How to Optimize Your Gut Health for High Performance | Dr. Colleen Cutcliffe

Colleen Cutcliffe (0:00)

I think of it like a car. You want to put great fuel into your car, but you also need a great engine. The fuel is the food you're eating, the engine is the microbiome. So if you put shitty fuel into a great car, you're not going to get a high performance.

And if you have the top-of-the-line fuel, but the worst engine ever, you're also not going to get a great high-performing car. So you need both of these components to really be successful in your health.

Michael Gervais (0:33)

Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade in training a high-performance psychologist. And I'm excited to welcome Dr. Colleen Cutcliffe to the Finding Mastery community. Colleen is the CEO and co-founder of Pendulum Therapeutics, who's on a mission to improve health through the first of its kind research and development in the gut microbiome. She received a doctorate degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from Johns Hopkins University. And then she spent over 20 years managing and leading teams in biotech, pharma and academia.

So Colleen, before we get started, I just wanna say I'm honored to have Pendulum as a partner on the show. I've been studying gut health and the microbiome for a long time, not at your level.

But I understand the value of it. And you're on the forefront of creating meaningful change for people. So I can't wait to take a deep dive and learn from you today. So with that, thank you so much for being here. How are you?

Colleen Cutcliffe (1:41)

I'm great. Thanks so much for having me. I'm also excited about our conversation today and getting to partner with you. And you know, gut health is becoming such a common word and everybody has maybe a little bit of different definition of what it means. So excited to dig in with you today and share thoughts.

Michael Gervais (1:58)

I thought what we do is we would better understand some of the science and then better understand where that comes from for you and what you're trying to solve. For two decades, just as a framework, you were working in biotech and pharma. And then what was the impetus for you to pursue gut microbiome specifically?

Colleen Cutcliffe (2:19)

I think there were two really key factors that made me jump in with both feet.

The first was really the science, the microbiome science that was emerging. And things like probiotics and yogurts have been on the shelves for decades, but there hasn't actually been a novel kind of new species introduced into the world for over 50 years. When you think about any industry where you haven't had real innovation over 50 years, that's sort of exciting to anybody who's kind of a creative thinker. And the microbiome is all of the bacteria and viruses and fungi that reside inside and on us. And the way we know about them now is through DNA sequencing. So DNA sequencing technologies enabled us to understand the microbiome and therefore to create new innovative interventions in the space. And so for me, I was actually working at a DNA sequencing instrument company. And so from a science perspective, there's this really cool new health opportunity that hadn't been available to us before because that data wasn't available to us. And so there was sort of that scientist and innovator part of me that was intrigued by it and bringing new products to the world. But then as I started reading and learning more about the microbiome, I realized there was also a personal connection for me through my first daughter. So my first daughter was born almost two months prematurely.

And she was about four and a half pounds. I held her for a couple of seconds. And then literally she was taken away to intensive care. She spent the first month of her life in intensive care, hooked up to all these machines and monitors, and also receiving multiple doses of antibiotics. And I noticed about her, I mean, if we got out of the hospital and she was ostensibly healthy, but I noticed about her over time as she got into elementary school that there were things about her health that were different than the rest of our family. So in particular, she had food sensitivities that the rest of us didn't have. She was the kid in Baskin-Robbins asking how much dairy is in the sherbert.

And she also just had to worry about, her metabolism was just different. She had to worry about what she was consuming. And at that same time, this study came out where they looked at 12,000 children and they showed that babies who were systematically given antibiotics were also systematically more prone to obesity and type 2 diabetes as they got older. And then that study was recently repeated by the Mayo Clinic and they showed that kids under two years old, if they got systematically exposed to antibiotics, they were not only more prone to obesity and diabetes, but also allergies, asthma, ADHD, celiac disease, all of these different things. And it really stems from the fact that the antibiotic treatment completely decimates your microbiome and so you're missing or lacking these key functions in your body that everybody else has. And so at the same time, this science is emerging, the DNA sequencing application was clear. I read this paper, I connected all the dots with my daughter and I thought, oh my gosh, we could create products that could help millions of people, including my own daughter who had this early antibiotic treatment and is on a path to potentially these chronic illnesses and lifelong health issues.