Update 1:  I’m not dead, haven’t gone out of business, or undergone any unexpected lobotamies.  Yet.

Update 2: We have an exciting new feature that I think will portend positive developments in the future.

Many of us here (or rather, many of us who used to be here) have a strong fascination with the natural products industry, how it works, and its most interesting and impactful products.

To that end, the past year has been spent in development of a new project called Nutraceutical Pro.  It’s a program that allows you to easily build formulas, save them, and generate convenient reports that you can share with manufacturers.

It’s meant to be an improvement over the previously built Formula Analyzer, and is borne out of the observation that getting and managing a dietary supplement quote is often a real pain.

The basic process works like this:

1).  Create a Formula:

On the formula page, you enter your project’s details, and the ingredients you want for your formula:

Once you save the formula you’ll be prompted to log in or create an account if you haven’t already done so.

2).  Save and Access Them At Anytime

A big benefit of Nutraceutical Pro over the Formula Analyzer is that you can save your formulas for later access.  Having a repository where you can easily access and manage your formulas makes it much easier to riff on old ideas and continually build on previous projects and brainstorming sessions.

3).  Generate Reports For Your Formulas

Once you have your formulas saved you can generate reports for them, which you can then use to pass around to manufacturers.  A large problem with the manufacturing process right now is that the information needed to get a product made is not very well standardized, so lots of time gets wasted trying to pin down exactly what everyone wants.

So the idea behind Nutra Pro is that you can provide information once, and then dispense it to as many people as you need in a way that’s systematic and complete.

An example report for a formula looks like this:

4).  Find Manufacturers

With this convenient information in hand, you’re now able to pursue the manufacture of your product with much more force.  If you become a member you’ll have access to a curated list of suppliers and manufacturers you can contact in order to get your project underway:

Taken together, this is a much more convenient way to create and manage projects……..and there will be more on the way!

Eventually this will be integrated with better ways to find manufacturers so you can contact them directly, providing a slick, end-to-end pipeline for developing awesome products.

Integration with our service for getting quotes will also be merged into this, but that’s a bit further off.

This is entirely free to use, and I genuinely think this is a seed that has the potential to sprout into something transformative for the Natural Products industry.

Questions are welcome, and if you’re trying to kick the tires on getting something off the ground, do yourself a favor and give this a try!

Hi Donald,

Election season’s in full swing and, beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, it looks like you might actually have a shot at winning this thing, even if some recent events haven’t helped your standing in the public.

However, quite a few of us have some concerns about the way you carry yourself.

There’s a certain something about you that doesn’t seem…….ahem……….presidential.

I readily admit that you have a certain charm, and your ability to say what you want and get away with it is truly remarkable.  It has us all fascinated, even if it feels like watching a train wreck at times.

But at the end of the day, I can’t help but feel a bit discomforted by the fact that you might be the one with your finger on the nuclear switch.

I can’t say specifically what it is Donald, but it just doesn’t quite click when I try and imagine you in the Oval Office.

It might be due to your sense of irony with others:

I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 14, 201

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsOr maybe it’s your nuance with public health:

The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 2, 2014

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Your PR instincts also get my eye:

Amazing how the haters & losers keep tweeting the name “F**kface Von Clownstick” like they are so original & like no one else is doing it…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 3, 2013

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

I can’t help but chuckle when I read these, but a part of me thinks it might behoove you to curb down the act a little bit.

Trying to do so might be futile, but it can’t hurt to at least have the possibility in mind.

So here goes.

Mr. Trump, if you want to temper your antics when the moment arrives, here’s a quick and easy supplement stack which might do the trick.

Oh, and by the way:  Yes, this is naked click bait.  Everyone else in the media is feasting at the Donald Trump buffet table, so I figure I might as well throw my name in the hat and see if I can ride your coattails too.

So, with that being said……..

If you have any inclination to change your appearances and can’t muster up the willpower to do so,  here’s a solid list of recommendations.

Temperament: Kava Root

You’ve been attacked quite a few times for your temperament, Mr. Trump.

You don’t seem to carry yourself with that dignity people like to see in their Commander in Chief.

If you wanted a quick and easy way to cool your inner dragons there are a number of directions you can go in, but I’d recommend the earthy drink from the South Pacific.

It’s been used for thousands of years, and got its nickname of ‘Herbal Ecstasy’ for good reason.

It reduces feelings of aggression and anxiety, and generally makes headstrong people more enjoyable to be around.

It’s traditionally drank as a broth from wooden bowls like this:

but if you’re in a hurry you can also take it in a pill.   Just try and get 250 mg of the active ingredient, kavalactones.

It might come in handy if you’re getting beaten up in the press for not having enough presidential charm.

Depth of Thought: Bacopa Monnieri

Donald, the chattering class likes to be reassured that their presidential candidates have a serious grasp on the issues.

As seen in the above video, your intellectual acumen might be lacking in the eyes of some.

If you want to at least give the appearance of caring about these things, taking Bacopa would help.

It’s good for helping your brain move serotonin back and forth, which helps with information recall and higher levels of focus when they’re needed the most.

You should take at least 300 mg, and ideally with a meal because its active ingredient, Bacoside A, is fat-soluble.  It won’t do you much good on an empty stomach.  It’s also an ayurvedic herb, so it probably wouldn’t hurt to source it from India if you can.  It’s a delicate plant and sub-optimal growing conditions don’t do it any good.

Hair Growth: Biotin

Despite this clip, I refuse to believe that there’s anything normal about your hair Donald.  When I look at it I wonder if it needs to provide its own birth certificate.

If you want to give it flamboyance the natural way you ought to go with biotin.  It reduces inflammation around your hair follicles, which allows the proteins on your scalp to fully express themselves, enabling your hair to grow longer and shinier.

When taking biotin Donald it’s best to go big or go home.  You need 10,000 mcg to make an impact, and you need to be willing to take it for at least 2-3 months before you see any difference.

Feelings of Aggression:  Saffron

You ought to like this one.

Saffron’s an extremely expensive herb who’s purchase is only possible for those who reside in society’s highest economic echelon.

You probably have some of it sitting in a vase in Trump Tower somewhere.

Saffron is delicate and floral, and fresh saffron is only grown in the middle east, where it costs more than $700/lb.

You don’t need to take very much (20 mg), and it’s best enjoyed like a fine wine.  Enjoy the scent, take it slowly, and allow it to gently improve your mood.

So……

I readily admit that I’m probably talking into thin air.  But I figured it couldn’t hurt to do a little carnival barking at the world’s most astute carnival barker.  I’ve always suspected narcissicists pay a lot of attention to what’s said about them on the internet, even if it’s never publicly acknowledged.

If any of this helps, just keep my name in mind for that Secretary of Health position you might need filled up……….

If I’m approached about a consulting opportunity I usually have people fill out a questionnaire to get a better feel for their situation.  I’ve been doing this for 2 years and the answers provide a pretty panoramic view of the issues people face when embarking on these sorts of endeavors.

To better illustrate how people need to make decisions in these circumstances it’d behoove us to take a look at the aggregated answers to see where people’s assumptions might be off.

The results are very revealing. It turns out there are 3-5 issues that people regularly deal with, and without any prior knowledge of how to deal with them it’s easy to paint yourself into a corner.  But without a little bit of foresight can help you sidestep divets in the ground.

Question 1:  How Experienced Are You in the Nutraceutical Field?  

According to the results most of you start a little wet behind the ears, and no one’s walking into this with a lot of tangible experience.

Is industry knowledge a pre-requisite for success or is it easy to pick up on the fly?

In my opinion it’s not too important if you can figure out how to get the product made.

From what I’ve seen you don’t need a lot of prior knowledge about the nutraceutical industry if you’re very good at marketing.  I’ve met about a half-dozen people who make a lot more money than me as business owners despite knowing much less about the industry and the one thing they all have in common is that they’re intense marketers.

They go about it in different ways, but they all have an ace in their pocket that allows them to continually bring in new customers.   And they’re not shy about milking it for whatever they can.  In person they’ve never struck me as being particularly intellectual or concerned with the world at large, but they have a distinct type of intelligence that’s hard to classify.  It’s like an expert carpenter who’s figured out how to size up a job and understands exactly where to strike his hammer to get the biggest impact for his work.

They can’t necessarily explain why it works, or care to understand the process too much, but nonetheless have an astute sense of how to aggressively go about getting customers.  To many people their approach might come off as distasteful, but that’s mostly because they don’t seem to care much about the social desirability of what they do as long as it works.  None of them have struck me as being the least bit idealistic.

The ability to have a narrow-minded focus on making money and a willingness to bluntly do whatever it takes to achieve that is a unique skill unto itself that not many people have.

I’m not sure if this is coincidence or not, but none of them have used social media as their primary way of getting customers.

If you don’t know what you’re doing the big hurdle is figuring out how to get your product manufactured in a way that’s congruent with your marketing claims and budget.  For many people this means discovering your business idea is no longer valid because your product can’t be made to your specifications on your budget, which forces you to erode your marketing claims to the point where they’re no different from anyone else, removing your reason for getting started in the first place.

When it comes to product ideals most people fall into two camps:  they have a pristine vision that’s unique and incredibly expensive to make, or no standards at all so long as they think they can make a buck.

Both approaches have their problems.  Pristine products with lots of certifications are great, but that usually means high order minimums that overwhelm your capacity to sell.  It’s best to have your order quantity and sales quantity be in harmony and for most people that means starting as small as possible.  But sourcing unique ingredients isn’t like shopping at Wal-Mart and you can’t just add the amount you’d like into your grocery cart before checking out.

It’s not unusual for differentiating ingredients to push your order minimums up several thousand bottles and that usually presents first-timers with a conundrum:  do you go all-in to give your product the best chance to succeed or do you diminish it and risk that it won’t be worth selling at all?

This is a very prescient question and the best answer depends on your stance on a survey question that’ll be covered later in this essay.

Making products that are cheap but have high markups is a viable strategy but you have to get certain details right.  Mainly, you can’t sell to people that will be able to tell that you make cheap products.  This means you can’t target the infovorous hyper-sharing folks that are so commonly the entry point into a market for new brands.

Instead you have to migrate to where low-information people consume their information, which is usually broad-based mediums that finance themselves with paid advertising.  Radio, TV, telemarketing, etc.  Here you run into a similar dilemma as product purists but with a different face:  advertising budgets that usually require a lot of money if they’re going to have any shot at working.

So while the product purist has to decide if they want to go all-in and buy the characteristics that will make their product unique, the marketing maven has to decide if it’s going to be worth it to commit to the marketing channels he needs in order to reach the people that’ll buy his product.

Question 2: Are You Looking to Develop A New Product or Use Existing Products?

The viability of creating your own product or selling someone else’ largely depends on your business model, which I covered in more detail in my article on private labeling.

If you’re looking to bring a new product to market you should swallow the knot in your stomach and make a custom product because that’s the only way you’ll have the differentiation and margin needed to blaze new trails.

Private labeling is suitable if your product line is not the main point of your business and you have some other customer acquisition channel you can add your private labeled products on top of.  Medical professionals, health stores, and people who already have an online presence are good fits.

Most companies can’t afford to go through all the work of blazing new business trails only to sell someone else’s product when they get to the end of it.  There’s not enough margin.  You could potentially do private label-to-custom but you’ll have problems with market penetration that will make it harder for you to differentiate enough to finally get to a large order.

The majority of private labelers are best suited for small orders of a few dozen bottles at a time for non-supplement companies that want to add extra profit channels.

It’s okay to not be that kind of company as long as one of the following conditions are met:

• You’re using the private label product as a “fill in” to compliment the stronger custom-made products in your supplement line.   Ie, some people would like it if you sold vitamin D even though it’s not your main product and it makes more sense to do a smaller private label than a large custom run for a commodity product.
• At large orders the private labeler gives you significant discounts over the standard 40% retailer markup.  This way you can approach the unit pricing of the custom product and still have the benefit of them handling the details of the manufacturing.
• You are particularly good at marketing and can sell enough of a private label product to justify a custom order.

Question 3: How Big Were You Thinking of For Your Initial Batch?  

Mmm hmmm……….

People are all over the map here, and not in a good way.  One of the details that’s hard to understand for industry newcomers is what the world looks like to a manufacturer.

Even now, I’m still just understanding it, and it’s difficult to wrap my head around.  When it comes to perspectives you’d be hard pressed to find two parties who approach the world as differently as a supplement manufacturer and the typical person filling out my questionnaire.

Most people looking to enter the industry are doing so with their personal savings, which is usually around $10,000-$20,000.  Most manufacturers preside over a 100,000+ square foot facility that required millions of dollars in CapEx to build.  They have large fixed costs which puts a pretty stiff floor on what they can afford to do and still make money.

Most manufacturers make most of their money from a few very large customers.  When the right MLM company or drugstore comes along they’ll make 100,000 kilos at a time of something.

There’s more work involved in making 100,000 kilos of something than 500, but it’s not proportionally larger.  The amount of testing, machine maintenance, and R&D is roughly the same, and even the time it takes isn’t that much larger because they can just use bigger machines.

Anything less than 1,000 bottles amounts to pixie dust to your typical manufacturer.

For most people starting out, the amount of money they’re using represents years of saved labor to get to that point, so everything they do seems incredibly important.  Anything they need that costs more than they can afford feels extractive.

Manufacturers start from the completely opposite viewpoint.  Runs of 50,000-100,000 bottles feel right, and by the time they get to less than 5,000 they feel like they’re doing you the favor.  They also put a lot of thought into attracting the right customer, which usually isn’t the person who’s starting out and wants 500 bottles made.

The newbie with a $5,000 budget and 500 bottle test run usually ends up coming off like  this:

If you’re just starting out you don’t want to be Bill Murray in that video.  It’s easy to become him if you’re not careful.

If you have modest finances to begin your venture you’re already starting off with some headwinds and you need to make sure you understand the landscape to give yourself some extra oxygen to placate your lack of cash.

A good first step to overcome this ignorance would be my article on how to deal with manufacturers.

A second would be a consistent recognition of how your situation probably appeals to others and act accordingly.  You should also anticipate starting with at least 1,000 bottles if your product is at all unique.

Question 4: How Decided Are You on Your Formula? 

The big obstacle in formula development is turning your wish list into a to-do list.  Most people start looking for manufacturers with lofty ambitions because they think they’ve targeted a big hole in the market that’ll get them penetration.

Most people have to backtrack from their original version for one of the following reasons:

• The ingredient doesn’t actually exist.  This is often true when people want a nutrient that’s certified organic.  Most isolated nutrients (like CoQ10 for example) are either made synthetically or extracted from a plant, often using a solvent that prohibits the ingredient from being certified.  For example, there is no organic lutein, because in order to extract it from the marigold flower you have to use hexane or methanol, neither of which is approved by the organic standard.  So lots of people have a formula that’s plum filled with all these trend-setting organic ingredients which can’t actually be bought.
• The ingredient is only sold by one or a handful of suppliers.  If an ingredient is developed with some remarkable (and sometimes unremarkable) technology that has a patent on it then chances are all yellow brick roads will lead to one seller, which usually means really high prices and minimums.  This is true of methyl folate, plant DHA, vegan vitamin D, and whole food vitamins, among others.  In general there is an arms race to develop new ingredients with unique certifications because that’s where the money is these days.  Overall sales of supplements are flat but there’s hot demand for getting the same ingredients from better, cleaner sources.  So there’s a big rush to be the first company to adequately veganize, organify, or plant-base something that hasn’t been done so before.  And then they get a patent.  And then you have to pay 10x more if you want to have it in your formula.  If your formula is chock-full of patented ingredients you are almost definitely putting yourself down this road.
• The ingredient list is overwhelming.  If you’re requesting 1,000 bottles of something be made and you want to sprinkle in 50 mg of 8 different things then you’re probably driving yourself to very high unit prices to compensate for the fact that you’ll be leaving the manufacturer with unused inventory.

All in all, it’s hard to develop a genuinely unique formula while being economical.  For most people it’s usually best to have one that’s merely good but with a distinct benefit, and then cultivate the right sales channel for it in order to give yourself separation.

Question 5: Where Are You Planning on Selling Your Product?  

The majority of people I speak with are from the USA, so most of these international ambitions mean people want to export.

My feelings on exporting are mixed.

On one hand, the world’s a big place and there are billions of people who are going through an industrial process that America has already completed, so it makes sense to do what it takes to expand your market.  Lots of companies, including Nutraceuticals, experience most of their growth internationally.

On the other, new companies have thin margins and exports have high regulatory overhead.  I frequently get the impression companies go into exports without the operational savvy to maintain it and this is sometimes more trouble than it’s worth.

Question 6:  How Much Money Do You Have to Get Started?

For the most part I don’t think nutraceuticals are a great business to get in if you have an ultra-thin budget.  The product overhead is too high and the growth coefficient to the market is too low.

In investing parlance good supplement companies tend to be value stocks, not growth stocks.  You can get consistent cashflows, but it’s hard to be a unicorn unless you have a lot of corporate backing.

If you’re reading this blog post in earnest interest then I can only assume that that doesn’t describe your situation.

As a rule of thumb $10,000 is a safe bet to get off the ground modestly.  If you want to make a liquid it should be more like $25,000-$50,000.

Premium suppliers can easily increase your order minimums several thousand bottles.  People who want to make a comprehensive product with lots of different certifications are likely to run into this problem.

It’s important to realize that your capital expenditures increase proportionally to your sales, so if you start fast and lean you’re going to have to stay that way as you grow, even if things are going really well.   That means it can be hard to ever take money out of your business the first several years, and bootstrappers should take note accordingly.

If I were doing it over again, I wouldn’t go into the natural product business unless I either had a really unique ingredient that wasn’t being sold elsewhere and/or had at least $30,000 – $50,000 to get started, even though you could do it for less.

Question 7:  What’s Your General Feel for Customer Acquisition?

Besides how good you make your actual product, getting your marketing right is the biggest determinant of your success.

There are a few supplement companies that get by today without being good at marketing, but they were started a long time ago.  All the new companies are great at it, and this will be true for you too if you want to get over.

The most important part to effective marketing is making sure you know how to reach the people that make sense for your product.  Your customer, marketing channels, and manufacturing specs all have to be in-sync if you want to get over.

For example, you could reasonably sell to both the elderly and vegans, but you’d have to align your business in very different ways to do either successfully.

Old people buy a lot of supplements.  They have to buy a lot of supplements because the only thing they want to do is feel young again.  If your product helps them feel young again, they won’t much care what’s in it, whether it’s certified organic, or any product benefit you could spend money on.

If their back feels better when they wake up in the morning then it works.  Period.

That sounds like the ideal customer, but with one caveat:  they’re expensive to reach.  For the most part they don’t form a lot of their buying decisions through social media, and tend to consume their information through channels that have economies of scale:  print, tv, etc.

Vegans are almost the exact opposite:  young, infovorous, well-connected, but extremely demanding.  So if you hit the right high notes your product can sell itself, but you’ll likely have to front a lot of risk in order to make it appealing to them.

Creating the right marketing channel is entirely about finding the right niche.  It’s a lot like creating the right menu for customers at a restaurant.  Almost any style of food could conceivably work, but you’ll have little hope if you don’t offer the right sort of food to the people who walk in your door.

Both greasy diners and high end brasserie’s can achieve great success, but one would never meet success by trying to think it could be like the other.

You should think of your natural products company the same way and mold your business appropriately.  And the time to galvanize your customer base is before, not after your product is released.

Regardless of their merit, probiotics are the supplement people turn to when they want to improve their digestive health.

However, most people don’t realize we’re still living in the Stone Age of probiotics and they’re nowhere close to fulfilling their potential.

Those 100 billion CFU’s on the label might be 50 billion once you open the bottle, and then turn into 25 billion once they get out of your stomach, and then get chopped down to 10 billion by the time they finally reach the back of your colon.

If you want nice bowel movements you need to do more than just down L. Acidophilus and call it a day.

Do They Colonize Your Gut?

People take a probiotic because they believe it’ll colonize their gut with healthy bacteria.  Skeptics point out there’s little chance they’ll make it there in the first place and are buying an expensive bug cemetery.

As it turns out, both are wrong.

Bifido and lactobacteria are surprisingly resilient at surviving the stomach and have survival rates between 20-40%, which is much higher than originally thought.

However,  they do little more than take a joyride through your colon once they get there.   If you stop taking a probiotic, their bacterial content will stop showing up in your feces shortly thereafter.

Luckily, their short-lived existence doesn’t render them ineffective.  Probiotics consistently have a positive albeit modest effect on various health conditions.  But they don’t work in the ways you think.

It turns out probiotics are nomadic, but not imperial.  They don’t stick to your intestinal walls, but they do emit a wide variety of particles that nourish your intestine, balance your hormones, transmit signals to your brain, and counteract a bratty immune system.

And it’s this chattiness that allows them to be therapeutic.  As long as you keep taking them.

What Are They Good For?

The probiotics industry currently runs on hope moreso than science.

Ever wish you knew which strains were best to maximize your health?  So do the people making them!

However, the cupboard isn’t entirely bare.  To figure out how to get the most out of a probiotic it’d be useful to look at a paper that pooled together all the trials conducted with probiotics and analyzed their results.

It produced a buffet table of insights on what’s important in a probiotic and what’s not.

Diseases

As you can see above, probiotics have the ability to improve the conditions of various gastrointestinal conditions, but the effect varies 10x.  [footnote]The conditions are ordered most effective –> least effective bottom to top.[/footnote]

If you’re lucky enough to get pouchitis there’s good news. People who take probiotics are 80% more likely to have their condition improve than people who don’t.   If you have enterocolitis they’re almost guaranteed to have no effect.

What determines what a probiotic can help with?  There are two good rules of thumb:

• Prevent, not cure.  Probiotics are good for helping with the prevention of conditions, or keeping them in check, but are not strong enough to reverse them once they’ve gotten serious.
• General, not acute.  For conditions that have very specific causes you’ll need traditional medicine for the bulk of your healing.  If your ailment has no specific cause then a good probiotic is likely to help.

What Strains Work?

Commercially bifido and lacto bacteria reign supreme, but therapeutically nothing compares to C. Butyricum and VSL #3 (which can’t be bought over the counter).

C. Butyricum works because it produces butyrate, which is a fatty acid your gut needs in large quantities but doesn’t typically get.  Here’s a useful thread that explains how it’s helped people with chronic conditions.  It’s really useful for killing gut pathogens and works well with resistant starch (more on that later).

Whole health source has a good article on butyrate, and why the best way to get it is with lots of lard.

VSL #3 is a proprietary blend that was formulated specifically for IBS, pouchitis, and other gastrointestinal conditions and…….is only available through a doctor.  It has the most comprehensive clinical research of any probiotic strain, but forget about picking up a bottle of it at Vitamin Shoppe.  Prescription only.

The rest have more modest levels of success, and quite frankly, suffer from being overused in formulations.  Many of the most popular bifido and lacto strains have been thrown against the wall for so many different things that it’s no wonder they’ve had no effect for a lot of it.

How Best to Take Them?

Since probiotics pass right through your colon it’s not surprising that you need to take them for a long time to be effective.  You’ll need at least 8 weeks of exposure to see a significant impact, and their benefit increases with length of time taken.

Notice that dose doesn’t move the needle much.  You have 10,000X more bacteria in your belly than you can fit in a pill.  Until they can create 100 trillion CFU in a serving adding a few extra billion is just tossing nickels in the fountain.

More strains are better if the people making the products are paying attention to what they’re doing.  However, most of the increases in strain varieties is a rat race that exercises little caution for how they actually work together.

The truth is that very little is known about how strains can be used to manage various health conditions and most strain combinations is guesswork.

This is the next frontier of probiotics, and will be covered in a later post.

The Importance of Resistant Starch

Truthfully, while probiotics are helpful, their effect is always going to be modest.  Taking a probiotic to change your gut flora is like filling up your swimming pool with the ice mug from your freezer…….it’s just too puny to have much of an impact.

If you want a healthy gut you need to make sure it has enough fuel to replenish its bugs on its own.

That’s why eating the right foods is important.

Some carbohydrates aren’t entirely digested in your stomach.  When they reach your colon bacteria are able to breakdown their remnants into sugar and ferment it for fuel. These are called prebiotics, and they might be more useful for increasing the spread of healthy bacteria than healthy bacteria themselves.

Despite many imprecise claims of being the real thing, the only supplementary ingredients that qualify are inulin, fructo oligosaccharide (F.O.S.) and lactulose.

The benefits of resistant starch are threefold:

• It lives in your hind gut, which is where lots of digestive orders are formed.  Many probiotic bacteria are most active in your foregut and have wilted and died by the time they can  see your anus on the horizon.
• They feed the bacteria which are already there, which are much greater in number and diversity than anything you could get with a probiotic alone.
• They produce short chain fatty acids, which are fuel for your gut and help reduce stress.

It’s useful to think of prebiotics as the supplementary equivalent of shampoo and conditioner.  It’s best to use one to prep your body for the other.  The Paleo Mom has a good article on resistant starch, and the astute Vin Cutty also has an awesome article on probiotics and why he doesn’t take them.  

Please note that you need 10-20g’s of this stuff to make a difference.  Supplement companies that fairy-dust it into their capsules are just label chasing.   Sweet potatoes, squash, yams, and artichokes are great sources of resistant starch in real food.

Moving Beyond Bifido and Lacto Bacteria

If you didn’t know any better you might think bifido and lacto bacteria were the genesis of all things gut health.

After all, why on earth would they be included in so many supplements if they weren’t?  

The truth, it turns out, is a bit more depressing.  They were originally included in products because they grow well in milk.  The fact that they’re good for cheesemaking does more to explain their prevalence in commercial products than anything having to do with human health.

The genome of a hunter-gatherer tribe called the Hadza was recently sequenced, and it turns out bifidobacteria were entirely absent.   Apparently they weren’t the probiotic of choice of our ancestors.

And this absence isn’t even limited to people who walk around in butt-flaps!

As we continue to sequence the gut-o-somes of people around the world it turns out bifido and lactobacteria are totally MIA.  (HT:  Vin Cutty).

Bifido and lactobacteria are useful, but if you’re going to use a probiotic you ought to aim a little higher than the Bert & Ernie of gut bugs.  Good strains to get outside of those two are the following:

1. C. Butyricum – see above.  It kicks ass.
2. S.  Boulardi – actually a yeast, but it has proven benefits for mental function.
3. P. Acidilacti – possesses many of the benefits of lactobacilli, but it’s better at removing pathogens.

What Brands Work?

There is a marketing arms race to boast the highest CFU count on your label, but the most important parts of a probiotic are well chosen strains that are carefully grown not to interfere with one another.  Here are three companies that basically get it right:

Prescript Assist – 29 different organisms + proven stability + useful clinical trials.

AOR Probiotic – The only OTC product I’m aware of that sells C. Butyricum in its formula in  the US.

Hyperbiotics – They use well produced strains and strong formulations.

Truth be told, there’s no probiotic you can take that’ll fill up your belly with the bacteria you need.

Fermented foods, a healthy relationship with dirt, and plenty of starch in your diet are the best ways to make your colon whole.

Probiotics are useful for people that are managing gastrointestinal disorders, on antibiotics, or abnormally hate potatoes.

When I walk into Four Seasons, I calmly stroll past the supplement refrigerator without suffering pangs of doubt.  I maintain my colon with a willingness to make the chess players in McDonald Park uncomfortable by my lack of awareness when I sit in the dirt next to them.

If you have more manners than I do, then god bless you.  Your gut might not thank you for it………but there might be a probiotic that can help.  Just make sure you get the basics right.

References:

1).  Bezkorovainy, et al.  “Probiotics:  Determinants of Survival and Growth in the Gut.”

2).  Ritchie, Marina, et al. “A Meta-Analysis of Probiotic Efficacy for Gastrointestinal Diseases.”

3).  Lin, Jun-Song, et. al. “Different Effects of Probiotic Species/Strains on Infections in Preschool Children: A Double-Blind Randomized, Controlled Study.”

4).  Timmerman, H.M.  “Monostrain, Multistrain and Multispecies Probiotics –A Comparison of Functionality and Efficiency.”

5).  Roberfroid, Marcel.  “Prebiotics:  The Concept Revisited.”

In the supplement world products that reside in the “Weight Loss” aisle are perennial high-sellers but the frequent object of media scorn for their inflated claims and poor results.

They move off the shelves, but more because of our vulnerable psychology than their proven benefits.  We want to impress the opposite sex now,  but the length of time and exercise it takes to melt away your gobble neck feels like timing the growth of grass with a stopwatch.

So there we find ourselves, vegged out on our couch at 2AM, our protuberant guts oozing over our belt, talking on the phone with an Indian telemarketer about that $90 thigh machine that’s been marked down from $479 if you order in the next 20 minutes.

Hey, it’s probably a bad idea…….but what if it works?  

That latter thought is the weight loss supplement industry in a nutshell.

The Supplement Industry:  Is There a Way Forward?

Over the years there have been many products developed towards weight loss but few of them have worked because weight loss itself is hard to combat with a pill.   It’s more of a system-wide thing than anything you can pinpoint directly with an ingredient or two.

Most of what’s out there are hacks that’ll jack up your heart rate and/or screw with your ability to absorb fatty nutrients if you take them too much.  [footnote]If you’re a product marketer most of your insurance rates go way up if you market towards weight loss because a lot of the ingredients are dangerous if used too much.[/footnote]

If that’s the case, is there any hope for a legitimate weight loss product or is the bridge between desire and reality too far to gap?

In some ways the answer is no, there’s probably not any hope because the issue of obesity is broader than any supplement could tackle.  However, there are some new ingredients on the horizon that could accurately be labeled as “metabolic enhancers” that have a modest effect on your body’s ability to process energy and melt an extra pound or three.

Omniactives recently came out with OmniLean, and Orgenetics has AimSlim, both of which are promising ingredients from companies that have carved out unique market positions for themselves.  But for the time being the 900 lb Guerilla in the room is Meratrim, a patented blend of Indian Thistle and Mangosteen made by InterHealth Nutraceuticals.  It’s the only weight loss ingredient that carries the gravitas of having valid research behind its marketing claims.

I was contacted about writing a review of the ingredient, and I giddily said yes since the chance to Guinea Pig myself is an exciting development for someone who uses nutrition textbooks for his bedtime reading.I’ve been testing it out for the last month or so and whaddya know…..it’s high time we had a blog post to reconcile what it’s all about.

What It Is

The most common weight loss ingredients are garcinia cambogia and raspberry ketones, but both of these are off the mark as far as weight loss goes.  The chatter around raspberry ketones should evaporate in an exhalation of Dr. Oz’es hot air any year now, and garcinia cambogia does not have a great track record when it comes to keeping the pounds off.

However, Meratrim calls on two sparingly used herbs to pull its weight:  Sphaeranthus indicus (Indian Thistle) and Garcinia mangostana.  Both are lightly studied, but carry a long list of promising biological activities that allow them to alter your metabolism.

Truthfully, they’re inflammation suppressors moreso than genuine weight loss agents.  Both reduce TNF-alpha and IL-8, two autoimmune proteins which wreak havoc on your gut and alter your ability to metabolize food.  G. Mangostana also increases your body’s production of insulin [footnote]Insulin is the chemical that allows your body to remove sugar from the bloodstream[/footnote], which allows it to help control blood sugar.

It’s these combination of effects that allow it to induce weight loss.

The Evidence

Front and center in Meratrim’s marketing claims is a clinical study published in The Journal of Medical Food in 2013 that reported shrinking waist lines and tighter tummies for the people who participated in it.   Sometimes the papers companies flaunt in their marketing is little more than an open access PDF they paid to get distributed, but in this case the journal article crosses off all the important checkpoints you’d want to see:

• Reputable institution.  The lead author comes from a reputable university, UC-Davis.
• Robust test conditions.  It was a long trial with a fairly large sample size (100 volunteers, 8 weeks long).
• Strong controls.  There was a control group, the participants were screened for appropriate criteria and randomized, and the study was double blind.  [footnote]That means neither the patients or the researchers knew who was getting placebo or the real thing.[/footnote]
• Powerful results.  The results themselves were promising.  Weight, BMI, waistline, and various metabolic parameters were all significantly improved.  Weight loss in particular was impressive with an average reduction of 10 lbs and a P value of less than 0.00001.  [footnote]This represents the likelihood the results were due to chance.[/footnote]
• Fast results.  Participants began to see clinically significant results after two weeks.  That’s great from a formulation standpoint, because no matter how much people preach the mantra of using hard work and diligence to achieve our goals……..we just want the magic to happen now.
• Safe.  In the clinical trial there were no treatment related adverse events.  This is important because customers fixated on weight loss don’t always get the highest marks for patience, so it’s helpful having an ingredient that won’t cause people to drop dead if they start using it to flavor their Gin and Tonics.

For the time being this is the highest standard that’s been set for a weight loss ingredient and makes it the most reputable option for a company looking to market a product with this health benefit.

From my point of view, the study they use to promote its health benefits is very sound and stands up very well on its own merits.  However, what’s currently missing from InterHealth’s IP portfolio is a well-conducted absorption study.  Some of the active ingredients in Meratrim are fat soluble, which means they’ll likely have a difficult time leaving the GI tract if not taken under the best conditions.  A paper that compares the absorption of the Garcinia Mangostana and Sphaeranthus indicus in Meratrim compared to generic versions of the ingredients would go a long way towards cementing their place as the premium supplier of a novel weight loss ingredient and give themselves a competitive moat from other products in the space.

MeraTrim…..My Story

Before this review I’ve never tried a weight loss supplement.

Thankfully I’ve always been pretty thin and am able to resist the titillating before-and-after pictures you see when you click on a Facebook ad for diet shakes.  So I was naturally curious about what sort of effect it’d have on me……both how I felt and whether or not I’d lose weight.

Here’s what I found:

• There were no discernible effects on my heart rate, concentration, etc.  Ie, taking it didn’t put me in a manic frenzy.
• I noticed after two days I became less hungry.  This was especially noticeable when I woke up in the morning.  I usually workout at 6:30 AM, and afterwards have a hankering for something sweet that’ll cause me to gorge on sticky buns and red bean pastries at the chinese bakery I walk past on my way home if I let myself.  On day 3 I noticed that I was unusually immune to these urges and that feeling persists to this day.
• I lost……..2 pounds.   Probably an artifact and not that relevant since I’m not overweight to begin with, but these are the results that I got after taking 1 capsule a day for over three weeks:

Day 1:  

I’m 186 pounds

Day 23:

`184!

Determine for yourself how relevant this is, but what’s definitely been noticeable is its gentle, non-invasive effect throughout the month.

Au revoir!

CoQ10 has long been a staple of the natural products industry, but its effectiveness is a disappointment when you take a look underneath the hood.

It’s meant to be a powerful antioxidant that turbocharges your mitochondria, but only 1-2% of it is absorbed because its high molecular weight and non-polarity make it hard to get out of your stomach and into your mitochondria where they belong.

The Cochrane Foundation concluded there’s no conclusive evidence that CoQ10 is particularly effective for its most commonly used purposes of cardiovascular health and oxidative capacity.

CoQ10 is a product that should work in theory, but falls short of expectations in practice.

The Trouble in Paradise

The problem with CoQ10 isn’t that it’s ineffective, it’s that your body is poorly equipped to get it in places where it does any good.

Getting the issue of nutrient transport right is a field of medicine called pharmacokinetics (how something moves through your body), and it’s the step-brother of the much more ballyhooed field of pharmacodynamics, which is what gets the most play in the media.  [footnote]Pharmacodynamics is the study of what a nutrient does when it’s inside your body.[/footnote]

CoQ10 hardly dissolves in anything and it doesn’t move through your cell walls very well because of its lack of electrical charge.  That’s problematic because inside your body CoQ10 resides in your mitochondrial membrane, a part of your body that pumps out large amounts of charged electric current in order to produce energy, so it’s very difficult for oral CoQ10 to make its way there to stay.

But luckily there are a few CoQ10 alternatives that do most of its vital functions much more effectively than CoQ10 itself, so it would behoove supp-a-holics to take a look at these choices instead.

MitoQ

MitoQ is a next-gen version of CoQ10 that gets around CoQ10’s ineffectiveness by attaching something called a TPP sidechain to the base CoQ10 molecule.  The TPP sidechain gives it an electrical charge that gives it a special affinity for the mitochondria which allows it to get taken up much more effectively than normal CoQ10.

In cell line studies MitoQ is about 800% more effective in getting into the mitochondrial membrane, and in humans the uptake into the inner mitochondrial membrane is estimated to be approximately 10-15%.

Inside the cell MitoQ “docks” itself into the walls of the mitochondria which allows it to stabilize the organelle and turn itself over more quickly so it can perform the antioxidant activities of CoQ10 more effectively than CoQ10 itself.

MitoQ has perhaps more R&D behind it than any other product in the supplement industry and there’s quite a bit of clinical research on the molecule’s effectiveness.  A quick search on PubMed shows there are currently 177 studies performed with MitoQ that cover a broad range of areas such as absorption, toxicity, antioxidant activity and treatment for degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and MS.

MitoQ is effective at 5mg doses and most people experience increased benefits up to 20mg doses before it begins to taper off.

It’s not cheap, but in this case you get what you pay for.

C60 (Buckminsterfullerene)

We’ll file this one under “speculative” for now, but it’s still worth talking about.

C60 is a type of molecule called a fullerene, and it’s a network of carbon atoms that are linked together like a soccerball.  (See the pic above).  It was hypothesized to exist in the 1970’s when research on unsaturated carbon-chains was getting underway and finally discovered in 1985, which allowed its research-provocateurs to get a Nobel Prize for their discovery in 1996.

C60 is a tantalizing health compound because its outer-shell can undergo redox reactions in 6 different places and is extremely stable, so its potential to be an uber-antioxidant seems plausible even though the evidence of it having any effect in the human body is scarce.

There was a stir in the online health community when a  study reported that C60 extended the lifespan of cancerous rats by 90% compared to the control group, creating a wave of speculation that the world’s next super-oxidant was on its way.

This result was exciting, but it’s best to remember that history has taught us this type of irrational exuberance is usually just that.  The study itself only used 6 rats in each group, and in my opinion did not do enough to account for the potential effect of outliers in its sample results.  It used something called the Shapiro-Wilk test to detect how well their results fit a bell curve but it’d be best to search for individually extreme results and discard them since the margin of error for an n=6 sample is very large.  So it’s possible for the results to be technically “normal” even though they’re not really experimentally valid.

The results for the C60 rats were striking both for what was observed and what wasn’t.  In addition to prolonged lifespans they also showed remarkably less organ damage when doused with CCL4 (a powerful free radical that’s used to poison animals in studies) and amounts of active glutathione 2-4x greater than the control group.

What was also curious is what showed up when they tried to find the remnants of C60 in tissues:  nothing.   Nary a trace was found in tissues and overall absorption was measured at less than 1%.

This means C60 is either such a powerful antioxidant that it can exert all these whiz-bang therapeutic benefits before you crap it out or much of the study was a statistical artifact.

To be honest….either could be true.  The idea of a supplement having a prolonged therapeutic benefit even though it only does a drive by through your colon might sound implausible but that’s basically how probiotics work.  They don’t heal your gut because they colonize your microbiome.  They pass right through but release various messenger particles in your colon which seems to stimulate different types of autoimmune activity before you evict them out of your anus 4 hours later.

There’s never been a study in human on C60 so there’s really not much you can say about how well it does or doesn’t work in humans.  C60 does not seem to be toxic even at high doses and if you want to buy it you’ll usually get it in olive oil.

There are no well validated suppliers at this point and searching the web for vendors takes you to websites that have a vintage 1990’s aesthetic, which isn’t a good thing when you’re thinking about spending money there.

PQQ

PQQ is a CoQ10 like molecule that has the unique benefit of causing your body to produce more mitochondria, which is the basis for its health benefits.

PQQ turns on genes that generate a protein called PGC-1-alpha, which is involved in producing mitochondria and is the likely reason it allows your body to make more of them.  At least 7 different studies have been done on mice and the results usually suggest an increase in mitochondrial count of 10-30% in energy intensive organs like the liver and heart.

The majority of PQQ’s observed health benefits are all downstream of this Mito-boosting capability, such as cognitive function due to reduced inflammation, improved antioxidant status, and some improvements in symptoms common in degenerative disease.

The clinical evidence surrounding PQQ in humans is thin but it has the benefit of being well absorbed.  It’s a water soluble compound and approximately 20-80% of it leaves the GI tract, which is 10-40x that of CoQ10.  And because its main pathway is ancillary to the other nutrients listed here, it’s a very nice compliment for those looking for natural, non-invasive ways to improve cellular health.

BioPQQ is the most validated brand of PQQ and is the only company that’s conducted clinical trials on its product and is the version of PQQ that should be used.  There are some other trademarked versions of PQQ but after looking at them more closely I decided these other companies had little teeth behind their marketing claims and offer nothing unique over generic forms.

PureSorb-Q40

Most people would be best served to avoid CoQ10 altogether in lieu of the substitutes listed here.  However, there’s one compelling reason to continue using it:  if you’re on a statin.

Statins are a class of drug that block the production of cholesterol, but they inadvertently stop your body from making CoQ10 because it’s made from the same pathway that makes cholesterol.

The nutrients listed above beat CoQ10 as a general purpose antioxidant but they can’t fulfill its role in something called the electron transport chain, which is a system in your body that produces energy and absolutely requires CoQ10 as a structural component.

For this reason someone taking CoQ10 alongside a statin would be suited to take a high absorption form of CoQ10, such as Q-Sorb.

QSorb is a specially prepared form of CoQ10 that’s water soluble, which solves a lot of the problems with regular CoQ10 since it must be well dissolved in a lipid to get transported out of the small intestine after a meal.

One absorption study was done comparing its uptake to regular CoQ10 and found that in humans the total amount absorbed into the bloodstream was about twice as high as regular CoQ10.

The term “vitamin E” is always associated with the dominant form in the body, alpha-tocopherol.  It’s less appreciated that vitamin E comes as a family of eight, and collectively they provide a spectrum of health benefits that are impossible to replicate with alpha-tocopherol alone.  [footnote]For reference, there are two families of vitamin e molecules:  tocopherol and tocotrienol, and each one has 4 different geometries:  alpha, beta, gamma and sigma, making 8 total.[/footnote]

In particular, the tocotrienols are a subclass of vitamin E compounds that are remarkably therapeutic, but have long been considered useless.

Even at the highest peaks of the industry, the acknowledgement of the tocotrienols’ benefits has been exceedingly faint.  For example, in the chapter on vitamin E from the textbook I keep at home the authors had this to say about the tocotrienols:

The tocotrienols do not seem to possess any biological significance at this time.

Hmmmm……

How could it be that these disregarded vitamers have an effect on our health?

More Than Just An Antioxidant

Vitamin E gets its status as a vitamin because it’s the body’s primary antioxidant for fats.  alpha-tocopherol is the primary form used to this effect, hence the confusion about it being the only legitimate source of vitamin E.

However, if you peep closer into the looking glass it turns out the tocotrienols have a variety of uses within the body that go above and beyond vitamin E’s most common functions.

They are:

• Reduce cholesterol synthesis.  In a process distinct from other compounds, the tocotrienols modify the shape of HMG-CoA reductase, which is the rate limiting step in cholesterol synthesis.  Its modified shape silences the effect of the enzyme and causes the cell to destroy it.  Statins are a class of cholesterol lowering drugs that neuter the same enzyme, but do so by mimicking HMG-CoA R w/in the body and blocking it from its preferred pathway.  The fact that the tocotrienols have the same effect as statins but with different methods means they might provide a complimentary treatment for those trying to lower their cholesterol.
• Protects the brain from oxidative damage.  Your nervous system is very sensitive to pollutants and the tocotrienols protect the brain from oxidative stress caused by excess glutamate, homocysteine, and prostaglandins, all of which lead to cognitive decline over time.
• Reverses the spread of cancerous cells.  For the time being this has only happened in test tubes and not humans, but certain types of tocotrienols activate your cells’ trash compactors that cause tumors to start eating themselves, thus halting irregular cell growth.  [footnote]Again, note the importance of this only happening in vitro and not in humans, so the clinical relevance of this is mute.  Ie, I’m not saying they cure cancer![/footnote]

It ought to be noted that these benefits are in addition to the typical roles provided by vitamin E within the body.  What’s more, the tocotrienols appear to be more potent as an antioxidant than alpha-tocopherol itself!

The trienols have three double bonds in their side chain which makes them less saturated and allows them to more easily embed themselves in the cell membranes of fatty tissues.  In organs like the brain and liver alpha-tocotrienol has shown to be more than 40x more effective at reducing free radicals than regular vitamin E.

If the tocotrienols are so great, it begs the question of why they’re given so little attention.  Vitamin E was discovered in 1938, so why so little movement on them in the last 78 years?

The biggest reason is that the body doesn’t absorb them particularly well.  The good news however, is that it doesn’t need to because the tocotrienols exert their effect at very small concentrations.  This is especially true for their ability to protect the brain.  Supplementing with 200 mg of tocotrienols will raise your serum levels to 1 uM, which is enough for the tocotrienols to completely demonstrate their neuroprotective effect.

What’s more, it looks like the body has “secret” pathways for transporting only the trienols, particularly to the skin which are especially thirsty for the trienols.  So the fact that the body’s primary transport proteins are 8.5X more selective for alpha-tocopherol just isn’t that important for their therapeutic potential.

 K1, K2…..E1, E2?

Vitamin K has now been subdivided into two subclasses, denoted as K1 and K2.  The two compounds have subtly different geometries which changes how they travel throughout your body and get into your tissues.  K2 stays in your circulation 6x longer than K1 after you eat it, and this makes enough difference that for a lot of uses K2 is vastly superior to K1 when used deliberately.

It might be time to develop similar nomenclature for vitamin E.  The more it’s studied the more it becomes clear that each version of the vitamin has its own unique properties, making it hard to generalize about what exactly vitamin E is good for.

For example, the cholesterol effect is most acute with alpha-tocotrienol, but alpha-tocopherol actually has the opposite effect, making a test with mixed vitamin E self-defeating.

Likewise, the neuroprotection effect is only seen with alpha-tocotrienol, and gamma/sigma tocotrienol are the only versions of the vitamin that inhibit the growth of cancer cells in cell line studies.

So clearly one can easily trip themselves up when talking about vitamin E without making specific note of what type they’re taking.

Gimme Gimme Gimme

Palm oil’s the best natural source of the tocotrienols and full spectrum vitamin E is pretty easy to find in supplementary form if you look for it.

The use of vitamin E to reduce cholesterol in humans is not well validated, but the neuroprotective benefits are.  There is a particular blend of tocotrienols called Tocomin Suprabio that’s been put through clinical trials and has shown to be effective.

If you’re looking to source the tocotrienols its best to buy it from a company called ExcelVite, which is the only company that has produced tocotrienols at scale in a facility that’s GMP certified.  They make the Suprabio brand of vitamin E but also sell it directly as well.

When you study the etiology of industries which got surprisingly big they all share one thing in common:  they  had insipid beginnings.

At their birth the businesses and their customers were not taken seriously, either ignored or viewed as oddball cranks that take their hobbies to extremes.

But the awkwardness of the products creates a unique appeal that catches the eye of people on the fringe of their customer base.  The openness of their community and its uninhabited niche creates a self-perpetuating growth cycle that maintains its goofy nature until it suddenly gets really, really big.

And then everyone wonders how it got to that point.

When we think of such industries examples from tech are usually the first to come to mind.  The internet grew out of a research project at the Department of Defense (Arpanet).  The PC industry was commercialized under the auspices of two nerds (Bill Gates and Paul Allen) who made over 50 billion dollars by building a software language called Altair BASIC for the world’s first microcomputer assembly kit.  When it was released it was projected to sell 200 copies.

While the natural products industry doesn’t have the economics to allows its founders to amass the wealth found in tech, it does provide them an outlet for idiosyncratic expression.   The supplement business has quirkiness in its DNA, and its biggest successes were built on the backs of homeopathic quacks that were too busy fiddling with their tinctures to make an actual living.

No product category demonstrates this effect better than whole food supplements.  Back when the national BMI was on the right side of 25 the idea of freeze drying fruits and vegetables to mix with water seemed a little odd.  But in the last 30 years our free time and disposable income has shriveled up, but the need to eat healthy has not.

So as a response the greens powder industry has exploded.  The manufacturer that produces Incredible Greens was opened about 30 years ago by an Indian pharmacist, a capsule machine, and a staff of 4 people.  Now they have over 100 employees and do more than 1 billion in sales and 3 million kilos of vegetable powders a year.

And in the larger context of the industry, that’s just a drop in the bucket.

…….Which brings us to today’s review.

Folks, meet Mobius Nutrition.  A new company in the Meal Replacement space that sprang into existence with a successful IndieGoGo campaign which you can view here:

https://www.indiegogo.com/project/mobius-breakfast-that-works–2/embedded

Today we’re going to pick it apart and discover what it should be used for and what kinds of people ought to be slurping it down their shaker bottles every morning.

Let the games begin!

The Skinny

Here’s a condensed run down of Mobius Breakfast’s most important qualities.

What it is:  A paleo-ish meal replacement powder that emphasizes healthy fats, a robust vitamin stack, and a variety of stimulants that’ll serve as an adequate replacement for your first meal of the day.

Its Most Unique Features:

• The first meal replacement powder to use coconut milk powder as its primary ingredient, which makes it unusually creamy and filling.
• Has a complete vitamin stack.
• Contains 7-11 g’s of medium chain tri-glycerides (MCT’s), which have unique health benefits.
• Contains nootropics, which gives long-term use of Mobius some unique properties, which I’ll get to later.
• Your package comes with a shaker bottle and wrapped up in packaging that has an unusually high aesthetic appeal.
• Each packet contains 71g of breakfast powder, which is almost 3x as large as some other competitors.

What One Might Be Cautious About:

• Outside of three herbs (ashwagandha, rhodiola and gotu kola) it does not contain any plant foods.
• At $135 for a month’s supply it’s not the cheapest option out there.
• The combination of nootropics + caffeine could be a little taxing for some people’s systems.
• They use subpar forms of certain vitamins and minerals.  Not a big deal normally, but for the price being charged it’s a genuine nit to pick.

So with all that being said, what kind of experience can one expect if they take Mobius for 30 days?

First Impressions

If you order a box of Incredible Greens you’re not greeted with anything special when it arrives in the mail.  A cardboard box with an Amazon emblem is all you get.  (What can I say, I’m a simpleton).

However, a Mobius customer is treated to a product package that’s uniquely high class and convenient.  You get a branded cardboard box with your individual sachets, as well as a shaker bottle to take it with you wherever you go:

My 30 day supply came in a dark chocolate flavor and it was unusually delicious.  The coconut milk gives it a very thick, creamy flavor that blends well and isn’t too sweet.  After a few days I found myself craving it in the morning and it quickly became my go-to morning snack if I found myself having a pang of hunger.

The heavy use of coconut really comes through here because it allows a product to both be creamy and filling without having to add a lot of cheap calories.  So Mobius is particularly useful for people looking for taste and satiety.

This observation is true both in the short and long run……….two weeks in and I was still finding it satisfying.

Nutrient Breakdown

Like any physical product, the cost and quality of a physical supplement comes down to how much attention is paid to its physical components and whether or not they fit well together.

A meal replacement powder is only as good as its individual ingredients, and how they add up to provide 3-dimensional nutrition.

How does Mobius do on this front?

Let’s break it down.

MCTs

Coconut is unique in that a lot of its fat comes in the form of medium chain tri-glycerides (MCTs).

What makes them “special” is that they’re the only fatty acid that gets turned directly into ketone bodies, which is the fuel source your body derives from fat.  Most oils take a slllloooooowwwww time to make it to your liver, where they’re ultimately used for a variety of processes besides energy utilization.

But MCT’s go right into your body’s metabolic express lane, which makes them a unique source of fatty energy.  Ketone bodies burn much slower than glucose, so for many MCTs are a convenient way to stay fuller longer on the same amount of calories.

For someone looking to make themselves “keto adapted” in a hurry then a heavy dose of MCTs is the way to go.

They also help your body burn more heat, which is good for losing weight.

You can buy distilled MCT as a supplement from companies like Bulletproof, but coconut oil is the best natural source of MCTs in the diet.  Mark’s Daily Apple has a good write up on the use of coconut oil vs. concentrated MCT oil for sustained energy.  (Hint:  coconut oils MCTs are more mild since they’re not as concentrated).

The specific amount of MCTs are not listed, but most coconut oil is about 65% MCT by weight.  Of that, about 1/2 is able to be turned directly into ketone bodies for energy, so it’s a safe bet that each packet of Mobius has about 8-12g of MCT per serving.[footnote]About half of coconut oil is lauric acid, which is technically an MCT but gets digested like a normal fatty acid.[/footnote]

This is on the low end of what would be considered clinically relevant.

Nootropics

Mobius Breakfast is the only meal replacement powder I’m aware of that contains nootropics in its formula.  [footnote]Nootropics are a class of supplements that enhance mental function in some way.[/footnote]

On its website Mobius lists its Nootropic stack as consisting of Acetyl-L-Carnitine, Rhodiola Rosea, Ashwagandha, and Gotu Kola.  In my opinion that’s not quite accurate since the last three exert the majority of their benefits outside the brain.

It’d be more appropriate if they were labeled as adaptogens, since their primary benefit is that they allow your body to adapt to the stress response.  Their mechanisms of action work throughout the entire body and generally don’t do much to the brain itself.

Acetyl-L-Carnitine however, is deserving of the term and it’s important to understand how it works.  It’s responsible for some of the best and worst qualities of Mobius.

Acetyl-L-Carnitine

Mobius Breakfast contains 1,000 mg of Acetyl-L-Carnitine, which is a modified version of L-Carnitine, an amino acid that’s made from lysine and methionine and is used in the body to metabolize fat.  L-carnitine doesn’t really dance with the brain too much.

However, Acetyl-L-Carnitine passes the blood brain barrier rather easily and once there it takes part in a variety of biological processes that aid cognition.

Including:

• Increasing mitochondrial count, which improves oxidation status within the brain
• Increasing the production of acetylcholine, an important neurotransmitter
• Improving the balance of biogenic amines such as dopamine and serotonin

Acetyl-L-Carnitine’s effects are fairly modest, and if taken regularly have a decent track record for improving cognitive function, particularly among the elderly.

However, Acetyl-L-Carnitine isn’t without its side effects.  For unknown reasons it can give you the jitters with regular use, which brings me to my biggest complaint about Mobius:  whenever I took it I felt slightly over stimulated.

After I gulped downs my first shaker bottle I had this unique sensation that my brain was swelling inside my head, and I couldn’t tell if I felt smarter or sketched out.  I thought the effect might subside after a week of use but this was not the case.

My guess is the combination of caffeine + acetyl-l-carnitine is what did the trick.  Outside of completely removing it from the formula, a way around the problem might be to use a form besides Acetyl-L-Carnitine L-tartrate.  The L-tartrate salt causes ALCAR to enter your system more quickly, and using a more slowly absorbed form might stem the jitters after taking it.

Vitamin Stack 

What forms are used for various vitamins can have important effects for how they’re absorbed.  Unfortunately, in the supplement industry these details are not always well executed.  For this reason it’s my favorite way to judge a product.

It’s the best window into the company’s mind and heart.

Most people don’t know the difference so you won’t be penalized if you take shortcuts, so long as you still get the 100% DV on the label.   So you can easily give the appearance of being thorough without actually having to cover your bases.

But the forms don’t lie, so going through the list tells you where they were naughty and where they were nice.

So how did Mobius do on this front?

Minerals

The chief determinant for how well a mineral is absorbed is the carrying molecule that accompanies it.   Minerals have to disassociate inside the stomach so they can travel into the bloodstream.

The best minerals are light and fluffy, easily dissolving in stomach acid to free the mineral to do its thing.

Here’s what Mobius used in its product:

The Good:  phosphate (calcium, potassium), aspartate (magnesium), citrate (selenium, molybenum), chloride, glycinate(zinc, copper).

Phosphate was used to deliver calcium and potassium and this is a fine choice, since calcium phosphate is the form that’s assembled into your bones and phosphate is easily absorbed into the bloodstream.  Citrate and aspartate are two of the more commonly used salts to deliver minerals and they’re usually adequate since they have low solubility constants.

Glycinate is a term you use when you attach the amino acid glycine as a salt.  It’s the most common amino acid used in chelates because it’s the smallest, which makes  the glycine:mineral complex likely to make it to the brush border membrane, where it can dissociate when it’s about to be adsorbed out of the small intestine.

The Not So Good:  carbonate (calcium), oxide (magnesium), sulfate (manganese)

They used magnesium aspartate as the dominant form in the mixture so they get a bit of a pass here, but a $135/month supplement should not be using an oxide to deliver its minerals.  They are dense, making it easier to make label claims with a minimal amount of space, but they are also dense, making good absorption all but impossible.

I say this all the time, but magnesium oxide is one of the only minerals that’s clinically proven…..to not be absorbed.

Carbonate is another problematic carrier molecule.  If you’re wondering why it’s not particularly well absorbed, you’ll probably understand once we call it by its colloquial name:  chalk.

The sulfates are easy to use, but the coordination bonds found in sulfate complexes are not easily broken up by the chemical and physical pressures that occur in the GI tract.  These three ought to be replaced with something more becoming of the product.

The Vitamins

Here’s what they used for the vitamins:

B1:  Thiamin.  This is standard and basically fine.

B2:  Riboflavin.  This is standard and basically fine.

B3:  Niacin.  You can also use niacinamide here, which has the benefit of not providing a tingling sensation at high doses, but you need a good amount more than what’s contained here for that to kick in so this is also fine.

B5:  Calcium pantothenate.  They used calcium to complex with the pantothenic acid, which has the benefit of increased stability……this is fine.

B6:  Pyridoxine HCL.  Standard.

B9:  They list it as “folate.”  This is a bit confusing, since folate itself is not an actual molecule, but instead refers to a variety of compounds which share the same folate backbone.

Synthetic folate comes as folic acid, which is what I’m going to guess is being used here.  Circulating folate occurs as 5-MTHF (which can also be made synthetically), and the folate you find in plants is called 7,8 – DHF.

Lots of companies are using the generic folate term, but it ultimately confuses more than clarifies.  To learn more about folate read my previous article on the topic.

B12: Again, they simply say “Vitamin B12”, which doesn’t distinguish between cyanocobalamin, methylcobalamin, adenosylcobalamin, and hydroxycobalamin.  See my article on taking B12 for further details.  Dollars to doughnuts cyanocobalamin is being used here.

Vitamin A:  beta carotene/retinyl acetate.  They use a hybrid of the plant (beta carotene) and animal (retinol) here, and that’s basically fine.  Both are good.

Vitamin K:  Again they get all generic on us and simply coin the ingredient as “Vitamin K”, neglecting the curiosity of their more informed customers who’d like to know which of the 13 different vitamin K molecules they decided to use.  I’m going to guess it’s phytonadione (aka K1).

Vitamin D:  Same as vitamin K.  The good news is that this time the choices are narrowed to 2:  cholecalciferol and ergocalciferol.  In this case the difference is huge since ergocalciferol only exhibits vitamin D like activity at deficiency levels but has none of the higher level regulatory effects that normal vitamin D has.

Vitamin E:  dl-alpha-tocopheryl acetate.  When it comes to vitamin E you can use full stack mixed tocopherol, d-alpha, and dl-alpha tocopherol.  Alpha tocopherol is what your body uses, but there’s only 1 geometry that your body accepts, which is D-alpha, which is what you want.  DL-alpha signifies a synthetic mixture which contains all 8 possible geometries.  The other 7 are inert within your body.  There’s no evidence to suggest that DL-alpha is bad (lab rats do just fine on it), but it’s not hard to source natural vitamin E from sunflower or soybean oil.

Vitamin C:  All vitamin C is basically the same.  It’s ascorbic acid.  Here they included 1,767% of the DV of vitamin C.  That amounts to about 1,000 mg.  There’s nothing wrong with including 1,000 mg of vitamin C in a formula, but it’s likely done out of naivete or marketing zest since your body stops absorbing it at about 300-400 mg.

Overall, these infringements on quality are modest.  The vitamin stack for the most part is pretty good, and the difference between what’s best and what’s used here is slight and not something that’ll make-or-break  the product for the people that want to try it.

But I always like to pass over this ingredient list with a fine toothed comb to separate the men from the boys.

You can read more about what forms of vitamins are found in food and supplements here.

Overall

As a whole I liked Mobius Breakfast quite a bit, and think the current version is a good choice for someone looking for a low-glycemic, paleoish meal replacement powder.  The combination of nootropics and heavy use of coconut make it a nice alternative to Primal Fuel, which is a similar product but with a much more pared down ingredient list.

You’ll have to decide for yourself whether or not it’s worth paying the $5/meal price compared to other products out there, but Mobius Breakfast definitely has its own spot in the meal replacement space.

Well, well, WELL!

Guess who’s back after taking a brief 39 day blog-o-batical?

That’s right — it’s me, Mr. Vitamin Man.  (Oh yeah, and sorry about that delay…..what can I say, being a neurotic misanthrope really complicates things).

A big reason for my writing hiatus is I’ve had a difficult time settling my brain down.  Clearing my head for a few hours to think straight.  Blocking out the noise.  Flowing.  

Every time I sit down to put words to paper the whirring ambulance outside leaves a nettlesome rattling inside my head that I can’t make go away.  To help mend my concentration I’ve tried all sorts of remedies that never seem to stick:  vipassanic meditation, pagan seances, staring at my courtesan night light before I go to bed each night…….none of it seems to work.

Until suddenly……

I had a moment of recognition.

Maybe…….

My brain’s feeding tubes aren’t working right.  Perhaps my methionine shunt needs its wheels greased so I can stop under-producing Sam-E and re-stimulate my methylation cycle.

Hmmmmm…….

So that got me thinking……where does this process start?  What’s commonly lacking?

And then the light bulb went on.

I NEED TO TURN ON THE B12 SPIGOT!

Problem solved.  [footnote]To be brutally honest, this didn’t literally solve all of my problems.  Consider these last couple sentences as a way to grab your attention to get you hooked on the REAL info of this post, which is contained below.[/footnote]

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Why B12?

Your body’s daily requirements for B12 are about 2.4 specs of dust (micrograms) per day, but don’t let these minute quantities fool you into thinking this amount is easy to get or unimportant if not consumed.

B12 works with folate (as 5-MTHF) and B6 (as pyridoxal-5-phosphate) to both help your body produce its DNA and regulate various brain cycles.

When it comes to your brain, it’s important to note that folate/B12 interactions are at the base of various other pathways that determine the amounts of serotonin, dopamine, and sam-E circulating in your brain.  So if you don’t have enough B12 (or folate) then the higher gears of these processes will begin to stall out.

Not surprisingly lack of adequate B12 is a common reason for senescence among the elderly and high homocysteine levels (the indicator used for low folate/B12) are a strong predictor of poor performance on mental tasks like information recall, spatial reasoning, and short term working memory¹. [footnote]Although it’s important to note that B12/Folate supplementation doesn’t reverse these conditions all by itself.[/footnote].

Up to 90% of B12 deficiencies manifest themselves with some sort of neurological symptom².

Why It Can Be Difficult to Get Enough

B12 is often sprinkled into packaged foods like pixie dust and if you look at a label you’ll often see that cyanocobalamin is added in sufficient amounts in lots of packaged foods that ought to supply more than enough of your daily supply.

Why then, is it often difficult for people to get adequate amounts of it?

The problem has less to do with how much we get and more to do with how it’s digested once it’s inside our stomach.

The issues are two-fold:

• Insufficient Stomach Acid.  Food based B12 usually comes attached to proteins which need the digestive enzyme pepsin in order to properly break it down and release B12 so it’s available for absorption.   In order for your body to activate pepsin you must have a sufficient level of stomach acid.  If the pH of your stomach isn’t low enough then you can’t metabolize the B12 from your diet.  Insufficient stomach acid is quietly becoming one of the more persistent public health issues, and is a leading cause of digestive issues like GERD, which affects approximately 1 out of 5 adults.
• Autoimmunity.  For B12 to get out of your stomach it needs to attach itself to a protein called Intrinsic Factor.  Intrinsic factor is the limiting step in B12 absorption.  AT MOST your body makes enough intrinsic factor to absorb 5 micrograms/day.  However, if you have an autoimmune disease your body will likely make much less than this.  IF is secreted by your parietal cells, which are a frequent point of attack for overactive immune systems.

Sublingual Absorption and B12 Mega-Doses: Mega-Good or Overkill?

If you buy a B12 supplement you’ll likely be taking tablets that are meant to be absorbed sublingually.  Ie, you let them dissolve in your mouth so they can bypass your stomach (and the IF bottle-neck) and go right into your bloodstream.

And the pill you pop will probably contain B12 in amounts that are yuuuuuuuuuggggggeeeee compared to the standard RDA of 2.4 µg.

You can get B12 tablets that contain as much as 10,000 µg/serving.

A lot of these supplements are taken with a mega-dose of misconceptions about how they work.

• They mostly go unused.  Just like your body has limits to how much B12 can go out of your stomach, so to does it have limits to how much can go in your muscles.  When intrinsic factor leaves your GI tract the B12 gets transferred to a protein called transcobalamin (TC) and you need TC to carry B12 into tissues.  TC can deliver about 1.5 µg/day to your tissues, an amount that’s……..less than the RDA for B12.

So clearly, the vast majority of B12 in these products is being pissed away.

If there is an effect by taking these super high dose B12 supplements it’s not because you’re getting anything close to that amount in your tissues, but rather because that extra amount is saturating your plasma TC enough so that you’re getting just enough extra to feel some sort of effect, even though the amount that’s actually being used is no more than a microgram or two.

You can read some stories of people treating their diabetic neuropathy with 10,000 µg B12 tablets and how nothing less than this amount has any effect.  If we can assume they’re being honest about this, it’s probably because of something similar to what I mentioned in the last paragraph.   The B12 saturation is intense enough to tip the TC-scales enough in one direction so that their body is getting those extra micrograms of B12 that they weren’t before.

Is There An “Ideal” Form of B12?

Your body uses B12 in three different forms:

• Methylcobalamin – This is the dominant form in circulation and the type that interacts with folate in the methylation cycle.  It exerts its effect by acting as a co-factor for an enzyme called methionine synthase.  It helps with mental clarity.
• Adenosylcobalamin – This is the form that’s used in your mitochondria.  It exerts its effect by acting as a cofactor for an enzyme called Methylmalonyl CoA mutase.  It helps with energy.
• Hydroxycobalamin – Your body takes circulating B12 that’s attached to TC and turns it into hydroxycobalamin once it gets inside your cells.  Hydroxycobalamin then gets turned into methylcobalamin and adenosylcobalamin.

For most people there’s probably not a big difference between taking one of these or the other.  Since your body converts them all to hydroxycobalamin when going into a cell the end result for all of these will be about the same.

Some people might experience an advantage for taking the form that’s specific to what they’re trying to accomplish since it might bypass some enzymatic bottlenecks, but the postcard version for most people is that these are pretty interchangeable.

There’s also cyanocobalamin, which is the red-headed step child of the B12 world.  It replaces the “methyl”, “adenosyl”, and “hydro” of the previous three forms and sticks a cyanide molecule in its place.  This form of the molecule is cheap to make since it’s the most stable when exposed to air.

In the body it behaves in a manner similar to the other forms of B12 but some people can get sick with cyanocobalamin mega-doses since the cyanide gets transported to your kidneys, where your body flushes it out.

The methyl- and hydroxy- forms are easy enough to find so it’s just as well to use those instead.

1).

2).  Stipanuk, et. al.  “Biochemical, Physiological, & Molecular Aspects of Human Nutrition.”  Ch. 25, pgs 693-732.

The last 10 years has seen an extraordinary push towards food that people feel is “clean.”

No funny sounding ingredients on the label.

Animal treatment that’d make us feel comfortable dropping off our pets there.

Rugged farmers with squared jaw lines and taut, muscular bodies that remind us of Robert Redford.

That’s right………..we’re sick of McFood.

Curiously enough, did you know ALL OF THESE THINGS point towards a common enemy that’s rarely acknowledged?

There’s a mineral causing metabolic madness that’s hiding in plain sight.

That’s right folks….I’m talking about phosphate.

Why Phosphate?

Lots of people have the impression that phosphate is this trace mineral we only get after nibbling on some caviar or slurping down raw oysters.

That’s not the case.

Phosphate is ubiquitous in the food supply and has the following curious facts about it:

• It’s very well absorbed.  70% of dietary phosphate makes it out of the GI tract after a meal.
• Calcium gets a reputation as being the primary constituent of bone, but it’s actually calcium and phosphate that comprise 70% of its material.
• Most people have levels of circulating phosphate that are chronically high.  The median adult has phosphate levels 150% above what the RDA recommends.
• Practically all food additives, regardless of their purpose, are phosphate based.

The Trouble In Paradise

Having higher than normal levels of a nutrient isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  After all, nutrients by definition are safe in large quantities.

So should persistently high phosphate levels really be a cause of concern?

Not necessarily, but there are three side effects of phosphate over-consumption we ought to be wary of:

• Kidney health.  Phosphate is primarily metabolized in the kidneys, and persistently high phosphate intake can impair kidney function.  When kidneys stop filtering toxins from the blood you get a condition called Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) and inhibiting the absorption of phosphate is the primary way CKD drugs work.  Over 26 million people have CKD in the USA.
• Antiquated RDA’s.  Up to 50% of your phosphate intake comes from food preservatives.  The RDA’s for phosphate intake were set in the 1940’s when they weren’t a prominent part of the food supply.
• Calcium in your arteries.  High phosphate levels lead to arterial calcification. which is a strong risk factor for cardiovascular disease.  When your body starts dropping calcium in your blood vessels it’s a good bet that a visit with your neighborhood cardiologist is right around the corner.

Somewhat surprisingly the details of phosphate metabolism are not very well studied.  Strong associations have been made between phosphate and kidney/vascular function, but the birds and the bees of why it happens is still a bit of a black box.

What’s The Impact of High Phosphate Food Additives?

The big outlier in our phosphate intake is the consumption of food additives, which pushes it into the red zone.

What this exactly means for your health isn’t entirely clear, but a study was recently published in the Journal of Endocrine Metabolism that examined the effect and the results were……..interesting.

They took a group of 10 people, fed them a tightly monitored preservative free diet, then substituted in levels of high-phosphate additives that mirror what people typically get in their diet and compared the levels of different markers for mineral metabolism.

The interesting results were the changes in compounds that promote arterial calcification.

Three proteins called osteocalcin, osteopontin, and FGF23 were all significantly higher, which signals an enhanced tendency to deposit calcium in your arteries.  Not good for your heart.

The good news is there are a lot of reasons to cast doubt on the significance of these findings.  10 people isn’t a large sample, most of them were men (women handle phosphate differently), and adherence to the intended diets is impossible to measure entirely.

The bad news is they conducted a much more tightly controlled experiment on mice and the results were a lot worse.  They monitored the mice for almost 4 months and doing experiments on rodents allows you to completely control their environment.

The same calcifying proteins were increased, but to an amount 10X found in the humans, as you can see here:

That’s pretty striking, especially when you consider the amount of phosphate used is what people typically get in their day-to-day diet.  Lots of times these studies will use a deliberately large dose in order to establish the effect.

But this was just a snapshot of what happens when you properly isolate one aspect of their food intake.

Hmmmm……….take heed folks.