Tommy Wood Hormetea transcript

Written by Christopher Kelly

May 11, 2017

[0:00:00]

Christopher:    Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly and today I'm joined by Dr. Tommy Wood. Tommy, say hello.

Tommy:    Hello.

Christopher:    Did you notice how I didn't set you up to say hello, Tommy?

Tommy:    Yeah. You do that well that time. You trapped me.

Christopher:    I did. I've been planning that all day on my bike. We've got a lot to talk about. We better get stuck into this.

Tommy:    Yes.

Christopher:    First of all, talk about the Icelandic Health Symposium. Your talk has just been made available online and I'll link to that in the show notes for this episode. But talk about the Icelandic Health Symposium.

Tommy:    Yeah. Icelandic Health Symposium is a group that I was part of forming based in Iceland, obviously, with some doctors and some other guys and we had sort of the inaugural conference last year in May. And we had guys like Tim Noakes, Gary Taubes, [0:00:52] [Indiscernible], some really great names particularly in sort of the lifestyle low carb kind of community talking. And I spoke. And the talk that I did was more about the lifestyle side of things, and that is probably one of the favorite talks I've given actually. It was sort of--

Christopher:    It was good.

Tommy:    It was high level, not very technical, more sort of -- I tried to make it more sort of like Ted Talks style, with some mike and some data and stuff in there too but sort of a bit more all encompassing and accessible. I thought it was pretty good. And that's available now. We can link to that and people are going to watch it. It's also very short. I think it's half an hour.

Christopher:    Yeah. I watched it again and I realized that a lot of what I've been learning has been going in one ear and out the other. It seemed to be brand new again even though that we've built a business around it. It's just really strange to see the references again. You think, well, this is evidence based medicine. I remember now. I'm not just making it up.

Tommy:    Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. All the sort of crazy hippie stuff that we tell people to do is actually sort of based in some real research which is nice.

Christopher:    It was the walking around with no shoes on that really made me think this. It sounds like I'm just making this stuff up when I tell people to do it but it really is evidence based medicine.

Tommy:    Yeah, absolutely.

Christopher:    I was going to say, and it's the wonderful Reykjavik, in Iceland which is an amazing place to be. It was the first time that I went there last year and I really, really enjoyed it. And both me and Julie, my wife, are very much looking forward to going back there. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

Tommy:    Yes. So, that brings us perfectly on to the fact that the Icelandic Health Symposium is, obviously, going to have it again this year in September. The main day is on September 8th. This year's is called Who Wants to Live Forever? So, it's based on longevity. We've got some people talking about the best ways to improve longevity. So, last year, the conference was hosted by Maryanne Demasi, who people might know from some of her documentaries in Australia about various things including cholesterol and wifi and all this stuff.

    But this year, the host is me. So, I get to host all these fabulous speakers. So we're going to have guys like Ben Greenfield, Dom D'Agostino, Bryan Walsh, Diana Rodgers, Doug McGuff, Rangan Chatterjee and Satchidananda Panda. I always stumble over the name.

Christopher:    That's a tricky name to say, isn't it?

Tommy:    Yeah. So, I mean, it's going to be a great sort of range of things from feeding restriction to strength training to the gut microbiome to ketosis to whether antioxidants are beneficial or not and all those kinds of stuff and how to make that sustainable. Obviously, if everybody on the planet is going to live longer, we obviously need to make that sustainable and sort of keep our resources, our planetary resources, available obviously to the future. I think it's going to be really nice sort of well-rounded discussion.

    And around that, the day before, there's going to be a cycling and brain-body biohacking workshop with Ben Greenfield. And you can also, on the Friday night after the main conference, you can sign up for pay to have dinner with the speakers if you want to sort of get direct access to them. And then on the Saturday, we're going to have more of a practitioner workshop. So, it's going to be, again, Bryan Walsh but then also Deborah Gordon and Mark Cucuzzella who are going to talk about various things in terms of how chronic metabolic disease is initiated and then ways to treat that. I think those guys are really sort of at the forefront of a lot of that. So, I think that's going to be really exciting.

    So, people can to go icelandichealthsymposium.is and then find the website there. I think that just went live a few days ago. So we'd love for people to come out and join us there. I think it's a really great opportunity to visit Iceland. I know it makes so much easier to get speakers involved because they all go, "Oh, yeah, I really want to go to Iceland. I'll bring my wife and my family." So, everybody should do the same and come and join us. I think it will be a lot of fun.

Christopher:    It was absolutely a lot of fun. We did a lot of sitting in geothermic hot tubs and lifting heavy things. And then right on the last day, your mom's neighbor, who embarrassingly his name I can't remember right now, said to me, "Oh, yeah, there's some really great mountain biking here. Let's go ride." And it was like 8 o'clock at night the day before we left and so I was kind of annoyed. But I know I've got his Facebook contact so I will get in touch with him and we should absolutely do some mountain biking in Iceland. I think that will be really fun.

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Tommy:    Yeah, it would be awesome. I've never mountain biked in Iceland, so, I think I will definitely try and rectify that this year.

Christopher:    Awesome. Icelandic Health Symposium. Look for the link in the show notes. So, moving on, Phat Fibre, our paper has been published. I'm so excited. I say "we, our" in the loosest sense of the terms. I feel like you did most of the heavy lifting on the paper, Tommy. Congratulations on getting that published. You want to tell us a little bit about the paper?

Tommy:    Thanks. Yeah. So, people might know about our MCT powder that we make called Phat Fibre. So, it's basically MCT oil that's sort of co sprayed with a prebiotic fiber to give you something that is going to be much easier to put into drink bottles, put into beverages, sort of much cleaner and easier to travel with compared to something like an MCT oil if people like to use that to support their ketogenic diet or low carb diet or something similar.

    There's a lot of reasons why we don't particularly like some of the MCT oil powders that are available in the market. Either they have some dairy products in, so for people with sensitive stomach they can cause issues or they're full of high GI carbs and things like that. So, we made our own version of this powder only to make sure that it was doing what we thought it was doing. So, we got together ten people, gave them a big dose of Phat Fibre and then looked to their insulin blood sugar and ketone levels.

    And they're sort of uptaking glucose, they're sort of uptaking ketones that we'd expect and a non-significant effect on insulin. It went up a tiny bit but which is to be expected. These guys were at rest. So, based on that, we then further developed it and we now have, it's much more MCT oil. So it's 70% C8 so it's much more ketogenic and doesn't have any effect on blood glucose because some of the fiber appears to be slightly digestible which actually in terms of athletes who are taking this as a calorie source during training or racing, small amount of carbohydrate source is actually potentially very beneficial. It allows you to use your ketones and fats from beta oxidation more efficiently.

    So, if you really want to get into the sort of the biochemistry behind that then the paper is open access. You can go and read it and read about how we developed it and then sort of the next stage of Phat Fibre, Phat Fibre version two which is now available for people to try. And it's actually really popular and I've got some in my tea right now.

Christopher:    That's great. Yeah, I've been using it on the bike. So, for the first time in a while I'd been mixing up some calories in my water. I've been doing that for many years but conversations with you and Kieran Clarke of Oxford University persuaded me that maybe I should be doing this even if I didn't really feel like I needed to do it. I can't say I've noticed a huge difference. The main thing that I thought was beneficial was I took some C8 MCT oil without shitting my pants especially when on the bike. That's a real concern. It goes down quite nice, the MCT, like a lip balm. You get dried out lips in the sun this time of the year.

    Rather than having water, it's just like a little bit of balm. It goes down quite nice. I'm quite pleased with that. And I'm really happy about the paper. I think you might have uncovered a little micro niche for yourself here because already two people have contacted us and said, "Hey, I've got a nutritional supplement. Would you do a paper like that for me?" It seems like the only thing that's holding these people back from doing the science is the science itself, designing the experiment and then writing it up. It's all a bit of a black art to most people. Obviously, you can cut through that and get it done. Tell us about it. Are you kind of excited to do more experiments like that?

Tommy:    Yeah, absolutely. I think some of the stuff that you may want to look at in people is harder to access if you want to do some fancy blood test or some markers of oxidative stress or something like that, it's going to be -- It could potentially get very expensive to work on things like that. But when you're looking at the basics like blood sugar, blood ketones, it's actually pretty easy to do. You could also do -- I think some people are probably going to look at some supplements that might help your cognitive functioning stuff and you could do online testing and stuff. So, it would be very easy to access that data.

    But, yeah, I think there's definitely this shroud of mystery around the peer review process. Once you've been through it a few times, like I've had, and you've dealt with difficult peer review as you were just trying to sound clever because that's what they like to do, once you worked your way around that, then actually it's pretty easy to navigate. So, I think, hopefully, there are some guys who want to do some studies with people using their own supplements to sort of actually see whether they're working and I really respect that.

    Most people are selling supplements without knowing what they actually do. So, we'll definitely sort of be helping as many people as I can do that kind of thing. And I think that will be really interesting and sort of get more of this stuff out there.

Christopher:    Absolutely. So, phatfibre.com. I'll put the link in the show notes because it's not obvious, the spelling of Phat Fibre. And I'll also link the open access paper so you don't have to pay to get this one. It's completely free and it's peer reviewed. I think it's pretty cool. Congratulations, Tommy. I'm really pleased with that.

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Tommy:    Yeah, thanks. Me too. I was actually -- I should really give a lot of credit to my fiancé, Elizabeth, because I was writing a blog post about this study that we did. So, we made a small amount of money starting the last version of Phat Fibre and that was what paid for all the testing kits.

Christopher:    The two canceled each other almost perfectly, didn't they?

Tommy:    Yeah, exactly. So, we made no net profit but we did get a published study out of it so, I think, it was definitely worth it. But I was writing this up as a blog post and Elizabeth said, "Well, why don't you write that out as a paper?" I was like, "Why not?" So, that's why I did it and it's turned out really well.

Christopher:    Yeah, amazing. So, onto your next project. Hormetea. How do you pronounce it?

Tommy:    So, I call it Hormetea. Although I couldn't quite decide whether it was Hormetea like hormesis or Hormetea like hormetic. Those names will probably give some people an idea of what it is which is a tea based around green tea which includes lots of sort of awesome plant-based polyphenols that some of which have, which give the benefits through hormesis or sort of via small cellular stresses that then cause beneficial adaptations. So, hence the name Hormetea.

Christopher:    Awesome. And it tastes great. That was the main thing I noticed about it. Like without you telling me anything about the science, it just makes a fantastic hot drink. So, do you want to tell us about the ingredients?

Tommy:    Yes. So, I was actually -- I was reading this really interesting paper about plant polyphenols and their ability to sort of simulate some of those fasting based pathways like activating AMPK, Nrf2, PGC-1aplha, mitochondrial biogenesis, increasing sort of antioxidant stores, all those kinds of things that many people would have heard of in relation to certain plant compounds or certain supplements. And what came up was things like curcumin, green tea. People probably have heard about, broccoli sprouts or sulforaphane. And if you haven't heard about it then go and listen and watch Rhonda Patrick talk about it, Dr. Rhonda Patrick, because she's probably now become the world's expert on sulforaphane and broccoli sprouts.

    And I saw all these things and I thought, actually, you could really easily make a tea out of that and put some really good stuff in there. And so literally that's what I did. So, one Saturday afternoon I took some matcha green tea and then I threw in some grape seed extract, some bilberry extract, so that's a dark blueberry, Nordic blueberry. Also a bit of turmeric, and some broccoli seeds and I ground them up first and threw that all together. It actually tasted pretty good.

    I tried to get the relative levels of things so that you're kind of in the range that these things have been shown to improve health. It might sound that it might be quite bitter but, actually, the bilberry extract, the berry extract sort of mellows out the bitterness quite well and it just has kind of a savory green tea kind of flavor which actually works really well. So, I kind of put them together in a kitchen and people said, "Oh, that sounds really interesting. Send me some."

    I made a few big batches and went around to various people particularly the guys at Nourish Balance Thrive and then from there we kind of decided we try and turn it into something that we could maybe sell because we quite like it. And we've just created the first couple of big batches and put them in little tubs and they're going to be available really soon.

Christopher:    Awesome. Let's slow down and talk about some of these compounds because I think they're really, really interesting. Do you want to talk about anthocyanin?

Tommy:    Yes. So, anthocyanins are the things that make berries purple. I absolutely love them because they do so many amazing things and it's one of the reasons why I think berries are one of the best things that we can include in our diet regularly. And the time that I first really started thinking about berries and anthocyanins was when I was working on the root cause analysis of multiple sclerosis. So, this was kind of one of the first things that I did in the sort of functional health space and I was doing this because my stepbrother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

    And because of some of the benefits of these anthocyanins, we actually, anybody who's worked with us for multiple sclerosis is essentially prescribed a pound of dark Nordic blueberries, Vaccinium myrtillus, every day. That sounds like quite a lot but actually it's pretty easy to eat that many blueberries. And specifically in multiple sclerosis, they can sort of inhibit some of the enzymes that break down the blood-brain barrier in multiple sclerosis and give the blood and immune system better access to the brain which is what we don't want so they can sort of help heal the blood-brain barrier. So, that's what we use them there.

    But at the same time, if you look at giving either blueberry extract or just frozen or large amounts of fresh blueberries up to about a pound, you see improvements in disease of colon, ulcerative colitis and reduced inflammatory markers in the stool like calprotectin. It can reduce DNA oxidative damage, improves vascular function in particularly people who have some kind of cardiovascular disease. They're even showing improved gait speed and agility if you give these berries to the elderly.

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    And one other study that we really like is that if you give berries and you add them to a carbohydrate based meal they seem to reduce the insulin or glucose responses to the carbohydrates.

Christopher:    Yeah. That was one of the highlights which I read out at the beginning of a podcast one time.

Tommy:    Yeah, exactly. It's because the anthocyanins can inhibit glucosidase enzymes so they reduce or slow the digestion of carbohydrates. So, even though you're adding carbs to a meal by adding berries it will actually reduce both the insulin and glucose responses. So, I thought that was pretty cool. So, anthocyanins and dark berries are really one of my favorite things. That's why they make up about 30% to 40% of the Hormetea alongside matcha, which is in a sort of a similar level.

Christopher:    Right, right, right. And it looks so beautiful, the powder. My wife made some up just the other day and the powders themselves are really, really beautiful. Is there a way for you to direct people at the Farmer's Market to get hold of these compounds and berries because those are just coming into season where we are?

Tommy:    Yeah. So, basically, I think the way that we sort of determine some of the helpful side effects of plants and sort of those really bright colors and that's the polyphenols that we've managed to sort of extract for Hormetea and they're available in various guises. But basically, dark berries, dark all the way through. If you think about the traditional American blueberry, it's kind of greed and it's [0:16:24] [Indiscernible].

Christopher:    Yeah, yeah.

Tommy:    That doesn't have very many anthocyanins. So, those aren't the ones you want. You want the ones that grow in the wild. They're here in the Pacific Northwest. They grow in the wild. In the Nordic countries, they grow in the wild. In various places, people would know them, sort of bushes close to the ground and then dark purple all the way through. So, you can either buy those in the store, you can buy them online, they can arrive frozen, you can go and pick them yourselves, and those are the really good ones. Those are the one you want. The more purple the better.

Christopher:    Okay. Yeah. And I've seem online in a couple different places. You can get them frozen. I'll link to that in the show notes. Okay. So, let's talk about matcha then. That's something that's kind of been my -- I used to be on coffee and then I got off that because it was affecting my sleep and then you get started on the green tea and then the green tea became matcha green tea and then you wonder whether you should just maybe forget it and drink coffee again because that's what you're doing really. But there may be some other interesting benefits of matcha. So, talk about matcha green tea?

Tommy:    Yeah. So, matcha is a type of green tea that tends to come as powder rather than as a leaf which you then dissolve in water. It has sort of a ceremonial history and you can get ceremonial grade matcha and involves a certain bamboo stirring implement and you have to measure out with a bamboo spoon and heat it at a certain temperature. It's about 80 to 85 degree Celsius, so below boiling. And the reason why I chose matcha is because it has a higher concentration of the catechins compared to normal green tea. And these are sort of, again, the phenolic compounds in green tea that have some of those benefits that we ascribe to green tea like improved insulin sensitivity.

    There's some data on green tea extract improving fat mass and fat burning but that probably only really work on people who aren't habitually drinking a lot of caffeine because there's a synergistic effect of caffeine there. So, maybe people who have a real caffeine habit won't get that benefit. But there's some interesting things that may help with the browning of fats which we know is usually associated with good metabolic or better metabolic health.

    Some studies on these catechins are shown to improve cognitive function in those with cognitive decline. And again, they might reduce carbohydrate absorption like the anthocyanins. So, if you're going to have a carbohydrate-based meal but you want to reduce some of the metabolic effects of it then, I think, something like these can be really nice to include and sort of dampen down some of the effect. Because we definitely in certain scenarios on people eating carbohydrates but maybe they want to minimize some of the insulin release or exposure to that which may have detrimental effects in the longer term.

Christopher:    Okay. And what about grape seed extract? I was kind of wondering whether that might have an effect on the gut microbiome because we see grape seed extract in many of the antimicrobial supplements that we use in our clinic for maybe treating bacterial or yeast overgrowth. What do you think?

Tommy:    In most places where you're using some of these [0:19:06] [Indiscernible] tend to be grapefruit seed extract and the two are kind of sometimes mixed up.

Christopher:    I think I might just have done that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tommy:    Yeah. So, we tend to use grapefruit seed extract as an antimicrobial but this is grape seed extract from grapes and it's sort of in the same area, sort of Resveratrol, if you think about another grape extract that supposedly have some health benefits. And people have used grape seed extracts again in clinical trials that seems to improve blood pressure and glycemic control in people with insulin resistance, might reduce oxidized LDL.

    So, it does seem to have some benefits in people particularly with metabolic disease. And that's where most of these studies are being done because they're being used as some kind of nutraceuticals to improve a disease state. But the reason why I include them is because they're sort of in this sort of spectrum of colorful polyphenols that potentially have health benefits. So, if you think about all the ones that we talked about, you have the anthocyanins that are purple, the grape seed extract is a nice red color, matcha is green, turmeric is a nice yellow. So, you kind of have the whole spectrum. That's why I try to include it.

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Christopher:    It's kind of -- And then the turmeric will get on to next is another really beautiful color. And so you've got all these individual ingredients that look absolutely incredible on their own and then you mix it all together and what happens?

Tommy:    It just goes kind of greeny brown color.

Christopher:    Sorry about that. I'll post a picture of what they look like individually in the show notes so that you can have a look at that. But talk about turmeric.

Tommy:    Yeah. So, I mean, people have heard a huge amount about turmeric. Curcumin is increasingly being used as an anti-inflammatory for various conditions. If you look at the real sort of hard core randomized controlled trials, there isn't a huge amount of evidence to really support that curcumin is kind of the be all and end all as some people say it is but, I think, certain small studies show that it definitely improves levels of inflammation and joint pain and things like arthritis and we've definitely used it to quite some benefit in people who have some kind of inflammatory process going on particularly in the gut.

    One of the issues is, with turmeric itself, so sort of the base root, is that, well, first of all, it's only about 1% to 5% curcumin and then that curcumin isn't very bioavailable. So, you can increase the bioavailability by using black pepper. And black pepper inhibits some of the metabolism in the liver. Actually, if you want some kind of systemic anti-inflammatory effect from turmeric, you're probably going to need to take curcumin and you'll probably need to take it in some kind of altered format like BCM-95 or Meriva or you can get various types of liposomal formulations which will improve their bioavailability.

    But then when you're looking at sort of turmeric itself, a lot of it will stay in the gut. And, actually, I think that's kind of where, potentially that's where a lot of this benefit is going to be. It can sort of improve intestinal permeability, at least in some animal models, and if you give large dose of turmeric. So maybe if you had two or three cups of Hormetea a day, you're sort of in that range. And then you'd see things like improved or lower CRP levels particularly in people with metabolic syndrome.

    So, it's kind of, it's unlikely that the amount of turmeric in Hormetea is going to give you a huge systemic amount of curcumin but, I think, particularly within the gut they'll be some benefits. And it's sort of, again, it's part of that. If we're trying to increase our intake of this sort of wide spectrum polyphenols that I'm fairly sure they'll have a lot of benefits. That's why I think it's still going to be beneficial even though it's not giving us those sort of huge systemic doses of curcumin.

Christopher:    Right, right, right. And then broccoli seeds. I just got into, I guess, this is Rhonda Patrick. Actually, that's not true because Jamie, Jamie Kendall-Weed that I started the business with, I know she's been talking about broccoli seeds for a long, long time, broccoli sprouts, I should say. And I only started growing them once Rhonda started talking about them. The first time I grew them, they came out great. And then every time after that, because I wasn't paying quite so much attention, they went moldy and it's super annoying when you put in a ton of effort to something and then you get home one day and it's just all really, really moldy. I wish there was an easier way. And it seems like there now is an easy way and I'm not going to lose any of the benefits. Is that right?

Tommy:    Yeah, definitely. And that's because the broccoli seeds -- So, broccoli sprouts have a much greater high concentration of sulforaphane or at least a precursor of sulforaphane glucoraphanin compared to say broccoli. And then, actually, higher than broccoli sprouts is broccoli seed. But a lot of people sort of originally avoided them because they have a slightly strange flavor. But if you grind up the seeds and then you activate them with heat which is, obviously, what you're going to do when you pour hot water in your tea, then you'll get quite significant production of sulforaphane which then has all those benefits.

    So, I think, as part of a greater whole, you can get in those seeds in a nice way and then you don't have to go through all the effort of sprouting all that stuff which I did too. And I still do occasionally. And I put them in my morning smoothie. But if you can do it with the dry seeds and get the same effect then, I think, that's definitely going to speed up the process for many people.

Christopher:    Talk about Nrf and explain it like I was five. That's my new thing at the moment. Explain it like I was five. So, Nrf2 explained like I was five.

Tommy:    Nrf2 is basically -- So, the pathway is one of the main ways in which we detect stress, any kind of stress, and that can be heat stress, so being exposed to heat. It could be oxidative stress, so oxygen free radical, reactive oxygen species. I'm going to pretend you're a very up to date five-year old. So, any of those kind of kind of stresses kind of activate the Nrf2 pathway. And then upregulates some of the enzymes involved in antioxidant defense. So, involved in generating and recycling glutathione but also kind of involve things like ferritin and activation of mitochondrial biogenesis. So, anything that will sort of buffer your ability or increase your ability to handle stress and buffer stress, those are seemed to be up regulated by the Nrf2 pathway.

[0:25:00]

    So, that's why people have become really, people have become really excited about sulforaphane and, I think, that's kind of -- It's received a lot of attention, understandably, but I think it's equally important to remember that there all these other great compounds that we can get in various foods. They're also going to have these great benefits. I think we can sort of really focus on sulforaphane. A lot of people have done that. But equally, I think, we don't want to forget about all the other great stuff that we could also be eating.

Christopher:    Okay. So, this is where the name, the play on hormesis comes from, right?

Tommy:    Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Christopher:    So, it's a little workout, an intracellular workout. But what happens if I'm already in an unstable -- Let's say I'm already over stressed. Would this make me worse? What happens when you give this to someone who's metabolically deranged, say, with type II diabetes?

Tommy:    That's a really good question. That's sort of the importance of hormesis versus total allostatic load. And, I think, particularly the ways that these compounds tend to act, they've been looked at both individually and in certain combinations, and the combinations, they definitely have a synergistic effect. So, some of the catechins in green tea can inhibit the enzymes that breakdown, say, quercetin in berries. So, they can kind of increase the benefit of each other.

    And when they're used in people with some kind of metabolic derangement, there generally tends to be an improvement. So, like I said, most of the studies that I'm citing in terms of these compounds improving health are in people who are already metabolically deranged. So, you could definitely argue that adding more stress on top of a stress system can have a negative effect. But at least for these compounds, that doesn't seem to be the case. They do seem to have a beneficial effect.

Christopher:    Do you think we could design an experiment that would show that the tea is working? So, you've listed some markers here. Improves 8-hydroxy 2-deoxyguanosine, GGT, ALT. Those are all things that we test, right? Could we do a study that shows that this is working?

Tommy:    Yeah, definitely. And that's something that we're thinking about how best to arrange. So, we can measure 8-hydroxy 2-deoxyguanosine, which is a marker of oxidative DNA damage. We could measure that in the urine. Obviously, some of the other markers, we can measure in blood like the liver function enzymes. We can also measure blood glucose and insulin sensitivity by looking at insulin levels, glucose levels, maybe also looking at things like triglycerides and HDL and all that kind of stuff.

    So, we could definitely do that with basic biomarkers. The more people we recruit, it rapidly becomes a multi-thousand dollar study just because the testing isn't cheap. But that's definitely something that we're looking do to. Because absolutely, as with the Phat Fibre, I don't want to make something and tell people it's going to have health benefits and then if it doesn't really do anything then -- Well, I mean, it tastes nice, right?

Christopher:    Yeah, it definitely tastes nice.

Tommy:    Yeah. So, I mean, like worst case scenario is you just had a nice cup of tea. But it would be great if it had the benefits that I think it will.

Christopher:    It's like the grounding. Worse case scenario, you've been for a lovely walk first thing in the morning with no shoes on.

Tommy:    Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, we're talking potential benefit of really low risk intervention here which is absolutely what we want to focus on.

Christopher:    Talk about the preparation for Hormetea because that might be important.

Tommy:    Yeah. So, generally, I have recommended that people have like a two-stage process. So, if you look at the studies of activating myrosinase, so, the enzyme in broccoli sprouts and broccoli seeds that create the sulforaphane, you tend to get the best production of sulforaphane and reduced production of like the inactive other product that can reproduce the sulforaphane nitrile. You get best production of sulfiraphane if it's heated to around 70 to 80 degrees Celsius. So, like 160, 170 degrees Fahrenheit. So, if you're a matcha green tea person then you're already paying close attention to the temperature of you water and actually you could just brew it at the same temperature as you brew your matcha and you're pretty much in the right spot.

    But what I do is tend to add hot water, so around 70 degrees Celsius, or boil a kettle and let it sit for a few minutes and sort of make sort of like a slurry in the bottom of my cup and then five, ten, 20 minutes later, depending on how patient you can be, then I'll top it off with hot water and then you sort of create your own sulforaphane and then you sort of heat up to a tea temperature and then you can drink it as normal.

Christopher:    Cool. Well, if you would like to get hold of some of these tea, it's available now but only in a sample form. So, there's some special task that you need to perform in order to get hold of this elusive elixir which is you need to go over to iTunes and leave me a five-star review and I'll give you the video instructions to do that in the show notes for this episode. And then I want you to email support@nourishbalancethrive.com and give me your US shipping address.

    Unfortunately, this offer is limited to people in the US because the shipping is quite expensive. And then it's also limited to the first 100 people that do this. So, I've got 50 tubs made up, 50 grams each, all ready to go right here. And then Julie can make up some more. It will take her a while. And we might have to get some more labels printed.

[0:30:03]

    But we will make it happen. So, the first hundred people that gave me a five-star review on iTunes, we will send you a sample of Hormetea. I think you'll really going to like it. And if you do like it, I would love it if you let me know. If you hate it, even more so. I want to know even more so that we stop doing things that people don't like.

Tommy:    We could play with the composition, add various things. There's lots of other things I thought about adding or taking away that could sort of change the profile. So, if people do or don't like it or have some other thoughts of things we could include then all the better. This was just sort of the thing that I threw together and thought, "Oh, it's actually pretty good." That doesn't mean that there isn't room for improvement.

Christopher:    It's really funny. When Julie tasted it, she said, "I know what I want this to be." And she added it to bone broth and said, "That is exactly what I wanted this to be. Taste this." And I think she's got quite a sophisticated palate, background in food science, very much passionate cook in the kitchen. And it makes this very sort of whole -- It tastes like a green pea soup. It's kind of weird. It is very -- I can't think what the word is. It's marmy, right?

Tommy:    Savory.

Christopher:    Savory. That's it. Exactly. So, that's kind of an interesting thing you can play around with if you're already consuming bone broth, add some Hormetea to your bone broth. Let us know what you think about that. Remember, if you're interested in the Icelandic Health Symposium, link is in the show notes. Phat Fibre is available now along with the peer reviewed open access paper. And then Hormetea is available. Give me a five-star review in iTunes, I will send you some Hormetea if you're in the US. If you're not in the US, I'm sorry. I'll bring you some to Iceland. How about that? Tommy, you've been doing some organic acids testing on yourself. Can you talk about what you did and maybe more importantly why you did it?

Tommy:    Yeah. So, actually, I guess, this was the end of December, it was the first time I've done an organic acids test. I've looked at plenty and helped people with plenty. We've probably done hundreds at Nourish Balance Thrive.

Christopher:    Yeah, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. So, the people that don't know -- should explain, actually. It's a urine test. You collect the first morning void. So, this is the first time you pee first thing in the morning. And then you freeze the sample. You give FedEx a ring. They come to your house, they pick up the sample, they take it to the lab, and then Bill Shore, who's been on my podcast, I'm sure he does each and every single one of those tests personally still, right?

    He runs it through his mass spectrometer and then he produces this PDF report and it tells you about all sorts of small molecules that appeared in your urine. And then when you have the vast knowledge of both Bill and then someone like Tommy who understands biochemistry, they can tell you about what's going on inside of your body. So, this is really interesting stuff to biochemists.

Tommy:    Yeah. And in terms of the stuff that you can look at, so we use the Great Plains organic acids and Genova has a version too, but we tend to look at lot of things associated with yeast overgrowth, some bacterial overgrowth, we look at some neurotransmitter turnover, some things associated with mitochondrial function and various micronutrients, vitamins B, vitamins, the need for stuff like methyl groups, methyl folate, and oxidative stress, glutathione, all that kind of stuff.

    So, you can really have a nice sort of look into somebody's metabolism and have an idea of what's going on and then what you can do to improve their health. So, this is the first time I've had access to one because I was in Norway and sort of shipping that stuff all the way from Norway was just a real pain. So, I did one at the end of December. As part of the first one that I did, I wanted to do an experiment and do like a before and after.

    So, what I did a before and after on was Qualia, which people may have heard of. It's become very popular or celebrated nootropic. So, it's got lots of various compounds supposed to improve cognitive function. And I thought I also haven't necessarily played that much with nootropics and I thought I'll try this because it's had rave reviews from various people and I thought I'll get some. I'll do my organic acids before and after because they let me look at things like my neurotransmitters, which will obviously be which should be modulated by various nootropics and things that alter cognitive function. And so I'll do a before, take Qualia for a month as they suggest that you do, and then do an after and look at the difference. So, that's what I did.

Christopher:    Did you notice anything just in terms of your symptom or cognitive ability?

Tommy:    Absolutely. I took it a time when I would have definitely benefited from any beneficial effects on cognitive function but then also at a time when there was a fairly high risk of, if it sort of made me worse in any way, probably a dicey time to take it but I thought it would be the best way to try it. So, it was in the month before my PhD defense. So, this is the time when I'm basically working pretty much all day every day reading the research that I did myself, reading the research around the topic of my PhD, preparing two lectures that I would have to give to an audience of experts in my field and then spend, ended up being three hours being grilled on all those stuff that I did on my PhD.

[0:35:09]

    So, it was quite an intense day but then also the month up to that, you have to work pretty hard just to sort of make sure you're by up to date in terms of the research knowledge. So, I took it during that time. And the guys can make it. So, the initial effects are quite different from the long term effects. And I definitely noticed that.

    When I first took it, it is very stimulating and if I had ever taken MDMA, it feels a little bit like taking a small amount of MDMA or amphetamines and it sort of gives you this sense of alertness but also kind of well-being. And it was definitely noticeable. Like you could feel it come on. But the problem was, this is in the first couple of weeks particularly, I definitely had a come down in the afternoons. In the afternoons, like I got a bit of a headache. I felt a bit grumpy. I felt great for a few hours and then in the afternoons maybe six, seven hours after I took it, I definitely felt like those effects were wearing off.

    In the longer term, sort of three to four weeks, I would notice sort of the initial boost less but then also would have less of sort of come down later. I think things sort of mellow out over time and I definitely noticed that. But interestingly, particularly in the evenings, I think because you're sort of driving some of that, because basically, the compounds in Qualia up regulate almost all of the neurotransmitter pathways in the brain. So, acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin.

    So, basically, all of that is up regulated. And then in the evenings, I would get really sleepy. I basically generated all these byproducts that you get from the brain working hard, if you want to call it that, things like adenosine which then drive sleep pressure and I definitely felt sleepier in the evenings because of that. So, obviously, it was working my brain harder so that I needed to rest it harder. And I definitely noticed that particularly, again, that sort of decreased over time.

    They do actually say that if you're not sleeping properly then you don't get as many of the benefits and I can kind of imagine that that's definitely part of it. And towards the end of that month, actually right to my PhD defense, I had all this time with like talks and things running through my head. I actually slept really poorly for the last few days. And then I had to fly to Norway and I did my defense with jetlag, not having slept for a few days. I kept taking it and, actually, I wouldn't be surprised if it helped me do pretty well.

    So, I mean, my defense went very, very well. And maybe that gave me some of the buffer that allowed me to do that considering all the stress and all the stuff around it. Could just be fabulous placebo effect but considering the outcome I'm very happy to take that. I mean, it was definitely a very interesting experience, definitely noticed an effect. I think it was really worth doing. And you can kind of see, and half the people, to look in my organic acids test. We can upload them to the website. People can look at them.

    What I saw, unsurprisingly, was -- Actually, all of my neurotransmitters were fairly low so including things like dopamine and noradrenaline which is sort of the next step in the pathway from dopamine. Dopamine is converted into noradrenaline. And then equally, some of the serotonin turnover, low serotonin, I think this is probably because -- Well, I mean, my theory is that if you look at my genetics I have all the SNPs that up regulate monoamine oxidase A activity. So, I probably chew through my dopamine pretty quickly. I'll probably chew through those neurotranmistters pretty quickly and then I end up with low overall levels. But, obviously, what is your level and works for you is very much -- So, I'm not saying I feel like my brain works pretty well.

Christopher:    I feel like your brain works pretty well. I'm wondering if you're going to do a washout period and then another PhD and then the defense with no Qualia. What do you think?

Tommy:    Yeah. I think that's the only way to do. But I should have been blinded in the first place. So, sadly, I couldn't do that. So then after a month of taking the Qualia I did notice -- Well, I saw, if you look at my organic acid test, an increase in dopamine levels particularly. But the noradrenaline didn't really shift at all. So that maybe there's something to do with the conversion there possibly. And then also serotonin didn't really shift the needle at all either.

    So, I think, there's definitely having an effect there particularly on the dopaminergic pathways. So, yes, interesting to actually see a quantified effect that is actually sort of doing something biochemically. And, obviously, a lot of other stuff happened during that time in terms of the stress and moving around and all that stuff doing the defense. Part of that probably feeds into the change in my results. It's definitely not just the Qualia. But I did make sure I didn't take any other supplements during that time. I was just doing that. I've had a wash out period initially because I normally take some various vitamins and supplements and things. So, I did try and control all those factors and that was the only thing that I was taking at that time.

Christopher:    Talk about what some of these neurotransmitters do. I know it's probably not possible to discuss them in isolation but I think we do know a little bit about what each of these things do. So, talk about dopamine.

[0:40:02]

Tommy:    Yeah. So, dopamine is very interesting. I know you'll post this video from Robert Sapolsky.

Christopher:    Yes, that's one of my favorite bits of one of my favorite lectures by Robert Sapolsky on dopamine.

Tommy:    Yeah. Basically, dopamine is the neurotransmitter that is associated with the drive to do the work to get a reward. So, people use the things that you get an increase in dopamine as a reward for something. So, you get a reward and then that increases dopamine in the brain. But actually, what increases dopamine is the thought of a potential reward which then drives you to do the work that we're getting the reward.

Christopher:    Right.

Tommy:    And it's actually you get even higher dopamine if the reward is uncertain. So, the best thing that I can associate with is betting, right? Betting on sports. Because people are driven particularly to bet on things with long odds. So, the chance of winning is fairly low but the anticipation of potentially winning gives you this huge boost of dopamine and that's what drives that betting behavior. So, you get increase in dopamine. That drives to put on the bet. And that sort of is that potential for big payout is that gives you that boost in dopamine. So, that's kind of if you're getting a potential reward, increasing dopamine will then motivate you to do the work to try and get that reward.

Christopher:    Do you know what it says to me? It explains to me how social media works the way that it does. When you look at platform like Instagram or Twitter or Facebook, generally, what you find is you scroll through miles and miles and miles of crap and then you see something really cool. Like somebody you went to school with just had a baby and they are super cute baby, maybe, I don't know, each person is individual in what they find to be pleasurable to see.

    And then you keep scrolling and you keep scrolling and you keep scrolling and it's that variable reward. If all they showed you was pictures of the baby, the pictures of the good stuff, then the reward, the dopamine would be low, right? You wouldn't come back. You wouldn't have that same drive to come back to the platform and use it again. I'm sure they must be taking advantage of this.

Tommy:    Yeah, absolutely.

Christopher:    And then talk about noradrenaline.

Tommy:    Yes. So, noradrenaline, if you look at the test results, they're called norepinephrine which is just the American word for noradrenaline. And in case you're interested, it depends on whether you decide that Greek or Latin is your base language, whether you use norepinephrine or noradrenaline. So, that's basically part of the, what we consider the sympathetic nervous system.

    So, obviously, that fight or flight particularly if we're looking in the brain associated with things like increased alertness but noradrenaline release in the periphery is also increases how hard the heart beats causes vasoconstriction sort of gives you that, gets you ready to do exactly that fight or flight. So, it's part of that sort of alerting side of the autonomic nervous system.

Christopher:    Right, right, right. So, the start of an exercise of maybe the start of a race or maybe even something more mellow than that.

Tommy:    Yeah, exactly.

Christopher:    And then talk about serotonin.

Tommy:    Yes. Serotonin, people will probably know of is part of like depression and mood disorders. A lot of the drugs that people take for that, serotonin are either agonists or they prevent the re-uptake of serotonin into nerve cells so you end up with more serotonin hanging around stimulating things. Actually, most of the serotonin we have is based in the gut. So, I think, it's interesting to think about the fact that when we're looking at serotonin on this urine test maybe we're looking more at serotonin in the gut then we're looking at serotonin in the brain just because of the difference in terms of the volume that's produced and where it's produced.

    But involved with a number of things including memory learning, anxiety, particularly, and also certain serotonin receptors used in terms of cognition and things like that. So, it has like kind of wide ranging effects. But we tend to think that if you're channeling, its created from the amino acid tryptophan. Tryptophan converts to serotonin. Serotonin then goes on to be converted to melatonin.

    So, if you're not making very much serotonin you might not be producing much melatonin. That's kind of, again, stimulated by life cycles, circadian rhythm and all that kind of stuff. So, if you're using your tryptophan to produce more serotonin rather than some of the -- There's another side of that pathway. This is the [0:44:18] [Indiscernible] pathway. And there is some other parts in that pathway that can be neuro toxic, particularly increase in inflammatory scenarios, quinolinic acids, particularly.

    And then if you're making more serotonin than quinolinic acid you're probably in better shape. But if you're making more quinolinic acid, that maybe suggests some kind of inflammatory process going on. So, kind of the balance of those systems gives us some ideas of certain things which is sort of like a nice picture into what's going on.

Christopher:    I still find that taking 5-HTP works really well for me for sleep. And I can be quite specific now about what it does to my sleep. So, do you know when you put your head on the pillow and what you really want to happen at that time is to let go of the dead man's handle, right? You want the train to come to a stop and you just want to stop thinking about everything and then go to sleep.

[0:45:04]

    And sometimes, especially when you're really excited about your work or something else, then it's quite difficult to shut your brain off. And I find that the 5-HTP does a really good job of that. It helps me to shut down my brain and go to sleep. But I find if I keep using it, it stops working after a while. I don't get the same effect if I use it over and over and over again.     And now I say that the specifications, like after a bike race or something like that. Or maybe from traveling or something and then my sleep environment is going to be compromised a little bit. It's really good for that.

Tommy:    Yeah. Actually, because of the results of my organic acids test, I've been using 5-HTP to sleep too and I find exactly the same thing. So, 5-HTP goes directly to serotonin rather than going down some of the other parts of the pathway so you can kind of, rather than putting in tryptophan as the starting molecule, you start with 5-HTP and more like to make more serotonin rather than some of the other potential molecules that can be made from tryptophan. So, because sort of my serotonin levels are at the low end of the normal range, I sort of felt that there was definitely some capacity to boost that part of the pathway and 5-HTP definitely works for me in the same way.

Christopher:    Yeah. I should say as well that there are lots of things that the organic acid test reveals that are like this. So, there's lots of supplements that you could take. The question is which are the ones that are likely to benefit you the most? And the organic acid test does a really good job of narrowing that down. I see not just like throwing supplements that at the problem.

    And the other thing I should say is that the organic acid test is just one tool that we use in our box. So, quite often people would hear me talk about organic acid testing on the podcast and say, "Oh, I really want to do this test." And the truth is that it is just one test and we normally combine it with many other tests. We look at urinary hormones, we look at blood chemistry, we do stool testing, and we combine all these data to form the overall picture.

    And so sometimes you'll see something odd on the organic acids test and then I need to look at the blood chemistry in order to confirm what I think I'm seeing. So, on its own, the test isn't terribly use -- I don't know. Maybe that's going too far to say it's not terribly useful but it's not as useful as it can be when combined with blood chemistry, for example. So, if you want to know more about how we use the organic acids testing, I would recommend that you head over to the link in the show notes and you can book a free consultation and we'll talk about our complete program.

    And we do actually have some capacity at the moment. So, the medical doctor that I started the business with, Jamie, recently had a baby, about six months ago, and she's almost done with her maternity leave and she's ready to start taking on some additional hours. And so we have some additional capacity in our clinic. And then almost by coincidence, at the same time, Tommy, how are you getting on with the ferrets? Tell us about the ferrets.

Tommy:    Yes. So, I'm currently working, like the day job, is working as a post doc at the University of Washington and trying to develop a model of encephalopathy of prematurity, we call it. It's basically babies who are born prematurely are a high risk of brain injury which could result to things like cerebral palsy, autism, sort of anything on that kind of spectrum due to various things like infections or periods of hypoxia or something like that.

    We don't really have great models of that in animals. And, obviously, my PhD was based in an animal model of a similar disease but in term born babies. So, I'm trying to develop a model of this disease in ferrets. Actually, it's been a bit touch and go. And they've been trying to do [0:48:45] [Indiscernible]. But I think we're getting pretty close actually. So, that's potentially really exciting because it's a model that's really needed to try and test treatments for these babies who don't really have any sort of robust therapy that we know will protect their brains.

    And particularly in the western world, babies born prematurely, they can be born earlier and still survive but then at least 50% of those will end up with some kind of brain injury so then they're surviving with some kind of disability. And, obviously, we're going to try and minimize that. So, I think it's going pretty well. I think six months and that will all be wrapped and ready to go and then I can move on to bigger and better things or different things, at least.

Christopher:    And different things, yeah. I should make that clear, actually, that you're not just a ferret doctor, that you have been working with. So, that's the other things that awkwardly need to talk about. The cost of the elite performance program is $8,500 in year one at the moment. You don't pay it all at once. There's a front loaded payment and then it's monthly payments after that. And I've been sitting down with some business consultants and they've really made me seen the light. Like, "You've got two doctors that have poured hundreds if not thousands of hours of sweat equity into this program that you're running. Are your really charging what it costs?" And the answer is no.

[0:50:00]

    So, it's likely that the cost of the program will go up by several thousand dollars in the very near future. So, if you have been on the fence kind of umming and ahhing is this something I really want to do, I would encourage you to come forward and at least talk to either Julie or Amelia about what the program has to offer for you. I think I should say something about what it does have to offer.

    We talk a lot about the testing, what tests does this include, what supplement does this include, what coaching does this include. And those details, they may be important. But the real thing that the program offers is transformation. So, we don't really care whether your goal is to qualify for the Boston Marathon, whether it's to get an erection, whether it's to think more clearly and get pass an exam, whether it's to become a professional tennis player or whether it's to do better in your next cyclocross race, we really don't care what standard of athlete or what your goal is as long as you have a goal and you're competitive and you're motivated to achieve that goal then we would really like to talk to you.

    It seems kind of strange to me that I've spent years and years and years trying to find doctors that would behave like engineers and really try to debug a problem and look inside of your body. And I've known, even before my health really crashed, I knew that doctors have the ability to look inside of a person and see the complex workings and maybe improve on what was there. And that was likely to have a much greater benefit to my exercise performance than any type of equipment improvement.

    So, cyclists in particular, they love to masturbate over the equipment, the derailleurs and the carbon fiber wheels. I love all that stuff too but I know now that the very best people, you can give them any type of equipment and they're still going to get the same fantastic results regardless and really what matters is looking inside the person. And, unfortunately, I feel like doctors, they're trapped inside of a system that doesn't work. And so what I was looking for was a doctor in the wild.

    I kind of think about this zoo analogy. So, doctors at the moment, they're kind of like zoo animals trapped inside their cages. And maybe what we've created at Nourish Balance Thrive is more of a doctor safari park. This is what doctors would do if they were in the wild, if they had an unlimited budget and unlimited amount of time to investigate your personal situations.

    People say, "Oh, is this covered by insurance?" No, it's not covered by insurance. Because these insurance companies are not at all interested in your performance. You're asking them to ask me to take insurance would be like asking me to put my doctors back into that zoo cage and that was the very thing that made them work better in the first place. So, yeah, it's amazing that I spent all this time looking for these doctors and now I've got two of them at once in the like buses. I swear it's crazy.

    Look for the link in the show notes. It's the elite performance program. And you can book a free consultation and talk to somebody in real life. Because I realize that nobody is going to pull the trigger on this thing without talking to someone first. So, I recommend that you do that. Cool. I can feel like this is a nice place to wrap up, Tommy. Is there anything else that you wanted to mention?

Tommy:    No, I don't think so. I think that kind of gives a flavor of what we've been doing. I think it's important to highlight that we spend a lot of time investigating various things so that we can do our jobs better. I don't like recommending things to people without sort of knowing what it would do to me or what it does in general, whether it has any science behind it. So, if we can't find any science behind it, we'll try it out ourselves and sort of like an ongoing process that is completely open.

    And that's why we're putting this research out there. That's why we have our highlights email, which we haven't mentioned yet. So, this is something that people can sign up for if you go to nourishbalancethrive.com/highlights. It's basically an email that I write every week. And when you sign up, you'll start from the beginning so you won't miss any. And it's basically one thing that you can do to add to your routine, daily routine that week to improve your health, and there'll always be at least one if not many studies which show why that's the case. But it's usually something very simple.

    You can integrate without too much hassle. Then there'll be something that we'd like to give a different opinion on. Maybe something we've heard out in the health sphere or the health news or something that we like to maybe clarify based on some of the underlying biochemistry or physiology. And then just like one thing that we think is really awesome and it's usually somebody else has written an awesome book or given awesome talk or is doing some awesome work that we like people to know about.

    There's a huge number of people out there doing, putting all this brilliant content out on the internet. So, we want to try and share that too. We definitely don't think we're the only people doing good work. So, we want to try and give more people access to that stuff. Sign up for that email. It will all come in one email. You don't need to sort of click on anything else or do anything else unless you want to read more into the references. So, it's all just -- Everybody's trying to send you an email ever day but I think this is a pretty good one. We've had some really good responses from it. So, I think, I'm sort of excited to keep doing that.

[0:55:12]

Christopher:    Yeah. The problem is not too much email. The problem is too much email with no value. And you are doing something amazing here which is delivering incredible value in that email. I really, really look forward to that as someone that just has made health a hobby, right? Like it's really fun especially the different perspective section for me is really, really fun. I should express some gratitude to all the people that have already signed up because I did this kind of sad "Oh, only 200 people have signed up for Tommy's highlights email" and I checked not long before recording this interview and it was well over a thousand now.

Tommy:    That's awesome. Thank you. That's cool.

Christopher:    And you don't need to worry about it. You have not missed anything. So, if you're listening to this saying, "Crap, I'm missing out here." No, you're not going to miss anything. So, when you sign up, I've set up the mailing system so that it emails you the first highlights email first. And the reason I did it that way is because you're going to get something in that email that you might want to consider adding to your routine.

    So, you get the first thing, you make the first change, a week later you get the next email. "Oh, that's interesting. I could add that in with the thing that I started to doing last week." That's kind of a habit now, right? And now get up and I walk around outside without shoes on, say, as an intervention and then the next week the next thing comes along. So, the idea is you drip these things in gradually and then that stops it from being too overwhelming.

Tommy:    Yeah, definitely. And there will be some things, because we try to stay up to date on stuff. So, there will be some things that maybe have a little bit of a shelf life and we'll definitely, as that stuff potentially happens, we'll always update. So, no matter when you stop, you will always be as updated as possible.

Christopher:    Yeah, absolutely. This actually we're giving away part of what the business consultant are persuading me is what's making this program so expensive, right? So, we spend a considerable amount of time on a really nice internet chat program called Slack that we've grown very fond of. And we've got some really cool people in there, not just the people here on the podcast but some other people who remain behind the scene, some of whom are researchers themselves and just all kind of cool stuff goes on all day.

    And then we pick out the coolest of the cool and we put that into our highlights channel and that eventually ends up in the email. So, this is the inner workings of Nourish Balance Thrive. I charge people for the amount of time that I spend on the phone or Zoom with them. But what I'm not charging for is all this stuff that goes on the back end and that's really what makes the program so expensive. So, it's kind of cool that you can sign up and get the very best of that absolutely for nothing. That's pretty cool.

Tommy:    Yeah, definitely. It's a lot of fun.

Christopher:    Cool. Well, thank you very much for your time, Tommy. This has been great. Thank you.

Tommy:    Thank you.

[0:57:44]    End of Audio

 
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