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Good and bad bacteria are revived by different things. Changing the pH can wake up good bacteria or put them to sleep. Good bacteria thrive in an acid environment, which protects them because many pathogens cannot live in that acidic environment.

Microbes have a mutual arrangement with us: we provide a home, and they offer immune protection, vitamins, and digestive help. If the environment isn't good, microbes will become dormant until conditions improve. Lowering the pH, making the environment more acidic, can activate microbes.

Prebiotics aren't limited to fiber; resistant starches and polyphenols also function as prebiotics. When you eat, the majority of the food is digested and absorbed in the small intestine. However, prebiotics like fiber, resistant starches, and polyphenols remain intact as they enter the colon. These prebiotics uniquely impact the microbiome, supporting beneficial gut bacteria and promoting health benefits.

Your gut makes neurotransmitters like serotonin, detoxifies your body, helps digest your food, and makes hormones. It's critical. When people get antibiotics because they had COVID or they had an earache, the antibiotics actually kill some of the good bugs in your gut, and then people get more anxious. They have more memory problems. They have trouble learning. Making sure you take care of your gut, so eat lots of fruits and vegetables, and a probiotic can be just so helpful. In one study, they gave mice an antibiotic and they actually found the stem cells in their brain in the hippocampus actually stopped growing. It's like, Woah.

Butyrate must be in the colon to nourish colon cells. One approach is taking butyrate-producing bacterial capsules. Another is consuming butyrate precursors through fermented foods and vinegars. Soluble fiber, not insoluble, is also necessary. Inulin, a soluble fiber, can be found in chicory family vegetables like radicchio, Belgian endive, and chicory, as well as asparagus and artichokes. Okra and root vegetables, such as yams and sweet potatoes, are also good sources of soluble fiber.

The gut microbes affect our brain. Essentially, the gut microbes have our brain on speed dial, and they help coordinate our body's functions. This system is known as the gut brain axis. The two way communication between our central nervous system and enteric nervous system, the nervous system linked to the gut, allows our gastrointestinal tract and brain to talk to each other. This back and forth conversation helps our body maintain physiological balance, also known as homeostasis. The gut microbes even release certain molecules and hormones that can affect our brain. Gut bacteria feed on the food we eat and produce metabolites like serotonin. This serotonin is released into our blood, where eventually it interacts with our nervous system. Some other metabolites include GABA, a neurotransmitter, and butyrate, which interacts in other critical ways with the nervous system.

You probably wanna keep your microbiome as healthy and diverse as possible. So how do we do that? Well, first of all, you wanna focus on your diet. No surprise here. Focus on eating vegetables, whole grains, legumes. These are fiber rich foods. Fiber rich foods are basically known as prebiotics as they serve as food for the probiotics. Next, you wanna consume probiotic rich foods like yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi. These foods naturally contain that good bacteria we've been talking about.

The food we eat determines our inner garden and what kind of bugs are growing in our gut. If this garden is full of bad bugs, you're going to be in trouble and have health consequences. If it's full of good bugs, your health will be great, including your mental health. The microbiome affects everything and drives inflammation throughout the body. It affects our mood, energy, and aging process. Damage to our microbiome is one of the 10 hallmarks of aging. Getting your gut bacteria healthy is one of the most important things you can do to stay healthy and keep your health a long time.

That intermittent fasting can supercharge your gut microbes. When you put bacteria on a fast or mice or fruit flies or bugs, they live a lot longer. You see an increased resistance to oxidative stress and xenobiotic stress. This is exposure to chemicals. Like in chemotherapy, for example, if someone goes through chemotherapy and they're fasting, the microbes, which make up a lot of the immune system, can survive longer. When you do fasting, you increase diversity of microbes. You also increase tolerance to bad bacteria. And when you're doing fasting, you starve off the food, the sugar for yeast and candida. So you kill off the bad population, the pathogenic microbes, and you help the good population. And these microbes do a lot for you. They help recycle and increase your bile acids, which help you digest fats.

Health problems arise when bacteria breach the immune wall, enter the bloodstream, and cause systemic infections. Microbes primarily enter the blood through the colon and gums; arterial plaque sometimes contains oral bacteria. Skin problems can stem from translocated gut bacteria. Certain microbes produce butyrate, which affects insulin resistance, and these microbes thrive in acidic environments. Maintaining an acidic pH can increase their numbers, emphasizing the importance of the body's internal environment.

So your body actually recycles bile because it is vitally necessary and important. In fact, it recycles it six to 10 times every single day. And on top of that, your liver makes bile. It's called primary bile salts and your microbiome makes bile. It's called secondary bile salts. Also, bile helps prevent SIBO small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. It competes for nutrients. There'll be less nutrients going into your small intestine because the microbes need them to survive. You're going to be deficient in nutrients. You're going to have a lot of gas, bloating, overgrowth of other pathogens, unfriendly bacteria. So bile salts have antimicrobial properties. So if you eat, especially like fiber or probiotics and you bloat, then chances are you can have SIBO.

The most important, overlooked aspect of the gut is its speed, not its contents. The 30-foot human intestinal tract functions like Henry Ford's assembly line, a conveyor belt where pH levels dictate the breakdown of contents. Increasing the gut's speed disrupts this process. Acidic bacteria handle contents leaving the stomach, while basic bacteria handle contents near the rectum. Speeding up the gut pushes acidic contents into a basic environment, causing functional problems. This leads to gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, irritability, and cramping, which do not originate from food intake.

Good bacteria can be activated or deactivated by altering the pH level. Beneficial bacteria flourish in acidic conditions, which also serves as a defense because many pathogens cannot survive in such an environment. Consuming apple cider vinegar acidifies the internal environment.

Butyrate, a short-chain fatty acid, is produced by bacteria in the large bowel. It serves as the primary fuel source for colonocytes, the cells lining the large bowel. Butyrate helps maintain an acidic pH in the large bowel, which is considered healthy. An acidic environment in the large bowel inhibits the growth of less friendly bacteria.

Speaker 0 and Speaker 1 describe findings from studying COVID and the gut microbiome, focusing on bifidobacteria. They state that their lab was the one to detect COVID in stool samples. Their central questions were what COVID does to the microbiome and how long the virus remains in the gut. They observed that one patient had COVID for up to 45 days after respiratory symptoms resolved, and another case showed the virus detectable for up to a year and a half after respiratory symptoms ended. This led them to investigate differences between people who do and do not get COVID, including households with similar exposures. A key observation was linked to bifidobacteria. They note that a difference between individuals who stayed healthy and those who contracted COVID was the level of bifidobacteria. They point out that bifidobacteria are the bacteria commonly advertised as probiotics, present in newborns and that aging is associated with its decline. They emphasize bifidobacteria as an important microbe for the microbiome and its potential role in health outcomes. The discussion includes an example: a farmer who kissed his COVID-positive wife and did not get COVID himself had high microbial diversity and a good amount of bifidobacteria, suggesting resilience due to microbial composition, including bifidobacteria. They extend the implication to mental health, noting that loss of bifidobacteria has been observed in anxiety and bipolar disorder, while acknowledging this is not the only microbe involved in those conditions. Another function attributed to bifidobacteria is aiding digestion: they help break down food to release sugars that enter cells, and assist in releasing calcium. The speakers contrast this with the broader focus on mitochondria and mitochondrial function, arguing that gut microbes initiate the process by breaking down food in the bowels to supply sugars and calcium for cellular processes. In summary, their findings indicate that people with higher bifidobacteria are more resilient to COVID and healthier, whereas those with lower bifidobacteria correlate with greater vulnerability; bifidobacteria play a role in sugar absorption, calcium release, and overall metabolic and potentially mental health outcomes. Speaker 1 and Speaker 0 confirm: people with more bifidobacteria were more resilient and did not get sick from COVID, while those who got very sick did not have enough bifidobacteria or had low levels.

The rapid increase in autoimmune conditions and allergies is unlikely due to human genetics, which change over long periods. People with these conditions often have dysbiosis, a dysregulation of gut health characterized by reduced diversity, fewer healthful microbes, and more pathogenic microbes. While a causal relationship hasn't been established for all autoimmune conditions, mechanisms exist. Dysbiosis leads to a breakdown of the mucosal layer and separation of endothelial cells, which are held together by tight junctions. Butyrate, a short-chain fatty acid, helps maintain these tight junctions. The breakdown allows molecules, like bacterial endotoxins, to flow from the gut into the bloodstream, revving up the immune system. Increased inflammation leads to oxidative stress, causing DNA damage and accelerating tissue aging.

Fiber is essential for optimal health and gut function. The gut contains 100 trillion bacteria, some good and some bad. Consuming both soluble and insoluble fiber feeds the good bacteria, allowing them to thrive. Without fiber, bacteria will consume the intestinal lining, leading to microscopic leaks in the gut wall, allowing unwanted chemicals to enter the bloodstream and cause inflammation. Insoluble fiber also helps to reduce the risk of colon cancer by brushing away dead cells in the colon.

Eating yogurt or taking probiotics is not an effective way to recolonize the gut because they often get killed in the stomach or small bowel and don't reach the colon. Fecal transplants are different because they involve cleaning the colon, looking at the mucosa, and implanting directly. While some people may get lucky with probiotics landing and implanting, most of the time they don't engraft, meaning they don't implant, so you have to keep taking them to sustain any benefit. It's a difficult process and hard to heal the gut that way.

In some countries in Africa, they're eating 100 grams of fiber every day. When you eat that amount of fiber, is not only gonna make you full, but it's gonna make your gut very healthy because fiber is the food for the good bacteria in our guts. The more fiber you put in your diet, the more you feed the good bacteria in your gut. The better the good bacteria in your gut or the more that's present, the healthier you're going to be.

Apple cider vinegar changes your microbiome of your gut because we have good bacteria and we have bad bacteria in our gut. And apple cider vinegar, it is a prebiotic for these good bacteria. But the other thing it does that's really cool is that it'll kill pathogens. We also know that apple cider vinegar can kill things like E. Coli, bacteria in the gut that might be causing you things like bloating or might be causing you to have craved other foods that you are trying to stay away from. Just a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in your fasting window when you're already changing your microbiome through fasting can really accelerate your microbiome state.