Adapted from episode 101 of The Perfect Stool podcast hosted by Lindsey Parsons, EdD, Gut Health Coach, and edited for readability with Jonathan Scheiman, PhD, Co-Founder & CEO of FitBiomics, sponsor of this episode.
Lindsey:
Yeah, it’s my pleasure. So I know that your mission–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?
Jonathan Scheiman:
Absolutely. 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 as a basketball player. I did go to FAME High School for Performing Arts–I was a tuba player. But then I played basketball at St. John’s, won a Big East Championship but didn’t make the NBA, so I’d always say my backup was getting a PhD in biomedicine. And that’s how I became a scientist.
Lindsey:
Like all basketball players.
Jonathan Scheiman:
Exactly. That’s just a natural evolutionary path. And evolution is a key theme in what I believe in. Then I did a lot of work on molecular biology, genomics, engineering and biotechnology. 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, wellness and physiology. And that’s how FitBiomics came about – decoding super performers to develop next-gen health solutions for broader populations.
Lindsey:
Cool. So what got you interested in the microbiome as a field of study in particular?
Jonathan Scheiman:
Yeah, I think in general, working as a scientist and a researcher, I tend to be drawn 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, and we have trillions of microorganisms in our body, collectively known as our microbiome. Most of them predominantly reside in our gut. You probably also have heard that 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 in the notion of what is actually programming human health, functionality and longevity, the microbiome plays a huge role. I think that’s something that excited me to get into the field.
Lindsey:
So I understand that you had the opportunity to start your career as a research fellow at Harvard under the mentorship of George Church, who’s the father of modern day genomics. Tell me about that experience.
Jonathan Scheiman:
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’s just me. George was an amazing mentor. So 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. I think it’s an institute and it was a lab that was really focused on disruption, and developing technology, but then not just developing it, but ultimately translating it to have real-world societal impact. So it was a great time of learning. It was a great time of development and hypothesis for FitBiomics, but then ultimately, validating it through science and publications and IP.
Lindsey:
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. But 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?
Jonathan Scheiman:
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 on 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. There’s a famous anecdote that 95% of serotonin is produced by the bugs in our gut, so that gut-brain axis has huge implications for neuronal functionality. As we mentioned, just in terms of immunology and inflammation, that can have all sorts of applications for anything from autoimmune disease to even immune oncology and therapeutic applications. So I guess I was all over the place, but what I’m trying to convey is how impactful the microbiome is and everything it does.
Lindsey:
So tell me what led you to start FitBiomics in particular, and how it’s different from other companies that are producing probiotics?
Jonathan Scheiman:
Yeah, so I think this goes back to my origin. If you look at the current paradigm in biomedicine, one, it’s studying disease physiology and phenotypes to understand what’s broken, what doesn’t work and can we correct it to promote health. But again, I’m a big believer in form fits function and natural selection/evolution. So what FitBiomics 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 and immunology for elite athletes; that’s basically endurance, strength, mental toughness and 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 what separates us– the source code and how we’re translating that for different health applications.
Lindsey:
So I know that for endurance athletes especially, 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?
Jonathan Scheiman:
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, or we can see how they’re different compared to non athletes. I mentioned that we published in Nature Medicine the discovery of this microorganism called Veillonella. We isolate it from ultramarathon runners to identify this microorganism that enriches in their gut after a strenuous exercise, eats lactic acid, converts it to short chain fatty acids and promotes endurance and run-’til-exhuastion assays. So that’s one example.
Then, we have another product on the 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.
Lindsey:
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?
Jonathan Scheiman:
Yeah, think about our GI tract is this huge interfacing fermentation facility. Everything we eat goes through it, a lot of things in our blood passage through it, and 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 goes to the liver for gluconeogenesis, but some of it actually filters into the gut. That’s where it can 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.
Lindsey:
That may explain why butyrate is increased and there’s better gut function in people who exercise.
Jonathan Scheiman:
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 and healthy physical activity have this positive feedback loop on microbes that produce beneficial metabolites like short-chain fatty acids.
Lindsey:
So are you doing metagenomic sequencing on the stool of these athletes? Is that how you’re studying this?
Jonathan Scheiman:
Yeah, 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 two weeks driving around Boston, eight 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 got to 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 can extract their genetic material and basically understand what’s going on in someone’s body, how that changes over time and how we could use that information now to develop next-gen probiotics for everyone to benefit from.
Lindsey:
And what’s the other 40%?
Jonathan Scheiman:
That’s a good question. Probably debris, unprocessed food, I guess things we don’t even really want to 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 saline, put it into liquid suspension. Then, if you take a little bit of that and 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.
Lindsey:
I thought I’d mention that there’s some yeast and viruses, phages and archaea of course…
Jonathan Scheiman:
Oh, of course. To your point, it’s an umbrella; microorganisms of all these things you just mentioned. Yeah. Not just bacteria.
Lindsey:
Okay. I was curious because I wondered what percentage of the stool might be, say, Candida, because I deal with people who have Candida issues all the time.
Jonathan Scheiman:
Yeah. Like you said, low abundance for things like that. But sometimes they spike out.
Lindsey:
Right. So tell me about what you’ve learned in studying these elite athletes’ stool?
Jonathan Scheiman:
The one thing I want to continue to convey is that elite athletes, 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 for 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, how influencers and ambassadors basically determine economic decisions and nutritional decisions. But think about that from a biological perspective: What really is in Mike, 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 a very distinct populations. It’s the .01% of humanity; we’re seeing microbes that are unique in their gut, we’re seeing microbes that are enriched in their gut, and we’re seeing microbes that spike in abundance after strenuous exercise that are helping them perform and recover better. So really, what we have validated is that elite athletes are a great discovery platform to understand the secrets behind health. And that’s really what FitBiomics is doing– understanding that and now translating that and making it accessible to broader populations.
Lindsey:
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?
Jonathan Scheiman:
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 people in their everyday lives, people on the grind, doing nine-to-five, like entrepreneurs, single moms at home? What about people dealing with chronic fatigue? What about people dealing with long COVID or fatigue in that regard? What about people that need exercise as medicine, and it’s not about running 100 miles, but you know what, “I want to be more active, so this could help me with glucose and 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.
Lindsey:
Did you have any big surprises when you looked at the microbiomes of these athletes?
Jonathan Scheiman:
That it worked! I think, in science, about this continual, iterative process. The reality is most of your hypotheses are wrong. Most of the experiments you run don’t work. But we had this crazy idea that we could look at the microbiome and we could look at the stool, we can look at the poop of these elite athletes, and we’re actually going to be able to find differences in them. And then we’re actually going to 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–we could rapidly translate it into real world solutions.
Lindsey:
How long have these products been on the market?
Jonathan Scheiman:
We’re early stage. So Nella, our first product has been on the market for two years now. But 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.
Lindsey:
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?
Jonathan Scheiman:
Yeah, great question. Again, everything is form fits function. Most of the probiotics today on the market are decades old. A lot of the products you see, they all contain pretty much the same strains. They’re just based on formulation. At FitBiomics, we’re not a formulation company, or an innovation company. Most probiotics either come from food, baby poop, animals or 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. Most probiotics are just for gut health. So yes, Nella supports gut health, but it also supports sleep health. That’s a very distinct application for probiotic Veillonella, our second product, that’s for lactic acid metabolism, fighting fatigue and promoting endurance. That’s a very different application for a 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.
Lindsey:
Okay, let’s dig in a bit more on those products. So Nella, tell me about the strains. Tell me about the research on the strains.
Jonathan Scheiman:
Yeah, so most of the probiotic market today, 90% of it, consists of lactobacillus and bifidobacterium. Again, most of these are isolated from food, and the industry knows how to grow them, but again, there’s not a lot of innovation. So Nella actually consists of three proprietary strains of lactobacillus that we isolate 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 consumed Nella on a daily basis for two weeks, and they basically provided us feedback before, during and after consumption. 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. What we’re seeing is, Nella is actually conferring benefits towards reducing oxidative stress and reducing inflammation. 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.
Lindsey:
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.
Jonathan Scheiman:
Yeah, I think in our environment and in what we eat, there’s a lot of things that create these free radicals that basically lead to cellular aging, DNA damage, and you could track the abundance of those reactive oxygen species, if you will, in the blood. So you might imagine that what we eat can determine those reactive oxygen species’ abundance, as well as 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 is also reducing these reactive oxygen species. And again, that has benefits for things such as cellular aging, DNA damage, stress and inflammation, which in turn could lead to better sleep or better energy levels. So that’s the gist of it.
Lindsey:
And how is Nella taken? Is it one a day or more?
Jonathan Scheiman:
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. It seems to be working pretty well for a lot of people.
Lindsey:
Great. And what about Veillonella? Tell me more about the strains in that and the benefits that you’ve studied.
Jonathan Scheiman:
So as we mentioned, Nella is really a variation of probiotic species that are currently in the market, from lactobacillus. Veillonella 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 I mentioned, we isolated from ultramarathon runners. We did in vitro testing, and we did preclinical testing. So when we published in Nature Medicine, we found that animals that consume Veillonella, on average show a 13% improvement in run-’til-exhaustion. We then did a lot of translation, a lot of manufacturing and a lot of regulatory work. But we also did human clinical work. We completed a small, double blind placebo-controlled study that looked at Veillonella effects on V02-max performance. What we found is that, in fact, people that consume Veillonella are protected against performance decline in these run-’til-exhaustion assays. That’s something we also submitted for publication. Veillonella 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.
Lindsey:
Okay, so it’s not on the market yet.
Jonathan Scheiman:
Veillonella 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 Veillonella before it comes to market, you can actually go to our website now and sign up for something we’ve called Project V. It’s basically providing Veillonella 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.
Lindsey:
What is the strain in Veillonella?
Jonathan Scheiman:
It’s actually what it is. It’s Veillonella atypica. Yeah, so we’ve made it very literal, the product is Veillonella, 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.
Lindsey:
And did you name it?
Jonathan Scheiman:
No, that’s its scientific name. Veillonella 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 confirmed these benefits in fighting fatigue and endurance, that was a novel discovery.
Lindsey:
Okay, I just thought because the name Nella and Veillonella have “nella” in them. Did you name the other after the strain?
Jonathan Scheiman:
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 Veillonella, we published it in Nature Medicine, and that was basically the validation of our crazy hypothesis. 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 “Nella” generation. We stuck to our roots in discovery and science, and we’re using that to name our products.
Lindsey:
And is that slower to come to market just because it’s a novel strain?
Jonathan Scheiman:
Yeah, so that one, actually, is a strict anaerobic microorganism. So you might imagine that manufacturing at industrial scale levels is not a small feat. The reason why 90% of the current probiotic market is Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium is because the industry knows how to grow them; you can isolate them from food. That’s the real power of biotech microbiome research genomics and culturomics. Now, it’s enabling development of all these other microorganisms that before weren’t really possible to develop.
Lindsey:
How quickly do you think people might actually notice a difference in their health when trying Nella or Veillonella?
Jonathan Scheiman:
Yeah, so we know for Nella, people see benefits as early as within seven to ten days. Microbiomes are different. There’s a lot of variability, I think. There are some really good responders within a week. There’s some folks for whom it takes a month, right? There are some people that don’t really notice the difference until they stop. The notion of probiotics, it’s not like instant gratification. It’s not something like, one day, you’re going to see a difference. But people do see noticeable differences fairly rapidly. And by the way, they’re very discreet measurements; bowel movements and quality of sleep. Those are two things people could readily measure. For Veillonella, 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 V02-max. We haven’t tested it in shorter resolution times. But with Project V, that’s something we’ll also uncover as well.
Lindsey:
Okay, so I’m sure people who listen to sports podcasts know about V02-max, but maybe not all my listeners. So can you explain that term?
Jonathan Scheiman:
Basically, in layman’s terms, it’s effectively how long you could run on a treadmill until 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 Veillonella: How long can it help promoting us at maximal energy expenditure and keeping us going.
Lindsey:
So it’s more for endurance than, say, for powerlifting.
Jonathan Scheiman:
That’s how we test it in this assay, we isolate from ultramarathon 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. I say running figuratively, not necessarily literal here. So I think something like Veillonella could have all these interesting benefits from fatigue, to endurance and recovery, and we’re just continuing to expand what those applications are.
Lindsey:
And are you testing it then in athletes?
Jonathan Scheiman:
So for instance, the clinical study we did was not with athletes. They were healthy individuals that maintained some level of physical activity. So we weren’t studying couch potatoes. But we weren’t studying high intensity athletes. Because again, our goal is 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 can have people that are maybe more sedentary, people that maybe are more endurance athletes or people that are in between somewhere.
Lindsey:
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?
Jonathan Scheiman:
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 in frequency 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.
Lindsey:
So more with regularity for people who are constipated, say, than people who have loose stool.
Jonathan Scheiman:
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 a diarrhea-IBS, and I think it’s helping both categories.
Lindsey:
So have you received any feedback from athletes who use your products?
Jonathan Scheiman:
Oh, yeah, for sure. So first and foremost, our products are field tested. We actually had two Olympic athletes utilize Nella during the Tokyo Olympics recently and won Olympic medals in historic fashion.
Lindsey:
Well, there we go!
Jonathan Scheiman:
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 as a six-time world champion and an 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 US female diver to medal in over 20 years in the Olympics. Now, obviously, we’re not saying that’s all from Nella, but what we are saying is that even at the pinnacle of human performance, people are benefiting, and they’re utilizing it in these all-world competitions to help them be at their best. So whether you’re an Olympian or whether you’re an entrepreneur, a scientist or a single mom, sleep and gut health could benefit you.
Lindsey:
So what other kinds of feedback are you getting on the products?
Jonathan Scheiman:
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, and you could better release what’s not wanted. And then if you have better sleep, you have better energy. So that’s the big thing we’re seeing as well. There’s this interesting synergy between bowel movements, sleep and energy that people are really responding to.
Lindsey:
When you say sleep, are we talking sleep onset, sleep maintenance, or the number of hours or the depth of sleep? What aspects of sleep?
Jonathan Scheiman:
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 the stool and blood. Anecdotally, we’re seeing from people using Whoop or Oura that there are less disturbances in the night, and we are seeing that certain stages of sleep are being improved upon as well, too. That’s something that in future studies we’re looking to dive deeper into.
Lindsey:
Yeah, not everybody owns an Oura or Whoop.
Jonathan Scheiman:
Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of what we’re hearing is just better quality, less interruptions, and maybe more of a deeper sleep.
Lindsey:
So are these products available just in the US or in other countries as well?
Jonathan Scheiman:
Up until recently, mostly available just in the US. But we just now started shipping to Canada and other parts of the world as well, like Europe. You can go to our website FitBiomics.com*. You can learn more about our company, you can learn more about Project V, the science, and 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 want to make this affordable and accessible to everyone.
Lindsey:
Great. Any final thoughts before we wrap up?
Jonathan Scheiman:
I think what we touched upon earlier is the motivation behind this. I think we’re very motivated by accessibility and democratizing bioscience and democratizing health. And even if you think about the concept that .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. I think that’s something that really motivates us. We don’t consider ourselves a probiotics company. We consider ourselves as a generational health company. The notion of generational wealth, but we feel this is just the fundamentally, radically different approach to health, health care, how we’re decoding health, how we’re recoding health. I’m sorry, you kind of got me now super passionate. But if you look at society, the health and wellness industry, by the end of this decade, will be a $7 trillion a year market globally. The majority of people that are in this wellness generation buy products to confer a health benefit. This is 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 health care 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. There’s a $7 trillion health and wellness industry, and yet 60% of US adults have chronic disease. There is this chronic disease crisis. And what I want to say is, yes, there’s athletes, yes, there’s probiotics. But really, we’re about is solving that crisis, and how we’re rapidly translating the biological health of the super-fit people into solutions for broader populations. That’s what Nella is, that’s what Veillonella is and that’s what our innovation platform is designed to do for years to come. So that’s my parting word and the big picture of what we’re doing.
If you’re struggling with bloating, constipation, diarrhea, soft stool, acid reflux, IBS, IBD or any type of chronic disease, etc. and want to get to the bottom of it, that’s what I help my clients with. You’re welcome to set up a free, 30-minute breakthrough session with me (Lindsey). We’ll talk about what you’ve been going through and I’ll tell you about my 3- and 5- appointment health coaching programs in which I recommend lab tests, educate you on what the results mean and the protocols used by doctors to fix the problems revealed. Or if you’re ready to jump in right away or can just afford one appointment at a time, you can set up an 1-hour consultation with me.
