Autumn Warren is the inventor of Ether Elixir. She joins us monthly to talk about probiotics and the importance of keeping your gut healthy. To find out more about probiotics and their role, it might be a good idea to check out a site like https://santacruzcore.com/probiotics/ to help you get started. This day that Autumn joined us had so much good information I could not wait to get it out!!Below is our Q & A, there is some seriously good information that is relatable to everyone.Bernadette: So, having good gut flora helps with...Autumn: All kinds of stuff. It's the "cure all." You know, you're talking about your brother with schizophrenia with any sort of mental disease. You've got a nerve in your body that's actually connected directly from your brain stem to your abdomen. It's called the vagus nerve. And it's thought to...it's believed that the gut microbes actually communicate through neurotransmitters all the way from your abdomen to the gut.So, when you get butterflies in your stomach, you know, that's a bad feeling. It's part intuition, part this. But your body is a living organism and it's not just human cells that are living within it. It's, you know, a whole different ecosystem of different microbes. So they're actually communicating with your brain.So in any sort of mental disease, the communication that's coming from them are resulting in hormones that cause stress like cortisol. And what you need the good bacteria, the good yeast, they send messages that increase the hormones that are related for happy feelings. Like any sort of oxytocin or any sort of serotonin, anything that has a "feel good", happy vibe.Those are natural byproducts of those...of probiotics. Whereas the bad ones, they have less desired chemical reactions that can cause mental distress.Autumn: And, you know, with children...this is one of the things that I wanted to talk about. You know, with kids, it is easy sometimes to feed them kid food, you know. But there are healthier versions of kid food. But really, because of this ecosystem you have going on inside of you, those...it is...there had been multiple studies found that they actually are the ones that are driving your cravings.So with little kids...I mean, with adults, too, but with little kids, they're at such a formidable time in their lives. You're trying to teach them what it is that they ought to be eating, what's best for their bodies, as well as allow them to have some independence to choose things for themselves. But if they have been eating a steady diet of processed foods and sugar, then they have been feeding these bad bacterias in their gut.And what those bad bacterias are doing is they're calling out for more of the bad stuff to keep themselves viable. And so then, you're fighting this battle not really with your child but you're fighting the battle with the living organisms inside of them. And the real honest thing to do is to give them a high quality, high dose probiotic that you kind of tip the scale.So they've got more of the good guys, flush out some of the bad guys, and then really try to just make a shift in their diet by giving them more of the good food. To feed the good bacteria and let their taste change. But you'd be setting them up for, you know, a lifelong battle with food if the good stuff isn't realized to be good at first.Bernadette: Yeah. And so...well, you know what? There's a lot of benefits of probiotics. And so here's something that we're gonna talk about today, is the connection between probiotics and diabetes.Autumn: Oh, yeah. This is something I could go on and on about. But, you know, diabetes, it's a metabolic condition, obviously. But it's also an autoimmune disease. And probiotics have been proven, first and foremost, to lower blood sugar in a diabetic. And I'm talking lower it to the point where a diabetic individual may not even need any sort of outside insulin any longer.Again, I'm not a doctor, but I will say I've got lots of testimonials from customers of mine. Some of them close friends and family of mine that use it, people that walk around with a blood glucose monitor. And when you ingest a live and active probiotic, like the one that's contained in Ether Elixir. What it does is that it uses the food in your system as its food source and it drastically reduces the metabolic load on your body.So rather than your body needing to secrete...your pancreas needing to secrete insulin or needing to take an artificial insulin, what you're doing is these probiotics are eating through that sugar. They're eating through the carbohydrates, and they're effectively making your body do the work...they're doing the work for your body is the way to say it.Bernadette: I know this may seem like a dumb question and I'm gonna...you really know I'm not a scientist here. Okay. So when it gets wet again like in your stomach, does it activate? How does it work?Autumn: Well, sure. It will come back to life but the thing with the ones in a capsules and there often in an entire coated capsule to protect them from your stomach acid. Probiotics, the actual definition of a probiotic is one that lives in the human environment that can withstand the acid of your stomach but it can't withstand the acid in your stomach when it's freeze-dried. So that's why they're in that capsule so that they have time to make it through your stomach and make it to your small intestines which is where they're often needed to crowd out the bad bacteria.The problem is when they're in that capsule, they're still in stasis. They're still asleep. And then that capsule starts wearing off and it gets into your small intestine and maybe now the capsule is gone but there is not enough time for them to come back to life and start to build a colony, they're just being woken up from a nap. So essentially, they don't have time to do anything. They don't have time to pre-digest your food for you like lowering your blood sugar, or changing your metabolism, or really even crowding out the bad bacteria because they're still all sleepy. And what they wind up doing is just being passed through your system.Autumn: The analogy that I love for probiotics and, you know, probiotics are capable of curing all kinds of things, especially like this Equineline that we have for horses. I mean, it can kill tons of pathogens. You just need them in sufficient quantities and unless they are alive and active, meaning they are in the process of replicating and doing something, they are not...and at the sufficient quantity, they're not gonna do anything. It's like food. If I'm a doctor and you come to me and you say that you're hungry and I prescribe you food and you go home and you eat one piece of bread, that one piece of bread is not going to stop you from starving to death.It's going to maybe prolong your starving to death a little bit if that's all you eat. And with probiotics, it's the same. You're not gonna see the benefit, you not gonna see the turnaround unless you get the sufficient quantity of them.Bernadette: Well, let me ask you this. What about treatments for Alzheimer's and dementia?Autumn: Yeah. It's all kinds of stuff. Alzheimer's and dementia, they are considered autoimmune disease as well. And the bad bacteria in your gut directly affect your brain chemistry. Directly affect how the neurotransmitters process in your brain. Directly affect the areas of your brain and how they communicate with each other. Which areas of the brains are turned on or turned off? And so many of those diseases especially Alzheimer's and dementia. Alzheimer's which runs in my family and has actually two of my close family members have died early deaths because of early onset Alzheimer's.Bernadette: Wow.Autumn: So it's something incredibly important to me, but it's because your brain is essentially shutting down and it's shutting down and you're not able to remember this, you know, these basics in life. You're not able to remember. Your body's recall just isn't there and with the probiotics, they essentially do a number of things. They change that communication, they open up different areas of your brain, they expedite the transmission of neurotransmitters. And maybe, in my opinion, most importantly, they take that toxic load off of your body.The human body is incredibly capable of healing itself, but when it is constantly inflamed and constantly under duress, it's just putting out fires. It's not curing anything. It's just stopping the whole thing from burning down. So, a lot these diseases can simply be left to heal themselves if the underlying gut flora is allowed to flourish with good bacteria.

---

Here are some pictures from her warehouse and her artwork.