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Podcast 259: Soil-based Probiotics – Part 1

Because of regulatory changes, Generation Plus is not able to get the decent soil based organism (SBO) Probiotics that they’ve had so much success with. They do not want to put up with the FDA regulatory pressure.

Martin feels he got lucky, finding a diamond in the rough with Body Biotics. Today, we hear from Kelli de Sante, president of Body Biotics, telling us the story to introduce the products properly.

Body Biotics Probiotic supplements combine strains of good bacteria that co-habitate in a symbiotic relationship, specialized for the acidic terrain of your lower bowel, while others are right for the alkaline terrain of your small intestine.

Click here to read “The Best, Natural Probiotics are Soil-Based Organisms (SBOs)”.

The term Probiotic comes from Greek words meaning “for life,” and refers to organisms such as the bacteria which contribute to the health and balance of the intestinal tract. The word, Probiotics, when used for descriptive purposes, covers all of those favorably disposed, healthy microorganisms such as the ones found in yogurt, kefir, sour milk, cheese, acidophilus milk, etc. They make up the major portion of the intestinal flora in a healthy person.

AMERICANS SEEM TO ACCEPT POOR HEALTH AS A NORMAL consequence of aging, while many experience poor health while still young. Meanwhile, researchers continue to gather evidence affirming the importance of the gut to overall health.

More and more health professionals believe there is life and death in the long hollow tube called the “gastrointestinal tract.” Dr. C. Everett Koop, former U.S. Surgeon General, indicated two out of three Americans suffer fatal health problems because of poor dietary choices. That means their problems are centered in their “gut”. “What we eat may affect our risk for several of the leading causes of death for Americans, notably, coronary heart disease, stroke, atherosclerosis, diabetes, and some types of cancer. These disorders together now account for more than two-thirds of all deaths in the United States.”

Podcast 259: Soil-based Probiotics – Part 1

SCOTT: Welcome back, everybody! You are listening to the Life Enthusiast Podcast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet! Starring the founder of Life Enthusiast, Martin Pytela! I am your co-host, Scott Paton. Hey, Martin, how are you doing today?

MARTIN: I am going great! I’m just so excited today because we are going to introduce a new brand and new products for Life Enthusiast customers. It has been a sore point with us for several months now perhaps because of regulatory changes, I’m told that one of our main suppliers, Generation Plus, has been unable to get the decent soil-based organism probiotic system, that we have been using and selling and having lots of success with, but his main supplier has gone offline, they decided to no longer manufacture with the human certification, he just will not put up with the FDA’s regulatory oversight. Boom, just like that. We were hearing that the increased regulatory pressure from the FDA and others is going to create a mess in the alternative or natural health products, and sure enough, it’s upon us. But I got lucky! I found a diamond in the ashes. I didn’t know then that I could actually get the product that’s been around for 35 years already, the product that I really wanted!

SCOTT: It’s one of those ‘when a door closes, another opens’ story, Martin.

MARTIN: Oh, absolutely. And so with that, I would like to introduce Kelli de Sante, the president of a company that manufactures a product called Body Biotics, so she could tell us the story instead of me trying to reinterpret it. So here she comes! Welcome, Kelli!

KELLI: Thank you, Martin, and thank you, Scott! It’s such a delight to be here.

SCOTT: We are delighted to have you. So before we get into details about Body Biotics, let’s talk about why probiotics are so important to our health.

KELLI: Wow, that’s probably one of the key questions, Scott! Probiotics are important to our health because our gut holds about 80% of our total immune function. And in the 1950s, when they started dumping chemicals into the soil, pesticides, herbicides, and so forth, they slowly and gradually began to destroy all of the friendly soil bacteria, that was a part of our daily life, that literally helps to keep the ecology of our gut clean, and to keep a healthy balance between friendly bacteria and unfriendly bacteria, which there again supports 80% of everything going on in our body. And so when they started dumping the chemicals, they began to slowly create serious issues, gut issues. And as you and probably our listeners know, there are so many gut-related health issues today that did not exist 50 years ago. Also about that time was the introduction of antibiotics. An interesting thing is that if you’ve had as little as one round of antibiotics, one round of antibiotics without the replacement of the friendly bacteria afterward, it can totally turn your gut bacteria into an overload of unfriendly bacteria. Just one run of antibiotics in your life can do that.

SCOTT: That’s scary. You reminded me of when I was a kid, and we would go out into the garden at my grandma’s, out in the country, and we’d pull out the carrots and brush the dirt off, and we just chowed it down, we weren’t really that concerned that there was soil still hanging off the carrot.

KELLI: That’s exactly it. I grew up on a farm as well, and I remember many times in the summer when we would take a watermelon and just pop it down on the ground, it would pop open, and of course, our hands were dirty, but we were digging into this watermelon and just eating it away, and of course, the flavors were so awesome back then, because you had all the rich minerals in the soil and in the food, the soil was so alive. It was very common to eat fresh tomatoes right off the vine, and watermelons and strawberries Nobody was worried about pesticides or herbicides, because we didn’t have them, you know? Life has really changed since those times.

SCOTT: So basically when we eat food, it goes into our stomach, but it’s not just the stomach acid that breaks down the food. There are lots of good bacteria that also work on the digestion of the food, but we can damage that bacteria. Almost everybody has ever taken antibiotics at some point, so it is safe to assume that we all have this kind of desert in our stomach. In the past, I often thought it was just acid in our stomach that broke down our foods, but I’m beginning to realize that that’s just one aspect of it. And the other aspect, of course, is all these good bacteria that should be in our system, from our mouth down into our stomach and intestines and everything else, that works to break down our food, that’s what makes me really excited to learn more about probiotics and specifically about Body Biotics.

KELLI: I remember when I first heard about soil-based organisms, I thought people really lost their minds. I thought it was the craziest thing I’d ever heard, but then as I read and understood more why and how, and the 80% immune function in the gut, and especially as I understood that we should always protect our environment from all of the hazards, but not just our forest and our living space, the environment in our gut is very important! How can you tell that your gut environment is not in good shape? If you have any kind of allergies, if you have eczema or breakouts, anything on your skin, that’s usually an indication that your stomach is polluted, so to speak. We know that 50% of the population alone has environmental allergies, so that tells you how off-balance most of us are if we’re not taking and consuming really good live bacteria, good probiotics, every single day.

The first probiotic was discovered because the soldiers during  World War II were dying not from gunshot wounds, but they were dying of dysentery. And so Peter Daubner, the formulator of our product, when he read that story, he was very fascinated, and he began an exploration of experimenting and playing around with friendly bacteria from the soil, gathering samples, isolating out a variety of different strains, determined to say what was toxic and what wasn’t toxic. So he went through years of work, and then he came up with initially six, and now eight, friendly bacteria that are safe to ingest according to the USDA. He began to explore what he could do with those strains so that they could be naturally adjusted because he understood that the soils were being depleted, that all of the herbicides and fungicides were changing our lives. 

After a number of years of testing different substrates, different mediums, taking them out, leaving them in their consortia, he stumbled across the very best way to gather soil samples of friendly bacteria, to extract out only the safe ones, to then culturing them in their natural habitat. The living friendly bacteria have a number of jobs that they do, and they also help to starve out the unfriendly bacteria, because they’ll devour the very thing that would keep the unfriendlies living and thriving, so they starve them out, it is one of the things that they also do. He was really brilliant, finding a way to make these strains of eight bacteria to become the ‘super strain,’ if you will. For about five years before the product came into the market, it was tested by a leading international doctor, who had a clinic down in Mexico. They were tested on people who were seriously ill with tremendous results. So that is the background of Body Biotics.

SCOTT: Wow. A lot of people have pretty amazing results when the food they eat actually gets into their body and gets used properly.

KELLI: That’s exactly right. Because when you have the friendly probiotics growing in there, teaching and retraining the body to produce its own natural enzymes, which is critical for breaking down the food properly, but also remove from the body that which shouldn’t be there. It also will sequester iron from any iron that’s coming into the body. People don’t know this, but iron is also food for unfriendly bacteria and can cause terrible problems. We will discuss iron absorption in more detail later, but if iron becomes a free agent, and it is just hanging out in the body, it can become very damaging to the body. So body Biotics will sequester that, hold it in reserve, and only deliver it to the receptors where it is properly needed within the body. It’s an amazing, amazing thing.

SCOTT: It’s amazing to hear that, because, of course, it’s all over the news all the time about how women need more iron, and they’re short of iron, and you should take this iron supplement and that iron supplement, and of course then they wonder why they have candida issues and stuff like that.

KELLI: Right! When you’re feeding those unfriendly bacteria, it is a problem, especially with women and candida. I remember in my early thirties, I was told I am iron deficient, but I think I was not, I think I simply had an overabundance of unfriendlies, that was absorbing or ingesting the very iron that my body needed because since I’ve been on Body Biotics, I’ve absolutely had no issue with low iron

SCOTT: And you’re not taking massive doses of iron.

KELLI: I take no iron supplements, other than the Body Biotics. The natural foods that you’re eating on a daily basis are the best iron you could ever get. It’s very dangerous to add the wrong iron supplement to your system.

MARTIN: Kelli, could you explain a bit how you got involved with the company? You were not one of the founders, right?

KELLI: Well, actually I was almost there from the beginning. 16 years ago, not at the beginning, not the 35 years ago of course, but 16 years ago when the company secured the worldwide marketing rights for Body Biotics, I was actually working as vice president of another company, and an old friend, the previous owner of the company called me one day, he knew me for like 15 years before that, he knew I had severe allergies, asthma, had been on medications for some 20 years, so he called me out of the blue one day, and he said: “Hey, I just wanted to connect with you,” and he started talking about the product and asked if I still have those allergy problems. And honestly, Martin, I just had to laugh at him. I’ve tried everything, nothing ever worked. So finally, after we were talking for a couple of minutes, I said: “Listen, if you really think you have something that will take care of my allergy problems, send it to me. And if it really works, I will quit this job, and I will go sell it because it will be a miracle.”

And it was amazing because I got on the product, the bottle says to take one capsule a day the first week, and then two a day, the next week. Well, I’m one of these people, so I started with one a day for three days, and then I went to three a day and then six a day, and I noticed some shifts in my body very quickly. My nose was draining, things were moving in my body, I could tell in just after a few days, but about three weeks into the process, one morning I woke up and I stretched and yawned. And for a second, I thought: “God, there’s something wrong!” And it dawned on me that what was wrong was I actually could breathe. It had been so long since I woke up in the morning and could actually breathe and get air in my lungs. I didn’t even know what it felt like. You know, it was really kind of funny. And so I waited a few days and then every morning I’d wake up and it was like: “Oh my God!” 

So I thought to myself: “I’m going to really test it, because for seven years prior to that, I had not been able to wear perfume.” If I went into a department store with all the dyes in the fabrics and all the smells, within 10 minutes in the department store, I’d have to leave, because I couldn’t breathe, and I would be sneezing and it would just really be a problem. And so I went into a department store, no problem. So I threw away my medication 16 years ago, I’ve not been back on it since. I quit my job and I started selling this product as I promised. (laughing) And then six years ago I bought the company, that’s how much I love this product. I believe in it. I think it’s the most superior probiotic in the world.

SCOTT: You reminded me of the Remington razor commercial: “I was so impressed with my shave, that I bought the company.” (laughing)

KELLI: (laughing) Yes, I should tell this story to our customers! I’m totally committed to this product.

SCOTT: I can really tell how totally committed you are, which is just absolutely wonderful to see and hear.

KELLI: Thank you! Well, I believe that every breathing human and animal needs his product, I sincerely truly believe it. I watched our competitors come on the market every day, and I just cringe, because I know what we have, and I know what a real probiotic will do, and then I know what so much of the competitors is unable to do. And it isn’t that our product “does” anything except help to restore your immune system, so your body can do what it’s supposed to do to – keep you healthy.

MARTIN: Yes, I certainly am well aware of the main problem. When you speak of competitors, there are essentially two ways to design products. One would be with bacteria that are made pharmaceutically, that will be capsulated and then put into some kind of a dormant state, hoping that you get to them before they are all dead, as opposed to the living formulation. But I think we’re going to have to leave this technical explanation for our next session because I would love to hear from you exactly why this is and how this is. I know I can sort of explain it, but I’m sure you can do a much better job than I can.

KELLI: Well, it only took me 16 years of figuring out why it works. (laughing) It is a complex product, and the whole probiotic industry is far more complex than people realize. But yes, we can talk again next time, I look forward to it!

SCOTT: Wonderful. So, Martin, if somebody wants to know more about Body Biotics and also about boosting up their immune system by using friendly bacteria, what should they do?

MARTIN: Oh, it could not be simpler! Go to www.life-enthusiast.com, and look for Body Biotics! If you have any questions, you can call me at (866) 543 3388. Kelli, thank you so very much for taking the time to chat with us and share all this with our listeners. We will be back next week! Thank you, Scott! This is Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast Podcast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet! Thank you all for listening!

Note: the information provided are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult with your medical professional(s) if you are dealing with a specific medical issue.