Dr. Will Bulsiewicz

And we would prefer to allow the first two to do the work for us.

So we've seen from our own research at Zoe that if you look at the state of the gut microbiome in America, the state of the gut microbiome in the UK, and you were to compare that to, for example, the third world, you see radical differences.

Our gut is not as diverse in the industrialized world.

Actually, in the United States, we're worse off than in the UK.

And that's an entire different conversation.

But the point is that we are dealing with mass scale epidemic dysbiosis.

And when the gut microbiome is not strong, it's not able to do its job, which is to repair and restore the gut barrier.

which leads to a weakened gut barrier that then allows the immune system to become perpetually triggered by things that are sneaking across.

Every doctor who is listening to this episode right now has heard the language, the terms lipopolysaccharide or bacterial endotoxin.

And we hear this and we immediately think,

This is a patient with an infection who's probably going to need to be in the ICU because this is basically the armor that coats bacteria like E. coli.

But it turns out that you can have a low-grade amount of these E. coli or other bacteria covered in this armor, lipopolysaccharide, that gets to sneak across.

It's not supposed to be there.

But because the gut barrier is weak, it gets to sneak across.

And this leads to an ongoing chronic activation of the immune system, which is another way of saying chronic low-grade inflammation.

And so this bacterial endotoxin is basically what the immune system has been trained since before our birth to identify that's the target.

If I see that, I need to take it out.

And so what we need is we need to repair and restore that gut barrier.

Because if we do, we would actually keep that contained within the gut microbiome where it doesn't actually cause any harm, any inflammation, and our good guys are able to suppress it.

The PREDICT studies, of which there are three, are what have set the stage for many of the things that we are discussing here today.