COVID-19 Files: Ep. 6.0

Welcome, everyone. It is now time for COVID Episode 6.0. We have an incredible special guest this time, of course, I'm Eric Rieger with your host, Dr. Kenneth Brown. But today, we have Aubrey Levitt. She is the CEO of Postbiotics Plus. She's very much into research and an incredible entrepreneur certainly knows a lot of the people in the scientific community that have inspired Ken and I to dig deeper to look further. Without further ado, Ken would you like to say hello to Aubrey, and we'll get started.

So you can imagine my excitement when I found somebody that was discussing postbiotics also. So Aubrey, thank you so much for coming in. Eric, do we have any...we need to shout out to our sponsors real quick? 

No, we don't have to do that. We just did that. You're all you're all here.

So Aubrey Levitt. Oh my goodness. This is so cool. I felt like I was alone on an island discussing post biotics and then I have this little routine. I'm a very routine type person. I like to work out and go to the sauna. And I do a little mindfulness meditation. And then I just kind of scroll for the last little 10 minutes on podcasts and I just typed in postbiotics and I couldn't believe it. The CEO of postbiotics plus I'm like, not only does she know about it, she's an entrepreneur. She's smart. And she's got like, and then I went to your website, I'm like, she's got like six PhDs working for her like, holy cow, we have got to track this woman down. So I apologize that I stalked you. But thank you so much for coming on the show.

No I was so happy about that. It's so nice to have somebody else on this island with me. Yeah, we put our stake in the ground like postbiotics and then echoes for a couple years, just looking back but no, it's very...

So we're calling this COVID episode 6.0 because although we're gonna talk about the microbiome I want to let you in on something that you're doing. So congratulations to you and your desire to go through science first, hire these PhDs make something effective because you're going to change the world like I believe that we're helping to change the world. A article just came out this month, discussing the gut, the actual title is this gut microbiota and COVID-19 possible link and implications. And then another one just came out that said a comprehensive review on the effect of plant metabolites on Coronavirus. Plant metabolites means postbiotics and then somebody that we will get you in contact with is a PhD that we're working with her name is Silvia Molino, she did it to get her PhD. Her postdoctoral study is so cool. She actually looked at invitro digestion and fermentation of stable polyphenols. So she was able to do an in and of course, invitro means in a lab. So she was able to show the postbiotic effect once through digestion and then once the microbiome comes in contact with it. Absolutely brilliant and so cool. So COVID you're making a difference!

Yeah. All across the board. No, yeah, I just want to say that one of the things that started this fascination for me was you just look at fermented foods, right, which are full of postbiotics and how much of a role they have played in every culture. And we may not have known why in the past, but when we're looking through the lens of the microbiome, we can see maybe a deeper into what's happening here. You know, I know people know probiotics and they know prebiotics of fiber. But when the probiotics eat the prebiotics, then this magic happens. And that's what's also happening in your gut, right if you have all those elements working.

Yeah, totally.

And I think why and what I've seen also why it directly relates to COVID is, you know, people are getting are at risk for secondary infections. And also people are getting antibiotics and whatnot. And that directly destroys the microbiome as we know, which leaves them vulnerable to being populated by whatever's there. And, and weakens them.

If I'm knowing that kind of research and listening to the PhDs while y'all are constructing the studies, and or the clinical trials to find out what is actually going to work. What are some of the endpoint measures that you that some of your PhDs are examining? Is it because they're looking for what the bacteria will do with the things that you present like postbiotics, as you mentioned before, and how do you measure that, is it like short chain fatty acid stuff or what...

We were looking specifically at one thing and just diversity overall, so we were looking at a point of injury. So the one because we wanted to kind of pare it down to. Okay, we know, we're researching the microbiome, and we're looking all these various things, but it's a complex ecosystem, right. And the one thing we do know is that when there is a lot of diversity that always correlates with health. And so we really pared it back to that of okay, but in our modern lifestyle, we have many, many things that affect that diversity and really, you know, strip it. So we looked at antibiotics first in our first study to say antibiotics is one of the harshest things that wipe out gut diversity and leave us susceptible in this window afterwards to either an opportunistic, you know, pathogen taking over or maybe just not recovering to the diversity that we had before. And so we did a study our initial study was to look at these antibiotics because think about it, also, people are coming in for maybe a sinusitis. So having their gut wiped out is a, you know, side effect that is not intended. It's a consequence that's not intended. So we gave them a fermented herbal product, which is full of postbiotics, because essentially, we put probiotic bacteria with the herbal components and it's breaking them down with we gave them that with some live probiotics as well. And we had a control group and we we took their stool samples to see if we are protecting their diversity. So right when they got the treatment, and then you know, all throughout the treatment and 10 days after, and we saw Yeah, so the endpoint was gut diversity is looking to see if the ecosystem was intact.

I couldn't agree more and Brown we've talked about this in the past. And of course, we've seen this in the hospital. Oftentimes when people are given really powerful antibiotics and they come to the hospital. Unfortunately, the end result is often c diff, and it's exactly what it does. It goes through it wipes out all of the bacteria we and it tears down all c diff is all that's left in incredible diarrhea which persists forever so that you're certainly speaking 

I think that bringing up c diff is probably the most extreme version of lack of diversity because you wipe out everything but one particular bacteria that then populates so it's almost like having a neighborhood where only one family dominates and they decide what happens well c-diff kills people. It's very serious. I'm a huge as a, as a gastroenterologist, I reluctantly ever try to put anybody on antibiotics and I see So my research was in bacterial overgrowth SIBO, which is, which is a consequence of antibiotics all the time. My classic patient would be somebody that said, I got a sinusitis just like you said, five years ago, took this big round of antibiotics and I've never been right since. And that's that's the patient comes to me as a gastroenterologist.

Yeah. And I was that patient because when I was a kid, I had antibiotics probably every week for years and then I had to go in and have two weeks straight of antibiotics, because I punctured a lung. And so they put you on IV antibiotics. And you know, ever since then it was just sort of this imbalance that couldn't get. I couldn't figure out how to right. And I didn't even know because that was sort of so early on. It was just this uphill battle that I wasn't aware of. So that was one of the things behind of like, you know, I could do everything perfect, but t...