Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
What is the best supplement for me? What potency is right? What does the research show? Is it worth the money? These and all of your other supplement questions are answered here. Jared St. Clair brings well researched information so that you can make more informed decisions regarding your health, specifically focused on how to effectively use natural supplements to optimize your health and Vitality. Of course supplement and food choices aren't the only factors in optimal health. Jared also shares a regular series of Emotional Vitality episodes that will help you release the negativity that may be holding you back and embrace your full potential. Vitality Radio is not JUST about health, it is about HEALTH FREEDOM. Jared provides needed insight into the current threats to your health as well as the threats coming from government agencies, pharmaceutical companies and modern medicine as a whole. With over 35 years of experience in the natural products world, and a hearty dose of wit and sarcasm, Vitality Radio isn't just educational but entertaining and enlightening.
Welcome
Announcer:to the Vitality Radio podcast, your source for the truth about health, wellness, and real alternatives to drugs, surgeries, and the status quo of health care. Here, you'll find information that empowers you to take control of your health, but it's not just about health and wellness. It's about the politics of health care and protecting your health freedom. Now here's your host, Jared St. Clair.
Jared St. Clair:Welcome to Vitality Radio. I'm Jared St. Clair. It's good to be with you again on another episode of Vitality Radio. This episode is a solo show.
Jared St. Clair:Just me talking about probably my favorite subject, and that is the subject of the human microbiome. We're gonna talk about a combination of things. I've discussed the microbiome many times on Vitality Radio. It is my preferred topic to speak at when I go to events. But, anyway, today, I wanna primarily focus on the concept, or not the concept.
Jared St. Clair:How do I put it? The comparison is probably the right word of spore forming probiotics versus human strain probiotics. And I have not really done a deep dive into this topic, and I think it's long overdue based on, well, a few things. Mainly, you listening to the show, sending me a whole bunch of questions that I apparently have not answered well enough yet, on the show. So we're gonna go a little deeper than what I have before on this topic for sure.
Jared St. Clair:And, also, because we had this fantastic guest on Vitality Radio, Brenda Watson. If you didn't hear her episode of Vitality Radio, it's episode three zero five. And Brenda is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to digestive health. She knows her probiotics very, very well and is a big proponent of human strain probiotics, as am I. Now that might surprise you because if you're a regular listener to Vitality Radio, if you've heard me speak, you have probably heard me say that human strain probiotics aren't the best colonizers in the world, that they can be very good for symptom relief, but that I don't believe that they trump spores for the purposes of rebuilding the gut.
Jared St. Clair:Now, all of that is still true. I still believe that nothing's changed as far as that goes, but sometimes I recognize that what I am thinking completely versus what I'm saying to you on the show sometimes doesn't always get all the way across. The message doesn't get across. So today, I am going to have a friendly debate with myself about spores versus human strain probiotics, and, frankly, I'm very excited to do it. This is gonna be a fun, fun episode, and I think it'll be very educational for you.
Jared St. Clair:Now I am gonna link in the show notes to other episodes I've done on the microbiome. If you would like to really get into this and really get a feel for at least what I believe based on the research I've done and the evidence that I've seen working with real human beings at Vitality Nutrition when it comes to this stuff, then I would highly recommend checking out my two Psychobiotic episodes. I'd highly recommend checking out my four strain episode where I talk about these four spores that are in the precision probiotic, which is my formula. So those are gonna be linked, in the show notes, and, you can check them out for yourself after this episode. But let's go ahead and just jump into this topic, remembering, of course, that if you have questions about anything you hear, because I know I'm not gonna answer all of them, please reach out.
Jared St. Clair:You can hit me up on Instagram at vitality nutrition bountiful. You can call us at (801) 292-6662, or, of course, you can reach out to us online at vitalitynutrition.com. Okay. Let's dive right in. Quick refresher course on the microbiome.
Jared St. Clair:I'm not gonna spend much much time on it, but some of what I'm about to say does play pretty heavily into why I believe, probiotics are so critical and why you might want to consider a particular type of probiotic over another, form. So let's jump into it. If you're not familiar with the microbiome, the best way I can say is that it's all the bugs. It's all the good guys, and even the not so good guys, pathogenic things, everything from parasites to fungal things, fungi, bacteria, viruses, if you believe in viruses. Not everybody believes in viruses, and that's okay too.
Jared St. Clair:But regardless, all of those types of things that might be in or on the human body. We typically think of the microbiome primarily, I would say, as what's going on inside the gut, and that will certainly be my focus today. But we have these bugs all over the place. They're in our sinuses. They're in our respiratory tract.
Jared St. Clair:Tract. There's all kinds of places where we find these things. They're certainly on our skin, unless we're using too many hand sanitizers, things like that, which we need to stop doing, if at all possible, please. But regardless, let's jump into this, thing. How is the microbiome built?
Jared St. Clair:The microbiome is built in three primary ways in the very early stages of life. The first one is actually the birth canal. And so if you're a c section baby like I was, unfortunately, you miss out on that incredible bacterial bath that you get from your mother's birth canal. So if that's the case, you've already started out in a bit of a hole with a deficit, and unfortunately, about a third of us in America came out with a knife as a C section baby as opposed to a birth canal baby. So, that's one of the big ways that we get all of those good guys.
Jared St. Clair:Breastfeeding is number two. And, unfortunately, many of us were not breastfed long enough or at all. I, thankfully, my mother, knowing what she knew about these things, knew that, especially because I was a C section baby, that I would need more breastfeeding. And there's a couple of ways that we get lots and lots of good guys through breastfeeding. One is in the milk itself, of course.
Jared St. Clair:And evidence indicates that somewhere between 12 and 18, 15 seems to be the the most common number that I see based on the research. 15 seems to be the amount of time to kinda optimize the transference of all these good bugs from mother to child. And so that is number two. So if you were breastfed for less than fifteen months, especially if you were breastfed for less than a year or if you weren't breastfed at all, then you may have another deficit there. If you were a c section baby and were also not breastfed, then, yeah, that's a pretty significant issue in my opinion.
Jared St. Clair:And oftentimes, those issues start to show up in very early age in ear infections and strep throat and RSV and all these things that our human microbiome would normally try to protect us from if it was fully stocked. I'm gonna say fully stocked probably more than once in this show. Well, I've already said it twice, haven't I? But fully stocked, for me, think of it as a pantry, right, where you've got your supply of all the different things that you might need, to cook these specific meals. But not only that, you've got supplies that you need to clean the house, hopefully, without chemicals.
Jared St. Clair:You've got all kinds of good stuff in there that you can pull out when it's needed. Maybe you've got your light bulbs in there. You know, you've got your extra toilet paper in there, and hopefully, you did when COVID hit. Right? And all these other things, that's a fully stocked pantry of good things that you'll need when it's time, and that's kinda how the microbiome is because we don't always need the support to fight off the thing that, we're trying to fight off, but we certainly do need it from time to time, that immune support.
Jared St. Clair:Well, we need it every day. Right? But, sometimes we need it more than others. And so a fully stocked microbiome puts us into a position where we can truly, excel, when it comes to protection of our body if we have all of the good guys in there. I mentioned three things.
Jared St. Clair:We've talked about the birth canal. We've talked about breastfeeding. Number three is the environment. The environment that we are in is really critical. You've seen it.
Jared St. Clair:You've done it. As a child, particularly once a child starts to crawl and can get around to things, what does that child like to do? Well, that child likes to put anything that he can get his hands on into his mouth, including his feet and various other things. Right? It's a constant thing, and for some parents, it's a constant battle.
Jared St. Clair:No, junior. Don't do that. Well, I'm gonna say, yeah, junior. Do it. Get dirty.
Jared St. Clair:Put that stuff in your mouth because that environmental stuff, most of the things that are in the, quote, unquote, dirty stuff are actually good for us. They're actually our friends. They are known, if they are bacterial anyway, as commensal strains of bacteria, and that's where spore forming probiotics come from. The human strain probiotics, those come from your mom. They come from your dad.
Jared St. Clair:They come from the skin to skin touch that we get when we're snuggling or being kissed or held. They come from people sneezing and wheezing, in the house. They come from all kinds of different places, but those bacteria are largely human strain bacteria. Those are the things that our gut is supposed to be fully stocked on. When we talk about the microbiome, that's really what we're talking about building is trying to get all of those human strains, the native strains that are supposed to be in the gut, where they're supposed to be in the quantities that we're supposed to have and in the variety that we're supposed to have.
Jared St. Clair:Because we do know this, no matter what you might hear about the politics of diversity and, you know, this whole melting pot thing that they call The United States Of America, we ain't as diverse as our gut's supposed to be. We've got a bunch of different races and creeds and colors here in America, and all of them have the potential to contribute to a greater country. But we don't have thousands of different races. And in the human gut, we basically do. They're known as species, of course, not races.
Jared St. Clair:But the point of the matter is we should have a lot of diversity in the human microbiome. Now depending on who you ask, they'll say that you should have at least a thousand. I've also heard 2,000, three thousand, four, and even 5,000. I don't really know what's true there because, frankly, I don't think researchers know what's true there. I was having a conversation with Jessica last night, my assistant, who helps me put this show together, and she said she asked me a question.
Jared St. Clair:I don't remember exactly what it was. And I said, here's the thing that we have to all understand about the microbiome. We know a lot less about it than we know about it. There's so much stuff we don't know yet. But, thankfully, over the last fifteen or twenty years, we've certainly learned an awful, awful lot.
Jared St. Clair:And what we've learned is incredibly powerful. So those are the three big builders, and it's important to understand that, again, if we live in too sterile of a home, and we we know that this is the case, where everything's wiped down with Clorox wipes, and every hand is sanitized every single time, and all of this stuff is happening, we're spraying our countertops with Lysol or whatever, we are endangering our microbiome or at least preventing our microbiome from flourishing to the extent that it otherwise could. If we did not get born through our mother's birth canal and we were a c section, we have a problem there. And if we weren't breastfed, we have a problem there. But then there are also things that come in that wreck the microbiome.
Jared St. Clair:And we know that in the first four years of life is when that full functioning human microbiome ought to be built. That's the adult human microbiome. We know the brain doesn't fully develop until we're about 26 years old. It takes a lot longer, but four years seems to be about the number when it comes to the microbiome. So by the time you're four, if you were born without c section, right, a vaginal birth, if you were breastfed for fifteen months or so, if mom and dad had the wisdom to let you get dirty and put stuff in your mouth from time to time, hopefully a lot, and if you haven't been on an antibiotic, then you should have a heck of a microbiome.
Jared St. Clair:Super powerful, robust, diverse, and I would dare say you probably didn't struggle too much, if at all, with chronic infections. Now interestingly enough, if you ask doctor Paul Thomas and you look at his 10,000, patient study that we talked about on Vitality Radio, I can link to that as well, in the show notes. He'll tell you that there's another offender for the microbiome, and that is actually some of the things that are found in vaccination. So there's a lot of different things, and I'm not here to tell you to vaccinate or not vaccinate or use Clorox wipes or don't use Clorox wipes or, you know, none of that. I I'll tell you how I feel about everything.
Jared St. Clair:You decide what you wanna do with it. But we do know that there are lots of different ways that we can beat the heck out of our microbiome, and that's what I'm here to really discuss, during this conversation. So I, as a child, was thankfully raised in a home where mom and dad knew some things. I don't think that any one of you, as a parent out there, that is raising a child or children is intentionally trying to do things to short circuit their microbiome. What it boils down to is knowledge, and knowledge, of course, is indeed power.
Jared St. Clair:And, unfortunately, up until recently, the knowledge of the microbiome and how it worked was pretty minimal. And even what we did know scientifically wasn't talked about all that much until, you know, weird shows like Vitality Radio podcast started popping up and people started listening to these things and reading books about it. Now almost everybody in America knows what a probiotic is or at least knows generally what a probiotic kinda is. Right? Whereas the word probiotic didn't even exist about twenty five years ago at all.
Jared St. Clair:And that is a really, really crazy thing when you look at the kind of the short history of our knowledge of probiotics. But because antibiotics are so prevalent and we know that ten days on amoxicillin, a really run of the mill antibiotic commonly prescribed for urinary tract infections or strep throat or ear infections, can wipe out half, yeah, I said half, 50% of your microbiome in ten days, then we know that antibiotics are really, really powerful things. Now these strains of bacteria are truly living, breathing organisms inside of our gut, And so they do repopulate and colonize and grow back to an extent, but it appears in the research that I've read that, they don't ever really get you all the way back all by themselves. It requires some therapy, and that therapy would be probiotic therapy. And there's a variety of ways that you can do probiotic therapy, and that's really what this show is about.
Jared St. Clair:But let me just preface the rest of what I'm gonna say with this. If you have chronic almost anything, and I I really am narrowing it down to that. Okay? It's a pretty wide net I'm casting here. But if you have chronic almost anything, chronic bronchitis, chronic asthma, chronic, ear infections, chronic urinary tract infections, chronic sinus infections, if you get pneumonia every single winter season, if you deal with any of those types of things, particularly infections, but and, of course, particularly bacterial infections like that, but not just infections.
Jared St. Clair:Also, if you've got autoimmune disease, if you've got mental health issues that are chronic in nature, depression, anxiety, ADHD type symptoms, any of those things, you should be looking back on your history, particularly the first four years of your life if you have access to that knowledge. And just ask yourself, how many antibiotics have I been on? And here's the thing that's really wild. When I'm at Vitality Nutrition or I'm answering a message on Instagram or whatever it is, what ends up happening is the first thing I ask with anybody that's got those types of issues is, tell me about your antibiotic history. And I get a a blank stare about seventy five percent of the time, maybe more.
Jared St. Clair:They're like, antibiotic history? What the heck is you know, what does that even mean? And then people sometimes answer with answers like, well, I haven't been on an antibiotic in years. And I'm looking at them thinking, okay. You're, like, 50 years old.
Jared St. Clair:How many years? And they say, oh, I haven't been on one for probably three years or more. Well, how many have you been on in your life? And then they start to think and count back and try and figure out, well, how many times have I been on an antibiotic in my life? And, unfortunately, most people can't say none, and most people can't count how many they've been on.
Jared St. Clair:They can't remember because it's too many. Well, what is too many? Well, I'll tell you, in my opinion, too many is any. Right? I mean, yes, there are needs for antibiotics, and I'm not throwing antibiotics under the bus.
Jared St. Clair:Antibiotics have saved many lives. But antibiotics are used in America way more often than they should be. Even the AMA, the FDA, the CDC, all of these people tell you that, but then doctors still prescribe them left and right. You know, eighty five percent of sinus infections, which are almost never bacterial, only about fifteen percent of bacteria or sinus infections are bacterial. But eighty five percent of people with a sinus infection that go to see their physician get an antibiotic prescription, which is absurd.
Jared St. Clair:It's wrong. It's reckless. It's dangerous. And it will set people on a path for the next sinus infection, among other things. It's done very, very poorly in this country.
Jared St. Clair:And so if you're out there listening and you're saying, well, jeez. I'm trying to count, and I've been on seven or eight or nine or 15 or 20 or whatever antibiotics. I can tell you this. If you've been on one ever in your entire life, you probably don't have what I call a fully stocked microbiome. You're probably pretty close if you've only ever been on one.
Jared St. Clair:I've been on two, I'm 50, and I've only been on them because I literally couldn't get out of them because I've had, a couple of surgical procedures where they would not allow antibiotic or allow me to do the procedure without the antibiotic. And the first one I went on was when I was 45 years old. So for forty five years, I escaped antibiotics. Most of us can't say that. And it's not because I have this incredibly robust immune system and I never get sick.
Jared St. Clair:I've had most of the things that people get an antibiotics for, maybe not most of the things, but a lot of the things. I just have educated myself and have learned how to not have to take them. And thankfully, I grew up in a home where I was educated by my parents on that. And if you're listening to this show and you are a parent, then my hope is that this show will be part of the reason why you're able to educate your kids on how to avoid those things. Because I don't hold any of that against anybody.
Jared St. Clair:Any parent who's done something that they thought was the right thing for their child when they maybe could have gotten away with doing something else, you know, for instance, colloidal silver instead of an antibiotic for a sinus infection or something like that. Well, we live and we learn. Right? But the question comes back to how many antibiotics have you had? What is your antibiotic history?
Jared St. Clair:And if it's long, even if it's a little long, then, yeah, you need to look at your microbiome really closely. And if it's not that long, but you have some of those chronic things, you probably have had enough antibiotics or enough insult to your microbiome that you need to look at restructuring and rebuilding that. Okay. So the microbiome plays a role in all kinds of things, not just our immune system. Of course, it plays a massive role in your digestive health.
Jared St. Clair:It plays a massive role in your mental health, like, way more than people think. And that's why I did those two episodes on psychobiotics that I'd love for you to listen to. It even plays a role in your in your weight. It plays a role in autoimmune disease and blood sugar. It plays a role in all kinds of things.
Jared St. Clair:So to be optimally healthy, we really need to have an optimized microbiome. So now let's talk about this thing called spores or spore forming probiotics. Spore forming probiotics are my favorite probiotics because I think, overall, they do the biggest and best job of rebuilding the microbiome. But as I said in the opening, they aren't human. They're actually what they call transient strains.
Jared St. Clair:They're not alien to our system because anytime your toddler puts a toy in his mouth, he's getting probably some spore forming probiotics. We breathe them in in the dust and the dirt. We eat them on food. They're all over. We get them when we get dirty, because they're in the mud and the dirt and the soil.
Jared St. Clair:These commensal strain probiotics are everywhere. And they call them transient because they don't stick around. They hang out in the gut for somewhere between about thirty and forty five days, again, depending on what studies you're looking at. And when they do that at thirty to forty five days, they are doing work. They're not just hanging out in there.
Jared St. Clair:They're not slacking off on the couch. They're doing work. And the work they're doing is impressive work. They basically do two things. There's a bunch of little aspects to these things, but to keep things pretty simple, they do two things.
Jared St. Clair:The spores, particularly, Bacillus coagulans, Bacillus subtilis, and Bacillus clausii, these are the three that I believe are the power pack of, probiotics, in the spore forming category, particularly, Bacillus coagulans and Bacillus subtilis. Those two are just absolutely fantastic. But those three spores have as a as a combination, have proven to have significant impact on the gut in two primary ways. One, they actually create an environment that is far more conducive to the colonization of our human spores. So they're basically setting up the gut to be able to receive and utilize, or sorry, utilize this prob well, yeah, utilize the bacteria that we're getting when we're eating things like fermented food or maybe we're taking a human strain probiotic or whatever.
Jared St. Clair:But they're actually allowing for all of the good guys that are still in the gut that haven't been wiped out by an antibiotic. Those bacteria are now set up in such a way that they have an environment where they can really thrive and grow and repopulate the gut and restock the shelves. And that is critical. You think about prebiotics, everybody's heard of prebiotics by now. I get lots of questions about prebiotics, and I'm going to do a show on prebiotics, but it's not this show.
Jared St. Clair:I'm actually working on that now, and I don't know when I'll release it. It's probably still a couple of months out. I've got a pretty long list of shows built up here. But think of prebiotics as the food for the gut. They are the food, not for the gut, but for the actual bacteria in the gut.
Jared St. Clair:Your body, doesn't do much with prebiotic fiber. It basically goes in and then comes back out. But while it's in there, it provides food for the bacteria, and that's great. Spores aren't prebiotics, but they work kinda like miracle grow for the good guys. And I hate to compare them to miracle grow because that stuff's toxic, but you get the point.
Jared St. Clair:They set up an environment that makes it much, much easier for the good guys to, procreate and do their job in the gut. So then if you want to take a prebiotic as well as, taking spores, then you are even enhancing the effect that much more. The other thing that spores do that is so awesome is they actually work against pathogenic bacteria. You know, I'm gonna mention a couple of things. E coli, candida, things like that that most people have heard of.
Jared St. Clair:The spores help to actually make a very healthy environment for the good guys to grow and a very unfriendly environment for the bad guys to grow. So they're not only working in your favor of boosting the gut bacteria that you want, but they're also working in your favor of wiping out the gut bacteria that you don't want. So there's a major shift happening with spores, and that is why I love spores. That's what they do. Why are they so effective?
Jared St. Clair:Well, first off, I believe and I always look at everything this way. I think about, okay, how were we designed? How were we designed to, you know, get our food? How are we designed to get our nutrition? You know, how are we designed to get our vitamin d?
Jared St. Clair:Were we designed to get it from a pill? No. I don't think so. I think we were designed to get it from the sun. Right?
Jared St. Clair:I sell vitamin d. It's one of the things I do for a living. I sell a lot of things at Vitality Nutrition. But if you're willing to get enough sun, don't buy vitamin d. Get the vitamin d from the sun.
Jared St. Clair:But I digress. Vitamin d, the whole point there was, by design, we're designed to kinda do certain things and get certain things in certain ways. And I believe that we are absolutely designed to get spores from our environment. I believe that being a legit tree hugger is a good thing. I believe that getting dirty is a good thing, and letting our kids get dirty is a good thing.
Jared St. Clair:I believe that social distancing was a horrible idea. I believe that shaking hands, hugging, kissing, holding, snuggling, all of those things are really, really great. We should be sharing our good guys with the people that we love. And even the people that we don't know that well, which is why handshaking and things like that works. Okay?
Jared St. Clair:So the spores are truly phenomenal, and I do believe that they have a role to play that is by design. So here's the thing. The first difference between spore forming probiotics and human strain probiotics, besides where they come from, is their level of resiliency. So if you've got a spore, it's gonna want to or, I mean, it's gonna be accustomed to hanging out in the wind and the rain and the dirt and higher acid environments, lower acid environments, humid environments, dry environments, all the different things. And so those things are pretty dang hard to kill.
Jared St. Clair:They're actually encased in a spore. The bacteria itself is encased in a spore, and it's protected from the environment that it, lives in. And that also happens to work incredibly well to protect it from our environment when it gets inside of us. So if you take a spore probiotic, whether you're licking it off of the, off of a toy like your two year old might do, or you're taking in a capsule, when it goes into the stomach, the stomach acid, which is known as the acid barrier, which is by design not just designed to help us digest our food, but also designed to protect us against pathogens. When you take a spore, it sails right through.
Jared St. Clair:The stomach acid doesn't wipe it out. It gets, in most cases, 100% down to the colon, which is where it needs to be. That's where the rubber meets the road when it comes to gut health and restocking the shelves. That's where the shelves are, primarily, is in the colon, and we've gotta get the probiotics down there to do what they need to do. Human strain probiotics, by comparison, are kinda wimpy.
Jared St. Clair:I don't know how another way to put it. That's why we hear about refrigerating probiotics. That's why we hear about enteric coating or putting them capsule in a capsule or something to protect them while they get down into the colon, hopefully, if they can survive. Basically, they have to come with bodyguards. And that makes it very difficult for those bacteria to actually get all the way down there alive and well so that they then can actually colonize and grow inside the gut.
Jared St. Clair:That's the single biggest difference in my opinion between the two, is some the spores survive very, very efficiently and get all the way down and do their job. Human strains, we have to do a lot of things to try and get them to survive if we can. And a lot of the time, they still don't. In fact, there's been studies done that of the top, like, 35 I might have this number a little bit wrong, so excuse me if I'm wrong on this, but I'm I'm gonna be close. Of the top 35 strains used in most probiotics in America that are human strains, only about three or four of those actually get to the colon consistently and colonize.
Jared St. Clair:And there's a lot of problems with that. Remember I talked at the very beginning of diversity? And again, don't worry, I'm not throwing human strains under the bus. I think I kinda have accidentally on previous episodes, which is why I chose to do this episode because I really wanna clear the air on this. Okay?
Jared St. Clair:But they're just not that good once they're out of the gut at getting back into the gut. It's just the nature of the beast. And so when I talk about diversity, remember I said that somewhere between maybe one and five thousand different species down there. Now it's important also to understand that your microbiome doesn't look like my microbiome, and your twin sister, your identical twin sister, has a very different microbiome than you, about 50% different, believe it or not. So when we talk about diversity, it doesn't mean we all have to have the same microbiome.
Jared St. Clair:We're all gonna have very different microbiomes. Where you live makes a huge difference. Who you live with makes a huge difference. What type of environmental, toxins and things like that are in the environment make a huge difference. How many people you live with.
Jared St. Clair:There's so many different factors. And we don't even understand all the factors because I don't think anybody quite understands how identical twins have such a different microbiome when they come from the same mother. So it is a little confusing. And like I said, I truly believe we know a lot less we we we know what we know is a lot less than what we don't know when it comes to probiotics. Okay?
Jared St. Clair:So bear with me. I'm gonna keep working through this, and and I really wanna try and help everybody listening to understand. Alright. So that's kind of the deal with the Alright. So that's kind of the deal with the human strain versus the spore strains in terms of, resiliency.
Jared St. Clair:But here's the interesting thing. If we are getting a really great human strain probiotic like, for instance, I was talking to Brenda Watson, episode three zero five. She makes what I consider to be some of the very best probiotics on the market, a company called Vital Planet. I love them. I sell them.
Jared St. Clair:They're fantastic. I recommend them on a regular basis. And they have probiotics that are specific for specific ages, 55, under 50 five, women, men, women of, you know, younger ages and older ages, and so on. And the reason for that is because there are specific strains. We know now that there are strains of probiotics, for instance, that specifically help to increase testosterone, believe it or not.
Jared St. Clair:And there are probiotics that help specifically to fight off things like candida and yeast infections and urinary tract infections that are a little bit more of a female problem. And that's just a couple of examples. There's a million other examples. In fact, every strain seems to have a bit of a specialty. But there's also a lot of redundancy, and that's important to understand.
Jared St. Clair:If you're taking a probiotic let's just say you're taking the Vital Planet probiotic. Their highest potency probiotic has a hundred strains, a hundred different species, and a hundred billion units of those species combined. And a hundred sounds like a ton. It's as high a one as I've seen on the market so far, a hundred different strains. But it's still a drop in the bucket compared to a few thousand that we may actually be, you know, quote unquote supposed to have.
Jared St. Clair:Right? And so it's a really interesting thing when you look at a gut that let let's let let me paint a picture maybe. Let's just say you've got someone who was born c section like I was. They were breastfed, but they were only breastfed for about six months. And they were on a couple of antibiotics in the first couple of years because of, you know, whatever illness they had that was treated with an antibiotic.
Jared St. Clair:And now that individual deals with, chronic urinary tract infections. And I'm just giving you a random example. And so, that person is saying, well, I know I need more because I keep getting these urinary tract infections. And as I've read, I realized that that my microbiome is probably the primary culprit when it comes to this because that's the, you know, the the bulk of my immune system that would fight these things off. So then, I'm gonna take a probiotic, and I'm going to build back up my microbiome.
Jared St. Clair:Well, can you build it back up? This is the biggest question. I think it's the biggest question anybody maybe should have when it comes to probiotics. Because if we're supposed to have a couple thousand or a few thousand or whatever it is, even if it's only a thousand strains, and if the most potent human strain and, probiotic on the market has a hundred different strains, how in the world, first, do we know if those are the hundred strains we need? Second, do we know if we're getting, you know, if we're at 900 strains in our gut and we're adding the right hundred, then ta da, we've got a thousand strains.
Jared St. Clair:That's never gonna happen. Right? I mean, we have to be realistic about this. It's a great probiotic. I love that probiotic, and I recommend it often.
Jared St. Clair:But I don't know if it has the hundred strains you need. What I do know is it has a hundred great strains that your body can potentially use. But here is the second big primary difference between human strain antibiotic or probiotics, human strain probiotics, and spore forming probiotics. And that is that because human strain probiotics are so often wiped out, killed, or what they call lysed on the way down to the colon, most of them don't actually colonize. But as Brenda said last week on Vitality Radio, they don't always have to colonize to make an impact.
Jared St. Clair:And that was revolutionary information to me when I first heard it, which was only just a couple of years ago. They don't have to colonize to make an impact because what doesn't die when a bacteria is lysed is the DNA of that bacteria. And that micro DNA actually speaks to our good guys in the gut and delivers messages and essentially marching orders. And so as symptom relievers, human strain probiotics are phenomenal. In fact, if you come into me and you say, I've got, you know, my gut hurts every time I eat, and I'm gassy, and I'm bloated, and all these other things, I'm gonna, again, have this quest this conversation and talk to you about your antibiotic history and all that kind of stuff.
Jared St. Clair:But what I'm gonna say is it sounds like to me that a probiotic would probably be helpful to you to help with the function of your digestive tract. And I will say, every single time, I think you need spore forming probiotics. But I will, in that case, almost every single time, also recommend a human strain probiotic. Now, is that because I wanna sell somebody two probiotics? No.
Jared St. Clair:In fact, I hate selling people two probiotics. Why do I hate selling people two probiotics? Hate's probably too strong of a word. But it's it's confusing to people. Why do I need this probiotic if I've already got that probiotic?
Jared St. Clair:Well, I can't tell you how many people come to me and say, I'm taking seed, or I'm taking, you know, vital planet, or I'm taking the Solarii probiotic, or I'm taking PB eight, or I'm taking, you know, what whatever. Pick the probiotic. And it helps, but I'm not any better than I was, really, or I'm not much better than I was, and I've been taking it for six months or two years or whatever. Or maybe they'll say to me, I've taken this one, I took it for a few months, and I switched to that one because I've heard that you should actually, like, diversify and take different strains, and but I still can't get there. But when I don't take it, I don't feel as good.
Jared St. Clair:And that's the big but on that one, is I don't take it, I don't feel as good. The question I had way back in the day before I knew what a spore forming probiotic was, which is now like 13 ago, is why in the world are we giving people living, breathing organisms to restructure and boost up their gut health and they get results, but it doesn't ever fix anything? Why? I didn't know the answer to that, and now I do. Because most of it doesn't colonize, and it's probably not diverse enough anyway.
Jared St. Clair:Because remember I said all these little bacteria have specialties, Like, some do this and some do that, and they also have redundancy. So this is what I believe. But I also believe, and I'll be very, very open about this, that I don't know all of these answers. I just have enough evidence to lead me to the beliefs that I have when it comes to probiotics. And frankly, I reserve the right to change my mind a little bit as we continue to learn more.
Jared St. Clair:But this is what I believe about that topic right now, and that is this, that if you get a really good quality probiotic, and there's a bunch of different ones on the market, not all of them are great. And if you want my opinion about the one you're using, I'm happy to give it to you. But there are some really great probiotics on the market. Lots of good ones that that aren't in my brand that are still excellent products. If you're getting one of those and you're getting symptom relief, that would indicate to me that you've got a probiotic that is at least good enough to help with your symptoms.
Jared St. Clair:But if you're not getting better, you're not really seeing dramatic improvement, then that would also indicate to me that you're not colonizing or at least you're not getting enough different strains colonizing to really improve your gut health. So this is what I typically recommend. I typically recommend for people who have, you know, significant issues that they're dealing with, that they take a human strain probiotic for at least two months. And right now, my favorite brand on those is the Vital Planet brand, but I also really love the Solaray brand. I don't know.
Jared St. Clair:Maybe I shouldn't even call them favorite. They're both great. The Microbiome brand, under the Solaray label. Both excellent probiotics. The Microbiome one does have to be refrigerated.
Jared St. Clair:The Vital Planet doesn't, require refrigeration. And, I'm gonna talk about that in a minute too, but we'll get into that in a second. Either are great. I love them both, and frankly, there's a bunch of other great brands too, like I said. But if you're taking one of those, you're getting symptom relief, but you're not getting better, then what is the missing ingredient?
Jared St. Clair:I think more often than not, it is the spores. So spores take a little time. I don't believe they're as good of symptom relievers. And that's okay, because we're not really trying to relieve symptoms here anyway. We're trying to solve the problem.
Jared St. Clair:Right? But sometimes, and I would dare say most of the time based on my experience, if you'll take a good human strain probiotic, like a vital planet or a solar ray, and you'll take them consistently for a couple of months while you're taking the Spore Probiotic. And the one I recommend, of course, is mine called Precision Probiotic Vital Spores. If you'll do that and you give the Vital Spores a couple of months to kinda be constructing things or reconstructing things in the background, First off, they will tag team to some degree because the vital spores will help any human strains that you're getting to proliferate and do their job more efficiently. And you're getting symptom relief in the short term as well as kinda somewhat at least restocking the shelves.
Jared St. Clair:But the reason the spores are gonna work so much better for actually solving things is because they will out help every strain, every species that is down there in your gut right now to grow more efficiently and more equally. So that we have more true diversity, and we don't have what the the some people call a mono gut, where we only have a handful of strains that are really, really high and everything else is low. I hope that makes plenty of good sense. I'm trying to work through this kinda topic by topic and make it as plain as possible as you're listening. So that's what I typically recommend is the human strains for two or three or four months, however long you need them until you feel like the spores are doing the job.
Jared St. Clair:And the only way to really know is to drop off the human strains after a couple of bottles and see if the spores have done their job enough at that point. But I always recommend the spores for at least six months. I used to say three to six months, and I've just seen too many people that don't get there in three months. So I pretty much recommend six months for everybody now if you're dealing with, again, any of these kind of chronic issues that may or may not be related to your gut, but probably or at least partly related to your gut. And that way, you're gonna cover the bases as well as you probably can besides, you know, taking some prebiotics if you wanna do that or eating more prebiotic fiber, or, of course, eating fermented foods, which are an excellent source of probiotic bacteria as well.
Jared St. Clair:So, let me answer a few questions that are really, really commonly asked. Let's talk about, the switching up of brands. I maybe hear that question as much as almost anything besides maybe the refrigerator question. And that is, should we take, you know, this brand for a couple of weeks or a couple of months and then this brand for a couple of months so that we can have a more diverse microbiome? And the answer to that question is, probably not, in my opinion.
Jared St. Clair:Because how much more diverse are you gonna get? If you take a product that has, say, 15 different species in it or maybe 30 different species, maybe 50 different species, or even if you take something like the hundred specie formula from Vital Planet, you're still not gonna get close to the number of species that are actually probably supposed to be there in the in the first place. But the reason I do love a very diverse probiotic, like the Vital Planet probiotics or like the Sol Ray probiotics, is that at least you're covering a lot of bases of these specialties, you know, these strains that do specific things. And I do believe, because there's no other way for me to believe that I can think of that makes any sense to me at all, that we don't need all of the strains. We just need enough of the strains that do all of the jobs to cover the bases.
Jared St. Clair:And so maybe and I don't know this, but maybe the vital planet hundred strains have enough of those strains on top of what's already in your gut. I think that probably varies more on what's in your gut than on the product itself. But moving from brand to brand, if you're only gonna do human strain probiotics, sure. Give yourself a little more diversity. I think that makes some sense.
Jared St. Clair:But I actually think it's a bit of a misnomer because if you are taking spores, either consistently every day or on some sort of maintenance dose, a lot of people take just a couple pills a week after they've been on spores for six months, which can be very effective. But if you're consistently taking spores, then you're going to consistently help all of the good bacteria to grow, and so you're gonna have more diversity. And then the only reason I believe that most people would need a human strain probiotic on top of that is if they experience some sort of an issue, an illness, an infection, they've been on an antibiotic and it's creating issues for them, any of those types of things. Then it makes sense to throw back in the human strains for a few months until you can build everything back up the way that you'd like to have it built back up. So switching from brand to brand, I personally don't think it's the most effective way to do it.
Jared St. Clair:I really think you wanna get a very diverse product from a reputable source and then use the spores in the background to do the the really important work. Do I need an enteric coated capsule or a capsule in a capsule? There's a few brands now that have capsules in a capsule. The capsule in capsule or the enteric coated capsule is designed to bypass the stomach and get through that acid so it can get into the intestinal tract. And if it's done well, that will happen, and that is valuable.
Jared St. Clair:But it really just kinda sheds the light on just how weak these probiotics are in the human strains in terms of their resiliency. And the truth of the matter is even enteric coated capsules, it appears, don't survive all the way down to the colon. Most of the bacteria still don't survive all the way down to the colon. Solar Ray uses enteric coating, and Vital Planet uses what's called a delayed release capsule. And so it just delays the release of the bacteria until it gets through the stomach.
Jared St. Clair:All of those are effective, and I would say all of those are better than a capsule that isn't protected at all. So I do think that that's a big deal. But, really, most of the benefit of the human strains for most people is still going to be in the fact that they're going to be delivering messages to the gut, not colonizing the gut. Should it be refrigerated? This is one of the biggest, it's it's the biggest question I probably ever received about probiotics.
Jared St. Clair:And there have been a lot of people taking very strong stands on it online, and so some people come in and they only want a probiotic that's been in the fridge. Well, first off, it's important to differentiate here too. Spores don't need to be refrigerated ever. They can handle temperatures up to about 400 degrees. I tell people you can store it on any shelf except for the ones in your oven.
Jared St. Clair:So you don't have to worry about that with spores. But the human strains, they do die over time at shelf temperatures or room temperature, I should say. And so, yeah, refrigeration makes sense on those types of probiotics. However, this is how it really works. Here's your little insider bit of information.
Jared St. Clair:Okay? What companies do, all of the companies with probiotics that call their product shelf stable, meaning it doesn't need to be in the fridge, is they load it with two or three or four times as much bacteria as what the label says it has. Because they know, over time, most of those strains are going to die slowly at room temperature. And so the bottle may say one of two things. It may say, at time of manufacture, so a little asterisk usually on the back of the label that says 50,000,000,000 units at time of manufacture, or some will say guaranteed up to expiration date or something close to that.
Jared St. Clair:Now that's an interesting differentiation, and both of them matter. If they're saying at time of manufacture, though, and they're saying they've got 50,000,000,000 in there and that bottle's been on the shelf for six months, I can guarantee you it doesn't have 50,000,000,000 units left in there. How many it has? I don't know. That's a tough one.
Jared St. Clair:I don't know how many are in there at that point. And depending on how how many days it was in a UPS truck or how many days you left it in your car after you bought it in the summer or whatever is going to determine, to some degree, the potency of that probiotic by the time you actually start consuming it. So that's important. My preference is to see on the back of a label something that says guaranteed, you know, 50,000,000,000 or a hundred billion or whatever it is up till expiration date. What companies that do that have done is they've put enough probiotic in there, whether it's refrigerated or not.
Jared St. Clair:They've put enough probiotic in there that they've tested it and proven that it can last the one year or two years or whatever the expiration date is, and you'll still have that many active units in the product. So that's more of a guarantee, basically. So whether it's in the fridge or it's not in the fridge, as long as you're getting a reputable brand, they're putting enough of the good guys in there to maintain, the potency that they're guaranteeing on the label. And I will say this, if you wanna double, what's the word? If you wanna on the side of caution, then put it in the fridge when you get it home, the human strain probiotics.
Jared St. Clair:It will slow it down, and it'll be more potent, for a longer period of time. But if you wanna travel with your human probiotic, even the human probiotic that says it needs to be in the fridge and you're gonna be gone for three or four days, you're not gonna wipe it out in three or four days in most cases unless you're keeping it at a very hot temperature. A lot of these strains are actually pretty stable even at 70 degrees, you know, standard room temperature. But that hopefully answers the question on the refrigerator or not. I, because of convenience, because of remembering to even take the stuff, I think a lot of times, a shelf stable is a better way to go because it's out on your counter with your other supplements or whatever, and you're gonna remember to take it.
Jared St. Clair:And as long as you're getting a good one, like I said. And I'll just tell you, I'm I have looked at brands over and over and over again, and the ones I keep mentioning, the Vital Planet, I absolutely love. And I love the Sol Ray Microbiome, brand. All excellent brands of probiotics that I believe you can absolutely trust. Okay.
Jared St. Clair:What about, let's see here. What else am I looking at? Well, actually, I think that just about does all the questions that I wanted to answer. I, I did a better job of that than I thought, and that's good because it's we're almost at an hour here, and I don't know if anybody likes to listen to me for more than an hour in one shot. So those are the answers to the probably the most common questions that I have, And I hope that I've shed some light on how valuable human strain probiotics can be and how valuable spore forming probiotics can be and when you may want to do one or the other or both.
Jared St. Clair:If you'll pair this with the other episodes that I've talked about probiotics, you'll learn even more. And between all of that information, I think it can really, really help you understand your probiotic strategy a lot better. As far as protocols go, like I said, if you're dealing with something that you believe has to do with your microbiome being, understocked, we'll say, then I think the fastest way to get relief and also rebuild and get healthier in the microbiome would be to actually pair the two. Human strain probiotics with spore forming probiotics, with the human strain going away after two or three or four months or whatever it is when you're feeling significantly better, and then the spores being more of your long term approach to really maintaining an optimized gut. And then the last thing I'll say is remember, those spores are all around us.
Jared St. Clair:Get out in nature and breathe it in and love on the people that you love. Share each other's microbiome. Don't be scared of human contact. Anyway, that's my microbiome and probiotic comparison contrasting the value of human strain versus the value of spore forming probiotics. I hope you understand now that I think both have their place in human nutrition and that both have value, and then it's just a matter of kind of figuring out what you need based on what you're doing.
Jared St. Clair:If you're just looking to restock the shelves and you really don't have a bunch of symptoms that you're dealing with, go straight to the Precision Probiotic and restock those shelves. If you are dealing with more symptomology, then you can do the, Human Strain Probiotics as well. And then one last thing I will say, Precision Probiotic is a capsule. I am working on a few things that I'll share with you in the near future. I'm working on a human strain probiotic, to go along with my Precision Probiotic vital spores, and, I hope to release that in the next six months or something like that.
Jared St. Clair:So it's not right away. And I am working on one for children that I'm really excited about that will be a spore probiotic, but in a powder form. But you can use the precision probiotic. It can be opened up, and you can sprinkle it in just about anything. It doesn't have much flavor to it.
Jared St. Clair:And you just go by body weight. If you've got a 50 year old 50 year old. If you got a 50 year old, they probably have a great microbiome. If you've got a hundred and fifty pound person, which is considered an adult when it comes to, medicine and and supplements and things like that, then one capsule a day is the dose. But if you got a fifty pound child, then a third of a capsule, can be a useful dose, and it can be sprinkled in food or water or, you know, whatever.
Jared St. Clair:Okay. I hope that answers the questions. We are at an hour, and, so we're gonna go ahead and close this one out with a reminder that if you have more questions about this, hit me up on Instagram at vitality nutrition bountiful. Hit us up on the chat at vitality nutrition dot com or call us at (801) 292-6662. I hope to talk to you sometime about your questions about health and nutrition besides just here on the podcast.
Jared St. Clair:Thank you for listening to me. My name is Jared St. Clair, and this has been Vitality Radio.
Announcer:You've been listening to the Vitality Radio podcast. Enjoy your week. In the meantime, Jared will be feverishly searching for the latest nutrition info to educate you on and wading into mounds of propaganda to help steer you through it. Vitality Radio is researched and written by Jared St. Clair.
Announcer:Our awesome music is by Brian Bob Young. Support Vitality Radio by subscribing and giving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or your favorite podcast source. Don't forget to follow us at Vitality Radio on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Please let us know your thoughts about this episode by using the hashtag vitality radio podcast. And if you like what you hear, go tell somebody with a share, a screenshot, or an airdrop.
Announcer:Thank you.