The gut is actually one of the most powerful yet really underappreciated control centers of your entire body.

Women are underrepresented. Much of the research is done on men.

How does the gut health shift as women move through different stages of life?

By the time you're in your 30s or your 40s, you have dealt with more stress.

Micro meaning small. Biome meaning living environment. Bio is life.

There are microbiomes everywhere, and so it's all of these organisms that are typically adapted for the area of the body they live in to perform certain functionalities.

Trillions upon trillions of bacteria inside my body, outside my body, and a large part of my health is determined by how healthy I keep.

Hi, I'm Stephanie.
I'm Seth, and this is... The Forever Young Show.

The most powerful force in this world is a woman who knows who she is, why she is here, and what she wants to accomplish.

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Our mission is to serve women as they fulfill their irreplaceable roles in families, society, business, the fabric of humanity.

So let's get this show on the road.

So, Lisa Barnes is no stranger to The Forever Young Show.

Number one, being a poster child in the anti-aging world — the Forever Young Show mantra.

She's also a former guest. She probably just kind of has a chair over in the corner. She can chime in anytime on all things health.

But we're grateful to have you back, Lisa.

Yeah, I'm excited to be back. It's actually been a little bit. I was thinking back — I think probably it's been almost a year.

So, a year to do this a little bit more frequently, but I'm glad to be back and get to chat with you both.

Thank you. Thank you so much for your time.

All right, today we're diving into one of the most important and misunderstood parts of women's health — the gut microbiome.

From energy and mood to skin and longevity, it all begins in the gut.

Our guest today and former guest, Lisa Barnes, is in the corporate world — in the world of science.

She is an active, engaging Vice President of Product Development. She's here to help us unpack the science, the myths, and the daily habits to keep our bodies and our lives in balance.

And that all starts with the gut — the microbiome.

So, Lisa, thank you for being a resident guru on all things microbiome this week.

Oh, yeah. No, I'm always glad to jump on and get to share a little bit more of another area of the body — especially one like this — that is so impactful for all areas of health, especially for women.

Absolutely.

And there is a ton of information. It's been going on a few years. Honestly, we've been talking about the gut — and we're going to again. We'll unpack that today.

We'll actually be there while you unpack.

But I think it's also misunderstood, right? It's misunderstood.

It's just one of those things that we hear about in the marketplace, but people don't necessarily know what that means.

"Oh, gut microbiome. Yeah, I'm eating my broccoli."

Yeah, kind of a thing.

It's one of those things that's often oversimplified as well. And I think, as with anything in our bodies, our bodies are incredibly complex, and there's so many things working just in tandem in order for your health to be running at full speed.

And so, I think we tend to oversimplify the gut and the gut microbiome when really it is this complex and dynamic organism.

And so, that's what makes it such a rich field for new research and just such a kind of a route to be able to address what's going on in your health.

Awesome.

Well, we've prepared — we know where we want to go with this episode. There's a bunch of things that we want to answer for our listeners.

Again, debunking some myths, giving a foundation so that — without getting super sciencey, geeky, nerdy — help us out here.

We know that you could go there, but giving people a basis to build some healthy decisions for their gut microbiome.

Well, just to clarify, I would be okay with that geeky, nerdy part. The science is my favorite.

Oh, yeah. No, I think there's a time and a place for all the things.

But today we're just going to go — what is the information you want to tell your best friend?

I think about it — after we record this episode today, later on today, I'm going to go for a run with my best friend.

If I was telling her about the gut microbiome, what are those words that she, as a stay-at-home mom, would resonate with?

That's the vibe we're going for today. We can go deeper another day.

Awesome.

And hey, if either of you two want to geek out, you do have a hall pass. I'll just say you've got a hall pass.

Perfect.

All right, so for women in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, why is the gut microbiome such a critical part of overall health, energy, mood, and even weight management?

Yeah, I think one of the things people don't realize is the gut is actually one of the most powerful yet really underappreciated control centers of your entire body.

And when you think about gut, you think mostly about digestion — and that's natural, because that's one of the big functions of it, because it's where nutrients are absorbed and all of that.

But there's so much more to it. Hormones are regulated there.

Seventy percent of your immune system lives there — like the gut microbiome, all of this community of bacteria that lives within your intestine.

And everything within has a hand in everything from how efficiently you burn calories, to how stable your mood feels, and even how your skin looks.

And kind of going to those specific decades you were naming — for women in their 30s and 40s and 50s, this really becomes crucial because hormones and gut bacteria are constantly talking to each other.

So, when you have estrogen or progesterone levels shifting — like during perimenopause or menopause — the gut is going to respond.

So if you have that balanced microbiome, it can help those changes and help keep things steady — like your metabolism, your mood, your weight.

It just gives you another tool to deal with all the shifting, because there's shifting that's going to happen. That's natural, that's normal, as part of just growing older as a woman.

But there are levers that we can pull to help make that change more gradual and easier to deal with — instead of feeling like you're jerking around on one of those old-school wooden roller coasters where you're just like, "Oh my goodness, I'm going to pull my back."

We want to make it a smooth ride as you're going into your older decades — or, "Oh my goodness, we're going to die!"

That's what I think about — one of those old, rickety wooden coasters.

I mean, it's the ultimate thrill because you actually don't know if you're going to die.

Exactly. You're like, "The time where it's not going to last!"

And that's how you can feel so many times because I think that we talk so little about women's health.

It's still one of those areas, even just beyond the gut, where we don't spend enough time talking about it.

So women are going into these changes having no idea what their body is doing. So every change is incredibly scary.

And I think the only way that you can really mitigate that fear is education — and be like, "Hey, you're normal. This is happening to other women. Here are things you can do about it. You aren't just sitting here passively having to let this happen to you. You can take control of your health."

And that's why I love that we're talking about this — because it’s just such an area that people have been like, "No, no, no, we don't talk about that," or "We don't do research here," like women are just difficult.

And what we're noticing is there's just such a rich field for research, and we can make such a difference to people's lives — from the physical to the emotional health.

It's crazy that you bring that up because this is something I learned this year for sure — 2025.

And you alluded to it — when we look at much of the bank, right, of research in human health — and I don't know how this happens.

Well, I do know how this happens, but women are underrepresented.

Meaning that so many of the studies — general health studies — in other words, whether it's a heart study or a kidney study, or you know, we all have immune systems, we all have endocrine systems, we all have lymphatic systems — much of the research is done on men.

Partly because we don't have to deal with having those hormone shifts or some of these other unknowns that we have in women.

So they're like, "Oh, well, men are just easier, so I can get easier data to interpret."

Easier and faster. Exactly.

You don't have to wait for the same day of cycle one month and then go to the next month on the same day of cycle to do some more of the same research.

Exactly — because a lot of times they typically want to do something quick. They want to have as little spend on their study as possible.

But if you're having so many changes within your health within a normal month, you have to repeat months to be able to have a data point — multiple data points — that you can actually compare.

You can't compare necessarily always week to week; you have to compare more month to month.

Yeah.

All right, so how does gut health shift as women move through different stages of life? Let's touch on that.

Yeah, so when you're in your 20s — back in those days — your microbiome's pretty adaptable.

But by the time you're in your 30s or your 40s, you have dealt with more stress, less sleep, and just cumulative toxin exposure — like you've just lived more life — and it begins to shift that microbial diversity.

And then as you continue to move into perimenopause and menopause, you have those lower estrogen levels that can slow digestion and reduce beneficial strains, and that makes it easier for you to experience bloating and irregularity and weight gain.

So really, you have to be supporting your microbiome and increasing that diversity as you're going through all those different stages.

You really want your microbiome to keep a lot of those characteristics that you had when you were in your 20s — having that adaptability versus becoming a little bit more single-focused on certain strains.

So diversity is the key — and it goes down as you age.

Gotcha. Perimenopause — it's the word.

It's the word.

It is the word.

It's just so many things.

So let's talk about — I think there's a major disconnect (pun intended) between what people really understand the gut does.

How is it even possible that your gut — and I guess what you're also saying — is not just digestion?

Yes.

And I think it's also important to note that the gut isn’t just microbiome.

And I think I want to touch on that for a second because I think we, going back to oversimplification, think it's just the microbiome — and the microbiome is incredibly important — but it's only a part.

It's housed within your gut, and the gut also contains the structure. It's all the way from your mouth to the end of your digestive system.

It's all that structure. It's all of those linings. There are peptides within it that help direct functionality.

There's a lot of things happening within this gut environment that are much more beyond just a microbiome.

So if you're only looking and focusing on the microbiome, you're getting an important piece, but you're not getting that entire large picture of gut health — and that’s at least a lot of that diversity of functions we were talking about earlier.

It's bigger than a lot of us have ever thought. Yes, we were working on some things for our event coming up this week and kind of looking at some of the comparisons. And it's literally, if you stretched out your digestive system, it's like 30 feet plus long. So you can think it's like about as long as a school bus or the surface area is similar to like a tennis court. Like this is a lot of surface area that you're dealing with.

And I think we know that for some of our organs, like the skin, we're like, oh yeah, we know that's the biggest organ in our body, it's everywhere. But the gut is right up there with how much area it takes up within your body, how long it is, and how much of an impact it can have because of its connectivity with so many other systems in our body.

It's one of those organs that if something's off with it, you feel it in just feeling off or you feel it in symptoms that you can't quite explain. And a lot of time it leads back to something going on in the gut because it is so interconnected.

Interesting. So we compare the gut — 30 feet plus, you know, from end to end, from the beginning to the ending, I guess. And then within that structure, we have the microbiome. Can you give us the really simple definition? Because, you know, as I go back to the days in school, right, college, even high school, right? You think about the root word here — microbiome — micro meaning small, biome meaning living environment, right? Life, bio is life.

Can you just give us the quick, easy definition in layman's terms of what the heck is this microbiome? Because we used to talk about gut health, but we really didn't talk about microbiome.

True, it's true. And so microbiome, so simple definition: it's the trillions of microorganisms, including bacteria, viruses, fungi, all of that that lives in and on our bodies.

And I think the important thing to note as well is that microbiome — when we say it, we have to specify where. So the microbiome we've been talking about so far has been our gut microbiome. But there are microbiomes throughout the body. You have the gut, and that's an important one, and it's in your intestine specifically — your small and your large intestine — but you have a microbiome on your skin. You have it in your mouth, your lungs.

Actually, there's been some new research lately that my team — they went to a convention, a conference — and they're now seeing a microbiome in the brain. And so there's microbiomes everywhere. And so it's all of these organisms that are specifically adapted for the area of the body they live in to perform certain functionalities.

But overall, going back to that simple definition, it's the trillions of microorganisms that live in or on your body.

That's fascinating. I know, it's so cool. And they keep finding more and more areas of the body where these organisms live and see the different diversity that there is because of what you need that body part to do and what happens when you don't have that diversity — and how that leads to a lot of just your body not functioning the way it should because you're missing those integral pieces that are so important for communication.

Have they found any microbiome in or on the eye?

I don't think they've found anything specific. I mean, obviously it's around your eye because you have skin all around it. But I know they're always looking to see if there are additional organisms that they should be studying. So I'm sure that's one of the areas that they're looking into.

Actually, I did hear something about that. They had — I'm surprised I would know something that you don't know, Lisa — but that they had an electron microscope of the eye area and they saw these little two-legged green-like microorganisms. They kind of look like Mike on Monsters Inc. Yeah. And I think they were part of the gut of the eye microbiome.

Okay, maybe not. Yeah, real quick — there's some new research coming up within this last year, kind of looking at some of the ocular surface. So it's on the surface of your eye, looking at specific bacteria that are about one bacterium per 17 of the cells. So they're definitely doing some new research in there to see if they can help use it as a tool for alleviating symptoms within the eye area. So yeah, it does look like within the last year there’s even been a ton of research on that specific part of the body.

So cool. You said, what did you say — fascinating. I'm like, it's kind of freaky. It's kind of freaky that you have all these living organisms. Like, we see it in the mammal world. We see it in the world of biology and zoology, right? You see little fish hanging around bigger fish or whales. You see sucker fish or parasitic-type fish, if you will. There's a biome, there's an ecosystem. And it's just, like, it's cool but...

That is just interesting to think that there are trillions upon trillions of bacteria inside my body, outside my body. And actually, a large part of my health is determined by how healthy I keep those guys.

I agree. Well, and kind of going back to what we were talking about earlier, I think it's an area where there's more and more education coming out, but there's still a lot of unknown. And where there's unknown, there tends to be some more of that like, oh, I feel a little bit creeped out by this, or I feel some fear because I don't know exactly what this — like, what does it look like, it does influence my health, but exactly how? Like, how do I prevent it from negatively impacting my health?

There's a lot of questions that people have, and that unknown and that uncertainty leads to that fear. So it makes it so important that they're doing more and more research on these different microbiomes and how they're all connected and how that plays into the larger picture of health.

Because the more education we have, the more that we can positively influence things and make a difference versus just passively letting everything on the outside impact that and then negatively impact our health.

So funny, I have said it on this show, right? Fear, fear, fear spawns where there's ignorance. And I just proved that. So I'm not going to worry about it. Take comfort in that we're not going to be diving into parasites on this episode.

Exactly. We're not trying to — let's move on then. Let's move on before we get alien on everybody.

The sciencey part of me loves it. I love finding out more about parasites, and it's so cool to see the new research that's coming out. Christina on my team is the one who went to the conference, and she was writing me messages back and forth. She's like, they're talking about the microbiome, and they found it here, and they found it here, and they found it here, and was sending me research papers.

Because once again, we've been focusing very specifically here on the gut microbiome, because that's just where our area of focus has been. Kind of finding out these new other connections is just fascinating.

The other thought that does come to me is, wow, you know, you talk about — and I've heard this lately — the microbiome of the skin. And again, in the gut, wow. All of the toxic lifestyle — the number one, the toxic environments we live in, the toxic products that we put inside, we ingest, and that we put on the outside of our bodies — and all of this petroleum-based approach to “health and protection” is... I can really see that absolutely decimating living organisms, the biome, the environment on the outside of the skin or inside of the body.

That's how you're losing diversity. I mean, only the ones that can kind of survive that environment. And it definitely selectively favors certain organisms over others. And then you're allowing opportunistic organisms to invade.

And so you — I mean, skin is one of their easiest areas to see it. You see it in acne. I mean, you see it in other disorders of the skin where you have that imbalance of those microorganisms, and these opportunistic organisms come on in, and then you're seeing increased inflammation and just irritation. And then the skin starts reacting. And so you're having big scabs from psoriasis and all these different things. It just sets off this cascade of negative effects, just because you don't have that diversity that you should.

And it all stems from kind of killing out that diversity by what we're choosing to either ingest or put on our skin or the environment we're living in.

Okay, so I have a question since we are on the topic of skin. Yeah. I love thrifting, and somebody that I was watching do thrifting — she got an old crystal, I don't remember what it was, but essentially like a vase or something that, you know, way back when they would — like, it's not way back when, but vintage, yes, vintage, you know, in the 40s, 50s.

And she said, you know, just be careful because there’s lead in crystal around that time. And people were talking about how they put mouthwash in it when they find those crystals, and then they swish in their mouth, or she puts her bath salts and oils in it and puts it, you know, soaks in the bath.

And I just kind of helped to think — but won’t that soak into your skin? And she was saying it doesn’t. Any thoughts on that?

I mean, anytime you have any heavy metals that are in a product and you're adding things on top of it that have any sort of solubilizers or could potentially cause them to leach out of the vessel, there always is the potential for there to be contamination. And it's just something you don't even want to risk.

I mean, it's something beautiful from the past and you can display it on your shelf if you want that. But for something where you're wanting to ingest or put something that could potentially impact your health in it, going with something that's more sterile or something that you're not going to potentially introduce any of that is the better way to go, because there is always that possibility that anything could leach in, especially with age.

That's what I was thinking. So thanks for clarifying that. No extra charge for that Q&A.

Exactly. That’s some thrifting advice.

All right, so what symptoms or daily signals should women look for that might indicate their microbiome needs support?

So, I mean, some of the obvious signs really are like digestive symptoms — if things are out of balance, like bloating, gas, constipation, heartburn.

But I think many of them were non-telling. Those clues or signs are non-digestive. So if you're just feeling off in ways that you can't really pinpoint, you're having fatigue, brain fog, restless sleep, mood swings. All of that could mean that your microbiome is really struggling.

And then once again, going back to the hormones, as your hormones are shifting, all of those signals can be amplified because of those hormonal fluctuations that are directly affecting the gut.

And so some of the things that you can be looking for are like new or worsening bloating, unexplained fatigue or brain fog, increased sensitivity to foods or caffeine, cravings for things you know you shouldn't have, like sugar or refined carbs, or crashing in the afternoon.

Your skin changes — that's a huge one because you see a lot of it in your skin first. You're not dealing with stress as well, it's impacting your cycle, you're having just that sluggishness in your digestion.

So there are lots of different ways that the body tries to send out alarms that your microbiome is out of balance because of how connected your gut is. So if you're experiencing any of that, one of the first places to look instead of just dealing with the symptoms at hand — because one of the things that's really easy to do is just be like, “Oh, I experienced this thing on my skin, I'm going to put a cream on it to take care of it.”

And that will help with the inflammation or it will help short-term, but it's not actually getting to the root of why you're experiencing this on your skin. So going to the gut at that point and being like, “Oh, I probably should do something to bring this more into balance,” is a much more long-term, sustainable approach to dealing with the root of what's going on.

We can basically treat the microbiome as the roots, just like you said — helping us get to the root cause instead of treating symptomology. “Oh, I've got gas, let me go get this over-the-counter medicine,” or “Let me go to my doctor and my physician's going to prescribe me a temporary medication to get rid of this symptom — bloating or whatever.”

It's just so interesting to me that we in the West have become so dependent on solving the symptom that we really ignore the whole root cause of things. And it's just crazy to think that your eczema could be linked to the fact that you're a little light on diversity in your microbiome because you've been downing In-N-Out fries or whatever, right?

Or you have some sort of sensitivity within your gut. Like a lot of times for kids, if they're having eczema that they're dealing with, it's kind of showing that maybe they can't handle dairy or they can't handle something else.

And instead of, once again, just putting a cream on it, you're like, “Let's explore this a little more,” because you shouldn’t be at a point where you’re having to do something that's a short-term band-aid constantly.

And there's always a place for some short-term band-aids — if you're in incredible discomfort, a lot of times you need to take care of that immediately. But I think we forget so much — once the pain is gone or whatever we're dealing with is gone, the bloating, we’re like, “Okay, we're fine,” and we just keep going on until it comes up again.

Then we do a short-term solution. The band-aid is supposed to be the band-aid until we can get to what's actually going on. It's a bridge, but you need to continue the conversation. You need to be curious and figure out what's going on. You can't just be like, “Oh, I'm not feeling it right now, I'm just moving on to the next thing.”

And I think that's just an approach that, especially in the West, that we have to our health. Once it's out of sight, it's out of mind until the next thing comes up. And then you don't realize, you're like, “Oh, I've been using this cream every week for a year,” or “I've been living on these pills that are helping me with gas, but I'm only using them once a week — but it's been 52 times over the past year.”

We don't often step back to look at the big picture of how often we're having to do things. It's not like it's a one-time thing — it's because something long-term is going on in our body.

So completely agree — we don't think of getting to the solution, the root of it, instead of just dealing symptomatically.

Well, let's talk real-world balance, okay? Because in the natural world and the preventative health world, they're like, “Hey, I'm the CEO of my health. I'm going to do the research.”

You've got people who think, “Hey, we can completely control and influence healthy gut microbiome by nutrient-dense foods.” And all the fad foods — good for you, like kimchi. We eat kimchi regularly. Kombucha has made a really strong push in the last few years.

Again, good. I was going to say all good — no, it's not all good because a lot of those products are crap. But the idea of fermentation, right?

So can you help us out with real-world balance in our lifestyle? Can we get everything that we need in our diet for healthy gut microbiome? Or do we need targeted supplementation or a different kind of targeted approach? What are your thoughts on that?

And so I think sometimes when we talk about targeted supplementation or other approaches, we forget the foods. I want to talk about how important food is, because food is your foundation — you need to ensure you're putting the right things in your body.

But I think we need to realize that it's not the full story because modern life is incredibly tough on our gut. Our diets are really lacking that microbial diversity. We have stress weakening our gut lining, and we have modern medications that are altering our microbiome.

So it's going to help to eat whole, fiber-rich foods and things like kombucha or kimchi, but it's not going to be enough to combat what's going on. We can't “kombucha out” everything that's happening.

Now, it's a great step forward, but there will still be gaps. We do want to have some targeted supplementation — great products that contain the right prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics in the right amounts and combinations to really help fill those gaps.

But I think it's even more than targeted supplementation, because there are so many things within your gut as an organ that influence that microbiome. That lining we were talking about — keeping in the good and keeping out the bad — helps maintain that diversity.

Once you even put it in there, it's going to help your probiotic work better if your gut lining is whole and sturdy. If you're able to absorb the nutrients from the food you eat, you're nurturing those right microbiomes.

And so it's more about activating your gut to get back into balance, because all the processes that regulate digestion, nutrient absorption, immunity, and gut repair are controlled by peptides you make within your gut.

They need targeted support to help them perform their functions and get back into balance. As you age — in your 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s — all these peptides that run everything within your gut go out of balance.

And part of dealing with gut health holistically is being able to bring them back into balance. You're not going to be able to do that just from food. You need targeted combinations of the right ingredients and the right amounts to support those natural processes and bring them back into balance so your gut can do what it was meant to do.

And then you have a gut that's working the way it should. So when you put in the right bacteria and you do the right things with the kombucha or kimchi, it's actually coming into an organ that's ready to receive them and use them right.

We can't just supplement and hope we're going to supplement enough — either with food or supplements — to outdo the other things happening in our body.

We really, truly need to work on the health of the organ, and then there's places for those other things. Great.

So can you clarify the difference between prebiotic, probiotic, and postbiotic?

Yeah. So let's start with the probiotic. The probiotic are those actual microorganisms. You're putting in microorganisms in your body. The theory with that is you're putting in the good to be able to push out the bad.

And so importance with probiotics is getting diversity in there because you don't want to just stick one or two organisms in there. You want to have the right organisms to allow for that diversity.

Prebiotics are the food that feed those microorganisms. So the prebiotics feed the probiotics. They have certain foods that they're more attracted to that help them to be able to grow.

So it's not just a one-size-fit-all prebiotic as well. You need to tailor your prebiotics to your probiotics, make sure you're giving them the right thing.

And then postbiotics are actually what is produced from the microorganisms. So they produce what we call metabolites — the short-chain fatty acids and other things that can be very bioactive and cause other positive reactions throughout the body.

Also, if you have microorganisms that have died, that is considered a postbiotic as well because the remains of those organisms continue to have positive effects within the body.

So pro is the live organism, post is what they produce or even them after they've kind of died, and then prebiotics are what feed those probiotics.

That is going to be one of the sound bites from this episode because people are confused. Ten years ago, we talked about probiotics, right? And then people started gunslinging prebiotics. And then, I don't know, in the last couple of years, everybody's talking, you know, not everybody, but there's a lot of talk about postbiotics.

And you're like, are they talking about the same thing? Or do they... And they use the same words to talk about them. And I mean, some of talking about it like you're seeding your gut, you're feeding it, but there doesn't tend to be a very consistent story and word picture of how to do that.

And so you really have to talk about them all in conjunction with each other because they're all pieces of the puzzle. You can never do it with just one piece or you're missing out on a huge aspect of even just microbiome health.

So even if, like I was talking about microbiomes, just part of gut health, if you only focus on probiotics, that's literally just one little tiny spot, a piece of that health as well.

So you're just being very niche and you're not being able to cause large-scale benefits to the gut as an organ, because it's just missing out on all of these comprehensive pieces.

And I think that's what's wrong with a lot of products out there today — there's just not a comprehensive approach to treating the gut like an organ. It's just being like, oh, well, probiotics are hot right now, so let's throw in a mixture of probiotics that are cheap and can easily work in this form and don't taste bad.

And let's just — that’ll work. That’ll get them happy. We'll give some prebiotics that hopefully won't make them gassy or anything. Let's just throw those in there.

And then probiotics or postbiotics — they don't even really talk too much about the benefits. They're just like, if I talk about it being kombucha, it's trendy enough. They kind of try to ride off the trends versus actually talking about the science of how they work.

And so that's such a danger with any area of health, but with gut health, when they get trendy, I think it stops becoming about the science and it becomes about buzzwords that people are like, "Oh, I think I know I need that." And so then they just take it, but they don't understand why they need it or whether what they're putting in their bodies is actually a good version of it.

There's just no differentiation there. It's just like, "Oh, it hit my buzzword. I'm going to use it."

That is so true. One year ago, when we were filming an episode with you and talking about the GLP-1 hormone in the body, not to be confused with the GLP-1 agonist drugs — the diabetic drugs, which are not the actual hormone — we were talking about products on the marketplace and you said, "Oh, yeah, people want to take a hot topic like Akkermansia," which is an ingredient, right?

And Akkermansia — is that a postbiotic? Is it a...

So it's actually a probiotic. It's a probiotic you can have in there. But a lot of, if it's not in the right form, it could be a postbiotic because it's not actually alive when it's getting down to your gut. So it all depends on the delivery form. But yeah, technically it should be a probiotic.

So you mentioned that. And then, of course, over the last year, even literally, I think within the last 48 hours, I get targeted for an ad saying, "And you know what you really need? Maybe you've heard of Akkermansia," right?

And I see this hyperfocus, even in the supplement world, where we're going to take either just a trend or a marketing buzzword or a marketing product — I'll even call kombucha a product, right? Or an ingredient, like a super ingredient or a super ingredient category.

And we're just going to super hyper-focus on that because we know that's on people's minds and they're going to buy it, right? It's a pre, or it's a pro, or it's a post, or it's none of the others, but we're going to put gut health on it.

And we seem to be getting even more hyper-focused. We've almost focused so much on one tiny thing, kind of like we do in the pharmaceutical world, where we're going to focus on one target, we're looking for one response, and we're going to hammer that home — and we're completely forgetting that the body is the hero.

The body wants to heal. The body has the power to heal. The body has the code to heal. It knows how to heal. And it comes down to pathways and intersecting pathways, which means we have to really look at it.

Here's hats off to all the integrative health coaches, all the integrative internal medicine physicians, all the doctors that are saying this whole thing is connected. The old song that the arm bone is connected to the elbow — you remember that song? The hip bone's connected to the leg bone.

And so I appreciate when we have conversations like this, where we're really talking about the body as a whole, as an interconnected — now we're talking about it, it's almost like we're looking at the multiverse, right? We've got us, and then we've got the little organisms on us and the little organisms in us, and realizing that whole thing has to work together.

And so you really have to — you just got to be aware that it's not just about one tiny little supplement or one tiny little drug or over-the-counter or pharmaceutical that's going to solve the problems, because it's not.

Yeah, I think where we get into trouble is when we try to silo all the pieces of health. And I think that happens a lot in modern medicine. I think of just as you get older and you go see a specialist for one thing and you get on a medication, and then you go see a specialist for another thing and you get on another medication, and those medications a lot of times will have interactions and you get side effects from that.

Then you're on another drug to combat that, and soon you're on 20, 30 drugs, and it's just all piled up and you don't know how this Jenga tower has built. If you pull one out, what's gonna happen to your health?

So you're so afraid, you're just staying on these 20, 30 drugs, and it's all because no one's talking to each other.

And that's why I love integrative medicine — we're not going to just look at the gut. We're not going to just look at the microbiome. We're like, what is it connected to? What else are you putting in your body? What food are you taking? What other products are you putting in your body? How will they work together? Will it be positive? Will it be negative?

And that's actually one of my favorite areas of research — looking at how products work together, because I think it's so undervalued. It's all about like, what's the hot product of the day? Let's get that person on it. But it's never asking the question, well, what if they're on the product we launched six months ago or five years ago?

And I love asking those questions and seeing what are those benefits, what are those interactions, and how does it influence health.

Because it's not treating the body like you're just a gut, or treating your body like you're just a hormone or one organism, like one microorganism like Akkermansia.

It's treating your body like the complex miracle that it is, with everything connected and talking to each other and influencing each other.

I mean, we even oversimplify it by saying, oh, this hormone does this one thing. And a lot of times we do that just for education purposes, or we'll be like, the gut does this one thing. It's just for ease, but it does thousands of things.

There's thousands, hundreds of thousands of reactions happening on the cellular level, on the tissue level, on the structural level — so many things. And so if we're not thinking about how all that interacts, then we're missing out on that larger picture.

And then you end up with just — we're approaching creating these natural products in the same way that they're doing it in modern medicine with drugs, where we're just looking at it in a siloed approach, and we can do better than that.

So we need to ask those questions of how does everything interact? Otherwise we're missing a big piece of the person as a whole.

This talk kind of makes me think of Horton Hears a Who. There's this tiny little speck and there's a whole world on that speck.

Yeah. Anyways. We're all connected.

Yes, all connected. And you're missing out if you don't understand that connectivity, or at least ask the questions about it.

I mean, it's complicated. It opens up a whole world of things, which people don't always like — complication — but I think our bodies are complicated. That is what it is. And there's always more to learn and more questions to ask.

And I know Stephanie's gonna go on to this next question. Before we leave this topic, something that I really appreciate that you're doing in your role in the world of marrying science and marketing, frankly. Right?

Or marrying solutions for people based on the integrative approach of sciences. You're at a big company and you're producing products or protocols or enhancing human pathways.

And for many companies, it does not pay to go back and look at what we developed in the past. How does that integrate with what we're going to release next week or what we decide not to release?

Like that is such a circumspect way to approach marketing that I don't really — I don't see other companies doing that because it takes time. Time is money.

And it takes money and money, I mean settings, to be able to do it too. And a lot of times, companies just don't want to spend the money on it.

And it's sad and it's hard on a research side. I think there's probably a lot of wonderful researchers within the world who would love to be able to do this kind of research.

I don't want to think that I'm the special person who asks these questions. I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands of wonderful researchers who ask these questions but just don't have the opportunity and the gift that I have to have the support to be able to fund and do that research — to be able to get answers to those questions.

So I think we have wonderful people asking the questions, but it also — you have to have that support as well and the understanding of how important that is and how that actually marries with the business.

Where it's not all about the money, even though money is important. You need to be profitable as a company, but ultimately if more people are healthy, then everyone's going to benefit.

Well, I think that is, like as a consumer, this is one of those questions. This is where I want to find companies that believe, that have the philosophy that you're talking about.

Because most companies don't know how their products interact with each other. They don't know how they complement each other or antagonize each other.

And frankly, they might not want to know. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like ignorance is… this is a question to ask because you always leave yourself open to data you may not like.

Like, you still need to ask the question. In real life, I mean, we have to ask the hard questions. We don't just avoid the hard things.

And I like that we ask the hard questions, even if it means we might get answers. We're being like, oh, well, we need to do something about this as a result to make sure that these go together better.

Love it. Love it. Thank you. Thank you.

Right, so some believe that you can do a cleanse or a detox, you know, just a few days, and that's gonna heal your gut and help your microbiome. What's the truth in that?

So I mean, everyone loves the idea of something very quick having such a big influence. I mean, I think we love easy — we want to hit the easy button on a lot of things with health. But any sort of actual real healing or change doesn't happen overnight.

So a cleanse or something along those lines could give temporary relief. But I mean, this is a complex microbial ecosystem that we're trying to influence, or we're trying to fix a gut lining.

Like this isn't something that's going to happen with a few days of a protocol because true restoration and repair are really going to take time and consistency.

Because you're going to have to feed the right microbes, activate the right peptides, calm the overactive responses that are causing damage. You're going to have to allow those new bacterial colonies to establish and flourish.

And so all of that does take time. And we just need to know that the things that matter — it's worth spending the time on.

And one thing also that's important too with gut — just talking about time — is I think when you start doing things with your gut, your gut can respond in lots of different ways.

You could maybe feel a little bit more bloating starting out, or you could experience a little bit of discomfort starting a new product, even if it's doing the best thing in the world for you, because you are adjusting an entire ecosystem and it's not going to happen in an overnight setting.

And so there also needs to be some patience — I might have some adjustments happening here and that's okay, that's normal. It's all going to, over time, be able to balance, and it's going to be overall for my long-term.

So having patience to know that it'll take a little bit for things to work because there has to be big change, and that there also may be these bumps that you have to deal with along the way — and that's just normal for health.

Just got to realize all the good things in life require time.

They do. And one beautiful thing about the gut, though, and the microbiome, is that it is one of the things in the body that can be more easily influenced in a quicker timeframe — which is good and bad.

Because bad is that the bad things that you're doing for your gut can really quickly influence it. If you do have to do a course of antibiotics, that's going to drastically shift your microbiome very quickly.

But on the good side, your healthy choices can start influencing it. But once again, that true healing and restoration does take time.

So let's dive into the world of products. We've kind of been on the edge. We've set a foundation, talked about antibiotics, prebiotics, probiotics, postbiotics.

Let's talk about products. Let's talk about what's out on the marketplace. Let's talk about some innovation. And I think most importantly, let's talk about how we can make empowered choices as consumers.

What should women look out for or avoid in many of the gut health products on the market today?

So what I want to start with first is — you want to look for, and I guess it's more on the positive side, but you want to watch out for those gut products that have no science behind them.

They're just trying to use those buzzwords like we were talking about earlier. They're using all the right words, but they're not connecting to any studies or they're not telling you exactly how they're working.

They're just using kind of those buzzwords to pull you in. They have nothing on their website that explains how they work.

Going to some of the ingredients you should probably look out for would be like artificial sweeteners, because those artificial sweeteners can disrupt your gut microbiome.

So they're going to cause a lot of the symptoms that you're looking to probably reverse by even taking a gut product. You're going to have worsened bloating, gas, altered glucose metabolism — like it can negatively impact those beneficial bacteria.

Excess sugar can do the same thing, and you can actually feed harmful bacteria or yeast. I know that's a big thing for a lot of people, which once again, worsens everything that you're experiencing.

You want to look out for probiotics that are only focused on a couple of strains. We talked about diversity earlier. We want diversity. We want multiple organisms. We don't want just a few targeted strains.

Gut microbiome is not about the targeted strains. It's about the diversity. And I think we need to remember that.

We want to look out for non-quality ingredients. So whatever company you're working with, you need to inherently trust their quality procedures — that they're picking the right ingredients, ensuring that they're going through the right testing so that you're having, on the probiotic side, probiotics that are alive; that you have ingredients that don't have heavy metals in them or other irritants that are not on the label.

You want to make sure that you trust them, that they're labeling their products appropriately. So when they talk about there being strains in there, they're in there — or amounts of ingredients, they're in there.

I was just at my church this weekend. There was a sermon, and one of the examples was about supplementation — how the pastor was talking about, "I don't trust supplements at all," because he had tried a creatine gummy and it talked about having five grams of creatine in there.

And I started laughing from the audience because I was like, you can't fit five grams of creatine in a gummy. You would have to take so many. He's like, "But I only had to take one." And I was like, no.

And he's just like, "But then I read these studies that they didn't even have that amount in there," and I'm like, of course they didn't. But there are just so many companies out there that don't meet their label claims.

So there needs to be that trust that the company has quality standards — that they're putting the ingredients in the amounts that they say they are into their products.

So you want to make sure that you have stable ingredients and quality ingredients.

I would also avoid excess stimulants — like a ton of caffeine or other bitter herbs or strong laxatives that are within them — because a lot of those cause dependency or digestive upset.

And then there's a lot of products that talk about detox, and they're really broad and they try, they end up being really harsh. Instead of resetting your body, they're just destroying it.

They're irritating things. They're interfering with nutrient absorption. They're disrupting microbiome balance.

So what it comes down to is we want to avoid the ingredients that are going to disrupt the microbiome — and there's a lot of them out there — or going to damage the gut lining.

We want to make sure that we're using quality ingredients that are stable, and we want to make sure that you're partnering with a company that you can trust as far as putting the ingredients in there that they say they are, that they're following the right quality process, and they're doing the research to support the claims that they're making.

They're not just using those buzzwords.

So from your professional opinion, how much caffeine would be too much?

Well, as far as caffeine total, as far as safety, we tend to say that 400 milligrams is the max that we would recommend for a day. I tend to stay lower, but that's kind of where that safety limit comes in.

And especially if you are dealing with more issues within your microbiome, I would keep it on the lower side.

So one thing that I've seen for, oh goodness, I would say decades — although we didn't refer to it as microbiome health or gut health at the time — but today I would think would fall within that under the umbrella is greens, right?

So you've got all of the greens products. You have all of the greens products — super greens and A greens and Z greens and everything in between.

Can you put that in perspective for us? I’m sure, and I know that greens are an important part of some of that system, but where do greens fit in, and what is the limitation when people are just buying their whatever greens product?

So I think what’s important to know is if you have a greens drink, you’re limited to what’s in there. It’s not a comprehensive approach to gut health. Most of the time, it doesn’t contain probiotics, prebiotics, postbiotics, digestive enzymes, or other necessary pieces to holistically address gut health. They’re kind of focusing on one area because they know that people don’t get the nutrients they need. They’re not eating all the vegetables they should, they’re living a life of convenience, and they need to do something to feel better about their life. So that’s really where those drinks come in.

Now, you do get some benefit. You get some roughage that kind of comes from that, some fiber that will help some. You’re going to get whatever the mixture of greens is, whatever their bioactive components are within those greens—those could potentially be beneficial to your gut as well. But once again, it’s a very limited approach to gut health.

So then you’re taking that one product and you’re like, “Oh, well, if I want to address gut health, I also need to add on now a prebiotic, and I need to add on a probiotic and a postbiotic,” and it now becomes this really complicated system of multiple products. And you’re like, “But am I getting the right things? Is it the right ingredients in the right amounts? Are they—going back to our conversation earlier—are they actually going to work together, all these products that I’m taking?”

You start adding a lot of guesswork into gut health, and a lot of people get either overwhelmed by it and don’t want to do it whatsoever, or they experience a lot of negative impacts of doing that, or they just end up with a five-step routine for their gut and they’re like, “This is not maintainable.”

And so green drinks are inherently not necessarily bad, but they’re very limited in scope. Now, there are ways they could be bad. I mean, if they have the ingredients that we were talking about earlier, if they are not—like they don’t have the quality checks on the specific greens to ensure that they don’t have those heavy metals or any other toxins or pesticides or things that are coming over with them—they could cause harm in that way.

But if they do use quality sources, the right sources, even then they’re still limited in scope.

Gotcha. So buying my greens product at the big box store is not necessarily—it’s not a full-spectrum approach to gut microbiome.

And going back to what we were talking about earlier, gut health has been so underrepresented and so unknown that people are like, “Well, maybe that is it.” And so they kind of go in not knowing that that’s not enough. And when they don’t experience the benefits that they’re looking for, they’re just like, “Oh, my gut must be too messed up,” or they just give up on it altogether versus realizing that there are much better solutions for them out there that would actually comprehensively impact their gut health and really change how they feel.

Awesome. That was for the greens people. I had a friend, I don’t know, a year or two ago who said, “You’ve got to get on this greens product.” So I bought this greens product, and I tell you, like, I drank it and it made me sick. Now again, I’m not saying that maybe my gut needed help, but like it just—it literally made me sick. And so if anybody wants some, I’ve got it left over. It’s up in the cupboard. You can just come and pick it up.

Be addressable. I’m gonna put it in our garden. I’m gonna put it in our garden. Oh my goodness.

So Lisa, what’s the most exciting new science or discovery in gut health that you’re working on right now?

So I think really where the new frontier is for gut health is not just adding those microorganisms, because probiotics and everything have been around. It’s really activating communications. So we’ve been doing a lot of research—I kind of touched on it earlier—about the importance of gut peptides, and there are so many.

It’s kind of funny. This shows just how much we know about peptides in general. If you just talk to a normal person—one of the people in my company asked—they’re like, “Okay, if we’re looking at gut and you’re doing research on it, find me the one thing, the one master switch for the gut.” And I just looked and I was like, “What? You think the gut is that simple, that I’m literally just going to influence one thing and it’s going to change everything? There’s just one magic switch?”

So we decided to have some education and be like, “Hey, there are these switches or these regulatory peptides throughout your entire gut that do run all these different functions, but there are multiple ones of them.”

So part of a lot of our research lately has been understanding these peptides and understanding what influences them, what brings them out of balance, and how can we bring them back into balance with the right ingredients in the right amounts, and just seeing how they all work together to overall level health.

You can kind of think of it—if you’ve ever seen the movie Up, where they have the little girl and she has all the emotions up in her brain and they’re all pulling the different levers—I see these peptides within your gut as essentially just a little bit lower, that control center. They’re all pulling the different levers for different functionalities of your gut communication with your brain.

Okay, we got that immunity. We’ve got that digestion. We’ve got that absorbing those nutrients, regulating other hormones, repairing your gut lining. They all have these different functions, because once again, your body knows how to be healthy. It just needs the right tools and that support to be able to do so.

And so really activating and supporting those gut peptides is an incredibly exciting area of science right now. And then you see how that influences the gut microbiome and how that influences communication with other organs. But it’s kind of getting to the root cause of what causes a lot of this imbalance.

Inside Out. I love that movie. I can just imagine a version of that movie for the gut microbiome.

I know, I’ve been trying to pitch it here because I was like, it’s cute, because my oldest are 14, and so they’ve always been the age of the character in that movie. So when she was a little tiny girl, mine were little girls. And then they just did one where she was 13, and my girls were 13. And I’m sitting in the movie theater and I’m crying because I’m like, “Oh, they’re growing up.” It’s just crazy. It’s crazy.

But I think it’s a good illustration, just explaining how it’s never just one thing. I think we oversimplify again. We think it’s a one switch that we can do, the one thing we can put in our mouth to fix everything. Our bodies are not that simple. It’s a lot of things, but once you have the knowledge of how everything’s working together, you can influence all of those, but you need to realize that it’s more than just one switch. It’s a lot of different pieces of the gut that we need to influence.

So talking about this new discovery—and you mentioned peptides—talk about a buzzword right now. Everybody wants to talk about peptides.

Oh yeah, they’re the coolest thing. Everybody wants to talk about—here’s what I should— I take that back. Everybody wants to talk about the peptide that they’re selling, right? This peptide product.

And to clarify, you’re talking about the peptides that the body makes.

Yes, and I think that’s actually the first thing that people don’t even know. So starting with Education 101: your body makes peptides, you don’t just have to take them. I think a lot of the education that has been out there is “Your body doesn’t have this, your body needs these peptides, I sell these peptides.” And we’re flipping that narrative and saying, no, no, no—your body would die without these peptides. You wouldn’t be able to do anything if you didn’t have them. Your system wouldn’t work at all.

They’re just getting out of balance as you’re living in this world that you’re living in, as you’re aging. We can help influence them and bring them back into balance so they’re doing what they were created to do. And that’s what’s so much more powerful about kind of an activation approach and supporting the body versus just taking something exogenously.

But I think that’s been the only narrative—it’s been, “You gotta take it because your body doesn’t have it.” Like, Education 101: you do have it. And it’s not that it’s completely gone, because if it’s completely gone, you’d be dead once again. It’s just that it’s out of balance. And when your body—it’s a finely tuned machine—and if it’s out of balance, you feel those effects because everything is working together in such beautiful harmony that if one thing is slightly out of tune, you feel the big effects of it.

So not just relying on, “Okay, here’s the peptide, take it,” but what if we fed the body in a certain way? What if we gave it certain signals and the body can actually make its own peptides?

Exactly. And then you don’t have to worry about whether the peptide you’re putting in your body is compatible with your body, ’cause your body is not a one-size-fits-all. That’s why I love supporting your body’s own health—because your body makes what’s specific for your body. And so if we support your body doing that, you’re gonna make the best thing for your body versus something that’s a one-size-fits-all approach.

The other question I’ve had about peptides, and please clarify—as I’ve looked at it, many of these peptide products, again, the body has natural peptides that it makes in these processes—it’s natural. Like I don’t have to worry about, I have zero concern about any of the peptides my body’s making, right? I’m starting to take these exogenous, right, external products—these peptides—they’re not necessarily the exact same peptide. They’re not the exact same structure, carbon structure. They can be chemically, or I don’t want to say unnaturally, but you know, they’re not necessarily synthetically—okay. Yeah. Okay.

They can be synthetically created. So even if I want to supplement with that peptide, it’s not the same thing that my body—it’s not creating the exact same thing that my body would be creating.

Correct. It’s not a one-for-one replacement because I think what people don’t realize is that when they’re making something that’s gonna be taken in the body, you have to put it in a form that’s gonna be shelf stable and that will get through your digestive system and will go through all of these rigmaroles to be able to have the effects they’re looking for. So it has to be modified in order to have that effect and have that survival and shelf life versus something that your body’s making. It’s gonna be in the exact form you need, exact carbon structure like you’re talking about, it’s going to be doing the right thing and it’s going to last in your body the right amount that it should. There are no question marks around how it’s going to behave.

Your body’s doing it versus things that you’re adding in. There’s always that question mark of how is it going to behave? Is it going to stay in the system too short, too long? Is it going to get where it needs to go? Is it an exact match for that receptor, or is it going to be slightly off? It just opens up a whole line of questions.

Got it. Got it. Honestly, I think peptides might be the single biggest buzzword right now in supplementation. I think for the last year—it started like last August—was when I started hearing it. So it’s been a little over a year. It just suddenly jumped on the scene and I’m like, it’s always that way with trends. I suddenly start hearing things and getting texts about things and being like, “What about this? Oh my goodness, oh my goodness.” And I’m like, your body makes that. We’ve been doing things about that for a long time. We just haven’t used that word, but we can start using that word so you can connect them. But it’s not something new that they’ve discovered—it’s just a different way of talking about something that now is trendy.

Gotcha.

So Lisa, if you could leave women with one message about their gut health, what would that message be?

Ooh, I think what I would want them to know is that they can take control of their gut health just the same way as they can take control of other aspects of their health. I think so often as women, we feel very helpless with our health. We feel like we’re just kind of going with the ebbs and flows as we’re aging, as things are shifting. We’re kind of just stuck in those waves, being tossed around on the ocean, and we’re just having to react and react and react.

But you can be proactive about your health. You can be informed about your health, and you can do the right things to be able to influence and take back control of your health, including your gut health. So step one: get informed. Know—understand your gut. And step two: take things that are holistically supporting your gut health, activating what’s already going on within your gut instead of just siloed little products.

So take control, be educated, and you can really change the course of your gut health. You’re not stuck with what you have. There’s a lot that’s within your control. You just need to reach out and take the first step.

Got it.

All right, before we end, we have to leave a carrot for people and give a little talk time to what you’re working on specifically. I think it’s a really interesting story coming up here very shortly, and by the time this is released, we’ll pretty much be on the verge. But can you give us an idea about what you’re bringing to the marketplace? You can get as specific as you want, and how it’s a different approach, right? Kind of combining a lot of this natural approach with targeted nutrition.

You talked about activation, you talked about what if your body could make its own peptides. Can you kind of bring us home with this message of what you’re bringing, which I’ve conveniently been—it looks green, but it’s not just green—been nursing here this entire episode. I absolutely love it. We’ve been on it since, what, last week?

Yeah, so let’s talk about it. We have a really cool gut activator that we are getting ready to launch called P84. And where it differs from what we’ve been talking about, it’s not just a supplementation of the gut. It’s not just a probiotic, it’s not just a prebiotic. It’s actually the right ingredients in the right amounts to help your body be able to make the gut peptides that we were talking about earlier.

It’s really kind of going on the offense with your gut instead of being reactive or being proactive with your gut health. We’re helping to activate the production of key peptides that are going to help regulate, repair, and restore balance to your gut from the lining all the way to the microbiome.

So this holistic approach that we’ve been talking about the whole time—that’s what we’ve done with this product. We’re not just focused on the microbiome. We’re not just focused on the gut lining. We’re not just focused on these different pieces—just on digestion, just on immunity. We’re focused on these peptides that really control it all.

And so there’s going to be a lot of really cool research that we’re going to—well, it’ll be out by the time we talk about this—but there’ll be a lot of information around what peptides we do activate, where they’re located, what they do. They each have their own specific functionality and control that they have within the gut.

But I think the three things to remember with these peptides—they do these three Rs: regulate, repair, and restore the gut. And with that, you’re having that comprehensive approach to gut health that will help your gut be as healthy as an organ and be able to then communicate with all of those other systems throughout your body, because it is that big communicator. It’s your second brain for a reason.

It's helping to keep everything talking. And when it's healthy, that communication is healthy between everything else in your body. So much more than supplementation, true gut activation, treating the gut like we would any other organ, and really restoring balance to what gets out of balance from the world that we live in.

Can you give us just a quick synopsis? Okay, I don't want to say we don't have to go through any green. Number one, what does P84 stand for? What's the significance in the name?

So P stands for phytonutrients because there's a lot of wonderful fruits, vegetables, a rainbow of color of them in there. And what's even more important about those fruits and vegetables is the reason they have their colors is because of specific bioactive chemicals within — the natural bioactive chemicals that give them those properties, be it antioxidants or other protective mechanisms.

And by imbibing those plants, we're able to impart those benefits onto the body, and they actually have a lot of activity within your body and influence your health very positively. And then the 84 comes from 84 different ingredients that we have between the two products.

So it's a two-product system called Phytopower 1 and Phytopower 2 that together make up P84. And between the two products, we've included 84 ingredients that influence different parts of this regulation, repair, and restoration of the gut.

And so it's from your reds and your oranges to your greens. So for those greens people, we got your spinach, we got your kale, we've got your chlorella, your watercress, we've got sweet potato for those that want the orange, we've got the berries with those deep pigments and everything that influence health so mightily — like all that rainbow plus cultivated probiotics.

So different strains, not just one or two, but like 15 between the two, and then the right prebiotics to feed them, plus having those postbiotics as well. So, and digestive enzymes. So it's really a comprehensive approach to having the right things to supplement, but not stopping there — going above and beyond that to truly activate the health of the gut.

So in other words, I don't need to have five other products for my gut health.
Yeah, you do not need five other products. It's superbly simple.

And one of the things we're talking about a ton is combining this product with our Pretandem Nrf2 Synergizer, which is the ultimate product for helping your body make its own antioxidants that are so much more powerful than any antioxidant you can take.

So you combine those two products — one that gets to the health of the cell, one that gets to the health of the gut — so two humongous systems that influence everything throughout the body. And then you put them together and you just see those powerful synergies of how healthy cells make healthy tissues, healthy organs, healthy systems, and then a healthy body.

So it's just incredible. So even with P84 on its own, it's incredible. But then you add this Pretandem Nrf2 and the cellular health piece as part of the equation, and you just amplify those benefits. Excited, excited to bring it to the world. I know it's going to be incredible.

All right. Well, I was going to... I think that's it. We started with... I was going to make a gut health joke. I will not try. That's one thing I've been doing as we've been doing all of this research and really focusing on gut health — I keep unintentionally making gut puns, and my team will just start cracking up in my office, and I'm like, I did it again. I did it again.

You don't even need to try to make those puns. They just happen. It's probably with me, it's going to end in some poop emoji because that's just... that's just kind of the end of it. But in any case, you're the end of this podcast. I did it.

All right. Well, thank you so much, Lisa. We're excited. We're starting a series all about gut health, and you are the — you're the alpha there to put this on the table, to really demystify it, to show people what they need to know to basically take control, get informed, and then to be able to do something about it.

So thank you for all you're doing and the time that you spend with us.
Oh, yes. No problem whatsoever. I will never say no to getting to come on and chat about this and really making sure. I love your mission of just making sure that women are very informed about their health and they understand what they need to know to make those right decisions and feel empowered and kind of demystify it as you were talking about. It's no longer this thing that we don't talk about, but it's this thing that they can truly get their hands in and influence.

All right, with the close — Lisa, thank you for reminding us that gut isn't just about food or products, it's really about freedom, balance, the foundation of every part of your health. For our listeners, remember, your body is designed to heal — you just have to give it the right environment. Start small, stay consistent, and as always, stay forever young.

And cut. It's a wrap. Thank you so much for being here today. And thank you for sharing this episode with that one friend who needs this conversation. Thank you for all the ratings, the reviews, the comments, and especially the support. We so appreciate you.

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