Podcast 475: Healthy Gut

On today’s episode, we’re delighted to welcome Steven Wright, who will be joining Martin Pytela to introduce our audience to an exciting new product line: Healthy Gut. Gut health plays a crucial role in digestion, nutrient absorption, immune function, mental well-being, and overall systemic health. Dive into the world of HCL Guard+, Holozyme, and Tributyrin-X as we unveil their many benefits. Tune in and discover how these products can revolutionize your gut health journey.

How to Do an HCL Challenge?
Pioneered by Dr. Jonathan Wright and various Naturopathic Doctors the HCL challenge is simple and works like this:

  1. You take one (1) capsule with your standard lunch or dinner
  2. If you don’t notice anything, increase to two (2) capsules at your next major meal
  3. If you still don’t notice anything, increase to three (3) capsules at your next major meal
  4. If you don’t notice anything yet again, increase to four (4) capsules at your next major meal
  5. You should keep adding one (1) capsule at each meal until you NOTICE something.

NOTICE something means:
Your digestive complaints normalize and you feel really good! If this is the case, stay at this number of pills per meal.

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MARTIN: Well, hello, this is Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast Podcast, and with me today, Steven Wright, a man who calls himself Health Engineer. And he created a system and a company that I admire a lot. Because I’ve had the opportunity to try their products, and boy, do they ever make a difference. Hello, Steven.

STEVEN: Hey, Martin, thanks for having me on.

MARTIN: Yeah. Steven, I would really like to have our audience understand just how big a deal is what happens in their gut.

STEVEN: I mean, it’s the biggest deal, I think, but I’m biased. But I do think if you, however you want to slice and dice it or… I like to think of ideas in the world as like a diamond. On a diamond, there’s all these facets or sides and as you rotate it, you see different things, you can project the light in different ways. And so, a lot of the divisiveness in the world today, even in the natural health world, is really people looking at the same diamond from a different lens or a different angle. And so, I think no matter which way you kind of break the body down at the end of the day, all of our liquids and all of our food has to go through the gut. And also if you were building a character inside of a video game and you were giving a hundred immune cells to put anywhere on the body that you wanted, 70 to 80% of those immune cells, so the majority of all the immune cells are located in and around the intestines and the abdomen. And so there’s a lot going on inside the gut that is really, I think people are not aware of just how complex of an environment it is and how much it is doing for them on a regular basis and how much is connected to areas of their body that they don’t think are connected, like their eyes or their hair or their brain or their fingernails or a joint pain or something like that. And just how deeply connected and intertwined something that’s far away from the gut is actually related to what’s going on in the gut.

MARTIN: Right. I think you came to understand this the hard way right?

STEVEN: Yeah, yeah, I have done a lot of therapy. I’ve done a lot of different integration work and stuff. And I think at the end of the day, the universe or God or whoever is in charge here really chose this path for me. I don’t know that I had a choice, because I was born with a birth defect called a hydrocele hernia where a boy’s testicles are kind of interwoven with his intestines. It’s not quite figured out down there. And I almost didn’t make it, because I was so upset. I was throwing up food all the time. Luckily modern medicine saved my life. And, you know, I’m here today, but I had many of these instances. Like I was, I had really bad acne in high school and I was given a Bactrum DS for almost four years straight.

I eliminated essentially my entire microbiome. I woke up on a gurney and then I went to the hospital and they tested me. They’re like: “He must have a parasite.”  All I had was bifidobacter. They couldn’t find anything else inside of my gut. And so I’ve had these things that were just leading me to where I am today. And I didn’t get the help that I was seeking from Western medicine. I think everybody was well-intentioned there. They just didn’t have the tools and they didn’t have the curiosity to keep learning. And then when I did go to alternative and natural medicine people, again..

I feel like everybody has a gift to give someone like your coach or your therapist or your doctor. We all have a skill set and we pass that skill set on. But at some point in time, the teaching ends. There’s no more of that skill set to deliver to that individual and it’s time to seek a new skill set, to up-level your life and get over whatever you’re coming. And so that’s led me on this constant journey of seeking out different types of integrative practitioners or functional medicine practitioners. And just trying to,

And the thing that I think I have a gift for is boiling it down and trying to understand what’s the same, what’s similar, and then trying to be able to educate the world and other people about what makes sense from all these different opinions, even if they seemingly don’t like each other. Maybe they are saying 80% the same and only 20% different. And so, yeah, it’s been a long journey for me. It’s been 15 full years now in the natural health world writing, teaching, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on my own health. And we’re here today.

MARTIN: Right, yeah, I didn’t say it, but I have a similar history when I got broken by mercury toxicity that was inserted into my mouth by a dentist who probably was ignorant, but whatever, That’s his schooling, his education. He was told: “This is how you do your job.” And I accepted it as, well, that’s what a dentist will do. And then my world came apart and I had to do something similar to what you did, which was first to give up hope with the Western medicine and then with the various alternatives. And I kept searching and searching and it was multiple six figure spending on trying this and that. And finally I figured it out.

A, what the problem was, and B, how to undo it. And still to this day, of course, I’m no longer a new jar. I’m a cracked jar, right? So I have fragilities. I have spots that are way less than perfect. And so, I really need to live my life within the limitations that were given to me by genetics and the damage that was done and so on.

I mean, I live a normal life and I’m feeling way better energetically now in my seventies than I was in my thirties. But I’m living a life that has certain limitations, right?

STEVEN: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, there’s that, I don’t know how to say it, but there’s that Japanese art where they use gold to put together a vase or a bowl that’s broken.

MARTIN: They break the bowl intentionally and then they put it back together highlighting with precious metal the injury that was done to the bowl.

STEVEN: Yeah. And I think that’s very for both of us and for many of us in this field, we turn our pain into purpose. We turn our tragedy into our gifts. Our kryptonite becomes our superpowers. And I think that’s what you’ve done. And that’s what I try to do because it’s what feels best, right? Like I would like to alleviate suffering from people. It took me, if I had the products I have now, if I knew what I did now, my time to feeling, like you said, really good, would have been shortened by triple probably.

MARTIN: Yeah. And a similar story where I say it took me 10 years to accept the fact that I had to fix myself. It took me 10 years to figure out how to do it, and then two years to do it, right? So I could have been shorter by 20 years of this process. Well, you did faster, good on you. But anyway, I would like to really get you to tell some specifics so that people really understand just how much they share with you. The journey has had markers and events and whatever, right? Like, I would like you to actually describe what it feels like or is like to be on the wrong side of the divide first so that we can explain what the products that you now have can do for people who are hearing this, right?

STEVEN: Yeah, for sure. So, like you said, I believe in the same thing that we have these emotional break points, usually around embarrassment or shame or anger or something like that. And I have way too many of them. But like I said, I was a very fit school kid. I had IBS at the time and I was very smelly. I was the smelly guy. In fact, I was so smelly that my family, who also shares in the IBS family history, they nicknamed me the gas man.

And it was just a laughter thing. I was kind of embarrassed about it, but like it was kind of accepted in my close family as well as my extended family. And then when I went off to college, I joined a fraternity. And suddenly I was with 50 other guys in the same household and it became very clear that I had different bathroom habits than everybody else. I had to wake up earlier to go to the bathroom and sit there for a while. I would have diarrhea and I’d have to run to the bathroom. I’d have to run out of meetings and things. Things that I’d just been doing for years, suddenly there was a reflection, hey dude, you’re not the same as everyone else.

MARTIN: Yeah, your normal was revealed to be not that normal.

STEVEN: Exactly, exactly. What was common to me was not normal. And so I didn’t deal with that in college because well, what college kid does, usually, instead I made my problem worse by doing a lot of cheap beer and a lot of cheap pizza and way too much stress.

And so by the time I graduated college, I was around 245 pounds. My face was almost like, you can see my college graduation photos, some of them are online. But my face is so inflamed and full of fat that I’m almost round. So that’s memorialized forever to remind me. But afterwards, I thought I could just do, I could just eat chicken and salad and I could just lose the weight, but the weight wasn’t coming off very well like it used to in high school. And then I was in a stressful environment and my IBS got worse and I started experiencing not only depression and anxiety, but also visceral hypersensitivity. I had had it before, but it was very sporadic.

And visceral hypersensitivity is a subset of IBS, about 30 to 50%, the data is not very clear about how many people have it. But what it feels like is if you imagine what it might be like if someone took a knife and just repeatedly stabbed you in the gut, just kept stabbing you because the pain is a cramping style, stabbing pain, a neurological style pain that is, it usually would put me into a fetal position. I’d be crying and I just want to get the pain out of my body. It would be debilitating.

And so this pain started coming every day. So every time I would eat, I would bloat up, my belly would get big, I would start getting the shooting pains, but I’d be at work trying to do my job. And then if you’ve had this type of experience, you know that there’s not really any options. There’s not really anything you can take. You have to fart. You’ve got to get the pressure because the pressure is what’s aggravating the nerves and the nerves are what’s causing the pain signals. And so if you’re locked in a high rise and there’s only one bathroom, not a lot you can do. And I do apologize to my coworkers, but I would literally eat from, it didn’t matter if it was a chicken salad.

I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was trying to lose weight. I was just eating like salad and chicken, very plain, or I could go out and have a burger and beer and very full of gluten, alcohol and sugar and all kinds of crap. It didn’t matter, I would feel the exact same amount of pain. And then I would be very smelly and almost got fired. I got talked to by my boss. He said: “You got to get this handled. And there was this other night where I had to get to the station, had diarrhea on the commuter bus and just all kinds of really embarrassing things.

And I used to think there, like who is gonna marry me? Who’s gonna wanna be with me? My boss and my coworkers don’t wanna be around me. Those were the intrusive thoughts I was having in those really dark nights. And so that was part of what led me out of that. When I didn’t get help, I was just like, I can’t look forward to a life of this, because at the time I was only 22 to 24. And I was like, this can’t be the only way to do life. There has to be another way.

MARTIN: Right. And you went looking for it, right? You had to actually change what you’re doing and start reading. Right?

STEVEN: Yeah, I did. I had a fraternity brother named Jordan, who… A lot of people have like one health friend. They confide all of their true health challenges and their fears. And he was, we were kind of that for each other. And he went gluten free for celiac disease, but he didn’t get better. In fact, he just kept losing weight, he kept having diarrhea. Everybody was blaming him saying that he was cross contaminating himself. And he’s a very intense dude. Very disciplined about what he’s doing. He ripped all of his countertops out. He threw away everything in the kitchen, bought everything new, and he was still having it. And he’s like, no, your recipe is not the right recipe. And so he found a different doctor who gave him a different type of diet called the specific carbohydrate diet. He started that, his diarrhea stopped within a few days.

And he was trying to tell me to do this. And I was like, yeah, but you’re telling me I have to cook everything from scratch. I can’t have anything from a restaurant. I can only eat these certain really specific food groups. And he’s like, yeah, but you won’t have all the pain and embarrassment. And I’m like: “But I don’t know how to cook. I don’t even know. I can make chicken and I can make salad and pizza. I don’t have chopping skills.” And so it was. It was a big choice for me to do that.

MARTIN: You have to arrive at the point of total desperation. You have to find your bottom.

STEVEN: Unfortunately. Or fortunately. Yeah, I did. And I committed to it. And he was right. The first seven days, probably 50% of my bloating started to go away. The pain was 50% less. And that unlocked empowerment for me. It unlocked, like empowerment that, whoa, I have given away all of my power, I’ve given away all my control, and I have way more influence over this whole situation than I thought I did. And so that coupled with my rage against the system just drove me to the depths of the internet and to just not stop.

MARTIN: You guys created quite the company, right? What was it called the first time?

STEVEN: The first company was called SCD Lifestyle. So we were trying to help people do that specific carbohydrate diet. We were trying to make it easier for folks. And then we were trying to start educating people on leaky gut and just different types of ways of healing. That was not popularized at the time. It was considered pretty wacky.

MARTIN: Yeah, I actually remember reading your emails and I’m thinking, these guys really know stuff.

STEVEN: Well, thank you. Yeah, it was fun. Iit was hard. It was humbling. It was a lot of things. I think it was,

MARTIN: You guys made a big difference in many people’s lives. I mean, you made it into thousands upon thousands of customers then, right?

STEVEN: Yeah, I think our reach was in the millions. At the height of it. We had 350,000 people on the email list and we had quite the following and it was successful. I do think we helped a lot of people’s lives. I think it’s challenging through the internet. It’s challenging to know who was impacted and who wasn’t, but I do know that we made a difference in the world.

MARTIN: Yeah, indeed. Okay, so now the solution, right? So now you have evolved and you have come up with, call it version two or three or four, I don’t know where you are now, but you have a version of your system that’s even easier to use than it was before, right?

STEVEN: Oh yeah, significantly easier, significantly faster results. Yeah, it’s been an evolution in my own learnings, in my own understanding of my body. Because two things happened. One, I became actually disillusioned with all of integrative medicine and functional medicine. I had access to everybody. Like you said, we were at the top of the world. I could call any New York Times bestselling author. I could see any doctor I wanted in the world. And I was running tens of thousands of dollars to test on myself. I was still having some reoccurring visceral hypersensitivity that I couldn’t explain. And that had me walk away because I was just disillusioned with nutrition and supplements and testing. And when I walked away, I walked into what I had not dealt with, which was my nervous system, which was my emotions, which was my spirituality. And that was what was impacting me in ways I couldn’t comprehend from my engineering, science-based nutrition perspective.

And so on that little couple year walkabout, that deep dive, I really did a lot of healing. And I really did a lot of integration because it always was amazing and also frustrating to me that you could have someone who said: “This chiropractor cracked my toe or did something to my foot or this acupuncturist did something to my foot and my gut changed or they adjusted my neck and my gut changed.” But you could also go to somebody else and they gave you a gut pill of prebiotic or a probiotic or a fiber or something, and they also changed the gut. And then that changed the foot. And so for a long time, I’m really like, how do you affect these systems from all these angles? And so that time period really helped me, I think, integrate those concepts and those ideas and helped me appreciate that there’s so much more that’s unseen and unknown and important about the body and about gut health and just aging and reversing issues.

And then my now wife was diagnosed with cancer and that really, it caused intense stress. And basically under that load, even though I had done my emotional  spiritual work, my trauma work, I have done a decade of physical healing and I had all these tools when your partner’s threatened in that way and it feels like you two versus the world.

All of my stuff flared up. And so when that happened, I reached into my medicine cabinet because I love pills and I love potions and I love cool stuff. And I pulled out the stuff that I used to use and I tried to do everything I used to do and it wasn’t working. And that was really annoying to me. And so it felt like a moment where I was like, I remember these problems. I remember that there were people who didn’t get help from these products. I remember there were people that didn’t get help from these protocols.

A lot of people did get help, but not everybody got the help they wanted. This could be better. And I have to fix this for me right now because I’ve got to stay better and on point to get through this time period with my family. And so that’s when we pivoted the company and launched version four probably of the company where I decided I’m gonna solve these problems once and for all for myself, but also for other people because there has to be a way that we make better products that get faster results.

MARTIN: Whoa, that’s quite the load, right? It’s interesting how hard the lessons can be that we are having to learn, right? Like you were, you said it, version one, version two, version three, and now finally you’re really hitting the wall. How hard is it when you are told that your partner is now possibly terminal, right? Like this is not funny.

STEVEN: Yeah, no, it’s I don’t wish it on anybody, but I know it’s happening to millions of people.

MARTIN: Yeah, and it happens to a lot of us. Yeah. And of course, the crazy thing is that cancer is a metabolic disease. And of course, the mainstream will deny it and will dance around it and will do everything possible to tell you that no, no, no, no, no, it’s genetic. No, it’s metabolic, anyway.

STEVEN: Yeah, I think it’s pleiotropic. There’s no one cause, but they all have important factors.

MARTIN: Oh, yeah. Okay. Of course. Yes, I agree. But more than anything, the stuff that you can change that will take you out of there is you can’t do a thing about your genetics. You should do a lot about your metabolism.

STEVEN: A hundred percent. Yeah, you can do a lot about your metabolism. You can do a lot about your toxin load. You can do a lot about your gut health. You can do a lot about a lot of things. And so I agree with you there. It’s definitely not just a BRACA gene or some sort of family history or something like that. That way of thinking has gotten us nowhere in cancer.

MARTIN: Yeah.

STEVEN: Basically.

MARTIN: I agree. Okay, so she’s still with us.

STEVEN: Yeah, so Shay has no evidence of disease going on for almost four years. This will be four years this year, I think, or three years. And yeah, I think for us, I think it’s what will allow her to live another 50 years. The process of it and resetting her health. And she had a lot of beliefs. She was not an unhealthy person. She was a low carber, she was an exerciser. She was always doing a lot of things to take care of herself. She lived a low toxin life for much of her life. And so she was not your sugar eating, obese cancer style person. She was somebody who was like, I don’t understand. I’ve done what you’ve told me to do. I’ve taken care of myself. How could this be happening? And I think for her and for both of us, actually, it was a great time to revisit all beliefs. Like what is health? How do we generate it in the short term and in the long term? But what makes sense? And I think it’s been a very informative journey. I wouldn’t wish to do it again, but I do think that she’s healthier than ever and I do think we’ll be stronger than ever. Each year that goes by, I think we’re getting stronger and better.

MARTIN: All right. So let’s talk about the kind of person that is going to be the most likely to get helped by the products that we’re about to start talking about. Who is the best candidate?

STEVEN: Anybody with GI issues that they’re struggling with, so constipation, diarrhea, bloating, gas, cramps, food sensitivities. If you have overt GI problems and you’ve already tried a few things, like you’ve already been listening to the show for a while, you’ve changed your diet, maybe you figured out your metabolic type, something like that. Those people I think are going to be in tune with their body and they should notice a difference within 30 days.

MARTIN: I noticed, for example, my body breaks down in such a way that I get rashes on my face. And it will be and there’s a map, you can look it up. If it’s on your forehead, it’s the small intestine. If it’s under your eyes, it’s your kidneys. If it’s down these folds, it’s your large intestine. If it’s on the tip of your nose, it’s probably your heart. And so on, right? There’s a map.

So if you have rashes or whatever’s on your face, you have a gut problem. And if you have loss of sharpness of your mind, right? Leaky gut gives you a leaky brain. You can probably address that pretty quickly, right? Like anyone who has inflammation coming, arising from the gut will also be losing their ability to think and recall and whatever. How do you put it?

STEVEN: Yeah, well, the way that I say it for people who aren’t clinicians and things like that is you got to think that you’re, again, 70 to 80% of all of your immune systems are around your gut wall and they are sending out these messengers. And a lot of people now know what the messengers are. They’re called cytokines. And these cytokines, think of them just like text messages. Like the immune system is sending text messages.

And some of those are like angry ones, and some of them are happy ones, and some of them are just nothing. But if you’re sending angry text messages, cytokines, up towards the brain, you’re gonna have a reaction in the brain. You’re gonna have a reaction wherever these messages get sent. And most of the time there is some disruption, inflammation, anger, but it’s really, the immune system’s really a lot of just signaling. It’s a lot of signaling. And so the immune system is a signaling mechanism to the brain to other tissues.

And so the beautiful thing about our physiology and our bodies is that a lot of the same things that happen in the brain happen in the gut and vice versa. And so anything you could do to improve the brain is going to improve the gut. Anything you can do to improve the gut is going to improve the brain. And so that’s the good news, right? The good news is that these things are actually all very interrelated. And so if you can do your meditation or you can do your exercise or you can do your prayer or you can do exercises for your brain or whatever that will change your nervous system in your gut and vice versa. If you take your supplements or you eat your vegetables for your gut, it will send up different signals to your brain and that will be helpful for the brain. And so I think that’s the beautiful thing about the body is that it actually isn’t that hard to start to fix.

It seems like it when you’re in all the pain and you’re having all the problems. But there is a blueprint here that I’m sure you talk about a lot that I talk about that there’s these blueprints, these stones you were talking about to get back to whatever health you’re looking for, like whatever your issues are.

MARTIN: So we have all of your products in stock. Is there some sort of a protocol or what would you suggest that people do? Do they need to take one at a time or most of it, all of it? How do we determine what’s the best thing to do?

STEVEN: Yeah, well, I’d say like, look, if you’re, not everybody’s the same constitution. And by that, I mean that like I have a, a bit of a gambler in me, I’m a little, I’m aggressive. And so like, if you tell me to go run up the mountain, I’ll run up the mountain. I won’t think too much about it. If you tell me I should take five products, I’ll take five products. But a lot of, not everybody’s like that. My wife is a little bit more cautious and doesn’t like to change too many variables at once.

So whether you want to buy the whole protocol I’m about to say, or you want to go more cautiously through it, that’s fine. It doesn’t matter to me. But what I would encourage people to think about and to do is whether you have GI issues yourself and you’re trying to overcome them or you’re like: “Hey, I don’t want to age like my parents did. I don’t want to age like the rest of the population. I don’t want to be normal. I want to be better than normal.” Then what I would say is that your organs inside your gut are aging just like your testicles, like your ovaries, just everything else is aging in us.

And so, I think going through all the fun stuff, the exciting stuff, the peptides, all the cool stuff, actually, the fastest way to make progress is to focus on the fundamentals and focus on the organs inside the gut. And if you get those optimized, anything else you try for any condition will actually work much better because you optimize the basics first. And so what I would encourage people to do is start with the stomach. Just start with, do you have enough stomach acid? Because most of us do not, especially as we age or we’re under stress. And so I would start with doing an HCL challenge with our HCL Guard product and just give it a shot. You just, you’ll know in literally seven days or less, you’ll know if you have low stomach acid and you’ll know if the impact is worth you taking that product for another six or 12 months. And for a lot of folks, not everyone, but for 70% or so, they will be like “whoa, I had no idea. This is really cool. I have more energy. My hair, skin, and nails look better. My bowel movements are better. I have less bloating.” And it’s central, right? Everything passes through the stomach. And if you don’t have enough acid, it’s not going to work properly. And so it’s just very basic, but it works. And it has worked for a really long time. So I would start there.

MARTIN: Yeah, you’re totally telling my… singing from my songbook. Of course, it starts right in the mouth, right? Make sure you chew your food properly. Don’t just swallow it whole. And then yes, give your stomach what it needs, which is the HCl. The stomach needs to be strong enough. The stupidest thing you can do is to take a PPI, which is the proton pump inhibitor, something that blocks your acid. You don’t need less of it, you need more of it. And that’s where this HCL product comes in.

STEVEN: Yeah, 100%. Yeah, proton pump inhibitors have done a significant amount of damage to the world.

MARTIN: Endless. I’ve lost people to cancer because of them being on PPI.

STEVEN: Yeah, I mean, stomach acid. So what’s really cool is, I’ve been talking about stomach acid since I read Dr. Jonathan Wright’s book back in, I think I read it in 2009 or 2010. And so I’ve been trying to beat the drum for stomach acid for a really long time. So long that I got bored with it, and then people were like, hey, stomach acid. And I’m like, oh, you want to talk about that now? Okay, cool. What’s cool is that finally there’s research papers coming out about stomach acid. Because for much of the 2000s, there wasn’t any real human data on it. But a paper was published out of Japan two years ago in Tokyo where they looked at people who are coming in for endoscopies and they actually took a sample of their stomach acid and they tested it and then they tested how much LPS. LPS are lipopolysaccharides. They’re a very intense toxin that comes from gram-negative bacteria.

And we have gram-negative bacteria all over the place, especially in our mouth. And it doesn’t matter how healthy your microbiome is, you will always have gram-negative bacteria there. But don’t worry, your body has detoxification built into it. We’re built to handle this. It’s not like an inborn problem. You’re supposed to detoxify it with your stomach acid. And what this study showed was that if your resting stomach acid was above a four, which it should be down below three, it should be around a two, the worst patients had up to 2000 times, not percent, that would be like 20 times, but 2000 times more LPS where it’s dumping into the small intestine that was not detoxified properly.

Now think about somebody with rheumatoid arthritis or some sort of autoimmune condition. They don’t think they have a gut problem at all. They don’t identify as having a gut problem. They identify as having inflamed skin, inflamed brain, inflamed joints, tennis elbow that doesn’t go away. Their single source of inflammation could not be, it might not be gluten, it might not be dairy. It might not be the mold in their house. It literally could be the fact that they’re swallowing their microbes every day and they’re not detoxifying them properly, driving up the inflammation in their small intestine. And then as we talked about, the small intestine sending or the immune cells in the small intestine are sending text messages out, angry text messages like, go be mad elbow, go be mad.

MARTIN: Yeah. You have the gram-negative story and you are going to suffer. Yeah. You put it beautifully. It’s the defense system that’s supposed to neutralize it. And if it’s turned off, well, there’s nothing stopping it, right? That’s level one.

STEVEN: Yeah, so that’s level two.

MARTIN: I bet you you’re gonna say, well, have some digestive enzymes, right?

STEVEN: I am, I am.

MARTIN: Go for it, go for it.

STEVEN: The next step in the digestive pathways in the process is the small intestine. And people, again, just assume that it’s their diet. They assume that, well, I’m eating organic salmon and organic broccoli, and I’m doing the metabolic typing correctly and everything. But what they’re failing to check is do you have enough enzymes to break down that very expensive and very beautiful food that you’ve created? And many times in our stressed out, sympathetic dominant, over-toxined world is the answer is no. And you could really benefit from some extra digestive enzymes because we have multiple layers of enzymes.

We have pancreatic enzymes, we have brush border enzymes, and we have specialty microbiome enzymes. And everyone’s focused on the pancreas, but the ones that are the first to go, the more fragile ones, are the microbiome enzymes and the brush border enzymes. Any amount of inflammation at the small intestine level, it could be those LPS that are coming through from your mouth. It could be other sources. It is going to stop or at least turn off part of the production of those brush border enzymes.

And so now you have a mal-digestion of carbohydrates and you’re setting up the conditions to have SIBO, CIFO, all types of infections inside your gut that will make your life miserable. And it’s not like you literally did a bunch of things wrong. It was just that you didn’t have enough enzymes. And so if nature is given food, nature will grow. I mean, that’s just a principle. You’d never convince me that’s not a law of nature. Like if there’s food, bugs will grow. And so if we don’t grab our food and we don’t take our food and actually absorb it, the bugs will eat it. And so I think that’s where a lot of digestive problems come from these days is a lack of HCl, a lack of enzymes. And then of course it just gets worse from there.

MARTIN: You gave it a beautiful name, Holozyme. I think that’s really inspired.

STEVEN: Oh, thank you.

MARTIN: I don’t know, was it your pick?

STEVEN: Yeah, so there’s a Greek prefix holos, which is moving towards whole or wholeness. And so our enzyme is different from other enzymes out there in that we are totally full of a bunch of minerals and specific minerals that help the enzymes work under bad conditions or less than ideal conditions. And it basically makes sure that they get the job done under all conditions. And so my thought was that we’re basically creating a more whole enzyme product and we’re moving the body towards wholeness. I look at enzymes as a top aging supplement. I don’t plan to ever not take them because I just feel like it doesn’t matter if I eat gluten or beef or broccoli, if I don’t have the enzyme for that food, it won’t even matter.

MARTIN: Yeah, there’s a really important study done, which was showing the association between enzyme levels and aging or acting old. And it goes both ways, if your enzyme levels down, your body is old. If your enzyme levels up, your body is young, regardless of your chronological age.

STEVEN: Yeah, I mean, it is. Enzymes are all over the body. There’s lots of different enzymes that do a lot of different things. But yeah, enzymes are critical to everything that’s happening inside the body.

MARTIN: I’ve used your enzyme and it’s a wonderful thing.

STEVEN: Well, thank you. Again, remember I was in a lot of pain again a few years ago and I was like, I was using three different supplements from three different enzyme products at the same meal. It was costing me like 200 bucks a month. And I was like: “This is insane. There has to be a better science way to deal with this.”

And so that’s where Holozyme was born, working with some scientists out of Utah and a lot of testing on myself and our team and everything. It’s actually on version six now. So that’s the other thing about our company is my background from schooling is electrical engineering. And so I don’t believe in this idea that you just make a product and that’s it for life. Like I think we should update those products and make them better over time and learn what works and what doesn’t work.

MARTIN: Awesome. I believe in that too. Okay, and the third one is?

STEVEN: Yeah, butyric acid and butyrate. So,

MARTIN: Yes sir, that is the most important thing we’re talking about now, the essential fats, right? People so appreciate the importance of fats. Well, anyway, I’ll let you explain it. You put your time into that. Go ahead.

STEVEN: Yeah. Well, I do think that’s where, if you hear this conversation now in five years, if you’re talking about this, you’ll be maybe mainstream by then. Like you’ll be a hero. You’ll have been here early. Because look, we’re taking more probiotics than we ever have as a population globally, and we still have not figured out gut health. We’ve still not figured out aging or any chronic disease. So, probiotics are not the solution. They’re not the end-all, be-all solution. They’re not going to deliver on the promise.

Part of the reason why is that maybe what we’re after is not the probiotics themselves, but what the probiotics do for us. And what a huge part of what the probiotics do for us is they turn the extra parts of our food into metabolites. And of those metabolites, those are signaling molecules for our bodies, for health, for bone growth, for anti-inflammation, for all types of things. And the most important molecule that we’ve identified so far is called butyric acid. And so basically, like a probiotic, a good microbiome, or a good bug in your biome, will eat a prebiotic, or a polyphenol, or a fiber, and then it will poop out a postbiotic, or a metabolite. And in this case, we’re talking about a short-chain fatty acid called butyric acid. And so at the end of the day, all that vegetable matter, and the fruits, and whatever else you were eating, we were trying to get that down so these little bugs could eat it and then poop out something that becomes absolutely critical.

In fact, there’s new research showing butyric acid, low amounts of butyric acid are found in neurodegeneration. They’re found in asthma. They’re found in osteoporosis. They’re found all across the body. They’re found in skin issues. And so what, what that’s saying is essentially we make a certain amount of butyric acid every single day and about 90% of it is consumed in the gut for gut health and gut health reasons, but 10% is absorbed and it goes systemically and it tells the body to essentially be in harmony, be in health and produce good healthy next order systems. And so without it, not only do we start to starve the far away body parts like our brain or our lungs or our bones, but our gut starts to fall apart. And so what I have been really fascinated by is I was blown away by the testimonials from our customers around Tributyrin-X. Like I thought it was gonna be a good product, but I didn’t know that was gonna be what it is.

And I couldn’t make sense of what they were saying because it didn’t fit my worldview. And so I started diving back into the research and lo and behold, almost everywhere you look inside the gut, there’s a connection to butyric acid. So if you’d like to have a better microbiome that’s more diverse and it’s thicker, which we all should want, butyric acid does that. It helps with that. If you want less leaky gut and less tight junctions, it does that.

If you want your immune system to be less aggressive and less reactive, it does that. If you want lower oxygen in your gut, it does that. It does all these things so much so that I’m now calling it, and I took this from a paper, so I didn’t come up with it, but I’m calling it the butyric keeper of the gut. Like if there’s one thing to focus on, it’s butyric acid. If you don’t have enough of it, you will never have optimal gut functioning and therefore never have the health you want. And so you can, I would say the optimal way to do this is eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and plants and colors and things like that. That’s the way we make it. But a lot of us don’t have the enzymes or the acid or the microbiome to be able to turn that into butyric acid. So what I’ve found is that in today’s world, what we need to do is we need to go and end around. We need to go to and insert the actual product we want for a number of months as we rebuild everything so that hopefully in five, six months from now, you can come off of the actual support product and make it on your own.

MARTIN: Yeah, this is the leg up, the crutch that you need. Wow. A crutch is a classic example. You need a crutch when you can’t put weight on your ankle. And this is sort of a crutch. You are going to lift your gut in such a way that it will allow the repairs throughout the body and you can start relying on just the fruits, veggies, and butyric, it got its name from butter, right?

STEVEN: It is partially found in butter. I don’t know how the name originally came about, but yeah, although the butyric acid in butter don’t think you can just go eat butter because it’ll get broken down, it’ll never get to your gut. So that’s not a way to do it.

MARTIN: That’s correct. And so your product is tributyrate, which means that it’s three butyric acids linked together. There’s a butyric acid out there as a supplement, but somehow this tributyrate seems to be better.

STEVEN: Yeah. So, there’s different types of butyric acid, as you mentioned. Tributerin is the three butyric acids with a fat backbone, a glycerol backbone. And what that means is that it penetrates deeper into the gut. It’s gonna need a little bit longer to get broken apart. Where as sodium butyrate, cal-mag butyrate, they’re just absorbed immediately across a gradient inside the small intestine. And so we want to try to coat the gut as deep as with butyric acid, because it’s involved in so many different processes and issues. And then we have the only enteric capsule that I’m aware of on the market for this. So we have the highest purity, we have the best raw ingredient form, and then the best capsule. Because at the end of the day, again, our goal is to not have anything destroyed in the stomach. The stomach will destroy butyric acid and we want to get it as deep into the small intestine as possible, hopefully touching the large intestine, but we’ll have to do some clinical data to validate that. I can’t claim that yet.

MARTIN: All right. I got hit by a customer saying, why is there sorbitol in there?

STEVEN: Yeah. So I worked with a scientist out of Spain. This is all he does. All he does is butyric acid and tributerins and things like that. He has spent his entire career on it. He’s a chemist. If you don’t use sorbitol for enteric coatings and enteric capsules, you end up using really toxic chemicals. So sorbitol is used in a fraction of the amount that you’d get from eating a berry.

So the amount in one capsule is like a fraction of what you get from eating a raspberry or a blueberry or something like that. And it’s used in a specific way in the capsule technology that if we didn’t use sorbitol, we’d have to use some chemical that we can’t pronounce. And that would definitely be manmade and probably toxic. And so that’s why it’s in there. And I get people’s fear of sorbitol because of FODMAPS and things like that. But just know that your body is not sorbitol intolerant; it has a load of sorbitol that it cannot tolerate. So in other words, even on a low FODMAP diet, it’s not a FODMAP free diet, it’s low FODMAP, because it’s impossible to eat a diet that has no FODMAPs in it. And so you’ll be just fine with a little sorbitol in the capsule.

MARTIN: Great. All right. Do you want to talk about any of the other products that you have, or are we going to call it a day here?

STEVEN: Oh, I mean, we could do a part two.

MARTIN: I would love that.

STEVEN: OK, let’s do a part two then.

MARTIN: OK. All right, Steven, this has been a wonderful 50 minutes that I’m just so excited to be able to share with my audience. And since we didn’t get to talk about the rest of your products, I think we’re going to have to do part two.

STEVEN: I love it. Yeah, I love it. Well, thanks for having me on. And yeah, this was a lot probably for some people to digest, pun intended. And so yeah, we can do a part two and we’ll go deeper into some other cool products that are also helpful for the gut and for other parts of human health.

MARTIN: Right, indeed. That way the rest of the physiology gets involved. Just so you know, the other products, I will mention, include magnesium and Serenity. There’s something to do with managing your emotions and Holoimmune, which I can’t really wait to get into because that is a very significant product. So I’m looking forward to talking about them in our next round.

STEVEN: All right, sounds good.

MARTIN: This has been Steven Wright from Healthy Gut and Martin Pytela from Life Enthusiast. Thank you for listening. You’ll find me at life-enthusiast.com. Thank you.

Author: Life Enthusiast Staff