Gut Bacteria and Detoxification with Dr. Grace Liu: Rational Wellness Podcast 104

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Dr. Grace Liu, the Gut Goddess, discusses Gut Bacteria and Detoxification with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
1:20 Gut bacteria play a role in detoxification, esp. since our air, water, and food is so contaminated.
2:03 Gut bacteria also produce toxins. They transform arsenic into a more dangerous form. Gut bacteria can also produce TMAO from food or supplements containing carnitine or choline, which Dr. Stanley Hazen from the Cleveland Clinic has argued is a marker for heart disease. Dr. Liu points out that vegans don’t eat foods that have a lot of carnitine (like red meat) or choline (like egg yolks) or contain TMAO (like fish), but yet still get heart attacks, strokes, and embolic events. Our gut bacteria protect us and create this non-leaky permeability of the gut lining.
6:04 We have evolved being close to the earth and eating food off the earth, covered with soil, which contains soil-based bacteria. We used to ferment foods to preserve them, since we had no refrigeration, which contain lactobacilli and other acid-producing bacteria. But now we refrigerate our food and don’t eat as much fermented food and due to c-sections we no longer get our flora from our Mom during delivery. This has created a generation without a firewall of protection. Also, during childbirth, many mothers are given an IV with pitocin and antibiotics to prevent the risk of sepsis or infection and this has a negative effect on our microbiota. We also get exposed to antibiotics fed to the cattle and sprayed on the grains and other crops. We also get exposed to glyphosate, which is an herbicide and pesticide and it has been shown to cause a kind of soil dysbiosis. Our guts are reflecting our earth right now.
9:53 People who have a healthy gut flora, like hunter gatherers and people living in very rural communities and in Europe, have very few of the unhealthy, putrefying bacteria, like Klebsiella, Citrobacter, and E. Coli. These unhealthy bacteria produce TMAO and other toxins that can damage our heart or cause cancer.
12:07 Dr. Liu talked about a genetic obesity study where they used a diet very high in prebiotics and they found that this would grow good flora and lowered their BMI.
13:29 Dr. Liu likes to look at various markers to assess gut health, including urinary organic acids, like Cresol, which comes from Claustrium Diffocele. She likes to look at other fungal markers, including Furans and tartaric acid. There are 9 markers on a standardurinary organic acids profile, such as the one from Great Plains. She will also look at the Oxalates that tells a lot about fungal overgrowth. When looking at the microbiome, Dr. Liu focuses on what she calls the A,B,C s, which stands for Akkermansia, Bifido (like Bifido longum, lactis, and infantim), and Clostridiales (butyrate producers like F prausnitzi, Roseburia inulinovorans, Eubacteria etc) and Christiansenella. Healthy people like hunter gatherers, people without disease, and centenarians have lots of these bacteria in their guts.
On the other hand, Akkermansia eats mucous and if there are high amounts of it, this indicates that the there is too much mucous in the gut and this is not healthy. There are also good and bad forms of Bifido bacteria. The bad Bifido tend to eat a lot of sugar and carbs and they are not foundational bifido. The good bifido include strains like bifido longum, bifido infantis, and bifido lactis.
16:50 I commented that when we consume probiotics by mouth, they are only temporary visitors, so I questioned how we can change our gut bacteria to have more Akkermansia or whichever other strains you’re trying to promote by consuming probiotics? But Dr. Liu disagreed and stated that our good gut flora follow us everywhere and some come in a pill and some come in food and they are not just transient visitors. The species that are core to our guts are our Mucosa-Associated Microbiota (MAM) and they eat the mucous and they do become permanent visitors and its called anchoring and engrafting.
21:35 I asked if it is more effective to consume the bacteria as probiotics or to consume perbiotic fuel to cause those bacteria to grow that we’re trying to promote? Dr. Liu pointed out that some bacteria eat fiber like inulin or oligosaccharides, but when she starts working with a patient who is suffering with a gut disorder like IBS or inflammatory bowel disease, she won’t use fiber at the beginning because it might aggravate their symptoms. But she will use polyphenols, since only the good gut bacteria can eat these and the pathogenic flora have not adapted to eat polyphenols.
23:31 The strains of gut bacteria that help us to detoxify heavy metals and arsenic and xenoestrogens, etc., are the ABCs, such as the Bifido longum and L. Rhamnosus, that are in high amounts in the Bifido Maximus probiotic formula that Dr. Liu has formulated. There is a study from Dr. Gregor Reid where they found that probiotic yogurt containing L. Rhamnosus GR1 reduced mercury by 36% and arsenic by 78% in pregnant women in Tanzania. Here is a Townsend Letter article discussing this issue and this study: Probiotics vs. Heavy Metals: A Win for the Good Guys. Dr Liu’s protocol for removing toxins is glutathione, binders like Quicksilver Ultra Binder, which has a bunch of different resins like charcoal, clay, sulfur-based resins, and a biological one called chitin, along with probiotics and polyphenols. Dr. Liu mentioned that if estradiol is higher, it’s a marker for stress, esp. for gut stress, due to aromatase. To correct it, Dr. Liu will use DIM and botanicals like olive leaf and bitter melon.
34:14 High blood sugar is just leaky gut, according to Dr. Liu. She cited the work of Dr. Patrice Cani, such as this paper: Gut microbes and health: A focus on the mechanisms linking microbes, obesity, and related disorders.
37:19 Some probiotics can help us to detoxify mycotoxins from mold. esp. soil-based probiotics, but also B. Longum and L. Ramnosus. Dr. Liu says that she likes the Shoemaker and some of the other Functional Medicine protocols for eliminating mycotoxins, but she stressed the importance of having a good microbiome, which help us to lower mycotoxin concentrations. Certain botanicals can shut off the genetic expression translation for mycotoxins. B. longum and L. Ramnosus also degrade glyphosate and help with heavy metal remediation.
40:42 Dr. Liu would ideally like her patients to have both a DNA based stool test like GI Map from Diagnostic Solutions or Thryve and also a culture based stool test, since they both provide different information that can be helpful. Dr. Liu explained that she works with clients with four phases and she goes big to small. She starts by focusing on parasites, helminths, and eukaryotes, then she goes fungal, then she focuses on bacterial, SIBO, and finally she looks at viral, spirochetes, and phages. E. Coli is a major problem these days, but there are also good forms of E. Coli and one form of E. Coli probiotics can be used to treat SIBO. Dr. Liu pointed out that many commercial forms of probiotics contain the wrong form of step (Streptococcus Thermophilus) and many people have antibodies against strep. Dr. Liu also does not believe in using Saccharomyces probiotics since many patients will also have an immune reaction against this as well.
Dr. Grace Liu, the Gut Goddess, is a Doctor of Pharmacy and a Functional Medicine practitioner. She consults with patients, offers courses, teaches practitioners through her Microbiome Summit, and develops and sells probiotics and other nutritional products, all available through her website, The Gut Institute. Dr. Liu offers an incredible masterclass to learn how to manage gut health: Master Your Microbiome.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111 or by going to www.drweitz.com.
Podcast Transcript
Dr. Weitz: This is Dr. Ben Weitz with the Rational Wellness Podcast, bringing you the cutting edge information on health and nutrition from the latest scientific research and by interviewing the top experts in the field. Please subscribe to Rational Wellness Podcast on iTunes and YouTube, and sign up for my free ebook on my website by going to DrWeitz.com. Let’s get started on your road to better health. Rational Wellness Podcasters. Thank you so much for joining me again today. For those of you who enjoy the Rational Wellness Podcast, please go to iTunes and give us a ratings and review. That way, more people can find out about the Rational Wellness Podcast.
Our topic for today is the role that our gut bacteria play in helping us to detoxify toxins. Dr. Grace Liu is a doctor of pharmacy and a Functional Medicine practitioner, and she’s known as the Gut Goddess. Grace, thank you so much for joining me today.
Dr. Liu: Dr. Weitz, thank you so much for having me here. I’m so grateful and glad for this opportunity to talk about all our good friendlies in the gut.
Dr. Weitz: So, what the hell do gut bacteria have to do with toxins?
Dr. Liu: Well, it’s a very, very minor role that they may play, but because our world is like a big toxic soup that we live in currently, our air, water, food is all very much contaminated, it may be playing more of a major role. Even in Functional Medicine, their role is not fully known. I actually wasn’t even fully aware of all their roles for our detoxification pathways until more just recently in the last few years, because the studies now are available, which are just amazing. We don’t have a lot, but just like a lot of Functional Medicine studies, there’s not a lot out there unless you have a big, deep pocket pharma behind you.
Dr. Weitz: Right. It’s interesting. It seems like it goes both ways. There are a number of ways in which the gut bacteria actually create more toxins. I had a discussion a couple of podcasts ago about TMAO, which is this marker for heart disease, and TMAO actually is produced by the gut bacteria in the presence of carnitine and choline, either from food or supplements. So, there is several ways in which gut bacteria actually create toxins for us. I also saw a study where arsenic, gut bacteria change arsenic and make it from inorganic to a more dangerous form of arsenic.
Dr. Liu: I know. Yeah. Those are fascinating, controversial points, which we often talk about as practitioners on your amazing forum in the closed group. I love that.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. The TMAO thing I think is really interesting, because the Cleveland Clinic is really touting that as a major factor in heart disease.
Dr. Liu: Yeah. And as we know, vegetarians and vegans who don’t eat those high carnitine sources, they still get heart attacks, strokes, and embolic events.
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely, yeah. I don’t buy this TMAO thing because carnitine and choline are so important for our health.
Dr. Liu: And detox.
Dr. Weitz: And for detox and even the health of the heart, so I just can’t believe that those are bad things to consume, especially when one of the foods that most causes TMAO is fish. Anyway, so, how can gut bacteria help us get rid of toxins?
Dr. Liu: So, what I do at the Gut Institute, I’m founder of the Gut Institute, and we are an educational platform. We love to share about how our amazing gut flora, the probiotics primarily, are really what we need to safeguard our health. They protect us. They keep our health tight, as well as our butts, and create this non-leaky permeability of the gut lining. All our guts are leaky. Babies are born leaky so they can take in immunoglobulins from breast milk and mom. They have no immune system when they’re born, so it’s mainly what mom shares with them, right? And actually, their probiotics. They get baby probiotics through Mom through the breast milk. It’s not sterile. It starts there.
Dr. Weitz: Do you test for that or do you just sort of assume we all have it?
Dr. Liu: Yeah, there’s no point in testing. Our modern testing methods are just so lame and primitive, actually. We can presume if someone has a chronic condition and the degree of it, there’s quite a lot of permeability. So depending on the test you decide to choose on, you may find it or you may not. It may be just selective permeability. It actually has to do with-
Dr. Weitz: Do you find zonulin of any benefit?
Dr. Liu: No. A lot of times, I suspect it, but 90% of the time it won’t be all abated on the testing that you pull. Actually, now, it’s good these test companies are reconciling what we see because they’ll have a disclaimer, “Oh, just ’cause it’s negative, it doesn’t mean anything.” Well, yeah, hello. Just like we do stool testing, we don’t find fungal overgrowths, just ’cause it’s negative doesn’t mean it exists there. You just pulled the wrong test. You pulled a lousy test. You’ve got to pull your organic acid out. So how we look at the environment is very important for what we do. We do terrain medicine now in functional medicine, and this is how conventional may be moving eventually if there’s not a lot of barriers, because sometimes there’s not a lot of money for the things that recover our terrain. Yeah. So it doesn’t behoove FDA, who are not always for the health of the populous.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. It’s hard for me to see conventional medicine moving towards terrain medicine because it’s complex medicine and it’s not part of the model.
Dr. Liu: Maybe, yeah. So when we lose this legacy from Mom, then we don’t have our protection and our firewalls, just like our computers have firewalls, right? Do you have a cleanup system, a malware protection on your computers, Dr. Weitz?
Dr. Weitz: Sure. Yep.
Dr. Liu: Yeah. So our bodies have that, as well. We’ve co-evolved with it for the last one million, two million years, soon as our kind emerged, if you believe in evolution, and moved toward that. We have always been near the earth, eaten off the earth. Things were covered with soil. There’s soil bacteria, as well as vegetation has different kind of bacteria. A lot of above ground have lactobacilli, so when we ferment foods like kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, we’re getting a lot of those lacto strains and other acid-producing strains. And then when they go anaerobic a bit without oxygen, without air, when we seal a system, those flourish, right, and they prevent mold from growing. So we didn’t have refrigeration up until 1500 years ago chilling our food, so we always relied on preserving our food via actually our bacteria. So we had many ways of replenishing. But now, we refrigerate now and we don’t eat these foods, Mom’s legacy may be disrupted and broken. The flora that Mom used to have is no longer conferred to the baby, and this new generation is moving without a whole firewall, even our generation a bit.
Dr. Weitz: When you’re talking about the Mom, you’re talking about the fact that we have so many C-sections and-
Dr. Liu: Formula.
Dr. Weitz: Formula, right.
Dr. Liu: If you get pitocin as a mom, a pregnant mom, if they need to induce the baby, they give something called pitocin. If you’re in the hospital, a hospital gets many fines or negative points if there’s complications that arise, so to prevent a complication like sepsis, which is a bacterial infection in the blood, or abdominal skin infection as a result of hospital procedures, they give everyone IV antibiotics with pitocin.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Dr. Liu: Does that make sense? Yeah. So now you have high dose IV antibiotic in the system that literally wipes everything clean. Can you imagine, you’ve wiped clear your hard drive every time you go into a hospital? No more memories, no more pictures. Your documents are gone, right? You’re kind of screwed, right? So this is what’s happening. It’s not just C-sections. It’s also any surgery. Some of my worst cases are where they’ve had … I mean, something happened, an accident happens, a knee breaks, right, you need to have surgery, so guess what? Sometimes IV antibiotics or many oral antibiotics, by mouth antibiotics are given. And it’s also permeating our food now, right? The last 20, 50 years, domestic farmers found that if they gave antibiotics to their herds, they’d instantly gain weight, so it meant more money for them, but they were really causing diabetes and morbid obesity, but animals don’t live that long. They just got many fat, right? They got fat, so it meant more profits for them, but we’re eating fat animals that are also ill and sick and they’re just fat. Not more muscle, necessarily. They’re just weighing more. It helped the farmer, but it doesn’t help our kind.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Dr. Liu: Yeah. So grains are laced with pesticides. Pesticides are actually antifungal, or the good ones, and they’re antimicrobial in a bad way. Glyphosate has shown over and over that it causes a kind of soil dysbiosis. So really, our guts are probably reflecting our earth right now. It’s horrible to imagine how it’s going to go forward the next 20, 50 years. It’s not really sustainable to have soil with such a low diversity and having plants that are just full of yucky flora. So it’s really great. I think you brought up the TMAO. If we dig longer and further, deeper, the signature of people who have heart disease is one of really severe, deep dysbiosis. They’re lacking all the good flora. So I’m going to delineate what the good flora are. In healthy control guts, whether they’re in rural communities, hunter gatherer societies, European tend to have better, healthy controls. I wouldn’t look at any of the last 20 years of US studies, their ideas of healthy controls. If you look at their BMIs, they’re not healthy. They’re very obese. They have yet to manifest something. But if you look at the BMIs, they’re not actually healthy, or if you look at a liver test, they all have non-alcoholic fatty liver. They’re not healthy. Yeah. They have early dysbiosis or really severe dysbiosis.
But if you look at European studies, all their functional markers rack up to a really healthy person. All their conventional labs as well as functional labs tend to fall in place. So if you look at them, they have a really healthy signature. I kind of look at things like a financial portfolio. So you can have assets, right, and you can have liabilities, debt, right? The worst debt might be multiple credit card debt, right? I mean, assets are like a diverse portfolio. It’s got bonds as well as S&P 100 stock and real estate maybe, good real estate, right? We know this for many things, for financial things. Now we have to think about that, apply those analogies to the gut. When we look through the signature of people who are healthy, they have very few of the TMA-producing, putrefying bacteria actually, which are known as Klebsiella, Citrobacter, E. Coli. We all know these to be very, very, not very good. There’s many reasons. They are producing toxins that may kill our heart or cause cancer. It’s not that we want to eradicate these. This whole idea like, “Oh, let’s eliminate, eradicate,” it’s actually not good because along there, we’re going to also be messing up the terrain further. Yeah. So we have to think about how to rejuvenate maybe.
Dr. Weitz: So maybe TMAO is a marker for dysbiotic gut.
Dr. Liu: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. There’s an amazing study by someone I really follow ’cause he has a lot of great protocols and studies. So we have adapted things in Functional medicine, but one is Dr. Jolly Pink. He had a genetic obesity study. He had just conventional obesity, as well as genetic. There’s a condition called Prader-Willi, Willis, I think, and it’s genetic.
Dr. Weitz: What is it called?
Dr. Liu: Prader-Willi.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Liu: Yeah. There’s various genetic mutations that allows these people to get overweight really quickly. It’s genetic. He applied a diet very high in prebiotics and found that he could grow all the good flora. So the good flora eat fiber. They don’t eat garbage. And he was able to shift it. They lowered their BMI, very slowly. I would’ve done things a lot differently for faster results. We tend to get really good results with reduced brain fog, body fat and fatigue in usually six months or less. So his is a very long story, over six months long. But they did see results with that. What they did was they focused on how to regrow the good flora, and then naturally, the good flora, they’re going to help change the terrain, eliminate, eradicate for us the bad flora, the TMAO-producing flora. So what they found in the study was that TMAO levels went down in the treatment group, not compared to the control group, who were eating a standard diet. Yeah, so we have many markers.
So I look at the urine organic acid. We look at Cresol, which comes from clostridium. We look at various fungal markers, Furans, as well as tartaric acid, many others. There’s nine markers on a standard urine organic acid testing from Great Plains, and then three other markers known as Oxalates that tells a lot about the fungal overgrowths. This is easily overlooked by a lot of functional medicine practitioners. They don’t know how to look for this, and so they’re missing a whole side of the terrain. In fact, I would say for disease, maybe 90% of the terrain. All our protocols, yeah, we combine anti-fungal botanicals, and even prescription sometimes if needed to the protocols to see what we’re trying to help to change in the terrain in terms of negatives. In the portfolio, what I look for is to see the good stuff growing back up, lactobacilli, bifido. Our ABCs start with the As. You don’t have to remember all these technical names, but Akkermansia is one of our big ones, A for Akkermansia. Yeah. It’s actually like a U-shaped curve. Too low is not great, and we may over-focus on that. Actually, excess levels aren’t great, either. Akkermansia love to eat mucin as their prebiotic. Their fiber is more gooey things, like our mucous, as well as RO mucous, so they’re mucous-eaters. So Akkermansia muciniphila, that’s the name of the A, the species that stands for A, that all the healthy people have. Centenarians have high amounts of it. Healthy people in the ruralest areas, hunter gatherers, people without disease, people without cancer. Now, going, swinging on the other side, ’cause it eats mucous, if someone’s sick, it’s kind of like having a runny nose, like if you have allergies or hay fever, right, or ill, you have a cold. Same like the gut. The gut can get runny. If there’s a lot of stress and inflammation in the gut, it may get runny, so there’s excess mucous. And then if we see high, high levels of Akkermansia, it’s not a good sign. So it’s always the context of what’s going on. Sometimes people are a little over-focused on high or low and you totally ignore the context of the host, right, the whole ecosystem, the whole terrain.
So part of ABCs, the B is called the bifido. We think of these as our standard probiotics, but there’s actually good bifido and bad bifido in our little financial portfolio. The bad bifido tend to eat a lot of sugars and carbs, and they’re not the foundational bifido that we need. We need some but we don’t need a ton. For a lot of people, they’re overgrowing and they don’t have the other Bs. The other good bifido, like bifido longum, bifido infantis, bifido lactis … Just by the way, too, these probiotics, they cost an arm and a leg. They cost more than coke per kilo. So I’m a probiotic formula maker.
Dr. Weitz: Can we make money selling our gut bacteria short?
Dr. Liu: Yeah. One of my friends, I told them, their kids have great flora. When I looked at their portfolio, I’m like, “You should start saving for their college,” and they have. They submit the stools to the FMT banks.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, really?
Dr. Liu: Yeah, yeah. My kids ignore me when I talk about this. They don’t want to get involved at all.
Dr. Weitz: They don’t want to eat capsules filled with poop, huh?
Dr. Liu: Yeah, yeah. They’re contributing to society. It’s awesome.
Dr. Weitz: There you go.
Dr. Liu: People can make a grand or two a month.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Dr. Liu: Yeah. Income, off of poop.
Dr. Weitz: One of the interesting things when we talk about trying to improve your gut bacteria and your microbiota is that we know that when you take probiotics, they’re only temporary visitors. They don’t continue to live there. So, how is it that you can actually change your gut bacteria to have more Akkermansia or whatever strains you’re trying to promote if the probiotics we consume are only there for a short period of time and then gone?
Dr. Liu: So first of all, there are various studies that show actually that’s not true, Dr. Weitz. Yeah. So I don’t know if it’s a fallacy, yeah, promoted by people who don’t read super deep in the literature, but our good gut flora, they follow us everywhere. Some come in a pill, in a capsule. Some come in food. But they aren’t just transient visitors. The ones that are core to our … They’re called the MAM, mucosia-associated microbiota. Let’s say this is our GI tract, right?
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Liu: Here’s the muscle, right, smooth muscle.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Dr. Liu: You have several layers. There’s two layers of mucous. The inner layer is full of some flora, good flora, but they don’t trespass beyond, and there’s an inner layer of mucous, which is pretty much almost sterile. Our flora, when they’re present, the ABCs are present and they actually make all these chemicals that keep the boundary tight and target certain pathogenic flora that really like to invade. So that inner mucous, the deep, deep mucous actually is very sterile. And then we have some flora that live there, and they’re very few. It’s called the MAM, mucosis-associated microbiota. These actually include the good bifido lacto, and also good Roseburia that eats inulin, Roseburia inulinivorans. There’s other Roseburia that actually aren’t so good for us. So we can actually drill down a lot of the strain, just like you know there’s good strep, right? There’s even good strep that help our gums and combat cavities. There’s good strep, but there’s also bad strep. In fact, almost all the other strep are kind of bad. Strep sanguinis, strep mutans, those cause cavities…
Dr. Weitz: Are you saying that some of the bacteria contained in probiotics, whether it be lactobacillus or bifido, et cetera, et cetera, that those have become permanent residents in our gut?
Dr. Liu: Especially yes, if they eat the mucous, yeah. It’s called anchoring and engrafting. It’s really awesome. In my last year in pharmacy school, I spent a year at Stanford as part of my rotation. I was so lucky. I did one rotation actually in the transplant unit. It was so cool seeing different protocols that would inhibit something called graft-versus-host disease. It was a rejection syndrome, graft-versus-host disease.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Liu: What studies show now for transplant, and actually, even same with implantation after IVF, in-vitro fertilization methods, transplantation and then the implant of a human cell requires actually good flora in the terrain.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Liu: Now, a lot of these floras are our ABCs, it turns out. They need to be present to help facilitate the organ to stay there without rejection. Basically, this is going to save the person’s life, or for a woman who’s infertile or barren, trying to have kids, that means success for her, for her body to actually take what is evolutionary, our full right to bear children. Yeah, but it requires flora, the right flora, the good flora, not the bad versions of the flora.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Dr. Liu: Yeah. So it has to do with their DNA, too. They all share DNA. One minute, they may be resistant to high dose antibiotic, and another minute they’re not. They’re always sharing their DNA. It’s called conjugation. They’re an amazing organ for us. They’re a silent organ. So when we think about them, we don’t think about them as … They weigh as much as our brain, actually, two or three pounds or more. The light is starting to be seen by what they do for us and what they don’t do. They can prematurely end our life easily. It’s usually when the ABCs aren’t there. It’s not hard to get them back in, too. It takes some protocols actually, a little bit, to help open up ecological niches for them so they actually have a chair to sit in. It’s like magical chairs in a way. My goal is to open some of these niches so we can get the high dose probiotics in.
Dr. Weitz: So is it more effective to consume the bacteria as probiotics or to give them the proper prebiotic fuel to cause those bacteria that we’re trying to promote?
Dr. Liu: Oh, that’s a great question. It depends on the stage of healing. So early on, I don’t use actually a lot of fiber. For instance, some of the really nifty, swifty kind of bacteria, like for instance, strains that secrete TMAO, they also have adapted. They can eat some of our fiber that we tend to think about as really great, awesome prebiotics. Some eat inulins. Some eat oligosaccharides. For instance, some people with dysbiosis, they don’t tolerate FODMAPs. Not everybody, but a lot of people, when they find that they eliminate the FODMAPs, they find out, “Oh my gosh, my bloating and brain fog actually go away.” Well, they have actually flora, it could be good or bad even, but they’re in the wrong place.
Dr. Weitz: So you’re saying when we’re working with a patient who’s suffering from a GI disorder like IBS or inflammatory bowel disease or something like that, you won’t use fiber at the beginning.
Dr. Liu: No, but I use a different kind of prebiotic. They’re called polyphenols, antioxidants. So we utilize a lot of these in Functional Medicine. Little did we know that actually, we’re super-feeding our good gut flora, the ABCs primarily. It’s really interesting. The bad flora, the pathogenic flora, they have not adapted yet to eat polyphenols. Polyphenols are usually low quantity. They’re very bitter. They’re medicinal. Usually besides feeding good gut flora, they actually antimicrobial benefits.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Liu: Yeah. They actually will kill them. So, they have not adapted to learn how to eat them, fortunately. So we can really create this selective ecosystem and terrain by using the right ones. A lot of them are found in ancient Russian medicine, German medicine, Chinese, Korean medicine, TCM, traditional Chinese medicine, Japanese medicine.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. So let’s get to the gut bacteria. Which gut bacteria help with detoxifying heavy metals and arsenic and xenoestrogens and things like that?
Dr. Liu: It turns out our ABCs are the ones that do that for us.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Liu: Not the bad signatures that show up, the bad signatures which are contributing to disease, the ones that putrefy TMAO, the ones that cause a lot of cancer chemicals or are associated with cancers, not those, but our ABCs, the good ones.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Liu: They all do that. Yeah. So let me tell you about Bifido longum and L. Rhamnosus. These are high amounts in our Bifido Maximus probiotic, actually the highest strength in the market right now.
Dr. Weitz: That’s a probiotic that you sell.
Dr. Liu: Yes, Bifido Maximus is only sold by us here at the Gut Institute.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Liu: Yeah, and the way I formulate it is that it’s based on all the studies where healthy controls have the good gut flora, they don’t have celiac, they don’t have gluten intolerance, and they also don’t have heavy metal problems. They don’t have other health issues. So for instance, one study by Gregor Reid, he’s a big, big probiotic formulator. They were able to get funding to do studies in Africa, Tanzania in particular. There’s a lot of silver mines and metal kind of mining there. In the process of silver mining, they leech out a bunch of heavy metals that are toxins for humans and other animals and fish. They go into the water. So, even their small fish. Usually we say, “Oh, the big predator fish have a lot of concentration of heavy metals.” Well, it turns out in Africa, in Tanzania, even the small fish that the villagers were eating ended up being very high and toxic in heavy metals. So what he designed was a yogurt, a 200 gram yogurt with 10 billion L. Rhamnosus GR1, strain GR1, and they made it into a yogurt and they gave it to pregnant women and children. This would not pass IRB in the US. Maybe it would. Who knows, right? ‘Cause there’s no other solutions, really. In that village, people were able to also create little economies, too, to make the yogurt. So it actually could increase economic advantages for the impoverished here. So what they showed was in pregnant women, the women who took the yogurt, they found that they had 36% less arsenic in the body compared to the controls who did not have the yogurt and had the placebo, 36% less mercury, and 78% less arsenic, which is so substantial for this population that they actually have really high heavy metal toxicity. All it was was just a daily yogurt.
Dr. Weitz: Which particular strain was in that yogurt?
Dr. Liu: It’s called L. Rhamnosus GR1, but it turns out, many of the L. Rhamnosus strains also have this benefit to detox. In an in-vitro plate, they can lower the concentrations of all kinds of heavy metals. Yeah. And it would go out in the system.
Dr. Weitz: So these are particular strains of bifido longus, right?
Dr. Liu: Lactobacillus rhamnosus is a lactobacilli.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, lactobacillus rhamnosus.
Dr. Liu: Yeah. They also did the same study with bifido longum, and many strains of bifido longum also contributed to this benefit. So it’s believed actually it’s a class effect.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Liu: All of them have this ability, unless they’re a weird mutation or something. Yeah. I would say for our probiotic, invariably, when people go through our program, they’re always using high doses of Bifido Maximus. We don’t always do testing in the beginning, but we test later. No one has glyphosate after provocation with glutathione for a month. That’s the typical way to do it. You provocate with glutathione. We check using a glyphosate study from Great Plains. People had not really any detectable levels at all. Then people start with those, we do really gentle chelation. We don’t really do a ton, ton, ton. It’s not so healthy when you don’t have a good gut anyway to do that. But we will see people also, their numbers go down. I didn’t know where to attribute it, but I think actually the probiotics make a big difference. We do so many different things. I can’t say that’s the factor that accomplished that result.
Dr. Weitz: So how do you discover that a patient has heavy metals? Does it come from history? Does it just come up on one of your routine testing? And then when you do suspect somebody has heavy metals, how do you like to test for it?
Dr. Liu: I look at sometimes their genetic SNPs. If they have mutations on glutathione, several, several of the MTRR, MTHFR mutations, and then APO E4, any of those will contribute to more heavy metals. I don’t always test, ’cause I know our protocols end up lowering it, but some of my clients, they’re great bio hackers. They come to me and they already have a lot of this testing from prior practitioners. Yeah. Sometimes we will test. So we’ll do different kinds of testing, either hair provocation. You could do urine. Again, it depends on the variants they have, the genetic variants. Some don’t release. You have to provocate for not just on month, but even two months to actually see something, ’cause they hold onto it. Also, they all have poor guts in the beginning, too. They may not release. Even though they look like a picture of heavy metal toxicity, they don’t always release. A lot of our protocols help to move those pathways. We try to look what the genetic SNPs are so we can start to bypass them. It’s not necessary to bypass all of them in the beginning. It’s also going to be like 20 million supplements. So what we do is just try to get the gut back online. We try to get the ABCs back online because they do it all. So for instance, bifido and lacto, what’s so awesome about these strains is that as you know for detox, we can use different resins, right? Questran, Welchol, these are all resins, pharmaceutical resins, so they pull mycotoxins. They also pull xenoestrogens and they pull glyphosate pesticides. They pull heavy metals often, right? We use also Quicksilver Ultra Binder. It’s got different resins in there.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Dr. Liu: Yeah, right. Charcoal, clay, as well as sulfur-based resins, and a biological one called chitin, chitosan or chitin. So these bind. Well, it turns out, the cell wall, certain strains of the good bifido and the lacto, again, they’re in the Bifido Maximus, their cell wall acts as an ionic resin. So whether it’s a highly, highly charged positive heavy metal or highly, highly negatively charged heavy metal, from mercury, arsenic, cadmium, all of them have different charges, they still get bound up. We don’t use too much of them. Sometimes we pulse these, ’cause they also can, I think theoretically, also bind our good stuff, our good zinc, good mag, good iodine. So we don’t want to pull too much of the good stuff, especially if people are already depleted. We want to make sure they get repleted as safely as we can. But as they bind them, especially at a high dose, they anchor and then some are going to leave and die, and then they’re defecated out. They take with them all these yucky things. Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: So your protocol for heavy metals is glutathione binders and then specific probiotics? Is that it?
Dr. Liu: Exactly, yeah, and opening up biofilms is really important. A lot of people don’t realize, the higher dose of antibiotic they had–Rifaximin–it selects for toxic strains that are super weedy. They’re like weeds. They’re also super nasty. So once the drug leaves the system, they’re only left with these nasties. If you don’t have the good ABCs in there, they’re just going to proliferate. Only the ABCs keep them in check. You can meditate, do prayer, yoga, all the F you want. They are not going to keep out the bad guys as soon as stress happens. Everyone’s got stress now. We have real life stress, right? All kinds of stress we’re not even aware of, EMFs, smart meters. I don’t need to really go in depth on all that, but go take a class, right? But all these bombard us all day, like you mentioning assaults to our gut. We have multiple assaults on the gut that did not even exist like two years ago.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. Now, you mentioned biofilms. Do you try to address biofilms in some way?
Dr. Liu: We must, yeah, especially when people have more of those genetic mutations that I mentioned to you. FU22 is a big one, as well. All our clients, 99% all have mutations on FU22. The healthier ones, like I also work with MMA fighters and endurance athletes, Spartan racers, champions, iron men, iron women. Actually, the better genes someone has to withstand environmental assaults, they’re usually going to excel in life through athletics, or I work with executives, too, multi-tasking ones. They tend to all excel in life, but they also have a few of these relevant kind of genetic markers and variants. But they also have-
Dr. Weitz: MMA fighters probably have plenty of bacteria. They get their faced rubbed in those mats and-
Dr. Liu: I know, and they withstand all of them. They withstand all of them because they’re usually not FU22 and they’re not APO E4 ever. When you look at their MTHFR reports, I use MTHFR Support, the Sterling’s app. They’re like seas of green, just all green, green, green, green, green. Yeah, especially next to mine, I’m like, “Wow, what a difference.” They’re genetically like another species, and their hormones kind of show it, as well, too. They have all the healthy longevity hormone patterns. We do something called fertility physics. No matter how old someone is, there’s certain ratios where higher anabolic is going to be higher than the estradiol. Estradiol is just a marker. It’s usually a stress marker, so we pair it up against there and look at it.
Dr. Weitz: What is that now? Estradiol is a stress marker?
Dr. Liu: Yeah. So it’s released when aromatase goes high, especially with gut inflammation.
Dr. Weitz: Estradiol goes higher with gut inflammation. You mean because estrogen’s being recirculated instead of excreted out?
Dr. Liu: There’s a hormone called aromatase. It gets lit up when there’s central stress going on, central inflammation going on. Gut stress is literally 90% of the stress I see people in. When we eliminate that using four phases, we target different things, and always at every phase, we’re trying to bring back the ABCs, the polyphenols and our protocols and really high, high dose. We even use a trillion a day probiotics every day of the Bifido Maximus. You’re able to massage all that. Yeah. We see aromatase go down. Also, I use specific botanicals to lower the aromatase activity, so it’s not so turned on for people, and they feel better…. Oh, way more than that. Way more than that.
Dr. Weitz: What do you use?
Dr. Liu: Olive leaf. Bitter melon’s amazing, which is like an ancient Chinese-
Dr. Weitz: Bitter melon? I always think of blood sugar, but that helps with estrogen detoxification?
Dr. Liu: High blood sugar is just leaky gut. All these people on the keto diets, awesome. What they’re trying to do is just repair their gut, but they don’t realize without polyphenols and certain prebiotics, they’re going to keep losing their ABCs. That’s what studies show. They particularly lose the Cs, the butyrate producing Clostridiales.
Dr. Weitz: Wait a minute. High blood sugar isn’t just leaky gut, right? I mean, it’s also-
Dr. Liu: You should read the work from Patrice Cani. [Here is one paper from Dr. Cani on this topic: Gut microbes and health: A focus on the mechanisms linking microbes, obesity, and related disorders. ]
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Liu: He’s from Belgium. Yeah. He did all the seminal landmark work.
Dr. Weitz: But I mean, it’s also eating the junk that people eat, the sugars and the breakfast cereals and the Hostess Twinkies and on and on and on.
Dr. Liu: It’s so fascinating. There’s a group called Ilan Ilanoff. They’re from Israel. They have a certain stool kit that’s pretty interesting. What they found is that they checked people’s blood sugars eating the same food. Let’s say rye bread, for instance, okay? Some people, based on just blood sugars alone and their microbiome data, some people had, let’s say, high blood sugars with eating rye bread, right? We see this often. They have gluten allergies. They have the whole bad signature of bad gut flora, right? He was looking at all kinds of people, and other people had low blood sugars, better blood sugars, better insulin sensitivity eating rye bread. Rye bread also is full of really good prebiotics. Grains actually can have really great oligosaccharides from the bran part, rye bran and whole grain, and there’s a lot of fiber, both soluble and insoluble fiber, right?
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Liu: Legumes, too. They have a lot of these good fibers. And they would see low blood sugar. It was all dependent on a microbiome signature.
Dr. Weitz: But you’re being sacrilegious right now. In the religion of Functional Medicine, though shall not say anything positive about grains.
Dr. Liu: All the longevity societies eat grains and beans all day long. I can’t think we could dismiss their data. Did you ever watch the Longevity film with Jason Prall and Michael Wesley?
Dr. Weitz: I never saw it. Is it worth watching? Yeah.
Dr. Liu: Yeah, I think so. If you’ve never interviewed Jason Prall, you should interview him, too.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Liu: Yeah. The diet of our ancestors is very important. I’m also … At one point … Well, I kind of gave it up now, but I was chapter leader for our area for Weston A. Price. Are you a fan of Weston A. Price?
Dr. Weitz: Not necessarily, but I know everybody else is.
Dr. Liu: I’m Chinese. When I took rice out of my life, my health went down.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Liu: Yeah. I can’t tell you how. I’m also APOE2. We’re agrarian adjusted.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, okay.
Dr. Liu: Yeah. Even when I was sick and I had Hashimoto’s and I was eating 400 grams of carbs a day and a lot of sugar, my triglycerides didn’t go over 100.
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Dr. Liu: Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. So, which goes to show, there’s no one diet that’s right for everybody. So, as far as gut bacteria-
Dr. Liu: That’s Functional Medicine for you, right, Dr. Weitz?
Dr. Weitz: Exactly.
Dr. Liu: Customized. Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: So as far as helping us detoxify mold, mycotoxins, how do we accomplish that with probiotics?
Dr. Liu: So I love the Shoemaker Protocol and all these other mold ideas and stuff, but I go back to the microbiome, right? If we don’t have a good microbiome, we also aren’t going to survive mold. We have mold everywhere. Our ancestors grew up with mold all over with them. So, it turns out, a lot of the soil probiotics, many strands like L. Rhamnosus in our probiotic and B. Longum, they have the ability to actually, in in-vitro, lower mycotoxin concentrations. It’s pretty amazing, amazing. We also have different protocols using certain botanicals. They shut the genetic expression translation off for mycotoxins. So mold may be present in the ecosystem. Doesn’t mean it has to be super bad all the time every day. It turns our food, if we eat an ancestral diet, which is high in polyphenols, antioxidants, and prebiotics, even grains, okay, we feed these bacteria. Guess what B. Longum and L. Rhamnosus eat, right? They eat a lot of FODMAPs. They eat our mucous. Also, studies show, I don’t know if they eat polyphenols, but polyphenols increase their growth and proliferation.
Dr. Weitz: Can we really eat an ancestral diet?
Dr. Liu: I have a hard time. I don’t eat as much fermented foods as my ancestors did, for sure. I don’t eat as much plants, either.
Dr. Weitz: I mean, none of our fruits and vegetables at all resemble the fruits and vegetables and tubers that ancient humans ate.
Dr. Liu: No. A lot of GMO now, too.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Dr. Liu: Exactly.
Dr. Weitz: And the hybridized farming for hundreds of years.
Dr. Liu: A lot of the fruit aren’t as high in antioxidants, either. They’re all farmed. Our fish is farmed. It is difficult.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Dr. Liu: I would say it’s not impossible, but it would be a part-time job, right? If I did eat all the vegetables and fruit, I’d be gnawing like a horse and cow all day, right? I don’t have time for that, either. I do like something called bionic fiber to make up for it. It makes my stools like Bristol 4 twice a day. [Dr. Liu is saying that her stool corresponds to the Bristol Stool Chart, which is a diagnostic medical tool designed to classify the form of human feces into 7 categories and it describes the ideal stool as either type 3 or 4] I don’t even worry about it.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, okay.
Dr. Liu: Yeah. That’s the only thing I bring on travel sometimes. I get bummed when I lose that.
Dr. Weitz: I was looking at some studies on a mycotoxin thing, and I saw that the soil-based probiotics have been shown to have some benefit, as well.
Dr. Liu: Yeah. The bacilli all do. Just like bifido and longum, the strains that I mentioned, they also degrade glyphosate and have helped with heavy metal remediation. Yeah. But bifido and lacto might be our mainstay. They are in much higher concentration than the bacilli. With the bacilli, you just need a little. A little bit goes a long way. With bifido and lacto, literally, they can be, healthy controls can be .5 to 1% out of the whole gut consortium. With bacilli, you’ll see the strains, but they’re much lower, much, much lower, like .1% or way lower, like when you’re looking at a 16S analysis like from uBiome or Thrive Kit. Yeah. The Vibrant kit they don’t give percentages right now, or they’re going to give number quantities. On the GI Map from Diagnostic Solutions Lab, you can also see quantity. I kind of look at that as we look at our clients, but it’s also great to get a culture. So, we have media when we culture using CDSA, a comprehensive diagnostic stool analysis-
Dr. Weitz: So it might be beneficial to get a culture stool sample, as well as a DNA based stool test?
Dr. Liu: I’ll take any data. All data is limited to information, but yeah, I like seeing it all, but then it ends up costing thousands of dollars.
Dr. Weitz: Right, right, but if you had a patient who’s willing to do whatever and cost wasn’t a factor, you would get a genetic stool test and a culture-based stool test?
Dr. Liu: Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Absolutely, yeah. You see just a different picture. The media is still old school, but it still shows us our most vile kind of bacteria that grow out. With the DSL, Diagnostic Solutions Lab, GM map, it’s awesome. They probably over-visualize right now. I’m sure some of it’s kind of noise. You can’t see to that degree, but what we see is with each of the phases we work on, we always go big to small. We work with people for four phases. We go big parasites, helminths, eukaryotes, then we go fungal, then we go SIBO, bacterial, and then lastly, we do viral. Viral, spirochetes, phages, small things. We go in that order. We always are looking at other eukaryotes through the whole thing. Fungal is really big, so we look at fungal throughout the whole thing.
But with the GM map, it’s really cool. Because the flora live in layers, the first layer is kind of the most needy kind, more toxic, severely toxic, like the C. Difficiles, right, and campylobacter, the enterohemorrhagic E. Coli. They can’t really drill down E. Coli well. You have to do genetic tests, so that’s why the culture’s not going to work so well. You have to use genetic testing to look at the different toxic species in there. E. Coli is such a menace right now, but what studies show is L. Rhamnosus, B. Longum, all are ABCs. They have all natural anti E. Coli abilities. Not all E. Coli is bad, either. There’s a Canadian and other European strains of good E. Coli. These are our first bacteria that were used to treat SIBO, actually. We gave 50% success rates, but we couldn’t use that in the USA.
Dr. Weitz: Killing SIBO with probiotic bacteria. Yeah.
Dr. Liu: Yeah. Depending on the study you look at, it could be 60, 80%, or even a higher percent, 97% improvement in SIBO. I see 100%.
Dr. Weitz: A lot of practitioners are still dead set on not using probiotics when treating SIBO.
Dr. Liu: That’s probably ’cause they’re using strep ones, right, and they have a form of PANDAS. They have antibodies against strep. You can’t use step probiotics. Many of the probiotics in the functional medicine field have very high amounts of strep. Strep thermophilus is not a natural native of the human gut. If people are reacting to it, it’s like a food allergy. Would you give gluten to someone who’s reacting with a high IGG, IGE with gluten? No, right? You take it out temporarily.
Dr. Weitz: Would you say the probiotics on the market have the wrong form of strep? That’s-
Dr. Liu: Yeah, and they may also have Saccharomyces. Our Saccharomyces is our-
Dr. Weitz: You don’t use Saccharomyces?
Dr. Liu: No, I don’t use any Saccharomyces.
Dr. Weitz: How come?
Dr. Liu: We look at the IGG panel from either Cyrex or Great Plains. When there’s a reaction, you definitely don’t want to use it. But some of the IGG panels, they’re not graded or calibrated to a person’s immunoglobulins. Some are under-producing a lot of immunoglobulins ’cause they’re immunocompromised. 80% of our immunity’s in our small intestine, so if they’re not lacking our ancestral core, like the ABCs, you can’t trust the immunoglobulins. They’re immuno suppressed, so their SigA isn’t going to light up. It’ll be even zero. You can look at total immunoglobulins. Let’s grade them against everything. Vibrant now has a free add-on you can just-
Dr. Weitz: Cyrex does the same thing. If the IGG is low, they’ll recalibrate the numbers.
Dr. Liu: Yeah, so you actually will see if it’s lit up. Yeah. So a lot of our clients, they light up for Saccharomyces. You definitely don’t want to be giving Saccharomyces, but we take it away from everybody ’cause again, we don’t always trust the testing.
Dr. Weitz: But what about for C. Diff? We find it really helpful for C. Diff, and also for fungal infections.
Dr. Liu: B. Longum’s even better. Yeah. They did a study in babies, ’cause all babies now are born in hospitals, right? The higher in the gut B. Longum was present, the lower the C. Difficile colonization. All babies get C. Diff. They’re colonized. It doesn’t mean anything. But the second they get stress or antibiotics or formula, this increases their risk to express it, right? C. Diff, literally spores are all over hospital workers, nurses, doctors, everybody. It’s on all the surfaces, doorknobs, everything. The more bleach they use, the more antiseptic they use, the more it becomes heartier. Spores last forever. Studies have found spores that are millions of years old embedded in the amber of different insect guts. Yeah. So C. Diff is one that is virtually indestructible.
Dr. Weitz: So, one more time, why don’t we want to take Saccharomyces boulardii as a supplement?
Dr. Liu: Saccharomyces, as you know, is a wild yeast. It’s actually one of our number one healthy, good flora in the gut, good fungi in the gut. But when someone’s permeable or they have toxic flora, they have the signature of toxic flora … They could be selectively permeable. Wherever these bad flora are, they’re causing little ulcers, so then they can enter the bloodstream, right? When Saccharomyces enter the bloodstream, what happens? The body launches an attack against it, right, just like it would for gluten or dairy or, yeah, who knows what. We see a lot of joint problems, fibromyalgia. A lot of times, it’s Klebsiella Citrobacter, right? It’s growing in the gut. It’s entering the bloodstream. The body’s launching an attack.
Unfortunately, a lot of our tissues look like the cell walls of Klebsiella or Citrobacter, and then it can be muscles or mitochondria even, and then they get attacked, so people feel achy. They don’t feel well. As soon as people go on a certain diet and they also fix their gut, all these aches go away. Even if they’re 60, 70, 80 years old, their aches go away. Aching is not really the best sign. It’s not normal. It’s not part of our aging process. It’s a sign of decrepitness, right? Sarcopenia. Muscles go down, as well, typically as well, too. So there’s a lot of different ways to assess leakiness or what’s going on in the gut.
Dr. Weitz: As a chiropractor, we get a lot of decrepit patients.
Dr. Liu: I know, I know. So looking at the fungal markers on the Great Plains lab is really the best ’cause you’ll see the fungal there. The thing is, it’s not direct, so we don’t know if it’s Saccharomyces. I look at the IGG to Saccharomyces. If it’s even in the upper green or yellow zone on the IGG Great Plains panel, that means they’re going to potentially be having IGG against Saccharomyces. It’s not safe to give it if that’s the case, nor is it safe to eat any of the foods that are slightly yellow, until one or two months later, then they heal the gut and immune system calms down. They’re kind of having this hyperimmune thing, right? They’re attacking everything that falls into the bloodstream. But we can assuage the immune system. There’s so many ways to calm the immune system down. Treating the adrenals. We use something called NanoMojo. Mojo is amazing. Using certain botanicals that balance TH1 and 2. We use mistletoe now. We use actually cancer treatments for educating our clients to help them normalize their immune system.
Everyone’s at risk for cancer now. Even some of our best Functional Medicine leaders, they’re drug-addicted. There are mental issues, depression, cancer. Why is that? They’re missing something. They’re missing the probiotics, I have to say. They don’t have actually a great financial portfolio. I’d say it pretty much sucks, actually. If they’ve never evaluated, they don’t know, right? Better be ignorant I guess. But it’s good to know there’s steps that can be done. Not to go overboard crazy, but not to ignore ancestral past. We’ve always co-evolved with this legacy of our flora. The first time in the human history now, kids are dying before their parents, or even before healthy grandparents. It’s insane. We must change this tide. It’s not good for us to ignore it and ignore the earth terrain, too, yeah, ’cause we’re just reflections of the earth terrain and how we treat the animals and the plants and the way we do farming.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. We’re not doing a good job of that. Well, I think we have to bring this to a close. So, any final thoughts you want to give our listeners and tell us how we can get in touch with you and find out about your programs, et cetera, et cetera?
Dr. Liu: Absolutely. I’m at TheGutInstitute.com. We also do Facebook Live every Tuesday at 2:00 Pacific Time at our Facebook, The Gut Institute page. You can contact us through our website, TheGutInstitute.com. I also teach practitioners. We have a 50 hour gut certification immune certification program and love sharing our protocols for what works and the cases. I have a very concierge practice, so yeah, usually we don’t have a lot of openings, so we don’t have a lot of openings. I have a class, like a Master Gut class if people are interested, as well, just to learn. We have a lot of practitioners and coaches that go through it, as well. They learn all the basics and get their gut a lot better. But thanks so much for having me on. I think everyone should be happy and have a look at their gut flora. Test it, don’t guess it.
Dr. Weitz: Great. Excellent. Thank you, Grace.
Dr. Liu: Thank you, Dr. Weitz.