Food Chained

3:36 – Focus on the gut-brain connection
A lot of gut health products are focused solely on the gut, but your gut health and your brain health are directly connected.

“If you look at most consumer products in the gut health space and the anti-aging and the Tropic space, they're very centric with probiotics. They're very centric with pushing this narrative that probiotics are it, and this is what it's gonna do. And what they don't really focus on is more of the whole body, how the gut-brain connection works, and how it could be manipulated through obviously diet, exercise, but also through supplements like prebiotics and postbiotics. So we wanted to start with two skews. The two things that helped me the most in my healing journey were something called digestive enzymes. So a little background on the health kind of things, when you're in an inflammatory state, you have your upper GI, your upper gastrointestinal tract, your stomach, small intestine, all that stuff. And then you have your colon, your gut, your lower GI. And what we focus on a lot is the lower GI health, but upper GI health, gastritis, all these things are very common. And when you're in an inflammatory state, sometimes the foods that you’re eating aren't properly digested. And that could be in part because of lack of digestive enzymes, or a lack of the way the food is being processed. And it causes inflammation later on.”

7:31 – Hormones are made in the gut
Because the majority of your hormones are made in your gut, gut health directly impacts hormone imbalance.

“To talk about it in very simple terms, if we don't produce things like serotonin, which is just another feel-good hormone. We have dopamine, serotonin, all these hormones I'm sure you've heard of. What people don't realize is a lot of them are made in the gut. Ninety percent of your serotonin, a feel-good hormone, is made in your gut. So if we don't have good eating habits, good sleeping habits, good digestion, gut health, then that's gonna affect the way we think a hundred percent. Some of the best athletes in the world are focusing on microbiome research now because it is really affecting, especially Tom Brady is one of the biggest ones actually, it's affecting the way they age, it's affecting their performance, it's affecting those different high-end elite athlete type of metrics, like 0.1 seconds here, three pounds here. And that's what they're focused on for that reason, because there's a huge connection between the gut and brain.”

8:41 – Start with your diet
The healthier your diet is, the healthier your gut will be. Try to intake a variety of diverse, healthy foods.

“I think our food supply in the United States specifically is so poor now that we really have to go out of our way to take care of our gut health and to take care of our body in all aspects of inflammation and aging. And I think eating a wide variety of colorful vegetables and a lot of diverse sources of fiber is definitely beneficial for microbial health. If you want to change your microbial diversity, which is creating better outcomes. Side note, diversity in our universe and our world leads to better outcomes. That's just a rule of life. Diversity in culture, diversity in genome, diversity in your microbiome, diversity in nature, all of that leads to better outcomes. And that's just a universal thing. And the same goes with your body. So intaking a diverse amount of foods, intaking different types of vegetables and wild-caught and lean meats can definitely help. So I would start with that first and then adding in a probiotic, adding a prebiotic, adding postbiotic, adding gut health supplements.”

10:03 – Address the three pillars of health
For biohacking, there are three main pillars of healthy living: a healthy gut microbiome, a good environment, and a healthy sleep routine.

“I see three pillars of health as far as biohacking goes. The first is nutrient and gut microbiome. The second is environment: the air, the plastics you’re around, the water quality. And the third would be sleep, really taking track of how your body is reacting to things in terms of, are you sleeping deep? Is your skin clear? Are you having brain fog? Are you having crashes throughout the day after you eat a meal? There's so many biohacking devices like the WHOOP Band, CGM, which is a continuous glucose monitor and something called Levels does that really well. So I'm sure some of your audience knows you can literally take a little chip, attach it to your arm, and connect it to your phone that can tell you how your glucose spikes. And that's really interesting because it also has to do with your microbiome as well. So for example, if I eat a burrito, my blood sugar might not spike, but it might for you. So it's really cool to understand what foods cause an insulin spike in your body and avoiding those foods that react poorly.”

13:20 – Check out the ingredient list
Healthy foods can be deceiving, you have to look closely at the ingredients list to find out if the foods you’re eating are really good for you.

“In nutrition school, we also learned that if you look at the ingredients of any package that you buy, food, drink, the ingredients were listed in most abundant to least abundant. And after I learned this, I was like, ‘Oh, let me look around.’ There was sweet potato chips that I saw in Whole Foods. And the first ingredient was corn, the second ingredient was vegetable oil, the third ingredient was potato powder. I'm like, ‘This is insane. This is like all complete marketing stuff.’ So you don't only have to look at the ingredients that you're buying from and look at the listing as well and what's most abundant in what you're buying. And specific to what you're saying, there's, like I said originally, there's a lot of processed food in America, more so than ever before. And if you look at just people our age, Gen Z, Millennials, there's way more people losing their hair. There's way more people having diabetes. There's way more people having chronic health issues than I would say ever before. And I blame the food and water quality.”

15:14 – Watch out for seed oils
While our bodies need a mix of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, we often get an overabundance of the omega-6 acids, which increases inflammation.

“In school we learned about omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids, and those are essential fatty acids that our body needs to intake. However, everyone knows that omega-3 fatty acids are really good for you. But omega-6 fatty acids are essential, too. And omega 6 fatty acids are highly inflammatory. And guess where omega-6 fatty acids are? They're in sunflower oil, safflower oil, cottonseed oil. They're all the oils that are basically in every packaged food you can see. It's almost unavoidable, it really is. And in America, our ratio is completely off of omega-6 to omega-3. I think it should be three to one. Don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be three to one. And in America it's around 20 to one. So that's another thing that people need to address that also causes gut health issues is seed oils that really can't be processed by the body the way they should be.”

18:04 – Educate consumers
Klora’s goal is to bring high-end science to regular people so they can be made aware of all the options for their health.

“We’re bringing the high-end science to the regular consumer. And I think that education will be first for Klora. So we're starting with gut health, but we have two other categories, mind and body. So we're gonna be doing stuff for cellular health in terms of anti-aging, in terms of lowering, we can't say inflammation, but lowering that kind of stuff and connecting all three. So for example, there's a really cool molecule called NMN, nicotinamide mononucleotide it's a precursor to mitochondrial health. That's an interesting ingredient that only high-end bio hackers know about. Some people on the podcast know about it here. AD drips are really popular, bringing stuff like that to the regular consumer, educating them on that. There's a molecule called spermidine which, given to any living creature, E cells, nematodes, mammals, their lifespan increases by 30 percent. It's amazing. It's found in foods like mato, it's found in blue zones around the world, and we can make it from wheatgerm. You know, there's a few companies making it from that. So that also is made in your gut, surprisingly. So there's things like this that are really high-end that we want simplify, educate our consumers, and make available in one umbrella that relates to the gut, mind, and body.”

19:27 – Why Klora stands out
Klora stands out in the biohacking world because they have examined every angle when it comes to gut health and the microbiome.

“We have a big vision for the company. And if you can see by our branding and the 16 months we put in before our launch, we really left no stone unturned. And for that reason, I think our company stands apart, and we’re gut health first, anti-aging cellular health first. Whereas other companies, they might have a vitamin brand and ‘Oh, by the way, here's our probiotic or here's our gut health supplement.’ It's a side thought, it's not the ethos. And that's where it is. We also think we have a great founder story. So this is something, all three of us are very successful in our own right. We're doing this because we want to do it. I'm leaving my job to do this full time because I think it's needed. I think it's something that's super interesting. I need cool people like you doing it, and it's amazing, and it's scalable.”