Hello, everyone. This is your host, Susan Rosen. And today I have a return guest. Very exciting. His name is Dave. I'm going to screw this up. Wattamal. Wattamal? I got it right. Okay. And Dave has been in a space of actually having his own astroxanthin product, which Which I have to say I take and I like. So I'll be up there if anybody wants some confirmation. And so, Dave, why don't you tell everybody a little bit more about yourself and how you came to be the Ashto Xanthum expert?
Well, I have been in this space for 25 years. And first off, thank you for having me back. It was a pleasure chatting a few months ago, and we're so happy to give you some samples of the product and to hear that you've had success and a great experience. And so pleasure to be back and to chat about your experience and share more about Assa Xantham. But yeah, my journey with Assa Xantham started in the late '90s. It was actually a high school job.
My father was working with a company that was producing microalgae on the big island of Pau. And this algae produces asosanthin as a defense mechanism against UV light from the sun. And this This molecule called ascizanthin is something that is ubiquitous throughout the marine environment. And so it goes from the algae that gets consumed throughout with crustations and salmon and whales. And it's something that actually makes salmon, pink, lobsers, and crab, red. And so it's a pigment.
But beyond that, it has important health benefits, where it's a really powerful antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and it has a wide variety of applications, given that it is distributed throughout the body. And so my father and I were working on this in the late '90s, and I was out in the ponds working with the algae on the production side. And And we learned that with the salmon, it's a key part of their diet.
And when they go to swim upstream to reproduce, it's actually a really vital component that enables them to do that, because it's a really long, grueling journey to swim upstream all those miles. And the salmon are essentially wasting away as they're going back to their birthplace to reproduce.
And when they turn bright red in that swim upstream, that's actually the ascianthin from their flesh going out to their skin to signify their readiness to mate, and it's being utilized to help them in their journey. And then ultimately, when they reproduce, the ascianthin is transferred to their eggs, and the salmon eggs are bright red because of asyxanthin. It's there to protect and help the development of the offspring. So it's this really amazing molecule.
And over the years, it's been demonstrated to have benefits on health and longevity. And so at that point in the late 1990s, there were only a few hundred peer-review papers on asexanthin. And we thought, Hey, this is really exciting. Let's look into this further and help to advance the research field in terms of how it worked, where it localized in the cells.
It turns out it spans stabilizes the cellular membranes, which are the outer layer of the sail, but also the nucleus, the mitochondria, all these key locations in the cell. And it sits there and helps to neutralize and scavenge the free radicals that caused the oxidative stress and the inflammation that can recap it within your body. And so we thought, let's bring this to the human market as a product to help with human health.
And we explored pharmaceutical development for many years because we thought this could be a really important drug candidate to help with age-related diseases and chronic diseases. And then we ultimately decided to focus on a dietary supplement, given that it's so safe and it's naturally occurring, that you can help a lot of people faster by bringing on a dietary supplement.
We also transitioned away from growing the asyxanthin or growing the algae that produces the asozanthin in the ponds just because that process is somewhat prone to contamination. It's not as pure because when you get the algae, you have to try to then extract the asozanthin from the algae, which in the first place, even growing the algae is challenging. You can have batches that are inconsistent or are lost. And so getting a batch of the algae made is already a big feat to start off with.
But then you have to extract the ascoxanthin, and you're only left with 5 or 10 % ascoxanthin, and the rest is other content of the algae, which are the non-active components that you don't need. It's also something that uses a lot of land and water and energy to produce. And so we decided to do it more in a pharmaceutical-like manufacturing, where we do it in the laboratory. It's made from scratch, but we make the exact naturally occurring molecule that you find in nature without anything else.
And so it's highly pure, highly consistent. It's scalable, and it's actually better for the environment when you look at the use of land and water and energy. So it's a more sustainable solution in addition to being more pure. And when we did a head to head human study with our form, that's the laboratory-produced nature identical versus the algal form, we got from the same dose in the same group of people, three times the amount of azacinab absorbed into your bloodstream.
And so that's something where just because you swallow a capsule doesn't mean you absorb all of it into your body. Getting as much absorbed as possible is really beneficial.
And so that's really been our focus has been understanding how azacinab works at a mechanistic level in the cells, the applications it has for heart health and brain health, where I know you've had some benefits that you've experienced and joint and muscle health, et cetera, throughout the body, and then also how to make it and how to deliver it.
And so that's been our journey over these last 25 years, and that's what led to bringing out this product, where we had a predecessor form of the product that we sold in retail stores, and we found that if people learned about the product, they would be interested and they would try and oftentimes experience great benefits. Or we had a big program reaching out to health care professionals, doctors and others in the space, present the science.
They would often try the product themselves, utilize it within their practice. But those endeavors are very labor-intensive and hard to scale to help as many people. And so we decided to create a direct to consumer brand with AX3 and leverage podcasts and social media to create conversation around ascizanthin. First off, ascoxanthin, in general, it's a category because there are other forms like the ALGE form I mentioned on the market.
And ultimately, we would love if everyone takes ascoxanthin, whether it's from us or anyone else. We think that would be a benefit for society. And then if you are considering ascoxanthin, we would like people to look at ours because of the benefits that I mentioned.
But we think it's something like omega-3s, where it's a very big market and it's something where we're probably a couple of decades behind omega-3s in terms of the awareness that, oh, yeah, everyone should take it, or like biotics or multivitamins, whatever it may be. This is something that hopefully in the future will be in that same category of, oh, yeah, everyone, I take the aliances in addition to these other things.
And so that's really been our mission is to create that awareness, because otherwise, if this product just sits on the shelf or it sits on an online marketplace, people don't know what it is. And so it requires that education. That's what we've been really working on. Yeah. No. And that makes a lot of sense. A lot of sense. Yeah, because getting information out to people is not really easy. Yeah. People have differences in sources that they trust.
And some people will listen to their doctor on what to take. Other people will listen to podcasts with experts or both. Some people will do their own online research, looking at peer-reviewed papers or blog articles. And there's a variety of things. And probably doing a broad review and checking with your doctor, plus looking at everything else that you can directly is a good thing.
And I just think that in the recent years, with the explosion of podcasts and social media, there's been just this democratization of access to knowledge and conversation. Sometimes it's both a blessing and a curse, where you have all this access and all these great conversations, but you also have conflicting and competing information and viewpoints and different people that are in different camps. And so it can be confusing and challenging to navigate that.
And so while we don't claim to represent to be experts in all the other approaches to health and longevity, we really feel like we understand aszanthin well. And there's some really compelling science behind aszanthin, both on its safety and its health applications. And in particular, on our last podcast, I know we talked generally about aszanthin and its benefits.
But one of the really exciting things that I hinted at, but I wasn't able to talk about until it was published, was this major NIH-funded study that was conducted with our form of asuzanthin over many, many years. And that was actually just published recently in December. Great. And so that's something that I can share with you and we could chat about.
It's really cool because earlier work that we had done with the University of Hawaii showed that we impacted this important anti-aging gene called foxel3, which, based on prior studies, was shown to be associated with longevity. People with a particular version of this foxel3 anti-aging gene were most likely to live to 100 healthy versus others that had a less active form of the gene.
And so we worked with our collaborators here and showed that with our assesanthin, we actually increased the activation of that gene in heart tissue. And this was a preliminary study in an animal model that led to this NIH program, then thinking, Hey, based on this work, looking at this activation of a gene, what if we put it in our own study that actually looks at lifespan? And ideally, you would love to do lifespan studies in humans.
But to take a human that's 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and then follow them for the rest of their life, that could be done in principle. But obviously, you're not going to get the results for decades. Unfortunately, it's not feasible. And so for actual lifespan testing, you do need to utilize animal models.
And so there's this NIH program called the Interventions Testing Program, which is conducted at three different institutions, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas, and the Jackson Lab in Maine. They have a program that's been running for 20 years that's funded by the National Institute on Aging, which is one of the institutes at the National Institutes of Health.
They essentially have specially bred mice that are heterogeneous, which compared to normal laboratory mice that are in bred, and you get all types of weird diseases and things, these are more like- Just like people. Normal... It meant to be more a replica of humans where it's like, Okay, we can actually have a result that we have confidence in.
They have large cohorts of mice that are run in parallel at these three different sites, and they have standard operating procedures where everything is done the same. They're fed the same thing. They're So our mental conditions are the same. Everything is as identical as it can be in their handling. And they give them either a control diet, just normal food, or they give them diet that also has the addition of some potential longevity agent like ours or something else.
And each year, they'll start a new cohort, and they'll have maybe five or six different agents that they'll test. And then they'll follow these mice through their whole lifespan, which is typically three years or so. And so the overall study from the set up and the reporting typically takes around four years. And so our study started in 2019, and the results were just published in December and showed had an extension of life in the model.
For context, there's research showing that in the human population, if you were to cure heart disease or if you were to cure cancer, the impact on median lifespan, like how long the average person lives, would be extended by 3% in each of those instances, because not everyone dies from heart disease or dies from cancer. But if you were to eliminate those, the average human across the board would live 3% longer in each of those instances. That's a context for understanding the results.
In our case, we got a 12% extension of life in the model. This was actually in the male mice because the female mice already live 9 % longer than the males, which is similar to humans. Of course we do. Females live longer. Yes, of course. And so there are some differences there. And so the females didn't have the same extension extension. They had a three % extension, but without the same statistical significance. The male had a 12 % extension with very, very strong statistical significance.
And if you looked at the males versus females, they were very similar in their lifespan. The females were slightly more. But in general, it allowed the males to catch up and live a similar lifespan as the females who were hopefully also living a little bit longer.
And so that's something that if it were to translate to humans, and if you took the average American male that has a median lifespan of, say, seven, six years, this could be another nine years, potentially, of human lifespan, if you were to translate those results from this model.
And the really cool thing is that because azazanthin has impacts on health span or areas of health that are not just how long you live, but cardiovascular health, cognitive health, joint muscle health, the presumption that those extra years that you live it would be much healthier years.
And so we're really excited about this because this interventions testing program or the ITP, which has been running for the last 20 years, has only ever, in all those different cohorts tested, identified five other agents that have extended lifespan more than 10 %. But all of those agents were the only one that actually has the exceptional safety to be taken every day for product use.
There's other There are things that have shown benefit, but they have side effects or issues that you wouldn't really want to utilize every day, say, like rapamycin, which is big in the longevity space, but people are not necessarily wanting to take that every day. They're trying different dosing regimens or analogs of rapamycin to see if they can work around those side effects and tolerability issues.
And so the fact that we, that only extended lifespan more than 10%, but also have exceptional safety, and we're broadly accessible as a supplement versus some that's being used off label or something like that. This is a unique combination that was the first in the 20 years. That's something where in this whole space, like we talked about, where you have all these different agents or things that you can do for trying to live longer, or things or increase your health, you don't know what is real.
This is something where it's an independent third-party study, a major NIH-funded program. The National Institutes of Health is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world. So very, very credible funding and conducting the research, which we couldn't pay to be in this program.
We had to be selected from their committee based on the preliminary data, and then they run the study, and we work with them to figure out what the right dosing is and analyzing the amount of azacin in the chou or in the blood leading up to the study. And so we are co-authors on the paper because of supporting them in that way. But we don't have any involvement in the actual the day to day conduct of the study. So that independent result is something that was really exciting for us.
And so we were happy to see those results published in December in JeroScience, which is a peer-reviewed journal that focuses on advancements in the field of aging research. But that was something that is news since our last discussion, and it's with our form and the product that we supplied to them.
And so we're the only I'm asking Zanthin on the market that was actually used in this program, in addition to having those benefits around purity and environmental sustainability and the bioavailability of how much you absorb. That's what we've been working in the last few months. And so that's really exciting. All right. So it's published and out there for people to... Oh, good. People can read the whole study. I mean, it's a peer-reviewed paper, so it's a dense scientific paper.
And so we have some- Yeah, but usually there's a particular- There's an abstract. A particular thing that people can just go to. Yeah. Well, that's great. You'll have to give me the link and I'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, sounds great. And then I know that in your case, you had some benefits with cognitive function.
And so I'd love to hear a little bit more about that, and we could chat about that because that something does cross the blood-brain barrier and has impacts on study of stress and inflammation that is really involved in cognitive function and brain health. And so if you had some benefits there, it certainly makes sense and is consistent with clinical data and other experiences with other people.
Yeah. Yeah. No, for me, boy, the brain fog started, I don't know, three or four years ago, around the time right before COVID was COVID, right? And I had, trying to think which came first, chicken or the egg, right? Well, there was one morning where I was sitting at my computer and I felt really, really bad. And my husband was asleep. I got up to go, finally got up, was able to get up out of my chair, go into the hall to go down and talk to him.
And I passed out in the hallway, and he had no idea that I did because he was in the bathroom. So he just wasn't. And so Anyways, then I came back to went and talked to him. I had called. I can't even remember now whether I called my doctor before or after I passed out. I think I did it beforehand. But anyways, point being that after that, it's like my memory just got... And just started... That was the beginning of the brain fog.
And then after that very similar time period, I took a couple of falls where I hit my head. So it was like all of those things just started all coming together. And my memory wasn't very good. And people's names or things that had happened or just got really bad for a number of years because this was like 2019. When I had talked to my doctors, they had said, Oh, no, that's not COVID or anything like that because everyone was starting to talk about it. Oh, no, that's not it. That's not it.
Something Well, come to find out, I was talking a couple of years later to some COVID experts, and one of them was like, That's standard COVID. Maybe they didn't know it at the time, but Yeah. Long COVID with brain fog has been a thing, certainly. And everyone will remember the whole cytokine storm with COVID. And so it's definitely an inflammatory storm that's happening and can involve some long term issues. Yeah. Oh, no, exactly.
And the whole thing of passing out and how I was feeling and everything, they just pooh-poohed it, right? Oh, you had something, you took something, whatever. Like, no. I've just been sitting here on my laptop. Yeah. But like I say, I got a lot of confirmation from other people and from people that I interviewed, right? From my podcast who knew what they were talking about. So anyways, it got better. I felt better. I didn't feel normal.
And so anyways, and I was always trying anything I could get my hands on that I didn't have an allergy reaction to because as I mentioned to you before, my family is just known for allergies. And so anyways, but fast forward to this year, actually, probably 2024 because it's been, what, over two months now? Isn't that scary? We're already that far into the year. Anyways, I started I actually had started taking the astroxamthin, and that did seem to help.
I can't say that it all cleared up and went away, but it definitely seemed to help. And then at the same time, at the same time that I ran out because we were going back and forth with trying to get me the next bag, I actually tried something else that if anybody wants to go and find the podcast for it as well, because this is at least what worked for me, let's put it that way, which is called My Vital C. Is that right? Yeah. My Vital C. See my... And that seemed to help.
And then when I got my Ashto's Anth, and again, it just made it even better. So, yeah, it's been a big help, a big help, even though my husband keeps telling me that I... I said, I know. I still don't remember names. Just leave me alone. Yeah. But like we talked about, even in my case, sometimes you don't even register the name in the first place. So you can't forget something you didn't even learn in the first place. That's true.
But I actually saw a paper or something that they did a research on. And they said that even for normal people, as they get older, not remembering names is not unusual. It's just one of those things with the way that the brain grows and changes as you get older. I think over time, aging impacts a lot of different things that happen in the body, and And even things like fighting off oxidative stress and inflammation, you have endogenous built-in systems to do that.
And just as you age, it's everything, the aging process itself, but it's also just life happens. And so it's diet and exercise and sleep and stress and past infections or injuries or all these different types of things can impact that increase of oxidative stress and inflammation in different places throughout your body. And then, in your case, in the brain, if you have certain internal things happening, plus external factors, like hitting your head, all these things can create challenges.
And so in the case of Afroxanthin, it gets distributed throughout the body, crosses that blood-brain barrier, gets into the cells in the brain, and helps with reducing that oxidative stress and inflammation, which is implicated in a lot of these things. And so there's been studies showing impacts on various cognitive tests, visio-spatial learning or MACE test, or information processing, memory recall.
There's been these various types of studies, and it makes sense because if your brain is inflamed, it's not able to communicate and function as it should. If you can dampen that, it'll help. Like you said, it's not a miracle cure that's going to change it 100 %. It's not one thing cures all. It's a positive, nonspecific benefit that helps to dampen it and basically helps your body restore or function in a more normal way. It helps you have a positive step in the right direction.
Together with if there's other supplements that you find work for you or lifestyle things, certainly everything, diet, exercise, sleep, mindfulness, stress, all those things, if you can mediate those, it's the total package. Pick up your feet when you walk. Yeah, a little bit like that. Exactly, all of it. Yeah. I'm serious. I can't tell you how many times I have tripped Oh, yeah. Just thinking, yeah, just in the habit of keeping that right cadence and gait and everything. Yeah, for sure.
I mean, I have to laugh about it because there's nothing else I can do. But I do try and pick up my feet now and watch where I'm walking. Yeah, that's good. Because just as anyone ages, you don't want to have preventable things, It set you back. So yeah, obviously, a fall could be damaging to the head, but also just hips and limbs and all these things. And if that's the case, then now you can't get out and exercise.
And then you're left inclined to eat well and maybe just to take whatever supplement or medication you're supposed to be taking and all those things. It's just those domino effects. I broke my collarbone one time. Yeah. Recently. I mean, not recently, but back 2019. 2019 was not a real good year for me. Yeah. It seems like a long time ago, right? Pre-covid. It's done. But it's really not that long ago. I know. I know. Exactly. Exactly.
Yeah. But just for everybody's information, I am feeling a lot better. Yeah. And so that... Yeah. That's really great to hear. And certainly for transparency, we haven't paid you to say that. So we're giving you samples. No. But you've actually become a paying customer and have your own subscription, which we're so pleased to see. I am a paying customer now. Yeah.
And we're just really thrilled because it's the conversation and the trust that when people talk about it and share it with their friends, family, community. That's really the goal. And so, yeah, so happy to hear about that. Yeah, for sure. Hopefully, it can help with picking up those feet and being active and all that because a lot of athletes utilize the product as well. And so it helps with endurance, recovery.
Because it's the same thing, when you do all that, that increases oxidative stress and inflammation. And so some of that is good, but also You don't want too much. And so this helps support all those efforts. Yeah, for sure. Well, maybe is that a good place to wrap up or anything else? Yeah, it sounds good. I think we're good on time, and I think we covered it, and it was great to come back and share the new news that we published.
Yeah. We'll give you the link to share with the summary and invite people to check it out. And just really that this is something that can really help people support that lifespan, health span, overall longevity regimen. And in addition to the appropriate lifestyle and supplementation, other things that make sense is another necessary piece that we think it can be a great addition. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Okay. Well, thank you for coming back on. I do appreciate. Thank you for having me.
It's great chatting. And I will say that, my usual, which is that neither of us are doctors. This is not to be seen as medical advice. And with that, I will say that I will be seeing everybody next week.