Hey there, welcome to the Root Cause Medicine podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Carrie Jones. On this podcast, we go in depth with leading experts from all walks of life to understand and improve your health and well-being. Today, I'm talking with Dr. Heather's Wiki, a teacher, researcher, and mentor, whom I deeply respect and have known for almost 20 years.

We're talking all about postbiotics and the microbiome.

Dr. Zwicki has a PhD in immunology and microbiology from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center

with a focus on infectious disease and vaccine development.

She went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship and teach at Yale University School of Medicine,

where she worked on immunotherapy for cancer.

At the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon, she launched a Healthgot Research

Institute and served as its director for 17 years

and is co-led NIH-funded clinical research and research training programs. In 2009, Dr. Zwicki

established the School of Graduate Studies. She is adjunct faculty at NUNM, University of Western

States, and Maryland University of Integrative Health.

She's also the Director of Communications and Innovation at Thana, which we're going to talk about

today. It was an absolute pleasure talking with her as she broke down the difference

between prebiotics, probiotics, and now the field of postbiotics for your gut health.

Here's a clip from today's conversation.

The microbiome is the collection of organisms that live in and on you.

So it's all the microbes that are in your gut, all the microbes that are on your skin, and then on all

sorts of other surfaces. Things that we used to think were sterile, like urine, turns out

it's not sterile. Turns out there's microbes in there all the time. And we're discovering that

those microbes are playing a critical role in our health. They include bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoa.

And usually we're very microbophobic. We think microbes bad, right? We think, oh my gosh,

I'm going to get Gartia and have diarrhea for months or something like that. But we're discovering

...