This Key Gut Molecule Is Crucial For Both Heart Attack & Stroke Prevention & Recovery

Summit Introduction and Guest Welcome 0:00

Everyone, doctor Eric Lenski here. And welcome to the Heart Attack and Stroke Prevention and Recovery Summit. I'm absolutely thrilled to be part of this life transforming event has been carefully designed to give you and your loved ones the natural living tips that you need to enjoy a long, hard, healthy life. This is information your doctor will not be telling you about, so please clear away distractions and get ready to take lots of notes. No joke, you will not find this collection of practical, natural solutions anywhere else online.

From avoiding hidden toxins in your home that are damaging your heart to easy natural product swaps to simplifying your lifestyle habits, each expert will empower you with simple, money saving tips to put your heart health back in your hands. And remember to keep this life changing knowledge at your fingertips. Be sure to grab a summit copy where you can have lifetime access to the bonus materials and interviews for ongoing support in your journey to a heart healthy, abundant life. And today, I'm thrilled to introduce you to a longtime friend and colleague, Steven Wright.

Steven Wright is a health engineer, functional medicine expert, and the visionary founder of the Healthy Gut Company, which exists to help people get transformational results with their gut health issues. The suite of products he has created over the years at Healthy Gut are some of the most innovated and powerful gut health supplements in the world, resulting in more than 12,000 satisfied customers and more than a thousand tough cases. Health. The company is trusted by more than 150 practitioners globally, and provides a customer experience unlike any other by staffing the entire support force with gut health coaches.

Additionally, Steven has become a renowned voice in the gut health space, personally creating more than 30 industry leading educational programs and contributing to over 700 research articles. You can learn more about Steven and his products at Healthy gut.com. And get ready! You're going to love this conversation, right, Steven? Thanks, buddy. Really appreciate you jumping on today. Thanks, doctor Z. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. And this topic is near and dear to my heart as I have a family history of heart disease and stroke.

And this is somewhat of a nostalgic moment. You were part of one of the first big events I did with doctor Josh Ax and Donna Gates back in 2016 to heal your gut. Summitt and I just remember listening to that and be like, wow, this guy knows his stuff. And that was, you know what? Now, eight, nine, ten years ago. And so it's, I know this is something that you've devoted your life to. You've created unbelievable products with thousands and thousands of customers and testimonials. And you, you live this.

I've seen you. I've hung out with you like you are the real deal. So, let's start with a question that I don't think a lot of people are asking. Like, what are people missing between,

Why Gut Health Matters for Heart and Brain 3:00

preventing heart and brain problems right now? Yeah, I think that, you know, and I assume there will be a lot of talks inside the summit where people are drilling into very specific levels. About your blood vessels or about your brain matter. And they'll be diving into micronutrients and all these different things that are part of the equation of heart health and brain health. And, it's really important stuff. I'm not saying that's not important, but I do think that if that was the only thing that mattered, we would be seeing maybe finally, like the numbers of people with heart problems, a number of brain issues would start to like decrease a little bit or slow down.

And I don't see that in the data. I see us having more and more issues, even though we're not smoking as much, even though people are trying to exercise more. And I think there's an awareness around food that's happening that's really helpful. But but still, something's missing. And what I think is missing is this other organ really. And what's going on in that organ, which is the digestive track. The way that I would position it is just like the US government. You have the executive branch, you have the, the, legislative branch and the judicial branch, and all three can make decisions that affect the entire country in a seismic way.

And when they make decisions, it does affect the other branches. And that's the same thing that's happening inside of your gut. There is this really cool superhighway of nerves and signaling pathways that goes from your gut up to your brain in your heart called the vagus nerve. And this complex is literally, from moment to moment can be telling your brain or heart what to do. We like to think that our brain and our heart are like these, I don't know, top down puppet masters that they can kind of, like, direct the show.

But that's not what the research says. The research has moved aggressively in the last five years, but definitely over the last ten years to show that the gut and what's happening inside of your microbiome, which are the bugs inside your gut, actually dictate a lot to the brain and to the heart. And, you know, my hope is by the end of this chat today, I'm going to show everybody why, if you're not including the gut in your preventative practices or in your recovery practices, you're probably missing, a really important area.

Well, let's give people a little tip. Like what are some signs and symptoms that I have a quote unquote gut problem. And I want to maybe gloss over or just assume, you know, gas, bloating, indigestion, like, let's, you know, obviously, if there's a problem in your tummy that could be related, but go there, maybe. But also like, what about those things that people aren't thinking of? Like a lot of people are walking around with serious, serious gut disorders and they're clueless. They have no idea.

Their doctor doesn't know they're being misdiagnosed. They're getting all kinds of different medications. So walk to us to a little bit of the signs and the symptoms and just the moment of, you know what, I gotta take this seriously. Yeah. I mean, there's the overt ones, like you said, the gut pain, the bloating. I would include heartburn. I would include excessive burping after you eat, if you feel like when you eat, it's just like a break in there and it takes like almost a whole day to digest your meal.

This goes farther, though. Like, if you're not looking into or tracking your bowel habits on a regular basis, you should be. Whether you're too constipated or you're having loose stools, you're on the diarrhea side. Those are both extraordinarily bad. The more confusing and the stuff that people don't associate with gut problems that are serious gut issues that, we're going to dive deep into today are things, like leaky gut syndrome. This is something you can't really feel, but the following symptoms suggest it's already happening for you.

And so that's why it becomes really confusing for folks. If you have a lot of food sensitivities, if you're just picking them up one after another, that is a, like, probably the strongest indicator or you've done a food sensitivity testing, you have a bunch. That's the strongest indicator. But there's these other ones like, you have rashes, unexplained skin symptoms. You have, an autoimmune diagnosis. Basically, to get that diagnosis, you need leaky gut to happen. You are having unexplained fatigue and, like, issues that suggest maybe there's a histamine issue and histamine issues are just like you'd think for, for, like, seasonal allergies.

So you're, you eat or you go outside your nasal passageways swell up your eyes water. You sneeze a lot. You can't be without your Claritin or your XR tech, or you have Benadryl in your purse everywhere you go. But for folks who start to have this after wine or beer or fish or some higher histamine foods, this is also extraordinarily bad sign that you have intestinal permeability. And you also have this histamine related issue. Now, there's another one that it's like undetectable basically. But if you have these conditions, I can almost guarantee you you have something called gut dysbiosis.

And that is the this is the thing that matters. I mean, both intestinal permeability and gut disposed matter. They're they're very, very important. But if you don't correct the gut dysbiosis that is linked to every single chronic disease that's ever been studied in intestinal permeability is as well. But I would say the root of the issue starts with the bugs inside of you. We are linked. We are symbiotic. So if they're happy, we're happy. And if they get sick, we get sick. And so it's hard though, to really know because there's not just like a,

Signs of Gut Dysfunction and Hidden Symptoms 9:00

you know, a ring that you can track your gut microbiome with. So, so. So, so bring this connection to this, this gut dysbiosis and and heart disease and brain disorders because it's all connected like one connect connected all. Yeah. So we have let me show our screen real quick here. So we have these nerves that I mentioned that run, this is the vagal nerve right here. If you see the red and the blue, this is this is the gut above and the brain below. And so we have this thing going on in our gut, which is our microbiome is located in our lower small intestine in our upper large intestine.

And this I call it a hippie community. It produces things we cannot make on our own. And when it's producing these compounds in these molecules, we need them to live. And we need to feed our bugs so that they can make these compost so they can live. But when things do not go correctly, we can talk about what happens there. So on the left side you have healthiness. And then on the right you have stroke or ill health. This is a stroke paper. You have dysbiosis right here. So LPs lipopolysaccharide.

These are very dangerous toxins. You have bacterial debris and other toxins. These all go up and then you have your intestinal barrier disruption. So basically you have a bunch of toxins and issues that go up here. And then it goes through the gut down it. Cytokines are essentially like signaling molecules. There's there's health promoting ones and there's inflammatory ones. And then in this state you send these, inflammatory cytokines, right into the brain and into the heart. And so, what you need to understand is that the compounds inside the gut, what keeps this gut healthy over here is essentially the symbiosis between us.

So when we feed them the right foods and we take care of them, they make these things called short chain fatty acids, of which butyrate is the most beneficial one. And it's sort of the keeper of the gut. It's it's the one that all the research is focusing on. When butyrate is high, short chain fatty acids are high, the gut stays healthy. The butyrate goes. These bacterial metabolites that feed right. It goes up the vagal nerve into the brain into the heart. And it's anti-inflammatory. It turns on a bunch of really good genes that keep us healthy.

It's it's just extraordinarily important. But when we lose that butyrate, when we lose that short chain fatty acid production, and it turns into this stuff on the right, everything breaks down. And this is where you get into the situation where you can't feel this. Usually now if you have the symptoms I just talked about, this is likely happening. But there I think there's a lot of people walking around who are like, I mean, I have a, I have a this, I have a that, but I don't have a gut problem.

And that's simply probably not true unless you've actually tested for it. Looking at an I'm looking at a study. Let let me share this quick. I mean, this is powerful. Like, it's almost like, why aren't we hearing more about this stuff? And it's like, it's just, I don't know, man. It just boggles my mind that we're in this situation and we keep on coming back to these discussions. And it's like, why? Why haven't my doctor told me about this? Why is this here? I mean, the literature is clear. I mean, it's new literature as well.

I mean, like, this is let me see here. Well, I think that's that's part you. I mean, look at this for gut microbiota and cardiovascular disease evidence on the metabolic inflammatory background of a complex relationship. But I'm going to I'm going to cue you up to talk about whatever you want to, because this is Candy land for people like you and I. This is from the International Journal of Molecular Sciences. So let me just like look you mentioned dysbiosis, gut dysbiosis. So this is the quote y'all.

And I'm gonna let Stephen like unpack this and just help you practically like what do I do. Right. So dysbiosis has not only been linked to well known inflammatory diseases such as inflammatory bowel, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, but cardiovascular risk factors, atherosclerosis, hypertension, heart failure, kidney disease, obesity, type two diabetes. You mentioned it. This is the proof you mentioned something. Every chronic disease we're talking about the top you know seven of the top ten causes of death here.

The microbiota just talk about this. It's involved like this is so important. The microbiota is involved in modulating cardiovascular risk or multiple and not only related to inflammatory mechanisms. And it goes on and on and on like this right here. This study should be at the forefront of of every chronic disease, every cardiologist, every doctor who works in this space. And it's like people aren't considering it. And then they might recommend a junk probiotic, or they might say, hey, here's a supplement and go on your way.

Here's a drug to manage your symptoms. So, I mean, this is right here. Heart failure, a small intestinal wall, altered function, permeability of your intestinal barrier. Like unpack this for us, Stephen. Like, why are we hearing about this? What do people do? What are the steps you mentioned? But be butyrate like? I would love for you to just kind of like, go on as long as you want. Like, there's a lot to unpack here. Yeah, there's a ton to unpack. I mean, I would say the first thing is why you've never heard about this before.

That study was from 2023. The study I showed before was from 2024. The other studies I have, I can show you are 2022, 2023, 20. My point is, is that there's been an explosion in gut research connected to all different types of diseases and issues in the last five years, and specifically in the last three years. And what I'm talking about today is not like necessarily Stephen Wright's like, epiphany. I'm talking about what the researchers are doing and the fact that this is not trickling down to even integrative and functional medicine.

Yet they're 10 to 15 years behind because they're still talking about probiotics like you talked about. I'm not going to mention a probiotic in my talk today. You will not hear a recommendation about it. Oh. Okay. Yeah. And if you're asking your cardiologist or your, you know, your brain doctor to know about this stuff, they're 20, 30 years out, like they're not going to be into this stuff for another 20 or 30 years. And that's just how research and modern medicine it works right now is. The researchers are at the forefront.

There's people like us who are trying to get the word out. We're at the cutting edge with them, trying to, you know, simplify this stuff, turn it into actual data. And then the integrative and functional people will follow us over the next 5 to 10 years and then and 20 years from now, maybe something like a supplemental butyrate will be common practice for anybody with a family history, or at least at a minimum, maybe they'll be testing your gut microbiota to make sure it's healthy on a regular basis, like maybe instead of a colonoscopy.

I'm not saying a colonoscopy are bad, but maybe in addition to a colonoscopy every five years after 50, you'll get a microbiome analysis done. And if it's low in the beta rate producers, maybe they'll say, hey, you, you have a family history. Your microbiome has dysbiosis. It's low in this thing called beta rate. And that is probably the most protective thing from the gut to the brain and to the heart. And you should think about supplementing with it. That would be the future. Unfortunately, it's going to take ten, 15, 20 years to get there.

Why is this like changing things or what about this is confusing to people. It's it's what I'm saying. I'm literally saying we are dependent upon bugs inside of us to make a compound. We cannot make ourselves to keep us healthy. And that is not something we want to easily accept as a human right. It's basically saying if you don't tend to your bugs,

Gut Dysbiosis, Leaky Gut, and Cardiovascular Risk 17:00

your bugs will get sick and die, and then you will probably suffer and maybe get sick and die. The gut microbiome of patients with chronic heart failure is characterized by a decrease abundance of beneficial, butyrate producing bacteria, and an increase in pathogenic bacteria. Like you're saying this again, this was a year old or now, depending on when you're watching this or listening to this 2023, what got you what got you started on the butyrate train? Because, again, this isn't something that we're hearing at functional medicine conferences.

Integrative medicine conferences. I mean, it's it's sad, truly, that it's not the forefront because it is at the core of what the research and what the body is telling us. So I'm curious about your history and where you're taking this thing. Well, I you know, I studied functional medicine with the Kalish Institute, and I was a big believer in probiotics. I was a big believer in fermented foods. And I still think those things have their places. But I've been in this for 15 years now, focused on digestive health through diet supplements, even pharmaceutical options.

I by my actual college training and being an engineer. And from an engineering perspective, I don't make a lot of determination around whether a pharmaceutical or a supplement is better or worse. I'm always looking at the risk profile. Does it get good results with low risk? And so I'm I'm open to almost any idea that comes if results happen. And just what I've seen is that there was this revolution that I was a part of around taking, a lot of probiotics around doing a lot of elimination diets, even diets like the Fodmap diet and these things that are still, quote unquote, the number one option.

If you have a gut problem. Well, I had a bunch of stress happened to me about five years ago. And, you know, we don't have to get into that. But basically would where I went from like a place where I thought I had all my issues handled, like I've had a lifelong, like, laundry list of issues. Mostly starting the gut, but then spreading throughout to my mind depression, anxiety, acute, exercise induced asthma, all these different things that that stemmed from the gut and spread. And I thought it was past all that.

But then life, you know, kicked me and they came back. And so I tried to pull out all of my old stuff, and it wasn't working. And that's when I kind of was set on this. This next rabbit hole would be like, wow, maybe elimination diets and maybe probiotics are not the answer. And so that's where just, just being willing to reexamine every belief I had around the gut is kind of how I've gotten here today. I was searching for relief for myself, but also just in integrity with the world. Yeah, we're taking more probiotics than ever, but we're not getting the results.

In fact, every doctor I ask, I don't care what product they they rep like, what brand they rep, a probiotic they even. And I love Microbiome Labs, but even Microbiome labs, most of them say 30% of people love it and get results immediately. 30% of people don't feel anything, but we think it's helping and 30% of people are harmed by it. They actively want to stop taking it, and that's across every every debate you can have about probiotics. And so that to me alone is enough to say maybe probiotics are one tool, but not the most important tool.

And so a dove had me dive deeper into, well, what are we trying to get the probiotics to do ethically? Like what is the function that we're trying to drive here and the real issues or the root causes behind needing probiotics in the first place, which drove me deeper into microbiome dysbiosis. Leaky gut continues to be a focus of mine has been for like the last 12 years. And that's where I've I've really just centered in on the short chain fatty acids and butyrate. And it's not it's not just me.

Again, this is hundreds of thousands of papers like, this is a this is a really cool paper right here that really kind of blew my mind. I, I like saw it a few nights ago. So it says oral supplementation with butyrate improves milk, a myocardial schema reperfusion injury via the gut brain neural circuit. So this is a mice or a rat study. They have a sham group, a, group that they gave the myocardial, ischemia. So a heart attack, basically sort of a heart attack group, a sham group, and they have heart attack plus beta eight, then they have heart attack beta eight, and they touched the vagus nerve.

Now, this is hardcore stuff. I feel sorry for the mice, but this is really amazing. Basically what they showed is that when the beta H3 treatment significantly reduced the exercise, decreased the expression of creatine kinase, creatine kinase, mitochondrial ice, ISO enzyme, and lactate dehydrogenase. So these are all, markers of how bad a heart attack happens. And like like how well you'll recover if you do. So beta eight significantly impacted all of those. But then what they did is they cut the vagal nerve.

And for those, the those mice are given the beta and they cut the vagus nerve. It didn't work. They basically got barely any, you know, basically beta eight treatment also suppressed the neuronal the activity of the para ventricular nucleus, PBN and the superior. I'm not even gonna try that. SSG. These both of these effects were lost after vague ostomy. So what what what is being said here is that basically beta rate is going up your vagal nerve and it is actively supporting the health of your heart, of your brain, and without it, without the vagus nerve part or without the beta part.

You know, we're in we're in bad shape here. And this study was 2021. So again, it's just new research. And so I think that's that's what's happening is people are kind of complacent in their elimination diet. Probiotic model. And I could talk about why those diets are harming us and are actually leading to this dysbiosis if you want. Or we can keep going down the the brain and heart data. I would love that. I'm asking why I'm question. I'm guessing many people are thinking right now is why. And I want to get back to this.

By the way the butyrate we're going to discuss and I'm going to make a note what affects what negatively affects the butyrate production, or decrease butyrate levels, what that means to the body and all that. Let's unpack that like some things that people can do to naturally increase it. How to properly supplements will impact that. But why don't probiotics work the way that people think they do? Because I think people have been sold on the idea that you need to essentially inoculate yourself with a mass amount of billions upon billions of microorganism probiotics to have a healthy gut.

And that seems very untargeted to me. That seems very, probiotic. I'm sorry. It seems very antibiotic approach. It seems very nuclear bomb approach, widespread broad brush. However you want to look at it, it's like if if antibiotics are bad, then why would a broad spectrum probiotic be good? I can't understand that logic. Like it says, two wrongs don't make a right. Am I misjudging that? Like what's up with probiotics? Yeah. So so I'm not throwing let's not throw a baby out with the bathwater. Or is some baby here with probiotics?

What? The story that got transferred through the the early researchers into people like us into functional, integrative and then down to mainstream America has been that, gut dysbiosis is bad. Like, your gut just gets disrupted from antibiotics, poor food choices, a bunch of alcohol, a bunch of stress, all these different things, maybe toxins. And so you should replenish or get rid of the bad guys and get get good guys in there. So probiotics are those good guys. Unfortunately they don't do that story.

After that the the narrative falls apart. They don't actually repopulate the gut and sort of like fix the population damage, which that's what dysbiosis is. Dysbiosis just basically means the bug community is sick and they don't have enough levels. They're very low growing. And then the amount of different species in the hippie community down there is not enough to get the job done. So, probiotics were thought to expand the hippie community and, like, make them thrive again. And that's just not true.

What they do do is, some of them help, like, make your intestinal permeability go down. Some of them help with your mucus production. Some of them do support, like one little bug here, another bug here, some help with the brain. Like they can go systemic. They can make you more muscle. They can make you have a better brain. They can make you feel better. There's like mood probiotics. That's all true. But what's not true is they don't fix this. They don't fix dysbiosis. And so that's where the narrative kind of falls apart and why probiotics are not even in my top choices for gut issues

Butyrate, the Vagus Nerve, and Heart Protection 26:00

is because they're important, but not as important as getting that dysbiosis and that leaky gut gone. And in order to do that, you actually need other things like what? Well, let's talk about how the hippie community works. So we, we need to feed them. We feed ourselves, but we're also feeding them. And what they eat are fermentable matter. And so this is basically fruits, vegetables and starches. The more colors in that, the better. And when we extract nutrients from those fruits, vegetables and starches, that's great.

But what's left over is this fermentable mash. And the hippie community goes to work on that. And like the first guy or girl grabs it and does something to it and then passes it off to the next and after the next and near the end are the butyrate producers, who will take some of those compounds and turn them into short chain fatty acids and butyrate. Then, that is what kind of keeps the whole system healthy. We can talk about that a second, but what we need is that feed, that food source. That is the fastest way.

If the if if the atmosphere is right down there, if it's possible, that's the fastest way to fix the community. The issue is, is if you've lost too much butyrate for too long, the oxygen inside your gut will get too, too high, which sounds like what? I'm so confused. Even like I get it. Oxygen in the brain. Great. Oxygen in the heart. Super important. Oxygen in the gut. Really bad. And that's super confusing. But most of the good bugs are called anaerobic bacteria in a row. Means without oxygen.

This is not a discussion. This is not a negotiation. This is like us walking on the moon and running out of air when the environment is wrong, we're dead. When the environment is wrong for them, they're dead. And so if the butyrate production goes too low, the metabolism that's happening in the gut, in the colon of sites, in the in the epithelial cells, it stops sucking the oxygen out. And so the oxygen starts rising. And when this happens, it causes more death and more destruction to the the hippie community.

And more bad bugs are growing than good bugs. And so you feed in the, the, the probiotic or not, the products, the prebiotics and the fibers hoping to restart that. But sometimes it doesn't happen because of that oxygen issue. And so sometimes you actually have to give birth. You actually have to give, butyric acid or butyrate and some food for them to, to feast on so that you can make the environment, you know, give them their own space suits basically, and then feed them again. And that is the way to get rid of the microbiome.

Dysbiosis. You mentioned fruits, veggies, starches. What what about people that are on low carb diets and things like are they at risk. 100%? So let's do that a little bit. I mean, like if people are on a high fat diet that could reduce the formation of butyrate, right? So it's it's, you know, again, we are at the cutting edge of research. But what I'll tell you is that. Fats in the story about fats is extraordinarily complex. And on one end we have like the worst fats in the world. The other ends we have, like this grass fed saturated butter.

Right. The research really suggests that saturated fats, even if they're from healthy sources, may potentially harm a gut that's already kind of thought about. And so people who are on a high keto, high carnivore, high fat low carb diet, they could probably offset that through, intense amounts of vegetables and fruits that were low in carbohydrates. But they're not eating enough likely. I mean, we're talking like 8 to 12, 14 servings a day, and most people are not even close to that. So you're going to need to supplement because this is just like it's just like fire.

Like, honestly, if you have a campfire going, you know, you have to feed it wood or at some point it's going to run down to just coals. And that's literally what you're doing to the microbiome. If you cut out FODMAPs, if you cut out low, low carb for too long and you don't keep your vegetables up, or if you go carnivore now, people are going to be like, what the heck, man, I feel better. Well, you course you feel better. You had dysbiosis. You just cut off the fuel source to the bad bugs. But that doesn't mean the good bugs are coming back.

It doesn't mean you're getting healthier. You just kind of stop the pain, you stop the bleeding, but you still have to repair the community. So. So walk us through what what you're what you're talking about. Prevention, maximizing lifespan. There's some really interesting studies that that you're pulling, walking people through how your body's changing with butyrate production. As you age. What the what risks of heart attack and stroke and heart disease. I mean, if you could unwrap that for a minute, that'd be great.

Yeah. So I think most of us would prefer just to never have a heart problem. Or a brain problem like that would be the ideal thing. You know, that we aged 90, 100, however long you want to live. If that's the case, we need to have an adult conversation. And I think most people don't want to have this conversation. Most people are now like, okay, you're right. Perimenopause starts in my 40s, maybe early 40s. Testicular function decline in your 40s, maybe in the late 30s. You're right. Maybe I should have some bioidentical hormone replacement.

What they're not willing to talk about yet is that the same thing is happening all over your body. It's why you get, you know, to the point where you're like, oh, I guess I'll get some readers can't really see anymore. Yeah, it's because your eyes are aging. They're slowing down. The same thing is happening inside your gut. There are plenty of studies. Again, this is not just one set of your two studies. And this is not on not just in in rats and mice. This is in humans that show essentially every decade we go on our microbiome starts to shift in a more negative way, and especially every decade from 50 to 60, 60, 70 and 70 to 80, it starts to escalate almost logarithmically.

Which means if you don't know, that word means this thing about every decade, the problem gets ten x worse. Every time you clip off a new milestone number in your H. And what this is saying is that literally, as we're aging, it could be a number of factors, and it likely is. It could be the fact that we stop eating the way we used to eat. We stop exercising the way we used to exercise. There's a number of factors that that make us capable of creating butyrate and short chain fatty acid production.

But what it says is that as we age, our microbiome ages and it stops producing beta eight, which is extraordinarily important if you want to, you know, even get rid of osteoporosis or send it off. And so, I think one of the things that's the highest correlated risk to having a heart attack or stroke is your age. And again, we don't want to necessarily talk about that. But like that's like a super high risk parameter. Family history and your age are way up there right along with smoking and no activity or obesity.

And so we could offset this if we want to think about healthy lifespan and healthy aging, we should start thinking about the bugs inside of us and how are they aging. And if we can do things like supplement with prebiotics or try beta in or other beta rates to keep them healthy longer, we're likely to stay healthier longer, and not have these associated, symptoms and problems that spread throughout the body. So there. So so walk us through how someone would best purchase a butyrate if they wanted a supplement.

Because you go on Amazon, there's a bunch of different products out there. They can go type up it. I know in the supplement world, and this is where a lot of your expertise lies, there are a lot of charlatans out there, unfortunately. And folks, I want a gentle reminder that the supplement and as I know very well the essential oil industry is not monitored by the Food and Drug Administration. Essentially any company can say whatever they want to on a label until someone gets hurt and they get sued.

And then the FDA starts to look under the hood. So there's a lot of bad stuff out there. Yet there is some good stuff. So walk people through, maybe in in general, dysbiosis, healing, dysbiosis, recovery type of supplements including butyrate. If you could give us a quick supplement master class. I'd appreciate that because we need some guidance on how to buy things and what to buy right? Yeah. Yep. 100%. As you mentioned, the the industry is fraught with with issues.

Why Probiotics Are Not the Main Solution 35:00

And if you don't spend every day on this like we do, it's it's so confusing and it's, yeah, it's super frustrating for people like me. I would say the number one thing is that you should trust but verify. So it's kind of on you. Like you said, no one's really watching until someone gets hurt. So you need to you need to verify and I know this is cliche, but it's true. Trust your gut if you don't verify and get the answer you want. So when I say verify, say just email the company, call the company.

Do they pick up? Do they answer their emails? And whatever question you ask such as, you know, where do you get your raw ingredients from? Or you know, something like that. Just make sure that it feels good inside of your body. The answer and the answer, you're, you know, unfortunately, just because they say it's us made, that doesn't make that doesn't mean anything. Frankly, some of the best ingredients in the world are in China. Why? Because the U.S doesn't grow curcumin here. It grows in Asia.

The herbs, a lot of the herbs we want to take don't even they could never grow in the US. So the idea that it's like oh I'll just get a U.S made company, no, that's not going to help you. Definitely. If you're in the gut world, probably the cheapest option is going to not perform. That's also a problem is that, people can use really good raw ingredients, but they cannot put enough in the capsule to actually help you. And so that's a that's another issue. And so if, if, if I was you, since we live in this cool new world with this AI technology, I would ask and I bought whatever one you use for one of the study dosages of whatever you're looking for.

Let's say Buterin or butyric acid. Or you can make the AI do the hard work. You don't have to be a scientist anymore. You don't have to be like this crazy extensive journalist like I am. You can ask the AI to go search for you and just you don't need to know a lot. Like, oh, okay, so most of the dosages are, say like 500mg. So then you should be able to just look at the back of the bottle from that company and say, does it have at least that much? How many capsules do I need? So those are some simple ways where if the company does not respond, if they don't have US based help, that can like speak really good English and you feel like you're taken care of and if a little quick use of ChatGPT or something doesn't result in some easy numbers that you can use, and then that's backed up.

That's a lot of red flags right there for me. That's a really good point. The dosing is such a good point because you might have to take ten capsules, 15 capsules to get a therapeutic dose of a supplement. And that is oftentimes not going to be a most every time. It's not going to be advertised by the manufacturer. And that is really, really key. I mean, I just level the playing here, brother. It is unbelievable. Which is great. What's take what used to take you and I hours sometimes days to semis.

It's like you get within seconds and you would be very wise to go to a ChatGPT or a bot. I'm sorry, your AI app and go like, hey, here's what I got dealing with. I'm looking at this product. What's the recommended dose? What does the research say. And and maybe even look up what products have this dose. That's great. Yeah. That's the unfortunate thing about when you're working with in the know, integrative or functional medicine, doctor, is that number one, they're going to choose a product that they know works really well, and they've already vetted that for you.

But number two, they know the actual therapeutic dosages and what's on the back of a label is legal language. It's not health advice. Now if you're in, you know, like a stand up company like we are and like a lot of practitioner brands are, we're going to try to put a therapeutic dose on the back of the bottle. But we know that we're just aiming for a window of therapeutic dosages because we're not your health practitioner. We don't know that you just had a heart attack or you just had a stroke or we don't we don't really know anything about you.

So we can't say, hey, you need six pills a day. And everybody else needs to because that's not this is not how the industry works. And so understanding the dosage and what's possible is another question to ask the company. You know, at Healthy Gut, we, you know, we have free health coaching for that purpose because you can get the best product. But if you get the dosage wrong, it's the number one mistake people make with curcumin. Almost all the research on curcumin is 1000 to 1500 milligrams a day for for awesome results.

And most companies are trying to sell you on taking something that's like 300 or 400mg because it's more bioavailable, but they don't have any research outcomes to to support that bioavailability, claim. So there's all these tricky things that happen in industry that frustrate me. And that's where if you have a guide or a coach or, a practitioner, you can really steer you through the maze. That is alternative health. So we're painting this picture gut brain, heart connection, heart attack, stroke prevention, recovery.

We're really unpacking dysbiosis. We've done a great job. We've kind of open up the lid on probiotics a little bit. Discussed a lot of butyrate. If you could. We mentioned symptoms. You mentioned a variety of different symptoms. The overt one's the hidden ones. But can you, transition into testing and even, like, determining, okay, like, now let's kind of shift gears towards therapeutics and recovery. What are some good tests? I know there's a 1 or 2 that you recommend. And, and really go down that route like, and does someone have to this is a question we get a lot.

Do I have to work with a functional medicine practitioner to go on this route? Can I DIY if so, how would you DIY this? I mean look, I, I was DIY and for a long time and so I have a lot of sympathy for, for those folks. And I think with the, the continual increase in I, I think it's going to be easier and easier in the future. As long as they don't get fed the wrong inputs, as long as they stay free to interpret the research. Yes. I would encourage people to get a microbiome test. Now, you could spend a lot of money on these things.

Like you could spend like $800,000 on a regular basis. And, what I'm going to try to offer here is like a simple. I'm thinking about this almost like a colonoscopy. This is like a simple check. Do it once a year. Do it once every three years. There's a company called Biome Site, and it's one of the most, economical and just kind of straightforward reports about your microbiome and what I've been talking about today, what I'm asking you to, to check on and look for is your short chain fatty acid production.

Feeding the Microbiome with Fiber and Fermentable Foods 42:00

Now, there are other short chain fatty acids besides beta eight. There's an acetate or the other two most important ones. And I would just do this test and just verify that the tests confirmed that your butyrate production is in the the middle, it's in the green areas. It's not too low to too high. And that the microbiome bugs that make beta eight are also in the beneficial range. The testing for microbiome. The testing for stool is still very medieval. I don't care what the company says. I don't you know, there's companies who start with the big V that have billions of dollars behind them.

There's there's other companies out there. They can claim whatever they want. But I can tell you because I run tests on the regular basis where I send, like the same stool sample to multiple labs at the same time, and they often disagree with each other. And so I think the best thing to be looking for at this point, and, I would be skeptical of a lot of the even biome site, I think sometimes makes some interesting recommendations around food and supplements that maybe, you know, that not so bad, but not necessarily the most important things.

That's true with all the companies. The most important thing is where are your beta producers? Like, are they high enough? And then do you have enough beta in doing that? Check is probably the simplest way and the fastest way for I think around a hundred bucks that you can, just identify. Is is this a risk for me? Yep. And you should check it more than once because this changes literally based on your stress, based on how often you get outside, based on what you're eating, based on how old you are.

So so your straight production fluctuates throughout the day, throughout the year, throughout your life, depending on what's happening for you. So simple ways to increase beta, right? That costs nothing. Exercise. If you actually exercise beta, it goes up and going outside. The more time you spend outside, the more the more likely you're gonna have higher butyrate production. Again, those are studies. It's not just me making stuff up, it's it comes right from the research. Beyond that, if you had those like, overt gut problems. Right.

There's other testing you might want to consider. Because if you're having heartburn on a regular basis, you're likely suffering from this thing called low stomach acid. If you're having food sensitivities and food problems that are really basis, you probably have low digestive enzymes. And these upstream. So this is your stomach your small intestine and then your microbiomes below that. So if if something bad happens like in your plumbing it's going to affect what goes out to the sewer. Right. It's either not going to or get there like a lot of different things could go wrong.

All I'm saying is that if you have an issue with a different digestive organ on the way down to the microbiome, it could be really difficult for you to ever fully get those numbers into the green on a test like that. If you don't address the other overt gut problems that you might be suffering from. And so that could look like, doing further stool testing with a functional medicine provider or just buying really well made supplements and seeing like, like it's that it's not really more complex than, does this make my poop better?

Does this make my bloating less? Do I feel better on this? This product at the right dosage? And so I would also encourage people to take a look at their acid in their stomach, take a look at their enzyme function. Both of those decline as we age as well. And, you know, also take a look at, you know, what are the what are their test results? If you're not willing to spend a hundred bucks on the test results, then I think if you if you've said yes to any of the risk factors I'm talking about today, just supplementing with something like try if you turn on a regular basis will also give you some level of insurance.

If you do enough of of the dose. And the dose we're looking at is like minimum probably 1500 milligrams a day. So let me summarize this. We've talked in the context of prevention. We're talking about prevention heart attack stroke. Heart disease. And then let's end with recovery because that is really a topic that a lot of people aren't talking about. It's like, oh, you already had a stroke or oh, you already had a heart attack. And it's just like it there are isn't enough, in my opinion. Whether it's cancer, whether it is any sort of, incident that someone happens, especially post-surgery, post cardiac event, we're not talking enough about how to get better and how not to prevent it from happening again.

But I want to summarize everything with this. For those geeks out there who want the the the science understanding of why and the summary of what everything's even saying here. Going back to that 2023 study, the ways the microbiota is involved in modulating cardiovascular risk are multiple and not only related to inflammatory mechanisms. This goes beyond inflammation. I think that's really important because a lot of speakers in this summit

Aging, Testing, and How to Choose Supplements 47:00

are focused on inflammation, which is important. I think you might have mentioned that word once, maybe twice. It hasn't been the focal point of it. Right. The human and gut microbiome cooperate as a metabolically active super organism, and this affects host physiology through metabolic pathways in turn. And this is where it gets serious congestion of the splenic circulation associated with heart failure, edema of the intestinal wall and altered function and permeability of the intestinal barrier result in translocation of bacteria and their products into the systemic circulation, further enhancing the pro-inflammatory re conditions underlying heart disorders.

I hope that makes sense. It makes sense to me and we need to take this seriously. So prevention. You've talked a lot about what if the unthinkable happens, what post heart attack or stroke recovery strategy would you recommend for people? Well, yeah, I think most people don't talk about it because they don't want to be liable for, for, you know, setting people up. But I believe in treating people like adults. I've had a lot of scary and sad things happen to me and family members, and we've got a lot of terrible advice from, the, the Western industrial medical system.

It's great if you break a bone, but not so great if you have a sick and chronic disease, especially if you have an event related to that sick and chronic disease. And so I would say your gut, the studies are absolutely critically clear on this in humans and mice and rats, they all line up boom, boom, boom. That doesn't always happen. And that's one of the reasons why I haven't been like super. I'm not saying that the gut alone will protect you from a heart attack or from a stroke. I'm not saying that.

I'm saying it's one piece of the three parts of the puzzle, that most people are overlooking. What I'm about to say is absolutely clear, because we do have this data. When you have a heart attack or stroke immediately. And this is in patients admitted to hospitals, you have intestinal permeability and you have gut dysbiosis. That's beyond everything else we already talked about. It gets really bad. And in fact, one of the reasons why you die in the hospital is because the leaky gut gets so bad. Can you get sepsis? Sepsis is LPs.

So the toxins inside your gut leaking across the gut barrier, overwhelming the body, and then you die. So hopefully that doesn't happen. And for the most part, you know, most people it won't happen to. But I'm just saying that this process kicks off extreme damage to the gut. You it happened up here, but it also happened in your gut. It happened in your heart, you know, but it also happened in your gut. So just adopting an anti-inflammatory routine or just adopting some sort of cardiac specific drug or supplement or brain specific drug or supplement is not going to be an optimal path for recovery.

Whether you use my products or any other thing I've talked about today, you should also treat it as if your gut just had a major, like, you know, event, a bad event. And so what the research in mice and rats says so we don't have this in humans yet. There's not a I couldn't find what I tried so hard to find any sort of intervention, trial after stroke or after a heart attack, for better or for, prebiotics specifically. I really couldn't find one. There's some probiotic stuff, and it's not that exciting, frankly.

Again, another thing around probiotics are probably not the only thing you should focus on, but the bright, the the rat and the mouse stuff all suggests that butyrate taking it will help lessen the symptoms, improve the outcomes, meaning you'll have less injury because there's all these like secondary injuries that you can have happen. You can also get infections from the hospital. There's all these just bam, bam, bam. There's this this thing that takes us out as humans and isn't all the time is not the first event.

It's the events that are coming next. And so if you have recovery on your mind and I'm really sorry if that's where you're at, but I would say the mice in the rat studies may not translate to humans. We won't know for another 5 or 10 years, but I would immediately be taking Tribe beta, and I would immediately start taking, probiotics and probiotics, and I would, do everything you can to, stimulate your vagal nerve. And so there are devices now you can buy like these, these little shockers for your neck.

I use the pulse Seto. There's a number of them. I would be doing that often all day long. And then I would also be supplementing with these things. It may not be the answer for your recovery, but I don't think it's going to hurt at all. Like, literally it's only going to be helpful for the recovery process. It may not be like the silver bullet, but like nothing I'm saying right now, in my opinion, is going to harm you. Of course, speak with your medical professional. And I just want you to know that, like when you go into the hospital,

Recovery After Heart Attack or Stroke 52:00

you're going to get antibiotics that you have to have them. It's going to be part of the process. And pretty much all the research has failed on probiotic recovery from from antibiotic dysbiosis. It just didn't work. Yeah, it didn't work. But try beta in which is the most, the best form of butyric acid, the best beta eight supplements. Try beta. And, we can talk about that at a different day, but this right here, 2023 paper shows how that in mice by taking the tri beta and they prevent the, collapse of the microbiome and and it helps recover way faster.

So if you're given an antibiotic in the hospital, again, just another reason to take like, urine, whether or not it's actually going to, you know, contribute to like improvement in motor function right away or improvement in brain outcomes right away. You know, we'll have to figure that out in the future. But what happens in the gut happens in the brain. What happens in the gut happens in the heart. And the same is true. So I would put a significant amount of your focus there. Like 5050 for recovery.

I mean, you can't recover without getting a good night's sleep. I mean, that's your body's regenerative process. You can't recover properly without having a healthy microbiome. I mean, if there's dysbiosis, you have to fix it. And so to your point, you might not necessarily feel different, but it isn't necessary. It is one of those things you need a sleep. You need to be hydrating properly. You need to be focus on positive, I mean really positive thinking. We don't talk enough about that and you need to work on the gut like it's so vital that it's not considered.

And I, I didn't know that. And I am kind of wowed that the research has, has fallen flat on its face because we've heard for for a decade now, whenever you take a pro, antibiotic, you better boost up your probiotics. That will fix it. But again, like I mentioned earlier to it's like two extremes. Don't fix it. And you're basically offering this targeted solution. I'm so grateful. Don't throw the probiotics away. But it's not the end all. It's part of the solution. And it seems like the missing link. Wow.

Maybe that's the title of this talk. The missing link to your gut health, right? It's it's beauty. Right? So while this has been awesome, there's been a masterclass and I really appreciate it. I'm it, I'm good. I got no other questions other than you have anything you want to leave people with? I think you summarized it well. There's a book called Radical Remission. If you do find yourself in that recovery phase, it's, it's mostly around cancer, which happens to be, you know, a feature in my life, unfortunately.

But I think all the principles apply. And I think what you just said there is, is extraordinarily important around, just don't stop. Just don't give up. I love it, I love it, folks. Check out Stephen and look up his products. Please dig deep. Go to healthy gut.com. And I hope you've enjoyed this talk, because I have a lot of a lot of light bulbs going on right now. So this is awesome. Connecting a lot of dots, brother. Well folks as always is Doctor Eric Zielinski. My hope and prayer is that you and your family truly experienced the abundant life, and I look forward to talking to you soon.

God bless.