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Did you realize how much your gut microbiome influences your metabolism, your weight and your overall health?

Dr. Whitney talks with Colleen Cutcliffe, PhD, CEO and Co-Founder of Pendulum Therapeutics about how the gut microbiome works, optimizing the way your body handles the nutrients you consume, and choosing a probiotic that really works.

Colleen Cutcliffe, PhD, is the CEO and Co-Founder of Pendulum. She has over 15 years of experience leading and managing biology teams in academia, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. Prior to starting Pendulum, Colleen was the Senior Manager of Biology at Pacific Biosciences and a Scientist at Elan Pharmaceuticals. Colleen received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Johns Hopkins University and her B.A. in Biochemistry from Wellesley College.

About Pendulum:

Pendulum optimizes the metabolism of sugar and carbohydrates, reducing sugar cravings and energy slumps, boosting sugar and carb metabolism, AND supporting a healthy weight.

Pendulum understands that whole-body health and wellness is tied to the complex ecosystem of microorganisms that is the microbiome, and that addressing imbalances in the microbiome transform people’s lives from the inside.

Their mission is simple: to improve the lives of millions through microbiome products. To that end, they create products that have the power and efficacy of a pharmaceutical with the safety and accessibility of a probiotic.

To accomplish their mission, they developed an entirely new product–a medical probiotic. Medical probiotics are the bridge between nature and medicine, helping restore our bodies to their peak balance.

To learn more about Pendulum Therapeutics AND to get 20% off your first month of Pendulum membership, go to www.pendulumlife.com and use code MODERN20.

PODCAST NOTES:

Dr. Whitney: Today we’re talking with Colleen Cutcliffe, PhD from Pendulum and I’m really excited because there’s a personal connection in here for me. Colleen, tell us about Pendulum and how you got started. It’s a really exciting story!

Colleen: I’m always excited to talk about the latest and greatest in microbiome research. I have a background in basic science research, I have a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from Johns Hopkins, I did a pretty traditional postdoc at NorthWestern, and then I moved out to the San Francisco area where I worked for a pharmaceutical company, developing drugs for Parkinson’s Disease. Then I joined a startup DNA sequencing company that went through rapid growth while also founding this company with two co-founders. At the heart of microbiome science and research is being able to DNA sequence the microbiome, so we had really strong technical knowledge about mapping a person’s microbiome and how that microbiome relates to that person’s body. 

From a scientific standpoint, it was the ability to create new data and really understand the role that the microbiome can play in health. On a personal level, the more I learned about the microbiome, I learned that my daughter was very likely impacted by her microbiome experience. My first daughter was born almost two months prematurely at 4 and a half pounds. I got to hold her for a few seconds before she was taken to intensive care. She was hooked up to all these machines and monitors for the first month of her life and received multiple treatments of antibiotics–not because she had any type of infection, just because she was so fragile that they were trying to prevent her from getting any type of infection.

One of the things that I noticed about her as she got older was that she had these food sensitivities that the rest of our family didn’t have. She had a hard time with dairy and even as a 5 year old, she was looking for plant based foods because she knew that otherwise, it would cause her GI distress. I read this publication that they looked at all these infants and showed that those that had multiple rounds of antibiotics were more susceptible to obesity and diabetes. It started with being sensitive to certain foods but then when the study was repeated by The Mayo Clinic, they showed it went beyond that and obesity and diabetes and also made these children more susceptible to asthma, allergies, and autism.

So early in life when you take an antibiotic, you decimate your microbiome and you are set up for a lifetime of depletion. When I was seeing all these connections, paired with the knowledge I had, I saw we could help millions of people, including my daughter. And that’s how we got started in this space a little more than 10 years ago. 

Dr. Whitney: I love the microbiome because I’m a science nerd but I’ve also been geeking out on how the microbiome influences so many things. Having a c-section can influence a child’s microbiome. If you had antibiotics, if the baby had antibiotics, it can all influence it. There’s so many people that are in this space and trying to help people. What makes what you do at Pendulum different?

Colleen: We aren’t all that different in the way that we are approaching things. We’re doing DNA sequencing, biochemical essays, preclinical and clinical trials, and trying to understand what the pathways in the microbiome are that affect human health. Compared to the probiotic companies that are using the already on the market lactobacillus and bifidobacterium strains, we are quite different. We’ve invested a lot of money into clinical trials and creating novel interventions.

I’d say the biggest difference is that we’ve honed in on a specific problem, which is how our body metabolizes food and the gut metabolism axis. I care very much about the metabolism of food. We can all remember a time in our lives when we could eat or drink whatever we wanted, but as we age our metabolism is affected differently. We don’t need a doctor to tell us our metabolism has slowed down. But what we aren’t usually aware of is that as we age, we lose certain gut microbes. As we go through times of stress, we lose certain gut microbes. When we travel and our circadian rhythms are messed up, we lose certain microbes. As women, when we go through menopause, we lose certain gut microbes. 

There are things that we go through or just because we are a human being, that cause us to lose these gut microbes. And it turns out that one of the key things is how our bodies metabolize sugars and carbs, and that’s been the thing we’ve focused on. How does our body metabolize sugars and carbs and how can we help replenish these gut bugs that are literally doing the metabolizing for you?

Dr. Whitney: Let me doctor-splain this to our audience that is less nerdy than you and me so they can understand what this means. The first thing I heard you say is that not all probiotics are created equal. They can vary greatly on the effectiveness based on what’s actually in the probiotic. The other thing I heard you say is that what Pendulum is aiming to do is really focusing on metabolism. I’ve heard you explain it this way: you can put great gasoline in your car, but if you have a shitty engine, it’s not going to make much difference as to whether the car runs well. Talk more about the basic components of a probiotic that make it work well and what things are on the mainstream market that have become generic that won’t work as well for people.

Colleen: There’s some vocabulary that is sometimes confusing. There’s prebiotics and probiotics. Prebiotics are literally the food that feed the probiotics and probiotics are the bacteria themselves. When you go into the aisle with pre and probiotics, things are usually mixed together. So when you see things like fiber and polyphenols, those are prebiotics. When you see things with “live bacteria strains” or CFUs, those are probiotics. If you start to look at the label of these, you’ll start to notice a pattern, which is that almost everything out there starts with lactobacillus or bifidobacterium. That’s it. That’s a very small category of microbes compared to all the microbes that are actually in our gut biome. Those strains do certain functions. And maybe you’ve looked at these and thought, “What is the difference between these probiotics?” Well, there might not actually be any difference because the ingredients are more or less the same.

What we’re really focused on are some of these novel strains that you won’t really find anywhere else. One of the key ones is akkermansia muciniphila which is really emerging as a keystone strain. It’s the only bug that lives in your gut lining–and think of that lining like a fence. There’s all the planks of the fence and then the glue between each of them that keeps it really strong. Overtime and with weather, those planks can really start to weaken, that glue can start to weaken, and planks can fall down.

Your gut lining is the same way. You have these planks, these cells that are held together by glue called tight junctions and mucin. And you have this mucin layer, the glue, that has to be regulated. Akkermansia’s job is to sit there at that fence, all day and all night, and strip the old glue off and put new glue on and to keep the planks really strong. So this strain, it’s the only one known to live in the gut lining and the only one known that that’s it’s job–to keep the gut lining healthy and strong. If you are depleted in it, that is correlated to things like obesity, diabetes, increased inflammation, lowered immune response, and even bad skin, which is associated with the inflammatory response. So it’s such an important thing to have a fortified gut lining. I know the word “akkermansia” is such a mouthful, but hopefully, over time, people will realize that’s something they want in their gut.

Dr. Whitney: Talk about the piece of how this plays in with metabolizing sugars. I know that at the beginning, you had started to develop this with the thought of helping the diabetes community, but now you’re seeing that it can help the population at large.

Colleen: When you think about it, everything that you eat goes to your gut to be digested. So you have these bugs in your gut that literally help you digest your food. There’s certain foods that we all eat that we can’t digest on our own. We need the bugs to digest them. And we found that some people are missing these bugs entirely. So when we think of metabolism, there is metabolic health and trying to be as metabolically healthy as possible, the other end of the spectrum are metabolic disorders or syndrome, which is Type 2 Diabetes.

So we started our research with diabetes, where they’re missing these functions where they cannot metabolize sugars. We created a formulation that helped people with diabetes actually be able to metabolize sugars and lower their A1C. And from there, it turns out, we’re all a little bit on the spectrum of metabolic health. And so having those good levels of bug in our gut doesn’t just help those with diabetes but all of us who are wanting to stay as healthy as possible. There’s basically two ways to stay healthy: don’t eat sugars and carbs or find a way for your body to metabolize them. We’re in that second camp.

Dr. Whitney: A lot of the work I do here at Modern Mommy Doc is showing moms how to work smarter, not harder. There’s things in life that we can’t control like having to get the kids out the door for school or a pandemic or work I have to do for my job. But there’s things that I can do to make those things more efficient. I can make sure I’m not in a rush in the mornings, I can make sure to take care of myself by taking walks during the pandemic, I can look at productivity hacks to get my notes done faster at work. And I really view this in the same vein. Moms can’t control the hormone shifts you go through after having a baby. You have a different body; that change in metabolism is going to happen and you can’t control it. But you can control what your body does with what you consume. And to be honest, I don’t want to give up sugar! We do the best we can, but life happens. So this is a way to optimize your microbiome in light of those things. Is that what you’re saying?

Colleen: Yes! It’s really a life hack to get through those things that are depleting your microbiome and giving yourself back these good bugs and helping your metabolism. If you’ve ever been on a diet where you’re trying to cut back on your sugars and carbs, it’s super hard. But people will tell you that when they do, they experience things they didn’t realize would happen. They had so much more energy, or slept better, or didn’t have as much brain fog. Those are outcomes that are actually of a better metabolism.

So we understand that Girl Scout Season comes along every year and we’re going to be consumers of Thin Mints. But this just gives yourself permission to live your life, while also metabolizing things better. We can’t feel when we’re metabolizing things correctly, right? But 70% of our consumers say they have less sugar cravings. Because there’s a connection between our gut and our brains: when we’re metabolizing sugar correctly, we don’t feel the need for more of it. And you no longer have to feel that guilt from hearing that you just don’t have the strong willpower to not consume these products. Biologically, you’re being told that you’re hungry! So giving yourself these hacks to improve that is what we want to bring to the world.

Dr. Whitney: Let’s talk about that guilt piece. I know it happens to me and so many moms. Those sugar cravings and just feeling like you’re not strong enough to stop. I was having a discussion about health and weight loss with my husband and what types of workouts to do because I wasn’t seeing the results I wanted and he was–all while I was drinking a smoothie and he was eating fried chicken! So there is something biologically to this! We end up feeling so guilty because we can’t find a solution to fix it. 

I tried your products and I’m really selective about who I bring on the show to make sure that everything is based in research and science. And I have to say that my energy levels are significantly higher and my sugar cravings are significantly lower. I just feel better. My stomach looks flatter. So I’m not surprised that your customers are saying those same things.

Colleen: This is why I think metabolic health is going to be something we talk more and more about because when you solve for that, it shows up in all of these different areas. When we were first creating these products, I wore a continuous glucose monitor so I could really track. And I took placebo pills and I took the real products but told my team not to tell me which was which. And each time, I knew when I was taking the real thing. I had way more energy. My workouts were so much better. And the sugar cravings are such a huge component. I’m not saying it solves all of it, but any little boost we can get on that front is helpful.

Dr. Whitney: Tell our listeners about some of the organizations you’ve worked with. I know you worked with Mayo Clinic, so now you have these clinical studies that show that these products can be really beneficial to certain people groups.

Colleen: When we started this company, every investor that we took money from, we told them we’ll never commercialize a product unless it actually works. That was a leap that our investors took with us. I decided a long time ago that health was where I wanted to make my mark. We’ve always been really grounded in scientific evidence and wanting to transform health. So as a result, we’ve ended up with really great backers. The first people that invested in us were the Mayo Clinic and they’ve invested in every one of our rounds. We’re in the pharmacy at the Cleveland Clinic so we had several people over there that tried the products and then really wanted to make it available to their patients and have it in their pharmacy. We also are used by Kaiser physicians and collaborators with Johns Hopkins, doing basic science research with them. So we’re very much embedded with medical institutions because this is still a new science and we’re trying to uncover new ways for people to optimize their health. It’s been really great to partner with the best of the best to get all that knowledge out there.

Dr. Whitney: This is my plug for all my listeners out there…make sure you know about the products you’re taking. Look at the research behind them and who they’ve collaborated with–not just for these, but any product you’re taking!

You have two main products. Tell the listeners about the differences between them and what moms can do to get started optimizing their metabolism.

Colleen: Let me actually ask you first, do you have any tips for people as they look through products to find out if it’s actually scientifically proven or science backed or not? I even have a really hard time parsing it out!

Dr. Whitney: Number one, if someone is recommending it and you check it out and it ONLY talks about patient experience, that’s a red flag. Patient experience is great, but it’s not the only part. It’s an augmentation of what the data says. So make sure that you’re not only basing it off of customer reviews. Number two, look at what organizations have associated with the product. If it’s associated with The Mayo Clinic, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, it’s at least a company trying to be legitimate. Number three, you can also do your own research and ask the companies for their studies and the links to their research. If you don’t understand the research yourself, ask a doctor. I’ve had plenty of patients ask me to look over something that’s a product for their child.

Colleen: That’s super helpful. So in terms of what we’ve created, the first product we created was for people with Type 2 Diabetes. We ran a placebo/control/double blind/randomized trial published in BMJ (which is one of the premier clinical journals) showing that for people with Type 2 Diabetes that were on this product (which we call Pendulum Glucose Control) were able to, compared to placebo, see that they lowered their A1C by 0.6. And, just for a frame of reference, that can be the difference between having diabetes and not having diabetes. So it lowered A1C by 0.6, it lowered blood glucose spikes by 33%. 

And so if you have Type 2 Diabetes or you've got Pre-Diabetes and you want to kind of avoid crossing over into Type 2 Diabetes, or you're really worried about your A1C and your blood glucose spikes, Pendulum glucose control is the formulation for you. It's a clinical dose that has all of these hard-hitting lowering of A1C and blood glucose spikes people report back. We used to give people free A1C testing when we first started, because we really wanted to see if it was working. And now we advise people to get your A1C tested and I think it's really important to know what you expect to get out of your probiotic. And we have the money back guarantee. If you take this thing and you don't get those outcomes, we're not here to fleece you. We'll give your money back. So that's if you have Diabetes. 

If you are somebody who wants to just optimize your metabolic health, and you want to metabolize your sugars and carbs better, we have Metabolic Daily. That is literally the exact same formulation as Pendulum Glucose Control, but it's at a lower dose. So if you don't have Type 2 Diabetes and you want to improve the way you're metabolizing sugars though, Metabolic Daily is for you. 

If you want just this single strain akkermansia that we talked about earlier, because you've taken a gut test and it came back and told you that you're low in akkermansia or you realize you have these issues that you think are associated with your gut lining and you just wanna take that one strain, we also offer akkermansia as a single strain. 

If you have a physician or registered dietician or somebody that you're working with on your gut health and your whole nutrition system, that's another person that you can ask for what's right for you. But it's really about which problem you're trying to tackle personally. I'm actually on Pendulum Glucose Control, because that's the one that I started with. It's got the highest dose, even though I don't have diabetes. But if I were starting now, I'd probably kick into Metabolic Daily because I think that's a great way to get started.

Dr. Whitney: And it's safe for people to take the Pendulum Glucose Control even if they don't have diabetes, right? I just wanna be clear about that for listeners.

Colleen: Yes, it is safe for anyone to take, even if you don't have diabetes. It's really just a different dose, but it's still a safe dose for healthy people too.

Dr. Whitney: Awesome. And for those of you who are wondering what A1C is, I realize we should back up and talk about that, too. Hemoglobin A1C is basically how much sugar is on your red blood cells over the course of about three months. So people use that to make a diagnosis of diabetes and also to track sugar control, because it's a more accurate view because it’s a wider lens, more long-term lens versus looking at just what your sugar is today before or after a meal. If you are in the general population, you might have never had a Hemoglobin A1C taken in your entire life or maybe one time. Of course if someone has diabetes, they have their Hemoglobin A1Cs tested regularly. So that's what we're talking about, about the Hemoglobin A1C drop. 

But that's a significant difference. I mean it is really true. The kids who are in my clinic who have Hemoglobin A1Cs and they’re 0.6 below that threshold for saying diabetes, I mean that's the difference between telling them to go to a dietician, keep on exercising and eating healthily, versus going to the endocrinologist and having a diagnosis of diabetes and having to get on insulin. It's a huge difference. So we're talking about significant scientific differences here.

Colleen: Thank you for explaining that A1C number. I think at a high level, whenever we eat anything with sugar in it, the name of the game is for your body to metabolize that sugar as quickly as possible. Because when it doesn't do that, the sugar is literally just permeating through your entire body, hanging out, wreaking havoc on all of your organs. Everywhere your bloodstream goes, that's where the sugar is going. So we're constantly trying to figure out how to enable your body to metabolize that sugar, get it to where it's actually going to provide benefit rather than just sort of floating around in your red blood cells, going to all of your organs. And so this is the thing about why when your body is able to reign it in and get those sugars metabolized quickly, you feel so much better on all these different fronts. It's because you don't have all this sugar just circulating in your body. You don't get this really big sugar high followed by this sugar crash, because you're now a lot more regulated.

Dr. Whitney: And if it doesn't get used, then it has to be stored somewhere, so it can be stored as fat. So that's a lot of times what makes it so that then we end up holding on to the sugar, then we end up holding onto fat and have more weight gain. So these things are all really scientifically based. I always really hate it when people come out with a new fad diet about, “do this, do that,” because we know the science already. We already know. It's very, very simple, actually, how our body uses foods, uses protein, uses fat, uses carbohydrates, and then what it does with those things when we have an excess in our bloodstream and the body needs to do something with it. So don't be fooled if people are talking about crazy fad diets that seem like they're new, because there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to that. There is something new under the sun that we have now talked about for the last 30 minutes or so when it comes to optimizing the metabolism of those sugars and making it so your body can use them more efficiently.

Colleen: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think there's so much more to uncover around gut health. I think one of the things that people are going to realize is over the next five to ten years, there's going to be so much more that comes out around gut health. And it's not just actually about, “I have GI distress” or “I have bloating.” It's also about your metabolism, which is what we’re focused on. But it's also about your immune response and your inflammation and even your brain function. And so I think it's an exciting time to be in the microbiome because there's new science coming out every day. I mean it's even a target now for Parkinson's disease. It's just an explosion of knowledge coming out and so I'm grateful to you for helping to bring some of this knowledge to everybody and help them understand, because it is a challenge to keep up with it and to know what's true and what's fact and what's fiction.

Dr. Whitney: Yeah, absolutely. Alright, so if people are listening to this episode and they want to find out more about you and Pendulum, where should they go?

Colleen: We would love for you to come visit our website, pendulumlife.com and it will have all the products on there, but it also goes into the science. You can get access to clinical papers and you can guide your doctor to go to pendulumlife.com, because we actually have a whole section, which is for healthcare professionals that really gives them all the information so that they can then help you understand from a clinician's point of view how these products might benefit you. If you just want to go buy the products, you could also buy them on Amazon. So, pendulumlife.com or Amazon and we actually have a special discount code for all of your listeners. So if you use MOMMY20, you will get 20% off your first month of any membership. So hopefully that helps people get jump started.

Dr. Whitney: Awesome. And how long should they expect once they start taking the product to see results, to feel different, or for it to be working within their system? So that way we set expectations appropriately for everybody.

Colleen: Well, it varies from person to person. It really has to do with what your starting microbiome is like, and if there's a lot to be gained or if there's only certain things that you're benefiting from. So for some people, they can feel benefits as soon as a couple of days in. But what I tell people is to take a 90 day challenge, because it actually takes about eight to 12 weeks to really, fully change your microbiome. We are not asking anybody to change your diet or do some kind of a cleanse ahead of time, we're just saying start taking the pills and it has to get into your ecosystem. It's like in your garden when you plant something new. It depends on how crowded your garden is, whether that new thing is going to thrive or not. So it varies for different people, but I always say give it 90 days. If you don't feel anything in 90 days, go off the product. Don't take things just to take them, but you should feel something within that period. And for some people, it's really fast.

Dr. Whitney: Yeah, I saw results within a week or two. There was a tiny adjustment period, just to be honest. It took a second for my gut–it must have been really mad. It was like, whatcha doing? So definitely an adjustment period. But nothing that was unreasonable. I was actually in Hawaii when I was doing it, so it didn't affect my vacation or anything like that. But it took a second, and then I've absolutely seen results after that. Thank you so much, Colleen, for being here! Again, it's pendulumlife.com. You can put MOMMY20 for the 20% discount.