Written by Christopher Kelly
March 6, 2024
Chris:
Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly. Today I'm delighted to present to you Laura Paling, PhD. She leads the animal science division for bio fractal dotai, an innovative start up using gene expression information and advanced data science to improve livestock yield and welfare. Laura's passion for human and animal health and performance has resulted in diverse professional experiences, including academic research in food chain nutrition, clinical dietetics, and consulting as a nutritionist.
On today's podcast, Laura shares her passion for understanding and reigniting harmony in the human gut. She discusses her doctoral work including research on the gut microbiome, food and health. She also touches on some current science related to keystone species of microorganisms and methane producing bacteria in the microbiome. Well Laura, thank you so much for joining me this afternoon, this morning at La Ucavilla in Costa Rica. How are you doing?
Laura:
Oh, good. It's a pleasure.
Chris:
Are you holding it together? If I put you off having kids yet, for the listener, Laura has been integrated into our family. I think that's fair. Would you think that's fair?
Laura:
I think so at this point. Yeah.
Chris:
At this point. So you arrived on New Year's Eve 2023. We're recording on February 12th. So it's been about 6 weeks since you've been living with Julie, my wife, and our 3 kids. Ivy, who's 10, Bauer just turned 6, and Ayla, who's 2.
So they're quite little kids. And we've lived in a variety of spaces. This the biggest being our 1200 square foot house, which is definitely not big enough for 6 people. And the smallest was our 1997 VW Eurovan, which is not even big enough for 5 people, which would normally be its usage. And yeah.
So how have you been finding that? Is it I mean It's been good.
Laura:
It's a good way to get to know people very quickly.
Chris:
Yeah. Well, the apartment we're in currently and have been in for the last month is only a 100 meters squared, which I guess is about 300 square foot. Yeah. There's not a lot of privacy. Do you find yourself craving privacy?
Laura:
No. Not really.
Chris:
Yeah. It's funny, isn't it?
Laura:
Yeah.
Chris:
It's not one of those things that people really want and then you get it or you don't have it and you're like, Yeah. Maybe I don't care so much about that.
Laura:
And I would have been a person that would say like I like my own time not a person that feels like I need to be with other people all the time but, yeah, I love having you guys around all the time and if
Chris:
I am on my own
Laura:
at any point, it's no longer than 5 minutes before one of your kids finds me.
Chris:
You don't even get to go to the bathroom by yourself here. Oh, no. There's not really a meaningful lock on the door, and there's really only 2 spaces, the bathroom and everywhere else. Yeah. And the kids will just come into the bathroom.
Laura:
Or the neighbor's kids.
Chris:
Or the neighbor's kids. Yeah. Yeah. That's been really wonderful. I find that whole thing very touching when, you know, the neighbor's kids, you know, feel free to just come over whenever they want and and it's really lovely.
What are your impressions of La Eco Villa in in general? I know you didn't really pick this place. Right? Like, I I found it online and sent you before we came here but it's not like you went seeking it out. Yeah.
So what are your thoughts on La Iquivilla?
Laura:
Yeah. I didn't have a lot of expectations in the beginning because like you said, I haven't sort that out purposefully. But I have been interested in wanting to explore different ways that people are living more in community and trying to figure out amongst that what I like and what I don't like to help guide me towards something that I think would be good for me longer term. Yeah. And I guess there are aspects here that feel like strong community but there are also aspects that feel like community is missing, I guess.
That's one thing that I've learned here. And we've talked a lot about that. Like, here a lot of things are taken care of for you. Like, the cleaning and the gardening and the general upkeep of all the houses and the places, the schooling. So we've talked about a lot that those are opportunities to build connection and that's kind of missing because that's a paid role for staff here and that's, like, one learning I think I will take when I hopefully go on to observe the next community is how are they dealing with those tasks and does integrating the community into those tasks more help build more connection.
Chris:
Yeah. It'd be interesting for me to interview one of the founders to find out why things the way they are because I'm guessing it's deliberate, you know, like Yeah. Maybe they went down that route initially where, you know, you were responsible for this. And there was an expectation, and they tried that, and it didn't work out. And so here we are with, you know, paying for everything outsourced.
Yeah. Who do I have to thank for meeting you? Someone in New Zealand listened to the MBT podcast, told you to listen to the podcast and then that's how we met.
Laura:
Yeah. Doctor Carleen Stark.
Chris:
Oh. Yeah. And tell us about her work.
Laura:
She was a nutrition scientist at the Ritter Institute in New Zealand where I was doing my PhD and she was also a mountain biker and she used to listen to your podcast. She also rode horses a lot and that was what brought us together is I rode horses a lot when I was younger and I was riding a bit in New Zealand. So we kind of connected over that And she was also one of the first scientists in the Riddick to start doing a lot of research into red meat and the benefits of red meat for athletes.
Chris:
Oh, interesting. Yeah.
Laura:
So she introduced me to your podcast that would have been in 2018.
Chris:
Oh, wow. Yep. This is going back away. Yep. And what did her work find?
I mean, obviously, red meat in athletes, zinc, protein.
Laura:
Yeah. Well, she actually didn't stay at the Riddick that long because I found this really interesting job that came up with a company. I think it was Radix Nutrition. And they were doing I don't know if it was keto specifically but kind of whole foods based dried meals for athletes who are out on, like, multi day adventures and they were looking for, like, a new innovation lead and I passed that on to her and she ended up leaving and taking a different job. Oh, nice.
So that probably I mean, I think it was a good move for her at the time, but I probably wasn't the favorite person around because she
Chris:
was a really good scientist and
Laura:
then she left.
Chris:
Well that for me is like a good sign you know that you're doing something that's relevant when you get stolen away by
Laura:
Exactly. Yeah.
Chris:
By business. Yeah. It's not just all academic.
Laura:
Yeah. That's true.
Chris:
We'll get to your PhD which is on the gut microbiome Yeah. In just a moment. I would really like to know more about your early life that shaped you Yeah. Into the scientist you would eventually become. Yeah.
Laura:
Tell me
Chris:
about being a kid. So your dad Yeah. Is well, both your parents are farmers.
Laura:
Yeah. But
Chris:
your mom has a PhD as well. What's your mom's PhD working?
Laura:
My mom did a PhD that was in the interaction between microbes and plant genetics. So she was actually looking at Rhizobium, which is a bacteria that lives on the roots of plants that is a nitrogen fixer.
Chris:
Oh, interesting.
Laura:
So it brings nitrogen back into the soil and she was looking at how that bacteria affects the gene expression of the plant actually. Back in the day I remember like I've been had it flick through my mum's PhD thesis many times and it was all written by hand
Chris:
Yeah.
Laura:
And the pictures taken on a microscope and then printed and developed in film.
Chris:
That's amazing.
Laura:
Handwritten graphs, like, in pencil with measurements and then you have to package it all up and send it to a professional typewriter.
Chris:
That's amazing.
Laura:
It's like it's a piece of art. Art.
Chris:
Do you think yeah. It's a piece of art and I just wonder whether there's less dip shittery because now, you know, with what you can do with modern statistical tools and analysis. Right? You can't really do that with a pencil and paper so much. That's super you're basically on the same path.
Right? Like Really? I
Laura:
don't know how that happened.
Chris:
I don't know how that happened. So tell us about growing up on a farm. It sounds like fun but was it?
Laura:
Yeah. Oh, it was great fun. Yeah. It was really good fun. So my dad was a dairy farmer in Gloucestershire.
He actually didn't grow up farming at all but he left school when he was quite young and kind of wanted to do something with a lot of autonomy and started working on a farm and building up to have his own farm, which he did in his early thirties. And we had about 60 Guernsey cattle, which are more of a kind of traditional breeds. So they don't produce as much milk, but it's very creamy kind of a 2 milk.
Chris:
You don't have to explain what a 2 is now.
Laura:
Oh, a 2 so a 1 and a 2 are variants of casein which is one of the proteins in milk. And traditionally, cows are very much a 2 type and a 2 doesn't cross the blood brain barrier. But as we selected cows for improved milk yield, we introduced by selective breeding an a one variant which is a different structure of the milk protein casein and that protein can actually cross the blood brain barrier and can interact with opioid receptors. So it is known to have some negative impacts particularly in children with autism and other neurological conditions and can also be a trigger of milk or dairy allergy in some people. So the more traditional breeds like Guernseys and Jerseys and even the Gloucestershire cow, which is where I'm from have more of that a 2, the beneficial a 2 variant of casein.
Chris:
And that is available commercially in the US as branded as a 2 mill but I'm sure a lot most people won't know exactly what a 2 is.
Laura:
Yeah. Probably not. And it's the same in the UK. You can quite buy that quite widely now.
Chris:
Okay. Yeah. I talked to your dad. He's a very funny guy and I really enjoyed the conversation. He was, like, telling me all this stuff that I kind of knew already, you know.
And it was just, like, so awesome to hear it directly from a farmer. You know, he was talking to me about the benefits of grass fed and
Laura:
Yeah.
Chris:
Some of what you just said. He said, you know, the Holstein, it's more of a an a one variant. Right? It's like a formula 1 car. It produces incredible amounts of milk.
However, there may be some downsides to that. Yeah. But you also talked about the, the meat milk yield versus the meat yield. And Yeah. There's kind of a a trade off there as well.
Laura:
Yeah. And that's just like I mean, that's lots of animals that we've domesticated for food like chickens would be the same. So you have breeds that are for laying eggs and breeds that are for meat. And that's the way we've divergently selected the same now. There are a few breeds like the Gloucester cow that are a bit more dual purpose, you would call it, can do meat and milk.
Chris:
Right. It's like an everyday driver.
Laura:
Many of yeah. There's not that many of those breeds around anymore.
Chris:
Interesting. How specialization causes these problems. Yeah. Tell me about your relationship with horses. That seemed like it was an important part of your childhood and Yeah.
And young adulthood even. Right?
Laura:
Yeah. Yeah. So my mom grew up riding, and horses were a really important part of her life. So when I was very young, before I could walk, she bought 2 very small ponies that were actually kind of foals really at the time. They were probably 6 months or a year old and had never been ridden.
Then my mum used to put me on them from a very early age and so I very much learned to ride the hard way by spending more time on the floor than I did on their back.
Chris:
When you say very young age how old were you?
Laura:
Yeah. I don't know. It was definitely before I could walk. I probably sat on horses from before the age of 1.
Chris:
That's amazing.
Laura:
And cows, We had particular cows because my mum dad would milk the cows and mum would bottle feed the calves And we have particular cows that were very tame and mum would actually put me on the back of a cow and we would walk out to get the cows in from the field. She would walk and I would sit on the back of a cow and then she'd pick me up on the yard when we got home from the back of the cow.
Chris:
Amazing. She didn't have to hold you in place or anything. You could just sit down.
Laura:
Yeah. Yeah. I'm pretty good on a bucking bronco, actually. I've had a lot of experience.
Chris:
What about so your dad now races beef cows. Sorry. I'll get back to the horses in just a moment. And those are a different animal altogether. Right?
You're not riding
Laura:
on the bike
Chris:
with one of those?
Laura:
Yeah. No. I mean, there are some that, like, are a bit more tame. But the thing is they are kind of left out in the field and they just, like, do their own thing. They're not the dairy cows are brought in twice a day to be milked and handled so they're very much used to having humans around and being handled whereas the beef cows aren't.
They kind of out in the field for like a year or 2 and don't really have a lot of contact so they're not tamed in the same way and particularly when they have a calf, they're very fiercely maternal and yeah. It's a risky business being involved in raising beef cows because if you get a calf that, like, needs veterinary attention and you have to then try and bring that in with the cow or separate her from the cow It's really dangerous.
Chris:
Yeah. Good luck with that.
Laura:
Can kill you very easily.
Chris:
Yeah. I'm sure. Imagine trying to take cubs from a grizzly bear. Right? Uh-huh.
Good luck with that.
Laura:
Yeah. Yeah.
Chris:
So tell us, how did you become competitive with the horses and how did it turn into because it didn't it turned into more of this than just recreational.
Laura:
Yeah. Well, it's I kind of started out that way. I think the first time I went to a competition I was probably 4 years old.
Chris:
Oh, wow.
Laura:
That was really tiny. That I had. Yeah. I was just kind of raised in that environment. So I grew up in the countryside and so I would ride a little bit in the fields and on the roads around us.
But if you wanna get better at a particular skill, dressage, show jumping, or cross country, you kind of have to join a club where they have those resources for you to practice that sport. So as a young girl, the kind of thing you join in the UK would be the pony club or the riding club and I was a member of both. And they hold rallies where all the kids come together and they hire 1 instructor and you all come together on your own pony and then they teach you and coach you in the different aspects of riding. And then those organizations also hold events and local shows and things and it becomes really it's a community and it's
Chris:
I was about to say that. Like, what what is it that in a community it's not it's not really something that you work on directly. It's something it's an emergent phenomenon. Like, it emerges from something and like, the question then becomes a what is that something? And in this case, it's the horses.
Right? It's not just a hobby. It's almost a way of life. Right? Those animals need a lot of care
Laura:
and protection. Yeah. Exactly. And the thing that I loved as a kid was pony club camp. That happens every year and it's like a week long and you take your pony and everybody is there all day.
You get to ride each other's horses and then you do all the kind of on the ground stuff like learning how to take care of all your saddle and bridle and keep the horse healthy and all the management stuff as well. And there's loads of like play involved and community there and that was like a really fun time for me.
Chris:
That's great. That sounds like an idyllic childhood and a great education to me.
Laura:
Yeah. Yeah. But farming is also hard. Right? Like, we never holidays were not a thing that we ever had.
Chris:
You can't really leave a farm. Right? No. You you can leave it to.
Laura:
No. Exactly. And, you know, Christmas Day is still dad getting up at and mum getting up at 5 and 6 in the morning and milking the cows. The only difference is they put a bit of Baileys in their coffee.
Chris:
That's amazing. And so what were the early competitions? What's that does it display in some of the types of competitions that you did on the horse there?
Laura:
Yeah. So anything from, like, local shows is a big thing where they'd have lots of different classes at a show. So you could do anything from dressage which is ballet on a horse. It's the kind of fancy bit on the ground. Show jumping or cross country which is kind of off in a field jumping ditches and hedges and other, you know, log built fences.
And then also showing, you know, like people show dogs where they're looking more at the kind of confirmation of the horse and how it's presented. So I kind of did everything of that. And that then evolved into doing pony club to triathlon. So my parents have done triathlons really. Yeah.
Their whole life, particularly mom drove that and she's done a few lots of half marathons, even a couple half Ironmans. So that was kind of ingrained into, I guess, our livelihood as kids as well. And the pony club to triathlon took the aspects of triathlon and pony club together. So it's riding cross country on horseback, a running race, like a cross country running race, shooting, pistol shooting, and swimming.
Chris:
Wow. That's so cool.
Laura:
So I spent a lot of years of my childhood and teenage years competing in that.
Chris:
Did you get good at it?
Laura:
Yeah. I got very good at it. Yeah. We got, as a team mainly, my team, we got to national level once. Yeah.
Chris:
That's great. Yeah.
Laura:
It was good fun.
Chris:
Super fun. And then talk about your relationship with dogs.
Laura:
Oh, yeah. Dogs. Yeah. I mean, the horse thing, the show jumping on horses, that kind of like evolved into dogs when yeah. We had a dog.
We got our first dog. I was about 7 and we got a Dalmatian puppy. I was obsessed with a 101 Dalmatians through my childhood. So that was a real delight for me. And she was very good around horses because Dalmatians actually were domesticated in the Croatian region of Dalmatia.
And they used them alongside fire engines when they were horse drawn. So Dalmatians are good endurance dogs that are used to running alongside of horses. So we used to take our Dalmatian out on horse rides all the time and she'd run alongside the horses. And then I kind of realized that if I would do a jump on the horse, the dog would also do the jump and that was really fun because I could
Chris:
do it
Laura:
on the horse and the dog would follow me. And our neighbor was actually involved in a lot of dog training and he drove past one day and said, oh, do you know, like, there's an agility club, like, down the road? Have you ever thought of doing it? So I started that probably when I was maybe 11 or so with the Dalmatian. And we did really well.
There were not many junior, like, young handlers at that time. And there were some really great people at that club who kind of took me under their wing and showed me how to train dogs, especially guiding a dog with your body language around an agility course, jumps and tunnels and things.
Chris:
And And that was new. Right? You you we've talked about this before.
Laura:
Yeah. It was a kind of really growing sport at the time. Yeah.
Chris:
But just the idea of directing the dog with your body.
Laura:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That was definitely yeah. Traditionally, agility had been done a lot more kind of like handling animals was more sternly.
Chris:
You would
Laura:
just use your voice and command the dog to do something. But at that point, people were starting to realize that there was a more harmonious relationship you can have with an animal and that by using your body language and how your shoulders are moving can actually direct the dog and you can basically steer a dog around a very complex course of obstacles without using your voice once. Yeah. So that was a really beautiful thing and though we ended up qualifying for crafts multiple times and we won crafts once when I was a junior as a team as well.
Chris:
What was that like? It was a lot of attention.
Laura:
Oh, yeah. It was great. I was probably maybe 15 at that time.
Chris:
Wow. Yeah. So that must have been like nationwide coverage type Yeah. In the newspaper
Laura:
stuff. Was really great. Yeah.
Chris:
It was great. And you didn't did you ever think you must have at that thought point thought well, could I make a career out of this? That might that might
Laura:
Oh, yeah. I absolutely did. And that was very much my intention. Unfortunately, the dog that I had at the time that I was very competitive with became very sick. And unfortunately, he ended up dying quite young and that was a real, yeah, real difficult time for me to deal with that.
And my mom actually kind of offered a solution to try and, you know, encourage me out of that difficult time, which was there was an appeal for people to train puppies for an organization, a charity called Canine Partners, which is very similar to Guide Dogs but it's training dogs for people with disabilities mainly people in wheelchairs. And so that was then what I spent the next year doing. This was my gap year before I went to university. And I trained an assistance dog for a guy that was shot in the neck in a tour of Afghanistan and was paralyzed in a wheelchair.
Chris:
And what so what did the dog do for him?
Laura:
The dog so the guy was permanently on a ventilator.
Chris:
Oh, wow. And Doesn't that normally require intensive care? But Yeah.
Laura:
He had like a full time staff of 3 carers all the time. Yeah. And he was like 30 something. He was a young guy, very senior in the navy and the special boat service very highly skilled individual. And we were able to train the dog.
His name was Wogan. Like Terry? Yeah. Actually he was named after Terry Wogan because he came from Ireland.
Chris:
So you're gonna have to explain now who Terry Wogan was so that everyone listening in the US has got no clue. I guess, Howard used he was a very famous, like, talk show host. It's how I think of him. Maybe it was something before that. I don't remember.
And a radio host as well. It was, like, super popular on the radio. Yeah. Anyway, so tell us about what Wogan was able to do for this event.
Laura:
Yeah. So we were able to train Wogan to recognize the normal beep of the ventilator. And then when there was a problem, Wogan, there was a large red button on the wall that would call emergency Wow. So Wogan could do that and then the
Chris:
guy
Laura:
So it was able to give him a lot of independence back because he didn't have to have someone watching over him 247 at that point. And it's a lot of being able to then help that person integrate back into the community. Like you're going around in a wheelchair, you've got a cute dog with you. People always wanna come and talk to you. Yeah.
So, yeah, that was a really cool time in my life as well.
Chris:
And tell us about the academic path that would eventually lead you to a PhD. What did you do undergraduate? How did you decide on that?
Laura:
Yeah. So that was I did animal science then and that was actually related to the fact that I wanted to carry on training dogs in the beginning.
Chris:
Okay.
Laura:
For the work that I did with canine partners in training that dog, I was awarded a bursary from HSBC Bank. Oh, wow. And that actually funded my tuition fees for the whole degree.
Chris:
That's great.
Laura:
That allowed me to go to the University of Reading and study animal science. So I went to Reading and did that, and I had a great time at Reading. Like, met loads of cool people, both like students and professors, and it was a really fun time in my life. And then kind of fell into academia, really. So in my final year, professor Ian Givens, who's the professor of food chain nutrition at Reading, kinda took me under his wing for my final project, which was building a dissertation around the importance of iodine in the development of a baby when it's in the womb, how that affects IQ, and the relevance of that to my project was that most iodine in pregnant women comes from milk, but we thought that there was a difference And that the hypothesis was that organic milk was actually lower in iodine.
And this is a problem because when women are pregnant and they're thinking, okay, I I wanna improve my health and I'm gonna switch organic. And then they go to organic milk and there's less iodine there which is really important for the development of the child and is actually subclinical iodine deficiency is linked to lower IQ development in the child when it's born. And so we looked at that and we did find that the organic milk was significantly lower in iodine than the conventional milk.
Chris:
Why is that? Do you know? Is it like with iodine in salt right? They just it's just fortified is the answer.
Laura:
Yeah. I think you're probably right. We did a lot of work with different farmers and with different feed companies and it became difficult in the end because there was some disagreement about the data being publicly accessible and published. So we weren't able to go as deep into that as we wanted to. But the hypothesis was that conventional cows receive more concentrate feed which is yeah.
Has iodine added to it whereas a pure grass based diet is actually probably a bit deficient in iodine for the cows most of the time.
Chris:
That's fascinating. They don't have concentrated animal feed operations like they do, you know, for anyone in the US. I'm sure they know what I'm talking about. Right? You drive down I5 in the US and you see these things that look like horrendous factories Yeah.
In the desert. You know, there's no grass anywhere to be seen. Yeah. Feedbox. Right?
And obviously in the UK, it's different. There's a lot more grass, but that doesn't mean that all of the beef available there, it all milk is all grass fed all the time. Is that right?
Laura:
Yeah. And the reality is that in the UK in the winter most of the grassland is just too wet and boggy to have cows out there all the time. It wouldn't be good for their feet. Like, imagine standing, like, barefoot in knee
Chris:
high mud or Yeah. Trench foot. Right?
Laura:
Exactly. Yeah. And there's not enough grass. So the reality is that most cows are brought in the winter and supplemented with a concentrate feed and or silage which is grass that's been cut in the summer and then kinda covered and fermented until the next winter when it's fed back to the cows.
Chris:
So what do you think for the listener? How are they getting the iodine? So I mean that's been one of the things that's been so wonderful about having you and Will in the past. We've been to see you in the Cottons a couple of times. So your partner Will Yeah.
Is very much of the same value system when it comes to nutrition. Yeah. And it's just been so easy for us just to in fact, Will has been really great in getting my son to eat more protein. Like, he's got don't ask me why. I don't know how he does it but, yeah, the mint.
I was like This is
Laura:
beef mince for breakfast is the key. Cook out with a bit of worcester sauce and vegetable.
Chris:
Some recipe I think happened within hours of us of first arriving at your house and you've got, you know, Bebo's eating mince that Will has prepared. I'm wait. What? Like, it's always a challenge with him for some reason. I don't understand why.
But okay. So we're all on the same page, and I think most of the people listening will will be on that sort of slightly lower carb, paleo, but we won't say paleo anymore because that's not cool. But I do work with a lot of clients that, you know, they're eating some sort of ancient sea salt and apparently that's better for you in some way and I don't really wanna argue against that. But you're Yeah. You know, obviously, they put iodine in salt for a reason and then the question, well, if you're not having that then where's the iodine coming from?
Do you have answers? Yeah.
Laura:
I mean the answer really is fish.
Chris:
Yeah.
Laura:
The problem the thing is that most people are getting their iodine from milk is because generally we're not eating anywhere near as much fish as we should be. If you're eating fish regularly, you're probably not getting most of your iodine from milk and it's not even a problem
Chris:
for you. Yeah. And certainly for our family, we think about that a lot because of especially for the, you know, the long chain fats Yeah. Especially DHA. Yeah.
70% of the dry weight of the brain is DHA. And if you're trying to build a brain, one would assume you have to eat Yeah. Those fatty acids. They're essential. Right?
Laura:
You can't, I
Chris:
mean, you know, some vegan is gonna tell me, well, you're gonna like yeah. I don't believe you.
Laura:
Yeah.
Chris:
Yeah. The activity of the enzymes involved in converting Yeah. Plant fats into Yeah. The thing that you need, the DHA that you need Yeah. Pretty poor.
And so you're either eating fish or you're eating the brains of another animal.
Laura:
Exactly.
Chris:
So yeah. So we're eating sardines, so hopefully we're okay. Oh, and those, like I know it's, like, terrible in the, you know, single use plastic and the amount of waste that comes with it. Those little nori sheets that are
Laura:
impregnated with Oh, the seaweed. Yeah.
Chris:
The seaweed impregnated with olive oil so they're like Yeah.
Laura:
Oh, your kids love them. They just smash a whole pack.
Chris:
I know. It's amazing how much mess they can make with those. But I really the amount of waste that comes in with Yeah. Is pretty insane. But okay.
So is there anything else? Like, if people are not if they're not into sardines?
Laura:
Or seaweed.
Chris:
Or seaweed.
Laura:
Oh, seaweed is obviously a really rich source of iodine as well.
Chris:
It's one of those. I don't know what is there anything else like it?
Laura:
Not that would come up really high. Yeah. There are like I mean, probably a lot of people would get it through kind of sources that have been enriched like bread or salt or something like that but yeah certainly fish and seaweed will come out top and then probably milk would be up there as well.
Chris:
So how did you end up in New Zealand on a PhD program? What's it like in the past it's it might be a bit different in the UK than it is from the US. I don't know. Like it certainly of the friends that I knew that went to university, I was they mostly did a 4 year master's degree. They were in a different I knew a bunch of friends doing aeronautics and astronautics, so I did computer science.
And I got hired away from university before I'd even finished my undergraduate degree. Yeah. But I didn't know anyone that stayed on to do a PhD. So how did that happen for you?
Laura:
Well there was a period in between actually. So when I was doing my undergrad I did a internship with a company called Dinesco Animal Nutrition which are owned by the American company DuPont, which are a large I mean, they kind of started out as a chemical company but they've got a huge biotech biosciences division which is I was in industrial biosciences. And then when I graduated, it was similar. I was hired straight away into the innovation team as an assistant scientist. And I was mainly working on the development of new feed additives.
So probiotics and digestive enzymes are a huge business in livestock, both improving the efficiency of digestion of feed and also the gut health of livestock. So I worked in that group for 4 years. And whilst I was doing that, we had a professor professor Paul Moen from the Ritter Institute in New Zealand who would come and work with us. His area was particularly around protein nutrition and it was his group that developed the p dcast which is the most modern way now.
Chris:
Protein bioavailability?
Laura:
Yes. Exactly. So that replaced the original Dyer system which was biased towards underestimating requirement, I think.
Chris:
I see.
Laura:
And that was a Gates Foundation funded project at the Ritter Institute where they developed that new methodology.
Chris:
Well, that's interesting because Gates is not so much into the protein from animals thing anymore. Can you speak to that at all?
Laura:
Yeah. Do you
Chris:
wanna burn any bridges there? No. Let's move on. But, yeah, it is interesting that when, you know, for the listener, if anyone's interested in why animal protein is more bioavailable than plant proteins, then it's is it p d c a s? Yes.
It's like the kind of the keyword PubMed, and you're gonna find a bunch of studies that order foods by their bioavailability and you're gonna find all the animal foods at the top of that list. Yep. Yep. And so can you talk about those probiotics that improved yield in livestock?
Laura:
Yeah. So the I mean, in livestock really, it's kind of slightly unique. That a lot of the strains in probiotics are used across humans and animals. And DuPont have a human nutrition group and, you know, we shared a lot of resources including probiotic strains, but the application for animal feed is slightly unique and that most of the feed is kind of extruded or pelleted. So if you're applying a probiotic and you have a bacteria that needs to withstand high heat and pressure really you need something that produces a spore.
So only certain types of like a almost imagine it like a it forms a spore which is kind of like a almost imagine it like a protective shell round itself and it kinda goes into hibernation so that it can continue to survive. And then when the spore is able to register favorable environmental conditions, usually temperature, moisture, possibly even nutrient availability, that spore will germinate so it will turn back into a viable cell. So the cultures that we used in animal feed, that point were all spore formers, which is usually a type of bacillus probiotic so that when you pellet the feed they turn into a spore then the animal ingests that and when it when the spore is then in the gut and it registers this favorable condition of temperature, moisture, nutrients, nutrients, it germinates back into a functional cell and performs its normal metabolism and benefits He was. Yeah.
Chris:
You should join me in New Zealand and I've got a PhD for you. Is that how it went down?
Laura:
Well, pretty much. Yeah. The unique thing about New Zealand is that a lot of their research is funded by the Ministry of Business. So for New Zealand, a lot of their their economy is built on food export, particularly in Asia and China.
Chris:
Yeah.
Laura:
So the science that's done in New Zealand, they don't play the global game of kind of cancer research. They leave that to Europe and the US and everywhere else, but they do play the game of wanting to support their economy as you would. So they fund a lot of research into food and Massey University, in particular, the Ritter Institute among others, including Otago University, and some government funded organizations like AgResearch and Plant and Food are really real strong hubs now globally in terms of the food and nutrition research that goes on there, And they use that to support food exports as
Chris:
well. Why did staying in academia appeal to you if you already had a clear path to the commercialization of your education? So I would say.
Laura:
Yeah. I mean, when I was working as a scientist in industry, there's a couple of things there that push me toward that. One was kind of really reaching the ceiling a bit in terms of where you can get as a scientist responsibility and a decent sized budget in terms of trials and development of additives, but you won't really go a lot further as a pure scientist scientist without a PhD. The reality is that a lot of our customers that we're working with all have PhDs So the company wants to present people who are equally, if not more, qualified. So there is a bit of a ceiling in industry at that time with regards to having a PhD.
And the other thing is that working in industry as a scientist kind of has a different moral perspective. When you run a lot of research trials and you realize that only the ones that are approved by the legal and marketing teams will be published, you start to wonder about the morality of science. And I thought, I'm gonna go back to the pure world and go back to academia where, you know, everything's out in the open, everything's published and you can actually use the literature to accurately understand the problem because it's accurately represented in the literature which isn't really done with an industry. They will only publish what supports, their agenda really.
Chris:
And and what do you think about that idea that you need a PhD to continue your career progression. Yeah. I'm I'm very much in favor of Brian Kaplan as a an economist. He's never been on the podcast. Maybe I should ask him.
But he has a book called The Case Against Education, computer scientist, I go to a 3 year undergraduate computer science know, even for me as a computer scientist, I go to a 3 year undergraduate computer science degree and then I get a job at wherever, Cisco. Yeah. And still, I find myself learning on the job. It's not like I learn everything I need to know in university. In fact, for some people, they don't learn anything that's
Laura:
relevant to
Chris:
what they do on the job and
Laura:
Yeah. I completely agree. And I think it's very dependent on what you want to do. So for example, in my position, my role now where I'm working in a start up and that's founded in molecular biology, my time in the lab during my PhD was that is actually very useful to me. So when I'm working with molecular data, I understand how that data has been generated, and I understand the biases that are present both in terms of generating data and analyzing data and in publishing data and it allows me to look at that with more of a critical eye when I see things in my work and when I also see things that are published.
However, you don't have to do a PhD to have that understanding. Like, if I'd done an internship in a lab and worked of, like, you know, 3 or 4, 6 months in a lab, I probably would have picked up a lot of the useful information that I know now.
Chris:
What was the transition to New Zealand like? I mean, it's to the other side of the world, isn't it? Yeah. Where you came from? What what did you bring?
It's like Yeah. It's probably limited in what you couldn't bring. Right? You're not bringing any horses or dogs.
Laura:
I don't think after my undergrad, I didn't really have any left to that point. Oh, my border collie, she and my mom had adopted yeah, the transition was great, actually. It was really kind of exciting time for me and I was ready to go off and do something different, live in another country, experience another culture. Yeah. New Zealand is an interesting one because it has a really good reputation of being people use the words lean, clean, and green to describe I've not
Chris:
heard that before. Zealand.
Laura:
Yeah. And on some level, it is many of those things but it's also moving to the UK like 50 years ago. Particularly in terms of things like health and safety and
Chris:
Oh, really? You know, I've heard people say that about with respect to California as well that New Zealand is like California in the 19 seventies or something like that.
Laura:
Yeah. Probably. And the natural world there is beautiful and the population is very small. So the land mass of New Zealand is similar to the UK, for example, but it's only got 5,000,000 people in the whole country.
Chris:
Oh, that's smart, isn't it?
Laura:
It's like smaller than London Yeah. In the whole country. So Maybe less. Everybody's got loads of space. Like, a small house in New Zealand is like single story with maybe, like, half an acre of maybe not so much half an acre, but it's not uncommon to find properties in suburbia with half an acre.
Chris:
That's wild. So really low population
Laura:
density. Loads of space. Yeah.
Chris:
And how was it? I mean, it sounds like a dream to the outdoor lover which you
Laura:
obviously were. Yeah. It really was. I lived in Palmerston North on the North Island which is an hour or 2 outside Wellington. Wellington used to be the capital.
Now, it's Auckland, which is more north at the North Island. And Palmerston North is not really known for anything and if you ask a Kiwi and New Zealander about Palmerston North, they really turn their nose up.
Chris:
Why is that?
Laura:
Just because I think New Zealanders have it pretty good. Any foreigner who ended up in Palmerston North would be pretty pretty happy. There's a beautiful the Manawatu River runs through Palmerston North. There's endless walks, bike tracks along the river, mountain biking in Palmerston North, hiking. And then if you get 2 hours in the car and go to Mount Rapayhu, which is a volcano covered in snow in the winter, loads of snowboarding, skiing, beaches, like, 20 minutes away, surfing.
You can kinda do everything, really.
Chris:
That's pretty awesome. No. I mean, it sounds like California. Right? Yeah.
Sort of. That's I think often why it's mean why I went to California was to be able to do all those things over the weekend. It's kinda challenging to do when you're in London
Laura:
Yeah.
Chris:
To say the least. Right? I ended up driving to South Wales every weekend. It got old real quick. What was your sport of choice?
It was there anything in particular that you enjoyed or focused on?
Laura:
Yeah. I mean, I carried on after the kind of triathlon to triathlon days. I carried on quite a bit of running for a while and did a few half marathons. And then, it was when I before I left in New Zealand, actually, I started having some problems with a constant stitch that I would have. And I was also having kind of intermittent back pain around that time and it I stopped running at that point and I tried yoga for a bit.
I came to the conclusion that the stitch was maybe breathing related. I'd tried seeing doctors and physios and no one could really give me a good explanation of what was wrong with me. The doctor would say, oh, the stitches because you're not fit enough. Oh, but I just ran a half marathon last weekend
Chris:
like what happened to this day.
Laura:
So I don't think I'm that unfit that I should get a stitch when I'm running around the park. Yeah.
Chris:
I know and I think that, you know, we did acro yoga together. Yeah. Like, a couple of weeks ago, wasn't it? And it was Marie that got an, like, an instant cramp. Yes.
You know, all endurance athletes think, well, it must be something to do with sweat and electrolytes and all of this and that. Yeah. But how is it that you can induce a cramp in less than 30 seconds in someone that's just started one movement? Like, how do you explain that? It can't be electrolytes.
Right? No. Anyway, we won't go down that rabbit hole. So what happens with you? How did you eventually resolve?
Yeah. Or how did it progress firstly? Because it was that as bad as it ever got or
Laura:
did it get worse? No. It actually got worse in New Zealand. So I kind of as I tried to explore the breathing thing, I did a bit of yoga and that wasn't really helping. I was kinda still running at the same time and didn't notice a difference.
And then I got into some strength training and I would never get a stitch when I was doing that. So I got into a bit of, kinda, CrossFit style resistance training in a gym. Carried that on in New Zealand and then was training a lot. Well, quite a lot in New Zealand probably 3 or 4 times a week. And I started to get hip pain which I've never had before.
It was actually on a leg press where that first started and it got to the point where it was quite severe, like, having to take paracetamol at night just to be able to sleep. And so I went to a physio in New Zealand with not very high hopes because I'd had back pain on and off for years in the UK and never found anyone who was really able to either tell me what it was or help me resolve it. And the first thing they did was actually do x rays on me, which having been to medics and physios and all sorts in the UK for many years before. No one had ever done. It was the first thing they did in New Zealand.
Chris:
Interesting.
Laura:
And they said, oh, did you know you've got one slipped disc and another bulging disc in your back, which, of course, I didn't know at the time. And that was a bit of a shock to me. But then, they wanted to do more investigations into why my hips were hurting. Because at that point, I didn't have back pain. It was more my hip.
So they did an MRI of the hip with like a label dye in the hip socket and they found out that I had hip dysplasia which is where the socket of the hip is actually very shallow, and it doesn't properly encase the femur
Chris:
I see.
Laura:
Like the top of the thigh bone.
Chris:
The fall of the top.
Laura:
Exactly. To really hold that in place. And that was a real major shock for me at the time. And I remember talking to my mom about it actually and she said, oh, yeah. I mean, when you were a baby, your hips used to fall out the sockets all the time and they just told me to put 2 nappies on you.
Chris:
Wow. Maybe you could translate that into adult advice. Right? Just stick Wear 2 nappies. To stick a belt on it.
Have you thought about spandex?
Laura:
Oh, well, the actual suggested solution by the top hip expert in New Zealand was not much better. It was to have a double hip replacement Wow. At the age of 26. And I would have to have one done at a time and then spend 2 or 3 months learning to walk again and move around again after each one. And then I would have to have that done every 10 years for the rest of my life.
Chris:
Holy shit. Yep. So what happened? You didn't do that, obviously.
Laura:
No. I didn't do that.
Chris:
Can I just wanna interrupt you here for a moment? I'm like Yeah. I find it so interesting when people have this sort of come to Jesus moment. You know? Yeah.
With medicine. I think about this all the time. Like, how many people are walking around with some subclinical thing that just isn't bad enough to Oh, yeah. Make a big change, you know? Yeah.
And I've talked about this on the podcast before and I won't repeat it, but I had one of those moments where it's like, don't think I'm going to do the surgery. I should probably try changing my diet first. Yeah. But, yeah, how many people walking around who just haven't had that moment yet? You know?
It's just like not a strong enough why. Yeah. So anyway, go on. So so what happens? You're like, okay.
I don't really fancy the double knee replacement.
Laura:
Yeah. I mean, fortunately, the physio that I was working with was actually, you know, really had his head screwed on and hid a year or 2 before diagnosed someone else with hip dysplasia and she was a powerlifter. And she got back into lifting successfully. So he kinda gave me an insight that the specialist that he'd referred me to maybe wasn't giving me the whole picture and that there wasn't another option. He didn't really have an answer for what it was, but he knew there was something.
So I kind of went back to the drawing board and there are a few connections that I'd made when I was back in the UK actually. And one of them was a guy called Rocco. A Greek guy who was working as a trainer in a gym in London just before I'd left and had offered me to help me with my back. And he had been trained by Professor Stuart McGill who's kind of like the godfather in back pain Yeah.
Chris:
Of course. Basically. I've never interviewed him but yeah. Check out Greg Potter. Greg Potter's been on the podcast at least 10 times and he did some fascinating interviews with Stuart McGill on his reason and well-being podcast.
Stuart McGill's all over the internet. I'm sure most people have heard of him. So go on. So Sue McGill.
Laura:
Yes. So I worked with Rocco for a while who was trained by Stuart McGill and he was very much into trying to bring it into my training. So he actually wrote my gym training programs, resistance training programs for a while. And I got on with that well for a while. But the thing that Stuart McGill encourages is training stiffness in the spine.
And I feel like, in the long term, that didn't help. And maybe that was unique to my situation because of the amount of then looking again for something else and that took me down the road. Then looking again for something else and that took me down the road of PRI, the Postural Restoration Institute.
Chris:
Institute. Okay. I've heard of it. I know it's complicated.
Laura:
Yeah. It is complicated.
Chris:
I know that one of the physical therapists I've interviewed for the podcast and worked with Zac couples is inspired by PRI to some extent. Right? So so okay. So what happened? Yeah.
Don't even know where to start to begin to explain PRI.
Laura:
Yeah. Well, actually, I had an experience with it years earlier. Originally, when I had my back problem, I saw a a PRI purist. Someone who's really trained in the fine art of PRI in London and he said that he felt like a lot of issues in people's bodies actually start in the
Chris:
jaw. Interesting.
Laura:
Because the jaw is like the highest joint in the body and the brain kind of uses it as a sensor to as a reference for all the other positions of the joints in the body. And so his argument was that misalignment in the jaw is what causes a lot of problems further down the chain. And he actually noticed that I was chewing only on the left side of my jaw. Sorry. Only on the right side of my jaw and not on the left.
So he actually used a wooden lolly stick as a reference between my back left teeth to create a point of reference for my brain in those left teeth. And then, would get me to do a bunch of exercises that she felt very different after adding that reference point.
Chris:
Interesting.
Laura:
But it was very abstract. Yeah. I mean, you're not gonna walk around with a wooden lolly stick in your mouth all the time doing that. And at that point, there was no real follow on about how to integrate that into life. So I kind of thought, oh, that PRI thing.
I think there's something to that and that's interesting but I don't know how to apply it. So I'm just
Chris:
It's not really a practical concern.
Laura:
But it came back around at that point in New Zealand. And I then met someone else called Alex Krasuski. And Alex was interestingly trained both by Stuart McGill and in the PRI side. So he was kind of looking at all the picture from both sides. And they've done a lot of work in people with hip pain that were weight lifters or power lifters in the past.
And Alex was really good. He was able to, again, build me a kind of workout program that integrated a lot of these principles of PRI. So, for example, modifying your setup in a squat or a push up position to reflect that change in proprioception that you needed whilst you were doing that movement. So it was a lot more integrated and a lot more functional and I really benefited a lot from that. And I have to say that was probably that was 2018, 2019.
I haven't had any significant hip pain since then. That's
Chris:
amazing.
Laura:
I've had a few acute instances with my back which I think now are probably related to stress more than movement actually.
Chris:
And that's just normal. Like, everybody has
Laura:
Exactly. Yeah.
Chris:
Some low back pain at some point especially.
Laura:
Yeah. Yeah.
Chris:
Well, that's fantastic. Yeah. You figured it out. No surgery. No double you imagine it.
Like, you go to it's just like this huge bifurcation in your the timeline of your life. Like things will never be it's a one way door. Right? Like if you're not coming back from that No. It's never be the same again.
Laura:
And for me, I never considered that because my relationship with movement as being a runner when someone said to me like oh you're gonna really struggle to walk and you might like, learn to run again, but it's gonna be a whole process. There was no way I was gonna do that. So I was motivated really to find another solution.
Chris:
That's great.
Laura:
But for someone else who didn't have that connection with movement who felt like that was their only solution.
Chris:
Yeah.
Laura:
Damn. That's like not a good
Chris:
The spleen.
Laura:
Yeah. It is. Very.
Chris:
Talk about your PhD work. I mean, you know, there's some definitely some clinical palsy. I mean, obviously, it's too much. How what do you ask in a in one interview when it's like several years of experiments and research and everything else. But I think there are some clinical pearls, shall we call them, that emerge from your PhD work especially in methanogens in the mouth.
Can you talk about that?
Laura:
Yeah. So by the time I was doing my PhD, I was more interested in human nutrition at this point. So I'd, you know, got a background more in animals, but I was in my personal life a lot applying that to my own health and nutrition and more interested in how I could use that to help humans. And for my PhD, I was really given free rein to choose whatever I wanted to study. And what I became really interested in was the gut microbiome, particularly around fiber fermentation and some of the dynamics that are happening in the gut microbiome that mean that fiber fermentation is beneficial in some people but not in others.
Chris:
I see.
Laura:
And then
Chris:
there's Animal fiber. It's a thing. Right? Yeah.
Laura:
This was more about plant fiber at
Chris:
the time. Okay. But animal fiber is a thing too.
Laura:
And yeah. So what I was really interested in was methanogens. Mhmm. So that is mainly in archaea, which is slightly more primitive than bacteria.
Chris:
Okay.
Laura:
And it is part of the gut ecosystem and interacts a lot with bacteria, and they produce methane. And in some people, methane is considered to be a real problem. And clinically, people have been measuring methane on a breath test. How much methane comes out on your breath and using that as an indication to actually treat people with antibiotics to try and wipe out those methanogens. But the literature is kinda quite mixed.
Like, in some instances, the methanogens are even seem to be protective against some colon conditions. So there's a bit of a mixed bag there about what these methanogens are doing and are they good? Are they bad? Are they even important in the context of, say, a 1000 species in the whole ecosystem in the gut? One thing that had been found, this was part of Petra Lewis, her lab in Edinburgh, actually, at the Rowett Institute.
They've done a lot of really good gut research there that actually stemmed from their animal science room and microbiology group that then moved into human. And they found that people that produce methane also had these other unique species of bacteria that we call a keystone species in terms of fiber degradation.
Chris:
I see.
Laura:
So the keystone species means that really that one species or very few species are the only ones in this whole ecosystem of a 1,000 other species that can do that very specific role.
Chris:
I see. So it's not a reference to the idea of a key you know, say interview Jim Estes that UC Santa Cruz and he talks about keystone species and trophic cascades. Right. The analogy is a keystone stone in an arch. You remove that keystone, the whole ecosystem collapses.
Laura:
And that is what happens, actually. So, yes, they have a very specific function and the point is that function then is completely removed. So if you take that keystone species out, that function of fiber degradation in that context can now not be done in that community at all. And that is important because the way fiber is fermented in the gut is a we call it a cross feeding chain. So these keystone species break down the first bit of fiber into smaller pieces that are then soon by other bacteria and they make that into even smaller pieces that are consumed by other bacteria.
So if you take out those keystones at the top, what's gonna feed all those others underneath
Chris:
it? And
Laura:
that's exactly what you're describing.
Chris:
It's the
Laura:
same as in the gut. So I wanted to understand why is methane production associated with these specific keystones related to fiber degradation. So what we essentially did is we use breath testing to identify a group of people that produce methane and a group of people that didn't collected their stool and then use that in an in vitro fermentation model which is basically a kind of petri dish style thing in the lab. And that allows us really to be able to monitor what's happening in these populations of bacteria over time, which you can't do in the gut. So I essentially then produced the population of bacteria that were in the gut in a jar in the lab and then I can feed them different things and see what they do.
See how that changes the population.
Chris:
Is that model representative? Because I know that Yeah. Like, this the faculty of anaerobes. Right? Like, you're not permitted to do that or I
Laura:
You can. You have to prepare it in a very particular way. So methanogens are facultative anaerobes and they're very sensitive to oxygen but you can set that up in a certain way using but you can set that up in a certain way using nitrogen to flush out all the oxygen in a sealed container to make sure that no oxygen gets in. And as long as you don't stir it and mix it up too much to disrupt the biofilms because organisms will form biofilms that kind of protects them against the environment as well. As long as you don't mess that up too much, a lot of those organisms will survive.
Chris:
Oh, that's great.
Laura:
There is a bias because you're working in vitro in the lab. You're working in a closed system. So none of the metabolites are being taken away and that will affect over time what happens, but you can probably get 24 hours ish before a lot of the kind of excretory products build up and inhibit things and things start dying to kind of have a look at what's going on there. So I did that with the stool from the methane producers the non methane producers and then fed different sources of dietary fiber from plants into there to see what was happening to those sulfide. I was measuring hydrogen sulfide production.
And when I didn't add any plant fiber into those collections of bacteria, you would get a lot of production of hydrogen sulfide and that's because there's remnants of protein and amino acids in the stool that the sulfide. And hydrogen sulfide is pretty well known to be negative for the gut. Toxic, actually. Yeah. But if you add fiber to that, instead of the amino acids being fermented into hydrogen sulfide, the amino acids will be used to promote cell turnover of the bacteria.
The bacterial population grows and uses the fiber. So bacteria have, like, a preferential way that they will consume energy mostly. They will use readily available carbohydrates, the sugars first, then starch, then dietary fiber, and then protein is really what they're using when there's nothing else left.
Chris:
Received. So it's like a fallback.
Laura:
Exactly. So when people talk about protein fermentation being very bad, that's only really in the context when there's no dietary fiber there at all.
Chris:
I see. That's interesting. So I've interviewed Jason Horolak and enjoyed some of his training courses And you may actually know of him. He's from New Zealand. He's still practicing in New Zealand.
Okay. Also a researcher. And my impression of him is this is kind of what informs his
Laura:
Right.
Chris:
Base bias. Right? He's about all of the plants Yeah. All of the polyphenols which I'm, you know, not against. Yeah.
But then there's also this well, you wanna be really careful with animal protein because this hydrogen sulfide thing with that. I mean, I've been eating with you for the last 6 weeks and you're clearly not concerned. So you so you think that anyone should be concerned about that?
Laura:
No. I don't think so. I mean, there are maybe in a situation where there's dysbiosis Yeah. And for whatever reason these bacteria that produce hydrogen sulfide have taken over more and that population is now prioritizing the production of hydrogen sulfide, but you wouldn't expect to see that in a healthy gut. In a healthy gut, you would expect to see the fiber degrading bacteria taking over and using the amino acids that are available for cell growth, and really limiting the production of hydrogen sulfide.
Chris:
I find it so interesting. I'm sure you're familiar with, you know, the Sonnenberg Labs Oh, yeah. Yeah. And his book, The Good Gut, I read. And I mean, he has a bunch of talks online as well.
And he's kind of the same. Like, they go down this, like, really sort of plant based. It makes me wonder whether, like, there's some ulterior motive here. Yeah. Like, there's, like, maybe some morality around eating animals or maybe some sort of climate change agenda or something wrapped up in all of that.
But who knows? I guess you're not really in a position to comment on that.
Laura:
No. But I have done it and I've been in their position, like, my first year in New Zealand. And that's what got me down there was the whole fiber story. I pretty much stopped eating meat for a year and I was vegetarian, vegan on and off for a year. And that was the worst time in my life for my chronic pain.
Wow. My back pain, especially, was really bad at that time. And I experienced a lot of fatigue like it would not be uncommon for me to start to fall asleep with my head and my hands eating dinner at 6 PM at night. Yeah. And it was really that that made me realize that something wasn't right.
When I started eating meat, my chronic pain was way less and I just don't really have fatigue at all Yeah. Like that anymore.
Chris:
Isn't it funny? I mean, you just reminded me of like how tired I was before as well and like how quickly you forget. You know, we go through the day here in Costa Rica and I don't I just don't feel tired during the day at all. I sleep really well at night. I don't feel tired at all during the day.
No. But before I, you know, read The Paleo Solution by Rob Wolf and all those other books around that time, I was taking a nap underneath my desk because I just couldn't keep my eyes open. It was bad. It was really bad. And I think it's part of the reason why I became dependent on exercise was because after an hour of warming up, you start to get some cortisol.
Laura:
Yeah. Yeah.
Chris:
You know, who knows what else going? Nor adrenaline or whatever. You like you start to wake up for the first time, you know? But of course, you can't keep that going forever. It's like yeah.
Interesting. Yeah. Well, is there anything else you wanna say about your, oh, dietetics work? Talk about your dietetics work.
Laura:
Yeah. So when I was doing my PhD I was, you know, you read a lot of papers and I thought there was so much interesting literature out there about how to improve gut health more on the like the functional medicine side and I thought oh my god I can take this into practice like I wanna become a nutritionist or a dietitian whilst I was doing my PhD and actually you know put this into practice. And I found a great dietitian. Her name's Kate Morland and her husband Toby run a studio in New Zealand called Studio Rubik's. And it's essentially it's a gym where they train people and then they have a kitchen and they do nutrition consults and cooking classes and stuff as well.
Toby was a like a ex professional rugby player. So they kind of built up their business from what they've learned about, you know, diet and nutrition and exercise in their lives. And Kate kind of took me under her wing as a dietitian and trained me up and alongside that, I took some extra nutrition classes in human nutrition to complement what I'd already done as an undergrad in animal science to get a registration as an registered nutritionist with the Nutrition Society of New Zealand which you don't have to practice but it is helpful and provides you with some resources and extra support. So I started working part time as a nutritionist in a dietitian clinic and yeah. I mean, the idea that I could bring all this interesting literature and apply it into dietetics and nutrition was completely wrong.
Chris:
Okay. Why was it wrong?
Laura:
People were just not at that level at all.
Chris:
So where were the patients coming from?
Laura:
Some of them were referrals through the New Zealand's version of the NHS.
Chris:
Okay.
Laura:
So I had a lot of referrals from of people with diabetes and non alcoholic fatty liver disease. That was probably my highest referred problem. And then now the private clients, 95% of which were weight loss. Usually, nearly all of them had gut health issues as well but the people rarely came in saying, oh, I've got problems with my gut. They would come in saying, I wanna lose weight.
And then when you would ask about it, you find they've got loads of gut problems. A huge proportion of them were also on some kind of medication. That was actually a big problem I had in my PhD was trying to recruit people that weren't on antidepressants.
Chris:
Oh, wow.
Laura:
Yeah. That was a big struggle and that was a kind of wake up call for me about what is going on
Chris:
behind
Laura:
the scenes that you don't get to see that information normally when you pass people in the street but yeah I guess that's a topic for someone else.
Chris:
Yeah. So were you able to help these patients?
Laura:
I was the particular people that really stuck with me for a while. One of them was a lady pilot actually. I've heard you talk about
Chris:
The pilots. Yeah. I
Laura:
don't know.
Chris:
It's like I we yeah. I don't know why. Yes. So Julie, my wife, also with a background in nutrition ended up working with a bunch of pilots. They're interesting people in that they're obviously very much systematic in their Yeah.
Thinking, they're excellent planners, they're really committed and motivated and they're willing Yeah. To do crazy shit to make Yeah. Things happen. Yeah. You know, like they all kinds of refrigerated lunch box and batch cooking and meal.
But like, it's pretty impressive some of the things that anyway, talk about your experience working with the pilot.
Laura:
Yeah. I mean, she was great. Had lived a lot of her life in Asia as a private pilot and they had chefs. So she'd never learned how to cook. She was, like, late thirties, maybe early forties.
And yes, she literally didn't know how to cook at all. And she'd been raised vegetarian and then living in Asia was all cooked vegetarian. So she'd never she'd maybe tried meat once or twice. She literally didn't like the taste and that was the only thing. She just could not stomach meat because she'd never eaten it.
And she was coming because she was, you know, had a lot of gut health issues. She had weight and metabolic problems and that was resulting in like signs of really early menopause. She she was having a lot of hormonal issues and in the beginning we had to start right at the basics like literally learning to cook. Every time she would come in with me, we would spend the evening learning to cook and then eat a meal together.
Chris:
That's amazing. You got to do that. Right? Like, how
Laura:
does that
Chris:
scale? I have no idea how to
Laura:
scale that business. Scalable, but, you know, the dietetics clinic wasn't paying me a lot and they just wanted to get people through the door at that point. So it was a really nice opportunity to, you know, connect and work with people based on what their needs were.
Chris:
Yeah. And you you kinda reminded me of what we said earlier about community,
Laura:
you know. Exactly.
Chris:
The value of community
Laura:
Yeah.
Chris:
For improved health outcomes actually in hospital admissions. Yeah. And, you know, he got me on Zoom one day said, oh, well, you really need to be thinking about community is interwoven with everything you talk about, Chris. Like, it's not a separate pillar that we work on after sleep and stress, you know. It's like everything you do should be an opportunity for community building.
And I think, I mean, what better example than that? Though I'm gonna cook this with you, you know. Yeah.
Laura:
Yeah. And then we would sit down and eat together.
Chris:
Yeah. So there's And
Laura:
we would talk about, you know, protein and all the basics of nutrition as we were eating. But, yeah, I mean, I tried to get her to eat meat a couple of times and she really couldn't stomach it. But what she would tolerate was beef protein powder.
Chris:
Okay.
Laura:
And we started we figured out how to learn to cook with that. So it went into, like, different sauces that we would make.
Chris:
I see. You can hide it in things.
Laura:
Yeah. Put it in smoothies and bone broth was the other thing
Chris:
that you
Laura:
can tolerate.
Chris:
That's great.
Laura:
And so it was that openness to try something. Yeah. And she just worked really hard at it. Stayed really open. Tried everything that we discussed.
Found a way around when there was a problem and she she did amazing. It was really cool to go on that journey with someone.
Chris:
It was fantastic.
Laura:
But that was also a difficulty of doing that work is that you do really invest in that person and wanting to bring them on that journey. And a lot of the time, they're just not ready. And it becomes quite exhausting doing that kind of work because yeah. You are investing into them and then they don't come back or they don't follow through.
Chris:
Of course.
Laura:
That's difficult.
Chris:
Yeah. And it's interesting the way that the system is set up where I'm sure you'd agree with this and I've kind of slowly realized this over the last 10 years. This is, of course, how Simon Marshall got involved with nourished brand strive was Yeah. You eventually realized that this isn't a problem of knowledge deficiency. It's not like the problem is we need to explain to people what, you know, cobalamin is or, you know, any of this super technical stuff, choline and, like, DHA, all these technical words you hear on podcasts about nutrition.
It's really not bad at all. It's one of, like, knowing what to eat and there's really not that much personalization required.
Laura:
Yeah.
Chris:
And then can you do it consistently? Can you turn this into a habit basically? Yeah. Where it's like you're basically doing it consistently. Yeah.
And for the pilots, they're also interesting because they can't it's hard for them to rely on habits because the environmental cues are changing all the time. Right? Yeah. It's not, I mean, I guess it all becomes habitual eventually. I'm sure they see the same things over and over again.
Yeah. But certainly, when I've worked with clients, this is true for me too. Like, where it becomes really challenging is when you're removed from the current environment into a new one as in travel. Right? Like, you you stay in a hotel.
I have to eat out. Oh, now what? Right? It's like everybody goes to shit. Mhmm.
But the problem is, you know, when you start to unpack the behavior science, you quickly get into, like, a history of trauma and Yeah. This person is eating for reasons other than hunger. It could be hedonic. It could be some sort of emotion based coping strategy. I mean, what do you do at that point when you've got, like, tremendously deep knowledge on dietetics, nutrition, the gut microbiome, like, you don't really have those skills to
Laura:
It's really difficult and, like, we had therapists that we would work
Chris:
That's great. So the New Zealand system interesting. Yeah. Okay.
Laura:
There was usually a really long wait time, which was difficult. But yeah. I remember sort of in the early days actually there was a lady that I was working with on weight loss and she had a real problem with fries. Just eating them all the time for every meal and when we got down into, you know, I had some basic training on motivational interviewing to try and, like, get to the bottom of the problem of what was there. And she described eating fries as like having a warm hug.
Chris:
Wow. Sounds like heroin.
Laura:
Exactly. But there was an emotional connection there and you can't just like rip the carpet out from under that person say you can't eat fries anymore. Like, there's not a nutritional problem at that point.
Chris:
Yeah. It goes
Laura:
way deeper than that.
Chris:
It's like Gabor Mate says. Right? Don't ask why the substance, ask why the pain.
Laura:
Exactly.
Chris:
You're screwed at that point. You're really screwed. I'm sorry. I can't help you. That's terrifying.
Yeah. I hope that situation improves over time. I really do. I don't know what to do about it. It's just.
Laura:
Yeah. But I think community is one answer to that. And, like, it has to be a supportive community. Right? The right kind of people that are slowly gonna show you the right habits and ways of doing things through action, not by through telling you.
I don't think telling those people, like you say, it's not a knowledge problem. Like, it goes deeper than that. Like, you need people who do emotionally connect with you, want to genuinely support you and love you and take you
Chris:
through. Maybe that's why we're here at Vertica Villa. Find that. I know. Yeah.
I mean, I have to say that mostly people like are vegan so well, they look great.
Laura:
Right? Yeah. They it looks like that on the surface actually. But we found Julie and I found this WhatsApp group called meat lovers and there's 50 people in there.
Chris:
Okay. So they're like There's
Laura:
a black market.
Chris:
You think that's what it is? It's like a yeah. It's like virtue signaling. It's like the kind of what I think people, you know, like, should want to see and then there's what I actually do. You know?
Yeah. Okay. Talk about your current work at a startup by a fractal dot ai. What can you do with bio fractals that you couldn't do before?
Laura:
Yeah. So what we're actually using is molecular biology. So kind of the biology at the tiniest level of the cell and using that to understand what's happening in an animal or a person or an organism physiologically. So the concept is really that, you know, your DNA is coded but the way that DNA or the the genes are part of the DNA and the genes are turned on and off by your environment.
Chris:
Right.
Laura:
And that determines how your body is physiologically responding moment to moment. So it's hot here in Costa Rica. And if you come somewhere hot, you're reading the environment and your gene expression will change to allow vasodilation and sweating and, you know, you're having a physiological response to that environment. We can measure the expression of pretty much every single gene now that's encoded in the genomes. That's about 20,000 genes.
So what we're doing at Biofractal, which is a startup that I'm a part of is we're using that genetic information to understand how the physiology of an organism is changing. So that could be in response to a a psychological stressor, could be an exercise stressor, could be diet. They're all kind of problems or challenges that you might measure the physiological response to. And on the other side, we can also measure that same physiological response to a kind of solution. So a probiotic or a change in diet or any kind of solution type protocol.
So that's what we're doing currently in the context of livestock.
Chris:
Okay.
Laura:
Livestock is yeah, really a good place to start because the conditions are quite controlled. So we've been working with a lot of vets actually and using this technology to understand how we can use it to improve animal health and welfare efficiency.
Chris:
And I find it interesting that people are much better about being objective when it comes to other animals. Right? So you know, taking care of, an animal in a zoo, it's obvious you need to understand what the environment is like in the wild and we create that in captivity as best you can and Yeah. Nobody, you know, nobody's concerned, you know, the gorilla is not addicted to French fries. Like, you know, you know, like, no one like, just never comes into it.
We're able to be objective. Yeah. So maybe that's a smart because you could do this for humans. Right? Like, you could map out the whole thing.
You know, MPT, we've been doing this basic blood chemistries and other tests as well in the past. And we're looking inside of the organism to try and figure out what might be going well, what's not going so well. Yeah. How can we intervene? Yeah.
But you're going so much deeper than that. Yeah. You could do in humans but Yeah. And now it's livestock only.
Laura:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have looked at some data in humans. But yeah, the application is a little bit more tricky.
I mean, essentially, it is a business and it has to have an economical justification. And in livestock production, we can put numbers on that and say, you know, this is the gut health problem in your chicken or your pig and we can measure that. And we can also assign that to a quantitative value in the performance of that animal. Like, these animals are growing this much less or this much slower because of this issue and that people listen to that. Right?
Chris:
Yeah. There's a dollar value associated with
Laura:
that. Yeah.
Chris:
And so when you use bifractal, you're essentially saving money, right? You're just not leaving money on the table.
Laura:
Yeah.
Chris:
If you don't use the software, I guess that's the main that's the thing that you can do that you couldn't do before is that you're basically impute improving yield and welfare and you can't do that without so it's not like, you know, so for in humans, I don't think the main problem is personalization. Right? We know that the paleo diet is the correct rubric. Like there might be some minor variance here and there but for the most part it's the correct rubric.
Laura:
Yeah.
Chris:
But that's not necessarily true in livestock.
Laura:
No. I mean, you could argue that there is an optimal diet. But the thing is the economics is so important Like, these producers have to make a livelihood. And so a lot of feed is produced on a cost basis.
Chris:
So
Laura:
it's a balance of what are the lowest cost ingredients and how can we optimize the efficiency of use of that input to get the most out of the output. And that's not always about having the best kind of diet. That's about making the most of what you do have in that moment.
Chris:
And so who are the customers right now? Can you talk about that?
Laura:
Yeah. The customers
Chris:
right now is exactly where I've come from. DuPont Okay.
Laura:
Other like you know, for the animal feed industry in order to improve health efficiency and welfare. So I'm working more on a kind of research scale at the moment helping to develop products that will solve problems in this industry with a view to being closer to the producer as the technology develops. And in this case, developing the technology is more a case of simplifying it than it is anything else because you can't go to a pig or a chicken or a cow producer with 20,000 genes and expect them to know what to do with it.
Chris:
How far away do you think we are from the technology that would modify the animal's environment, the livestock environment based on gene expression data? So somehow, I'm collecting a tissue sample. I'm running your software pipelines and then I'm putting some additive into the food based on what I learned. I mean, how far is that from being automated?
Laura:
I mean it's basically happening.
Chris:
Oh, it's happening already?
Laura:
Not necessarily in terms of gene expression but we have the technology to do that already. So a really nice example is in cattle. A lot of oh, and many cows now are being milked by robots. And so the technology that's integrated to that is that the robot is reading the respiration rate of the cow, the temperature of the cow, the white blood cell count in the milk which tells you how at risk of infection they are, how much milk they're producing, how much feed they're eating. And from all this information, the robot can understand exactly what's going on with that cow and can actually then redirect that cow into a certain pen depending on what kind of treatment it needs and then leave a voicemail on the farmers phone to say cow number 365 is in pen 1 with a higher than average cell count and may need antibiotics.
Chris:
So we're
Laura:
not that far away and pig production is similarly ahead of the game. Yeah.
Chris:
And do you think that someone's gonna do this for humans then? I'm like, I'm particularly interested in performance, you know? Like, you you know, when you look at day to day, like, there's all these people who are basically doing the same thing as the cow being milked by a robot. Right? They're wearing the Oura ring.
They're wearing the Apple Watches. Yeah. They've got some fancy mattress that has some sensor built into it. You know, like all these mirror balls and whatnot.
Laura:
It's a question of collating the data altogether in a way that it can be mined and used to train models that are then gonna be accurate. And, I mean, the driver of economics and animal production means that there's been a lot of research done there and a lot of that research information is available to be able to be used in a constructive way. And we can compile all that data and make it useful. The human literature is more sparse than that right now. So we don't really have, you know, controlled studies that are done in the same way and published to the extent of which the animal literature
Chris:
We should go cool off. It's getting very hot spot in here in Costa Rica. You have to go to the river periodically. Right? Cool down.
Laura:
There was one thing we didn't talk about with my PHD that might be helpful, which in the methanogens thing
Chris:
Okay.
Laura:
There was one really interesting thing that I found is that when I profiled people by the methane in their breath, in among the group that had detectable methane in their breath, when I studied the stool samples, I was actually not able to find any methanogens at all. And this was like really unheard of by all the scientists in my lab, by all the researchers. We couldn't find it anywhere in the literature. I contacted other labs that had done work on this topic. We didn't really know what was going on.
There was one functional medicine practitioner in the North of New Zealand in Auckland who was actually doing a PhD on a similar topic. And by combining what she was doing with what I was learning was that we actually think that the methanogens are also in the mouth. So when I was measuring the methane on the breath, we assume that's methane that's been produced in the colon, passes into the bloodstream, goes through the lungs and comes out in the breath. That's how we know the gases come out on the breath. But the methanogens were just not in the stool suggesting they're not in the colon but there was evidence that actually methanogens are better at living in an environment where there is oxygen than we first thought particularly when they're in a biofilm which is multiple organisms kind of grouping together and making a little network to kind of protect themselves against the environment.
And this other researcher had evidence that actually you can find methanogens in tooth
Chris:
Interesting.
Laura:
And that when methanogens are in the colon, maybe they come from the mouth. So there is this literally one way system that goes through the digestive tract starting in the mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, and bacteria move in that flow as food moves in that flow.
Chris:
Probably not going the other way. Right? Hopefully.
Laura:
Yeah. Something going really wrong with it is. So, yeah, we kind of developed this hypothesis that is still really yet to be tested. Mhmm. That methanogens are appearing in the mouth when there are unresolved cavities.
And then those and potentially other pathogenic or potentially pathogenic bacteria as well translocating down the digestive system into the gut. And one of the things that I took when then into my practice as a nutritionist and dietetics is anyone who came in with gut problems really going into that oral health and seeing if there were any kind of unresolved cavities there and looking at oral health and thinking about treating that first.
Chris:
Wow. That's fascinating. So well, this has been amazing. I've waited a long time. When was it?
I first you connected with you on the MBT 4 in, I don't know what year, 2019 maybe or something something like that. So it's taken basically 5 years for me to finally get you on the podcast and it had to happen in person, which great. It's, like, so nice to record these interviews in person. So thank you so much for everything you've done for MBT and for my family. You're you're truly a wonderful human and I'm very grateful to get to spend so much time with you.
If people wanna find you online, is there a place that they can do that or
Laura:
is that Yeah. I'm not super active online at the moment. I mean, LinkedIn and Laura Pailing would be where you'd find most of my work related to biofracture and that's mostly what I'm working on at the moment. And if there's anything else, people can also contact me on there as well.
Chris:
That's great. I will of course link to your LinkedIn profile and also to bio fractal dotai. Yeah. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you.
Thank you. It's a
Laura:
pleasure.
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