Podcast 264: Soil-based Probiotics – Part 3

Soil-based Probiotics and Iron Absorption

More discussions with Kelli de Sante, president of Life Science or Body Biotics, and their flagship product Body Biotics – a major player with your body’s ability to absorb iron.

750 Million people worldwide are iron deficient. Many do not have bio-available iron. It is supposed to be bound by the microbes in the intestinal tract.

In one way or another, iron is essential to most forms of life. It is the most abundant transition-metal in living organisms and is endowed with unique properties that enable it to both initiate and participate in certain paramount chemical reactions. Though iron is very important in the metabolism of many life forms, in humans its chief usefulness is addressed to redox mechanisms, of which the most important is breathing.

Podcast 264 about Iron Absorption with Soil-based Probiotics

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

MARTIN: Thank you, I am doing great! I would love to introduce our guest today. Today, it is not just the good old boring Martin and Scott show! We have Kelli de Sante with us, Kelli is the CEO of the Life Sciences company, whose flagship product is Body Biotics. The best combination of soil-based organisms in their native terrain, that I know of. They are mixed in… Oh, my mornings are slow, Scott, I’m sorry, I’m stumbling over my words. Pardon to all the readers and listeners, see, I can’t do it! (laughing) Anyway, Kelli may be a little more awake than I am. Welcome to the show! Please, tell us what is so great about Body Biotics.

KELLI: Well, first of all, Martin, I just want to say that the one thing I love about you is that you’re so human! (laughing) Good morning, I’m not much of a morning person either, and I realize you guys are a couple of hours ahead of me or behind me, so my apologies for waking you up so early. Today, we’re going to actually talk about iron, iron deficiency, an overload of iron, and how lactoferrin plays a part in that. And miraculously, how our probiotic, which most people think is just a gut-related friendly bacteria type of product actually is a major player, when it comes to your ability to absorb iron, to sequester it, and to deliver it to the proper receptors, necessary for your bodily function. And you won’t hear this about other probiotics, because they don’t function in the same way, they are not necessarily a living whole food complex in their natural terrain, therefore their ability to do certain things is very limited. So today is going to be a very exciting talk about lactoferrin and iron deficiency!

MARTIN: I just actually read this article written by a scientist, his name is Peter Rothschild, and he wrote in this particular article, it’s just amazing, he says: ‘potentials for both recombinant human lactoferrin and human-compatible recombinant lactoferrin embrace a wide spectrum of uses, both critical and mundane medical treatments have demonstrated that many life-threatening diseases suffer from unsolvable shortcomings, which can, however, be successfully addressed and bridged by the iron sequestering power of lactoferrin, or of products such as the SBO probiotics consortia, that contain therapeutically significant concentrations.’ Isn’t that beautiful how a doctor can write a sentence that’s just practically incomprehensible?

SCOTT: I was just going to say the same thing! So what is lactoferrin?

MARTIN: It’s a protein or hormone in the body, if you take it apart, ‘Lacto’ as in milk, and ‘Ferrin’ as in Ferrum, iron. It somehow deals with the removal of iron from where it shouldn’t be and taking it where it should be.

SCOTT: So is there something that happens in the body so that we have too much iron in some place, let’s just say your heart and the liver, and not enough iron somewhere else, like maybe the kidneys or your muscles?

KELLI: Not exactly like that. What it really does is it sequesters, it helps the body to assimilate it so that it’s bioavailable. Most people don’t understand this, it took me forever to really quite get this, but the reason that this is really critical is that iron is critical to all of the redox mechanisms in our body. The very air we breathe, the very ability for us to breathe, is all directly related to our iron assimilation. Our life depends on iron assimilation, but not just our life. All life depends on iron assimilation, therefore the friendlies in our body are dependent on it, and the unfriendlies, the pathogens, the deadly toxins, they’re all also dependent on it. So if you do not have the lactoferrin mechanism within the body working fully, functioning fully, the iron becomes like a terrorist in your body, it can provide resources anywhere, to any of the bad guys, as opposed to strictly being sequestered and held in reserve, and only delivered to the proper organs, the proper bacteria, the proper places in the body that desperately need it.

SCOTT: Right. Okay, so iron is critical for specific functions in the body. And if we have too much iron, then it’s toxic. If we have not enough, then basically we’re not going to be able to breathe.

KELLI: Okay, let me back that up, it’s not exactly about having too much iron, but having too much free reigning iron, if we have free agents running out all over the place, and in fact, many people are diagnosed actually with having too much iron. Well, they don’t really have too much iron, but their iron is not sequestered, it is not being held in reserve, and it is not being protected against the very enemies that would fight against your body being healthy and strong.

SCOTT: Okay.

MARTIN: Remember red blood cells?

SCOTT: Yep.

MARTIN: That’s hemoglobin. Every molecule of hemoglobin has an atom of iron at its center. That’s why it is a big deal, especially for women and pregnant women, they’re always watching the hemoglobin levels, and making sure that they’re oxygenating correctly because as the hormonal states change, they could have problems with that.

SCOTT: Right. So it is said that about 250 million people worldwide are iron deficient.

KELLI: It is actually 750 million people, over 10% of the world’s population! 750 million people are diagnosed as being iron deficient, but according to dr. Rothschild, more than half of those are not deficient at all, they simply don’t have the ability to make the iron bioavailable for their receptors. So if you take 50% of everybody that’s been diagnosed, it’s a misdiagnosis basically, because they simply don’t have the lactoferrin, their bodies don’t produce enough lactoferrin in order to deal with the iron coming into their body with foods, and to sequester it and to deliver it to the proper receptors. It’s just a free iron, again, that is becoming a terrorist in their body because they can’t have access to it, but I can bet you that the pathogens have all the access in the world to it.

MARTIN: I’d like to read one more sentence from this article it says: ‘Nutritional aspects of lactoferrin address other important human needs and offer improved treatment for undernourished populations, that range from formula-fed infants, this is really critical, to human iron-induced pathologies. The ever more complex problems of food preservation can be naturally and physiologically enhanced as well, with the assistance of lactoferrin, or products that contain it in meaningful concentrations.” So he’s telling us that malnourishment happens because of incomplete iron availability. And this is really accentuated in formula-fed infants.

KELLI: Exactly, exactly, it’s a huge problem. Before I got on the Body Biotics, I was suggested when I would go to the doctor that I was very anemic, so they would always prescribe iron. Also, I had taken a lot of antibiotics when I was 14. So of course all I was doing for those years that I was taking iron, was feeding the yeast and the mold and the fungus that was in my body from all of the antibiotics that I’d taken. So it was kind of a perpetual problem that I had. And it wasn’t until I got on Body Biotics 16 years ago, that I was able to actually go off the iron supplement. I haven’t taken an iron supplement for years now. And the same thing happened to my daughter. And I’m sure that the reason is that moms pass on their microbial balance or imbalance to their children. So my daughter, as soon as she was in her teens and early twenties, she was having the same problems that I had with being anemic. And again, she got on Body Biotics, she’s had three babies, she’s never been anemic during the whole time she’s been on Body Biotics. So it clearly shows you that it wasn’t a problem of not enough iron. It was a problem of not enough iron available in the right places.

SCOTT: So how do we get lactoferrin into our diet?

KELLI: Well, the most critical thing about lactoferrin is that it must be organic, it cannot be inorganic. Unfortunately, most of your supplements, and most of your food, they have to put iron in them, even milk has iron added to it, so it is not organic. Even if you were able to break it down and assimilate, according to dr. Rothschild, you’re only getting maybe assimilation of 7%. So if you’re taking a product that says ‘contains 95% of the daily intake needed for iron,’ well, you’re probably getting 7% assimilated. And even less than that is bioavailable to you. One capsule of Body Biotics provides 15% of the necessary iron on a daily basis, so you want to get it from an organic product, like the Body Biotics, which has the blend of SBO probiotics in it, but it also has a humic and fulvic acid. The way that these probiotics work together is that they help the body to generate lactoferrin in plentiful amounts, thereby setting up the body to assimilate any iron that comes into your body, that’s of an organic nature, sequestering that iron, and holding it in reserve, only to be delivered to the proper receptors and the proper organs in the body that need it, and sheltering it away from the pathogens, yeasts, fungus, and the unfriendly bacteria that would be deadly to the body.

SCOTT: Cool! Seems like an easy way to solve this problem.

KELLI: It’s huge! Like I said before we started recording, Body Biotics is not just a probiotic, that word doesn’t do it justice. We are going to have several more conversations about the multiplicity of this product in the future. For a number of years I’ve been really frustrated in the marketplace because I think that our typical consumer goes: “Oh, that deals with friendly bacteria or unfriendly bacteria, and the gut.” That’s just the tip of the iceberg as to what this particular product, this probiotic consortia, can do because it is a living organism that is multifunctioning, just like you and I are.

MARTIN: So I guess we need to redefine the product because if somebody defined it as just a probiotic, you can say: “Oh, I can take yogurt for that.” But what we have here in Body Biotics is something very different.

KELLI: What we have here is totally the cornerstone of your well-being. It is the first defense, it is what assists your body in setting itself to become its maximum best.

MARTIN: Right! I’d like to quote a little more from Rothschild, he’s really good. ‘The human body fights infections, combining three principal methods. Number one, antibodies produced by the B-lymphocytes, which takes care of bacteria size pathogens. Number two, T-lymphocytes, also called T-cells, because thymus controls their production, they virtually devour antigens up to the large viruses, and number three, lactoferrin that condemns the pathogens to iron starvation. Iron is an important element for the metabolism of all pathogens. No germ, virus, or yeast can survive without iron.’ So essentially, when you successfully starved the pathogens of iron using this lactoferrin, you have choked them out.

KELLI: That’s exactly right. It’s just like in the soil. A really good organic soil with proper friendly bacteria can choke out anything that could harm the plant. The same thing is happening in our bodies. We have billions of microbes, some good and some bad, and we want to have the good in, and the bad out.

SCOTT: Right. So a big problem we have is iron deficiency, and you are saying that it’s not that we necessarily don’t have enough iron in our body, but it may be a non-organic type of iron, and it also may be in the wrong place. It can be because of blood loss, poor diet, or inability to absorb the iron from the food.

MARTIN: Yeah, you can’t chew on a nail, right?

KELLI: (laughing) Right! It has to come from your organic foods, and you have to be able to assimilate and sequester that iron properly.

SCOTT: So, if I’m listening to this, and thinking: “I don’t know if I’m iron deficient or not,” what would be some clues that I want to look for? Would I be tired? Would I have more colds or something?

KELLI: Your body would just be basically susceptible to any and everything that is coming at you, that’s for sure. But yeah, you would be tired and sluggish, you would quite frankly have a difficult time concentrating, not very motivated, lethargic, any of those things would be an indication, needing to sleep too much, never feeling like you are quite rested, these things would indicate that you are low in iron. And the thing we also have to talk about is that it isn’t just where people are diagnosed with having not enough iron. When the iron becomes a free radical and becomes available to the pathogen, it looks like you have an overabundant iron, because the body isn’t dealing with it properly, so it sets up all kinds of issues in the body as well. The Body Biotics is very supportive not only for your low iron but also in what appears to be overabundant iron.

SCOTT: Great, that’s pretty exciting!

KELLI: It is!

MARTIN: Imagine there has been no cure for hemochromatosis other than bloodletting! These poor people are either having to grow their own leeches, or have to have some blood drained because they seem to be rusting while alive, but what they really need to do is get on these strains of probiotics with lactoferrin. They can’t just get on yogurts, they need to get this right.

KELLI: Yes, unless it is a probiotics consortia and it is a natural food source, it is not going to happen.

SCOTT: I think we’re coming to the end of our talk today! If somebody wanted to know more about the Body Biotics, what should they do?

MARTIN: Visit Life Enthusiast website, look up Body Biotics in our probiotics category. Or just give me a call at (866) 543 3388, I am happy to answer your questions! Thank you, Kelli, thank you, Scott! We will talk again very soon! This is Martin Pytela for the Life Enthusiast Podcast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet. Thank you 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.

Author: Martin Pytela