Adapted from episode 58 of The Perfect Stool podcast and edited for readability.
Lindsey:
So you want to start by just telling us all a bit about your gut health journey and what brought you to found healthygut.com?
Steven Wright:
Yeah, love to. First, I just want to say that I love the name of your podcast and what you’re doing here. I think we need a lot more levity. We need to bring levity and seriousness to this work. So thank you for doing what you’re doing here. And I love the name of your podcast. So, I feel like some people identify with me, which is I’m a “from birther”, or I had a birth defect that caused intestinal issues, right from the start. And other people are what I would call trigger people. They, they have some sort of life event, they go to Mexico or something, and then everything changes. So, I’m a from birther. And then of course, things just compounded with dermatologists prescribing four years of antibiotics, animal house college experience, and then a high stress consulting job at a big four accounting firm. I sort of realized along the way that I wasn’t normal. When I talked to other people, I wasn’t normal. But at that job, I actually got called to my boss’s office and told that I was stinking up the place and that I was probably going to lose my job if I didn’t fix my gut. And, of course, I knew this. Every meal that I ate, I would bloat up so bad that I would cry softly in my cubicle. I tried chicken breast and salad and I tried beer and burgers, nothing really worked. I saw a bunch of Western medical doctors in Chicago. And basically, they told me that I have a family history of IBS. And that I should suck it up, essentially.
Lindsey:
Can I ask what the birth defect was that that gave you gut issues?
Steven Wright:
So I was born with a hydrocele hernia, which is where the ball sack doesn’t necessarily close. And you can get a bunch of the abdominal cavity kind of stuck in the layers there. They didn’t catch it. And so I was in pain from zero weeks to 12 weeks, and my mom kept asking for someone to take a look at me. And they just kept telling her that she’s a new mommy, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. And then at 12 weeks, I had only gained one pound. So, I was now in the failure to thrive category. Luckily, finally, someone gave me a manual exam, they found the hydrocele, and they gave me an antiemetic drug to help me basically keep food down because I was literally spitting up everything.
So yeah, it’s been a long journey that, you know, I don’t wish it on anyone. And I do know that people have had it much worse than me. When Western medicine said, “there’s not much we can do for you, if you’re not eating your whole grains, we can’t help you,” That’s when I just got really mad. I thought, well, I earned a degree in problem solving. Electrical engineering, this is my college degree. You can’t touch electricity, you can’t really see it. It’s this thing that’s in a box, and you just have to monitor inputs and outputs.
And I was just really angry, up all night having diarrhea, and I was like, “the body’s no different.” I can figure this out. I just have to find mentors and people who have helped problems that I have, and then I’m going to reverse engineer this. That kind of launched me on this different trajectory of my life in which I changed my diet and immediately started seeing improvements and gaining confidence. And then, writing about it because I was so angry that I wasn’t given any other options. You know, this was 2009. The internet was nothing like it is today; we don’t have amazing podcasts like this one. So yeah, that kind of kicked off Healthy Gut and then as I fixed one thing or got partial benefit, it just kept driving me down the rabbit hole deeper to be like, well, why does my skin still react? Why do I have mental health struggles? Why am I still overweight? And that’s how you spend $400,000 in like 12 years
Lindsey:
I see that you trained under Daniel Kalish. He’s one of my mentors as well, so I’m curious how you thought that training was.
Steven Wright:
I thought it was amazing. I really appreciate Dan’s work and models. I think he produces some of the best clinicians out there versus IFM and some of the other functional medicine schools. I think it’s mostly because he’s really good at some simple things that a lot of other schools make really complex. I’m not saying that the Kalish Institute is the place if you have super complex issues or gene-related things, but for basic and some really solid protocols that work on 90% of people? I think he knocked it out of the park. He’s got the, you know, 20-40 years of experience to back that up.
Lindsey:
Yeah, I just finished his amino acids and B vitamins course, and we even had a webinar with Richard Lord.
Steven Wright:
Oh, man, he is so smart.
Lindsey:
Yeah! I’m still trying to work my way through the text materials from Laboratory Guides to Health for the relevant chapters. And it is definitely more of a reference guide than a novel.
Steven Wright:
I bet that guy’s IQ is off the charts.
Lindsey:
Anyway, at least when I tell people, “this is the recommendation that Richard Lord, who invented the test and wrote the textbook for it, says,” I feel pretty confident that I’m making a good recommendation.
Steven Wright:
Totally!
Lindsey:
Okay, wow, that must have been a super awkward conversation when your boss had to complain about your gas. Was that a long time coming? Until like the entire office was about to mutiny.
Steven Wright:
Yeah, I mean, I guess so. It was super uncomfortable and embarrassing for me. I have plenty of other embarrassing stories about commuter buses and being locked in certain places where I’ve had issues. I think what’s true is that the majority of us who have a chronic health issue who break out of the pharmaceutical model, we have an emotional breaking point. Where the pain gets so strong there’s an opportunity for a new paradigm to come through, and that was one of the biggest ones in my life. I’ve had multiple, but that was a big one. I don’t think he enjoyed it. I didn’t enjoy being the stinky guy. That’s not what I want to be.
Lindsey:
So looking back on it, do you think it was hydrogen sulfide SIBO? Or what do you say you had?
Steven Wright:
Well, I have positive stool tests from within a year of that. A positive stool test for Candida, and I immediately responded to the specific carbohydrate diet. Obviously, I was not absorbing or malbsorbing all the carbohydrate groups or FODMAP groups, or both of them. I had low stomach acid, because betaine HCl supplementation just almost immediately changed my life.
Lindsey:
You just had a whole messed up gut.
Steven Wright:
Yeah, heah, I had all kinds of things. I had a history of head injuries. I had leaky gut, couldn’t eat any dairy. Taking dairy out allowed me to smell again. I just thought you walk through life congested, I didn’t know any different. I was in a bad place with a host of things. I didn’t see a functional medicine provider until years later. Had I seen someone that graduated from the Kailash Institute and they did an Organic Acids panel, a GI test and, some basic blood chemistry; it would have been two hours’ worth of material there.
Lindsey:
I’m curious, did you settle then on digestive enzymes, betaine HCl and butyrate as the three products to heal the gut.
Steven Wright:
I don’t know that those are the only three, I just want to start with that. But I think they’re really core to gut healing. It started from my experiences. On one hand, I think I have this brilliance, but this brilliance comes with a downside. I believe every claim, I believe every miracle. You tell me about açaí juice, I’m going to buy some açaí juice. You tell me about some jungle herbs, I’m going to try it. That’s me. It started when I was buying MLMs with my first $20 when I was 13 years old. I just believe everything, therefore I fall for everything. But I’ve done it hundreds and hundreds and probably thousands of times now. I take recommendations very seriously, because of how much I’ve been burned. I’ve tried all the latest stuff on myself. One of the things I ended up realizing is that this idea that it’s just prebiotics, or probiotics or things like that, it’s not working! You have a certain class of people who react to them, and right off the bat they can’t even process them. So that drove me back to my engineering principles. What are the first principles? Well, the first principles is, if you eat it and you cannot absorb it or break it down, it is toxic to you. It doesn’t matter how “good” it is. It just kept driving me nuts. Why are there so many SIBO recurrences? Why are there so many lifelong gut people? It drove me back to the naturopathic principles of terrain. I guess, with this new engineering model of building an ecosystem that is super uninhabitable for the things that we don’t want, we have to determine what the prerequisites to that ecosystem are. One of the prerequisites is great stomach acid. Another prerequisite is proper enzymes at all three levels; at the pancreatic, brush border and microbiome. Another prerequisite is short chain fatty acid production, especially butyrate. It seemed like as I looked at the marketplace over the last 10 years that no one was focused on these boring things that have been around for 30-40 years. They’re really focused on the new exciting probiotics, which I also am excited about. So I decided if no one’s innovating, I’m going to go innovate on this. To build the best products for creating the great ecosystem, you need to have a great gut.
Lindsey:
You mentioned that you don’t think those are the only things. Do you think that most people would maybe need a round of antimicrobials or two, if they have SIBO or Candida prior to using the products that you have?
Steven Wright:
Definitely need them, not prior to but in combination with. In my opinion, we want the body’s defense mechanisms up and working when we use antimicrobials of any type, whether it’s antibiotics or herbal. I think that’s one of Kalish’s principles that he drove home for me in my class. If you just keep throwing antimicrobials at the body, but the body’s defense mechanisms never support you in that process, why would you be surprised if the infection comes back? It’s going to come back. And so I think they’re in conjunction with a program that needs to happen for that person.
Lindsey:
Okay. So are you familiar with Lucy Mailing? I interviewed her in Episode 25, and she wrote a great article summarizing the whole gut oxygen dysbiosis hypothesis.
Steven Wright:
Yeah, yep.
Lindsey:
Okay, so I tend to think of butyrate as a stool hardener. I’m assuming that it’s related to making the gut more hypoxic or less hospitable to facultative anaerobes, like proteobacteria, and increasing the anaerobic bacteria, as a consequence of it becoming more oxygen free. Those anaerobic bacteria tend to be butyrate producers. So in theory, I think that it should turn things around to take butyrate for a while. And then ultimately, you have more of this anaerobic bacteria that sort of supports itself. Because of that, I feel like I should be able to get off butyrate. But each time I go off it, I regret it. And I have to go back on it to keep up with my podcast namesake of the perfect stool. I do have a reputation to keep up. Do you find that after being on butyrate for some time that people can wean off it and stay in good health? Or is it something you’re finding that people need to stay on for life at some dose?
Steven Wright:
Number one, I think the oxygen hypothesis is so fascinating. There’s one study now on mice involving butyrate and antibiotics and how, basically all the probiotic studies taking probiotics with antibiotics to recover from microbiome have failed. The one butyrate study has so far been a success. So I hope they do more of that, because I think the oxygen hypothesis-
Lindsey:
Oh, I’m not familiar with that one.
Steven Wright:
It’s really cool. I think the oxygen hypothesis that you and Lucy talked about is really, really fascinating. And I cannot wait for more work on that. I do think it’s going to end up holding out because again, it’s setting up the conditions for a healthy microbiome. That’s what we want. Now personally, I don’t know if these are “lifelong supplements,” I highly doubt it. I’m going to be working over the next five to ten years to make sure that we have a roadmap for someone like yourself who wants to bridge off of a butyrate product or tributyrin product on to maybe prebiotic, probiotics, fruits and vegetables, whatever your belief is or what you need for the perfect stool.
There’s a few things that could be holding people on a butyrate supplement. One, is the microbiome actually recovering? For instance, when you’re on the supportive crutch of a butyrate supplement, can you introduce higher and higher loads of specialty prebiotics that are known to increase butyrate producers? And then maybe after three months of that, could you bridge off of it slowly? With that higher prebiotic load that would be one possibility and also coupling that with probiotics. That’s the hypothesis I have on how to get people from a tributyrin or butyrate product bridged off onto something else. I think the other thing that’s fascinating that kind of works counterintuitive to that, or maybe not counterintuitive, but butyrate is a lot like magnesium in that. Basically wherever researchers look, they find butyrate acting systemically. And so if we’ve been depleted for long time due to dysbiosis. For myself, my whole life I’ve had messed up short chain fatty acid production. There might be a nutrient deficiency that has to be filled systemically before it’s time to get off. And again, total hypothesis, but these are the things that I think about, late at night when I can’t sleep.
Lindsey:
Do you know of special prebiotics for butyrate producers?
Steven Wright:
There’s several studies out there. Research is kind of new, but they’re typically really, really brightly colored fruit. So certain types of grapes, pomegranate, cranberries, green kiwi fruit. I’m missing another one or two, but in general, really brightly colored fruits seem to be preferential. Also, lacto rhamnosus GG, LGG, is one of the most popular longest standing probiotics. There is one or two studies on that increasing the butyrate producers.
Lindsey:
I’m always on so many different things, because people are sending me free products to try and I’ve got new theories I want to try out myself. And I have that on my list of things to try next when I’m done with the current thing, because you can only take so many pills in a day, you know. That’s good to know, though. I mean, at least I can certainly think about including more of those foods in my diet. On another podcast, I heard you talking about butyrate for constipated people, not just people with soft stools, or diarrhea. And I found that surprising! As I was saying, when I tend to ramp up the butyrate, I’ll get to the point where I start getting rabbit pellets, and then I’ll back off. That usually does the trick of getting back to more of a perfect stool. I’m curious about using it and the dosing and the mechanism of action that you’re using when somebody is constipated.
Steven Wright:
This is also something that is going to take me another six to twelve months to really wrap my head around. At this point in time, there’s been a few human studies showing that in constipated people, you have low butyrate production. And there’s been one intervention trial, I believe, with sodium butyrate 300 milligrams once or twice per day, I can’t remember off the top of my head, but I believe it, I would assume it’s once per day. In that trial, only a certain percentage of those people got help. But in general, their pain and bloating went down. What I’ve seen in practice with our Tributyrin *, which is a totally different compound, and we can get into the specifics of that later, is that I believe there’s something around constipated people in this sort of oxygen microbiome hypothesis. And I don’t know what exactly would be happening over eight to twelve weeks. But what we’ve been seeing is that people who have been extremely dependent on laxatives of all types, if we can get them to take the Tributyrin-X* once every three days for about a month, and then they go to every other day, somewhere between eight and twelve weeks, a seismic shift tends to happen inside of their GI environment such that they are tolerating new foods, they’re going every day. It’s really weird. There’s an unlocking that happens. And I’m assuming or hypothesizing that it’s creating a shift in the GI tract, probably in the microbiome, such that it maybe gets that oxygen balance right, finally. But you have to go so slow, like you said, because the number one side effect or really the only side effect of butyrate supplementation is you can slow the motility down too much.
Lindsey:
I think of butyrate as an intervention for the large intestine because it feeds the cells lining the large intestine. I’m curious about why you don’t have a product with l-glutamine to feed and heal the small intestine?
Steven Wright:
I’m not against l-glutamine at all. In fact, I wrote a really long blog post on it many years ago; it’s been helpful for myself and for many others. I think, unfortunately, too many people out there are under dosing it, you know, most of the studies suggest 30 to 80 grams is what you really need to be at to see some benefit.
Lindsey:
30 to 80 grams a day?
Steven Wright:
Yes.
Lindsey:
Wow. That’s pretty hefty.
Steven Wright:
It is from the functional medicine perspective, but not if you look at it from a bodybuilding or a burn unit perspective. So if you want to be on l-glutamine for the rest of your life, then you can take it at three grams a day or two grams a day. But if you want to have a quick intervention for someone who has small intestine issues, or leaky gut issues, and they don’t convert it… the other thing with glutamine is that some percentage of people, I don’t know if it’s 10%, or 20%, seems like it’s going to follow the 80/20 principle. That’s my observation. But some people preferentially convert it right to glutamate, and it causes all kinds of neurological issues. I don’t know how to screen for those people based on a test or symptoms at this point in time, maybe you do. But because of that, I don’t like it when you get people in that state of mind where they’re ready to invest as much money as it takes and emotionally change their life. And then you give them something; they have a big adverse reaction from just one scoop. So, I’m not against l-glutamine in any capacity. It’s just that butyrate to me seems better tolerated and has just as profound impact. Used in combo, they could be amazing. I haven’t even done it yet.
Lindsey:
Okay, so why do you think that so many people need supplemental stomach acid? Shouldn’t we as a species have what we need to digest our food if we’re in good health, and we’re eating a healthy diet?
Steven Wright:
That’s if we don’t take into effect aging. The thing that people are often overlooking is that, for instance, ovaries and testes are literally going into organ failure. Potentially the stomach is too. So there’s been a really cool paper that came out showing that in 90% of people over the age of 60, they don’t necessarily lose their ability to produce stomach acid when they test it without any food or in a fasted state. But they seem to really lose their ability to regulate and produce stomach acid after the introduction of food or some sort of nutrient. That ability to acidify and then re-acidify the stomach tends to really drop as we age. I don’t know if you’re stressed but I’m very stressed. I struggle to make sense of the world today; there’s a lot going on. And when we’re in a sympathetic state, we can’t make as much stomach acid because we need to be in the parasympathetic state to actually produce that stomach acid. So I think between the increased use of technology and stress, and then just general aging, I think we’re often overlooking those two really important principles.
Lindsey:
And so with your betaine HCl product, I noticed that it had an intrinsic factor in it, which is what we need to digest vitamin B12. I was intrigued because I had, at one point, gotten the diagnosis of pernicious anemia, which means I had some autoimmunity against the cells in the stomach that produce intrinsic factor, although my latest test was actually negative. But at the time, I couldn’t digest B12. And I had to either get injections or take sublingual pills. When I saw the intrinsic factor in there, I thought, that’s genius. Because by doing that, you’re basically saving someone one more pill to take, or at least covering your bases for the digestion of B12 just in case somebody has undiagnosed antibodies. So I’m curious how you came to decide to put that in there, and what kind of customer feedback you’ve gotten.
Steven Wright:
Well, it basically just came from exactly what you said, honestly. I didn’t really want to start a supplement company. I mean, I love supplements, I told you earlier I buy every miracle pill out there. But I thought the world needed something different from me. There’s already 1000s of supplement companies out there, but I had been wanting an intrinsic factor HCl product for six or seven years now and none of the big name practitioner-grade supplement companies would build it. I would tell them at conferences, “hey, what do you think about adding intrinsic factor,” but I guess it’s just not a product that people wanted to innovate on. So that’s part of what I want Healthy Gut to do; take some things that just biologically make sense. We know that the intrinsic factor may be low if we have to replace stomach acid, kind of like including pepsin in there. That was just what I thought is supposed to happen biologically, and then there appears to be a difference. I would say that the number one thing that practitioners report to me about HCl Guard*, is that it’s working better than anything they’ve ever tried. They’re not sure exactly why but in general, people report using two to three less capsules than whatever other brand they’re using. And they actually get the results, such as regulated motility, less burping, less gas, less heartburn and different symptoms that would suggest that your stomach acid is regulated.
Lindsey:
And do you recommend people take it in the same way that a typical HCl challenge would go?
Steven Wright:
Same way, same ramp up dosage, starting with one pill. One other big misconception is that everyone’s always trying to find burning or some sort of uncomfortableness and I’ve observed that 20 to 30% of people never really feel that. What they do feel is loose stools or some sort of speed up in their symptoms. I would encourage people to try to find their dose, whether they use a different product or our product. You do need to find that ideal dosage because one pill too much or one pill too little from any brand, and you’re really not getting the perfect change in your ecosystem that you’re hoping to.
Lindsey:
Okay, what’s the dosage of one pill of your Betaine HCl?
Steven Wright:
We have 550 milligrams of Betaine HCL in our pills, 30 milligrams I believe of pepsin, 15 milligrams of intrinsic factor, we have the organic ginger at 100 milligrams and DGL at 50 milligrams.
Lindsey:
Why the ginger?
Steven Wright:
Well, the other thing that kind of annoyed me is that one of the biggest drivers of peristalsis is your stomach acid, the pH of the food as it moves through the body, that’s a huge signal. It seems like in today’s world, that prokinetic usage and prokinetic support has just gone through the roof. I was trying to think about that, and I think it’s related to the stomach acid issue. But I also bet that the cells are getting a little weaker in there, and maybe even forgetting how hard to contract. There could be so many factors, I mean, who knows, it could just be low thyroid; there’s a lot of variables that could be at play there. But with the up-regulation of prokinetic use, it just seemed natural to me to use a strong prokinetic like organic ginger in the formulation to help people get their GI tract regulated. Also, ginger has a long history of use for anti-inflammatory possibilities, healing the gut lining and all those types of things. So to me, it was just a natural herb to add in there. There was a study done with ginger extract for producing a peristaltic wave, so it is backed up by studies in humans, which is the other thing that I really try to do.
Lindsey:
Speaking of prokinetics, that’s my current fascination since I have now had a positive IBSsmart test* for the anti-vinculin antibodies. I’m on a mission to discover the best prokinetics, do you have any experience with this?
Steven Wright:
I’ve never tried any other prescription prokinetics. I’ve tried many of the supplemental forms; you’ll probably be more up on it than me. 5-HTP, and the amino acids can be really, really helpful for brain related things and mood related things. But I’ve never really seen them do much for prokinetic related issues. I’d be curious to hear from you what you’re excited about?
Lindsey:
Well, I’m trying Iberogast right now. It’s hard to say if it’s going well, it’s one of these things where you have these issues and they come and go. I think those of us who have these kinds of either inborn errors or acquired problems, in my case, food poisoning, that we may likely always be off and it’s always going to be sort of an ongoing battle. I haven’t tried any prescription ones. I’m working to try and find a gastroenterologist who will actually listen to me and not blow me off and try and get me to a colonoscopy like my last one. Anyway, the digestive enzymes that you produce, is the theory behind that, that if you’re digesting more while everything’s in the stomach and small intestine with the help of those enzymes, even if they aren’t deficient, that the less you’ll send on to bacteria that will then overgrow in your gut and ferment the food?
Steven Wright:
Yeah, that’s one of the big issues. If you want to have a healthy microbiome, we have to send it the right types of food particles and the right sizes for it to ferment. Then the other thing is, we don’t want the wrong size food particles or food in general sitting around in the small intestine, which I think is driving a lot of the SIBO, Candida, SIFO, all these different sorts of overgrowth in the small intestine. I think one of them is just mal-absorbing food due to poor enzyme production, release or activation. So Holozymes*is my answer to all of these carbohydrate malabsorption issues with FODMAPS, as well as just the generalized issue that people have with stomach acid. I think, potentially, if you have any inflammation from the SIBO/SIFO/etc., you’re in this loop where you have inflammation probably shutting off your brush border enzyme release at some level, or inhibiting it at some level. How do you dig yourself out of that spiral where it just gets worse and worse? I think Holozymes can be a solid intervention for that type of situation.
Lindsey:
Can you just elaborate a little bit on the different types of enzymes, I think that might be helpful to people?
Steven Wright:
Going from top to bottom is the best way to visualize it. But there’s a little amylase in your saliva. There’s pepsin in your stomach, a super important proteolytic enzyme. The three most important enzymes for digestion, in my opinion, are the pancreatic enzymes, which are protease, lipase and amylase. Protease is protein. Lipase is fat. Amylase is carbohydrates. That’s coming in at the top of your small intestine from your pancreas. Then you have at the brush border, the villi In the crypts area. They’re releasing brush border enzymes. These are typically things like lactase for lactose absorption. A lot of people “lose” their lactase over time. Who knows if it’s inflammation at the brush border, or if it’s actually happening; you have other ones there like sucrase and maltase. These break down the last bonds of disaccharides, down to monosaccharides. And then in the microbiome, you have all these crazy cool enzymes. And I bet we’ll learn about hundreds more in the next decade. Specific ones that people have probably heard about are things like cellulase, which breaks down the cell wall components of your vegetable and fruit matter. Alphagalactosidase, which break down raffinose, it’s an oligosaccharide part of the FODMAP fructan group that often is found in cruciferous vegetables, beans and lentils. Those traditional “gassy foods,” if you will. If we start going back up the chain, if you have dysbiosis, you might not have the right bacteria classes, or the right enzyme production from those bacteria to break down the last part of your food. This would be the vegetable matter, the fibrous stuff and the prebiotics. In the small intestine if you don’t have your brush border, that’s where you’re going to be really feeding SIBO/SIFO. You’re not going to be able to break down, for instance, sucrose, which is two molecules of monosaccharides combined. You won’t be able to break that down, and that’s going to cause an easy meal for some bacteria. The pancreatic enzymes are the heavy lifters at the top, so they really need to be happening to begin the unfolding of the big complex molecules that we eat.
Lindsey:
Is there any situation in which digestive enzymes might be contraindicated? If you keep on taking them past the point when you really need to, are you in danger of eating up your own stomach wall?
Steven Wright:
If you have active gastritis or if you have active ulcers and you take any enzyme product, ours or anyone’s, and you have pain, then that is contraindicated. Work with your provider to do something to heal your mucous lining and whatever is happening with your gastritis. Beyond that, I don’t believe so. I’ve looked for this; I bought almost every book that’s ever been made, ones that are out of print. I’ve tried, I found every paper I can on this, and I have yet to find anybody with a theory even on what a negative feedback loop would be basically that would turn off our internal production of enzymes, if you take them exogenously. Everyone’s pretty familiar that if, for instance, males take testosterone replacement, it shuts off any internal production of testosterone in a ratio based on how much they’re taking. That sort of feedback loop I have not yet found, and I haven’t found anybody even with a theory on it.
Lindsey:
How about for HCl?
Steven Wright:
I haven’t found that either.
Lindsey:
It’s the opposite, isn’t it? You take it for a bit and eventually your production comes back on?
Steven Wright:
Right, right, that’s what I was going to say. In fact, I’ve experienced that personally. I’ve seen that in our community quite a bit. And people like Dr. Jonathan Wright and Dr. Steven Sandberg-Lewis say that you can typically bridge off of your HCl usage, at some point.
Lindsey:
Yeah, that’s what happened for me. At first when I started taking it, I seemed to need it. And then after a while, I started getting that burning sensation. Now at this point, if I try even one, I get that sensation. I kept thinking I needed it, until I got my negative intrinsic factor and parietal cell antibody test, and now I know I don’t.
Steven Wright:
Well, that’s great. That’s awesome healing.
Lindsey:
Yeah! And what might people see that indicates that they’re not digesting their food well, that they might need digestive enzymes?
Steven Wright:
I do want to touch on my last point on enzyme usage. I, coming from the functional medicine world, thought that I should probably only take two or three or four, and that seemed like a lot to me. Then my fiancée was diagnosed with breast cancer. So we’ve been on a journey for a couple of years. She has no evidence of disease at the moment. She’s recovering very well, but the fight is not over. In our journey through the cancer underworld of medicine, there’s a whole class of cancer doctors who have successfully used high dose systemic enzyme therapy for this and they take like 130 to 160 capsules a day. When I realized that people were dosing enzymes systemically, at 100 times more what functional medicine people were doing, I realized we’ve fallen for a few myths here. I really started to experiment with that and check in with other doctors and practitioners. It does seem like, as the integrative and functional medicine community has been trained, that we might be under dosing. It doesn’t matter what brand you’re using. And if people are not responding, they’ll still continue to have symptoms like undigested food in your toilet or in the stool, oily toilet or experiencing food sensitivities to certain classes of foods. All of these things suggest a lack of ability to break down the food. Gas and bloating are the top symptoms, other than the pieces of food and food sensitivity. That’s kind of the main driver of your inability to break down your food. It is real and it’s live and it’s happening. Now, of course you can run tests like fecal elastase, but as far as I know, there’s no real test for microbiome enzymes, or brush border enzymes. That makes it more, I think, symptom driven, at least at this point in our understanding of testing and the body. And so if people are having those issues, I don’t care what brand you have, double or triple the dose. The safety profile of enzymes in humans seem to be extremely robust.
Lindsey:
Speaking of that, using enzymes on an empty stomach systemically, I’ve done that with the proteolytic enzymes for Hashimoto’s because there was a study around that.
Steven Wright:
Did it help?
Lindsey:
I assume so because my Hashimoto’s is completely reversed. My antibodies are completely negative, or normal.
Steven Wright:
That’s amazing!
Lindsey:
Yeah, it all works!
Steven Wright:
With the Holozymes, there’s been six pilot trials on our product, and the patent behind it, and they were looking at both systemic and digestive use. The dosage was two per meal, and then two before bed, and we routinely get comments around improvements after exercise. Some people can only exercise once a week or twice a week, and they get really, really fatigued, right? Because they’re trying to come back from all these issues. Immediately, their exercise tolerance doubles, or triples, and they can work out every other day. We have people who have joint stiffness and aching, which could be related to things like arthritis or getting old, and they’re moving. They’re walking four or five miles again. Also, things related to gout, pain, and high uric acid pain. Lots of anecdotes, again, this is not treating any of these diseases. This is just anecdotally, when you use the whole enzyme systemically and adjustably. I’m just a huge fan, whether you’re using ours or somebody else’s for systemic enzyme use.
Lindsey:
That’s interesting about the gout because my husband has gout and refuses to take anything or do anything. When he has a flare, he takes the prescription stuff you’re supposed to take, but I should try to get him on that.
Steven Wright:
Yeah, and this is just anecdotal usage. This is not indicative. Our product does not treat gout or any of these things. But I developed high uric acid at 32 after about six or seven years on a paleo, gluten-free style diet. That was five years ago. And I was just mortified, right? Like I’m supposed to be this healthy guy. And I’m trying to set the bar, and here I am hobbling around the house. I tried to suck it up. I tried all kinds of cherry this cherry that, and other stone breaker thingies, anything related to uric acid I could find out there. I got nothing and nowhere and I almost had to give up working out and being out in the mountains, because it would hurt so bad when it was flaring. Then I met the PhD behind whole designs that I partnered with on this formula. He was telling me, “oh, we did these six pilot trials.” Well, two of the pilot trials were on high uric acid and gout patients. And I was like, “okay, give me your miracle pills, buddy.” Basically about 14 days of higher dosing, I did a loading dose, and I have not suffered the big toe issues that I did since. It’s been over three years now.
Lindsey:
Are you talking about taking them on an empty stomach or both with meals and then on an empty stomach?
Steven Wright:
With meals and on an empty stomach. That’s how I use them. So I did a loading dose of six per meal and six before bed for two weeks, and then I cut back. On average now I use three to four per meal, depending on the meal. And I use three to four, depending on the day, before bed.
Lindsey:
Do you find now that you have these few products that are helpful that you can limit yourself to those?
Steven Wright:
Yes and no. I still believe that one of the most important things for aging and for our longevity and for our immune system health is microbiome health. And so I am regularly testing probiotic brands, probiotic strains, I take probiotics on a regular basis and I cycle through all different kinds. I don’t just limit it; every once in a while I throw some immunoglobulins in there, because especially in today’s world we don’t want to catch anything. So I’m hyper vigilant on taking my products and testing out new things. The product lineup at Healthy Gut right now, which is just the HCl Guard, Holozymes and the Tributyrin-X, are the basics. Those are mechanically what a gut needs to do its job and then everything else beyond that is the really fun, fancy stuff. Very exciting stuff. I want both worlds, basically,
Lindsey:
I really liked the Tributyrin-X* because it’s a small, easily swallowable pill. And with three of them, you’re getting 1500 mg. I like Probutyrate too, but it’s only I think 300 per pill. So if you take four, you’re getting 1200. That’s one reason I really like yours and chose to get those, just to take fewer pills at the end of the day and get a higher dose.
Steven Wright:
I’m glad that you’re testing it. Are you noticing a difference at all between the two?
Lindsey:
The impact is roughly the same, but the difference is that I can take one fewer pill. I think that the goal for people who’ve been through these high supplement regimes, as many of my clients have, is to get off of as many pills as possible and get back to just eating food and being able to digest it and live a normal life. I think for some of us, it’s going to be a lifelong battle where you have to take something to help out. If that something is digestive enzymes, that makes sense, because if you’re not fully digesting your food, because you have a tendency to have SIBO and overgrown bacteria that are going to steal some of your nutrients, then it makes sense that perhaps digestive enzymes is the thing that helps you to not have to take the other things.
Steven Wright:
100%. That’s my only thing that I try to tell people. I see people spending thousands of dollars and many, many hours trying to source organic grassfed beef or wild caught salmon or organic vegetables from a local farm. And then they can’t utilize the nutrients from that food. It’s just sad to me, it’s really heartbreaking at some level, because I’ve been trying to optimize every single variable in my diet, only to mal-absorb it. I think enzymes, especially as we age, have this sort of pancreatic theory of aging. I can’t remember the exact term on it. It’s basically that you only have so much pancreatic enzymes, just like you only have so many stem cells. As you age, they’re running out. So I think enzymes as you age should be thought of like magnesium or vitamin D. It’s what you need to be healthy in today’s world. We have products like butyrates and tributyrins. Again, if that is a lifelong thing, it’s better than losing a colon or ending up with a worse diagnosis, in my opinion.
Lindsey:
I mean, at the end of the day, if all you have to do is take some digestive enzymes while you eat… I find that three butyrates once a day pretty much does the job for me.
Steven Wright:
That’s awesome. At healthy gut, I really want to support people and their dosing because I know that a lot of people have dosing challenges and most supplement companies really don’t want to talk about that. Whatever the back of the bottle says, may not be true for you. We do know that based on studies and talking with clinicians that around 1000 to 2000 milligrams a day of tributyrin should be where 80% of everybody falls. I personally only need one per day, but when I started I needed three per day. I wouldn’t be surprised if over time, Lindsey, you reduce down and need less. We have some people who haven’t had a formed stool their entire life. They’ve tried almost everything, and they use you know, four butyrates three times per day. And they’re finally having regulated, perfect stools. It’s very dependent upon the person, genetics, epigenetics and the environment.
Lindsey:
Are you seeing butyrate useful with people with ulcerative colitis?
Steven Wright:
We have some amazing testimonials from people with ulcerative colitis. I think one of our most famous was a father who during the pandemic, his wife got pregnant. You got a pandemic happening and your wife gets unexpectedly pregnant. That’s very surprising and awesome, but also very stressful. He already had IBD and was just on the verge of being out of a UC flare. He was super super concerned. He bought the product and sent us an amazing review. He told us that his prayers had been answered, he’s able to take care of his wife and child and he’s not flaring. That was unheard of for him. I think it’s super exciting for the IBD crowd. Butyrates in general, whether it’s our product or anybody else’s
Lindsey:
Any thoughts about dosing that people should know? I too think the dilemma is that people think, “I get this bottle and in theory it should last me at least a month,” but the reality is it may not. Especially at the beginning, right?
Steven Wright:
Some people are going through a bottle a week and other people are going through a bottle every 90 days. I think the one thing that’s not being talked about in integrative medicine and functional medicine is that you cannot escape statistics. I don’t care how quantum you want to talk, statistically speaking, 34% of the people you see will fall on the long tail of a bell curve. That means they’re either going to need a lot more or less of whatever product. I mean there are studies showing that some people do not respond to vitamin D3 supplementation until you crank it up to like hundreds of thousands of units, which for other people would be potentially a fatal dose if they took it for six months or a year. We actually do a very similar thing for our product as the HCL challenge, which is start low, start slow, especially if you consider yourself a sensitive person. Then, ramp up until you notice things like really good Bristol stool chart poops, your bloating is going down or your reactions change. The number one thing that we see is histamine, mast cells and food sensitivities are the biggest thing beyond stool regulation. So whenever they stop reacting to perfumes, environmental toxins, dogs, foods, all those types of things. I tell them, “you’re really close to your dosage so stay around that dosage, because obviously something important is happening.”
Lindsey:
That’s really good to know because that is an area where I have felt I needed assistance. I just use over the counter allergy pills for this type of histamine reaction, and of course, diet changes, but that’s good to know butyrate is useful in that case, too.
Steven Wright:
Well, it’s got to be an tributyrin product. Sodium butyrate is absorbed extremely fast. Calcium and magnesium butyrates are absorbed extremely fast in the upper GI tract. So you want to get a tributyrin, which is more of a delayed release just because of the compound, it needs lipase to begin to break down. Any tributyrin product from any company, you want to spread it out. The reason why is that you want to spread it out across the mast cells all the way through the GI tract as far as you could go. So if you slowly coat the GI tract from the top of the small intestine down, the farther you can get it, the deeper into the small intestine and potentially even into the large intestine. That’s your ideal delivery zone. But you want these slow release ones so that wherever you have mass cells that are over activated, you’re sort of like putting a nice weighted blanket on them or something to kind of see, you know, calm them down a little bit and regulate them.
Lindsey:
Are you the only tributyrin product or are there others?
Steven Wright:
There’s others! I think the second best product on the market is SunButyrate* by Pure Encapsulations. It’s a liquid. It’s like a blueberry-lemon flavored tributyrin liquid and it’s packaged in a liposomal. All butyrates smell terrible, whether it’s tributyrin or sodium butyrate, but also you have got to protect the tributyrin from the stomach acid. Sun went with a liposomal package that gets about 90% of it through the stomach acid. I think that is what their practitioner handouts say but it might be 92%. What we did is we found an amazing enteric release capsule that’s patent pending right now. Our capsule failure tests are showing zero. Of course if you left them in acid all day they would fail at some point. So it’s not that it’s perfect. We just put a gel cap that is enteric coated rather than gastric resistant. There’s a lot of other capsules out there that are not enteric capsules, they’re gastric resistant. That’s kind of the difference between an iPhone 6 and an iPhone 11. You drop an iPhone 6 in the water and you have a few seconds to get that thing out, but you can drop an iPhone 11 in the water and it’s totally chill, it’s not a big deal.
Lindsey:
I’m surprised there’s a liquid. I wasn’t aware of the liquid tributyrin product, that’s interesting. So you could give that to a child.
Steven Wright:
It’s a great option. There are powdered tributyrin products as well. Now the unfortunate thing is that to powder something, you always have to dry it with something. As far as I know, all the powdered tributyrins are roughly 30% standardization by weight. If you think about that dosing of getting to 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams a day, now you’re talking at like 5000 milligrams to get roughly into that payload range of actual tributyrin delivered. I’m not a huge fan of powdered tributyrins at this point in time in their technology.
Lindsey:
Any further thoughts about the products before we talk about some offers that my listeners can get for buying them?
Steven Wright:
People should be skeptical of everyone that’s coming on and talking about supplements. Be skeptical. That’s why we have a 60-day money back guarantee. That’s why we’re growing slow, because people are skeptical. Could you really make digestive enzymes better? Could you really make HCl products better? Is Tributyrin-X really that much better than a sodium butyrate that’s been studied in 15 plus human studies? The answer is yes, actually, and the benefits are meaningful. We have doctors signing up left and right to be wholesalers. That being said, I know without a doubt from being the sick person who’s tried a lot of things, and with working with a lot of people one on one, that not everything is right for everybody. If you don’t get that dose right, it’s definitely not good for you. We offer that money back guarantee and we offer free health coaching. If you have a dosing issue, you can hop on the phone with one of our health coaches and try to work through it. We still refund around three to five percent of purchases, because at the end of the day, you might just not need it. You might not have low stomach acid, you might not have an enzyme issue or maybe a different brand is better for you. I want to respect people’s time and money. They gave us a shot, and I don’t want to slow them down from healing. You can read more about our products online, and about how we’re different and how we’ve innovated on things. But I think you feel the difference; that’s why people stay with us.
Lindsey:
So they can find you and the things that you sell at healthygut.com?
Steven Wright:
Yeah, but they should go to healthygut.com/perfectstool if they want to support your show and also save $15 and get free U.S. shipping. That’s our main site, but we want to make a perfect stool community offer. Save some money and reduce the risk, and also get free U.S. shipping.
Lindsey:
My understanding is you’ve got a code “perfectstool15” for $15 off. I’ll put those all in the show notes so people can find them easily enough.
Steven Wright:
Again, I tried to do a lot of different things in my brief time on the planet here, but for some reason I just keep getting directed back to supplements. I bought my first supplements off the internet at 13 and my mom was like, “you just got our credit card hacked, and you’re going to die of cancer from that.”
Lindsey:
I think we have the same mom.
Steven Wright:
So I mean, I’ve been using products from all over, all the weird stuff, my entire life. I enjoy it. If I can be the guinea pig, and then back it up with research and trials and good formulations with the smartest PhDs I can find, and then offer the dosing and guarantees that I think a reputable company should offer, I guess that’s what Healthy Gut is. And I’m very excited about the results. I’m most proud about the stories of our users. That’s what gets me excited and keeps me going.
Lindsey:
Thanks so much for sharing all this information with us. I think it’s really useful to think about some of the basics of gut health. I focus a lot on the more complex interventions and these are just your basic digestive function interventions. And that’s what’s important for a lot of people.
Steven Wright:
Yeah, yeah, I hope I can make that sexy again.
Lindsey:
Great. Well, thanks so much for being with us.
If you’re struggling with any type of gut health problem and are ready to get some professional help, you’re welcome to set up a free, 30-minute breakthrough session with me. We’ll talk about what you’ve been going through and I’ll tell you about my gut health coaching 5-appointment program in which I recommend lab tests, educate you on what the results mean and the protocols used by doctors to fix the problems revealed. Or if you’re ready to jump in right away or can just afford one appointment at a time, you can set up an 1-hour consultation with me.
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