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Hi, my name is Chris Burris. I'm a longevity expert and the chief scientist at a lab focused on a longevity molecule. My primary focus is to help people live longer and better lives with science. Make sure to subscribe and share so you and your friends can live longer and better. Well, actually, so you and your friends can live beyond the norms.

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Hi, and welcome to the next Live Beyond the Norms Health and Longevity Podcast episode. You are optimizing your gut with prebiotics, probiotics, maybe even postbiotics, but what if those are barely scratching the surface? Maybe your future health is about rebuilding your microbiome

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From scratch, and I mean from scratch. Our next guest, Dr. Shana Cahill, is here to provide some guidance and maybe surprise you all together. A little bit about Dr. Cahill. Dr. Cahill, with a decade of experience, is the director of medical affairs at Novel Biome, a company focused on fecal transplants.

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Dr. Cahill has her master's and PhD in neuroscience, the latter from the University of British Columbia. She works with physicians, researchers and practitioners to advance the evidence-based use of fecal microbiota transplantation, addressing issues across the spectrum of gastrointestinal, neurological, immune and of course longevity, what we're here to talk about.

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Her mission is to educate people on how gut health and maybe FMT can shape brain health, immunity and longevity. Hopefully we can help her on that mission in this interview today. Dr. Cahill, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me.

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So before we jump into your area of expertise, I always like to go back. I like to go much further back. What was it like growing up little Shana? Where did you grow up? What were your parents like? And if there were some event or someone you could pinpoint as the reason you would ultimately become a microbiome pioneer and gut brain longevity scientist, what or who would that be?

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Yeah. So I'm from a small island, the most easterly point in North America, from St. John's, Newfoundland. So a very tiny place comparatively to everywhere else. And so I was really lucky to get to kind of experience...

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I don't know, just a really rich culture, a really integrated community. And my fascination with the brain kind of started with wanting to understand why people were so different and how people worked together. How do people work in an office and get along? How do people go from being kids to being adults? What's that process look like from inside, I guess, the driver's seat?

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That kind of led me into neuroscience. And then from there, funny enough, my master's work actually looked at feeding hormones in the brain. So there's the same receptors that exist in your gut that tell you if you're hungry or you're full. Those receptors exist in the brain as well. And so looking at how the impact of those changing as you age impacts memory and longevity.

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So how about parents? You didn't mention, and I know I have a lot of pieces to that question, so I may need to change it into like three different questions, maybe. But like what kind of roles did they play? Any kind of neuroscientists in the family? What does that look like?

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Yeah, so I am the only scientist in my family. I have a lot of nurses in my family, and my brother is a corporate lawyer, so we're kind of all over the place. My mom has seizures, and she has for a really long time, so that probably influenced wanting to understand how that worked. But she was a single mom, and she worked really hard and ensured that every time we had a question or wanted to, we figured out how to get there.

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And both me and my brother kind of are the product of having a parent who is willing to let you ask way too many questions and figure out exactly what you wanted to be when you grew up without kind of limits or expectations. And so one brother, couple sisters?

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Just me and my brother. There's just the table. Oh, just you and your brother. Okay. Very, very cool. When is it that you started to realize that you were noticing and wondering how people got along at work? Were you struggling to get along with people? And so you're trying to figure this out from like a scientific practical application or is just you were just like, how do people get along at work?

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Yeah, I think it's fascinating. How do you take so many, especially you think in school settings and then in work settings, all of these people with completely different backgrounds and motivations and externally and externally motivated people coming and then working as a unit is fascinating to me. I just, not from a like having a difficulty, I just thought it was interesting. Like, how does this happen? How would we as a society decide that this is how we should go forward? Yeah.

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And in a very weird way, I did a grade 10 project, I think. We had to plan out what we thought we would be when we wanted to grow up and look at the economics of that and the difference between staying in Newfoundland and moving away and all of these things. And in that report, I decided I wanted to do my PhD at the time in industrial organizational psychology, which is actually the study of people at work.

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but as I got into school I realized I kind of wanted to go a little bit more granular in like how does the brain process this and so yeah I think I've just always thought it was cool probably way too early but I just I think it's fascinating I think it's the coolest thing we do as people is create a society and coming from a very kind of youth social space where everyone was kind of working together but then seeing on TV or seeing people who moved

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back to where I lived and their experiences of, of course, more separated cultures, um, all within the same country, I thought was interesting. What dictates that? How do we get there? Why are some groups really close and willing to help each other and some much more separate? I thought it was...

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And I think there's a number, like a magic number of 150 people, right? Like when a culture, this applies to business, we're at 150 people, things start to fall apart because the peer group actually falls apart. I don't know if you dove into that to any degree. Yeah, it's the difference between small and large groups. But it's also...

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how you grow up, how families are centered. So if families are centered as a unit versus individualistic, you pull that forward going forward in your life as how you define how you should integrate with others. And so it's very interesting. You see it culturally, but it exists within one culture depending on the place. And so I find in harsher environments, colder places, people tend to band together more because shared resources make for easier relationships.

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you know, survival. And that kind of follows through all the way. Yeah. So it's just cool. I think it's interesting. That is very cool. Yeah. So eighth grade, if I remember, you have decided that you're going to do industrial psychology for your PhD, right? So you've already mapped out the, you know, the next eight years to 10 years, you decide on psychology. Yeah. 13 years of university plus whatever high school.

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Yeah. Right. What was left over at that point. That's a commitment. I like your style. Like I kind of knew what I was going to be when I was that same age. So psychology, it was really that's your undergraduate. That was really just in pursuit. And when did you start to shift and realize that you in your words, you said you wanted to get more granular and now switch to neuroscience? Yeah.

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Yeah. So halfway through my undergod, I started, like, I did half of psychology, half behavioral neuroscience. And I took a course called Brain and Behavior. And it was on a, like, a textbook, but, like, very more graduate-style textbook, just a book with a lot of words, no pictures, no graphics, just, like, let's go in. And it really looked at from...

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from small organisms to monkeys to humans, how those same concepts apply and what parts of the brain are involved and how we've evolved to that point. And I thought it was like, that's it, that's the key to really understand why all of these things are happening. The brain seems to be the driver. And the longer I've been out of really kind of basic science, I've kind of come back to this and we're seeing this across the health spectrum where we're going more now more to systems biology versus individualistic

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So the brain is not independent of the gut and the gut is not independent of the liver. We're starting to see everything as one whole unit again. But I think when I was going into basic science, it was very much like, well, the brain's all that matters. Ignore the rest. Shoulders down. Who cares? And now I think I'm coming to see that that's kind of not the case. And there's a couple throughout my career of aha moments of like, okay, so the brain's not the only thing.

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And how do I better understand that? How do I get involved in ensuring that we understand that to protect your brain, we have to protect our body? And I think our biggest fear as people, especially from a longevity standpoint, is as upper humans,

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We really do see our memories and our ability to recall how we got to being who we are and looking back in our childhood. The fear of losing those memories is probably one of the things that people hold most dear. And it's one of, I think, people's largest fears about Alzheimer's and dementia and in general, you know, cognitive impairment that comes with aging.

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But we don't really still understand how to protect memories. We don't really understand what memories are. And so that's where a lot of my kind of PhD questions came from. How's the brain changing from the beginning? In the beginning, you have this infantile amnesia. So we're not really encoding memories yet. And then we have this period of strong storage. And how does it store? Why does it store? What does storing look like? And then you get into the aging factor of like, what's changing in the fact that we aren't as plastic anymore? We aren't storing memories the same. And then we're not storing memories.

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And our ability to recall starts to shift. What does that look like from a cellular perspective? Because I think that's fascinating. And I think now, having stepped away from that and looked at the bigger picture, there's a lot more in terms of your overall wellness that protects that system that I think we're just starting now to really appreciate. It's one of the things that you just said, which is interesting, which is this kind of...

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translation from small creatures to monkeys to humans. And now you're working with the smallest of creatures. So I love when we can kind of tease out some cool pieces. Now, when did you start landing on your thesis, your PhD thesis on gyros? Am I pronouncing that right? Gyros.

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Yeah, the dentate gyrus, which is a part of the hippocampus, which is the part of our brain that's most known for short-term and memory recall. That's kind of where we think most about it. It plays a role in emotions. And, you know, when we think about a memory, memory is tied into an emotion or a smell or a taste. So it does tie in there, but it's really the driver of what we think of memory. Yeah.

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And the cool part about this is it's one of two parts of the brain in adulthood that makes new neurons. So our brain is fairly set up by the time we're, you know, kind of in our teen years and we see in that early 20s.

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We kind of, the frontal lobe, which kind of makes us adults, I always say, like the ability to inhibit and to recall, to know that this thing you think is the worst thing ever, you have memories to pull from to say, ah, it's actually not that bad. And when you're working with small kids, I always try to, when I talk to parents, because I have a small child now and parents are like, it's crazy, they stomp their toe and they act like it's the end of the world.

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And I'm like, yeah, because for them in that moment, this is the most pain and the most insane thing that's ever happened to them because they have nothing else to pull from. This moment is the worst moment. And the next time they fall down and, you know...

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skin their knee, it will be worse than that. And it will, they will then say, this is way worse than anything that's happened for me before. But as adults, we're able to compare other experiences and go, actually, this isn't that bad. It's bad right now, but I know what this too shall pass because I have passed other things. And so it's, it's interesting how that happens, but there's two parts of the brain that continue to make new neurons. And so allow us to be plastic. And so, yeah.

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In the ventricles, the upper part of the brain, those can go anywhere. They can respond to trauma or injury and help mediate that.

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In the hippocampus, in the dentate dryers, they don't move. They just stay there. No matter what's happening around them, they're like, sorry, guys, our job is only in here. And they can turn into multiple different types of neurons. But a big part, and there's a couple of theories about how memory starts and stays and is recalled. But the idea here is that it helps allow for new memories to integrate. And kind of if you believe, which I do, believe in kind of the upper storage ideas. So that short-term memories live in the hippocampus.

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they're stored in the prefrontal cortex, and there's a connection between the two that helps you recall long-term memories. And there's a lot to this in terms of some proofs around Alzheimer's disease and how different parts of the brain deteriorate. And that indicates that probably long-term memories and short-term memories are stored in separate spots. But

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The idea here is that we know we're going to continue to learn and we need to become faster at it. And so that's part of why this system is making new neurons and new connections and smarter connections as we get older. Because a good example of this is when you walk into a kitchen, if you see a stove, you will assume kitchen.

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It's all you need to see. Stove, kitchen, death. I am in a kitchen. When you were a kid and you're still creating a schema, which is like a cheat code for a room. A map, yeah. When they walk in, they have to go fridge, cupboards. There's a stove here. Like, the floor is not carpet. Like, I think this could be a kitchen. But that processing takes much longer. And so the idea here is this part of the brain is so plastic because you're always trying to find shortcuts so that you can experience and process faster. Yeah.

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And so that's kind of one of the ideas of short-term memories and this consistent plasticity is we're always evolving in terms of how quickly we can process this information.

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And how did you come to study those? Like, you know, you just had this, you had an advisor. It was like you have all these options and like that's the one. And you talked about it related to hunger, right? Yeah. Like how's that all full together? How? Why? I did an undergraduate thesis in Newfoundland where I did my undergrad. And I looked at spatial memory processing. So how we process space.

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And a lot of that's also done in the hippocampus. And so that was kind of my first introduction. I've always, I don't know, memory became this thing. The further I got through school, I think explaining how people interact with each other, memory became this source because what you've experienced before will dictate how you will experience going forward. And so

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I think that then became the like, okay, so like how do memories work? Why do they work that way? How do we decide which ones are more important? How do we add new ones? And so from my undergrad was very much like space and time and how that's created.

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And then in my master's, it was looking at, okay, so what happens when we get older? Like what's actually happening when we start to lose memories or our brain slows down? So then I had the opportunity to work between a couple of labs. And one of them was a hunger lab and they had this, this rat model that basically was missing receptors for ghrelin, which is your hunger hormone.

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And then it was found that they exist in the hippocampus and the Dante gyrus. And so I was like, well, wouldn't it be cool if we look to see if not having these causes you to have poorer memory? And so the model was very interesting. It had a lot of heart issues and things you shouldn't delete were deleted, basically. So you really need these receptors. And they had really impaired.

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um, hippocampal memory. And so it was like, okay, so the, this was kind of the beginning and really like to age myself, this was really when people were even starting to think about the gut and the brain even being connected. Like, could it be a possibility? Um, and then into my PhD, I wanted to really understand, okay, so like we know as the age, um,

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this is declining. But what's happening from the beginning, like when all of these cells are there, when you're the most plastic, your brain is just being built, what do those cells look like when your brain starts to slow down in terms of making these new neurons and being able to store and

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It seems not connected, but the idea was like understanding what these cells do and then understanding how that is impacted in aging. When we look at from from the opportunity I was given was looking at these feeding hormones. And then it was OK, so like what's the whole story from beginning to end? What's happening with these cells and how does that impact things like memory and also like how can we protect these cells in aging?

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using synthetics that we already use and things like Alzheimer's disease, certain medications are used to kind of boost this plasticity. And how do we peer that with things we already know are good, like better diet or exercise? And could that make those medications better? Could that make those new neurons healthier? And could we actually make that system kind of reboot better?

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So this may have been kind of precursors to what you're going to be doing now, right? Because at first you're just looking at these neurons that are hunger triggers. You're like, hey, what if we just remove those, not really thinking about the gut-brain access? And then you finish school and you go to Aurora Cannabis. That must have been fun. It was. What was your role there?

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So I worked on their clinical science and medical affairs team. So we did a lot of education. I always say like my first foie into medical affairs was saying no a lot. So it was the in-between of like the people who were like, we should tell everybody all these crazy, amazing things and being like, no, not really, because we don't know if that's true yet. And so kind of both training people within the company about what the difference of kind of what we think is happening versus what we know is happening. Yeah.

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As well as creating kind of educational documents and decks and training and kind of going out into the world and explaining to doctors, one of the things that was cool about Aurora is they were global. And so we were working, you know, we had sites in Germany. So the system there looks much different than in Canada today.

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Um, but as well, it's, it was, it is, it was, it's hard to say because the field is quite, um, dynamic would be the way that I would put it nicely. Um, it kind of goes like, it's like crazy highs and amazing. And then like, we're very confused. We don't know what's happening. Um, but the size was very cool and, and we know there's cannabinoid receptors all over the body and in the brain. And so for me, I came in from a neuroscience perspective, looking at neurological diseases, um,

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And is the endocannabinoid system involved? And looking at the difference between, because biologics versus synthetics. So like FNT is a biologic, it's meat.

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from nature. So the idea was even comparing like we had synthetic cannabinoids versus biologic-based cannabinoids and what's the difference between those and is one better than the other in terms of actually treating these diseases or helping to alleviate symptoms. And kind of that was for me a big part of

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The change in my concept about really relying on pharmaceutical synthetics versus what's naturally around and can we use those better? Because our body is better at using those because synthetics, the problem with them is they bind too much or they do too good of a job. And then the toxicity profile on those gets really narrow. So if you take too much, it's too much for your body. Your body can't process it. It binds more than what would naturally do.

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And so that kind of was a good shift in my thinking about maybe we're relying too much on a synthetic version that we think is the right thing. We boiled it down to it's this one chemical we need, when really what we need is much broader. And what's found in nature is actually probably going to be a better fit than these synthetics that we're creating. So that's kind of that was that shift. Yeah.

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We tend to find that in lots of places, right? Like, hey, you can take vitamin C or you can take vitamin C in the form of fruits. And then there's also all sorts of extra benefits that come along. So when does when does the gut microbiome? Right. So when you shift from I have lots of jokes because it's, you know, Aurora cannabis, but we'll leave those off the table. Yeah.

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When does this shift from like, okay, these neurons that are kind of driving hunger or controlling hunger to the actual gut microbiome?

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Yeah. So funny enough, it's not always linear, I guess, would be the way to start. So I had the opportunity to sit in a lecture hall with a group that came in to talk about the connection with Parkinson's disease in the gut. This was early days. I was probably at the beginning of my master's, I want to say. And sitting in this lecture hall, someone came in and the idea was

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What if these neurological and neurodegenerative diseases are starting way before we're defining them? What if it's not just the brain? What if another system breaks and that causes either the support to be gone or the miscommunication between those systems? And that leads to what we define as this disease. And so in Parkinson's disease, 10 plus years before someone is diagnosed with Parkinson's, 80% of patients have the same GI and colonic issues. Oh, wow. Yeah.

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10 years before. And so this was retrospective. The idea was looking back through case history of a number of people who have Parkinson's to say, when could we say this was happening earlier? And so for me, that always stuck in my head of maybe we're asking the question wrong and we're looking at the end versus looking at the beginning. And it's way harder to cure or fix or alleviate something once it's at the end game. You're like...

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Everything has already kind of fallen. The wheels are off. The engine's sputtering. It's way harder to bring that back than understanding what happened before we got here.

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What's the first step? What could be the first indication that this disease is coming? And sadly, even in Parkinson's, it really, we haven't shifted our thinking about it or how we evaluate it. But for me, it was a game changer of like, okay, so like it can't just be the brain or it can't just be that there's this specific, you know, plaque or thing that's starting this disease. Yeah.

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There's something else. It's not just one system. And so that always stuck with me. And this, you know, the getting into the FMT space and the gut health space was the first kind of opportunity I had to look at it and go, okay, so I know the gut and the brain are connected. But like, what does that even mean? What's coming first? What's asking for something? What's the thing that fell apart? And so then this was kind of one of those things, this opportunity came up and I was like, yeah, pick me.

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I got it. I have so many questions. Like I'm ready to dive into this. And so sometimes it all, it just lines up and it's, you know, I always say I'm interested in a million things and overly passionate, but probably way too many. And this gave me the opportunity to kind of start looking at prevention. What's, what does prevention mean? What, where, where are we starting? What's the first thing that might be breaking? And there's many things now, the more I know and the longer I've been in the space that

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that, you know, we really need to start asking about what's happening before, because there's way too many people in the after already. And there's more people headed that way, and it's happening younger. And so prevention and really understanding what the first domino of this, you know, series is, is I think more important than ever.

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So it's interesting that that's what got you in this, because I'm literally preparing for an interview. Today is Thursday. I'm interviewing Martha Carlin on Monday. She just wrote a book called Connections, and it's the journey of her with her husband who was diagnosed with Parkinson's, and she's dug in. She actually started a poop collecting company, just a fantastic story. And

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you know, land in your sphere around the same time. All right. So FMT, what is it? Like, why do we need to know anything about FMT? Yeah. So the idea here is if you've heard of probiotics, the idea here is we know that the bacteria in the gut is important. And so what is a probiotic? Let's start there. Yeah. Yeah. So probiotics are basically specific strains that have been cultivated synthetically and,

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to kind of the idea is to try to match or fill in the holes of what we know are important in the gut. And so we have defined somewhat a subspecies or a subset of what exists in the gut. And we know which ones are probably playing a really big role. And so probiotics have come in and go like people are probably deficient and we know they're deficient in these.

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I wonder if we could, from the outside, give them back. And so the unfortunate thing about probiotics is they're super helpful while they're in your gut, but they can't engraft. They're not set up to live in that environment. So they're transient. So as soon as you stop taking them, you lose all those benefits because they don't stay there.

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And so they work really well if you have a kind of an imbalance or you're trying to help rebalance certain species. But although those species exist already, they're probably just not in the numbers you want. And so what it can do is it kind of fertilizes that. So it allows some support to allow the natural subgroups to kind of to populate. But if you're missing them,

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There's no way to get them back. We haven't figured out how to synthetically get something to stay and engraft in the gut. So this is where FMT comes in, our fecal microbiota transplantation. And so the idea is taking a healthy gut microbiome from a stool donor. And so that's basically...

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you capture this kind of population of the microbiota, which includes bacteria and the fungi and different phyla and things that are and metabolites and you can purify that down and just extract it from stool, which is kind of the part that everyone kind of gets a bit weird about. And I will appease that by, you know, if you're taking this, we actually have a product that we make that's an oral powder. It is a white tasteless colorless doesn't smell like anything we could,

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Science is a beautiful thing. And so we figured out a way to kind of buy weights and spinning and different things to pull out what we think is important and get rid of the rest. And so the idea here is you take this, and if you think of it like an instruction manual, if you have a dysbiotic or an unhealthy gut, you've got five of the 10 pages you need to get this system to run. So you're just missing things. They're just not there. There's no way to figure out what they're supposed to do because you're just missing pieces. You can take a healthy microbiome from a donor. Right?

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which is the full set of instructions, take that, it will engraft because it's naturally supposed to be there. The mixture of, it's not, because it's not just the bacteria, the mixture of everything coming in can really shift and engraft in your gut. And then it provides the missing pages that your gut is missing on how to function. And this is important because the integrity of the gut lining, so these tight junctions that exist that keep all the stuff inside your gut that should not go outside your gut

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If your gut gets unhealthy and dysbiotic, those become looser. So then things are going outside the gut where they're not supposed to be, which causes a lot of inflammation and immune issues. So you need the right formula within your gut. You need the right, you know, bugs and buddies in there to keep those tight junctions to ensure that they're healthy and that everything is being supported. But outside of that, what you eat needs to be taken apart so you can utilize the pieces that are important to synthesize vitamins, to make neurotransmitters.

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to communicate with all the systems.

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And so if you're missing some of these key species, you just can't do that. And so this can range from, you know, small, small, you know, dysbiotics, some miscommunications or a little bit too much of this and not enough of that, which can naturally be recovered from diet and exercise, improving your sleep and, you know, those kind of things. But if you're missing these species, you do really need to kind of have them re-engrafted so you can start again. And so that's kind of where FMT comes in.

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If it's been so dysbiotic or you're missing keystone species, you really need to like repopulate those. And the only way to do it is kind of re-engraft it, which is kind of cool that you can even do that. And like I always say, we're all hoping one day that we can find a way to make this without using it and needing a human donor. But unfortunately, the gut is not hospitable. Not everything wants to live there. And so it seems like you really need to take it from...

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some a naturally occurring subset and then it seems to engraft and it's really interesting because you go you we always say you shift donor like so the recipient does play a role what their diet is where they live all those things will dictate what the gut will look like long term so you get a lot of what the donor gives you but you also play a role in that so that it will function within the space and the food that you eat it's really cool

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There are so many questions that I have, right? So one, I've never heard and never pieced together nor heard thinking about this as, hey, probiotic. And I'm trying to come up with a good analogy. And all I've got is like, you know, using plants as a...

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to stabilize soil in the rain, right? And you can throw a bunch of grass on it. But if the soil is not good, nothing's really going to happen. And with FMT, you're actually dropping down soil and grass so that I can actually fertilize, right? So I hadn't really because in my brain, it was like, Oh, you just take a probiotic and your body figures out how to make more of them. And you're

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And I actually had a conversation. I'm sure you're familiar with Acromansia. Sure. You're probably familiar with Pendulum, who's kind of Acromansia leader. There's also a company called the Acromansia Company. And I had a conversation with them where they're saying actually dead Acromansia, right, is doing a better job at what we think Acromansia is doing, which has this thing like, okay, well, it's not the grass. It's actually other things. It's other kind of pieces. So I

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I don't know if you've got anything to add to that and why you're adding to that. Where's the gut we're talking about? Below stomach, starts at stomach, upper intestine, lower intestine. What are we talking about?

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Yeah, so the first part, I think, I always think of probiotics, like fertilizer, and FMT, like seeds. So you can throw as much fertilizer you want on dirt that doesn't have seeds in it, and nothing's going to grow. And so that's this keystone species. Like, you need the seed to be there for it to help and populate. And so FMT is more like reseeding. And so it's like giving everything you need, like clearing the field and then planting all new.

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versus putting fertilizer on and helping support what's already there. So if those things are missing, no matter how much support them, they don't come back. And I think I totally agree. I mean, acromantia is hard because we know taking external sources, they don't graft. But it's true. We know it's the whole. We're starting to rethink. And I think this is happening because of the growth and the research in the gut microbiome space and really understanding what FMT is doing.

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from a mechanistic standpoint, a little bit better. But the idea is it's not just the bacteria. There's so much else that's going on that you really do have to capture all of it. And I think we're seeing a shift, I think, a little bit across the board. Even the existence of postbiotics is a really good indicator of that because we're understanding there's a lot there and that supporting that more holistically does a better job than picking one or two things we've decided is good.

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Because I think in this field, we don't know everything. And so what we've decided is on the subset of things we've learned, but we know the population is 10 plus times bigger than we've even defined. And so we're picking what we've designed as important off of, you know,

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one or less percent of understanding of the total, right? So it's, you know, are we even picking the right things? Are we picking things that we can populate better? Because that's a lot of this too. We want to measure what's in there, but we can only measure against what we've already found. It gets very meta and confusing, but the idea is that we're defining what we think health is in the gut off of a very small percentage of what the total is. And so you only hear about bacteria talked about, but there's a lot more going on there.

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So I've heard a couple of things about FMT, like Alzheimer's, rats, et cetera. I'm sure you what are some things that would surprise people about FMT that's been done either in a rat or in a human or whatever? Because, you know, it's it's frankly, that particular example I'm thinking of is amazing. Like what are some things that would shock people?

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Yeah, I think the coolest stuff that's happened in the FMT space has been by accident, which is my favorite kind of science. Oh, I did not expect that at all. And so FMT is most well known for being used in C. diff infections. But basically, it's a pathogenic overgrowth of bacteria that does exist in the gut, but that's kind of kept at bay. And sometimes it will overgrow. This happens a lot in immunocompromised patients and in elderly patients.

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It is happening more and more in younger people, but that's a whole other discussion. But some of the Alzheimer's research really started with someone with Alzheimer's or mild cognitive impairment getting CDIF, getting FMT, and then their cognition improving.

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And being like, oh, that's weird. Similarly in MS, we see it in Parkinson's. That was not supposed to happen. Like your gait shouldn't improve because your C. diff is fixed. And so then it becomes, okay, so what was that? How do we redo that? And so I think from a neurological perspective, people will be really surprised at how much research is being done in Alzheimer's, in Parkinson's, in MS, in Parkinson's.

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as well as in things in neurodevelopmental diseases like ADHD and autism, because we're really looking at diseases from a standpoint now from the microbiome space is going, okay, so like, what does the gut look like in this condition?

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And is it completely different than what we should expect? And surprisingly, in more conditions than we thought you would find, the gut microbiome doesn't look normal. It doesn't always look the same. It's not that like sick people have this type of gut and healthy people have this type of gut. It's just that the composition that is expected or the types of bacteria or the level of diversity would be not what we consider normal.

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And so in neurodevelopmental diseases, it's often the gut isn't meeting milestones at the right point. So that's staying underdeveloped, which is then triggering everything else that's connected to the gut to not develop at the right pace. Because the gut develops really young. So about three to four years old, you have your adult gut. Yeah.

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No other system is fully running and going by that young. But the gut then triggers the immune system to start to develop and it triggers the brain to reach certain milestones. And so from a neurodevelopmental perspective, it's like, OK, so the gut isn't getting where it's supposed to go. And because of that, it's not telling everything else what it's supposed to do.

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And then from these kind of neurodegenerative diseases, the gut is probably aging faster or it's losing diversity and composition at the wrong rate. And that's leaving space for these diseases in different ways. So, you know, in MS, it's a lot of neuroinflammation in the immune system.

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And, you know, something like Alzheimer's, is there neuroinflammation that's triggering or allowing this disease to spread at the rate that it is? And that part we don't really understand yet. The part we've gotten is like fixing the microbiome seems to slow that down. So it's like, okay, and then is it, does it work better with other diseases?

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treatments we have to make the body use those better. And so there's a lot of questions as to the why or hows. I think the other part is how important the gut microbiome is in the immune system. Like 70% of your immune system comes from your gut. So now we're looking at, okay, so from an autoimmune perspective,

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how is the gut playing a role in these autoimmune diseases if it's such a driver of the immune system, as well as that connection between inflammation in the gut and losing those tight junctions into, you know, from a developmental perspective, we know the same tissue that makes the gut lining makes the blood grain barrier. And so,

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is the brain becoming leaky because the gut is becoming leaky? And we know the gut is much worse off than it's ever been from a general perspective. I think kids are getting born with not as great of a gut microbiome as they did. And so now we're trying to look at these systems from a like, okay, so like how big of a role is the gut playing? And changing our thought process. It's really hard when I talk to people, I'm like, and the gut is involved in everything with a question mark because it really is. And so we have to rethink like, it's not that it's one super organ.

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It's just so integral in so many other systems. And I think that's the part that surprises people is that the gut is changing always. And if it's changing in the wrong way or it doesn't have the building blocks it needs, disease is the next step, unfortunately.

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I think the one example that I kind of hinted on, I think it came from Dr. Gundry's book. And he actually talks about when he was in residency, they had this thing.

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I forget what it was called, like the glory bucket. And all of the all of the residents were pooping in this bucket and they were mixing it up and doing things with it. And I think in that same book, he talks about how they can take the gut microbiome from a rat that has Alzheimer's or a right and clear out that. And I want to talk about kind of how you implement FMT here in a second.

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give, re-fertilize it with a gut microbiome of a rat that doesn't have Alzheimer's and the Alzheimer's goes away. And then the reverse is also true where they can take the gut microbiome from a rat that has Alzheimer's, get it into the rat that does not have Alzheimer's. And now it starts showing all of these symptoms of Alzheimer's.

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I mean, this is just fundamentally amazing. Talk about, are we talking about starting at the stomach, upper intestine, lower intestine? And then what do we do? Like, do we just take these pills that people are uncomfortable? By the way, I just don't think that. Like, you tell me it's safe, right? Then I don't care if it came from...

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who it came, where it came from, if it's going to get rid of my Alzheimer's. You know what? There's a lot of things people, a lot of people would do a lot of things to make sure they don't get Alzheimer's. It is the most terrifying of all diseases, and that's just a fact. But yeah, so where do we sit and then how do we implement it?

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Yeah. So the gut microbiome is predominantly in the colon. So that lower GI. There is interplay between the small intestine and large intestine. For a long time, we believed that the small intestine was sterile. And that belief is changing. But things like recurrent SIBO is actually now being shown to be able to be effectively treated with FMT.

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And it's probably some interplay between the small intestine and the large intestine. And dysbiosis is kind of impacting the ability of the small intestine to function. But the interesting part is we have microbiomes everywhere. So there's an oral microbiome. And we know the oral microbiome is connected to the gut microbiome. And so it's a bunch of systems. We're just bugs. We're just covered in bugs.

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Yeah, we're bug transportation units. Yeah. We're bug transportation units. Yeah. Yes. And so I think the gut, like from a gut microbiome's perspective, it's mostly in the colon, but it's communicating with all these other microbiomes as well.

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And then you asked another question. What was it? Yeah. So how do we implement? Right. So in that example, right, like you're you're destroying or getting close to destroying the existing gut microbiome and then kind of implementing. Can I just take the pill and add it to my existing gut microbiome? What does that look like?

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Yeah. So I think it depends on what you're looking to do. So we always say from a longevity perspective, if you have a decently healthy gut microbiome, but it's aging. So you know that you're getting to that point where you know there's shifts happening. You're publicly seeing changes in how when you eat fiber or for women a lot, it's like new allergies and stuff coming up because of estrogen changes in the gut.

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So part of this that's interesting is like, if you have a generally healthy gut and all you want to do is kind of supplement and kind of try to get it to gear younger, because that's one of those cool animal studies where it's like, take a young microbiome and put it in an old animal. And not only does their gut microbiome improve, but their fragility marker, so like muscle mass, how bone looks, all of these things, inflammation improves, as well as lifespan increases. Yeah.

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So like it's a little bit of a cheat code or a rewind is the idea in this early research. And so in those cases, you would just supplement on top. I got to throw in here because the whole mindset at one point was like all you need is the blood of a young boy to live longer. And it turns out you just need their poop.

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Yeah. Which is so much better because they'll get that free. I think easier to get, I think more sustainable. Yeah. But it's this idea that you can supplement and kind of help rewind. And so in those cases, you wouldn't want to kill everything you already have because you have a generally healthy gut. All you're trying to do.

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is support or help fill in holes that are starting to degrade. If you are dealing with a really dysbiotic gut, what you've got there is not what you want. Normally what we're starting with is an antibiotic and often an N.I. fungal. And so...

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It's hard because a lot of people who are dealing with conditions are, they often think, I think this started because I took so much antibiotics as a kid. Or I can tie it back to this bout of antibiotics I have. And I never, I never was the same again. So we always say like antibiotics, well, a medical marvel because it really did. It's changed the game. The ovaries has become a bit of a problem.

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But the idea here is that in this case, what we're doing is you're killing everything off. And one of the reasons why people have issues is because their gut doesn't rebound on its own the way that it's supposed to. But in this case, you're getting rid of everything and then following it up with putting in what should be there. And so it's, I always say, it's one of the uses of antibiotics where, like, the idea is we're trying to knock down everything so there's less competition. Because you don't want what's there. So why do you want the new stuff coming in to compete in?

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And maybe not be able to have as much space to engraft as you could. The other is like removing antimicrobial ingredients, no kind of probiotics or single guardian prebiotics while you're doing the FMT. Because the idea is we don't want to dictate what's going to engraft. We want it naturally to happen. We want the copy. And so adding those things in can really dictate what's going to be there.

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And the other part that we would say is like, and then while you're doing FMT, you've got to fix your lifestyle. You've got to do the things that are going to make the difference. That's going to then keep these microbes alike. They're a living organism. If you don't feed them or you don't treat them right now,

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they're leaving. And by that, if you don't feed them, they die off. If you, if there's too much, you know, things coming in, that's, that's going to negatively impact their ability to survive, they die. And so that's kind of an interesting take, I think, from a treatment perspective is that one of our things, and we're educating anybody on this is that, like, this is part a step, but you then have to change everything around it so that it will stay or you'll end up right where you were.

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And so we talk a lot about what does diet look like from a microbiome perspective? What does exercise look like from a microbiome perspective? Because it's a little bit different than how we traditionally define these things, because looking at it in terms of what your gut needs is a little bit different than the numbers we've been giving. You eat so much of this and so much of that. But from a gut perspective, it's diversity, because the more diversely you eat, the more diversely the microbes that can survive. And so it's a

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That's part of this process is that how do we prep the microbiome so it's easy for the new microbes to engraft? And then how do we support those microbes now that they're there to still live long term? So a couple of things. Do you have people kind of, as you described, why does our microbiota change as we age? Right. And if you have my current super simplistic view, you've got a bag of bacteria.

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Right. And and and that bag, I mean, is the bag deteriorating? Like is our like what is going? Do we have any idea? And maybe we don't of what what it is that we know we age. Right. NAD declines the way that our blood is glycans attached to our blood, like all of these, you know, our telomeres are showing like we know these. These are kind of in our physiology. But why does this bag of bacteria change? And mostly maybe it's because my description is horrible.

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I think part of it is we don't even know what we consider to age gut. We know what a young gut looks like. We know what an old gut looks like. We're not really sure what defines or what age that happens at. So that's part of it. So we haven't gotten there yet. I think a big part of why it happens is a change in diet often happens. The amount of medications that people are taking or the reliance on supplements versus food becomes an issue because you're not eating good.

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wholly. And then I think the other part is as movement changes, as well as I think it's integrative, but like as the gut starts to deplete based on how it's being supported, but as well how the body is functioning, that those inner connections, I think, become less consistent. Tight junctions are an issue, but

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Part of it, I think, is lifestyle. I think we just generally change because we know that gut microbiome is healthier and those that continue to eat diversely as they age. We know that there are people who are 100 have healthier gut microbiomes than some people who are 30. But those lifestyle factors and where they're living and what they're exposed to from an environmental toxin standpoint plays a big role, but as well as how they're eating and the exercise they're doing. And there's really interesting, adorable studies in people, you know, 60 plus, that they're like,

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People that do orienteering, which is literally like going out with maps and going for a short walk and taking on the world, are healthier and have a healthier gut microbiome than those are sedentary. And so they're not at the gym every day. They're literally going out as a little group. Like I picture them with backpacks. I don't know. They're just adorable. But just doing these exercises and eating healthier, your gut will stay healthier longer. And so I think in general...

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Some of us start behind the line because we take it a lot of antibiotics or our gap. I just wasn't set up the way we needed to at the beginning. But age doesn't help that. But also, you know, living that lifestyle long term is harder in some cases and especially in places where, you know, you feel like you're just not processing fibrous as well. So you just stop eating them versus figuring out why is that happening. And then that can keep going and become a much larger problem.

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I think I read somewhere, and so maybe you can add this to your cute picture of the backpack, is that if you've got a dog, your gut microbiome is significantly, I don't know if it's significantly, but definitely more diverse. Is that true? Yeah.

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Yeah, I think it's a mixture of exercise, mixture of what you're exposed to. I always say, like, there's a whole concept now, and it's still growing, the idea of rewilding your gut. Go out in the dirt with no shoes, you know, don't wash everything, eat locally and keep the dirt on it. All of these things, the idea of just, like, getting out and being around germs, less sterile, more dirty, seems to play a role in the health of the microbiome and, and, yeah.

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love dogs, don't personally have one, but you love them. They're kind of dirty. And so they bring in, they help diversify your space. They're everywhere. And so that also plays a role. I think we, I don't know, we had a moment where we were moving away from the ruleies,

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sterile, hand sanitize, clean everything. And then, you know, the world happened. And so now we're really back there again. But we were edging on this idea that like, yeah, kids need to get out and play in the dirt. Like they need to eat dirt, not on purpose. Like don't spoon feed them dirt. But like...

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They're out in the garden and they're licking weird stuff and, you know, doing their best. And that helps encourage a more diverse microbiome. And so, and it's, there's a lot of crazy things. Like when we talked about aging and exercise, you get more out of exercise if you do it in a group when you're older than if you do it alone.

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And so there's idle impacts and things like that that play a role in how we age. And I think from the beginning, we have to understand where our microbiome's at. Because if you're 30, but when you were in your 5, 10, you took a ton of antibiotics, you should be thinking about your microbiome now, probably before. But we're here. You're already 30. What are you going to do? Think about it now because you probably started behind the line that the issues are probably...

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were worse. And I think if you talk to people, how many people do you know that have IBS or IBS-like symptoms? How many people do you know that can't eat certain foods? They're like, I'm just really sensitive to this and this and this and this and this. Or like, I can't eat up in my house because something touches something or there's pepper on it. Like...

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We're probably, our eating is a good indicator that we probably aren't as healthy as we think we are. And then really evaluate, what does that mean? And can I today start fixing that? Because changing your diet now, 24 to 48 hours, you see changes in the gut microbiome if you start changing your diet. So it has a huge impact. Yeah.

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But part of that may be diet can only do so much. So understanding where you're at, can you fix it by improving your diet and really diversifying it? And exercising in the way that helps the gut and focusing on your sleep, can that be enough? Or are you missing something we really need to evaluate? Where do you go from here? Can you naturally recover it? Or do you really need to start again? Because I think that's an important question. If you catch it early enough, could you fix it all by yourself? And I think that's something to think about as well.

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So we're collecting poop from donors, right? Yes. We're processing it maybe the same way that the municipality processes your urine so that you can put it back into the water supply, right? So this is not a stretch. You're breaking it, but you keep more components. You're not just keeping H2O. You're keeping, you know, all of the—

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Uh, microbiota, but we've already talked about like C diff there can, there can be challenging bacteria in there. How do we, how do we kind of know that that peel we're taking doesn't, is, you know, isn't potentially loaded with bad stuff.

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Yeah, a lot of screening. Donor screening is a big part of what we do. So screening even before you get the poop, right? So even before, right, so it's the of the act. Okay, go ahead. To get into our donor pool, about 1% of people who apply who think they're healthy enough

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actually may get through the first phase of screening. Wow. And so part of what we're doing, and it's something that we do a little bit different at Novel Biom is because we don't really understand long-term. We don't know yet. But for mouse studies, we know if someone has a disease and you give it to a mouse that

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you know, doesn't have it traits or that disease can propagate. So what we do is not just looking at infectious diseases and lifestyle impacts. We're looking, you know, they had to be vaginally bored and breastfed. That's where the gut microbiome starts. We look at where they've traveled. We look at their diet. We look at how much they exercise, but we're also looking at their and their family health history for diseases tied back to the gut. So that's GI conditions, cancers, autoimmune diseases, pain diseases, sleep diseases,

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mood disorders, neurological conditions, any of those in them or their family, they can't be a donor. And so, and now just stop, how many people do you know that meet that? Like, you know, and then they have to be between the ages of 10 and 30. 10 is our cutoff because of the amount of blood you take for screening. Anything younger than that, we worry that there's not enough blood. It's a lot. You suck the life out of them so you can get their poop. We already talked about that. Is it the blood or the poop that we need? Yeah.

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Yeah. And it's this amount of screening. So we do this screening, about 1% of people pass that. If they pass that, then we do blood, stool, and urine screening. And that's looking for things that are pathogenic and general health and wellness markers. And so there, that's redone every 90 days. So we don't release product unless we have screening from the beginning of the 90 days in the end. And that's...

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We say like nothing's changed in that 90 days. And if they fail this, they're out. And some of the most healthy people, unfortunately, are carriers for things. They don't. They are completely well.

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But they carry something. So they may carry a multidrug-resistant organism. They may be a carrier for H. pylori. So they don't have any cyst symptoms. And from face-to-face, you would never know. But we test them. And so that removes people from the pool. Once they do that, then they do a physical exam with our doctor to ensure that everything they've said is true, that they look healthy, that they're within the weight range that's required.

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And then every time they donate, they do a mini health screener. And then every 90 days, they get the blood, stool, and urine again. So it's, you know, we're trying to keep an eye on everything at all times. And we go by the philosophy. We keep a really small motivated pool versus a large pool that donates kind of sporadically. And this allows us to know what's going on.

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And their donations, are they done in your office? Like, do they ship it in? Like, what is that? And how often, you mentioned kind of a time frame, are they just donating all their stool? Like, this seems like a good gig, maybe. Yeah.

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So they have to be local tasks. So we are in the Fraser Valley region of British Columbia. So small little area, about two hours outside of Vancouver. And so they're local tasks. We actually have a driver that goes to their house. We have a regulated fridge that lives at their house. And there's a whole system and paperwork and stuff. But this way, they don't have to come to us. And so that allows to kind of ease that process.

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Um, and then as well, they, um, they, they donate as much as they want to. We have like, you know, the more they donate, then the, you know, they get incentivized to do those things. And so that helps us keep the pool small. I'd rather have a smaller donor pool that I know everything about. Like I know, you know, where they, if they sneezed today, um, versus having a huge one and missing things. And so that's kind of the way that we, we kind of roll is keep it small and keep it consistent. Yeah.

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So so what, you know, part of me is like, as we've described this, you know, removing Alzheimer's from Alzheimer's rats, making you more youthful, living longer. Like, I feel like this should be part of my stack. Why shouldn't it be part of my stack? And is that something like down down the road? You think this might be part of people's whatever longevity stack on a regular basis?

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I think it will. I think it makes the most sense. I think out of all the things that people are doing, all of the things you're putting in your body, guess what processes them? Guess what takes them apart and ensures you're allowed to use them? You can use them effectively. I think this will help other treatments. We know even pairing it with stem cells. We know FMT makes stem cells more effective. We see it in cancer treatments. Yeah.

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Patients that are non-responsive to certain cancer treatments will become responsive to them by changing their gut microbiome. Improving the gut microbiome during chemo and radiation will ask people to do it for longer, which makes those treatments more effective. Helps people recover post-chemo because we know the gut is completely destroyed after that. So that really helps with longevity.

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afterwards. So I think we're learning more that it should be used more than not. There's many hills to climb. Unfortunately, the current system is set up for synthetics, not for biologics. So across the board, if you're working in a biologic space, it makes it a lot harder because how do you prove that something is consistent when the goal is it not to be consistent?

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Every donor is a little bit different. The idea is that the makeup is going to be different. So, you know, we keep heightening the safety. We keep making it. You know, and I do truly believe in this, that like FMT should be made like any other drug. It should be made in a space that if the rare was an issue, we could recall it. That there's no crosstalk. That it's made that we as people are impacting the product so that, you know, we make all of our stuff in clean rooms, which is basically like.

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high airflow spaces so that we aren't adding to it. So I believe in that. I think that's where the field has moved more towards that kind of systemized space. Unfortunately, like there's always going to be differences in a standard pharmaceutical. Some of the stuff that they don't allow in a standard pharmaceutical, you want in FMT.

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And so it's the fight part of the fight right now is like, how do we educate from a regulatory standpoint is what's actually important for safety? What's actually important for efficacy? And how do we get those two things to meet so that we can fit in this current model? And so it's I think we'll see it more. I think one of the encouraging thing for me from 2013 to 2023, we went from 30 clinical trials running to over 300. Yeah.

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which if you've ever worked in the clinical transplant, does not happen. There's not one drug that goes from 30 to 300 and across the board what is being studied in. So we are getting close. I think this will be the thing that we'll start seeing as more of a preventative thing. I think we'll start looking at it from a,

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We think the gut is playing a role in this, so let's go there first. Let's fix that and see now are we going to respond to everything else we think should work. And some of the stuff I think that we logically have always thought was part of a disease, maybe the body just can't use that version we're giving it because the gut microbiome is toast. And so could some of these medications that logically made sense, they made sense in a lab.

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and then you put them in humans and they didn't work. Could this be that our body just wasn't able to use it properly? And so I think we have to rethink a lot of the other questions we've asked once we start solving the thing that's taking everything in part and allowing us to use it. I think that's the part that I think is fascinating is that we never thought about how are the drugs being used.

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And what happens if the system that uses the drugs is broken. And so I have a big hope. And I think it'll be in the short term versus the long term only because the field is growing and there's a lot of pushback to be like, if this is working, why? How many clinical trials do we have to do? And how do we get more companies doing this so that it's not price-free?

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And that's a part of what we're seeing right now is some of the approved products are just really expensive. And so it becomes cost prohibitive. And so it's like, can we make this more accessible? And I think that's kind of why we exist, because we, you know, Nullibe started with treating patients, and then it became, okay, we've perfected making this product, we've got it to a point that it's, you know,

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We think it's accessible. Let's just start making it and then teach everybody else how to use it so that it's in more hands and we're moving this field forward faster. Because at some point, like, we have to be ready for when everyone goes, oh, this is the thing.

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We should be doing this. And I think it's probably one of the better tools we have right now from a preventative standpoint. And I think some of the longevity stuff, to be more on point for everyone that's listening, that it's fascinating. It is crazy that there's been probably six animal studies that have all shown the exact same thing.

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And all they're doing is taking a young microbiome from one rat and putting it in an older animal. And consistently the changes. And one of the things that I think everyone will find really interesting, there's a giant clinical trial happening right now. And all it is looking at is, does doing FMT improve longevity markers? And the question is being asked. It's getting put into people today. And I think that will be a study we see that's going to really shift of this, like, chronic disease is a problem.

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If we fix all these things by doing this one thing, we fix the gut, we don't see these age-related disease markers go down, then is this the preventative answer to some of these kind of inflammation and immune-based beginnings of disease? And so I'm very excited for that study to come out.

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Me too. I have to ask, have you have you taken FMT? Have you decided that this is something that? Yeah. So in Canada, we can't. And so that's a whole thing. So we are we are regulated by Health Canada, but we cannot sell or treat in Canada. Yeah.

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In Canada. So you just need to like cross the border? I just have to visit. I just have to like come stay for a vet in the States. And so that's, it's as soon as we can. And we, we actively work with health Canada and trying to understand what needs to happen in the regulations so that we can exist from a treatment standpoint and trying to get clinical trials happening in Canada. But that's, I will be the first person to sign up because I can't wait.

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Yeah, no, that's exciting. I actually have so many more questions, but we've come to our time. Before we get into wrap up questions, is there anything maybe we didn't touch on or any sort of summary that you want to share with the Live Beyond the Norms audience?

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Yeah, I think if you're hearing this and going, okay, so now I know my gut is really important. What can I do today? I think rethinking how you approach diet, diet diversity is key. We always say you should be eating at least 50 different foods a week on the low end up to 100 to 150 foods if you want to be an overachiever. And not thinking so much or being so worried about how much of each thing you're eating.

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thinking more about eating diversely, eating a little bit of everything. Again, not like high fat, high processed foods. Those are not good, but real foods, foods that exist in the world all by themselves. Those kinds of foods, eating, eating diversely, thinking about how many different foods you're taking into your body.

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is really important. Understanding the importance of aerobic exercise. It is going to have the biggest impact on your gut, on your brain, on your overall wellness. And remembering that both diet and exercise, it's all about starting and building. You don't have to be perfect today to make a change. Every change you make makes a big impact. So taking the stairs versus taking the elevator, parking further from the door and walking there.

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And building up to going for a 10-minute walk after dinner and then going for a 30-minute walk every day. All of those things, each one of those stacks is important. It doesn't all have to happen at once. The likelihood you stay with something you change all at once is probably like 2%. It takes three weeks to start to get something consistent. It takes three months to make a habit. Yeah.

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So knowing that, you know, knowing that it's still difficult two months in is because it takes three months for your brain and your body to go, we just do this now. And so don't get discouraged at the beginning. And the last one is sleep.

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It's simple. Sleep when it is dark outside. Be awake when it is light outside. And that will be a huge game changer. And we really don't appreciate how chronic disease is tied to mismatched sleep cycles. So those would be the big three. If you want to make a change today that does it, start with diet, add in walking, remember to sleep when it's dark outside. I love it. That's really good. All right. Here we are for our wrap-up questions. Dr. Cahill, do you have a target age that you want to live to?

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I think for me, it's more health span than lifespan. So it's not a specific age, it's how I want to live into that age. And so I think I, having left the academic space, I work really hard now to not be stressed, to focus on my sleep and kind of approach the world with kindness and understanding so that I don't take on things.

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the burdens of everybody else and try to live in a way that like whole live, holy, live calmly, um, and then live longer cause you're happier. That's my kind of goal. I don't have a number. I just want to live well. How long do you think humans can live? Huh? I think we could live past a hundred. Um, it happens. It's physically capable. I don't think our bodies at this stage are made to live that long. Unfortunately,

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So we really have to start thinking. I think we're moving towards living shorter than living longer right now. So we really need to rethink what have we done to our environment? What are we exposed to just because 50 years ago we let that be sprayed or put into the water and those kind of things?

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I think we really need to think about what's happening around us and maybe start evaluating what kids look like today. Because if we want to live forever, it's the kids that we need to figure out. So why does their gut look different? Why are kids getting diagnosed with liver issues? And that kind of step, understanding that. And then I think we can understand how do we cause our bodies to live longer? Because I think we're getting back towards, I think, living where our lifespan may be expanding, but our health span definitely isn't.

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And so I think we need to start rethinking what's happening around us that's impacting the level of disease that we're seeing both in young and old people. And then I think we're on our way to living longer and living better.

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Excellent. Dr. Cahill, what two to three protocols, habits, mindsets, let's call them shortcuts, because everybody loves shortcuts, to longevity and a long health span would you share? And you may be repeating them from just a moment ago. And I'm going to say exactly what I said a minute ago. Diet diversity, eating diversely.

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Knowing that the more difference you put in your body, the more expanded your diet is, the more you're feeding your gut, but the more you're also feeding your body. And what your body needs changes as you get older, as you experience different things, different cycles. So eating diversely and eating and ensuring you're kind of eating broadly really will have a huge impact.

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And the other is aerobic exercise. I've seen it in research, seen it in my own research, that aerobic exercise makes medications work better. It makes the brain look younger. And so I think aerobic exercise is key. And knowing that it's not all about high intensity. We know high intensity is actually can be detrimental, especially from a plasticity standpoint. So yeah.

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you know, mild intensity and being able to keep going at that intensity is kind of, is probably the more important part. And then sleep. That was your third month. Sleep. Always sleep. And I always say, like, I dislike in the world's space where we're going to go, well, be less stressed. And I always say, you should never suggest something to somebody that they don't have a tangible way to fix it. But if you want to be less stressed, sleep better.

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If you want to be less stressed, eat better. If you want to be less stressed, do aerobic exercise. But all of those other options, you have an ability to change. And so, you know, I find sometimes the suggestions we get can make you feel quite hopeless because you're like, I don't know why I'm stressed.

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I don't know why I'm at this point. I don't know why I'm not motivated. And so it's really like, what are the building blocks that allow these changes to be easier and allow people to actually feel like they can make those changes and build towards a better, longer life? Excellent. Dr. Cahill, are there maybe one or two things that you think people get absolutely wrong regarding longevity in a long health span? One of them would be that there's a singular fix. Mm-hmm.

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Take one thing, do one thing. We are a complex creature. And you really need to understand how all of these things come together. So I think that's one of the big things. It's like, oh, if you just take this supplement, if you just do this one thing, you'll live forever. And I think that's, I think that's, it's too simplistic. It's a complex thing. So I think that's one thing. And I think the other thing is restriction.

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We focus so much, eat less, don't eat that, don't do this. But really, when we see really restrictive diets, they don't last long. They have short-term effects. They can really do people feel really great for a short period of time. And then the body goes, and where's everything else?

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And things start to die off and then it gets to the negative impacts. And so I think we have to stop thinking about what we take away and think more about what's important to be there. And I think we just become, we've become, you know, we like to restrict. And how long can you restrict? And so I think we need to think about like, what does that actually mean? And what does that look like?

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three years from now and thinking more about what we should be eating or what we should be doing for the whole versus what we can take away. And knowing that there's a couple of things you have to do. There's never one quick fix. Nothing's ever quick or easy. Well, leave it fun. If it wasn't hard, where would it be fun? Right? That's not how it works.

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explain that to my son. I'm currently trying to explain that stuff to him. Every literally I said, what's the point of doing anything if you're not going to try hard? And he's like, cause you're making me. I can't really argue with that. He is 16 and he's a little bit on the spectrum. Right. And so that is a whole interesting can of worms. It's fascinating. It's fun. It's challenging. It's all, all the good stuff.

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Dr. Cahill, how can people contact you? Yeah, so you can reach out to us through our website. We have a contact form there. And then we have lovely staff that will sort it into who should reach out to us. And so if you've got a question or a topic you'd love us to talk about or write more about, we've got tons of blogs and stuff that I've written on different topics to try to kind of catch everybody up on the field. But you can always email us through our website. And someone on our team or me, because sometimes they just send it to me,

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we'll reach out and answer any questions you have. And if one of your questions is like, I want to know more about this or I want to know if this is a good fit, we always either try to help you connect with your doctor about it or connect you to a doctor who can answer those more, you know, specific health-related questions as well. Any social media to share?

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Yeah. So we have all of our social media is very like general health. We don't talk a ton about FMT on it. We just want to, you know, encourage people to have good gut health. So we're on Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn and Facebook.

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tick tock i don't know i don't internet a lot um it's one of my like calm kindness things it's a smart way to stay calm yes yeah and we also have a podcast uh which is normally just myself and our ceo just talking about things we think are cool in the space

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Um, so that's what our YouTube is. Uh, and you'll see lots of my face there. Cause I deal a little shorts of things that I think I'm like, I think someone should know about this. And then I just talk about it for, you know, 30 seconds to five minutes. Um, so that's mostly our YouTube. And so our, uh, we're buying breakthroughs is the podcast. And so it's just talking about cool science that's come out that we think, um, if you want to learn a ton more about FMT.

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that would be the place to do it because it's just the two of us nerding out. And he's a naturopath and I'm a neuroscientist. And so we kind of come at it from two different viewpoints and try to cover these topics to educate people. Excellent. And what in the near future are you excited about?

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I think I'm excited for us moving towards prevention, really understanding what's happening in disease and trying to fix it before it starts. I think we're seeing a shift. We're seeing a push towards maybe we shouldn't just be treating it at the end. How do we get there faster? How do we fix it before it happens? And so I'm really excited to see kind of more of a belief or support in preventative medicine and seeing how that kind of changes is how we live and how we approach health.

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All right. You can find more about Dr. Cahill and FMT at novelbiome.com, N-O-V-E-L-B-I-O-M-E.com. On social media, also Novel Biome. Is that correct? It's the same name across the board. We were lucky that way. The podcast is Biome Breakthroughs. Dr. Cahill, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. This was great.

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I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Live Beyond the Norms podcast. Make sure to subscribe and follow. Also, make sure not to be that guy, the guy sharing this podcast with people who are not interested in living beyond the norms. If you would like to learn more about the ESS60 molecule, the molecule responsible for the single longest longevity experimental result on mammals in history, a full 90% extension of life.

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