Episode 101 | Oct 10, 2024

Nurturing Gut Health in Mothers and Babies, With Cheryl Sew Hoy

Are you concerned about your children’s gut health in today’s environment? In this episode of Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi speaks with Cheryl Sew Hoy, founder of Tiny Health, who is on a mission to improve infant and maternal health through early microbiome testing. Cheryl shares her journey of founding Tiny Health after discovering the profound connection between early-life gut health and lifelong well-being, especially for babies born via C-section or exposed to antibiotics early on.

“You’re sharing microbes. So, you can’t just say adjust your baby’s microbes and then have it be okay. Their microbiomes are going to look like yours because you’re living in the same household environment, getting the same nature exposure. You’re eating the same foods… you can’t just improve your child’s microbiome in a vacuum. You have to look into your own gut health as well.”

Cheryl Sew Hoy

Cheryl’s personal experiences as a mother of two, combined with her dedication to research, led her to develop Tiny Health’s at-home gut tests for moms and babies. Her own challenges, from C-sections to managing her children’s food sensitivities, gave her firsthand insight into the importance of gut microbes in early childhood. Tiny Health has now helped over 30,000 families, providing actionable data on microbiome health during the critical first 1,000 days of life, empowering parents to make informed decisions about nutrition, supplements, and lifestyle changes.

In this conversation, Cheryl explains how early gut health affects the immune system, digestion, and even future allergy risks. She highlights how Tiny Health’s testing can guide parents through dietary and lifestyle adjustments to course-correct imbalances in their children’s microbiomes. Cheryl and Dr. Sandi also discuss how health coaches can support families in navigating the growing field of microbiome research and applying it to practical everyday health decisions.

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Dr. Sandi: Welcome to another episode of “Health Coach Talk.” I have two grandchildren. They are boy and girl twins. They are two. And I got to admit, I worry about them. I worry about the health of their microbiome because we are faced every day with so many insults that are going to disrupt the microbiome. And so if you are listening and you are a grandparent like me or a mom or a dad, you may also be concerned. Perhaps you have a child who was born by C-section. Perhaps they were bottle-fed. Perhaps they’re on antibiotics. And you may also be concerned about the food they’re eating and toxins in the environment.

That’s why we are bringing to you somebody who is truly making a difference in infant maternal health. Her name is Cheryl Sew Hoy, and she is the founder of Tiny Health. Let me tell you about this amazing woman. Cheryl Sew Hoy is the CEO and founder of Tiny Health. This is the leading microbiome health platform for families. It was launched in 2022, and Tiny Health’s Gut Health Test is the first ever at-home gut microbiome test for moms and babies in the crucial first thousand days using shotgun metagenomics sequencing. Cheryl’s mission is to improve the health outcomes of our future generation and reverse the pediatric chronic condition crisis by empowering individuals to make evidence-based personalized dietary, nutritional, and lifestyle choices that are informed.

Cheryl’s perspectives and Tiny Health success stories have been recently featured in The Washington Post, TechCrunch, Forbes, SPINK Insider, Fortune, and many more. Cheryl is an accomplished and repeat founder of multiple companies, including a successful consumer software startup that was acquired by Walmart Labs in 2013. And in 2020, Cheryl founded Tiny Health to take charge of her family’s microbiome health after giving birth to her two children when she realized that early life microbiome imbalances are linked to many chronic conditions. So, without further ado, here’s my conversation with Cheryl Sew Hoy. Welcome, Cheryl.

Cheryl: Thank you, Sandi. I’m so happy to be here and to share what I’ve learned through my own two birth experiences and now helping almost 30,000 families and exceeding that pretty soon.

Dr. Sandi: Wow. Can you begin by sharing your story? What got you interested? You mentioned your own birth experiences.

Cheryl: Of course, yes. So, I have two kids now, and my daughter is six years old. She’s the firstborn. I have a son who’s four. So, both kids were breech in my belly. And so with the first, obviously with the first child, I was told, “Oh, you might have to go through a C-section.” So, I was researching vaginal breech births. Is that possible? Should I opt for a C-section? So, it really got me into a lot of deep research around… I know C-section is a big operation for me and there’s risks associated with that. But what about my baby? Are there lifelong health risks to my infant? And I came across a lot of literature pointing to the fact that babies are sterile in a womb, and they first get the first flush of gut microbes through the mom at birth, through the vaginal canal. So, they actually acquire mom’s vaginal microbes first and then the gut microbes through some fecal fluid during labor. So, that labor process and a bowel movement during labor is actually healthy for a baby. And then mom is actually continuing to transfer her gut microbes through breast milk, but we can go into all that later.

Anyway, I realized that the gut microbes of the infant at birth for a C-section born baby are missing some key microbes from the vaginal canal and some of the gut microbes as well. They tend to acquire more of the hospital microbes or skin and oral microbes of the mom because of, again, bypassing the vaginal canal. And they’re also being exposed to the antibiotics from the operations, right? So, what I then found is that C-section born babies, because they have a different gut at birth, they tend to have a higher risk of atopic march conditions, which includes eczema around six months, sometimes three months between that and a year. And that babies who do have eczema are at a higher risk for food allergies between six months to two years old. And then babies who have food allergies or eczema are at higher risk for asthma by age six. So, it is this progression of allergic diseases called atopic march, and it’s pretty known in medical literature. And as an adult, they get hay fever, so pretty severe hay fever.

So, I was reading all this and really trying to figure out, all right, I know laboring is good. So, I will try a vaginal breach birth and laboring. But despite that, I ended up with a C-section and my daughter did get eczema with sensitivities. She was allergic to sesame at the beginning, but now she’s grown out of it. But she was gluten and dairy intolerant. So, I had definitely experienced a lot of early, kind of, baby infant conditions with her, which maps to the literature I was reading. But then I was also reading that you can course correct. So, breast milk is the number one modifier of a C-section born baby. In fact, C-section born and breastfed babies could have actually a healthier gut from literature than a vaginally born baby who’s exclusively formula fed. And I can go into reasons why later.

Anyway, fast forward, when I had my son, breach again, I thought, “Oh, no, he’s going to be C-section again. I’m going to face all these conditions with him again.” I really was trying to prevent that. Miraculously, I had a home VBAC with him. So, turn him around at 37 weeks, and then he came the next day. I did a procedure called ECV where two OB-GYNs got on top of me and turned him around, hit down, and he came out at home. And I just had a very surprising, again, what I felt like was a miraculous birth. So, I started Tiny Health a week after he was born because I was already doing this research a year prior to that and learned all about how to restore my first kid’s gut and prevent it for my next kid. And so I was just really inspired to start this company.

And I got his early microbiome. I got my pregnancy gut microbiome and vaginal microbiome, which I can talk about that later too why it’s important. And I realized actually I didn’t have the microbes that I needed to pass on to my second child, even through vaginal birth. So, then I knew that, okay, I needed to actually supplement him with certain pre and probiotics. And that, I think, the early adjustments, he ended up not having any of the symptoms his sister had. He slept really well. My daughter was never a good sleeper. He never had eczema or sensitivities. He can drink dairy and eat dairy while my daughter can’t. So, it, again, maps to literature. So, we did a lot of R&D and we launched our flagship mom and baby gut tests in April of 2022. And so now it’s been about two and a half years. And like I mentioned, we served almost 30,000 families. So, I’ll stop here.

Dr. Sandi: What a phenomenal story. And you have really dug into the research behind microbiome and the importance of the delivery method in functional medicine. That’s a question that’s always asked when somebody is coming in to see a functional medicine practitioner or a health coach to look at birth history. And what exactly is Tiny Health measure? Can you explain for those who might not know, or if there’s coaches, educate people on concepts like microbiome and they might not understand…we hear it so much, but they might not actually understand what it is. Can you explain that and then what the test measures?

Cheryl: Yes, of course. We didn’t even talk about that. So, we actually measured the stool of the baby, of the child. So, the newborn’s poop anywhere from once a day to eight times a day. So, it’s very easy. This is the collection kit, and we use this for even older kids and adults too. It’s some Q-tip-looking swab, and this is how much stool you need. This is just peanut butter, by the way. It’s not actual stool, but this is how little. If you’ve done any conventional stool testing, you’ll know that conventional PCR-based stool tests, you need to put in this thing and collect it into this little tube. And it’s not a very pleasant experience.

Dr. Sandi: It’s gross.

Cheryl: Exactly. So, we really innovated because we were sampling moms during pregnancy, and I can’t make a mom poop into a hotdog cardboard. So, you’re sampling directly from the soiled toilet paper or diaper, right? Again, you’re changing diapers, so you’re just touching a little bit. And then this preserves the sample. It keeps the oxygen out so there’s no overgrowth and then you mail it into a prepaid envelope. I don’t have one here. Drop it into any USPS mailbox. And then within a couple of weeks, you get online web portal results that you can browse. You can also print out a PDF to forward to your health coach or pediatrician or whoever you’re working with. And we have a team supporting practitioners and also health coaches. If you wanted to help families with the stool tests, we provide interpretation support and we help you understand how to interpret these reports for your clients or your patients. So, both. We’re a D2C company, so parents can buy it directly at tinyhealth.com, and practitioners, we support health coaches and practitioners poweredbytiny.com.

Dr. Sandi: Okay, so let’s say… So, I’m a grandma of a two-year-old…twin two-year-olds. And so let’s say they wanted to have this test done so they would take that stool sample of both twins, and they would mail that in, they get the results back. Now, who is actually interpreting? Some of these tests are AI-driven. Some have doctors who are interpreting. So, can you explain? And what might that report look like?

Cheryl: Yes, for sure. So, the reason why our tests are so innovative for the pediatric group and especially infants is because, again, they’re pretty sterile in the womb. They’re acquiring new microbes as they get born into the world and get exposed to solids in six months and environment and pets and nature. So, gut microbiome is changing rapidly. So, the reference range for what is healthy and not healthy changes from three months to six months to eight months to two years. So, in the first three to five years of life, our test adapts to those reference ranges. So, when you’re getting your results back, we’ll tell you if your baby has enough bifidobacteria. And even if they have bifidobacteria, this is one really beneficial bacteria that’s training their immune system, preventing pathogenic strains from colonizing their gut. And it’s just doing a lot of great things. They’re digesting the prebiotic fibers, the HMOs from mom’s breast milk, and turning that into energy for the baby. So, lots of benefits. We look at four specific strains. We want that to be dominant in the baby’s first year of life, so 50% to 90%. And if they’re deficient, this is where we see a lot of colicky, gassy symptoms, eczema, food sensitivities, just a ton of correlative associative issues.

And then as the child gets older, past one year old, they’re eating a robust diet. Ideally, they’re out playing with nature and pets. We want to see lots of diversity come in. The short-chain fatty acids requirements change from acetate. We want high acetate production in the first year of life and then changing to butyrate production, which is what we want to see in a healthy adult individuals as well. So, again, the functions that the microbes do, meaning it’s not just who’s there, but what roles they’re playing to help build that intestinal permeability, the gut lining that keeps this gut barrier integrity strong, is really being built in those first three years of life. So, we measure all the metrics related to those things, the immune gut training correlation, and make sure that your baby has the right balance in the first three years of life. And so you’re going to get a report that tells you all these metrics and then what to do about it if it is imbalanced from a dietary or nutrition standpoint, from a supplement standpoint, if needed. We do not think that every baby needs a pre or probiotic. It depends on the baby. And then the third category is lifestyle changes, educating parents about toxic chemicals because you may be using Clorox on your floor and over-sanitizing and your baby’s kind of on the floor licking and maybe ingesting these antimicrobials that may harm their beneficial bacteria. So, we educate on lifestyle changes and exposing your baby to nature and pets. And I think today in this world, we’re so afraid of germs and they’re actually really healthy for an infant.

Dr. Sandi: That is so true. I see this all the time. We’re obsessed with hand sanitizer and making sure that God forbid there should be any dirt. And I remember there was a pretty famous study a number of years ago where… These were older children, but they were comparing the microbiome, the population of children in a village in Africa, that they were in the dirt and they had a very diverse microbiome with the good kinds of bacteria that would be immune restoring and protective. And then they compared that with children who were in an urban population in a city in Italy. And their microbiome was quite different and deficient in those species that are so beneficial. It was a very remarkable study.

So, let’s say… You talked about a child, let’s say a baby is born by C-section, they are bottle fed, and maybe in that first year of life, they have already had a few courses of antibiotics. Are you noticing a difference when they are tested versus somebody who might have a natural birth, breastfed, and also maybe less antibiotics or no antibiotics? And when they’re starting whole foods, perhaps a less processed type of diet?

Cheryl: Yes. So, generally speaking, of course, there are edge cases. Yes, we do see a difference. In maps to literature, again, it’s not something new. It’s been shown in published data and literature that babies who are C-section born and/or formula fed and/or living in an urban environment and/or exposed to antibiotics, even in utero during labor and birthing, and then early life does impact the child’s microbiome. So, we are seeing that in our data set but not always. So, here’s an interesting kind of fact from our own data of almost 30,000 families. Thirty percent of vaginally born, breastfed infants also don’t have a great gut, meaning zero bifidobacteria. And when there’s no zero bifidobacteria, that important beneficial immune-training bacteria, then what takes hold could be the pathogenic ones like E. coli, Klebsiella, Salmonella, Streptococcus, Staphylococcus, again, those ones that are connected to actually a C-section birth. Not always, but when we mentioned diversity and exposure to lots of dirt and nature, you do that when you know your baby has sufficient bifidobacteria to protect their immune system. When deficient of that and when exposed to pathogenic bacteria, then the wrong kinds may be colonizing their gut, right?

So, some moms or dads come to us and like, “We thought we did everything right. What happened, my kid has eczema and all these sensitivities, they’re breastfed, they’re vaginally born.” So, then again, there is a strong connection between mom and baby. So, when we do have the mom’s gut sample, mom was deficient of bifidobacteria. So, this is my case. This is exactly what I experienced. I thought, “Oh, I did everything right with my son, right? This time a VBAC magical birth, breastfed him for two and a half years, but I was deficient of bifidobacteria.” So, even through a vaginal birth and breastfeeding, I’m not able to pass on that bacteria to my son. So, it’s a lot of weight on mom, but if the dad has it or older siblings has it, they can also pass it on to baby. So, the cuddling and kissing and skin-to-skin time with Dad does matter because we have seen in cases where mom didn’t have it and then baby has it. And when we did have Dad’s sample too, Dad had it. So, initially I felt like, “Oh, there’s so much weight on the women, the mom, but dads play a role.”

So, it really goes to speak. And this is why we’ve expanded to support the whole family. We support adults too. The dads can always do a gut test. The grandma can do a gut test too. My mom lives with us and I’ve got her to do a test, because you’re all living in the same environment. You’re sharing microbes. So, you can’t just say adjust your baby’s microbes and then have it be okay. Their microbiomes are going to look like yours because you’re living in the same household environment, getting the same nature exposure. You’re eating the same foods. And, Sandi, your gut microbiome is so influenced by environmental dietary factors. So, you can’t just improve your child’s microbiome in a vacuum. You have to look into your own gut health as well.

Dr. Sandi: That is fascinating. And I think that’s under the radar. I don’t think most people realize that. And I love the concept. Perfect for any health coaches who are listening or prospective health coaches, because you can be that educator. You can help a whole family have healthy guts. And so you have mentioned that you can go up to the first thousand days of a child’s life. So, can you keep repeating? Let’s say you’re doing the test in six months. When would you suggest repeating perhaps if there are issues that you’re now addressing through dietary intervention or perhaps a probiotic or prebiotics?

Cheryl: Yeah. So, the first 1,000 days actually starts at conception. So, the mom’s… Again, I mentioned we do have a vaginal test too, because again, you want to make sure you also have a healthy vaginal microbiome. If your baby’s passing through it, it should be Lactobacillus dominant. If the mom’s vaginal canal has zero lactobacillus, which is rare, but it does happen, then there is actually higher risk of preterm labor too. So, you actually want to make sure that it’s an acidic environment. Lactobacillus creates an acidic environment that keeps pathogens out from the vaginal canal. So, you want to check mom’s vaginal canal as early as possible, even before conception, trying to conceive because it takes a longer time to restore the vaginal microbes. And then the gut microbes, you want to check that mom has the bifs that I mentioned, the four specific strains, Bifidobacterium infantis, Bif. breve, Bif. bifidum, and Bif. longum. And this is all within our educational portal as well and our practitioners. You want to also check if mom has early gestational diabetes risk from a microbiome perspective and to take care and adjust their diet and lifestyle before you have to do the glucose test at 20-something weeks, right? I feel like a lot of the tests during pregnancy is a little bit too late. You can take steps to see if you have a microbiome risk for it earlier. So, mom is important to check-in.

And then when baby’s born, around two to three months is a good time to check-in. The earliest you can check in is seven days, and the seven-day stool sample from the baby, you can truly see what’s seeded from mom to baby. That’s more like, if you can afford it, I would say that’s a bonus test because it gives you an idea of what happened at birth. But if you don’t have so much funds, I would reserve that for two to three months because you would have seen mom’s breast milk come in at that point. And if the baby’s still deficient, then maybe mom and baby needs supplementation as well. But if all is good, I would then do the next sample between six to nine months when baby has started solids to see how the gut maturation is going, if there’s enough diversity there. And then one more time around 12 months because 12 months is an important biomarker for asthma prediction as well. You want to make sure that baby’s microbiome is mapping well.

So, in the first year, I would say at least three to four tests because it’s kind of frozen in time. You’re never going to get that time period back. And so if baby does have any issues in the future, you have those memorialized, and it can help you figure out more clues for how that was developing in the first year. And then post one year, I would say once every six months. And even for older kids and adults too, once every six months is what I would recommend as a proactive measure. Or if they ever did have an ear infection and needed antibiotics, it’s a good idea to have a baseline test for what the state is and then how the antibiotics actually impacted your child’s gut. So, we can help you restore it to where it should be and what was there before and what should be there post-antibiotics.

Dr. Sandi: Great recommendations. So, let’s say you’re a mom, dad, and you want to improve the health microbiome, gut health of your child who’s now on solid foods. And like my grandchildren, they are turning two and they have very definite likes and dislikes. And then if something’s on their plate, there’s no guarantee that they’re going to eat it. And so what recommendations would you have for parents? Should they go on a probiotic? What about prebiotics? What about sources in foods? Again, given the toddler stage of establishing their own independence and maybe strong will, they’re just not going to touch it.

Cheryl: The picky eaters, I have one myself. Yes, for sure. We have a lot of wonderful tips because we work so much with the pediatric population. And I would say smoothies are my superpower or my secret weapon. Kids always love smoothies. I rarely meet a kid who doesn’t like it. You add a banana, you can add anything else like fiber and spinach and kale, whatever seeds. I add a lot of seeds for the omega-3, like hemp seeds and flax seeds. So, there’s a lot there. So, I would say generally stepping back aside from like, how do you add more fiber or even fermented foods? I actually use the base of my smoothie as kefir, homemade kefir. So, that gives them that fermented. So, instead of dairy or milk, you could do a coconut milk kefir or you can do a cow’s milk kefir. It’s up to you. So, that’s how I add a lot of the things in there to make sure they have it on a daily basis or every two days.

Beyond that, we really do not believe that every baby or child needs a probiotic. Most of the time, they’re actually missing the prebiotic, the fiber for the good bacteria, right? And that helps with constipation and a lot of issues. So, I would say, frankly, we have the technology now and why wouldn’t you check in and test and not guess? Because supplements are expensive and you want to make sure that you’re using the right kind. A lot of parents come to us using the wrong kind of probiotics that their child is in need because you can’t just randomly pick one from the shelf. Different strains perform different functions. So, sometimes you may be accidentally picking a strain that isn’t beneficial to them. And sometimes these probiotics have fillers in them that may not help their microbiome, right?

So, I would say sometimes when we see imbalances, then we would recommend a pre and probiotic combined for a short course until the problem is addressed and then you maintain it with diet, right? Because we see supplements as a way to short-circuit some of these problems to come in there and adjust quickly, but you have to long-term use dietary nutrition for maintenance, right, for long-term support. If you don’t want to end up giving your baby a probiotic for long-term and rarely, unless you have some condition that the certain strains are helping with, we rarely recommend long-term probiotic use.

So, that’s how we would approach it. We think conventional medicine and even some functional medicine practice focus a lot on a killing approach. If you see pathogenic bacteria, you kill with anti-microbials. Not necessarily antibiotics but herbs, right? And herbs we think are too strong for babies and kids. Our approach is boost the beneficial because it’s much easier to boost beneficial in kids and there are strategies and tips we can offer. And then the way we’d like to reduce these pathogenic bacteria is through diet as well as the spices are a very useful weapon. Cinnamon can target a lot of pathogenic bacteria. So, again, when you’re doing your smoothie, add some cinnamon in there and, again, different spices target different pathogenic bacteria. We have a really robust table and list and the action plan once you get our reports. So, just lots of wonderful strategies and how to help kids.

Dr. Sandi: I love that. Actually, I have a recipe that I’ve perfected for toddler muffins that I make every time I go see my grandkids. And yeah, I’ve been putting tons of cinnamon in there as well as I use the Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. That’s just Dr. Jeff Bland’s big bold health flour as opposed to white flour or even almond flour. But there are so many ways. And if you’ve seen differences, let’s say a baby has been on, whether they’re breastfed or bottle fed, but now they’re in solids and more of eating organic as opposed to somebody whose diet might be strictly conventional, are you seeing any differences? Because you mentioned toxic load earlier.

Cheryl: We haven’t done the analysis. We have a ton of data, but we haven’t done the organic, non-organic analysis. I suspect it’s harder to tease out unless you do a study specific on organic. And it’s the glyphosate in food that we’re concerned about, right, that harms the child’s microbiome. But it is tough because there’s so many environmental factors. It could be water as well, right, that’s having that toxic load. I recently tested my water here in Austin, Texas, and we found out our water has lead, arsenic, and uranium in it. Oh, shocking. We tested our guts because we moved here from California, and my husband and my gut health, my mom, my kids all went downhill. And we thought it was our food supply and adjusted that supply source from local farms here. And still we weren’t doing so well until we filtered our water, RO system, whole house filtration, including the shower, and that helped a little bit. So, there’s so many factors. It’s not just the food source, which you definitely should look into. It could be the water source too, right? Because we were having some skin issues. So, we felt like maybe it’s the shower and gargling and there must be something else going on. So, it is a lot of troubleshooting, right? And sometimes you just have to figure out one by one what are the factors influencing your gut health.

Dr. Sandi: Sure. And as you mentioned earlier, those toxic cleaning products or overuse of hand sanitizers, for example, or overuse of sunscreen, which might have toxic chemicals in them. So, there’s so many factors that are at play. And what are your thoughts about the conventional community? So, the OBGYNs, the pediatricians. Are you seeing any change? Are they becoming more aware of the importance of the microbiome? So, can you share any experiences that you’ve had? Because that’s where the majority of people are getting their information from, their recommendations. And so often this is not on their radar.

Cheryl: No, which is my personal experience. When I asked my OBGYN, I was prescribed an antibiotics for suspected UTI before I had a UTI, just in case.

Dr. Sandi: Just in case.

Cheryl: Because it was my first child. I listened to her. And then midway through, I actually got a UTI because I now know that the antibiotics during pregnancy actually killed the healthy vaginal microbiome too. So, I wish now I had gone to D-mannose, which is the cranberry extract to prevent UTI and pregnancy. So, I really went through the more holistic, integrative route where I am researching on my own, everything that my OB or my pediatrician tells me, I will just fact check and just do my own research, right? Advocate for my own health. But to answer your question, OBs are really tough. They’re the most high-risk medical community. And because they’re in terms of high risk from maternal mortality, infant mortality perspective, they’re not as maybe open to new research and new tools, a stool test, right? So, I found it pretty hard to even speak to that group. There are a couple who are more open-minded, but pediatricians in general are much more open-minded, probably because they tend to be younger perhaps. They tend to be more open to new studies and new research because they’re always seeing maybe younger kids and they have more time. So, we found that it’s easier to approach the pediatric community, but certainly the functional, integrative, holistic world has been much more welcoming to this concept of a stool test for infants. In fact, they’ve been asking for it for a long time. Yes, so we’re just so happy to be able to support this group and educate this group further. But yeah, I am seeing again, from a conventional pediatrician perspective, more pediatricians offering [inaudible 00:31:32.895]. However, this is where we’re like this is a good start, you know, that they’re open to it. But again, we feel like the next step would be… Again, not all kids need pro and it depends on strains, right? So sometimes pediatricians are just saying, just take one. And we don’t necessarily think that’s the best strategy because if baby has mom’s native strains transferred to baby and it’s colonizing really well, you don’t want an exogenous probiotic strain to route out the native strains of the mom. We see that happening and we think that mom’s native strains are adapted to her specific HMOs in breast milk and that will be the best for infant health. And then again, different strains perform different functions.

Dr. Sandi: That makes a lot of sense. And I just want to touch on the vaginal microbiome testing. So, if mom, someone’s pregnant and they’re asking, “What is the health of my vaginal microbiome?” So, that is possible or even if you’re not pregnant, you can have that assessed.

Cheryl: Yes. So, the difference with the swabbing from the stool collection is it’s a longer swab, and there’s some stabilization liquid in here that you can release if you click this. And so you would do it at home, just like you would go to an OBGYN and do a swab. And again, we would recommend doing this anytime, not just during pregnancy, if you’re trying to conceive because there are correlation between a healthy vaginal microbiome and even IVF failure or success rates. It’s a proxy for fertility, we think. We don’t have a lot of studies showing connections between the vaginal microbiome and fertility specifically, but the IVF success rate is a good proxy.

So, if mom doesn’t have, again, those healthy lactobacillus-dominant vaginal microbiome, then there are oral probiotics you can take. There are vaginal suppository that’s quite new in the market and the industry with the right strains, Lactobacillus crispatus, that should be dominating the mom’s vaginal canal, crispatus or gasseri. Again, the science in the vaginal microbiome has recently exploded really just in the past 10 years, but we now do have pretty strong research around what constitutes a healthy vaginal microbiome that creates the lactic acid that keeps the vaginal canal acidic, right? So there are things you can do. There are supplements you can take to really keep a healthy vaginal microbiome. You don’t douche. You don’t put soap down there. It is not cleaning. So, a lot of, again, women need to be educated on how to take care and maintain healthy vaginal microbes because it’s so important for fertility, conception, prevention of preterm labor, STIs and GBS, group B strep, which you don’t want because if you do get tested positive for GBS during pregnancy, you’re most likely going to be recommended antibiotics during labor and you want to try to prevent that.

Dr. Sandi: This has been such a fascinating conversation, and I think this is where health coaches can really lead the charge because this is under the radar and they can educate people about this, how important it is, and also help them with practical suggestions because if you’re a busy mom, if you’re a working parent, it can be really challenging and seem overwhelming, for example. And so there are many ways that they can improve their own microbiome health as well as the microbiome health of their children. So, Cheryl, where can people find you?

Cheryl: Very easy. It’s just tinyhealth.com. We’re a D2C product. And if you are interested in becoming a practitioner within our network and getting the extra support, you can check out poweredbytiny.com/practitioners. I do want to say again, we have an older child test, 3 to 18 years old. Lots of resources there for older kids and we have an adult product that’s over 18 for men, women who are not even pregnant or trying to conceive because we believe in supporting the whole family’s health and we think it’s really important.

Dr. Sandi: You are at the forefront, you’re the cutting edge of healthcare and I really applaud you, your perseverance to find answers and to have solutions that are easy to implement. It seems so obvious that we can take control of our health. We can feel empowered to take charge of our health and the health of our children. So, thank you so much for being on the podcast today and to be continued.

Cheryl: Thank you, Sandi.