Gut Health, MCAS And Histamine Intolerance

Beth O’ Hara, FN

Welcome back to the Reversing Mast Activation and Histamine Intolerance Summit. I’m your host, Beth O’Hara of Mast Cell 360. And I am really delighted to have my colleague and a really good friend, and someone who is on the cutting edge of gut health with us today. And this is Steven Wright. And if you got any kind of GI issues related to histamine tolerance, mast cell activation, you definitely want to catch this interview and listen through the whole thing, because we’re gonna talk about some cutting edge and new developments in this area that may be a game changer for you. So lemme tell you a little bit about Steven and then we will bring him on. So he’s a medical engineer and a Kalish Functional Medicine Institute graduate. He’s a gut health specialist. Similar to me, he’s spent close to $400,000 overcoming his own health challenges. So he’s tried everything from Western medicine to shamans. And today, he’s the Founder of healthygut.com and he lives in Boulder, Colorado with his fiance, Shay, and their two dogs. Welcome, Steven. It’s so good to have you with us.

Steven Wright

Thanks, Beth. Thanks for doing the summit and having me on.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

So I know like most of us that get passionate about an area of health like you are, and like I am, that there’s a story behind that. And I love to hear a little bit about that. Can you start us off just with what got you involved in gut health? ‘Cause I know there’s a quite a journey in there for you.

Steven Wright

Yeah. I mean there’s a really long story and a shorter story, so we’ll keep it on the shorter side. But it’s definitely one of those sort of, we teach what we struggle with or sort of the wounded healer archetype. So I was born with a hydrocele hernia birth defect and that was pinching my intestine. And so for the first 12 weeks in my life, I only gained a pound. And I basically, the stories from back then are that I spit up, almost all the food that I took down. I cried all day long and that slept all night, and then just repeated it. And so basically, I was kind of born into this world with intestinal pain and that progressed into way too many antibiotics from a dermatologist in high school and then too much beer and pizza in college. And by the time I graduated college, my health was a real wreck. I mean, I had been having IBS symptoms, alternating constipation, diarrhea for many years. 

At that point, I was really gassy and bloated. In fact, my family had nicknamed me, the gas man. And just where I came from and the way that I was orienting towards life was that, hey, just suck it up. You know, you can make it through, suck it up. There’s a lot of other people out there with a lot more pain than you and a lot more issues than you. And so, it wasn’t until despite like exercise induced asthma and acne, and depression, anxiety, and IBS, and all these things that are building up. I was still sort of not thinking anything was too wrong. And then a few years after college, when I was really trying to get healthy, I was trying to lose weight. And I was exercising like every day, trying the whole bodybuilder sort of athlete ideas of like 2007, 2008. I just wasn’t losing the weight. And my boss basically called me into his office one day and said that, you are stinking up the office and your coworkers are complaining, and you’re gonna have to get this figured out if you wanna work here. And so that was like the big wake up call for me. And it was true. At that point in time, it didn’t matter what I ate, whether it was chicken and lettuce or pizza and beer. I would just be totally bloated with visceral hypersensitivity, which basically is a division of IBS where you have extreme pains in your gut every day. 

And I would just fart and hope that nothing happened. And I have all kinds of embarrassing stories, but that was my journey into this. And then that sort of pain fueled me into seeking alternative options when Western medicine didn’t have any more answers for me. I changed my diet. I started gut supplements and all kinds of supplements right away in 2009, 2010. And each little improvement in my health fueled me. It was like, okay, I can use all this anger, all this determination to realize that like, hey, no one’s gonna do this for me. No one has as much interest in this as I do. And I don’t wanna live the rest of my life in this kind of pain. So I’m just gonna use my engineering degree in the framework for dealing with problems. And I’m a reverse engineer, each issue I have. And it also happens to be that I’ve been taking supplements for nootropics and athletic performance since I was 13. And so you couple that with this desire for not just living in a box. 

So, I mean, I understand that in the beginning and I do believe in this, restricting your life down, cutting things out, whether it’s your environment or your diet or whatever else to stop symptoms and get stable is really important. However, I was not happy with this idea that I had to lead a really regimented life. I couldn’t have dairy. I couldn’t eat out, all these things. And so, I’m of the orientation in this life that I’m a heedness. I wanna try it all. I wanna experience it. I don’t want restrictions. I don’t want my health telling me, I can’t do and experience things. And so between already using a lot of supplements for other things, and then realizing that they could be used for health, I’ve just been on a 12 year experience here, trying to figure out how can I live the fullest life possible and use supplements, and diet, and anything actually that works to lead that life.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

I really appreciate, you sharing the vulnerability side of that story because I think it’s something that many of us can relate to, and we don’t talk about. And I’ve had that myself with the hydrogen sulfide SIBO. And been really grateful that I worked from home and also had those tough conversations with my husband telling me, I don’t wanna sleep in the bedroom with you tonight. And that’s a hard one, you know. But what I also know about you is, one, you’re a bit under, you understate what you’ve done. And I know you ran a clinic that worked with some of the most difficult, challenging gut issues. You’ve got a lot of clinical experience with people that you took this story and then did all of this one on one work with people, and really made huge inroads for them in terms of their gut health. 

And I had some of the most stubborn gut health that, of all the practitioners I’ve seen, which is over 75, had no idea how to deal with. And you were one of the few people that were able to help me with inroads into my own gut issues. And so, I just wanna let people know who don’t know you, that part of you. And then you’ve built this company that’s really doing all of this cutting edge research which I love and excites me. Let’s dive into the role of the gut in mast cell and histamine issues. Can we talk just some more about what happens with the gut when you have these chronic illnesses, what is going on and how they can be driving histamine and mast cell problems?

Steven Wright

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s a massive question. And the simple answer is, that the gut literally is, the center of the interaction with the immune system, the center of the interaction, mostly with the mast cells. The majority of them are located in and around the gut. Like if you only had like a hundred, like if life was a video game and you were a creature in that video game, and you had a hundred immune cells in your body. 70 to 80% of them would be located just underneath your ribs, between your ribs, and your groin. Like they were they’re centered right there. And so all your nutrients, everything you need to lead a healthy life and repair from any sort of chronic illness, they have to go through the gut, they have to broken down. And so there’s this massive focus on what we eat, which is important, and what we don’t eat. 

But there’s a real under-appreciation for, can you break down what you eat and can you take those nutrients and pass them to the body parts that need them to recover? And so, the gut really is the core functionality, if it’s not functioning properly, or if it’s out of whack in a number of ways, it cascades down everything. So it’s gonna cause decreased ability for even the supplements you want to take like corset 10 or curcumin, or even prescription drugs that may be helpful for you. If you have low stomach acid, those drugs and those supplements are gonna be less absorbed and less able to help you basically. And so, there’s this massive cascading underlying assumption that our stomach is working properly, that our enzyme function is working properly. Our gut wall in the microbiome in there is working properly. And it makes sense. We can’t see it. We can’t really touch it. We can’t feel it really. 

Measuring, it’s very difficult. And so, it’s way easier to focus on other things. When I think the core of relaxing histamine and mast cell activation syndrome is, number one, obviously, all the stuff you teach around removal of offending incoming agents. But also, anything you can do to optimize your gut, to be able to actually just do its main job. Just the job it was designed to do every day, will basically multiply every other thing you do or it will divide everything you do. And people really struggle with non-linear equations, but multiplication division can become non-linear equations over time. And so, basically what that means is like, if you have less hydrochloric acid in your stomach, if you have less enzyme function, if you have less butyrate things like this, everything you do will be working like one fifth or one quarter or one third is good as what it could be working, should you make inroads in your gut health. And so, I think, the key to a lot of stuck cases, if not the key to the stuck cases.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

Yeah, it’s huge. And your work has greatly influenced the development of our MC 360 method that we use in the clinic. And we do start with removing the triggers and we have to make sure that we’re optimizing digestion the best that we can at that point in time, make sure that people are getting their nutrients broken down from the foods, make sure that particularly constipation is super common or the types of diarrhea that I’ve had, where you’re running the bathroom six and seven times a day. And you’re just not hanging on to anything and get dehydrated. That nutrient loss or the constipation. we’ve got those toxins just sitting there, and reabsorbing. So I know when we’re not digesting our food properly, not only do we have that nutrient loss, but then it’s going to be agitating and inflammatory in the GI tract. And then we have mast cells that completely line from the entire epithelial cells of the mouth, down the esophagus, the stomach, all the intestines. So anytime there’s that agitation, those mast cells are going to be creating inflammation, creating mediators. And then we have this DAO enzyme made in the gut in the small intestine. And inflammation is gonna affect those brush border cells that make that DAO. So then we start opening up more mass activation histamine intolerance. That’s where this digestion piece can be so critical. And I’m wondering, if you can talk more about the role. You kind of started into about digestive enzymes and stomach acid. But can you talk about what these are, the differences in them and their roles, and how they’re important in maintaining that immune health and integrity in the gut?

Steven Wright

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I just wanna highlight really quickly what you said there, which is that there are human studies on histamine, intolerant people and healthy controls, showing that there’s higher markers and intestinal inflammation, higher markers of Villi, destruction which is the brush water and where the DAO is released, higher markers of zonulin which is a marker of leaky gut, diverse or basically dysbiosis of the microbiome and reduced diversity of the microbiome. So this is not like conjecture. I mean, it is theory to practice where I’ve seen it in real life in hundreds and hundreds of people, and you’ve seen it in your clinic, but we have literal research studies now that are saying like, this is legitimate issues in histamine intolerance. So it’s really important to highlight that in case people are still focused on other areas. So one of the first stages of digestion is low stomach or is stomach acid, and just the stomach and what it does there. And then the next phase is the small intestine and digestive enzymes. 

And so, I think that what people may not be aware of, is that your stomach is this really cool organ that can like get down to a less than a one pH on the pH scale. And the pH scale is super annoying. I don’t know why they constructed it the way they did. But one is like really acidic, like battery acid levels. Coca-Cola and apple cider vinegar are like at a two point fourish, 2.6ish on the scale. So you even know like maybe from your grandmother or somewhere in life, you have upset tummy, you can take the acidic thing and it helps your gut. And so your stomach is really cool and it should be hanging out in those lower pH ranges. And then when it hangs out in a higher pH, we tend to see things like heartburn, acid reflux, burping after meals, meals that sit in your body. You tend to then see decreased protein absorption. So you start to see things like hair, skin, and nail issues. You get decreased energy. 

Typically, you’ll start to see mood dysfunction. everything that relies on protein and immuno acids basically. And the really cool research that’s coming out in the last decade or so, is that in mice, they’ve actually shown now that if you take mice and you give them a proton pump inhibitor and you create higher acidity, which is not what we want, we want lower acidity. We basically make the stomach function worse, their ability to create IgE antibodies in response to food and their like sort of histamine like experience goes way up. And then they can give them Betaine HCl and gastric enzymes, so digestive enzymes. And they can knock with the food, and they can knock that back down. And so, what we’re starting to see is that the stomach and the acid, and the pepsin in that that are made in the stomach. Pepsin is the main sort of protein degrading enzyme that we make. When these two, I don’t know, variables can do their job. We see less LPS going into the small intestine. This is also a study that’s been done on humans where that lipopolysaccharides are a toxin. They’re part of the cell wall of bacteria. 

We have them every day in a certain amount of LPS is normal, but we want the stomach and the stomach acid, and the pepsin to break that down and nullify it. When it gets through, that increases intestinal inflammation which we just talked about then starts to degrade DAO release. But also, the pepsin and the acid, basically open up the protein structures and like eat away at it, reducing the allergy potential of even normal proteins. ‘Cause a lot of the studies aren’t done on fish proteins which of course, is a histamine inducing food for a lot of folks. But in general, fish is not an allergic food if you will. And so, the fact that it’s just doing this to fish peptides, is pretty amazing that that’s what they’re working on. They’re not working on like dairy or some sort of complex food. And so, I think the moral of the story, if you will, is that if the stomach is functioning properly, it sets the stage for everything. The speed. You talked about constipation and diarrhea earlier, it sets the speed for your digestion. It sets the right conditions to have lowered inflammation, less toxins going in your small intestine. And it helps to create the right environment for your digestive enzymes to work in the small intestine. And so, optimizing right at the beginning of the stomach, is a really big overlooked variable for anybody with chronic health issues.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

So just to recap, ’cause we covered some really great juicy stuff in there. That we have to have this correct digestion happening in the stomach and in this small intestine in order to not just get our nutrients out, but to decrease histamine intolerance and to also decrease immune related food sensitivities. So it’s important to help turn that around. And one of the other things I was just thinking about, is so many people in the mast cell community have earlier stand lowes, ADS, hypermobility connective tissue issues. And that connective tissues gets made out of amino acids. So if we don’t have that stomach acids break down the protein, not only do we have what we talk about a lot neurotransmitter issues, but we’re gonna have trouble making our collagen in our skin, in our joints, in our ligaments, even the lining of the intestines to repair that. And it just saw somebody post just today that coming off of a PPI, which is gonna be like a Meprosone with that reversed her histamine intolerance after three months. And I think she was doing some digestive supports like you’re talking about. Can we get into more details for people who just don’t know a whole lot about these kinds of supports? Like what is Betaine HCl? What is pepsin? What are the brush border enzymes versus pancreatic enzymes?

Steven Wright

Yeah. So, Betaine HCL is hydrochloric acid in a powderized form or it could be liquid. But in this case, most of the supplements on the market are powdered. And basically, it’s replacement acid for your stomach. Because what we find is that as we age, but also due to stress, due to micronutrient deficiencies or infections like H. pylori. And also I believe, histamine disruption is also part of it because histamine is actually released to make stomach acid. So if you’re always trying to like, down regulate all your histamine, because it causes so many issues, you may be accidentally down regulating stomach acid production as well. And that might be okay in the short run, but what you’re gonna want to do, and what they’ve shown in humans is that, you can use powdered acid basically in capsules to re-acidify the stomach and allow the normal functioning of the stomach to happen. And so that acid is just one component of what’s called gastric juices. Gastric juices are very complex. But at this point in time, we know that they’re primarily made up of at least three things, probably all kinds of cool stuff we don’t know about or can’t measure yet. But one is the acid that we just talked about. 

The other is pepsin which is the main protein degrading enzyme. And the third thing is intrinsic factors. And so pepsin helps acid basically, kills off any incoming bugs, any of the LPS. And then it’s an acid bath. And so, if you look at YouTube videos or like what happens when you put stuff in acid, it kind of like bubbles and then it opens. And so what acid does, it helps open the protein structures from these balls of like say steak that you just ate or chicken or whatever. And it helps open it up. The pepsin can come in then and cleave the big protein structures down to smaller. So that the other enzymes, we’ll talk about in a minute, can go to work. Meanwhile, if there’s any B12 that’s released, the intrinsic factor kind of swoops in, binds to it, and then helps basically be, allow it to be absorbed in the small intestine later. Otherwise, the B12 can be just broken or not absorbed by the stomach acids. So that’s gastric acid and you should basically make a lot of it in proportion to your meal. It should drop down. 

The food should be in your stomach for like two to three hours. And then it’ll slowly start dumping into the small intestine. As it dumps into the small intestine, bile and bicarbonate, and all kinds of things dump in as well as pancreatic enzymes at the top of the small intestine. And pancreatic enzymes include proteases, which is another protein degrading enzyme, also includes amylase, which is a carbohydrate degrading enzyme, and lipase which is a fat degrading enzyme. And so, these pancreatic enzymes flow in and they’re activated by the baking soda that hits the the low acid or the acid, basically, food stuff turns on. And those enzymes start working on the food right away. Meanwhile, as the food travels a little lower into your small intestine, it’s gonna start hitting the brush border, the villi. And the villi are a little hairlike projectiles that increase the surface area of your small intestine up to like 4,000 square feet. It’s kind of crazy like the way that nature has constructed your small intestine. 

The villi actually excrete another set of enzymes. It’s called brush border enzymes. And many of these are around carbohydrates. Most of them are around carbohydrates. And so, this is where you get your lactase for the lactose enzyme and milk. You also get invertase and maltase, which are disaccharide degrading enzymes for like sugars and milk or sugars and wheats or vegetables, things like that. So if your brush border is messed up due to the inflammation or infections or whatever, not only do you not get your DAO, but then you don’t get your brush water enzymes. And so that increases your likelihood that your carbohydrate intolerant. And when you do that, you also leave carbohydrates around for other things to eat them, ’cause you’re not breaking them down, absorbing it. So this is where we start to see concurrent infections of SIBO, yeast, Candida in the small intestine, while you have like say, a histamine reaction happening, a histamine tolerance happening, or you have another say, another root cause issue happening at the same time. You start to create this snowball where if you don’t, if you can’t break down and absorb the food you’re eating, the bugs will do it for you. And they will just grow up out of your large intestine. They should not be in the small intestine. There’s there’s a small microbiome there, but it shouldn’t be very like diverse. And so, for those people with like the gas, the bloating, a lot of this is gonna be coming from this carbohydrate intolerance, this vegetable intolerance, and what may be overgrowing in your small intestine.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

So this is why we have, we need these different types of products if we’ve got these GI issues. So that’s a question I get a lot in the clinic is, well, can I just take this one enzyme. But they have these different properties, so we have what’s happening in the stomach, specifically with the intrinsic factor, the hydrochloric acid, which we usually call Betaine HCl and then we’ve got the pepsin. Then we have the brush border and the pancreatic enzymes is going on the small intestines. So we’ve got these two different locations that are so critical. And you alluded to something that just wanted to highlight a little more, which is you said that when we swallow the food, the hydrochloric acid in the pepsin are helping to reduce any kind of bugs that are on that food or, we call ’em bugs, but bacteria. And we don’t like to think about this, but there’s always some parasites in food. And so, we need that to help reduce those parasite infections and they should be getting killed in the stomach and not making it. They can even help with food poisoning, I imagine.

Steven Wright

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think the stomach acid is part of the immune system. If you think about it from that way. And if when it’s reduced, that is a great time to catch a bug. We do know that studies on proton pump inhibitor. So again, class of drugs that reduce your stomach acid production, your risk of having SIBO after that is like, well above 50%. I haven’t seen a parasite study on it yet, but I think, if you do enough case histories like I have, like you have. There’s like this really, really common story, which is I was very stressed. Life was hard. I went on vacation. And we all know what happens when we go on vacation. We like finally relax, right. And you’re super stressed. You finally relax. You kind of like go out and be a little adventurous, and you get exposed to a parasite. And that’s when you come back from Mexico or Europe or somewhere Asia, and you’re never the same, ’cause you have this parasite. Would it been avoided, if you weren’t so stressed and you were making enough stomach acid? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s definitely one of the defense layers that often comes down before the infection starts.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

I just wanna clarify for people, ’cause this is super common, confusion as well. That when we’re talking about these PPIs, we’re talking about brand names like Prilosec, Nexium, Protonix. Those types of medications which are really tamping down that stomach acid production, that proton pump inhibitor. But we’re not talking about the category that usually gets conflated in there, which is the H2 blockers like famotidine or pepcid, is the brand name, Tagamet, which they’re used a lot to help calm mast cells. And they block the H1 blockers. So I just wanted to let people know that difference because people get all worried when they hear about PPIs. They think they’re the same as those. Now one of the things that you have taught me a lot about that also changed my practice is the role of butyrate. And particularly, involved in things like histamine intolerance, mass activation, FODMAP issues. When we’re seeing all kind of the interesting things with butyrate, can we talk about what that is and how it’s created? What kind of benefits it has for people?

Steven Wright

Yeah, definitely. So, let me start with why you should care. So, there’s really cool research on butyrate helping with allergic reaction like symptoms or conditions in humans, such as asthma. And so, taking things orally can impact other things in your body, whether it’s your sleep asthma, endometriosis, bone loss, osteoporosis, and a lot of it can, not all of it. But one component of it, tracks back to butyrate coming out of the microbiome which is really cool. And we can kind of work our way back from that. And also think about histamine release and mast activation syndrome. One of the underappreciated things that’s not talked about when it comes, I think to histamine intolerance, is how often are you giving the mast cells a chance to get mad about what’s happening? Like how exposed are they? In other words, like are you driving on a moped on the highway or are you driving in a giant SUV where you’re very well protected from whatever might happen? If you’re driving on a moped and you don’t have much protection, anything could aggravate you. A little pebble in the road, a bug, a bird can be life threatening. 

We wanna have a gut with a really thick mucus membrane that’s really healthy, that allows the mast cells to not be affected by everyday life. And so, underappreciated thing is that part of leaky gut, part of histamine reactions, part of the gut breaking down, is the mucus membrane shrinking and getting less healthy. And one of the things that actually helps create a really solid mucus membrane is butyrate and butyrate production. And so, butyrate to define it, is a short chain fatty acid that is mostly created in the large intestine, the upper large intestine by the microbiome. There’s other short chain fatty acids. Butyrate has a significant amount of research that blows away the other ones as far as how good it is for us, how important it is for us. It’s not that the others aren’t important, they are, but they’re nowhere near in the same category of importance as butyrate. Now 90ish, 90, 95% of all the butyrate is consumed in your gut by the colonocytes, by the intestinal epithelial cells. It is the preferred source of their energy, their basically metabolic processes. And we can go into that in a minute, if we want. But basically, when that’s happening, it’s sucking oxygen out of the gut and it’s creating the right environment for a really healthy microbiome. The cells are very healthy and five to 10% of all the butyrate you make, is going global or systemic. 

And it’s helping to regulate all different areas from your brain to your lungs, to your bones and elsewhere, even your muscle cells. What happens when we start to lose butyrate due to, maybe, you can’t consume fermentable foods, ’cause they bloat you and they just like FODMAPs. Maybe they just like wreck you or maybe you’ve taken a round of antibiotics or a couple rounds of antibiotics. And you’ve caught dysbiosis and you can’t basically tolerate certain foods. Maybe you have SIBO. There’s lots of reasons why you might lose your butyrate production. When that starts to happen, it creates another downward spiral where you get less and less butyrate production over time. 

And then you have less ability to regulate these other areas of your body. And part of what it butyrate does is create T helper cells or T suppressor cells. These are cells that help balance our adaptive immune system from not getting to auto whack. The butyrate like I said, up regulates mucus production through the MUC2 gene. And so there’s a whole host of things that butyrate does across the body. And if we start to lose it and then we actually need to go on an elimination diet to get symptom free. We actually create further butyrate loss and further dysbiosis. And so that’s where supplementing with a really high grade tributyrate supplement is what I believe in, based on the research and based on what’s happened, what I’ve seen in clinic, can really help stop that slide, reset everything over the coming months, and create the opportunity for you to reintroduce those foods that you’ve lost or reintroduce other things that may be high histamine that you weren’t able to tolerate prior to this.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

When I am some firsthand experience around this, because I had pretty significant histamine intolerance, I’ve had FODMAP intolerance. I’ve had issues with oxalates. I’ve had issued lectins. And I had tried so many digestive enzymes. I had actually tried numerous types of butyrate, different kinds of Betaine HCl. And I hadn’t seen a big difference other than a little decrease in the food particles I was seen in my stool. But I was still right in the bathroom all the time with loose stools. I was still having a lot of histamine issues. And one of the things that you taught me about was the difference between these different types of formulas and what makes it more effective. And I think that’s important for people who are trying things because looking back now, I feel like, I threw years of money down the toilet using things that weren’t working. 

And I really trust you in this, because of my firsthand experience. And then I’ve seen this over and over in our clinic when I have people come in and they’re taking this digestive enzyme or this butyrate, there’s a mineral based butyrate and they’re not seeing anything with it. And I shift them over to the types of formulas we’ve talked about. They’re seeing some big changes and my histamine tolerance, it took about six months. It’s almost entirely gone. As long as I take my digestive support, I take my tributyrin. I’m eating half a pound strawberries which is one of my joys in life. And I can eat out in restaurants and I’m not paying for it like I used to. It’s really gotten me some great pleasure back in my life. I love to eat.

Steven Wright

Yeah. Well, I’m so happy that it’s worked out for you. And yeah, you hit on something that, that I don’t think clients who don’t see, like they’re not in a practitioner shoes and they don’t have exposure to like hundreds and hundreds of data points. Like when I was a patient or a client and I was paying people. And they would say like, you have to only use this brand. And I’d be like, well, this other brand says it’s the same and it’s way cheaper or whatever. I would always be so pissed at the provider, the health practitioner, because I felt like they were maybe, trying to pull one over on me or trying to make profit margin or they were trying to do something. And I was pretty broke back in the day. I had to go bury in debt to make it to where I got my health back. And so every dollar mattered. And the truth is, when you cross the line and you become a practitioner, and you look at the science, and you look at how supplements are created and formulated, there’s actually a significant difference between the products that work and the products that don’t. And once you find the products you work, and then you start to notice how to dose those products based on symptomatology, you also create a massive leap in your capacity to get results for people. 

And so, we’ve talked about things like digestive enzymes on the show so far, and there’s a massive difference between a $30 bottle of enzymes and a $70 bottle of enzymes. And the numbers on the back of the bottle don’t tell you as a consumer, the difference. The difference is actually like the raw enzymes. They buy it. You know, some of it sure is brand name, but a lot of it is actual increases in what is in the product and the quality of the product. For instance, like our enzyme includes a patent that turns on the enzymes and makes sure they work no matter the conditions. And so, the same thing is true in butyrate supplementation. There was generation one butyrate which were have a lot of data in humans and the data is mostly positive, but it’s not like really amazing. It’s just mildly positive. And those where the sodium butyrate at Cal mag butyrate, these types of butyrate. And so it’s not that they’re bad, they are good and they have good data on them. But the breakthrough in tributyrin, which is a fat back butyrate compound is, especially for histamine induced issues and support around histamine stuff, is like next level. 

It’s not even, you’re not even playing the same game at that point. Again, there’s a bigger cost difference because it’s really hard to work with. And we have to use like our products in intra capsule. And that’s very expensive to obtain. All these things that go into it. But I do want to encourage people that like, let’s say you’ve already tried HCl supplementation or enzyme supplementation, or even sodium butyrate supplementation. You haven’t seen any effects yet. I really would encourage trying our company or something that Beth proves as another option besides our company. Because the difference between what works and what doesn’t work in the clinic is like a big deal. And if you marry them together, they also have a synergistic effect. 

And so, again, as a consumer, as a non-health provider, you probably don’t understand these things. Why would you? It’s taken Beth and I, like almost a million dollars in many years of our life to realize that like, oh, if you get the right mast cell support and the right diet, and then you get the right HCl, plus the right enzymes, it’s not just like one plus, one plus, equals four. It’s like one times, two times, three times four, equals whatever that is, like 40 something. And so, stacking the right products at the right dosages for people, can really have it an amazing effect and doing it together since the gut, the stomach affects the small intestine, the small intestine affects the large intestine, the large intestine affects basically everything. And so stacking those things together can also provide like really big breakthroughs. And I think that’s something we had worked on together as well, was like, yes, you’ve tried ’em. But can we try ’em all together one more time?

Beth O’ Hara, FN

Yeah. It’s been really huge. And we’ve talk a lot about in our clinic that we’ve gotta have the right supports in the right order. And that’s so critical. And I’ve had, I mean, we don’t even have time to go through all the case stories, but I’m thinking of a woman had severe C. diff and nothing was calming it down. And she was on the verge of having to be hospitalized. And we got her on those higher doses of tributyrin and we did your HCl Guard plus, we did your holoenzyme in the higher doses. And it probably saved her life. So we’ve seen a lot of that, not always that extreme. But these major shifts and you just barely touch on- You’re so humble around these things. So I just wanna highlight a little of this, that in the enzymes that you’re talking about, that they’re activated. And that’s been a big difference as well in what we’re seeing in our clinic, because so many people in our practice have significant nutrient depletions from being unlimited diets, from having mold toxicity which depletes so many nutrients. 

And then one of the things I learned from you is that, these enzymes have to be activated with cofactors. So if we’re low in the cofactors, it doesn’t matter. I can take eight, 10, 12 of this nonactivated enzyme. It’s not gonna do anything. It’s just going right through me. Whereas if I act, if it already has the cofactors in there. And it makes a big difference. And you’ve known me for a long time too. And you know that I’m super cautious with bringing things into our clinic. And we work with some of the most sensitive and the most sensitive people. We have to be really careful. And I have people in our clinic who can’t tolerate water. I have people who can’t tolerate baking soda. So I can’t ever say that we’ve got something everybody handles, ’cause that’s not how it works here. But I would say about 90 to 95% of people in our clinic do great on these, which is astounding. Because we don’t have that success rate with this super sense of population of so many things. And I just wanted to share a couple little tidbits for people because so many in our community, microdose and open capsules, and start with little drops. That that’s fine to do on the activated enzyme. But if you wanna open a Betaine HCl or stomach acid capsule, to make sure to wear gloves and put it in another capsule, you don’t wanna put it that on food, ’cause it might burn the mouth. And then on that tributyrin-X, we don’t wanna open that one. Can you tell people why we don’t wanna open that soft gel?

Steven Wright

Yeah. So butyric acid, it smells like, I don’t know. I think that it smells different to other people, but to me it smells like deep vomit. Like, really-

Beth O’ Hara, FN

I think it smells like Chitlins.

Steven Wright

Yeah.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

But I’m from the south.

Steven Wright

Right, yeah. I don’t have a reference point for Chitlins in my head, but it can be a really intense smell. And if you’re someone who’s sensitive to smells, you may develop a psychological reaction to it, not be able to ever take it again. We’ve had people do that. And we’ll give you your money back if that happens. But we really encourage people not to open the capsule. Instead, go spread it out one day at a time, like go every three days. And so, put a lot of time in between each dosage. And that seems to work for people.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

Yeah. And that’s gone pretty well. I haven’t had many reactions surprisingly and we usually have to start with everything with a little sprinkle in water. But for some reason, that one is going really well. And…

Steven Wright

Well, tributyrin is a mast cell supporter. It really helps lower the release. And so, I think, it’s immediately providing relief while it might be aggravating certain characteristics. The relief it provides, I think, typically allows it to be very well tolerated.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

Yeah. It really has. And I was suspicious when we started, but I’m suspicious of everything when I started with. Oh, I had one more thought around it that I think I’ve lost it. Oh, I just wanted also that when you swallow it, because of the type of enteric capsules you have, it’s not gonna open until a small intestine. So people don’t have to worry about getting that burp. Like sometimes they get with fish oil or you’re not gonna burp it up and have a nasty flavor of never had anybody tell me that.

Steven Wright

Yeah, no. I mean, that’s part of like what makes our product different is that it’s 99.9% pure tributyrin. We’re the only company on the market where that pure. And then we’re the only company true enteric capsule. And the difference in enteric capsules and non enteric capsules, but gastro resistant capsules. Again, as a consumer, I always thought, ah, they’re the same. Why would I pay? You know, why would it matter? Why would I pay more? And now that I’m on the other side and formulating, and working with people like it’s a really big deal. It’s basically the difference between an iPhone like 12 and an iPhone six. The iPhone six, you drop it in the water. You’re like freaking out. You gotta put it in rice. 

You gotta protect it. ‘Cause you know it can get a little wet, but not very wet. That’s like gastric resistant. You know, our flip phones back in the day that one drop of rain and your phone was fried. That’s like a regular cellulose or gelatin capsule. So it does matter. You know, when we went from iPhone one to iPhone six, the water tolerance went up. But once we went to like 10 and above, you can go into the ocean with it. If you stay in the ocean with it all day long, it will fail at some point, which is what an enteric capsule is supposed to do. It’s supposed to make it through the acid and then open in the small intestine because it’s a pH dependent capsule. But that difference might seem small, but it does make a massive difference in outcomes.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

And I know also you’ve got a couple other things in your Betaine product. You’ve got DGL, you’ve got ginger, which have been shown in some studies to help reduce histamine or block some histamine receptors, which is pretty cool too. And I’ve seen that be helpful for most people, as long as I don’t have salicylate intolerance, those go quite well. Now there’s a new exciting area I wanna talk about as well. And I’m still getting up to speed on this. So you’ll have to help me out with it. But it’s this area you’ve been researching called paraprobiotics. And there’s some really amazing stuff coming out reports about mast activation, improving histamine intolerance, improving, we’re seeing possible improvements and things like autoimmunity. Let’s talk about that, what are paraprobiotics? How are they working? What are they doing?

Steven Wright

Yeah. So, paraprobiotics are heat killed or dead probiotics, but they’re also typically immature cells. So cells grow from little to big, just like we grow from little to big. Your standard probiotics in the market are full adult probiotic cells. And some of them are alive, some of them are dead. What researchers noticed was that the cell wall and the receptors on the cell wall changes as a cell grows and matures. And that composition of that cell wall and those receptors causes specific immune changes or immune modifications, if you will, inside of a human, as well as inside of mice and rodents. And so they realize that they’ve done multiple trials now of the full grown probiotic in a immature heat killed non alive. Like, so this one’s alive and full. This one’s dead and smaller. And these ones preferentially, the paraprobiotics, preferentially help modify the gut immune access and the communications that are happening there.

It’s really exciting. I think the future probiotics will be these very specific applications of bugs in what we’re trying to modify. whether it might be our eyesight, our brain, our lungs, our bowels, whatever it might be, in this case, I started to realize that there was, part of what I deal with, all day long, other than histamine is food intolerances, and then people who have gut skin issues, got brain issues, things like this. And so I was fascinated by like, okay, if the immune system’s mostly in the gut, then maybe we can change how those things relate. And maybe that will change how we are in the world. Like it’ll change our daily lives. And I found that there was like the last 20 years, these companies have been building these paraprobiotics. Most of them are in Japan. And they’ve had ’em on the market, but one’s really talked about them in the US, as well as no one’s really started to play with what happens if we combine them? And what if we strategically take certain mechanisms of actions from studies and say like, well, we want both of these at the same time. And what if we created like this adaptogenic blend of them for your immune system? 

Because other than one test from vibrant in America, there’s no real way for us to cha- or figure out if we’re th1 dominant, th2 dominant, how is our natural killer cell function doing? Like these very important components in the immune system are very hard to measure. And so we can take all the immune support we want, but what happens if we’re driving, our immune system in a way that’s already in balance? Like we’re just making it stronger but weaker at the same time. And so I think the last couple years of the pandemic have helped us realize that we don’t want a strong immune system, because if it’s too strong, it’ll actually kill us. We actually want a smart immune system that can use a feather, if it needs to use a feather and use a hammer, if it’s time to use a hammer. And so these paraprobiotics are really cool because they help the immune system recalibrate to food, to the environment, to itself even around what it can and well, how it can behave. And in this case, a lot of times we’re trying to sort of rebalance its behavior.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

And so what you’re talking about in terms of that balance is, where we’ve got th1 is that innate immunity. It’s the side that’s killing viruses, bacteria. It’s that initial response. And then we’ve got this th2 side. So our mast cells have a role on both sides. They’ll be part of the initial response. But if this response fails with viruses, with bacteria, then this teach two side can take over. And that’s where we get this chronic mass activation, chronic inflammation. That’s where we can get cytokine storms. But also, it’s about rebalancing these. So things like mold toxicity will flip us where we have this low th1, and it’s hard to fight off infections and we have this high chronic inflammatory mast activation kind of thing going on. So I think, if I’m understanding correctly, is we’re talking about helping restore balance that system. And that’s a lot of what we’re doing with our mast cell support. So now this is a way of really targeting it in the intestines where we have so much of the immune system resigning. Do I have that right?

Steven Wright

Well, my understanding is that, the th1 and the th2 side are T cells. They’re only on the adaptive immune side. So the innate immune system is more white blood cells, natural killer cells, and dendritic cells. And the th1, th2, is on the adaptive side. So basically, you had it right other than that. I think that one little technicality there, the th1 and the th2 have to be in balance like a teeter totter. And when you’re seven, it’s really fun to fly around. But if you’re dealing with mold toxicity, and histamine issues, you don’t want your teeter-totter flying up and down. ‘Cause every day your experience is gonna be all over the place, you’re not gonna have a understanding about where baseline is. And so, yes, the paraprobiotics can help either raise up th1, if it’s too low or lower it, if it’s too high. The same thing with th2, it can help raise it or lower it. So it gets more imbalanced. And then on the innate side, histamine is also part of that side as well. It’s just a different type. It’s more the white blood cells, more natural killer cells, secretary IGAs over there. And those are like inflammation fever as well. That’s also innate. And so, you have to have innate immunity. And innate immunity also becomes chronic inflammation, if it’s chronically turned on.

So really common for people in this category of patients would, or clients would be to see a stool test with a really low secretary IGA. And the assumption is, you’ve had an infection so long that your body’s like, I can’t do it anymore. I can’t make enough immune cells to fight this battle anymore. I’m tired. And so it starts to get depressed. And so we can use things like beta-glucan and other things to help boost that production back up. And hopefully, balance th or balance innate and adaptive immune systems. So it is complex, ’cause you can get outta balance from innate and adapt, but then the adaptive can get outta balance over here. And that is definitely, too much th1 is typically associated with things like hayfever, atopic dermatitis, things like that. Th2 dominance is typically, autoimmunity, things like that. And so, I actually think that the same person has had, oftentimes experiencing both. And so, I think, depending on the environment, depending on their mast cells and their diet, they’re actually driving one really high and not getting that balance that they need when the study is done.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

So what’s available? ‘Cause this is a real new area. What is available about in the pair of probiotics now that people wanna look into this more?

Steven Wright

So there there’s probably like 10 to 12 strains you can find in the research. Only maybe like five or six of them are commercially viable at this moment and you can actually find. Many of them, you cannot get in isolation. So our product is the first in the market to include three studied paraprobiotic strains that are studied in humans as well as animals. Together, the product has over 50 studies on it with the individual strains combined, not together in the product. And they were chosen because each one, either modifies th1, modifies th2 or modifies the innate adaptive connection. Some of the names you could Google and look into are called a IMMUSE, I-M-M-U-S-E. And this is also the strain I was telling you about. That’s a lactic acid producing strain, which I found some research prior to this interview that I had never seen before, showing that you can give lactic acid bacteria to histamine. You can make mice histamine intolerant, and they will have histamine issues. Then you can give them lactic acid producing bacteria that are killed. In this case, they were freeze, dried killed bifidobacter And basically, it will down regulate histamine receptor one as well as HDC expression, which is the enzyme that converts L-histidine into histamine, I believe, if I get that right.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

Yep, you got it. Yeah.

Steven Wright

Okay. So that’s really cool that we can, we also know from microbiome research that you have lowered fecal bacterium prausnitzii, which is a butyrate producer for histamine tolerant folks. And you have other higher, there’s higher counts of histamine producing bugs in histamine folks. So the microbiome interaction and using paraprobiotics or other types of substances to modify the microbiome, is I think a really cool and emerging area for anybody with histamine issues.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

So I love how we’ve gone so much deeper beyond just using digestive supports or immune supports like this, gut supports for moduling constipation and diarrhea, or for helping with breaking down food and getting nutrients out of food. We’ve really been diving into how to train the immune system and the immune response, the mast cell response, how to help histamine intolerance, even how to help things like salicylates some FODMAPs, food intolerances that are immune mediated, all of this stuff. So this has been really exciting. And I’m so grateful for the generous sharing of your knowledge and all of the work that you do in the world. It’s truly game changing. And we get emails all the time from people, because we use your product so much in the clinic. And then we talk about them in our courses and on our website. And then people will let us know how they’ve been doing with them. Can you let people know more about how to find you and the names of the products that you have formulated?

Steven Wright

Yeah, so healthygut.com, is the best place to get more info. All the products are on there. There’s info about them there. Beth also has articles about various types of the products in their relation to histamine. And we don’t write as much about that specific interaction on our site. The products are HCl Guard, is the stomach support formula. Holoenzymes is the digestive enzyme support formula. Tributyrin-X is the butyrate support formula. And then Holoimmune is the paraprobiotics, sort of gut immune retraining product. And so, we do offer a 60 day money back guarantee. We know that three to 5% of every single person that buys from us, will have some sort of either, they won’t get a result with the product or they’ll have a reaction to the product. And so we want to give you your money back and let you go buy whatever you need to buy to get better. We don’t want to keep your money if it doesn’t work for you. So we build that into our business model. We have health coaches on staff, ready and willing to answer questions. If you’re a special case, if you’re worried about dosing, because of best support of our company, as well as usage of the products, we do have a lot of really sensitive folks in our user base. And so we’re very trained up on these issues and can try to help you with their usage basically.

Beth O’ Hara, FN

Yeah, you’re support for people in the products is amazing. I’ve never seen a supplement company that did that kind of level of support that you guys do. And if you didn’t catch all that, don’t worry. You can find links to all of these over at your summit resources page at mastcell360.com/summit, S-U-M-M-I-T. And Steven has given us generously, a coupon code that I’m gonna have that listed over there for you guys too. So you just go over there, click those links. You can find those products. And everything else we’re talking about on the summit. And if you want more details on how we use those in the clinic, we cover that in our mold master class. And we do use these extensively in the clinic, if you need one-on-one help. Thank you again so much for being with us. I just really, really appreciate you. And you know how much I just respect you and your dear friend. I’m really grateful for you being on our summit.

Steven Wright

Well, thank you, Beth. Thank you for doing the summit. Thanks for doing the work that you’re doing to support the people out there.