Full transcript:

Emily Race: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Founding Mothers podcast, where we're imagining new ways of living with one another and our planet. I'm your host, Emily Race. 

Today we are speaking with Ara Katz. Ara is co-founder and co-CEO of Seed Health, a microbiome science company pioneering innovations and living medicines to impact human and planetary health.

Ara's work has encompassed work at the intersection of health, consumer tech, media, and design. She has led award-winning work and science communication and storytelling under the Seed brand, and her efforts have earned accolades such as Fast Company's World Changing Ideas in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, and TIME's Best Inventions 2018, and various accolades for marketing, design [00:01:00] and science communication initiatives. Most recently, she authored A Kids Book About Your Microbiome to introduce the next generation of kids (and their grownups!) to the microbiome and offer a powerful new framework for kids to understand their bodies and how the choices we make impact our health.

Ara Katz: I was kind of watching the rise of wellness, and I say wellness with large quotation marks, and meaning the 4.3 trillion dollar industry that exists where no one's getting any like healthier by the, by the large statistics and, and the really big stuff that matters. 

Emily Race: Ara is also a co-founder of Seed Health's Environmental Division, SeedLabs and LUCA Biologics, Seed Health's women's health venture in partnership with Dr. Jacques Ravel, which develops living medicines targeting the vaginal microbiome for unmet medical needs in urogenital and reproductive health. 

Ara was a visiting fellow at the MIT Media Lab, where she helped create the Center for Future Storytelling and CCA's Design Thinking MBA program.

Ara's work has earned her spots on Marie Claire's 'The New [00:02:00] Guard: The 50 Most Influential Women in America', Business Insider's Silicon Alley' Top 100' and '36 Rockstar Women in NYC Tech,' Create + Cultivate's ‘100 List for STEM,' and Women We Admire's 'Top 100 Women CEOs of 2021.' 

A serial entrepreneur, Ara previously co-founded mobile commerce startup Spring, where she helped launch ApplePay on iPhone, and has invested in and advised companies across consumer, health and tech, such as RXDefine, Umbra, C 16 Biosciences, MindBodyGreen, Mahmee, Stadium Goods and Unicycle. She also sits on the board of Biosphere 2, a closed system replica of Earth's ecosystems built to advance our understanding of the grand challenges in sustaining Earth systems and quality of life.

She lives in Venice, California, with her husband and her son's, Pax and Zen. She's also the proud owner of several tardigrades, which live at Harvard's Museum of Natural History. 

Welcome Ara. I'm so happy to have you with me. It's [00:03:00] truly a gift because I feel like we go way back. 

Ara Katz: Yes. 

Emily Race: So it's a gift 

Ara Katz: We do.

Emily Race: So it's a gift to have you with our listeners as well, and they can hear a bit about your vision and what you're up to with Seed, so thank you for being here. 

Ara Katz: Thank you for having me. 

Emily Race: Do you wanna start by sharing who you are today and also a little bit of a summary about whose Seed is.

Ara Katz: Absolutely. Although, who you are today, as you were asking me before about two kids and running Seed and sometimes I feel like I don't know how to answer that question of who I am today. In the general today, I am Ara Katz and the co-founder, co-CEO of Seed Health. I am a mom of seven and a half month old and a seven year old, Pax and Zen.

We founded Seed Health, really with a very singular vision, which started back in 2016, which was to realize the potential of the microbiome.

 What that meant was, if that was the vision, our mission was to say how could we translate some of the most breakthrough leading microbiome science into innovations[00:04:00] that could impact human and environmental health. We started with where a lot of the field of microbiome started, which is focused on the gut microbiome.

We work with and have on our team some of the greatest scientific minds in the world who not only are leading the field, but actually were the foundational scientists of the field, which is incredibly exciting. And we started with looking at how you could apply microbes, and what is known more in the consumer world or in the health world, as probiotics.

And probiotics are a, despite what you may believe scrolling Instagram and going to your local grocery store, a very serious field of science; a term that is not necessarily regulated in the US but is really important as we start to think about-- and actually one of the first probiotic drugs will be approved probably soon-- is really starting to understand the importance of the microbes, specifically for us, bacteria that live in, on, around our bodies and the critical roles they play, what happens and what [00:05:00] diseases and conditions and symptoms emerge when they're disrupted. But in our world, I think what's most exciting is how we use them to address some of the greatest problems in health that we're facing, both from a preventive and a proactive perspective.

And we started, as I said, with gut microbiome. Our first innovation is called DS-01, it's a 24-strain symbiotic, which is a probiotic and prebiotic, and then more recently, and I'm very proud to say we just actually published in Nature in Pediatric Research Journal, around our PDS-08, which is our Pediatric Daily Symbiotics.

So that's our first product for children, which is a nine strain symbiotic. That also just came out of a amazing clinical study looking at the impact of our product on children, which is now one in three, at least in the U.S., with intermittent constipation. 

Seed Health itself, outside of gut microbiome, we also look across other ecosystems of the body and thinking about ways that we can take the platform and the model that we've built and apply it to other areas of health. We have programs in the gut-brain [00:06:00] axis, we have programs in vaginal microbiome, skin microbiome, oral microbiome.

And then on the environmental side, which is under SeedLabs, that's where we start to look at how microbes, also as probiotics in some cases, can restore or protect some of the ecologies that are disrupted by anthropogenic and human induced climate change. 

So we started off with a probiotic for honeybees.

We have a probiotic that we helped accelerate the research for, for coral reefs. And just two weeks ago we launched our first microbes into space, that are now on the International Space Station. And those are microbes that we're looking at for plastic degradation. We mostly work in bacteria, as I said and you know us from this side too, which is exciting as outside of our science, you know, our brand, really, we spend a disproportionate amount of our time in addition to, of course, product development and research, on how do you communicate science and how do you use education as an intervention and how do you cultivate agency, through the lens of the microbiome, for people and their health. 

Emily Race: Wow.[00:07:00] There's so much to dive into with you, so I'm looking forward to that, and I also want to speak to anyone who is like, "I need definitions." We can definitely talk about definitions. We love definitions. 

Tabling that for a little bit later, but can you share actually the origin story of how Seed came to be? Because I find this to be so interesting, even the name itself and how that relates to the microbial world. So what is that origin story? 

Ara Katz: I love, I, it's kind of like when people look on LinkedIn to know who you are.

Emily Race: Yeah. 

Ara Katz: And you're just like, if I tell you the origin story that started in 2015, it's a 10th of the story. I feel like so many of the things we do in our lives are just one of those rapid time lapse montages from the minute you were born all the way up until that moment.

Emily Race: Yes. 

Ara Katz: I'll just pull out five highlights from that reel. 

Emily Race: Okay. 

Ara Katz: That I think is part of our origin story. 

The first is that my mom got pancreatic cancer at 48 years old when I was in high school and died 361 days later. During that period of time, I learned to read scientific papers and I learned to research clinical trials.

 Interestingly, had no interest [00:08:00] in becoming a doctor or even more formally going into science, but I did feel the empowerment that came was starting to understand in a way that did not rely on advice from others and doctors that I felt sometimes had really narrow views of the human condition and health. And that set off a very lifelong journey for me of reconciling the space between what we know, what we understand, and science and how we make choices for our health. And I just found this crazy schism between all of that. 

And then, my career was in, really at this strange intersection of design, storytelling and tech. And media. And working in both very traditional industries like Hollywood, but also very profoundly innovative and exceptionally inspiring places like the Media Lab at MIT.

And had been very early in e-commerce, and had founded and built a [00:09:00] couple consumer tech companies. And I felt that I was watching the rise of wellness and I say wellness with large quotation marks, meaning the 4.3 trillion industry that exists where no one's getting any healthier by the large statistics and the really big stuff that matters, particularly when you look at all of the non-communicable diseases that we are now afflicted with and are afflicting more than 2 billion people on the planet.

I started to feel like, great, it's amazing that this is happening. Amazing that people are starting to shift how they spend and how they think about their bodies and there's a greater consciousness that's a reaction I think to post-industrial period of time where we developed a lot of things that really didn't serve our health, and allowed a lot of industries to go rampant on the planet that are not serving the collective health of all living beings.

But I really continued to feel that wellness was going in this direction that we were really starting to understand and make choices about our health from marketing content. And totally self aware of what we do at Seed and that we do commercialize. So of course [00:10:00] there's conflict to reconcile there, but looking at the rise of autoimmune conditions and really how unhealthy people were looking at the excitement and interest who want to be healthier, and then my own life of well, what permission did I have to make an impact?

And I had founded a mobile commerce company and I was driving myself into the ground commuting from New York to LA and I had a miscarriage. And I'm one of those people that think miscarriages are biological miracles. 

Sad, and of course comes with all kinds of grieving and change and adjustment and breathing and working through and healing for a number of people. So I don't mean that in a way to diminish anyone's sadness about them, but, they are moments that bring you, if you think about snapping to a grid, they snap you to the grid of your body back in a way that I think any pathology or bad thing that happens to us does, particularly as women.

I was like, wow, that life wasn't viable, I don't think the life that I'm living right now is viable. It was a good kick in the ass to say there's a lot of things that are just not viable for me right now, and I got a little lost in building things and then not taking enough of a big step back to say, is this what I want to be building?

And it made me do that and I resigned. And for a woman in tech that is not something that happens all the time without some backlash. 

I got pregnant actually very shortly after that. And I met my co-founder, Raja, who you know, and I started thinking a lot about, what do I wanna create in the world?

And the microbiome had been on my radar, going back to that nerdy roots of always wanting to know what was next in science and thinking deeply about health and kinda always having a little bit of my finger on the pulse of certain things, certainly not the way Raja, of course, does and did.

And we both came to, him from much more the R&D and scientific perspective, myself, I went through period of getting to know him, had Pax, my first son, had trouble breastfeeding after about three months. And this is really where the curse happens of [00:12:00] when you know what you should be doing, having spent so much time in microbiome at this point over the course of that year in that full immersion, in really figuring out what we wanted to do, when I couldn't breastfeed and my milk supply really dried up after trying literally everything, that's when I started to look for formula and he and I really started to look at, what is out there? And it really was based on what we knew about microbiome science and the importance of breast milk and what we knew about that early critical window of development for a child's gut microbiome, and of course what that means for their immune system. I was really bummed to see what existed.

And so that of course, from an entrepreneurial perspective, was the aha of, well, let's just go reinvent infant formula from the microbiome perspective.. 

Which has always been on our pipeline and something that takes a while. And I think the science is in a place now that's even more exciting than when we started.

I think we just felt that there was this opportunity then to say, okay, let's take the world of microbiome, let's look at how we can take the best research and the researchers in the world and translate their work into innovations that could impact human health at these really [00:13:00] critical windows of development. 

Seed got its name because "seeding" is the process by which an infant is first exposed to microbes. And then those are the initial "seeds" that begin the development of their microbiome. That starts prenatally, it starts well before birth. It is of course greatly accelerated at birth, whether it's in vaginal birth or a c-section, and continues up until about five years old, until a child has what they call a "steady state microbiome". 

That was really how we got started. I found in Raja, I think the compliment to me from an R&D perspective, is kind of like in tech, you often find that founding engineer or product person, and he and I just felt so aligned with bringing the best science, create unprecedented life science, and combine it with unprecedented experience in consumer and commercialization in a way that through a brand that we felt could be so grounded in education and do it in a way that really recognizes what is most beautiful about [00:14:00] microbiome and microbiology in general is that you take one little closer look and you just realize that everything is so connected, human and environmental health, especially for us.

And that was how Seed was born. 

Emily Race: One thing I didn't know, so I'm so glad I asked this question about this story, I didn't realize that this origin in some ways began with your mother's pancreatic cancer and then how that was really the opening of you immersing yourself. Yeah. One thing for listeners who are not familiar with Seed, please check out at least their Instagram, definitely their website.

I mean, there's so much information that you all package so digestably for folks so that they can start having a similar experience. I would hope that they can start understanding some of the science. And so on that note, I do wanna get into the vision with you, but before we dive into vision, can you define the basics of what the micro microbiome is?

Ara Katz: I'd love to, given it gets distorted so often. 

At Seed, we always talk in, "nerd, nerdier, nerdiest." I'll give you the "nerd" version. The nerd [00:15:00] version is the microbiome is the community of microbes that live in, on and around the human body. It can be really any ecology. A coral reef has a microbiome. But for the purpose of our discussion today, we'll just say the human body. 

That includes bacteria, fungi, protozoa, like archea. There's different types of microbes, but the majority are bacteria and the reason that there are different biomes of the body, so there's an armpit microbiome, there's a belly button microbiome. There's an oral microbiome, there's a skin microbiome, for women, there's a vaginal microbiome, in general, there's a genital microbiome. So there's these different ecologies to the body and actually each of them are incredibly distinct right from one another.

They're not the same by any stretch and have very different markers of what would be considered a healthy ecology for each. The reason that the gut microbiome is used so often synonymously with, or interchangeably with the word microbiome, is because it is the largest and most diverse ecology of the body, with thousands of species of bacteria. Whereas the oral microbiome, [00:16:00] for example, is second most diverse ecology, but it's only about 700 plus species of bacteria. 

So, the gut is a) where a lot of the research started, and where the field started. But also it is the biggest and probably the most interconnected and intersected with other aspects of our health.

Emily Race: Mm. Yeah. I, I think it was from you all that I heard the analogy that we are an ecosystem, but then within us, there's the rainforest, there's the desert. Like there's all these different ecosystems. Or maybe that's a analogy I made up

Ara Katz: no, no. You know, we do, we, we always say like, you know, they're, they're as distinct from one another as the rainforest is from a desert. 

Emily Race: Yeah, exactly. 

Ara Katz: Yes, absolutely. 

Emily Race: And I do wanna make sure we spend time not only talking about what the future of human health could look like, but also planetary, because like you've said, they're super interconnected. And what's so fascinating to me as I was learning more about the microbial world, to understand that there are microbes in a coral reef ecosystem, for example. Can you define a bit around what[00:17:00] the microbial world outside of our bodies looks like. 

Ara Katz: Sure. Mm-hmm. Look, if we were having this discussion prior to Covid, by the way, viruses are microorganisms also. So, I think prior to Covid, this discussion would have a less awareness that microbes are everywhere. Everyone is now aware that there are microbes on all surfaces. Door handle, you name it, there's microbes everywhere. We live in a very microbial world. I think if you added up the weight of all microbes they would weigh more than all mass on this planet, which is extraordinary to think about.

The way to think about the environment is, I mean there's a few things. the soil of course, and just the earth itself has its own microbiome, which of course impacts nutrient density of soil, how soil can utilize water, it plays a role in the health of the soil.

And then of course, most importantly for human health, plays a big role in the health of the food that's being grown in that particular soil. If you did one Google search, you would find a lot about soil probiotics and the way people are starting to think about using microbes to [00:18:00] enrich the soil. 

Under Seed Labs, as I mentioned, our first project was a probiotic for honeybees. So honeybees just like us, have a gut microbiome and that gut microbiome is impacted by a number of things, but neonicotinoid pesticides is one of them, and they increase the immune resilience of a honeybee the same way that when we are exposed to certain toxins in the environment, our immune systems are also impacted. It impacts our gut barrier, it causes inflammation. Honeybees and their gut microbes are very similar. And so what we found with one of our fellows, Brennan Daley, was that you could apply strains of probiotics.

We started off with a nutrient source. It was a bio patty. It's kinda like a pancake that goes in the hive. I think he has now evolved this to be sprayed onto the hive that they ingest. And those strains help and improve the honeybees immune response. Which makes them more resilient because what was happening, and it is one of the major [00:19:00] contributors to colony collapsed disorder, and another actually affliction, which is American Foulbrood Disease, which actually hurts the larvae more than the adult honeybee even. 

That was our first experiment in thinking about how you could take the idea of probiotics and apply them to a population like honeybees who are our most important pollinators, where the cascading effect of losing honeybees has massive implications environmentally, and in terms of how we can make food well. Everything from avocado is to blueberries we would lose if we lost honeybees. 

It's really important for us to be thinking very ecologically. I think the Monarch butterfly is another really interesting, we have not done the work yet, but I believe we have a patent on this, which is looking at a probiotic for butterflies, for example. 

Because there's a lot that's happening environmentally where, in some ways, one of the most interesting ways to think about this as it relates to human health too, is, we are experiencing the climate change of our insides. And you look at stats that are crazy. We've lost over 50% of the bird species in North America. Well, the same thing is happening inside our guts. [00:20:00] 

By the way, some other science I've been exposed to recently, the same thing's happening in our breast milk, and in our vaginas, which means that even for a vaginally-born breastfed baby, they're still not getting the microbes because we actually don't have them anymore. Specific ones. 

So if you think about the like maternal passing down and seeding, from mother to child, you can't pass down things you don't have. So I think that's a really interesting analog to what's happening in the environment. 

And you see this in the ocean. You see this in other ecologies where in the same way that they're losing species, of course, then they're losing microbes. And microbes play a really big role in the health of all organisms, for the most part. It's what is referred to as the great extinction.

Emily Race: I'm so glad you mentioned the climate change mirror within ourselves because that was something that really struck me when I heard it. Even now hearing it again, I find myself really taking a pause, and feeling like, oh shit. Like this is something, this is a massive problem.

And to know that you all, with Seed, are starting to look at [00:21:00] solutions is comforting, but also I think not enough people understand that this is happening. Do you, maybe there's a quick high level storyline of how we got here, how did we even get to this place? You mentioned toxins, for example. Are there certain disruptors to the microbiome over time that have gotten us to where we are today? 

Ara Katz: Oh man, where do I start? Well, I think we can start with a few things. One of the most impactful that is really actually a hard one because it's such an important innovation, is the overuse of antibiotics. That's probably one of the first ones. There's 251 million prescriptions of antibiotics written every year. Over a half of them are for things that are of non-microbial origin, which means, that is a lot of killing indiscriminately. By the way, if we saw that same behavior out in the environment, which is precisely what we're so outraged about environmentally. Just to try and keep going with that analogy. [00:22:00] That's one of the big ones. 

Our diet is probably one of the most important ones.

We fundamentally, between the consumption of processed foods, or I should say ultra processed foods, the lack of fiber and diversity of fibers in our diet, we have really essentially eaten our way to a moment in time where we die now of non-communicable diseases. 

If you think about the reasons that most people died, largest groups of population died, up until recently, it was from communicable diseases. It was from things you catch, right?

There was poor sanitation. You could catch things easily. You had plagues, you had large Spanish flu you had, and these were things that were communicable, and of course for which there were no vaccinations. Now, we die of like, cardiovascular disease. We die of things that are actually preventable. And so certainly, diet and food are massive, antibiotics, as I mentioned. Environmental toxins is probably the next one.

So since [00:23:00] 1950, 350,000 chemicals have been introduced to the world. 

Emily Race: What. 

Ara Katz: We had never been exposed to them before. 

Emily Race: That's crazy. 

Ara Katz: There's a chart called the Bach chart, which is fascinating.

If you look at a chart, we didn't have food allergies before this time. We didn't have allergies. We didn't have the rates of asthma. We didn't have the rates of diabetes. You can go down the line of almost every one of the conditions that exist today at rates that are increasing exponentially and they fundamentally just didn't exist at certain points in time prior to 1950. 

And you can look at other societies that live fairly protected from these external exposures and you don't see these conditions. 

Actually we work with a scientist, Dr. Chesney Actis, that has the epithelial barrier hypothesis, which basically is a great way of saying exposure to all these things have impacted the barriers of our gut, our respiratory tract, and our skin, [00:24:00] in such a way that we basically live in this state of micro inflammation, which is that we're just consistently exposed to, whether it's the soaps we use, the over-hygienic things that we both actively choose to put on our bodies as well as things that we unconsciously come into contact with just by living in the world. And he believes that that is such a great contributor to basically this state of inflammation that people live in, which of course then has a cascading effect on our health and a number of these conditions.

The next, I would say is hygiene, which I kind of touched on, which is this over cleaning of ourselves and what that has done. The lack of exposure to nature and animals is another big one. And then mode of birth, you know, birth in general has really changed, which is that we've greatly increased c-sections and greatly concurrently decreased breastfeeding, often correlated with a high incidence of antibiotics in early life as a result of birth complications or a C-section. When you start to look at that very circularly, you just start to see that right from the [00:25:00] beginning of life, we've really gotten, I mean, we get a lot of things wrong, but from a microbiome perspective, we're living in a moment where the confluence of all the things that I just mentioned are really challenging and they're making us really sick. 

Emily Race: Yeah. Not to just spiral down a doomsday. 

Ara Katz: Yeah, no, no, no. 

Emily Race: But it's so helpful for you to break this down this way.

And I know there's probably more depths that we could go to in here, so I invite listeners who are curious to follow that curiosity, right, and continue to research and learn. 

But the reason why I wanted to kind of set that foundation is so that then we can start talking about your vision and Seed's vision for the world from a place of people understanding why this is important.

So yeah. Let's talk about your vision. What would you like the world to look like, whether that's in regards to human health, planetary health, specifically, what does that look like for you? 

Ara Katz: What would I love? I've loved so many things about the world. We talked one of the about systemic injustice or you wanna talk about Well, they're all the same actually when you, when you look down into it.

I think if you [00:26:00] zoom really far into almost the thread of everything is that I would love the world to re-examine the truths that we've inherited, in my world from a medical and health perspective. Because the world that I'm in, really changes and shifts the whole framework through which you understand health and medicine to begin with.

It really adds this other axis or other dimension to the way we think about our bodies. So if you can imagine in a world where doctors are always questioning and understanding and considering what is the microbial aspect to this thing that I'm trying to understand and unpack and solve for a patient, for example. 

For a human, and for all of us, I really do hope that the microbiome becomes as important as way and a lens of making choices and understanding our bodies and understanding the impact of food and the impact of medicine and the impact of the choices we make and becomes almost this lens for how we live our lives.

Embracing it that way, and I think especially based on where the science is heading, [00:27:00] really will lead us to a greater ecological way of thinking, which means that we consider not just ourselves, but we also understand that we are a part of a greater ecology and that the choices that we make impact others. 

When you make a decision for your child and you understand how immune health works, you understand how disease or virus works, you realize that the decision you're making for your child actually impacts the other kids in their class. Actually impacts their parents, actually impacts their grandparents that might live with them.

And of course we saw this very distorted through covid with everyone having very disparate ways of considering themselves or not considering others and vice versa. 

And outside of, I could tell you to eat more fiber. I could tell you the importance of eating a diversity of plants and all the things that I know are good for the microbiome and then therefore are really good for you.

If I zoom a little bit out, I really hope that it just offers us a really nice opportunity to rewire so many of the things that actually got us here, and really question, [00:28:00] and realize that actually despite not being visible to the human eye, this world offers us a really beautiful new language, framework, lens, whatever you wanna call it, to think about ourselves and our health.

And then more than any other fields of science, much more than even genomics, I always make the joke that we sequence the human genome, but you can't go to Whole Foods today and do anything about it. Meanwhile, there's probably five papers that came out on microbiome this week that actually would allow you to action them in your life today.

That's what's so fascinating about the microbiome. It's dynamic, it's malleable. You can improve it. You can improve its functioning in different parts of the body. It just has to be considered. 

Of course, there's areas that are frustrating to talk about because it's early in the science, but we kind of know what needs to happen.

And then there's areas like diet that actually I think we know a good amount today that we could make meaningful decisions and changes in our lives that would have meaningful outcomes and improvements. 

Emily Race: Mm. So if I were to summarize that, what I'm really hearing is a foundational part of your vision [00:29:00] is that we're considering the microbiome in all of our decisions. Is that fair to say? Or most? 

Ara Katz: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Maybe not which financial software to use, but certainly in the, in everything related to health. Yes. 

Emily Race: Okay, so then what would that tangibly look like here, now, if someone's listening and they're saying, yes, sign me up, I wanna start considering this. Like where would they begin? 

Ara Katz: Oh, it's a great, it's a great question. I think different people resonate with different doorways.

So if you're a book and or audiobook person, I would say that ed Young wrote a pretty seminal book called I Contain Multitudes, which is a phrase out of a Walt Whitman poem, and it's really beautifully written. I'd say reading anything of his on the microbiome is always fascinating. He writes for The Atlantic mostly, although he is done Op-eds for others. Julia Enders wrote a book called Gut. That is this great 101 that I actually highly recommend you listen to you. She has the most lovely voice. 

And then there are a few more seminal books that go into different hypotheses. "Missing Microbes" was written by Dr. Martin Blazer, who's one of our scientific board members.[00:30:00] There are a few others like that, Emily, that I can link for you in your show notes if you'd like. 

And then hopefully this doesn't sound too self interested, but @Seed on Instagram is really where I think we do some great scientific communication and translation and we win awards for it.

So we're really proud of the way that we educate and communicate. We don't talk about our products that often, but certainly from just basic understanding microbiome, I think it's a great one, and a place to get quick hits of both some of the latest sciences coming out, as well as some of the basic definitional elements of microbiome and some of the really fun insights and really meaningful insights that we're learning from some of our own researchers as well as the greater scientific community. 

Emily Race: Mm. And I know you're not here to give medical advice per se, but I did find it interesting right, that part of your vision included how our healthcare providers might consider the microbiome.

Ara Katz: Yes. 

Emily Race: And so how might we hold those providers accountable or think differently about where we seek medical support. 

Ara Katz: Yeah. It's a really interesting question because microbiome is one of [00:31:00] those rare fields, again, unlike genomics that East and West have common ground and it's one of my favorite parts of microbiome.

I'd say Ayurvedic practitioners, TCM practitioners, people who come from more Eastern disciplines, the gut and digestion are so central to so many of those frameworks. Chinese medicine doctor will look at your tongue first, which of course, if you understand biofilms and you understand the oral microbiome, and you understand where that science is going, makes a lot of sense.

In a lot of ways, the Eastern disciplines always understood the central meaning and significance of the gut, but probably didn't have the tools and certainly technologies and the greater resolution and maybe understanding, and certainly some of the elucidation that's happening around all the different ways that it plays a role.

But I would say that you have to give them some OG credit for that. 

At the same time, you have the medical and scientific community who often otherized that field and were the earliest skeptics and were a little late to the party to thinking about the gut.

But despite being late, have [00:32:00] the best sequencing technology and now we're starting to really understand how you actually really harness this world to solve some of our greatest kind of unmet medical needs in human health. But it's a fascinating field because it is a place where everybody can meet in the middle to say, we agree on its importance.

We may disagree on some of the protocols and some of the ways to go about it, which by the way, all doctors do around certain things anyway. 

So I think for us, there's a couple key things that are not taught in medical school. One is nutrition and the other to me is microbiome.

 Our hope is that in engaging healthcare practitioners in the future, for the integrative and functional community, I think we hope to be a source of some of the leading science and being able to maybe update some of their understanding and learning that comes out of some of the older disciplines prior to the field coming online from a scientific perspective. 

And then for more allopathic doctors, being a source of education in general around the microbiome and what it's meaning might be to various expertise or fields of medicine.

Emily Race: One thing that came to mind as you were talking about the gaps [00:33:00] in education is also the gaps in our general population's education around this, and I'm so grateful that you helped to author the book, "A Kid's Book About The Microbiome". I have a copy myself. So I, I, I'm just gonna plug that in because regardless of what age you are, if you have a child or not, I think that's another great way of breaking down this information really simply.

So is that also part of your vision, that kids are learning about the microbiome right from a young age in school or at home? 

Ara Katz: Oh yeah. My dream is that from the beginning, it becomes a lens for how you're making choices really, really early. And then as they start to learn about food and the soil and the environment, it's just another thing you learn about the world, the same way you learn about garbage trucks, 

right.

The same way you learn about flowers in the same way. It's hard with a child because it can't be seen by their eyes. So it's a concept that needs to be translated and it's not dissimilar to space in some ways although of course they can see the moon and the stars, so it's a little easier.

The idea that there's a whole world [00:34:00] that you can't see that exists, but you can't see it with your eye is something that's really exciting for kids.

Emily Race: Mm-hmm. And if you're a listener who wants to have a better understanding of your own microbial health, do you have any guidance on where folks could start learning about their own microbiome?

Ara Katz: We would say we stay pretty far away from the " take of sample of your poop and then someone can tell you what that means". Outside of really important things like parasites, poop changes. Every poop is different and your microbiome changes pretty frequently, especially if your dietary inputs are changing and other factors.

From a scientific perspective, we've stayed pretty far away from the diagnostic side. I don't think we feel the science is sound there yet, and not sure that we would wanna mislead people in that way, based on where we think it is. 

There are, however, despite that, some more universal truths that we believe, certainly depending on someone's medical history, are easy guidelines to follow. As I said, diet being one of them. The high unsaturated fats, like, of [00:35:00] course incorporation of omega-3 fatty acids. Diversity of plant fibers. The American Gut Project out of UCSD found that highest diversity in the gut equaled diversity of vegetables and plant-based foods that were eaten.

I know people who are pretty healthy often sometimes get into habits, they end up eating the same thing over and over again, which of course is better than having a burger every single meal.

But if you do have the benefit of choosing and the privilege of choice, I would say the diversity of different plants is an awesome one that just allows you to also experiment and eat different foods.

But also, there's really interesting science I think behind that. 

And then, as I said about sometimes it's not just what you do, but it's also what you avoid or don't do. And so moving back to the antibiotic discussion, don't indiscriminately take antibiotics.

Don't reach for that Z-pack just because you feel like you have a cold. These are things that really actually have pretty big effects on the microbiome, and if you really don't need an antibiotic and you're taking it prophylactically or too indiscriminately, I would just say to be mindful there.

Same thing with, by the way, antacids and [00:36:00] NSAIDs. Things like Advil or Ibuprofen, all medicines have an impact on the microbiome. And we've seen research on NSAIDs like ibuprofen as well as antacids that actually also have a negative effect on the microbiome. So medicines and antibiotics would be one. 

Get a dog. 

Emily Race: Yeah. 

Ara Katz: Is another. Pets increase your microbial diversity. 

Emily Race: Do cats as well? I know you mentioned dogs a lot. 

Ara Katz: Not as much because cats are not typically doing what dogs do out in the world and they obviously have less surface areas, so they're just bringing in less. They have smaller feet, et cetera. But for the most part, I think pets in general have different microbes. And so that exposure is good. But dogs, I think are the ones that are known to be the, get the better prize for microbial diversifiers. 

And then of course there's the time in nature.

Being in nature exposes you to a whole variety of microbes that you're not gonna get in your very sterile home. Which I think is an important one. 

And then there's of course things that fall into the boring list that your parents even told you that just now have some good science behind 'em, also from a microbiome perspective. But sleep is pretty important. [00:37:00] Microbes have their own circadian rhythm, and so sleep is not just important for us and our human parts, but also for our non-human parts, which are our microbes. So those are probably some of the basics. 

And then of course, in our world, we encourage the use and supplementation with probiotics and probiotics and thinking about how you can incorporate that into, depending, especially on diet, into your life. And of course, we're biased proponents of our DS-01, for adults and PDS-08 for children, because of course I know the data well, and I know what goes into it and I know that it's really hard to find that information about other companies, but of course there are other good ones out there. 

Emily Race: I would echo that, definitely check out Seed's, probiotic or synbiotic. Personally, I've found it to be really effective, but obviously everyone has discernment on what's best for them.

And on that note, I just wanna loop back to something you said at the start around the whole industry of wellness and then the role that marketing has played. I would assume that another action or inquiry for folks to take away from today is to be thinking more critically [00:38:00] about what's being marketed to them and one of the things that Seed, from my experience, has done really well is there's this value around precision of the science, and the accuracy of the information being shared. So do you have a specific inquiry for folks to think about around discerning what information they're taking in? 

Ara Katz: Yes, except I always feel badly answering it this way because I feel like it puts the onus on people who, I can say, "sure, find out if they have clinical trials" and people will just show you a clinical trial and it's very hard for somebody like a layperson to know that that is a real clinical trial, it's being done in the right way, the protocol is right, is it being published? Where is it published? Was it peer reviewed? You know, it puts a lot of onus, I give customers more credit and humans more credit who are actually curious, which is, I can tell you that you should look for clinical trials.

I think you should look for specific strains and then Google those strains. There's ISAPP, which is the International Society of Prebiotics and Probiotics that lists the strains. The hard thing is you don't [00:39:00] know if the strains were included in the appropriate dosages. You don't know how they're being delivered.

You don't know if they're even in there. By the way, not everybody does whole genome sequencing, and there's all kinds of loopholes that happen in the probiotic industry that they include the ones that are the cheapest, and they include the ones that are the most expensive last, just so that they can say they have it in there.

And unfortunately no one says that you have to have a certain dose to be able to make a certain claim. So that's a loophole. It is hard for me to say other than to say that I think consumers and humans in general have a good spidey sense and they have, to use appropriate pun, gut instincts with these things.

And I think you can tell from different language that's being used on a website or when people are a little bit more hyperbolic, I think you can tell if anyone's using words like IBS or really making any claims about disease, you can tell that they're not being compliant from a regulatory perspective in terms of what they can say, which means that the companies that feel a little bit more comfortable taking risks there and being misleading may also be, this is a hypothesis, but may also then not [00:40:00] be doing the right things in other parts of their business. And/ or may just not know, which is just to say I don't think some of that is malicious. I think sometimes it's just purely that people start from more of a marketing and brand perspective and they're not really setting out to raise a bar from a scientific perspective and therefore just honestly don't know, and they're just believing what a contract manufacturer tells them. 

So it hopefully doesn't come off as skeptical as much as it just comes off as, there's just a lot of misunderstanding in the field in general, even sometimes from the people who are even starting the companies themselves.

I think sometimes you just need to go and look at who's on their scientific board. Are these real scientists? Are they, what work are they doing? Who's affiliated with it? And look, that's not always tried and true, but I think that people, again, have good spidey senses. I think that they have good gut instincts. And sometimes, by the way, I think health more than anything is sometimes about experimentation. You never know. Science can't know everything and everybody is an individual. And there are some products that people are, what they would say in science, that have a high responder rate to one [00:41:00] thing versus another.

And sometimes you actually do just need to try a few things until you find something that actually really works for you. Whether or not I think it's the best probiotic, you know? Right. And, and that then of course you can't discount placebo effect, which is very profound in human health and can also be very appealing for certain people in certain conditions.

Emily Race: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we talked about many entryways in, as you put it, and just to summarize for folks as we close out here, if they were to just walk away with one thing today, one inquiry or action, what would that be? 

Ara Katz: I think first of all, be really curious about what you're putting in your body and be really curious about your own ingrained beliefs about the things that you think to be true about health, and how you can potentially use some of the things that we talked about today to just inspire greater inquiry for what will then inform the best choices for you and your family. 

Emily Race: Mm. Beautiful. Thank you. And lastly, how could we [00:42:00] support Seed in the work that you all are doing? 

Ara Katz: Well, if you wanna learn more about us, you can go to seed.com.

If you wanna learn more about all of our research, you can go to seedhealth.com. 

And if you want that daily dose of science and health inspiration, you can go to @seed on Instagram. 

Emily Race: Yeah, I definitely recommend doing that. The way that you all distill this information, I think is just it's, it's what's needed for it to be accessible.

So thank you for all that you're doing in that front. 

Ara Katz: Thank you. 

Emily Race: Yeah. 

Ara Katz: Thank you.

Emily Race: Well, thank you again for being in conversation with us and for helping to create Seed, truly, because I think the work that you all are doing across the board is so needed, and I'm personally grateful to have been introduced to you all, and I'm grateful that some listeners are walking away some new information today. 

Ara Katz: Thank you. Thanks so much, Emily. 

Emily Race: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Founding Mothers podcast. This podcast is produced and hosted by me, Emily Race, and edited by Eric [00:43:00] Weisberg. If you wanna support the show, please leave us a rating or share this episode with the important people in your life.

We'd also love to hear from you if you or someone you know would be a great guest to share about their vision for the. You can email emily founding mothers.com or visit www.founding-mothers.com/podcast.