BiotiQuest® Gut Health & Probiotics Blog with Martha Carlin

Your Adrenal Fix with Dr. Joel Rosen (part two): How to Fix Our Soils, Foods and Metabolic Health

Martha Carlin | Dec 22, 2023 | 15 minutes read

Dr. Joel Rosen: Alright, hello, everyone. And welcome back to another edition of the truth about your house where we help exhausted and burnt-out adults understand the truth about their health so that they can get their health back quickly. And this is part two of a two-part series with Martha Carlin, which is a joy to have her here, we’re going to tell you her story in a little bit. And we’re talking about, you have to fix our soils and fix our foods before we can fix our guts.

Because if our gut health isn’t doing well, we can develop a lot of metabolic issues and autoimmunity and specifically in Martha’s personal experience, early onset of Parkinson’s and her husband, John. And as a result, Martha, Martha formed the bio collective team, which is driven to access the microbiome to fuel innovative health solutions, their team has developed easily, are not easy, but has developed ways to easily comprehensive collect samples, to be able to understand what’s going on in those and then create a database and to be able to unwind and figure out how the microbiome plays a pivotal role and what goes wrong.

And ultimately, in part two, today, we want to talk about learning how we can alter the landscape, as Martha says, to be able to develop proper health again. So Martha, without further ado, thank you so much for being here once again and sharing your time with us.

Martha Carlin: Thanks for having me again, Jill.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah. well, listen, I’m, I’m very grateful that you’re here. And I had the opportunity to just listen to our first part one interview. And I think I felt the same way after I listened to it as I did when we were interviewing you that there was so much deeper, richer, I guess, the analogous of soils and minerals in the content that we were talking about, that we just had to go on. And ultimately, we were talking about altering the landscape. And so maybe you can catch us up with all that you’ve been through to realize that, hey, calth, is all about altering the landscape and what that means to you or means to the future of, of your, of your team and what you’re doing with the bio collective?

Martha Carlin: Sure. Well, you know, I think this is an age-old argument, if you will, that goes back to I think it was Claude Bernard and Louis Pasteur, who were kind of lifelong scientific rivals in the hypothesis of you know, the pathogen makes the disease versus the terrain, and Claude Bernard was a terrain guy. And it’s interesting because there is a famous quote, I think it’s Claude was right, the pathogen is nothing or something on his, the pastor said on his deathbed.

And I’ve used that several times, in talks, because when you start to look at the microbiome, and individual organisms, what you, what you start to see and learn is that it’s not just a single organism, they work together in communities, just like humans do. And they work together for good or bad, just like humans do. And so a lot of that has to do with what genetic capabilities they have, what they use and produce that benefit, or to the benefit or the detriment of another organism.

And so that was one of the foundational things that our chief scientific officer, Dr. Rowe Cano brought to the company is he was a very early pioneer in something called microbial ecology, which is how microbes work together, but also in using the terrain, to foster the right kind of community for what you want to happen. And actually, one of the early things he did in his career was using microbial systems to clean up oil spills. So he was an early pioneer in that, but to do that, he actually would kind of come up with the growth media that would support the growth of the right kind of bugs that would then eat up the oil.

So if you think about that, in the context of the human body, you know, our, the food that we put in our body is what’s forming that landscape. Because whatever we eat, you know, we think we’re eating it for ourselves. We’re feeding different types of organisms in our body and that’s, you know, bacteria, fungi, viruses, you know, they like certain types. substrates, you know, sugars, fats. And it’s also interesting that you know, that most microbes are multifunctional.

So they have kind of the full toolset, they can use, you know, carbohydrates, fats, missing the other protein. But there are, you know, there’s a handful of organisms that are very specialized that are lipo lytic, or, you know, like proteins. So, you know, you can better select for the specialists, when you have diets like saying, a ketogenic diet, which is more fat and protein that is going to select for more of those specialists versus the organisms that have all the tools but particularly like carbohydrates.

Dr. Joel Rosen: So yeah, that’s a great primer, for sure. And I appreciate the bringing us back to the history between those two rivals, and on the deathbed realizing, you know, it is the terrain that makes the difference. And I think that when we look back from, I guess a perspective, in a lot of ways on health care, if we’re constructive, or at least objective about it, we will look back and say, oops, right, because you think about, hey, let’s just go in there from a traditional approach, and wipe out the bacterias with antibiotics, and then create all this resistance and strains.

And then you have the pharmaceutical started the big pharma company saying, hey, let’s figure out how to increase our crop yield, and kill off these pesticides with nerve gas, or other types of pipe cleaners and stuff like that, to realize that only oh, maybe it’s having an impact on our body. And yet, here we are, and it’s amazing with Dr. Raul who you’ve hired with the microbial ecology, and understanding if we can repopulate the soils to bring on or get rid of these things, especially in the way of an oil spill.

And we can have bacteria that are harnessed to be able to kill this disaster, then there’s a lot of hope for what we’ve done in terms of adulteration. So that kind of catches us up to where does that lead us now and I know you have the Paleo biotic program and the yield and shield. But let’s just take a step back. Because as I was listening to the last conversation that we had, of course, the whole reason you got on this path, Martha was your husband, John has Parkinson’s, and you were in your previous life, a turnaround specialist for businesses.

And here, you are now being presented with this daunting task of your loved one having a life-threatening neurological disorder. So let’s maybe talk a little bit about how that Genesis started. And because I was intrigued to hear that and you said you’d be willing to share it on the podcast, so why don’t you go ahead and give us some insight on that?

Martha Carlin: Sure. Well, John, and I first met in college, actually, and he was, uh, ahead of me in school. So I think it was my sophomore year, maybe his two anyway, it was his last semester. And so we, we dated, and, you know, I was pretty gaga for him. But all of a sudden, he just vanished. Didn’t see didn’t hear from him. Didn’t see him ever again. And he graduated and was from another state. So you know, I sort of forgot about him, I guess. And I, you know, went on with my life, moved to Texas, married someone else, and had a child and got a divorce.

13 years later, in a bar in Dallas, Texas. I walked into the bar, it was like singles night, and I was there with a bunch of my guy friends. And we walked in, and this tall, handsome guy comes walking across the room, like, you know, very. He was very intent on talking to me, walks up to me, and says, Hi, I’m Martha Carlin. I mean, Martha Karl. I’m John Carlin. Remember me from you know, the University of Kentucky and he remembered my name you know, and I was glad that he told me his name. I recognized his face but I would not have off the top of my head.

I remembered his name and we just immediately it was like no time had passed at all started talking to each other. sat up till about four o’clock in the morning. And the next morning, I just talked about everything and caught up. I told my girlfriend, I was like, you’re gonna think I’ve lost my mind, but I’m going to marry him. And, you know, I did also find out why he disappeared.

Dr. Joel Rosen: was my next question like what happened.

Martha Carlin: So that was that was a clue later as I started to unravel kind of the whole immune system Parkinson’s, he got shingles on his face from the stress of final exams and all of that. So, you know, he had shingles all wrapping around his face toward his eye, which he was in danger of losing his vision. So, you know, he said, he looked like the Elephant Man or something.

And so he just kind of was like, I’m not gonna let her see me like this, and just went off and, you know, our ways parted. But I always tell people, I think we were, you know, we were meant to be together to solve this problem and help for the greater good of other people who have this issue. And that’s why we were brought together. Because I mean, like, we’re both from, like, I’m from Kentucky. He’s from Ohio. I mean, I did move to Texas, he moved to West Texas, a different part. And we met in, in Dallas 13 years later. I mean, what are the odds of that?

Dr. Joel Rosen: Right? Yeah. So then how long after I mean, you’re right, that is a tale looking back at it that when you have the reactivation potential for a herpes virus, where the shingles go along that nerve root, the when the immune system is depleted, I always say when the mouse kites cat’s away, the mice will play so when the immune system and that’s a very good lesson for people listening that if you have reoccurring cold sores, or shingles, or mono, then the reality is that your immune system is always being hijacked.

Right. And we’ve talked about foods and the importance of nutritional sufficiency because any viral reactivation or any type of immune challenge is going to be secondary to meeting that nutritional deficiency. So with that being said, Martha, how, how long into the, into the reacquainting and getting back into, I guess, the relationship with John that he started to have? Or that or did he have the dreaded diagnosis.

Martha Carlin: So that was about eight years later. So we reconnected in 1994. And then he was diagnosed in November of 2002. He did have you know, earlier that year, in 2002, was when we started to see you know, the pinky tremor, he had some tremor was kind of interesting. He had a tremor in his tongue. And you know, he had the mask face where he was starting to lose facial expression, now, and his Parkinson’s has changed over the years where he’s not tremor dominant, and it’s divided into people who are tremor dominant and posture and gait dominant, he has a very little tremor.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Right. And then just if you if the listener wants to hear what you did, once you learned about that, that’s all in part one. But ultimately, one of the Cliff Notes was that when you start creating a database of what all the Parkinson’s microbial ecology or the terrain looks like, you could predict who would have Parkinson’s without even knowing and that was one of the things that you said, was the lack of water homeostasis. And then from there, you just kept doing further and further studies and understanding molecular mimicry.

And then the importance of mannitol and maybe sort of picks a weakened Springboard forward from that, because one of the things I want to talk about is you’ve developed an amazing probiotic formula that has eight different strains. And they help to as we’re talking about, alter the landscape or create that nice fertile ground. So let’s maybe start from there and Martha.

Martha Carlin: Sure. So um, well, you know, the water homeostasis issue was pretty interesting. I think I mentioned this on the other one, but our staff in the lab who process the fecal samples could identify a person with Parkinson’s just by looking at the fecal sample because parts of it Were like the consistency of concrete. And when we looked back through the literature, there was nothing about hydration and water.

And, you know, I had spent a fair amount of time looking over the years at the mitochondria and, you know, water production capabilities by the mitochondria. So I, you know, had some curiosity around that, but I stumbled across a food connection. That could be could be impacting water homeostasis in the autoimmune category, there. So there are Aqua pouring genes in the body, these Aquaporins control the movement of water over the different membranes, and spinach, I think corn, and one other food that John was eating quite a bit of actually have a number of this molecular mimicry, where the peptide sequences overlap with this aqua Boren, and they can cause autoimmunity reaction to the awkward porns and make that not work properly.

So then fast forward a bit to when I came up with the idea for the probiotic I went to the park world Parkinson’s Congress in Portland, Oregon, and some researchers were presenting data on a scientist who had shown that the sugar alcohol mannitol could stop the aggregation of the proteins in an animal model and pull them out of the brain. And of course, you know, if we think about mannitol, is sugar alcohol? Well, alcohol is a solvent. So, you know, that makes some sense. Logically, they’re also mannitol is a neutral molecule. So, you know, it could be you know, doing something with pH. And it is interesting in the fermentation of proteins in, you know, commercial production of proteins, you acidify the solution to increase protein production.

So, I think, again, back to terrain, pH has a lot to do with terrain and, and what happens in those ecosystems. You know, that’s probably one of them, you know, key things you can change is your pH. But so we came up with this concept for restoring mannitol production in the gut by converting glucose and fructose. And what was interesting, we did this, like in 2016, made the formula you know, John had some positive results. And then about two years later, some follow on research came. I think it’s the University of Edinburg had some research on a strain of bacillus subtlest where they showed in a worm model. That bacillus subtlest could stop the tremor. While our formula already had a bacillus subtlest in it. And then there was a Korean company that came out with research on a strain of lactobacillus plantarum, they did a clinical trial and Parkinson’s and showed that they were able to improve something called your PDR score.

And, you know, we had a very specific Lactobacillus Plantarum in our formula, and we compare the genomes of those to our formula, or our lactobacillus Plantarum, was selected to be able to break down glyphosate. So again, reshaping that landscape and getting a lot of glyphosate out of the body. So you know, that sort of all those little pieces around kind of the concept. But what we’ve also found along the way, is that by producing mannitol, from the glucose and fructose in the body, so restoring this endogenous production,

you know, we were changing insulin profile or, or, you know, people’s blood sugar. And so, we’re actually in the middle of a clinical trial and people with diabetes as a result of that, and I was not aware at the time but went back to say, there’s quite a bit of literature around insulin resistance and about two-thirds of people with Parkinson’s have insulin resistance, and there’s, you know, evidence and both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s have what’s called type three diabetes, which may be insulin resistance of the brain.

So you know, this All these pieces of how the product works just continued to kind of play into the mix in a lot of ways, I feel like the formula itself was a bit of a gift. And even the strains, some of the strains that are in it, that we were able to find an isolate either from fermented food or some other source just sort of came about kind of miraculously.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, yeah, well, listen, it comes back to what you were saying with the age-old argument of the terrain. And it’s not like you’re doing the reductionistic approach of, hey, let’s just isolate this, this particular strain in a lab, you’re getting it from foods, and then identifying it from the natural foods or so it has every living intelligent thing in there. But like you said, we’re being scientists in a way of isolating, hey, this one does this, this one does this, but we’re not producing it in a reductionistic way like a pharmaceutical company would or a supplement company would, we’re doing it naturally.

And the other thing I love about it is, as you’ve already sort of alluded to it, it increases the short chain fatty acid post biotic production of butyrate, which is super important for the taming of the Galt or the gut-associated lymphoid tissue or the things that impact the body’s ability to lose tolerance, because people need to understand when, when you’re not maturing, the prebiotic probiotic post biotic health of your microbiome because of adulterated foods and not getting anything that resembles something that mother nature made and stress and life and everything else in between, you’re not creating that, that what I call the fruit on the vine, where that helps your body tame down the swinging at everyone, and having an overactive immune system and settling it down.

So that’s amazing. And then the other thing we talked about was the which I thought was amazing, which is I’m just more and more fascinated by oxytocin, and the ability to produce oxytocin and how therapeutic that is. And then we also talked about the ability to iron key laid or iron support, so that doesn’t accumulate. And of course, you and I have major ties in the whole world of copper availability and mineral deficiencies, and ATP production. And the other thing that I thought, oh, go ahead and look like you’re gonna say something there.

Martha Carlin: Well, the copper, the copper connection, I made the copper connection with Morley, after, you know, after we’ve made the formula had been out for quite some time, John had been taking it. But I started looking at bacterial multicopper oxidizes, and the ability of that, you know, the right type of probiotic organisms to, you know, carry this multiarch, copper oxidizes for us, and help us with that copper metabolism in the body and the importance of that to the mitochondria. And so we went back through the genetics of our strains and found that several of the strains in our formula, have these multi copper oxidizes, so that was awesome.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah. Right. And I did, I don’t mean to say, Hey, I’m the one with the copper that you and I met each other.

Martha Carlin: I just, it was a fun find after the fact. And I mean, that’s actually the connection. You know, when I first met you, I was like, Oh, here’s somebody who gets the copper.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Right, right. Well, you know, it’s amazing, just sort of as a backstory, because I do a lot of genomic test interpretations on people that are exhausted and burnt out. And I was wondering why, like, why is everyone everyone having a problem with their iron regulation? And, and it seems that for me, specifically, and most of the clients we work with, there’s these copper genomics, which basically means in English, they’re set up from a weakness to be able to transport copper or utilize copper, for effective cellular respiration. And then some stroke of genius. You know, frequency just sort of led me to cure your fatigue with Morley Robbins, and it was just like, I guess a wheel for a caveman.

You know, it was like fire for us. Oh, my gosh, all these things. And then when we’re at the biohacking Congress, conference in Las Vegas, you introduce yourself and the forever it’s been changed from that. So so as far as the other thing I love about what you talked about last time, Martha was one of the correlations that you noticed were strep infections where were people that had strep infections. streptococcus preferred glucose as their growth factor and based on the fact that you could get a strain that you’ve made, you have all these isolated individual components that have all these benefits. What, let’s take us through that so that we can now expand into other correlations, what was it again, that you found with the streptococcus infections and so forth?

Martha Carlin: Well, so when I kind of started out talking to collecting samples from people with Parkinson’s taking, they’re kind of the standard history, but I would also just do a personal interview with everybody we collected a sample from to get their life story. And one of the things that early on people were mentioning was that they got a lot of cold sores until they got a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, and then they’ve never had a cold sore since. And I’m like, That’s interesting.

So I started to specifically ask that question, to pretty much everybody. And I found that also with several people who had multiple sclerosis. And so you know, I started to dig a little deeper about the strap and how it works in the body, and you know, what, post-infection kind of symptoms that you might have. And so that that was just kind of a dot connector for me. And I think I mentioned before I went to 23, and they and they were able to also connect that strep infection. But you know, eventually, that’s also circled back to the use of antibiotics. Because, you know, as a child, if you’re frequently having antibiotics, and you grew up in the era that we grew up in, you were given antibiotics, you know, here’s amoxicillin or penicillin, whatever.

And, of course, that will kill the streptococcus. But it’s also going to kill a lot of the other really helpful bugs in your gut. And that’s one of the major issues with the approach using broad spectrum antibiotics is that it has wiped out a lot of the really good beneficial probiotic organisms that we need, you know, the bugs in our gut, produce many of the vitamins, hormones, and neurotransmitters, we need to be healthy. So if we don’t have that full complement, and so we were able to also through one of the researchers that I’ve collaborated with, over the years, did a population study.

And I think I might have mentioned that, that they were able to connect the risk of Parkinson’s, with exposure to certain antibiotics 10 years before a diagnosis, and certain fungicides or five years before a diagnosis. So if we go back to the landscape, you know, 10 years before you’re getting a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, you’re wiping out the landscape. So let’s say that’s like, spraying napalm, in Vietnam over all of the greenery and killing everything.

I mean, that’s how I kind of equate that. So you’ve set up the terrain with very few tools to deal with what’s coming it’s way. And you know, that’s one of the main drivers I think, is antibiotics and the connection there back to the food supply that I think many people didn’t realize, in 2011, Monsanto filed a patent for the use of glyphosate, Roundup. I mean, that’s the connection of the antibiotic. But the unfortunate thing about glyphosate is that it actually destroys more of the good bacteria, and a number of the pathogens are resistant to it. So with the increasing load of glyphosate in our food supply, then we’re constantly exposed to, you know, these doses of antibiotics through the residues in the food supply.

And then, as that market has continued to develop, and the different approaches to how they sell it, you know, it originally started that it was used in you know when they’re before they plant, they spray to kill everything. So start with the new field, and then they would do some selective spraying during the growth. And now it’s used in I think, more than 60 crops, where it’s used at the end of harvest to accelerate the death of the plant to get the harvest done faster and more uniformly. And so when that happens, you have even higher loads of this antibiotic, glyphosate residue on the plant. And there’s an interesting short story there back in 2007, with the beer industry, who used uses barley. And they started using glyphosate and barley in 2007. And the beer brewers were having trouble brewing their beer, because the bacteria that are and fungi that are used in you know, the brewing of beer, the yeas and the in the bacteria were dead in the barley.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, so So okay, so to summarize, it’s no wonder that we have 88% and greater of our population metabolically unhealthy. And you’re saying, Okay, we have the birth of the antibiotic era where we kill and drop the atom bomb in our microbiome and kill the innocent and the healthy, or sorry, and unhealthy and, and everything in between, but at the same time, doing the same thing to our food source, and making it so not only are we not having the internal mail, you have healthy bugs, but we’re not having the external mail, you have healthy bugs. And there’s nothing left in between.

And just sort of to go back to what you were talking about with the cold sores? That’s a question I asked a lot of clients, how often do you have reactivations of cold sores, which is sort of the same thing as John having the shingles outbreak. And we really know that that’s mineral deficiency. And when you put these antibiotics and key laters, and so forth, and pesticides in our food soils, where are in our food supply, there are no minerals left, so it’s no wonder. And then it’s interesting, as far as seeing some other correlations, which you and I have talked about where I look, I first looked at it as when I only really knew about methylation and MTHFR. And the whole making Sammy and homocysteine and glutathione, I really looked at it as Oh, that wheel is not working well.

And when that wheel is not working, well, those those viruses can reactivate. And that’s still helpful from a clinical standpoint, because when we looked at John, and we understood that, hey, there’s a methylation or actually a B 12 thing, a parietal cell thing and antibody thing, maybe there’s Pernicious anemia, and there’s something going on there. So you see all these other correlations.

And the reason why I expanded from that methylation is that I looked at it as that’s only an income thing. Whereas the expense thing is the iron oxidation is the depletion of NADPH, which helps to recycle so many things, is the histamine, the glutamates, the electrical sensitivities, not turning on our antioxidant pathways. And when all those things are going awry, I don’t even look really at MTHFR anymore, because it’s like saying, Martha, let’s get you a job at you know, McDonald’s, and really not expect that to pay for your mortgage, your car payment, your your student loans.

And really, it requires us to pay down the student loans and the car payments and not create so much expense so that the methylation slash income isn’t expecting to do the heavy lifting. And that’s why you see a lot of clients or people will say, Well, yeah, I had MTA I have MTHFR. And I started to take mega doses of methyl folate, and it makes me feel worse, it’s just as an aside, so if you have a comment on that, I’d welcome it. But what I’d like to also do is a transition that to Okay, well, you’re not just doing the research, but you’ve also come up with ways to do something about it. And that’s with the microbial ecology and the yield and shield and paleo biotic. So if you’re listening to this, and you’re thinking, Oh, my gosh, the sky is falling. We have antibiotics, we have glyphosate and there’s nothing left. There’s nothing left to do.

There is a lot of left to do. It’s not just producing sugar shift and a probiotic to help you change the terrain. But it’s also like you said in our last podcast, to fix our gut, we have to fix sick Pixar foods to fix our foods, and we have to fix our soils. So that’s a long-winded question. But if you want to kind of go from there, that’d be great.

Martha Carlin: I may have a little bit of a long-winded answer. Because you know, if I go back to the beginning of when John was first diagnosed, and I started digging in and trying to figure out okay, what would be, you know, I was trained in this method called transaction flow review, I can’t remember if we talked about that, but in a business where you follow every transaction that flows through a business, looking for the breakpoints, and that’s where your risk is. And so I took that approach on, you know, John and the human side.

And of course, the main things that flow through the body are food and water. So I spent a lot of time looking at the food supply, looking at the chemicals that are used in the food, and looking the genetic engineering of our food. And if you think about it, food is information. And our body is like a quantum computer. And so all the food that’s flowing through our body is providing information. Well, genes are the code of that information.

And so, I dug very deeply into trying to understand more about how plants are modified genetically how organisms are modified genetically, what happens in that process, and they use viral vectors, I mean, they use like little pieces of code, it’s like putting together, you know, object oriented code and software, something where you’re, you’re taking pieces and putting them together.

And, you know, pieces of them are viruses, viruses, viruses are the vectors that deliver you know, the information into a plant or you know, whatever is going to be modified, and then you have these little snippets of genes. So, you know, I had this whole thing in my mind that, and I’ve continued to look at that over the years about what genes are being used or targeted, or how so then, you know, we started to collect fecal samples and look at we did the whole genome, so then I could start to see, I could see differences in healthy and unhealthy microbiomes in the presence of certain genes that were either, you know, targets of certain herbicides and pesticides, or were genes that were engineered into the food.

So that was a really inter interesting connection for me. But then when, when Raul came on board, and we’re, you know, talking about the complexity of the problems in the microbiome, and how to restore them by putting back the working systems that are missing. So our human probiotics, you know, we have sugar shift, we have one called the antibiotic antidote that you take after you’ve taken antibiotics to help restore the terrain, we have one called the ideal immunity that has specific things that target foodborne pathogens. So you know, salmonella, Listeria, that kind of thing. You know, we have one for the heart that improves cardiovascular metabolism.

And we’re just bringing out one that helps restore bacterial melatonin production, so helps with sleep at night. But even so we’re like, no matter how much you you can build these systems to really help humanity, you’ve got to go all the way back to the food and the soil, because the same thing that’s happened to our gut has happened to the Earth’s gut, which is the Earth’s soil. By constantly printing plants spraying these herbicides and pesticides on the soil, the soil microbiome is depleted, well, plants need the soil microbiome just like we do to be able to extract the nutrients from the soil. So if they don’t have the right kind of microbiome, then the plants are also minerally depleted.

And so we think we’re eating a healthy food, but you know, the foods have maybe 50% or less of the nutritional mineral content that they had 100 years ago. And so we started to look at, okay, how can we make microbial you know, working systems like we’ve done on the human side, for soil and plants and specifically clean up the glyphosate that is in our soil, that is, you know, basically an antibiotic for the soil.

So we developed several different products and then ultimately combined some of the mechanisms into one product called yield and shield, which can break down glyphosate all the way to I think it’s carbon phosphate and water, so it makes that phosphate bioavailable to the plant and then feeds a broader microbiome in the soil because it’s gotten rid of that antibiotic and it can do that in a bad out, that gets rid of about 90% of it, and 90 days.

And then what that does is accelerate. So we’ve seen accelerated seed or improved seed germination. So if you have low seed germination rates, you can get higher seed germination, you get more plant mass, you get more yield on your crops. So we have, we’ve used it in oil and gas grassland remediation, we’ve used it in organic farming. And we’re now working with some people who are trying to reclaim conventional agricultural lands and turn them back into organic, which takes some time.

And if you don’t have the right remediation for the glyphosate is still going to be there in the soil, so that we’re making those for, you know, larger convert commercial farming operations. But we decided, even for consumer business, that we would make a little eight-ounce bottle, that’s enough for somebody to, you know, it’s a concentrate, and they can use it in their backyard garden. So we’ve just produced that. And that’s also available. So people sometimes go Okay, wait, this is a probiotics company, why do they have a garden, but it’s because it’s all connected.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Now, it’s because you you’re conscientious, and you have a bigger purpose and mission, and you realize that you can’t reductionist sleep reductionistic we do this without having a domino effect on that. And you’re aware of that. Just curious as far as for personal use, and not so much commercial for big agriculture? How would I know if I like just wanted to plant in my backyard if I felt like I had a glyphosate issue or a mineral issue, but I just assumed guilty until proven otherwise? Or would it just help it another way?

Martha Carlin: Anyways, I would, it would help it anyway, it would help it anyway because it does restore a microbial ecosystem that works very well to provide a lot of the key elements that a plant needs. But I would assume that you have it and the reason why I say that is we did some field trials with our work and measured the glyphosate in the different soil plots. And we used an, we used a Miracle-Gro soil, you know, the bags that you get at the, at the Home Depot or wherever, as our control soil, but we went ahead and tested that to see if it had any glyphosate in it.

And there were, and I’m sure you know, they haven’t been testing, they get materials from different places to make their compost and to do what they do to make their soils. But you know, my expectation after that experiment and seeing that there was glyphosate in the miracle growth soil is that it’s, it’s in every ubiquitous Yeah, soil amendment, and I got a different branch. This was probably three or four years ago in a, you know, had a raised bed garden, and I filled it with some soil that was organic, you know, a compost soil bag that I filled it with. And none of the plants did very well. And they were all sort of anemic and yellowish. And you know, I think it was one a pH thing, but also very likely that soil amendment that I got had had some kind of glyphosate residue in it.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, and I think that’s an important thing to highlight where even from you get organic foods from one farm, but from the wind and the and the runoff. Everything is adulterated at some point at some level, I would imagine, as far as Martha or the art, is there a kickback? Or is there a concern that let’s say the commercial industry wants to use a product like a yield and seal to restore their soils, but then now they’re dealing with less crop return because of now you have pests that can come in and adults can do the things that the antifungals or the anti-pesticide things we’re aiming to eliminate? Is there that concern now?

Martha Carlin: Well, I think, you know, when you talk to the big ag commercial type people, they’re very vested in their approach to farming, which is a very chemical intense approach to farming. If you have very healthy soil and a mic and a healthy microbial ecosystem, you don’t have the problems that we’ve we’ve created, you know, self-inflicted wounds in both our internal ecosystems and the external food systems.

By the approach that we’ve, we’ve taken, so, I mean, that’s not to say you’re not going to have any weeds if you go, you know, organic, but you’re going to have a much healthier ability for your plant to compete. And different bacteria. So I mean, maybe a lot of people may not know this, but so the the corn that is engineered, it’s called Bt corn. Well, BT is actually stands for Bacillus Thuringiensis, which is a strain of bacteria. So this bacteria naturally prevents, you know, certain worms and lepidopteran stuff.

And that they, they took a natural microbe and the gene involved with that toxin production, and put it into the corn so that if, you know, if a worm eats that corn, it eats that BT toxin, and it kills the worm. So, you know, if we think about all the tool sets of, you know, a healthy microbiome in the soil and the plant, they have a lot of tools naturally, if they have a healthy ecosystem to defend themselves against, you know, the predators.

Dr. Joel Rosen: It’s what drives me crazy Martha in terms of you don’t see this in public health anymore. And I’ve even considered going back to school and getting a master’s in public health just to not be a person that understands the problem, but is unlike you, that does something about a you know, like, want to do something about it. And the reality is, is that you don’t see anything about public health anymore about we’re endowed with this strong immunity.

If we eat healthy foods, and healthy nutrients that it becomes one of those things where now that you’ve increased your healthy immunity, you don’t need all these other supporting things to help your healthy immunity. And those that do very well, or don’t have major challenges with exposures to pathogens and viruses have a healthy immune system, but yet, we’re not preaching good healthy eating, getting out in the sunlight, putting your feet in the ground, having good relationships, not being completely fear monger and allowing that to just increase what I call your oxygen consumption.

Right. Interesting on the I wrote down on the heart, cardiovascular, the bacteria, melatonin and the antibiotic, one that you have just as an are they? Well, I do want to make sure we’ve talked a little bit about water too. So just as a quick answer, because I have again, I Oh, gosh, I got to part three now, as part of the just the insights are those vastly different with the strains that you have, or with the particular foods that you’re making to produce those, but you can’t put enough in one super pill, you know.

Martha Carlin: Well, so I think that’s also the misconception of in the probiotics industry. A lot of people just think, okay, more strains is better, like, I’m going to put, you know, 20 strains in here. And that’s better, we use a computational modeling system that we built called Bio flux that helps us understand how they work together in a system. And we, you know, we use that to design our formulas. But we also very early on in the bio collective did work for other companies, taking the genomes of their strains and analyzing their formulas, and comparing them to their competitors.

What we saw is some of these formulas, were say they put 10 or 12 strains together, what happens in that system is one of the strains is basically using up all the resources. And what you get after, say, two or three hours is only that strain growing, all the other ones have, you know, petered out. And so we’re designing working systems that will work together as a community over say, seven to 12 hours, depending on what we’re designing. So I always tell people, I mean, it’s great if you want to try different products that we have, but you don’t want to take them all together at once. Right? Because, you know, it needs to get in there and get it system working for several hours before you throw something else on on top of it.

Dr. Joel Rosen: So, right. Right as a great, thank you for sharing that because you and I had a conversation about the other companies that have proprietary information that suggested diet, which to me that doesn’t have a strong foundation because it’s so temporary Mental based on stress and travel and diet and genome and all of the above where I think that the best is to understand from a good health intake.

Also know maybe some metabolic real-time lab results, also know genomic factors, and have a good review so that you can say, hey, for the next four to six weeks, we want you to go with these strains that don’t necessarily have a cool name like antibiotic this or that but has the same profile that would be therapeutic for those people, which I’d love to talk to you about in terms of like masterminding on that.

As far as the two more questions are sort of the whole paleo biotics and what that is, and then maybe you can weave in, you also mentioned, which we haven’t even talked about is when John first got sick, it’s like, okay, as a system analyst, and where’s the breakdown goes and what flows through its food and water. We’ve talked about food, we haven’t talked about water. So I’d love to hear your two cents on what not even two cents to 1000s of dollars of insight on what the water what what we need to do about water as well.

Martha Carlin: So maybe I’ll start with that, because it dovetails back to paleo biomedical. So you know what, what a lot of people don’t realize is that our water systems, the design of our water systems, and water purification, and all of that, that had such a tremendous impact on public health. Because so many diseases are waterborne, those systems were designed 100 years ago, let’s say, and they haven’t evolved to take into consideration pharmaceutical pollution or chemical pollution that is now coming into our water systems.

So over the years, industrial waste is now flowing down into the wastewater system, and you know, they can wash their hands, once it enters that storm sewer. And pharmaceuticals, you take an antibiotic, I think it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 to 75% of that antibiotic will be excreted unchanged in your urine, which goes in the wastewater. So you know, somebody’s taken an opioid, you know, a hormone.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Not to mention people putting them in the toilet supply, right when they’re thrown away.

Martha Carlin: So they down the toilet, because often they’re they’re told to do that, by medical professionals just throw them out. But those pharmaceuticals go into the water supply. And the Environmental Working Group did some pretty comprehensive work, I think in 2012, and published on some of the major US cities and how much pharmaceutical pollution was in and what drugs were most prevalent in the different water systems, one of the ones is an over the counter is ibuprofen.

And what a lot of people don’t realize is that taking ibuprofen over over and over and like constantly, actually increases the permeability of your gut lining. So that can contribute to a leaky gut. So if you’re just getting these things, you know, small doses in your water supply all of the time, you know, you’re taking your neighbor’s drugs, I say.

So that’s one of the first things when people say what’s something simple I could do. And I say, you know, filter your water, make sure you’re but when you do filter your water, of course, then you’re filtering out the minerals. So you’ve got to, you know, put back the minerals, because doing reverse osmosis and some of these heavy heavy filtrations are also you know, taking out the, the trace minerals that that we also need. So it’s kind of this tricky little balancing act. And then that goes back to, you know, the waters flowing into our public water supply, but it’s also all these chemicals that are used on the land are and with the cattle, the antibiotics used in the cattle, you know, the big ponds that hold they’re, their waste.

You know, when it rains, it overflows, and that gets into our water ecosystems and our rivers. And you know, one of the things that we talked about with paleo biotic and making products to help the soil and the water, because if you think about the fact that you have an organic farmer here and now Next Door conventional farmer, but there’s a river, or some body of water flowing along the edges of their properties.

And they both draw water from that, depending on the direction of the, the flow of that water and where when and where they’re pulling it out, the organic farmer is getting contaminated by the chemicals that are flowing into that water. So part of our thought also was, you know, Paleo biotic could do the same thing for the land and the water that we’re doing on the human side, to clean up.

These cannot these chemicals, you know, in some of them, they call forever chemicals. But what’s interesting about microbes is I love microbes, because they can do just about anything, they’re just so amazing in their ability to transform things, you know, toxic things into good things, but they can also make toxic things. So they’re used in so many ways, industrially. And when you start to see all the different ways that microbes kind of underlying our modern life and how they’re used as tools for so many different things. We have a tremendous tool set. And the story behind paleo biotic is Dr. Kondo came from.

As I said, you know, microbial ecology. He was a professor at Cal Poly for many years, he had an early company called Amber gene. And he was a pioneer in a field called paleo microbe microbiology, so ancient microbes, and he developed the techniques for cracking open ancient Amber. You know, if you remember the mosquito in Jurassic Park, well, not exactly that. But opening up Amber Amber is basically a resin from tree sap, which has some sugars in it, even the stone itself has this tiny amount of food source that over billions of years can continue to feed that microbe.

And so he built this collection of over 2000 strains of bacteria and yeast, that he isolated out of these ancient Amber occlusions and deep-sea cores from the bottom of the ocean. So there are these pristine organisms that haven’t been adulterated by all the chemicals and things in our world today. And, you know, some of them have some amazing abilities for DNA repair, UV radiation protection. So, you know, that’s how it helps the plants, the soil. And so we’re using that suite of microbes to design things for the ecosystem outside the human body.

Dr. Joel Rosen: That’s awesome. I was just about to ask, so are you using that as part of your your paleo biotic mission to support water? So two things I got, well, a lot more than two, but two proprietary things are I’m gonna create a shirt with I love microbes, you know, as one of my main shirts. And then the other one is your gut health is your general ledger. That was from our first one.

I love that as well. So as far as filtration, I know reverse osmosis removes the minerals, but are you basically saying for the average household that is, you know, impervious to these things, to just get a filter or get our own? Or is there a special other technology that you endorse or do yourself personally or recommend Martha?

Martha Carlin: We have a lot of water technologies, I’ll say, you know, we we have something called a John LS water machine that does UV and evaporative. distillation, we have our machine, we have a hydrogen water machine, but I think even just for the average person because all of that equipment can get very expensive, is just even at a minimum, if you can get yourself a Beretta or some type of a carbon filter, where you’re filtering out as much as you are a Berkey. You know, there’s a pretty affordable Berkey countertop solution. That’s a carbon filter that gets a lot of this out. But I tell people all the time, do not drink tap water. And that means when you go to a restaurant and they bring water to your table, do not accept tap water at your table.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Right? Yeah. And I also would further that in terms of when you get your own water, get it in a bottle and instead of a plastic because that sort of rubs off. So just as an aside to put you on the spot, as far as tech Kangen, water goes, What are your thoughts on that? Have you heard about that?

Martha Carlin: I know there’s I’m not an expert on that. But I, because it can control pH. And we talked about the impact of pH. I think you know, that understanding and connecting pH to the microbiome is critical. And I haven’t seen enough of that kind of research connecting those dots. But I do know people who have done the alkaline water and had great results.

But I also know that you need stomach acid in your gut. I mean, you can, you can take butane, and some other things to replace that. But there is a connection between loss of stomach acid, and dementia, even back to some papers in the 1940s.

Dr. Joel Rosen: So yeah, I have a friend who I’ll talk to you off the air that’s an engineer that they look at different different utilities of using it. So it’s not just across the board like for, for disinfecting and using it as a natural way again, but I was just interested in your your opinion on that. So as far as I think we’re lots of great information, as far as what would you tell the person that would be listening to this, and be overwhelmed by it, but maybe they have a loved one or themselves that they were diagnosed with neurological autoimmunity that can be very daunting.

And to you know, and I’m urging you to send me your stuff, because the loved one, the caregiver of that person also gets lost in the shuffle, and is overwhelmed themselves. But what would you say in terms of I mean, we got less than five minutes to sort of succinctly summarize, hey, like, just just like a diagnosis of cancer, like, God forbid, don’t just run to the person that told you, you got to do the big, the big sort of machinery of what we do, like take a step back and take a deep breath, survey the land.

What else would you tell that person to do? Knowing what you’ve known? And all the things that you’ve done? Obviously, they’ve probably won’t create a whole industry, like you did. But what would what do you tell that average sort of weekend warrior, once they have these these diagnoses, what what they should be doing?

Martha Carlin: Well, I think, probably the number one piece of advice is to take control of your health by taking control of what you put in your body. And you can do that, by taking small steps. You don’t have to do it all at once. But you know, take a small step today. And, you know, eliminate one thing that might be a problem, maybe that’s wheat, because of the glyphosate or the allergies, or that kind of thing. Do something about your water, that’s probably number one.

But you can take these small steps and starting to understand and pay attention to your body because your body is telling you something. And so that’s one of the things even over 20 years, we’re still learning with John is when something’s not working well, on a particular day, we stop and we go, okay, what’s my body telling me? What did I do? What did I put in the system?

Food was the day before, you know, just like quick anecdote, John has had some long COVID symptoms, and it’s impacted his his Parkinson’s and he’s walking toward the end of the day, but he did this fast mimicking diet by prolong for the last five days, and he’s had the best five days COVID And so talked about how, you know, fasting and allowing the body to rest and cleanse can have a pretty significant impact on how you feel. So I mean, that the clue is you. I mean, the the advice is, you don’t have to do this all at once, but really start to understand back to my transaction flow review.

You know, what’s flowing through the body, and how are those transactions impacting you be conscious and aware of what you’re putting in and how it’s making you feel. And as you start to do that and become more and more aware, I think you will We’ll start to feel better and realize how the food and the external environment are impacting your health, whether that’s neurological or cancer, or yes, if you’re healthy.

Dr. Joel Rosen: That’s a great answer. In fact, I’m glad to hear that I’m on day five myself today. So I’ll be happy when I can go and eat tomorrow. Although I’ve done it, I have an interview with the CEO next week of proline to discuss that and I knew that was gonna be a game changer for John and as we work together, get into shifting into the metabolic flexibility given his you know, long history of being a marathon runner and everything that you’ve learned.

So, Martha, a big hug to you, I really am grateful for people like you that, that put the world on your back and have a deeper mission to not just get answers for your loved one and yourself but for the world to and I do think that you were put together for for that purpose. So future success to you, I want to talk to you about all of the products that you have, so that we can help our listeners with those as well. And I got to run because I got another client here today. So I appreciate all your time and, and energy and everything else in between. Thank you so much for everything you do, Martha.

Martha Carlin: Thanks for having me, Joel, and thanks for everything that you did.

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With gratitude,

Martha Carlin photo Martha Carlin, is a “Citizen Scientist”, systems thinker, wife of Parkinson’s warrior, John Carlin, and founder of The BioCollective , a microbiome company expanding the reach of science and BiotiQuest, the first of it’s kind probiotic line. Since John’s diagnosis in 2002, Martha began learning the science of agriculture, nutrition, environment, infectious disease, Parkinson’s pathology and much more. In 2014, when the first research was published showing a connection between the gut bacteria and the two phenotypes of Parkinson’s, Martha quit her former career as a business turnaround expert and founded The BioCollective to accelerate the discovery of the impact of gut health on all human disease. Martha was a speaker at the White House 2016 Microbiome Initiative launch, challenging the scientific community to “think in a broader context”. Her systems thinking background and experience has led to collaborations across the scientific spectrum from neuroscience to engineering to infectious disease. She is a respected out of the box problem solver in the microbiome field and brings a unique perspective to helping others understand the connections from the soil to the food to our guts and our brains.

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