Heal Your Gut, Reduce Fat, Fatigue & Brain Fog Using Oxytocin, Peptides, Probiotics, & Other Personalized Strategies

Nick Urban [00:00:07]:
Are you a high performer, obsessed with growth, and looking for an edge? Welcome to MINDBODY Peak Performance. Together, we’ll discover underground secrets to unlocking the full potential of your mind, body, and spirit. We’ll learn from some of the world’s leading minds, from ancient wisdom to cutting edge tools and everything in between. This is your host, Nick Urban. Enjoy the episode. Your gut controls more than simply digestion and protection against pathogens. What if it also played a role in your mood, your energy levels, and even how fast you heal? We covered this topic with Joel Green back in episode number 167. And today, we’re continuing the conversation with doctor Grace Liu from the Gut Institute.

Nick Urban [00:01:03]:
Today, she’s sharing why gut health is the foundation for performance and longevity, how oxytocin influences healing and connection, and why fixing increased intestinal permeability, aka leaky gut, could change everything. In this episode, we cover topics such as oxytocin and its benefits for gut health, wound healing, stress reduction, and ways to both naturally and supplementally increase your levels. We also talk about peptides for gut health, things like larazotide and BPC one five seven, KPV, and how these peptides can optimize your overall health as well as other peptides like thymosin alpha one, TA one, GLP ones, and their roles. We also explore the misunderstandings and misconceptions of probiotics and prebiotics for a healthy gut and which strains actually work and which ones do not. All of that and a whole lot more. Joining us today is doctor Grace Liu. She’s the founder of the Gut Institute and a leading functional medicine expert with over twenty years of clinical experience. As a pioneer in microbiomedicine, probiotics, and nutrigenomics, She formulates advanced gut health products and educates clinicians worldwide.

Nick Urban [00:02:39]:
She has hosted microbiome medicine conferences, spoken at global events, and authored the bestseller, seven steps to heal SIBO. She’s also been featured in a number of high profile publications, and doctor Liu helps high profile clients like athletes and executives overcome fatigue, weight issues, and food allergens. You can find the link to the resources and everything we discuss in the show notes for this episode, which will be at mindbodypeak.com/thenumber190eight. Alright. Ladies and gentlemen, sit back, relax, and enjoy this conversation with doctor Grace Liu. Doctor Grace Liu, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:03:26]:
Thank you so much, Nick, for having me. I’m so excited. This is really an amazing podcast you have.

Nick Urban [00:03:31]:
Thank you. Yeah. Me too. I’m excited because we’re diving into your specialty today, and that is all things gut health and peptides, intersection of those, and a whole lot more. So to get started today, tell me the unusual nonnegotiables you’ve done for your health, your performance, and your bioharmony.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:03:53]:
Oh, that’s really awesome. Bioharmony is one of my favorite favorite topics. So I, love the hacks I’ve done where I’ve added in, like, extra oxytocin, natural ways of adding extra oxytocin. And for me, that’s, kamalini yoga because we’re incorporating, like, breath work with mantra and movements. The second is cold clenching. Mhmm. With hot like, heat, either a hot pool or sauna hot sauna. I like the Russian spas actually.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:04:20]:
They’re really fun. And the Russian are fun too. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:04:24]:
Yeah. Contrast therapy is awesome.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:04:27]:
Yes. Yeah. Third, and this is another oxytocin, but, a lot of my, hanging out with, like, my favorite girlfriends and frat guy friends, just our natural way of bonding. We’re all tribal and, need to be with our tribe.

Nick Urban [00:04:41]:
Yeah. So oxytocin is a big part of your routine. Why did you settle on that?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:04:46]:
Well, when I looked at the data, when we’re wound healing for the gut or just living long, if you look at centenarians the way their lifestyles are, they have a lot of oxytocin building activities in their lives. You know, centenarians, blue zones, these people who live to over a hundred without any chronic disease or cancers, it’s surprising. Right? And what do they have in their life? They’re part of extended family and a community, and they even do, like, community based exercise pretty often. Whatever they do, if it’s, like, Tai Chi like or Chibo like, but they’re doing, like, community. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:05:20]:
For people who aren’t aware, what would you say the main benefits of oxytocin are?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:05:26]:
So for wound healing, we see it quickly help heal and regenerate to normal. Like, that’s insane. And when we dig into the studies, human and animal, when they inject it or take it orally, there’s huge benefits for neurotypical, changes. So, like, for autistic kids, they did nasal doses, like, I think sixty, seventy units and daily, and they would start to make eye contact and say I love you or talk to their parents. That’s pretty tremendous for anything because we don’t really have any meds for that right now. Right? And oxytocin is what we make. I Think it’s nine amino acids. We know we it’s very important for uterine contractions, but that’s a fake one.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:06:08]:
It’s not identical. And so now, you know, realizing that might have caused a lot of damage for these babies, fetuses as they were getting it in birth. Yeah. But oxytocin also helps our our lean mass. So it’s a really great part of, like, fat burning protocols, and people will get these amazing orgasms afterwards if they get an orgasm. And, so even for cancer, cachexia, when they’re using oxytocin, it helps build lean mass. They don’t lose weight anymore. They’re building lean mass and they’re gaining.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:06:38]:
So for hard gainers, men or women who are, you know, skinny fat, looks like this is actually a great addition. And I think it’s because we’re departed in our DNA from natural ancestral tribal activities, you know, where we’re actually naturally having naturally having oxytocin daily all day through like our meals, being with others, laughing, having long meals and talking, eye contact. Eye contact, eye gazing is one of our also amazing ways or it works with your cat or dog. That works too.

Nick Urban [00:07:09]:
Yeah. Yeah. If I had to guess, I’d also assume that oxytocin will antagonize or oppose other hormones and neurotransmitters, perhaps like the stress hormones.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:07:20]:
I bet so. Yeah. I I I bet they do do that. You’re you’re right on, I think.

Nick Urban [00:07:25]:
Have you personally used the oxytocin nasal spray?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:07:29]:
Yeah. I didn’t find too much benefit with that. I I prefer the JAPS. And you have to treat the dose. Yeah. And you’ll OD when you’re first trying it out. Like, a lot of my friends, Natalie Niddham, who runs, like, optimizing superhuman performance, we we hang out a lot at conferences or talk. And we both have tried the oxytocin, before workouts.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:07:48]:
And if you ODA, you’ll be having the runs, diarrhea, palpitations, sweats. It’s very uncomfortable. You feel like you’re gonna die. So I don’t really encourage ODing on it, you know, but you have to find the dose. So it could range from, you know, fifty to seventy, eighty units jab. And you can do it multiple times a day, but, you know, extra jabs aren’t really fun. I think natural ways is the best, really. Seeing your friends, hanging out with friends, laughing, watch a comedy show.

Nick Urban [00:08:17]:
Yeah. And there’s obviously other things going on there in those interactions as well beyond oxytocin, but it’s a nice easy natural way to get appreciable amounts of it. I like a bit of the nasal spray on say like a date night or something. And if I use enough of it, I think it’s oxytocin acetate that form, then I do notice a little bit of a difference. It’s not mind blowing for me.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:08:40]:
What do you mean, Nick, that is oxytocin acetate?

Nick Urban [00:08:43]:
I think that’s like when I look at the nasal spray, I think it says oxytocin acetate on it.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:08:48]:
Oh, okay. Yeah. And how many sprays do you like? Like two sprays, four sprays?

Nick Urban [00:08:52]:
I think it would depend on the concentration of the spray bottle. But when I was doing it, I think it was like three sprays, I wanna say. Oh. I haven’t I haven’t used in a while.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:09:03]:
Oh, okay. Cool. Cool. Cool. Yeah. For date night, it’s the French to do, like, PT one forty one and other things.

Nick Urban [00:09:10]:
Yeah. It’s a nice stack. PT one forty one and some oxytocin.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:09:14]:
Yeah. I have a Dragon Mojo product I love. We make it and it’s got, like, dual estrogen blockers. They basically kinda drive everything toward anabolic hormones and they block stress because it’s got tribulus. Tribulus is really great for stress and ginkgo, dim, and passion flower extract, the chrysin.

Nick Urban [00:09:33]:
Nice.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:09:34]:
Yes. Even one dose makes a huge difference for people. I think people are just inundated with plastics and, you know, estrogens all over the place just like the frogs and amphibians. They’re all like, no males exist, you know. And it’s terrible.

Nick Urban [00:09:48]:
Yeah. Grace, how did you get involved in all this? What’s your backstory here?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:09:52]:
So about thirteen years ago, I had a I mean, all through my life, teens, twenties, I was really heavy overweight. And then after my kids were born, I finally actually got really into exercise. And oh, well, and during the pharmacist, well, I got into exercise, but I got injuries. I didn’t know how to do yoga. I didn’t do yoga. But I discovered yoga after my kids were born and and during their birth, and that really transformed my health. Like, I, cut out gluten and even my extended family, my sister’s family cut out gluten. One of my nieces was born with autism, and we saw within a month or two, she started talking and becoming more normalized.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:10:26]:
And, actually, eighty percent of her symptoms went away of autism. And then for myself, adding in a couple vitamins, omega threes, like Rob Wolf, I’m a big fan of his. So he was I did CrossFit certification, but I was a nutrition cert while I was doing CrossFit and, learned all about, like, benefits of omega three, and healing for heart disease and a little bit of lower carb diet. I have a lot of diabetes risk in my family. So these things and adding vitamin d, vitamin a, retinol, and k two all transform my health. Like, I had periodontal disease after my births, so that all reversed instantly in asthma as well when I added these supplements in and and added more exercise and sunlight and omega threes, a lot of fish oil, omega three. So I I really saw how it happened. But then I’m super furloughed, so then I use the Mirena IUD.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:11:16]:
And so for women, this hormone just like any hormones, and these end up actually into municipal water as well, but it’s a a device. It’s a really high dose of a fake progestin, and it nearly killed me. Yeah. I really had to do a lot to, like, detox those, fossilable toxins. It made me susceptible to other stealthy infections and mold and other things. So I had to do just full healing. And I wish I had the peptide peptides back then. Peptides won’t detox.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:11:44]:
They won’t cure mold toxicity, you know, but or mercury or heavy metal toxicity. But they would have countered, you know, some of the inflammation that I had, So, actually, the GLP ones. We we do a lot of GLP ones actually with more toxic clients that it really just brings down the level of inflammation for a lot of them. Even though they’re not trying to lose weight, we just do low dose, like, two hundred or four hundred micrograms a week of some of the time. But turns up a time works as well too. So I you know, after my health problems, you know, I had to heal a lot. I developed the probiotic, the maxims, and this really supercharged my health. But we when you look at testing, I love looking at testing, like testing not guessing.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:12:23]:
We want to emulate healthy people. And our most healthiest people are the centenarians from all over the world. And when we look at microbiome data, I really drill down into poop and all that about ten years ago when I made this, and poop is really important. Yeah. We can see kind of our wealth portfolio there. If there’s many things missing, these are bankruptcies. And if they’re not fixed, they’re gonna eventually lead to disease, mental illness, metabolism issues, you know, hard gainer status or, infertility and and hormone imbalances. We need all of them there.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:12:57]:
And at high enough quantity, abundance, as well as percentages, like the relative amounts of them. So I really started to drill that down because we have testing we can do. Stool kits as well as organic acids. That’s a way it’s called metabolomic studies, but it’s a way to look at what are the biome making and then how to bring it to a natural, a healthier state, when that’s not dysbiotic. And then what we see is that health completely shifts. People become super optimized, you know, their their testosterone increases, they get six packs without even trying, all all the benefits.

Nick Urban [00:13:32]:
Yeah. Okay. So optimizing the gut is a complex process. It’s not like just simply do this one thing and all of a sudden your gut will thrive and your whole health will thrive. What is your overall process? Because I know you have a book called Seven Steps to Heal SIBO. And so I assume that first diagnosis and, like, understanding assessment, like, what’s going on in there is a big part of it. But then also, what’s the role of, like, parasites and stealth, like, subclinical infections and all that stuff?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:14:03]:
Right. So those are great questions. So I’ll answer it one by one. So when I talk about testing, you know, many years ago, we had different stool kits. Someone went out of business. They didn’t make it. But now we have newer ones, and they all vary in different pricing. The one I like right now is called bytrackbytrack.com.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:14:18]:
And we have a code. I think it’s $10 off with mojo 10 mojo 10. So I love to look at the wealth portfolio in the gut, you know, and if things are missing, we use certain prebiotics and a lot of probiotics to seed the gut, feed the gut, and to get them up. We can always presume when there’s a lot of things missing, there’s a lot of stealth infections like you mentioned. And then that’s when okay. We already got seeding, feeding going on. We need to start weeding a little bit. But the goal is not to do what antibiotics have done.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:14:47]:
We’re all ill right now because of too much antibiotics. We don’t wanna create the same problem. So the key is just to use use very gentle, gentle botanicals, and if needed, certain pharmaceuticals if absolutely needed. You know? And we bring the gut to a healthier state while we’re nourishing. It’s kinda like regenerative farming. I don’t know if you’re a fan of Rudolf Steiner and farming. Yeah. I do the same with the gut, you know.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:15:12]:
He is able you know, regenerative farming, they can bring back health to a desert, basically. They’ll even get weather pattern changes when you bring in bison or elk back to the land and they’re pounding their herbivore poop into the earth. They’re they’re bringing the seeds that are deep in the earth to live again. And then these plants that are ancestral to the land, they change the weather patterns with their c o two, carbon changing, and, the manure. They all work together and then rain and clouds come back, which is phenomenal. And that’s kinda what we want for the gut again. So many people’s guts are just deserts. Deserts like, why? But we can it’s like in Dune.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:15:51]:
Did you watch Dune one and two? Yeah. It’s like Dune. Herbert kinda had it. Like, we can’t bring back the oceans if we try because we all have it. We’re supposed to be born with it. So So bifidos are so important because they’re supposed to come with us with mom from birth on and then all the way until we’re a hundred years old if we can make it to a hundred. Centenarians have a richness and abundance of bifidos, particularly bifidoblongum. So we really encourage people to make symbiotic things with it, either shakes or like a coconut milk, yogurt, and maybe add, like, extra antifungals like lauric acid, the MCT oil, make it creamier.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:16:31]:
So, you know, when we have when we are lacking a lot of keystone keystone bacteria, then we get overgrowth. The biggest one is actually the fungal picture. So we do certain botanicals and, treatments for that. And I love peptides because nearly every peptide we look at, they’re neuropeptides. They help our brain. Many peptides are nearly all of them are antimicrobial to some extent. So it’s a matter of stacking the right ones and not killing off our good good flora.

Nick Urban [00:16:58]:
Interesting.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:16:59]:
Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:16:59]:
One thing I was curious about is I’ve learned a bit about parasites that oftentimes they will be there, and part of their role is to sequester heavy metals and other things that you don’t necessarily want floating around in your blood serum because that can spell disaster. And so if if you eliminate the parasites without first detoxifying the heavy metals or whatever contaminants there are in your blood, then you might not be doing as much good and then they might just come back because your body has that innate intelligence that it wants to heal before it returns to homeostasis.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:17:36]:
Yeah. Our our our gut, it has so much intelligence and information. It’s the IQ of the gut is just enormous. You’re right. And we we co evolve with parasites. We co evolve with yeast and candida. Candida and yeast, they make b vitamins for us, cobalamin and others. That’s what vegans eat.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:17:54]:
Right? A bunch of flakes. So, you know, how do we harvest that, right, at a healthy level without them becoming crazy? Well, they become crazy because we’re missing Keystone Flora. It either happened at birth or after a bunch of antibiotics or somewhere along the line. But we can restore it, and we just have to get that balance back in there. And you’re right. It’s good to do detox when the body’s ready and prepared. You know, get everything in place if needed, you know, TUDCA, a bunch of fat soluble antioxidants. You know, I love Pycnogenol and acai berry and a bunch of others.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:18:30]:
And and then and then start to do a good natural detox, you know, keep keep your cell membranes healthy, phospholicholine, phospholcerine if needed, a whole bunch of glutathione, I even recommend IVs because you know if the guts broken and we’re having chronic malabsorption, you can take the best supplements and you’re just it doesn’t go anywhere. We we we need it absorbed. Same with minerals. People don’t realize when they have leaky gut and a lot of overgrowths and not the right flora, the metal transporters, MT receptors at the tip of our microvilli in the small intestines, they’re broken. They’re denuded. They can’t absorb zinc or boron, molybdenum, all all these selenium, all these necessary minerals to keep our glands and detox pathways and and even acid production proton pumps active and healthy. We don’t even make hormones.

Nick Urban [00:19:16]:
Yeah. So if that’s the case and you don’t have an IV available, it’s kind of a catch 22 paradox here where it’s like you can’t absorb the nutrients. You need the nutrients to build and rebuild and repair things. What’s the first step? I know you mentioned reseeding certain, like, bacterial species into the gut. Would that be number one after you recognize this is an issue?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:19:39]:
Well, you can’t recede when the gut’s super broke broken. That’s the problem. And especially when it’s, can’t take fiber, let’s say. So I think you’re correct. Like, we wanna bypass the gut so we can use liposomal products, formulations. Quicksilver is my favorite. But if people have mast cell issues, there’s a lot of citrus oil in it. They don’t tolerate the phenols, salicylates, and other, you know, things in there.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:19:59]:
But there’s also skin. Yeah. So, like, mag chloride is a great bath, you know. It’ll kick out toxins, bromides, and even mycotoxins in oxalates, from the skin and soft tissues. So soaking a whole bunch with mag chloride is super helpful as well too. Some some people can’t tolerate actually IVs and Myers. Like, their oxalates are so high. Oxalates come from mold and candida.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:20:24]:
So this is again why we tackle them first no matter what, while the detox, you know, and support is all all set up because it might be a lot of, you know, herx or reaction or detox. So we have to get that in place. And then we can start our gentle, you know, weeding, weeding. And it really changes people. Their skin becomes remarkable, you know, radiance from the internal inside out, and they feel great. Their mood changes, like, for for the first time they’re laughing, smiling, happy. And then for metabolism, you know, those who are struggling to burn body fat, you know, they start to really, like, you know, burn the body fat and especially if we if they’re able to tolerate, we do a couple human growth hormones secret dogs. I some of my guy friends and clients like they just wake up with six packs.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:21:08]:
I’m like, oh damn you. Like all of this stuff works so hard. But, you know, they’re like they don’t change anything. In fact, sometimes they don’t even work out as much, you know, but with the right stacks, like, I love stacking Tessa Morlin with Somorlin or Tessa Morlin with Ivorlin and CJC, you know, with some antioxidants, stacks if they tolerate, like Wolverine BPC with TA one and TB four, like, bam, like, overnight and after a couple days while we’re doing gut healing. So there’s a really tremendous study called, there’s this researcher named Tremelin. He’s in Australia. He’s at the Adelaide School of Pharmacy. I really love his research on hormones in men and women.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:21:47]:
He gave he took really healthy men. They were aged, like, 18 to 40. He gave them a real low dose of LPS, like a polysaccharide from gram negative bacteria, which we’re not supposed to have a lot of in the gut. That’s why I like looking looking at stool kits, like, BiTrak, because I can count the number of gram negatives that are pathogenic. And our goal is to squish them, you know, like, get them down and while growing the good stuff. This keeps the pathogenic gram negatives down. So anyway, you give them a low dose, about eight nanograms per kilo, not much. But within six hours, their testosterone tanked.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:22:20]:
They were young, you know, very viable, viral people. And so then it naturally went back up to baseline. No problem. But a lot of our our clients, male or female, when they’re coming into us, coming to us to work, you know, they’re frayed. Their gut flora is completely dysbiotic. Not enough of a good keystone that keep the gut tight and keep a sterile mucus lining. And once we bring them back in, the same thing happens. We see free testosterone triple or total testosterone double.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:22:49]:
For women, all their PMS goes away or nearly all away. And if they have cystic fibroids, they start to get chewed up. All the oxalates go away and they get melted. Because oxalates, again, they’re calcifications. They create cysts and fibroids and PCOS or fibrocystic breast or just calcium oxalate, but they come from fungi and candida. So if we can start to squeeze these populations and bring these flora back, these will all naturally go away. And then also for women, the progesterone will change. I’ve seen women where, like, literally doubling their progesterone every month if they’re single digit to begin with.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:23:23]:
And they’re supposed to be fertile, you know, they’re 30. But they have wonky, erratic ments, and their progesterone is almost, like, undetectable. So I gotta be careful. Actually, I had two couples I was taking care of. I warned them, you know, make sure you’re on, you know, you know, just backup method or something. Preferably not contraceptive. And these two couples got pregnant, like, almost within weeks of each other after we were on stacks of, gut protocols and stacks of, peptides. Like, it’s pretty profound how quick it can happen.

Nick Urban [00:23:58]:
Let’s double click into this a little bit because there’s a lot around the gut specifically that I wanna explore with you. First, then that is like the lining of the gut, the tight junctions and everything. Can you explain what those are and, like, how you go about fixing any issues and what the consequences are if you have less tight junctions?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:24:20]:
Yeah. So as we’re born, babies don’t have an immune system. So they get IGM, maternal antibodies from mom through the breast milk, the main route, the breast milk. And they are born leaky. Babies are born leaky. There’s a purpose to it. There’s an evolutionary purpose to get the immune system from mom into their bloodstream. You know, mom’s milk feeds the, bifidos.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:24:42]:
As the baby grows and it’s ready to, like, eat solid foods, the gut naturally starts to tighten. And then the full gut is, microbiota is there. We have a hundred trillion bacteria. And they create a sterile zone of mucus, right, where the layer of, absorption of food goes from the microvilli into our bloodstream. Okay? And there’s only one cell layer, so it’s a very critical fragile area. It’s not that strong. So things like maltodextrin, but maltodextrin emulsifies our single cell layer and it creates actually inflammatory bowel disease, autoimmune disease, and all kinds of leaky gut. So most most supplements use maltodextrin now.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:25:23]:
It’s also coating potato chips and anything with fat flavoring because and it’s everywhere. That’s why when people go to a more natural diet, they’re instantly healing their gut. They’re not taking maltodextrin or other emulsifiers. We’re not trying to make, like, salad dressing out of our microbial life, but that’s what happens. And it’s highly associated with mental illness and inflammatory bowel disease, gut issues, and IBS. So when the gut’s leaky, if this also happens instantly after antibiotics, like, the worst are, like, oh, h pylori eradication regimens with triple therapy. You know, they’re getting two antibiotics. Very instantly.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:25:56]:
There’s a bloom of yeast and candida. These people are usually worse off than when they started, and they still have h. Pylori. Now they’ve also created a, a leaky gut. Yeah. So how do we tighten it? So our protocols over, of course, to gradually increase bifurro maximus to get eventually get to a high enough dose that will reseed the gut really well, and that’s usually, like, a tablespoon a day. That’s a trillion. It’s used daily.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:26:20]:
But not everyone can tolerate that, especially if they have mast cell issues or SIRS, complex illnesses, or other immune problems. We start to have people start low and then gradually up it. Ours are strep free. So, like, some of the worst probiotics on the market have a lot of strep in it. Strep is strep thermophilus is is usually what’s in it. It’s also in a lot of sterilized yogurts now. So we’re getting enormous amounts of strep everywhere. And strep kinda messes mental illness up besides skin and, you know, other and other issues like acne.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:26:47]:
That’s usually yeast and strep. You know, a lot of mental illness, whether it’s anxiety or depression or bipolar or schizophrenia, a lot of it’s viral based and strep based. So we don’t want strep. Ours are strep free, and we wanna lower the amount of strep. So, again, on a 16 s stool kit, we can look at that and crunch the strep down.

Nick Urban [00:27:05]:
Okay. So what you just said is that there’s strep in a lot of commercial yogurts, and there’s a correlation between strep and worsening of mental disorders.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:27:15]:
Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. Strep is insane. For kids, it’s called autoimmune PANDAS, pediatric autoimmune neural diseases and things. But for adults, it happens as well too. And so if we can reduce the strep overgrowths, it’s SIBO basically, then we’re gonna heal the body. And these keep strep away.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:27:33]:
That’s what studies show, especially bifobacteria along at a healthy level. A high enough level. Yeah. So other protocols I’ll do, is we wanna feed the gut, you know, we want a diversity of different prebiotics. And Patrice Canney is a researcher in Belgium. He studies so many prebiotics, particularly the cook resistant starches type three and oligosaccharides, like the gooey tuber starches. In in Asia, there’s a lot of them like yams and, and konjac root. We use glucomannan as a fiber, you know, prebiotic addition.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:28:09]:
And psyllium is really great, and people tolerate it. And, any of the inulin FOS brands are great as well too. But now we can get fancy. There’s XOS, HMO those are the human milk oligosaccharides, the the

Nick Urban [00:28:23]:
g I was gonna ask you about that because I first came across the idea of supplementing HMOs from Joel Green and his protocol to rebuild, like, the immune system in the gut. And I actually use HMO powder

Dr. Grace Liu [00:28:36]:
for that very

Nick Urban [00:28:36]:
thing along with other stuff. Do you are you a fan of that?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:28:40]:
Yeah. Those are all great. I love all ways to rebuild the gut safely without emulsifiers or strep or or espalarde.

Nick Urban [00:28:47]:
Okay.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:28:47]:
Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:28:48]:
No no espalarde.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:28:49]:
Yeah. Most people already have a lot of yeast overgrowth. We don’t wanna promote more. It’s not there’s many better ways many better prob probiotics, many better ways to lower candida.

Nick Urban [00:28:59]:
I wanna explore, like, a really quickly a brief at home gut healing stack that we things we could use. You’ve mentioned a bunch of things. I’m also curious if you do have any peptides there, maybe KPV or something?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:29:11]:
Yes. Yes. So I was gonna, hit that. So the next peptide okay. So we heal the gut. Our our foundational way is prebiotics and probiotics. Right? So we covered that. The next is peptides.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:29:22]:
Peptides have revolutionized, healing for the gut. The first peptide I would add in is larazotide. It’s a oral pill. We don’t sell it. Our research sites, like, for instance, we work a lot with limitless limitless longevity. And larazotide is just amazing. Super amazing. And people need a lot in the beginning, six capsules a day.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:29:41]:
That’s five hundred milligrams times a day. Take it with food. It will just seal the gut up. And what studies show and and there’s like a one case report study with, like, five or six kids. They had all kinds of different antibodies, after long haul COVID. It immediately brought these antibodies down within just days. Yeah. So I find the same with clients.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:30:03]:
Whatever’s whatever’s going on with leaky gut, people are making autoimmune attack to the things that are leaking into the bloodstream. Does that make sense? Yeah. Because there’s only one cell layer that separates the healthy sterile mucus and all the hundred trillion bacteria from our bloodstream. And our body does a lot to guard that. Right? We’re supposed to have a hundred trillion good bacteria and then feeding it with, you know, 50 grams of fiber a day. But who does that now? Right? Nobody. And that’s why we’re so ill. We’re struggling.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:30:32]:
Yeah. So larazotide is the first peptide. And then if people are open, we stack on a bunch of others, like some or others. But those are optional, but I would highly recommend a couple cycles. Yeah. So if they don’t have contraindications, I really love the human growth hormone secret dogs because we’re building muscle and every time we are building muscle, we’re also building a better gut lining over time. But people who are insulin resistant, really, really, you know, inflamed, they’re not they’re not gonna necessarily tolerate the the human growth hormone secretods. They have to bring their insulin resistance down.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:31:03]:
So then we’ll stack a GLP one first and wait for the inflammation to get better and then and and lower the pathogens in the gut, regrow the anti inflammatory probiotics first, and then we’ll add that on. But if people can, it will, like, miraculously also heal help heal the gut. And I’m not sure if there’s really data for it, but whenever we’re gaining six pack abs, burning body fat, we’re generally healing the gut as well too, which is what happens with tesamorelin, you know, stack with, you know, ipamorelin or stack with samorelin. We’ll just, you know, instantly see muscle muscle growth. So So the other anti inflammatory peptides, there’s two versions I do. One are nasal. So we talk about oxytocin nasal, but I also do c like nasal. And I drop a vial, yeah, five or ten milligrams KPV in the nasal vial, and that is hugely healing for the sinuses.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:31:52]:
Our sinuses are the gateway to the gut. Everything in the sinuses is huge massive surface area. If we don’t heal the sinuses, they’re all gonna drip through post nasal drip back into the gut, And it’s really literally gonna ruin the perfect gut that someone created, literally, because they’re all connected. And for women, it’s very important to also focus on the vagina. You know, lungs are important too, as well as skin. You know. So for nasally, we have people inoculate a little bit of probiotic just to the nasal if, you know, they’re open to it just a couple times a month. Yeah.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:32:25]:
But c lank, nasal heals the gut. There’s studies for healing, peptic ulcer and other things as well as improving the brain for anxiety and mood and depression. So it’s a really great combo. Anything that heals the brain and raises EDNF tends to help the gut as well as you know and heal the gut.

Nick Urban [00:32:43]:
What about this one I have right here in front of me, which is c max?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:32:46]:
C okay. So the other peptide, they can rotate between the two or layer both is c max instead of c max. And c max is slightly different, but still also, in parallel, it’s actually really great for healing the gut as well as healing healing the brain and raising BDNF. So BDNF is brain derived neurotrophic factor. Anywhere where we’re kinda getting better brain, we’re getting a better gut.

Nick Urban [00:33:09]:
Yeah. That bi directional communication between the two.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:33:13]:
Yeah. Exactly. So then peptide wise, of course, we can go both oral and sub q, injection with oral BPC and injection BPC. The only caveat is if someone has mass cell issues and their histamines are super high, we don’t do PPC. They’ll just tank. They’ll get depressed. Yeah. They’ll they’ll ruin their lives, so don’t do that.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:33:34]:
Yeah. It’s it’s sad. It’s it’s, it’s amazing how many people have mold and lime and other histamine related problems until their gut gets better. So we usually see a turnaround within two months usually, then we can start to add in a little bit of BPC. But it’s it’s really a big work to fix the immune system, and lorazotide is a big helper for that as well as detoxing what the biotoxins are, Whether it’s plastics or heavy metals or mold, whatever. You have to get you have to move it.

Nick Urban [00:34:00]:
Yeah. How prevalent would you say SIBO or SIFO or lime or mold are in the population?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:34:08]:
I’m honestly I think it’s like everybody. Any kind of help for chronic conditions. Anyone who’s unhappy, anyone who’s dealing with any kind of skin or premature aging issue or long haul. Long haul is definitely all that. Long haul to me is like mold and line.

Nick Urban [00:34:24]:
I think before any stack to heal the gut, we gotta start by removing the things that are destroying the gut in the first place. That goes without saying. But, like, the antibiotics, if we’re able to not use them and find other alternatives that are safe and approved by our doctor, and then also the medications that can interfere with the gut that aren’t necessarily antibiotics. And then there’s, like, obviously, the foods, the chemical additives, environmental toxins that we’re exposed to, a lot of different things. You wanna start by not introducing more of the things that are breaking down the gut and the gut barrier.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:34:57]:
Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. There is a bit of a elimination diet to start because there’s the stickiest dietary pep proteins out there, gluten, dairy, casein, and nut nut proteins. Sadly, they are pretty sticky. It’s not that they’re bad, you know. Once you heal the gut, you should be able to eat these.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:35:14]:
I mean, I wouldn’t go off the, you know, rockers and, you know, eat like an asshole every day, but, you know, occasionally, like, that’s fine. Yeah. Especially if you take a lot of larazotide, you’re gonna be fine. But I would stack it. So I would, you know, consider oral KPV, oral BPC one fifty seven, oral TB four FragMax. We we all we saw all these at, thegoodinstitute.com. And then, stack the the jab, you know. Do a couple cycles, three to five days a week.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:35:44]:
And depending on the amount of inflammation, you know, I would go with post injury doses, post surgery doses, one milligram each, you know, BPC, TB four. I love TB four. And then because everyone has viral issues, Epstein Barr or cytomegalovirus, a number of viruses including spike, t a t a one’s really, really helpful for people.

Nick Urban [00:36:06]:
Yep. Do you ever stack t a one with l l thirty seven?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:36:10]:
No. L l thirty seven’s really potent. You’re probably aware of that. Yeah. So I’m kinda careful, like, it it can have some side effects just like antibiotics. So unless someone’s on a lot of good probiotics, I’m a little careful. But it is really helpful. I’ve heard of stories.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:36:25]:
I was on a podcast and the host, like, cured his, you know, toe fungus, which normally I would have to do gut protocols and some pulse intermittent antifungal like Focconazole or Itraconazole. And so that’s, like, pretty profound. He just did three hundred micrograms a day. So we’ll do that for some clients, to low lower the load of all the prescriptions and supplements we’re doing. Yeah. But they have to be on a really high dose probiotic. I I believe l o thirty seven is so strong. It’s like Rifaximin.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:36:51]:
You know, you can get into trouble where there’s overgrowths of c diff later. It’s so strong. Yeah. I think it’s great nasally. I think orally, like, it might be okay. Just put one drop, you know, three hundred to five hundred micrograms, like, occasionally. Like, it can lower a load of all the supplements. And we know it’s helpful to preventing COVID and during travel.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:37:11]:
You know, someone wants to have extra prophylaxis with usual, you know, l l thirty seven.

Nick Urban [00:37:16]:
That’s what I’ll do sometimes. I I mean, I don’t I’ve when I travel, sometimes bring, t a one and l l thirty seven with me. If I get the slightest symptom and I can’t afford it, then I’ll I’ll use those, I I mean, a little bit prophylactically.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:37:29]:
Oh, I I think it all. Like, I’m like, handful oral capsule BPC, handful of ProphagMAX. And and I don’t get sick if I do that. Like, if I’m religious and I’ll give it to my friends, I’m like feeding it to them and they don’t get sick either. Like, we’ve we’ve been in crowds of people, like, full on COVID, and we’re the ones that don’t get sick where it works. Like, oral because that’s where the ACE two receptor is, where the virus binds. It’s in the gut. So, I mean, I love meeting people tribally because we get each other’s pheromones, right, the feels, and all the hugs and kisses gives us good bacteria just like our dogs or, you know, pets and things.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:38:05]:
But we also get all the other stuff. Now that includes in the category, you know, SARS CoV two and all the variants.

Nick Urban [00:38:12]:
Taking a step back, the simple thing also, I’d assume that you’re a fan of making sure that your gut is producing enough butyrate because it’s it’s highly protective. Like, what’s your your take on fiber? I’m assuming if someone has an overgrowth of some kind, they might need elimination diet first where you’re actually reducing fiber, but then over the longer term, it’s gonna be protective so you’d titrate back up.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:38:33]:
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. You know, it’s great to do a stool kit initially. I mean, if they wanna do it, but it’s really funny. Some people have a butyrate overgrowth, believe it or not. So it’s all the good stuff in the wrong place, too much of it, and they could be feeding too much sugar or too much whatever, you know, anything, starches. But our goal is to weed seed feed.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:38:53]:
That’s the approach which will bring everything to a normal homeostasis.

Nick Urban [00:38:57]:
So weed weed seed feed.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:38:59]:
Yeah. It’s just the regenerative farming approach. You also need water, sunlight, love, good good nervous system bioregulation with each other and ourselves, meditation. So So when I do sauna, I go, okay. I just wanna die, but I’ll try to meditate, you know, like, you know, get into the state and breath work.

Nick Urban [00:39:17]:
For the weeding phase, are there any things that you find work well that are also safe? And I’ve read that the, like, bacteria and yeast, they mutate very rapidly. So you don’t wanna use the same ingredient for long periods of time because they adapt to it and then it no longer is effective. And it makes more sense to rotate. What are your thoughts?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:39:40]:
Yes. Parasites get very, you know, GRD and all the single cells particularly yeah. They get they get resistant really quick. So that’s why antibiotics are the worst. Yeah. But I do use certain prescription, anti parasitics, and it’s good to rotate them because there is some resistant patterns that develop. Same with, yeast and candida mold. If you pound them too hard every day, they will develop huge patterns of resistance.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:40:07]:
So I do as low dose as possible, pulse intermittent, like once a week or twice a week at mouse, and then always do botanicals. By doing botanicals, you’re introducing three to five different other chemicals at a low enough dose where you’re preventing resistance patterns, and that helps the the the parasite, like, they don’t they don’t get pushed to be selective toward the worst, you know, types. Yeah. So a lot of clients come to us, you know, they’ve got high amount of clostridium. May not be difficile, but it’s probably stuck in there somewhere. What study shows they don’t if there’s okay. The amount of bifolongum is inversely proportional to how much clostridium is there. Yeah.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:40:46]:
So the way we combat any pathogen, whether it’s clostridium or not, is to get the long amount. And that’s a challenge. You know, I check it every month, and we don’t always see it coming up. But it is just below detection. So, you know, what our past cases have shown is, you know, like, you just stick with it. You know, every month, it’ll be a hundredfold increase or a thousandfold. But this is coming from point o o o o o o 1% of the gut. So, you know, it’s really coming from way behind, but it will get there.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:41:16]:
It will eventually get there. You just have to keep kinda working toward that. So there’s also a point, you know, the more sick someone is or the more leaky the gut is, you know, it might take longer. Instead of two to four weeks, you’re just generally how it might be. You know, it might be two or four months, and then they’ll be like, oh, okay. I finally feel like I made the turnaround. Because there’s a certain amount of toxin biotoxins to unload and detox, and you can’t do it immediately. You have to kinda protect everything at first.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:41:38]:
It’s just kinda like asbestos. You know, you wouldn’t go in and just rip it out while the dog and the family are still in the house. Right? You have to kinda, like, prep prep everything. Because as it’s coming out, it’s gonna, like, cause a lot of damage or potential damage. Right? Same thing with the toxins inside us. Our bodies do like you said, there’s a feedback loop, and our body does a good job because it doesn’t wanna die. It will sequester toxins to a place that’s safe. Right? It might be our own.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:42:06]:
It might be soft tissue somewhere. And so when they’re coming out, like through sweat or running, movement, where we want the protection there. You wanna take binders, some IVD, sulfur based things. There’s a lot of different ways to detox. And I I do prefer some of the prescription ones as well, well, colostomy and colostomy because we have so many fast soluble toxins now. It’s not safe to even lose weight unless you kinda take one into consideration. Right? There’s studies higher higher on cause mortality for people who lose weight. That’s like crazy.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:42:39]:
But that’s because they’re suddenly now, you know, releasing all these fat soluble toxins without the protection in place. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:42:46]:
What’s tricky there is if I was losing weight, I might take the binders initially, but then after a certain point, it’s like, is this necessary? Is this doing something? Is it also just absorbing and rendering the other things I’m using useless? Of course, you have to space it away from food and supplements and everything. But then it becomes it becomes very complicated, like, if you eat close to your workout and you take a binder so that you you bind the things that you’re breaking down and mobilizing into your blood serum Totally. Then what?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:43:18]:
Right. We’ve seen too the second we add in the binders, you know, their thyroid and testosterone and all their hormones start coming down. It’s because it’s being bound up. I mean, but it’s a good thing. You just have to titrate the doses up until you get the homeostasis you want. It’s not forever. You’re not doing it forever. Yeah.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:43:35]:
I will caution people too. Don’t do sauna unless you’re taking some binders pre and post. Because I was trying it, I was like getting lazy, I didn’t take my binders, and I started to feel like shit. And then second I took the binders again, everything cleared. So I think it happens for a lot of people, especially if you have different genetic mutation types like, you know, glutathione snips or sip one b one snips or m a o b or m a o a, you know, you just don’t detox certain things or estrogens and fats the same as other normal people.

Nick Urban [00:44:05]:
It probably depends on your total toxin load before you go into the sauna protocol as well.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:44:11]:
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:44:12]:
Do you do much genetic testing? Because even when you’re, like, say, using sulfur if you’re adding sulfur compounds or foods into the diet, some people are very sensitive to those, and they actually feel terrible in even though it’s an important cofactor for a phase of detoxification. How do you approach that?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:44:27]:
Well, it’s also biome. You know, there’s a lot of sulfur making bacteria, desulfo, sulfa, vibrio. Yeah. And there’s many others, you know, because they use the bacteria is so amazing. They’re cross eating, cross feeding each other all the time. Sulfur is actually a food for some of them. Yeah. So they’re producing it for each other to feed each other during meals.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:44:48]:
Oh, yeah. You’re right. Like, if someone’s really intolerant of garlic and onions and leeks and MSM and or even glutathione or Epsom salt baths, which is a high sulfur, form, You’re looking at probably yeah. Their gut’s super messed up. They stink. They have sulfur making bacteria, and then the net amount of sulfur is going up, up, up, not negative or neutral. But they could have CBS snips. Do you look at that? Yeah.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:45:15]:
I mean, it’s it’s possible. But usually, they also have mold and muscle problems and a whole bunch of other things, like maybe even glucose six phosphate deficiency. You know, they’ll they’ll have issues. So then I’m really careful where the sulfur source is, you know. Let’s just reserve it for glutathione and NAC and acetylcysteine, like, only reserve it for that and limit the sulfur until they feel better. They should eventually, at some point, be able to eat normal, feel normal, and take higher doses of glutathione at some point. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:45:44]:
It obviously gets very complicated when you’re trying to mitigate some of the potential issues genetically and then lifestyle wise, then dietarily, and then a lot of this is gonna be transient based on the state of their gut. So it takes a lot of rejiggering of the variables to make sure that the program works for them for the long term.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:46:03]:
Yeah. And and it’s all, like, evolving. You know, every month, hopefully, they’re changing their DNA with the peptides and what they’re doing in lifestyles. It’s what is true one month is definitely gonna be not true the next. Yeah. That’s the wonderful thing. You know, one meal, one one fiber shake, you know, one one dose of probiotic, we’re we’re changing our DNA. That’s how, you know, amazing and powerful our bodies are.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:46:26]:
And it wants to shift. We just have to give it the right information and read those signs, hopefully. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:46:32]:
Are there like, say a top five list of probiotic strains that you think are the most helpful? And of course, probiotics need to have prebiotics with them so they have their food to munch on.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:46:44]:
Yeah. Like okay. Well, you know, we I love our probiotic, species, but we also added in others for biodiversity. You know, we start with this. It’s seven species, with Bifobacterium longum, lactus Bifobacterium infantis, as well as a couple of lactobacilli that are for body fat and mental. They’re, psychobiotics like lactobacillus remnosus, lactobacillus gasseri. And I love these because they have five out of seven are obsolete degraders. So I mentioned a lot about Okay.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:47:14]:
Conditions and, you know, why why our lymph gets all stuck and we can’t detox. It’s the oscillates from mold and candida and yeast overgrowth. And we can melt them down, just by taking this. Eventually, you know, usually in forty eight weeks, our women who have PCOS or cysts, they’re gone. The cysts are gone. We’re not even adding in enzymes even. But if you add in enzymes, it might be a lot faster. Like, systemic enzymes like nattokinase, sorapatidase, or kinase.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:47:40]:
So these are awesome, and this is a great place to start for foundation because these should make up 5% of the whole gut microbiome. One to 5%. And then as these grow, Akkermansia will bloom if it’s low. The problem is Akkermansia, studies show it has allies. If bifidobacteria lactis is not enough or bifidobacteria infantis is not enough, it doesn’t go anywhere. My friends aren’t here, I’m not gonna play, and it won’t grow. And if you don’t have acromancy, you really can’t heal the gut, so you need to eventually get it in there. And it eats mucus, it eats all the oligosaccharides FODMAPs.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:48:14]:
So HMOS and XOS or psy psyllium, which is arabinoxylan OS oligosaccharide and inulin. So then I like to bio diversify. So we still provide called Equilibrium. Recently they just changed formulation, but these are more found in fermented foods, natural fermented foods. So these are histamine making. Ours is histamine free. These are Spain strains are really good and safe. They’re SIBO safe.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:48:39]:
And his for mast cell, they’re a lot safer. Usually, our mast cell people, when they take just a few pinches and they’re, like, titrating titrating slowly, usually about eight to twelve weeks later, they’ll say, oh my gosh, Grace. I have much less histamines. So these are really important because they lower the net amount of histamines. And that’s the key to heal mold and anything, plastics or, co infections of the gut and body. We wanna get a normal histamine. We don’t wanna get rid of histamine. It’s a very important signaling molecule.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:49:13]:
We need it, but we don’t want excessive amounts. So these take over, and they lower the TMAO producers. TMAO producers are all great histamines. They’re the putrefying bacteria found in, like, putrefying fish or putrefying meat. So it’s a it’s a balance. Right? And so to add biodiversity, I love equilibrium. These are more like fermented foods. And then when people can, it’s really great if they eat fermented foods, like, once or twice a week or a couple times a week or daily.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:49:40]:
And then the fiber shake, 30, you know, eventually build up, start at three or five grams, then eventually go to ten, twenty grams, then twenty, thirty, 40, 50 grams of fiber a day is really nice.

Nick Urban [00:49:50]:
A day, but broken up, not 50 grams of fiber all at once.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:49:53]:
Well, some people can hack it, you know, if you drink a lot of water. Yeah. But hopefully diet takes care of a lot. Like, I don’t really cook or, you know, I’m kinda lame with my dietary fiber. So I like to eat, like, thirty, forty grams of fiber in a shake, and then eat some whole grains, like, whole brown rice or lentils and beans, you know, to make up for the rest. Because just half a cup one third of a cup of lentils or beans can’t do as much as 12 grams of fiber.

Nick Urban [00:50:19]:
Yeah. Exactly. I mean, foods tend to be a lot lower in fiber than we’d like in terms of, like, getting the total amount up, but, like, the legumes are good. Like, really the best sources by a long shot and then, like, other stuff comes after that.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:50:32]:
Tolerate beans in the beginning. They won’t even go to hear it. But little do they know, like, if they soak their beans and make it overnight themselves, put a little pinch of our probiotic, the lactobacilli will make the beans and the fiber there more bioavailable. Even the even the protein becomes more digestible and bioavailable, little pop of probiotic. And then, if they take probiotics like ours, within a week or two, they should be able to digest starches again, whether it’s beans or, things other than just cassava. You know, I have some clients that are just only eating cassava. I’m like, oh my god. You have to go on to eventually some, you know, regular starches at some point because you, you know, you’re limiting your gut.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:51:12]:
It just won’t there’s a there’s a ceiling, you know. Yeah. It’s a whole world of biodiversity that can be opened up.

Nick Urban [00:51:20]:
Yeah. It also seems like the right probiotics can do a lot of what enzymes can do. Yes. Do you ever stack

Dr. Grace Liu [00:51:28]:
There’s 10,000,000 genes here in our hundred trillion bacteria, which is a hundred to 200 times more than our chromosomes, our DNA. So they have all the genes to make and break down foods, make our neurotransmitters like serotonin. No wonder so many people are mean or crazy or narcissistic, like, there’s just, you know, like, so many things broken in their brain.

Nick Urban [00:51:51]:
Yeah. There’s a whole class of probiotics called psychobiotics too. Yes.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:51:55]:
Yeah. So we have the biggest in here, the remnos l remnosis and b lumb. These are, like, the most biggest category in the psychobiotic field. We don’t have the same strains, but they’re all they’re not unique. They’re just they’re all it’s all part of the species.

Nick Urban [00:52:11]:
Do you like the spore biotics?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:52:14]:
Yes. So our microbiome Mojo has two novel, spore probiotics out here. They’re novel to the human human, the Western world here in USA. It’s a it’s a bicillus, megaterium and bicillus pumilus. And they both make b vitamins, interestingly. Mhmm. Kinda like yeast, especially b two riboflavin. I I found I I would track my oats and I was always low in it.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:52:40]:
So I’ll take even, like, five or 10 of these. We gradually people build up. And spore products are great. We do need some. We don’t wanna overdo it or anything, but certainly, you know, two, five billion or 10,000,000,000 a day easily shouldn’t be a problem for most people. We, spell sell a lot of megaspore. They’re amazing.

Nick Urban [00:53:01]:
And the advantage people listening in of spore probiotics is that they last a lot longer in the body. Is that the main difference?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:53:09]:
I don’t know if there’s really data on that. They are associated with increasing bifol longum, interestingly. Everything’s associated with bifol longum. That’s the best track record. Like, whether an FMT works or not, you know, it depends on if bifel longum and akkermansia regrow. Whether someone gets over a clostridium difficile or they get colonized or not. It depends on how much bifel longum is in the gut. But spore probiotics are associated with benefits on other keystone flora, which is so amazing.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:53:38]:
You know? I think they make exopolysaccharides, the spore probiotics, like this bacillus species on the outside of their, coat. So it has bifida longum and many others. And these possibly are the sugars for other bacteria to survive between meals. Yeah. The exopolysaccharides are sugar coating, but not, you know, no sugar carb content for us. It’s just for other bacteria to eat. They’re very, you know, gentle in that way and benevolent. And, you know, they’re they’re a they’re a ecosystem together.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:54:09]:
Yeah. So biodiversity is really important. There’s pendulum. I wouldn’t necessarily give someone acromancia. I didn’t really find too much clinical success, but I do like some of their species. You can also get Clostridium butyricum, which is what they they have in some of their you can buy separately like AOR three is a really good probiotic with, enterococcus probiotics as well as clostridium a good clostridium butyricum, which makes butyrate. And there are many other ones. In Europe and Canada, there’s E.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:54:36]:
Coli Nissl strain. E. Coli nissle nineteen seventeen, which is really great. It was one of our first probiotics in Europe, that first developed, outside of yogurt yogurt strains. So there are there are ways to really expand our biodiversity. A lot of it comes down to what we’re eating. You know, different rainbow colors of our meals, are ideal. And if people eat, meat, hopefully, all all different kinds of seafood and meats that have different nutrient profiles that our gut gut loves.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:55:08]:
Like, our bacteroides in the gut should be thirty, forty, 50 percent of the gut, the good ones, and they make, you know, really good searching fatty acids for us. They love they’re omnivorous. They love protein and fats, unlike, you know, these carb eaters. So we want you want we want the full spectrum.

Nick Urban [00:55:26]:
Mhmm. What is the code that comes after the at the very end of the probiotic name? So say, lactobacillus reuteri nineteen seventeen or whatever that is.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:55:38]:
Those are designated identifiers usually by patented, you know, labs. Well, it could be from patents, but also labs the way they, work it out. But that was old school, and now we have DNA match markers. So now it’s all really different. Even my I haven’t updated the names, but now there’s, like, other fancier names. I haven’t I haven’t quite updated at all, you know, because nobody knows these, you know. It’ll take another ten years, you know, before they hit the this nomenclature, you know. Because we now know so much because we’re looking at functional genomics, what they’re what they’re doing, what the genes are doing.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:56:15]:
And then it doesn’t even matter necessarily what the species is because they all trade. They have sex with bacteria, have conjugate sex with one another, and they’re trading like little plasmids of DNA. And then some of these even get incorporated into their own chromosomes. So it may not even really matter what the species are, but what they’re doing, you know. We get can get different functionality. And I’m not really into the GMO, genetically altering the bacteria. There are a couple brands out there because they’re trademarked and they’re GMO. But we don’t know, like, very that much if they proliferate, you know, without without checks in place.

Nick Urban [00:56:51]:
You’ve mentioned diversity a number of times. What’s your opinion on long term carnivore or any diet that restricts food groups like that?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:57:04]:
Yeah. I mean, I’ve looked at these, some of the guts of people who loved carnivore, and it’s really interesting. You know, they’ll usually have a lot of mold overgrowth. Yeah. And they don’t know how to detox the mold or, you know, going down that path is often difficult and hard. You know, it’s it’s not an easy path. And it’s long. It’s not fun.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:57:23]:
Yeah. There’s a, you know, a lot of detox involved. And, they don’t tolerate generally spinach or kale or oxalate containing greens. And and if if we look at oxalates, you know, they’re really usually high in their system when we look at organic acid testing. So the kids look at the root issue, you know, did they used to eat all these foods and had no problem? Well, then it’s really not genetic, right, or ethnicity or ancestral. Right? Yeah. It’s it’s a consequence of their ecosystem internally, their terrain.

Nick Urban [00:57:54]:
Yeah. I saw one carnivore influencer saying, like, showing of a study. I didn’t look at the study, but it was comparing the gut diversity of someone on carnivore eating only meat to someone eating omnivorously, plants and animals. And, apparently, the according to the influencer, the carnivore diet had a greater bacterial diversity. Have you seen that?

Dr. Grace Liu [00:58:22]:
I haven’t seen that. But I I used to have really high bacterial diversity, but also I was really sick. I had diversity of pathogens and abundant pathogens. So no. Like, you have to look at, okay, what’s considered symbiont and how beneficial benefit, you know, beneficial versus kind of a known human pathogen. Right? Mold is kind of a known human pathogen. And not not a lot of these testing will look at it. You have to do special testing and you have to propagate.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:58:49]:
Most people have, like, special genetic snips. They hold on to fat soluble toxins. You have to really push these out before you do a test because they won’t they won’t show and you’ll you’ll think, oh, I’m fine. No. There’s no possible way you’re fine. Yeah. One of the first signs I had of mold toxicity was I my vision would go wonky when I had spinach or kale raw, especially with, like, black tea. Yeah.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:59:12]:
Or if I had chicory tea. I hate chicory now because because it’s so high in ocelots. And then paired it with, like, corn, tortillas or corn, whatever. Obviously, it was, like, at a restaurant, so it wasn’t it was, like, GMO up to wazoo. But the corn has it’s really high in arginine, and it was depleting my ysine. And then I’d have, like, viral stuff, you know, like, and that’s like, that was, like, one of the first signs of illness. And if I eat too asshole yay, if I do that again, it’ll kinda come back. You know, my eyes will get you know, that’s one of our visual contrast testing we do, VCS testing for mold or any toxin.

Dr. Grace Liu [00:59:50]:
You know, our eyes are really good litmus of of, you know, showing on the radar, like, toxins because it’s a neural tissue and it’s really sensitive, fragile. But we can we can check it on there. Yeah. So it’d be interesting if carnivores passed that visual test. I bet they would. Yeah.

Nick Urban [01:00:09]:
Yeah. And it makes sense, like, you don’t gravitate towards a diet that’ll make you feel better because of the issues.

Dr. Grace Liu [01:00:15]:
I can’t argue that. They feel better on that. Yeah. I can I can do it for a while, but you’re gonna trash your adrenals? That’s the one they may not be paying to and then they’re all on tea therapy, TRT. Well, you want TRT when you’re 30 years old? Come on. Like, maybe you have a little too much LPS and gram negative, lipopolysaccharide, from leaky gut, from mold and SIBO and parasites. Yeah. And a lot of raw raw meat will have parasites even if it’s grass fed, organic, and pasture raised.

Dr. Grace Liu [01:00:50]:
The pasture is full of parasites, and they’re This is why horses, they eat hay, but they’re constantly getting parasite treatments every year. Yeah. Our horses, dogs get better treatment than humans pretty well.

Nick Urban [01:01:01]:
LPS is a fascinating topic, and I’ve seen some interesting research about what it does to the body and the blood brain barrier and all kinds of things.

Dr. Grace Liu [01:01:12]:
Yeah. Enterobacter close a, we can see it on the vi VITRAC, 16 s toolkit. Enterobacter is a terrible class of, like, very pathogenic gram negatives that make LPS. Enterobacter cloacae, the LPS is 10,000 times more toxic in increasing CRP and other inflammatory markers in humans than other gram negatives that are considered symbionts in the human gut. Yeah. So certain species are way more fatal than others. And when when we are able to weed them out, studies show, there’s this research I followed, Zheng Li Ping from China. He, he had a case where someone had a high amount of enterobactericulosine, was very morbidly overweight.

Dr. Grace Liu [01:01:54]:
And when they gave the gut microbiome, to rats, they died instantly. Or like, you know, one out of five died instantly. And others were sick, overweight, became overweight. When they, they gave an antibiotic, I think. It it lowered the enterobacter close a to low levels or undetectable. And then the guy actually lost weight. Yeah. Well, he’s also really into botanicals, so his studies are really interesting.

Dr. Grace Liu [01:02:16]:
And he uses a lot of oligosaccharide fat fiber to heal whole grains and botanicals.

Nick Urban [01:02:22]:
Yeah. I think LPS is one of the reasons that people tend to do really poorly with carbohydrates. And you address LPS, and then people can tolerate carbohydrates much better.

Dr. Grace Liu [01:02:33]:
Yeah. They have overgrowth of pathogens. These pathogens are Citrobacter, klebsiella, and a whole bunch of E. Coli, Enterobacter, gram negatives, proteobacteria, and yeast. They all eat sugar and simple carbs. Yeah. So it’s no wonder they these flora crave it and they hijack their brain satiety messages. Their GLP ones are, like, all the whole pathway is really off.

Dr. Grace Liu [01:02:58]:
This is why I love, like, a low micro dose of tirzepatide or semaglutide for people. So you show it helps heal the gut. We don’t have too many microbiome studies, but it does show there’s, like, a blooming of good flora when people are in GLP bonds. I think mostly it’s just like, it’s more of a fasting effect. You know, they’re eating less. But there is anti inflammatory effects just on those or high dose. Yeah. There’s just reduction in global inflammation.

Dr. Grace Liu [01:03:20]:
Even healing, eighty three percent improved mortality if someone had COVID. You know, those using GLP ones going into the hospital versus those not. Eighty percent risk reduction of death. That’s pretty yeah.

Nick Urban [01:03:33]:
That is. Because that also has an effect on insulin sensitivity and other things as well.

Dr. Grace Liu [01:03:38]:
They still end up in the hospital with COVID, but, yeah, it’s global. They’re Yeah. Probably antimicrobial.

Nick Urban [01:03:44]:
Yeah. That makes sense.

Dr. Grace Liu [01:03:44]:
It may boost the immune system. Our natural killer cells there’s a couple of studies that show it boosts natural killer cells. I bet it improves neutrophils, you know. We need we need everything when things get broken. When the leak gets leaky, everything’s broken.

Nick Urban [01:03:57]:
Yes. Exactly. I would love to see more analogs that don’t have a one week long half life or whatever it is because it’s it it lasts so much longer than natural GLP one, which is like a couple minutes. It’d be nice to it’d be nice you get what you could, like, take an oral GLP one that would last, like, a day. And that way, it doesn’t impair your, like, resting heart rate, your HRV, your recovery metrics, any of that stuff.

Dr. Grace Liu [01:04:18]:
Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean, both of these drugs, they’ve been tampered with, you know, so that they do have motifs from the Gaila dragon who only eats four times a year. It only eats once a quarter. So he has a really high level. And so they tweaked it to make it, but the homology is like 94, 90 five 90 five percent homologous to human GLP products. We don’t have autoimmune problems with it, you know.

Dr. Grace Liu [01:04:42]:
The original guylomonster, drug, Bietta, it had huge amounts of anaphylaxis after people used it for a while. You know, they’re diabetic airplane. And now you give them something foreign, inject it into them, like, of course, like, causes huge problems. But not not so much with some of the gluteitis. That’s what makes them so so safe almost, you know. Yeah.

Nick Urban [01:05:02]:
Well, Grace, this has been a blast. We’ve covered so much ground. I have a lot of notes to take for this episode. If people are interested in checking out your work, your website, following you on social media, how do they get a hold of you?

Dr. Grace Liu [01:05:14]:
Absolutely. They can come to our website, thegutinstitute.com, and we sell all kinds of peptides there. And we have, peptide consults. And at this time, we have a circle, a forum, on an encrypted site, for anyone interested in fat loss and and lean mass growth, and GLP ones or whether they use GLP ones or not. We have, twice a month, group group support that I run and give a lot of hacks and, you know, ways to beat this if they want to. So it’s all on our website.

Nick Urban [01:05:45]:
Beautiful. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. If people have made it this far, any parting words of wisdom you wanna leave them with?

Dr. Grace Liu [01:05:53]:
I think tending to our oxytocin is always gonna yield a lot. So any natural ways that people have for, raising it and loving one another more, I think is just good for everybody and good for everyone around them, good for you and I, good for the world and their gut flora. Most likely, and very much their gut flora.

Nick Urban [01:06:14]:
Well, that’s the perfect note. Doctor Grace Luth, thanks for joining the podcast today.

Dr. Grace Liu [01:06:19]:
Thank you so much for having me, Nick. It was super fun.

Nick Urban [01:06:21]:
Thank you for tuning in to this episode. Head over to Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave a rating. Every review helps me bring you thought provoking guests. As always, you can find the show notes for this one at mindbodypeak.comslash, and then the number of the episode. There, you can also chat with other peak performers or connect with me directly. The information depicted in this podcast is for information purposes only. Please consult your primary health care professional before making any lifestyle changes.