About this show:
As promised: Part 2 is here, with microbiologist Kiran Krishnan and it is a deep dive into the mechanism for “leakiness” of our body’s barrier functions. He took my nightclub bouncer and ran with it and I think you’ll find more empowerment when it comes to understanding and working with issues related to:
- Leaky Gut
- Leaky Skin
- Leaky Brain
…as we explore:
- Why does it happen?
- What’s going on with these issues?
- Why treating the symptoms is not the best way forward and how can we build healthier barriers and immune responses?
Enjoy the show – Low Tox Life podcast is anywhere you like to listen to podcasts – send it to anyone experiencing inflammation – with gut issues, skin issues or cognitive symptoms. It is jam-packed and we’re here to help. Be sure to go back to Part 1 that we did here, centred mainly on gut health building blocks and pitfalls. https://www.lowtoxlife.com/show-387-thriving-body-biomes-part-1-with-kiran-krishnan/
Kiran Krishnan is a research microbiologist and a health and wellness expert who aims to make complex information understandable to all. He has founded a number of successful health and supplement companies over the last 20 years including co-founding and leading Microbiome Labs, the preeminent, microbiome therapeutics-focused brand among healthcare professionals.
Can’t wait to see what you think of the show, Alexx x
Alexx Stuart
Founder of Low Tox Life and the Low Tox movement
Join me on Insta @lowtoxlife
Questions we explore in the show:
- Leakiness is something we’ve come to learn so much more about – leaky gut, brain, skin… and we often talk about it from the protein “wrong protein particles floating around” perspective – How does leakiness occur in a person? Is there a difference between leaky gut, brain and skin?
- Genetics, microbiome health and environmental/lifestyle factors – all or one more important in leakiness?
- Can you talk us through the immune system implication here and the role inflammation plays? (if this doesn’t come up prior)
- If one barrier is leaky, is it more likely for there to be systemic leakiness in other areas?
- Is there a specific functional fix and a whole-body ‘insurance policy against’ leakiness?
- What sets a solid stage for barrier repair? How can various probiotic interventions support barrier repair?
- And whatever else comes up on the topic!
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Be sure to join me on Instagram @lowtoxlife and tag me with your shares and AHAs of this week’s episode.
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About Kiran Krishnan:
Kiran is a research microbiologist and a health and wellness expert who aims to make complex information understandable to all. He has founded a number of successful health and supplement companies over the last 20 years including co-founding and leading Microbiome Labs, the preeminent, microbiome therapeutics-focused brand among healthcare professionals. He is currently a co-founder and partner in 3 other companies that aim to revolutionise wellness care. He has conducted and published several research studies in scientific journals, has published chapters in scientific textbooks/reference books, has global patents and is a sought-after speaker on human health and the microbiome
Connect with Kiran on Instagram @kiranbiome
Websites: www.endoaxis.com and www.sivcare.com
More about this month’s sponsors:
Thank you to this month’s sponsors for partnering with our show and helping you make your swaps with their special offer:
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Title show track, by LIOR.
Love the podcast music? You will hear excerpts from Lior’s track “Caught Up” – go check it out on iTunes or Spotify if you want to hear the whole song or album, Scattered Reflections. Co-written with Cameron Deyell, it’s a great song and I love the reflective energy of it – perfect for the show, right? Enjoy. Lior is always touring, so do check out his website. It is wonderful to hear him sing live, trust me.
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If you would love reading like me or you just simply want to go through the full transcript, you can check below.
[Alexx Stuart] (0:00 – 9:17)When the barriers of your gut, brain, and or skin are compromised, and what can you do about it? That is what we are unpacking in today’s show. Hello, and welcome to the Low Tox Life Podcast.
I am Alexx Stuart, your host, and today we are nearing 400 shows, just a couple more weeks to go. And I want to say a huge thank you to our new listeners, a massive thank you to our existing and regular listeners, and to anyone who has time to write a teeny tiny review or share a show that you absolutely love. Well, you guys get like an extra prize because I know life is busy, but those shares and those reviews mean absolutely everything to someone who has been podcasting for eight years now into our ninth and who plans to continue doing it for many more.
So a massive thank you for taking the time to do that. And if you haven’t, and you just thought, oh gosh, I love this show. I should do that.
Yes, you should. And yes, I’m giving you an advanced thank you as well. Now, today I promised I would bring Kiran Krishnan back, the microbiologist, researcher, entrepreneur, founder of Microbiome Labs, which is a fascinating approach to microbiome supplements.
And I noticed recently, he also had a skin range that was trying to bring health and resilience to the skin biome as well. So super fascinating guy. I genuinely don’t know how he makes time for it all, but there is a lot in his brain to download.
And the first time I had him on last month, we literally only got through half the questions and I had all of these leaky gut brain and skin questions left. And I was like, Kiran, we got to do a part two. So he’s back today to run through that.
And I just think it was such a brilliant explainer of what it looks like, how these different leakinesses can present, what they can do to impact your health in a negative way, once the barriers are compromised and what on earth are we going to do to sort them out, heal and improve the resilience of those linings. So it’s a super fascinating show. Of course, the other people that I constantly thank for allowing us to put this show on every single week for you are our sponsors.
And they’re really not just sponsors where we like plug in an ad and, you know, it’s noise, but a lot of our listeners are making low-tox swaps. And some of the best messages I get are, thank you so much for that code. It got us across the line to be able to get the dehumidifier or the air filter or the water purifier or the new low-tox skincare that they’ve been wanting to swap to.
And on and on we could go, right? So a massive thanks to our major sponsor Ozclimate. You still have 10% off.
They’re often already discounted. So your 10% works over the top. Low-tox life is your code, brilliant dehumidifiers, brilliant air purifiers, the Winix brand, and of course their amazing heating range.
And I noticed coming towards the end of winter now, Aussies, their heaters are on sale. So you’re 10% on top. If yours is on its last legs and you’re thinking already about next year and you want to get a sweet deal, I would be jumping in right now.
Please don’t worry about the word smart in terms of like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth because these are only activated if you choose to activate them by having an app on your phone that speaks to the heater. So don’t let that sway you. It will not be automatically transmitting and creating high levels of EMFs in your home.
I just wanted to flag that because I’ve had a couple of questions around that. Now, someone was actually posting in our Low-Tox Club membership group this week, which by the way, you can join anytime. You just Google Low-Tox Club, Low-Tox Life, and all the details will come up.
And they said, gosh, you know, cleaning the dehumidifier tanks is a real drag. But often we have like really short little cleaning brushes that we’re using. Go to the hardware store and get something longer because then you can just give it a really good monthly clean or every couple of months.
I find actually though, that as long as you religiously take out and empty the tank, even if it’s not full, just whenever you’re dehumidifying, empty the tank and don’t put the tank wet back in. Put it out on your balcony or out in the garden overnight, let some sun hit it in the morning. It is so much less likely to need regular cleaning if you are hygienic, I guess, with that sort of aspect of it.
So if, you know, you get that little bit of pink slime or a sense that there might be mould about to start growing, proliferating in your tank, you definitely don’t want that because you don’t want it coming out into your air. But just be a bit more mindful about really ensuring it’s never sitting there with water in it and you’re sunning it really regularly. So that’s my pro tip there.
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Even in their compact filters, they managed to get seven stages in there as well as a remineralisation step for over 60 trace minerals. Beautiful brand. If you can afford the big Mac Daddy 10 litre benchtop, we’ve had one of those for about six years now, I’d say.
Still going strong. We’ve only had to replace the filter once. So a lot of the time people think, oh, that’s expensive, but then they don’t factor in the value of long lasting filter refills.
So that would definitely be something I would be looking at in your considerations when choosing a brand and is definitely one of the major reasons I forked out for a big benchtop Waters Co one when we did. We also have the little mini waterman and ace jug for things like camping, travel, and it’s just been a brilliant range for us. So 12% off your entire filtration range there, including their shower filter, their tap filter for under sink, which should be back in stock any minute now.
Code Lotox Life, 12% off. I think that’s all I have to say on those Lotox swaps. So make the most of them while they’re there.
And now let’s talk about leaky gut, brain and skin. Very, very good. Show ahead.
Enjoy. Hello, Kiran. How are you doing?
Welcome back.
[Kiran Krishnan] (9:17 – 9:20)I am doing well, Alexx. Thank you so much for having me. [Alexx Stuart] (9:20 – 10:16)
I’m excited to have you back. Last time. I felt like we did a bit of let’s get back to basics and remember the function of the microbiome.
Why can go off? Why certain things we may have thought were a good idea, like taking one strain forever are perhaps not such a great idea. And we didn’t get to the topic of leakiness.
And there has just been so much research come out. You’re a microbiologist, but you’re not just fascinated with leaky gut. You’re interested in the gut brain, leakiness connexions, leaky skin.
And so I thought we could focus there today. And my first question is, it’s like we hear leaky a lot, but because you’re so good at 101ing, can you give us some leakiness 101 and then we’ll move on from there?
[Kiran Krishnan] (10:17 – 24:01)Yeah. You know, it sounds. The thing is, it sounds kind of silly, right?
When you when you think about it, you’re like leakiness in my body, because most people associate leakiness with, let’s say, a dripping leaky faucet, right? As if something is dripping and or a leak in the wall or leak in the dam, right? There’s leaking occurring.
What’s important to note is that there are similarities to the types of leakiness that we’re used to understanding about. And the similarity is that there are specific barriers that function in very specific manners. And we’ll elaborate on that for people.
And when those barriers are compromised, it causes dysfunction. And as it turns out, the types of dysfunction that are caused, if barriers are dismantled or are not functioning properly for a long period of time, the type of dysfunction that causes is the exact type of dysfunction that becomes the root cause of chronic disease, right? So that’s the general understanding.
So let’s tackle a couple of barriers. So people understand leakiness. So let’s take the gut, for example.
The gut is such a complex system, right? You’ve got trillions of microorganisms that live there. You’ve got loads of immune cells and immune tissues.
And most of your exposure to the outside environment comes through your gut, the things you eat, the things you drink, the things you swallow inadvertently, the things that go into your eyes, your ears, your nose, they all drain into the back of your throat. So most of the exposure to the outside environment goes through the gut. There’s lots of good things that go through the gut and lots of potentially harmful and bad things that go through the gut as well.
So the gut has to be what I refer to as a dynamic selective barrier, meaning it has to be open and closed and open and closed sometimes at the same time. And it has to allow certain things through, but very importantly, not allow other things through, right? It’s like a bouncer at the nightclub.
It’s a bouncer, right? Yeah, absolutely. And it has to have that kind of intelligence to understand what to let through and what not to let through.
Now, imagine that there’s a bouncer at a nightclub and the bouncer is making the decisions as to what comes through and what doesn’t come through, but behind the bouncer is a whole police force that at the moment that the bouncer points at something and saying that this thing is not supposed to be here, all of the police behind the bouncer draw their guns and shoot that thing with hundreds upon hundreds of rounds, right? That’s how sensitive that barrier is where they’re very, very serious about not letting the wrong things through, right?
So, let me elaborate on that a little bit more. So, the bouncer really is in part the microbes that exist in that area and they manage the physical checkpoints that separate the outside of the intestines from the barrier that enters into the body. And it’s important for people to understand the physiology here, right?
So, something that enters your digestive tract, you swallow something, it doesn’t mean by any means that it’s inside your body, right? Intuitively, we think it’s inside our body because we swallowed it, but it’s not actually inside your body until it passes past the lining of the intestines and enters into the bloodstream, right? That’s when it is truly inside the body.
Now, the reason for that is your digestive tract is a tube that’s open on both ends. So, things could theoretically go through and come out the other end, never actually entering officially inside your body. So, when food or viruses or bacteria or toxins enter into the digestive tract, they pass through, they go into the intestines.
There’s a lining of the intestines, the wall of the intestines. This is true of the small intestine, large intestine, the stomach, all of them have a lining. And that lining is where the decisions are made, whether this thing can pass through and enter into circulation or it has to stay in the tube and then either get neutralised, metabolised, broken down in some way or the other, and then either taken in in a different form or sent through to the rest of the digestive tract and out for excretion, right?
So, keep in mind that most foods, when they come in, they’re not directly absorbed how they look, right? Even proteins, for example, we eat chicken breasts, we’re not absorbing chunks of chicken into our bloodstream. What’s happening is that chicken breast is going in, it’s getting basically digested, it’s getting broken down.
You’ve got enzymes chopping it all up. The structure of the chicken basically becomes long strands of proteins. Even those proteins get chopped up into individual amino acids.
Then those individual amino acids pass through or are carried through and then taken to different parts of the body, right? So, that’s the dynamic functionality that’s occurring. Now, let’s say with that chicken breast comes a large amount of bacteria.
Let’s say you’ve undercooked that chicken, right? And now you’ve got a bunch of bacteria coming in with it. We don’t want that vector passing through and entering into the bloodstream.
So, the bouncer, which is the microbes in that area, can recognise the presence of those bacteria and go, hey guys, we’ve got to shut the gates, right? We can’t let this through. So, the tight junctions, the spaces in between the cells of the intestinal lining, they have these spaces that they can open and close.
That’s what the tight junctions are for. Now, when the chicken is being digested and we want to absorb the protein, this can be open. But the moment they sense that something bad is there, like that group of bacteria, they can shut it closed, right?
So, now this is shut closed. The microbes have indicated that we need to shut this closed. Now, on top of that, the indication by the microbe activates the cops that are behind the bouncer.
The cops, in this case, are your immune cells that are mulling about that area. There are some on the outside part of this barrier and some on the inside part of this barrier, and they both get activated, right? They both go and they get activated and they’re waiting to see if one of those microbes makes its way through.
If a microbe happens to start to make its way through, then they attack it in a very drastic fashion, right? And that’s part of what makes you sick. So, if you get undercooked chicken, it comes in, the microbes in there start trying to attack through the lining cells, break through those barriers.
Your immune system sees that, they attack very ferociously. You feel fever, you feel diarrhoea, nausea, all of those things. Many of the symptomologies are actually your immune system fighting against that bacteria, right?
Now, the same thing happens at a smaller scale with toxins coming in, with environmental particles, with all these things that we don’t want to leak through. The bouncer, the barrier, the physical barrier that the bouncer controls, and then the cops, which are the immune cells in that given area. They all have to work together in concert in order to prevent things from leaking through.
Now, when one, two, or three of those systems aren’t functioning properly, that’s when we have a leaky gut, right? That’s when the chicken come in with a bunch of bacteria on it, toxins round up, you know, all these things that could be on it. And then the barrier systems open, even though it should be shut.
The bouncer is not really there, he’s taking a nap, or it’s a different bouncer who doesn’t really care. And then the immune system is confused and is not getting direction from the bouncer. So the immune system is not necessarily there.
It’s either attacking everything that comes through because it doesn’t know who’s good and who’s bad. The bouncer is not giving it information or it’s not attacking anything and lots of things are leaking through. Both situations aren’t very good.
In the situation where the immune system is not getting the appropriate information from the bouncer, which is the microbiome and attacking everything, which is a default mode that it goes into, it goes, all right, nobody’s telling me this is good or bad. I’m just going to attack everything. Those are the people that end up with food sensitivities, right?
The reason you’re sensitive to the food is your immune system is now attacking the food. It no longer tolerates that food. Those are the people that end up with things like Crohn’s and colitis and IBS and various forms of digestive discomfort because everything they eat is driving an immune response.
These are also people that will tend to get chronic constipation or chronic diarrhoea because there’s a massive immunological response happening in the digestive tract. Now, if their immune system is not really functioning and it’s not there attacking everything and certainly not the things that should be attacking, those individuals tend to have lots of chronic inflammation and they tend to get that inflammation that normally would happen in the lining of the gut. They tend to get that in other parts of their body.
They could eat the wrong thing and instead of getting lots of cramping and bloating in the GI tract, they might get a big rash. They might get histamine activation, right? They might feel completely lethargic and be knocked out.
They may get anxiety and stress because the inflammation from here is travelling and impacting inflammation in the central nervous system. They’re set up for chronic low-grade inflammation. They become much more susceptible to things like autoimmune conditions, allergies, asthma, eczema, psoriasis, all of these inflammatory conditions that are distal from the gut, right?
So, that’s a very important way of really understanding this barrier dysfunction because as long as the barrier is not working the way it’s supposed to, you’re not only going to not absorb a lot of the things that you should be absorbing, so you’re not getting all the nutrition you should, you’re also going to be absorbing tonnes of tonnes of things that you shouldn’t be absorbing, thereby eliciting massive amounts of inflammatory responses in the lining of your gut and areas distal to the gut.
Now, this is why in 2015, there was a publication in the journal called Frontiers of Immunology. This was a meta-analysis paper, meaning it was a study that studied lots of different studies on this topic. So, these are the studies that try to help develop scientific consensus among lots of different studies that address a topic, right?
For people who aren’t familiar with meta-analysis, what tends to happen, just so people are familiar, is that if a topic becomes a topic of interest, you’ve got all these independent researchers all over the world studying the topic, right? And they’re publishing their own papers and so on. At some point, some researcher or expert in the field reviews all of those studies, all the relevant ones that meet certain criteria, meaning they write randomised control trials and so on, and then they discern a consensus from those papers.
That usually provides kind of the highest level of scientific validation because it’s not just a single study, it’s a consensus from numerous studies, right? So, this consensus analysis, this meta-analysis paper concluded that leaky gut, and they went more specific, they said leaky gut typically as a result of stress. And I’ll talk about why stress can drive a leaky gut.
And the resulting chronic low-grade inflammation, because remember I said that inflammation occurs in the gut and distal to the gut when the gut becomes leaky, and the resulting chronic low-grade inflammation was the number one cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide. It’s the number one killer worldwide, right? That sounds crazy, right?
Now, why is that the case? Why is it the number one killer? Because nobody goes to a hospital and the doctor goes, oh my God, you’re suffering from leaky gut, you’re going to die, right?
That’s how you’re not going to emergency room for leaky gut. Why is it the number one killer, right? So, this is where a lot of disconnects happen for people.
The reason it’s the number one killer is because a vast majority of chronic diseases, certainly the top 10 killers of people, so we think about things like heart disease, diabetes, dementia, Alzheimer’s, cancers, obesity, all of those, right? The top killers, they’re all inflammatory conditions and they all are started as a result of chronic low-grade inflammation. And the most prevalent cause of chronic low-grade inflammation in these conditions is leaky gut, right?
So, leaky gut is at the foundation of the majority of chronic conditions that kill people. This is why leaky gut is the number one killer of people in the developed world, number one cause of morbidity and mortality, right? It’s no different than saying, you know, liver disease is the number one killer, cirrhosis of the liver is the number one killer, if the cirrhosis is predominantly driven by people drinking too much, right?
So, you would say alcohol is actually the number one killer because alcohol is leading to cirrhosis of the liver, right? The liver is just a consequence of this thing. Many of those disease conditions I described are a consequence of leaky gut.
[Alexx Stuart] (24:02 – 24:25)So, why are we spending, that was 2015, you said, right? So, we’re nearly 10 years after that. Why are we spending so much time and focus on cures of the downstream effects worldwide when it sounds like the front page news should be a step back and getting everyone’s gut sorted? [Kiran Krishnan] (24:26 – 27:09)
Yeah. You know, part of the reason I, so I can give you, I can think of three very significant reasons, right? Number one is that most people who have leaky gut don’t know they have leaky gut, right?
So, you could have it for years and feel fine and not know you have it. And you only know you have it when it manifests into a chronic condition like diabetes or heart disease or dementia and so on, right? So, for that reason, it’s hard to proactively look for it and then thereby go after treating it.
So, that’s one reason. The second reason is the predominance of medicine in the world is an allopathic focus, right? And keep in mind that allopathic medicine is not focused on root cause, right?
It is not a root cause driven practise. And so, it’s very much a practise on a name disease state and then how do you treat that name disease state more often than not you’re treating the symptoms of the name disease state and leaky gut is not a name disease, right? And it does, and it has a long-term effect.
So, it’s much harder to treat things that are long-term. That’s the second reason. And I think the third reason is that even though it came out in 2019, that’s really only nine years ago.
And medicine is often multiple decades behind on new emerging research, right? So, I think there’s a chance that 20 years from now, it’ll become a staple test, especially after a course of antibiotics, right? Like let’s say you had to take a course of antibiotics or a sinus infection or something, your doctor may test you right after that for, hey, have we damaged your gut enough so it starts to become leaky?
Oh, and then, oh yes, we are seeing some markers of leaky gut. There’s lots of well-established immunological markers for leaky gut, lots of publications even by the NIH, even by the American Diabetic Association. So, large institutions are publishing and reporting on this.
It just hasn’t developed to a pharmaceutical approach yet, right? But 20 years from now, your doctor might test you for leaky gut and go, oh, okay, here’s an intervention we need, let’s monitor this so we don’t elevate these inflammatory cytokines and so on. And I think that’ll go along with this growing understanding that inflammation is really at the root cause of most things.
And this being one of the biggest sources of inflammation, it’ll start getting the attention it needs.
[Alexx Stuart] (27:10 – 27:20)And you mentioned markers there that we already know about. Can one walk into a doctor’s office right now and specifically request some of these markers? What are they? [Kiran Krishnan] (27:21 – 35:35)
You can. Yeah. So, so most comprehensive immune panels or even basic immune panels that you can get at your doctor’s office, right?
So you can go to your doctor’s office and say, I want an immune panel test, right? What that means is they’re going to check very basic things like CBC, which is your complete blood count or CMP, which is your complete metabolic panel. Within those, there are immunological panels like white blood cell count and leukocyte count, neutrophil count, and so on.
Those very basic things will often be elevated if you have very profound leaky gut. Those aren’t very direct measures, right? So those can take a while to elevate while you’re having leaky gut.
The more specific markers for this, and these are things that we’ve looked at in clinical trials in leaky gut that we’ve published, are interleukins and certain types of cytokines. Some people may have heard of IL, interleukin 6, interleukin 12, interleukin 1 beta. These are things that are found on immunological panels.
You can get those tested and when they’re elevated, it often is associated with leaky gut. Now here’s, here’s an even more profound way to test it. When you have leaky gut, the biggest surge of inflammation you see in your body is about three to four hours after you eat a meal, right?
Now they’ll say, well, why, why is that? Well, okay, here’s what’s happening when you eat a meal to, to put it short, because this could be a four hour conversation just about what happens when you eat a meal, right? But just, just to summarise it, when you eat a meal, what’s happening is, there’s lots of acid that’s being released, enzymes, you know, bile, salt, all of these things.
It’s a very tumultuous thing that’s going on in your gut to break down and digest food. Now, while that’s happening, you’ve got a lot of bacteria that normally live in that area that are dying off, right? And many of those bacteria are what we call gramme negative bacteria.
Every bacteria in the world can be, can be categorised as gramme negative or gramme positive. Gramme negative bacteria are unique in that in their cell membranes, they have a compound called LPS, lipopolysaccharide. This LPS is something that the bacteria uses for its own function and mechanisms and so on.
The problem with it is when the vector dies and breaks the cell open, the LPS gets released. If that LPS is found inside your body, it leaks through, it elicits a massive inflammatory response inside your body because your immune system has been designed to constantly monitor your system for the presence of LPS in circulation, because to the immune system, the presence of LPS in circulation indicates bacteremia or sepsis. That’s how your immune system recognises bacteria is by seeing its LPS, right?
And most bacteremia conditions are driven by gramme negative bacteria. And so over time we’ve evolved where our immune systems are very keen on looking for large amounts of LPS in circulation. And if it sees it, it gets very serious and it elicits a massive inflammatory response to try to control this bacterial sepsis that’s going on.
Now why that’s important? Because we know that if you become septicemic or you become septic, you can go from walking around fine one minute to being on death’s doorstep in 36 hours, right? Because septic shock and septicaemia and all the resulting issues that come about from it are very, very dangerous.
So your immune system takes it very seriously. So now you eat food, all this tumultuous things are happening. Gramme negative bacteria are dying in your gut lining, right?
Which is fine. That’s normal. But if your gut is leaky, that LPS that they release leaks through and ends up in your circulation and within four hours of eating your meal, you get the highest amount of LPS accumulating in circulation.
As a result, your immune system goes haywire and all of these inflammatory markers also get upregulated, right? That is called postprandial endotoxemia. Endotoxemia meaning it’s an endotoxin, which refers to a toxin that’s created from within as opposed to an exotoxin, which is something we would get exposed to from the outside.
So it’s a toxin that exists from the inside of the body. And emia means this endotoxin is now in the blood. Postprandial meaning it’s after a meal, right?
So postprandial endotoxemia is the official terminology for leaky gut, right? That’s the most defined way of understanding and looking at leaky gut. If somebody has significant postprandial endotoxemia, it means they have a very leaky gut and that’s very measurable.
It’s heavily published. We’ve even published using that mechanism. So what it means for these individuals is that every time you eat food within four hours, your body’s going through a mini septicaemia.
You’re going through sepsis like inflammatory responses in your body. Now the crazy thing is it can be disseminated, meaning it can be happening throughout the body or it can be highly concentrated depending on where a lot of that LPS made its way to. If it made its way to your brain, your brain is going through septicemic like inflammation after the meal, right?
If it made it to your heart or your pericardium, your heart’s going through it, your muscles, your joints, all of those regions are going through massive inflammation after a meal. So when we’re measuring leaky gut, what we’re looking for is we’re giving individuals a high caloric meal. The higher the caloric meal, the higher fat in the meal, the more endotoxemia you’ll have if your gut is leaky.
And what we’re doing is we’re measuring their blood four hours after the meal compared to baseline before feeding. And the markers we’re looking for are IL-6, interleukin-6, IL-1 beta, interleukin-1 beta, IL-12, interleukin-12, TNF alpha, and then often interferon, interferon gamma, right? So these are some of the key markers that will often be super elevated once if you have postprandial endotoxemia.
So how you would mimic that in your doctor’s office is you would go to your doctor, fasted, you’d be 10, 12 hours fasted overnight, and you go to the doctor’s office in the morning, and you have a blood draw for all of those markers, right? So you’re doing it fasted, then you go off and you have a meal, right? So you have a real, especially if you can have a really high fat, high caloric, high sugar meal, you know, maybe go get fast food, that’ll do it every time, right?
And then four hours after you come back to the doctor’s office, you get the second blood draw. And then when the results come out, if you see a big delta between the baseline levels of those inflammatory markers and the four-hour postprandial, then you know, you’ve got pretty significant leaky gut. What we normally look for is around a four to six fold increase in those inflammatory markers in individuals who don’t have leaky gut, who have a robust gut microbiome.
Even if you went and ate three cheeseburgers, pizza and ice cream, you won’t get that postprandial elevation, right? So the food, you can induce worse postprandial inflammation with the types of foods you eat, but the leaky gut has to be there, right? Or you just won’t see that postprandial elevation because your lining of your gut is working the way it’s supposed to.
It’s allowing the proteins and nutrients and all in, but not allowing the LPS and all of the things that’s going to cause problem.
[Alexx Stuart] (35:35 – 35:46)Mm-hmm. Huge. And how far away are we from being able to do such a test at the doctors?
Cause I’m picturing going to my GP and them going, you want me to do what?
[Kiran Krishnan] (35:47 – 35:59)So, so fortunately some, some very few functional medicine practitioners are doing it, but it’s not standard yet, right? Because it is a little cumbersome. [Alexx Stuart] (35:59 – 36:05)
Yeah. And I imagine it would be cost prohibitive as well. At this point. [Kiran Krishnan] (36:05 – 38:37)
It could be, although these, these particular immune tests are in most places should be covered by insurance because they’re not, they’re not speciality tests. They’re part of a lot of comprehensive immune panels that the doctor can justify wanting to see those, those markers. They can absolutely cover it either in the U S by insurance or national health service, wherever you live.
It’s just a little cumbersome and most doctors aren’t aware that this is something that can be done right now at the same time, the way I see it when we’ve done our studies and we’ve, we’ve screened hundreds of people for leaky gut, and normally we’re screening healthy young individuals because the FDA in the U S does it really allow you to do clinical trials on a disease population for supplements? You’re supposed to only use a disease population with drugs, right?
And so most of the studies we do, we have to do it on a healthy population. So we take healthy young individuals. So these are people with no chronic conditions that have been diagnosed.
They’re not on any medications. They’re normal body weight, average age, 23, 24, right? They’re by all intents and purposes, they’re, they’re healthy individuals.
55% of those individuals have severe leaky gut, right? To a point where it can take their body up to two weeks to recover from the inflammation from a single meal, right? That’s how bad it is in many of these individuals.
So if 55% of healthy young individuals have severe leaky gut, anybody that’s, that’s in their thirties, forties, and so on that especially has experienced some sort of chronic issue, like they’re a little bit overweight, you know, from, from where, where they were when they were at their leanest, if they’ve experienced food intolerances, allergies, asthma, brain fog, anxiety, depression, you know, skin conditions like psoriasis, eczema, acne, all of these things, you know, any sort of immune condition, any sort of metabolic condition, all of these are tied to leaky gut. Leaky gut is present in most of these conditions. So it’s, it’s easier to just assume you have leaky gut and treat your microbiome in a way that you want to alleviate that leaky gut.
And that’s generally healthy for you anyway. Yeah, exactly. So I’m saying you don’t need to go get a test and any of that, just treat it like you have it.
[Alexx Stuart] (38:37 – 39:21)Yeah. And can I just clarify something? Because before you were, when you were talking about this this four hours after the meal and you said high fat, high caloric, and then when we talked about the example, you added in sugar.
So I just want to clarify, is it the, the double whammy? Because a lot of dietary protocols exist where one would be on a ketogenic diet, let’s say, to heal leaky gut. Now, whether you agree with that or not, that’s probably a whole other conversation.
But I just wanted to clarify, is it about the high fat, high sugar, like that old mouse study with the cheesecake kind of situation?
[Kiran Krishnan] (39:21 – 40:10)It’s actually more about the high fat, high caloric. Sugar, if there’s added sugar into that mix, you will see an even bigger rise. But the most impactful is the caloric density of the meal and, and, and the amount of fat in the meal.
Now some of the fat matters to a certain degree as well. What kind of fat matters, right? Studies have shown that very high saturated fat is going to create even more leaky gut, right?
Olive oil, for example, will actually either be neutral or may reduce the leaky gut to a certain degree. Omega fatty acids can reduce it to a roof. Coconut oil is one of the worst.
[Alexx Stuart] (40:12 – 40:40)Okay. Cause like who hasn’t seen the meme with, I got 99 problems and coconut oils fixing 98 of them. And like all that, I mean, everyone went mad for coconut oil.
I’m putting my hand up at one particular point, probably about 12 years ago, where I was like, Ooh, this is amazing. But it really was, it felt like a very congesting food for me. And I tapped into that quite early.
But you know, some people still are raving about it. What does the science tell us?
[Kiran Krishnan] (40:41 – 45:11)So, so the science is clear. If you’re looking at endotoxemia, the effect of leakiness in the gut you, if you consume coconut oil, it’s going to increase the endotoxemia quite dramatically. It’s the worst among all the oils.
It was even worse than like vegetable oils and, you know, which we know can be oxidised and not very great for you. Coconut oil was the worst. Now, now here’s why, let me explain why it doesn’t mean the oil itself is bad necessarily.
Right. There’s, there’s a mechanism and a nuance about it. The thing is, so, so there’s two parts to it.
Number one, so saturated fat is a very unique type of fat, right. Versus say monounsaturated and so on. Now, number one, your microbes, your gramme negative bacteria utilise dietary fat to make their LPS.
LPS that endotoxin I talked about earlier is a fatty acid molecule, right? It looks, it has a carbohydrate head and it has these two or three fatty acid tails. Now the part of the LPS that elicits a profound immune response, the part that we say is toxic is actually the fatty acid tail, right?
Now what the studies have shown is when the gramme negative bacteria make LPS from saturated fat, they make an LPS that’s even more toxigenic and even more immunological than when they make it say from polyunsaturated fatty acids or omega fatty acids, right? So, so that’s one effect of, of having, of getting a lot of saturated fat. When your gut is leaky, you’re going to end up with LPS that’s even more immunogenic, right?
Meaning that a certain version of LPS, say from, you know, that’s, that’s from a polyunsaturated fat increases inflammation up to here, postprandially, the one from saturated fat will increase it 20, 30% higher, right? So that’s one factor. The second factor is your body doesn’t break down saturated fat as well, right?
So it’s saturated because it has these double bonds. That’s why it’s called saturated fat. So it’s a very, it’s a more stable fat, if you will.
And it’s part of the reason why saturated fat is, is solid at room temperature, right? So coconut oil, for example, is solid at room temperature. It has the highest concentration of saturated fat.
So it’s harder to break down and your body has to go through a bit more to utilise it, to try to break it down and then absorb it. So one of the things that the body does when you consume high amounts of saturated fat is it actually creates these lipid rafts. These are like boats that your body creates, and it sends the boats across the lining of the gut, grabs the fat and brings it into circulation.
It can utilise the fat in many different ways, right? For our own cells and so on. It’s not that the fat in itself is bad, but what tends to happen when you make these lipid rafts, they go across, they accidentally pull in even more LPS because remember the LPS is a fatty acid as well.
It looks like that saturated fat that came in from the diet. So it inadvertently gets carried across and brought into circulation. So those are a couple of reasons why high saturated fat will actually increase postprandial endotoxemia, which, and the highest source of saturated fat is coconut oil.
Coconut has something like 85, 90% saturated fat, right? People often say, oh, uh, you know, red meat or it has high saturated fat. Actually it doesn’t, especially if you get free range and all that, it’s still a small percentage of the total fat of the animal.
There are polyunsaturated and other things, but in general, what I always advise people, and I’ve seen this over and over again, when people would just jump into a ketogenic diet, you get the keto flu, right? Keto fever, people hear about these things, is that’s that increased level of postprandial endotoxemia when you first start the diet, right? If you’re going to go keto for whatever reason, and I would recommend if you’re, if there there’s some great studies, uh, coming out of the U S, some, um, I think university of Florida.
I’m not, if I’m not mistaken, um, uh, Dr. D’Agostino and his team has done some great studies on the use of ketogenic diet for very specific conditions.
[Alexx Stuart] (45:11 – 45:16)Some great mental health diet, uh, dietary protocols as well. Yeah. Yeah. [Kiran Krishnan] (45:17 – 46:50)
But I think for a general person, if you’re not being guided by a physician or, uh, a clinician, um, what you really need to do, you’re trying to attempt keto is you need to spend at least one or two months fixing your gut microbiome before jumping into the high fat, because what you could do is in an inadvertently dramatically increase your leaky gut. Now keto is not fixed for leaky gut. There’s no evidence that it fixes leaky gut.
You have to change the microbes in the microbiome. You have to upregulate the tight junctions. You have to rebuild the mucosa in order to fix leaky gut.
So keto doesn’t do that. Um, you know, in, in, in some people, it may alleviate what feels like symptoms of leaky gut. Um, the other important thing to note is if you do decide to go on keto, it’s not something you should be on long-term because you will damage your microbiome, right?
Because the vast majority of microbes in your microbiome need fibre and need plant material, right? That’s how they’ve evolved to, to consume, uh, macromolecules. It all comes through plant fibre, plant material, pectin, cellulose, all of these things that we don’t break down very well, but it causes us to feed the microbes in the microbiome.
Very, very few microbes can metabolise fat and utilise fat in an effective way. So what happens, and there are a couple of studies that have shown this when you go on a very high fat diet or keto like diet over a relatively short amount of time, the diversity of your microbiome reduces quite a bit.
[Alexx Stuart] (46:51 – 47:12)So it seems to me that it would be key. And I know a couple of practitioners who do this very well, that if this is a diet being used for certain conditions, as the science shows a clear benefit, uh, that cultured foods and, you know, protecting your microbiome in this higher fat state would be essential. [Kiran Krishnan] (47:13 – 49:07)
Absolutely. You know, and, and I would say that, you know, you take, you take your average diet and I’m just kinda, um, you know, pulling a number out of my, uh, out of the air. Um, you know, your typical diet has somewhere around 30% of the calories from fat, right?
So then if you want to switch to a keto like diet, you don’t have to go a hundred percent of your calories from fat. You can switch to something like 80% from fat, but ensure you’re still getting 20%, at least from mints, polyphenols, maybe some fibre that you’re taking in as well, right? All of those things that are important to, to keep feeding your microbiome while you’re using the high fat based diet for whatever purpose that you’re using it.
But again, it’s also not sustainable long-term, right? There’s, there’s, there’s really only one known culture in the world, uh, that, that has ever consumed a very high fat diet. Uh, and that’s the Inuit Indians.
And often, you know, uh, people will use them as an example and say, Oh, look at them. They can eat a diet, very high in seal blubber. And they they’re fine.
Well, actually when you dig into it, it’s, it’s not actually true. There’s a, there’s a few different things. Number one, they’ve got a number of genetic snips that allow them to utilise fat differently than you and I, right?
They, they, they have, they have enzymes that they produce and proteins that they produce that convert fat into other things that we can’t convert it into a number two. They actually do eat a number of plant materials because hunting seals and getting seal blubber and all that is a lot of work. And there’s a lot of risk associated with it.
They do it, but in the meantime, they also do forage. They eat actually a lot of berries. They eat a good amount of fibre.
So they eat a lot of plant-based material, uh, as, as a, um, along with that high fat diet. And that’s a very important part of how they maintain their overall health.
[Alexx Stuart] (49:07 – 49:41)Yeah. And humans have just got to stop with the headline learned as like some deep fact, just so much more to things than a quick, like, oh yeah, they eat high fat. We should all, it’s just bizarre to me that we, we so easily and, and trustingly jump on a bandwagons that might, you know, not suit our ancestry, our genetic snips, our current microbiome situation, which I think was a key thing that has just come out of what you’ve said there, Kieran.
Yeah.
[Kiran Krishnan] (49:41 – 51:31)And coconut is another example of that, right? So if you think about where coconuts are grown and coconuts are equatorial trees, right? You don’t see a coconut in Denmark.
You don’t see a coconut, you know, down in, uh, in, in, um, in other regions. You don’t see, I didn’t, when I was in New Zealand, I did not see a lot of coconut trees, uh, in New Zealand. And so people who come from, you know, Europe, Northern Europe and, and so on, or even certain parts of Asia and all that their ancestors themselves, they’ve never been exposed to coconut and coconut is a very unique food, right?
It’s a very unusual combination of fatty acids, a very high percentage of fatty acids. It’s got long chain, medium chain, uh, triglycerides and so on. Um, and equatorial people seem to digest it and hold on to it and, and utilise it quite readily.
But then, you know, you take somebody from a region that never sees a coconut and then all of a sudden they started using coconut all in everything. It’s going to have a negative effect on their system, right? No different than, um, you know, if I went to Mexico city and I ate street food, I’m probably going to get sick, right?
But every Mexican walking down the street can eat that street food and be fine. And that’s because we are intolerant to some of these things that we’re not used to. Yes.
In that case is that the issue is going to come from contamination, but their bodies are perfectly aligned with that level of contamination or that type of contamination. Mine isn’t right because I’m not used to it. So, so with, with food and things like that, we have to remember that our microbiomes evolved and our system evolved based on region.
And, and when we introduce something that’s dramatic from a very different region, it can have a deleterious effect. A hundred percent.
[Alexx Stuart] (51:31 – 51:43)Yeah. I think it’s just so fascinating. And like, it’s like, you know, as you learn more, you realise how little, you know, still, uh, and I’m sure as a microbiologist, you even feel the same way sometimes. [Kiran Krishnan] (51:43 – 51:44)
A hundred percent. Yes. [Alexx Stuart] (51:44 – 52:06)
And so you did mention a few skin conditions there and you mentioned brain fog. So can we just expand the lens onto all the leakies and the interrelationship? Is it all coming from leaky gut originally?
Uh, or can leaky brain and leaky skin exist separate to leaky gut?
[Kiran Krishnan] (52:06 – 57:25)So what seems to be the, um, the, the, what the evidence points to is that leaky brain, sorry, leaky gut and leaky skin are two independent leaky barriers. Um, they can certainly make each other worse, right? I’ll describe how they can make each other worse.
Leaky brain becomes a victim in all of it. Right. Um, so leaky brain tends to be a consequence of leaky gut and or leaky skin or a combination of the two.
So, so your gut and your skin are the two biggest barrier systems in your body, right? We’ve always, uh, you know, said the skin is the largest organ in the body and it has this massive surface area. I described how the gut has this very dynamic selective permeability.
Um, the skin is similar to that, but much more narrow, uh, meaning that the skin is predominantly a barrier. There’s very little that it lets in or should let in. And it’s mostly there to prevent stuff from getting in and stuff from getting out actually.
So it’s a two way barrier in that sense. This is why, when you look at the structure of the gut and the skin barriers, they’re quite a bit different in that the gut is a single cell, uh, layer that, right. So the intestinal lining is actually just one cell thick and these cells sit together like soldier cells, shoulder to shoulder, and they have spaces in between them that can open up and let stuff through.
Now, one of the key things that protects the intestinal cells is this nice mucosal layer up top, right? And what the mucus, what the mucus does is it slows down the transit of things that are trying to come through, right? So when you eat stuff in this food and viruses and bacteria and all these things, all of it gets slowed down by the mucus.
So this time for the immune cells of the microbiome in this region to decide, is this good or is this bad? Right? So, so that structure is clearly very dynamic, like a gate system.
The skin is very different. We’ve got the, the epidermis, which is a nice chunk of, of your, uh, skin barrier system. And then you’ve got a dermis layer, and then you’ve got fatty layers below that.
And, and, um, you know, other, uh, structures below that, but in the, in the epidermis alone, in the topmost layer of the skin, you’ve got layers of cells. They’re not single layers, multiple layers of cells that look like bricks, right? And then, and then towards the end of the epidermis, you’ve got this beautiful fatty acid layer.
It’s called the ceramide layer, right? So, so you’ve got these, all these cells sitting one on top of the other, like a bunch of bricks, like a bunch of tiles. And then you’ve got this beautiful fatty acid layer that covers everything.
And then below that, you’ve got the dermis, which is even more cells sitting. And then you’ve got some, some mucus and proteins and collagen and all of these structures that act as a barrier. Now, the reason why the skin looks like that is that the fatty acid layer acts as a very important component of preventing moisture from leaving your body and leaving your skin, right?
Your skin is a major source of evaporation. It’s exposed to heat and sunlight and all that stuff. And you maintain a lot of moisture in your skin, but the moisture is below that fatty acid layer.
Now remember fat, water don’t mix, right? So even though the sun is pulling as much as it can through evaporation, trying to pull the moisture out, the moisture can’t actually get out because that fatty acid layer is blocking it. So that’s a very important layer for maintaining moisture and function of your skin, because of course your skin cells need the moisture to, to remain functional, except for the very top dead layer of skins that doesn’t need the moisture the same way.
And then also all the fibres, the collagen, the elastin fibres, and everything else that make up that structure of the skin, all of it needs that moisture to continue to function as a, as a real barrier. Now, the other thing that the fatty acid layer does is it also prevents toxins from penetrating through the top layer of the skin because most toxins are oil or fat soluble. So they’ll get stuck in that fatty acid layer.
And as that fatty acid layer kind of starts to slough off and you produce more ceramides in the bottom, the top layer of ceramide sloughs off. And then as it moves through the top most layers of the skin, you’ve got microbes that break down this, this used fatty acid. And what that does is two things.
Number one, it allows you to release those toxins that got trapped. Now that’s evaporated off right from your skin, or when you wash and bathe, it comes off. It also breaks down the fatty acids and creates acid and it brings down the pH of your skin.
This way you prevent mould from growing on your skin, right? Skin is slightly acidic in its pH. And there’s a very important reason for that because that prevents mould and fungus from growing on the skin.
But the maintenance of the pH of the skin is dependent on microbes that are there to break down the fatty acids, right? So, so the dynamic ness of the barrier system of the skin is far less than the gut because there’s almost nothing that it wants to let through and almost nothing that it wants to let out. It’s trying to act as a real firm barrier, right?
[Alexx Stuart] (57:26 – 57:29)Very, very exclusive club. Yeah. [Kiran Krishnan] (57:29 – 1:05:07)
Very exclusive club, right? Yeah. The bouncers are plenty.
The, the, the police in this case are farther back. They’re down below the epidermis layer normally. And, and these bouncers, not only are they there with a velvet rope, a dainty velvet rope, they’re actually there with a brick wall and they’re sitting on top of the brick wall, staring down at the things that are trying to come in.
Right? So, so the structures are much more robust to act as a barrier. Now, the maintenance of that barrier is, seems to be very dependent on the microbes that live in the region, right?
I mentioned one form of maintenance, that’s the pH balance of your skin is microbe dependent. The turning over of skin cells. So we know that skin grows from inside out, right?
And then the top most layer of the skin ends up becoming dead skin cells that we normally shed. But in order to shed those cells appropriately, often they’re broken down and then they’re released. The debris of those cells are released.
They need to be broken down. Or what happens is they can accumulate in larger numbers and your skin starts to look dull. When you don’t have that shine, you know, on your skin and your skin starts to look dull, that’s the top layer of the skin cells, not sloughing off appropriately.
This is when people go and start doing exfoliations and all that stuff, but your body naturally exfoliates through microbes because there are microbes that live on your skin whose job it is to break down those skin cells and get them released. Now there are microbes that also increase the expression of the collagen and elastin fibres so that your skin cells can make more collagen and elastin to improve the tautness and the infrastructure of the skin. You’ve got microbes that also modulate immune response on your skin because as you’re walking around through the world, you might get a toxin or something that lands on your skin, a virus or something like that.
Your immune system may detect this and go, hey, I want to go attack that. But the microbes modulate that response saying, we don’t need you to come attack because when the immune system does attack, it damages the skin, right? That’s inflammation.
That’s what happens in psoriasis, in eczema and various forms of dermatitis. The redness, plaquing, dryness, damage to the skin is from your own immune system, right? It’s nothing from the outside.
So the beneficial microbes sit there and they keep the immune system at bay unless it’s absolutely necessary. They say, okay, don’t come and attack this. Don’t come and attack that.
It’s providing tolerance on the skin to the world around you, right? Now, if you don’t have that, let’s take you and I as a hypothetical example. Let’s say you’ve got the right microbes in your skin and they’re providing you tolerance.
And I have the wrong microbes on my skin. Not only are they not providing me tolerance, they actually add to the induction of an immune response by producing toxins and things, right? So let’s say you’ve got a lot of staph epidermidis, which is a good protective microbe.
I’ve got a lot of staph aureus, which is a microbe that has the potential to be toxigenic or pathogenic, right? So you and I go for a walk together in the park and we walk through trails and whatnot. And in that walk, we get exposed to a number of things, some fungus or mould from the leaves and the bushes that we walk close by that falls on our skin.
Maybe some toxins from one of the animals or something that was there recently that falls on our skin, right? A few other things fall on our skin. And what happens is when we come home, you’re sitting there with your resilient skin and your staph aureus, and the staff is looking at that stuff going, right, that’s not really a bother.
The immune system is underneath going, hey, do you need this to come take care of this? And your staff is going, nope, we don’t need that help. It’s perfectly fine.
It’s not damaging the skin. So you feel nothing. Your skin looks and feels completely normal.
You might go and shower later that night. All that stuff is gone. You go to sleep just fine.
I come home on the other end, and then all of a sudden I’m going, I’m starting to feel a little itch, right? Why am I starting to feel a little itch? Well, what’s happening there is those things fell on the skin.
The immune system underneath is going, do we need to take care of that? The staph aureus, the dysfunctional bacteria, not only is not telling the immune system that they shouldn’t take care of it, it’s producing toxins to initiate even more of an inflammatory response. Now the immune system is going, okay, not only do I see these things, these foreign things, but I’m seeing bacterial toxins, I’m going to go attack it.
So it starts a cascade of responses. Most of the responses are going to be inflammatory-like responses to try to control things in that region. And that initial inflammatory response starts breaking up the ceramide layer, and I started losing moisture in that area.
So it starts to feel dry and it starts to feel itchy, right? So I’m starting to scratch it. Now the problem is the scratching acts as another stimulus to elicit more immune response, right?
So now I have three things on that part of my skin that are eliciting more immune response. So I’m scratching and scratching, the immune system is getting more and more activated. And then before you know it, the immune system is so active in that region, it’s damaged that region enough where now I have a plaque there that looks like a psoriatic plaque or an eczema plaque, right?
Now it’s dry, it’s red, it may even be broken, it could be itchy, and it looks like a lesion or a plaque on my skin. And it’s the same things we were exposed to, but you had the right microbes on your skin and I had the wrong microbe, right? So that’s the fundamental difference.
Now my barrier is now compromised, right? What’s happening now from here is the inflammation that has started in my skin is also starting to get translated as it goes through different layers of the skin, further and further down where it actually starts ending up in my circulation, right? And the staph aureus that’s been sitting there making toxins, trying to stoke the immune system even more, is now making even more toxins and that toxin now has a path to enter into my body.
And then now it enters into my body, whatever mould and toxin was on there from my exposure in the environment, that enters in as well. Those things are now in circulation, driving chronic low-grade inflammation. So leaky skin barrier not only then shows up as dysfunction on the skin, but can cause chronic low-grade inflammation as well.
The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Ageing, which is a 50 plus year study, showed that a damaged age leaky skin was a major risk factor for chronic disease. And these are chronic diseases that have nothing to do with the skin. They’re talking about Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes, dementia, autoimmune conditions, and so on, because when the barrier system on the skin is not functioning, things are leaking through and creating chronic low-grade inflammation.
Now, if you have both leaky skin and leaky gut, then you’ve got a double whammy of daily massive amounts of chronic inflammation being induced. Those are the people with the highest risk of developing chronic conditions. And then of course, facing issues around mortality and all that.
[Alexx Stuart] (1:05:07 – 1:05:37)Wow. So I feel like we need to spend our final few minutes on solutions after this incredible deep dive. But let’s start with skin because we’re fresh on that topic.
This whole kills 99.999% of germs, you know, phobia that we have of bacteria. That’s got to stop, right? That just, that has to stop.
[Kiran Krishnan] (1:05:38 – 1:06:09)It has to stop. I would refuse to use anything on most of my body, most of my skin that has any antimicrobial effect at all. Right now, some people may say, well, you probably use soap, right?
So I do use bar soap. I use a very simple and clean bar soap and soap does have a killing effect, but, but we know from decades of use that soap actually has a very minimal impact on the types of microbes. It doesn’t change the ecosystem a lot.
[Alexx Stuart] (1:06:10 – 1:06:10)Yeah. [Kiran Krishnan] (1:06:10 – 1:06:11)
Just gets rid of the bad guys. [Alexx Stuart] (1:06:12 – 1:06:33)
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I always say, you know, look, yes, I have my little Bronner hand sanitiser in my handbag for the airport bathroom or the, you know, that kind of like for those sorts of situations, of course, I’m going to use that.
But I’m not like running around my house, patting my dog and then using a sanitiser. No, no.
[Kiran Krishnan] (1:06:34 – 1:07:33)And I don’t use it, you know, like I have lots of friends and all that. And if we go on a hike or we’re outside and we’re doing things, playing around in the park and all that. And then before sitting down and eating, they’re using the hand sanitiser.
I don’t use it in those conditions. I will, if I go to the bathroom, right. If I’m at the gym and I’m touching all the same equipment that everyone else is, I’m going to use some sanitiser before I accidentally start picking at my face and poking my nose and so on.
Right. So so high touch air in high touch, inanimate objects. The official scientific term for that are fomites.
Fomites are these inanimate objects that transfer viruses, bacteria and all that very readily. Right. Like doorknobs, for example.
Right. And things like that. So in a very public area, if I’m touching doorknobs, I’m in the bathroom, things like that, I will use the sanitiser, but never in my home.
Right. If my hands get dirty from something, I’m going to rinse it off in the sink or maybe put some soap.
[Alexx Stuart] (1:07:33 – 1:07:36)No bacteria wipes on the counter and all that kind of stuff. [Kiran Krishnan] (1:07:36 – 1:07:37)
Yeah. [Alexx Stuart] (1:07:37 – 1:07:37)
Yeah. [Kiran Krishnan] (1:07:37 – 1:08:12)
That’s right. And so if you if you have a bath gel or a bath soap and things that are antimicrobial, that’s the first thing you should do is you should start removing those kinds of things from your from your personal care routine. Right.
And you also want to consider things like your lotions that you put on, you know, the the the shampoos that you use and all that. The cleaner you can go with some of these things, the better. You know, it’s it’s a lot of work and it’s hard for people to kind of revamp their whole routines and chuck out all the products.
[Alexx Stuart] (1:08:13 – 1:08:16)But that’s what I’m here for. Right. Good.
Yeah, exactly.
[Kiran Krishnan] (1:08:16 – 1:10:26)But I tell them that, listen, you know, don’t let it be overwhelming. Start with one thing at a time. Right.
Like spend the next couple of months finding the best lotion for you that is clean, that doesn’t isn’t full of antimicrobials and pesticides and preservatives and all that. Try to find the cleanest version of the lotion that works for your skin. Once you find that, great.
Now go to your soap or your shampoo or your deodorant. Right. So slowly you will clean up your personal care products.
All of those things can have a very negative effect on your skin microbiome. Number two, get outside as much as you can. Right.
So there are lots of benefits for your skin microbiome, specifically from being outside. And that’s because interaction with the natural environment allows for transient microbes to come onto your skin. They modulate your immune response.
It can help your resident microbes kind of sort out dysfunction. And then they leave. They jump off.
Right. And then there are things like we’ve we’ve created the CIV product, which is oh, yeah, I was reading about that. Yeah.
Yeah. This has been an amazing thing. This is a skin microbiome product.
It uses bacillus spores and bacillus spores. We’ve come to find out is that they’re really good at quorum sensing on the skin. And we’ve done a few microbiome tests where we show that people really high elevated problematic vector on the skin, whether it’s on the face or other parts of the body.
And as a result, they have acne and lots of other conditions. Just using this once a day for anywhere from four to five weeks makes a dramatic change on that skin microbiome. And then all those inflammatory issues and all that come down quite dramatically as well.
I think we had in our 317 subject tests, we had 90 percent measurable skin improvement in terms of inflammation, hydration, tonality, the skin pimples. So those most of those people had occasional acne and breakouts. So all of those things change dramatically in that period of time because we’re changing the microbes on the skin.
Amazing.
[Alexx Stuart] (1:10:26 – 1:10:46)So good. And and so it just feels like, you know, take all the complicated stuff away from your skin. Uh, that is, uh, high tox and then go low tox on the skin and consider implementing some, um, microbe friendly skin care in the mix.
Good plan.
[Kiran Krishnan] (1:10:47 – 1:11:51)That’s right. Yep. Great plan.
And then if you go to, you know, we, we created an Instagram page for Civ, uh, called Civ Care. So if you’re on Instagram, it’s at Civ Care, S I V C A R E. The, the focus of that page is to really, we, we posted a lot of videos on like things that you may not know are actually harming your skin microbiome.
Right. So we, we have a aesthetician and nurse and a few people kind of going through and introducing people to new things that are things they may not be aware are harming the skin microbiome that they can look for on their products on the ingredient list and so on. Right.
Like phthalates and benzoates and, you know, uh, lake dyes and all these kinds of ingredients that you may not be aware of that have a damaging effect on your skin microbiome. So, so that’s the skin side. Now on the gut side, uh, what you really want to do is diversify your diet as much as you can, right.
Get as much variety into your system of natural foods, uh, real foods, really. It’s not like a variety of chips. That’s not going to help you.
Uh, right. You want to get a variety.
[Alexx Stuart] (1:11:52 – 1:11:55)Yeah. You don’t want the variety pack of belays chips. [Kiran Krishnan] (1:11:56 – 1:13:33)
That’s definitely not. Yeah. He said variety.
So I got the variety back of candy bars and chips. Um, so real food, like a nice variety of real food, um, increasing fibre is so critically important. There there’s a, a group of compounds it’s made in your gut called short chain fatty acids that play a very important role in maintaining and repairing the physical structure of the barrier system in your gut.
Short chain fatty acids can only be derived from fibre being fermented and converted to short chain fatty acids in your gut. And this is one of the reasons why fibre is so critically important. My recommendation for fibre intake to people is you want to get to a goal of 50 grammes or more per day.
And that can be a combination of food and supplementing fibre and so on. Um, you, if you’re taking two grammes a day right now, you don’t want to go to 50 tomorrow because you’re going to have a lot of indigestion and you’re going to be very upset. Uh, what I, what I always recommend people to do is add about a gramme a day each week, right?
If you’re at, you know, three, four grammes, normally a fibre this right now, in terms of your normal diet next week, you go to four or five grammes. Then you go to six, seven grammes the following week and so on until you get to 50 or more. And in fact, you will absolutely live longer, right?
Fibre is one of the biggest, from a dietary perspective has one of the biggest impacts on mortality for, for every gramme of fibre you add to your daily diet. You can reduce all cause mortality by almost 10%.
[Alexx Stuart] (1:13:33 – 1:13:39)Yeah. I remember that from our first show at that has absolutely stayed with me. Yeah. [Kiran Krishnan] (1:13:39 – 1:14:29)
It’s so huge, right? I, desperately work on trying to get 50, 60 grammes of fibre or more per day. And it makes such a difference, right?
Um, and then using the right probiotics. So we had developed a spore based probiotic mega spore with the, with the sole intention of alleviating leaky gut. And we published a couple of studies showing in humans that we can stop leaky gut with that probiotic.
So if you add that in to the beneficial behaviours of diversifying your diet, increasing your fibre, modulating stress, because stress does increase intestinal permeability, getting outside more, getting exercise, getting sleep. Um, you’ll be perfectly fine. All those barriers will go back to functioning the way they’re supposed to function.
And you will dramatically reduce your risk for long-term chronic conditions.
[Alexx Stuart] (1:14:30 – 1:15:16)So good. Karen, thank you so much. A wealth of knowledge as always.
And, uh, for the people who maybe weren’t really clear on why we should care so much. I think that for me is one of the, you know, you hear so many things on the internet and you see so many real leaky gut this and it’s like, Oh my God, everything, it just shush. Um, but I really like deep diving and just having proper explainers.
Maybe it’s my Gen X self of like quality information that we can really learn the why, because then when, when you feel connected to a Y you’re much more likely to take action and notice things about yourself. You’re like, Hmm, absolutely. Yeah.
That’s actually a red flag on the leaky gut front. I gotta put, I gotta reign that in.
[Kiran Krishnan] (1:15:17 – 1:16:41)That’s that’s my biggest purpose in what I do is, is really getting people to understand the why, right. If they understand the science, if they understand the mechanisms, if they understand the connexions, uh, they’ll get the why. And when you know it, you can do better.
You know why I always say when you know better, you can do better. Um, and, and it becomes more relevant. It’s no different than why it doesn’t take anything to, to cause me to brush my teeth every day or twice a day, but it takes a lot to get your kids to do it.
Right. They don’t understand why. Um, and so it’s just a pain in the butt to do it.
Right. And so, but I understand why now, you know, and, and so I do it every day, right. That’s a, it’s the same kind of simplistic, um, you know, reasoning.
Um, and I think people really need to be empowered to take control of their own risks and their own health, right. Because we cannot just rely on our doctors. We cannot rely on our health systems, you know, for, for, um, for keeping us healthy.
That’s not what those systems are designed for. Right. Our, our doctors, our health systems are all there to manage our sickness.
They’re not there to manage our wellness. And so we absolutely have to take on the mantle of, of creating wellness for ourselves. And it, and so much of it starts in the gut.
[Alexx Stuart] (1:16:41 – 1:16:44)So much of it does. Thanks again for joining me. [Kiran Krishnan] (1:16:45 – 1:16:45)
My pleasure. [Alexx Stuart] (1:16:46 – 1:19:41)
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