So, there's more bacteria living in our gut than there are cells in our body. The human gut, as you guys know, has all these bacteria that can have a profound effect on your health. Can actually make you sleep better, help you have a better mood, can reduce your blood sugar, and then some of them are really bad and they increase inflammation.
To dumb it down, it's essentially like food for your gut bacteria.
That's right. For the good stuff.
But fiber, for whatever reason, feels unsexy.
GLP-1 is made by your gut. This will cause your gut to make GLP-1.
Billions of dollars. So like companies are pumping out marketing all the time on this stuff. 99.9% of probiotics are absolute [__]. Yeah. The placebo effect is a profound effect, and a lot of common allergy and skin-based autoimmune stuff starts in the gut.
I just feel like there's a different type of mentality that you kind of like bring to everything you do. Would you say that?
I don't think humans have like very well-defined limits. Like we have incredible potential.
What do you think people early in their careers are getting wrong?
You never know why something serendipitously might happen. World is becoming more open to more people.
And there's more opportunity for everyone than ever before.
One, welcome to Gut Talk.
We are happy to have you. We're beyond excited. Yeah, you are not our typical guest. I don't think we live on the same sides of the internet, which is a great thing. And I say that because I do want to do a little intro. Normally, we just like jump into things, but not only are you a co-founder of Super Gut, but you have a few pretty big accomplishments, I would say. One is that you're the current CEO of Ohalo, an agriculture technology company. You are, I love that you guys call yourselves the besties, but you're a member of the All-In podcast.
One guy calls us the besties.
Most of us don't say that, but then he just keeps saying it, so everyone else says it.
There's a lot of clips saying besties.
Yeah.
And you're also previously CEO and founder of the Climate Corporation, which you sold back in 2013. You started at Google, so you've had quite a career thus far. But we're here a lot to talk about Supergut today and very excited about that. Start off. You're in Austin for South by Southwest, right?
Supergut related or are you doing multiple other things?
No, there's stuff we're doing like the All-In podcast is doing a show tonight.
And we've got some cool guests that are stopping by and doing a couple other events here.
Okay, we're going to dive into Supergut.
This place is like podcast city, by the way.
Yeah, it is. Like I did another podcast, I've done a couple podcasts this week, but it's like very like everyone, there's a lot of podcasters here.
Yeah. It's the podcast mecca.
I think it's a thing cuz you get inspired by a lot of people in this city. We've been able to meet like a lot of really cool people and I feel like you kind of just feed off each other's energy and such. So that's another reason we're not leaving Austin.
Yeah, exactly. Just like it's got that environment.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's really easy to find guests. Just you meet people through events, coffee shops, friends of friends, like just we're originally from Northern Virginia. There's not much podcasting going on there. So it works for us and also health is super important to us. Obviously we got involved with Supergut. Jenna is a nutritionist, gut health focused.
I'm going to warn you I barely passed like biology. So as we talk today, never took biology but the internet's a great teacher.
AI and you might disagree with me. I don't think everyone's brains are wired that way and mine I start to just like black out when we go too in the depths. So today when we're talking today, I won't if I ask you to clarify. I'm not trying to be funny. Like I'm really confused.
You'll be like, 'I'm blacking out.' No, we'll slow down.
I don't always register it. If you just start seeing me like kind of looking confused, I'm kidding. I think high level. Let's start.
You'll warn she's like, 'Okay,' I'm like, 'We're losing her. We're losing her.'
Obviously, Supergut is a fiber-based company and you were in climate and agriculture prior to Supergut. What made you want to get involved in fiber?
Yeah. So after Climate Corp, I started this incubator, let's call it foundry, where we started companies called The Production Board.
And inside of The Production Board, we kind of took this like thesis-driven approach where we would do a lot of scientific research and figure out, hey, what's possible that isn't like being done today that, you know, we should be addressing because of advances in technology, particularly in food and agriculture and human health. And so there was one area where we started spending a lot of time, which is the microbiome.
So you know we don't really intuit it, the fact that everything around us is covered in microorganisms, bacteria, fungus all over the world, like this room is just covered, right? Like in our guts there are 40 trillion bacterial cells living in our guts doing stuff. Those cells, there are, you know, 10 trillion human cells in the whole body, so there's more bacteria living in our gut than there are cells in our body. And every one of those bacteria, like in the environment, are eating chemicals and making chemicals all the time. And it turns out that that microbiome, as we call it, which is kind of all of the bacteria together, have a really profound effect on the environment they're in and they can change stuff. So, we actually started a company where we analyzed the microbiome of farmers' soil and then gave them recommendations on what to do to improve their crops.
That's pretty cool. By looking at the microbiome.
Yeah.
And that business is called Pattern... it's called Earth Optics now. And it's taken off. And it helps farmers make decisions about fertilizer and things that they could put in their soil to increase their yield, spend less, you know, regenerative agriculture is kind of a thing, but like how do you maintain the health of your soil and get the bacteria in the soil to make the stuff you want them to make to make your crops bigger.
And then the other area we looked at was the human gut, which like there's hundreds of research papers going back probably to the 90s. So in the 90s is kind of when DNA sequencing got cheap enough that we started to be able to like figure out what bacteria are in an environment because before that we didn't really have the ability to do that. So DNA sequencing lets us look at the DNA of all the bacteria and that tells us, hey, there's bacteria A, bacteria B, bacteria C, there's 10 of A, 20 of B, 30 of C. And as we started to get all that data and then we looked at the health and the other chemical markers in the blood, we could start to realize a lot of interesting stuff. And so all these papers started to come out, you know, call it 30 plus years ago and then 20 years ago and then things have really taken off in the last decade showing that the gut, the human gut, as you guys know, has all these bacteria that can have a profound effect on your health. That there are little bacteria that some of them can actually make you sleep better. Some of them can help you have a better mood. Some of them can reduce your blood sugar. And then some of them are really bad and they increase inflammation. They can increase your blood sugar. They can increase your, you know, insulin resistance. So it turns out that, you know, this understanding of what's in the microbiome kind of launches a whole bunch of ideas on like, hey, what could we do? What can we do? What can we do?
We started saying like, hey, one idea we had was like, let's measure the bacteria in people's poop, right? And use the microbiome that we read from the DNA in their poop to figure out what do they have in their gut and then we'll give them a personalized probiotic recommendation back. And we very quickly kind of found like, hey, that might be a little bit tough of a business to make to scale because not everyone wants to scoop the poop and all the sort of stuff that goes on. We get that pushback a lot.
And then we started looking at like also the probiotic space. And the probiotic space, there's a whole bunch of research that shows that a lot of the probiotics that are on the store shelf are not really shelf stable. So what you're eating is a pill with nothing in it.
There's literally nothing in that pill.
Yeah. It never gets there.
Never. The bacteria all die.
Mhm.
And then the second problem, so it, you know, you got to keep stuff in a cold chain. The second problem is that you got to put a lot to have any sort of health effect in the probiotic. It's like the typical dosage is like 1/30th or 1/40th of what's really going to have an effect on your health. And the third thing is that the probiotics don't change your gut microbiome. What happens is you'll take the probiotic, if you take a cold chain from a refrigerator, like a really good one, you take a lot of it, you get this great little health boost. You're like, 'Oh, great. My blood chemistry looks good. I'm like super healthy. Got energy.' But then after you stop taking it, your gut biome returns back to normal. It goes back to where it was before.
And so all these papers started saying like, 'Hey, it's like putting a house cat in a jungle.' That's kind of my analogy. Like you could put a house cat in a jungle. It'll do stuff for a while, but it's not going to like thrive. If you're not going to get lots of house cats mating and growing, like the leopard will eat the house cat, right? Like bad stuff will happen. Meanwhile, like in the jungle, you've got like monkeys making poop. The poop makes the trees grow. The trees are kind of, you know, where the monkeys live. Then the leopard eats the monkeys and they all survive and there's an ecosystem, right?
That ecosystem exists in the gut biome, too.
And so, you can't just put one bacteria in and expect to change the gut biome. It's very hard to change it. It turns out what you can change is the prebiotics. That's where you can put something in the gut that really changes which organisms are successful and which ones die.
And so it's almost like, hey, let's give a bunch of food to the leopards and now the leopards will take off and they'll take over and you get more of them. And so that's why we decided to start Supergut. We said, 'Oh my goodness, there's this ingredient called resistant starch which has been studied like crazy and no one built a product out of it.' And so it is an absolute game-changer in terms of like having a permanent lasting effect and changing your gut. That's why we started the company and so that was a couple years ago.
Cool. Yeah. You mentioned resistant starch. For anyone who's never heard of it before, will you explain it?
Yeah. So all starch is made up of two molecules, amylose and amylopectin.
Okay. Okay. Like that's crazy to think because that's the same two molecules in potato starch, in potatoes, in pasta, in wheat starch, in breads, in rice.
Like they're all the same two molecules, amylose and amylopectin. What makes rice different from potato, different from wheat is the way the amylose and the amylopectin are kind of stuck together. Like they make these sort of structures. And so the structures taste different, feel different in your mouth. That's the difference between like potato and rice and wheat. Despite coming from different plants, the majority of the product is starch. Amylose and amylopectin in different shapes.
And amylose is this molecule that's very hard for your body to digest. It cannot break it down. Amylopectin is broken down and that's what turns into blood sugar and, you know, we use as energy or gets stored as fat. What resistant starch is is amylose. It's just like a ton of amylose. The more amylose you have, the more resistant that starch is to being digested. And what that means is your body, your digestive juices can't break it down. But good gut bacteria can eat it. They can ferment it. And when they have that amylose, they eat a bunch of that amylose and they start to populate and they make and you get more of them. And so all the papers have shown, and there's dozens of papers, that if you eat high amylose starch, resistant starch, you have a totally profound change in your gut bacteria. And all of the good bacteria go up and the bad bacteria go down, generally speaking. And so that's what it is. Resistant starch is the amylose component of starches that we find in food. And that's why people are like, oh, if you take rice and cool it down, you end up getting more resistant starch. What happens is all that amylopectin kind of changes into amylose and the structure changes as it cools down. The temperature actually creates a chemical reaction that causes the amylopectin to convert into amylose. And so that's one of the ways you get resistant starch. And then there's other stuff like green banana has a lot of resistant starch. You can actually extract amylose from corn. You can extract amylose from rice, from wheat, from potato. So there's lots of ways you can kind of extract amylose and that's kind of what we make with Supergut is we get that amylose, kind of that resistant starch taken out so you don't have to load it up with all the other carbs and all the other stuff that comes with the other products. Yeah.
So to dumb it down, it's essentially like food for your gut bacteria.
That's right. For the good stuff.
It's feeding the good stuff. Is it getting rid of the bad stuff or is the idea the more good stuff you have the less the bad stuff has a place to live?
Okay. See, that's the type of science I got.
No, not to say that you can't handle the hard science, but like, yeah.
No. Well, there's arguments to be said if you look back at some of my... That was exactly right. Yeah. Cuz like, you know, the bacteria live in your small intestines on the lining. So, there's like a surface. There's only so much surface to live on.
And so, the more good stuff is growing cuz they're getting fed, the more the bad stuff kind of gets drowned out and goes away. Yeah.
Now then what happens is the good stuff actually pumps out these molecules. This might be where it gets a little more complicated.
But that good bacteria makes what's called short-chain fatty acids. Yeah. Acetate and butyrate. And these things get absorbed through your intestines into your blood.
Acetate and butyrate are so good for you when they get into your blood.
Drops your blood sugar, gets rid of insulin resistance, reduces inflammation, it goes into all your cells, turns off all of those inflammatory markers and so on. The other thing that ends up happening at that point when all this good bacteria is being made and all this short-chain fatty acid being made is your cells start to secrete a molecule that we've all heard of called GLP-1.
And so as that happens, as you get all that good bacteria to grow in your gut, you get GLP-1 naturally getting made in your gut. So that also suppresses appetite, reduces inflammation, reduces like, you know, and that has a whole systemic effect.
And real quick just to clarify, the short-chain fatty acids, they come from the resistant starch. They come from the bacteria that grow out that eat the resistant starch. Got it.
So the bacteria, they spit out because they're what a bacteria is, it's a little chemical factory. It's eating and making stuff all the time. So it eats the resistant starch and then it eats the amylose and it makes butyrate and acetate and that's what it releases. So the more of it you get, the more butyrate and acetate you get in your blood. And then there are people that sell like supplements of butyrate. Turns out those don't get in your blood when you take them like that. Okay?
So they get broken apart and so they don't actually last very long. But when they're made in your intestinal lining by these bacteria, they actually get into your blood and that's how you can actually get the benefit from this stuff. And that's why this is such a profound effect.
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. It's interesting. I feel like protein has had this huge moment as do so many other products in the health world. But fiber, for whatever reason, feels unsexy. Like fiber, it's catching on now with the increase of colon cancer at a younger age. But what do you feel like people are missing and don't understand about fiber?
Well, people just, I think there's a shift. People kind of very quickly mess up the idea of digestion.
Gut biome and like poop. Like people are like, 'Oh, you know, it helps my poop soften.' Yeah. Like that's a different problem and there's like a whole different thing that's going on there.
And there's a whole different thing going on in digesting food, like having good digestion. But like increasing good bacteria or improving your gut microbiome, that's its own kind of health thing that I think we need to come back to focusing on.
And honestly, the first generation of stuff, there was just a lot of [__] in the market. Like a lot of the stuff that people were like, 'Oh, it's so good for you. Like, we should all be taking probiotics.' That's like billions of dollars. So like companies are pumping out marketing all the time on this stuff saying, 'Probiotics are so good. Probiotics are so good.' It turns out 99.9% of probiotics are absolute [__].
Yeah. They don't have anything in them. You're literally taking a pill with nothing in it. It's like whatever bacteria were in there when you made it, it died. Yeah.
And there were so many studies, you can go pull this up, like they're all dead, right? And even if they were alive, they don't actually inoculate your gut. They don't change your gut, right? So they're temporary as they pass through.
So, you know, it's almost like you're kind of like rewriting, like you got to go back to the gut biome and then you got to rewrite kind of how everyone thinks about this stuff.
Yeah. This is kind of like a silly question slash point, but what do these company owners then think that they're achieving by like, are they just greedy or do they actually think they're doing something for the world when they produce these probiotics?
Like genuinely, I'd like to know from your perspective.
Yeah. I'm not gonna like cast a generalization on supplement company owners, but probably fair to say there's like a whole bunch of supplement companies that are like, I mean look, you can go back to like snake oil salesmen on trains, you know, like it's like as long as they're feeling good.
They're paying for it. They feel good about themselves. What does it matter? Like it's not like I promised I'm gonna cure cancer to them. I told them like, 'Hey, this gut biome is good. This will change your... this is a probiotic. It fixes your gut.' I think that there's an element of like, you know, you're not a doctor, you're not making medical product and you have to be careful about claims you can make as a supplement company. And so many of them make kind of like soft enough claims that they don't get in trouble. And then as long as the consumer feels good, placebo effect is a profound effect. Like if people feel like they're doing something good for themselves, they're like, 'Dude, I'm like feeling great.'
Energy's up, this is working. You see like the placebo effect is like legit. Right. Your brain has power.
Yeah. Well, and also too, I think when people start taking supplements, especially for their gut, they pay more attention to their poop. So maybe you just weren't paying that much attention to it before or maybe there's also I think a lot of people they start taking supplements and at the same time they start eating healthier. So it's like, well was it the supplement or was it the fact that you started introducing vegetables?
I'm eating better. I'm exercising. I'm drinking less.
Right. Yeah. And so it's hard to sometimes say it's like the supplement and more so just that the supplement was a part of a massive lifestyle shift.
Another thing with fiber is you explain the science of it, but can you explain the effects of fiber in just your day-to-day life?
By the way, before I do, I will say one thing like there are a bunch of probiotics that are like very efficacious. They do stuff. They just don't change your gut permanently. So, you know, there's a set of microbes, probiotics called VSL#3, it's what it used to be called. There's a company today called Vis Biome. Okay. So, I have no affiliation with this company.
But they sell cold chain seven strains of bacteria that have been well studied in like hundreds of research papers. And it's these seven bacterial strains in this pill. You get in a cold chain, comes to your house, and it's kept in dry ice. So, everything's alive. And people have studied it to make sure everything's alive. And it is. And it's ultra ultra ultra high dose. It's like 450 billion CFU, you know, in a pill.
125. Yeah. Anyway, huge amount. And then people take this and it actually can have a very significant effect in a lot of different health conditions because that good bacteria is now being forced into your gut. It's doing a bunch of good stuff. It's releasing all the good molecules and you're getting the benefits. But once you stop taking it, it kind of does a reset.
Yeah. No, I think what you explained about it's consuming the resistant starch and how you explain bacteria is like it's consuming stuff and then it's spitting out other stuff. That's the change that you're explaining.
That's right. And then it multiplies.
So all the bacteria are trying to make copies of themselves, but if they don't have food, they can't divide.
Now, if you eat shitty food, you eat fries, you eating, you know, even artificial sweeteners, believe it or not, they can actually feed the bad bacteria and the bad bacteria start to multiply and then they take up more space. So, this stuff starts to counteract a lot of the other things you might be eating that have given an advantage that are pro-inflammatory. And when I say inflammatory, it means that they're releasing something, some small molecule that then causes the cells in your body to release signaling molecules that say alert, alert, bad stuff's around here. Those are like, you know, interleukin molecules, cytokines that kind of trigger inflammation, inflammatory signal through your body.
And the GLP-1 and the short-chain fatty acids that come out when you have the good bacteria do the opposite.
Yeah. And they downregulate all that stuff.
I mean, I've studied the gut a lot. I do the GI-MAP stool tests. I run them on my clients. Like, I do a lot of different things. I am learning muscle testing right now with energy testing. And like our number one recommendation is never probiotics. Like, it's lifestyle change. It's fiber intake. Fiber. Fiber. Like, it really is like the amount of times I have a list written out for my clients where I'm like, 'These are the foods that you should start consuming.' And sometimes I'm like, 'Start taking Supergut.'
Yeah. Well, the thing we know about this is there's a threshold of efficacy. So, like we can say, 'Hey, eat a lot of fiber.' But like how hard is it, do you think, to track how much fiber you're exactly eating in a day, right?
It's very annoying. I try to do it.
We try. So, with this, you could like the goal is 15 to 30 grams a day. So, that's three servings of this is six grams. There's another one that's got eight. There's a... And then we have a, you know, we still have a bar product, but that's like the goal is to get to 15 grams a day.
So if you get 15 grams a day, you know, you're taken care of on that front and then everything else is upside, you know, that's kind of the idea cuz that's like the threshold is get to 15.
Yeah. No, I mean, I try to track my macros. I just like to make sure that I'm eating a balanced lifestyle. And not only is it just inconvenient and annoying, but fiber isn't looked at as one of the main things to track. So, it's like it's always on like the bottom left corner of any sort of macro tracker.
I think you're right. I think that's going to change. I do think there's like so much and, you know, in the retail business like Walmart, Target, etc. That's like the number one category growth area right now is fiber.
And so people are distinguishing fiber to like make your stool soft, which is what fiber used to be thought of like to your question earlier. It's like Metamucil for like old people and make soft stool versus like fiber to change your gut biome where there's kind of a targeted health benefit we're trying to get.
And that's I think what's happening now is people are realizing that.
And then you'll see like things like allergies, autoimmune stuff, all of that stuff starts to go down and go away when you get on this stuff. I mean, honestly, I think you can without taking other medicines, and I'm not going to be a doctor on this stuff, but I do think a lot of the pro-inflammatory source in a lot of common allergy and kind of skin-based autoimmune stuff starts in the gut.
And when you turn the stuff down, it's like boom, it goes like my daughter had eczema, okay? So she got blasted with antibiotics at some point and doctors like try this cream, try this thing. For years it was like give her all this stuff and then I'm like no, we're actually going to like do a gut thing. We did a gut thing and like within two weeks eczema is gone. Boom. Like it was unreal how well it worked. And I'm like, oh [__], maybe this is real. Like, you know, the company, this is legit. And this was after we started. So I'm like, why did I not think of this before? Like why did I let the doctor give us all this [__] when I know like there's like, I knew she got blasted with antibiotics at one point, I'm like I was really against it and then I got her, you know, on this kind of gut therapy and it was like boom, like how quickly it changed. And so I do think like for a lot of that people see that health benefit kind of so it's not about stool softening, it's like all the other pro-inflammatory stuff then the weight loss because you'll like have more GLP in your blood, you'll be eating less and you know the good, I mean you guys have probably read all the studies on the benefits of GLP-1s, you know, just like reduced compulsivity so you're not like compulsive. This is one of the most amazing things about GLP-1 is people that were drinking alcohol, gambling, like doing random purchases that they probably shouldn't have been doing, like there's all this sort of stuff that kind of stops and you're like I just don't feel like I need to do it anymore. Like there's like GLP-1 just kind of like turns that part of your brain, that reward cycle, it's like hey, you're good, you don't need the reward cycle right now. And so your brain kind of slows down a little bit.
Is it fair to say that if you consume more fiber, specifically resistant starches, that you could probably work through that before going on a GLP-1 or is there so much of a difference there? Cuz I don't think I understand.
That's not a great like that cuz I don't want to be like a medical doctor like I think the GLP-1 receptor agonist. So what a GLP-1 drug is is it's actually a peptide, a little small protein that sticks to the GLP-1 receptors in your body.
In your brain and all the rest of your body. It's not actually GLP-1.
So GLP-1 is made by your gut.
This will cause your gut to make GLP-1.
They're two totally different things.
I hear you. No, they're not different.
But the point is that for certain people, they need to kind of very quickly, you know, like if you're clinically obese or there's some reason why a doctor might say, 'Hey, this could be really good for you.' But I have a lot of friends who have gone on GLP-1 receptor agonist therapies and then they're like, 'Well, it's made me feel sick. I kind of like there's side effects I'm dealing with. I want to get off of it.' And then it's like that's where this can play an important role for them is either in place of or as part of a maintenance program. Or to your point early on instead of if you're just like, 'Hey, I'm trying to lose like 10 pounds. I want to reduce my skin allergies,' then it plays a really important role.
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's helpful. I think what's interesting for us is like we see it a lot in women that look just like us and we're watching GLP-1s be used in a way to just kind of cut those last few pounds off. I'm not necessarily, I think it's a whole different category that when GLP-1s are used for people who have struggled with obesity or really need to lose a significant amount of weight. But I think that part of what you're saying is like fiber almost needs like this rebrand and we need to go back to the beginning to understand like it's not just a stool softener. There's so much more to it. And I think if more people understood that then they wouldn't necessarily run to maybe more extreme.
Which is kind of like our whole, we're in this skinny epidemic, right, where girls, women our age really want to be super skinny and like it's really sad, but once they saw that GLP-1 come in, people took full advantage of it.
It's, I think it's a problem that's plaguing because there's something to say about just like balancing blood sugar, eating more fiber, taking care of your gut health, and like naturally, like we saw it with ourselves. I was 20 lbs heavier when my gut was in shambles. And once I started taking care of my digestion, I became regular and my blood sugar started to even out because I was 20 years old and my blood sugar was like going crazy.
That's when I noticed the big difference. But I also feel good like mentally and like my clarity is great. Like all of the benefits that came with just like improving my health. And you have a daughter, right?
It all goes together.
I think we talk about it a lot on the podcast. We've had a lot of conversations about it because there's the next generation of girls growing up and it's important to say like there's ways to do this. There's ways to be healthy that don't necessarily take these like pharmaceutical extreme measures and...
And the food, I mean the food options are what makes it tough, right? So like the majority of people, like, you know, what's economically available to you, what's regionally or locally available to you. So, it's not like you're getting tons of fresh fruits and vegetables and then food is tuned in such a way in the CPG companies to make it very like appealing like beyond anything you'll have naturally.
As soon as you eat a bag of Cheetos, you're like cuz it's loaded with glutamate. So, it gives you this like umami kick and your brain is just like whoa, what the hell? That is awesome. I want more and the salt and then another and the crunch. And then, you know, obviously Coca-Cola and other stuff is tuned on the sweetness. And like every one of these products is tuned in a way that it like immediately flips the switch in a way that it's very...
Hard to like pick that over the thing that doesn't flip that switch. And like it just like because of that, there isn't a lot of economic demand to go like make fresh fruits and vegetables available everywhere.
