The REAL Truth About Probiotics with Kiran Krishnan
There are about a million and 1 different probiotics out on the market these days all claiming something different but somehow all claiming to be the best... So what's the truth? Today I have microbiome expert and microbiologist Kiran Krishnan on to help uncover the truth about probiotics.
Show Notes
Check Out Microbiome Labs: https://microbiomelabs.com/register/?ref=DANI
For more information please visit www.detoxingwithdani.com
Connect with Dani!
IG: @detoxingwithdani
Facebook Group: Detoxing with Dani
Medical Disclaimer
The information provided by the Detoxing with Dani Podcast, Dani Ferguson CN, or any of its guests is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice. Please consult your physician first before implementing any of the information provided.
Episode Transcription
Dani: Oh my goodness, you guys are in for a freaking treat! This week, the guest that I am about to introduce has honestly been a bucket list guest for me. I listen to so many of his lectures. Oh my gosh, I'm just so excited for you guys to hear this!
We are talking all about probiotics today. This is not going to be your standard probiotic episode... We are going deep! We are getting into the marketing of probiotics, what to look for in a probiotic, what not to look for in a probiotic, and debunking all of the probiotic stuff that is out there. I am just, I am so freaking excited for this!
Before we jump into the episode, I do want to give this man a very proper introduction because he deserves it. So, his name is Kiran Krishnan and he is a research microbiologist. He has been involved in the dietary supplement and nutrition market for the past 18 years. He comes from a University Research background, having spent several years with hands-on R&D in the field of molecular medicine and microbiology at the University of Iowa. Kiran established a clinical research organization where he designed and conducted dozens of human clinical trials in human nutrition. Kiran is also a co-founder and partner of New Science Trading LLC and nutritional technology development and research company. Kiran is also a co-founder and chief scientific officer at Microbiome Labs. He is a frequent lecturer on the human microbiome at medical and nutrition conferences. He's an expert guest on national and satellite radio. He has appeared in several international documentaries and has been a guest speaker on several international health summits. As a microbiome expert, he is currently involved in 16 novel human clinical trials on probiotics and the human microbiome. Kiran is also on the scientific advisory board or a science advisor for 7 other companies in the industry. You guys... this guy knows what he is talking about! I am just so blessed that he gave us time to come and talk to you all. Without further ado... Kiran Krishnan!
Dani: Thank you for being here!
Kiran: It’s my pleasure, thank you so much for having me.
Dani: Yeah! Gosh, I feel like I know you, but you have no idea who I am because I listen to you non stop!
Kiran: Well thank you so much for that, it is so great listening to you and the information that you’re putting out there that so many people are gaining from.
Dani: Of course! So first, let’s just do a brief introduction as to who you are and how you got involved in Microbiome Labs and what is Microbiome Labs.
Kiran: Yeah! So, I'm a research microbiologist, that’s my background. I came from the area of neurology research and research on pathogenic bacteria. That;s the work I did in the academic world. And then, I decided at one point to leave the academic world because, number one, just for my personality standpoint, I'm just not cut out for that 12-14 hours a day in the lab. Typically, on your own, you're usually working on aspects of projects all by yourself. I always had a strong interest in working with live pathogens, live viruses, which means that you're in what we call a BSL level 3 lab, which is a biosafety level-3, which means you're fully gowned in this vacuum-chambered room and, you know, and you have to be there by yourself. So the last project I was working on, academically, was an HIV project, working with a live virus. So I was spending 7, 8 hours a day in that room by myself just doing things. Doing research, doing gene splicing and all sorts of crazy stuff. And as exciting as the science part of it was,the nerd in me really loved that and was driven by that. But there was this other side of me that really loved the idea of innovation and building things, and kind of having megalomaniacle thinking. You know, part of the reason I wanted to get into science was this idea of really helping the world and somehow having an impact on the world. So I knew that my long-term career wouldn’t be in the lab. And I also had really strong interests in natural medicine and natural health. I was very athletic in college, so I used to take supplements and all that myself. I was focused on that healthy diet. And I found it a little bit disturbing that a lot of the supplement companies that I tried to engage with and talk to, didn’t really have a whole lot of research on their products. And what I came to find out was it's just, it's not feasible for a lot of companies to do the kind of research that can get published, and so on because these randomized controlled trials have certain structure to them, and most of that structure is based on the pharmaceutical industry, which is where this randomized-control trial ideas started. And these are expensive to do! You know, these are studies with 20 patients that cost half a million bucks. And supplement companies can’t afford to do a study for a half a million dollars to find out that their product doesn’t work the way that they think it works. So, pharma companies do that all the time. Back in the day, they had one in a thousand compounds that actually made it to market that actually worked. And for a product that ended up making it to market, they would spend upwards of 300 million dollar on the research and development of the product through a course of 7-8 years. So, that whole model just did not fit what we all try to do and want to do in the nutritional space.
So, my first idea on my own was, “I wonder if I could come up with a smarter way to do trials for supplement companies.” You know, slightly different designs, different types of focuses, pilot trials a little bit better so they could spend a small amount of money to figure out if there’s a chance their product will do what they think it does. And then, invest a little bit bigger to prove that out further. So I developed a clinical research association here in Chicagoand we started doing lots of trials for companies. The concept was working, I was really busy working, designing, and doing a lot of human clinical trials in nutritional products. And I got to know the industry that way. Because I started working with a lot of the R&B groups, a lot of the product development groups, doing studies for them. And then I started getting pulled as an adviser or a consultant for a lot of these companies for the research or science side. So that’s what kind of threw me into the supplement world. Interestingly enough, about 12 years ago, a big multinational supplement brand hired me and my research company. And at that point, we had built an ingredient company as well, to study probiotics for them. So they had the question of, “what is going to be the next advance in probiotics?” The probiotics department was just starting to take off, competition was getting fierce for shelf space in all those health food stores. So this company wanted me to figure out, you know, are these other companies going in the right direction? So they wanted me to figure that out, and also, you know, do we do refrigeration? Do we not? What kinds of strains do we use? What is the next innovation? So going through all of that work, I kind of realized and learned what the probiotic industry is and is not. And I discovered the use of these spores. In fact, the product that we are known for, theMEGAsporebiotic, that was a formulation that I created for them. I said, “this is going to be the next generation of probiotics. And here’s what I would do from a clinical trial standpoint.” And the fortunate thing about it now, looking back at it, is that before I finished my work, the owner of that company changed. They got bought out by a larger group. And when I finally came back with all the work we had done, they said, “you know what, we’re not changing anything, we’re dealing with an acquisition.” And so, they just pushed it off. And in that moment, we realized how important the next advancement in probiotics will be. And so, we took it to a few different companies. Companies you would know, and none of them really understood it. They couldn’t wrap their heads around it. So we said, “we’ve got to do this ourselves.”
So I partnered with Tom Bane. And we founded Microbiome Labs. Neither of us have ever had a product company. Neither of us have ever been in the forefront, or the face of a brand. We always worked behind the scenes. But this was just so important. We tried to get so many companies to bring it to market, but nobody could really understand it. So Microbiomes Lab was born out of a sheer need for this evolution in microbiome therapeutics. And just the simple thing of, you know, “can we set the standard of what a probiotic company should be?” That became our challenge. We should always be spending 2-3 times more on research than marketing. Versus, every other company spends most of its money on marketing and almost nothing on research. We should always set the standard for doing clinical trials and discovering what your product does for adding to the collective science. Rather than borrowing science from all these different areas to try to make claims.
So, we got on the mission. We decided to try to set the new standard, try to bring better innovation to microbiome therapeutics. Ultimately, we are trying to help a lot of people. So that’s where it came from.
Dani: Wow! I love that. It’s not like you set out to start Microbiome Lab. It just evolved out of a need.
Kiran: It just had to happen, yeah.
Dani: So, do you still do the trials and the testing and stuff like that? Is that still part of what you do?
Kiran: Oh bigtime, yeah! That’s one of the things that keeps me the busiest. We published 3 studies this year in the last 3 months. We’ve got 6 more studies that are going to peer review. And we’ve got probably 7 more trials going on right now. Almost every other week, I’m on the phone with other researchers and universities and we’re discussing studies and trials and all the things we want to discover. And the way we do trials is interesting because there are academic trials, which are done by universities and professors who get grants for those kinds of trials. But they are doing it purly for academic curiosity. They’re trying to figure out mechanisms and how things work. Now as a company, as much as I would love that, we can’t actually do that because you won’t survive as a company. You’ll never turn a profit to afford more studies, and so on. So we have to play this balancing role between that academic curiosity and how everything we study has to be marketable and meaningful to people.So there’s that gap, there, which we call the translational gap. Meaning, all of the research and the work that is going on in the academic world, which is where the vast majority of research is going on, very little of that research is translatable to something that will end up in the marketplace that will help people. So that’s a big issue that we have in science in general. We have this massive translational gap because researchers are not thinking about products and applications and all that when they’re doing research. They’re very focused on their little, minute mechanism that they’ve been working on for a very long time. And either companies are doing their own thing that they’re really focused on, or they’re not doing any research at all.
And so, we started playing this role, of, okay we’ve got to create a bridge between this translational gap. So we worked with a lot of researchers at universities. Sometimes we take their ideas and we figure out how to make it translatable or we come up with the ideas ourselves and then find the right researchers to partner with who have expertise in that area. So it’s a really complex part of what we do. But I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that we’re probably one of the only one or two provided companies that do that.
Dani: Right, and I think that’s a great segway into our next topic. I talk about gut health and probiotics all the time with my clients because I think acne and gut health are very much related. But I get so many questions about “Oh, I’m on this probiotic, so I’m fine.” So, can you really, kind of, like you said, “bridge that gap” of like, how can we understand probiotics better and what do we really need, because it’s really hard to navigate that.
Kiran: Totally, yeah. And, you know, for your average consumer, you really cannot make sense of all that. Because I’ve been consulting for so many years, oftentimes I’ve been brought into product development meetings. And keep in mind, a lot of product development is done by marketing. It’s not like supplement companies have a band of scientists sitting there. Most of them don’t have any scientists at all, they’re mostly marketing companies. So, I’ll be brought into a product development meeting, because I’m the science voice that the company has hired. And they’ll be talking about probiotic development and they’ll say, “okay, we’re going to do 35 billion CFUs and 20 strains.” My first question is, how the hell did you come up with that? Like, why 35 billion and why 20 strains? What is that based on? And it’s really based on the company that they’re competing with. The closest has 30 billion CFUs and 15 strains. So they want to be just a little bit better than them. That’s all they’re thinking about. That’s how product development happens. And that’s where this scaling started happening. You know, companies just started going, “oh well, we’re at 50 billion , we’re at 100 billion.” I can tell you, having read tens of thousands of probiotic studies in my lifetime, there isn’t any study that shows you that 100 billion is better than 50, or that 50 billion is better than 10. There’s no scaling or linear relationship that goes that way. And there’s very few studies on, what I call, these kitchen sink cocktail products where they’re just throwing in a bunch of strains just to make it look like, “oh, look at all these different strains that we have.” There’s zero scientific backing behind that. And so, that’s the part that really bothers me. I think, you have to, number one, have a goal of what you want this probiotic to do in the gut. And that goal should be attributable to a change that leads to an improvement of someone's condition. So when I start asking them, okay, you're 50 billion CFU products and 20 strains, what does it do in the microbiome? How does it impact the other organisms in the ecosystem? They have no idea! It just sounds better, it sounds bigger and has more value.
So that's what people are battling against. That’s what I've been battling against ever since I was in those meetings all the way up to having our own company. We're saying that dose doesn't matter, the numbers of strains doesn't matter. It's the quality of strains and what is your goal you’re trying to achieve? And so, that's the part that people are going to have to be very careful about, the vast majority of products on the shelf that you see when you go to a Walgreens or a health foods store, have never had a single study on that formulation So they do not know what those products are doing in your gut. If you ask the companies, if you call them up and talk to their scientists or whoever their technical person is,and you question that person, and you say, “what does your product do in the gut” How does it impact the other microbes that live in my gut?” They will have zero idea. And that’s the part that we really wanted to not miss. We wanted to be able to show, formulate, and create a product that we could show and be very confident about ourselves, that it had a very positive impact on the microbiome.
So let’s talk about why that’s so important. So when you think about the microbiome, there are about 40-50 trillion organisms. That’s a massive number to wrap your head around. So if you take a product, and let’s say this product has a high dose of 50 billion, it sounds like a lot, right? But you’re putting those 50 billion cells, if they can survive through the gastric system, but let's assume for a second they do, you're putting those 50 billion into the sea of 40-50 trillion. So we're talking 4-5 orders of magnitude higher. It's like putting a few drops of dye in an ocean hoping to change the color. So the organisms themselves that are in the product aren't really going to have much of a profound effect on your outcomes unless they can change some aspect of the rest of that microbiome. So that’s the biggest thing that we need to look for out of a probiotic is, what probiotics have the capacity to go in and be influential to the rest of the microbiota so that you can actually create a more lasting sea of change within the microbiome. Because, ultimately, that’s what impacts our outcomes. This one strain going in, it’s one little thing is really a minute function when you’re talking about an entire sea of 40 trillion other organisms. So that’s the part that people aren’t really looking at and focusing on and doing any research around, certainly not in the probiotics space.
Dani: Right, and that makes a ton of sense. I mean, you’re not going to put a drop in the ocean, like you said, and change the ocean. But are there key-stone strains that actually can make a difference?
Kiran: Yes, there are a couple categories of strain. So what we work with are the spore-based probiotics. What’s interesting about the spore-based probiotics is that they have a really powerful capability of influencing the other microbes in the microbiome at relatively low doses. And, how did we come up with this idea? Well, the spore-based probiotics have been used in the prescription market in Europe, Latin America, and SE Asia for well over 60 years. And the first probiotic drug ever put out is one called Entrogermanide in 1954. And that drug is still on the market today. And what it’s used for is for gut infections, like dysentery and so on. One of the first recorded discoveries of this was during WWII. When the German army was in North Africa, one of the things that they were suffering from was that the German soldiers would get dysentery all the time from the contaminated water and so on. So lots of German soldiers are dying from dysentery rather than any sort of conflict or war. And so what they realize is that when the locals had an upset stomach, what they would do is they would find dried camel dung and they would eat it. And that got rid of their infection. But they did it and that's the amazing ingenuity of humans. I don’t know who the first person was who did that, but that became the tradition for hundreds of years. And so some of the German scientists brought back a lot of camel dung back to Germany, and through a research process, to try and figure out what are the antimicrobial compounds in this dung. They came to realize it was his bacillus spores. They were in the camel’s gut, they would come out in the defecation, and they would be in the dung.
And so, when you consumed it, the spores would go in and live in your gut, and they would actually seek out the infectious bacteria and they would kill the infectious bacteria without killing any of the good bacteria. So, if you have a gut bacteria, you could send in a “nuclear bomb” antibiotic or you could send in the Seal Team 6, who are going to go in there, find the big, bad guys, and get rid of them without harming anything else. So that was a spore discovery. And that was way before us, obviously. But we saw that, and we said, “okay, if these microbes are intelligent enough to understand our gut and identify harmful microbes, maybe they have the capability to also understand that certain beneficial microbes are low, and maybe they have the capability of supporting the growth of the beneficial microbes.” Because, they can find bad bacteria that can produce up to 25 different antibiotics and they can compete in different ways and bring down the growth of the bad microbes. Our hypothesis is, maybe they can increase the growth of the good microbes. That's what became our hyper-focus. We said, “okay, if these bacteria can do that, and if we can increase the growth of certain good microbes, then we can really make a big change in the gut. We can solve big problems associated with the microbiome.” Skin is one of them, and we’ll talk about that area. Our big focus right off the bat is that we started getting excited that we had this probiotic that could go in and actually make a fundamental change in your gut ecosystem.So the first thing that we wanted to study and the big problem we wanted to solve was leaky gut. At that point, studies started coming out fast and furious. That leaky gut was the source of chronic low-grade inflammation, it was a big driver of disease, such a large portion of the population has leaky gut, and there’s no solution for it. So that became our focus. We’re going to solve this issue. And then, sure enough, our first publication, a leaky gut study, published in a major gastroenterology journal, showed that in 30 days of using these spores, we can reduce leaky gut by over 60%, without any of the changes.
So that’s the difference in the approach. And guess what… the dose of our spores is only 4 billion. That seems ridiculous in the probiotic realm because, who does 4 billion? That seems like nothing! But it’s all about the quality of the strains. Because they're so good at going in and changing the sea of microbes, they're not putting drops of dye in the ocean. They are actually getting the ocean to change itself. So, that's the mindset that we've gone in. And now, because we understand how the spores modulate the microbiome. we can make a little tweaks to them or we can add other compounds, like certain prebiotics, to focus on particular changes to the microbiome. That’s called microbiome modulation. A lot of the studies moving forward regarding the microbiome, are going to be associated with figuring out what is wrong with the microbiome for a particular condition, and then how do you modulate that. We've done a number of studies in this realm already. We’ve done it with obesity, acne, leaky gut, and autoimmune disease. So we’ve been doing these kinds of studies to show that we can actually modulate the microbiome in an intelligent way and then dramatically change the course of certain conditions.
Dani: Yeah, which is so important because, I mean, I hear it all the time, like, “oh I took a probiotic, it didn't do anything.” Well, first of all, let’s make sure you’re taking the right probiotic. With that microbiome modulation, maybe you just didn't need those strains, maybe they weren’t doing what they needed to do.
Kiran: And most of them don’t support the stomach. That’s part of the problem, too.
Dani: That’s the other thing, yeah.
Kiran: One of the first things I studied, when we started studying probiotics, was, do these strains really make it through the gastric system? Because the gastric system is designed to kill bacteria.The pH is really low. Most bacteria can’t survive that. If somehow they make it past the pH, bile salt kills most bacteria. If somehow they make it past that, pancreatic enzymes will kill the bacteria. And that got me thinking, like, “how in the world are these weak strains surviving through this environment? And sure enough, they did. We took 40 of the top probiotic products and we ran them through gastric simulation. And I think 98% of them all just got obliterated in the stomach. So not only are we buying nonsensical, 100 billion, 200 billion, but 99.9% of that is just dying in your stomach and your pooping out bacterial debris 12 hours later.
Dani: Yeah, and most of them are expensive! I mean, it’s not like it’s a $20 bottle. I mean, it’s an investment.
Kiran: Right! And I’ll tell you, the thing that bothered me the most about this when I first started studying the probiotic industry, was the whole concept of refrigeration.BEcause, one of the first things I did, was, to go to health food stores and just survey the market and see what’s out there. And whenever I would ask someone who worked there, what their best probiotics were, they would point to the stuff in the refrigerator. And you start questioning it, you go, “why is it in the refrigerator?” And they go, “well, because it’s a live culture. To keep it alive, you have to keep it refrigerated.” So okay, that means, if it’s sitting at room temperature, it’ll die. And they say, “yes. If you get it, take it home and immediately put it into your refrigerator.” So my question is, “if it can’t survive at 70 degrees, how does it survive at 98.6 degrees in the body?” It clearly is not designed to be going through this oral route. And I’ve never gotten an answer for that. None of those companies, with the refrigerated probiotics, have ever studied that. And it just didn’t make any sense to me.
Even though I’m trained as a microbiologist, I’m a closeted evolutionary biologist. But I love evolutionary biology. In fact, in many ways, I look at approaches to things from that evolutionary perspective. So my question always was, whatever we are attempting to do, as a therapeutic, did it happen naturally throughout the course of human history? If it didn’t happen naturally, then we’re circumventing, or we’re going about the problem in the wrong way. Or at least in a way that may cause other problems. And so, when I start looking at these refrigerated probiotics that give you specific meals, like “eat in between meals” and all of these ideas. And I go, “where did our ancestors get all of that?” Where do they get refrigerated probiotics where they take them between meals. You know, that’s just such an unnatural way of trying to affect our gut colageina in a positive manner. It just always bothered me, because I’m looking for evidence of what we're doing is supported by the course of evolution. And showing up on those things I loved about these spores was that there’s all of the studies that show that these very spores were abundantly present in the Earth's atmosphere; in the soil, in the water, and all that, 3 million years ago, 5 million years ago. That’s through glacial ice core studies. And I'm not going to bore you with explaining glacial ice core studies.
But I assure you that what they found was that the spores, like the ones we’re working with, are pretty much identical to the ones that existed in high abundance in Earth’s atmosphere all those millions of years ago. Which means that our ancestors who lived in dirt and didn’t sterilize their environment, they got huge exposure to these biomes everyday. And there are some studies that show that these microbes are a commensal part of the gut, they actually use the environment as a vector to get into the host.
So, you know, all of this fits really well into the idea of evolutionary biology, in that, what we are doing is not so unnatural. Basically, what we are doing is we’re just smart enough to understand the value of what nature has given us and then utilizing it. We’re not trying to out-smart nature in some way. We’re not taking some probiotic that is not designed to do something and wrapping it in seaweed. I mean, there are some companies that do that, you know, wrapping it in specialized capsules to try to get it to survive the gastric system. And my view is, if that bacteria is not designed to do that by nature, then maybe it shouldn’t be doing that. You know, they put in so much technology to try to get it to survive, maybe it’s not designed to survive and you should take a different approach.
Dani: I love that. I think nature knows how to do it all and we just screw it up half the time.
Kiran: Yeah! I mean, where I saw we screwed it up with the spores is we built big barriers between us and nature. We no longer are that intimately connected with the soil. We’re no longer intimately connected with natural ecosystems. And there are studies on this too. I mean, if you know how to dig through research, you’ll find studies on almost everything. But there are studies that show that people that live in rural environments live actually physically closer to the earth, actually have healthier, more diverse microbiomes than those who live in urban regions. And that’s true for different cultures in different parts of the world. It always rings true. Studies like that can be found in Japan, Russia, US, Bangladesh, etc. These studies further that same idea that the closer you are to dirt, and the closer you are to the ecosystem, the more diverse and healthy your microbiome is. The farther you are, the more barriers you have between you and the natural world, the less diverse your microbiome is and the more risk you have for chronic illness.
Dani: Yeah, yeah, I believe it! I always feel better in nature. And some people are like, “oh, you’re just that woo-woo person.” But, it’s true!
So, I think maybe let’s transition into acne now. Because I can get on a soap-box forever, talking about gut health and acne. Because I lived it. I had cystic acne from head to toe.
Kiran: Wow, did you really! Your skin looks incredible.
Dani: Thank you, yeah. I mean, for 2 and a half years, I was going from doctor to doctor.
Kiran: At what age?
Dani: It was in my mid-20s.
Kiran: Really? So it came on later on.
Dani: Yeah. Something I’ve noticed a lot of too, just women coming to me for help later on. Like, it’s not just so much puberty anymore, it’s mid-20s, after having kids, like, it just keeps getting later and later. But mine was all due to my gut. I had a major yeast issue going on that took way too long, in my opinion, for Western medicine to understand.
Kiran: Now, did that yeast problem start before the acne started or around the same time?
Dani: I think it’s what was causing the acne. Because I was getting chronic yeast infections, and then I was getting UTIs, I was probably on 3 or 4 rounds of antibiotics in 3 or 4 months. And my skin just erupted out of nowhere. I tried everything, I probably spent well over $10,000 trying to figure out my skin. I got engaged and I was hell-bent on figuring it out before I got married because I was like, “I am not going to have acne on my wedding day!”
Kiran: And how much time did you have, then?
Dani: I had about a year. But it wasn't until I went to a naturopathic doctor who did a stool analysis test that showed I had, I think it was called, a protozoa-wicker hammie. Which is a type of weird bacteria. And he put me on a high dose of grapefruit seed extract and I didn’t realize how quickly my skin could heal as quickly as it did after addressing the root cause. So I made it my mission for the rest of my life, to be like, “you have to find out the root cause! You can’t just go on another antibiotic, you can’t just put a bandaid on a bullet wound.” I just noticed such a connection between the gut and the skin. And now I know we’re learning everything with the gut-skin access, I know we know a lot more about the gut-brain access. Everything is coming back to the gut, and I know you guys have done a little bit with acne, and just understanding that gut modulation. Like, what is going on with the gut and how do we modulate that. So can you touch on that a little bit?
Dani: Hey guys, I know we’re in the thick of the episode right now but I have to let you in on where you can buy these amazing products that Kiran is talking about. Whether it’s the Megaspore Probiotic that was their foundational product when Microbiome Labs first came out. Or their Prebiotic or Mega Mucosa That we will talk about shortly. You can find all of these on Microbiomelabs.com. You can use my code DANI to be able to access these. They do only allow these products to be sold through practitioners, so in order to have access to them, you will have to use my code DANI. And that’s it! You can go, search around, they have amazing research on their website as well. Please go, have at it! If you have any questions, you know where to find me on instagram, but I wanted to pop in really quick so you would know where to find these amazing products! Okay, now back to the episode.
Kiran: Yeah. So acne was an area that I’ve had on my bucket list of problems to try to solve for a long period of time. Because I realized these cycles, like what you went through, because of course, when you get acne, the first treatment they're going to do is antibiotics. Those antibiotics are not only not going to resolve the acne in any significant way, but they’re also going to cause other problems that you’ll need more antibiotics for. And you’ll need different types of antibiotics. So you might be on one antibiotic for the acne, develop a UTI because of that antibiotic, and then you’ll need a different antibiotic for the UTI. And so you’re just on this cycle. Everytime I look at, like, what are the big problems that are just really being mistreated, that was one of the ones that were on my list. Because the other problem with acne is, even though it’s not exactly a health issue, you’re not exactly dying from acne, it is a really difficult thing to deal with. I mean the quality of life. And part of the reason is that I empathize a lot with that because my sister had struggled for a while with skin issues. And so I saw it first hand. mYou know, it’s a really difficult problem for people.
Dani: And I would say too, it’s so hard because, like you said, you’re not dying from it, but mI feel like it’s almost a sign from your body, like, “hey, something’s off.” Address it right now before it becomes something much bigger down the road. And that’s why I’m such a proponent of, don’t do the antibiotics, don’t do the Accutane, don’t cover that up because it’s going to show up somewhere else down the line.
Kiran: Yup, exactly. I think that’s a really huge point because most of our conditions that we deal with are canaries in the coal mine that are calling out that something is dysfunctional inside the body. And that thing could blossom into something far more serious than the condition that you are dealing with at the moment. So acne, even though it’s giving you a really hard time in terms of quality of life and self esteem and all that. It is calling out that something is wrong and that same something can be something that leads to things like colon cancer or inflammatory bowel disease. The same thing with eczema and psoriasis and all that. Like people, you could live with eczema forever, it’s a horrific thing to have to deal with for a lot of people, quality of life is impaired. But the big part about eczema is that it’s a signal that something significantly wrong is going on inside your body. So that’s a really good point that you bring up. And so, what we said is, number 1, we need to set out to prove further that there is a gut-skin connection. There’s a lot of good studies on that. But what we wanted to prove was those translational signs. So if you look at a lot of the studies on gut-skin connection, they’re very academic. And it’s hard to grab a practical grasp from those studies to do the next thing to resolve your skin. So again, with our focus of bridging that translational gap, we said, “okay, there is certainly a connection between the gut and skin.” We have to figure out, in the case of acne, what is that dysfunction in the gut that’s causing more and more acne in people. And then, that’s where we come back to the keystone strains.
So, you had mentioned this briefly, earlier, and I didn’t elaborate on it. But keystone strains, and that’s the right word you use, are these really important microbes within your microbiome, that not only support and maintain the diversity and the health of the ecosystem, but they are also inversely correlated with a number of chronic illnesses. Meaning, the higher levels you have of these strains, the lower risk you have of getting these conditions. So there is a hint that there is a keystone strain involved in acne and skin conditions. And that keystone strain is one called Ruminococcus. Ruminococcus is another genius of keystone strains.
And so, we wished we had already finished this study, that we had already published, that showed that we could increase these keystone strains when we used the spores. So we knew the spores dramatically increased two types of keystone strains. So our thinking is, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t also increase Ruminococcus. Because it seems the spores seem to be really giving a leg up to all of these really important keystone strains. And the beauty of the keystone strains is they control a lot of the metabolic processes in the gut. So once they have been given a little bit of a head start, they start taking over the metabolic process and then they can perpetuate themselves until they find a balance in your microbiome and maintain a level of diversity.
So that’s the important thing with keystones strains. It seems like the spores get in there and kind of give them all a nice push. So that they can start doing their thing and growing and helping with all the conditions. So we hypothesized that the spores could go in and increase the growth of Ruminococcus. And because of the increase of growth of Ruminococcus, you start to see a reduction in acne lesions. And then if we did extracts of the sebaceous gland, we would see changes in the inflammatory process of the sebaceous gland. We also went as far as looking at the microbiome changes that were going on. And finally, we looked at something called the lipidome. Which is the lipid profile in the blood. Because the skin is heavily influenced by the lipid profile in the blood. You know, which short-chained fatty acids do you tend to have, is it high cholesterol, LVL, HDL, all of those lipids seem to have an impact on skin to a certain degree. And so those are the things that we hypothesize and study. We partnered with University of California-Davis. They have a great integrative Dermatology Department. They do lots of studies so we partnered with them. And we did this study where we took Megaspore, which is our commercial product. And again, we do all of our studies with our commercial products because we want to know that the commercial products have that effect. So when I'm doing it with some special, lab-grown version of the strains, we're doing it with the commercial strains. We wanted to see if we could bring down acne lesion counts and then we wanted to understand the mechanism by which it was happening.
So what we saw was that, in the treatment group, in a 30-day period, we saw 45% reduction in acne lesions. 45%- now that's kind of study, that kind of result, you see with certain antibiotics. But it takes 90 days on the antibiotic to reach that level. And of course you're screwing up all kinds of stuff along the way.
Dani: How high was the dosage?
Kiran: The same for a billion. We do all our studies with the same 4 billion. And our reason for that is to us, it’s a cheat when we want to do a study and we do a study with 12 billion to try to get the effect to be much more profound. But what we're selling is 4 billion because it's better costing. That to us doesn't translate well. So we've done every one of our studies with the 4 billion dose. That’s the commercial dose that everybody gets. Now, what we started to see is a major change in the lipidome. So the mechanism by which the probiotic, and remember we only took this orally, these individuals did not do any skin care at all. So we let them do whatever their regular skin care routine was, which would still maintain that acne lesion count. They just followed that so we didn't have them do no change at all - no change in diet, nothing else. tire No antibiotics of course. They were just compared to a placebo group that did not get probiotics.
And so 45% reduction in acne lesion count. What we also started to see was excretions within the sebaceous gland reduced measurably - meaning the sebaceous gland wasn't producing as much sebum as it normally would. Which is actually another positive thing. Looking in the blood, we started to see trends in the inflammatory markers So inflammation was coming down. And then we saw a change in the lipidome - meaning in the lipid profile in the blood. We started to see higher levels of acetate, which is a type of short-chain fatty acid that’s produced in the gut. And that acetate has an antibacterial and an anti-inflammatory function in the body. Acetate that's produced in the gut ends up in places like your liver. To help bring down inflammation of the liver end up in places like your pancreas or your skin or your brain because it helps bring down inflammation to combat overgrowth of bacteria in these regions. So we started to see increased levels of acetate. Now, who produces a good amount of acetates in the gut? Ruminococcus - that keystone strain. And sure enough, when we did the microbiome part of the analysis, we saw a much more dramatic increase in Ruminococcus in these patients. So in the placebo group, that did not have any change in their acne lesion count. We saw their Ruminococcus levels stay the same. They stayed low. But in the treatment group, we started to see the Ruminococcus levels dramatically increase. And as Ruminococcus increases, acetate goes up in the circulation. Then sebaceous sebum gland excretion reduces. Inflammation reduces. The microbes in the sebaceous gland that controls a certain degree and you’ll start to see the acne lesions go away. So it was a super exciting study for us. We’ve now partnered with a large multinational company to do a second version of that study - a larger scale study. In fact, this time we're going to go 90 days to see how much better it gets in 90 days. And the idea is that, hey, can we make this some mainstream treatment for acne, over the use of antibiotics? Because as you know very well, the antibiotics have all kinds of other side effects.
And so, you know, your example is a quintessential example that shows that it's all about evolution of your gut, in your body, and what's going on in the terrain that's bringing about the acne. Because it's not like you were born with acne. You weren't born with a genetic defect that caused acne. This came on 20 years after you were born. And it's just a change that occurred in your ecosystem that starts presenting itself as these lesions. And we all have the capacity to have cystic acne. And we all have the capacity to have clear skin, whether you have clear skin or cystic acne depends on what's going on in your gut.
Dani: Absolutely! It’s true, everyone can have clear skin - you're not sentenced to it for life even though it feels that way sometimes.
Kiran: Yeah, it’s devastating! I mean, one of the side effects of accutane is suicidal tendencies. It's psychotic episodes, I mean it and how does that happen? That's another question. Well as it turns out, there’s a whole class of antibiotics where one of their side effects is a sudden onset of panic and anxiety. Because again, you’re going in and disrupting that ecosystem. And when you create dysbiosis, it actually lends itself towards things like anxiety, depression, and so-on. You know, so the ramifications can be really great but I completely understand patients, parents, people who, when you're dealing with the acne, you will do anything to get rid of it.
Dani: Yes you will. And that’s great to know, with that one study you were talking about, that they were seeing results in 30 days. I mean even for some 30 days is kind of long. But I mean, that’s a pretty decent turn around especially with something that is working naturally in your body and helping you to recover and really address the root cause. It’s not, unfortunately something that is going to happen overnight, but I mean, 30 days is pretty phenomenal.
Kiran: Yeah, I mean it goes by quick. When you survey most of those participants, they started noticing noticeable changes within the first couple of weeks. And I know if you have acne, you are very in tune with what's going on in your skin. You get one or two extra blemishes or minus one or two blemishes, you will notice it. And so, my new progress during that first 30 days was absolutely realized by most of these people.
And then to underscore a point that you brought up, that acne is really a signal that something bad is going on inside of your body. The things that I’ve talked about, the mechanism that we want to change - the increase in acetate, the breaking down of inflammatory markers, the increasing ruminococcus - all of those things, not only are they helping the acne, but they're also helping a significant amount of risk that is associated with the development of other chronic illnesses. So it's absolutely helping when you go back to root cause, medicine, and root cause therapy, you are dealing with the problem at hand but you are also preventing a whole host of problems in the future.
Dani: Yeah, exactly! Inflammation is… it’s it!
Kiran: It’s it! Ans when you look at it, even what we're dealing with right now with COVID, right. The most susceptible people to really severe response COVID are those with chronic, low-grade inflammation. Which is represented in people with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and age. Age is another factor of chronic, low-grade information. So those five conditions are the conditions that have highest risk of mortality and adverse events with COVID. So think about how different your body is when you can have a 40 year old that has none of these risk factors. 80% of those people will get COVID and never even know they had it. Still, 80% of people have very mild symptoms that they wouldn’t notice. In that same vein, you could have a 40 year old with hypertension or diabetes that ends up in the hospital for 45-50 days on life support. And that's just how different, what's going on inside their bodies, is. The person that has hypertension or diabetes has severe chronic, low-grade inflammation. That's one of the things a virus like this takes advantage of, to infect you. So the vulnerabilities that we create for ourselves by having this kind of low-grade, chronic inflammation cannot be overstated. People have to understand how much more vulnerable you are to everything. Not only contagions like this pandemic, but also other chronic illnesses. It’s the foundation for illness. And like you said, this is the same thing driving acne early on and if you have the ability to realize that and address it early on, not only will it get rid of your acne, but it'll just make you much more resilient.
Dani: Exactly. I want to touch on, because I think people might hear this and want to run out and find a probiotic that has Ruminococcus, but those don't exist.
Kiran: They don’t exist in probiotics, no. These microbes that basically only live in the human gut or in some cases some animals also harbor them. They are what we call obligate anaerobes, meaning the oxygen is highly toxic to them. And maybe people don't know this, but the vast majority of your gut, in terms of surface area and length of it, is completely anaerobic. There's no oxygen inside your gut at all. And most of the bacteria, somewhere on 85% of the bacteria, that live in your gut cannot survive in an oxygen environment. So your large bowel is largely anaerobic. So most of those bacteria which all live in the anaerobic part of your bowel. If they’re ever taken out of the gut, they will die within seconds in the presence of oxygen. So you cannot grow them in the factory, you cannot encapsulate them and put them in a bottle, and so on. The only way to really improve this is by trying to grow your endogenous level of these keystone strains.
Now I know the next question that I typically get is, what if I don't have these strains in my gut? What if I’ve had several courses of antibiotics? What if I was C-section born? And so on. You absolutely have it. You just have it at such a low level that they're not functional. That’s the key. I mean, you're an example of that. If we had stool tests that we did on you when you had your cystic acne to the point where they went away, you would see a huge difference in your ruminococcus levels. It's something that happened, whether it was a course of antibiotics or something else, that brought down your ruminococcus levels, that brought down your acetate production, that's what started increasing the type of inflammation that leads to acne. The grape seed is a great example because the polyphenols in the grape seed extract have some of the food that akkermansia love, that ruminococcus love. Polyphenols are extremely important for these keystone strains. So people will see that polyphenols over the next two years are going to become the next big category of Prebiotics because we're coming to find out that these polyphenols are feeding very specific groups of important keystone bacteria. That they’ve become a really essential part of having a healthy microbiome.
Dani: Wow, interesting! And I just read that too, about how akkermansia and polyphenols and I didn’t put two and two together. But, it's just, it’s very exciting! So if somebody is looking to possibly go look at Microbiome Labs, the MEGAspore is what they should look at? Because I know you guys are adding, you always have such exciting new projects coming.
Kiran: Yeah, thank you! The MEGAsporebiotic is our flagship product. The first almost 4 years of the company that's all we had. And then what we were really trying to do is just really understand the crap out of that product - all of its capabilities, what all it does, are we really going about things the right way? It’s through that process that we found that there was something off with it ,we would have just abandoned it and not continued to grow the company. Because the company continued to bill just as a necessity as we talked about earlier. So that’s the flagship product. That’s what we do a lot of our studies with. And that's the one that we did the acne study with. That's the one that's increasing akkermansia, increases ruminococcus. One of our studies that we did last year with a combination of our MEGAprebiotic and MEGAsporebiotic, that combination, which is called a symbiotic, dramatically increased all of those microbes. We’re talking about a 1,000 fold increase in a three week period.
Dani: Holy-moly! I’m actually drinking mine right now!
Kiran: Oh awesome! Good! And that increases ruminococcus growth, it increases the production of butyrate and other short chain fatty acids that are all really important parts of how keystone strain bacteria really improved the microbiome in general. So that's going to be extremely important, the prebiotic and the probiotic. When we did the study, we did it just with the probiotic. And as far as the other products that we developed, the way we think about things, we look at the mechanisms that are going on in the body and we might have products that address certain mechanisms. And then, if we find other mechanisms that impact that outcome that we are not addressing, then we would look to develop a product that actually helps to address that mechanism. However, our final decision on developing a product is, is there someone on the market that's doing it well? If there's somebody else in the market already doing it and doing it well, we would say nope, they're doing it. In fact, we would promote them and tell people to use their product and we're not going to get involved in it. We really want to continue that theme of doing things that have a significant need and solve big problems. So yeah, it was very exciting when we saw the acne stuff, we were getting lots of anecdotal stuff from our practitioners. That their patient’s acne was improving dramatically.
Dani: I will say, I love the MEGAspore and I love the RestorFlora. I’ve had some people who, I should have them send you an anecdotal of RestorFolra.
Kiran: Yeah, and you know what, we developed that in parallel with MEGAsporebiotic but we actually didn’t introduce it as a Microbiome Labs product for a few years That was developed because a couple of nursing home groups that we were working with on formulation work and so on, came to us and said, do you have anything that can help with all of this antibiotic-associated diarrhea. You know, poor nursing home residents are on antibiotics all the time. And anytime they have to go to the hospital because they're living in a nursing home, right, and if they have some sort of medical issue, they go to the hospital to get checked out. And by the time they come back from the hospital, they have all these other infections from in the hospital. So they come back and they have to go on antibiotics. So they’re constantly on antibiotics, they’re constantly having loose stool associated with it. So we developed RestorFlora for that reason. Because it has such a powerful capability of finding and bringing down and neutralizing bacteria that is causing inflammation, diarrhea, and so on. And then the time that lots of doctors were using it from our other label, so we said, alright, we can add it to the Microbiomes Labs because it has so much utility.
Dani: And you’re always coming out with more, it’s great!
Kiran: Yeah! And our next fun thing is our stool tests.
Dani: *holds up a Microbiome Labs stool test kit on zoom camera*
Kiran: Yeah! Very good! Have you pooped in the box yet?!
Dani: I haven't yet, it's on my to-do list. But yeah, I’m all about gut health. Like if you tell me to poop in a bag, I will poop in a bag.
Kiran: Yes! You’ll see, when you get the analysis back, this is a stool test unlike any other. As innovative and as much a game changer as MEGAspore was to the probiotics space, this is a total game changer in stool tests because it’s highly focused on functional aspects of your microbiome. And we pull out every keystone strain, give you your relative abundance levels of every keystone strain. We look at lots of functionality within your microbiome. It’s really a personality test for your microbiome. It tells you what your microbiome tends to do and tends not to do. And everything we test is actionable. That was one of the important things. Everything that you get a result on will have diet, nutrition, supplement, lifestyle information on how to modulate that aspect. It’s got to be actionable, right? And so, and then on July 1st, the amount of data you'll get from the test is doubling. So we've doubled the number functionality things that we’re testing. And let’s say you pooped in the box, by next week, you’d get the 1.0 version of the report and then come July 1st, you’ll automatically get the 2.0 version. Because we have all of your sequence data, we’ve run the entire sequence, we just have to run it through the updated computer program that does all of the mapping calculations for the new functions. So you'll automatically get a second report with all the added functions.
Dani: It’s like the 23 And Me of gut microbiome! I’m always getting updates from them, like, you tested for this now, and here you go!
Kiran: Totally! Yeah, because, you know, once we have your sequence information that doesn't change a whole lot, it's just a matter of finding other things within the sequence in the information to identify, read and map out, and so on. So that's kind of our hope, that in the next couple of iterations of the test, because we’re constantly trying to evolve it and improve it, we want to make sure that people who did the previous version will automatically get an updated report.
Dani: Amazing, wow. Thank you so much! I can continue to listen to you talk but I don't want to take up more of your time.
Kiran: It is my pleasure! Thank you so much for having me. This was a really fun conversation. Hopefully people got a little bit more of an understanding of how their gut affects their skin. How they have all of the power in the world to change it. I'm sure all the other work you do gives them all kinds of other recommendations of things that they can do. But modulating the microbiome will have a huge impact on your skin.
Dani: Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much, Kiran!
Kiran: It’s my pleasure, Dani, thanks for having me.
Dani: Oh my gosh you guys, how freaking good was that?! I just, I could listen to that again and again and I hope you do! I hope you use him as an amazing resource for gut health. I know that I do because, again, we are all wellness warriors in this lifetime. We can help our loved ones while we are helping ourselves. And I really hope you do so. And if you have any questions, you know where to find me. I'm always on Instagram @detoxingwithdani. If you have not already left a rating and review of the podcast, I would be so grateful if you took a minute to do that. It really does help get this information out to more people who need it, who need to hear it, who need it to heal. And we have a big mission to accomplish you guys, and so I hope you come along the ride with us. Share it, take a screenshot, share it on your stories. I would love to see you, say hi to you, start a conversation.
And yeah, until next time! I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day, your week. I love you so much and I'll talk to you later, bye!
Thank you so much for listening to the Detoxing with Dani podcast. For free resources and materials, head on over to detoxingwithdani.com/resources. You can find a free Gut Health Guide: the basics to get health and all things acne and skin care over there. You can also join us and our free Facebook group. Just head over to Facebook and search Detoxing with Dani. And as always I hangout on Instagram all day everyday and I would love to start a conversation with you. Until next time, here is to a healthy and happy future!