Surprising Supplement Secrets From An Industry Insider (& The Shocking Truth About Your Multivitami

Well, hello my friends. I have a funny story. I had a dog growing up, a boxer, a brindle boxer. And my dog's name was Hector. And my podcast guest on today's show is also named Hector. But he's not a dog. He's a pretty smart dude, especially when it comes to navigating the supplements industry. He's like a formulator. He knows a ton. So I got a chance to pick his brain for a while and I think you're gonna really dig what you come away with on this one as far as understanding the oft confusing wide world of supplements just a tad bit better. But before we jump into that, I want to tell you about speaking of supplements, this stuff called Tian Qi. T I A N C H I Now it's an herb extract, a whole bunch of herbs in one tiny packet. And the thing is, when you buy herbs, especially Chinese adaptogenic herbs, the herbal extract are mixed at about a 10 to 1. That means they use about 10 pounds of raw herb to make 1 pound of pure extract. This guy actually has about a 45 to 1 yield out of these tianchi herbs, meaning 45 pounds of raw herb to produce 1 pound of pure extract. The guy that makes it is named Roger Drummer. He's been on my podcast twice. One of the smartest Chinese adaptogenic herbs and Chinese medicinal practitioners that I know. He lives out in Portland, Oregon. Anyway, so he's jammed inside this tiny pack. Schizandra, rishi, ashwagandha, eklonia. One really interesting one that's basically known as Huperzine, which is fantastic for blood flow to the brain. They use that on TBIs and football players. It's got a restorative for the liver and the kidneys. It's got something called polygonum in it, which translates to hose black hair. One of the main kidney restoratives in Chinese herbology. The list of these things go on and on and on. There's only one Chinese adaptogenic herb blend that you will find at my website, kion@getkion.com and it's this stuff, it's amazing. You get one big box and it says on the box brighten your mind. And it actually does just that. I take it on an empty stomach mid morning or mid afternoon when I need a non jittery pick me up. Check it out getkion.com and this stuff's called Tian Qi. Get K I n.

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He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And if you're like me, you take supplements sometimes. But where they came from, how they were made, how that ingredient label came to say, what it says about the ingredients or claims to. To have in the actual bottle of whatever it is that you're taking. It's a. It's a real rabbit hole and a real can of worms. And those are the best two analogies I can think of to describe what goes on in the supplement industry. And occasionally, I like to get industry insiders on this show, folks who kind of understand the nuts and bolts of what's say. You toss back a handful of capsules or take some kind of an oil or powder or tablet or anything else. And the guy that I managed to get on today's show is probably One of the most well educated fellas who exists in the nutrition supplement industry. His name is Dr. Hector Lopez. He's an MD and what I like about him is he's also a certified strength conditioning coach. So he understands exercise. He's got a big background in SP medicine and exercise science, nutritional biochemistry, metabolism and clinical research. He's actually the CMO and the partner of center for something called Applied Health Sciences, which is this multidisciplinary clinical research organization. And they actually focus on really increasing the body of evidence within the dietary supplement and the natural product and the functional medicine and the functional foods and beverage industry. And I'll let him speak a little bit more to that, as well as his participation in something called Nutra Vigilance, which basically acts to make sure that you're not going to die or have explosive diarrhea or get a third eye growing out your head when you take a supplement. He actually has a pretty starred history in the supplement industry as well and consults a whole bunch of different professional athletes and professional athlete organizations from the NFL to the NBA to the MLB and beyond. And so I'll let him tell you a little bit more about his history and how got into all this in the first place. But I've been emailing Dr. Lopez and talking to Dr. Lopez a lot just because as many of you know, you know, I have this, this new nutrition supplement company called Kion, and I'm really working on bringing out some very unique formulations, some novel delivery mechanisms, and most importantly, supplements that are of an extremely high quality compared to a lot of the, the crap that you'll find out there in the nutrition supplement industry. And so Dr. Lopez has been really helping me navigate through that as well. So, Dr. Lopez, welcome to the show, man.

Awesome, man. Well, thanks for having me on. I, I've got to say, I'm a little embarrassed with that intro, man. That was a glorious intro. So thank you for that.

You should be more embarrassed because before we started recording, you told me you'd never even heard the podcast before.

Yeah, yeah, that's true, that's true, that's true.

Have you, have you heard a podcast before? Like, like, do you listen to podcasts at all?

I, I do on occasion. I have, I've listened to, I've, I've listened to some of Tim, Tim Ferriss and, and Joe Rogan, and I've listened to some podcasts when I'm traveling sometimes. But you know what? I'm gonna have to listen to yours. No, I'm traveling too.

Those Guys are jokers. Their podcasts are, are our teeny tiny podcast. Nobody listens to them. You gotta, you know, listen to Big.

Yeah, we're there. Yeah.

Who the heck are they? So, so how'd you get into the whole supplement industry, man? I mean, you know, you'reyou're a, you're a physician, but did you kinda start off being interested in nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals and supplements or was this something that you developed over time?

Yeah, you know, it's been an interesting journey actually. So I would have to say that what's happened to me is I've actually just come full circle, to be honest.

Yeah. I'll tell you a funny story actually. So going back to when I was, I was probably about 11 or 12 years old and I remember actually I don't think I've actually ever told this story like on any, you know, prior radio or podcast or any show before, so. So there we go.

We get the exclusive, baby.

You're getting the exclusive. So actually, pretty funny story. I grew up in Jersey, in North Jersey, so North Bergen and North Bergen, I'm not sure if you're familiar with that being that was the initial headquarters and the very first vitamin shop. The Vitamin shop store. The franchise of stores of retail. Oh yeah, stores across.

Yeah, I used to wander through those and go straight to that little metal shopping cart in the middle that had all the bargain bin stuff, grab the fish oil that was knocked down from $35 down to two or three, you know, just, just try any of, any of the fringe powders with the man in a can posing in the front of them. So yeah, I've, I've wandered through a few vitamin shops in my time.

I'm sure you have, I'm sure you have. So, so here I am, an 11 or 12 year old kid, right. And I say, you know, already at that time I'm, you know, I love the sciences, but I also love everything athletics, anything sports related.

You know, I remember reading through my dad's like old school weeder pubs, you know, the magazines like Muscle and F or sometimes as we used to call it, Muscle in Fiction.

Or Flex, right, Flex, all those Iron man way back when. But I was always mostly drawn to and intrigued by the science and the mechanisms and anything that would delve into even touching upon the science of how ingredients worked, how bioactive compounds really did what they did, how they could support, potentially support enhancing essentially what I didn't know at the time was human performance, whether it be cognitive or physical, on or off the field. And so when I was about 11 and a half or 12, I actually went to the main. This is the big headquarters, Vitamin Shop. It's a huge distribution warehouse, right. And there's a small little storefront. And you know, this was in the, I guess this was probably in the 80s, late 80s or so. And I approached the, the front desk and I asked for a manager because I remember telling my parents, I said, you know, I want, I want to work at Vitamin Shop, but I want to do something in their labs. You know, I want to work on the, you know, I want to do something chemistry related or biochemistry related and maybe I could do an internship or maybe I could just volunteer. I don't care. Whatever it took, right? So it was pretty funny because I approached the front counter and asked for the manager. He brought the manager in and I asked him, I said, you know, I'm really interested in science. I'm a great science student, you know, straight A science student, great at math. I'd love to work in your lab, you know, where's your biochemistry lab? Here on the office. So after about 30 or 40 seconds of straight laughing, you know, they basically said, they said, oh, kids, I hate to break it to you, but we don't really do any of that here, you know. So that was the. I was struck with the harsh reality, you know, it's kind of like finding out Santa Claus wasn't real.

Yeah, we don't test jack shit, baby, we just sell it.

Yeah, exactly. We just distribute and sell. We're good at the marketing piece, you know, that we're good at. So the blowhorn. So if you can write marketing copy, we'll definitely do that. So now. So that was the very first introduction into the, the harsh reality that obviously I had a lot to learn about the industry, but I was only, you know, whatever, 11 and a half 12 at the time. And so basically, look, I was a decent athlete growing up, but definitely not elite, you know, by any stretch.

You know, I was not one of those guys that would walk into the gym and, you know, had that sort of like mesomorphic physique. You know, they'd inhale a couple times in the gym, walk out and they'd put on a few pounds of lean body mass over a month. That was definitely not me. So then I started getting more intrigued and more interested in the science of, hey, if I wasn't going to be a pro athlete and I wasn't going to be able to play professional baseball, for example, then maybe I could find A way to make other talented athletes better. Right. Make good athletes great, make great athletes exceptional. And so that's sort of got me down the path of everything that I looked at science wise throughout high school. I always looked at through the lens of, huh, I wonder how this plays into nutrition. How does this play into strength and conditioning, exercise physiology, exercise science, really the science of human performance and athletic feats. So that really was my, you know, my genesis. I loved molecular biology and biochemistry, but I also had this passion for nutrition and the more macro stuff of how it actually all happens, you know, from a molecular level all the way up to the macro level. So then I went to undergrad at Rutgers and double majored in nutritional sciences and molecular bio and I minored in exercise science. Nice. So that was, that was it. That was basically, if you, in a nutshell, you know, I was in heaven because I was studying.

That's actually kind of similar because, because what I did was I, I put together my own self directed master's degree course when I went to University of Idaho. And I thought, well, there's, there's three things that I'm interested in. Exercise, nutrition and supplements. Yeah, because at that point I was a bodybuilding, you know, totally, totally geeked out, bro. Science enthusiast. I was all in.

You were all in?

Dude, I was like 215 pounds. I was three and a half fat. And you know, I, I pretty much lived on, on creatine and that, what's that, what's that? Central nervous system stimulant red line, I think it was called.

Oh yeah, yeah, from BPX Redline.

I was sponsored by abb. So I did a lot of these ABB bodybuilding protein shakes and you know, crapped out of straw every day. Had tuna can for, for tuna can.

Eating straight out of the tuna can.

Oh, for sure. You put a little relish, little ketchup in there to make it taste good. These days I probably would have done stevia on, on top of tuna or something crazy like that. But anyways, yeah, so I, I did exercise science combined with a lot of advanced human nutrition coursework and a lot of pharmacology coursework. So I spent a lot of, a lot of time in the microbiology lab and the biochemistry lab doing my practicums and my internships and so it's, it's kind of interesting. We, we wound up probably taking a lot of the similar classes in, in undergrad and graduate school. But you just decided to put on the big boy pants and become a.

Doctor, whereas I, I guess so, but.

You know, I became a personal trainer.

Whereas you went the personal training route. Well, you know, I, listen, I still, I have a ton of respect for, you know, the, the fitness profession in general. Right. I mean, that's, you know, I, I ended up getting my CSCs, as you mentioned, real early on. I, I was actually a CSCS before I was a physician, certainly before I got my master's in nutritional biochemist. So, yeah, I, I dig it, man. I get where your interests were at. And again, a lot of them were probably aligned, as you said.

Yeah.

And so what happened to me is, interestingly enough, I had no plans to go to medical school because I always felt like that was just going to get in the way. I mean, in undergrad, you know, how you meet with your advisors and obviously if you've got good, if you're doing well academically, they feel like you've got some potential to.

To sort of, I guess, beef up their stats if you can go to med school and score well on the mcat. But I, you know, every time they pushed me in that direction, I said, I'm really not interested. I, because ultimately I wanted to probably go to grad school, get a PhD and then get into the industry somehow. Right. That, that was my plan probably all the way up to about my junior year in undergrad. And then my dad came down with some really strange or odd symptoms. He developed diplopia and some neurological symptoms. And then I got, I just, I was forced to get closer to medicine from a, from a completely different perspective. And so when my dad, you know, was, he was going to go see, he was seeing a bunch of neurologists, I was going to a lot of the visits with him, neuro ophthalmologists, et cetera. I realized in, in my communications with them, you know, I was always trying to, I was kind of probably in their eyes like, oh, this is the wise kid, the wise, you know, 19 year old who thinks he knows a thing or two about patient care and he's good in the sciences and he's trying to show me up. But I just realized there was such a gap between what was happening in medicine in general. Right. And what we were discovering on the applied exercise physiology, nutritional biochemistry, applied dietary supplementation, advanced supplementation, even in the life extension longevity areas. Right. Of nutrition. So I felt like there was such a gap there. Like there were two different islands and they were operating in silos. So for me, I felt like, you know what, I think I should go to med school and try to bridge that gap. Ultimately I felt like if I went into some sports medicine field, like I could still do both right a little bit. And. And so I decided pretty late, actually it was probably late my junior year into my senior year, took my MCATs and did well and then ended up going to med school and then ended up in Chicago after that. Where'd you go to Robert Wood Johnson? It's now Rutgers Medical School, so it's Brunswick.

I also, you know, I briefly. I joked that I went to personal training, but I also took the MCATs and. And I got accepted to six different medical schools and none of them were the medical schools that I wanted. So I threw a hissy fit and I went back and worked for about four months in the medical industry selling surgical tools and hips and knees and just became completely just like I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon. I got totally disillusioned with the medical industry and then I kind of pivoted and went back into fitness after that, that. That gig working for Biomet over in Post Falls, Idaho. So I never actually went to medical school obviously, but anyways, that's okay because there's guys like you who, who did and wound up getting well.

That's cool though. Again, though, still a lot of, you know, definitely a lot of alignment there in terms of our interests. So. So then I. I ended up becoming a Midwesterner for a while. I did my physiatry, or pmnr, you know, physical medicine, rehabilitation. That, that was my specialty that I chose because, you know, again, advisors and counselors trying to push me into. In the. Into a competitive like neurosurgical or orthopedic surgical field. And I just felt like I just don't want to be in the or I want to be able to really integrate. Honestly. You know, a lot of people thought it was crazy, but ended up starting to get involved in an interest groups, sports, various sports medicine interest groups and saying, listen, you may think I'm craz crazy, but I actually have this business plan. I developed a business plan while I was in med school that I wanted to integrate all of these things, right? All the things that I'm sure, you know, had we gone to school together, who knows, we might still be practicing together because it sounds like you probably would have been interested in something like this that essentially was a complete integration of medicine, physical therapy, chiropractic. We'd have a little gym, like a studio, a fitness studio in the office, a procedure suite to be able to do PRP and regenerative injection techniques. And, and this was, you know, this was in the, in the 90s.

This is so funny, dude. Because when I graduated I partnered with a physician. Well, not when I graduated, but, but after a couple years working as a personal trainer, after I got my master's degree, I partnered with a physician and we opened this one stop shop for sports medicine. We, we had one of the first PRP units that.

When did you guys use? Did you use Harvest? Did you use Harvest prp? You know, you remember that? That was one of the first ones.

I don't remember the brand, but it was one of the first ones we did. We had full high speed video cameras for 3D biomechanical analysis of gates and you know, for, for cycling and for exercising. We had, you know, EKG set up. We had indirect calorimetry and VO2 max testing. We had a full biomechanics and exercise physiology lab that I was the director of. I was the director of sports performance, what was called Champion Sports Medicine. That was my job. That was my role for like six or seven years. So yeah, I actually I, I did wind up kind of doing something that sounds, kind of, sounds kind of similar to what you were doing except.

Yeah, that's crazy.

I was just the peon, not the physician.

Oh no, no, that's. It seems like that's the theme you keep getting into here. But no, man, that's, I think it's awesome because yeah, again, very parallel paths here. And so long story short, I ended up going to Northwestern and doing my residency out there and then fellowship and continuing to work on the business plan essentially that I said, look, I'm going to invest whatever I have, anything I have, I'm not going to join a group because I felt like joining a group at that point. You know, you'd be, you'd join a surgical group, for example, most of the time. And as you probably know, because you worked in that area, in that setting, you know, the surgeon is probably going to be a little more aggressive and is going to call the shots. And you know, here we wanted to kind of shift the paradigm and make it effectively a non surgical musculoskeletal institute that was integrative and functional. So we, you know, we would bring in, we'd have nutrition protocols that, you know, we'd work with an RD who would also see patients. So it was sort of a one stop shop where patients would come in for some ailment, let's say rotator cuff tendinopathy, and they would leave better, you know, after rehabbing their Rotator cuff and they would leave more functional and there, if you were to take a look at their biomarkers across the board, you know, they were effectively younger and more functional when they left than when they came in. So that, that was the model. And so after my residency, I invested everything I had to open that model. I partnered with couple of chiropractors in New Jersey. We opened that model, it flourished. I mean, as you can imagine, like this was earlier in the 2000s, there was really a darth of that in at least in this area in New Jersey, New York, you know, there was really no one doing everything to that extent. And so the model just flourished. So ended up getting to the point where grew aggressively, brought in a couple of other partners.

Which was interesting because you know, I think the rapid growth and maybe not being careful enough with selecting one of my partners ended up effectively causing a rift. And after about, you know, there were seven offices of these, of this model, we ended up essentially breaking up. I sold my interest back to the practice. He ended up showing some, you know, some sort of colors that were a little ugly. And you know, I've since forgiven them for everything that happened, but I've actually thanked them because if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have been thrusted all the way back to come full circle to get into the industry again. Because at that time I was consulting part time, I was doing some ghost writing for a few big sports nutrition brands that, you know, you know, the big boys that now are owned by Glambia and.

And actually as you mentioned before, like Redline, like vpx, I was also consulting with.

Running clinical trials for some dietary ingredients and finished products in the industry with Tim Zigginfuss at the time. And we were just kind of working part time in that capacity because as you can imagine, running a booming practice with seven offices and, and many employees was definitely taking up a lot of time while growing the family as well. So finally the breakup really between one of my partners and I is what thrusted me full bore into the industry again. And so Tim zigginfuss, who's a PhD exercise physiologist, he used to be the chief science officer for Biotest and T Nation. You remember those guys?

Yep. Oh yeah, for sure. I've written some articles for T Nation.

And what was the other one you said?

Biotest.

That's Bodybuilding.com's supplement line.

Yeah, no, so it's actually teenage. So T Nation developed T Nation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Labs. Biotest Labs. Yeah. Out of Colorado.

Right, right, yeah, sorry. I get my websites mixed up that have the tanned, ripped men and women on them. There's just so many.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they are now, they're a dime a dozen now, but they're all, probably a lot of them are going to go away any soon.

Wait, why do you say that?

Well, you know, the big disruptor, I guess in terms of they're not necessarily go away, but they're going to change. They're going to have to change. They're going to have to adapt because the big disruptor is coming, right, which is Amazon, so. Really? Yeah. What do you mean? Well.

They'Ve already shown signs of wanting to get into the industry with their Elements, the Amazon Elements line.

I didn't know anything about that. So Amazon is launching its own nutritional supplements line, huh?

Yeah, well, they launched already. Yeah, it's called Elements. Is it good? They are. Well, they've, they're doing some, some cool things, I must say. They're doing some great things. Like, you know, they've, they're using the QR code where you can scan the label and get the original C of A. You get the original lot and production information from the, when it was manufactured, where it was manufactured. So I think, you know, there's a lot more of that. Transparency, Full transparency, Full disclosure. They're doing some cool things, actually. And so that's why I'm saying they're going to be the big disruptor because, you know their scale, right.

And they're probably, they're probably going to do like a lot of the popular stuff like fish oil, multivitamins. Right.

That's how they started.

Yeah, you're right, you're right.

They started. They actually did. That's exactly what they did. Magnesium curcumin, generic, you know, turmeric, like a 95% curcuminoid turmeric. I believe they did a D3 of vitamin D and I think they've got a calcium supplement as well for women. And so they're probably, yeah, they're going to continue to expand their line, but who knows where they go next in terms of, you know, the writing sort of on the wall, right, that they're probably going to want to dive into some of these other functional categories. Maybe.

Yeah, maybe. I don't know. You know this because we've been talking, but I'm really not that interested anymore in the, the, you know, the basics, right, like the multivitamins and fish oils. Just because there are so many companies like, like Amazon that are doing Those type of things, you know, I'm, I'm wanting to develop, as we are developing a lot more very, very unique formulations that are, that are combinations of things that I've, I've discovered and used myself, you know, that, that are mashup of a lot of things, you know, for longevity and ketosis and gut and things like that. So basically as a physician you kind of transitioned away from like the traditional patient and clinical practice and dove into working with a lot of these supplement companies and you've got this, this thing now called, called Nutra Vigilance. Is that, is that kind of where everything wound up?

No. So basically I partnered with Tim at cahs, which is that center for Applied Health Sciences, that, the, that's the Human Clinical Research center, basically a research institute. So we do all our clinical trials at CHS in Ohio. Then Supplement Safety Solutions is another company with, I have a different.

Partner there, Dr. Steve Schmitz. And what we do there is that's mostly a regulatory compliance, safety based company. Right. So it works on a different aspect of the industry. So CHS is doing clinical trials to validate and substantiate safety and efficacy of just about you know, many of the most common ingredients that are available right now on the market to even multi ingredient finished products as well. We do studies there at chs. So CHS is the research that validates the safety and efficacy. Then Supplement Safety Solutions does nutrivigilance, which is basically now pre and post market safety surveillance.

So what that means is if you're a company like for example, like Kion Kian wants to know that when they bring a product to market and they introduce it into interstate commerce to their consumer base.

It'S important for them to abide by some of these federal regulations that are in place. For example, since 2007 there's something called the Non Prescription Drug Dietary Supplement Consumer Protection Act. And what that act does is it lays out a set of rules and guidelines that mandates that anyone who sells a product into commerce, anything commercial for an ingestible product that's a dietary supplement is supposed to have an adverse event report and a customer complaint, like a product quality complaint system in place. Now you probably wouldn't be surprised, I was going to say you'd be surprised how many brands out there don't have a system. Right. You guys are obviously different because right from the beginning you made that a priority. But there are many brands that are still flying out there without an actual legitimate system that can actually keep an eye on the cookie Jar, if you will.

I want to ask you what that means for people who are actually grabbing a supplement. And by the way, not to distract us too much or dive down too deep of a rab hole, but I just checked out that Amazon supplements line. Yeah, I, I don't like it, dude. Like, they've got like, their, their multivitamin is like folic acid grown on yeast. It's like synthetic folic acid, which is, you know, it's kind of bad news bears for people who've got like methylation. Yeah, their vitamin D is like a crap load, crapload of vitamin D. There's no vitamin K or anything in there, so you get increased risk of calcification. Yeah, yeah, some, somebody needs to, somebody needs to tell Amazon what's up because I wouldn't use this stuff.

Yeah, I think, you know, if you think about it, if you're them, they're trying to dip their toe in the water and be very careful with, you know, I'm sure they've got a team, an army of attorneys and legal guys that are, it's almost like the product development team there is probably being run mostly by regulatory and by legal, which is not the way you want to run a company. If you want to be innovative and truly, you know, bringing something of a little more unique value at least.

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You were talking about how a lot of these nutrition supplements companies and we don't want to kick the horse to death because I think a lot of people know that it's not that well regulated the nutrition supplements industry and in many cases folks can just push out there whatever they want and slap anything they want on the label, even if the, if the bottle doesn't contain what it says that it contains. But when it comes to an issue like that, like what are some examples of common things that people are consuming that really aren't regulated that well? I mean, in terms of one bottle versus another, what are some of the shocking things that you've found in the nutrition supplement industry history?

Ah, okay, good. Yeah. All right. So obviously without giving anyone up, because as you can imagine in this position, especially under supplement safety solutions, sometimes I feel like a priest or a rabbi. Right. We end up finding out everyone's darkest, deepest secrets. Right. In terms of, wow, that really happened. But some of these things that occur, they happen because of human error. They're not necessarily intentional. Right. So I'll throw that caveat out there. Not everything is done with intentional malice. Right. But I will say, look, we were involved in a situation where there was a disgruntled employee at a contract manufacturer, right. And a pretty prominent sports nutrition brand unfortunately ended up succumbing to being, having their product run on a line that this disgruntled employee was employed on and was during his shift. And let's just say that he introduced.

Less than desirable items into product. And that's something that we were able to discover and do root cause analysis and investigation. And, you know, that's part of what we do.

That's one of the extreme reasons, Right. Why the FDA mandates that if you put, if you're, if you're going to introduce a product into interstate commerce and you're going to have consumers using your product, that's why you need to have a surveillance system in place even after the fact, after you've produced the product. Because sometimes the only way you ever find out is if you're surveilling what's happening. Right. With consumer complaints.

So that's an example of something that ended up really shocking us. That's something that happened maybe five or six years ago with a very prominent brand.

When you say introducing a foreign compound into the nutrition supplement, you make it sound like, forget the name of that movie where the guy's like putting hair and, you know, jacking off into people's food. Are we, are we talking about like, stuff like that or just, just basically like, you know, steroids, hormones, actual compounds that people normally wouldn't want in a supplement. In a supplement. Or is this guy like.

No, it is kind of like more like the first. More like.

Oh, gosh, I was hoping.

Yeah, sorry, did say that.

Okay, well, that's nasty. So this is a contract manufacturer. When you say contract manufacturer, what you mean is that unlike a company like, say, Thorne, for example, these supplements were not being produced in house by that company, but that company had contracted with a manufacturer to actually make that supplement for them, which, which is very common practice in the nutrition supplement industry.

Absolutely. But.

But this was not a manufacturing practice that was being well regulated. And so this guy was able to do that.

Exactly. That's exactly it. So they didn't have the appropriate processes. So really what happened is the problem there starts with gmp, right? That Contract manufacturer really, really didn't have their eyes dotted and their T's cross when it comes to good manufacturing practices.

So they weren't gmp.

You know, they were, but they weren't following. Right. They had an SOP. But what good is having an SOP if you're actually not following your SOP with the appropriate oversight and in process controls and etc. So they did, they weren't following their GMP guidelines.

Okay, and for people who don't know what an SOP is, you're just referring to standard operating procedures for that particular manufacturing facility.

Exactly. Okay, that's correct.

And for people who aren't familiar with cgmp, can you describe that?

Yeah. So CGMP is it's now.

Federally mandated.

Good Manufacturing practices, which is basically, it's regulated by something called 21 CFR, which is the code of federal regulations. It's basically federal law and it's part 111 and 110. So part 110 covers food, part 111 covers dietary supplements. And for your audience who may not know that, you know, well, how do you know the difference? The quick and dirty, the easy way to tell is if you look on the back of your product or your bottle, if there's a supplement facts panel, it's a dietary supplement. If it's a nutrition facts panel, then technically it is regulated as a food. So that's, that's the quick and dirty way. Now what, what the CGMP does is it basically sets up a set of rules and regulations and standards about how to run everything from, let's say you've got a pre workout product that's got four product, four ingredients in it. Right now those ingredients need to come into the, into the manufacturing facility somehow they need to be delivered there. So they get delivered, they get delivered with paperwork which includes, it's supposed to include a certificate of analysis. But part of the GMP processes doesn't allow you to just trust that C of A because you know, they can be doctored and they could be, you know, obviously fraudulent C of A's. So what they make you do is they make you quarantine. Per gmp, you're supposed to quarantine in a locked area or at least in an area that is clearly demarcated and separated off to the side. Any incoming raw materials are quarantined before they get tested again, confirmed, and then released into inventory. So ingredients come in, they get tested, they get verified, then they get released from quarantine and now they go into inventory. And now they can be used for the staging process, which requires something called a master manufacturing record for every product that's manufactured. Then there's something called the batch production record. Once it goes into production with the milling and the mixing and the filling of the product into either capsule tablets, if it's a powdered, like a ready to mix powder, then it goes directly into a container. Then there's the it covers. So GMP covers all of that, from soup to nuts, from start to finish, including labeling, bottling, what you do with the inventory.

How and when it gets released for shipping. So again, if it's a contract manufacturer that's working on behalf of the brand, the brand is also supposed to have their own way of verifying that the contract manufacturer they're using is in fact following GMP guidelines. So they're supposed to be audited on a routine basis. And then the brand themselves is supposed to test and release the finished product, the finished good, before it goes into.

Interstate commerce, before a consumer, a customer, is able to purchase it.

What you're saying is a lot of companies don't do that? They take shortcuts?

Yeah, of course, yeah, because. Right. It takes resources and money to do all this. Right. And so, yeah, if a company is motivated by economics and they're trying to save a buck, then this is an area they can certainly save a few bucks in. Right. Is the process, the GMP process. In addition to they can save a buck by using inferior quality ingredients, raw materials, those are other ways they can obviously save a dollar or two.

Okay, so to do things right, let's, let's use, for example, you know, people, you know, like, like there are a few supplements that I take every day, like a multivitamin, fish oil, creatine, you know, those are some of my daily staples. Let's say, let's say fish oil, for example. Like, like walk me through what it would look like for a company be to be doing everything right when it comes to designing a supplement like that, that a lot of folks are taking. Like, like what would be the steps that you would love to see a company going through or that people listening in could, could look into when it comes to the nutritional supplement that they're using as a staple and whether or not the company making that is actually going through each of the steps that you would like to see a company going through?

Yeah, so let's use your, your example of fish oil, for example. So fish oil is a good one because actually, so I used to do some consulting for Nordic Naturals. They're definitely one of the, one of the leading.

Say, fish oil brands in the world right now.

So one of the things you want to make sure is first there's your raw material. So what's your source? Your source of the raw material. So fish oil, you can source fish oil.

From different biomasses, right? So you can source it from sardines, you can source it from salmon, you can source it from any other fatty fish, anchovies.

Some of the things you'd want to make sure if you're, if you're going from scratch and you're building a fish oil brand per se, is first, you want to make sure that your source is fresh, that it's reliable, that it's sustainable, and that you can test it, obviously for purity and potency. So with fish oil, right, you want to make sure that it's fresh. So one of the ways you can check for oil freshness is you can see if it's oxidized. You can check for peroxidation value. Now, this is an area where it can get a little controversial because there actually could be a role, believe it or not, for consuming somewhat what people would consider, well, that's rancid fish oil or rancid oil. Why would you ever place rancid oil into your body? Why would you ever consume that? Well, there's actually a hormetic. There's a theory of if you take like, you know, salmon oil, for example, and ferment it, some of that, some of those oxidized byproducts are actually signaling agents, and you can actually take advantage of the hormetic response and your body can develop an endogenous antioxidant response to it. So it's almost like you're introducing a stress and then you're adapting to that stress. But let's just say you want the freshest fish oil possible, right? Because that could be a little controversial. And that could be another discussion for another day or an article.

So you want to check for peroxidation value. Then of course, you want to see how clean that oil is. So you want to make sure that it's independently tested using something called icp, mass specific, which is mass spectrometry. Spectroscopy is a way to basically measure the level of heavy metals in the product. So you want to see what kind of heavy metal load it contains. You also want to, when you're talking about fish oil, you want to test for things like dioxins or persistent organic pollutants, things like PCBs or polychlorinated biphenyl compounds. And then once you have clean oil, you want to keep it clean. So one of the things, for example, that the best fish oil companies in the world do is when they source their fish and they start to extract the oil, they actually start doing it and keep it under what's called a nitrogen blanket. So they use nitrogen gas to keep not only the temperature down and under control, but also. So when you have nitrogen gas in a closed loop system, you're basically displacing oxygen. So you're able to keep your oil a lot fresher, right? So you're preventing the oxidation from taking place.

So after you know that you've assured exceptional freshness and you know you've got high quality oil and you're keeping it that way, then you want to basically have control over your entire supply chain, chain or as much as possible. And if you're the kind of company that cannot have control over the entire supply chain from essentially from like, if you're talking about a botanical product from seed to shelf, or in the case of oil, you know, from fish to bottle.

Then you should at least have an incredible amount of oversight over that entire process. And it should be a, there should be a chain of custody that allows you to see everything that your oil has been through, what it's been exposed to, what processes has it been exposed to, what temperatures has it been maintained under, how has it been cared for throughout the entire supply chain until it gets to the bottling facility or manufacturing facility, which then goes into those stages that we talked about before, right into gmp.

How many people?

There's a lot that goes into, you know, a good quality product.

How many companies in the supplements industry do you think are actually jumping through all these hoops with their, with their products?

Oh, gosh, man.

It has gotten better, I will say that. And part of the reason it's gotten better, it's because of exposure, right? I mean, social media, for example, it is keeping more companies on it. I would say it's probably, you know, you have tiers, you probably have a top like quartile, you could probably break it up into quartiles. Like you have a top 25% where a quarter of the brands are really following all the necessary steps to keep, to make, to ensure that they're providing a high quality product to their consumers.

In terms of following all these steps and jumping through all these hoops. But then you've got another 25% that's probably doing maybe 75% of it. And then You've got another, you know, probably half or 50% that's probably only following 50% of these guidelines or these, you know, best, let's call them best practices. Right.

So how can people know when they look at the actual bottle that they're consuming, like what are the actual things people should be looking for on the label? Are there markers? Are there ways that aside from like calling a company or visiting that company's website and scrolling through whatever laboratory certificate of analyses or things like that that people can actually look for.

Yeah, so that would be the main thing to look for are if you call, let's say you're interested in a brand, you should be able to ask the brand to produce certificate of analysis of the batch or the lot of every product that they are producing. So, so if you're about to purchase a product and you've got a lot number, you should be able to call the company or the brand and ask and require that they provide you with a certificate of analysis showing the results of that C of A for any of the major marker compounds that they've chosen in order to maintain to assure that that product contains what it says it contains. Now you do have third party purveyors like NSF for example, Right? NSF certified for sport, which definitely is an organization that puts companies through the hoops of making sure that they follow not only appropriate GMP guidelines, but in order to get NSF certified for sport, they also need to be prepared in a manner that minimizes any risk of cross contamination. Like for an athlete that's tested, for example. A tested athlete, same thing for Informed choice, Informed Sport. It's another good one. Banned Substance Control Group is another good one. So there's probably a top three that you can look for if you want to make sure that a product is manufactured in a way that it will minimize cross contamination or adulteration.

Okay, what were the three again?

So NSF.

Informed choice, slash informed Sport. And then the third is BSCG or Banned Substance Control Group.

What about that Australian one, the tg?

Tga.

Yeah, tga.

So TGA is different in that they don't test the finished product. So it's not necessarily as much of an issue with brands. TGA is more of a, it's more of a level of.

Certification that a contract manufacturer has to undergo in order to be TGA certified. So that's more on the contract manufacturing level. TGA basically elevates the standards beyond even gmp. So there's like minimum requirements, that is federal law that you're supposed to follow, which is gmp. And then there's TGA and then there's sqf which is for food. For anything that's food based, you want to make sure that it's manufactured in an SQF certified facility. But TGA is the Australian government's standards and TGA definitely elevates the standards and practices even beyond the bare minimum gmp. And then you have other, other things like usp. Right. United States Pharmacopia. But the limitation with USP is they don't necessarily have, they cannot approve a product or give you a monograph for a product that is a little more exotic. Like let's say you've got a certain peptide or a certain alkaloid from a rare botanical or an herb. That's something that's going to be limited that like USP will not be able to give you the approval for. And then finally you have, you know, what we're doing now is by, by popular demand now with a lot of the companies that we're working with that Supplement Safety Solutions, we're actually providing a seal as well that it's called nutrivigilance Verified. It's the only physician directed regulatory compliance program. And so we're going to start offering that seal to be able to be leveraged.

Okay, so that's what you're doing. Nutrivigilance is you're basically certifying, you're going in, you're checking to see if everything that you've just described is actually being done by these players in the supplement industry and then if it is, you'll slap the neutral Vigilance. What'd you call the safety seal?

It's a seal. Yeah, yeah. It's like a logo, like a seal.

Yeah. But you call it the supplement safety.

Supplement Safety Solutions nutrivigilance Verified. Yeah, Supplement Safety Solutions seal.

Okay, got it. So that's what, that's what people would look for as well would be some sort of a seal like that.

Exactly. Because what that seal indicates is it indicates that that brand that's carrying that seal is working with us. And if you're working with us, then that means you're going to have your pre market safety and post market safety needs covered, best practices covered. Which means we look at all the stuff that we just discussed. Pre market is manufacturing everything that goes into the product being made and manufactured before it goes to market. Hence pre market safety then post market safety is that, that's the vigilance and the surveillance, the ongoing monitoring of hey, what's going on once your product gets out there, are we getting, did we get a spike, for example, a signal in complaints of GI complaints? Maybe there's nausea, vomiting, diarrhea for a certain batch or a certain lot. And again, that might not be because of any intentional malicious. It could have been that there was a bad batch of a certain raw material or botanical. And if we go back and reanalyze it, we might see that the microbiome analysis is off on that particular batch of that ingredient when it gets retested.

I want to move on to some of the crazy new stuff, like the crazy new ingredients out there that you're excited about. What are some of the crazy new ingredients out there? I mean for everything there's like new calorie restriction mimetics, there's new ketones, there are new longevity formulas, new pre workout molecules. Tell me about a few of the, a few of the molecules that you, that you're excited about. And also I'm just curious how you find out about this stuff. I mean, are you hopping on a plane to China and visiting labs in other countries? Are you wandering around the forest with your farmer's hat on, like digging up roots and harvesting things? Like how does it actually work in the position that you were in to find new ingredients? And then what are some of those cool new ingredients?

Yeah, yeah, no, so, okay, so do you want to start with how we do what we do when we're finding, when we're kind of going on the prowl for new cool bioactive ingredients?

Yeah, sure.

So that's something we do through Nova Nutra, the other, the third company of the triad, sort of like you mentioned before, and through Nova Nutra, that's where.

Wait, back to the Tritis, Nova Nutra, Nutra Vigilance and what was the other one?

So there's the center for Applied Health Sciences is the research arm, the R and D arm. Right. Then there's Supplement Safety Solutions, Nutra Vigilance, which is the regulatory. Then the third of the triad is Nova Nutra.

And Nova Nutra, like Nova, like the name implies, is where we look for innovative new ingredients, new bioactive compounds that we discover, then we study, we incubate in our lab and then we basically button it up so that we have safety data, we have efficacy data, it's regulatorily compliant. And then what we do is when we out license that to a partner, a third party partner, like.

Basically a raw material distributor, because that's not something we do. Right. We want to be involved on the back end, the Cool science, the discovery. And then we just want to launch it, have somebody take it, and then we want to move on to the next thing in our pipeline.

Right? So. So if I am over in Finland and I'm out with my twin boys and we're wandering around the forest tasting lindenberry and bilberry and learning all sorts of things about the antioxidant potential of these. These tiny little tart berries, and I think, well, I'd love to create an antioxidant formula that's like the, the ultimate Finland antioxidant powder. I would then come to you with the list of things. I'd say, okay, well, I want lindenberry in this, I want bilberry in this. I want. What's that dark orange one that they have over there that's so good. I forget the name of that dark.

Orange berry from Finland.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

Orange.

It's like a dark orange. What's the name of that one? Anyways, I'll, I'll remember it. I'll remember it later. But anyway, so I would come to you, this list now, Nova Nutra. You would then go out and find, you'd find basically raw ingredient sources that are. That you can vet for quality and vet that, hey, this is actual lindenberry. This is actual bilberry. This comes from a good source. This one isn't fraught with pesticides and herbicides, et cetera.

Yes, yes. So that's one approach. That's one strategy. So one strategy is we do have relationships with, let's call them like indigenous medicine hunters. Right. If you will, which is kind of what you describe, like people that are foraging.

Remote areas of the world, talking to and actually engaging with some of the local, you know, for example, local shamans or local traditional health gurus in those areas or in those cultures.

And so that's one way to do it. If you were to approach us with that interest, then we would want to secure a source, start doing some of the analytical work. So there's a few stages to this, right? So one stage is let's discover what it is that we're interested in a biomass, for example. So you just talked about a few berries that might be some exotic berries.

You know, maybe like an Amla berry, for example, or, you know, from the Ayurvedic, like Phalanthus umblica, for example. And you might feel like, hey, you know.

They'Ve been consuming this berry for centuries and been using it in traditional Ayurvedic systems or local indigenous health systems for all these different ailments. I'd love to really dig in, peel back the onion layer, if you will, on this biomass to analyze it for its bioactive compounds and then maybe even concentrate or try to standardize or extract it for some of these bioactive compounds that may be more responsible or predominantly responsible for the effect you're looking for. If you're just looking for general antioxidant profiles, we can talk about that at a future.

Show as well. I think you probably, I don't know what you feel about it, but the data is really showing us that if you're looking at just pure redox potential, like antioxidant potential, you're probably looking in the wrong place as far as health optimizing or longevity and health span and lifespan optimizing compound. Because really what you should be after is the signaling potential of these compounds that although they might also have powerful antioxidant properties from a physical chemistry standpoint, that's really not what's causing it to have profound physiologic benefits. Most of the time. That's what the science is dictating. Right. So what we'd want to do is dig in and see what bioactives are actually responsible for the effect you're, that you're interested in. And then we have to take it into doing an assessment of its regulatory status. Meaning is it considered an ODI or an old dietary ingredient that's been on the market before 1994 if you want to launch it in the US there's international regulatory concerns that we would need to look at before taking a deeper dive and investing big dollars into really developing this ingredient to basically bring it to market as a new branded, proprietary ingredient, where we might actually even have some patented methods, some new novel findings.

For this new ingredient. Then we take it into some first in human work. So after we determine that it's regulatorily compliant, and then we get an idea for LD50 and some basic safety work in toxicology models, then we jump right to human preliminary, we call them preliminary alpha studies in our lab. And the cool thing about having our clinical research center, the CHS that we talked about before, is that that lab can also serve as part of the incubator for any new ingredients that you want to bring to market. Okay. So in our lab we can do our first in human experiments, there's. And see if something's actually moving the needle. Because, you know, we do things differently than you would in pharma. Right? In pharma, you would go through this like high throughput screening and in vitro and tissue culture and cell culture models. And then if you've got some molecular mechanisms, then you take it to animal preclinical and then from animal, then you start your first in human work, right. Your phase one. That just takes way too long. Number one, especially when you're talking number two, you know, you're talking about compounds or ingredients that are naturally occurring. And so safety is less of a. Toxicity is less of a concern.

And if we're not able to move the needle in humans in a small cohort of subjects, of five to 10 subjects, then that ingredient or that product is probably not worth bringing to market per se. Or at least it falls lower on our totem pole.

Okay, got it. So, by the way, C. Buckthorn berry.

For people who are watching, wondering.

I was thinking it was Cloud bear. Cloudberry is another really good one from over there. But sea buckthorn, that's, that's the one I really like. Yeah.

Yes. Buckthorn is high in palmidol lake acid, right? Omega 7. Yeah.

Have, have that and some reindeer. And you're off to the races, baby. Anyways, though, the. I know, really good stuff. I'm going to live in Estonia for the summer with my family at this, this Mind Valley thing. So I'm sure I'll have some over there too. I'm pretty sure they have Seabuck there or in Estonia. If not, I'll take the ferry over to Helsinki and find me some anyways, though. So what I was asking though, before we dove down that rabbit hole was what are some of the ingredients that you like that are kind of like some of the newer, sexier things, like give me a few examples. You know, here's here, here's an example of say like a calorie restriction memetic that's new on the scene, how you find something like that and then, you know, how you would then turn around and make that available to say, like a supplement manufacturer.

Yeah. So, so I'll give you an example. Like a couple of the ingredients in our, in our actual pipeline that we developed, for example, you know, and obviously this is, you know, full disclosure, we have IP on, on a couple of these ingredients. Right.

So a lot of people don't know what that means when you say that you have ip.

Oh yeah. So intellectual properties, meaning that we have an interest, a financial interest in some of these ingredients that we are bringing to market. Because, because we've discovered them and done a lot of the development work. And then when we license it to an ingredient supplier, then we end up seeing a percentage of their sales. So there is a business interest, obviously, in many of the ingredients that we bring to market, if we're bringing a new one to market. So, yeah, I just wanted to get that full disclosure, not to hide anything. So to give you an example, so theacrine or T crene is one of the ones that we're most proud of. And methylibrine or dynamine. So methylibrine is the generic compound which is a purine alkaloid, and it's sort of a chemical cousin of theacrine. T Crene is the brand name.

Yeah, that's like an alkaloid that's kind of similar to caffeine, right?

It is, it is. So what's really cool about this is the way we went down that rabbit hole is to bring that to market is we went back and said, you know, I bet you there's a few rare teas, botanical species teas like Camellia genus, right. So green tea, for example, is Camellia sinensis. That's like the species name for green tea or black tea. Basically, any, any major white, black or green tea is coming from Camellia sinensis as the botanical. That's the plant.

Where you can harvest the leaves from. So we went back and found that there was a particular tea called Kucha. Locally in the Yunnan province of China, they call it Kucha tea. And locally in those areas, the kids that are going to school, that are in high school, during exam time, the parents provide a lot more of this tea to make them sharper and improve their fatigue resistance and allow them to study longer and hard. Whenever somebody comes down with the flu or some other ailments, you know, this Kucha tea is kind of like one. It's been locally in that area, it's been one of the go to remedies. Right. So we decided to take a look at that, at that species. And that species is called Camellia assamica variety Kucha instead of Camellia sinensis. So it's basically a different species of tea. And within that tea you find a bunch of alkaloids like you do in many other plants. Right? Plants have a lot of alkaloids. And alkaloids basically just means that there are bitter compounds that are nitrogen containing, they have amine groups or nitrogen groups. So that makes it. An alkalo usually has a higher ph if you put it in water. So that's where the term alkaloid comes from. So the alkaloids that were found in this particular tea Were very unique. It had a unique profile. Something that you don't find in your standard green tea or black tea or white tea. So we were really intrigued that it had actually been characterized chemically over 30 years ago. But no one ever did anything with it. They kind of just like. Yeah, they characterized like 35 different compounds in this tea and no one ever really went any further with it. There was some very early, early work done that we saw that was intriguing.

With respect to its analgesic properties and anti inflammatory properties. But we ended up securing a source first, a botanical source and then we ended up basically getting it synthesized. We started looking at it to make, to kind of give you a fast forward because this is like an eight.

Year process to develop this one molecule, this theocrine.

One ingredient. Yeah. To bring one compound, one ingredient to market. Yeah, it's been a long run.

The molecule is theacrine. What's the ingredient called?

So the branded ingredient is tea cream. All we did was take. Yeah, all we did was take the H out and then kept it t. And then it's that way it looks like tea and people can, you know, resonate with. It's like it comes from tea. It is also found by the way in.

A fruit called kupuasu which is indigenous to the Amazon in South America. Kupuasu fruit is Theobroma grandiflorum. So they actually look like cocoa pods. And these cocoa pods are also rich in theacrine. And so we are actually in the process of securing some cupuacu from Brazil and doing some work with naturally occurring instead of just doing this nature identical synthetic where we isolated just the theocrine.

I love those cocoa pods by the way. Like cocoa fruit cocoa pods. Laird Hamilton, last time I was hanging with him in Hawaii he introduced these to me. Just crack them and eat all these little, little cocoa. Are the cocoa beans the same as the cocoa pods?

I think they're a little different. Like the pods are the big, the larger fruit.

Okay.

And then the beans are inside, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the pods, you crack open the big pods and that's like the big fruit and then they're usually sitting. The beans probably are sitting in that like thick sort of almost.

Yeah, it's like this mucus like snotty substance.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly it. So that's another place that mucinage type of material, that white almost paste is also rich from the Theobroma grandiflorum fruit. The cocoa pod from that species is also rich in theacrine. So what's really cool about theacrine is the reason we're excited is at first we noticed that there were some experiential neurocognitive. You know, basically there was neuroactivity there. So people felt an enhanced mood. They felt anecdotally and you know, just their perception was improved mental clarity, focus, concentration and energy. But one of the things that made it different, because that sounds a lot like caffeine or like any other stimulant, right? One of the things that made it different was more. The mood was more amplified than you get with caffeine. And the other intriguing aspect that we found in our first in human work with T crine or theocrine was that anxiety actually went down. And what's different from caffeine is that when you get these same findings of elevated movements, euphoria, you know, perceived energy focus and concentration from caffeine, it is actually.

It is directly proportional to levels of perceived irritability, anxiety, jitteriness. There's an edginess, right, to people when they're. When they consume like pure caffeine, like caffeine anhydrous. Or if, you know, if they're somebody who carries one of those. One of those snips in the cytochrome P450 and their CYP1A2, where they're slow metabolizers of caffeine and they're real sensitive to it. They typically. You have that jitteriness or that edginess, obviously, because you get that cardiovascular stimulation. That's something we were not getting at all with our first in human work with theocrine. So we got really excited really quickly.

And then we started sponsoring more animal work. We started doing toxicology and safety work in order to do what's called to get this compound to be grass or generally recognized as safe. And that's a very high standard that you need to meet. It's a high bar that the FDA sets in order to be able to do a ton of safety work that shows that your ingredient or substance can in fact be consumed effectively on a daily basis safely as part of the food supply. That means it's grass. So we were able to do all this work to get it. And now there's even animal data that shows that this compound, T crine or theocrine, not only is it a neuroactive ingredient that's great for energy, mood, focus and cognition and nootropic benefits, but. But beyond that, there's now animal data showing that it has Hepatoprotective effect and even upregulates sirtuin like SIRT3 genes and mitochondrial efficiency in mice that are fed theocrine over it.

So you get almost like an anti aging effect.

Yes. Yeah. Wow. So imagine an ingredient that makes you feel almost like caffeine, makes you feel with a little less of the edge without any cardiovascular response, no hemodynamic or pressure response, meaning no increase in blood pressure, heart rate. And there's animal data to suggest that it actually has health span and life extension benefits and it has hepato protection benefits and it has neuroprotective benefits beyond just it making you feel good and improving your performance. It doesn't just make your engine work better per se, but it even has neuroprotective benefits in animal models that are that they do what's called restraint induced stress. So whenever you, you basically hold rodents down too long, they get exceedingly stressed and it causes this huge inflammatory response and it actually causes cognitive dysfunction. Like you can you cause dementia in these, in these rodents by holding them down that long. They get learning impairments, memory impairments, they can no longer navigate mazes as well. What theacrine has been shown to do in a dose dependent fashion, meaning the more you give it up to a certain dose, the more benefit you get is you prevent that from occurring in these rodents who you hold down and you basically introduce this stress that normally causes cognitive dysfunction. Theocrine protects them. And when he did the necropsy work. Yeah, it actually I feel like we.

Could do a whole podcast on, on Theocrine and, and it's amazing.

Yeah, it's really exciting.

I actually, I wanted to ask you. We might have to do a part two because I wanted to ask you about a whole bunch of other crazy new ingredients, but I also wanted to.

Ask you about if you want to do like a quick, I don't know, like, like a, like a flash, like a lightning.

Yeah, let's, let's do, let's do rapid fire. Throw two more crazy number new ingredients out there at me. Like give me the 32nd overview because I also before we wrap up today, I want to ask you also the one thing, I don't want to let you go before I ask you this question. It would be novel delivery mechanisms. Right. Because the capsules are so old school. I want to know about some of these patches and lipophilic delivery mechanisms. And I'll do a quick rapid fire with you on that because a lot of times I get these podcasts going And I've got, I actually one of the things I do is I go over people's blood work and data with them and work with companies like Wellness FX to do this. And so I've got the next couple of hours after we finish just going over people's blood work with them. But before I dive into that, my first client is in 15 minutes. So we got a few minutes to play with here. Fill me in on a couple more of these crazy new ingredients, give me a 30 second overview and then let's dive into novel delivery mechanisms.

All right, well, another one we're excited about is, so we're calling it Karno Prime. Imagine you're familiar with beta alanine, right? In the sports nutrition world.

Absolutely, yeah.

Right. Carnosine, beta alanine. Imagine being able to load beta alanine the way that people have loaded creatine forever, right. When creatine first hit the market, you could load creatine in five to seven days and see actual ergogenic performance improvements from creatine monohydrate supplementation in five to seven days. Days with carnosin. Part of the issue is this, you know, the paresthesia from it, number one, limits people from being able to take more than, you know, 3.2 grams per day.

The nasty tingling sensation.

Yeah, yeah, that's the paresthesia, the itching, tingling, burning. So we've managed to find a way to put a nutraceutical blanket on the, it's called the MGPRD receptor, which is the itch receptor that's responsible for causing the darn itching, the paresthesia for beta alanine. So now if we put a nutraceutical blanket on it now, we can start really cranking your doses up. And one of the interesting things about.

So beta alanine is a rate limiting step for producing for your listeners. They may already know a lot of this, but there's a peptide in muscle called carnosine. And carnosine is a peptide composed of beta alanine and histidine, two amino acids. So it's a dipeptide. This dipeptide has buffering capabilities. So when you're doing high intensity activity, usually in that 60 to 200 second range of super, super all out high intensity activity, you get hydrogen ions, acidosis, basically that's manufactured within the muscle, within working muscle. And so this carnosine is there to buffer that. So you can, if you have more of this peptide then you can extend your capacity to do work at a high level. And so this has enormous application as obviously as you know, for Everything going from MMA athletes to crossfitters to high level athletes that have a sprinting component in there, to racers, etc. Etc. Cyclists, you name it. So we managed to find a way to get 15 to 25 grams of beta alanine per day. And what that allows us to do is to get a total dose of over 150 grams or so of total dose of beta alanine. That's basically the magic dose, total dose that it takes to increase levels of intramuscular carnosine, that peptide enough to about 30 to 40%, enough to where then you get the ergogenic benefit. So we're excited about that, so we're bringing that to market in the next year. There's also other cool stuff like alternative fuels. So an alternative fuel is basically imagine something that doesn't really burn like a fat or oxidize like a fat, doesn't burn like a carbohydrate, but it's also not a ketone, an exogenous ketone, which obviously have started to make their way into the market over the last couple of years. So I'm excited about that because these alternative metabolic fuels or substrates that don't burn like a carbohydrate or like a fat have clearly they have metabolic health benefits in addition to some potentially some really cool performance enhancing benefits.

Microbiome modulation is an exciting area that's going to continue to explode.

And also the endocannabinoid system. Man. Yeah.

Before I let you go, because I want to come back to some of these unique ingredients and we could do a separate podcast on these but novel delivery mechanisms. They're like patches.

Microneedle injections, like under the tongue delivery mechanisms, like things that are not encapsulations per se, that you've looked into that you think are going to be kind of the next big thing in the supplement industry or things that you think are gonna be really good as far as delivering and increasing bioavailability of a lot of these compounds.

Yeah, you know what, I'll be honest. Honest, Ben.

I'm not that tweaked by, you know, like more trans, like more transcutaneous, more transmucosal liposomal technology. It's like we've kind of been there, done that, to be honest. Right. I'm actually more excited about unique applications or delivery systems in terms of from pill fatigue. Right. Everyone's tired of like consuming 15 capsules a day or for those of us that are really into the optimization. Right.

So I think what I'm excited about are like tabletop Mobile options, things like 3D printers. Imagine being able to print off your own customized set of bioactive compounds before you leave in the morning or for the next week before you leave on a trip. Imagine being able to print those off. You've got, like, cartridges that maybe deliver basic elemental compounds. And now you're able to sort of print off your own supplements. Mobile options. I think in the future you might be able to do that connected to your mobile phone. Those are things I'm pretty excited about. I think there's even like recently, like a tabletop version that has like access to 25 different ingredients, and it basically ends up creating a shot for you. It's almost like a Mr. Coffee or like one of those.

Like Nespressos or Keurigs. Right. Type of setups that you can hit a button and then you end up basically with whatever you need on demand.

That's crazy. That's similar to. I have a friend, he's like this rich guy, lives out in Texas. There's only a few people in the country that have this, but they have these fancy seventy to eighty thousand thousand dollars water filtration systems. And they can hit a button and have the water they're showering or bathing and deliver things like melatonin, vitamin C, et cetera. But they're essentially just bathing in it. Using the skin as a delivery mechanism. It's crazy. You go to like a dashboard on a wall. I forget the name of the guy who develops these. I think his name is Leo. I'll see if I can find a link and put it in the show Notes for folks. But it's nuts, by the way, for people listening in the show. Notes for this show are over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Lopez, as in Hector's last name. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Lopez. But yeah, a skin delivery mechanism via water is super interesting. Anything else? Any other delivery mechanisms?

No. I mean, obviously you've got your basic. You've got mucosal, transdermal, mucosal meaning buccal.

Using various films like biofilms, I guess, could be a cool thing to utilize. You can apply biofilms either to skin or to the inside of your cheek, to your gums. So I think, yeah, those are convenient ways to get.

Some of these unique ingredients that have classically poor bioavailability systemically to be able to really crank some of those plasma levels up to there to deliver a certain effect, you know?

Yeah, cool. It's a. It's the Aquapellas is the name of that water system, by the way. Aqua dude I talked to at an anti aging conference. I think his website is. Is phprescription.com. and on that website, it's mostly just, like, their normal filters and stuff like that. But if you. If you contact him and. And you're listening in and you have a bunch of money to throw around, you, too, can just take all your vitamins as you.

You.

As you bathe.

So that's awesome, man.

I've got no financial affiliation with them, but it's. It's an interesting idea.

Imagine walking into, like. Yeah, it's almost like you. You can incorporate that into saunas and stuff.

I know, I know. If. If I happen upon 70,000 bucks lying on the streets as I'm walking by. Yeah, just snag it and get one of those myself. Well, Hector, I mean, like, I mentioned that, like, we kind of scratched the surface on a lot of this stuff, so I think I'm gonna have to have you back for part two. But in the meantime, for those of you listening in the show, notes are over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Lopez and Hector, after. After we hang up here, I'll get in touch with you. We'll schedule a part two. Sound good?

Yeah, for sure, man. This is fun. I love doing this. Yeah.

Amazing. All right, well, folks, in the meantime, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Hector Lopez signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week and leave your questions, your comments, anything else that you want to know about what Hector and I talked about over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Lopez. Thanks.

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