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From our family to yours...
We are a 100%-owned family farm, so you can rest assured that everything that bears our name is produced on our farm with the greatest attention to every detail.
You see, we truly care about the health of our family, and we care about yours too.
Our mission is to provide families with truly healthy meat.
Farm Blog
Posted by: Trevor
August 23, 2025
As many of you know I regularly run experiments on myself with various substances and whole food supplements. Sometimes the experiments turn out well and I learn something new, but most of the time I see no effect. Occasionally I see a really negative effect.
Actually, speaking of negative effects, for the past while I have been testing natural mitochondrial uncouplers. Mitochondria are the power plants inside your cells which generate energy1. An uncoupler increases your metabolism temporarily, by making the energy production less efficient2 --- the energy gets turned into heat. It would be like putting your vehicle in neutral while revving the engine. Your body temperature increases, and you burn more calories. Your body does this naturally when it tries to stay warm, by producing a substance3 called Uncoupling Protein 1. Thyroid hormone also results4 in uncoupling.
An artificial substance called 2,4-Dinitrophenol (DNP) was released as a fat-loss drug5 nearly a hundred years ago, because they discovered that it is a powerful mitochondrial uncoupler. It works by increasing metabolism, substantially raising body temperature, and burning fat. It worked very well as an anti-obesity drug, but a number of people took too much of it and died of over-heating. The FDA banned it.
But various food substances6 can also facilitate a safe, modest amount of mitochondrial uncoupling, such as certain long-chain fatty acids, found in foods like lard from outdoor pigs, tallow from grass-fed cattle, avocados, and olives.
Capsaicin is another natural uncoupler7 --- most of you are familiar with this substance, which is found in hot chili peppers. Capsaicin makes them hot. It results in mild thermogenesis8 and is a fat-burner9 (weak).
Cayenne peppers contain a lot of capsaicin. Carolina reaper peppers are much higher though, about fifty times hotter than cayenne. I decided to test the Carolina reapers to see if they had a thermogenic effect on me.
I started gradually and noticed no effect. The next day I increased my intake, and still no effect. On day three I increased it again and almost went to the hospital. Abdominal pain, off the chart. Dry heaving. Drinking milk antidoted the capsaicin, and within a few hours I was feeling better. Incidentally I still noticed very little thermogenic effect. The experiment failed. Please don’t try this yourself.
My experiment with lactobacillus reuteri was, however, a bit more successful. It is a type of bacteria that resides in the gut. There are hundreds of species of microbes living in your gut, some of them helpful, some of them not.
The gut microbiome is poorly understood, but plays an essential role in our health. Antibiotics can severely disrupt it, as can processed foods, lack of specific types of fiber in the diet, and glyphosate in the food10 supply. Once certain microbes are wiped out, they may or may not re-establish themselves, for reasons which are not clear. Almost everyone in modern society has a compromised gut11 microbiome.
A dysfunctional gut microbiome can be hard to fix, but fecal transplants are being successfully tested12 on everything from IBD/IBS to metabolic syndrome to behavioral disorders. But a less extreme treatment for gut dysfunction is to naturally nourish the microbiome with prebiotics13 such as inulin and fructooligosaccharides (readily found in garlic and onions), pectin (apple peels), beta-glucans (whole barley, mushrooms), and even hyaluronic acid (not commonly thought of as a prebiotic but functionally it is one). These prebiotics provide the raw ingredients which beneficial microbes can use to improve healthy gut function.
But what about the beneficial microbes which have been (perhaps permanently) wiped out? No matter how optimal our prebiotic intake is, it can’t bring back the lactobacillus reuteri or other microbes which got wiped out in one of the many rounds of antibiotics which most of us have had.
We initially get our microbiome as babies from our mothers. But antibiotics have been widely used for nearly a hundred years, and certain microbes14 (such as lactobacillus reuteri) are extremely susceptible to antibiotics, including amoxicillin. Our mothers may not have been able to pass along a healthy gut microbiome to us, because they lacked one themselves. And even if they were able to give us a healthy microbiome, it soon came under assault from the antibiotics, glyphosate, and processed foods which we’ve all been exposed to. Once certain beneficial species are wiped out, it can be difficult to re-establish them15 in the gut.
Although taking probiotics (microbes) orally can sometimes re-establish a species, it often16 does not work. To make things more complicated, there can be many different strains of the same species, each of which functions differently in the gut, making it difficult to know which probiotic you need. Further, some species of microbe are impossible to re-establish through oral ingestion because they either do not make it through the stomach acid, or they die within seconds of exposure to oxygen. Plus, microbes often have synergistic relationships with other microbes, and re-establishing microbe A might require re-establishing microbes B, C, and D at the same time.
For these reasons, I had been reluctant to self-experiment with probiotics until I understood them better. So a year ago I spent some time researching them, and I eventually decided to start by taking a strain of lactobacillus reuteri, which I propagated in homemade yogurt to maximize the number of colony-forming units (CFU’s) beyond that which is normally available in capsules.
Lactobacillus reuteri and its role in a healthy gut microbiome...
I had read numerous anecdotal reports online by people who had done this with l. reuteri and claimed various health benefits, including sleep improvement, fat loss, improved energy levels, improved clarity of thought, improved social interactions and reduced anxiety, improved gut health, increased hair thickness, improvements in skin health, and improved joint function.
As a word of caution --- whenever people report online about their personal experiences with supplements, I try to keep in mind that sometimes (most?) of the time, they may be nutrient-deficient to begin with. When a nutrient-deficient person takes a supplement and experiences good effects, those of us who are proportionately better-nourished may see no effects at all.
My wife and I began by ingesting about a half-cup of l. reuteri yogurt each day. I noticed no significant effects for about a month, after which I began to notice that my hair felt thicker. My wife noticed the same effect on her hair. We kept up the protocol for about 6 months. Then we went off the yogurt for a month, and within a few weeks the hair-thickness (for both of us) went back to what it was prior to the experiment.
This result is consistent with other anecdotal reports I’ve read --- the lactobacillus reuteri seems to be dose dependent, and requires constant re-dosing in order for the effects17 to be maintained. In other words, the l. reuteri does not re-establish itself in the gut, rather it seems to only survive in the gut for a few days, and therefore requires constant re-dosing.
We felt that the improvement in hair thickness was a positive benefit, so we have gone back to ingesting about a half-cup of the l.reuteri yogurt each day. If you are thinking about trying the l. reuteri yogurt, the protocol I follow is the one promoted by William Davis M.D. (the doctor who wrote the Wheat Belly and Super Gut books). Keep in mind that not everyone has reported health benefits from taking l. reuteri, and some people who have severe gut dysfunction or histamine-intolerance have reported negative effects.
I approach probiotics supplementation with caution, but am optimistic about future possibilities. I intend to keep experimenting with oral ingestion of different species of microbes. Aside from their proven role in overall gut health, they can be powerhouses18 which produce vitamins and beneficial short-chain fatty acids (including butyrate) as well as support healthy hormone levels. But keep in mind that many probiotic supplements are gimmicky, often not specifying the strain of the species they are using, and usually providing such low doses that they have no therapeutic effect.
However, prebiotics are another matter. Ingestion of inulin (as found in garlic and onions), FOS (again, garlic and onions), pectin (apples with the peel on), beta-glucans (whole barley, mushrooms) and hyaluronic acid (from high collagen bone and organ broth) are simple ways to nourish the beneficial microbes in your gut, increase your butyrate production and restore gut integrity. Most of these prebiotic food sources are relatively easy to work into our daily diets, unless we are following an exclusion diet.
And remember, if you are supplementing with prebiotics, you have a choice: you can either get them from whole food sources, or you can buy them as powders. I am not against powders and pills when necessary but I prefer getting my nutrition from whole food sources. Certified organic onions, garlic, barley, mushrooms, apples and organ-broths are especially important because they are free of harmful chemicals such as glyphosate (glyphosate is used in conventional agricultural production and the residue is everywhere in the food supply). Certified organic foods contain myriad enzymes and nutrients which act synergistically and provide benefits to our bodies in ways which pills and powders cannot.
As our customer friends, your health and well-being matters greatly to us. By sharing our personal health experiences with each other, we can multiply the benefits, and together we can achieve more vibrant health. The conversations we have with you, in person and through email, allow us to share information, improving each other’s lives and wellbeing in ways that each of us could never do on our own. Please let us know about your own experiments and experiences, we love to hear your stories.
Sources:
1. The cell: a molecular approach. Cooper and Sunderland. 2000
2. 2,4-Dinitrophenol (DNP): A Weight Loss Agent with Significant Acute Toxicity and Risk of Death. Journal of Medical Toxicology. Grundlingh et al. 2011
3. UCP1: the only protein able to mediate adaptive non-shivering thermogenesis. Biochimica Et Biophysica Acta. Nedergaard et al. 2001
4. Thermogenic Mechanisms and Their Hormonal Regulation. Physiological Reviews. Silva. 2006
5. Metabolic Actions of Dinitrophenols... Journal of the American Medical Association. Cutting & Tainter. 1939–1941
6. The role of uncoupling protein 3 in fatty acid metabolism... Proceedings of the Nutrition Society. Schrauwen et al. 2004
7. Capsaicin-induced beta-adrenergic action... Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine. Kawada et al. 1986
8. Effects of red pepper on appetite and energy intake. British Journal of Nutrition. Yoshioka et al. 1999
9. Acute administration of capsaicin increases resting energy expenditure... Nutrition Research. Rigamonti et al. 2018
10. Use of Shotgun Metagenomics and Metabolomics to Evaluate the Impact of Glyphosate... Environmental Health Perspectives. Mesnage et al. 2021
11. The ancestral and industrialized gut microbiota and implications for human health. Nature Reviews Microbiology. Sonnenburg & Sonnenburd. 2019
12. Clinical Application and Potential of Fecal Microbiota Transplantation. Annual Review of Medicine. Ooijevaar et al. 2019
13. Expert consensus document: The International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics (ISAPP) consensus statement... Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology. Gibson et al. 2017
14. Identification and characterization of antibiotic resistance genes in Lactobacillus reuteri... Journal of Applied Microbiology. Egervarn et al. 2009
15. Impact of oral vancomycin on gut microbiota, bile acid metabolism, and insulin sensitivity. Journal of Hepatology. Vrieze et al. 2014
16. Post-Antibiotic Gut Mucosal Microbiome Reconstitution Is Impaired by Probiotics and Improved by Autologous FMT. Suez et al. 2018
17. Colonization and immunomodulation by Lactobacillus reuteri ATCC 55730 in the human gastrointestinal tract. Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Valeur et al. 2004
18. The role of short-chain fatty acids in the interplay between diet, gut microbiota, and host energy metabolism. Journal of Lipid Research. Den Besten et al. 2013
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