Episode 112. Unlocking the Microbiome: Martha Carlin’s Journey into Gut Health & Parkinson’s
by Kevin Danielson February 22, 2025
In this episode of The One Thing Podcast, Dr. Adam Rinde dives deep into the fascinating world of the microbiome with Martha Carlin, a citizen scientist, entrepreneur, and microbiome expert. After her husband's Parkinson’s diagnosis, Martha took a radical approach—teaching herself chemistry, microbiology, and systems biology to uncover the connection between gut health and neurological conditions.
When most people think about circadian rhythm, they think about sleep. But your circadian rhythm is much more than a sleep-wake cycle. It is a master biological timing system that influences nearly every aspect of health, including metabolism, immune function, hormone production, digestion, detoxification, and even how your gut microbes behave.
Let’s be completely honest: When was the last time you actually looked inside the bowl before you flushed? If your immediate reaction is to cringey-laugh and say, "Ugh, never," you are throwing away the single most valuable health report your body produces daily.
A chronic diagnosis is almost always delivered as a final sentence, completely devoid of hope. In the conventional medical model, patients are given a label—whether it’s Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or chronic fatigue—and told, “There is no cure. This is progressive. Take this pill.”
The path to vibrant health is rarely a straight line. Often, it takes a deeply personal disruption to force us to look at the human body through a completely different lens. For Martha Carlin, a former corporate auditor and turnaround expert, that disruption came in 2002 when her healthy 44-year-old husband, John, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.