Name: How Gut Bacteria Shape Your Brain, Immunity, and Mental Wellness | Dr. Sabine Hazan
Uploaded: 2025-11-04T17:34:25.000Z
Description: Is it possible that autism, Alzheimer’s, bipolar disorder, and other major health challenges might all be related to the gut?

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Is it possible that autism, Alzheimer’s, bipolar disorder, and other major health challenges might all be related to the gut?

That’s the question Dr. Sabine Hazan, a gastroenterologist and CEO of Progenabiome, has been probing for years.

The Food and Drug Administration recently approved the use of fecal transplants for research into the treatment of autism, and Dr. Hazan says this may open the door to real breakthroughs.

She hopes to compare the microbiomes of autistic children with their neurotypical siblings and see if fecal transplants can help treat autism. She’s already seen one remarkable case where restoring gut bacteria brought real improvements for a child with autism.

Can these findings be replicated on a larger scale?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she observed that people who experienced the worst bouts of COVID-19 seemed to have significantly lower counts of a key microbe: bifidobacteria.

“Bifidobacteria is important in absorbing sugar. It’s important in your metabolism. It’s important in your energy drive,” Dr. Hazan says.

There are trillions of microbes in the gut, and scientists are only just starting to discover how this delicate balance of microbes impacts people’s health, immunity, and mental wellness, Dr. Hazan says.

There are “microbes that can kill us, but also microbes that can save us,” Dr. Hazan says.

“You will see, probably in 10 or 50 years from now, there will be a connection between cardiac disease and the microbiome. We will be possibly able to fix the heart by fixing the gut, because it all is connected,” Dr. Hazan says.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Dr. Sabine Hazan, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you for having me.

So there’s some news hot off the presses, very relevant to your work. We have the FDA approving familial fecal transplants for research purposes. I mean, this is kind of a game changer. And the only reason I know it’s a game changer is because we’ve talked in the past and have kept talking. And the other thing is you have this study where you helped some twins, autistic twins, get better. And so I want to talk about both these things and then the whole bigger picture. But what’s going on with this FDA approval now? How is that going to change everything?

It’s going to at least allow us to do the proper research. This is not a pharmaceutical product. This is using the stools of a healthy sibling in a kid that is autistic. And it is also looking at whether the kid that is neurotypical has the same microbes as the kid that has autism and therefore kind of decide if we want to use that or not.

So this is going to be research that’s going to open some avenues, give us some answers about autism, hopefully, and also research that’s going to allow us to say, why isn’t it working if it’s not working? Why is one kid neurotypical and the other one autistic? To be able to compare, because kids share microbes, families share microbes, and so that’s kind of like, you know, what I want to see with this study.

Well, so let’s break all this down. Okay, there are multiple elements here. You know, autism, it’s this multifactorial disease, as best as I understand it at the moment. And of course, HHS now has this deep interest in tackling it because the rates have been going up. And that’s kind of, I guess, incontrovertible at this point. The question is why? And this directly targets that.

The other part that I think you’re speaking to here is that people are different. One-size-fits-all policies for medical care just don’t work. And this is one of the lessons we learned during the pandemic that you need to treat each patient individually when it comes to the microbiome, when it comes to their genetics, all sorts of things. So let’s unpack all this for me.

Yes. To unpack it, you have to go back to the history of what happened. Right. How did we get to this? What is the microbiome? How does the FDA look at the microbiome, etc.? So if you think about the microbiome, it’s basically microbes in your gut. We describe the microbiome of the gut, but there are microbes all around us. If anything, we’ve learned from COVID is the importance of microbes, microbes that can kill us, but also microbes that can save us. And the importance of gut health, which is really your immunity, is in the gut. So that’s the first thing.

When I embarked on this, I started looking at fecal transplant because I come from a world of having done hundreds of clinical trials for pharma. And clinical trials for pharma basically brought me to the world of C. diff. C. diff, a bacteria that causes diarrhea in patients. They overdo it with antibiotics and then eventually acquire this bacteria that secretes toxins and then gives them diarrhea and could kill them.

In 1957, Dr. Einsman said, I can’t fix my patients with antibiotics. I can’t seem to get rid of this bacteria; let me do two enemas of poop from a healthy so-called healthy person. Back then, we didn’t even know what constituted a healthy microbiome. We still don’t; we have some ideas, but we still don’t have it as a guideline of what a normal healthy microbiome looks like.

So when you look at Dr. Einsman, he just took from a gut feeling, because that’s what medicine is. It’s an art. It’s bravery. It’s, I’m going to take stools from a person, put them in another, and he fixed those two patients. That was the first case. Those were the first two cases.

From there, Dr. Tom Borody started looking at that and saying, wait a minute, there could be something there. And there could be something there for autism. There could be something there for Alzheimer’s. There could be something there for other diseases. And he took it to the next level, but he tried to show it for C. diff.

The way it works in medicine is you have doctors writing abstracts, and they publish them, and they present them at the American College of Gastroenterology or these meetings. And then you’ve got, you know, 18,000 young brains from all over the country gathering, and they go around these posters, and they start looking at the data.

That data from Dr. Borody attracted the attention of a few doctors; Colleen Kelly at Brown University, Neil Stollman, who’s on the board of the American College of Gastroenterology, Sahil Khanna, who’s at Mayo Clinic, Zain Kassam, and Jessica Allegretti from Harvard. So all these young people were basically fascinated with poop, whether it’s their gut instinct that there’s something there or not, it was definitely interesting.

For me, it started at a meeting probably about two or three decades ago; I can’t even remember. But Neil Stollman took me to a poster and he said, the future is in poop. And I said, please don’t make me play with that because I like my colons to be clean, and I don’t like to step into this.

And sure enough, fast forward, you know, I had a doctor that was dying of C. diff. I was the girl that was bringing drugs to market for pharma. I was the girl that was enrolling patients for clinical trials. And I was well known for C. diff. In fact, they called me, pharma called me the queen of C. diff because I was really good at enrolling patients.

And the way that I would enroll is I would call on my colleagues and say, look, before you do a fecal transplant, give me this patient. Let me try this new drug. It’s, you know, safer. Basically, the FDA is watching; it’s cleaner. You don’t have to do testing on the stool donors. And so I started enrolling a lot of patients. And when a doctor could not be fixed with the treatment or couldn’t be fixed with the clinical trial, I did a fecal transplant and that doctor survived. And that was the first time for me to kind of say, wow, there’s something to this, right? But I would still do fecal transplant only when the clinical trial would fail.

Because to me, the simplest way is, look, you’re getting paid by pharma to do a clinical trial. You do the trial. The trial doesn’t work. You at least have a backup, and you could use the money that you made from pharma to test the patient’s stools. You can treat the patient because fecal transplant, colonoscopies are expensive. Anesthesia is expensive. Testing the stools of the donor is expensive. So this was not something that you could readily do.

And so when fecal transplant started showing Alzheimer’s improved in an N of One for me, that’s when I really paid attention. And then it kind of became from there, you know, the studies of Dr. Adams. Dr. Adams was working with Dr. Borody, then I started working with Dr. Borody. We all united as doctors that played with poop to understand the microbiome a little bit better.  I didn’t really believe feces could help autism; I had to see it with my own eyes, and so I had to do that N of One with the FDA.

I just wanted to kind of break this down for the uninitiated, right? I mean, basically, so with a fecal transplant, you know, you’re basically taking poop from one person and you’re giving it to another. Correct? It’s a messy business, right? It’s a messy business, but you’re taking sort of a healthy, what you believe to be a healthy poop. Right? And you’re giving it to someone who has a problem, and you would see it if it was an obvious, very clear problem and that there’s no drug that will help them. That’s how it started. That’s what you’re saying, right?

That’s basically it. So the people that come to me are always the people that have tried seeing a lot of doctors, and they come to me for clinical trials, whether it’s for psoriasis, Alzheimer’s; they come to join a clinical trial. So we look at<a href="http://clinicaltrials.gov"> clinicaltrials.gov</a>. If we find a trial, we contact the pharmaceutical company. We say, hey, we have a couple of patients for you. Can we embark on the trial and test those patients? So those are the people that come to me. C. diff, they came to me because they didn’t have the funds to pay for a fecal transplant or the county hospital was not able to pay for whatever reason. So that’s where we are.

So explain that to me, though. So you were giving them a fecal transplant, or you were enrolling them in a trial, or both?

When I started for C. diff, I was treating patients. And if the treatment didn’t work, I would enroll them in a clinical trial. So I had multiple clinical trials that I was doing at all times. So I’ve been doing clinical trials for pharma for decades. And so when a C. diff clinical trial didn’t work, I would use the funds to pay for a fecal transplant to help the patient.

I see. Okay. I understand. Yes. Okay, very good. Then with N of One, meaning this one patient, you saw a marked improvement.

Yes, in one instance. So when I was doing it for C. diff, the only way in America to do fecal transplant is for C. diff. So remember, from Dr. Einsman to now, it took 62 years for fecal transplant to be part of the guidelines because it needed clinical trials. We needed Zain Kassam to show the data that fecal transplant improves C. diff.

From there, pharmaceutical companies started paying attention and saying, wait a minute, if it improves C. diff, maybe we can make a pill of poop for C. diff and bring it as a pharmaceutical trial. They would bring it to the FDA. The FDA would help them; together, they would bring out a poop pill, essentially.

So when you look at it from the beginning, those two enemas to where we are right now, where it’s part of the guidelines, it’s part of the guidelines as fecal transplant. It’s not part of the guidelines as well. I’m going to use the product from pharma, but 62 years have gone by. So in this country, if you want to have fecal transplant for whatever condition, you want to try for Alzheimer’s, you want to try for MS, for Parkinson’s, you cannot do it unless you have C. diff. And so the guidelines are very clear on that.

Well, until now.

Well, no, still you need FDA involvement. So that case of N of One, which most people, you know, don’t realize, took three and a half years to get approved by the FDA. Of course, COVID was in the midst of all that, where the FDA said, hold off on fecal transplant because we discovered COVID in the stools and therefore we could pass stools with COVID to the patient with the immunosuppressed or the autistic kid or whoever we use feces, right?

My first N of One of fecal transplants was actually not for autism, but it was actually for metastatic mesothelioma. So this was a woman that was supposed to die within a week. And the family came and begged me to do a fecal transplant thinking that it could be a good adjunct to the drug Keytruda. And I said, well, let me look at it, but it needs FDA approval. So that case was pre-COVID and that took us 24 hours with the FDA to basically say, hey, no problem, go for it.

But I still had to argue with the FDA to say, look, this woman’s dying. Frankly, if I show her how to blend her grandson’s poop, you have no data. I’m giving you the data, and I’m willing to do it and watch her. Well, this woman improved up to a certain point. I mean, she lived on for months and months when she should have died within a week.

What we learned from that case was that not only did her appetite improve with the implant, she was craving her grandson’s foods, and her appetite increased; her weight improved. So it was a great adjunct in a way, but it had to be done the right way because the FDA was right. This is poop you’re putting in an immunosuppressed patient. So the problem then happened is that she ended up being given antibiotics down the road, and that killed whatever I gave her in the transplant.

But that was the beginning to see and say, this is a patient with terminal cancer that was supposed to die within a week, and she lived on for months and months, maybe because we optimized the gut while we gave her a drug to kill the tumor or suppress the tumor. That’s the direction I want to go with that.

But from that to that N of One with autism, that was 2019 and we submitted the case, and then COVID came in the middle of it. And we had a hard time getting that approved because COVID was in the midst of it. So if I want this familial FMT [fecal microbiota transplantation] that’s approved right now, it literally is a breakthrough in a way or not a breakthrough because we haven’t done the research, but it’s going to be an important study to give us data on whether siblings that are neurotypical can be a good donor for the kid that’s autistic.

Well, just as I understand, as you said, right, there’s just you simply couldn’t do these studies before.

Couldn’t do it. No. And what changed, I think, is this administration is a little bit more efficient in the processing of the paperwork. I’m the agent, and I thanked her. She went back and forth, like within three days gave me an answer. The last administration, we basically had, we gave the protocol, we gave the paperwork in, and it would take like a month before we got answers back.

So I don’t know if the politics changed. I would hate to think politics have something to do with treating kids with autism because kids with autism affect both the Democrats and the Republicans and the independents. It affects all races. It affects all religions, boys and girls. So, you know, to make it a political agenda is really not okay.

We need to think when you look at one in 12-and-a-half boys in California having autism, you have to pay attention. You got to put all hands on deck and say, what are we doing here? How do we do it? And this is an amazing study because this is not a pharmaceutical study where, you know, the price of the stock matters more than the price of a life.

This is a physician-initiated IND (Investigational New Drug) that, basically, as a physician, I’m going to be looking at these kids, every single one of these kids, and say, why did it work on this kid? Why didn’t it work on that kid? And what can I do to that kid that it didn’t work?

Because I’m not going to wait, you know, for something else. You know, for something else. You know, this is where it happens. It happens on the front line of clinical trials, where as a physician, you have the courage to try different things. And there are definitely a lot of different avenues for autism because there are different causes for autism. You know, like you said, it’s most likely multifactorial. I’m focusing on the microbiome and an answer with fecal transplant possibly.

But what about the kid that doesn’t have a microbiome abnormality and has a neurological primary? Or what about the kid that has inflammatory bowel disease where his colonic mucosa is completely, you know, destroyed, and we need to fix that before we start implanting microbes? What about the kid that has a connection between the brain and the gut? What about the kid that has a genetic problem? You know, these are different ways to treat.

So when you do clinical trials, and when I do clinical trials anyways, I do clinical trials for a pharmaceutical company to bring a product to market. The product either works or doesn’t work. And then the FDA says, OK, Dr. Hazan, the product works, we’re going to bring it to market, even if the product only gives you 20 percent success. But what happens to the 80 percent that didn’t succeed on that protocol? Who looks at that, right?

So think about it, the pharmaceutical company, their job is, hey, let’s bring the drug to market, let’s make billions of money. But who’s looking at the 80 percent that didn’t succeed on the protocol? Nobody. This is going to be a great trial because it’s going to allow me as a physician, with my hat as a physician that has done hundreds of clinical trials for pharma, to say, OK, well, familial fecal transplant didn’t work. Let’s look at this trial. And let’s not give up on this kid, much like what I did with C. diff.

I would first start with the guidelines, which is you give antibiotics. And then if the guidelines didn’t work, I would go to clinical trials because that’s what was available. And I would say, let me try ABC trial. And then if that didn’t work, I would go to fecal transplant, and fecal transplant, 99 percent of my patients improved with C. diff. So I think that’s the same attitude that I’m going to take with autism.

I’m going to try the first; I’m going backwards now. I’m going with familial fecal transplant first, and if that doesn’t work, then I’m going to go to the clinical trials, and then I’m going to go to whatever else is being used that has improved these kids. Dr. Richard Frye has some amazing studies that he’s seen some kids improve. You know, we’re testing the microbiome before and after because we want to see what is it in kids with autism that is improving and what’s not improving.

You know, we first met because you had been doing work around microbiome and COVID-19, the virus, and then also what happened after mRNA vaccination. And this had profound effects on the microbiome. And maybe you can kind of remind us of what you discovered. And maybe sort of bring us to the current stage.

Yes. So remember, I was the girl that basically was doing clinical trials for pharma. And when COVID, and I was doing fecal transplant, and that N of one was in the process during COVID. And at the beginning of COVID, I looked at myself and I said, I have a portal with the FDA. I’m connected with all these brilliant minds, Dr. Borody, Dr. Stollman, so many brilliant minds. And I’m a physician on the front line of clinical trials. Surely I can figure it out, and I own a genetic sequencing lab that’s looking at the microbiome, and we have the possibility to look for COVID.

The first thing that came to me during COVID was I bet you it’s in the stools. Why? Because we noticed when we were doing stool analysis that if you have a person that has nasal congestion and is growing a microbe in the nose or in the sinuses, you will find that microbe in the stools. If you have a patient that has pneumonia, H. influenza, you will see that H. influenza in the stools.

Or a person with a kidney stone, or Klebsiella pneumonia, you will see that in the stools. People are shocked when I analyze their stools, and they don’t tell me they have a prostate problem. And I say, you have a prostate problem, don’t you? And they’re like, how do you know? Because I see the microbe that would be presenting prostatitis in their stools.

Think about the colon. What is the colon? The colon is where all the waste ends up, right? And so you’ve got three parts to the colon. You’ve got the part that goes backwards, the motion of the colon goes backwards. That’s the cecum. And then you’ve got the transverse colon and the sigmoid, where basically the stools are just to be evacuated. It’s the process of evacuation, okay?

So when you think about what we do when we do fecal transplants, we transplant microbes of a healthy person and we put it in a cecum for the best results because it’s backwards and it keeps it in there, right? The rest of the colon is really for the evacuation of the toxins. So think about eating a hamburger with E. coli. Too much E. coli, it’s in your system. Your body’s going to give you diarrhea because you’re flushing out that microbe that’s too much, right?

Same thing when you ate some rice that stayed over the counter, and you have a bacteria called B. cereus, you’re vomiting that. It’s foreign to the body. It doesn’t recognize it. So it says, get out of here, right? So to me, the first thought was, wait a minute, immunity is in the gut. I know that the colon is where everything’s there. I bet you COVID is in the stools.

So the first thing we did, the first samples that came to America, we were right there trying to collect the stools. So the first patients that had COVID that we intercepted, we already had their stools, and we started working a pipeline. And I even called Scott Jackson at the time because he was part of my biome squad. He used to work for the National Institute of Standards [NIST]. And I said, I bet you it’s in the stools. And he started looking and getting his team at NIST to look at the septic tanks. And that was all the brilliant work that was done from NIST at the septic tank level.

But we were at the clinical level. We were taking patients that had COVID, doing a nasal swab positive, and we were finding COVID in the stools. We found COVID in the stools in 100 percent of patients that were positive nasal swabs. What we then ended up figuring out is COVID can persist in the stools. And what we also ended up figuring out was that some people were asymptomatic and had COVID in their stools, but yet never had symptoms. What was the difference between those people? The difference was their bifidobacteria.

I’m going to jump in because I remember early in COVID, there was some anecdotal evidence. I think it might have even been from Korea initially that people that are eating kimchi, a lot of kimchi, are doing well or not catching COVID. And then I heard something similar about sauerkraut, which made me want to eat kimchi and sauerkraut, of course.

So that was my question at the beginning, right? Those anecdotal studies of kimchi and sauerkraut, because obviously you can talk to people that ate sauerkraut and still got COVID. What’s different between that population? Why is one person eating sauerkraut and kimchi fine and another person not, right? So that was my biggest question.

That question led to me wanting to test, first of all, families, right? Because I’m a big family person, like we find the answers in the family. Because we’re all different, we all have a different microbiome, it’s easier to compare within the families, right? So you could see, we published the first case of a family, which was basically the kid had COVID, the other three didn’t have COVID, and yet they didn’t wear masks, they ate the same foods, the mom was taking care of her kid face to face, and never got COVID.Her two other kids never got COVID.

The main difference between those three and the kid that had COVID was the absence of bifidobacteria. Not only bifidobacteria, there’s another bacteria called Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, and there’s an increase in bacteroides that happens and loss of diversity. So we noticed that, but we focused on bifidobacteria. Why did we focus on bifidobacteria?

Remember, we had the clinical data of the microbiome before COVID. We were analyzing stools before COVID. So we knew babies had a lot of bifidobacteria. I always spill the beans and then somebody’s listening somewhere else, and then they do the research and publish, which is fine. When I talked at the first microbiome meeting, I was saying bifidobacteria, focus on the bif. Why did I focus on bifidobacteria?

Because if you look at the bottles of probiotics, you turn the bottle and it says bifidobacteria. Now, in the olden days, scientists could make an experiment like the discovery of penicillin, where you essentially, as scientists, left this apple mildew next to a petri dish with a bacilli, and then the bacilli disappeared from the fungus of the apple, and there goes the discovery of penicillin, right?

So in the olden days, you could see all these things. Now there’s such a, because everything is about market and patents and business, there’s a lot of secrecy to research. There’s a lot of data that we don’t know. And sure enough, bifidobacteria are important in absorbing sugar. It’s important in your metabolism. It’s important in your energy drive. It’s important in, you know, making sure a person wakes up and, you know, in the morning and goes to work and is effective, right?

So bifidobacteria is really an important microbe, and it’s that microbe that is present in newborns. So when you start looking at the bifidobacteria and you start looking at COVID, we noticed that 43 severe patients with COVID had zero bifidobacteria. I’m just going to focus on bifidobacteria, not the others, because there are some people that have zero bifidobacteria and never, I’m going to up this group of microbes to basically create a resilience, right?

You think about your kids that, and that’s something we don’t really talk about, resilience, right? So you think about your kids that took a ton of antibiotics and they’re fine. They don’t have any problems. Why? Because their microbiome has adapted to increase other microbes to create that resilience, right?

So again, when you look at the bifidobacteria in these 43 patients, zero. Then you look at your patients that were exposed but never got COVID, like that first family that I did, we noticed they had a lot of bifidobacteria. So bifidobacteria was really the beginning for me. I was like, I wonder if that’s the microbe I need to focus on to neutralize COVID, to suppress COVID. If I have a lot of good bifidobacteria, maybe I’ll be fine during COVID, right?

There was a study from a newspaper in India about a woman who lived to be 117-years-old. They found that it was because she had bifidobacteria in her gut. For longevity, the longer you retain that bifidobacteria, the better it is. And it’s not a simple thing because people are like, what should I take? Should I take this probiotic?

No, it’s not that straightforward. You have to figure out what is killing your bifidobacteria and what’s growing, right? It’s like having a field that just burnt and you’re trying to stop the fire, and you’re pouring gasoline and water, and you expect to grow some fruit trees. It’s not going to happen. You have to turn off the fire, stop the gasoline pouring, bring on the water and then turn the earth, replant and let it grow.

It’s the same thing in the microbiome. You’re destroying a city. So when you destroy a city, expect complications from that. Expect disease to happen. And so that’s really my field to demonstrate that once you destroy a key group of microbes, you start the disease process.

So what we discovered, this bifidobacteria was really the beginning. It was the beginning. And then when we looked at that kid with an N of One of autism, that we got approval after, you know, in the midst of COVID, and we discovered if I give him a neurotypical sibling that has a diversity, that has good resilient microbes that have, you know, allowed herself not to have autism, but yet the boy has autism, then that sibling might be the answer for that kid.

And what we noticed with this sibling is that the kid had one group of microbes that the sibling didn’t have. So we picked that sibling. We didn’t pick the other ones because they had some of the same microbes as the kid with autism. Are they predisposed to going into autism? Who knows? But we picked that one sibling, and that one sibling became the donor. And what we discovered with that was that there was refloralrization. And the refloralrization process is really an engraftment of microbes to mimic, to look like the sibling, to look like the donor.

And one of the things we discovered was that bifidobacteria are increasing. Now, whether it was because we suppressed that toxic bacteria and allowed the gut to kind of rest and give it diversity, and therefore the good bacteria started flourishing. But that case was really the one that, first of all, made me say, I need to see more, because that was the miracle. I think what I saw during the pandemic was a bunch of miracles, from losing no one during the pandemic to still being standing and speaking to you today with all the controversy in my research.

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