Episode 112. Unlocking the Microbiome: Martha Carlin’s Journey into Gut Health & Parkinson’s 💡

Adam Rinde (00:06):

Martha, welcome to the One Thing podcast. It's so great to be here with you today.

Martha Carlin (00:11):

Thanks so much for having me, Adam. I'm excited to talk to you.

Adam Rinde (00:15):

Same here. I'm really looking forward to diving into your area of interest and expertise, and it was great getting to know you a little bit offline here. I think for the audience, it's probably a good thing just to hear a little bit about your journey into the microbiome as a citizen scientist and now you're even doing published research, which is really remarkable to see a citizen scientist get into and actually have papers being published, and that's quite an accomplishment. I'd love to hear, just for the audience, what sparked your interest in the microbiome and its connection to health.

Martha Carlin (01:00):

So, well, I actually came from a background in business and was kind of a business turnaround expert. My training was in accounting, which is a system that has to balance, and I was trained in a process called Transaction Flow Review, which is how you identify business risk by mapping out everything flowing through the system. And in 2002, my 44-year-old husband, who looked very healthy on the outside and was a marathon runner and had never done anything bad in his life, was diagnosed with Parkinson's. And so I started to apply my turnaround skills to looking at Parkinson's because the depressing story from the neurologist is, here's a pill; there's really nothing we can do. It's a slow downward progression. And back then, they said, maybe you'll have 15 good years, maybe they said after 10 years the medicine won't work. And so I started initially studying food because that's the main thing flowing through the system.

(02:12):

So, I did a lot of things to change our diet and really focus on what was in the food supply. And then from 2002 to 2014, I'm studying all these different components of the food supply and thinking there's got to be some way to connect all of this. And I read a book in 2014 by Martin Blazer called Missing Microbes that was talking about growing up in the age of antibiotics. And I knew a lot of people with Parkinson's who had had a lot of exposure to antibiotics as children with repeated strep infections or taking antibiotics for acne in their teens. And so that resonated, and I had never heard the term microbiome, so I was like, what is this microbiome? I start digging into it and trying to understand what it was. And about six months later, the first paper was published that showed you could show the two different types of Parkinson's by the bacteria in the gut.

(03:13):

And that was, I said, that's it. I stopped what I was doing and just took a total right turn over and started funding some research at the University of Chicago where I met one of my co-founders and we started the bio collective with this idea of we look at things like their single diseases, but if you really start to understand what the microbiome is and how it impacts the systems of the body, the problem is down there at a deeper level and it just manifests through our weak spots in different things. But we're calling something a single disease, but there's a lot of commonality down in the microbiome crossings. So, we founded the Bio Collective to start collecting people's stool samples and, sequencing them, and share them with other scientists to accelerate the research. And that was in 2015, and there's been a lot since then. But maybe I'll stop there and we can talk about some of the other things along the way.

Adam Rinde (04:20):

Yeah. So I'm curious, with your husband's diagnosis and your diving into the microbiome research, what are some things that you think that you learned that were particularly helpful for his journey and that you think other caregivers would like to know?

Martha Carlin (04:52):

Well, we tried a lot of different diets trying to kind of unearth and figure out, and actually, one of the simplest things that we figured out really toward the end was that changing the temperature of his stomach when he was eating could actually have an impact on these gram-negative bacteria that were battling the good bugs in his stomach. And at body temperature, they make a certain enzyme, but if you can lower body temperature just a small amount, they won't make that enzyme and it doesn't kill the good bacteria and spill out this calcium and potassium. And so once we started to actually just put a little ice pack on his stomach when he was eating and put it on his stomach at night when he would go to bed, he started being able to sleep through the night again, not having to get up multiple times. It was just such a very simple thing. It almost was like, how could I have been looking at this for 23 years and something simple like that? The other sort of going back to early symptoms in Parkinson's is constipation. And I think often, well, there's a couple of things. Doctors don't really understand what someone means when they say they're constipated because Parkinson's constipation I think is very different than other forms of, or it might be in our laboratory collecting samples. We could identify a person with Parkinson's just by looking at the stool because it had a structure like concrete. Interesting

Adam Rinde (06:51):

From that. Can you explain that more?

Martha Carlin (06:54):

Well, essentially, the research with Dr. Em in Australia, I think what we've uncovered is the urease-producing bacteria, the bad guys that produce that enzyme, they attack the good guys, and it spills out their calcium and potassium, and it actually makes a concrete-like colloid where then you can't access the nutrients, and it makes a very dense colloidal mass. And in learning that and then talking to other people with Parkinson's about the situation actually learned, there's often a very large mass. So, if you think about the diameter of a normal Bristol stool scale, you have a pretty small diameter; it's easy to pass, but if you have a large colloidal mass that might be two or three inches or even larger than that in diameter, you can start to understand why the body is because it's painful to pass something like that. And so this lack of understanding of that.

Adam Rinde (08:14):

So was your husband describing this to doctors or was he explaining it to you in those early stages like this stool? No. Okay.

Martha Carlin (08:26):

No, I mean, that's actually something we learned from first collecting it and figuring out that we could tell we had a Parkinson's sample. And then from that point actually talking to other people about it and then talking my husband, the light bulb kind of going off, he actually could go all the way back to his childhood when he was under the age of being potty trained and a young child, he had trouble going to the bathroom, and he remembered his mother bribing him with stuffed animals to go number two. So he probably had some form of this constipation all the way back then. So then you have people who maybe don't understand what, because for them, that seems normal, but it's not a healthy normal because when you have that waste sitting in your body, it has a lot of different toxins. And maybe we'll talk about endotoxin later, but bacteria produce a lot of different toxins. They have a repertoire that is like, I have a book that's about three inches thick called the comprehensive book of bacterial protein toxins. And if you just think about waste sitting in your GI tract for days circulating in the immune system, having to deal with it and the inflammatory compounds over time, that's going to cause some immune fatigue.

Adam Rinde (10:08):

Exactly. Yeah. So it's interesting. So it's not only because a lot of things like on the Bristol score stool chart, the score number one would be a stool quality that's a pellet or something like that, that's difficult to pass. It's associated with constipation, but you're talking about constipation with kind of like a hard volumous, larger stool mass. Okay. That's interesting. And so when I think these, are you seeing that this is starting to crop up as I know that constipation has been clinically and it's really understood as being an early sign of Parkinson's disease now it's very in the mainstream. Are you seeing more emphasis on having those discussions with patients early on in clinic or,

Martha Carlin (11:16):

Well, I'm not in the clinic with people, but I do talk to a lot of Parkinson's people, and I'm actually in the process of making a documentary to put all these stories together because so much of it gets missed in medical practice either because the window of time they have is short or they're very just narrowly focused. And I think about 70 to 80% of people with Parkinson's do complain of some level of constipation, but I don't think they even really understand the level of constipation. And then there has been some research, it's been a few years back, it was published that there is inappropriate opening and closing of the valves, and that can also be related to small intestinal bacterial overgrowth in the pH because you need an acidic pH to close the valve for the stomach to do its digestion. And I've talked to a number of people with Parkinson's who were on proton pump inhibitors for five, 10 years before they got diagnosed with Parkinson's. So there really isn't a connection because the neurologist is looking at their neurological specialty, and the GI people are looking at their GI specialty, and there's very few people who connect those things together. There's a few, but it certainly hasn't made its way into clinical practice. And then often in clinical practice, the recommendation is well take MiraLax, and MiraLax actually has some pretty bad effects on the microbiome profile. So that's not something you want to be doing long-term either.

(13:20):

But really trying to focus on doing things to have a bowel movement every day, getting enough fiber in the diet, getting enough water, hydration, exercise and movement breathing, learning ways to get the waste to move without having to constantly take a laxative. But sometimes it's really imperative to get the waste out, and that's necessary as well. But John had tried some different; there's some Ayurvedic herbs that are helpful that he had tried, and there's a magnesium oxide that's a little gentler that he had tried at different times, but

Adam Rinde (14:16):

We

Martha Carlin (14:17):

Got focused on, have you had a bowel movement today?

Adam Rinde (14:21):

Sure, sure. Yeah. I know about 10 years ago, Dr. Laura Mic, who's one of in my profession, and I know you're familiar with her work, she was sending a number of her patients over to me who for treatment for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, her Parkinson's patients. And there is research that showed that when you clear the sibo, some of the Parkinson's symptoms got much better, which certainly we saw, but also it was very difficult to treat in that population compared to other populations. Just very difficult. But my point is, is that when the overgrowth happens, ammonia can go up and other waste products that can really affect the neurology, you have a particular interest in lipopolysaccharide LPS as a metabolite that can come from the gut waste matter or gut dysbiosis and affect the human systems organs. And can you talk more about that and other, you had mentioned that you wanted to bring up a few points about the waste products that are possibly affecting the neurology.

Martha Carlin (15:46):

Sure. Well, one interesting thing about trying to eradicate SIBO in Parkinson's, so one of the problematic organisms is h pylori, and that's a urease producer that's killing those good bacteria, but it also eats dopamine. So if you just think about you're trying to eradicate an organism, and they're taking a medication daily that is speeding it, and that often is connected to when they start to have more off time, it's because they're feeding a larger population of the h pylori that is then eating more of their medicine, so they have to take more medicine. It's kind of a vicious cycle, but that, yeah, it's another underappreciated connection to what's going on in the microbiome.

Adam Rinde (16:47):

Yeah, that's interesting because thinking back to one long-term patient that I worked with with Parkinson's disease, I worked with her for probably four years more, and every time we had control of her dysbiosis, she had to adjust her dopamine medications. It was like when her gut was doing good, her medications went down when her gut was, which might seem obvious to people listening to this, but to me it was just fascinating. And hearing you say even more details about that rings a bell.

Martha Carlin (17:25):

Sure. So on the endotoxin side, I had been looking at, so endotoxin comes from the cell wall of gram-negative bacteria. So a lot of the bad guys I'll say, are more of those are gram-negative, and their cell wall component is made of this inflammatory. And then if you have a leaky gut, so if you have gut dysbiosis, you're not making a lot of butyrate, so you're not feeding the lining of the gut, then it's permeable. And so you have more of these gram-negative bacteria and their ability to cross that permeable barrier into the bloodstream than those inflammatory compounds that LPS endotoxin travels around the body and it can cause a lot of different things. It's associated with depression, it's connected to diabetes, ms. I mean, there's a whole host of things. And I actually have a blog where I write about Parkinson's in the microbiome called Martha's Quest, and I have a piece there that goes into detail about the endotoxin models in Parkinson's, and there's a couple of Parkinson's researchers who have proposed endotoxin as maybe the primary driver of Parkinson's neuroinflammation. So yeah,

Adam Rinde (19:08):

I think it's with all these different terms of leaky gut or intestinal barrier kind of intestinal barrier issues, the LPS is present. I mean, we all are producing LPS. You can't get around producing LPS. So what, do you think it's more of a barrier issue or do you feel like it's a dysbiosis issue or both?

Martha Carlin (19:38):

Well, I think it's both because the dysbiosis kind of drives the barrier permeability. And when you don't have butyrate-producing bacteria, those cells that line the GI tract are fed directly by butyrate. And so as that population declines and the butyrate declines, then the cells aren't getting fed. And so that protection that we have goes away, and the toxins that are coming from food we're eating or from the bacteria then can cross over and undigested proteins. A lot of different things can cross that barrier and cause problems for us.

Adam Rinde (20:25):

So I think the fascinating thing about barriers is there's multiple barriers that are being breached. So the gut lining and then the brain blood-brain barrier, which is how these microbes get access to brain structures. So one other barrier before that I'd like to talk about is the gum barrier and the connection between gum disease and Parkinson's. If you could talk a little bit about that. I know that's an area that you've studied a little bit.

Martha Carlin (21:00):

And actually, I actually just wrote a blog on oral care because if you think so, gum disease is one of the bugs that's most commonly associated with gum disease. And there's another one, fusobacterium nucle aum. That one's actually more connected to cancer than neurological disease. But the porus is actually been found in the brain of people with Alzheimer's. I don't know if they've actually done brain biopsies in Parkinson's, but we found in our microbiome collection that the people with Parkinson's had elevated an organism called Porro ben onus, which is a relative of that oral bacteria. And as your fine motor skills are challenged by Parkinson's, it can become more difficult to brush your teeth. I mean, that was one thing I was constantly telling John, even if you can't brush your teeth after every meal, take a glass of water and s swish it around in your mouth and spit it out, get all the food that's stuck in your teeth that you possibly can out of your mouth, because any of that food that's in those cracks and crevices is feeding those bacteria. And it can be LPS producers or the porphyromonas produces something called GIP panes, and you want to have really good oral hygiene

(22:40):

And also take care of any metals you have in your mouth that's going to feed pathogenic organisms and any infected teeth, infected teeth, they're right up by your brain and they can also be producing LPS and those inflammatory compounds that are right there by your brain.

Adam Rinde (23:01):

Yeah, it's amazing to think that just 20, 30 years ago, nobody was even really talking about this. And now we have access to all this information, our commensal microbiome. You've gone into the world of probiotics and the utilization of probiotics to prevent chronic disease or address chronic disease. What's been the most surprising thing you've learned about probiotics so far?

Martha Carlin (23:36):

Well, when I started down this path, I didn't know a ton about probiotics, but my chief scientific officer was actually one of the early pioneers sequencing the first strain of lactobacillus. But he wasn't a commercial scientist, he was an academic scientist. And then when I got into this, it's like, oh, well, there's all these probiotics on the shelf, but there's very little diversity in those probiotics because most of the suppliers, like everything we see these days, we have this massive concentration and there are really three major global suppliers of strains to the market. And so a lot of what you see on the shelves, you can see a whole aisle full of probiotics, but they're not going to be very different from each other. And so what we started looking at was how can we one, build our own strain banks so that we find bacteria that can do specific things that we want done? And I'll tell you about one of those in a minute, that is my favorite.

(24:51):

But also, we know organisms work in teams. Just like at a factory, not everybody's putting the wheels on. You've got different skills. And so we looked at it like building teams, which fermented foods are teams of bacteria. One bug grows at the beginning and changes the pH so that the next guys can come in and do what they're going to do. And then so you get this sort of succession and this nice working team to produce what you want to produce. And so that's how we started to think about building probiotics that actually have a function, restore a function that we've lost in our gut. And the first one that I made actually was for John, and it was based on some research from, I went to a Parkinson's conference and the researchers were showing that the sugar alcohol mannitol could stop the aggregation of the proteins that were associated with Parkinson's in an animal model and actually pull them out of the brain. And I was like, wow, that's something. So I came back and I got this mannitol chemistry book, and I'm looking at, it's a very powerful free radical scavenger. It opens the blood-brain barrier and lets things come across or lets the trash come out.

(26:18):

But there was a chapter on the bacteria that actually make mannitol by converting other sugars and their converting glucose and fructose. And so that was the spark for our first idea was let's put back a factory that can make mannitol in the gut from all this excess glucose and fructose and produce butyrate in the process. And so that's what we did. And John tried it, and he was walking with a cane at the time, and within a month of taking it, he was no longer walking with a cane. And we were testing his microbiome at these different points along the way. We tested it for 120 days at different points along the way, and we could see his microbiome moving back to the healthier human microbiome profile. So by moving good guys into the neighborhood who were working as a team, they were reshaping the whole community to work better and more effectively. And they measure progress by something called the UPDR score. And his, excuse me, UPDR score went from a 35, which was the high down to a 20, and it stayed there for four years until he had covid.

(27:57):

And so in that process, then we started really looking at the mechanism of that and how that was working and this sugar metabolism change, and we wanted to do a clinical trial, but Parkinson's is, it's difficult for clinical endpoints because there aren't any great clinical endpoints to determine efficacy, I'll say. And because it had an impact on glucose and fasting blood glucose and postprandial blood glucose we're like, we decided to test it in diabetes, but to also measure this serum endotoxin, which we knew could apply across many other issues people are having. And in the clinical trial, that was one of the markers that we had the most significant improvement, and a hundred percent of the people who took the product actually had lower serum endotoxin in the trial. Usually when you try something, maybe 70% of people will have efficacy, but your average comes out and you say, oh, this was a great result, but this actually a hundred percent of the people had improvement.

Adam Rinde (29:20):

That's so great. Yeah, so it's interesting. So the probiotic mechanism is to change glucose utilization. It reminds me of some of the things I've seen in Parkinson's. When there's a shift into slight ketosis, the function goes up, the motor function, or at least during certain windows of ketosis, we'll see better movement, better walking, more brain engagement. Is that something that we could propose is related, is connected to what you saw with these probiotics?

Martha Carlin (30:05):

That's one mechanism we've thought could potentially be it. The other is just AL'S ability to open the blood brain barrier and either allow that trash to be removed or to allow glucose into the brain, because both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's have some publications calling them type three diabetes, which is insulin resistance of the brain. And I've actually been reading some research by this Dr. David Stevens about glucose resistance in the brain in the last couple of weeks, but I still have to put all that together and figure out how would you do a study around that. But the improvement in butyrate, so we did have an improvement in butyrate producing bacteria and genes involved in butyrate production. And of course, again, that's going to protect your gut lining and enable or certainly prevent a lot of that LPS from crossing over into the bloodstream.

Adam Rinde (31:19):

Very interesting. So probiotics, I think there's some assumptions on both sides. One is that they do all these amazing things like colonize your gut and you can sort of take this probiotic and then regrow communities of lacto IL and bifidobacterium. And then there's other sides that say that they absolutely do nothing. They just kind of go through our gut. And can you state kind of your current position on when we take a probiotic, what the term is, the permanency or the duration of

Martha Carlin (32:07):

In graft?

Adam Rinde (32:09):

Yeah. What's your take on that these days?

Martha Carlin (32:12):

Well, my take really hasn't changed in that is I know bacteria and the tools for engraftment are I tools that can be shared with pathogens. And those are, I don't think it's necessarily a great idea to really focus on if it's going to attach an ENG graft in your gut. What you want is something that has action as it is moving through your digestive tract. You want it to do what it is supposed to do and to work with the team of microbes that are native to you. But I don't think necessarily a focus on whether or not something is, and the reason why I say that in our clinical trial in the before and after, we certainly, we don't see, one of the main strains that's in our formula is a leuk stock. Meis. That's also one of the main organisms that you see in a lot of fermented foods, but we don't see it colonizing.

(33:33):

But it's that organism that lays that foundational work of shifting the pH and allowing the other organisms to flourish, or our lactobacillus plantarium. I don't think we saw that in the engraftment, if you will, in the stool, but our plantarum, one of the primary things we love about it is it breaks down glyphosate all the way to phosphate, hydrogen and water. Most bugs will break it down to something called AMPA that's more toxic to the brain. So you want that bug doing its action all the way through the body, but does it need to in graft?

Adam Rinde (34:26):

Right?

Martha Carlin (34:27):

Maybe not.

Adam Rinde (34:30):

Yeah. Yeah. I love how this concept that you talk about with putting a team together of probiotics and understanding what their individual role is and helping each other, and that resonates with a lot of other things we see in functional or integrative or natural medicine. We've been doing that type of thing with herbal compounds for years. And to understand that there's just not just a solitary ingredient that you can just drop into a system and expect everything to work. You have this multimodal function of probiotics. I've never thought of it that way. And it makes a lot of sense how you describe it.

Martha Carlin (35:20):

It's a synergy. We're an ecosystem, and so we're trying to put an ecosystem in that can work with our ecosystem to improve it.

Adam Rinde (35:31):

Yeah, exactly. And along those lines, there's, there's a lot of new categories of probiotics or probiotic like organisms. So we've got on the scene, spore based probiotics, we've got bacterial phages, we have yeast, biotics, psychobiotics. Where are we going with this, and how have you utilized some of these areas of the probiotic field?

Martha Carlin (36:06):

So yeah, always with marketing spin, there's a lot of different angles, but the spore based organisms are interesting because if you just think about it, most of them are soil-based organisms. And we used to come into contact with a lot of them because we were outside, we're not outside anymore. We were out in the dirt. We were getting our 50 years ago, 75, probably 75 years ago, not 50, but getting them from a local farmer, they still had dirt on them.

(36:45):

Now we get vegetables and things in this very industrialized system that have been irradiated and all these different things done to 'em. There's not a live organism. I mean, very rarely on some of these root vegetables that were in the soil, probably there's no live organisms on 'em. So we're putting back spore-forming organisms. All of our formulas contain a bacillus subtles that is a spore form. My chief scientific officer, Dr. Kano, actually is coming out with a bacillus coagulants from his ancient collection that he's done a lot of work on. There's a lot of research done on coagulants from, it was Eden, I think it was sold to Carrie. And there's quite a bit of clinical evidence showing the effectiveness of the spore formers in addressing some of these really calcitrant GI problems. So I do think they're important.

(37:55):

I'm trying to think what else you asked me. Well, so there's actually this whole field 15 years ago maybe that was developed or studied by a researcher named Mark Light, LYTE, called microbial endocrinology. So people think, okay, we're making all our own hormones. Well, no, you're not. Your microbes are making a lot of that. I think about 80% of our serotonin is made by bacteria in the gut and our organism that breaks down glyphosate. One of the things that I think is very, very important about that is a lot of these hormones and neurotransmitters require the aromatic amino acids, either tyrosine tryptophan or phenol alanine. Dopamine is in that pathway and the chiate pathway that makes those three aromatic amino acids, all the phenols in plants, and about 8,900 metabolites downstream of the top of that pathway is the target of glyphosate. So there are a lot of different things can get broken by that, and that being that loop of the gut brain and stress distress, I don't have the nutrients I need to make the neurotransmitters and all of that. So I think that's an expanding area that we're going to continue to see some exciting work. And university, college cork in Ireland does a lot of

(39:39):

Really interesting work on that. John Kry, I think Ted Dinan is retired now, but John has taken that forward and does a great job. So I think that's an interesting area. Then you also hear people talking about prebiotics, and that's kind of the new catchphrase or whatever, but I'm going to tell you, it's a little bit of marketing spend because in the growing of pure cultures, so you buy a probiotic and it has four different pure cultures, so they grow each one of those organisms separately. It's grown in a prebiotic, which is prebiotics, just basically food that microbes like to grow on. And it has the live organism, which is the probiotic. And then while it's growing, it's producing metabolites and things which are what are called postbiotics. And then at the end of that, they freeze dry it, and when they freeze dry it, you get prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics. So every bottle of probiotics that you buy has all three of those in it. So anybody who's telling you that I'm the only one who has all these in there is telling you some marketing spin.

Adam Rinde (41:07):

That's good to know. That's really good to know. Yeah, I think it's really helpful. I think the probiotic selection and prescribing of probiotics is becoming more and more complicated. In the beginning of having these, we literally had two or three strains to give to people, and now there's just so much more known about individual strains and their effect on blood sugar, their effect on gut barrier. And so yeah, it's getting more complicated, and I think the probiotic strains are so different and their mechanisms. So what about bacterial phages? These are kind of what I'm seeing as the new area that, I mean, they've been around for a long time and we've known about them for a long time, but we're starting to see supplements and bacterial phages.

Martha Carlin (42:07):

Yeah, there hasn't been that many in the United States. That's an area that is very interesting to me. Early on when I founded the company, I think in 2015, it was the year of the phage, and I got this big book on phages with all these beautiful drawings, and I'm reading about it, and I was looking at where there were commercial products back then because I thought it would be a great therapeutic for Parkinson's because you could specifically target these pathogens. I mean, the nice thing about a bacteria phage for if people don't understand what it is, it's a virus that specifically targets one organism. So if you want to get rid of let's say salmonella or typhus or something, you have a very specific bacteria phage that can kill that organism. And it does it pretty fast in probably less than 24 hours. And I had some conversations. I was in the early phases going to some conferences in Europe, and there are some very nice commercial products in the eastern block countries and Russia, which is where a lot of that phage work continued after antibiotics came to the market. And they have a great nasal one for dealing with staph and some of the nasal problems. And there is some evidence that colonization through the nose may be implicated in Parkinson's. They have an oral kind of a mixture that I think targets por and some of the other

(43:56):

In the mouth, and they had a vaginal product for bacterial vaginosis. And I just thought that was really fascinating, but I couldn't figure out how to get anybody to ship it to the United States from Russia. It's nice to see a few products coming on the market, but you can actually also develop resistance to bacteria phages the same as organisms can develop resistance, same as they can antibiotics. So if I were looking at a phage product, I would definitely take that more intermittently than I would on a continuous basis.

Adam Rinde (44:39):

That's great. That's a great pearl. Well, great. This is been fascinating to talk with you, and it's really evident just how much knowledge you have in this space, and it's always inspiring to me when someone takes a situation that's unfortunate and then all takes that and turns it into a means of helping lots and lots of people. The best we can do with tragedy is try to transform it. So I commend you for doing that. And so I'd love to wrap up by just hearing more about what you'd like us to know about your company and organization. You have six or so websites, so I had love to hear what we should know to follow your work and find you and support you.

Martha Carlin (45:47):

Sure. So our commercial product Quest is where our probiotics are. Sugar shift is the one I talked about, but we have a full lineup of, we have ideal immunity for the immune system. We have antibiotic antidote for restoring yourself after you've taken antibiotics. We have heart-centered to support cardiovascular health, and we have a product called Simple Slumber that helps with sleep and that tryptophan bacterial melatonin. And then we actually launched a yogurt culture with our sugar shift product because we had so many super fans from Dr. Davis Super gut, SIBO yogurt.

(46:34):

And so we have a lot of people who actually make yogurt with our sugar shift culture starter. And actually you can make yogurt with any of our products. So we get a lot of people who make specific yogurts from those different products. But I have a Parkinson's blog called Martha's Quest where I write specifically about Parkinson's and the microbiome, and then also just tips and alternative health approaches. And I've written about Lori Michele's work and a lot of things like Qigong and mindfulness and naturopathic medicine and Chinese medicine, because I think there are many avenues for having a better outcome in Parkinson's if you look beyond just the conventional neurological appointment that you may have where they're giving you appeals. So I talk about that a lot. And then the bio collective website, that was our stool bank, and we don't do the sample collection and all of that anymore, but if anybody wants to hear about the history of the company and see where our expertise comes from, that's the bio collective. And then we actually have a little ag company called Ancient Organic Bioscience where we're working on cleaning up the soil and making the plants healthier, because if we don't do that, we're kind of pushing a string up a hill.

Adam Rinde (48:15):

Okay. Yeah. Very good. Wow. Well, thank you so much, and congratulations again on all your work, and I really appreciate you being here, and I look forward to just continuing to learn from you and watching the spaces where I think someone said there's like 300 papers or something that come out a week or more. It's crazy in the renaissance of the microbiome. So we're all lucky to be part of this.

Martha Carlin (48:48):

Yes. And we are more microbial than we are human.

Adam Rinde (48:52):

Yes. We're never forget that. Right. All right. Thank you so much.

Martha Carlin (48:59):

Yes, thank you.