Pure Living Family (00:01.634)
Hey friends, welcome back to the Pure Living Family podcast. I am very excited to introduce you to our guest today, Dr. Andrea McBeth Let me just give you a quick intro. Dr. McBeth is the co-founder and CEO of Thaena, a female founded Pacific Northwest based company focused on advancing gut health through innovative microbiome based therapies. Her work centers on ThaenaBiotic, the world's first stool derived postbiotic supplement designed to support gut health.
by delivering a complex mix of postbiotic signaling molecules, prebiotic fiber, heat killed probiotics, and cell fragments. Dr. McBeth holds a bachelor of science in biochemistry with an emphasis in molecular biology from the University of San Diego. She later earned a doctorate in naturopathic medicine from the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon, graduating in 2017. Thanks for joining us on the podcast, Dr. McBeth.
Andrea McBeth, ND (00:58.973)
Thanks for having me.
Pure Living Family (01:00.928)
Awesome. Well, there's so much to talk about and we're going to try to compress everything we can in a 30 minute episode. And I want to know more about your path on becoming a naturopathic doctor, but more importantly about your journey in creating this stain antibiotic product, which I believe will help families because I've worked with many families that have used it in my work with Rising Health, which we can talk about later, but.
But before we get started there, I just want to read an insert from our bylaws we had written in our articles in corporation just for everyone to understand our mission and our purpose for our nonprofit, for those new listeners. So real quickly, it states, families with special needs children have unique challenges in addition to ensuring that a special needs child is loved, cared for, and provided with ample opportunities to grow and flourish.
Parents must also find balance in raising their other children while maintaining their own physical and emotional health. These challenges are different for each family with a special needs child or special needs children. The foundation's primary purpose is to empower families with special needs children to discover ways to best support their children and family as a whole. Specifically, the foundation aims to help parents in exploring all avenues to find the best path for them to optimize the mental and physical health of their families.
including encouraging a personal connection to Mother Earth and divinity as a parent sees fit by promoting positive mental and physical health practices. Now believe Thaena fits well into that mission, so let's dive in. Dr. McBeth, tell us and tell us the audience just to get us started. There's a couple key terms I think people need to understand, but if you could just start by defining what is the microbiome?
Andrea McBeth, ND (02:49.477)
Yeah, that's one of my favorite questions. So we have, what is essentially another organ system in our gut GI tract. So if you think of the GI tract as like your mouth to your bum and in the colon section where
You eat food, goes through the stomach, it gets digested, we absorb a lot of nutrients in the small intestine, and then the colon is where this really cool organ system is of trillions of microbes. And we only relatively recently discovered it, discovered it in the sense of appreciated that the diversity in these microbes are necessary for our health, and they play a role in our gut brain access, our gut immune, our metabolic, and it's a
the size of our brain by weight and it's not human cells, it's microbial cells and other non-human cells like fungus and viruses, but it's functioning and creating signals and interfacing with the world and the food we eat and giving us, know, telling us what to eat, whether that's chocolate or other things. And it's, you know, in the context of health and wellness, dramatically impacting our immune system.
in our neuroinflammation in ways we've only just started to discover in the last decade or two.
Pure Living Family (04:13.149)
Awesome, and you mentioned the gut-brain axis. Can you define that a little bit more in greater detail?
Andrea McBeth, ND (04:18.983)
Yeah, it's a catch-all term for the fact that we're just now starting to appreciate that.
We have neuronal cells, like little satellites, that go into the gut microbiome and bind exclusively to microbial-derived signals. We also have microbial-derived metabolites or small molecules that get into our bloodstream and go to our brain and impact our brain. And even more interesting, as we've done some basic science looking at development, the gut microbiome is important.
for our neurologic development too in early life. And so the gut-brain axis is sort of a catch-all for this new discovery of all the different ways that the gut and the microbes are interfacing with our brain.
Pure Living Family (05:09.121)
Well, and that's making me think of the Vagus nerve, is a lot of the bottom up communication. A lot of times people are just thinking about from top down, but there's actually more messages from our body to our brain than there is vice versa. And that's kind of what you're talking about here with the brain, gut brain access, right?
Andrea McBeth, ND (05:32.701)
Yeah, it's bi-directional and I think there's different, so there's direct signaling I think of as like the electrical email, if you will. And that's direct neuronal cells with calcium channel signaling going through the vagus nerve, both.
to the brain and giving signals. And then also our vagus nerve controls peristalsis and components of digestion. So it's both controlling the way that that orchestra of digestion works, but also the microbes speaking directly to the brain. And then that is also happening, what I think of as like the snail mail through molecules that either are going into the bloodstream and entering the brain, or our brain is signaling different
endocrine or hormone signaling or immune cells. And those signals are coming into the gut through the, through the cells and impacting the microbes. So bidirectional also. And then, we have a whole new universe of things we're starting to discover about other sensory input of the abdomen and gut. And, know, basically we're at the tip of the iceberg, but I would say what we do know definitively is there's a snail male and an email version of signals going.
both directions.
Pure Living Family (06:48.287)
Awesome. I love that visual and imagery. Thank you for describing it so well. We hear a lot about prebiotics, but yours is more of a postbiotic product. Can you kind of define those terms and differentiate between the two?
Andrea McBeth, ND (07:03.805)
Yeah, like to think, I like to put them all together, right? So prebiotic is the food that we eat that then the bugs eat. And the bugs are the probiotics, right? So we think of the bugs that are making this microbiome up or the bugs that are in our yogurt or, you know, lactobacillus or bifidobacter, right? When you buy a probiotic from the store, it's a live bacteria, just like the live bacteria that live in our gut. And they're consuming the prebiotic. And what happens with
when they consume a prebiotic is they convert it into a signaling molecule that we call a postbiotic. You also might just see heat killed versions of probiotics, it's called postbiotics, but the...
piece of the story, the puzzle piece that we were missing before was this post-biotic metabolite molecule that's doing the binding to the electrical signaling, that's getting into the bloodstream. Butyrate is a really good example. And if people have heard of butyrate, that's a post-biotic that a bacteria makes that gets into the bloodstream and reduces inflammation or can impact our cellular metabolism and neuro and immune and all the things.
Pure Living Family (08:18.237)
Is that an amino acid butyrate?
Andrea McBeth, ND (08:18.321)
if that makes sense.
Short chain fatty acid. But there's amino acids, there's dipeptides, there's tryptophan derivatives. There's a lot of really cool chemistry, but they're all small molecules. So they're all like a broccoli or a blueberry or a piece of psyllium gets broken down by a bacteria and through a series of chemistry ends up as a postbiotic or metabolite.
Pure Living Family (08:23.767)
fatty acid. Okay, thank you.
Pure Living Family (08:49.845)
Awesome. Thank you very much. In my research, Dr. Mark Hyman, obviously a world-renowned author and family practitioner, in his book titled Young Forever, he states on page 67, billions of dollars are pouring into microbiome research. Many companies now offer microbiome and stool testing. Others are bringing to market new probiotics and prebiotics and even fecal transplant pills. Yes.
poop pills. And that's why we're here today. That's you. He's talking about you and Thaena, right?
Andrea McBeth, ND (09:26.413)
of. mean, we do work with Mark Hyman's clinic and he's known about the work we've done for many years. He was like one of the first people that called me when we first started actually. there's two. There's us, which is a stool-derived post-biotic that's been sterilized. And then there's fecal transplant. And so they're very distinct and I'll define that right now. Fecal transplant is the live bacteria and everything in a stool. And that's what
you've heard about in treatment of C. diff and in the Arizona autism study and research into fecal transplant or what your experience was with fecal transplant. There's that which you can get commercially for C. diff as a drug.
in a pill, and then ours, is poop that's been from healthy screen donors that's been sterilized, that stool-derived postbiotic. And so my guess is he was probably giving a nod to both, but we do provide Ultra Wellness, his clinic, with Thaenabiotic, which is a poop, a sterilized poop pill.
Pure Living Family (10:20.077)
Hmm.
Pure Living Family (10:35.588)
Well, and you referenced our journey and just for the new listeners, we took our son Theo to Mexico in 2020 for a fecal microbiota transplant, which was actually a loading dose. Two different nights just before bed, he had fecal matter injected into his rectum. And the idea was to keep it in his colon for at least five to six hours. And it was an immense...
unbelievable treatment and life-changing process. the time, Theo was very, he had a lot of food aversions. He wouldn't even want food near him. Like he couldn't look at it. It was really bizarre, but he lived off of blueberries, grapes, and like a protein shake and protein bar that was really highly processed. But after the fecal microbiota transplant, his palate expanded and it taught me a huge lesson. I was reading a lot of books at the time about microbiome and microbiota and good gut.
bugs, but it taught me that our gut microbiome is really what drives our cravings and what drives us to crave specific foods. So you had mentioned that your Thaena was inspired by fecal microbiota transplants, but it's safer. You mentioned a little bit it's no live bacteria. Can you talk a little bit more about that safety protocol and how it's different?
Andrea McBeth, ND (12:00.039)
Yeah, so I'll give you like a little bit. I was a researcher.
with oncology as an academic researcher doing a PhD. And I like to think I fell out of academia down the hill to become a naturopath and find my other path. But I was inspired. I was chronically ill as a kiddo. My sister had cancer.
I don't have a primary relative with ASD or special needs explicitly, but I've navigated the health system and I have an appreciation for being innovative. I think there is value in supporting people through agency and being innovative and on the cutting edge. And so when I had the opportunity to work with fecal transplant in Portland, Oregon, in sort of the early days, I was a part of a stool bank that did FMT and was able to see
the
its application in C. diff and in a handful of patients and hear stories like yours of people going to places like Tijuana or Mexico and doing FMT for other things other than C. diff. And so I was incredibly inspired and fascinated by the technology. And what we did was recognize it's a potential in this, you know, complex thing we know very little about, right? We can't make synthetic blood.
Andrea McBeth, ND (13:31.499)
We've been trying forever or medicine's been trying to make synthetic blood. The reason we can't make synthetic blood is because it's too complicated. We don't know. And I think the same thing's true for stool. So we wanted to create something that had more accessibility but addressed the concerns of infectious disease risk that fecal transplants main barrier to implementation is that we're transferring viruses that we don't know we don't know or bacteria infection we don't know we don't know.
Pure Living Family (13:52.717)
Okay.
Andrea McBeth, ND (14:01.419)
And so we had been part of an early...
brainstorming about the small molecules or postbiotics and decided that if we sterilized it in an autoclave, which is like a pressure cooker, but it's what you use to sterilize like equipment for surgery or the dental office, we would be removing that infectious disease risk and then we could purify or focus on the postbiotics, the small molecules that these healthy people represented, their microbiome.
Pure Living Family (14:20.449)
Alright.
Andrea McBeth, ND (14:36.235)
away from fecal transplant, inspired by, you know, really what happened in 2017 was that study came out of Arizona State in autism. And then in 2019, the follow-up and, you know, amongst other things, it's the thought of having all this really great healthy poop in the freezer and not being able to support people with it.
Pure Living Family (15:00.173)
Hmm.
Andrea McBeth, ND (15:00.617)
And so that was a big part of the inspiration to make a sterilized version that is a dietary supplement that has a different safety profile and accessibility. So that's what we did.
Pure Living Family (15:13.965)
Well, I'm sure some of the listeners might wonder where in Mexico did we go? The doctor we did it with is actually no longer doing it because the E. coli started to break out. So I'm curious with your heating process, does that solve that problem of E. coli? Perfect. Okay, so then let's jump to the donors. Talk to us about like how they're screened.
Andrea McBeth, ND (15:31.251)
kill.
Pure Living Family (15:43.821)
to make sure that we're getting the best poop possible.
Andrea McBeth, ND (15:48.723)
How do you define health is the ephemeral question, right? So we were part of Early Day Stool Bank for fecal transplant, which is great, because I got to sort of learn and evolve with the industry doing FMT. And so we approached our donors that way. Like, do you have any chronic disease history? The answer needs to be no. Do you have any acute medical diagnoses? No, you've never been given
Pure Living Family (15:53.772)
Okay.
Andrea McBeth, ND (16:18.747)
a prescription drug for any chronic disease. So no mental health, no, you know, heart medication. I mean, our donors are like 30 to 40.
We require donors to be over 18. We have a couple that are in their 20s. They've never been sick with any major diseases or chronic diseases. Maybe they had the flu once or twice, but they've had less than five antibiotics in their lifetime.
And then it's really important that they meet the best that we can define as like a healthy microbiome environment. So what is their exposure based on what they do for a living? you know, are they ever exposed to VOCs or plastics or pesticides? And so that's a disqualifier. Do they have a healthy diet? Have they had a healthy diet more or less for most of their life? Were they vaginally born? Did they have breast milk predominantly for
for their first six months of life. Any of those types of things, we have a preliminary survey, then a follow-up survey that's several pages, and then we do blood and urine and stool testing for infectious disease, and then we do our best to define health through intakes and then screen out infectious risk with labs.
Pure Living Family (17:45.239)
Okay, perfect, thank you. Have there been any adverse reactions, anecdotally, just for people to be aware of from your experience?
Andrea McBeth, ND (17:55.665)
Yeah, think the best, we have been doing this since 2019. So the first time we sterilized what was at the time, fecal transplant, we started using that with patients to see if it was something we could use in the interim while we didn't have access to FMT. And it seemed to be helpful for GI.
support. And then from there, we've had, Thaena has been available through providers since like, you know, the 2020, 2021, we used it outside of our clinical practice and had doctors providing it. And I would say of, and we've always tracked adverse events and we have an adverse event tracking form. We, we always follow up and
If anything, we've seen a handful of people who've had cramping or slight increase in motility, but you know, that's a handful of people over the years and no major adverse events. then if, you know, the worst side effect tends to be the reason people, we do a money back guarantee is that it just doesn't do anything. So my goal early on was to find something that felt really, really safe, like as safe as we could make it. And then.
see if it had impact in a positive direction and what we tend to find is that it's very mild. It doesn't create die-off like your typical antimicrobials can or you know, it's pretty benign and inert, but then when it does help people there seems to be a strong improvement in GI and neurocognitive.
Pure Living Family (19:42.327)
Perfect. I appreciate that.
Andrea McBeth, ND (19:42.599)
symptoms. So the short answer is that it seems, it seems, I never say never, but it seems to be very gentle.
Pure Living Family (19:50.285)
One thing I've listened to a few of your podcasts that I love. One, I just have to compliment you for your humility. Thank you for saying you don't know when you don't know, because a lot of times doctors, providers like to blow smoke and it's super frustrating when you realize they were making stuff up. So thank you for your humility from your place of authority. The other thing that I just want to mention is you had mentioned on a podcast that it was like...
If you wanted to compare the Thaena to FMT, you would have to take like hundred capsules to be the same loading dose, right? I think you said 50 or 100 milligrams?
Andrea McBeth, ND (20:27.945)
Yeah, so our capsules represent a half a gram of stool per capsule of like raw stool equivalent. And so you figure the typical FMT is between 25 to 50 grams total. So it's 50 to 100 capsule equivalents. Are you, can you still hear me? Yeah. Okay.
Pure Living Family (20:49.271)
Yeah, I'm still here. Yeah, that's perfect. And thank you for that description, because part of my work in the last year working at a functional medicine clinic, that was always people's biggest fear of like, how many pills do I take? And what happens if something goes wrong? And I love your approach of go slow, go low, I think is your terminology you use. And because you can start with one and maybe you want to titrate up or titrate down, that's what's so beneficial of starting.
slow is you don't have to force the issue and make it super uncomfortable but just go at your own pace and I think that's really smart. Both for a consumer, I'm on my third day of it myself and then just from your standpoint of making sure people don't go too fast.
Andrea McBeth, ND (21:40.261)
It's a different, like...
mechanism than fecal transplant too. So if you think about if the goal of fecal transplant is to clear out the old bugs and replace them with new ones kind of grossly, right? Like overly simplifying that. We are just like a nutrient from healthy stool that's going to nudge the native microbes or it's like a multivitamin. And so it's totally fine to not have 50 grams all at once. In fact, that doesn't make any sense. You want just a little bit
to change the baseline nutrient profile of your native microbiome to shift it in the right direction. And the main mechanistic research we've done is looking at oxidative stress levels and the metabolism of microbiomes. And we know there's lots of things that can make a microbiome be in a more oxidative stress environment. And this is probably just shifting that a little bit and providing some of those like
calmdown immune mediating signals as opposed to the goal of fecal transplant, which is like a loading dose and then a follow-up, which is replacing bugs. And we're not doing that because everything's dead. It's a nutrient that's like a soft, gentle nudge. And patients will use this one cap every third day or a half a cap every other day or two to four caps a day. And it's totally fine to dose it in a
Pure Living Family (22:52.269)
Yeah.
Andrea McBeth, ND (23:11.793)
kind of customized to your own individual microbiome.
Pure Living Family (23:17.429)
I love that. My theory, we have about five or so minutes left in the podcast, but I want to lay a hypothesis down and you can challenge me and tell me that's BS if it is. But one thing that I found on our journey and it's kind of our theme is we give you permission to take better care of yourself so you can take better care of the special souls that you care for. And my theory is...
If parents gut microbiome is a disaster and they're trying to correct or fix their kids, they're really fighting a losing battle because I believe we're actually giving our microbiome to our kids in the foods we share, when we love and kiss on them, when we touch doorknobs and the fridge. Would you agree with that assertion? Is that accurate?
Andrea McBeth, ND (24:08.381)
I read that question in your pre-interview and I got excited because I think yes and no, and I'll explain where I think you're yes and where I think it's no. What we know is that we have a cloud of microbes around us and our microbiomes of the people we cohabitate with find an equilibrium.
And there's really interesting work that's been done about siblings and parents and people living in a housing. And Jack Gilbert from UCSD has done some of the more interesting work. And you can look at his YouTube videos or lectures about microbes in like a house and a family unit. And so there's absolutely a component of that. And then I think the place where I would say there's a distinction
is in our first thousand days of life, there is a set point. We all get a microbiome through how we're born, matrilineally through the vaginal canal, or from poop from mom that gets into the baby's mouth in a normal kind of birthing, traditional birthing evolutionary setting. And then...
breast milk has a huge impact on our early set point, and then the environment in early childhood. then our immune system is toned to that fingerprint for the rest of our lives. And I think what we're continuing to learn in microbiome research is how much does that set point shift with environment as we age and our diet and our cohabitation and how much...
Is it always going to kind of return to its set point? And I think that's where looking at nutrition and parents or people cohabitating has for sure an impact, but it isn't the end all be all. there's a lot of nuance there. And I think it's really interesting to think about.
Andrea McBeth, ND (26:02.151)
Well, you're here today, you can't undo what happened. Like I was a C-section baby and all those things, right? We just are surviving and doing the best we can. But what I can do today is impact the community around me. And even if it's not just the microbes, I really resonate with that idea that to be a caregiver, you have to care for yourself. And...
Pure Living Family (26:06.093)
that.
Andrea McBeth, ND (26:27.332)
as somebody who took care of a family member with cancer for two years, you know, I learned a lot in my early twenties that I don't think I would have learned otherwise about just how important that is. And this is a tool to build resilience, whether you're a caregiver or not. And so I like that a lot, the framing of it, but because I'm a scientist, my technical thing is to bring us back to like, there's a set point.
Pure Living Family (26:44.363)
Hmm.
Pure Living Family (26:52.546)
haha
Andrea McBeth, ND (26:57.095)
by the time we're two to three, or they call it the first thousand days. And then there's huge variability that we can influence throughout the rest of our lives. And so there's a nature-nurture kind of nuance as we go.
Pure Living Family (27:12.809)
Yeah, environmental influence, epigenetics. There's a whole conversation there that is maybe a whole other episode, but I appreciate you challenging me. I'm learning. And part of my health and wellness coaching training is you are patient zero. And if you're not eating the dog food as they say in sales, as if you're not eating the dog food you're selling, then it falls flat and people don't hear you.
I really appreciate you coming on the podcast to speak to our audience that we care so deeply about. Maybe one final thought you have for the parents out there, maybe a word of encouragement or anything that you can think of, maybe going back to that time that you were caring for someone with cancer, what sort of advice or encouragement would you maybe give to them?
Andrea McBeth, ND (28:07.965)
You know, I had a really profound conversation early on with somebody who worked with an autism spectrum support group. And they said, the most dangerous drug is hope. And that was a really, really caught me.
in a way that I could understand because I worked in cancer. And at one point in time, my sister was told she had two weeks to live. And I happened to be in research and sort of didn't accept that. And we did all kinds of stuff to navigate the system. She's alive. She's been in remission for 14 years. And I want to acknowledge that there's no magic bullet, right?
And I think that there is so much out there we don't know and so much opportunity for hope. If we can approach it from a perspective of everybody is gonna be interfacing differently. And like, I just fundamentally believe that there is solutions out there that we are yet to discover. And so I wanna be really conscientious about not selling hope.
that is blind, but with a sense of consent and understanding that there is no one size fits all, but there are tools and we're continuing to learn about biology and some hope is okay in certain circumstances. And it's all about having a toolbox that you can customize and learn on your own personal journey.
Pure Living Family (29:51.103)
I love that. I appreciate that very much because that is something that we hear frequently. think J.B. Hanley says it well is that parents get sold hope again and again on different products and different treatments like this is going to make your kids speak. This is going to make your kid get potty trained. Like I don't know how many times I've heard that and parents become so frustrated and like tired of hearing that.
We're not promising that this is gonna do anything other than maybe it's worth experimenting with. I am personally experimenting with it for my own gut health to then hopefully assist my son Theo in his journey and his protocols. We do have an affiliate partnership with Thaena, which I'm very excited about. So we do get a discount for our followers and for our community. So we'll list it in the show notes. But Dr. McBeth.
Thank you so much for your time and thanks for joining us on this podcast.
Andrea McBeth, ND (30:51.955)
Thanks for having me and all the work you do. This is really an honor to be a part.
Hey friends, welcome back to the Pure Living Family podcast. I am very excited to introduce you to our guest today, Dr. Andrea McBeth Let me just give you a quick intro. Dr. McBeth is the co-founder and CEO of Thaena, a female founded Pacific Northwest based company focused on advancing gut health through innovative microbiome based therapies. Her work centers on ThaenaBiotic, the world's first stool derived postbiotic supplement designed to support gut health.
by delivering a complex mix of postbiotic signaling molecules, prebiotic fiber, heat killed probiotics, and cell fragments. Dr. McBeth holds a bachelor of science in biochemistry with an emphasis in molecular biology from the University of San Diego. She later earned a doctorate in naturopathic medicine from the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon, graduating in 2017. Thanks for joining us on the podcast, Dr. McBeth.
Andrea McBeth, ND (00:58.973)
Thanks for having me.
Pure Living Family (01:00.928)
Awesome. Well, there's so much to talk about and we're going to try to compress everything we can in a 30 minute episode. And I want to know more about your path on becoming a naturopathic doctor, but more importantly about your journey in creating this stain antibiotic product, which I believe will help families because I've worked with many families that have used it in my work with Rising Health, which we can talk about later, but.
But before we get started there, I just want to read an insert from our bylaws we had written in our articles in corporation just for everyone to understand our mission and our purpose for our nonprofit, for those new listeners. So real quickly, it states, families with special needs children have unique challenges in addition to ensuring that a special needs child is loved, cared for, and provided with ample opportunities to grow and flourish.
Parents must also find balance in raising their other children while maintaining their own physical and emotional health. These challenges are different for each family with a special needs child or special needs children. The foundation's primary purpose is to empower families with special needs children to discover ways to best support their children and family as a whole. Specifically, the foundation aims to help parents in exploring all avenues to find the best path for them to optimize the mental and physical health of their families.
including encouraging a personal connection to Mother Earth and divinity as a parent sees fit by promoting positive mental and physical health practices. Now believe Thaena fits well into that mission, so let's dive in. Dr. McBeth, tell us and tell us the audience just to get us started. There's a couple key terms I think people need to understand, but if you could just start by defining what is the microbiome?
Andrea McBeth, ND (02:49.477)
Yeah, that's one of my favorite questions. So we have, what is essentially another organ system in our gut GI tract. So if you think of the GI tract as like your mouth to your bum and in the colon section where
You eat food, goes through the stomach, it gets digested, we absorb a lot of nutrients in the small intestine, and then the colon is where this really cool organ system is of trillions of microbes. And we only relatively recently discovered it, discovered it in the sense of appreciated that the diversity in these microbes are necessary for our health, and they play a role in our gut brain access, our gut immune, our metabolic, and it's a
the size of our brain by weight and it's not human cells, it's microbial cells and other non-human cells like fungus and viruses, but it's functioning and creating signals and interfacing with the world and the food we eat and giving us, know, telling us what to eat, whether that's chocolate or other things. And it's, you know, in the context of health and wellness, dramatically impacting our immune system.
in our neuroinflammation in ways we've only just started to discover in the last decade or two.
Pure Living Family (04:13.149)
Awesome, and you mentioned the gut-brain axis. Can you define that a little bit more in greater detail?
Andrea McBeth, ND (04:18.983)
Yeah, it's a catch-all term for the fact that we're just now starting to appreciate that.
We have neuronal cells, like little satellites, that go into the gut microbiome and bind exclusively to microbial-derived signals. We also have microbial-derived metabolites or small molecules that get into our bloodstream and go to our brain and impact our brain. And even more interesting, as we've done some basic science looking at development, the gut microbiome is important.
for our neurologic development too in early life. And so the gut-brain axis is sort of a catch-all for this new discovery of all the different ways that the gut and the microbes are interfacing with our brain.
Pure Living Family (05:09.121)
Well, and that's making me think of the Vagus nerve, is a lot of the bottom up communication. A lot of times people are just thinking about from top down, but there's actually more messages from our body to our brain than there is vice versa. And that's kind of what you're talking about here with the brain, gut brain access, right?
Andrea McBeth, ND (05:32.701)
Yeah, it's bi-directional and I think there's different, so there's direct signaling I think of as like the electrical email, if you will. And that's direct neuronal cells with calcium channel signaling going through the vagus nerve, both.
to the brain and giving signals. And then also our vagus nerve controls peristalsis and components of digestion. So it's both controlling the way that that orchestra of digestion works, but also the microbes speaking directly to the brain. And then that is also happening, what I think of as like the snail mail through molecules that either are going into the bloodstream and entering the brain, or our brain is signaling different
endocrine or hormone signaling or immune cells. And those signals are coming into the gut through the, through the cells and impacting the microbes. So bidirectional also. And then, we have a whole new universe of things we're starting to discover about other sensory input of the abdomen and gut. And, know, basically we're at the tip of the iceberg, but I would say what we do know definitively is there's a snail male and an email version of signals going.
both directions.
Pure Living Family (06:48.287)
Awesome. I love that visual and imagery. Thank you for describing it so well. We hear a lot about prebiotics, but yours is more of a postbiotic product. Can you kind of define those terms and differentiate between the two?
Andrea McBeth, ND (07:03.805)
Yeah, like to think, I like to put them all together, right? So prebiotic is the food that we eat that then the bugs eat. And the bugs are the probiotics, right? So we think of the bugs that are making this microbiome up or the bugs that are in our yogurt or, you know, lactobacillus or bifidobacter, right? When you buy a probiotic from the store, it's a live bacteria, just like the live bacteria that live in our gut. And they're consuming the prebiotic. And what happens with
when they consume a prebiotic is they convert it into a signaling molecule that we call a postbiotic. You also might just see heat killed versions of probiotics, it's called postbiotics, but the...
piece of the story, the puzzle piece that we were missing before was this post-biotic metabolite molecule that's doing the binding to the electrical signaling, that's getting into the bloodstream. Butyrate is a really good example. And if people have heard of butyrate, that's a post-biotic that a bacteria makes that gets into the bloodstream and reduces inflammation or can impact our cellular metabolism and neuro and immune and all the things.
Pure Living Family (08:18.237)
Is that an amino acid butyrate?
Andrea McBeth, ND (08:18.321)
if that makes sense.
Short chain fatty acid. But there's amino acids, there's dipeptides, there's tryptophan derivatives. There's a lot of really cool chemistry, but they're all small molecules. So they're all like a broccoli or a blueberry or a piece of psyllium gets broken down by a bacteria and through a series of chemistry ends up as a postbiotic or metabolite.
Pure Living Family (08:23.767)
fatty acid. Okay, thank you.
Pure Living Family (08:49.845)
Awesome. Thank you very much. In my research, Dr. Mark Hyman, obviously a world-renowned author and family practitioner, in his book titled Young Forever, he states on page 67, billions of dollars are pouring into microbiome research. Many companies now offer microbiome and stool testing. Others are bringing to market new probiotics and prebiotics and even fecal transplant pills. Yes.
poop pills. And that's why we're here today. That's you. He's talking about you and Thaena, right?
Andrea McBeth, ND (09:26.413)
of. mean, we do work with Mark Hyman's clinic and he's known about the work we've done for many years. He was like one of the first people that called me when we first started actually. there's two. There's us, which is a stool-derived post-biotic that's been sterilized. And then there's fecal transplant. And so they're very distinct and I'll define that right now. Fecal transplant is the live bacteria and everything in a stool. And that's what
you've heard about in treatment of C. diff and in the Arizona autism study and research into fecal transplant or what your experience was with fecal transplant. There's that which you can get commercially for C. diff as a drug.
in a pill, and then ours, is poop that's been from healthy screen donors that's been sterilized, that stool-derived postbiotic. And so my guess is he was probably giving a nod to both, but we do provide Ultra Wellness, his clinic, with Thaenabiotic, which is a poop, a sterilized poop pill.
Pure Living Family (10:20.077)
Hmm.
Pure Living Family (10:35.588)
Well, and you referenced our journey and just for the new listeners, we took our son Theo to Mexico in 2020 for a fecal microbiota transplant, which was actually a loading dose. Two different nights just before bed, he had fecal matter injected into his rectum. And the idea was to keep it in his colon for at least five to six hours. And it was an immense...
unbelievable treatment and life-changing process. the time, Theo was very, he had a lot of food aversions. He wouldn't even want food near him. Like he couldn't look at it. It was really bizarre, but he lived off of blueberries, grapes, and like a protein shake and protein bar that was really highly processed. But after the fecal microbiota transplant, his palate expanded and it taught me a huge lesson. I was reading a lot of books at the time about microbiome and microbiota and good gut.
bugs, but it taught me that our gut microbiome is really what drives our cravings and what drives us to crave specific foods. So you had mentioned that your Thaena was inspired by fecal microbiota transplants, but it's safer. You mentioned a little bit it's no live bacteria. Can you talk a little bit more about that safety protocol and how it's different?
Andrea McBeth, ND (12:00.039)
Yeah, so I'll give you like a little bit. I was a researcher.
with oncology as an academic researcher doing a PhD. And I like to think I fell out of academia down the hill to become a naturopath and find my other path. But I was inspired. I was chronically ill as a kiddo. My sister had cancer.
I don't have a primary relative with ASD or special needs explicitly, but I've navigated the health system and I have an appreciation for being innovative. I think there is value in supporting people through agency and being innovative and on the cutting edge. And so when I had the opportunity to work with fecal transplant in Portland, Oregon, in sort of the early days, I was a part of a stool bank that did FMT and was able to see
the
its application in C. diff and in a handful of patients and hear stories like yours of people going to places like Tijuana or Mexico and doing FMT for other things other than C. diff. And so I was incredibly inspired and fascinated by the technology. And what we did was recognize it's a potential in this, you know, complex thing we know very little about, right? We can't make synthetic blood.
Andrea McBeth, ND (13:31.499)
We've been trying forever or medicine's been trying to make synthetic blood. The reason we can't make synthetic blood is because it's too complicated. We don't know. And I think the same thing's true for stool. So we wanted to create something that had more accessibility but addressed the concerns of infectious disease risk that fecal transplants main barrier to implementation is that we're transferring viruses that we don't know we don't know or bacteria infection we don't know we don't know.
Pure Living Family (13:52.717)
Okay.
Andrea McBeth, ND (14:01.419)
And so we had been part of an early...
brainstorming about the small molecules or postbiotics and decided that if we sterilized it in an autoclave, which is like a pressure cooker, but it's what you use to sterilize like equipment for surgery or the dental office, we would be removing that infectious disease risk and then we could purify or focus on the postbiotics, the small molecules that these healthy people represented, their microbiome.
Pure Living Family (14:20.449)
Alright.
Andrea McBeth, ND (14:36.235)
away from fecal transplant, inspired by, you know, really what happened in 2017 was that study came out of Arizona State in autism. And then in 2019, the follow-up and, you know, amongst other things, it's the thought of having all this really great healthy poop in the freezer and not being able to support people with it.
Pure Living Family (15:00.173)
Hmm.
Andrea McBeth, ND (15:00.617)
And so that was a big part of the inspiration to make a sterilized version that is a dietary supplement that has a different safety profile and accessibility. So that's what we did.
Pure Living Family (15:13.965)
Well, I'm sure some of the listeners might wonder where in Mexico did we go? The doctor we did it with is actually no longer doing it because the E. coli started to break out. So I'm curious with your heating process, does that solve that problem of E. coli? Perfect. Okay, so then let's jump to the donors. Talk to us about like how they're screened.
Andrea McBeth, ND (15:31.251)
kill.
Pure Living Family (15:43.821)
to make sure that we're getting the best poop possible.
Andrea McBeth, ND (15:48.723)
How do you define health is the ephemeral question, right? So we were part of Early Day Stool Bank for fecal transplant, which is great, because I got to sort of learn and evolve with the industry doing FMT. And so we approached our donors that way. Like, do you have any chronic disease history? The answer needs to be no. Do you have any acute medical diagnoses? No, you've never been given
Pure Living Family (15:53.772)
Okay.
Andrea McBeth, ND (16:18.747)
a prescription drug for any chronic disease. So no mental health, no, you know, heart medication. I mean, our donors are like 30 to 40.
We require donors to be over 18. We have a couple that are in their 20s. They've never been sick with any major diseases or chronic diseases. Maybe they had the flu once or twice, but they've had less than five antibiotics in their lifetime.
And then it's really important that they meet the best that we can define as like a healthy microbiome environment. So what is their exposure based on what they do for a living? you know, are they ever exposed to VOCs or plastics or pesticides? And so that's a disqualifier. Do they have a healthy diet? Have they had a healthy diet more or less for most of their life? Were they vaginally born? Did they have breast milk predominantly for
for their first six months of life. Any of those types of things, we have a preliminary survey, then a follow-up survey that's several pages, and then we do blood and urine and stool testing for infectious disease, and then we do our best to define health through intakes and then screen out infectious risk with labs.
Pure Living Family (17:45.239)
Okay, perfect, thank you. Have there been any adverse reactions, anecdotally, just for people to be aware of from your experience?
Andrea McBeth, ND (17:55.665)
Yeah, think the best, we have been doing this since 2019. So the first time we sterilized what was at the time, fecal transplant, we started using that with patients to see if it was something we could use in the interim while we didn't have access to FMT. And it seemed to be helpful for GI.
support. And then from there, we've had, Thaena has been available through providers since like, you know, the 2020, 2021, we used it outside of our clinical practice and had doctors providing it. And I would say of, and we've always tracked adverse events and we have an adverse event tracking form. We, we always follow up and
If anything, we've seen a handful of people who've had cramping or slight increase in motility, but you know, that's a handful of people over the years and no major adverse events. then if, you know, the worst side effect tends to be the reason people, we do a money back guarantee is that it just doesn't do anything. So my goal early on was to find something that felt really, really safe, like as safe as we could make it. And then.
see if it had impact in a positive direction and what we tend to find is that it's very mild. It doesn't create die-off like your typical antimicrobials can or you know, it's pretty benign and inert, but then when it does help people there seems to be a strong improvement in GI and neurocognitive.
Pure Living Family (19:42.327)
Perfect. I appreciate that.
Andrea McBeth, ND (19:42.599)
symptoms. So the short answer is that it seems, it seems, I never say never, but it seems to be very gentle.
Pure Living Family (19:50.285)
One thing I've listened to a few of your podcasts that I love. One, I just have to compliment you for your humility. Thank you for saying you don't know when you don't know, because a lot of times doctors, providers like to blow smoke and it's super frustrating when you realize they were making stuff up. So thank you for your humility from your place of authority. The other thing that I just want to mention is you had mentioned on a podcast that it was like...
If you wanted to compare the Thaena to FMT, you would have to take like hundred capsules to be the same loading dose, right? I think you said 50 or 100 milligrams?
Andrea McBeth, ND (20:27.945)
Yeah, so our capsules represent a half a gram of stool per capsule of like raw stool equivalent. And so you figure the typical FMT is between 25 to 50 grams total. So it's 50 to 100 capsule equivalents. Are you, can you still hear me? Yeah. Okay.
Pure Living Family (20:49.271)
Yeah, I'm still here. Yeah, that's perfect. And thank you for that description, because part of my work in the last year working at a functional medicine clinic, that was always people's biggest fear of like, how many pills do I take? And what happens if something goes wrong? And I love your approach of go slow, go low, I think is your terminology you use. And because you can start with one and maybe you want to titrate up or titrate down, that's what's so beneficial of starting.
slow is you don't have to force the issue and make it super uncomfortable but just go at your own pace and I think that's really smart. Both for a consumer, I'm on my third day of it myself and then just from your standpoint of making sure people don't go too fast.
Andrea McBeth, ND (21:40.261)
It's a different, like...
mechanism than fecal transplant too. So if you think about if the goal of fecal transplant is to clear out the old bugs and replace them with new ones kind of grossly, right? Like overly simplifying that. We are just like a nutrient from healthy stool that's going to nudge the native microbes or it's like a multivitamin. And so it's totally fine to not have 50 grams all at once. In fact, that doesn't make any sense. You want just a little bit
to change the baseline nutrient profile of your native microbiome to shift it in the right direction. And the main mechanistic research we've done is looking at oxidative stress levels and the metabolism of microbiomes. And we know there's lots of things that can make a microbiome be in a more oxidative stress environment. And this is probably just shifting that a little bit and providing some of those like
calmdown immune mediating signals as opposed to the goal of fecal transplant, which is like a loading dose and then a follow-up, which is replacing bugs. And we're not doing that because everything's dead. It's a nutrient that's like a soft, gentle nudge. And patients will use this one cap every third day or a half a cap every other day or two to four caps a day. And it's totally fine to dose it in a
Pure Living Family (22:52.269)
Yeah.
Andrea McBeth, ND (23:11.793)
kind of customized to your own individual microbiome.
Pure Living Family (23:17.429)
I love that. My theory, we have about five or so minutes left in the podcast, but I want to lay a hypothesis down and you can challenge me and tell me that's BS if it is. But one thing that I found on our journey and it's kind of our theme is we give you permission to take better care of yourself so you can take better care of the special souls that you care for. And my theory is...
If parents gut microbiome is a disaster and they're trying to correct or fix their kids, they're really fighting a losing battle because I believe we're actually giving our microbiome to our kids in the foods we share, when we love and kiss on them, when we touch doorknobs and the fridge. Would you agree with that assertion? Is that accurate?
Andrea McBeth, ND (24:08.381)
I read that question in your pre-interview and I got excited because I think yes and no, and I'll explain where I think you're yes and where I think it's no. What we know is that we have a cloud of microbes around us and our microbiomes of the people we cohabitate with find an equilibrium.
And there's really interesting work that's been done about siblings and parents and people living in a housing. And Jack Gilbert from UCSD has done some of the more interesting work. And you can look at his YouTube videos or lectures about microbes in like a house and a family unit. And so there's absolutely a component of that. And then I think the place where I would say there's a distinction
is in our first thousand days of life, there is a set point. We all get a microbiome through how we're born, matrilineally through the vaginal canal, or from poop from mom that gets into the baby's mouth in a normal kind of birthing, traditional birthing evolutionary setting. And then...
breast milk has a huge impact on our early set point, and then the environment in early childhood. then our immune system is toned to that fingerprint for the rest of our lives. And I think what we're continuing to learn in microbiome research is how much does that set point shift with environment as we age and our diet and our cohabitation and how much...
Is it always going to kind of return to its set point? And I think that's where looking at nutrition and parents or people cohabitating has for sure an impact, but it isn't the end all be all. there's a lot of nuance there. And I think it's really interesting to think about.
Andrea McBeth, ND (26:02.151)
Well, you're here today, you can't undo what happened. Like I was a C-section baby and all those things, right? We just are surviving and doing the best we can. But what I can do today is impact the community around me. And even if it's not just the microbes, I really resonate with that idea that to be a caregiver, you have to care for yourself. And...
Pure Living Family (26:06.093)
that.
Andrea McBeth, ND (26:27.332)
as somebody who took care of a family member with cancer for two years, you know, I learned a lot in my early twenties that I don't think I would have learned otherwise about just how important that is. And this is a tool to build resilience, whether you're a caregiver or not. And so I like that a lot, the framing of it, but because I'm a scientist, my technical thing is to bring us back to like, there's a set point.
Pure Living Family (26:44.363)
Hmm.
Pure Living Family (26:52.546)
haha
Andrea McBeth, ND (26:57.095)
by the time we're two to three, or they call it the first thousand days. And then there's huge variability that we can influence throughout the rest of our lives. And so there's a nature-nurture kind of nuance as we go.
Pure Living Family (27:12.809)
Yeah, environmental influence, epigenetics. There's a whole conversation there that is maybe a whole other episode, but I appreciate you challenging me. I'm learning. And part of my health and wellness coaching training is you are patient zero. And if you're not eating the dog food as they say in sales, as if you're not eating the dog food you're selling, then it falls flat and people don't hear you.
I really appreciate you coming on the podcast to speak to our audience that we care so deeply about. Maybe one final thought you have for the parents out there, maybe a word of encouragement or anything that you can think of, maybe going back to that time that you were caring for someone with cancer, what sort of advice or encouragement would you maybe give to them?
Andrea McBeth, ND (28:07.965)
You know, I had a really profound conversation early on with somebody who worked with an autism spectrum support group. And they said, the most dangerous drug is hope. And that was a really, really caught me.
in a way that I could understand because I worked in cancer. And at one point in time, my sister was told she had two weeks to live. And I happened to be in research and sort of didn't accept that. And we did all kinds of stuff to navigate the system. She's alive. She's been in remission for 14 years. And I want to acknowledge that there's no magic bullet, right?
And I think that there is so much out there we don't know and so much opportunity for hope. If we can approach it from a perspective of everybody is gonna be interfacing differently. And like, I just fundamentally believe that there is solutions out there that we are yet to discover. And so I wanna be really conscientious about not selling hope.
that is blind, but with a sense of consent and understanding that there is no one size fits all, but there are tools and we're continuing to learn about biology and some hope is okay in certain circumstances. And it's all about having a toolbox that you can customize and learn on your own personal journey.
Pure Living Family (29:51.103)
I love that. I appreciate that very much because that is something that we hear frequently. think J.B. Hanley says it well is that parents get sold hope again and again on different products and different treatments like this is going to make your kids speak. This is going to make your kid get potty trained. Like I don't know how many times I've heard that and parents become so frustrated and like tired of hearing that.
We're not promising that this is gonna do anything other than maybe it's worth experimenting with. I am personally experimenting with it for my own gut health to then hopefully assist my son Theo in his journey and his protocols. We do have an affiliate partnership with Thaena, which I'm very excited about. So we do get a discount for our followers and for our community. So we'll list it in the show notes. But Dr. McBeth.
Thank you so much for your time and thanks for joining us on this podcast.
Andrea McBeth, ND (30:51.955)
Thanks for having me and all the work you do. This is really an honor to be a part.