Restoring Gut Health in Midlife

Natalie Tysdal (02:18)

Martha, thank you for joining me today.

Martha Carlin (02:21)

Thanks so much for having me, Natalie.

Natalie Tysdal (02:23)

So gut health is big in my life. I talk about it every day. I focus on it. But for a lot of people, they're still like, what is this gut health thing? Why do I need to care about my gut health?

Martha Carlin (02:35)

Well, really is. Go back to Hippocrates who said all disease begins in the gut. I mean, it really is true. So going back to in 2005, I think the NIH funded a major study called the Human Microbiome Project and that was a five year.

lots of institutions around the United States and there was one similar in Europe that kicked off this project of studying the microbiome.

basically the bacteria, fungi, and viruses that live in and on our body. And it was running studies in every disease you can imagine, in health states, and all of this, trying to look for patterns. So ⁓ fast forward from 2005, 20 years later, there is so much research now that connects directly to what is going on in our gut.

to all these chronic diseases, as well as how we

medicines, how we process food, how different diets

different people. So it really is kind of the central hub of everything, which, you know, it makes logical sense because, you know, we eat to stay alive and to fuel ourselves. And where's that going? Right through this very important into the gut where kind of the factory is.

Natalie Tysdal (04:05)

So are there things we can do to correct all the wrongs that we did? ⁓ When we finally realize this, you're like, ⁓ OK, I get it. Now I know I need to pay attention to it, but I did a lot of bad stuff. I took a lot of medicine, a lot of antibiotics. I ate a lot of crap food. Can we autocorrect while our bodies respond when we start paying attention to it?

Martha Carlin (04:27)

our bodies will definitely respond. There are a lot of things that can be corrected and approved. There are some things like certain antibiotics where the gut never fully recovers from them. So there's a book by Dr. Martin Blazer called Missing Microbes, which is actually what got me into the field of the microbiome. And he was talking about growing up in the age of antibiotics and how ⁓ antibiotics...

are really connected to the rise of chronic disease because we're losing these keystone species in our gut. But when you start to kind of focus attention on it and rebuild your internal ecosystem, you can make a lot of progress to restore that. But a history of macrolide, that's a class of antibiotics, his research actually showed that the gut never recovers from that.

So I think, you know, when we have a situation like that, then we've got to start to understand we may have to do additional things as backup support because, you know, we've lost some certain aspect of that function. But there's a lot you can do. I I recommend.

There's a woman named Natasha Campbell McBride who developed the GAPS diet or there's another group doing the specific carbohydrate diet. So often kind of pulling back on these processed carbohydrates and restoring the gut lining with things like bone broth. that the gut lining is really that protective layer that's keeping the bad things from the outside world from getting in.

sick, a lot of it is related to inflammation and things that have crossed over that barrier because the barrier is not tight anymore. you know an anti-inflammatory or a autoimmune type diet, I'm not saying you have to do that along you know forever, but taking those steps to restore that gut lining first is often

really one of the best steps you can take before you try to, because you'll hear people say, ⁓ eat fermented foods or take probiotics or, you know, and I make probiotics, but if you don't have a healthy gut lining, you're gonna continue to have problems until you address that issue.

Natalie Tysdal (06:55)

Yes, I've talked about this for anyone who wants to go back and listen to some of the other episodes on gut health, on restoring that line. went through my own gut crisis and restoring that lining was number one. All the other stuff isn't going to matter. So go back and listen to some of those. But let's talk about some of the things people might see. I know that your late husband is an example of an illness that he had that's what turned you on to all this.

what you can tell me about that. And then some of the things that we would never associate with the gut, but that repairing your gut might actually change.

Martha Carlin (07:35)

So one of the things with Parkinson's that, you know, nobody ever asked us about bathroom habits when John was first diagnosed and he was diagnosed very young. So he was diagnosed at 44, healthy marathon running athlete. And I'll tell you that connection here in a minute, but ⁓ chronic constipation.

Natalie Tysdal (08:01)

Mm.

Martha Carlin (08:02)

is a problem with about 75 to 80 percent of people with Parkinson's. And it can go back as far as childhood, which it did with John in his first four years of life. He was very constipated. And when we're not removing that waste, these bacteria are producing toxins.

So you have waste building up with a toxic burden in there that your immune system is having to deal with over and over and over again. And what we actually discovered, so I founded a company that actually started collecting people's poop. And I don't mean like a tiny little swab, I mean a box full of the entire sample. And in our lab, the people in our lab,

came to me after about I don't know six or seven months of collecting samples across the population and they said we can tell if a person has Parkinson's just by looking at their stool because it was like concrete well you know that was almost ten years ago you know when we discovered that there was nothing in the scientific literature about it but

Natalie Tysdal (09:01)

Wow.

Martha Carlin (09:14)

Fast forward to today, I've been actually working on a paper with a Parkinson's hypothesis about what's happening with the battle between the microbes in the gut and how they spill a small amount of calcium and potassium into the gut. That calcium makes the ⁓ stool like concrete and the potassium, you lose the balance and you lose that electrical signal. So for anyone, if you are

constipated if you're not eliminating waste every day and this sort of drives me nuts because doctors well first of all they rarely ask you but if you bring it up and you say I'm only going every three or four days they'll tell you that's normal well that that may be normal but that's not healthy ⁓ you need to remove the waste every single day

Natalie Tysdal (10:02)

Yeah.

Martha Carlin (10:08)

And when I talk to people, I'm like, do you have a pet? Like people know if they have a dog and it hasn't pooped today, there's a problem. So why would we be any different? So that I think is kind of one of the connections with Parkinson's that people often miss. But what I've also...

Natalie Tysdal (10:15)

There's a problem. Yeah.

Martha Carlin (10:28)

come to learn really in the last two years is this endurance athletics. So my husband was a marathon runner and I have become friends with a young woman who has young onset Parkinson's and she's also an endurance athlete. And when you're doing those kind of endurance events, well first of all there's a lot of carb loading or you know, you're.

putting stress, electrolyte stress on your body. And then ⁓ what happens is all the blood goes out to your muscles to oxygenate your muscles while you're running. But then when you stop,

that blood comes rushing back into the gut where it's been pulled away and you get something called reperfusion injury. So as the blood goes back into those vessels, I mean that's also what happens in a stroke is one of the problems is reperfusion injury when the blood goes back in too fast. And so that's part of what damages and makes that leaky gut. And often people who are runners will have...

kind of an inflammatory cascade a day or two after a major running event. And that's because the gut has opened up and endotoxin from the gram-negative bacteria has crossed that barrier into the blood and it'll go to your weak spot wherever that is. So, know, in Parkinson's, that can be the brain. So you get brain inflammation.

Natalie Tysdal (11:53)

Wow, yeah.

That is, it's fascinating to me because I had a friend who had a husband with Parkinson's and he was an athlete. I mean, like, I think he did triathlons and I doubt she's even considered it. So I'm very anxious to see in the research that you've done in this paper if there's a connection amongst other things with that.

Martha Carlin (12:20)

Well, I just, over the years, I've interviewed so many people with Parkinson's, I'll kind of ask them to tell me their story, but if they don't say anything about exercise, I'll often ask, and I'm really surprised at the number of people who have done marathons. And that's also a very pounding, know, a beating on the body as well.

Natalie Tysdal (12:38)

Yeah.

Sure, yeah, we think we're doing good with that extreme exercise. let's talk about other things though. ⁓ Other illnesses, I know ⁓ anxiety is one thing, ⁓ just illnesses in general. But give me some other examples of where someone might be sick and go, wait a minute, the gut could have something to do with that.

Martha Carlin (13:03)

So the pioneers in the field of that gut-brain connection are scientists from the University College Cork in Ireland. They actually have a book called Psychobiotic Revolution, which is so interesting. And it's written pretty well for the average person who's not a scientist to understand this connection. So many of those hormones, neurotransmitters, and peptides are actually made in our gut.

or the precursors to them are made in the gut. So, amino acids like tyrosine, tryptophan, and phenylalanine are made by bacteria in the gut, or we have to get them from food. And so, what happens, what can happen is, stress runs the gambit. So when most people think of stress, they think, it's my tough day at the job, my boss, I've got too much on my list, but there's all these other stressors, like,

you know, back to the exercise, metabolic stress, that type of exercise is metabolic stress. You've got ⁓ emotional stress like grief, loss, any kind of... ⁓

you know, what we went through during COVID is a stressor. know, those kinds of stress will signal and will make these stress hormones, but then what they do is feed bacteria in the gut that thrive on those stress hormones. And so then you get more of those bugs, they send signals to the brain and say, make more. And so you get this loop going. And so if you focus on the gut,

Natalie Tysdal (14:19)

Yeah. Yeah.

Martha Carlin (14:46)

and settling that back down, then what you can do is kind of break that loop of what's going on in the communication from the gut and the brain. But, you know, also cancer, so they've shown, ⁓ and this is pretty well established now, that an oral bacteria called fusobacterium nucleatum,

⁓ is one of the primary causes of colon cancer. So that bacteria getting into the colon, ⁓ colonizing the walls, you know, if there's loss of barrier integrity, it gets into the barrier and causes colon cancer. ⁓ And there is a connection to another oral ⁓ bacteria called...

porphyrmonous gingivalis, which is the gum disease one, and that's connected. They found that in the brains of people with Alzheimer's. So you could just about look at any disease state or even mental health state that somebody's got, bipolar, like that, schizophrenia. They're starting to connect what's going on in the gut.

to all of these different things through the metabolism of different bacteria and the interaction with the gut and the brain and the body.

Natalie Tysdal (16:07)

So knowing that, having the information, I'm all about the knowledge, then what do you do? You know, some bacteria, you're talking about the bad ones, we connect them with the good ones or balance them. Like what's a normal person to do to just avoid or be healthy?

Martha Carlin (16:23)

Well, so that's the tricky part because a lot of people always, well, should I go get, you know, my microbiome sequenced or stuff? most people, most health practitioners don't really know what to do with that. Or they often try to go the antibiotic route, which, you know, can be more troublesome and cause more issues down the road. What I do say, like these connections to oral health are very important. So good oral health,

making sure that you are brushing your teeth, but pay attention to your toothpaste and make sure it's not a toothpaste that has, ⁓ like some of our toothpaste and mouth washes have something called quaternary ammonium compounds in them. Or if they're saying, kill all the germs, like ⁓ Lysol mouthwash or that. That's actually very damaging to that protective layer. So you don't want...

You don't want toothpaste like that, but you want it to be here. Yeah.

Natalie Tysdal (17:22)

You don't want to clean your whole mouth out. It'll smell good for a moment,

but it's like an antibiotic. It's just like washing everything, even the good stuff, right?

Martha Carlin (17:31)

We

need the good stuff in there. But like I use these little wooden dental picks after I eat. If you're not someplace where you can brush after you eat, you want to just rinse your mouth. So good dental health, getting rid of ⁓ root canals, root canals or metal fillings, those have a tendency to feed a certain profile in the mouth. I've actually become really good friends with a couple of dentists who do a lot of work in this area and have had

Natalie Tysdal (17:37)

Yeah.

get there.

Martha Carlin (18:00)

crazy results with you know people with cancer who fixed their teeth and their cancer turned around.

Natalie Tysdal (18:06)

That's fascinating. I just did an interview with a

biological dentist and then I just got a recommendation for someone here in Colorado for this very reason. It's fascinating and important. What type of toothpaste do you use, by the way, since we're talking about that? I don't want to miss that.

Martha Carlin (18:25)

⁓ I use a toothpaste by Himalaya, but I use like a tiny, tiny amount of it. And then I also, like once a week I use, I don't know the name of it. It's like a two, it's two tubes. It's by a company called Frontiers and it makes chlorine dioxide, I think in your mouth. But I use that about once a week. ⁓

Natalie Tysdal (18:32)

Okay.

Okay.

interesting. Okay.

Okay. But

basically you just don't want something like tradition or most traditional toothpaste. Not good.

Martha Carlin (18:59)

You

just have to, you really have to look at the ingredients because I have been very focused in the last three or four months on these quaternary ammonium compounds that are in so many of our cleaners because that lining, that very important lining is damaged and our cellular membranes are damaged by those cleaners. And so, you know, just being mindful of that sort of thing and being mindful of the food that you eat, know, eating.

Natalie Tysdal (19:09)

well.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, and that's what I want to talk

about next is I don't want to overwhelm people so much that they think there's too many things for me to remember. I just it's too hard. So if we're just simplifying this, but giving them specifics when we can, giving those listening, what are some of the foods to avoid and to eat more of?

Martha Carlin (19:47)

So, know, sort of back to if you're at that phase where you need to restore your lining, you're gonna wanna do some period of time where you're eliminating some foods that are fermentable because that's what sort of feeds a bad profile. And there's a lot of different ways you can do that. ⁓ And...

Natalie Tysdal (19:54)

Mm-hmm.

Martha Carlin (20:09)

then you wanna start to add those back and listen to your body and notice, does this bother me? Do I feel worse? Do I feel better when I eat this particular food? I think that's one of the big, you have all these lists of people saying, do this, do that, do this, do this diet. What we've forgotten how to do is listen to our own bodies. Like how does the food I'm eating make me feel?

But you do need, you are feeding yourself and you are feeding your microbiome. So when they talk about we eat a low fiber diet, that's because we eat so much processed foods. But if you eat a more whole foods, nutrient dense diet of vegetables, meat, you're gonna have...

or fiber because you're eating a lot more vegetables. I talk a lot to people on both sides of the aisle. I'm plant-based, I'm carnivore. ⁓ The microbiome is a diverse kingdom and it needs diversity.

Natalie Tysdal (21:18)

Yeah.

Martha Carlin (21:19)

So

I try to tell people don't be afraid of food, but also pay attention, look at the label, try to avoid processed foods, try to eat as much whole real food that you have cooked and you know what's in it yourself.

That's a path to a simple way to start to address things. And then if you want to get more advanced, you can start to follow somebody who is teaching about nutrition. I love Terri Walls. She actually reversed her own MS through a nutrient-dense diet. And she has a lot of videos and tools and ways to. ⁓

make simple meals. She has a ⁓ Walls Protocol cookbook that has like, you know, simple, you don't have to be a fancy cook. And it has three different ways you can make it. One has more fat, one has less fat. And it's a very simple way to do that. I love that. ⁓ And there's a little microbiome cookbook that I like. It's basically called the microbiome cookbook.

Natalie Tysdal (22:28)

So simple. That's good. Yeah.

Martha Carlin (22:28)

and it has recipes

for feeding your microbiome, but that is one that you have to be mindful of. you start trying to cook things like that and you notice discomfort in your gut, maybe you need to back off and do that elimination a little bit and restore the lining first.

Natalie Tysdal (22:46)

Yeah.

What are some of the culprits though? What are some of the things that are damaging our gut? Guts for all of us.

Martha Carlin (22:54)

⁓ gosh.

Emulsifiers. So you you buy salad dressing at the store. You know, the emulsifiers that pull fat and ⁓ water or liquid ingredients together, those are some of the tiny, tiny amount of those are damaging to the gut. Sugar.

Natalie Tysdal (23:14)

And where else,

where else do we see that? Is emulsifiers like salad dressings and mixed products, so processed types of foods?

Martha Carlin (23:23)

sauce sauces my husband loves sauces ⁓ you know sugars yeah

Natalie Tysdal (23:24)

Hmm.

Who doesn't love sauces, right? If you're not

making them yourself though, right? Yeah. Sugar. What does sugar do to the glass?

Martha Carlin (23:33)

Sugar.

So a lot of those pathogens that we talked about, the gram-negative bacteria that produce a lot of those toxins, they love glucose and fructose.

And so you wanna eat ⁓ as little of that as possible to keep your starving them. And that's why a ketogenic diet or a, know, people who do carnivore for a month say they feel so much better. Well, part of that is because they've removed all of those sugars from the diet. And so they're not feeding those bacteria. But there are a lot of other sugars that are in...

fruits and vegetables and there's fructose in there too. ⁓ But it's with a fiber. So, you know, that will sort of change things up. But definitely avoiding ⁓ any processed sugars, know, soft drinks. ⁓

Gatorades, things like that that have very high levels of sugar. I mean, it's kind of crazy. did a, when my son was in high school, he came home one day with one of those Sonic slushies, and he doesn't even like sweet stuff, and it was a small one. And I looked up online and I was like, we're gonna go see how much sugar is in that. And then I,

Natalie Tysdal (24:36)

Yeah. Yeah.

Martha Carlin (24:55)

went in the cabinet and took, and it was something like, I don't know, 16 or 18 teaspoons full of sugar, and I put it in the bowl and I said, do you wanna eat this? And he was like, gross, no. Well, we don't think about that when we see like rams ⁓ on a box or something. And if you can learn how to translate that and start to see all this hidden sugar, I mean, it's crazy the places they put sugar.

Natalie Tysdal (25:04)

And wow.

it is and where it's so not necessary. just, you just don't need it in that, but it just gives that extra little taste or yeah. It is, it's the addiction. That's right. And then you, and you get the people then that they, they need it. They, they crave it. And as soon as you start to, I mean, we all love it, myself included, but as soon as you start to really get off of it after a few weeks,

Martha Carlin (25:31)

Well, it that addiction. So sugar is an addiction, and it's more addictive than cocaine.

Natalie Tysdal (25:52)

you'll find that you're not craving it as much, just like an addiction of anything else. You've got to get it out before you can stop that feeling or that craving. Yeah.

Martha Carlin (26:02)

Yeah,

it's amazing when you don't want it. Like I sort of fell off the wagon during Christmas, which a lot of people do. then, you know, I shipped some of my stuff back here and everybody gave me chocolate. So I have like this bowl of chocolate and I look at it every day and I was like, I don't want it.

Natalie Tysdal (26:09)

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so last thing I want to talk to you about is good probiotics. Now I know you have created probiotics for this reason because you know they're good. How do people know because if you just walk into the store, Whole Foods, Sprouts, even you order online, it's overwhelming. And I think a lot of people get lost in the overwhelm and then they just don't do it.

Martha Carlin (27:47)

Well, it's an interesting overwhelm because all of that space in the store when you go in and you see wall to wall probiotics, there are primarily three suppliers of the strains for those what you see on the shelf. And there are roughly 12 widely used strains. So you're looking at all these products on the shelf, but they're all

pretty much the same, you know, like a tweak here or tweak there, because the strains are coming from the same place and they're, and I'm not saying some of those strains aren't good strains, but they're not.

maybe specific enough. So what we did was we looked at, okay, the gut is an ecosystem. And we know from collecting poop samples and seeing what's going on in the research and in our own data across the population, people are losing certain kinds of functionality and we want to try to restore functionality to the gut. So we used computer modeling to build teams, kind of like if you had a factory.

and you want to build a car, well you want to, you know, the right people on the line to build the car. And so we build teams of probiotics that work together to produce something at the end. So for example, our best-selling one is called Sugar Shift. And so it's a eight-strain formula. Three of those are proprietary to us. Two of them you won't find in most of the...

ones you see on the shelf in the store, but they come from fermented foods. And those have been around for thousands of years. And what it does is it converts glucose and fructose, which is that bacteria that feeds the bad guys. And it's also the sugar that does something called glycation. So if people know HbA1c that they're testing for their...

Natalie Tysdal (29:34)

Hmm.

Martha Carlin (29:57)

you know, whether they might be pre-diabetic or diabetic, that HbA1c is measuring basically sugars coating, glycating that blood cell. And so our formula converts those sugars into mannitol, which we basically pee out, and it's a sugar alcohol that doesn't glycate. So we did a clinical trial in diabetes and showed, you know, all the...

fasting, postprandial, triglycerides. We also measured seramindotoxin, which is now known to be one of the major risks for getting type two diabetes. All of those markers improved, insulin improved, and something called HOMA-IR. And so we went from that, our first formula, to looking at what are all these problems we wanna solve. And so we have one for...

anxiety, it's called Perfect Peace, which helps the gut produce those calming neurotransmitters that help us. GABA is a neurotransmitter that helps calm us down. You can feel that one in about 20 minutes. Sugar shift, you're not gonna like feel a sense of what it's doing, but that Perfect Peace, you're gonna be able to tell.

or if you have a tracker, you'll be able to see on your tracker. Simple Slumber, a lot of people have trouble with sleep. That product was designed as a team to help produce bacterial melatonin. So we produce melatonin, but so do bacteria, and tryptophan, which helps us sleep. And so that one is also one, you'll know if it's gonna work for you. Doesn't work for everybody, but for the people it works for, the first time you take it, you'll know. And we have people with their Ura rings

Natalie Tysdal (31:17)

Great. Yeah.

Yeah.

Martha Carlin (31:47)

who show us their sleep data. They no longer have a sleep score deficit or they're doubling their deep sleep. So really improving on the sleep quality. We have one for ⁓ if you've taken antibiotics that was designed specifically to help the gut restore ⁓ post antibiotic, it's called antibiotic antidote. And we're doing a clinical trial this year with that to look at.

know, pre and post. And we have one called the ideal immunity. That's very good if you've had food poisoning or if you're going on foreign travel, it's got a strain in it that you also won't find ⁓ anyplace else. don't, I haven't seen it anyplace else. It is our strain that came from a healthy gut. And it targets a lot of the foodborne pathogens like salmonella, E. coli.

Natalie Tysdal (32:14)

So important. Yeah.

Martha Carlin (32:40)

Women often have trouble with chronic UTIs, so that can also maybe be a helpful one in that sort of situation because it's effective against ⁓ those pathogens that can attach to the ⁓ lining of the...

Natalie Tysdal (33:01)

So do you go in and out of taking what you need at the time or do you need to get on a protocol and stay with it?

Martha Carlin (33:08)

It really varies. So sugar shift is one, like we did our clinical trial for 90 days and then we unblinded, it was a double blind trial. At the end we unblinded and kept a small group of people on for another 90 days. And so that is one where you continue to see the benefits.

because you are really working through a modification of the whole ecosystem by changing how sugar is working in the body. And that, I mean, that works for energy and sleep and brain fog. I have ⁓ a couple of physician groups who use it for long COVID because it lowers those endotoxin producing bacteria that can help make brain fog. ⁓

And ⁓ but like something like Perfect Peace, I mean you can kind of take that as neat like I if I know I'm going to have a really stressful day I might take two in the morning or you know sometimes I just take one before I go to my yoga class so I'll be a little more zen.

Natalie Tysdal (34:13)

nice and calm, but you can take

more than one. You can layer them.

Martha Carlin (34:16)

You can layer them. We do recommend because they're built as teams that, you know, you don't take them both at the same time. So like if you think about sugar shift, you take it twice a day, but it's also helping you produce energy. But if you want to take simple slumber, you want to take those a couple of hours at the end of the day, you want to take those a couple of hours apart because you don't want to crank up your energy and then try to sleep.

Natalie Tysdal (34:38)

Yeah, sure.

Yeah. Well, I'd love to learn more and I will tell everyone where to find those with a link in the show notes because the research you've done and your knowledge is just so valuable. But thank you for explaining these things to us for your time. And I look forward to talking to you again. This is an ongoing conversation.

Martha Carlin (35:05)

Thanks so much for having me.

Natalie Tysdal (35:06)

Yeah, have a great day.