Your Body Is Home to Millions of Bacterial Pilots | feat. Anders Corbett
The Gabby Reece Show
Dear Media
4.8 • 954 Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2026
⏱️ 101 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, I talk with Anders Corbett, microbiome researcher and founder of Craft Microbiome, about how the bacteria living inside us may be influencing far more than we realize — from performance and recovery to cognition, mood, and long-term health.
Anders’ journey into microbiome science started at Harvard Medical School, where he sequenced his own microbiome as a former elite rower. What he discovered sparked a much bigger question: do elite athletes carry different microbial patterns than the rest of us?
That curiosity led him to study Olympic athletes, UFC fighters, NBA players, endurance competitors, and high-performing executives — identifying how certain bacterial strains correlate with inflammation control, lactate metabolism, testosterone signaling, VO₂ capacity, and stress resilience.
In this conversation, we explore the rapidly evolving science of the microbiome and human performance, including:
• How the microbiome shifts before and after elite competition
• Inflammation-reducing bacteria found in endurance athletes
• Growth-hormone–associated strains identified in sprinters
• Gut changes after concussive and non-concussive hits
• The gut-brain axis and its impact on mood and decision-making
• How bacteria influence dopamine and serotonin production
• Microbiome changes that tend to happen around 40 and again around 60
• Epigenetics and how microbes may turn genes on or off
• Why sunlight, soil exposure, and environment matter for microbial health
• How stress reshapes bacterial populations in the gut
• The future of performance-focused probiotic formulations
We also talk about something many of us overlook: how modern life — sterile environments, limited food diversity, chronic stress, antibiotics, travel, and poor sleep — may be reducing microbial diversity and resilience.
Anders shares practical ways to begin supporting your microbiome even if you’re not a professional athlete — including simple shifts that may improve sleep, digestion, recovery, focus, and energy.
This conversation bridges cutting-edge science with something more timeless: the idea that our bodies are ecosystems. And it raises a deeper question worth considering:
Who’s really in charge — you or your gut?
CONNECT WITH ANDERS
Craft Microbiome
(Custom microbiome sequencing and consultations available)
CONNECT WITH ME
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast is a Dear Media production. |
| 0:03.9 | Hi, everyone. |
| 0:04.8 | Welcome to the show. |
| 0:05.6 | I'm your host, Gabby Reese, and let's face it, none of us have the answers. |
| 0:09.6 | But that's why I think having the conversations with some of the smartest people, |
| 0:13.1 | whether it's in health and fitness, relationships, parenting, even business, |
| 0:17.7 | gives us an opportunity to take complex ideas, simplify them, and put them in our |
| 0:22.8 | day-to-day lives and make them more manageable, easier, and more fun. Remember to subscribe and like, |
| 0:29.6 | and it's all an experiment. Anders Corbett, welcome to the show. |
| 0:42.4 | This is like one of your first three or four interviews, right? |
| 0:43.1 | Second. |
| 0:44.1 | It's a second. |
| 0:44.8 | Second interview. |
| 0:45.2 | Yeah. |
| 0:50.5 | So you are all about the microbiome. And I think that people hear about, they know the importance of the microbiome. |
| 0:55.0 | Yeah. |
| 0:55.6 | And I encourage people to sort of listen with different ears because we're getting a little more specific. |
| 1:03.5 | Yeah. |
| 1:04.3 | About the microbiome. So this is, I would call this microbiome performance. |
| 1:09.4 | Yeah. |
| 1:10.3 | So maybe you can just give me a little bit of your |
| 1:14.3 | own history. Okay. And then we can dive into sort of these interesting segments about what you have |
... |
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