Connected: The Hidden Story

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With that, for years, chronic disease has been treated like a series of isolated problems. A diagnosis here, a symptom there, a prescription to match. But what if the real issue is not just what we can name, but what we've failed to understand?

Today's guest says that's the real issue. Martha Carlton, founder of Biodequest and author of Connected, Love Loss and the Unforeseen Forces Behind Chronic Disease explores chronic disease as a whole system story. Why people feel unwell, why the current medical paradigm falls short, and how microbial and environmental damage shape health. Her work began with her husband's Parkinson's diagnosis at 44 and grew into a 24-year search for answers beyond conventional medicine. She explores the hidden factors shaping chronic illness from inflammation and vascular vulnerability to microbial and environmental forces we often overlook. Her message is simple.

Chronic disease is a whole system story. Welcome back, Martha. It's always a good conversation.

Martha Carlin: Thanks for having me, Richard.

TalkToMeGuy: There's so many directions we go. But I want to start here just because this was a great quote that I you I heard you talk about. We are more microbial than we are human. Would you talk about that?

Martha Carlin: Yes. So when I started down the microbiome arena, uh that was back in 2014. Uh the there was something called the Human Microbiome Project that was about five years and ended around 2012. And that's what fostered a lot of the excitement around the microbiome. It was a multi-site kind of all over the United States, basically, in the major institutions, looking at this thing called the microbiome in all different sites of the body, all different ages, um, you know, from babies up to centenarians and in the gut, in the mouth, on the skin, in the vagina, you name it. And um, you know, I had gotten very interested in it, and early on what they were talking about was they thought that uh there were 10 microbial cells to every one human cell. Now that has since been revised, and I think the agreement is it's closer to two microbial cells to every one human cell.

But you know, if you think somebody is standing in front of you, and you know, they're a human being, but uh most of the solid matter there by a ratio of two to one is microbes. Um, and I think that is kind of surprising, would be surprising to most people, but the even more surprising piece of it is in the genome. So we know there's been all this research for the last, I don't know, three decades in the human genome, maybe a little longer than that.

And what it turns out, the microbes have anywhere from a hundred to three hundred times more genes than our human genome. And they're doing all these incredible functions for us. They they produce vitamins and hormones and neurotransmitters. I mean, it's really uh the workhorse of our of our body. Um, it's also removing waste and recycling things. So um and and we haven't really been taught to think of ourselves as this microbial ecosystem.

TalkToMeGuy: Well, and when I was interviewing the folks, uh, let's see, that was the blue zone book. I can't remember that it might have been called the blue zone, but it was about various, you know, who lived the longest really was what the book was about. And it ended up being the men of sardinia. And it was a combination of, as I mentioned, well, they spend every day climbing up and down mountainsides with their herds. So physically they're very active, and they ate only because Sardinia is a tiny island, they ate only their own food produced, which was clean, healthy food. But one of the things that they they mentioned in the book was that people who were uh I'll call them globetrotters, but people that traveled a lot actually had stronger microbiomes. And I extrapolated out that that it made sense to me because they were exposed to more stuff. Right.

More action happened in their gut, and they ate foods from all over the world, and therefore they would have a more active and more well developed microbiome. I can't make that into a question, but that is a question for you. Is that true? Yes. Well, uh is that true?

Martha Carlin: Um I'm sure there's probably a paper on it that I'm not aware of, but what I will say is uh Dr. Rita Colwell, who is a world renowned infectious disease doc and one of the early pioneers of microbiome research, um she did a study on each of the seven continents looking at the different microbiomes of people on each continent. And I want to say I I guess would India be the Asian continent, is that I think so.

Yep. So, you know, India in particular had one of the most diverse uh microbiomes. But in looking at that, if I'm recalling correctly, it had a much higher pathogen load. But I think in their in their instance, because they have all this diversity, their immune systems are much more robust and capable of dealing with a wider variety of microbes. And then you look at the United States, where we know we've grown up in largely sterile or attempting to be sterile, you know, cleaning everything to death, wiping everything down with chlorops wipes, um, not being outside in the soil in the dirt.

I mean, kids aren't playing outside like they used to play outside. And so we're not exposed to the same level of microbes that you know, somebody in the countryside in India would be. And we've got a lot of autoimmune and confusion in our immune systems and you know, problems that probably wouldn't be there if we weren't so sterile. And that I think that's called the um hygiene hypothesis that you know our overly hygienic population now has failed to train our immune system properly.

TalkToMeGuy: I I have to pardon me for a slight side uh step for a moment, that in the agricultural world, uh, because I've done a lot of shows with Stephanie Senef, and because I grew up near the Silinus Valley, I am constantly amazed at the agricultural industry where they're I just saw somebody had invented this tractor to go through fields and expose the plants to ultraviolet light, supposedly to kill bugs, without the understanding that the leaf causes a shadow. So anything under leaf can make the bug or whatever they're trying to kill not get killed.

And my grouse, my grouse and complaint is in the same arena of why don't we look at building stronger immune systems in plants versus just applying more stuff because they're they're immune suppressed in a certain way. Like I grew up again back to Selenius Valley, they used to run plastic. You'd see the hillsides of of the Salinas Valley just covered with plastic, rows of plastic, rose of plastic. And what I eventually years later, as I began to get into the environmental world, discovered or figured out was they did that because they gassed that field, those fields with methyl bromide. And then did that to sterilize the earth. So the earth was now dead, in my words. And then they would plant strawberries. And they did that because the strawberries ended again, in my words, were so immunosuppressed they had no capacity to fight anything off. Isn't our capacity, I'll go back to humans, isn't our capacity to fight things off what our system is built for?

Martha Carlin: I mean, that's what it should be built for. Okay. I don't, you know, I think it's underperforming. Yeah. Um and you know, some of that is overexposure to antibiotics, chemicals and food. I mean, there's so many things that disrupt the microbiome or select for you know, maybe a more pathogenic uh microbiome that you know, I think we're just really beginning to understand the importance of thinking about it like an ecosystem. Because even the early uh years of microbiome research, um kind of focused on who's there, not so much what they're doing or how they work together.

And there's a lot more research now looking more at what's the function of the microbes that are there and how are they working as a team, and then how are they interacting with you know, with our immune system? Mm-hmm. That's a whole different show. Yes, I agree completely. Um that's so yeah, it's a team.

TalkToMeGuy: We're we're uh we're walking sacks of water with microbiome trying to help us. And if we would listen to the microbiome, we'd be a lot healthier, I think.

Martha Carlin: I love that. I love that.

TalkToMeGuy: Well, that's sort of always uh, you know, that's it from the alien perspective. We really are just walking around sacks of water and we collect stuff, and the microbiome has to be a dominant thing. And so why not support that so that we are stronger as humans?

Yeah, I totally agree. Okay, end of show. Mike Trump. Thank you. No, no. Um I want to jump, I want to jump way back because I want to bring John into this context of your journey. Would you take us back to that July 1944 1994 when you met John during the Kenny Rogers perfect game?

And we don't mean the singer. Oh, yes, might be distracted by that. Well, what do you mean looking back now? What do I what? What did what do you make of that? You know, that meeting, that that junction of like when the two of you met.

Martha Carlin: Well, we we were we were absolutely meant to be together. Um but interestingly, so John and I had met, we overlapped one semester in college, and we met and dated very briefly, and then John just kind of vanished. Poof, he was gone.

And I sort of forgot about him. Uh, you know, I was enamored with him, but he didn't call me and I moved on. And uh, you know, I moved on, I graduated later from college. I uh got married, had a child, um, got divorced, moved a few different places, and and moved back to Texas. Uh, and I walked into a bar.

Uh it was a Friday night, it was first Friday, which was this happy hour for you know, single adults, and I went with a bunch of my guy friends, and some of them from work, and they were like typically we would go to these events, and if I ever came across a guy that I was slightly interested in, they would just harass me, and that would put the end to that. But um, we walked in and it was so the Texas Rangers, I don't remember who they were playing, but Kenny Rogers was um pitching, and he was very close to the end of pitching a perfect game. And you know, I'm not a huge baseball fan, so I wasn't even that aware of it, or the rarity of a perfect game, but um like everybody in this bar is just glued to the TV, and you know, another strike happens and people gasp, and I'm walking into the bar and coming across the room, kind of making a beeline at me, is this handsome looking fellow that looks a little bit like Clark Kent but without the glasses, and he comes up to me and says, Aren't you Martha Rogers uh from Kentucky? And I say, Well, you know, yes, I am, except for you know, and I give the spiel of you know, my last name now is this, and I'm divorced, and I have a kid, and he didn't run away, and it was like I can't really describe it other than everyone else in the entire room just disappeared, and it was this instant magnetic attraction, and my friends that normally would have harassed me, they just moved away and left, and I ended up sitting up till about four o'clock in the morning with John talking that night. And I told my girlfriend the next day, I said, You're gonna think I've lost my mind because I think I've lost my mind, but I'm gonna marry him.

And you know, it was about a year and a half later, but it was probably a year later before he realized he was going to marry me, but um, and a year and a half later uh that we got married, and you know, I I used an AI to calculate like what are the odds of you meet somebody in college um in one state, and 13 years pass by, and you walk into the same bar on a particular night um and meet again. I mean, what are the odds of that? It's pretty slim. And I think I said in the book it calculated out to be roughly one in 15 million. Wow. So I think that we were meant to solve this problem together to, you know, and John had the hard part of it because he had the disease, right?

TalkToMeGuy: But fortunately, he got together with you for a person who was possessed in the best of ways and helped extend his life tremendously and the quality of his life.

Martha Carlin: Well, I think you know one of the things that I hope people take away from the book is a diagnosis of Parkinson's does not mean your life is over. And um we had John had, and sometimes I had with him, a very adventurous life.

I mean things that when we first heard that diagnosis of Parkinson's, and you know, said they said, Oh, you know, there's a medication you can take, it works for about four or five years, and you're thinking, okay, well, I'm probably gonna be gone then in 10 years. Um, and when you're that young, I mean, I was 40 and John was 44. At first, we were like, you know, our life must be over, and that's just not true. I mean, we had um 2 years of a really fabulous and exciting life doing lots of things. We climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, we climbed lots of mountains in Colorado.

John rode the uh the ride across Iowa on his bike eight times. Wow. Um yeah, I mean, we just did all kinds of things that uh most people would not think you would do after you got diagnosed with Parkinson's, and so you know, your life's not over if you choose for your life not to be over, right? And that's that's another thing that John and I learned along the way and used to talk to people about. He, you know, we know the 80-20 rule, but he said generally, um in his meeting of people with Parkinson's, you know, roughly 75 to 84 to 75 to 80 percent of them took that diagnosis on and never made any positive progress from it, like they kind of took it on as a curse and sat down and waited for the end, and um the other, you know, 20, 25 percent are the people who were in the support groups that we were active in in Colorado who were really actively trying to um have a different outcome to have better health every day, just to feel their best every day. John was also involved with the Davis Finney Foundation, and that's that's one of their main purposes is improving the everyday life, like you know, there are so many things that you can do to have a better outcome.

TalkToMeGuy: And you along as you were going forward, you had two very different doctors, one who saw what you suspected, one who delivered the diagnosis with cold efficiency. That's that's my phrase. And what did that demonstrate to you about a system good at naming things and then poor at explaining them?

Martha Carlin: Well, first of all, so John went first to his internist. So he had had a small tremor in his pinky, and um I had noticed the loss of facial expression, which is one of the early signs of Parkinson's. And he went for a physical at my urging.

And so then he was going back to get the results, and I said, Well, you know, I want to go with you. Because I'm thinking I had read Michael J. Fox's book, and I'm thinking they're gonna tell him he's got Parkinson's, and you know, we get there, and the doctor's going through all of his blood work and everything looks great, and this is great, and this is great. And you know, we get it's like he's winding down to the end, and there's nothing wrong. And I it occurred to me that John had not told him about the tremor, and you know, it's such a slight little trimmer. A doctor's not looking for a tremor in a 44-year-old, and um he only sees him once a year, so he doesn't remember what his facial expression is like, and so I said, Well, what about the tremor and the loss of facial expression?

And I could see immediately. Um, Dr. Leader, um, like the light bulb went on, and he said, Oh, I think we need to send you to to see a neurologist, and so that to me, you know, just solidified for me how the medical system, and and Dr. Leader was a fabulous doctor.

He, I mean, we loved him, he was really fantastic. Um, but unless you're seeing somebody on a regular basis, these very subtle differences, you're not gonna see them unless somebody actually tells you. And that's another one of those things where um the patient doesn't always, I won't say I mean I'm gonna say tell the truth, and I don't mean it like they're lying, but I think sometimes they don't mention things, either one because they forget, or they just don't want to say out of their own fear of what that might mean. Um, and then so he sent us to a neurology practice, and the neurologist that he wanted us to see was not available, and so they gave us uh a different um a different physician, and you know, we called our name, and as we were walking down the hall into the room, I guess the doctor was in the hallway observing us, and so when he walked into the room before even doing the examination, which like seems kind of wacky to me now, looking in reverse, he looks at me and he says, uh, you know what I'm gonna say, don't you?

And you know, what are you gonna say to that? And he says, you know, you have Parkinson's, and it's like, what kind of a bomb is that for a 44-year-old young father? I mean, it just was the bedside manner was just no good. And I I we did find over the years, um, a number of neurologists with very poor bedside manner. Um, John eventually found uh a doctor uh seaburger that we were with for 15 years, and we absolutely loved her.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, a doctor that can communicate is an amazing thing. I've experienced it a couple of times, well, a number of times, and uh it's really and then the other side, as you said, the shocking side is the when they just come in and like lay it down.

Here's the thing, here's what you've got, here's what's gonna happen. And it's you know, you'd think somewhere in the profession of medicine, they might teach a class on communication, just a thought.

Martha Carlin: Well, you know, I want I do think maybe they do more of that now than they used to. I'm not positive, but um I think also neurologists, neurology is I don't know, it's it's kind of a strange specialty to pick because it's a kind of depressing specialty, you know, neurological problems are not. I mean, most of the time the doctor is telling somebody there's nothing you can do, and I don't know why you would choose a profession like that, yeah.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, I had not about that because it's not something we're you know, cardiologists are pretty straight, you know, what they do, they have to cut, they have to replace there, there's something they can do typically. But neurology neurology is there's something wrong. That's kind of it. Right.

Martha Carlin: It's just, you know, it's an odd specialty, I would say. Um and as such, it's probably attracts the you know people who are more comfortable with that. Yeah.

TalkToMeGuy: And you spent some time in Costa Rica working on John's health. And when you came home from that, what was the audit of your kitchen like? What did you find when you came home to your own kitchen, having been spent time in Costa Rica working on suspecting cleanses and that kind of thing? What did you learn? I guess I'll say well it actually came out.

Martha Carlin: So I went to Costa Rica to a yoga retreat that was you know, I left like two or three days after John was diagnosed. I I offered to not go, and he said, No, I want you to go.

I think he just wanted to, you know, be with himself and think about it, or you know, wallow in it, maybe it wasn't a great time for him. Um and I went down to Costa Rica, and one of the speakers at this yoga retreat was talking about the West and Price Foundation and West and Price's work, uh, nutrition and physical degeneration was his book, and he was a dentist. You've probably talked about it before, but uh who had really discovered that the Western diet um was changing our facial structure and our uh teeth, uh, but also impacting you know generally our health and was a major contributor to uh chronic disease, and that if we would return to more traditional whole foods diets, um we could reverse that. And so I came back, you know, I I was working full time and John was at home staying home with the kids, and 50% of the time I traveled, and so John was not a cook. So when I was gone, he was you know pulling a stofers out of the freezer or you know, something from the Schwans truck or a sleeve of pasta and a jar of tomato sauce, and so you know, I came back with eyes anew uh looking at the kind of food we had in our house, and also John had been drinking a soy protein shake that our neighbor neighbors sold through some multi-level marketing thing, and um, you know, I went deep down the soy rabbit hole and read a book called the whole whole soy story, and I was like, okay, we're getting rid of this and this, and then you know, like I mean, I just threw everything out and then started um you know, a process of grocery shopping for me on a Saturday on my day off, you know, involved going to three different stores to try to find organic food, you know. I would go to natural grocers, and there was a new whole foods, and you know, so I I spent probably four hours of my Saturday driving around to different grocery stores trying to get um healthy ingredients, and you know, I had grown up cooking, so I knew how to cook, and I just went back to home cooking meals and you know, getting out the cookbooks, and uh one of those in particular was Sally Fallon's nourishing traditions, and you know, she runs the West and Price Foundation, and um really just getting back to healthy nutrient-dense food, or what I thought was nutrient-dense food. Now I have come to learn all these years later that even you know the fresh vegetables and things that we're getting at the store are probably not anywhere near as nutrient dense as they were 50 years ago. Yeah. And what did you not what?

TalkToMeGuy: When did you begin connecting the the you know, soy glyphosate, the soybeans transformation into an industrial ingredient versus a good nutrition source? Was that from the West and Price work? Was that further down the road that you begin to go, oh soy glyphosate, yeah, yay.

Martha Carlin: Well, it's a little bit further down the road. So I I did find the whole soy story book not long after I came back from Costa Rica. And that's a I mean, that's a thick book. It's the long history of you know how the modest soybean, a whole food that seemed quite healthy, um, got fractionated into a zillion different pieces and ingredients and turned into something that's not very healthy. Um, And, but in that process of looking into the soy, that's that was my first dipping a toe into genetic engineering and what we had done to the food supply in terms of um like engineering genes into plants, and uh so you know, I probably spent, I don't know, a good four or five years uh teaching myself, reading about and trying to understand um how plants plant engineering works, what they you know, in the early phases, they used a gun. Um, you know, it's gotten a lot more sophisticated than it was back then, but um I and I just kept thinking to myself, well, how do you know it stays in the plant?

Well, you don't, it actually doesn't. Yeah, you know, genes we're all made of the same information, genes are just information, plants, microbes, humans, animals, we're all made of the same four letters. And you know, that and we're all connected through the microbes. And so later on, I mean, it much later on when I after I founded the microbiome company and was doing sequencing of samples, I was actually able to identify specific genes from genetic engineering that were showing up in the microbiome of you know, different cohorts of people.

Now I never published any of that, and I can't say it's a causal factor of anything, but what I can tell you is those genes that are targets of the or or marker genes in um genetic engineering are definitely more or less abundant depending on the cohort you're looking at.

TalkToMeGuy: Ick is my technical response to that.

Martha Carlin: Yeah, exactly. It was kind of it was like, oh, yeah. Well, I knew the microbiome was kind of like a general ledger, and it is definitely kind of like a general ledger.

TalkToMeGuy: Wow. And boy, this takes me down so many paths. I I think part of it from again growing up near the Salinas Valley and just being somebody who cares, that I think this one of the spooky factors of GMOs is that they keep engineering them so that they are glyphosate tolerant, or air quotes tolerant. Um, they don't ever talk about where that glyphosate goes and how the plants assimilate it, I think uh that the plants still take it on, even though they're because they can then because it's not killing them, they're glyphosate glyphosate tolerant. And then they started the trend of oh, let's use it as a dexfoliant right before we harvest our crops. So the crops are literally dripping wet with glyphosate right before as they're being harvested in my cinematic mind.

Martha Carlin: Well, you're you're yeah, you're correct, you're correct. And um, you know, I have the I'm a partner in the ag company, uh, ancient organics bioscience, and we've studied glyphosate in the tissue and in the like in the great grapes. We we looked at it in grapes, um, because we have a soil probiotic that can break down glyphosate, and we showed that using that soil mixture of microbes, you know, uh the the glyphosate amount in the grape was much less than in the one that didn't use our our product.

TalkToMeGuy: And so that they're so so if they're even spraying it with glyphosate, their the microbiome mix in the soil is helping break that down before it gets to the consumer somewhat. Yes, yes. Wow.

Martha Carlin: I mean, it would be uh so we've we've tested that in oh, I think 20 different crops on about 76,000 acres over the last seven years. Wow.

TalkToMeGuy: That's a whole other show. Okay, I'm making a note. Okay. Um, again, as I say, having grown up by, you know, in this around the Salinas Valley and having been because it was a cool thing to do, uh, stick your head outside of the car when you're on your way to uh visit your grandparents up in what is now Silicon Valley and be crop dusted because you're driving up Highway One and the crops are on both sides of the so the crop dusters are flying along, which are amazing to watch these crazy pilots, you know, getting down to the and then like jumping up, shooting up right at the end like a surfer hitting a wave and jumping over and then dropping back down to finish the other side.

Yeah. So I was crop dusted fairly regularly because about once a month we'd go up and visit my grandparents. And just like it's sprayed by DD, what I'm old enough that it was probably DDT in those days. Probably was.

Yeah. So I have definite, you know, caring for the earth. I I personally I mostly get all of my produce from farmers' markets where I know the farmers. I know how they dedicate how dedicated they are to their crops, and they have dirt under their nails. I really trust people who live in the dirt. And that's my that's my workaround for what I've grown up seeing.

Martha Carlin: Well, I I tell people all the time, like go to the farmer's market, know your farmer, ask them. I mean, you know, I had a farmer out in Colorado that I would buy produce from, and you know, he he was honest with me. He would say, you know, this crop here, when I first planted and the plants are small, I have to use some pesticides on it, or I won't have a crop at all. But I don't apply any pesticides after you know so many weeks or whatever, and no pesticides are applied applied any time, you know, around when I'm going to harvest the crop. And you know, so that you know, I I felt comfortable with him.

Uh because I, you know, I've also grown my own garden, and I I know the times that I have had everything in my garden decimated by you know the little broccoli worms or what yeah, something, yeah, some crawler.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, yeah. And so that so eventually you got John's diet dialed in, I'll I'll call it. Well, got him stabilized enough that some of his tremors began to disappear.

Martha Carlin: I mean, when we tossed all that processed food out and went to a more uh whole food diet, uh his tremor pretty much disappeared in that first year or so.

Wow. And it was really rare for you know, the next 10 10 to 12 years that we even noticed the tremor. But you know, something he mentioned later on, and that I observed like after he had COVID in 2021, um, he described like it's not a visible trimmer, but an internal vibration, and it's interesting because other people with Parkinson's have described it like that. It's like not a visible trimmer, but if you put your hand on their arm, or like if we uh would go to, you know, we're going to bed at night, and I I could feel this subtle vibration in the bed, and I would reach over, and I mean it it was almost like uh do you remember the magic fingers? Oh, yeah.

TalkToMeGuy: And from that, Yeah, yeah, cheap hotels.

Martha Carlin: I mean, not quite like that, but a little bit like almost like an electric toothbrush was running inside the body.

TalkToMeGuy: Wow. And so that must really confuse it seems like it would put the um body into a state of thinking it's in flight or fight.

Martha Carlin: Well, I think you know, there's ample research that Parkinson's is stuck in fight or flight, you know, and elevated catecholamines and um you know, adrenaline um, and you can sometimes see like I would say, like especially during periods of stress where you can you can almost see a look on I could see a look on John's face, and I've seen it on other people's face with Parkinson's, where um they almost look startled, like their their eyes have a startled look to them. Mm-hmm. That makes sense.

TalkToMeGuy: That's sort of that adrenaline pumped up feel, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. And I want to jump back slightly. This is actually more sideways. As I was studying for the show, and by the by then I've read and heard too much stuff, so it all blurs. But you said if you actually listen to someone's story, meaning that you could figure out they're almost a diagnosis of Parkinson's. Otherwise, if you actually intake uh I would I would describe this as almost like a homeopathic intake where they do this amazing amount of data gathering and homeopathy, pages and pages and pages of questions. And I I when I heard you so heard or read you say this, it had that same thing to me that if you just sat down with somebody and actually listened to them tell you their story about possibly their total toxic load, meaning their mold mold exposures or plasticide exposures or chemicals or where they worked or what they did or what they braved, or you know, they were a bus driver and they got too much asbessis from brake linings or you know, just all sorts of stuff that you can it do an amazing amount of learning just from listening to someone's story.

Martha Carlin: Yes, and what I think, you know, going back to our medical system again, uh, there's no time in the billing codes for actually listening to someone's complete story. So, you know, you go to a doctor who doesn't know you from Adam, and um they have you fill out some forms, you check some boxes, and you know, I guess now they put those in the electronic record. Um, but nobody's really reading that whole history, you know, they've got like I mean, neurologist, John's neurologists had more time than um a lot of other doctors do, but you know, in a lot of these medical practices, they have seven to ten minutes.

I mean, they're not gonna listen to your story. Um, and I started working on a docuseries with Lisa Samansky of the Resolved Parkinson's Foundation about two years ago, and we've interviewed about 35 people with Parkinson's, and you know, we just sometimes it's a little longer than an hour, but it's generally at least an hour, um, where we just have them tell us their story, and it's remarkable. Well, first of all, it's often the first time somebody's really asked them, tell me your story and you know, how did you grow up?

You know, what kind of stressors, what was your life like? Um it's often the first time somebody's asked them something like that, or listen to them. And you know, these pieces come out that there's definitely a pattern of stressors. Uh there's often a potential like traumatic trigger, um, whether that's loss of a job, loss of a parent, loss of a child, or a traumatic injury to a child, um, you know, though those kind of events, uh, some people is a lifelong uh series of traumas, and you start to see these patterns.

Also, many, many of them grew up on farms or like you, you know, they were running behind the crop dusters or playing in the puddles with the chemical slick on top of it. Um And the pieces are there in the story. So the fact that after all these years, we haven't really put together the cascade of things involved in the total toxic burden that finally breaks the camel's back, is you know, it's I don't know. It's frankly, it's it's shocking to me that we haven't done that.

TalkToMeGuy: Now I'm gonna jump for a moment because this makes me think we were talking a little bit backstage. Do you think this is somewhere when let's say somebody did that intake and they put it into a computer and had an AI go through and scrub it or not screw well, actually scrub it, and then pull out points that popped up or things, because this would take a human to set that up. But do you think there's an AI potential there? I'm not a big huge fan of AI, but it just occurs to me that's a massive amount of data. And if someone can process it.

Martha Carlin: Well, there the problem is it's not in there because they haven't they have not been asked those kind of questions. Yeah, they've been, you know, check this box, what relatives had what diseases, you know.

There it's a very standard. Um, there's nothing about tell me about I mean, unless you go down the homeopathic or naturopathic uh arena where there is a very detailed intake form, yeah, you're not gonna have that kind of information, and you're not gonna have it in a large data set, but absolutely I think AI could do, you know, what I've done um in terms of spotting the patterns that's what it's kind of made to do is spot the patterns but the the data is not there because nobody's ever asked them yeah and you know still a lot of times nobody ever asks them yeah

TalkToMeGuy: years ago I worked with a chiropractor um on the Monterey Peninsula helping him with some other projects technical projects and he worked with the part of his practice was that he worked with the Kelly program is what it was called which was a radical nutritional therapy mostly dealing with people with cancer and they had tremendous results tremendous positive results and but the but the intake was huge enormous I mean it's like really light that first write down your life story and then a human would go and read all that and break it all down into the grids and eventually the protocol would be a lot of raw food a lot of juices regular coffee enemas and high quality nutrition only period and it was pretty it was tough it was tight but I knew four or five people who went with that protocol personally who came out the other end cleared I'm using that for lack of a better word of their cancer or of their condition that they went in to start with and it was all by stripping everything out giving them nothing but organic everything they had to get a juicer and there is there were there were agreements with the Kelly protocol like if you do this you agree to get a juicer do the deal get a Vitamix and then you agree to all those parts so it was a big thing. Big commitment yeah big commitment but the people that did it came out the other end cleared of prostate cancer or ovarian cancer or you know pick a cancer.

Yeah And it was amazing but it was a it was brutal he he eventually stopped doing it because it was just too hard and time consuming for him and it was difficult supporting the people along the way because they wanted somebody to like call 24 hours a day to go oh my God and it was difficult but it was amazing to see it actually work.

Martha Carlin: Yeah well I do think you know that's another piece of the puzzle I think uh in I'm not gonna say it's everybody but I have there's oh so there's a in a pretty good percentage of people there is a blind trust of the medical system and they will only do what their neurologist tells them and of course neurologists are trained to give the dopamine drugs and then you have side effects and there's like this cascade of the drugs that they give you for the symptoms and side effects of all the different drugs um and they're not typically um typically going to tell you to exercise or change your diet I mean we got a we did get a book on food I think early on but it was like when I looked at looked back at it later I was like well this is mostly wrong um you know the one thing it was saying was don't take don't eat protein with your medicine because it interferes with uptake of the medicine but of course you know if you lower your protein too much then um you know you start losing muscle mass um so this you know I say it's like giving over your agency to somebody else so the doctor tells you you have Parkinson's then you give over all your agency to them and you're gonna do whatever they say and only what they say and not think for yourself and I think one of the paths to recovery is regaining your own agency

TalkToMeGuy: you're we're ultimately responsible for ourselves

Martha Carlin: and and taking you so taking responsibility you know doing the hard things if it means giving up sugar or you know changing from a highly processed easy diet to one that requires you to work harder at producing your meal um to make it healthy you know the you've got to make the decision to do that and do the hard work and that's not always easy. I mean so one of the things I have actually been talking to uh a nonprofit that John worked with some in Colorado is they have a kitchen at the place where they're located and if they could potentially like put in some kind of a program where, you know, once a week or once every two weeks, they have a chef come in and you know, they come together as a community and help chop ingredients, you know, because fine motor skills are uh challenged in Parkinson's. And so, you know, chopping and doing things like that can be more laborious. So if you had volunteers and people who could come together in community to help get all that done, and then you would have your ingredients to make your you know fresh recipes for the rest of the week. That'd be amazing.

TalkToMeGuy: Considering all of the, you know, I see a lot of food on TV that is, you know, shipped to you in an ice box and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But just the idea of getting together with groups. I have I had I was a working chef for 20 years, and I've had a couple of times where groups have said, Oh, would you come and show us how to cook a bunch of stuff? And I would. And a lot of it was I had the skills from having done it so much, but it was really just the idea of here like five simple ingredients.

Let's make some meat, let's make food out of this. Right. And the prep work is the hardest part for people. It isn't the cooking, it is the you know, ability to chop an onion in 20 seconds.

Martha Carlin: That is the and it's that's the part like figure figuring out the ingredient list, you know. Yeah.

TalkToMeGuy: And I can't believe we're so close to the end. I have to go a couple minutes over. Um sugar the sugar shift formula came from a simple question. Could we rebuild the system? Not just supplement a compound. Would you say more about that? Because that is so you know, fascinating to me.

Martha Carlin: Well, I mean, the idea came from I you know, went to the World Parkinson's Congress with John and researchers there were um presenting some research on the sugar alcohol manitol. Uh, and that's it's a sugar alcohol that's used as a sweetener replacement in diabetes, interestingly.

Um, but they showed in an animal model that it could stop the aggregation of the proteins and actually pull them out of the brain of the mouse. And I was like, wow, that is really interesting. And so I came back and I I got a Manital chemistry book and started reading about this amazing molecule. Uh and the first chapter in the book was about microbes, bacteria that actually ferment manitol from glucose and fructose.

And I I knew people with Parkinson's and my husband being one of them, had a sweet tooth, and I was like, well, we have way too much glucose and fructose in our diet. Wonder if, you know, since these strains of bacteria can ferment manitol out of glucose and fructose, couldn't we just put a little factory in the gut? And so this idea of putting a team together that could actually accomplish something sort of came out of this chance meeting at uh at the World Parkinson's Congress and reading that book. But I had a friend who was a fermentation chemist and had spent 20 years in the uh probiotics industry, and so I called him up and I was like, Steve, do you think that we could um like put a factory back in the gut?

And he said, you know, I I think we can. And so I gave him um some of the strains that I wanted to see in it, and he had ideas for a couple of others, and one of them was actually kind of difficult to get. And at one point he asked me, he said, um, like, do you think it really has to have this one?

And I said, I can't really tell you why, but um, yes, it has to have that one. So he ended up, he did find it, and he was able to prototype that in about 90 days. And John started taking it, and he had some really remarkable results because at the time he was walking with a cane, and within 30 days, he was no longer walking with a cane.

Four months later, we went to our daughter's college graduation of about 5,000 people, and he was able to navigate the crowd with no problem, and he had been having trouble freezing in crowds. And we were testing his microbiome, and we could see it was moving back to the healthy human microbiome uh profile. And it even his um uniform Parkinson's disease uh rating score improved by 40 percent.

And he was pretty stable for about four years until he um he got COVID at the end of 2021. But that idea of building those teams, you know, we made that sugar shift for John, and then we took that concept and we said, okay, well, now we know we can build a team and it works. You know, what else can we do with this? And we started basically using computer models and the genes and capabilities of each of the strains of bacteria and putting together teams. So now we have you know, one that helps support uh sleep by producing uh tryptophan and melatonin. Uh the bacteria produce tryptophan and melatonin. And we have one for cardiovascular health that uh increases the production of nitric oxide and coQ10. You know, we have one for immunity that has a strain that is very effective, 100% effective against Listeria and very effective against Salmonella E.

coli so all those foodborne pathogens, you know, that's a great one for um travel if people are going on foreign travel, or you know, if they are eating out in the summer picnic where mayonnaise is sitting out on the table all day. Um and um let's see, we have a new one that we just brought out called Perfect Peace. That that one you can you can actually feel the edge come off of your know your stress level uh in about 20 minutes. Um, and that helps support uh GABA production and the calming neurotransmitters. And we have one that we designed as a team to help restore the gut after antibiotics, because you know, I knew this antibiotic history connection with Parkinson's and you know, probably a lot of other things that I haven't looked into. So this idea of if you just think about you know, we have factories and they have teams of people with different skills. Um, you know, we're an ecosystem, and there's teams in our body that are making B vitamins and those neurotransmitters, and you know, blah blah blah. So why can't we put back those teams? And so that's where that concept came from. It goes back to my

TalkToMeGuy: old grind in the best of ways. Uh, I've always said that given the opportunity, the body will heal itself, and what you do is part of that opportunity.

Martha Carlin: Yes, I mean, it's kind of putting back a little piece of the foundation that helps the body be able to take care of itself.

TalkToMeGuy: And you take perfect peace and you have you feel the edge go away. Not that anybody in this time is stressed. But you know, take perfect peace and a little bit more GABA, and suddenly you're taking a deep breath and you're not in flight or fight. It's amazing. It is I have no closing question because we have too many directions we could go. That was stupendously great. Thank you. Well, well, thank you for having me.

Martha Carlin: I I appreciate I appreciate you, the work you do, and you having me on here and talking about my book and the probiotics and the work I do.

TalkToMeGuy: I I do want to ask, uh thank you. And I do want to ask, where would you like people to find connected?

Martha Carlin: Well, you you can find it anywhere books are sold, but you know, if you I always like to support local bookstores, but to get it there, you will have to ask them to order it. Um, it is available online at Barnes and Noble.com and at Amazon.com. Um, and you know, those are probably the easiest places there. You can also get it at Bookshop, um, which is uh online bookshop, and I I can send you a link for bookshop. Okay.

Um that is a independent bookseller kind of website attempting to compete with Amazon, which is hard to do. I'll put that in the show notes for everybody. So that's you know, that's where to uh that's where you can find it. And of course, you can find uh the probiotics at Biotiquist.

TalkToMeGuy: And I highly recommend and thoroughly enjoy your Substack. Well, that's the whole other show. You've been possessed by feet lately, which I think is very funny and so perfect.

Martha Carlin: Well, I I write a pretty broad spectrum of articles, and like some of them are really deep science that I think probably runs people off. And um, I wrote the the foot one, the first foot one called Death Death Begins in the Feet or Death Starts in the Feet, based on a conversation with my neuromuscular person and these new barefoot shoes I had gotten. And that's turned out to be the most read piece I've ever written. But it also was a really great learning process for me, understanding how the feet connect throughout the entire chain of the body, and why it is so important to uh maintain our the sensory capabilities of our feet, the flexibility of our feet, and how it how that uh the fascia moves through the chain all the way up into the you know up into the base of the skull.

And um, you know, who I laugh, somebody I was talking to. I remember that song when we were kids, like the foot bones connected to the yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, the foot bones connected to the head bone.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, it's all connected, it is all connected.

Martha Carlin: It is all connected, yes.

TalkToMeGuy: Thank you so much. We could do this for another hour, but we're not going to now.

Martha Carlin: Well, thank you for having me, and I hope to see you again soon.

TalkToMeGuy: Me too.

TalkToMeGuy: Thanks, everybody. Have a great rest of the week. Bye bye.

Martha Carlin: Thank you.