's just mention them one more time all starches are sugar molecules strung together in long chains and it takes a while for our enzymes to break the bonds of these sugar molecules to absorb them as glucose resistant starches means it takes a whole lot longer and a whole lot more work for our enzyme systems to break these bonds and so more of these sugar molecules make it past you absorbing them down to our lower gut where they become food for our probiotics for our gut microbiome so resistant starches are also incredibly useful to get your fiber load that feeds good gut bacteria okay that's how we get postbiotics now one of the tricks that i keep bringing up that's really important you can take really any starch and make it more resistant to digestion by cooking it then cooling it and then reheating it again in fact interestingly enough the most resistant starch that you can make as far as i know is a purple sweet potato which is cooked then cooled and reheated about 30 percent of all the starch in that purple sweet potato will become a resistant starch now what's so interesting about that is of course this purple sweet potato or the blue sweet potato is actually 85 of the ancient okinawan diet and okinawans are one they were one of the longest lived people in the world and 85 percent of their diet was a purple sweet potato the other thing that's interesting about rice first of all if you have to have rice please make it white basmati rice from india which is far more resistant starch than any of the other rice types cook it preferably in a pressure cooker cool it and then reheat it and you will make that rice far more resistant and i think that may explain why rice which is a staple for four billion people in the world traditionally rice is cooked at the beginning of the week or over a weekend and then it is cooled and then dull dulled out on a daily basis rather than cooking it every day and i think these tricks the making starches more resistant are one of the reasons why these long-lived cultures exist okay what are the benefits well the benefits are in fact remarkable in everything i've just talked about the more resistant starches people get in their diet the more prebiotic fiber they get in their diet the more their gut buddies make postbiotics the better they feel the more their weight normalizes their autoimmune diseases go away there's every reason in the world to get and make more postbiotics and as i always say i want you to step on the gas and just remember there are some cultures where farting at the dinner table is a sign of respect to the chef so let's embrace our inner gas it's not as bad as you think okay we've got a bunch of postbiotic questions that you guys have sent in so now it's time for the audience questions uh at level seven awesome for those of us allergic to onions garlic and other alums what other options do you recommend well first of all there are people who clearly have food sensitivities to the alum family like onions and garlic one of the things i do first with all of these patients and i do have patients like you is ask you to try it with a pressure cooker most people once we ask them to pressure cook their garlic or their onions no longer have a problem but this is only one family that contains prebiotic fiber so please load up on the chicory family of vegetables like like chicory like jerusalem artichokes like artichokes for instance like radicchio like belgian endive all of these have tons of prebiotic fiber that you and your gut buddies will love also just remember any of the tuberous vegetables like jicama is another easy way to get prebiotic fiber in but that's a great question uh at mother of stories how do you know if you're on track with your gut buddies post biotics you just go by how you feel i just want to know how to gauge my progress on how my insides are doing another great question now in my clinics we have the ability to look and measure through blood tests which unfortunately insurance doesn't pay for yet one of these days i hope they will but we're able to look at the degree of leaky gut that you have we're able to look at the sensitivity of your immune system to various components of food and years ago when i first started this i was fairly naive that i thought we could see a leaky gut maybe in a couple of weeks and quite frankly if you have an autoimmune disease it may take you or me to get your leaky gut completely sealed in six months nine months maybe a year some of my patients have taken over a year to seal their leaky gut but i can tell you almost immediately within a month or two we see dramatic changes in the levels of the markers of autoimmune disease and the good news is insurance companies will pay for the measurement of markers for autoimmune disease and so we can see these changes in your inflammation markers one of the things that many people notice right away and we read one of these on our last podcast within often weeks people's pain goes away their heartburn goes away their sleep patterns change and that's actually all a really good way of gauging your progress in how the lining of your gut is doing how many postbiotics you're producing and what they're telling your immune system to just kind of relax and stand out another great question at byron gp byron ygp just started reading your energy paradox i know everyone is different but is there a bare minimum of fiber grams that we should meet particularly concern for my teenagers curious for myself thank you uh an excellent question um ancient hunter-gatherers and me them even modern hunter gatherers may get up to 150 grams of fiber in their diet a day which is a whole lot of fiber and the idea that fiber was important was actually discovered by an english surgeon mr dennis burkett in the mid-1900s when he was on a mission trip to africa he was a colon surgeon and he went down there to operate on hemorrhoids and colon cancer and unfortunately he couldn't find any hemorrhoids or colon cancer don't operate on he said well that's odd and it's we've got plenty of hemorrhoids in colon cancer in england what's going on and he became fascinated with the amount of tubers that the african tribesmen were eating and he started following them around into the bush and he noticed that their bowel movements were gigantic they were almost like termite mounds he became obsessed with the size of bowel movements and one of my good friends dr terry walls has on her back shelves um dolls of giant poops and as you know she thinks that a sign of great health is you should look into your toilet bowl and see a giant coiled snake looking back up at you and i actually wrote about that in the plant paradox the point is the more fiber the better but there's easy ways particularly to get your teenagers to get fiber into their diet first of all you can sneak it into the things you make you can grind up flax seeds really easy way to get prebiotic fiber you can grind up psyllium powder and mix it in the smoothie they'll never know it's there you can make and grind up some of these high fiber containing vegetables like radicchio like belgian endive and mix it in one of the muffins you're going to make for them you can hide it in all sorts of places so you don't have to say you kids are going to have to eat three you know purple sweet potatoes this week or you're not leaving the house although it's not a bad idea but there's a lot of easy ways to do it okay that's all we've got time for today i just want to let you know i really enjoy hearing from from you thank you for these questions i love getting them please review us answer give the questions to me in the reviews section in the itunes and i'll answer it here on the show just like i did today so thanks a lot for tuning in on post-abiotics the most important gas you never heard of up until today and go make some postbiotics and let me know how it's going because i'm dr gundry and i'm always looking out for you see you next week before you go i just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on itunes google play stitcher or wherever you get your podcast because i'm dr gundry and i'm always looking out for you you

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Keywords: dr gundry, dr. gundry, steven gundry, gundry md, gundry, plant paradox, the plant paradox, plant paradox diet, diet, cookbook, lectins, lectin free, the dr gundry podcast, podcast, interview, Postbiotics, Prebiotics, DrGundry, bacteria, microbiom, gas, water, hydrogen, hydrogenwater, postbiotics, energy paradox, prebiotics, probiotics, world congress of microbiota, fiber, resistant starch, microbiome, leaky gut, nutrition, health, gut health, gut bacteria, autoimmune disease, gut health diet

Id: tXisHXxqtnA

Length: 32min 14sec (1934 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021