EFR 798: Probiotics, Prebiotics, Postbiotics, Best Ways to Improve Your Gut Health and Why Akkermansia is the Most Important Gut Mircobiome Discovery in 50 Years with Colleen Cutcliffe, PhD

00:00 - Speaker 1 The following is an Operation Podcast production.

00:03 - Speaker 2 Gut health and microbiome have become actually terms that everybody knows. Even just five years ago, I don't think people knew the word microbiome. What we're referring to when we talk about gut health and the gut microbiome is after you eat food. There is literally a factory of 100 trillion bacteria that are there helping you metabolize all of that food, and so there are bacteria viruses, fungi this is kind of what is meant by the microbiome.

00:31 - Speaker 1 I think a lot of people might be acting on more misinformation. What? Are maybe two of the biggest misconceptions, in your opinion, when it comes to gut health, that people might be leaning into too much?

00:38 - Speaker 2 All the products on the shelves are more or less the same. So using the phrase probiotics and thinking a probiotic is a probiotic is not true. But if you take an antibiotic and this strain is able to survive that antibiotic, it can start to replicate and divide and when it gets too high and there's nobody else around, it makes you super sick and actually ultimately it's fatal. Hi, I'm Colleen Cutcliffe. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Pendulum Therapeutics. This is Ever Forward Radio.

01:13 - Speaker 1 Hey, hey, hey, everybody, Welcome back to Ever Forward Radio. I am your host, Chase Tuning, army veteran, certified health coach and overall wellness enthusiast. I am striving for physical and mental resilience, daily things that I can add to my toolbox to make me better, to get more optimized in terms of health span, lifespan, but just making sure I'm doing the things necessary and maintaining the right things to keep me moving forward, ever forward. As I say, my goal with every episode is to help you do the same. I'm so excited to bring you this episode with Colleen Cutcliffe, scientist with a PhD in biochemistry and microbiology from Johns Hopkins University and co-founder of Pendulum. She has more than 15 years of experience leading and managing biology teams in academia, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. Leading and managing biology teams in academia, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. Pendulum is passionate about finding revolutionary, safe and effective solutions to the ailments that can be tied to our gut health and, given their backgrounds in biostatistics, microbiology, biotechnology and medical research, they recognize that the key to discovering these solutions lies within the emerging field of microbiome science. A very special thank you to Pendulum for sponsoring today's episode in its entirety. I had the honor to sit down with Colleen in the office in the Pendulum headquarters up in San Francisco. If you want to check out the video, which I always encourage you to do, we got some incredible production value we're bringing to the show as the YouTube channel continues to grow. Everybody that has followed on your podcast platform of choice and subscribe to the channel. I greatly, greatly thank you. The more that you subscribe, the more that you share the show out, the more that we can keep doubling down on production and going off site and bringing incredible guests like Colleen to life in new ways.

03:05 Today's episode is going to help you walk away with a true foundation and understanding in gut health and the microbiome. We're going to be talking about the complexities of the gut microbiome, emphasizing its role in metabolizing food with the help of these little things called bacteria, viruses, fungi and we have trillions of them, both internally and externally. Colleen is going to be addressing common misconceptions, talking about the variations in probiotic quality and the importance of understanding the difference between probiotics, prebiotics and postbiotics. But buyer beware Supplements, especially probiotics, is a very unregulated market. It is up to us to do our due diligence before we put anything into our body, but this is why I love to lean on brands like Pendulum that have done the research and invested years and money and resources into making sure what they come to market with not only is effective, but has the right doses of the right things in it. Colleen is going to dive into the importance of quality over price when it comes to such products, emphasizing that cheaper options may not be effective or even contain the advertised ingredients. Another thing I admire Pendulum for is their ability to bring innovation to the industry, with many products relying on outdated FDA approvals from the 70s.

04:22 But I really think the flagship section of this conversation is about one of their products, acromantia, and I can tell you, once I started taking Acromantia a couple months ago, the way that I just felt slimmer. I felt like my stomach had way less bloating and I didn't even know that I had bloating to begin with. I felt just overall more at ease in my gut health. Colleen is also going to be helping us understand the gut-brain connection, gut neurons this incredible new discovery, including neurological diseases and what are the most important metrics when we're looking at gut health? How do we measure it? What are the labs we should be getting? Should we be focusing on quantitative data? What does the lab say? Or how do I feel Colleen believes it's a little bit of both, but certain markers are crucial in making sure that you are going to be promoting positive gut health and living in that optimal metabolic health range as well.

05:17 Welcome to the show, everybody. Thank you again so much to Pendulum for sponsoring today's episode. If you all would like to learn more about Colleen and what Pendulum has to offer, I have all of their information down in the show notes under episode resources, and they are hooking it up. We got a great discount for you to get 20% off any of their products by simply heading to PendulumLifecom that's P-E-N-D-U-L-U-M-L-I-F-Ecom and use checkout code EVERFORWARD to save 20%. Welcome to the show, everybody. When we say gut health, gut microbiome, what are we really talking about?

05:52 - Speaker 2 Well, it's a great question because gut health and microbiome have become actually terms that everybody knows. Even just five years ago, I don't think people knew the word microbiome. I can tell you. My parents would often ask me what's that thing you work in again, and I would say the microbiome. They're like oh right, right right, we were trying to explain to somebody.

06:09 So it's pretty amazing to see how, in just a short amount of time, these two phrases gut health and gut microbiome have become so relevant and that people are really realizing how important they are to our health. And so what we're referring to when we talk about gut health and the gut microbiome is after you eat food and it goes through your stomach. There is literally a factory of 100 trillion bacteria that are there helping you metabolize all of that food, and so there are bacteria, viruses, fungi this is kind of what is meant by the microbiome and their role is to help us metabolize foods, and they actually interact with our own immune system, our inflammatory response, our metabolism, and we've co-evolved with them, and they play a super important role in both disease and health, and we're just starting to learn how important that they are. What do you think?

06:57 - Speaker 1 are a couple of the biggest misconceptions out there. When it comes to the microbiome, there's a lot of information and misinformation. I think a lot of people might be acting on more misinformation. What? Are maybe two of the biggest misconceptions, in your opinion, when it comes to gut health, that people might be leaning into too much?

07:15 - Speaker 2 I think one of the big misconceptions is that all the products on the shelves are more or less the same. So using the phrase probiotics and thinking a probiotic is a probiotic is not true. There are varying degrees of quality of products that are out there. There are companies who really take that quality seriously and there are people, unfortunately, who are putting things on shelves that don't even have the ingredients that they say are in there. So not all probiotics are created equal. That's probably one of the biggest misconceptions. And then the second one I think is kind of getting some definition around these really technical terms like probiotic and prebiotic and postbiotic. I feel like they're kind of flying around everywhere and it's hard to know what am I talking about.

07:56 - Speaker 1 Are they all equally important? How can we kind of better understand and navigate those three Well?

08:00 - Speaker 2 so the first thing is what are they? So, when we talk about probiotics, those are actually the bacteria, so that's the thing that's doing all the work, that's the living being. The prebiotics are the food that feed that probiotic. So when we talk about prebiotics, that's things like fibers and polyphenols, and things that feed the probiotics, and then the postbiotics are all the things that these little machines are making. So the probiotics eat the prebiotics, and then they create postbiotics. So there's an argument about which of these is the most important. At the end of the day, what you really want is the thing that those guys are producing, but the really natural way to get at those is to feed them with great prebiotics and to actually supplement your body with the probiotic strains that you might be missing. I think, think, though, probably the most important thing is knowing which probiotic and from whom should I be taking.

08:51 - Speaker 1 What's the answer to that question?

08:59 - Speaker 2 Besides pendulum, I think it depends on what problem you're trying to solve, and I'm sure we'll get into that. But most probiotics out there are really targeting GI issues and there's specific families of bacteria that are out there that have clinical data showing that they can help certain people with GI distress, and so, if that's a problem that you're trying to solve, a lot of people are out there experimenting on their own with which products are working or not working. If you want to think about how you can boost your metabolism and how your body metabolizes foods, pendulum really is the only company that has products out there that have clinical data behind them.

09:29 - Speaker 1 So and I'm excited to dive into, especially in a little bit. We're gonna talk about acromantia. This one, that was new to me. I've never heard of the strain before and once I tried the product and gave myself this kind of 30 day test, it's one of those things where you go oh, I didn't know. I actually wasn't feeling as great as I thought I was. Um, but we'll save that for a little bit later on. I've heard you talk about good bacteria, bad bacteria and how you don't really like to put a line in the sand, so to speak. A lot of people, when we're looking at our gut health, we go I need more good bacteria, less bad bacteria. But you have a different kind of opinion.

10:07 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I think, um, it's a, it's a subtlety. It's much easier to sort of classify things as as good and bad, but the truth is not just in probiotics but in lots of areas it's it's a much muddier line than that and really you should think about the microbiome like an ecosystem. So you're really these things are all dependent on each other. They're, they're thriving together. It's like a rainforest, uh, where you really want the diversity in there. In certain contexts, uh, certain bacteria might be bad and in other contexts they might be good. So if we do the you know uh, garden analogy, where you have lots of plants, uh, in your garden, you might not like weeds because you've gotten rid of everything else except for the exact plants that you want, and if weed gets in, it's taking over and it's getting rid of the plants that you want. So in that context, you might feel like a weed is a bad plant. But in the context of a forest, we need weeds because they are there, they're part of the ecosystem, they're delivering nutrients to the soil, and so in that context they're not actually bad and so it's really contextually driven. And it's the same thing in your microbiome.

11:07 There are certain strains where, if they're just living in your body and they're part of that ecosystem. You're fine. One great example of this is Clostridium difficile. This is a strain. Most of us are walking around with it and it's really not doing anything harmful. But if you take an antibiotic and this strain is able to survive that antibiotic, it can start to replicate and divide and when it gets too high and there's nobody else around, it makes you super sick and actually ultimately it's fatal. And so in that context you would say, well, that's a really bad bacteria.

11:35 - Speaker 1 Fatal is bad. Fatal is bad, it's bad. Wow, it's just going for. Oh, this says gut health. Is that actually improving our gut health? Do we even need it?

11:48 - Speaker 2 Oh, I feel like it's a very leading question.

11:49 So, it depends really. I think, first of all, just going after something that says gut health is probably not the ideal tool, unless you're in a you know a particular store. You've gotten a short list from your physician or your nutritionist. You know that that could maybe help narrow the scope, but unfortunately this is a pretty unregulated space and so lots of people and the phrase gut health can be used by anybody, and so the fact that somebody puts gut health on their label doesn't really mean anything.

12:19 - Speaker 1 It promotes gut health. What does it even mean?

12:21 - Speaker 2 That doesn't mean anything and that's not a claim that requires any backing to it. Anybody can make that claim, and so I think that phrase is not particularly helpful. Unfortunately, it probably requires a little bit of research before picking your favorite packaging. Yeah, there's some clever packaging, that's for sure.

12:42 - Speaker 1 What are maybe some common things that you think a lot of people are doing in efforts to improve their gut health that might actually be doing them a disservice.

12:51 - Speaker 2 Well, first of all, I think one of the most amazing things about our society right now is so many people are trying to do things to improve their gut health. They're really, really interested in improving health and proactively getting out there and trying to do the right thing. So that is an amazing starting point to be at. I think you know one of the issues is what you just brought up, which is that you're trying to do something good. You're going out there, you're looking for the phrase improves gut health. Maybe you're looking at the least expensive product out there. One of the things that Amazon does that's wonderful and harmful is they will show you the per pill cost, and so if you're really you know, shopping, discount shopping for your probiotic, that might not be the best thing. It's not to say that things that are inexpensive are not good, but it's just to say that that might not be the criteria that you want to use for efficacy.

13:36 - Speaker 1 Discount health shopping might quite literally be discounting your health. You really get what you pay for a lot of times.

13:42 - Speaker 2 Absolutely. And again, because this is an unregulated space, anybody can put a thing up, and Amazon is a great example. A lot of people think that if you go to Amazon then you're buying something that's been verified or validated in some way, and the truth is it's not. It's a convenient shopping location where you can get all your different stuff, but they really don't have the same kind of processes or rigor that, say you know, an FDA approved site would have. So, for example, acromancy is a good example. If you go to Amazon and you type in acromancia, you're gonna see a bunch of different bottles show up, and I literally just got a text earlier this week from a professor at Cornell who said hey, I just want to let you know, I bought a bunch of those acromantias off Amazon and I just sequenced them and here's the DNA sequencing data and only one of them actually had acromantia in it, and that was ours, and the rest were all other strains.

14:34 - Speaker 1 What are some ways, maybe some non-obvious ways besides misinformation? Uh, in the wrong bottle that you think people are hurting their gut health? Uh, particularly I've been hearing a lot more about how alcohol directly affects our gut health.

14:47 - Speaker 2 I'm ignoring all the alcohol is bad for your gut health data.

14:50 - Speaker 1 Really, really.

14:53 - Speaker 2 No, it really. It's not good for your gut health and your general health. I mean, there's ample studies to show the negative impacts of alcohol on various systems Like zero good amount, zero amounts.

15:05 - Speaker 1 But are you saying in your opinion you're not seeing as much of a direct detriment to our gut health from alcohol as we may be?

15:14 - Speaker 2 No, I'm not saying that, I'm just saying selfishly, even though I do have a science background. I don't like the answer to that where it all leads us to.

15:21 - Speaker 1 I'm with you. I'm with you, yeah.

15:26 - Speaker 2 No, but certainly you know as the public service announcement. You know alcohol is not good for your body.

15:31 - Speaker 1 Why does innovation matter? Because it seems like there are so many similar products and similar approaches to this model of improving our health that we need as new humans, because humans continue to evolve. But where's the innovation in the products to benefit us?

15:45 - Speaker 2 Well, I think there's sort of two things, you know. One is there's a bunch of products on the shelves. All of us have stood in the grocery store and looked at just shelves and shelves of probiotics or prebiotics or things for gut health and just been, you know, at a loss or confused and, like you said, you just grab the thing that's maybe right in front of you and you're off. So I think the first thing is there has been a ton of marketing and packaging innovation in the supplement space and in the probiotic space, and so from that perspective, you know, I think they're one of the craziest things that I learned is that if you start reading labels on these probiotics, you'll start to see all of them start with one of two things lactobacillus or bifidobacterium. And when you start actually looking at those labels, you'll start to realize that everything out there is the same ingredients, and then the astounding thing is that those ingredients were grandfathered in by the FDA as safe in the 1970s. That's 50 years of no new ingredients.

16:44 - Speaker 1 So they're like these ingredients at these amounts are good and we're just going to take that at face value for over 50 years now.

16:50 - Speaker 2 Yeah, do you remember what phones were in the 1970s?

16:54 - Speaker 1 Did everybody have a phone in the 70s Exactly? With a cord hooked on your wall in the kitchen. Oh yeah, I remember my grandparents' house. We had the rotary phone all the time, exactly.

17:08 - Speaker 2 So that's really the world we're living in. So were those phones fine? Yes, they were fine, but could everything be better? A hundred percent? And so, really, when we ask the question, what's the value of innovation? It's well, we could start targeting things outside of just GI. We could start to target your metabolism, your brain, your cardiovascular health, your immune response, your inflammatory response, your skin health. All of these things require innovation, because the products that are out there today were not designed to target those things and, by the way, they only represent a very small fraction of all the microbes that are actually inside of you.

17:39 - Speaker 1 This concept of evolution is important when we're looking at the research and products and just updated information. But evolution is important when we're looking at the research and products and just updated information. But evolution is happening at the microscopic level here, and this is really where I want to highlight your background and expertise, because when I was learning more about your research, this, this aha moment hit me, of course, this sense, and that's how fast and how long bacteria really replicates and duplicates, and it is evolving. It is having generational evolutions. What? In hours, days, if that. And so, of course, this concept of evolution we need to apply to understanding the bacteria that is feeding our gut. Why is it important for us to respect and know our bacteria's ability to evolve so quickly?

18:28 Some of these bacteria divide every 15 minutes 15 minutes, yes, and so it's fast A whole life cycle in 15 minutes.

18:33 - Speaker 2 Yes, I mean, imagine if you could have had kids in 15 minutes. They had kids in 15 minutes, they had kids in 15 minutes.

18:39 - Speaker 1 I mean that's how fast.

18:41 - Speaker 2 I think, nick, that's the rate of evolution, and so the reason that's important is because what that means and the other part to this is that that division is happening, and with every division, as with everything in nature, the next generation is intended to be better than the previous one.

19:00 So there's genetic modifications happening that make the next generation better than the previous one, more resilient, and so that's an important part of just evolution.

19:08 But the other part is that you control that evolution because you're the one selecting the pressures.

19:15 So, for example, in caveman days, you had to go out and kill an animal in order to be able to eat, or you had to be able to go out and forage and figure out what's going to be things that are poisonous versus good for you, and so you would be optimizing for people who are really athletic, who could go out there and, you know, hunt down an animal and kill it, and for people who are very detail-oriented, who would be able to look through things and not just kind of blindly, but they would pick the things that were really helpful.

19:43 So, in this context, what you're doing is by eating certain foods, by allowing yourself to feel a certain amount of stress, by you know, your exercise, all of these things that you have control over. You're actually changing the pressures and what these microbes are evolving to be able to be optimized for. Now, there's a lot of things that we don't have control over. One might argue stress is one of them. But these are the selective pressures that, as these microbes are evolving, they're evolving for you and your environment and your lifestyle.

20:12 - Speaker 1 I've never thought about it that way. Maybe I'll just speak for myself that what is happening internally directly changes my life externally. The quality of my internal health, what is going on in my homeostasis is going to be reflected in terms of my energy, muscle mass, body fat, immune system, skin, all that. But I've never thought about it in reverse. What is going on in our life and what we were doing and how we are really building our external life is also building that internal life for billions, trillions of these microscopic life forms.

20:43 - Speaker 2 Absolutely. And then, and the real disconnect is that you're changing these trillions of microbes, this factory that's doing all this metabolism of foods inside of you, but you're not changing. So this is where it becomes really important the gut-human relationship. So, for example, let's say you eat potato chips all day long, that's all you eat, and so what you're doing is you're evolving your microbiome to have potato chip microbes and the rest of them Conditioning them.

21:09 Conditioning them to get better and better at that. And then all the other guys who maybe are great at metabolizing carrots or blueberries they're all dying off because you're not feeding them. And so now you've evolved for potato chip loving microbiome. You've got the most optimal microbiome for that. The problem is that your immune system, your inflammatory response, is looking at all the postbiotics, all these small molecules that those guys are making, and it's getting into this heightened inflammatory response, or heightened immune response, because all of a sudden it's seeing this inundation of these molecules coming out of the microbiome that it doesn't like, it doesn't recognize. So you can be, if you ate potato chips all day, you've got the optimal microbiome for that diet, but your body it's not optimal for, so then you don't feel well, you have brain fog, you're fatigued, uh, you're not healthy, you have low energy, so so that's kind of the disconnect. So when we think about shaping our microbiome, we have to also think about the fact that we are not evolving at that pace.

22:05 - Speaker 1 Hey everybody. So, like I said, pendulum is not only bringing incredible information today in the episode with Colleen, but they're also bringing you immense savings and value and a way to feel better. By sponsoring this episode, I really want to highlight again the product I talked about earlier in the intro their Acromancia for gut health. It's one of those things that you don't know how good you can feel. You think you're doing okay and odds are you are, because you're listening to Everford radio and I know that means you're prioritizing a lot of things in your life that are going to help you feel your best and perform your best, and I'm right there with you. But after just a couple of weeks really about 10 days of taking acromancia daily, the way that I just felt more calm, the way that my stomach just felt smoother, I felt slimmer it's one of those things I didn't know I was walking around with such levels of mild bloating and kind of I guess you could say discomfort, because the comfort that I felt after taking acromantia was noticeably different.

23:01 This is a next generation beneficial strain that is essential for gut health. Now available exclusively from Pendulum as a daily probiotic. It is going to help improve gut health. It strengthens gut lining and reduces gut permeability and even increases GLP-1 production, which is great for anybody looking to maybe curb those cravings. Acromantia strengthens the gut lining by promoting the production of the mucin layer and enhancing the integrity of the intestinal barrier. This truly is a keystone strain beneficial to everybody.

23:34 So if you're looking to improve your gut health, strengthen your gut lining and even reduce gut permeability, let me put you on Acromantia and with code ever forward when you head to pendulumlifecom, on top of their amazing deals, of their membership. It's so easy you sign up once and it renews either every month or you get a three-month supply at a time. You can actually get it for less than $50 a month. So if you'd like to try Acromantia or any one of the other amazing gut health and gut microbiome product from Pendulum, all you need to do is click the link in the show notes today under episode resources, or again, that is Pendulum Life P-E-N-D-U-L-U-M-L-I-F-Ecom. Check out code EVERFORWARD for an additional 20% off. What are some of the common strains you think most people focus on and why?

24:20 - Speaker 2 Well, I think most of the strains kind of fall into this family of Lactobacillus or Bifidobacterium, and there is good research around those strains Lactobacillus plantarum, lactobacillus gasseri. These are strains that have actually been well studied and have important roles in not only our gut microbiome but other microbiomes in our body. I think the issue is not that those are bad. The issue is that you've it's like if you I said to you like oh, I want you to build a castle out of these Legos. And I gave you two kinds of Legos and you're like well, what about all the different kinds of Legos that I could be using to build this amazing castle? So one person's got all the different Legos and windows and cars and wheels, and they make this beautiful castle with a moat that comes down. And you're like well, I made this block because I only had two.

25:07 - Speaker 1 Right, it's not like impossible completely, but it's way more difficult and also it doesn't have to be.

25:13 - Speaker 2 Right, it doesn't have to be so.

25:15 - Speaker 1 These two strains if that's all you're working with you've got a much worse tool set than somebody else who is able to have this much wider variety of strengths. Let's get into acromantia. I had never heard of it before discovering pendulum, and I think a lot of people like me. If you're going to supplement your diet with protein, you reach for a protein shake and I for years would always latch onto traditional classic whey protein and I always felt like a little bloating. You know, maybe get some gas or just, you know, mild stomach discomfort.

25:49 I never really latched on to what a lot of people describe of oh, it just wrecks my stomach. But then about three years ago I switched to a lactose free whey protein powder and I didn't know how much better I could feel. I didn't know that I was walking around with all that stomach discomfort, bloating. I just kind of felt like my stomach was just a little bit flatter and I liken that sensation to using this guy right here, acromantia, to go wow, I didn't know I was walking around with that much mild bloating I wouldn't even say like distended stomach. But after just I did 30 days using that, I felt so much slimmer, so much toner. I felt just so much more at ease and it's not like I was really in dis-ease before, but a very noticeable difference and I was floored that it was coming from something that I'd never heard of. Why have we never heard of it before?

26:44 - Speaker 2 The most important strain I would say that no one's ever heard of is acromancia, and the reason you've never heard of it before is because it's never been available to any of us before. So unless you're somebody who's reading primary literature and you know biochemistry news, you you're.

27:00 - Speaker 1 All the time, all the time.

27:03 - Speaker 2 You're not going to know all the things that are happening in the depths of you know, research and academia, and so, because it wasn't available to anybody, we just haven't nobody's known about it.

27:13 - Speaker 1 It wasn't available in the US or globally or Anywhere. Is this a new development?

27:16 - Speaker 2 Anywhere Like this product. This strain has not been available anywhere.

27:25 - Speaker 1 We're the first people to bring it to market. Um, did it always exist and you all discovered it? Or was it just always there and just kind of overlooked and not as important as it actually?

27:29 - Speaker 2 is. It's always existed, but it wasn't really discovered until the early two thousands by this professor at Harvard Um, actually he's a surgeon, a bariatric surgeon at Harvard and he is. He was really curious uh, hey, what happens after surgery that makes people lose all this weight, and how come some people keep it off and some people don't? And through all of that research he kind of discovered the strain acromantia. And acromantia is an incredibly powerful strain because it does two really different but super important things. The first is gut lining regulation and the second is it stimulates GLP-1.

28:04 - Speaker 1 There's the word, there's the word of the year. Right there, there it is.

28:07 - Speaker 2 Yes, the word of the decade, I might argue. So, first of all, on the gut lining part. So I think many people know that you have a gut lining. It's really important. You want to keep that regulated. I think what a lot of people don't know is kind of the structure of that lining. So it's sort of like a wooden fence where you have all these planks. They're next to each other and they're held together by glue, and so what can happen is you can have this amazing wooden fence but then over time and through seasons and wear and tear, the glue can start to weaken, the planks can start to get old and then they fall and you've got now, you know, opening in your fence. Your gut lining is exactly the same way. You have these cells which are these planks and you have this glue which is called mucin that is holding all of them together, and acromantia mucinophila that's its full name. It's the only strain that we know of to date. That's job is to sit at that fence and strip away the old glue when it gets old and put up new glue when it needs new glue, and so it's doing that regulation all the time. And so if you're low in acromantia, you have an inability to create enough of this glue regulation and then you have what a lot of people call leaky gut or GI issues and all of that, and so that sounds like a little bit of what you might have experienced, which is that it sort of helps with general GI from that gut lining perspective.

29:25 The second thing, which I think you also experienced a little bit of, is that there are only two strains that have ever been shown to be able to stimulate GLP-1. Maybe we'll take a step back. So I think a lot of people have heard of GLP-1s because the drugs have become very, very popular. Those are sort of a fake GLP-1. It's our attempt to mimic actually, a natural hormone called GLP-1 that's in your body. So we all naturally make GLP-1, and those drugs are trying to mimic that. Furthermore, it's actually our microbiomes that make GLP-1.

29:56 And there are two strains which have been shown to stimulate GLP-1. One is acromantia, the other one is the strain called clostridium butyricum. And so if we go back to this factory, when you eat food, there's one department in this factory that's job it is to convert that food and then turn on GLP-1. And the reason GLP-1 is so powerful is because it is the signal to your brain that you're full and it's a signal to your brain to not have cravings. So it's sort of like when you go add gas, you put the nozzle in your tank, you set that little thing and then you don't have to worry about it because you know when the click happens the tank is full and you don't need to add any more fuel to the tank. Glp-1 is that click. And so if you don't have these microbes in that department, that set that GLP-1 click off your fuel is. Your body just thinks like oh, we're not full yet, we just need to keep eating.

30:47 - Speaker 1 Wow, I'm floored to hear and I think a lot of people don't know this as well that we create it naturally. If we can just popularize and get to the point that by making lifestyle choices, by focusing on gut health, by looking at things to naturally increase GLP-1, we can get the same or very, very similar result without going that, just hey, let me just go for the quick fix. The body is so incredibly resilient and capable if we just allow it to be, and it takes a little bit of work, right.

31:20 - Speaker 2 Absolutely. And I think, first of all, that discovery that your microbiome can stimulate GLP-1 and that, hey, there's these two strains that really are in this department and that's what they do, and then, moreover, like well, why would somebody be lower missing them? Why would one person have a lot.

31:34 - Speaker 1 All of that is new science.

31:34 - Speaker 2 So that's really just emerged over the last you know five to 10 years. And so that's really just emerged over the last you know five to 10 years. And so, um and so the reasons it happens are partially things that you have under your control. So your nutrition, uh, how much you exercise, all those things can shape your microbiome.

31:51 But, I think the more interesting part is that a lot of it is completely outside of your control.

31:58 So things that cause you to be depleted in acromancia and these strains include aging, stress, uh, change in circadian rhythm, so when you travel and night becomes day and day becomes night, um, for women, when we, uh, go through menopause, so there are all of these things that I mean you can't control aging and you're going to go through periods of stress, uh, you're going to travel, you're not going to stop doing that, and so these are all things that we don't have control over, but we know that those cause you to be depleted in these trains, which is why now, if you're having these issues and, to your point, a lot of times you don't even know you're having an issue you just think well, this is just part of aging.

32:35 If you just give yourself back acromantia and the food that helps acromantia grow, you can get back that GLP-1 stimulation. If we can all kind of remember a time when we could eat or drink whatever we wanted to, we didn't have to worry about it, part of why you were able to do that and can't do that now is you're missing these microbes, and that's why the drugs were designed. Knowing that biological system. The drugs were designed to essentially mimic the natural thing that your body is doing by saying, okay, well, what if I could make a GLP-1 out of a bunch of chemicals? And that's where the drugs really came from is what your body naturally does.

33:13 - Speaker 1 So you hit on a couple of things. I want to go back to real quickly Some of these concepts that I don't think people really credit enough that directly affect I'm hearing our gut health, circadian rhythm, stress, different biological landmarks not landmarks, benchmarks of age and just aging. Can you maybe walk us through a scenario where someone might be out of their norm and they're experiencing gut health issues and they would never think that it's because of oh, I'm not going to bed at the same time, or you know what, my stress is really unchecked. What can they be doing in those scenarios to really connect the dots?

33:51 - Speaker 2 Well, if you're a really diligent person, I think it's been shown that if you can keep a log of what you're doing and what you're experiencing, a detailed log you know what you're eating, what you're feeling, and there's apps that can help you do that that you can start to draw these correlations on your own.

34:08 If you're lazy like me, then you would try giving yourself these products and seeing if you feel better, because a lot of times you don't really know that you're not feeling it. Like I said, we kind of accept that, oh, my metabolism is going to slow down, or, gee, I'm going to be tired, or sometimes I'm going to wake up in the middle of the night I'm going to, then the next day is going to be terrible for me, or hey, after lunch I just always feel tired, and and maybe you start to accept that and you don't even know that that's something to be recording or logging, because it's just part of what's happening Um, or this is my body and this is how it's. You know how it is. And so I think that when you, especially for these products, which are really centered around improving your metabolism once you start taking them, that's maybe when you start to feel the difference.

34:52 - Speaker 1 Qualitative and quantitative, um, how we feel and what the numbers show are not always the same thing, at least in my experience. I can feel great, I can feel okay, we'll say. I think we all know when we're feeling really great and dialed in, I can feel okay. But then if I go get labs, I get physical, I get a comprehensive metabolic panel, like a lot of people do I do now as well you know, the numbers show something different. It's like oh, I didn't know I actually need to work more in this area of my health. I thought I was okay, or even the opposite. I feel not so great, I feel crappy. But then my numbers show oh, my A1C is fine, my cholesterol is fine. You know what is fine, really, what is normal. But the numbers don't always match the feeling and vice versa. Which one should we be focusing more on, or what is that kind of that balance of the two when it comes to gut health?

35:47 - Speaker 2 When we talk about the numbers around metabolism. So A1C, blood glucose those are pretty reliable metrics. The thing to remember is that if you get an A1C measurement, what it's telling you is integrated data over the last three months. So whatever you've been doing for the last three months, that's what your A1C number is reflective of. So you might have had great days during those three months and terrible days during those three months, and your A1C isn't going to tell you that kind of difference. Your glucose spikes, on the other hand, can be very much tied to that.

36:19 So if you wear a continuous glucose monitor, I actually just experienced this a couple weeks ago. So I wore a continuous glucose monitor. I wanted to test our new product, glp-1. And I had this like crazy situation where I had a meal one evening and I was in range. First of all, I don't have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, and so I generally am in range for stuff, but everybody has certain foods that cause you to spike.

36:46 So I had this meal, I was in range, and then two days later, I had leftovers.

36:50 This was the exact same meal and I spiked out of range for it, and it was a dinner, so I had it at dinner time, the same time of day, the same meal, and, um, I was completely baffled and, uh, I was talking to a registered dietitian about it and she said, well, do you think it's possible? You were dehydrated that that second time around and I thought about it and I was like, oh man, I did. I had a kind of a crazy day. I probably didn't drink as much water as I did, you know, the other day, and if you're a little bit dehydrated, your glucose response is exacerbated, and the CGM showed me that. And so I think these are the kind of little tweaks where that data can be really, really powerful. And that's not to discount the way that you feel and how important that is, but it's just to say that you know those numbers. Really understanding what they're telling you and what they mean can be important for changing your lifestyle. These little tweaks can make a big difference.

37:46 - Speaker 1 If we want to go the quantitative route, we want to get some labs drawn. What are the best things to look at or to request to measure gut health? You mentioned A1C blood sugar. I think those are really solid as well. Is there anything else that we can be asking for requesting?

38:03 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so to be clear a1c and blood glucose, that's for metabolism, so Not necessarily a measure of your gut health. You could have Terrible numbers for other reasons, like dehydration right.

38:20 And so are there things we can request for gut health. There are a lot of gut tests out there right now. They're not really. It's an unregulated space, so nobody has to pass any certain thing with the government in order to have a to put a gut microbiome test out there. And then, furthermore, there's no standardization about how do you measure the gut. So, like if you go to the doctor or you go through telehealth and you get your blood work done and it tells you you know your IGA levels or your cholesterol levels, there's an agreed on way in which that lab had to process your blood and had to take that measurement and had to report standards that say that, yes, we all agree, this is the number.

38:58 - Speaker 1 It's correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is it's that lab in that community. So you go to another state, you go to another city, even you go get labs drawn, you could have totally different ranges that show up. It could be different ranges, very population-based.

39:13 - Speaker 2 I think it's more actually regulatory-based but yeah.

39:16 So I think that. So then you have that, but then with the gut tests, there's not even an agreement on should you measure this thing by, you know, dna sequencing, or should you measure by this other, you know, by plating and culturing, like there's all these different tools that people use and you don't know unless you're like deep diving into this company how they're actually measuring it, and there's no standardization, reporting. And then, furthermore, frankly, we're really early in our microbiome knowledge. So what do you do with that data? It's hard for me. I think people should.

39:47 I would love for everyone to get gut microbiome tests and get them over and over again so that you can get your baseline At some point in the future. We will know what to do with this data, but I think right now it's a little early to get too fired up about that. One thing you can do to measure your gut health that's been around for a while is measure your zonulin levels. So zonulin is a protein that basically measures your gut lining health, and so that is a it's just a blood test. So that's probably the best thing we've got right now.

40:16 - Speaker 1 I want to kind of go back to where it all started for you. You, I haven't said it yet, well, you probably heard it on the separate intro, but, um, you have a phd in all of this and you are very, very in the weeds, in the gut of all of this. What have you seen happen in your professional history from when you started to where we are now? We've talked about the evolution quite a bit of of science, of application. Um, I'm sure someone who's been doing this for longer than me, um, that you've seen a lot of things change. Has that influenced or changed your approach to gut health at all? Has it influenced or changed uh, recommendations? Do you see it just happening so fast that it's really kind of hard to say even right now?

41:01 - Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a super fast growing area, and so we've been in it for a little over a decade, and our company has, and the evolution in that time has been huge. So I can tell you, the first year we started this company, there was a professional microbiome conference and they got all of us together. It was in Washington DC and there were about five of us companies in this room. There were less than 50 people. It was like everybody brought their whole company and we all were in this room together, and now if you go to a microbiome conference, it's just thousands and thousands of people and there's microbiome conferences. If I wanted to, I could go to one every week, just in the US alone and so that has exploded.

41:41 And what that means is that there's a lot of awesome data out there that's moving us forward and there's a lot of junk that's getting produced out there. So I think what it's meant is for us is really starting to be super discerning about separating what's actually believable and really rigorous science from what's all the stuff that people are just doing to like get a fast publication or get a quick product out the door. And I think that's also a challenge for the consumer, which is what should you be buying when there are more and more of these things popping up every day? And how do you discern what's real and really backed and what's just somebody trying to make a quick buck off of you? And so that's it. It's just a lot of data and a lot of junk, and we all have to sift through it.

42:24 - Speaker 1 Is our gut going to get reset, or do we just have to keep working on it forever?

42:30 - Speaker 2 So the annoying answer to that question is it depends.

42:32 - Speaker 1 That's the right answer, I think, for everything when it comes to our health.

42:34 - Speaker 2 I'm not going to lie, I'm with you.

42:37 - Speaker 1 I say it depends a lot, and that's a very important statement.

42:39 - Speaker 2 Yes, it depends. It depends on your microbiome and it depends on all these factors that got you to where you are now. And so you know, in the best case scenario, you have an ecosystem in your microbiome that allows you to take 30 days of acromantia, and now you've got. Acromantia has been able to colonize, it has all of its friends there that it likes to work with, and they're, all you know, uh, kind of happily thriving. Then your only job is I have to make sure that I feed the acromancia. So I have to make sure that I'm eating, um, high fiber foods, high polyphenol foods, uh, and that's giving the acromancia the food that it needs to sustain.

43:16 So that's sort of best case scenario. You can colonize a thing and then you just have to eat the right foods to keep it alive. You can have healthy people who are doing all the pretty good stuff that still see a benefit when they supplement with the strains that they have been missing. And we have seen that time and time again with people physicians, influencers, nutritionists who all are really healthy people at baseline and then experience an improvement. And it's because there are all these things that are out of your control that can cause you to lose the strains.

43:50 - Speaker 1 Who has the most to gain by focusing on prioritizing and improving their gut health, or do we all kind of have as much to gain? It's just to what degree? Their gut health, or do we all kind of have as?

44:01 - Speaker 2 much to gain. It's just to what degree. Maybe, philosophically, we can all be better versions of ourselves. So if you believe that, then everybody has something to gain by having a healthier gut. But anyway, even getting a little bit more philosophical about it, I think if you wish or you hope or you believe that you could be in a better future state than you are in today, you have everything to gain. And if you've thrown up your hands and you've given up and you're like this is just how it is and I've resigned to this, then it may be less valuable for you. So I think that what I've observed is that most people, if you can improve your gut health, you will experience a benefit, either in your numbers or in the soft benefits of things that you feel, and so therefore, if you're looking to have a better life, this is at least worth a shot. I mean, let's put it this way, you're not going to hurt yourself by trying to improve your gut health, but you have a lot of upside benefit you could get.

44:59 - Speaker 1 And as someone who has prioritized taking care of his wellness for almost 20 years now, I kind of started my own new health, new me journey yeah, about 18 years ago.

45:11 - Speaker 2 And what triggered that for you. What made you decide to focus on that?

45:15 - Speaker 1 Two major life events. I lost a loved one. There was a. My father passed away from a terminal illness, so that was kind of. It was a little different. It wasn't really anything I could do about it, and it's non-hereditary, thankfully, so that was one thing.

45:27 - Speaker 2 But it put things into perspective. I guess Absolutely.

45:29 - Speaker 1 And you know that's kind of an extreme example, but I also I have diabetics in my family and so I've grown up and I've seen grandparents and aunts, you know, need to inject insulin and struggle with weight issues and other complications that come when that doesn't go checked. And so there was this extreme case of death and also other you know chronic illness in my family. Like I don't, I don't want that. And then I went through a major health setback myself. It was more injury related, not an illness that ultimately, you know, I wound up having to learn how to walk again twice.

46:03 - Speaker 2 Wow.

46:04 - Speaker 1 And so when you have nothing but time on your hands and you're bedridden for quite a while, you can go one of two ways, I think.

46:12 - Speaker 2 And it could be.

46:13 - Speaker 1 What was me? This sucks. My life is over and I had those moments. I'm not going to lie, but I decided to go the other route of all right if I'm stuck here. I'm not going to lie, but I decided to go the other route of all right, if I'm stuck here, I might as well learn how to make this situation as best as possible. And that's when I really began to dive into nutrition and physiology and ultimately led to me, when I got out of the military, to to go study it and put me on my path where I'm doing now.

46:35 - Speaker 2 Amazing. And then now you're really sharing all of that with other people.

46:38 - Speaker 1 I share a little maybe a little too much sometimes, but I do want to share one other thing that I've shared on social media though. So actually, no, actually I don't think I have. I was waiting to kind of get the labs back, and I do now, and despite my best efforts as long as I can remember and getting tested I have not had an A1C below 5.1.

46:56 - Speaker 2 Okay.

46:56 - Speaker 1 Which isn't bad.

46:57 - Speaker 2 Yeah.

46:57 - Speaker 1 I'm not pre-diabetic, it's not, you know, but I'm. I'm shooting for more of that optimal range. You know sub that, you know even high force. And it wasn't until taking pendulum's products uh, the glucose control that I was able to achieve that and it blew my mind I'm trying to live a good life but have a fun life and I was like, okay, that plus this is actually helping me get to a goal that I've always wanted, and I was blown away.

47:22 - Speaker 2 I love that story and I can tell you I have been so astounded by people who, if somebody said to me, do you think that guy is going to benefit from your product, I'd probably be like probably not. He looks pretty healthy. I don't know that it's going to do anything for him.

47:36 - Speaker 1 I think a lot of us can say that about a lot of people.

47:39 - Speaker 2 And and I have been astounded at how many people who are doing what you're doing and come back to me and are like my A1C dropped. I can't believe it. And so I think that is sort of the whole reason that I got into health in the first place and was to be able to make products that would be impactful, and so I love hearing that story, because it really points to the fact that you can be doing all the right things and, for whatever reason, you're just low in these strains, and how easy is it to just be like all right, well, I'm going to take these pills that have the strain, give it back to my body, and voila, now I have these capabilities back again. I've resupplemented that department, I put more resources into it, and so I love that. I love that story.

48:20 - Speaker 1 But also just really how much our gut health and how much our overall health directly affects our mood, our mental health. Long story short. This year, 2024, to you know, here we are now, end of March has not been the norm for me in terms of my regular training, physical activity levels, um, I've had to kind of backseat a lot of that, the ways that I normally train, due to some mental health issues going on. And with that I know for doing this 18 years, if I'm not training the same way frequency, intensity, time type that I'm going to need to alter my nutrition a little bit because my metabolism is going to be fluctuating. I don't need as many calories, I need to be focusing more on nutrition and cleaning that up if I'm not exercising as much.

49:07 And with that has been some struggles because I like to eat and I've noticed that the way that I feel and by focusing on metabolic health through my nutrition, but plus pendulum products, I've been able to really stick to that goal way easier than I thought. And it's also because I feel better. I feel like I said earlier, I feel not as distended I don't have I didn't know that I had so much kind of, you know, bloating and just oh, I thought this was just how I look and how I feel, but no, there are some gut health things going on that has really helped me maintain and that has not only helped keeping me at this normal kind of health and feeling and body composition, but really my mental health, and I got enough going on with that right now that I don't need any other stressors. And so I guess what I'm trying to say is that when we can find something that helps us in how we look, it directly influences how we feel, and that just keeps feeding one another.

50:07 - Speaker 2 Absolutely. But furthermore, these microbes actually do directly work with your Right.

50:11 - Speaker 1 So yeah, I would like to ask you, and then directly it's not just in my head, right? So what is going on then that's influencing brain, health, mood and all the things up top that we might not directly link back down to the gut?

50:23 - Speaker 2 Yeah. So there's two things kind of in your story that I would say you're not alone in feeling those things. So, basically, the gut and the brain are connected to each other. They're literally physically connected to each other through this thing called the vagus nerve, and your microbiome actually makes a bunch of neurotransmitters. And so you might be wondering, like why is your microbiome actually makes a bunch of neurotransmitters? And so you might be wondering, like why is your microbiome making neurotransmitters? Because it's literally sending those to the brain.

50:46 So dopamine, serotonin, all of these GABA, all these really important neurotransmitters, and your gut actually makes a ton more of them than your brain even does. And so if you've ever felt, you know, I've eaten this meal and now I feel really sluggish or I'm kind of down, that's not just in your head, that is literally your microbiome is sending different signals to your brain. So two things the first is that, um, acromantia actually, uh, is able to produce GABA, like lots of it, and GABA is a quite well-known small molecule that helps reduce stress and anxiety. It's sort of a calming, uh, um neurotransmitter.

51:21 - Speaker 1 I'm just going to say all the acromantia I can find, I'm just going to take it.

51:25 - Speaker 2 Wow, um, so. So there's that Um. But the second thing is and, and so there's acromantia kind of in in all of these formulations. So, uh, glp-1 has, uh, acromantia in it as well, and and, as I said, there are two strains that have ever been published that can stimulate GLP-1. We have those two strains in here, plus a third one that we know works with them. So this is a combo of three strains, including acromantia, and one of the things about GLP-1 we talked about that click to tell your body that you're full is that it reduces your food cravings, and so that is one of the biggest things that happens when people go off the GLP-1 drugs is that they get all these food cravings back, and that contributes to the terrible weight gain, but, conversely, when they go on the drugs, they have very few food cravings, and that helps accelerate the weight loss, and so the food cravings are really important.

52:15 And what I recently learned about food cravings is we all have them and we've all come home late at night. You know you should just go to bed, but instead you put a frozen pizza in the oven and you eat the whole thing, or you grab a spoon and you're like I'm just gonna have one spoon of ice cream. The next thing you know, half the container is going actually let me go find the biggest spoon possible.

52:33 - Speaker 1 I'll just have one spoon for it.

52:35 - Speaker 2 Yes, one, you know exactly. Uh, full pint, full spoonful. So've all done that. And then what happens after that is, it's not just in the moment that you made that decision, you kind of caved to your food cravings. What happens is you walk around with that guilt that, oh man, I was weak, I did that thing that I knew wasn't good for me and it's terrible for my body, and I'm just weak and I succumb to it. I don't have control.

52:58 80% of women are walking around with food guilt. 70% of men are walking around with food guilt. Generally men feel less guilty than women, but that's still a lot of that's everybody right. That's 70 to 80% of everybody has food guilt because of these food cravings. And so that's astounding. That means we're all feeling guilty because we feel we don't have control over ourselves. And so when you understand that you might just be not making as much GLP-1, and if you were making more you would now not have these food cravings because that click happens and your body knows I'm full, I don't need to eat any more food. It is a game changer. And so we did a study after being six weeks on the GLP-1 probiotic Ninety-one percent of people had lower food cravings using this diagnostic test for food cravings In just six weeks.

53:45 In six weeks and it was across. This food cravings test tests the four primary types of food cravings, so everybody usually knows what group they fall into. There's sugars, carbs, fast foods and high fat foods. I'm definitely a carb weakness.

54:01 Oh yeah, carbs and sugars, carbs and sweets, yeah All day, and so it was reduced across all four of those categories of food cravings, and so this is really an opportunity to try out whether, if you were to give yourself probiotics that help you stimulate that GLP-1, can you experience what 91% of these people experience, which is less food cravings.

54:21 - Speaker 1 It's such a great example of how often we get bogged down in thinking that it's self-control and willpower and that is the thing making or breaking our health goals. But it might be a little bit of that. I do believe there is some of that mindset and that mental fortitude that needs to be developed. But it might not be. It might be just an unideal gut health situation.

54:46 - Speaker 2 Absolutely, and even if it's half and half, you could solve half of it. Why not work on both? Why not?

54:51 - Speaker 1 work on the mental fortitude. Why not work on that willpower? But also, why not set your literal body up for as much success as possible?

54:58 - Speaker 2 Exactly.

54:59 - Speaker 1 Before I get to my final question, I want to ask, just you know, with your background, um, and what, everything, everything, the pendulum is doing, if you can talk about it, is there anything on the frontier, on the horizon that you're most excited about when it comes to gut health?

55:14 - Speaker 2 There's so many things that I'm really excited about when it comes to gut health, so we've really been focused on metabolism. How do you boost someone's metabolism? How do you metabolize sugars and carbs better through the microbiome and I think there's still a lot more to be had on that front, um, but I'm super interested in this gut brain axis. So this is like 91% of people having reduced food cravings.

55:33 - Speaker 1 I think that's fascinating and, and maybe 92% now with me in the cookie, 92% of in the stats um, I, I, there's all this.

55:43 - Speaker 2 So I started my career actually in pharma. We were developing drugs for parkinson's disease, and when we were developing drugs for that disease we focused really on on the brain, which is where, uh, you get kind of these plaques that form in the brain, and the whole goal was to get rid of those. If anything that any drug that you could deliver that could reduce those plaques um form in the brain, and the whole goal was to get rid of those. If anything that any drug that you could deliver that could reduce those plaques would show up for people as reduced symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

56:08 What I learned recently is that your gut also has neurons and, unlike your brain, where we all know you kind of get what you get and so if you kill them they don't come back, the neurons in your they actually regenerate, they're constantly regenerating and so, remember I said, we make all these neurotransmitters. There's also these neurons in our gut that are benefiting from those neurotransmitters and then so, first of all, they continue to uh regenerate, unlike your brain, but then, second of all these plaques that show up in the brain, it's been shown that actually they first show up in those gut neuronal cells, and so it's possible that they are the first ones to have a problem. They send a signal to the brain, and then you start to see it in the brain.

56:50 - Speaker 1 Issues in the brain are secondary to the gut.

56:52 - Speaker 2 That's the theory right now, and so I think it's super cool if you could target the gut neurons, if that's actually the way to target things like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and autism so these things that we've always thought of as neuronal diseases if they actually do start in the gut.

57:08 - Speaker 1 I am way more intrigued than that now. That's incredible. But also I shared with you earlier my father passed away from ALS.

57:15 - Speaker 2 That's another huge one, yeah.

57:16 - Speaker 1 That is incredible information, I think, for research and potential help with that as well.

57:24 - Speaker 2 Absolutely. Yeah, wow, there are so many people doing amazing research in this field that are applicable in ways that you know we would never have thought of even just 10 years ago, and so, really, the name of the game now is what's real and what's kind of you know shady business. The name of the game now is what's real and what's kind of you know shady business, and so, um, I'm grateful for you as being one of the people that's bringing real science and real knowledge to people, because, uh, for most of us, we're not spending time reading through all this literature and sifting through stuff and figuring out for ourselves. We need other people to help guide us, and so I think this is such a valuable thing that you're bringing.

58:00 - Speaker 1 Thank you, thank you.

58:01 Well, everyone, if you want to check out more of what Colleen and Pendulum has to offer, I have it all linked for you down in the video notes and show notes and we've got a great offer for you guys to check out as well, to get a great discount Again.

58:12 I personally have been using a couple months now, before we ever sat down, three of your products and I'll link all the ones I personally have been using and, like I said in the episode, I've had fantastic results and I'm a person that is pretty dialed in overall. But to see and feel a difference, especially in an area for my metabolic health, my A1C, that has been very important to me over the years, cause that is something that if I if I do kind of let my attention slip, I know that can lead to something that I'm genetically predisposed to. So I was amazed to see that A1C come down below 5.1 and amazed to see and feel an incredible difference and it has helped me move forward in my life and my wellness. And so, colleen, I'll ask you the final question Ever forward? When you hear those words, what does that mean to you? How would you say you live a life ever forward?

59:04 - Speaker 2 Well, I think ever forward means that we are always making forward progress and we are hopeful that we can live in a future world, that that health is how I wanted to make my mark. And so, every day, getting to wake up and spend all my day trying to create products that are going to help people, and then getting to hear these stories of people who are actually benefiting from them and how do we get it to where we can help millions of people improve their health that, for me, is ever forward. We are moving forward in health and in bringing new tools to people, and it's exciting and a gift to be able to do that.

59:45 - Speaker 1 And look if our gut microbes are advancing in life and moving forward every 15 minutes.

59:50 - Speaker 2 You know we got to get on their level.

59:51 - Speaker 1 We got to start setting a 15 minute timer and go am I better? Now Am I better now I mean maybe not, maybe not, but um, this has been incredible. Thank you so much and seriously, I've been loving pendulum products and they've uh, they've helped my, my daily wellness in some ways that I thought I was just at. I thought this is it, so thank you.

01:00:11 - Speaker 2 Awesome, thank you.

01:00:13 - Speaker 1 For more information on everything you just heard, make sure to check this episode show notes or head to everforwardradio.com