Using Microbes of Elite Athletes to Heal the Gut with Jonathan Scheiman, PhD of FitBiomics

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is your host, Lindsey Parsons, and today I will be speaking with Jonathan Shaiman, PhD, a former research fellow at the Harvard Medical School in the laboratory of George Church and CEO of FitBiomics, sponsor of this podcast. He's worked on transformative sequencing technologies and programmable cellular engineering with publications in leading journals such as Science and Nature Medicine. Having played Division I college basketball at St. John's University and coached inner-city public high school basketball, one of Jonathan's long-term goals is to use sports as a medium to inspire the next generation of health solutions and innovations. But before our conversation, if you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, be sure to do so. And if you want to get transcripts of the podcast, pop over to my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com, and sign up for my newsletter. You'll also get my free ebooklet, Finding Your Root Cause Through Stool and Organic Acids Testing, when you sign up. And if you haven't yet done my quiz on which stool test would get you to your root cause, you can find a link in the show notes and take that. Now on to the show. Welcome to the podcast, Jonathan.

Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's my pleasure.

So I know that your mission and the mission of your company mixes sports and the microbiome. So can you tell me a little bit about how you got into that combo?

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's just a story of my background and I guess you could say my life and career. I grew up in New York City. I was a basketball player. I did go to Fame High School for Performing Arts. I was a tuba player, but then, uh, played basketball at St. John's, won a Big East championship, didn't make the NBA. So as I always say, my backup was getting a PhD in biomedicine, and that's how I became a scientist.

Like all basketball players.

Exactly. It's just a natural evolutionary path, and evolution is a key theme in what I believe in. Then did a lot of work on molecular biology, genomics, engineering, biotechnology. And then I think when I was at Harvard doing my postdoc, I thought it would be amazing to mix these two fields together using cutting-edge technology with athletics as a form for understanding optimal health and wellness and physiology. And that's how FitBiomics came about, decoding super performers to develop next-gen health solutions for broader populations.

Cool. So what got you interested in the microbiome as a field of study in particular?

Yeah, I, I think in general, working as a scientist and a researcher, I tend to be drawn one by understanding underlying codes that elicit health benefits. I'm a big believer in form fits function, genotype to phenotype. So you probably know we're as much bacteria as we are human. We have trillions of microorganisms in and on our body, collectively known as our microbiome. Most of them predominantly reside in our gut. You probably also have heard we have 100 times more bacterial genes in our body than we do human genes. 70% of our immune system interacts with the microbes in our gut. So just the notion of what is actually programming human health and functionality and longevity, the microbiome plays a huge role. And I think that's something that excited me to get into the field.

So I understand that you had the opportunity to start your career as a research fellow at Harvard under mentorship of George Church, who's the father of modern-day genomics. So tell me about that experience.

Yeah, so it was actually my postdoc. I got my PhD from NYU. I'm a New Yorker, so I always have to shout out New York before we get to Boston, but that, that's just me. George was an amazing mentor. Uh, the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, it's a specialized institute in Harvard. Really, as its name implies, it's looking at solutions through nature and evolution, and how can we understand those solutions and use that to engineer and solve the major human and climate challenges of our time. And I think it, it's an institute and it was a lab that was really focused on disruption and really developing technology, but then not just developing it, ultimately translating it to have real-world societal impact. So it was a great time of learning, it was a great time of development, hypothesis for Fitbiomics, but then ultimately validating it through science and publications and IP.

So in this podcast, we talk a lot about the microbiome, but down to the nitty-gritty of like when it's going wrong and what to do if you've got, say, diarrhea or, but look, going bigger picture, can you just talk a little bit about the function of the microbiome and the human body and its impact on human health?

Yeah, I think there's one question, what does the microbiome do? I think a better question is what doesn't the microbiome do? And I think it's actually something we're learning more and more seemingly every day. I've mentioned briefly the notion of the immune system. So think about just energy metabolism, protein metabolism, neurology, immunology. The microbiome impacts all of this in our body. So first and foremost, whatever food we eat, we actually don't digest most of it. The bacteria in our gut does that, and it breaks it down into macromolecules and nutrients that our body could absorb. So think about that in terms of energy and protein neurotransmitter biosynthesis. Famous anecdote, 95% of serotonin is produced by the bugs in our gut. So that gut-brain access has huge implications for neuronal functionality. And as we mentioned, just in terms of immunology, inflammation, that could have all sorts of applications for anything from autoimmune disease to even like immune oncology therapeutic applications. So I guess that was all over the place, but what I'm trying to convey is how impactful the microbiome is and everything it does.

Mm-hmm. So tell me what led you to start Fitbiomics in particular and how it's different from other companies that are doing, you know, that are producing probiotics and such.

Yeah. So I think this goes back to sort of my origin. If you look at the current paradigm in biomedicine, one, it's study disease physiology and phenotypes to understand what's broken, what doesn't work, and can we correct it to promote health? Health. But again, I'm a big believer in form fits function, natural selection evolution. So what Fit Biomix is doing is the exact opposite. Let's look at what does work in the most fit and healthy people in the world. What is driving optimal physiology? We mentioned energy metabolism, protein metabolism, neurology, immunology for elite athletes. That's basically endurance, strength, mental toughness recovery. So let's learn what works in them from a microbiome perspective. And then translate that in next-generation probiotics. So things that the world hasn't seen and novel functional applications for not just gut health, but sleep health, fatigue, recovery, and things of that nature. So that's kind of what separates us, the source code and how we're translating that for different health applications.

So I know that for especially endurance athletes, they can have issues like IBS and such. So I assume you're not just taking excellent athletes, but excellent athletes who are in excellent health as your models.

Yeah. Athletes are superheroes in many ways, but they're not necessarily perfect. So you might have an athlete that has a lot of muscle development and strength phenotypes. Yeah, they may have GI issues, but we could still learn what microbes in their gut are driving, let's say protein synthesis, amino acid degradation, or bone and muscle strength. Conversely, you could have ultramarathon runners that run 100 miles at a time, and we could identify, which we have, microbes that eat lactic acid and things of that nature. So it's just really dependent upon which type of athlete you're working with.

So what kinds of things specifically have you been looking at as you study the microbiomes of these elite athletes?

Yeah, so a couple of things. We work with athletes in a longitudinal manner, so what that means is We look at their microbiome pre and post-exercise to see how it changes from performance to recovery phases. And from there we could see how athlete microbiomes are different by sport. We could see how they're different compared to non-athletes. I, I mentioned we published in Nature Medicine the discovery of this microorganism called Viennella. We isolated it from ultra marathon runners to identify this microorganism that enriches in their gut after strenuous exercise and basically eats lactic acid, converts it to short-chain fatty acids, and basically promotes endurance and run till exhaustion assays. So that's one example. Then we have another product on market called Nella. This is beneficial for gut health, but also has been clinically validated for sleep and improved quality of sleep. And think about that for a second. Sleep is almost the number one performance-enhancing drug. So we're effectively decoding athletes that have optimized sleep patterns and now turning that into a probiotic capsule that can help everyone with their sleep.

So is the lactic acid that you produce in your muscles after exercising going into your gut such that a microbiome can then transform it?

Yeah. Think about our GI tract as this huge interfacing fermentation facility. Like a lot of things, everything we eat goes through it. A lot of things in our blood. Passage through it, right? Our immune system interacts with it. So to your point, lactic acid is produced by mitochondria in the muscles. It's used as an energy source. Basically when we produce more than we could utilize, there's lactate threshold and it's associated with fatigue. Some of it, not all of it goes to the liver for gluconeogenesis, but some of it actually filters into the gut and that's where it could interact with the microbiome and become an energy source where it's now converted into different sorts of metabolites. That confer benefits to the host.

That may explain why butyrate is increased and there's better gut function in people who exercise.

Yeah. Diet plays a huge role in microbiome composition. And by the way, if you look at Western diets, high fat, high sugar, high salt, high antibiotic usage, it's depleting and wiping out beneficial microbes, right? So that's a problem. But like you said, I think active lifestyles, the notion of lactic acid buildup, that's now serving to promote growth and abundance of beneficial microorganisms. So healthy diets, healthy physical activity has this positive feedback loop on microbes that produce beneficial metabolites like short-chain fatty acids.

So are you doing metagenomic sequencing on the stool of these athletes? Is that how you're— studying this?

Yeah, I, I spend most of my time dealing with shit, both literally and figuratively. When I was in Boston as a postdoc at Harvard doing this study, the joke is I spent 2 weeks driving around Boston 8 hours a day in a Zipcar, literally collecting stool. And that was our initial study with marathon runners. So it's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it. But there's a lot of interesting molecular cues we could find in stool. 60% of stool is actually bacteria. So you have millions of microorganisms. We could extract their genetic material and basically understand what's going on in someone's body and how that changes over time and how we could use that information now to develop next-gen probiotics for everyone to benefit from.

And what's the other 40%?

That's a good question. Probably debris, unprocessed food, I guess things we don't even really wanna know what it is. Actually, if you take a stool sample, and put it in a little Eppendorf tube. You collect a stool sample, we resuspend it in phosphate-buffered salines, put it into liquid suspension. Then if you take a little bit of that, put into an Eppendorf tube, if you centrifuge it, actually you could precipitate all of that junk, like the undigested food or debris in there, and then supernatants will have the bacteria and all that stuff in it.

So, but I imagine there's some yeast and viruses and phages and archaea, of course.

Oh, of course. To your point, it's an umbrella microorganisms of all these things you just mentioned. Yeah. Not just bacteria.

Yeah. Okay. No, I was curious just cuz I wondered what percentage of the stool might be, say, cuz I deal with people who have Candida issues all the time.

Yeah. Yeah. Like you said, low abundance for things like that, but Sometimes they spike out.

Right. So tell me about what you've learned in studying these elite athletes' stool.

Yeah. The one thing I wanna continue to convey is elite athletes really for us are a model for understanding optimal physiology. You know, it's kind of provocative. There's this notion of like, be like Mike, and obviously what that's done Nike in terms of fashion and sneakers and what it's done for Gatorade in terms of energy drinks. And now if you just look by and large in society, you influencers and ambassadors, how they basically determine economic decisions and nutritional decisions. But think about that from a biological perspective. What really is in Mike, right? And what if we could actually decode that and turn that into nutritional interventions for broader people? I guess what we've learned is that these are very distinct population. It's the 0.01% of humanity. We're seeing microbes that are unique in their gut. We're seeing microbes that are enriched in their gut. We're seeing microbes that spike in abundance after strenuous exercise that's helping them perform and recover better. So really what we have validated is that elite athletes are almost like a great discovery platform to understand the secrets behind health. And that's really what FitBionics is doing, understanding that and now translating that and making it accessible to broader populations.

And how do you know that the microbes that are spiking in these athletes are going to be useful to other people who aren't necessarily doing exercise?

Here's another provocative term. It's almost like, what if you could get the benefits of exercise without exercise? First of all, let me also just say, we don't believe in magic pills. We believe in science pills, and that's what biotechnology and research do. It converts science fiction into science fact. So we isolate this microorganism that eats lactic acid. Okay, it's beneficial for people that run 100 miles at a time, but what about just people in their everyday lives, right? That's on the grind, 9 to 5 entrepreneurs, single moms at home. What about people dealing with chronic fatigue? What about people dealing with Long COVID or fatigue in that regard? So what about people that need exercise as medicine? And it's not about running 100 miles, but you know what, I wanna be more active. So this could help me with glucose insulin resistance. So these microbes could confer benefits to everyday people. And that's actually what our goal is. It's not to make better athletes, it's to improve human performance.

Did you have any big surprises when you looked at the microbiomes of these athletes?

That it worked. I think in science, this continual iterative process, and the reality is most of your hypotheses are wrong. Most of the experiments you run don't work. But the fact that we had this crazy idea that, you know what, I, I think we could look at the microbiome and we could look at the stool, we could look at the poop of these elite athletes and we're actually gonna be able to find differences in them. And then we're actually gonna be able to isolate those differences from a microbial perspective and functionally validate that they're conferring a benefit. And that's what we've done from a preclinical and a clinical perspective, like our probiotics are functionally validated. So I would just say the big surprise is that this crazy idea actually worked and we're helping thousands of people today in their health journeys from gut health to sleep and fatigue so that it works and we could rapidly translate it into real-world solutions.

How long have these products been on the market?

We're early stage. So Nella, our first product, has been on the market for 2 years now, but really last year was our first full year on the market. We're actually getting set to publish some clinical studies results that we did, which is very exciting. So they're still somewhat new, but the point of this is now creating awareness so more people could benefit.

So what's the difference between, say, the probiotics that you're producing and the ones you find at the grocery store, or say through me?

Yeah, great question. Again, everything is form fits function. Most of the probiotics today on the market, they're decades old, right? A lot of the products you see, they all contain pretty much the same strains. They're just based on formulation. Fitbiomics, we're not a formulation company, we're an innovation company. Most probiotics either come from food, baby poop, animals, the environment. What we're doing is we're naturally sourcing our probiotics from, we like to say, the finest microbiomes on earth. So probiotics that naturally function in peak performers to help drive their physiology. And then the other thing I'd say too is there's that innovation, but also it's the application. So most probiotics are just for gut health. So yes, Nella supports gut health, but also supports sleep health. That's a very distinct application for probiotic. Vianella, our second product, that's for lactic acid metabolism, fighting fatigue and promoting endurance. That's a very different application for probiotic. And I'll just say that's what the science and the technology does. It leads to rapid disruption because now we could accelerate discovery and translation.

Okay, well let's dig in a bit more on those products. So Nella, tell me about the strains. Tell me about the research on those strains.

Yeah, so most of the probiotic market today, 90% of it consists of lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium. Again, most of these are isolated from food. The industry knows how to grow them, but again, not a lot of innovation. So Nella actually consists of 3 proprietary strains of lactobacillus that we isolated from elite athlete microbiomes. We formulated them into this capsule. This is something that we started with an open label study before bringing it to market. 250 participants, they consumed Nella on a daily basis for 2 weeks and they basically provided us feedback before, during, and after consumption. And almost 95% of them reported at least one functional benefit that ranged from better digestion to better sleep, to better energy. We then followed that up with a placebo-controlled clinical trial with a professional soccer club, and lo and behold, the results showed statistically significant benefits in better digestion, better sleep, and better energy. So that's actually what we're getting ready to publish. I'll also just say In that clinical study, we collected stool, blood, and urine. And what we're seeing is Nella is actually conferring benefits towards reducing oxidative stress, reducing inflammation. And again, I think it's part of this holistic health that's now driving benefits in sleep and energy. That's what we've seen with Nella, and that's why we're so excited by it.

Hey, this is Lindsey here, just letting you know that if you're tired of dealing with digestive issues, like bloating, indigestion, soft stool, diarrhea, constipation, reflux, IBS, IBD, or the numerous health conditions that come about when your gut is off, like brain fog, weight gain, UTIs, fatigue, mental health issues, or complex conditions like fibromyalgia and ME/CFS. That's my specialty. With my 3 or 5 session gut health coaching packages, we'll discuss different stool and functional medicine tests to find out the root cause of your symptoms. I'll interpret the results and provide clear explanations, empowering you to make informed choices for your gut and overall health. And together we'll develop a customized action plan based on your test results so you can find relief and regain your health and vitality. I come from a functional medicine perspective, trying to incorporate the latest peer-reviewed research and educating you on protocols used by functional medicine practitioners, but devoting lots of time and support to my clients the way a doctor simply can't. If you're interested in a 3 or 5 session coaching package, you can sign up for complimentary 30-minute breakthrough session. Or if you can only afford one appointment at a time, you can book an initial 60-minute consultation. Links for those are in the show notes. Now back to the show.

I'm sure that my listeners have heard the term oxidative stress before, but I'm not sure anybody's ever explained it to them. So maybe you could just elaborate on what that means.

Yeah, I think in general, our environment, what we eat, there's a lot of thing that creates these free radicals that basically lead to cellular aging, DNA DNA damage and you could track the abundance of those reactive oxygen species, if you will, in the blood. So you might imagine what we eat can determine those reactive oxygen species abundance, how much we exercise and we're producing things to combat those and sequester them. So basically what we found is that Nella as a probiotic is conferring these anti-inflammatory benefits and are also sort of reducing these reactive oxygen species. And again, that has benefits for things such as cellular aging, DNA damage, stress, inflammation, which in turn could lead to better sleep or better energy levels. So that's the gist of it.

Okay.

And how is Nella taken? Is it one a day or more?

Right now it's a daily capsule. We sell a 30-cap supply. So on a monthly basis, one a day in the morning with a glass of water before breakfast. That's how most of our consumers enjoy its benefits. Seems to be working pretty well for a lot of people.

Great.

And what about VNL? Like, tell me more about the strains in that and the benefits that you've studied.

So as we mentioned, Nella is really a variation of probiotic species that are currently in the market, Lactobacillus, but VNL is something completely different. It's actually a different genus of probiotic bacteria. You can't find variants of those in the market. This is something, as mentioned, we isolated from ultramarathon runners. We did in vitro testing, we did preclinical testing. So when we published in Nature Medicine, we found that animals that consume Viannella on average show a 13% improvement in run till exhaustion. We then did a lot of translation, a lot of manufacturing, a lot of regulatory work, but we also did human clinical work and we completed a small double-blind placebo-controlled study that looked at Vianella effects on VO2 max performance. And what we found is that in fact, people that consume Vianella are protected against performance decline in these run till exhaustion assays. That's something we also submitted for publication. Vianella has taken a lot of time to translate from Nature Medicine to real-world product. But what I can say is actually we're bringing it to the world later this year in the fall.

Oh, okay. So it's not on the market yet.

Vianela is not on the market yet. What I can say is we have done some interesting, really cool early access. If people do want to try Vianela before it comes to market, you can actually go to our website now and sign up for something we've called Project V, and it's basically providing Vianela early access to very diverse populations to see how it's benefiting different people. Everything we do is constant evolution and iteration. And seeing how our innovations could help broad, diverse people.

What is the strain in Vianella?

So that's actually what it is. It's Vianella. It's Vianella atypica.

Yeah.

So we've made it very literal. The product is Vianella, and that'll be coming out later this year, but I would encourage everyone to go to the website and sign up for Project V if they are interested.

And did you name it?

No, that's its scientific name. Vianella is something that's been out there, just like Lactobacillus has been out there. But again, the discovery of how it's enriched in these elite athletes and how it's actually conferring these benefits in fighting fatigue and endurance, that was a novel discovery.

Oh, okay. I just thought because the name Nella and Vianella have Nella in them, did you name the other after the, the strain?

Yeah, so actually I think Nella is in a lot of different sorts of bacteria genera, but you hit it on the head. When we were at Harvard, our first discovery was Vianella. We published it in Nature Medicine and that was basically validation of our crazy hypothesis. And because it was so influential in our company, we took the root of it, Nella, and we felt like all of our products should be befitting of this discovery. And what we like to say, it's not about next generation, it's like Nella generation. We've stuck to our roots in discovery and science, and we're using that to name our products.

And is that slower to come to market just because it's a novel strain?

Yeah, so that one actually, it's a strict anaerobic microorganism. So you might imagine manufacturing at industrial scale levels, like that's not a small feat. The reason why 90% of the current probiotic market is like Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium is because the industry knows how to grow them. So you could isolate them from food. That's the real power of biotech microbiome research, genomics, culturomics. Now it's enabling development of all these other microorganisms that before were weren't really possible to develop.

How quickly do you think people might actually notice a difference in their health when trying Nella or Vianella?

Yeah. So we know for Nella, people see benefits as early as within 7 to 10 days. Microbiomes are different. There's a lot of variability. I think really good responders within a week. There's some folks that it takes them a month, right? There's some people that don't really notice a difference until they stop. The notion of probiotics, it's not like instant gratification. It's not something like one day you're gonna see a difference, but people do see noticeable difference fairly rapidly. And by the way, they're very discrete measurements. Bowel movements and quality of sleep. Those are two things people could readily measure. For Vianella, when we did our clinical trial, that was in a two-week time span. So two weeks of daily consumption, that's when we saw the benefits in VO2 max. We haven't tested it in shorter resolution times, but with Project V, that's something we'll also uncover as well.

Okay. So I'm sure people who listen to sports podcasts know about VO2 max, but maybe not all my listeners. So can you explain that term?

Basically, in layman's terms, it's effectively how long you could run on a treadmill till basically you pass out. That's essentially what it is. So when you use that as a measurement for fatigue and endurance, it's basically consuming Viennella, how long can it help promote us at maximal energy expenditure and keeping us going?

Mm-hmm. So it's more for endurance than say for powerlifting.

That's how we test it in this assay. We isolate from ultra marathon runners, so we want to test it in an endurance capacity. But obviously the notion of fatigue, endurance, you could sort of trade them off. We are starting a clinical trial this summer that's more focused on recovery. Looking at not necessarily how long can we keep going, but how quickly can we get back up and running again? And I say running figuratively, not necessarily literal here. So I think something like Vianella could have all these interesting benefits from fatigue to endurance to recovery, and we're just continuing to expand what those applications are.

Mm-hmm. And are you testing it then in athletes?

So for instance, the clinical study we did was not with athletes. They were, healthy individuals that maintain some level of physical activity. So we weren't studying couch potatoes, but we weren't studying high-intensity athletes because again, our goal's not to make better athletes, it's to make a healthier population. In Project V, that's something where it's a wide distribution of the population. So that's where you could have people that are maybe more sedentary, people that maybe are more endurance athletes or people that are in between somewhere.

And so you mentioned with Nella that there were potentially benefits for stool quality. What kind of things were you hearing about that or digestion?

Here's a fun fact for you. Around 60% of the US population report having GI distress on a weekly basis. A lot of that could be just infrequency of a bowel movement. A lot of it could be constipation, and then there could be other things like IBS. So what we're seeing is that people that take it are having better and more frequent bowel movements.

So more with regularity for people who are constipated, say, than people who have loose stool.

Yeah, I think that's correct. But again, there are different forms of, let's say, IBS. I think it's helping people that have IBS, and there are different types. You could have a constipation IBS or diarrhea IBS. And I think it's, it's kind of helping both categories.

Okay. So have you received any feedback from athletes who use your products or either of them?

Oh yeah, for sure. So first and foremost, our products are field tested. So we actually had two Olympic athletes utilize Nella during the Tokyo Olympics recently and won Olympic medals in historic fashion.

Well, there we go.

So it's funny you mentioned about consistency. One of these athletes, Adeline Gray, She's by all means the greatest wrestler of all time, 6-time world champion, Olympic silver medalist. When she travels internationally, as anyone, you might have issues with regularity and digestion. So actually Nella is something that's helped her when traveling. And then we had another athlete, Krista Palmer. When we met her, she was having issues not only with her GI, but also sleep. And she started taking Nella, loved it. Qualified for her first Olympics and then became the first U.S. female diver to medal in over 20 years in the Olympics. Now, obviously, we're not saying that's all from Nella, right? But what we are saying is that even at the pinnacle of human performance, people are benefiting and they're using it in these all-world competitions to help them be at their best. So, you know, whether you're Olympian or whether you're an entrepreneur or scientist or single mom, sleep and gut health could benefit you.

Mm-hmm. So what other kinds of feedback are you getting on the products?

For Nella, because it's on market, another big thing we're seeing is just improved energy levels. And that makes sense, by the way, right? If you have better digestion, you could better absorb nutrients, right? And you could better release what's not wanted. And then if you have better sleep, you have better energy, right? So that's the big thing we're seeing as well. And there's this interesting synergy between bowel movements, sleep, and energy that people are really responding to.

And so when you say sleep, are we talking sleep onset, sleep maintenance, or the number of hours or the depth of sleep? Like what aspects of sleep?

Primarily the quality. In our clinical studies, a lot of this was survey data. However, again, as mentioned, we do have some of those molecular insights from stool and blood. Anecdotally we're seeing people using Whoop or Oura that there are less disturbances in the night. And we are seeing certain stages of sleep are being improved upon as well too. That's something that future studies we're looking to dive deeper into. Yeah.

Not everybody owns an Oura or a Whoop.

Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of what we're hearing is just better quality, less interruptions, and maybe more of a deeper sleep.

So are these products available just in the US or in other countries as well?

Up until recently, mostly available just all in the US, but we just now started shipping to Canada and other parts of the world as well. Europe. You could go to our website, fitbionics.com. You could learn more about our company. You could learn more about Project V, the science, but you could also go to our shop page and purchase Nella. Actually, we're doing a promotion now for summer and things of that nature. Right now, if you go to fitbiomics.com, you could purchase a month's supply of Nella as a subscription customer for $49 a month. So you're talking about less than $2 a day, which is cheaper than coffee or prebiotic sodas or protein drinks and stuff like that. So we definitely wanna make this affordable and accessible to everyone.

Great. Any final thoughts before we wrap up?

I think what we touched upon earlier is just sort of the motivation behind this. I think we're very motivated by accessibility and democratizing bioscience, if you will, democratizing health. And even if you think about the concept, like the 0.01% of the human population have these superpowers in terms of physiology and health and how we're now decoding that and translating that to make it available to everyone. And I think that's something that really motivates us. And we don't consider ourselves a probiotics company. We consider ourselves as a, a generational health company, the notion of generational wealth. But we feel this is just, it's a fundamentally radically different approach to health, healthcare, how we're decoding health, how we're recoding health. I'm sorry, you kind of got me. Now, super passionate. You look at society, the health and wellness industry by the end of this decade will be a $7 trillion a year market globally. Majority of people that are in these wellness generation, they buy products to confer a health benefit. The reality of health in America, 60% of US adults have at least one chronic disease. It's the leading cause of death in this country. It costs the country up to $4 trillion a year in healthcare costs. According to the CDC, two of the leading drivers for chronic disease are poor nutrition and sedentary lifestyles. So basically what we eat and our lack of exercise are killing us far more effectively than anything out there. $7 trillion health and wellness industry. 60% of US adults have chronic disease. There is this chronic disease crisis. And what I wanna say is, yes, there's athletes, yes, there's probiotics, but really what this is, it's solving that crisis and how we're rapidly translating the biological health of these super fit people into solutions for broader populations. That's what Nella is, that's what ViaNella is, and that's what our innovation platform is designed to do for years to come. So that's my parting word. Big picture what we're doing.

Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you coming on.

Absolutely. Thank you. Appreciate it.

If you're interested in trying Nella or Vianella, I'll put an affiliate link in the show notes, so you'll be supporting the podcast when you try them. Other ways to support the podcast include buying supplements at a discount from my Fullscript dispensary, ordering tests at a discount from my Rupa Health Lab Store, or using my affiliate links to eVitamins, Bulk Supplements, or Amazon. If you'd like to connect with me online, you can follow my High Desert Health Facebook page, join my Gut Healing Facebook group, or join my newsletter list at highdeserthealthcoaching.com, as well as Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. Links for those are in the show notes. Thanks for joining me today, and here's wishing you all the perfect stool.