Podcast 024: Microbiome, Probiotics and Magnesium

Your intestine functions best when the microbes in it are present in specific ratios. Various species balance each other out in a delicate equilibrium. The flora in our intestines manages the extraction of nutrients from all the food coming in. This beneficial flora can be damaged, as is often the case, by antibiotics, drugs, chlorine, and other chemicals. This occurs in a way that is reminiscent of how acid rain or a drought damages a forest.

When the equilibrium is upset, the bowel becomes more permeable. We soon start seeing symptoms of dysbiosis. Common symptoms include irregular bowel movements, gas, bloating, cramps.

Most of the water we drink now is chlorinated and this contributes to the problem, as chlorine kills many of these bacteria. The good bacteria in our intestine are more fragile than the bad bacteria, so they are the first to die. Antibiotics do the same thing. They are designed to kill microbes including intestinal flora. Doctors might tell you to eat some yogurt, but that may be not sufficient to undo the damage.

Podcast 024: Microbiome, Probiotics and Magnesium

Scott Paton: Welcome back everybody. This is Life Enthusiast Co-op podcast restoring vitality to you and to the planet. I am your co-host Scott Paton along with Martin Pytela. Hey Martin, how are you doing today?

Martin Pytela: Scott, it is a great day, although it is raining out there, I am enjoying the beautiful colors that the rain brings out.

Scott Paton: You got the nice flowers when we got the rain that’s for sure.

Martin Pytela: Yeah, looking beautiful to me.

Scott Paton: Martin, one of the most enjoyable aspects of doing this podcast with you for me is the feedback that we get from people who take some of our advice, try some of the things that we suggest and have a wonderful results. I mean it’s one thing for you or I to say you know take Excela-50 and feel happy and joyful and energetic and everything else, but it’s entirely different thing when somebody just tries it for the first time and has amazing results and before we start at this podcast you were mentioning a number of people had called you a few days ago and I thought may be would be good for this podcast just to share some of those stories.

Martin Pytela: Yeah, that really sounds like a cool thing, you know, I am sure somebody else can relate to another person’s story. I would like to talk to you about this one lady, age 64, she calls me up and says Martin I am just so desperate and she was just crying on the telephone. She had gone to have an operation. She wanted to have her eyelids fixed up, you know not a problem. She just wanted to have just a little bit of vanity. She just wanted to be a little better looking. Well, the surgery went okay, they prescribed antibiotics for after the surgery, that’s where the fun started. The antibiotics caused a infection of candida to just bloom out of the portions. You know when you kill of the intestinal flora with antibiotics, there is the window for the candida to grow.

Scott Paton: Right, right.

Martin Pytela: So, she came down with that. So she has this thrush. It’s called thrush in common language, candida albicans is typically the creature that overgrows. So here is what you say you know. Okay, so I have this thrush in my throat, I can’t swallow. It is just all raw, I mean I am hurting, I am burning every time I try to swallow, of course it is in my vagina too. It is just itching horribly, I am just in such trouble. And it’s getting worse. I am getting anxiety attacks, I shake at night. I mean it’s just horrible. So we started her of on the Exsula Superfoods products. Well, what else we do, right?

Scott Paton: Right, right.

Martin Pytela: And this took may be a year. It has been a year of different things that we have just moved her slowly from changing her diet. I mean I spent half an hour of the telephone with her several times telling her, teaching her essentially how to start living a different life style, taught her about food combining, taught her about essential fatty acids, and how she can get them in to her body, that sort of stuff.

Scott Paton: Right, the basics.

Martin Pytela: Yeah, so here is … I am going to just going to read something. “Dear Martin, I just want to say thank you for your help when I came across your wonderful products. Most of all for introducing me to the Exsula products, they are amazing and since I have candida and I almost wanted to die. The Strata-Flora has made such a wonderful difference in my life. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Keep up the good work. I will always buy Exsula Superfoods products, whenever I can afford them. Grateful to you”.

Scott Paton: That’s great.

Martin Pytela: Yeah, you know.

Scott Paton: I was going to say, tell us a little bit more about this Strata-Flora?

Martin Pytela: Well, Strata-Flora is a product that has been formulated to help with the digestive system from one end to the other. Starting right in the mouth with the enzymes and the saliva and working its way to the stomach and so on and so on. There is something for each of the aspects you need to have a different supplement for the stomach and different for the small intestine and different for the large intestine. We have been of course blessed with this talented formulator Jevari Oberon, he has got such a phenomenal ability to pull things together and make them just harmonious and I don’t know, it just … it just works, fast results. He told me that people often get carried away and take too much too soon and get themselves a royal house cleaning, and indeed you know there is definitely a concern. when you first start taking it, you get an increase in the volume of what is leaving.

Scott Paton: Right, right. Well, that’s a problem I think that a lot of people have and they don’t realize is whether they take antibiotics or because of the food we eat or what everything else, the basic flora and fauna of our digestive system gets pretty whacked out and we don’t actually put any of the good stuff back in there and it is amazing that our body does as well it does I think.

Martin Pytela: Actually you are right. Frequently I am thinking this is just a miracle that is just holding together. Anyway, so I am just going to I don’t know what should I answer first. Who should use it or what is in it?

Scott Paton: Who should use it?

Martin Pytela: Okay, we have a list. Anybody who is taking or has ever taken antibiotics.

Scott Paton: So that’s five billion people.

Martin Pytela: Yeah. Children and the elderly. Children because they need to build up, their digestive and elderly because there are just already weak. Women who have experienced vaginal yeast infections, anyone who doesn’t have two or more bowel movements everyday.

Scott Paton: That’s an interesting one – this is very clear right, like I went once, I went five times. I mean it’s not, you don’t guess at that one, right.

Martin Pytela: Well normally what you want to do is the transit time should be about 12 hours or so. It should be under 24. So when you eat your lunch, you should probably be getting rid of it some time in the morning. So your breakfast you should be getting rid of sometime before you go to bed and your dinner, sometime well, after you get up.

Scott Paton: Right, right.

Martin Pytela: So that’s about the cycle. Most people think that having one bowel movement a day is just fine and there is a good group of people who think that every other day is just dandy, but it isn’t.

Scott Paton: Yeah, it just blocks up and gets hard and stuck and …

Martin Pytela: Yeah, well you know. When that stuff starts sitting in the bowel and your body is actually, well your body is recovering water from the food, that’s where it is taking the water. So it is sort of like sipping through the sewer that’s just lying there. I don’t know, it’s a horrible image.

Scott Paton: Thanks a lot Martin. You have ruined my appetite for the next day. However, we can just get the Strata-Flora and clean that right up, can’t we?

Martin Pytela: Yeah we can definitely help. You know the sort of stuff that is in it, we started with 49 different active organisms like you know the stuff that when people think of probiotics, that’s what they think of, you know like the acidophilus and thermophilus and laterosporus and that sort of stuff. But we also put soil based organisms in there, plus we also put in kombucha, which is another one of those cultured type of things, and we also put in fructo-oligo-saccharides which is that’s the food that these creatures live on. You know not only do we do probiotics, but we put in prebiotics. Prebiotics is what feeds the creatures so that they can thrive.

Scott Paton: Oh, that’s interesting.

Martin Pytela: Some of the popular soil based organisms probiotics aren’t self-colonizing. They do a decent job of getting things moving, but they don’t have enough material to actually make themselves established. So you become dependent on them, that’s probably intentional by the manufacturer that they have set it up in such a way that you have to continue to buy their products or else the benefit stops. We take a little more ethical approach saying well, ours is a self-colonizing when you take ours, you will actually be able to get off of it.

Scott Paton: Of course if you are feeling great, and your food is being absorbed and the energy level goes up, then why not keep doing what works, right?

Martin Pytela: Yeah.

Scott Paton: Voluntarily of course.

Martin Pytela: Voluntarily. Well, you know like this strata flora, you would probably take one bottle and consume it in one month as a therapeutic dose and then if you want to just take it light, you would take about three months to take one bottle, it is just a gentle supplementation.

Scott Paton: I mean, everybody knows that how important supplementation is and how you are not getting the minerals, you are not getting the vitamins that you need to get in your body.

Martin Pytela: Yeah, this will definitely help your bowel system or digestive system to extract more nutrients out of what you are taking or eating.

Scott Paton: Neat.

Martin Pytela: Yeah, so anyway, so that is the Fructo-oligo-saccharides. We also put some xylitol in there and Apple Cider Vinegar. Apple Cider Vinegar is famous famous famous for helping with digestion. It actually helps people slim down.

Scott Paton: Oh, interesting!

Martin Pytela: And then we put in a complex of ground seeds, golden flax, raspberry. We put in high pectin apple fiber to bulk it up and then we put some glucomannan, that calms things down and slippery elm that calms your bowel even more and then some protein powder and cracked cell chlorella and brown rice membrane. So these are famous anti-oxidant supplements and chlorella is of course famous for helping with metal detoxification and then we had a bunch of essential fatty acid blends, like lecithin and organic cold pressed oil of olive and apricot, coconut, pink grape fruit, tangerine, rosemary, thyme and white rose.

Scott Paton: This doesn’t sound like the typical probiotic supplement I could get at the grocery store that has acidophilus and a couple other things.

Martin Pytela: No, this is a digestive system restorative.

Scott Paton: Very cool.

Martin Pytela: So I am in about half way through it, okay.

Scott Paton: No, I thought wow, this is a lot, just from what you have just done.

Martin Pytela: Here we go with some enzymes okay.

Scott Paton: All right, of course because we have been talking about enzymes, right.

Martin Pytela: So we have some bromelain, now we put in lemon juice powder, silymarin that helps with your liver, cats claw, Pau d’Arco bark, suma, red beat juice powder, ashwagandha, boswellia, ginger root, whole grape seed, and some more cranberry, blueberry and cayenne. So little bit of stimulation to all organs. So then we need to put some anti-oxidants in it. So we have high vitamin C and bioflavonoid blend of schisandra, acerola and grape fruit. And then we put some nutrients in there. We use a coral calcium, well it’s not a coral. It’s a marine mineral. So it has calcium, magnesium and trace elements. And we add to it some leaf juice powder of alfalfa, parsley, watercress, dulse and kelp. And finally on top of it all we add a bit of co-enzyme Q10 which is the ingredients that helps with anti-oxidant activity throughout the body. It is essentially the rejuvenation aspect of everything else we do.

Scott Paton: That’s amazing!

Martin Pytela: So there is your Exsula version of intestinal health.

Scott Paton: I am just sort of beside myself thinking of all the things you just talked about Martin. That’s a lot in one little bottle.

Martin Pytela: Well, yeah it is a proper complex, look after all aspects of digestion.

Scott Paton: And it comes in a powder form?

Martin Pytela: Yes, oh yeah.

Scott Paton: So you just mix it with …

Martin Pytela: All of our Exsula Superfoods things come in powder. This one should be taken after the last meal of the day, a tea spoon or two mixed in to a glass of water. It actually tastes really delightful.

Scott Paton: Oh interesting.

Martin Pytela: Yeah.

Scott Paton: Well, I am not at all surprised because the Excela-50 I think tastes great, and I had a friend over and I said here, try this and he said oh well, says it tastes green, but it is the best tasting green I have ever tasted. So … it comes down very easy compared to some of the other stuff I have tried in the past.

Martin Pytela: Yeah, indeed.

Scott Paton: So tell us couple of the other stories that you have … other people or customers you have been talking to lately?

Martin Pytela: Okay, let’s think here. Well, okay I am going to just take it to a very different topic, just yesterday I was talking to a fellow. He had called in and he was relating a story. He spent two months, two horrible months in absolutely frightful tail spin with the following. An active fellow, young man who lives a typical life, he would drink and alcohol and coffee and party and go to the gym and exercise hard and just live the good hard life, nothing too bad. He didn’t eat especially badly just typical. Anyway, what has started happening to him was crams. Just horrible horrible crams in his biceps, triceps, quads, calves, everywhere, and they would just start in the evening and just I don’t know, wreck his life. And so he would of course you know after the first night he starts panicking, after the second night he goes to I don’t know down right crisis. He says “my OCD kicked in”. Anyway, so he went to doctors. He went to a neurologist, and he went to a nutritionist and all of that, and finally a naturopathic physician, then he went to see suggested, may be you should take some magnesium. So he was two days into taking some magnesium supplements orally and he was already starting to feel better. But he was telling me, you know I was at a neurologist, explained to him all the stuff and he is just looking at me with empty stare, sorry sir, I just don’t know what I can do for you. And yet the solution is so darn simple. It’s the calcium – magnesium imbalance. We correct it very simply with either the bath crystal or the magic oil just sprayed on, so anyway, he is getting some stuff from us now, he was saying can you overnight it, can you overnight it?

Scott Paton: Oh I guess, when you are in that kind of pain …

Martin Pytela: Oh, that poor guy, yeah. Anyway, I was just amazed how long it was, and how many professionals he has seen before somebody finally suggested it may be the magnesium, calcium-magnesium balances involved. I was describing to him the what a person with calcium-magnesium imbalance would behave like and he is saying, oh, that’s me. That’s exactly me. So I said well, I guess that’s what you have then. Then you know it’s the typical, unable to relax, twitchy, fidgety, nervous, anxious, quick to anger, quick to flare up.

Scott Paton: So if anybody listening has any of those symptoms or behaviors you now know how you can get rid of them.

Martin Pytela: Yeah, you have that calcium-magnesium imbalance, and it’s too much calcium and not enough magnesium which is so typical because of course the foods we eat are just simply not rich enough in magnesium, we just suffer, suffer suffer until well, this guy was an extreme case of it.

Scott Paton: But it is interesting if you just did that, how different your day and your life could be with really, I mean everyone bathes, right?

Martin Pytela: Yeah, imagine. If you are properly loaded with magnesium and somebody comes into your office and starts giving you, I don’t know what you will call it, you know just giving you the information that would normally send you into a tail spin of fear and worry, and instead you just calmly look at it and evaluate the situation and go about your day because you know you are balanced, your fear doesn’t kick in to spin you out of reasonable evaluation of the situation or on your drive home instead of just screaming in anger and hurling expletives and everybody who cuts you off, you just say, you just look at and say interesting driving style these people have.

Scott Paton: That’s right, yeah just because we can have choices that reactions that we make, can’t we?

Martin Pytela: Absolutely. But it’s difficult to act calmly when your mineral balance is out of whack.

Scott Paton: And your body is in a crisis state, correct?

Martin Pytela: You are out there already in the, I want to hit you mode.

Scott Paton: Yeah, yeah. That’s right.

Martin Pytela: So there it is. well we have talked about this before. Magnesium is terribly important, 60% of the American population is deficient, actually not. I should say it this way. 60% is significantly deficient, 80% is at least partially deficient. So that is pretty rare if you weren’t. And it is so darn inexpensive, you know this magnesium oil, a bottle that costs $15 will last you at least a month probably two. And if you buy the refill that will last you 6 months. So there you have it.

Scott Paton: Cool. I think it is important that we share some of these stories from time to time with our listeners because it just reinforces again the importance of going back to the basics and making sure the body is in balance, it is hydrated, it’s got the proper enzymes and nutrients and it has got the ability to absorb them.

Martin Pytela: True, absolutely true. I started thinking that maybe I should charge for that service.

Scott Paton: There you go. The Life Enthusiast Health Program.

Martin Pytela: For now it’s free, so folks if you have questions, you can call in.

Scott Paton: There you go.

Martin Pytela: Yeah, you can call us at 1-866 543-3388. We will even pay for the call.
Scott Paton: I was going to give that number out, but you beat me to it Martin.

Martin Pytela: All right.

Scott Paton: Great, well thank you very much for again taking time out of your busy day to share some fascinating information with me and all our listeners I really appreciate you taking time out of your day for that and for those of you that want to listen to previous podcasts that we have done you can head over to lifeenthusiast.podomatic.com. All of our previous podcasts are there for you to listen to. And head over to life-enthusiast.com if you are looking for any of these products particularly the Strata-Flora or even the magnesium supplements.

Martin Pytela: You can look it in to products under probiotics or products under magnesium.

Scott Paton: There you go. Awesome. So until next time this is Scott Paton and Martin Pytela the life enthusiasts co-op podcast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet.

Author: Martin Pytela