Transcript of Episode 71: Gut Health, Microbiome, and Bacteriophage
With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Warren Phillips and special guest Shayne Morris.
Warren:
Hey, we’re live, Episode 71, got an amazing special guest, actually, and a good friend of ours, Dr. Shayne Morris, with us this morning, and of course, our main expert, Dr. Dan Pompa. We’re really excited. This is a huge topic, a lot of interest, a lot of emails, especially from our female audience, on your gut. We’re going to talk about—throw out some buzz words like microbiome, phage, some big scientific words. Dr. Shayne is a PhD biochemist, so some of those will just squeak out of him, but between the—an interaction between Dr. Pompa and Shayne we’re going to get some great truth on gut health. How to get control of it and how it affects you at the genetic level, all kinds of great things today. If you want to learn about your gut health today, you’ve turned on to the right show. Dr. Shayne, welcome. Dr. Pompa, take a hold of the reins, and let’s get on this topic about gut health today.
Dr. Pompa:
Hey, Shayne, Dr. Shayne, let’s decide right now we’re going to call it phāge or phäge. Now, I think the correct is phāge. However, we’ve always…
Dr. Shayne:
It is, indeed. Phāge is the correct term.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, we always evolve back into phäge, right?
Warren:
I know.
Dr. Pompa:
So we all do that, for sure.
Warren:
Phāge.
Dr. Pompa:
We’ll try to keep ourselves on the phāge word. But anyways, look, this is a topic, Dr. Shayne, that you know a lot about. It’s a topic that interest me some years ago, and just understanding what these little guys are. When we talk about the microbiome, I think everybody knows all the probiotics and all the buzz words there. But what the heck are bacteriophage, Dr. Shayne, and why are they so significant for a healthy gut? And microbiome, and guys, when we throw out that word microbiome, we simply mean all the good bacteria, bad bacteria, fungus, viruses, all of these organisms that live in the gut. That’s the microbiome.
Warren:
Even parasites, right, Dr. Pompa?
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right, even parasites. When that’s healthy, you’re healthy. When that’s healthy, you have a healthy immune system. Your brain works normal, but what the heck are these phage guys all about?
Warren:
You mean phäge, just kidding, phāge.
Dr. Shayne:
These phage guys are pretty amazing. So when you think about bacteria, and yeast, and fungi, they’re very, very small, right? And then when we talk about our overall bacterial load, we carry through our gastrointestinal tract or our gut billions and billions of them. I’ll take it one step smaller. You could literally fit a thousand phage inside of a bacteria. So they’re extremely small, and what we think their job is they’re essentially a virus that keeps the bacterial cultures in check.
And when we think about it, this is both good and bad, right? So Dr. Pompa and Warren, you guys have all experienced through your years of clinical practice dysbiosis, and SIBO, and all these issues where the GI gets a little bit disrupted. For the most part, we usually focus on the pathogens to do that disruption, but in many instances, it’s the good guys growing where they shouldn’t be growing, right? We don’t want good guys in places they shouldn’t be.
Dr. Pompa:
Right.
Dr. Shayne:
So in those instances, we turn to herbs. We turn to diet. We turn to so many amazing things to help us, but a lot of times that leaves us with questions when we can’t quite make it happen with your patients. And so this is an old technology. Bacteriophage have been on the planet as long as we have. They are—like I mentioned, they’re a virus that only attacks bacteria. They’re completely harmless to us, and they’re everywhere. They’re ubiquitous. They’re in every ocean, in every river, in every soil. There’s, literally, trillions of them. There’s more of phage than there are…
Warren:
Oh, no, we just lost Dr. Shayne.
Dr. Pompa:
Well, I saw his reception going in and out.
Warren:
Yeah, I noticed that.
Dr. Pompa:
Well, while we get him back—Warren, you can work on that, but…
Warren:
I wanted to bring this back really quick because there’s something that I was going to ask you, Dr. Pompa, at the beginning of the show, and I think it’s timely and it’d be a reason. It’ll also explain the reason why I haven’t been on the show for a couple weeks. But where do you—where does a human microbiome start?
Dr. Pompa:
From mama, yeah, so Warren just had his new baby, of course, and yeah, so you inherit your microbiome, your good, bad, all these bacteria, bacteriophage that we’re talking about, which are actually these little viruses. But yeah, you inherit that from your mom when you come through your uterus. So if mom has a good microbiome, a good balance of these microorganisms, then guess what, baby does. If mom doesn’t, baby doesn’t. Oh, if baby doesn’t go through the birth canal…
Warren:
That’s what I wanted to bring up, yep.
Dr. Shayne:
Did I lose you guys for a second?
Dr. Pompa:
Anyway, oh, we were just—we segued because we lost you. Yeah, no, we lost you.
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, that was very, very peculiar. Sorry about that.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so we…
Dr. Shayne:
Back to the phage though, the phage are nature’s way of balancing all the bacteria that we live with. How do they do that? Well, phage actually destroy bacteria, and there is a phage for every bacterial species. So of course, we have phage for E. coli, phage for salmonella, phage for staph, phage for Clostridium, and so on and so forth. So the variance is they’re already in you. They’re around you, but what we can do as clinicians, and healers, and scientists is we can say, well, we want to take advantage of these phage, and load them when we need them.
It’s no different than these old stories. You guys may have heard where they take people to rivers, people that have leprosy, and they douse them in a river, and this was back in the 1900's. And then, amazingly, they would heal. Their sores would start healing. Well, since that time, we’ve studied those rivers, like the Ganges, and they have phage that kill leprosy. So they’re just an amazing little virus that kills bacteria, and that is an amazing part of keeping our microbiome healthy.
Warren:
So leprosy is a microbiome issue on the skin?
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, it’s a bacterium that attacks your skin, right? It took us years to figure that out, of course, because we knew about the disease before we looked at the possible issues. However, so what we look at phage as is they are a prebiotic. That’s what we like to refer to them as, as a prebiotic. They allow for the good bacteria to flourish when bacteria want to flourish by allowing the phage to keep the other elements of the terrain under control, if that makes sense?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and Dr. Shayne, I can tell you from a clinical perspective. You spend much of your days in the laboratory. I spend many of my days working with very, very sick people, right? And when the brain doesn’t work, when their gut doesn’t work, obviously, or when they have immune challenges, whether it’s autoimmune with different things, we know that the microbiome, according to studies, affects these things greatly. I mean, the more and more studies come out to show that a balanced bacteria in this gut right here or this brain, because this is actually called the second brain, dramatically affects the way this brain works. We look at people who can’t lose weight. We can actually see certain shifts in that microbiome for the negative, and realize that that’s somebody who’s going to have trouble losing weight, or we have seen people who have certain memory problems, depression, certain psychological problems, and now they’ve correlated certain bacteria down here with this.
Matter of fact, you’ve heard me talk a lot about Stephanie Seneff’s work from MIT, she’s the senior scientist there, showing that glyphosate, a chemical that is ubiquitous in our food supply right now—spraying it on every grain, every conventional grain. I’ve written many articles about it. Well, this chemical destroys certain bacteria in the gut, which we need to make certain neurotransmitters for our brain to work. So I mean, I say all that just to show the people the correlation of why this is such an important topic because so many people today have problems here, and so many people have problems with their immune system, with autoimmune. And this balance of bacteria really plays a role.
So from a clinical perspective, I can tell you, Shayne, throwing more probiotics at the gut hoping for a good result, which we see that in the autism world. We see that in practically every natural practitioner. My gosh, we see it on TV now. Use probiotics for this. Use probiotics for that. Yogurt, everyone’s advertising it. However, I find that often it doesn’t work. Well, why? And what I hear you saying and what I see clinically is that some of these bad guys, like E. coli, which is probably the number one bad guy that keeps your good bacteria from taking root, so there’s practitioners just throwing more and more good bacteria in a form of probiotics down their throat. And yet, the E. coli are just too darn strong, so going in there with a bacteriophage like the product Ec that you created—Warren, I don’t know if you have the product. I do downstairs.
Warren:
I probably do in my cupboard.
Dr. Pompa:
I’ll run down while you guys…
Warren:
Warren’s cupboard, you’ve been there. It has everything.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, and mine too. You’ve been there too. So we have it all.
Warren:
Mine is stacked deep. I want to show Shayne. Just so you know. I keep all my Systemic Formulas just in case I need them.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we’ve ran down with the thing and showed—and they see Systemic everywhere. And by the way, I don’t know if we gave Shayne the proper formal introduction.
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, he did well. Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, but Shayne is the leading biochemist for Systemic Formulas. Hey, look, I use a lot of different products like most of you. We have practitioners watching, and we also have public watching. It’s all over Warren and my cabinets, Systemic Formulas, and for many reasons that we’ve talked about. Shayne, I think you make the finest products in the world. I do. I think that you’re one of the brightest fellows that I know, man, and we have some…
Warren:
With integrity, that’s what I love about you.
Dr. Pompa:
My interest in cellular healing has been years and years. As a matter of fact, Shayne, I’ve talked about you on so many of these shows that most people are like, “Oh, so that’s the guy.” But, I mean, we’ve became kindred brothers talking about the cell. My interest of the cell was a clinical, from a clinical aspect and clinical experience. Your interest was from years of study through your biochemistry, your degree. I mean, we have great talks there. So anyways, that’s more of the introduction.
Dr. Shayne:
There you go. It’s funny that you—when you go back to your clinical side, there’s so many things you talked about that damage the cell, but that also damage the microbiome, right? That damage the bacteria within us, whether it’s the work that you’ve mentioned with Stephanie, the mercury, the heavy metals, the organophosphates, the organochlorides, PCBs. What we should point out is I think many people are getting an understanding that, wow, those things are not good for us. They’re in our diet. They’re in our lifestyles. They’re in our water. But what we can now say, I think, confidently, at least we will be the first people saying it, Dr. Pompa, you and I, is they can also hurt our phage microbiome, right? They can hurt the things that are keeping the bacteria in the prebiotic environment in check.
Dr. Pompa:
Right.
Dr. Shayne:
So they’re very sensitive. When we grow these things and we’ve manufactured, they’re not the toughest guys in the world.
Dr. Pompa:
Right.
Dr. Shayne:
So I wouldn’t be surprised that they’re a little bit of the canary in the coal mine. You hurt your phage dynamic. Now the bacterial dynamic comes out of sorts, and now you have—well, you mentioned, you lead to GI dysfunction. You lead to neurological and immunological where have all these metabolic, all these struggles, but it begins with some of the most amazing little creatures so to speak, our microbiome, right?
Dr. Pompa:
And I think, clinically, that’s what many people are seeing now. It’s not about just adding just, obviously, these popular seven to ten probiotics that you find in your store. I mean, when you have an overgrowth of something as strong as E. coli, these little bacteriophage, they go in there, and they just pick out these bad guys. Literally inject their DNA. I wish we had a picture of one of these. Hey, Warren, I mean, you’ll go on up and pull it because I think our audience would be really…
Warren:
As long as at some point I can show a picture of my daughter I’ll do that for you.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, and actually, I see some pictures of Shayne’s little girls back there behind him. You probably don’t even know they’re back there. Anyways, these little guys inject their DNA, and there’s a few ways that bacteriophage work. But one is by doing that, and then they can actually multiply, and when they kill that organism, that bacteria, they explode. And all these little guys go everywhere. So that’s one way of how they take over, and then guess what they do? They start going after the next bacteria. I mean, this is clever.
Shayne, I mean, listen, this got my interest when I started reading that this is the way that Russia and some of these other Eastern Bloc countries, this is their main form of antibiotics, and there’s a reason for that because here’s why. Number one, it doesn’t kill good bacteria. It specifically kills the bacteria that you’re trying to target. And here’s the other thing. When you give an antibiotic, it only goes so deep, meaning that it gets weaker and weaker as time goes on. So the bacteria only can affect so much in depth, really. But these guys actually get stronger and without ruining the good bacteria so, number one, target specific. Number two, it goes deeper, and number three, it doesn’t wreck the good guys. My gosh, I mean, Dr. Shayne, I have to ask that question. Why in Russia is this the number one antibiotic, and it’s cheap and easy, and yet, here in the United States, we’re not utilizing this absolutely amazing technology?
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, there was really a convenience factor. When they discovered antibiotics, like you said, it goes after everything, wipes out everything.
Dr. Pompa:
Everything.
Dr. Shayne:
And at the turn of the century, 20th century, we were all about what we call infectious disease, right? That was our focus. Get rid of it. Get rid of infectious agents entirely. Well, in Russia, and Georgia, and Ukraine, they, of course, had the same problem, but they stayed on task with the phage. But it was much more a difficult challenge because instead of going after a molecule that you can just shotgun approach it, you have to set up a system to cultivate phage, right? You grow them. You have to find a phage for a particular bacterium. So it’s time consuming. It takes research and thought.
And if you show up in critical care with somebody in Georgia, let’s say, if they don’t have that on hand, they actually can’t help you immediately because they would have to grow what you need. And so that’s why, on the Western side of the world, it was not adopted. Because people weren’t putting the time and energy into making phage that would appeal to most different scenarios, right, so…
Dr. Pompa:
Well, it’s easier just to throw a napalm, and just wipe it all out is what you’re saying.
Dr. Shayne:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. Now let me ask you this. Can a drug company patent a phage and put it in…
Dr. Shayne:
Good question. I don’t know that they can patent them because, as you know, we’ve been using them since 1919 was the first case of using them for a particular condition. So I don’t know that you can patent them, but certainly, there are moments that I think they might try to convert them into drugs because they are amazing things. They don’t—you don’t develop resistance, right? And again, when we return to the idea that they’re specific, they’re natural, right, when we look for phage, we get them out of natural places, like water, like sewer, like our own feces, right? Not to bring that up because I guess some people might gag, but again, they’re everywhere. They’re in us. They’re among us. They’re throughout the planet. And we just go to those places, and we allow them to grow.
Just like you would a ferment, right? When we want bacteria to grow, we create a fermentation, and it’s that simple. So it’s the same concept with phage. So the nice thing is they’re harmless to the things that we don’t want to harm. They’re amazing to re-terrain your microbiome. So they’re essentially a prebiotic, and as a prebiotic, they set the stage for GI health. They’re one of the things to set the stage for GI health, all right? Not unlike fiber. Not unlike other foods that we love to ingest to help build our terrain for our microbiome.
They’re good for—excuse me, skin, skin microbiome. There’s a phage that we’re looking at for skin. So there’s all of these niches that we want to start offering up as a prebiotic to people like yourself, Dr. Pompa.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Warren:
Let’s take a look at some of these guys so we…
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, they’re really cute. You got to see them.
Warren:
Can you see my screen?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Oh, there they are.
Dr. Shayne:
There you go.
Warren:
Oh, why does it keep going away? Can you see it?
Dr. Pompa:
You have to talk.
Warren:
Click to hide or show participants. Present to everyone.
Dr. Pompa:
So Shayne, what—with that [00:18:48]…
Warren:
Oh, there we go.
Dr. Pompa:
Good. It’s holding with me talking. Shayne, why don’t you speak to that little guy right there?
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, so what you see is you see this little—well, it almost looks like a lunar lander, right? And at the very top, you’ve got the capsule that holds all of the DNA for that phage. Then you got the legs, and then you got the little channel. So what the legs do is the legs are what give it its specificity. Every phage has a different set of legs to attach to a different bacteria, and that’s where the specificity comes in, so for the thousands and thousands of bacteria that we care about, there are thousands and thousands of phage that attach to just that bacteria. So it’s fairly amazing.
So the DNA, like Dr. Pompa described, if you look closely, the DNA then, once this bacteria lands—or excuse me, this phage lands on a bacterium, it punctures the bacteria, injects the phage. And why it would do that is because it wants to reproduce. Phage don’t reproduce on their own. They need to reproduce inside the cells of the bacteria. So they inject their DNA. The DNA tells the bacterial cell to make a whole bunch of me. And as it does, it replicates inside the bacteria, and essentially bursts the bacteria. And like you said, there’s now a thousand phage where it started with one.
So this speaks to the idea that it can change the microbiome because the microbiome is essentially a biofilm. And if you can get deeper, and deeper, and deeper—but what happens when you run out of that specific bacteria? That phage simply just washes out of your GI tract into the sewer system because it no longer needs to be there. And then, hopefully, as you move through the rest of your life, and you tackle things like organic foods picked from the earth, and you’re drinking good water, you re-phaging yourself naturally. You go kayaking, and you swim a little bit in lakes and streams, again, your re-phaging yourself naturally. So these things are—they’re amazing, and they’re necessary for us to maintain our health.
Warren:
So when I was—when I go camping and jump into a stream, or like I used to do in Montana all the time, always getting in the water, that was good for my phagome, virome.
Dr. Shayne:
It was good for your phage, yeah. You were phaging.
Dr. Pompa:
I remember I was swimming in this nasty lake the other day, and a big one attached to my head. And the dang thing was kinda—what do you do when that happens?
Warren:
That was your brain. I mean, that was your head, Dan.
Dr. Pompa:
My kid had to rip it off, and the legs were—I mean, it’s just these things can get pretty nasty if you’re in the wrong water.
Dr. Shayne:
It’s good for a Halloween costume, though, Dan.
Warren:
So here’s a picture of a real one, which is pretty cool, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, they really look like that. I mean, you can see. I mean, look above that. I mean, there’s pictures above that one. Those are real shots too. I mean, these things really look like these little Martians.
Warren:
Yeah, right there.
Dr. Shayne:
The other point is you can see how small they are because the cells they’re attaching to are bacteria. And remember, bacteria are, compared to our own cells, extremely small. They’re the size of the mitochondria. So these things are really, really tiny. You can also now see how delicate they would be. Look at the legs. You break a leg, and the guy is out of commission.
Dr. Pompa:
This is—yeah, poor little guy, but I mean, these things, it really is amazing. I think the reason we haven’t seen it in this country is more and more some dollars and cents. Because I think the problem is drug companies making something natural into their own patent. And I think that if there was a way to make money for a drug company, I think we would be using more phage than we are antibiotics. That’s my personal opinion. Yeah, but…
Dr. Shayne:
And when you—your doctors that are watching, they can certainly take a moment after we’re done and do a little search on phage research. And it is a growing trend, even in the United States right now, because they are so amazing. For all the same things we’ve talked about earlier, there are no—remember the shortcomings with whether it’s herbal or drug approaches. These guys, they’re natural. They’re everywhere. So there’s no harm in humans. In fact, there’s very little—there’s a few instances where they’ve found antibodies against them in our bodies, but there’s been no reported issues with people having an allergic reaction, so to speak.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s another thing I love about it. As a practitioner, you don’t have to fear dosing, over dosing, side effects, like that. I mean, sometimes people do get a die off when these suckers go in, and they start wrecking their enemies. Boy, you can get a die off, which we call Herx reaction, and get some mild symptoms from the die off of that particular bacteria. I have to say, you glossed over something. A big problem with people trying to get rid of E. coli and other gut pathogens is that they get into the microbiome, which the microbiome is in all of—I’m sorry, the biofilm. A biofilm is in all of us. It protects our good bacteria. They could pull back into this biofilm, and protect itself from our antibodies and the things in our bodies, even our acids and things.
But the problem is when the bad guys overtake that biofilm. It’s very difficult with herbals, often times, antibiotics, anything that you’re trying to kill with to get into that biofilm. These little guys get in there, right, Shayne?
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, so based on that, again, that description. Where you have one becomes a thousand becomes a million, and they’re only going after their particular, what we call, host. Yeah, they’ll move right through a system of bacteria because they—as they explode one bacteria, they release a thousand more. So they grow exponentially. Everything else, as you mentioned, dilutes, right? It gets diluted as it goes. So it exponentially gets lesser where these exponentially get larger. And then in the end, when they run out of hosts, they move on. They move back into nature, back through the sewer systems.
Just a funny story, the company we’re working with, when we look at different phage, we—the samples we’re collecting, or they collected, I should say, and then we start to study, are mostly sewer system samples from around the world because they are so important—it’s important for us to be looking at the prebiotics that are related to humans, and those prebiotics, of course, are going to be found in the sewer systems because they were at one time in us, right? They were part of our own microbiota around the world. So it’s the best place to look, all right? If we looked in the oceans, it’s—of course, you’re looking for phage food. It would be for every bacterium. The ocean is full of phage. That’s too many. So we focus on the human phage, which tend to be found in human feces, all right, the human skin and so on.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s interesting. I found an article, and they were talking about—and we talked a little bit about fecal microbial transplants. Taking a human sample of bacteria from one person and giving it to another, and it’s lifesaving in the area and, obviously, many other conditions. Literally, there’s certain bacteria in humans, as we’re talking about, and in this case, viruses and other organisms that you just can never put in a pill. Well, these people doing this fecal microbial transplant from one human to another, the article was talking about that they believe that these phage are the reason why these things are so effective. I mean, I believe it could be it’s the phage, it’s this, it’s that, but again, the phage plays such an important role in you, in me, in this person. There’s so many of these phage and so many of these microorganisms that, literally, you put them into someone else.
So it doesn’t surprise me what you said about the sewer system. It’s when people are getting their life saved by a fecal transplant from one human to the next, I’m sure the phage, as in this article stated, play a significant role in why that’s so effective.
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, and I hope that phage stays a part of the natural products world instead of moving out of that world into whether you call it the drug world or what have you because they really are—they’re no different than fiber. They’re no different than other elements of what we need to engage in. Fermented foods, and healthy cooking, and pulling the carrot out of the soil, brushing it off, rinsing it slightly, and then going and eating it because it’s still covered in, well, good soil mind you, covered in bacteria that you want and the prebiotics you need.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah.
Warren:
Yeah, that’s why, when you’re fermenting, you don’t wash your vegetables because, if you do that, you wash off the bacteria you’re looking to culture phage, as well. So that’s why you—un-rinsed organic vegetables is the way to go with fermentation.
Dr. Pompa:
A hundred and eighty degree concept that we are always blowing up, if you will, myth busting, is this whole topic of trying to kill off everything, right? Everyone’s very into—if you go into every school on the planet, there’s always the bottle of Purell, right? There’s always the bottle of, basically, killers that everyone’s putting on their hands constantly, right? I mean, all the time, all the time. And again, we have—that was very popular. Science has really moved away from that in many ways, and yet, it’s still happening. That people really are thinking kill, kill, kill because that was very popular at the turn of the century, and in the public’s eye, it still is. Let’s run from every virus. Let’s run from every bacteria.
On the scientific end, we know that’s impossible. As a matter of fact, the people who don’t get sick have a very good microbiome starting on their skin, starting in their mouths, starting in their ears, their eyes. And they are very comfortable around all types of different bacteria and viruses, and they don’t get sick because their balance is so good. So as you know, the hand sanitizers or the triclosan in every soap that we use, we’re really disturbing that microbiome, our first line of defense, correct?
Dr. Shayne:
That’s right, and you’re probably disturbing your virome, which is, of course, the phage and the other natural viruses on you. So I’m really glad you pointed that out because the killing piece is where people want to naturally go, and I don’t want phage to be thought of as even that, right? They’re there to reset the microbiome terrain. So they’re a prebiotic.
Dr. Pompa:
Right.
Dr. Shayne:
Not a killing tool. Because I think the killing tool, even when we talk about E. coli, E. coli is—many E. coli strains are friendly to us. They absolutely inhabit us, and they become part of the normal microbiota. So even when we look at phage products to work with our terrain, we’re avoiding good E. coli. Just so you know. We’re avoiding good versions of what people have demonized because we need them. It’s really—you made the point brilliantly that we really want to benefit the terrain for the prebiotic. We’re not going after killing or any antibiotic effects because that is the wrong approach.
The hygiene hypothesis, which you mentioned, is where people went too far, and people are chronically ill. And then what happens is it takes you years to get your microbiota back, and as you mentioned earlier today, once that’s dysfunctional, you’re dealing with now physiological problems. Not bacteriological problems, right? Because you’ve destroyed the bacterial issue—or the bacteria that you needed, you now have true physiological issues that were being fed and maintained by the bacteria.
Warren:
So is this is good argument for not bathing, and then is it—so I cannot bath anymore or shower?
Dr. Shayne:
Well, there is an argument to that, yes.
Dr. Pompa:
But you know what? But that’s a good point, right? Yeah, you bathe, and you use just a real good natural soap, which utilizes fatty acids, etc. You’re not knocking down your good bacteria. It’s not going to kill your microbiome off. But when you’re using soaps with triclosan, which are basically, I mean, literally, insecticides, if you will. You can use them as such, even killing herbs. I mean, they’re herbicides for goodness sakes, and they’re putting it in all these soaps. So anytime you see antibacterial on a soap, beware. You’re killing your good guys as well.
But I think this is a really important topic though, Shayne. Because think about what’s happening today. You’d be hard pressed to find a human today that hasn’t been on many rounds of antibiotics. There’s a time and a place. We both would acknowledge that, right? But many rounds of antibiotics for all the wrong reasons, right, whether it’s a simple sore throat that, yeah, they’re giving you antibiotics because they’re worried about strep, or a simple earache, or this and that. I didn’t grow up that way. That’s for darn sure.
But here’s the deal. We’re putting people on antibiotic after antibiotic. They’re using all these hand sanitizers. They’re using antibacterial everything. It’s all around. They’re antibacterialing every surface in their house, and at the top of the show, I made the point that your microbiome affects the way that your brain works. The way, obviously, your gut works and even how your immune system works. We can tie it into almost every process in the body.
So we are disrupting this important thing that shares these bacteria in your gut and on your skin. Share their DNA with your bacteria, with your immune system, with your cells. Even to make cells, to make other cells and other immune cells, and my gosh, I mean, it’s amazing today that—but it’s not. It really gives an explanation of why people have to go from one antibiotic to the next, and this thing, and that thing, and they’re sick all the time. I mean, it’s a microbiome disrupted world.
Dr. Shayne:
It is, and you made a point that you could actually be helping another industry in what you just said. It just occurred to me. Not only are we—we’re becoming more prudent with what goes into our own bodies, right? We’re becoming more prudent about how often we want to engage in an antibiotic. You’re telling your patients don’t engage in it if it’s not critical. However, there’s still a huge source on the planet of antibiotic abuse, and that’s in the animals, right, and in our food supply.
So what you just—you just gave, maybe, someone that is friends with someone that raises cattle on this show that they need to look at the animals’ microbiome, the animals’ phage, maybe phage products they get their hands on, so that they’re not shooting their animals full of things that end up in our food, in our water supply. Because that is now one of the leading sources of antibiotics in the environment is through the animal world that we want to keep in check, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Dr. Shayne:
Probably not intentional but you just gave someone on your show an idea to go out, and work in a different world to help us all out.
Dr. Pompa:
Well, it’s funny because they actually use phage in the animal world. In the sense of you have to have the meat, infection becomes a big problem, right? You have raw meat hanging around. Well, they spray it with phage because it’s harmless to humans, and it kills instantly. Matter of fact, I have to say that, and that leads me into where I wanted to go. One of your latest creations was a salmonella phage. That it should be in every kitchen in America. Explain what it is.
Warren:
Here it is. I have it.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, go ahead.
Warren:
You got it.
Dr. Shayne:
One of the—for the fermenters on the planet, and of course, Dr. Pompa and I both and Warren hang out with a young lady. She’s a fermenting wizard, and whenever we are talking to her, salmonella tends to be an issue with sometimes organic food, food prep areas, and so on. So yeah, what you just said is you could take what Warren just did on a surface, on a plate, or on a dish because it is just a phage. It’s a prebiotic.
Warren:
On your hands, right, you could do?
Dr. Shayne:
On your hands, yeah, oh, he’s even got the…
Warren:
How about my face?
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, it is completely harmless, and it’s…
Warren:
My eyes? Is that fine, my eye virome?
Dr. Shayne:
Well, I don’t know that we’re quite ready for that yet, Warren. That’s not a good idea. But the great thing about that is, you’re right, you can now level the playing field with something like salmonella. Unfortunately salmonella is never really a friendly guy, unlike E. coli. Yeah, so when you talk about food prep and other things, you’ve now got a tool that allows you to—and for those of you that do ferment, it’s challenging but quite exciting. This is the tool in one way. You can use it as a prebiotic. You can use it as a pre-food prebiotic, so to speak.
So what is it? It’s a phage that is—actually, it’s a grouping of phages, just so you know, that is specifically grown to target salmonella, right? So it’s just salmonella. If you’re trying to create a prebiotic environment for, let’s say, staph, this isn’t going to work, right? This is—remember they’re very, very specific, and that’s what makes them brilliant. It also makes them a little bit frustrating for people that want the shotgun approach. I want to kill everything. Well, that’s a mindset change. This isn’t—you don’t want to be in the mindset of kill everything.
In fact, the hygiene hypothesis shows, as Dr. Pompa said, the more we do it the more sickly we become as an environment, which means we have to do it more, right? The more sickly you become, the more you have to be worried about what you’re going to come up against because now you’re in trouble immunologically. Your immune system is weak. You have no—you haven’t, essentially, trained your body to become tough, to see the environment and react appropriately. You’ve been aseptic, so the first time you come in contact with, essentially, a weak pathogen you could be on your back for a week, right?
Dr. Pompa:
It’s an opposite thinking, Shayne. Look, I went—this whole year, I was around so much sickness. You have five kids. They’re always sick, I mean, because they’re around schools, right? And my kids, they don’t get sick as often as other kids, no doubt, but, I mean, they were around me, wiping it on me, sneezing in my face. Not once, I didn’t get one cold. I didn’t get one flu. I didn’t even—I mean, nothing.
Warren:
Or if you did, you took a nap and you were better.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly.
Warren:
You started feeling a little tired or…
Dr. Pompa:
Maybe I’m being—never once. I think my kids were trying to get me sick at one point. Because they were like, “You’re the last to go. You’re going to get this one. You’re going to get this one.” And I don’t worry about not drinking out of their glasses. If they have a full—I drink out of it. Honestly, I think because I purposely, often times—I do not care.
Warren:
I used to think you were nuts, Dr. Pompa, just so you know, back in the day when I first met you.
Dr. Pompa:
What’s that?
Warren:
When I first met you, Dan, I was all freaked out how you lived your life. I’m like, ah, yeah, just don’t worry about it. It’s all over anyway, and you’re eating their food, and I’m washing my hands. Doing my 80's training from growing up, and everything you learned on TV, and washing your hands, and not touching things. Now I don’t care. I don’t purposely, like you, run through sneezes, but I’m not afraid anymore.
Dr. Pompa:
No, I mean, listen, if you had a—if you don’t have a good immune system yet, then I wouldn’t practice my habits because, most likely, you will overwhelm your immune system. But, yeah, I mean, I travel a lot too, right? So I mean, I have these snotty people sitting next to me. I’m just going, eh, no big deal. I’m really not worried. Even our dogs are always in our bed licking our mouths. That’s the other thing. When you look at the study, people who grow up on farms…
Warren:
Gross.
Dr. Pompa:
People who grow up on farms have the greatest microbiomes in the world. I mean these people are exposed to animals constantly. And it’s funny, I always say, my father, my father was the bricklayer who knew nothing about nutrition but, yet, knew everything. My father always said, “It’s good if your dog licks you in the mouth.” So he always—somehow that guy just knew it, man. I mean, honestly, my father was a big—not worried about the typical things that someone coming out of his generation were worried about. I don’t know. He just had that intuitive spirit about him.
Dr. Shayne:
Breaking out of the irrigation ditch, that kind of stuff, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Let me go get a bottle of Ec.
Warren:
I have—I actually have it here.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay.
Warren:
Here is one of Dr. Shayne’s creation, Ec, and then the other one is SI. I’ve been spraying SI on my skin. That’s why I have a little spray bottle top that they gave us and Ec.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, both of those in your kitchen, obviously, are fantastic.
Warren:
Maybe they could take these on Naked and Afraid. You could sneak them on the show, Naked and Afraid, and they could put Ec and SI in the water before they get sick and have to get carted off.
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, there you go.
Dr. Pompa:
Shayne, clinically, I’ve used both of those to go in first as a prebiotic, just as you said, and just, basically, open up. Because I don’t—all of my bacteria work, which you know I love to do, it—so many people have overgrowths of E. coli and have too much E. coli. I don’t care what bacteria you give them. You could eat all the ferments you want. You could take all the good bacteria that you want, and it just simply will not take root with those overgrowths like that, especially of E. coli because they’re so dang strong. But when you go in ahead of time with some of those guys, now you just set the stage for your good guys to take root.
I don’t know the analogy. What that would be for gardening because I am not a gardener or planting. Anything that I plant, typically, doesn’t take root, but that’s—it just makes that soil that perfect soil, so to speak, so all your good plants can rise up.
Warren:
That’s why a lot of these people, when they take—do ferments and they have done this. I take probiotics, and they’re like, my gut’s still—I’m still constipated. I’m still sick, still bloated. Still can’t eat certain foods. They’re virome could be off. They have a—well, not their virome as much, but they don’t have enough—they have too many of these bad bacteria. So no matter how much they eat they’re still not able to digest food, and bloat, and all these different things. And of course, constipation is really important too if you’re missing certain bacteria and inflammation that happens in your colon.
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, and what you’re referring to is the wonderful connection between the gut and the brain, right?
Warren:
Yeah.
Dr. Shayne:
If the gut isn’t telling the brain to function properly, then the brain’s not sending messages to do peristalsis and other amazing things. But I want to circle around real quick. When you mention things like, Dr. Pompa, with the lifestyle, I want to remind everyone that this is—these are two—I wish I had a thousand phage to offer everybody, but we really only have two at the moment. So really, to be prudent, you still want to do all the other things that we recommend regarding the microbiome, right? We still want all those other recommendations. These are two tools, but they’re very specific tools, and they’re just the beginning. They’re just the beginning.
The microbiome is the new frontier. I mean, it really is. I mean, you and I have been talking about for a while with the respect to cellular healing, but we’re just at the tip of the iceberg. So if we keep pushing the frontiers of what to do next, you’re going to make huge strides in your doctor’s practices, right, because we’re just beginning this process. We’re just beginning to know what it means to deal with phage, and microbiome, bacteria, and environment in prebiotics, right? There’s a whole new message to be said about what we eat and why we eat it. And that’s going to be the new frontier that I hope you and I can tap into.
You and I talked a little bit about prebiotics. You and I discussed that I think that some of those herbs we eat aren’t about the medicinal properties physiologically but are about the medicinal properties to bacteria. It never even makes it into our body. It changes our bacteria enough that they convert it into things they need to grow and to—and it’s all those things that we’ve given up over time because we’ve decided that we want preprocessed food, and we don’t like to hang out on farms, so to speak.
Dr. Pompa:
I think you just raised one more good point. And it’s today, I think the focus is on the macrobiotic foods, right? I mean, we eat our vegetables, and good grass-fed meats, and these things, but as humans, we’re not eating the herbs that we used to eat. We’re not eating a lot of these things that really have a major impact on our microbiome and our cells at the cellular level. The one thing I love about Systemic Formulas, in every formula you make, you always have a combination of—well, I shouldn’t say always, most often, a combination of nutrition, and what you have named the herbalomic component to that formula. Meaning that certain herbs that target certain function as well. So it’s really, look, when we look at God’s medicine, people say the food, but really, it’s the herbs. Herbs are really God’s medicine.
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, absolutely.
Warren:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
You do this combination, and Systemic is really known for that, that combination. I have to say that, as your grandpap—people love stories. He was the Doc Wheelwright that years ago formulated—he’s the guy that didn’t have a biochemistry degree. Shayne does, folks that are watching, but his grandfather didn’t. He just traveled the world and, basically, learned from the world, Aborigines, tribes. Matter of fact, your mom—she would tell stories just saying he would just—all of a sudden he’d be gone for months at a time, right? I mean, do you—I’m sure you don’t recall that.
Dr. Shayne:
Well, I do recall because there wasn’t very many Christmases I would see him, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Dr. Shayne:
There was one time they had to call up Coast Guards in other countries to find him because they really needed to find him once, so they had to start going through government agencies in a different country to actually track him down because we needed him.
Dr. Pompa:
I say that to show you here’s a guy that gained his knowledge—I mean, a brilliant guy, right?
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
I mean, most people would have trouble having certain conversations with him. Went and learned from the world. I mean, gone.
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
I mean, just those types, right? And then here you come, the grandson, with that brilliance, man. I mean, you know I have so much respect for your brain.
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, I appreciate it. You guys, you bring the clinical element to the story, and I bring the big words just to confuse people, right, like herbalomics. That’s my job is just to confuse people.
Dr. Pompa:
No, no. You do a—I always say that Shayne’s not your average biochemist. He actually can communicate.
Warren:
I’m sure he can.
Dr. Pompa:
But, hey, with all that said and like I said, Shayne, you and I have worked. We both have such an interest in the cell, and really, we need to bring you on this show more often to talk about more products. Because I think our viewing audience is a really educated audience, honestly, and they would love…
Warren:
They’re loving this stuff.
Dr. Pompa:
So where are we going next with phage? I mean, I’ve given you a list of bacteria that I know are associated with autoimmunes, like Crohn’s and colitis. That’s down the road, but what’s coming up next?
Dr. Shayne:
The next plan is we’re trying to—so because it is a costly endeavor, we’re going after the ones that we don’t have to redesign the growing process. So just to give you guys another little bit of a nerdy information. In order to grow a phage, you have to be able to grow the bacteria they live on. So imagine a big brewer’s vat, right? You fill that brewer’s vat full of the organism that you want to grow the phage on. So for example, salmonella, let’s just say. You need to grow that whole vat, let’s say it’s 500 gallons, full of salmonella. You add your phage, and then a few days later you can harvest the phage because it’s completely consumed the salmonella. And now you have trillions and trillions of phage which you harvest as useful prebiotic.
So the key here is you have to grow the bacteria in order to grow the phage, and so we’ve had to look at key bacteria that are easy to grow right now technologically speaking, practically speaking. Some of the ones that we’re looking at next are—the last of the easy ones is going to be staph, right, so staph aureus, Staphylococcus aureus. This is a skin microbiome issue, right? We want to keep the skin healthy, so there’s various species of staph aureus. Some of them we refer to as MRSA, right? They’re methicillin resistant. It means that there’s antibiotics called methicillin that won’t kill them and there’s others. Well, phage doesn’t care, right? So we’re going to be—that one can be grown with oxygen in the air, and that’s going to be our next go around. Beyond that, we’re working on the technology to grow what are called anaerobes.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, I can’t wait.
Dr. Shayne:
Bacteria that don’t use oxygen but we’re having to redesign that vat that I mentioned. Because that vat pumps oxygen in in order to…
Warren:
Get one to pump nitrogen in.
Dr. Shayne:
Right, exactly. We’ve got to pump in things that they like, and keep things out that they don’t like, like oxygen. So it’s a little more technically challenging, so it’s down the road a little bit. But each time we do this we get better at doing it too. We get smarter about it.
Dr. Pompa:
Well, I have to ask you this. Charlie is a chemist that I love there. That works down there at Systemic. How’s Charlie doing with all this growing of bacteria?
Dr. Shayne:
Well, it’s funny you mentioned that. So pretty good, he is a chemist. So what I’ve done is, as you know, you and I have a couple of concepts we’ve been playing with. One started with the NO/ONOO cycle. Won’t go there today. It’s just more confusing. But the NO/ONOO cycle led us down the pathway to ADMA, which allowed me to meet people at Utah State. So there’s a gentleman there that is becoming more interested in knowing the research we’re doing with him up there, but he’s actually becoming more interested in the microbiome. So he’s—I’m trying to coax him away from Utah State to the microbiome project here in Ogden.
Warren:
Is this a Cellular Healing TV job offer? Is it happening right now?
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, Warren, it is, yeah. So trying to get him down to Ogden so that he can take over the, essentially, fecal bacterial project. Because that’s what he—he’s better at it, right? That’s just what he does. He works with bacteria, and genetics, and other amazing things, so I’m in the process of trying to raise the bar just a little bit this year.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, Charlie’s afraid. He’s a chemist who’s afraid of bacteria whereas I’m not afraid.
Dr. Shayne:
Dr. Pompa, you and I have at least—we’ve taken him—he was the epitome of the hygiene hypothesis, right? He wouldn’t go anywhere without lathering himself in chemicals. So we have taken him from that guy to a guy that spills bacteria on him and doesn’t panic, right? He doesn’t run into the room, and strip down, and jump into a shower. So we’ve come a long ways with Charlie.
Warren:
He’s the little guy—like the mom with the little clip, the climber’s clip, with the little Purell thing, so he can sleep with it.
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Warren:
He has it on, and it’s hanging from his belt loop all the time—before I shake your hand, afterwards.
Dr. Pompa:
Well, hey, listen, this is a great topic, Shayne. We’re going to have you on more often. I think people are really interested in some of the deeper roots of some of these products, honestly. Obviously, you can bring that, so we really—Shayne, we just love and appreciate you.
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, thanks so much for inviting me. It’s been a lot of fun.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, we’d never have the products that we have, the healing tools that we do. I mean, they are some amazing tools that you’ve developed and still developing. So we love you man. Thank you.
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, we all love you, and I love you guys. You guys are awesome.
Warren:
And I appreciate—Shayne, the reason I got on the show today was because I knew you were going to be on. Because David does the show, I’m a busy guy, and I can’t do the show every week anymore. And I just—just to hang out with you because I can’t…
Dr. Shayne:
I know, but we get to hang out in the summer at Sunshine, so yeah, this is nice.
Warren:
So I was having a baby, and I want to show a picture, Dr. Pompa.
Dr. Pompa:
New dad, oh, yeah.
Warren:
There she is.
Dr. Shayne:
Oh, awesome.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, my gosh, she looks like Rebecca right there, holy cow.
Warren:
Well, she always looks like Rebecca. There she is. Five days old there. She’s now, I don’t know, it’ll be two weeks on Saturday.
Dr. Shayne:
I love that they love to be bundled up like that.
Warren:
Yeah, look at that. I mean, that’s like a little—like a little spider got a hold of her and spun her around.
Dr. Shayne:
You unbundle them, and you let their arms and legs come out, and they freak out.
Warren:
Yeah, they do. They do that response. I can’t do it right now because you won’t see, but they go [gasp].
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s the way they are in utero, man.
Dr. Shayne:
Taken where they’re from.
Dr. Pompa:
But look at those fingers. Talk about spider fingers. Those are long fingers. She’s going to have big hands.
Warren:
She’s a pro. She’s a swaddler. We swaddle her like crazy. See if there’s anymore pictures of her.
Dr. Pompa:
Hey, Shayne, was that picture, back behind you, is that your little girls, one of them, two?
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah.
Warren:
Hold that up.
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, right in the middle. Yeah, that’s when my—that’s when she was small. She’s now 16.
Dr. Pompa:
Come on. Go back there and grab that.
Dr. Shayne:
Want me to grab it?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Warren:
We’re big into family here on Cellular Healing TV.
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, can you see it?
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, that’s bigger than I thought. It’s just blown up on me.
Dr. Shayne:
So mine’s right here.
Dr. Pompa:
Ah, look at that. Oh, so she had a little cast on?
Dr. Shayne:
Had a little cast on. Yeah, she’s a little crazy rebel.
Dr. Pompa:
How old was she?
Dr. Shayne:
Also, she’s boss of the group.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I can tell. I can tell. I can tell. They’re all going off her lead. How old was she there?
Dr. Shayne:
She’s only 4, I think, 3 or 4. I mean, that’s just when they start—they started at 3, both of my girls, dancing. I’ve been a dance dad ever since. And I swore to myself that my kids would be ex-sports people, right? They’re going to wakeboard, and snowboard, and ski. And they do that, but they’re passion is dance so, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’ve got those. I’ve got those kids over that…
Warren:
Yeah, they’re the extreme. I always wanted to be a dancer.
Dr. Shayne:
It’s hard. I’ve tried. It’s really difficult.
Warren:
I was being sarcastic.
Dr. Shayne:
I was being serious. It’s hard.
Dr. Pompa:
Warren, those piano legs, he’s not dancing. I mean, he’s not getting his legs high enough.
Warren:
Nope.
Dr. Pompa:
But I guess I could’ve been the dancer of the group here with these legs.
Warren:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
We can regress here really quick.
Warren:
Oh, we have. We have.
Dr. Pompa:
Shayne’s like a brother to us so we could—it could go down hill fast. Speaking of wakeboarding, I was going to go there how you slammed me and slapped me on my face the first time I wakeboarded.
Dr. Shayne:
Oh, yeah. I didn’t mean to do that.
Dr. Pompa:
Slap.
Warren:
I was there. I was there. I saw it.
Dr. Shayne:
You only do it once, and then you…
Dr. Pompa:
Everyone on the lake heard a slap, and yeah, that was Pompa’s face hitting the water. Watching that toe edge. You’ve got to watch that toe edge, yeah. I didn’t even know what you meant by toe edge until that. All right, well, look, everyone, we’re going to have you on…
Warren:
Cellular Healing TV, happy 4th of July, have a great weekend. Go eat some. Jump in some lakes. Get some phage. Have some fun, and be safe. God bless.
Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, take care. Thank you all.
Warren:
Thanks, Dr. Shayne.
