Episode #157: The COMPLETE Guide to Probiotics Featuring Kiran Krishnan!

The Dylan Gemelli Podcast

In Episode #157 of The Dylan Gemelli Podcast, host Dylan Gemelli welcomes Kiran Krishnan, Chief Science Officer at Just Thrive, to deliver a comprehensive guide to probiotics, prebiotics, and postbiotics. The episode

Key takeaways

• A probiotic must be alive, survive the gut environment, and demonstrate a measurable health benefit to qualify as such.
• Prebiotics are complex carbohydrates that feed beneficial bacteria in the large intestine; they can come from food or supplements but precise dosing is key for therapeutic effects.

Main topics

• Probiotics: definition, survival, dosing, health benefits
• Prebiotics: sources, function, supplementation vs. food

Notable quotes

'Without your gut, you really can't achieve really strong outcomes and you can't be there for your family and friends and your career and all of that.' – Kiran Krishnan

Conclusion

This episode establishes foundational knowledge about probiotics, prebiotics, and postbiotics, emphasizing the importance of scientific

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:17) Do you want to know why nothing seems to help you with constant cravings? GLP-1 is the hunger hormone that everyone's talking about. But your gut was designed to make it on its own. However, it needs the right signal. Bitter receptors in your gut and mouth are directly tied to GLP-1 release, and most modern diets are extremely low in bitter foods. And so this natural pathway rarely gets activated. But have no fear, because I found the answer with Just Thrive Digestive Bitters. Just Thrive Digestive Bitters deliver concentrated bitter botanicals that activate receptors in your gut, encouraging your body to produce GLP-1 naturally, supporting healthy digestion, comfortable fullness, and a balanced appetite without any synthetic inputs. No bitter taste required. The bitter receptors that matter most for GLP-1 signaling and digestive support aren't just in your mouth. They line your entire GI tract. So when the capsule dissolves in your gut, the bitter botanicals activate those receptors. Same signal, same response, zero. bitter taste. Right now, Just Thrive is offering my listeners something special. When you start a 90-day Just Thrive probiotic subscription, you'll get a free 90-day supply of their new digestive bitters, and that's a $90 value. So visit justthrivehealth.com slash Dylan to claim your free digestive Speaker 1 (1:37) bitters with your first 90-day probiotic subscription today. All Speaker 2 (1:41) right, everybody, welcome back to the Dylan Gemelli podcast. As you can see, as promised, I have my good friend Karan Krishnan back with me. Now, I pivoted about 20, 30 minutes into our last interview and said, okay, I knew you were brilliant. I knew what you had, but I didn't realize it was this good and this much. So what we decided to do now is do a series where we're going to focus on key components and aspects of everything related to the gut and the gut health. We're going to cover... So many different topics, but we're going to do it very selectively so that everybody gets a true understanding and we're not skipping all over the place and trying to fit in everything we can in an hour to an hour and a half. So today, we're going to focus strictly on probiotics, every single thing that Quran knows about them. We're going to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly, basically, the things that we're seeing out there that people are... getting into trouble with in terms of using what they don't understand or know, survival of the probiotic itself and other types of products you may want to take with your probiotics and which ones you might want to avoid. So we're going to cover all the bases. I've been working extremely close now with Just Thrive and Karan. He's the chief science officer. He is the man over there, but they are so focused on product development and making sure that Everybody is getting taken care of in all aspects. They teach and everything that they produce that Karan has had his hands on is, I mean, nothing short of gold. So Karan, welcome back, my friend. Thanks for joining Speaker 1 (3:22) me today. It is such a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me. And I love the pivot you made because I think ultimately once people listen to the whole series, they're going to know everything they need to know about the gut. in gut health. So I think it's brilliant. It's a great approach and I'm super excited to be part of it. Thank you. Speaker 2 (3:40) Well, I appreciate you taking time to do this with me. I know it's important to you and I'm really focusing on key aspects of health in total and the gut as we know. I mean, that I don't like to say one is the most important, but if I had a tie for first, it would certainly be there. So. Let's break this down first. I want to make this as simple as we can, but still getting deep into the science of it. So can you just say what is a probiotic and what is the difference between a probiotic, a prebiotic, and a postbiotic? Because it's very, very confusing. Speaker 1 (4:14) It is. Yeah, the names are so similar. So a probiotic is defined by the World Health Organization, and this is the universally accepted definition from a scientific perspective. It is a live microorganism when administered to the host in adequate amounts confers a health benefit, which means that a few things, right? So let's break down the definition. The first part is a true probiotic has to be alive and functioning in the living state in the gut. And so if it cannot survive through the gastric system, if it cannot survive past the small bowel from bile acids, pancreatic enzymes, all of the things that tend to kill microbes. and get to the intestines, get to the site of action alive, then it's not classified as a probiotic. The other part of it is that when they say when administered in adequate amounts, meaning that there is a dose dependency to it where there's got to be some studies that show that 1 billion didn't work, but 4 billion does work, right? So there is a effect there that is related. to the dosing of that agent. And then the third part is confers a health benefit to the host. So there has to be a measurable health benefit to the host. So that is a probiotic, a living organism that is shown to have a health benefit to the host. A prebiotic, you can think of that as food for microbes, right? So these are typically complex carbohydrates. In nature, you would find them in fruits and in vegetables and in certain starchy foods, you know, things like cassava and, you know, twice-cooked potato and so on. And you'd find them in all kinds of fruits and vegetables. Prebiotics are complex carbohydrates that cannot be absorbed and broken down by us, the human, which means it passes through the small bowel, enters into the large bowel, and specifically feeds beneficial bacteria. Now, a postbiotic... is a dead bacteria that still has functionality or a component of a bacteria, right? So a number of years ago, so this was probably about 15 to 20 years ago, there was some discoveries being made that, you know what, some microbes, even though they're dead and you specifically kill them, you administer them to the host, they give very similar effects to the live microorganism. And so then they started, you know, researchers started playing around with the idea that maybe there are components on the outer cell structure or outer cell membrane of the microbe that actually does the signaling, that does the work, which means a microbe doesn't have to be alive. And just delivering either the dead microbe or the component of the microbe can create that benefit, right? But the key thing with that is that they tend to be very specific benefits, very specific effects. So all three can be utilized and should be utilized in someone that's really trying to revamp and improve the resilience and the health of their gut. But they play different roles and they are distinguished. Got it. Okay. Speaker 2 (7:10) So before I knew anything, my whole idea when I hear these is. You take a prebiotic before you eat. You take a probiotic either during or sometime during your meal and a post after. Am I completely wrong and off on that? I'm just going by the base of how it sounds. That's what I always thought prior. Speaker 1 (7:30) Yeah, generally that should be fine. You know, in most cases, you don't have to consider timing to be a big issue. Got it. Now, sometimes you do want to take the... postbiotic, which is the dead bacteria or bacterial components, apart from the probiotic, because they could interfere with each other's functionality. Some cases they're synergistic, and that should be the role of the companies, the brands, doing the research and figuring that part out and telling you, okay, you should take it, you know, two hours apart or three hours apart, or, you know, you could take them together. So they should be able to tell you that. Generally, the way you're thinking about it should be fine across the board. Speaker 2 (8:09) Okay. I personally take the prebiotic first thing in the morning. I take the probiotic before my heaviest meal. I don't really take a postbiotic, I guess, per se. I do have a couple questions. One, you said that prebiotic is basically like a complex carbohydrate. So would you recommend supplementing a prebiotic or can you get that through food or how does that work? Because I see some... prebiotic formulas, which I take, you know, with Just Thrive, which I love, and I'm not a big carbohydrate guy as it is. So can you kind of touch on that? Speaker 1 (8:43) Yeah. So I think, you know, most people should get a mix. The benefit of getting prebiotics from food is that you get a little bit more diversity out of the prebiotics, right? So for example, if you eat a banana that's not super ripe, so, you know, or you ate, say, a sweet potato or cassava or kiwis. You know, you're getting prebiotics from all of these, but you're getting five, six, seven different versions of prebiotics. The issue, though, is that the dosing isn't precise, right? So if you're trying to rebuild your gut, you want to know that you're getting the right amount of a prebiotic that is clinically validated to increase the good bacteria, decrease the bad bacteria, increase things like short-chain fatty acids. And so I always think of it as this kind of, you know, dual system where... There are certain things for my gut that I want to be precise about to ensure I'm achieving at least a baseline effect. And then everything else I just want to add in as like this beautiful rainbow of things because the gut loves all the diversity, right? So the way I think about prebiotics is I try to get two to three servings of prebiotics throughout my day from food. But I absolutely take... two to three grams of a prebiotic as a supplement because I know that the precise dosing and I know what the clinical effect of that is, right? So think of the supplementation as like the baseline effect that you need to get. And then everything else is kind of icing on the cake. Something that you said that just kind Speaker 2 (10:14) of popped into my head was about taking the potential interference that you could have with the postbiotic mixing. Now I've seen like three-in-one products and these ones that claim it's a... pre, post, pro, all in one, is that not a good idea? Speaker 1 (10:28) It's absolutely not if they haven't researched it because they often interfere, right? So for example, Just Thrive has a product called Just Calm. That is mostly a postbiotic, right? So it's a bifidobacterium longum. What's interesting about the strain is it is alive in the capsule, but it doesn't have to be alive. for it to confer its function because the function of that strain in terms of lowering anxiety, lowering stress, improving mood. comes from this natural carbohydrate structure that it has on its outer membrane. There's a structure called peptidoglycan, and then they have another carbohydrate layer. They call it like an exopolysaccharide, right? So this exopolysaccharide and the peptidoglycan is what actually gets released from the bacteria and then has this immunological effect to reduce cortisol, reduce stress, and reduce neural inflammation. But that bacteria will work whether it's live or dead, so it's mostly a postbiotic. What's interesting, though, is if you... Mix that with any other probiotic, it knocks out its function. Okay. Right? And so we know that, and that's why we didn't mix it together with the spores. We didn't mix it together with the prebiotic. We sold it separately, and we recommend to people take it a couple hours apart from your other probiotic for that very reason. So I'd say the vast majority of the products on the market that are called synbiotics, right, or they have pre, pro, and this, that, and the other. they're not studying it. They're not testing it to make sure they're compatible. And then they're just not knocking out each other's effect. Speaker 2 (11:59) I want to stay on the probiotic stuff, but I have a question because it dawned on me as you're talking about this, that you've mentioned carbohydrates now multiple times, that they're needed for gut health. So that being said, would you say that going too low a carb can be detrimental to gut health? Because you keep bringing up... carbohydrate in the prebiotic, then in the postbiotic. So my mind is going up. If we're just eliminating carbs, that could have a potential negative effect on the gut. Speaker 1 (12:32) It does. Yeah. And the study is showing this, right? So people that go carnivore long-term and so on, they will have a very negative effect on the gut over time. Got it. The reality is the vast majority of microbes in your gut, the 30, 40 trillion microbes in the gut, their predominant food are carbohydrates and they're plant-based carbohydrates. For the most part, it's fibers and starches and prebiotics. Now, that doesn't mean we need, you know, like processed carbs, right? That's not going to help at all. Any kind of carbohydrate that we