[00:00:01] Luke: So tell me about your grandfather starting this company. I find that always interesting when there's an entrepreneur or an innovator in a space that builds a company and either the offspring has an interest in carrying the legacy forward, or they don't. And from what I understand, your parents weren't interested, and then one generation past that got interested in it, which I think is really cool, because I hate to see a legacy brand lose its soul and just get sold off to a mega corporation. It's always cooler when it stays in-house and becomes a family business.

[00:00:38] Jessica: I think that happens so often with brands too. Nobody wants to continue that legacy. My grandfather was the ultimate tinkerer. He was an entrepreneur in the 1980s. He had chronic fatigue syndrome. He owned a steel factory and had heavy metal poisoning. And so he is the ultimate explorer. Our brand archetype is an explorer.

[00:00:57] So those people who are not just scratching the surface. They go so much deeper. And what was interesting about BodyBio is he built it, and they built it selling to doctors, direct to doctors only. They sold direct to doctor until 2018 actually. And in 2017, my husband and I got involved because we saw what he was doing and we saw what was happening in the health and wellness space.

[00:01:22] And I've always been somebody who was passionate about health and wellness. I've always been someone who was going deeper. Through my fertility journey or being told I had polycystic ovaries, I knew, okay, this is a dietary change. This is a supplemental change that I need to make. And I was hooked on it.

[00:01:38] And I'll tell you the story of why I got hooked early on in my early 20s. But there was a movement of people taking their health into their own hands that we've seen explode over the last 10 years. But I think there's so many people that have just been let down by allopathic medicine that my husband and I really saw an opportunity to say, I think people are going to understand this.

[00:02:00] They don't have to have a prescription from their doctor to be able to take these products. And my grandfather agreed. He wanted the products in everybody's hands. He really feels or felt, and we still feel that cellular health is transformational for everyone. It's something that everyone can apply to their lives.

[00:02:21] And it doesn't take a medical degree or a functional medicine certification to prescribe it to somebody to say, this is an essential nutrient that you need. It is a foundational essential nutrient. And we saw that and said, we can help you do this. And it didn't take some convincing for him to bring my husband on board because my husband had had that business experience to be able to continue the succession plan of the business.

[00:02:44] And I would go and sit in my grandfather's office for hours and hours and hours. And I think part of the reason why it was intimidating to my father and to my uncle, that first generation of children, why they skipped over it was it was really hard to distill simplicity and what they were doing, and so they would start talking about phosphatidylcholine and go down a rabbit hole of scientific jargon that no one could really understand.

[00:03:09] I was able to take my background from school in biochemical engineering and say, okay, I see what you're saying, and this is what it does to the layman's. So this is how we can explain to everyday people how foundational and important these things are.

[00:03:25] Luke: I love that. Yeah, that's one of the coolest things about doing this show, is having people like you that can either explain it in a way that's relatable to masses of people, or on a good day, I'll interview someone like your granddad, who can explain it from a very technical and scientific point of view, and then act as a translator. So what you're saying is two plus two equals four at the end of that equation.

[00:03:51] Jessica: Took many, many hours of that.

[00:03:52] Luke: Yeah. That's one thing that's cool about BodyBio too. I was telling you before recorded, I think it was the last box that I ordered from you guys came with a ton of educational material. There's folders and binders telling you every little thing you could ever want to know, and even that material was also written in a way that was very relatable.

[00:04:14] Jessica: Yeah. And I try and combine that with some of the white papers and the research that he wrote so we can have them both together. But really, even for practitioners and doctors, because that's such a massive demographic for us, we till have to distill that information down for them. Because sometimes it can be, they don't have time to sit and read all the research all the time. And so how can we bring that to the forefront so they can understand it more?

[00:04:37] Luke: Cool. I think that's one of the big gaps in our medical system in general, is that these medical professionals are spending so much time and money in med school. The time they get out, they're in so much debt. So they have to join a practice or start a practice, and then there's just no time to keep studying.

[00:04:58] So they're just locked into the cut it out, burn it out, poison it out, paradigm of health quotes because it's shocking sometimes you go to the doctor and you'll know more than them about fundamentals of health, yet this person's been in school for however many years.

[00:05:19] It's shocking. And I know most of them are well-meaning and got into the business with the best of intentions. It's just like, oh man, the system is so flawed. So it's up to us, as you said, to take it in our own hands and self-educate and find purveyors that we trust.

[00:05:38] Jessica: That's also for the doctors though. So many of them, especially in the integrative functional medicine space, have suffered from something themselves, and they were let down by the allopathic community, and they had to go seeking answers. Once they found those answers, they said, okay, I am no longer doing my residency in plastic surgery, or going to be an ER physician.

[00:05:57] I'm going to move towards this and dive deeper and learn more. And so my grandparents really started the company by educating those types of doctors, those who were seeking, okay, there's something else going on here. Why are all these people so sick? How can I help my patients more? And those who wanted to really go deeper than I would say a traditional med school model.

[00:06:16] Luke: Yeah. When you were a kid, I don't know how much time you spent around your granddad, but was he getting you to take butyrate and all this stuff wen you were a kid?

[00:06:24] Jessica: Luckily, not. A lot of it was really foundation of nutrition. So a big part of BodyBio and a massive part of what we do is really to give back through educating people on how they can incorporate healthier foods into their diet, how you can stay away from the bad oils, how you can get the great oils, how you supplement with the healthy fats and the things that your body really needs and those essential nutrients.

[00:06:45] Let's remember that in the 1980s, our world was not as toxic as it is now. These things were starting to come out. There was a great place called Mom's Organic. He would always take us up there, and we would get dye-free candies, and carob chips, and things like that. I remember.

[00:07:02] Luke: Carob chips. Oh my god, I forgot about carob chips.

[00:07:04] Jessica: Yeah. When you smell them, it brings you back to when you were a kid in the health food store.

[00:07:08] Luke: Dude, I totally forgot about carob. When I was a kid, my mom would shop at the health food store. I'm sure you remember this too. Health food stores back in the day were most of the real estate inside the store would be those bulk bins.

[00:07:21] Jessica: 100%. Now we know.

[00:07:23] Luke: With wheat germ and, I don't know, bee pollen and the old-school super foods, and then carob. Everything was carob.

[00:07:31] Jessica: Has that bizarre nutty flavor.

[00:07:33] Luke: Yeah. And then I think I really have to give credit to David Wolfe. I think he was the guy that really put the health benefits of cacao on the market and really launched this chocolate as a super food movement. Now there's cacao everywhere, and you don't see carob. That's funny.

[00:07:52] Jessica: We miss carob.

[00:07:53] Luke: Thank you for bringing me back to that. That some 70's memories there.

[00:07:57] Jessica: But we were fortunate. Being in New Jersey, there's so many great farms, and you were able to go directly to the farm and get some great quality food. And so he always educated us on that. But we did. I remember sitting with him, and he would like, pour Balance Oil on my food, or, here, take this little sample bottle so you can put it on your food when you go to a restaurant, or when you're eating at home, or whatever it. was.

[00:08:17] Luke: I was listening to one of your interviews, and you were talking about how he used to crush six raw egg yolks a day.

[00:08:23] Jessica: Oh, like 12.

[00:08:24] Luke: Really?

[00:08:24] Jessica: Yeah. So for the linoleic acid haters there--

[00:08:27] Luke: I need to step my game up. I do two or three yolks usually in my little morning drink.

[00:08:32] Jessica: He would eat egg yolks mixed in raw cottage cheese.

[00:08:37] Luke: Wow.

[00:08:38] Jessica: He really refined his diet to eating as biohacking. Food was medicine to him for sure, in every way, in every sense. And so we still continue to treat, and he came out with the products with that intention. And we still manufacture the products with that same integrity.

[00:08:57] So whether it's an individual raw material, whether it's looking at testing results, whether it's the third party testing that we're doing, whether it's testing for glyphosate, all these things cost money, but they're so critically important to make sure that we are able to give people products that are truly nutritional.

[00:09:12] Luke: What were some of the health challenges that you were able to overcome?

[00:09:15] Jessica: My father passed away when I was 18, and my health just took a hit. My entire GI system, my gut, it was so affected. I was going to all these doctors doing colonoscopies, endoscopies. Nothing was coming up other than IBS. But I was unhealthy. I didn't feel good. Now we know so much of what was driving that.

[00:09:38] And there's so much work that I've done to move on from that. But when I sat with my grandfather, we were actually in San Diego, and we went to a taco restaurant, and I was sitting with him, and I said, I can't eat this. This will sit in my stomach, and I'll throw up in five hours. I couldn't digest foods. He handed me an HCl.

[00:10:00] Luke: Game changer.

[00:10:00] Jessica: He said, take this. Changed my life.

[00:10:02] Luke: Oh, so true.

[00:10:03] Jessica: Changed my life. And he said, you're exactly like me. Take this. Take this magnesium carbonate in an hour, take these butyrate tonight. Tell me how you're feeling tomorrow. And then I started, I felt great, and I said, I could eat this food.

[00:10:17] I digested the food. It changed my whole outlook. I was so restricted on what I could eat because everything was just making me feel that acid reflux. And that was when I was 20. And from then on out, everything was, hey, papa, what hat do I take for this? Hey, papa, I've got a headache. What do I do for this?

[00:10:35] Then when it came to my 30s, I went to a fertility doctor. I don't even know why I went. I hadn't even been trying to get pregnant. And the doctor said, you have polycystic ovaries. Here's metformin. Here's Clomid. You will have diabetes in 10 years. And I walked away and I said, that's not happening.

[00:10:54] So I called him, said, make a couple tweaks to your diet. Take these couple supplements. You'll be fine. You're dealing with insulin resistance. Stop drinking your coffee first thing in the morning. Stop drinking alcohol. Eat a more balanced diet. You've been partying in your 20s. That's nice.

[00:11:09] You've been living the life in London and eating at all these wonderful restaurants. Let's balance it out if you want to have kids. I was fortunate in my fertility journey. I had three kids in four years.

[00:11:21] Luke: Wow. Cranking them out.

[00:11:22] Jessica: Yeah. They're a healthy little family. I'm super blessed. And I had no problems getting pregnant whatsoever.

[00:11:30] Luke: Wow. Cool. I love that. Yeah, you reminded me, again, another old-school thing, taking HCL, the hydrochloric acid. I was a vegetarian for way too many years and it didn't serve me, but I wasn't a good vegetarian. I was eating a lot of grains and stuff like that, and I had the gnarliest heartburn all the time.

[00:11:51] And then someone turned me onto HCL, and I'm like, but I have too much acid. Why would I take acid? They're just like, trust me. Trust me. I started taking a lot of it, like three or four capsules with every meal, and I don't know. I don't remember how long. Maybe within a couple of months, just no more heartburn. Really never had it again. It's so interesting that you would think if you're-- in some cases, like with hormones, if you take something exogenous, then it signals your body to stop making it.

[00:12:17] But it's weird with HCL, I don't know how it works. Maybe you have some insights into that, but I was nervous to take it. I'm like, well, if my body's not making enough of it and I take it, isn't my body going to stop making it? But it seemed to just ramp up my own production because I rarely, every once in a while, take an HCL if I'm eating a big steak or something.

[00:12:35] Jessica: Yeah, me too.

[00:12:36] Luke: But I don't have to take it because I never have heartburn.

[00:12:39] Jessica: But you're in a better place with your health. You're no longer a vegan, and so you're in a better place with your health. Your bile flow is probably much better. You take things like PC. Also help with bile flow. Your liver detoxification probably is not as backed up as it once was.

[00:12:55] And so when you have all these foundational steps that you're doing towards living a more healthy life, you no longer need those things. And I rarely take HCL anymore. I love digestive bitters and things like that. Love using TUDCA and Ox Bile to help with bio flow regulation, things like that. But I got past that point in my life, luckily.

[00:13:16] Luke: Right on. This was later in my notes, but you just mentioned it. Tell me about TUDCA because I've seen it here and there online, and, oh, it's for detox, good for your liver. I don't really get what it does, but at one point I ordered some from you guys, and I burned through it really fast because it was one of the smaller bottles.

[00:13:35] But it was a lot of the things that I do are just intuitive. I'll scan a website, look at a couple of studies, get the gist of it, and more than an intellectual process, it's just like, I don't know, almost like a muscle testing without doing muscle testing. I'll just go, hmm, I think I'm supposed to take that. And I burned through the bottle and then forgot to order more.

[00:13:55] Jessica: You're lucky to have that intuition. I think if you can tap into that, that's really quite unique.

[00:13:59] Luke: It's hard-earned. We renovated this kitchen in here, and one of the main goals was to make more counter space because I had so many supplements. There's still an overflow into the whole pantry. It's like people send me all this stuff, which is great. I'm so blessed to be able to try out so many things.

[00:14:20] But I run out of room. So I have my one cabinet, which is my daily things or my go-to things. And then there's backups stuffed away. But the cabinet that I really go to every day are the ones that I can feel a difference from or things that I'm just intuitively sensing that I need at that particular time. So tell me about TUDCA.

[00:14:41] Jessica: TUDCA is an acronym.

[00:14:42] Luke: It's a funny name.

[00:14:43] Jessica: It is. I'm not even going to try to pronounce the full-- the acronym is TUDCA, tauroursodeoxycholic acid, something like that. How it came into the BodyBio protocol is pretty interesting. So first, it's just bile salt. It's something that we make in our body, but we don't often make a lot of it.

[00:15:06] And it can be very backed up by the bile flow process and liver detoxification, gallstone formation, things like that can really hinder TUDCA production. So it's been used in Chinese medicine for hundreds and hundreds of years. It was traditionally sourced from bear or bull bile, which obviously is not what you want.

[00:15:26] We don't want to harm animals in actually sourcing this. Ours is synthetically made. But it's a really effective supplement for decreasing gallstones, improving bile flow, decreasing liver enzymes. It's really extremely effective. How it came into the BodyBio protocol is because of its role as a chemical chaperone.

[00:15:50] And chemical chaperones are molecules, both butyrate and TUDCA are chemical chaperones. They are molecules that break down toxins that attach to our nuclear and mitochondrial DNA. And so this was part of that foundational work that built BodyBio in the 1990s. It was part of this research that you could use specific elements, molecules, and essential nutrients to detoxify at the cellular level.

[00:16:16] And so it's used because there's a drug called sodium phenylbutyrate that's an IV drug that's used in detox protocols. The IVs were used, and then TUDCA was used to break down those toxins. And there's some fascinating research on those. And then they develop the products after seeing the different drug variations.

[00:16:37] So it came into BodyBio because of its role in cellular detox. And you can think about it in terms of-- and if you talk about where BodyBio came from and the role of each of these things, remember an old-school sponge, those orange sponges. If you think of the sponge as our body, the holes are our cells.

[00:16:57] Toxins in our world should be sitting in the yellow part, and the sponge gets sucked up and turns that brown color. What's happening is the toxins are going into our cells, and because our toxic burden is so high because of the world that we live in and all the different environmental toxins that are affecting us on a daily basis, which is getting worse and worse as the years goes on, those are getting into our cells, and they're affecting our nuclear and mitochondrial DNA.

[00:17:22] And what's happening is you're getting less and less ATP production. And so that is changing our epigenetics. It is activating things that may not be activated or may not be activated for 40 years. And so you're seeing higher rates of disease and mitochondrial dysfunction. There's a great researcher, Doug Wallace, who wrote a wonderful book about mitochondria, and he--

[00:17:45] Luke: Thanks for mentioning him because he's someone I've wanted on the show forever and I keep forgetting to try and track him down.

[00:17:51] Jessica: Fascinating. Fascinating work on mitochondrial function. Robert Naviaux and the cell danger response is another one. But I think we're getting to a place where research is showing that 90 to 95% of disease is driven by mitochondrial dysfunction. Very small percentage is driven actually by genetics. And so when you have this toxic burden that is affecting our cells like this, what do you do? And so that's where the BodyBio products come in.

[00:18:18] Luke: Awesome. Something that's interesting about what you guys do is, unlike a lot of supplement companies that-- every supplement company basically has a B complex. They make a Vitamin D. They make a magnesium. They cover the entire gamut, which to me always seems redundant because--

[00:18:38] Jessica: There's so many of them.

[00:18:39] Luke: Yeah. There's so many viable products in the general category. What has helped you guys with the temptation of wanting to be all things to all people and just keep to a very limited suite of products?

[00:18:53] Jessica: It was actually a strategy that my husband implemented. So he really looked at it, and he said, what is our core competency? We manufacture certain supplements. We're carrying third party of other supplements. Let's stop carrying those products. You can get them anywhere now these days. And so let's look at the core of what makes BodyBio.

[00:19:11] And it was that those products together for cellular detoxification and these essential nutrients for that foundation of cellular health, let's double down on those. And so you'll see a lot of companies perhaps private label supplements for doctors. It's not something we'll ever do because at the end of the day, that is our core competency.

[00:19:28] We make phosphatidylcholine differently than anybody else in the world. We make butyrate. We're probably the largest manufacturer of butyrate in North America. It's not many people that want to make the stinky stuff. We manufacture Balance Oil in a way that is protecting these delicate essential fatty acids and protecting the polyunsaturated fats that are so delicate and subject to oxidation.

[00:19:50] We cold press these things. We use organic materials. And so if you really look at the line of products that BodyBio has, they all tie into cellular health and cellular wellness and decreasing cellular inflammation. And so we really stuck to, this is our mission. Our mission is to help people improve their lives through better cellular wellness.

[00:20:10] Let's just double down on that and really focus on how we educate. And that's been something we've been doing since the beginning of BodyBio, but instead of just educating doctors, now we educate everybody through things like this.

[00:20:21] Luke: Yeah, it makes sense to go after the cell because, if I'm not mistaken, at the end of the day, most if not all diseases originate in the cell.

[00:20:29] Jessica: All.

[00:20:30] Luke: Really? Is it all of them? So it's like, why? I don't know. It's go to the root of the problem, right?

[00:20:36] Jessica: Yeah. There's nothing more root than a cell.

[00:20:38] Luke: Yeah, that's cool. Let's talk about, omega-6 oils. As I'm sure you're aware, there's huge issues with oxidized rancid seed oils, canola oil. And what I've observed is that it's great that people are having this awareness. I remember shopping when I first got into health, and I would find a product that just said vegetable oil. And I was like, oh great. Vegetables are good for you.

[00:21:09] Jessica: Right?

[00:21:09] Luke: Meanwhile, vegetables don't make oil. Try getting some oil out of a piece of broccoli. So it's like, well, it's not really. So there's a lot of misleading labeling and things like that, and now there's this massive campaign against seed oils.

[00:21:23] But what I've noticed is that it's like kind of throwing the baby out with the bath water where your body can use and does need omega-6 oils in ratio to the others, but not all omega-6s are created equal. So maybe give us some education on that piece.

[00:21:43] Jessica: There's so much there. There's so much history there from industrialized agriculture and looking at a byproduct. There's a wonderful book, the History of American [Inaudible] and just looking at the production of corn, and soy, and all of these things and how companies can make money off of things that are just a byproduct so that they continue to make money.

[00:22:07] Vegetable oils, and I'll call them industrialized seed oils, are terrible for us. We all know that, but there are things called essential fatty acids that are very much essential to our life, to our cells. Our cells need a ratio of 4:1. And sure, we talk about this 22:1 ratio that people have.

[00:22:31] But the reality is, if you are careful about your food and you're careful about your diet and you're not eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and you are not eating rancid oils regularly, and you are conscious of avoiding these things, you need linoleic acid. Linoleic acid drives the cardiolipin production in the mitochondrial membrane without which you're going to have serious mitochondrial issues.

[00:22:53] Linoleic acid is critical for myelin, and if you remove linoleic acid to the extremes that some people in the health and wellness space are, you'll demyelinate. And we see that because we know clinically from doing-- we run these red blood cell fatty acid analysis. So we're looking at the fatty acid composure of these omega-6, omega-3, omega-9.

[00:23:13] And we're seeing what happens when people remove linoleic acid entirely. There's a beautiful pathway called the fatty acid pathway that you can look up, and you can see that the parent essential fatty acids are-- what was his name that we were just talking about? I'll remember the researcher's name in a moment.

[00:23:33] Luke: Was it Brian Peskin?

[00:23:34] Jessica: Yes. Brian Peskin.

[00:23:35] Luke: I was going to ask if you knew about his stuff.

[00:23:38] Jessica: Of course.

[00:23:38] Luke: I don't want to hold that thought. But years ago, I heard him on a podcast or watched a video or something, and he made such a compelling case that traditional, nutrition guidelines, and even in the alternative medicine space and alternative, all, everyone now basically, according to him, has the ratios all wrong. And his case was so compelling. He's another guy that I've been wanting to track down an interview.

[00:24:07] Jessica: Yeah, you should.

[00:24:08] Luke: That I thought, is this guy just trying to be contrarian to get attention because he flies in the face in such opposition to the prevalent ideas around these ratios.

[00:24:19] Jessica: And so do we now.

[00:24:20] Luke: But his case is so fucking convincing.

[00:24:23] Jessica: It is.

[00:24:24] Luke: And he doesn't sell any products too, which gave him more validity. He won't even like recommend a brand. There was one brand called Yes, I think. Yesnow or something. And I ordered their stuff for a while with unadulterated non-rancid oils in the ratios he recommends. But then again, I wasn't sure because he is literally the only guy. And maybe, maybe now you.

[00:24:45] Jessica: There are others. And if you look at the research and you look at the meta-analysis of the research, we cannot have this myopic view of this because at the end of the day, the essential fatty acid pathway creates a chain of biochemical reactions in the body and biochemical pathways that are not endogenously made. We have to take them. We cannot actually make them in the body. These are not biological substrates.

[00:25:09] These are products that we need to get from seeds, from seed creams, from seed oils when done properly. And so we need these healthy fats essentially and these lipids in order for all these processes to occur. And so when people say, well, it leads to inflammatory arachidonic acid, well, there's pro-inflammatory arachidonic acid, and there's anti-inflammatory mediators that come from arachidonic acid.

[00:25:34] And it's not as simple as taking a fish oil to offset the levels of six. The two pathways actually don't interact. There's one pathway down from ALA, alpha linoleic acid, and there's another from linoleic acid. EPA DHA come down lower in the omega-3 pathway. You can't just out fish oil your way off a bad diet.

[00:25:55] So the point is really to provide nourishing fats and lipids and these really healthy oils that are so critical for not only our cell membrane, cell membrane fluidity and neuro transmission, but most importantly and most critically for mitochondrial health.

[00:26:11] Luke: So what's the difference in terms of sourcing these oils or fats from industrial seed oils, canola oil or rapeseed oil, and getting them from sunflower seeds or other sources?

[00:26:25] Jessica: Whole food sources of the best. Get them from your sunflower seeds. I like to soak seeds like sunflowers, or pumpkin seeds, or hemp seeds. I soak it in electrolytes or E-Lyte overnight, and then I just blend that. And it makes a beautiful seed cream. Just take a teaspoon of that. In addition, I also use our Balance Oil because I understand the value, and I'm avoiding oxidized rancid, industrialized oils.

[00:26:48] I understand the value of feeding my body those healthy bioactive lipids, and I feel better. My skin looks better. My hair is growing. I had very little postpartum hair loss. I had wonderful production of breast milk. The breast milk was always very fatty.

[00:27:02] I would take a ton of it when I was breastfeeding, and I took it throughout all my pregnancies because I just understood the critical importance that we're making a body out of cells, and they need these healthy fats and oils. And if we avoid these things, there are massive detriments to our health..

[00:27:17] Luke: And doesn't it have a lot to do with the production process too? You mentioned cold pressing yours.

[00:27:23] Jessica: Cold pressed, organic.

[00:27:25] Luke: Yeah. Again, looked at some studies, vetted it, but my body really responds to the cold pressed black seed oil and pumpkin seed oil.

[00:27:37] Jessica: Great.

[00:27:37] Luke: To me, my body's like, yes, give me more of that, the oil blend that you guys make. We ordered some barbecue a couple of nights ago and one of the salads came with some ranch dressing or whatever, and I'm just like, I know it's GMO canola oil, full of hexane and God knows what. But it was really tasty, so I had some anyway.

[00:28:01] And then what I'll do just intuitively, and maybe you have some insight, whether this makes some any sense to you, is I'll take like a bunch of vitamin E afterward or take some of your oil blend butyrate. So what I'm asking is like, when we have to or we decide to take the hit we eat some rancid inflammatory omega six oils, how can we counter that if we have a slip.

[00:28:25] Jessica: You can counter it by taking Balance Oil daily. You can counter it by taking phosphatidylcholine, which helps to detoxify your entire body. It helps to build that reserve of phospholipids that you need for the constant onslaught that we have of environmental toxins and rancid oils.

[00:28:41] It helps to normalize the misfolded and aggregated proteins that occur in our cells and on the cell membrane to change the receptor sites from where the oxidized oils take us to where the healthy oils can bring us. And then my trick that I always use is, this has a role as an HDAC inhibitor and chemical chaperone. And so what it does is it breaks down what's called very long chain fats that attach to our cells from oxidized vegetable oils.

[00:29:08] Luke: The butyrate.

[00:29:09] Jessica: Just take two butyrate after you eat in a restaurant. Simple as that.

[00:29:13] Luke: Yeah. That's one thing I think is important for people to get is that there are tools that you can use to counteract some of the hits because it's like you can't live in a silo, like a boy or girl in a bubble. You just can't avoid all this stuff all the time.

[00:29:30] And I've experienced this is. How I know is the orthorexic control and tightening around being afraid of everything in the environment and everything in our food. It's like sometimes you want to go out to dinner with your friends and have a good time and not be the one at the table that's like, I brought my own avocado or whatever. So I like the idea of you do the best you can, and when you want to party--

[00:29:56] Jessica: Enjoy life.

[00:29:58] Luke: Yeah. You want to enjoy life and loosen up a little bit and not be so controlling about it. That there are some things you can do to minimize the detriments of your decisions.

[00:30:09] Jessica: Always. I think that that's moderation and that balance and enjoying life is such a critical-- that's why we're here.

[00:30:15] Luke: Yeah. Let's hope so. I feel it's important to say that as the host of this show because I'm having people on all the time, and they're like, this is dangerous. That's dangerous. This kills you. This kills you. So it's like, well true, but also being in fear and anxiety around everything's trying to kill you is probably worse for you than sometimes just having some fries in canola oil.

[00:30:39] Jessica: Enjoy them. If you're going to have them, just enjoy them, and not feel guilty. And I think we have so much coming our way and so much information coming our way, and this is that vegetable oil argument with the omega-6.

[00:30:54] It's a couple of opinions that have taken off and have this myopic view, and then it's in this silo and echo chamber that everybody hears it. And we're not really looking at the research. We're not looking at what these things do clinically. We're not looking at people who are chronically ill, who are slamming tons of fish oil or maybe demyelinating because they're not taking linoleic acid in any form.

[00:31:16] They're not eating eggs and just bring us back to a place where it's less fear. Every time I do a reel or something on social media where I'm like, this environmental toxin affects you this way, or this is where mold is, I do it to give back. I do it to provide some hope and some inspiration of like, there are beautiful essential nutrients, and there's ways for us to build our health through our diet. And there's ways that you can feel better, especially for so many people that we deal with who are chronically ill.

[00:31:47] Luke: Tell me why good pastured egg yolks are good for you.

[00:31:50] Jessica: Oh, they're just the best. It's such a great source of phospholipids. It's a great source so of many different things. It also is very high in sphingomyelin, which is a different form of phospholipid. Our PC Complex has the different phospholipids in it, the main phospholipids and the ancillary phospholipids.

[00:32:09] Eggs are the closest form you're going to get of that. The highest amount of phospholipids come from soy, which is why we use soy in ours. We extract it from soy. So we remove the soy protein, which is the part that gets the allergenic or the estrogenic component.

[00:32:28] Luke: I was wondering about that because that's another thing. Everyone back in the, I don't know, when I got into this stuff in the '90s, everyone was eating soy because everyone thought being a vegetarian was healthy, and then you realize you're going to grow man tits if you eat too much soy. So now I'm anti soy, but I was wondering about that. Because there are some goodies in soy, so it's the proteins that are estrogenic and inflammatory and cause the problems.

[00:32:52] Jessica: So in the way my grandfather figured out how to isolate those phospholipids, he removed the soy protein.

[00:32:58] Luke: Wow. That's cool. That's good to know. What do you think about natto? That's one soy product that I eat quite a bit of. It's loaded with spermidine, and it's got this, really incredible bacteria in it. But it's fermented, so I don't know that it's making it-- I'm hoping it makes it less estrogenic and so on.

[00:33:19] Jessica: I think that there are great aspects to soy, especially if it's organic, so in that case, but it definitely wouldn't be like removing that part of it. But if you're eating a cleaner version of it, I think it's probably beneficial.

[00:33:33] Luke: Right. Have you ever had natto?

[00:33:35] Jessica: I have, yeah.

[00:33:37] Luke: It's so smelly. I'll open up a jar of it way down in the kitchen, and Alyson will be at the other end of the house. She's like, oh, you're eating the natto again. It just wafts through the house. It's crazy. But you know what's funny? My dog loves the natto. I think dogs love anything super smelly and pungent. So I feed her a little natto sometimes.

[00:33:57] Jessica: I think they also have that intuition of knowing--- you'll see what they avoid and what they go for.

[00:34:01] Luke: Yeah. Do you have pets at home?

[00:34:03] Jessica: I do. We have three dogs and a massive fish tank.

[00:34:05] Luke: Oh, cool. Yeah. A fun experiment with dogs is you put out two bowls. I'll do it with structured hydrogen water versus just regular. I won't give her tap water, but just some spring water and come in from a walk and put both down and see which ones she goes for. That kind of stuff's fun. You can do placebo proof experiments when it's something that they can eat, obviously.

[00:34:27] Jessica: I used to do that with little liquid minerals and put all the different liquid minerals. Especially after they get a surgery, I'll put electrolytes our E-Lyte in their water occasionally and just see which one they'll go to.

[00:34:37] Luke: Yeah. cool.

[00:34:38] Jessica: Especially in the summer.

[00:34:39] Luke: It's fun doing that. Okay, so we covered eggs. What about egg whites? Personally, I can't stand the taste of eggs, so I don't eat cooked eggs. I'll literally gag if I try to eat egg. I just find them disgusting. So what I do is I'll crack open an egg, and then I just rinse off all the whites and then I'll throw a few of the yolks in my smoothie.

[00:35:00] Jessica: Nice.

[00:35:00] Luke: Do you think there's any benefit to eating the whites, if you were to cook them or--

[00:35:06] Jessica: I guess it's per taste. The value is in the yolk. The nutritional density is in the yolk.

[00:35:12] Luke: Okay. Got it. All right. And then what about fish oils? What's your take on that?

[00:35:17] Jessica: Oh boy.

[00:35:19] Luke: I don't do fish oils. There's too much propaganda from pharma of about being pro fish oil, and there's too many people I respect that speak out against the fish oil because of inflammation, and the PUFAs, and getting sunburned and causing liposkin, and all this stuff. But I really, again, just going on intuition, respond well to cod liver oil.

[00:35:47] And my theory there is that it's from Iceland, and it's just pressed out of the raw liver. So it's not processed, and isn't cooked, or anything like that. But it's really the only way to get adequate amounts of retinol and vitamin A, unless you like eating tons of liver, which is even more difficult.

[00:36:09] And plus, it seems like nature has created a balance of those fats in a liver oil, whereas if you're just having fish oil, it's just out of balance. It's just not natural. You would never like take an entire fish and put it through a vice grip to get the oil

[00:36:28] Jessica: And that's not what they do. It's solvents. It's heat-extracted.

[00:36:32] Luke: Tell me about it.

[00:36:33] Jessica: It's a nightmare. The fish oil industry is an absolute nightmare. And most of it's rancid. We have a CO2 extracted fish oil that we're actual discontinuing because we are coming out with a phospholipid-based fish oil.

[00:36:48] And so whole foods are the greatest way to consume EPA DHA.  What you're trying to get out of fish oil is EPA DHA. And then the anti-inflammatory molecules are called SPMs, specialized pro-resolving mediators. And those are going to be abundant in roe caviar and breast milk. It's the only places you can get pure SPMs.

[00:37:11] There are synthetically made SPMs. Some of the supplement companies have synthetically made SPMs. But if you really want the true anti-inflammatory molecules, you have to get it from whole food sources. And so we have figured out a way to basically cold press caviar. And in that you're going to get EPA and DHA in a phospholipid form in addition to the naturally occurring SPMs, which are extremely anti-inflammatory.

[00:37:35] I still would not tell someone to take the supplement every day. You cycle on and off of it. You take it when you need to. Balance Oil is an everyday supply of those essential fatty acids if you're not getting enough seeds in your diet or you're not making the seed cream and having these types of things. Balance Oil is a great way to get those essential fatty acids that are just those essential nutrients we need for building a foundation of cellular health.

[00:37:58] Fish oil is not needed to build a foundation of cellular health. They're downstream metabolites in the Omega-3 fatty acid pathway. And so you need some of them. I think whole food sources, eating shellfish, eating the right types of wild caught organic fish is really beneficial. Just taking a little teaspoon of caviar once or twice a week is really great. Getting some salmon raw, things like that are really beneficial ways.

[00:38:24] Luke: Is your caviar-derived product going to be like $500 a bottle?

[00:38:27] Jessica: It's not, no. And that's the thing. You can find at Whole Foods 29.99 a little thing of caviar. It doesn't have to be beluga from or Osetria. It can be just any normal fish roe. It can be tobiko next time you eat in a sushi restaurant. Get some tobiko. Get the salmon roe, and just have that. That'll supply those great EPA DHA, just to build that DHA pool. Also very important for your brain health.

[00:38:54] Luke: What about oysters?

[00:38:55] Jessica: Great. Best source of zinc there is. Yeah.

[00:38:58] Luke: Yeah. That's another thing, another food, kind of like egg yolks. I'm not a huge fan of the taste of oysters, but I find that I have instant energy when I eat the same. I eat 12 oysters, I'm like, what happened? Oh, I ate a bunch of oysters. It's so nutritious.

[00:39:15] Jessica: Yeah. And as long as you're eating carefully sourced oysters, it's great.

[00:39:21] Luke: Right.

[00:39:21] Jessica: Yeah.

[00:39:22] Luke: Okay. Cool. Let's talk then about phospholipids.

[00:39:28] Jessica: Yeah.

[00:39:29] Luke: I know there's a bunch of different phospho acetyl blanks, and I don't know what any of them mean or do? I know I love your PC product here.

[00:39:38] Jessica: Well, I'll explain them.

[00:39:39] Luke: And I read it's a proprietary blend of all of these phospholipid complex on GMO, yada yada. And again, just one of those things that feels good, read the data on the website, go, oh, that seems really good for you, so I'm going to take it. But I've never fully understood how it works in the body, how it supports the cells, and so on.

[00:39:59] Jessica: It's fascinating. Lipids are single handedly the most critical part of our body and the most damaged by environmental toxins. So they are so critical because they make up what's called the cell membrane, and that's the wall that encase your cells from the extracellular matrix. So that is the wall around our 70 trillion cells.

[00:40:25] It's the wall around the organelles within the cell. Mitochondria has a membrane. So all of these things are separated by this wall. The wall is made up predominantly of phospholipids, the most predominant phospholipid. And the external part of the wall-- it's a bilipid layer-- is phosphatidylcholine.

[00:40:46] It makes up 50% of the outer membrane. And then you have ancillary phospholipids like phosphatidylserine, which is big in the biohacking world for a little, phosphatidylethanolamine, which is fascinating, phosphatidylinositol, phosphatidic acid, and sphingomyelin.

[00:40:59] Luke: How do you remember all this stuff?

[00:41:00] Jessica: This is what I would sit around with my grandfather. Papa, explain that again.

[00:41:03] Luke: Oh, man.

[00:41:04] Jessica: Yeah. It took a while. It took a while to really understand, but what really is unique about our complex is it's liposomal. So you're going to take it, it's going to get through the digestive tract into the bloodstream for cellular delivery to those cells. And it helps to rebuild not only the cellular membrane, but the mitochondrial membrane, all the organelle membranes as well. And so it's essentially building blocks for your cells.

[00:41:30] Luke: And what you do that's unique is you're mixing a bunch of the different phospholipids in one product.

[00:41:36] Jessica: You see products that are called PC. This product, we should have changed the name four or five years ago when we opened up the direct to consumer audience and started educating. We should have changed it to something like Cell Plus, but we didn't. And the problem is you'll see other PCs on Amazon or in nutritional health stores, or in Erewhon, wherever. They're not the same.

[00:41:58] It's typically less of impact in oil, and you can label that as PC. The difference there is it's going to break down in digestion, into choline and triglycerides because it's not liposomal. In order to make a liposome, you have to have phospholipids. Another little tidbit is most of the liposomal supplements on the market are probably not liposomal. Because they're mixing it with the wrong stuff.

[00:42:20] Luke: Oh, interesting.

[00:42:21] Jessica: They're mixing it with that stuff that can be labeled as PC but that's just an emulsifier.

[00:42:26] Luke: Right.

[00:42:27] Jessica: There's no regulation. There's no regulation for what can be called liposomal and what can't.

[00:42:31] Luke: Really?

[00:42:32] Jessica: There's no regulation for what can be called Phosphatidylcholine and what cannot. It's all down to how trustworthy the company is that you're purchasing things from.

[00:42:42] Luke: A few times I've taken an organic sunflower lecithin and just blended my drinks with it, thinking I'm making a homemade liposomal. Am I doing anything?

[00:42:53] Jessica: No.

[00:42:53] Luke: Oh, man.

[00:42:54] Jessica: You're giving yourself some choline, which in turn will help with acetylcholine production.

[00:42:58] Luke: But I'm not turning my little elixir into a liposomal.

[00:43:01] Jessica: Mix it with that, and it will.

[00:43:02] Luke: It will?

[00:43:02] Jessica: Yeah. So if you mix it with phospholipids from this, anything you mix with it, it will becomes lipsome.

[00:43:07] Luke: Cool. My theory there was there are some different things that I like to take, and I want to get into the cell. Like, for example, I think that the one I used to do was fenobate, which is like a version of GABA that's super relaxing. It's like quarter glass of wine feeling if you take a dose of that. And I'm like, well, I want to make it stronger. So I would try and make my own liposomal version of it.

[00:43:32] Jessica: Not with sunflower lecithin.

[00:43:33] Luke: Ah, Goddamnit. All right.

[00:43:34] Jessica: So when you see--

[00:43:35] Luke: Well, done it in a while, so I didn't waste that much--

[00:43:37] Jessica: Intuitively, you stopped doing it. Yeah. It'll break down in your digestive tract, but it won't give you that supercharge to sell.

[00:43:45] Luke: And the idea with a liposomal delivery getting into the cell is similar to getting an IV in a way, right?

[00:43:54] Jessica: Yeah. So it's making something more bioavailable in the body, and so it's going to integrate into that cell membrane and then bring that nutrient into the cell.

[00:44:03] Luke: Okay. Now, if someone has been eating, like most of us have in the industrialized food world that we live in, if somebody has a buildup of toxic omega seed oils in their cell, would your cell membrane be made of those shitty, rigid because it's made of those shitty oils?

[00:44:25] Jessica: Rigidity is the best way to think about it. It starts to look shrivel up and look like a raisin instead of a grape. And so that happens not only to your cell membrane, which is-- are you familiar with Bruce Lipton and his work?

[00:44:37] Luke: Yeah, yeah. He was on the show a couple of years ago. Yeah

[00:44:38] Jessica: Bruce Lipton's work about the importance of the cell membrane and how the cell membrane is the part of the cell that is responsible for taking out all the actions that the cell dictates, that our DNA tells us to do. That's all done on the cell membrane. So if you have this very rigid, damaged leaky cell membrane, it's going to affect your health and disease states and how you feel on a daily basis. You're going to have more cellular inflammation.

[00:45:04] Luke: I've heard different statements around how long it takes to get all of those omega-6 fats out of your body.

[00:45:13] Jessica: It depends on if you're taking BodyBio or not.

[00:45:15] Luke: So this could speed it up.

[00:45:16] Jessica: Yeah, six to nine months of higher dose PC butyrate Balance Oil will regulate the cell function. Because, remember, it's not about just removing those oxidized vegetable oils. It's also about nourishing at the same time. It's how do we break down those very long chain fats and renegade fats that have accumulated on our cells, and how do we wash those out of the body and then replenish with the good? And so that's really the lifecycle of the BodyBio protocol for building a foundation for cellular health.

[00:45:51] Luke: Where would vitamin E play a role in that process?

[00:45:54] Jessica: That's a great question, actually.

[00:45:56] Luke: You haven't looked into it?

[00:45:56] Jessica: I haven't.

[00:45:58] Luke: A friend of mine, Matt Blackburn, has a product line called Mitolife, and he has a great podcast called-- maybe it's called Mitolife podcast. I forget that. I listen to his podcast all the time. I can't remember the name. Mitolife Radio. There you go. And he talks often about-- he used to be a big algae oil advocate and then stop selling it and taking it.

[00:46:21] So he's taken a bit more of a balanced approach on PUFAs and things like that. And he's always talking about taking tons of vitamin E as a strategy to mitigate the omega-6 and PUFA overload

[00:46:34] Jessica: I want to look at the content of omega-6 and three in vitamin E and comment on it after that. Because at the end of the day, sure, it's an important part, but it's not a foundational lipid. And what our cells need are those foundational lipids, those bioactive lipids, those PUFAs that are so delicate, but that are also almost like breathing, moving oils. That's what makes up our cells, not vitamin E. But I think there has to be a balance. There's probably a role for it.

[00:47:03] Luke: Okay. cool. Well, we'll further look into

[00:47:05] it. One thing that I was unaware of, I've been taking your stuff for years now, but I had no understanding that there was a relation to healing from mold exposure. And I was tested last couple years. I did like the urine test for mycotoxins, myco Texas, and tested really high.

[00:47:26] And some people said, oh, you could test on any different day and get a different level. The thing that was a little suspect about it is both my tests showed the exact same reading a year apart, even though I had changed a lot of different things in my lifestyle. And that made me doubt the accuracy of the tests. I'm like, how could it be exactly the same? And then when I got a box from you guys, there was all of this information.

[00:47:48] Jessica: You got the mold.

[00:47:49] Luke: Yeah, yeah, And I was like, oh, shit, I didn't realize this was helpful for that. So how can butyrate and these phospholipids be useful in helping the body get rid of the mycotoxins?

[00:47:58] Jessica: Yeah. I think a lot of that comes down to really having a good practitioner who's aware of the benefits and the cons to testing. That's one of the big ones. It's also looking at, not necessarily your urine, but looking deeper at how those molds are affecting your nuclear and mitochondrial DNA.

[00:48:16] So they get into the cells, and they get into our DNA adducts, and they sit there and they affect your epigenetics, as we talked about earlier. But the way BodyBio products work is they go in, especially with PC, and takes these fat soluble toxins and makes them water soluble and pushes them out of the body.

[00:48:36] So through high dose phospholipid therapy, you can actually remove a lot of these toxins. And early days, it was thought that you had to use IVs to do this. But now that we've developed this and we see through using it a high dose of PC, you'd be at two to three tablespoons a day, probably four if you have bad mold exposure for a year.

[00:48:56] And then you can taper back down to a lower dose. But really to get rid of those mold toxins, you're using sodium butyrate and TUDCA as those chemical chaperones, PC and Balance Oil too. Just flush the body with those healthy oils to normalize the function of the cell membrane of the mitochondrial membrane and get those toxins out of the body.

[00:49:14] Luke: That is a pretty mega dose of the phospholipid complex because I think this is, what, a half a teaspoon?

[00:49:19] Jessica: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:20] Luke: Is the dose on this, which I--

[00:49:22] Jessica: Right now I'm dealing with mold.

[00:49:23] Luke: I drink it out of the bottle, so I'm probably taking a tablespoon because I seem to go through it very fast.

[00:49:28] Jessica: Yeah. I like the big bottle because you have to be on a higher dose when you're dealing with mold. Right now we had mold in our house. It was remediated. And I'm doing like two tablespoons a day, and my kids do a teaspoon a day. Yeah. We're lucky. We didn't know we had any mold issues because we weren't sick. We just knew it because of the test that we did.

[00:49:52] Luke: Yeah. It's a huge issue here in Texas.

[00:49:57] Jessica: It's an issue everywhere.

[00:49:58] Luke: Is it?

[00:49:58] Jessica: It's everywhere.

[00:50:00] Luke: Maybe I've been exposed to it my whole life and I just didn't know it. But we moved here. It's like the number of people-- I just got an email from a guy today. I don't think he lives in Texas, but he is like, hey, it's Warren. Shout out to Warren from Alive Waters.

[00:50:13] Hey, man, what can I do? I got mold, toxicity, yada, yada. And I'm like, I'm going to put them onto this now that I was reminded of that particular protocol. But yeah. I find so many people get sick with mold here, and it's like-- how often do you recommend testing a home? It seems like at least once a year is a good idea.

[00:50:31] Jessica: I think to some extent, if you do a dust test, you're always going to find something. And that goes back to that fear thing, right? If you suspect you have a mold problem or you see a mold problem, one trick I learned from mold finders was if you open the back of your toilet and you see mold in there, it means there's most likely mold in your HVAC system.

[00:50:48] Luke: Oh, that's good to know.

[00:50:49] Jessica: Some simple fixes. Put in an air purification system. Put in a UV light, no ozone, but UV light.

[00:50:54] Luke: Yeah.

[00:50:54] Jessica: Occasionally use ozone as one of the wall plugins. Run some ozone. Don't sit in the bedroom, but kill off those things in the bedroom.

[00:51:02] Luke: Make sure your pets are out of the house when you do that.

[00:51:05] Jessica: Yeah, don't do that. But use a lot of these things that you can do to decrease the mold. But we live in a human environment. It's incredibly human here. Yesterday, it was crazy, and it's unavoidable. And so our perspective and our take on it is if you supply the body with the right essential nutrients and the right bioactive lipids, the right phospholipids, you have a larger pool to pull from to detoxify these things faster.

[00:51:32] And it means that your body's toxic burden is going to be decreased because your liver is functioning better, your excreting things on a more regular basis, and they're not getting into effect your epigenetics.

[00:51:45] Luke: Cool.

[00:51:45] Jessica: Yeah.

[00:51:47] Luke: Let's get into butyrate.

[00:51:49] Jessica: Yeah.

[00:51:50] Luke: Which is a funny supplement, well, funny to me because for those that haven't tried it, it smells like feet, is what it smells like.

[00:52:01] Jessica: A aged Parmesan.

[00:52:03] Luke: Yeah, yeah. But I actually like the smell. Maybe I'm weird. To me, it smells like really good raw butter. That's what I associate the smell with.

[00:52:12] Jessica: Raw butter is extremely high in butyrate, so that's why. Butter is extremely high in butyrate. If you're not eating raw butter, you're going to have to eat a lot of butter to get ample butyrate production. Butyrate, we are systemically low in because of pesticides, herbicides, overuse of antibiotics.

[00:52:32] And so often we are killing off those keystone strains that produce butyrate in the gut. Butyrate is the byproduct. It's a molecule that is produced in the GI system in the colon when you have a balanced microbiome. When you're eating the right prebiotic resistant starches, and when you have those right keystone strains of bacteria in your gut that are making butyrate on a frequent basis.

[00:52:57] Luke: Why do the bacteria make butyrate?

[00:53:00] Jessica: We need it. It's one of the most important molecules for immune function. It regulates all of our immune function. It feeds the colonocytes. It feeds that one cell wall thick wall that protects our colon. It seals those tight junctions for leaky gut, and it's just one of these really critical molecules that are made-- this biological substrate that's made in the body that we really need, and we're just low in it. And so it's really critical, but our world has created an environment in which we are now seeing people just extremely low from birth.

[00:53:36] Luke: So it's essentially a postbiotic then technically?

[00:53:41] Jessica: Yeah, it's classified as a postbiotic.

[00:53:42] Luke: And if we were living 10,000 years ago and we're hunter gatherers and had a very diverse and robust microbiome, we would have enough butyrate.

[00:53:51] Jessica: Of course. Oh yeah. It was there.

[00:53:54] Luke: This is the thing so many people-- not so many people. There's a certain subsect of people into alternative health or biohacking that say, oh, all supplements are bullshit. You don't need it. Just drink spring water, get sun, eat steak, ground, yada yada, the ancestral people.

[00:54:13] And I get that and would agree if we were living 10,000 years ago, but it's like we've passed this threshold of toxicity in the environment. You might've been born c-section or not been exposed to biodiversity in your diet, so you don't have the biodiversity in your gut. It's like we're past the point of no return, I think, and nutrition, deficiencies, right?

[00:54:42] Jessica: Oh yeah.

[00:54:43] Luke: Some of us weren't breastfed. Some of us never have even eaten any foods with enough vitamin A and so on. So it's like, unless you were born into an intact hunter-gatherer tribe in the middle of the Amazon and lived your whole life there, I'm sorry. I really don't think you can be up to speed without some targeted supplementation.

[00:55:05] Jessica: Look at the rates of disease. Look at the rates of neurodegeneration. Look at the rates of autism. So many of these things you can say in an ideal world, that's a really nice thing to say, but life doesn't work that way. Today, it just doesn't. And so we need butyrate, such a potent anti-inflammatory molecule.

[00:55:23] There's so many amazing studies, so many of them I cannot talk about because of FDA FTC things. But I encourage people to look up butyrate on Google Scholar. It's fascinating.

[00:55:35] Luke: Oh, also, I wanted to tell people that want to check out your stuff, which I obviously vouch for, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation. You guys can go to bodybio.com, and if you use the code, LUKESTOREY20, you get 20% off. That's bodybio.com, and we'll put that in the show notes too.

[00:55:53] Butyrate is one that's fascinating to me. I think I first became-- actually, no, I first became aware of it from finding your guys' stuff which is in a capsule form. And then I just took it because I like the smell because I'm weird. For me, the thing I notice about the butyrate is digestion's always been my Achilles heel.

[00:56:15] We're talking about HCL, and it's just like, ah, man, I'm so healthy. I have so much energy. My sleep's great. I'm rocking at 53 and a half in most ways, but my digestion's always going to be the thing that I have to work on or has been historically. So I noticed it definitely helps with that. A friend of mine named John Lieurance has a clinic in Sarasota, Florida, Advanced Rejuvenation, and he's a naturopath, and he has a company called MitoZen.

[00:56:42] Jessica: I just took it before I came there.

[00:56:44] Luke: Oh really?

[00:56:44] Jessica: Yeah, some methylene blue.

[00:56:46] Luke: Oh yeah. Nice, nice. By the way, the luminol blue bars, people always ask me, where do I get the methylene blue? I'm like, by far the cleanest USP grade and definitely the most affordable because it can get really expensive is the MitoZen. But anyway, I brought him up because we were talking about butyrate, and he makes a suppository version of it, which is not going to be something everyone's into using that way. Definitely harder than taking a couple of capsules.

[00:57:11] But he was telling me, for all the years he's been working with that, that he has witnessed so many of his clients with things like Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, just three months cured, done, healed just from that, which is really interesting. So tell me some more of how butyrate works to seal and heal the gut and reduce inflammation. I think that's really compelling. And would the same effect be possible taking it orally? Is it going to get where it needs to go and not have to put something up your butt?

[00:57:44] Jessica: No, it's enterically coated, so it makes its way. There's some of it that's released in the small intestine, which you want, and the most of it is actually released in the colon.

[00:57:54] Luke: Oh, nice.

[00:57:55] Jessica: But it's essentially like a balm for your GI system, which is why for so many of us that have had those just chronic lifelong digestive issues, it's so beneficial for. But I think most importantly, with butyrate, it's helping with the regulation of motility and keeping you regular.

[00:58:15] It's feeding the colonocytes for energy production in the colon, which is so important. But there's so many ancillary benefits that come from this molecule and having the molecule in therapeutic doses and abundance for people with GI disorders, for people with different sorts of cancers. People with different types of neurodegeneration are typically low impute rate because of its role at the cellular level as well.

[00:58:40] So it's such a multifaceted product. It's not just a postbiotic. It's something that's made in the body. Our bodies are such beautiful things. They were created to deal with all these things, and they were making ample levels of butyrate hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And so it's just our world has affected that butyrate production. So extra endogenous butyrate I think it's critical for everybody in today's world.

[00:59:08] Luke: Should the oral version that you make be taken on an empty stomach, with food, after a meal? What's the best time?

[00:59:14] Jessica: I like to take it a meal because it helps with blood sugar regulation, and so it helps with GLP-1 agonist. It boosts GLP-1 production. I really like to take it because I just see on my CGM it keeps things much more consistent. Even if I have some rice or something like that, it's going to keep it much more low.

[00:59:30] Luke: How does it stack up against berberine?

[00:59:33] Jessica: Berberine acts like metformin, and butyrate acts a bit more like Ozempic. And so that's the role that they play. I think both of them are very beneficial for people, and I think together they're really powerful actually.

[00:59:49] Luke: So if somebody's struggling with weight issues because of insulin resistance, blood sugar issues and stuff, that would be helpful for that.

[00:59:57] Jessica: Yeah. Two caps after each meal. The dose, I think, on there is two capsules, but you can take higher doses. So six caps a day would be a therapeutic dose.

[01:00:04] Luke: I have a friend with a severe-- actually, I have two friends with severely autistic kids, and I think it's becoming more widely known that gut issues are a part of that puzzle. And as these parents become aware of that, I'm sure there's people listening in that same boat unfortunately.

[01:00:22] It's difficult to get a highly autistic kid to take supplements, especially if they taste or smell funky. It's a problem that I hear a lot, and you mentioned earlier that you guys were working on a odor neutral version of butyrate. Tell me about that.

[01:00:39] Jessica: So we're working on, I'll say it's a kid-friendly butyrate. I won't say what it is yet, but it will be a way that kids on the spectrum are able to get this super critical nutrient so that they can take it easily and parents can disguise it into foods. And the other thing critically important for autistic children in decreasing that brain inflammation and this idea of the brain on fire is phospholipids.

[01:01:03] These kids should be on high dose phospholipids for the rest of their lives because something occurred within their epigenetics that altered things and that caused that inflammation to just run rampant. And so phospholipids, Balance Oil and PC, are so critical for kids on the spectrum.

[01:01:20] Luke: Awesome. I had it backwards because I keep the PC in the refrigerator.

[01:01:25] Jessica: That'll make it more--

[01:01:26] Luke: Yeah. And I have a really hard time getting it out, and I was like, what the hell? There's a bunch in the bottom. And I'm trying to suck it out of there.

[01:01:32] Jessica: So once you get to the bottom, add some water and just shake it up a lot. And it will come out.

[01:01:39] Luke: That's what I did this morning.

[01:01:40] Jessica: My grandfather used to take alcohol like vodka because you can literally just use a tiny bit of-- you wouldn't use ethanol, but you can just use a little bit of vodka, and he would just mix it up. He was originally from Russia, so he was fine with that. Just a drop.

[01:01:55] Luke: I'll probably stick with the water just to be safe. How do the phospholipids and the cell membrane and the gut health that we're building with butyrate relate to the gut brain connection, with neurotransmitters, mood regulation, anxiety, depression? We're starting to learn now that a lot of our mental problems and even mental illness in more dramatic cases are related to the gut. Is there any research or anything you found about that relationship?

[01:02:29] Jessica: 90% of the gastric mucosa is made of phosphocholine. So these products work. For a while, before we really dove into the strategy behind what was my grandfather's mission, what was his goal with the company and really working on that with him, we were thinking, okay, we have products for the brain, and we have products for the gut, but that's not actually what it is.

[01:02:52] All of these products work in conjunction together to improve our cellular health, and those cells are everywhere in our body, whether it's the brain or the gut. And so we hear a lot about different levers you can pull within the gut health to improve neurotransmission or improve things in the gut-brain axis. That is BodyBio in a whole. That is improving the gut-brain axis through using all of these essential nutrients that we need.

[01:03:16] Luke: what about, is there an application for sleep?

[01:03:19] Jessica: When I talked to Dave Asprey on his podcast, he uses sodium butyrate for sleep. So he'll take two cups before bed for sleep. There is some emerging research on that. It definitely needs to be looked at much more. I think with sleep, it really comes down to photobiomodulation and all the different things that you've talked about to so many different people. But I think there are definitely applications for sodium butyrate, and I'm interested to see where the goes on that.

[01:03:46] Luke: Yeah. The reason I brought that up is because I'm just thinking about the melatonin that's produced in the gut and different neurotransmitters. There seems to have a lot to do with circadian regulation and mood regulation that have to do with our gut and the more jacked up our gut is.

[01:04:01] I know if I, I don't know, eat some gluten or something that gives me gut inflammation, it will for sure affect my sleep. So I think of gut health and sleep hygiene are in the same bucket for me. I don't totally understand why, but I just noticed anecdotally that that seems to be the case.

[01:04:19] Jessica: Well, when you have that heightened inflammation, it's going to affect your whole body. And so I find that even if I eat in a restaurant, you just don't sleep as well, and sometimes you just don't feel as well. Take a couple of butyrate. The healthier you get and the more you build on this foundation, the less of these types of symptoms you'll actually feel.

[01:04:40] Luke: What's the difference between the different formulations of butyrate? One is sodium butyrate, one's calcium, magnesium butyrate. Does that have to do with pH?

[01:04:49] Jessica: It does. Yeah. So butyric acid is extremely acidic, and so we balance and buffer that acidity using different minerals. We used to also have sodium, potassium, but we realized there's really not a role for it. The type that's naturally produced in the body is sodium butyrate. Then we have cal mag butyrate for people who are concerned about sodium hypertension.

[01:05:07] It was also created at a time where the research really has shown increased levels of sodium are actually beneficial and it's the type of sodium that matters. So we now know to eat mineralized salts and things like that as opposed to iodized table salt.

[01:05:20] Luke: Oh, right. Yeah.

[01:05:20] Jessica: Yeah. But it came down to that. It came down to the doctors wanting it. People often ask, like, well, can I also take a magnesium supplement? Yes. As we know, everyone is low in magnesium. Additional, you can take a magnesium supplement. This is really going to supply very small amounts of those minerals that are used as buffers to get the butyric acid where it needs to go.

[01:05:40] Luke: Oh, okay. And you guys do. your own manufacturing. You have like a Willy Wonka factory somewhere where you're making this stuff?

[01:05:47] Jessica: Totally. So we're in Central, Southern New Jersey, Millville, where my grandfather, his parents came over from-- immigrated from Russia. And they started their companies there. My grandfather stayed there. He started the facility. So we have three different facilities now in Southern New Jersey, one completely dedicated to butyrate. That's grown tremendously since the pandemic.

[01:06:11] And so that's one that needed to have its own facility just with the growth of butyrate. We're getting asked all the time for butyrate to be donated for research, which is really exciting. And then we have another facility for PC and the other products as well.

[01:06:28] Luke: How do you make butyrate? How is it synthesized? I'm always curious how things are made. Like some B vitamins I know and melatonin are made from a fermentation process, and there's all these fascinating things that we don't get to see behind the curtain as consumers.

[01:06:43] Jessica: Yeah. In the body, it's a bacterial fermentation of resistant starch. But when we make it as a supplement, it's a combination of different things. And I can't give away too much because it's a little bit of a trade secret, but it's a process by which you bring these things together, you cool them down, you dry them out. It's an interesting process. It's cool to see.

[01:07:07] Luke: Do your kids show any interest in what you do for business?

[01:07:10] Jessica: They do. My daughter is four and a half and she always says, I just want to work with mommy and daddy. And even my son. He'll be playing with his little trucks, and he'll have a UPS truck, and he'll say, we're going to deliver BodyBio supplements. And it's really cute to see. I'm really working hard to educate them on healthy decisions and let them make their own decisions and not be restrictive and not create an environment that could harbor something with orthorexic tendencies.

[01:07:38] So it's really about educating on nourishing and fueling your body. And so they all seem to be really interested in that. Not necessarily my two-year-old, but he will follow them. We call it brain Maddy. When it's brain Maddy time, they all just are like, no. And they just chase it with some water.

[01:07:55] Luke: Wouldn't it be cool if one or more of your children remain interested and you have a fourth-generation business?

[01:08:02] Jessica: I hope so. That's the goal.

[01:08:03] Luke: That'd be so cool.

[01:08:05] Jessica: That's the goal for sure.

[01:08:06] Luke: Yeah. I'd love to see that. It's so neat. Like businesses that my parents were in weren't ones that piqued my interest ever. But I have to owe it to my parents, though, of getting me into taking vitamins, and supplements, and things like that when I was a little kid. So I did inherit some of that from them, but I think it's really just so sweet when you have a lineage of service basically. You find a way to help people, and if your kid taking interest in that, it's really sweet.

[01:08:34] Jessica: Yeah. We could only be so blessed. I hope so.

[01:08:36] Luke: Yeah. So you mentioned you're taking methylene blue. What other stuff do you get into? That one's a little bit of a biohacker elite level supplement that your average person probably doesn't know how to take.

[01:08:48] Jessica: Probably say I skew towards that demographic. I'm definitely on the fringe of things when it comes to my supplement routine. Right now I'm doing a mold protocol, so I'm taking products by a company called Beyond Balance, which I really like. That's another family business as well.

[01:09:03] In the winter, I take vitamin D when I don't have enough sun exposure. I am taking a bunch of different minerals. I'm doing a biofilm by I think it's called Byron Formulas. I'm doing some biofilm busters. This isn't necessarily what I take all the time. You know my staples.

[01:09:24] These are my staples. Mineral balancing electrolytes in my water. I am just getting into photobiomodulation, light exposure first thing in the morning for myself and my children, melatonin production, all these types of things. But when

[01:09:38] Luke: Do you drive your kids outside to get in the sunlight in the morning?

[01:09:41] Jessica: Oh yeah.

[01:09:41] Luke: Oh, that's cool.

[01:09:42] Jessica: Oh totally. And my husband, it drives him nuts because as the sun sets, all the lights in the house are going down, and I do not have my children wearing blue blocking glasses, but I think it's just important to set these up as habits, healthy habits in our home. What else am I doing right now currently? I like methylene blue viral. I'm around germs all the time. I'm exposed to so many viruses. When I travel, I like to definitely take molecular hydrogen on airplanes and things like that.

[01:10:12] Luke: Oh yeah. You do the tabs in the water?

[01:10:14] Jessica: Yeah.

[01:10:14] Luke: Game Changer. I think that's got to be the number one air travel remedy.

[01:10:22] Jessica: Yeah. I like that. I like methylene blue. And then I take a lot of PC when I'm traveling.

[01:10:26] Luke: Oh, you do?

[01:10:26] Jessica: Just to protect and to keep fueling that reserve for whatever, when you step outside and you see that the sky doesn't look the way you want it or the airplane fumes.

[01:10:37] Luke: That's a polite way to put it.

[01:10:38] Jessica: Exactly.

[01:10:40] Luke: There's a tic-tac toe board above you in the sky.

[01:10:43] Jessica: Exactly. And you're looking up thinking, what am I exposed to? For us, it's not about binding and removing. It's about nourishing.

[01:10:50] Luke: Yeah. I like that perspective. I've heard you talk about that because we can get paranoid.

[01:10:57] Jessica: Yes.

[01:10:58] Luke: It's a double-edged sword of educating yourself about self-healing and wellness. And then along the way you're going to find out, wow, the environment is really stacked against you. And get trapped in that fear. And also becoming obsessed with detoxing, detoxing, kill it, get rid of the parasites, kill this, kill that.

[01:11:16] Jessica: You could detox.

[01:11:17] Luke: I like the approach more so rather than having to get rid of all the bad stuff. It's like just add a bunch of good stuff in, and it's going to displace at least some of the things that we've accumulated.

[01:11:29] Jessica: Our body's most potent detoxifier is phosphatidylcholine.

[01:11:33] Luke: Wow. So cool.

[01:11:35] Jessica: So supply the body with that, and your body's able to do what it's supposed to.

[01:11:39] Luke: Awesome. Well, this has been enlightening and inspiring. I'm so happy. I love when I've been using something for a while and, I don't know, I just feel like it's good for me and I like how I feel on it, but I don't really totally understand how it works. So I feel like the luckiest guy in the world. I get to talk to the head honcho of so many great brands and innovators like you and really get to school myself. And then the audience gets to learn along with me.

[01:12:03] Jessica: I'm happy to continue educating, and thank you so much for having me.

[01:12:07] Luke: I appreciate your passion and expertise. You're a real brainiac for all this stuff, which--

[01:12:11] Jessica: I got it from my grandfather.

[01:12:12] Luke: Yeah. Then I don't have to do the heavy lifting of totally understanding. I just go, okay. I'm sold. It's good for me. I'm going to keep doing it. And that's all I need to know.

[01:12:19] Jessica: Cool.

[01:12:19] Luke: All right. Well, thanks again for coming.

[01:12:21] Jessica: Thank you.