Our healthcare system is focused on treating ailments and symptoms, not really on intercepting problems before they happen. Jimmy St. Louis calls for a change of perspective, believing in gut health as the root cause and taking care of it. In this episode, he sits down with Pamela Wirth to tell us more about this, narrowing down to health, food testing, as well as stem cells. Jimmy is the Founder and CEO for Regenerative Medicine Solutions, a leading medical company with a focus on cellular therapy and a mission to treat the untreatable. Prior to that, he is a former NFL Player and Olympian. Tune in as he shares more about this interesting transition from sports to treating the untreatable. Learn about improving gut health and regenerative medicine in this conversation
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A Former NFL Player And Olympian’s Journey To Regenerative Health With Jimmy St. Louis
Listen To Jimmy St. Louis On Health And Food Testing As Well As Stem Cells
In this episode, I have Jimmy St Louis. Jimmy is so many things, including a prior professional athlete, an Olympian entrepreneur, businessman focused on innovating and changing health and technology industries. He's focused on innovating and advancing the industry of financing through a combination of technology advancements, as well as new operational and team efficiencies.
He’s the Founder and CEO of Regenerative Medicine Solutions, a leading medical company with a focus on cellular therapy and a mission to treat the untreatable. Under RMS, Jimmy founded the Lung Health Institute and the Cognitive Health Institute and was very successful. He’s also the CEO and Founder of AliRx. Jimmy's business career includes five years with the Laser Spine Institute, which grew from 9 people to over 1,000. He has a passion for advancements in medicine, including regenerative and cellular health and wellness.
As an early adopter of new procedures, medical treatments and overall health, Jimmy is a longtime advocate of life dedicated to wellness. Jimmy, thank you so much for being with us. Please tell us a little bit more about you and all the things you're working on. It's near and dear to my heart in terms of how we get to the grid of the health and wellness crisis we’re in.
Thanks, Pamela. I have looked forward to being on this show. I have heard a number of your other episodes. It’s nice to be in good company here with you and other guests as well. Thanks for having me. Our passions are aligned with what you're doing with Hello Health. What we're starting to launch with AliRx, we believe that a lot of what happens from a health perspective starts in your gut. Throughout my experience in healthcare, that's always been something that I've believed in but I have never figured out how to operationalize that for patients.
As we talk more, I'll be happy to go more into it but I have been a lifelong learner. I'm not a physician but I've been in healthcare for many years and I've had a number of startups that we think have helped a lot of people. I believe in trying to solve problems for people. Let's identify something that's a real need. If the mainstream way of taking care of treating that need may no longer be acceptable or perhaps people are yearning for something more, we try to create protocols, companies or programs to find a way to ultimately give them a better solution and a happier life where perhaps their length of life can meet their quality of life.
This latest endeavor is fantastic and I've been looking high and low for affordable solutions for people for a long time. I've certainly come across plenty of unaffordable solutions but as we take a look at gut health as well as your nutrition, genetics, vitamin levels and any deficiencies and challenges that someone might be having, tell us a little bit about some of the testing that you're launching and doing and some of the great next steps people can anticipate and do.
The science has been out there for quite some time. The challenge is this type of science is not in particular taught in medical school certainly and then post medical school under residency, most likely not. You have to go and seek that out as a medical provider. What takes place here is you got a philosophy in healthcare that's focused on treating a particular ailment.
Let's see what the symptoms are and try to find a way to treat those symptoms. You hear a lot of the time people talk about underlying conditions and there are these underlying conditions. What are the best ways to intercept that? Our healthcare system is not focused on intercepting problems before they start to happen. It’s focused on treating those particular ailments or symptoms.
Our perspective is the large number of things that happen within your body starts within your gut. In your gut, you've got bacterial makeup. You've got good and bad bacteria. At some point in time, there is an imbalance that causes what people are more commonly understanding as a leaky gut syndrome. When that takes place, that causes your body to be under attack.
I look at it like this. If you are not getting rest and you don't have a good diet and you wake up feeling lethargic, that's because your body has been in a fistfight all night. It's not giving itself the proper chance to rest and recover. What takes place in the gut causes a leaky gut syndrome that causes inflammation. That's your body fighting against itself, not working for itself.
When that starts to happen, you can develop all kinds of symptoms associated with autoimmune diseases. There's even a strong correlation between neurodegenerative diseases being correlated to gut health as your body develops a systemic inflammation that over time can begin to beat up against and permeate the blood-brain barrier causing a variety of issues.
One of which is Alzheimer's. A lot of people are referring to Alzheimer's as Type 3 diabetes. Ultimately, that's our philosophy. It all starts there with gut health so how do you improve gut health? From our perspective, you improve gut health by improving what goes into your body. There's another peel back of the onion here, where we believe that generally certain foods are healthy for us.
You improve gut health by improving what goes into your body.
You may hear spinach, goji berries, cashews and macadamia nuts but oftentimes, 1) There are conflicting opinions and then, 2) On top of that, if something's good for you, it may not be good for me. Your body may not respond well to spinach and mine might respond very well to spinach. What we do is we do that gut health testing and food sensitivity testing to tell people exactly what's right for them and then we put that into a food prescription for them.
That food prescription is recipes. It says, “Here's what's good for you. Here's what's not good for them.” We'll take it further and start to show people at restaurants what they can eat and give them access to things on DoorDash that they should and should not eat. Ultimately, that's our philosophy here. It starts with the gut. We want to utilize food as medicine to help your gut and give you a healthier life.
When people take the test, what kind of test is it? Is this blood, saliva or stool? What results are people finding? What are the next steps?
Someone goes online. They order the package and it gets sent to them depending on what they order. The package that we would most recommend comes with two health test kits along with some prebiotics that has been provided by you at Hello Health. We also provide them with a guide and a journal. The guide is a book that goes into our philosophy in more detail as I described. It gives them some baseline recipes and things that may be good for them while they're waiting on their test results. It primes them for what's to come.
There are two different levels of tests. One that's primarily utilized is a simple finger prick. It's a pretty expansive panel though so you get a finger prick and you provide your blood on three different little things that look like Q-tips. We provide a very detailed assessment of food allergy response and inflammatory response as it relates to hundreds, if not thousands of different types of foods.
There also is a gut health test kit as well that's an add-on option as well. That test kit tells you how's your microbiome performing for you but most likely what takes place on that gut health test kit from a food and ingredient perspective is going to be very similar to what we are recommending for your food allergy and inflammatory response tests as well. You log into your customer portal. You get a report that shows you all the dos and don'ts from a food perspective.
On the left column, you might see 150 different ingredients that are great for you. In the middle column, you'll see some things that we would recommend that you rotate and the last column is stuff that you should stay away from. We take anything you should rotate and stay away from. We eliminate it from your food prescription. Anything that has those ingredients in them, those recipes are eliminated. We'll provide you specifically with a food prescription based exactly on what you should put into your mouth and eat.
Also, we recommend that you retest every six months and you'll start to see some of your results change, maybe even some foods that you loved that you couldn't eat. You can cycle back in. We recommend that people stay on a good cadence of this testing so we can continue to be more and more precise about what they should be eating.
How long does it take to get the results back typically?
Typically, it takes longer for someone to see the test, read the instructions and take it than it does for them to get the results. We guarantee two weeks. Typically, people are getting the results back in about a week. If those results come in, then it takes us a few days to provide the food prescription but you'll get a ding to your inbox saying the results are ready. You can go in there and start to review them. You can start to develop your shopping list. Once those results come in and we provide you with your food prescription, you can swap recipes in and out.
On your member portal, it will provide you with a shopping list for the week. If you want to go out and shop based on all those different recipes that you like or have for the week, you get your shopping list, you can go out and get ready for the week. We also see a lot of people take the ingredients that they can have and they make their recipes. They may go out and buy all those ingredients. They know exactly what they should put into their body and they may go and make their recipes off of those as well.
With these changes depending on the age or if it’s a male or female, is there a difference between children, teenagers or aging adults? Later in life, are there any differences that typically come up or any patterns?
We don't have enough data yet for us to be conclusive from that perspective. Part of this program allows people to still put in their preferences. Those preferences are going to change, especially from kids to adults. For example, asparagus is on your “superfood list,” but you don't like asparagus. You eliminate that from your list and anything that has that in it will not be recommended to you as well. Not enough evidence just yet to be able to show a difference based on those demographics that you listed but I'm sure we'll start to notice some down the road. That's something we do plan on doing. Once we have enough data, we'll start to provide some research papers based on our specific findings as well.
In your experience, you've done quite a bit of change subjects for a second stem cell. You were a professional football player. You've seen and lived a lot of wear and tear on your body. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've learned over the years and what's led you here?
As it relates to the world of regenerative medicine, I try to keep it very simple and explain to people that the field of regenerative medicine is geared towards finding the best way to accelerate the healing process for your body. One great example is as you get older, you might notice that a cut on your leg takes longer to heal than when you were younger.
It's not even less stem cells but those signaling agents are not as strong either. When you get a localized stem cell injection in your knee, it's not necessarily just those stem cells that go into your knee that are starting to heal it. What's taking place is it's signaling and calling the troops in to say, “Why don't we start to go in and attack this problem? Let's heal it together.” It serves as a signaling agent.
I've had several ACL tears so I've had several directly in my knee. Typically, what happens when you get a localized stem cell injection is you'll notice a couple of days of pain. It's a little more painful than expected. That's a good thing. That’s localized inflammation. It’s not chronic or systemic but it's happening in a localized spot. Those are the signaling agents working. When that takes place, you know that the healing process has begun. Eventually, that inflammation starts to subside and then that's when your body has the chance to start to regenerate perhaps some of that tissue that may have been torn or damaged from before.
The other thing that we've noticed is different from those localized injections with cellular therapy. For purposes of this particular question, I'll stay away from the difference between PRP, stem cells and exosomes. All these discussions taking place, we'll call it regenerative medicine. We noticed that the main thing it does is it helps to reduce inflammation. When we were treating patients’ lung disorders, for example, we weren't providing stem cells to go in and heal the lungs.
We were effective at reducing their body's inflammation, which then allowed it to start to work for itself. We would see an improvement in pulmonary function because the lungs had less inflammation and therefore their pulmonary function started to improve. If that happens, then perhaps the lung has the opportunity to start to heal itself but that's your body beginning to work for itself.
Based on some of the research I've done as well with my mother, she's been getting some stem cell treatments and natural cancer-killing cells with her cancer. In the lungs, for instance, I would imagine a lot of that was through an IV, not necessarily an injection. Is that fair to say?
That’s right. It's funny how we stumbled on that protocol. Go online and do some research. Type in stem cell treatment for post-heart attack victims or healing a heart. You will see a lot of discussion about the challenge of stem cells getting treated through an IV, passing through your circulatory system and then a large percentage of the stem cells don't even make it to the heart. We utilize common sense to develop our treatment protocols for the lung.
What we notice in these studies is these physicians and scientists were complaining about the stem cells getting caught in the lungs and not making it to the heart. Common sense says, “Perhaps we should find a way to treat the lungs.” The protocol was very simple. We call it more cellular therapy because although we would re-administer something that's called the buffy coat, which had a concentration of the stem cells, it was a combination of the stem cells and then PRP combined.
We still did bone marrow aspiration as well as adipose tissue, which has a high concentration of stem cells but the protocol was easy. We would essentially concentrate the cells and re-administer them through an IV. We trademarked the term, the pulmonary trap, which is where the cells pass through. Since those cells got stuck in the lungs, we coined the term pulmonary trap. Eighty-five percent of our patients saw an improvement in their pulmonary function, reduction of inflammation and improvement in their quality of life, at least for a period of time. It would either stop or slow the progression of their disease. It was a rewarding endeavor for us.
What I'm finding too is there are different quality of stem cells and different types of stem cells. To get a higher quality, a lot of people do end up having to leave the country to go somewhere else and get from a placenta or an umbilical cord versus something different. Do you find that in your experience or do you find that there are plenty of doctors here in the US that are still able to get their hands on quality stem cells and be able to help people?
Anyone has access to get their hands on quality stem cells. The challenge becomes what type of ailments you will treat with that. Typically, here in the United States, things like arthritis or orthopedic conditions are not a problem. Also, hair restoration and cosmetic stuff. When you start to get into some of the more serious conditions, it's still encouraged that physicians are overseas largely because of some of the FDA regulations around what's taken place.
With that said, we have this master grid of all the different cellular therapy treatment options nationally and internationally. You break those out into PRP stem cell treatment with adipose, bone marrow and central cord blood. You got exosomes and there's a variety of different types of that as well. Exosomes are considered cellular. There's this whole debate around if they should fall under the FDA regulation or not.
There's a whole discussion there but I don't necessarily know yet that people know what makes quality stem cell treatment and what doesn't. Some people argue cell count and common sense would make you think, “There are more cells so therefore it's better.” I don't know if that's the case or not. I can't speak strongly to that one way or another.
I just know that we've worked with scientists who have posed that question and said, “1 billion stem cells versus 100 million, how much of a difference is it making?” The challenge is there's not necessarily a critical mass of patients enough to draw a statistical correlation to outcomes based on cell count and it's also a challenge to see which one's superior.
One thing I do know is that primarily it is a safe procedure. I'll say that with some hesitation because people out there can argue it. I would just say I've not seen a lot of evidence of serious adverse reactions to stem cell treatment, especially if it's your cells. There's going to be a lot of debate around utilizing other patient's cells and I would agree. I don't have enough experience to know the contraindications of utilizing someone else's cells but I do know that if you're utilizing your cells, primarily it's been a very safe procedure.
That's been our experience too. It's been pretty interesting and my mom's doing great, which has been a miraculous thing. She had originally gotten someone else's stem cells to kick things off and get things going. They told me to look out for flu-like symptoms in her but they didn't expect anything too much more serious than that. She's been getting her own monthly. She feels so much better than she did when she was on low-dose or high-dose chemotherapy or radiation.
Consequently, it's helped her lung, which sustained some damage when they did radiation for breast cancer. It's pretty wild and miraculous. I love what you're doing in terms of testing. Every person is different. Yes, we can make generalizations about what you could or should be eating, taking or doing but until you have the data in your hands, you don't necessarily know and it's hard to get the data.
Creating these kits and allowing people to test and find out what's going on with them and their family is exciting and important. Anything that we are missing in terms of inflammation or autoimmune disease? We talked about Alzheimer's. We've not touched on autism but there's some correlation there as well in terms of brain function. Anything else that I'm forgetting to ask and think about it?
I've got a couple of notes. You mentioned autism, although I have limited knowledge of the science of what happens from a gut health perspective. Dr. David Perlmutter pioneered the hypothesis and has done a fantastic job of helping to simplify it. I love his common sense approach. You can measure all the biomarkers but he said, “For a set of children with autism, we've found a way to change their diet.” What we've done is take his concept. We have further enhanced it because of a specific food prescription that's been put in place.
He simply said, “It works. When you change a kid's diet who has autism and you do it properly, you start to see them interact with kids.” They're out there playing soccer with friends they may not have done before. They're participating in school. Some of the social challenges they may have had improved. That's evidence enough. What I like about this field that we are in is taking a health test to understand food sensitivity and gut health and providing someone with food that they know is healthy for them, it's very difficult to argue that's not going to be good for them one way or another.
There's a direct benefit and significantly improving one their likelihood of or the symptoms associated with an autoimmune disease. It’s simple things like rheumatoid arthritis. MS is being tested under treatment protocols like this as well. Those are things that people should research more and take into consideration. The reality is it's hard to argue that a proper diet is not going to be good for you.
The last point and Perlmutter touches on this as well in one of his books, is the correlation of gut health directly to Alzheimer's and why they call it diabetes Type 3. The gut lining gets permeated that causes inflammation and permeates the blood-brain barrier. At some point in time, that brain inflammation causes amyloid plaque buildup. It crystallizes and starts to formulate the symptoms of Alzheimer's.
One thing I feel strongly about and I'm sure this could be somewhat of a controversial comment but I believe that the Alzheimer's associations are headed down the wrong rabbit hole. There are plenty of drugs and prescriptions out there that can reduce and/or eliminate amyloid plaque. When you do that, you still have Alzheimer's. It causes Alzheimer's but my understanding is once the damage is done, you can get rid of the amyloid plaque and you still have those symptoms.
Perhaps the prescriptions are one of the legs of the stool but there are some other things like what we're doing here that would help to improve the symptoms associated with Alzheimer's. My last note is that's why we got into this. We originally launched the company under the brand, the Cognitive Health and Wellness Institute geared towards brain health but we started to realize that there was such a strong correlation to a number of other ailments that we wanted to expand our marketplace.
Thank you for that. Using food as medicine is certainly important. There are certain things that cause inflammation in us. If we can reduce that inflammation, then all of a sudden, we're going to start to remove a lot of the diseases that we're eventually going to have based on our profile from that inflammation. Thank you so much, Jimmy. It's been exciting to have you. We can't wait to help a lot of people with these tests and help them with their diet. Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me. I look forward to following the show and many more. It’s an awesome show you have here and great company. Thanks for the chance to be on here.
Important Links
- Regenerative Medicine Solutions
- AliRx – LinkedIn