Brain Biohacking with Kayla Barnes — Dr. Colleen Cutcliffe, PhD: Natural GLP-1 Production, Fiber Deficiency, Akkermansia and the Gut Microbiome Connection

Most people think of the gut as a digestive organ. It is not. It is the upstream controller of your metabolism, immune function, brain health, skin, and hormones and almost everyone is running it on a depleted, misfed microbiome without knowing it.

Dr. Colleen Cutcliffe, PhD is the co-founder and CEO of Pendulum Therapeutics, holds a PhD in biochemistry from Johns Hopkins, and spent over 15 years in pharma and biotech before pioneering next-generation probiotic science. Her team was the first in the world to manufacture Akkermansia, a strain found at high levels in virtually every centenarian population studied and depleted in almost every major chronic disease.

What makes this conversation different from most gut health discussions is the level of scientific rigor behind it. This is not wellness theory. This is published research, clinical data, and a decade of actually building the science from the ground up.

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In this conversation we explore:

How your gut produces its own GLP-1 naturally and why synthetic versions may blunt that system over time
Why Akkermansia is elevated in centenarians and depleted across virtually every chronic disease
The fiber gap: 95% of people are under-threshold and it is driving metabolic and colon health decline
What early antibiotic use does to the microbiome and how to rebuild at any age
Why soap may be fueling the allergy and asthma epidemic by stripping the skin's protective barrier
How butyrate links gut health, colon cancer risk, and natural GLP-1 production
Why most probiotics on Amazon do not contain what the label claims