Realfoodology - Fake Amazon Supplements, Clinical Trials + Natural Medicine | Jeff Chen of Radical Science

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

EP. 195: Join us for a thought-provoking journey into the world of natural medicine with Dr. Jeff Chen, founder of Radical Science. As an MD with a passion for exploring alternative treatments, Jeff discusses the critical need for scientific validation in natural medicine. We discuss the challenges of conducting trials, the influence of Big Pharma, and the complexities of FDA regulations. From the benefits of alternative models to the importance of informed decision-making, this episode challenges conventional notions of healthcare and will leave you feeling empowered and ready to take control of your wellness journey. Topics Discussed 05:52 - Introduction to Jeff Chen and Radical Science 09:06 - Studies around natural medicine 13:14 - Finding volunteers for studies and trials 17:50 - Conflicts with Big Pharma studies 22:33 - Shortcomings of clinical trials 25:32 - Side effects of natural products 30:48 - Model of modern trials 41:04 - Reasoning behind lack of natural medicine studies 44:21 - FDA and compounds 47:59 - Patent expirations 49:49 - Allopathic vs Alternative models 55:08 - Jeff’s TED Talk 57:16 - Alternative models have less side effects 59:49 - Getting involved in trials 01:01:01 - Importance of doing your own research 01:09:52 - Jeff’s non-negotiables Check Out Jeff: Instagram LinkedIn Website Ted Talk Sponsored By: Lumen Use code REALFOODOLOGY at lumen.me to get $100 off Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Get a free $39 bottle at Getfresh324.com and only pay $1 shipping BiOptimizers Get 10% off at bioptimizers.com/realfoodology with code REALFOODOLOGY Paleo Valley Go to paleovalley.com/realfoodology for a discount Seed 25% your first month with code REALFOODOLOGY at https://seed.com/realfoodology  Check Out Courtney: LEAVE US A VOICE MESSAGE Check Out My new FREE Grocery Guide! @realfoodology www.realfoodology.com My Immune Supplement by 2x4 Elementa Silver Revolutionary Oral Care Produced By: Drake Peterson Edited By: Mike Frey

on today's episode of the real foodology podcast that's really the vision of radical it's it's a rebellion against the current state of health care and it's a movement towards wellness products that are proven personalized for individuals and also affordable for all future generations hello friends welcome back to another episode of the real foodology podcast i'm your host courtney swan as always and today's guest is my dear friend, Jeff Chen of Radical Science. I am so stoked for you to hear this episode. What my friend Jeff is doing right now with his company is so freaking cool. He is leading this right now. Nobody else in the country is doing anything like this and you are going to love it. He is an MD by trade and his company, Radical Science, is collecting

data on the effectiveness of natural treatments. It is so freaking cool. I really don't want to give too much about it in the intro because I really just want you to listen to the episode. But we talk about why there's not a lot of clinical trials for natural medicine. Also, why does science need to get behind natural medicine? He actually did a TED Talk on this, and he shares all of his insight around that. We talk about the current state of Western medicine, what the history is behind the pharmaceutical drug industry. We talk about clinical trials and what really goes on behind the scenes, and also how you can actually be involved in this. It's so freaking cool. We also talk about, should you be buying your supplements on Amazon? So please stay tuned. I hope you guys love the episode. And as always, if you are loving

the podcast, if you could take a moment to rate and review, it really means a lot to me and it really helps the show. So thank you so much for your support. And if you want to post it on Instagram, tag me at realfoodology. I really, really appreciate it. Imagine having a metabolic coach in your pocket that you could access at any point, any time in the day, whenever you want. That's what Lumen is. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. And on the app, it lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs and gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workout, sleep, and even stress management. I have so many podcast episodes about metabolic flexibility and why it is so incredibly important for your

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Oh my gosh. So you and I went to dinner very recently. So we've been, we're newer friends, but we've been friends for the last couple of years. And I feel like we run into each other once a year somewhere and get into like a really intellectual, informative, like debate over something. We just go straight into it.

Yeah. Which I always love. I always look forward to seeing you because the conversations that we have are always so intellectually stimulating for me. And I always learn a lot from you. So I loved our dinner that we had because you were telling me about your company, which I'm very excited to dive into

today. So first and foremost, thank you for coming on. And can you tell everyone a little bit about how you started your company and what is the premise behind it? Sure. So my background is in healthcare. And I always wanted to figure out better ways that we can improve health in America. And I thought that to figure out better ways that we can improve health in America. And I thought that the way I was going to do that was by becoming a doctor, but also having a doctor with some business training and running healthcare systems. And so along that way, I realized that the whole world of wellness is such an easier way, potentially, to impact people's health because it avoids the bureaucracy of FDA and prescriptions

and pharma and insurance companies and all these things. So what radical science is doing is we're building the first kind of layer of intelligence that can predict the right wellness products, the right types of people for the right conditions. And the way we're doing that is by creating a fundamentally new way to generate clinical evidence and scientific proof on wellness products. So we work with the brands, we work with their products, and we figure out what it does, who it works for, and we're able to do this at a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost and the speed of, say, pharma clinical trials. And the way I arrived at Radical was I was in grad school at UCLA. I was getting my medical degree and my MBA at the same time and headed towards being

a physician executive. And along the way, just realized that all the drugs we were prescribing, they weren't necessarily the most effective things out there. They were just the most effective things out there that had tons and tons and tons of hundreds of millions of dollars of research behind each one of these things. And as I looked closer and closer, I realized, well, it's not that wellness products don't work. They're just, the evidence isn't there yet. And the evidence isn't there because these things are so expensive. So I started a research center at UCLA focused on botanicals and natural products. And after years of hustling there,

still not making that much progress, still not really moving the needle, every innovative thing I wanted to do to lower cost or improve the speed of our clinical trials was not really possible in academia. And so about three years ago, left to start Radical Science with this vision of what happens to society

when there's abundant knowledge and proof on the effects of these non-prescription, non-pharmaceutical health products. And so that's really the vision of radical. It's a rebellion against the current state of healthcare and it's a movement towards wellness products that are proven, personalized for individuals and also affordable for all future generations. It's so amazing. I just love so much what you're doing. And I think so many people don't know that a lot of these pharmaceutical drugs that are being created, they start, they get their inspiration from plant compounds that already occur naturally in nature. And like you just said, the issue is that now, but those can't be patented, right? Because they're

natural. So these companies are using components of these natural things and then reformulating them back, putting all this money behind it, because since you can't patent a natural product, then they have to recreate their own version of it. And then they can get the funding. And that's why we have all these big pharmaceutical drugs. And neither you nor myself are here to vilify those drugs because thank God we have them for certain capacities. However, what's happened is natural medicine has now gotten this stigma that it doesn't work because there's no studies behind it. And so you are actually proving with your company that they do work and you are now

providing the scientific studies to back that up, which is very cool. Yeah, that's exactly it. And I mean, historical context, I think is important here, which is prior to, you know, prior to a hundred years ago, you know, for thousands and thousands of years, all our medicines were preparations of plant and animal products. And it was only about a hundred plus years ago that chemistry got good enough where we could synthesize similar compounds in the lab. And so we took inspiration from nature. You know, aspirin, salicylic acid came from willow bark, right? And all these like classic examples. And yes, there are estimates today that about half of all FDA approved drugs were compounds discovered in plants.

And you can't patent the plant, you can't patent the naturally occurring molecules. So what pharma does is using synthetic chemistry, they create a synthetic analog, but it's often slightly different so that it's a novel compound and can be patented. And once they patent it, now they're willing to spend egregious amounts of money

to go get it through the FDA. And what's interesting is over time, the cost of these clinical trials and getting through FDA approval has been rising. Everything else is getting more efficient in society, yet the cost of getting these drugs to market keeps growing and growing and growing. And so in some ways, it becomes actually a competitive moat. So pharma actually doesn't have an incentive to bring down the cost of trials by 100x.

They know how to play that game. They know how to invest this money and reap these large monopoly profits in the long run. And I love what you said. We're not here to vilify pharma. The real solution here is if we had perfect knowledge of both pharma drugs and natural products, it'd be in this instance for this individual, which of these products has the

best effectiveness, the least side effects, and also the consideration of what's the most kind of affordable or sustainable for society. So those are the three levers that we really need more insights into to make a good decision on in this case, what should be used for this individual. And so by uplifting the data on the natural products, you just then get to have an apples-to-apples comparison and get to use all, these are just tools. So you're expanding the toolkit

and deciding which tool is appropriate to use in what situation. That's so amazing. And you are creating now an incentive, I feel like, for companies to test these products. And so that we have, you basically, you're creating this bank right now of studies, correct, of all these different natural compounds that then other companies will be able to use. Hopefully individuals will also be able to use this information to then apply it to them from

a bio-individual standpoint, correct? Yeah, that's exactly it. And so each client comes to us and we put them through what we call this, we've kind of reimagined how clinical trials are done. We call this new category proof as a service. It should be as easy as software as a service. And the way we've done that is we've taken clinical trials from being in the hospital, in the clinic, we've turned them fully virtual. We have taken all this kind of expensive personnel you need for a clinical trial, doctors, PhDs, nurses. You can automate a lot of that with technology and also reduce the rate of errors. And then also you can standardize the clinical trials. So in some ways we're kind of like the first Ford Motors for clinical trials. You know, when they came along,

they didn't build the first car. They built the first standardized, affordable, high quality, predictable assembly line manufactured car. So that's what we do for clinical trials. We have one master sleep study and we'll run that same study on dozens, hundreds, thousands of different products for sleep. And then we're powered by American volunteers. You know, last year, we had more Americans volunteer in our trials than all FDA drug approval trials combined. Wow, really? And how do you find people? How do you find volunteers? So we do a variety of digital advertising. We also partner with certain community groups, but we've also fundamentally

changed the value prop for people in trials. Generally, it's a very inconvenient, objectifying experience to be in a clinical trial. And you got to go to a hospital, waste a lot of time driving there, get poked, get prodded. And at the end of the trial, often you're never told what you took. Was it the placebo? Was it the real thing? No one gives you your data back. And in exchange for all this inconvenience and keeping you in the dark, you get some money or a gift card or something. And you can see why low, low, low, low, low single digit percentages, like a couple percent

of Americans have ever been in any sort of clinical trial, which also brings up another issue, which is how are we making generalizations that the trial results apply to you and me and the rest of the society when only a couple percent of a very uniform type of people, historically white men, have been in trials? Yeah. So it brings up a different question. But we basically say is, hey, are you suffering with an issue with libido or sleep or pain or mood? Great. Are you interested in non-pharmaceutical options? Oh, great.

We'll send you a natural product. We've put it through more safety testing than even the leading natural organic grocers in the country. So it's safer than anything you can buy in a store. Explain that a little bit. So what do you mean? You're testing for heavy metals, stuff like that? Correct. Yeah.

So when we get the products from the client, the placebo and all the active products, we actually hold them in quarantine at our facility and we send it off for random testing. Whereas when you go buy something, even at like Whole Foods, none of those have actually been officially held by Whole Foods and randomly sampled and tested. They just go off of reassurances from the manufacturer of the product. We actually will hold it in quarantine and test it for heavy metals, microbials, residual solvents, the whole range of contaminant testing. And so yeah, you're getting something safer than what you could actually buy. It's free. And we give you tools to track your usage, tools to track your outcomes. As soon as the study ends,

we'll immediately unblind you, tell you if you got placebo or was it the ashwagandha or the turmeric or the lion's mane. And we give you all your data back in a health report. And furthermore, for each week that you're in the study, we're donating supplements to developing countries to prevent cases of blindness and pregnancy defects. So it's kind of like a take on the Tom's one-to-one model as well. And the broader picture to your earlier question is your data is also contributing to kind of this first ever kind of intelligence about wellness products. And so you're kind of part of this natural medicine movement. We're a public benefit corporation. We're a B Corp. And so I think that really incentivizes the folks as well. We don't pay them a dime. And we've had all these people come through.

They're bringing their friends and family through. And again, as soon as you start paying people, are they incentivized to give you accurate data or are they just incentivized to give you data? So in our model, if you've skipped a dose, if you aren't feeling improvement, great, tell us that you're just making your personalized health report more valuable. And so it's been a kind of a reimagining of this intrinsic motivation for folks to come into our trials. And then yes, in aggregate, this data set also becomes very

valuable for society. So for each one of our clients, we hold their data strictly confidentially. But in aggregate and anonymously, you can start to use this data set to say, oh, in general, these doses of these kinds of ashwagandha products may be more efficacious in women of this age, of this ethnicity, who have this type of a diet. But men of this type of a situation tend to have more side effects. They may want to avoid certain types of these products. So that's kind of what we hope to achieve. And that layer of insights and personalization doesn't even exist for pharma and won't exist for a very long time. Just the way that the pharma trials are run and the way that the trials are not standardized. You can't really just collapse and combine all the data from pharma trials. And that's why we have dozens of dozens of antidepressants. They're all FDA approved. You know, all of them work

against placebo, but you have no idea to predict and personalize who should be using what for what lifestyle factors they have and things like that. Yeah, that's a really great point. And that's exactly what I was just thinking as you were talking about this, is that you're getting better data than these big pharmaceutical companies are getting with these massive fundings behind them.

And also too, I know another big, really big concern that a lot of people have with big pharma studies, myself included, is this notion that they are paying for these studies and then also paying for a certain outcome and then presenting the data that skews in favor of this medication. And we see this all the time with big pharma. It's very commonplace that the FDA will essentially green light something saying we mostly know that it's safe and then they'll come back

and they'll pull it off the shelves later when it gets out to enough people and they realize like Vioxx is a perfect example of this where it ended up killing, I think it was 50,000 people. A lot of folks. Yeah. So yeah, I think there's a couple things to unpack there. I think the first is the fact that because of the laborious, inconvenient, and physically based nature of clinical trials, you get a non-representative sample in the study.

And it's no surprise that women are much, much, much more likely to get unanticipated side effects from pharma drugs. Minorities are as well because we weren't represented in those data sets. In fact, there was a very long time where women were banned from clinical trials. I will, or what were you going to say? Oh, because we thought that their hormone cycles would mess up the data. Yeah. I was going to say too, I know, I'm not like in defense of that because we need to figure out a way to include women into studies. But I will say,

I think some of it was on the good basis of they're concerned about women's health and especially, yes, around like pregnancy and all that. So I did want to tell people that it's not like inherently misogynist. It's more that they're concerned about women go through so many different stages

in life than men do. So yeah, it was partially out of concern that women who are potentially about to bear children or pregnant or breastfeeding, we don't want to remotely expose them to anything that could harm them and harm their child. And then part of it was as well, we just literally said, well, if you look at rat studies though, here's what's interesting. Again, for the longest time, female rats were not put into rat studies. Wow. Because of their menstrual cycles. And we said,

that's too complicated to deal with those hormones. Let's just study the male mice and apply the data. So classic. Men are like, we don't even know how to figure that out. Yeah, yeah. Still haven't figured it out. Haven't figured it out in rats,

haven't figured it out in humans. Still working on it. And it wasn't until, gosh, I want to say only in the last several decades that the government actually mandated that if you're going to receive federal funding from the U.S. government, you have to have female rats in your study. And it was only then that the trend started to actually go towards that. And so with, so those, yes, those are some of the limitations of the pharma model. Here's the other thing, all clinical trials and

kind of until we came along, they were bespoke. They were custom. And so, yes, you are able to better game the system if you get to kind of set up the scaffold and set up the rules. But in our model,

because it's template and standardized, you don't really get to change anything. Here's the sleep study. Everything is predetermined, pre-built, ready to go. And so there's much less risk of bias that is almost kind of baked into the bespoke nature of trial, the custom nature of trials. And so in our model, we have gender parity. We are having tremendously more diverse ethnicities than say in a typical pharma trial.

What's also interesting is we have geographic diversity. So 20% are coming from rural areas, which is unheard of in pharma trials because where do pharma trials tend to take place? Big cities. Urban areas, academic medical centers, right? Exactly. Wow.

And we've had people come from all 50 US states and these people, in addition to, yes, representing gender, ethnic diversity, there's just, it's a different lifestyle, different environmental exposures, all these things. And so now you start to create a data set that actually resembles and looks like all of us. And with a diverse data set, you can also now, using more sophisticated data analytics tools, machine learning, you can now zoom in on subpopulations. Whereas if everything's homogenous, you can't understand what differences in variables could change someone's

response to a product. But now that there's diversity, I can zoom in and be like, okay, let's take a look at diet. Let's take a look at where you live, rural versus urban. And now these become predictive factors. And for whatever reason, people in rural areas tend to benefit more in sleep from these types of products. Hey, that's still a useful insight to help people more quickly arrive at something that's going to work for them. That's really cool. Are there any other shortcomings of modern clinical trials besides that? Like what are we looking at versus like what you're doing versus how we see it right now in the standard allopathic model? Yeah, I think the diversity thing is a big detriment.

I think the cost is just, again, absolutely prohibitive. So the typical stat you hear somewhere in the hundreds of millions up to excess of billions for a pharma drug to get through FDA approval. So I don't fault them that in that situation that it's so expensive, yeah, you better damn well have a patentable product. And therefore you instantly are only looking at synthetic options that don't exist in the natural world. You can't really patent.

It's really difficult to patent things in the natural world. And so that high speed or that high cost and that slow speed just cripples the ability for anyone who doesn't follow that model to go get evidence, to go get trials. And so you kind of started off the interview earlier with this, but by lowering the cost and speed to the way that we have, and it's actually several orders of magnitude, it's somewhere around 100 to 1,000x cheaper. That's about 10x faster than say a pharma trial. In our model, for these wellness brands, they go, oh, well, I don't need

a patent to invest in clinical research. I have a brand, the data is tied to my brand, and I have this product. And do I go spend this money on like some billboard ads? Or do I go spend this money proving that my product works, which is a permanent, durable, long lasting differentiation. And so yeah, we get really excited about these. Oh, the other thing about trials, I'm glad you brought that up as well. There's also a criticism of trials that the data is very artificial. And by that, I mean, sure, someone in a trial, in a classic pharma study saw benefit, but that was when they went to the clinic every day and didn't miss a single dose and had people,

you know, and so they don't reflect real world conditions. And it's not that uncommon where these trials get, or these drugs get FDA approved based on beautiful trial data, it hits the real world. And for whatever reason, the actual outcomes aren't that great. And doctors stop prescribing it. Insurance companies stop paying for it. And what happened? Well, what happened was the difference between being in a highly artificial, sterile, controlled trial and then being out in the real world where you skip doses or you don't adhere to

a crazy strict diet or you look very different than the people in the trial. So by studying people in their own homes, studying them in these real world situations and studying diverse populations, the data is also much more predictive of how these things will actually work when someone pulls that off a shelf at Ralph's or at Sprouts or Whole Foods

and starts using it in the kind of natural chaotic life that we all inevitably have. Yeah. Yeah. That's such a great point. And it's also cool too, because with the trials that you're doing, since these are natural compounds, the side effects are going to be a lot less. Like you, there's a less of a concern for these really intense side effects that we have to be concerned about just because we know with natural products, like not saying that people won't have side effects at all, but they're not going to be something that could potentially kill you versus like a pharmaceutical drug that we don't really know exactly how it's made up.

And since it's man-made versus like natural made, something that God, you know, nature, whatever you want to call, gave us versus something that has been artificially created. And so that's, I think that's a great, I don't know, it's just cool. Yeah. And so in our model, what we really focus on are products that can already be sold. Those are the ones that we allow onto our platform. And yes, to sell a natural product in the U.S., there's systems that you need to go through to show that it is safe. And a vast majority of these natural products have really long historical usage.

And so you kind of have that, you could call it ancient wisdom or you could just call it that. We have tons and tons and tons of long-term observational safety data on these. And all our trials also still go through third-party human ethics review to make sure that we are indeed using products that are indeed safe.

So we do our own internal review, then we get third-party oversight from human ethics committees to make sure we're not exposing anyone products that are indeed safe. So we do our own internal review, then we get third party oversight from human ethics committees to make sure we're not exposing anyone to something that could be remotely unsafe for them. Stress is a common factor that affects everyone in today's fast paced world leading to various issues. What if the answer to a better stress response is in a key nutrient? I'm talking about magnesium. Actually, I'm more specifically talking about magnesium breakthrough by Optimizers.

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explain a little bit how these work? Because I'm assuming the majority of the audience, even myself, I don't know too much. How do they go about getting the funding? How do they actually decide which studies are going to be done? How do they find the participants the funding? How do they actually decide which studies are going to be done? How do they find the participants? What does the whole model look like? I'll try a very high level describe maybe like a classic pharma study. Then I'll kind of describe how the elements compare to ours. But some key principles that are shared,

but both between traditional pharma studies and our model, is that you want several things. Number one, you want a control group. So it's not just that, did this product work in 100 people? Did this product work in 100 people compared to, say, placebo? That way you can establish causality. And in order to more effectively compare the control group, you want those people in the study to be blinded as to what they're getting.

So that's what that term means. They don't know if they got placebo. They don't know if they got the active, the real product. Other things you want to do is you want to make sure that there's randomization. And so, for instance, let's say I'm running a clinical trial. And the first 100 people that came in through the door, I signed to the placebo. And the next 100 people came in the door,

I signed to receive the actual real product. Well, what if the first 100 people came in through the door, I signed to the placebo and the next hundred people came in the door, I signed to receive the actual real product. Well, what if the first hundred people came in and it was like a tour bus of like Korean tourists who were in LA and the next hundred people came in was a bunch of like college kids on spring break from like ASU or something, right? You can't, there's two, there's so many confounding factors that are not evenly distributed between the two.

So with randomization, each time someone comes in, they're randomized to placebo or the active. And inevitably, differences in DNA and diet and alcohol usage and smoking, they all kind of get evened out. And so any differences that emerge in health outcomes, you know, is due to the one thing that was different between the two, which is, did you get the placebo? Did you get the active product? So those are just some examples of the key things that you want to put into place. And so in a traditional pharma trial, generally what you're doing is you're recruiting doctor's offices, dozens, sometimes hundreds all over the country. Those doctors are going through their patient lists or putting up flyers, trying to get their patients to sign up and be in the trial. Those doctors collect data,

and then all of this data then is forwarded on. And you can see how like at each point in this, there's room for error, but also a lot of bureaucracy, and it's a very slow process. The other thing is these pharma trials often have insane narrow criteria as to who is and who cannot be in the trial. And so sometimes they have a list of literally 100 or more inclusion, exclusion criteria. You literally have to fit these 100 criteria to actually be in the trial. And so finding someone that fits that also becomes a very slow and expensive process. And actually, most trials fail to even get started because they fail to meet their enrollment goals.

They're like, we just couldn't. And why do they go so crazy narrow? Well, it's to your point about kind of setting up the system from the start. They want to prove the maximal, they want the maximal chance of proving their product works. So they think of like the absolute perfect person it could work in, not realizing that the people that actually be using it in the real world don't look like that type of a person. So those are some of the things.

And then, yeah, people show up. They enroll at the clinic. They're handed the placebo. They're handed the active. They come back a week later. They're asked some questions. They hand in this medication diary that they've been keeping, but you don't know when they filled it out,

if they were panicking in the parking lot right before the, you know, all these things, right? And so this goes on for years and years and years and years and years till finally it's done and they analyze all the data. In our model, people will see our digital ads online across TikTok and Facebook and whatnot. They're interested.

They go through screening questions. I want to make sure that they are eligible, that they actually have that health condition, that it's severe enough that they may see improvement, that it's also safe for them. So for instance, as a general rule of thumb, anyone who's pregnant gets screened out from our studies just to be safe, for example. And then at that point, they are just to be safe, for example. And then at that point, they are randomized to get placebo or the active. Product ships out from our warehouse. We're tracking in real time.

We know when it's arrived. They verify the serial code on it, so we know they got the right product. We also know that their address is valid with the USPS. They're a real person. And then we start collecting data on side effects and usage and health outcomes. Sometimes, depending on the study, we might send them a little kit to collect some saliva or a little kit to get a drop of blood dried on a card that they can mail back. And we can also look at how it changes values of these. The study runs automatically. It ends. They get them blinded. They get their data back. And then we have the aggregate data that we can

now auto-analyze because, again, it was all standardized. That's kind of the model. And now you're studying people in their own homes. And for pennies on the dollar, we can get the similar, you know, clinical grade data on what's happening. And with those improvements in cost and speed, now all these wellness brands can finally afford it. And what's interesting is there's shifts as well that are happening where McKinsey came out with a report only six, seven weeks ago that Future of Wellness was the name of the report. And they found that this is very new. The number one reason consumers now buy wellness products

is clinical effectiveness, scientific evidence. In the past, the number one reason was now buy wellness products is clinical effectiveness, scientific evidence. In the past, the number one reason was clean, natural, you know, all these things. So that's a shift in consumer sentiment. The retailers are now increasingly wanting data on these products in order to back up claims because the retailers are now technically liable for any misleading claims made by products on their shelves. And then the government is being much more strict about health claims as well after like decades of really being loosey-goosey. Like companies could kind of just say what they want and oftentimes there'd be no penalties. Well, now there's kind of a new bar of science that you need to be able to make a claim. You can still sell your product without any science. You just can't make claims. But now that bar is like higher and also being more actively enforced.

That's very cool. So now what's happening with these natural products that go through your process, they're allowed to actually make these claims if one of your studies proves it to be true, right? That's exactly it. So, and it's in line with the new Federal Trade Commission standards. First time in 25 years the new Federal Trade Commission standards. First time in 25 years, they've created new standards for health claims. Basically saying, if you're a wellness product, you want to make a health claim, it better be backed up with double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial data run by competent experts and all these things.

And so, yeah, with data, these products can stay clinically proven. And if you see there are many successful natural products that have leveraged clinically proven claims because they were willing to invest in the trials. And so with that, we also hope that consumers can more easily find products that are actually going to work and that have been proven by science. And sometime the next year, we also hope to roll out with a seal of approval from Radical where products can be certified to be effective.

And so just like you have certified organic, you know, you can have products that are certified effective. And so you look at that and you go, great, I know that this is going to work. And I know I trust what Radical has done. And what's amazing is we've already had, you know, at this point, 40,000 Americans go through our trials. We have another waiting list of another about 40,000 who want to come in. And so those are consumers who are aware of Radical, aware of what we stand for. And, you know, when that seal is available, we already have folks who can start getting the word out and start buying the right way? Everyone hears that we need to be on a probiotic, but do you actually know how probiotics can

benefit our health? I want to list off a couple of ways in which probiotics really support our health. They support healthy lipid metabolism, promotes an optimal balance between good and bad cholesterol, supports gut barrier recovery and integrity of the intestinal barrier, reinforces healthy tight junction function in vitro, also supports healthy gut immune function and responses to occasional GI and environmental stressors, promotes a healthy microbial environment in the gut,

helps immensely with digestion, like promoting healthy regularity and stool quality, provides relief from occasional digestive comfort, bloating and intermittent constipation, also supports and stool quality, provides relief from occasional digestive comfort, bloating, and intermittent constipation, also supports healthy stool quality, promotes healthy stool consistency, and it also reinforces healthy gut skin access to promote clear skin for improved comfort and appearance. These are just some of the reasons why I take Seeds DS-01 Daily Symbiotic, and I take it every single day. It benefits your gut, skin, and heart health in just two little capsules a day. Your body is an ecosystem and great health really starts in the

gut. Your gut is a central hub for various pathways through the body and a healthy gut microbiome means benefits for digestion, skin health, heart health, your immune system, and more. And the reason that I really like Seed in particular is that it's backed by a lot of science. They also have a patented capsule and capsule design, meaning that the fragile bacteria is actually going to survive the journey, not only from shipping to your door, but also survive the journey throughout your body to actually make it to your gut. So it gets to where your body really needs it. And it's without any synthetic or chemical coatings. It also travels really easily, no refrigerated needed. And they have this amazing subscription service that's also eco-friendly where you hold on to the glass jar that you get from your very first shipment. And then on a subscription, you get the probiotics

sent to you for a refill every single month in a compostable bag. Trust your gut with Seed's DS01 Daily Synbiotic. Go to seed.com slash realfoodology and use code 25 realfoodology to get 25% off your first month. Again, that's 25% off your first month of seeds, DS01, daily symbiotic at seed.com slash realfoodology, code 25 realfoodology. Yeah. God, it's so cool what you're doing with this company. I'm just so proud of you as a friend. I'm like, yes, it's so needed. Yeah, really. And I'm curious, you know it's so needed. Yeah, really. And I'm curious, you know, we've kind of talked about this a little bit, but I do want to address this more in depth. So why has it taken us so long to get to this point where we're doing

clinical trials with these wellness products? Because I know, you know, there's a lot of talk online and people get really conspiratorial and they're like, oh, there's this nefarious intent behind it to keep people sick. And do you think that there is a level of that happening? Or is it more really basically just because companies are not able to patent these, so they're just not able to make as much money, so they're not willing to put as much money behind it?

I think that in terms of like a true nefarious thing, I don't think it's been that explicit. I think it's just been more a consequence of how expensive the trials are and the fact that they have not gotten cheaper. They've only been growing in cost. And so instantly, that's just the ballgame of pharma. But what's also interesting is, again,

despite every other industry getting more effective and lowering costs and goods are being cheaper and all these things are being democratized with technology, the trial process is virtually unchanged over the decades. That's probably the primary, primary reason. Is it just because they're unregulated and they have so much money they can just get away with it? I think what it has been is that this is where I'm, this is pure conjecture now. Yeah. But some people have said that there's been no incentive to lower the cost of trials because if you're one of the top 10 pharma companies, would you want trials suddenly being a hundred times cheaper? Because then you would have thousands of little biotech startups who could compete with you, get a drug to market.

And then what you've mastered is how to spend a billion dollars to get a drug approved and patiently spending that five, ten plus years to go through that motion. It's a competitive moat. It's a barrier to entry. if you're not incentivized to bring it down, then the people that you're paying to run these studies, these so-called clinical research organizations, they have no incentive to drop their costs because they're just billing you and you're happy to pay and everyone's, you know, partying. It's just good. So, yeah, I think that that has been and also, you know, to give people some credit because of concerns of safety. There also hasn't necessarily been an easy way to just say, you know what, we're going to just make this process much less strictly monitored and just flow it through more quickly. They're like, no, you know, these compounds have never really been used in large scale populations. So we have to proceed very slowly, make sure it's safe, make sure it's not going to harm anyone.

That also obviously slows things down when you're working with things that have never been used in humans before. But with natural products, not that case. Also, candidly, Radical's approach wouldn't have worked 10 years ago. We needed virtualization. Everyone needed a smartphone. You needed broadband internet. You needed really reliable D2C e-commerce infrastructure to mail the products out. You needed really good digital advertising

to reach people easily and seamlessly and all these things. So this was only possible now for us to bring something like this to be available for the wellness industry. That's cool. So everything at its perfect time, right? And I think this is also a great time

because I'm wondering if you know anything about this. So there has been this trend lately in the last, I would say maybe like 15 years or so where the FDA has slowly started going after, you know, certain compounds or certain companies creating certain compounds. Like for example, a couple of years ago, they were going really hard after NAC. And I don't actually know what ended up happening with that. Like, I don't know if it, like, I just remember in my world, everyone's buying NAC up off the shelves because they were like, the FDA is going to ban it soon. Or they're like really highly regulating it. So what you're doing, is that helping to keep these kinds of products on the shelf? Because so many people in the health and wellness world that know these work for themselves, anecdotally get worried

because they're like, oh my God, I take NAC every day. It's great for glutathione, you know, and what harm is it on us? Because we know it doesn't really have any side effects because the body naturally creates it anyways. So what is your take on that? Is this helping with that? It's really interesting you brought that up. And this does have a direct implication for consumers. It all has to come down with this notion of drug preclusion, this drug preclusion framework

within the FDA kind of regulations. Basically, if there is a naturally occurring product that could theoretically be sold as a dietary supplement without needing FDA approval, if a pharma company starts to develop it as a drug, it's basically can, and they do that before it's sold as a supplement, it can never be sold as a supplement. Wow. And again, so there are some instances where pharma companies are willing to develop natural compounds. The only reason they're willing to do that is because they know they still get to get a monopoly effectively. Yeah, they get to corner the market. Yeah.

But they would only do that if that product wasn't already sold as a supplement. Once it's sold as a supplement, it's grandfathered in, which blessings like that, that exists. So NAC was initially kind of the target of this drug preclusion principle where the FDA was like, wait a minute, like there's a pharma company developing NAC into a drug. It appears that they beat the supplement industry to the punch and therefore NAC is a drug and it can't be sold as a supplement. And the industry fought back and they showed evidence that NAC had been sold much earlier

and then the FDA kind of relented. But then that's what trapped CBD and it still traps CBD to this day. That's why the market, that's why the FDA continues to say CBD is a drug. Not a controlled drug, not like a narcotic, but a pharmaceutical drug. And that's because a pharma company, GW Pharma, back in like 2011 or something, started developing CBD into a drug.

And as far as I can tell, it wasn't sold as a supplement until a few years after. And so 10 years later, CBD is still trapped in that paradigm. And NMN just got trapped in that too. Which one did? NMN. It's a longevity. It's a precursor to NR, that longevity compound. And unbeknownst, this is a really interesting story,

where the dietary supplement industry started selling it and sold it for years and years and years. And they even, as I understand it, they even filed documentation with the FDA saying, can we sell this as a supplement? The FDA was like, yeah, you can go ahead and sell it. And then years and years. And they even, as I understand it, they even filed documentation with the FDA saying, can we sell this as a supplement? The FDA was like, yeah, you can go ahead and sell it. And then later the FDA was like, oh, whoops, like psych, rewind. A pharma company had been developing it for a few years prior,

but they were just referring it to a different scientific name. That's why when the FDA looked up drugs in development, they couldn't find it. They're like, okay, great, you can proceed. And so now they're saying you can't sell NMN ever again as a supplement because it's a drug now. And so the industry

is trying to push back, you know, so there's these weird situations that pop up when this happens. And will that be a thing where like, for example, with M&M,

where if, because you know, like when a drug comes out and it's patented, there's like a, I don't know what the window is, but like, let's say like 30 year window or whatever, where only that company can sell it. And then after that point, it's kind of a free for all and any pharmaceutical company can create it. Is it kind of like that with those as well? Where

like after a certain point that other companies can start making it or is it just forever? It will never be able to be sold as a supplement. So it's a great question. So yes, these patents have expirations, and then any company can now make and sell that product. It would technically still be as a, at that point, it would still be either a prescription generic drug or a prescription or a non-prescription over-the-counter drug, like say Tylenol. And then there is a potential framework where they could petition the FDA

and after all this patents expire, say, hey, we want to sell this as a supplement now, not as a over-the-counter drug, which are still regulated very differently. Some people don't realize that Tylenol, they're like, yeah, I just walk up to it and I buy it. It's a supplement, right? No, no. It's basically a non-prescription drug, but incredibly regulated. They can't change a single thing about the formula, the form factor. They can't put a single extra word on the label that the FDA doesn't allow because it's a drug, just non-prescription. Versus in the supplement industry, the FDA has much less oversight.

Now you're in the world of like Federal Trade Commission, consumer protection, consumer fraud, and then like the retailers who are also kind of significant stakeholders and pseudo regulators in this space. So I think that, yes, there's a possibility they can eventually be sold as supplements. It would have to be decades down the line after the patents expire and after the FDA says, okay, this is not necessarily a non-prescription drug now. It's now a supplement that can just be sold. Wow, that's really fascinating. And what is the difference while we're kind of there between a company selling something like, for example, a Tylenol

or like if they're just selling like a NAC or glutathione? What's the regulation looking like that? Because a lot of people talk about, there's this war right now between like allopathic and like more natural alternatives, I feel like. And the allopathic model tends to shit on the alternative model. And then they say that none of the supplements are regulated and you have to be really careful about the supplements that you're taking. What kind of is happening there? Just like everything, the truth is somewhere in between.

So let's start with how the drugs are developed. And then it makes sense how, in contrast, how dietary supplements are released. So you spend a billion dollars in 10 years. You get a drug FDA approved. It's sold via prescription. And then generally what happens is one day that patent cliff expires and now other companies can make a generic version of that drug. And that's happened to a lot of drugs now. Adderall's generic.

Ivermectin, I think, was another one of them. Yeah, so many antibiotics are generic. I just remember because that was a big one the last couple of years. All these things are generic. Even a lot of the cholesterol medications are generic now. Metformin, the most common diabetes drug, all generic now. And then at a certain point, someone goes, you know what? This is a generic drug.

It's still prescription only, but it's been used for so long now. And we have so much safety data and the public is so familiar with it. Let's make it non-prescription. And so that's what they've done for Tylenol. And that's what they've done for Claritin. Some of these like allergy medications. They were all at one point prescription drugs. I didn't know that.

Yeah. But with enough data, you know, even like Pepsid AC and these, like all this stuff was a prescription drug at one point. The stuff, the proton pump inhibitors you take for having stomach ulcers and indigestion and stuff. All these things. That was my Alto driver on the way here. He was literally chugging Pepto-Bismol. That at one point was a prescription drug.

Pepto-Bismol, Tums, all these things were at one point prescription drugs. But decades and decades and decades of safety data and familiarity. But petitioning the FDA to approve of that process, as I understand it, takes tens of tens of tens of tens of millions of dollars. Not as expensive as bringing a new drug to market, but also takes years. So still expensive, but not as expensive. Okay, so that's how you get things that are called over-the-counter drugs. They sit in a very different section of the pharmacy,

as you may have noticed, right? When it comes to supplements, supplements were not legal in America until like the early 90s. And it was in, yeah, they were like kind of super under radar in this gray area. Like you wouldn't be able to just walk

into like a conventional store and like buy a bunch of supplements. And then in 1994, something called, the acronym is DISHE. It's like the Dietary Supplement Health and Safety Education Act or whatever. It basically created the modern supplement industry as we know it. And what it basically said is, if there's a product, generally natural products, but they don't have to all 100% be natural per se. But if there's a product,

and there's a reasonable basis for its safety, and you don't make disease claims, you can start selling it. And you don't need to go through years of FDA approval. You don't need to prove that it's effective. Just make sure that there's, you know, safety data, that you don't put any contaminants in there and you don't make disease claims. And otherwise, like, go. And that started the explosion of the dietary supplement space. And some critics of it will say, and again, the truth is somewhere in between. Some critics will say, yeah, it allows someone to release a product. It is not, the

manufacturing is not that strictly enforced. So it could be a third of what it says on the label. It could have contaminants because no one's doing like strict, regular daily testing and monitoring. The retailers aren't doing it. The FDA is not doing kind of to take the word of the manufacturer. And it could be that the effects are no better than placebo because they weren't forced to do scientific effectiveness testing to demonstrate proof before they start selling. And whereas when you buy an over-the-counter drug, certainly with prescription drugs, but when you buy an over-the-counter drug, 99.9% chance it is exactly what it says it is. There are no contaminants in it. And if it says that it's for helping your stomach antacid or helping your pain, there was a ton of clinical data for when it was first

approved as a prescription drug to back that up. So it does stand in stark contrast. But what I like is that it has created a, it's all, you know, we call it alternative medicine, but what's nice is it's an alternative pathway so that there are always going to be options out there, additional tools. And what I hope is through the work of companies like myself is that those tools can then be, we can create the proper data around that tool to make sure it is a useful tool and to help you understand when's the best time to use that tool and when's the best time to not use that tool. And in that case, maybe a prescription drug is the better option, for example. Yeah. Yeah. That's why prescription drug is the better option, for example. Yeah. Yeah. That's why you're doing the Lord's work over here.

So I want to ask you about, you did a TED Talk that you sent me a couple months ago, which was really great, by the way. And I wanted to ask you, so my audience can hear this, why does science need to get behind natural medicine? What was your point behind that? Sure. I loved it. Yeah, it was an amazing experience. One of the most stressful things I've done, actually, getting on that stage in front of that audience, it was really stressful. But the premise of the talk was, hey, we've been using natural products for thousands of years.

The whole pharma synthetic drug model is only like 100 years old. And if we could just create the science, if science could just get behind natural products and we had that evidence and proof, these things could become medicines. Not medicines in the FDA regulated sense. Medicines in that it's something that's proven and will give you better health. These things become medicines. But more importantly, they're medicines for all. Anyone can buy them. No one can ever patent them and take them away. They are affordable. So if you don't have insurance or insurance doesn't cover it, it doesn't matter. It's $27 for a month's supply. Great. It's not 10,000 bucks.

You can just directly buy them. I don't have to go to a doctor, make an appointment, get a prescription, go to a pharmacy, argue with my insurance, and do it all over again for a refill. So the premise of the TED Talk was, if we could generate this evidence on these products, we have democratized personalized medicines for all. Now, how do we get to that evidence in a scalable way? It's through virtualization. It's through automations. It's by going direct to consumer. It's by having a army of citizen scientists and everyday people volunteer to be in some of history's first and largest studies on these natural products. And yes, it benefits them. They get to learn about their health. They get to try a product that might work for them. They get to learn about their health. They get to try a product that might work for them. And it's good for society overall. So that was the premise of my TED Talk. And yeah, it just came out,

I think, six, seven weeks ago, right after Christmas. And you can check it out and see if it resonates with you. Yeah, it was really great. And another point that you didn't bring up that was really resonating with me that you said is that also if we can treat people with a natural alternative that has less side effects, why wouldn't we do that? Correct. Which was a really good point too. A hundred percent. And actually you're making me realize one other point from my talk was if you study enough people on these natural products, then you can really arrive at that precision and that true personalization. So it's not just, on average, ashwagandha works better than placebo.

It's this type of an individual with this lifestyle, this age, this severity of their issue with sleep needs this specific product. So it's this precision medicine that we've heard people talk about again and again and again for decades and still has not fully arrived. Not even fully, it still has barely arrived in the world of pharma and in Western medicine. So that's, I think it's an exciting opportunity. It's only available now because of the technologies at our disposal.

And it only can fully happen to its full vision with the American people, with the citizen scientists, with these volunteers jumping in. And one thing I'll add to that that's interesting is, even if you get placebo in our study, you're going to learn something. Because at the end of the study, we unblind you, and you're like, oh, I'm convinced I got the real product. I'm so much better.

Then we tell you it was placebo. And you're like, holy cow. Well, damn, that's the power of the mind. And I wonder what are the things in my life that are bothering me that i would otherwise turn to a prescription for and god forbid be on an ssri for 20 years on antidepressant when oh gosh the power of the mind let me see what else i can try that for or let's say you don't feel anything you're convinced you're on the placebo we unblind you and reveal to you you were actually taking the natural product. Well, now you know it doesn't work for your unique body. Versus if you

bought that same product in the store, there's fancy packaging, there's a beautiful glass jar, and you have all these biases and placebo effects. You take it, you're like, oh, I think it's working. I think it's working. Well, two bad things about the placebo effect eventually wears off. And there's something more effective you could have been using, but instead you were spending your time and money with that product. So whether you get the placebo or the product, whether it works for you or doesn't, you learn something about yourself and you still benefit in the process as well as benefiting society and benefiting people in the developing world who are getting supplements to

prevent blindness and pregnancy defects and all these things that we do as people come and join our studies. I love that. I love that you guys do that too. It's really cool. It's giving back. So if someone is listening and they want to get involved, how do they get involved with wanting to do one of the trials? Oh, sure. Yeah. Just come to our website, www.radicalscience.com. Radical is spelled differently than what you might think. It's spelled like particle, R-A-D-I-C-L-E. And that spelling of radical, phonetically, it's like, yeah, we're radical. You know, we see ourselves as rebels. We're on a rebellion against healthcare.

But that spelling of radical, that's actually, radical is the first root of a plant to emerge from the seed. And we're getting to the root of the truth. We're getting to the roots of medicine, right? So we thought it was really fitting. That's the name of our company. So yeah, you can check us out. You can learn about all our studies that are open.

They range from gut health to libido to energy to pain to mood, anxiety, all these things that you might want to try something for. That is so cool. I kind of want to get involved in one of these. I might want to volunteer for a trial. Check it out. Yeah, we're always opening trials and there's always a litany of things that you can jump into. That's so cool. Well, in the essence of time, is there anything about what we talked about today that you feel like wasn't addressed that you want to talk about?

Anything we missed? I guess the one overarching thing to say is when it comes to the wellness sector, just do your research, you know, do your research and just recognize that even compared to the over-the-counter drugs that you're probably taking, the antihistamines, things for your allergies, things for every time you have cold and flu and you take some cough syrup or whatever, most of that's all over-the-counter drugs. It's such a different universe. So when it comes to wellness, just be really proactive and be educated and be informed and be knowledgeable. You know, is this a brand I trust? Are they manufacturing this according to good principles? If they throw the word science-backed on their product, what does that mean? Is there clinical data? Why are you just saying science-backed? What's going

on here? And through that, you can just, again, arrive at products that are most likely to be effective for you and also arrive at products that are less likely to be ever contaminated or have much less than what the label says. You're actually getting your money's worth as well. And so there's a couple of things you can look out for that can be helpful. So for instance, if the product is NSF certified or USP certified, these are third party certifying bodies. They certify the manufacturing quality. So if you see USP or NSF, that product is much, much, much, much, much, much more likely to be exactly

what it says on the label and not have contaminants than products that don't carry. Oh, Clean Label Project is another one. Clean Label Project, USP certified or NSF certified. And isn't also GMP considered a good one? Isn't it GMP? So GMP is a term that companies

will throw around loosely. Okay, that's good to know. Yeah, so they'll just say, we are a GMP? So GMP is a term that companies will throw around loosely. Okay, that's good to know. Yeah, so they'll just say, we are a GMP manufacturer, but that just means that we believe we manufacture to GMP principles. Hey, so GMP is out for everyone listening. Correct, correct. Versus if you see USP or NSF as part of that, they actually verify and randomly inspect

and make sure that you are actually adhering to GMP good manufacturing practices. And on top of that, they'll also randomly pull products off shelves at store and then test them to make sure there's no contaminants coming in. So they'll make sure your manufacturing is good, they'll inspect your facility, and then randomly over time, they'll also pull finished product off shelf and test it to make sure nothing has happened in between their visits and inspections. And then one day soon, I hope you can find radical certification that it also is effective as well. So these are all kind of sister organizations of

ours. We love what they're doing, USP, NSF, Clean Label Project. So those are some ways that you can better discern as you go around purchasing these products. I'm so glad you brought that up because I actually, that was something I was going to bring up and then I just went down a different tangent. But it reminded me of a, I guess it was a study that came out. It might've been a consumer report that came out maybe like five or 10 years ago. And you'll probably remember this, where they went through like GNCs, Walmarts, Targets, and they were just pulling random supplements off the shelves and they were testing them. And what they found was really horrifying, actually. They found that a lot of

them did not even have the right dosage. There were also supplements that were on the shelves that didn't even have a trace of what they claimed to have in there, period. And it was very incredibly concerning. And a lot of people use that. They reference that now to say, oh, it means that supplements are trash. And in fact, my dad sent me a text maybe a year ago and he's kind of been on this crusade of like trying to prove me wrong in certain ways,

which is another story for another time. But he was trying to say, well, this just shows that supplements aren't safe and good for you, period. And my argument back was exactly, it was very similar to what you said, where it's a good reminder that we need to practice discernment. It doesn't mean that it's happening with every single supplement. It doesn't mean that the entire industry is faulty. But we have to make sure that we're buying good products and good supplements from the right companies.

And another really good thing to look out for, if a company, the more transparent a company is on their website, we have to make sure that we're buying good products and good supplements from the right companies. And another really good thing to look out for if a company, the more transparent a company is on their website, if they're posting their COAs, if they're showing their third-party testing, if they're actually posting their lab results on their website, that is a really good sign. I love that you brought that up. So yeah, when it comes to these wellness products,

the brand is everything. So it's not that supplements are whack or they're all contaminated or that you can even honestly trust the retailer. You can't. It's the brands. So once you dial in on the handful of brands that you either they have third party certification or you've done your own research to figure out that these are legit, then, yes, that's where you can now kind of shop reassured. So the brands are everything when it comes to that. Another thing that's interesting to note is that when it comes to Amazon. Yes.

Oh, we need to talk about this. Yes. It's even more, at least with a retailer, a big box retailer, CVS, Walmart, Sprouts, Whole Foods, they at least know that when they're interacting with a supplement brand,

there's certain criteria that you have to check. You do have to show them that you do manufacture a certain way. Again, they're not going to necessarily verify per se, but at least there's documentation and all these things so that you are at least a legitimate company and that you can meet their minimum order requirements and all these things. So when you're shopping at supplements on CVS, you're, you know, and there's not really a risk for counterfeit products because they're directly purchasing it for the manufacturer. When you're shopping on Amazon, man, someone can just pop up a storefront and there's not nearly as much diligence done on them as a vendor

or they're just a complete counterfeit organization. So it's either a brand you've never heard of that may not be very high quality that's able to get a listing on Amazon or it's fully full-blown counterfeit, pretending to be a highly reputable brand. So here's how you can protect yourself against that. When you go click the Buy Now button on Amazon or Add to Cart, you'll notice right below that, it basically says sold by or fulfilled by or shipped by. If you see soldbyamazon.com,

that's actually a good signal because that means Amazon has taken possession of the product directly from the brand, puts it at their warehouse, and ships it out. That's a good sign. Or it's fulfilled by, sold by, shipped by the name of the brand itself, which is great. It means they're operating their own storefront and shipping directly to you. They're just using Amazon as a platform. Or you see sold by, shipped by, fulfilled by, and you see a name of a company, they could be a bona fide distributor and reseller. And you could very quickly Google like, hey, shipped by, fulfilled by, and you see a name of a company, they could be a bona fide distributor and reseller. And you could very quickly Google like, hey, you know, like Gaia Herbs, Now Foods,

you can literally figure out who are their authorized resellers on Amazon. Then you know it's bona fide too. If it falls outside of those three, I'd be very skeptical, just be very skeptical and know there's a good chance, not a good chance, I don't want to say the word good chance. There was a much higher chance

that that could be a counterfeit product. So again, good things to look for, sold a ship by either Amazon, the brand itself, or an authorized reseller distributor. After that, counterfeit's pretty rampant on Amazon. Here's why. That's a $30, $40 product. Maybe it costs me a penny to make a counterfeit product with blank capsules inside and talk about an amazing profit margin.

And it's so hard for someone to figure out if it's counterfeit versus I try to counterfeit like Apple AirPods. The second it arrives at someone's house, they know it's dysfunctional. And the cost for me to make fake AirPods with electronic, you know, but to counterfeit a supplement and just print a box on it that looks like the brand, super easy, insanely high margins. And no one would ever

really know until these reports come out where they're like, oh my gosh, there's so many counterfeit products. And you'd be lucky if it's just inert cornstarch, but these counterfeit products often have really poor manufacturing quality and then contaminants get in or all this other stuff gets in. Yeah. I'm so glad you brought that up. I usually tell people, unless if you know that the store themselves is directly, like, because a lot of times you'll see a store will have their own storefront on Amazon. I feel safe buying supplements from that on Amazon, but otherwise I just buy directly from them or I go to places like iHerb or, you know, there's a couple of those that you know that they are getting it from there. Because I mean, I've had this happen to me before. Thank

God, not with a supplement, but I've bought things on Amazon before and gotten it and been like, this smells different than the one I bought at the store. And then there was this big report that came out that a lot of these are counterfeit supplements and hair care. I mean, all of it. All of it. And God forbid you get something that has contaminants in it or like who knows what. So you just, with supplements and you're ingesting that in your body, you want to make sure you're getting the real deal. That's such a good point. So I only brought up Amazon. Yes, directly buying from the brand's website. Great. iHerb is a good site too. Or sometimes going back in store in these instances

may not be that bad of an idea. For sure. Because you know that the chances of a counterfeit product sitting on a CVF shelf is so slim compared to a random listing on Amazon that might look legitimate. Exactly, yeah. Well, before we go, I want to ask you a personal question that I ask everyone.

And I'm very excited to hear your answer. What are your health non-negotiables? So these are things that you prioritize for your own health, non-negotiables. Ooh, oh Oh, dear. Yeah. I try to eat so healthy. I try to eat so healthy. I mean, and I travel so much.

I'm at these conferences so much. And they're serving you delicious, decadent food that is not good for me. And that's where I'm just like, brr. And it's easy. It's a lot easier when you're just like, look, I'm not going to eat fried food. I'm not going to eat like sugary stuff. I'm not going to eat like tons and tons and tons of like red meat, stuff like that.

That's how I at least maintain some semblance. Because honestly, if your diet's right, like I would argue that, yeah, we're sedentary. Yeah, there's environmental exposures and weird things in the environment. Yeah, we're not eating healthy and all these other things and we're sedentary. Yeah, there's environmental exposures and weird things in the environment. Yeah, we're not eating healthy and all these other things and we're stressed. But I think the food that you eat, because it's literally what makes up like the cells in your

body, it's literally what's giving you energy and vitality. That's the most important thing to optimize out of all of these. And I'm not the only one to suggest that. I think a lot of prominent scientists and doctors recognize if you had to choose between eating really healthy, but being sedentary versus eating like crap and exercising a lot, eating like crap and exercise a lot, it's going to be much worse for your health in the long run. So the non-negotiable is I got to eat healthy.

I got to maintain that. And it doesn't matter how delicious something is or whatever. I got to find the healthy food and just keep my body humming along and going. I love that. You and I are on the same page with that. That's like number one. Yeah.

Well, please tell everyone where they can find you and where they can find Radical Science. Yeah. So you can follow my social media handles are always at Dr. Jeff Chen, Instagram, connect with me on LinkedIn. And then, yeah, our website, www.radical.science, radical spelled like particle to get to the root of things. And yeah, thank you so much, Courtney, for all the education you provide. I've been listening to your stuff ever since we first met

and I'm so honored to get to be on your show and get to share some knowledge and have a conversation with you. Thank you, I really appreciate that. And I've said this all throughout the episode, but again, thank you so much for doing what you're doing. It really is the Lord's work and it's really needed. And it's so cool to see you do this

because it's so revolutionary. Thank you, Courtney. Yeah, it's radical. It's radical. Fuck yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yay.

That was so good. That was fun. Woo. How cool. All right. Isn't that so cool? Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of the Real Foodology Podcast. If you liked the episode, please leave a review in your podcast app to let me know.

This is a Resonant Media production produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Mike Fry. The theme song is called Heaven by the amazing singer Georgie. Georgie is spelled with a J. For more amazing podcasts produced by my team. Go to resonant media group.com. I love you guys so much. See you next week. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't constitute a provider patient relationship. I am a nutritionist, but I am not your nutritionist. As always talk to your doctor or your health team first.