Ready to uncover the intriguing connection between Parkinson's disease and the gastrointestinal microbiome? Join us as we explore this fascinating subject with data analytics specialist turned microbiome researcher, Martha Carlin. Martha brings us up to speed on her research endeavors, one of which includes the Bio Collective, a project that collected fecal samples from 1,000 participants, and her venture, BiotiQuest, that developed unique probiotics with collaborative microbial species.
Some of you following my Defiant Health podcasts or my DrDavisInfiniteHealth.com website may already be familiar with Martha Carlin. For those of you not yet acquainted, Martha Carlin, formerly a data analytics specialist, turned all of her attentions to the microbiome when her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She quickly learned that current medical treatments for this condition do not slow the progression of the disease from increasing disability and dementia; they only reduce some of the phenomena such as tremor or impaired gait. She therefore founded several organizations to better study both Parkinson’s disease and the gastrointestinal microbiome.
As we venture deeper, we connect with Martha and Dr Raul Cano, founders of Biotiquest, to understand their innovative probiotic products designed to support various health aspects. Martha shares the results of their recent study, showing a significant shift in the microbiome and drop in serum lipopolysaccharide.
In the captivating latter part of our conversation, we investigate the promising potential of probiotics and fasting in Parkinson's disease treatment. Martha and Raul share their patent news and discuss their probiotics' successful use to reduce endotoxemia and target abdominal visceral fat. We also examine the story of a man's remission of Parkinson's disease after a long fast, sparking a discussion on the potential of a 30-day fast experiment. By tuning in, you'll gain a wealth of insights into the evolving field of microbiome research and the impressive impacts of probiotics on our health.
Full disclosure: BiotiQuest is a sponsor of this Defiant Health podcast. But the reason I asked Martha and BiotiQuest to be a sponsor is because their interests are aligned With my philosophy and scientific interests: we are both interested in giving people better tools for health, specifically better tools to manage the microbiome.
For BiotiQuest probiotics including Sugar Shift, go here.
A 15% discount is available for Defiant Health podcast listeners by entering discount code UNDOC15 (case-sensitive) at checkout.*
_________________________________________________________________________________
Get your 15% Paleovalley discount on fermented grass-fed beef sticks, Bone Broth Collagen, low-carb snack bars and other high-quality organic foods here.
For 12% off every order of grass-fed and pasture-raised meats from Wild Pastures, go
Books:
Super Gut: The 4-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight
Ready to uncover the intriguing connection between Parkinson's disease and the gastrointestinal microbiome? Join us as we explore this fascinating subject with data analytics specialist turned microbiome researcher, Martha Carlin. Martha brings us up to speed on her research endeavors, one of which includes the Bio Collective, a project that collected fecal samples from 1,000 participants, and her venture, BiotiQuest, that developed unique probiotics with collaborative microbial species.
Some of you following my Defiant Health podcasts or my DrDavisInfiniteHealth.com website may already be familiar with Martha Carlin. For those of you not yet acquainted, Martha Carlin, formerly a data analytics specialist, turned all of her attentions to the microbiome when her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She quickly learned that current medical treatments for this condition do not slow the progression of the disease from increasing disability and dementia; they only reduce some of the phenomena such as tremor or impaired gait. She therefore founded several organizations to better study both Parkinson’s disease and the gastrointestinal microbiome.
As we venture deeper, we connect with Martha and Dr Raul Cano, founders of Biotiquest, to understand their innovative probiotic products designed to support various health aspects. Martha shares the results of their recent study, showing a significant shift in the microbiome and drop in serum lipopolysaccharide.
In the captivating latter part of our conversation, we investigate the promising potential of probiotics and fasting in Parkinson's disease treatment. Martha and Raul share their patent news and discuss their probiotics' successful use to reduce endotoxemia and target abdominal visceral fat. We also examine the story of a man's remission of Parkinson's disease after a long fast, sparking a discussion on the potential of a 30-day fast experiment. By tuning in, you'll gain a wealth of insights into the evolving field of microbiome research and the impressive impacts of probiotics on our health.
Full disclosure: BiotiQuest is a sponsor of this Defiant Health podcast. But the reason I asked Martha and BiotiQuest to be a sponsor is because their interests are aligned With my philosophy and scientific interests: we are both interested in giving people better tools for health, specifically better tools to manage the microbiome.
For BiotiQuest probiotics including Sugar Shift, go here.
A 15% discount is available for Defiant Health podcast listeners by entering discount code UNDOC15 (case-sensitive) at checkout.*
_________________________________________________________________________________
Get your 15% Paleovalley discount on fermented grass-fed beef sticks, Bone Broth Collagen, low-carb snack bars and other high-quality organic foods here.
For 12% off every order of grass-fed and pasture-raised meats from Wild Pastures, go
Books:
Super Gut: The 4-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight
Some of you following my Defiant Health podcasts or my DR Davis Infinite Healthcom website may already be familiar with Martha Carlin. For those of you not yet acquainted, martha Carlin, formerly a data analytics specialist, turned all of her attentions to the microbiome when her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. She quickly learned that current medical treatments for this condition do not slow the progression of the disease from increasing disability and dementia. They only reduce some of the phenomena, such as tremor or impaired gait, but do not slow the progression of the disease. She therefore founded several organizations to better study both Parkinson's disease and the gastrointestinal microbiome. One of her projects is the Bio Collective, co-founded with academic microbiologist Raul Cano, phd, in which they collected fecal actually whole bowel movement samples rather than the usual small stool sample from 1,000 participants, an effort that generated a number of novel observations. She also co-founded Bioti Quest that has developed a number of unique probiotics, using a method to identify collaborative or guild effects among probiotic microbial species to work towards greater effectiveness in alleviating health conditions.
William Davis, MD:As Martha and her team have been generating unique observations at breakneck speed, I thought it would be a good time to bring Martha back for an update on their recent work. Full disclosure Bioti Quest is a sponsor of this Defiant Health podcast, but the reason I asked Martha and Bioti Quest to be a sponsor is because their interests are aligned with my philosophy and scientific interests. We are both interested in giving people better tools for health, specifically better tools to manage the gastrointestinal microbiome. Here in the podcast, let's talk about Defiant Health's sponsors that include Paleo Valley, who provides fermented grass-fed beef sticks, bone broth, protein rich in collagen, organic super greens and low-carb super food bars, and now 100% grass-fed and finished pastured meats. And our newest sponsor, as I mentioned earlier, biotic Quest, who provides unique probiotics such as sugar shift to support healthy blood sugars, and simple slumber to assist in obtaining healthy sleep.
William Davis, MD:Bioti Quest crafted with the unique property of combining synergistic microbes. Thanks, martha, thanks for coming on. It's always been a pleasure having you back on because you're so full of novel ideas and new observations. So it's been at least a year. So I think we've last talked. You want to kind of fill in the audience on the kinds of things you've been up to.
Martha Carlin:Sure, bill, I'm glad to be here today. One of the areas I hear you talk about so much is endotoxin, and that's an area that I was looking at I'd say on the fringes, I mean, for people who maybe don't know that much about me. I started into this field because my husband had Parkinson's and I started studying science kind of on the side and eventually, eight years ago, founded the Biocollective, a microbiome company, and we did a large-scale collection of Parkinson's microbiome samples and with that data we've collaborated with different research groups, really all over the place. We've shared our data with different academics and we've shared our samples with other people. We have a couple of publications.
Martha Carlin:But on the endotoxin front we had done some research analysis with a company called Artigens. Artigens is a machine learning tool that they were mostly using for cancer diagnostics, but they wanted to start using it more in the microbiome, so they used our data set and what came out of that was some of the key drivers that they were showing as indicators of Parkinson's were gram-negative bacteria and of course those are the endotoxin producers. And I had formulated the sugar-ship product of course we advertise on your show the sugar-ship product, originally for my husband based on some research that had shown that the sugar alcohol, mannitol, could stop the aggregation of the proteins. Of course, since then we found out a lot more about how the product works than just the mannitol. It is a free radical scavenger also. But we did a clinical trial last year, actually in a diabetes population, because they're much easier end point measurements in a diabetes cohort than there are in a Parkinson's cohort and there really are no agreed upon end point measurements with Parkinson's related to endotoxin or related to any of the blood sugar measurements. So in our clinical trial we found that one of the measurements that improved significantly during the trial was serum lipopolysaccharide.
Martha Carlin:So kind of turning that back around, I actually just wrote a piece. I have a personal blog where I write about Parkinson's, alternative health-related things and the latest microbiome research papers, and so I wrote a piece called Rethinking Parkinson's Disease and really focusing on lipopolysaccharide and the gram-negative bacteria. And now I'm not saying that's the only cause of Parkinson's, because Parkinson's is pretty complex and there's quite a bit of evidence related to herbicides and pesticides. But of course we know those are antibiotic and they alter the microbiome. But in the process of writing that blog post you know started going through the PubMed research and of course I already knew there is an animal model of Parkinson's disease where they duplicate the symptoms and the outcomes of Parkinson's using LPS they injected into the mouse and there is a lipopolysaccharide model in diabetes. So I mean, I'm sort of curious what you think about these animal models and how we could actually go look at all the different animal models and the microbial metabolites that are byproducts that they use to induce these animal models to kind of connect the dots to the microbiome.
William Davis, MD:You know, I'm always impressed that there's a German group who actually took LPS and injected into humans, which is a very scary prospect Because, as you know, if you miscalculate even a little bit you can kill somebody. But this German group did it for depression, for question of depression, and so they took non-depressed people and injected LPS into them and within about three hours they were clinically depressed and MRI functional MRI showed all the hallmarks of depression. And so you know, I don't know, I don't think anybody really knows yet what the mediators are. It may be a complex pathway involving multiple receptors, multiple mediators, but it's clear that, as you point out, lps, elevated LPS, the two to four fold increase in serum LPS, not the hundred fold of sepsis but the two to four fold of, say, of SIBO, that clearly drives a lot of disease. So as you know, martha, it really means having to reconsider not just Parkinson's, not just depression, but reconsidering practically all human disease, and maybe in a couple of generations some of my colleagues will catch up to that in practice.
Martha Carlin:Right? Well, it does. It definitely turns things on on it or on its ear. Well, and another sort of connection to that where people who think they're healthy actually are endurance athletes. So my husband was a marathon runner before he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. And in the process of all this studying and looking at things as it turns out, when you do endurance athletics, you there is a period of like the 24 hours following the endurance exercise where the gut is more leaky and more endotoxin goes out and creates that inflammation. And so if you have people who are chronically doing endurance athletics and I've talked to a lot of people with Parkinson's who were marathon runners you know they may not really be fully grasping the context of how that impacts the gut and the brain and the long term implications for their health.
William Davis, MD:The Defiant Health podcast is sponsored by Paleo Valley makers of delicious grass fed beef steaks, healthy snack bars and other products. We are very picky around here and insist that any product we consider has no junk ingredients like carrageenan, carboxymethylsalos, sucralose and, of course, no added sugars. And all Paleo Valley products contain no gluten nor grains. In fact, I find Paleo Valley products among cleanest in their category. One of the habits I urge everyone to get into is to include at least one, if not several, servings of fermented foods per day in their lifestyles. Unlike nearly all other beef steaks available, Paleo Valley grass fed beef steaks are all naturally fermented, meaning they contain probiotic bacterial species. And now Paleo Valley is expanding their wild pastures program that provides 100% grass fed grass, finished pastured beef and pastured chicken and pork raised without herbicides or pesticides. And they just added wild caught seafood caught from the waters of Bristol Bay, Alaska. Among their other new products are pasture raised fermented pork sticks, chocolate flavored grass fed bone broth, protein and grass fed organ complex encapsul form and new essential electrolytes in powder form to add to potassium and magnesium intake, available in orange, lemon and melon flavors. Listeners to the Defiant Health podcast receive a 15% discount by going to paleo valley. com/defianthealth.
William Davis, MD:And I'd like to welcome Defiant Health's newest sponsor, BiotiQuest. I've had numerous conversations with BiotiQuest founders Martha Carlin, and academic microbiologist, Dr Raul Cano. They have formulated unique synergistic probiotic products that incorporate what are called collaborative or guild effects, that is, groups of microbes that collaborate with each other via specific metabolites, potentially providing synergistic benefits. They have designed their sugar shift probiotic to support healthy blood sugars. Simple slumber to support sleep. Ideal immunity to support a healthy immune response. Heart centered that supports several aspects of heart health. An antibiotic antidote designed to support recovery of the gastrointestinal microbiome after a course of antibiotics. The BiotiQuest probiotics are, I believe, among the most effective of all probiotic choices for specific health effects. Enter the discount code UNDOC 15 (all caps) for 15% discount for Defiant Health listeners.
William Davis, MD:You know, Martha, I think it's becoming clear from that evidence as well as some other evidence, non-microbial type evidence, where you know, there's a marker in the bloodstream called creatin kinase and there's a marker for skeletal muscle, like in the thighs and arms and such, and then there's a marker for myocardial muscle. So CK, we say CKMM for skeletal, CKMB for myocardial. Well, if we were to draw someone's blood prior to starting their marathon or their triathlon or whatever they're doing, and then we draw it as they cross the finish line. There's a huge flood of both of those markers into the bloodstream, Such that some of these runners pee brown from muscle breakdown and the rise in the CKMB, for instance, it'll be something like this hundred and twenty eight at the start, 2400 at the end, and with the MB it's about the same magnitude as a heart attack. So between that and the microbiome disruptions and the endotoxemia, it's probably not a good idea to run marathons.
Martha Carlin:Well, you know, the other sort of interest, I don't. I don't think it's quite as bad now as it was 20 years ago when my husband was running marathons, but of course you know they are the ultimate carboloaders and of course we're low carb people and there's a good reason to be low carb, but that whole, just kind of the whole ethos around running and everything was around your how many, how much carbs you're taking in the, the goose that they would, you know, sell in the jail packs that are made of fruit toast that are just horrible. So you know, I think I wonder sometimes how, how long it takes to undo something like that.
William Davis, MD:You shared some of your data on the most recent study you did with me. How free do you feel in talking about some of the results?
Martha Carlin:Oh, we can. I can talk about the results. So I mean it was interesting. So in the in the trial group we had. So we had 30 subjects on the sugarship product and 30 subjects on control and the control was actually all of the prebiotics that are in the formula itself and just none of the live bugs. And there were some. There were some benefits to just the fiber. There were some markers that improved in people taking the fiber and the sugar ship.
Martha Carlin:But we measured triglycerides serum, lps, a measurement called HOMA-IR which isn't typical here in the United States but internationally it's more measure that's looked at for insulin resistance.
Martha Carlin:We did insulin, cholesterol and post-prandial and fasting blood glucose and HBA1C. The original study was three months and then at the end of the study we unblinded and we took 10 subjects and kept them on the sugar shift who had been on the sugar shift. We kept them on for an additional three months, so they were on a total of six months. Because we didn't we didn't get a statistically significant endpoint measurement on HBA1C and that's in large part because it takes about 120 days for the blood cells to turn over and we did get a drop in the HBA1C at the six month point. So, but one of the most dramatic things at each one of the measurement points was the drop in serum lipopolysaccharide. So, and by the end of the six month period it wasn't zero, but it was pretty close to zero. So there was a significant shift in the microbiome where those gram negative bacteria are getting pushed out and the microbiome is being remodeled because they don't have those sugars.
William Davis, MD:So you did do a microbiome analysis also.
Martha Carlin:So we did do a microbiome analysis also and we're working on the microbiome paper. Actually, this past week we had our second meeting looking at data and one of the areas we're looking at is changes in virulence factors. Last week we were just looking at the taxonomy so we did get we did get some important increases in some beneficial groups of clostridia that help kind of keep the bad clostridian check and I don't have the data in front of me, but I want to say roseburea and fecaliprosnitii. Both are which are kind of beneficial keystone species, both of those rows, and we had an increase in bifidobacteria.
William Davis, MD:Very nice.
Martha Carlin:Very excited about those results.
William Davis, MD:You know, so listeners understand obliteration of serum LPS is Incredibly important finding because that means over time that formulation is going to have spectacular health benefits, since a higher as you know, higher LPS levels drive insulin resistance, inflammation, numerous other Distortions of health. So a hundred percent reduction, or something close to that, is absolutely spectacular and, to my knowledge I'm completely unprecedented well, you know it's serum, LPS, is, I guess, not that frequently Measured.
Martha Carlin:I'm not sure whether you can actually go to, say, a lab core, the hospital, and just get an LPS test.
Martha Carlin:No, unfortunately so it was something, as we were just Designing the study, I just I asked Raul, I said, would they be able to test serum LPS? Because you know, I think that this LPS is a driver of all these different things. When I look at these animal models, you know, maybe it'd be great if we can measure that. And I mean it was sort of a there was a bit of a last minute Kind of toss the ball in and see if we could do it. And you know, we were able to do it, and or they were able to do it in the in the study and just was. We were just very excited about it because, you know, it's one of those things that's just going to have a lot of long-term health benefits, if you, you know, if you continue to focus on that.
William Davis, MD:Did you see any changes in body composition, like waste, circumference, weight?
Martha Carlin:They didn't. They did not do Measurements of that. We do have some data on from a well-being survey and there were some people who reported Losing weight. We do get customers who tell us you know, when they take it. I mean I'll have people who say I lost 15 pounds. That doesn't happen to everybody and so and we haven't studied that. So I'm always very careful about not really selling it as a weight loss product.
Martha Carlin:But what it, what it will often do, is make people less hungry. So, and one of the things that we've been looking at in the microbiome data and Raul found this really interesting paper about when you, when you have a diverse and well functioning Microbome that's making all of those B vitamins and the TCA cycles working and all that, you have this level of efficiency where I mean I guess everybody's happy and so You're not getting that feed me Seymour signal all the time that's telling you to eat. And I know I think sometimes I mean you talk so much about Ruderite, and of course we have. We have lactobacillus Ruderite in our formula and I love that bug, but I, you know, wonder if that's not some of the driver there too.
William Davis, MD:Yeah, I bet you're right. You know it's my suspicion that the reasons why mostly lack the silts gas or I two strains of gas, or I like the 2055 and the BNR 17 and, of course, ruderite I suspect that there's changes in body composition due to the that is, a reduction, waste circumference or cross sexual CT or MRI reduction in visceral fat area. I'm gonna bet you it's exactly what you did and that is the reduction in endotoxemia. So that can be. I think that'll prove over time. We need you and I need better evidence, but I'm gonna predict that that is the fundamental underlying process that allows the Specifically target loss of abdominal visceral fat, because I think we're seeing it. So it'll be interesting in future if you do any body composition work. This, even something simple like a waste circumference, because we're, as we're seeing with just the Ruderite and some other non-microbial Microbial agrees with your formulation with a hundred percent reduction LPS, I'm gonna bet you it's even bigger.
Martha Carlin:So that's, that's a great idea because we're actually gonna be running another Sugarship challenge in October, probably starting at the end of October or well, we're trying to decide because, you know, when you go into the holidays not too many people want to be in a sugar challenge, but it's actually a time when you do need a lot of support to stay away from all the sugar.
Martha Carlin:But maybe we can add a waste circumference measurement or you know something like that to the metrics we ask people to try to put together for that, one of the other good news things we have. So I think it was about five years ago. We filed a patent that covers more than the sugarship formula it covers. It's a patent for probiotics and method of use and it's basically our consortium concept of putting microbes together to produce a, you know, specific output. And so we had filed a patent for the production of mannitol, reduced glutathione butyrate, some of these other things and the potential treatment of Parkinson's disease and diabetes and some other things. And slowly but surely that has moved along, and actually at the beginning of October we received notice from the patent office that they are rewarding the patent, so Congratulations. So we're in the process of, you know paying our fees and getting all of that done, but that was pretty exciting for us as well.
William Davis, MD:That is terrific. I know you think a lot about Parkinson's disease. Has your thinking changed or evolved in any way in the last year?
Martha Carlin:It. Actually it has evolved quite a bit and it's evolved in a couple of ways. One actually came from one of your inner circle people, my husband. So when he started taking the sugar shift back in 2017, there's a measurement called the UPDR score. That measures kind of how advanced somebody is and at that time his score was at 35. And you know he had was like 15 years. In a year after taking the sugar shift, his score had dropped to a 20, 1920. And it stabilized there for four years.
Martha Carlin:But then at the end of 2021, he had COVID and he had a very bad bout of COVID and there's some research showing that low Bifidobacteria is associated with poor outcomes in COVID and low Bifidobacteria is also an indicator in Parkinson's. And one of your people contact he had some long COVID symptoms. He was really struggling to get back to where he was before. And one of your people contacted me who had had a neighbor. She made your yogurt with my sugar shift because her neighbor got very severe Parkinson's like symptoms after he got COVID and so she made it like with starting with 10 capsules and then with your doubling, I mean you're getting up to like 800 billion CFUs or something in the back and I started doing that and I mean we did a few, we did some other things along the way, but when he started doing that yogurt and I was alternating that with the Rudora, his improvement really kind of accelerated, so that that changed my mind quite a bit. But then the other thing I started looking at is actually fasting, so the opposite of putting anything in the pipe. And John started doing something called the if you're familiar with the research of Balter Longo and the prolon fast mimicking diet. He started doing a fast mimicking diet about every five weeks and always at the fifth day of that diet he's always at his very best. Well, in Parkinson's autophagy which is for your listeners, if they don't know that's the kind of the eating up of the damaged cells and that happens faster during fasting than if you're eating all the time. It doesn't happen. And in Parkinson's autophagy is really not working properly. So you know there's definitely something to that.
Martha Carlin:And in the last month I actually received a phone call from a gentleman with Parkinson's who I've communicated with him some over the last several years on my, my personal blog. He said don't you want to know how I cured myself? And so I had a phone call with him and I mean and I'm not telling people to run out and do this and I'm still getting a little more details and information about how he went about it but he did a. He did a very long fast and at the end of that fast he went in to see his doctors and he had more than Parkinson's wrong with him. He had some kidney issues and some other things.
Martha Carlin:And you know, his doctor said to him like what have you? And he said, can you do it for my other patients? And he said, well, I could, but if I, you know, if you started doing that for your patients, you probably lose your license. And so we're actually looking at I've talked to a small group of people. I have a little guest cabin here on my farm that can accommodate three couples or, you know, three individuals, and we're looking at doing in January a 30 day fast where you know we will take some blood measurements and have some tracking and and look at that as a what that may do along the way. And if you think about if there are pathogens in the GI tract, when you stop putting food in there, you're going to stop feeding them and you know, eventually they may just totally drop out of the niche that they've taken over.
William Davis, MD:And that's what this guy with presumed remission did. Yeah, oh, very interesting, very interesting.
Martha Carlin:It takes about 30 days for your mitochondria to turn over. So I think you know I'm just sort of picking that as an arbitrary number, but now I know you introduced the antibiotic antidote.
William Davis, MD:Could you give us the rationale for that formulation?
Martha Carlin:Sure, actually, that the idea for that came probably about I think it was about four, four years ago. There was a study that came out of the Weitzman Institute in Israel. What they showed was an 11-strain mixture of probiotic organisms. I ultimately found a product in Israel that it looked like it probably was that product, but they were looking at it, as in a study for people who had taken antibiotics, and they found that it was actually detrimental. And of course I got the paper and was looking at it and I was talking to Raul and Raul said well, I would never put all these organisms together because it's going to make the whole system way too acidic and then you're not going to be able to repopulate. He's like you need to do something that's more balanced, that enables kind of the whole system to flourish again. And so you know, we Raoul's brain went away and said, okay, here's how I would do it. And then we put it into our BioFlux computational model and tweaked it a little bit and came out with antibiotic antidote and that was our concept.
Martha Carlin:But we really didn't bring it to the market until it was a couple of years later, one of my advisors, steve Cosmi, who's a fermentation chemist, his mother, who's in her 80s, had appendicitis and had to have her appendix removed and then she got sepsis and had to be on IV antibiotics for a month.
Martha Carlin:And he called me up and he said, martha, when are you going to make that antibiotic antidote? And I said, well, you know, let me look at what I have in my strain inventory, like maybe I could make a small batch of it. And so we looked and we had, you know, we had all but two strains we needed. And so we called our supplier and ordered some inventory and we made a small batch, his mother's. I mean, she has a review on the website and she calls me all the time and tells me how much she loves it. And he just laughed because he'd been in the probiotics industry for 20 years and telling his mother how great probiotics she was. Listen to him. And now she thinks the antibiotic antidote and biodequest is the best thing since Brad.
William Davis, MD:So how about the simple slumber formulation? How do you come to that mixture?
Martha Carlin:Well, we just knew so many people have sleep problems and you know I had also been looking at tryptophan metabolism and how that's involved in a lot of dysregulation in the microbiome, and so that was another one where I mean, actually all these ideas came, raul and I sat one week in our laboratory with the whiteboard and we kind of mapped out, I think, about 25 or 30 problems that people have Either, you know, they're not making the vitamins right in their gut or they've got sleep problems, or they have this vitamin problem, or you know they they don't have a good immune system or sugar metabolism. And we sort of mapped all of that out and mapped out the different microbes and what we especially Raul but I also had some textbooks on what are the capabilities of all these different microbes. And then he went away and cogitated for 30, 45 days and came back with, you know, this concoction of all the different formulas that we had, and then we we had our computational model and we were able to kind of plug and play those.
Martha Carlin:So we've got 25 different formulas that of course you know we haven't brought them all to market. You know we have some for hot flashes. We even prototyped one for somebody who was interested in a formula using probiotics to help with opioid addiction. I mean that would be a pretty novel approach. But shoot, anything that could help with that would be amazing. But the one that we have slated next for coming out is called Perfect Peace, and that's more. You know mood and sleep regulation, mood and depression, or, you know, just leveling out the mood swings.
William Davis, MD:So do you have an idea what the next year holds for you?
Martha Carlin:Well. So I mean the next year, we really would like to get the the perfect piece out, and I think I also. We have an electrolyte, an electrolyte probiotic blend that we have also been working on, so we'd like to get both of those out and really just get more of the word out on. I mean, sugar shift is by far our best-selling product because it's just a tremendous formula for overall metabolic health, and what we see so much today is people with problems with metabolic health, and it kind of underlies all the other little downstream things or bigger downstream things. You know, if you can get that metabolic health in good shape, then everything else is gonna work better, you're gonna sleep better, you're gonna have more energy, you're gonna be happier.
William Davis, MD:And, as you know, you provided A sugar shift for 20 of my followers who are non diabetic and agreed to do fingers take blood glucose at the start and then daily for a month, and I was so impressed more 9.8 milligrams per deciliter reduction over the four weeks, which in a non diabetic, non pre diabetic population is Absolutely huge. That is on a par with a prescription medication. But of course, the sugar shift is not a medication, doesn't come with side effects. It comes with ancillary benefits, unlike, say, a drug you take to reduce blood sugar. So I think sugar shift has the potential to completely change the landscape of how Diabetes is managed and how people can prevent diabetes. You know, I'm gonna bet you there's even a age reversing effect and waist shrinking effect because of the reduction in insulin resistance that's necessary to see a drop in glucose of that magnitude. So that's a spectacular outcome.
Martha Carlin:Well, I, you know we'd like to do more studies and again we're gonna have another sugar shift challenge, the the big challenge. You know. For you you've got a tight, close-knit group. You know your people will actually follow up and do all the data. The last time we did it we had 200 people and I think about 25 of them actually stuck with Doing the reporting throughout the period.
Martha Carlin:So we're still kind of trying to figure out if there's a better way to Get people to measure one thing or another, and of course, most people don't want to measure blood sugar. So that's never much fun. But you know, in my own personal experience I mean I take sure shift and I Do a ketogenic diet and so I have a keto mojo and If I don't take it, versus when I do take it before I like when I take my evening dose, if I remember to take my evening Sugar Shift, my blood sugar is always about five or ten points lower the next, more than it would be if I didn't take it. And I mean it just makes sense because it's Eating up those sugars and turning it into mannitol, which is doesn't spike your blood sugar. So it's kind of just about basic biochemistry.
William Davis, MD:Well, martha, you are a flurry of interesting activity, so thanks as always.
Martha Carlin:coming back on any closing comments, Well, I mean, I just I'd like to say a thank you to you for all the education you do for people on the micro bone and, you know, for being that the kind of global ambassador for lactobacillus rhodii which you know we love that microbe to. It's not in every one of our formulas, but you know, I just love how you're an evangelist for, for gut health and for ways for people to Measure and understand what's going on in their gut. And we didn't even talk about sebo today, but that's. You know there's a big connection to sebo methane hydrogen sulfide in Parkinson's. So, you know, anybody who's listening to this, who is interested in learning more about that, should listen to some of your talks about how to use the food marble and and looking at sebo and addressing sebo, because I think that's also an Undernot-aligned driver in Parkinson's disease as well.
William Davis, MD:I will post, of course, links and discount codes and such for all the biodequest products in the show notes. So so we'll send it to your site, because why are they doing incredible work? I'm very proud of what you and Rowell are are accomplishing.
Martha Carlin:Well, we appreciate it and I'm I am very fortunate to have Rowell because, as you know, he's he's one of a kind who is like a walking encyclopedia of microbes.
William Davis, MD:Thank you, Martha.
Martha Carlin:Thank you, Bill.