#413 Topics:
Purchase Primeadine (spermidine) signature and gluten-free at Oxford Healthspan:
https://oxford-healthspan.myshopify.com/balancedbitespodcast
Use code LIZ10 for 10% off your order!
Resistant starch & the gut biome
Spermidine, autophagy & inflammation
Spermidine from Primeadine vs. other sources
Leslie’s autoimmune journey of healing
Primeadine for hair, skin and nails
Primeadine for post-COVID hair shedding?
When to take Primeadine
Primeadine and leaky gut
Why to avoid synthetic or liposomal spermidine
Find Oxford Healthspan and the Oxford Longevity Project Online:
www.oxfordlongevityproject.org
@oxfordhealthspan
@oxfordlongevityproject
Balanced Bites Podcast #413 with Leslie Kenny
Welcome to the new Balanced Bites Podcast! I’m your host, Liz, a nutritional therapy practitioner and best selling author bringing you candid, up-front, myth-busting and thought-provoking conversations about food, fitness, and life. Remember: The information in this podcast should not be considered personal, individual, or medical advice.
I have spent YEARS researching whether a good multivitamin is truly necessary for overall health. But the truth is, there are a LOT of opinions out there, including from people like me, who love to ask lots of obnoxious, overly detailed questions. But the truth is, if I’m paying attention to how I FEEL, my answer was clear: I will be taking my multivitamin. And it will be from the brand Needed. Needed third-party tests EVERY batch for performance and quality, which is incredibly rare in the supplement industry and also incredibly important to me! To get started with Needed, head to thisisneeded.com. Use code balanced for 20% off your one-time order or your first three months’ subscription. While you’re at it, add Stress Support to your cart. I’m loving that one, too.
About Leslie Kenny
Today I’m talking to Leslie Kenny, who is the, Founder & CEO of Oxford Healthspan and the Co-Founder of the Oxford Longevity Project
Oxford Healthspan produces one of the few supplements I actually make sure to take every day. And I’ll talk about that in a moment. But first, more on Leslie.
Leslie is a Southern Californian entrepreneur and graduate of both Berkeley and Harvard, whose life was turned upside down when she was diagnosed with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis in her 30s. And we talk more about that in the course of this podcast. When her doctors told her lupus had a life expectancy of five years and that RA could only be managed, not cured, she set out to optimize her health as best she could with safe, natural solutions.
She went back to school at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in NYC, became a Bulletproof coach under health pioneer Dave Asprey, and took on health coaching clients worldwide.
At the same time, she began helping life science academics at European universities, including Oxford (where she lives), to raise money for their discoveries. At a meeting with one such scientist, she also learned about a natural compound called spermidine, which is abundant in nattō, a traditional Japanese dish that she had grown up with.
Spermidine was showing great promise supporting health as we age.
The science was compelling – one scientist even called it “an anti-aging vitamin” in a published scientific journal – and it was safe. Still, because it was natural, food-derived, and not a drug that would bring in more money, no one was interested in promoting it.
Leslie immediately wanted her octogenarian mother back home in California to take it – especially since nattō is very hard to come by (and it’s pretty smelly!) Unfortunately, spermidine wasn’t available in the US (or really even known there). Spotting this unmet need, she decided to bring it to the US herself.
Today, at age 57, Leslie is living proof that we can get better with age, so long as we take responsibility for our health and meet our doctors halfway.
Spermidine is part of her anti-aging arsenal, and she hopes it will become part of yours too.
So again. The supplement is called Primeadine.
And I have it by my sink and I take it before bed every night. I began to take it for post covid hair loss, but it has a lot of other benefits as well in anti aging, hair skin and nails, autophagy (cellular cleanup), sleep enhancement, and according to Leslie, it inhibits 9 of the 12 signs of aging, and you know I’m all about that.
What I like about it, and what we talk about in this interview, is that it contains the poly amines spermidine, spermine, AND putrescene. And can fairly I think be called a spermidine complex because we have not just isolated one nutrient in this supplement, we actually have those auxiliary nutrients as well. I recognize side note that those are terrible names. And the origin of the name spermidine is pretty close to what you might think it is. But it’s not AS bad as it might sound, so get your mind out of the gutter a little bit.
And here’s something I want to disclaim quickly.
It is a BIG priority of mine to have people on who are the driving forces behind companies and products I love. Selfishly, because I want to ask all my own questions of them. But also because one of the things that has been consistent in my entire career doing this is: people want to know what *I* am using and why. That’s why I am bringing on folks who are behind the products I love. It’s not because they ask to come on and advertise themselves. In fact, I decline quite a few of those types of interviews because it’s just not authentic to what I’m actually doing or taking or researching.
There are times, here and there, that I will get a free bottle of something, or a discount as an affiliate, but another benefit of me being an affiliate is that I can usually offer you all a discount as well; but most often, I’m buying these products for myself because I believe in them so much.
So with that, Go to the link in this podcast description and Use code LIZ10 for 10% off your order from Oxford Healthspan. Let’s start our chat with Leslie:
Leslie: Hi, Leslie. How are you? I’m good. I’ve got your, I’ve got your book behind me.
Liz Wolfe: That is so cool. I don’t know. You had my book.
Leslie: I’ve had it for a while. It’s a kind of old price tag. Oh my gosh. It’s so, I got it here. Yeah, no, I got it a while ago. So that, that is mind boggling. And Michelle ta I love the nom no Paleo cookbook. Of course. I, I have that and have made various things from that, especially her cauliflower fried rice, which is
Liz Wolfe: really yume.
Yes. Oh my gosh. I love her. So just as a person and as an entrepreneur. Yeah. And just everything she does. I just like, I I love
Leslie: Michelle. Yeah. Yeah, she’s great. And I [00:05:00] identify a lot with her because of the, um, I’m, my mom is from Taiwan, so I’ve got the, the Chinese thing going in the background and completely recognize some of the things she talks about, but it’s also why that cauliflower fried rice recipe was so good, you know, because fried rice is a big part of the, of the diet.
Well, rice is,
Liz Wolfe: Well, I would very much like fried rice to be a big part of my diet in general.
Leslie: So, yeah, yeah, yeah. It, yes, it’s, it’s just handy to have, and of course, you know, you can take, you can, you can turn it into a resistant starch oil, it cool it, throw some coconut oil over it. Um, and the Japanese, you know, who are very long-lived and healthy, they primarily eat white rice like that.
But the OK Owens who are even longer lived don’t, they don’t. Okay.
Liz Wolfe: So, oh my gosh, this is so interesting. I never thought about it that way. You know, I came from like the Western, A price [00:06:00] foundation. Yeah. You know, thing where they’re very, like, one of the things they would say is, you know, the big thing about the Okinawans is they eat a lot of pork.
Like they eat meat. They’re not vegetarian, they’re not vegan.
Leslie: Uh, no, they’re not vegan. Yeah. They, they, I would say it’s ceremonial. Um, I mean, Asians in general, well, Chinese love pork, but um, but they, they eat two thirds of their diet is actually purple sweet potato. I have no idea. It’s a huge, huge percentage.
But I think what that is, is a resistant starch and it’s feeding the gut biome. And that is what is, they’re the raw inputs for the pharmacy in the gut. And that is what’s keeping them alive longer. Oh, that’s my fascinating, that’s my hypothesis because they do have better he health outcomes and the rest of mainland Japan, even if you account for things like high [00:07:00] smoking and drinking in the, , you know, in the cohorts of men, the salary men.
Right. , still the Okinawans do better than the rest of the, of the Japanese.
Liz Wolfe: Oh, and you’re saying the Okinawans do not eat their rice in a way that would, that would generate resistant starch before consuming it? No, with the purple
Leslie: sweet. Oh, they do? Well, well, they don’t, they don’t actually just don’t eat rice where the rest of the Japanese eat rice and that’s kind of their car.
Um, the Okinawans have sweet potato. Okay. Oh
Liz Wolfe: wow. Wow, wow, wow. Okay man, I love this. Yeah,
Leslie: it’s, it’s interesting. Let’s
Liz Wolfe: just keep going. I’m, I’m gonna record our introduction separately, so like, if you’re good with it, let’s just like,
Leslie: let’s just keep talking. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Are you good for an hour?
Are yeah. Are we recording now? Yeah, we’re recording.
Liz Wolfe: Fantastic. Good. Which it starts from the very beginning because otherwise I’ll forget to turn it on and then I would do a whole podcast with somebody I [00:08:00] just forget.
Leslie: No worries. At. That’s so
Liz Wolfe: fascinating. I had no idea about the, about the purple sweet potato.
That’s, that’s really cool. So is resistance starch something that you focus on for your,
Leslie: your personal diet? Uh, it is, and it’s also something that I wanted to focus on with, um, with priming original. And we have a resistant starch in there, a fructooligosaccharide. And part of the reason why was because, um, if you think about how all of us first encounter sperming as infants, it’s through.
Mother’s milk and mother’s milk is very highly concentrated in these poly aimings and sperming because it helps for quick cellular turnover so we can grow, but about half of breast milk is fructooligosaccharides, and the only purpose is to actually feed the gut colonies that have been bequeathed to the baby as the [00:09:00] baby passes through the birth canal.
And you know, presses on the secum, right? So, Uh, I thought if sperm meine and fructooligosaccharides occur in nature like that, well then we should. We should not forget that this could be beneficial for ourselves, because often with supplements we think I’ll just supplement this and then I don’t have to either get it from food or it’s not even possible for me to make it.
I think that’s, that is something that most people don’t know, that in fact, the gut biome is capable of making certain B vitamins. If we give it the right inputs, it can make serotonin mimetics, it can make even insulin mimetics, but more importantly, it can make sperming, and that is one of the things that will help activate autophagy, will help tamp down inflammation.
And why? Why ignore this amazing free pharmacy in the gut? We have to feed [00:10:00] it though. And so every time I feed myself, I always want to get some kind of, um, you know, soluble fiber in there or resistance starch just to feed the gut bugs. So I feed myself and I feed the bugs because the bugs are probably what are help helping keep me healthy.
This
Liz Wolfe: idea that we’re more bug than human as little crazy. Yeah. This is kind of an odd question, this, and this is a little farfield from what I intended to talk about, but I do have a question because when I speak to people who are able to be so,
thoughtful about what they put in their body and not. anxious about it. I guess the substance of my question is, it’s kind of the holy grail, right? To have information and then utilize that information without becoming obsessive or without becoming so obsessed or orthorexic with, with the diet that we, , go off the emotional rails and go off the, the food rails and all of that.
And in [00:11:00] some of these interviews I’ve been doing for the Balanced Bites podcast, I’ve noticed that some of the people that I’m talking to are able to be not compartmentalized about the emotional and physiological, you know, parts of eating. But it’s interesting to talk to people who are like, well, I know this is best for me.
So that’s what I love to do and that’s what I do in general. So my questions for you are, number one, what contributes to that kind of balanced mindset about what you’re actually eating? And number two, do you have any, I don’t wanna call them vices, but are you ever like pizza, pasta and Chinese food? You know,
Leslie: do you go that way?
Of course. Well, firstly, I’m half Chinese. So naturally Chinese food, well, I tend to make it myself, but, uh, of course we can’t be orthorexic, especially those of us who are moms, right? I mean, I have two girls and there’s a certain day in the week that’s delivery night. So what do the kids want? They want fa, you know, Vietnamese food healthy option.
[00:12:00] Actually pretty healthy. Yeah, that’s not bad. That’s not bad. That’s not bad. It could be so much worse. Um, but …of course I’m going to partake in [takeout] because it’s not just about [getting] the nutrients into my body. It’s about the emotional nutrients of the act of being together with my family and enjoying something [together].
I think that there is a lot of resilience in the body and therefore I believe that unless we are really, really ill, we don’t have to be a hundred percent perfect. And I noticed this when I was very ill and I was trying to get better. My only goal– this was when I was 39 and diagnosed with three different autoimmune conditions–
my only goal at the time was to make myself comparatively better so that I could meet my doctors halfway. In the end, I actually ended up reversing my autoimmune conditions and not having [00:13:00] to take the standard treatment of immune suppressants as a result. And so that’s an example of where I thought, let’s just try to be comparatively better.
Let’s not focus on being a hundred percent perfect, because that will do your head in. But just be a little bit better. And I think that once you take small steps and then you find confidence and you’re able to layer on more, then you notice the changes in yourself and they become self-reinforcing.
Right?
Liz Wolfe: Oh my gosh, that’s so well articulated. And you put into words something that’s really been swirling around in my head lately. This idea. What did you say comparatively? Yes, yes. I adore that because it brings the agency back internally. It’s not what somebody else is telling you to do, or it’s not some, you know, fitspo or inspo or whatever it is that’s outside of you, where you’re looking at somebody else and saying, I need to be more like them.
I need to be more like some, some random idea that we [00:14:00] come up with. That would be the, the apex, the, the idea of perfection. It’s just saying, who am I now and how can I just be incrementally better? And how that over time is, is adds to your momentum. And it’s all self-generated so it becomes much easier to
Leslie: sustain.
Precisely. That’s, that’s all that it is. We can’t try to look at some of the things we see on social media and aspire to those things. And then if we can’t do the protocol that those, or the regimen that those people do and we fail, we can’t then label ourselves as failures because often it’s quite. You know, it’s quite difficult to do those individuals who’ve probably worked at it for years, uh, or perhaps they’ve been born with natural gifts that we, uh, haven’t been bestowed with.
But it’s, uh, it’s always, it should always be about ourselves and just, just being that little bit better. Right. And then the changes come more easily.
Liz Wolfe: Absolutely. Well, speaking of natural [00:15:00] gifts, your resume is very, very impressive. And while I would like to spend some more time talking about your personal journey and founding your company, I’d also like to hear a little about, bit about your journey through academia.
We’re talking like Harvard and Berkeley and, you know, just, it’s, it’s impressive stuff. So I’d love to hear a little bit about that and maybe how that prepared you and maybe if relevant didn’t prepare you for your journey into, into health and.
Leslie: Right. Well, uh, I never thought I would be going anywhere near health and wellness or uh, science at all.
I was very interested in making things happen and economics and policy, politics and policy, though that does begin to touch on health and. Now, but, uh, those were my areas. I was, although I did an AP biology test, I, you know, was not interested in going much further. [00:16:00] Uh, I did do a degree at Berkeley, did a, um, uh, degree in Chinese economics, and, uh, was looking at the special economic zones that were being set up in the early eighties.
And, uh, was fascinated by how rapidly a primarily agrarian economy can be shifted into an industrialized one. And of course, this is something that you might be interested because in, because of the fact that the American population. In the 19th century was primarily agrarian and then shifted into an industrialized one that was accompanied by an industrialized diet.
And look where that’s gotten us. The Chinese have had exactly the same problems that we have with, uh, diabetes. In fact, I think they’re even, their problem is even greater because they seem to be much more insulin resistant than, uh, Caucasian populations. [00:17:00] But my focus was very much on the economics and the big shifts that were happening.
And I ended up taking that degree. And because I had lost my grandmother, I was an only child and an only grandchild had lost my, my grandmother in my sophomore year of college really wanted to do all the things she wanted to do, which was, she’d always wanted to see Europe. A lovely Midwestern woman had never been outside of the United States, so I decided I would go to Switzerland and I went to the university, uh, of Zurich for a couple of years and at doing economics, and then decided to get a job.
When I realized that Swiss banking wasn’t really a great place for a woman, it was very difficult in the nineties for a woman, I, I decided to go to graduate school, so I applied to. Uh, applied to [00:18:00] Inciad. Actually, I wanted to stay in Europe and a girl that I met said, oh, you should really apply to Harvard because the application is the same and it’ll be good practice.
And so on. A complete lark applied to our
Liz Wolfe: wow. And then,
Leslie: then got ahead and thought, well, I suppose I had better go. Um, and, and that was, that was a great two years. It was, it was wonderful. And I met some amazing academics. Uh, of course there are some very well-known names like Michael Porter and Clay Christensen, who sadly passed away.
Um, Other people like Michael Zaltman who did marketing, um, absolutely love Myra Hart, who was a co-founder of Staples, was one of my entrepreneurship professors. So was very, very lucky to get all this exposure and wanted to, uh, to really make my mark in business. [00:19:00] But as with all things in life, your plans can be derailed by your body, by your health.
And if you don’t give it time to rest, digest, repair, regenerate, you will find yourself in a car crash. And I did find myself in that kind of car crash, um, at age 39, which was the same age that my father had died at and had these multiple diagnoses. I was. Getting ready to do my fifth round of I V F and you’re a mom, so you’ll know what this is.
Like, you know, if you, you really want a baby and you’ve gone to the extent of doing I V F and this is the fifth round and we’re using donor eggs because they’re saying I’m too old to use my own eggs. So it’s very important. And then, you know, [00:20:00] get these diagnoses, you’ve got, yes, the reason you’ve got pain in your hands is you’ve got rheumatoid arthritis and, uh, and you’ve got this other thing which I’d never heard of called lupus.
And sorry, there’s no cure for that. So the education is great and maybe does help me think a little bit critically, but, um, but the health was, uh, was something that just stopped me in my tracks. Perhaps the fact that I did have. A questioning mind, or I was a bit rebellious, did help in that. When the doctor said to me, don’t do the fifth round of I V F, there’s no point.
You’ve got a good five years left. Don’t do this, uh, because of the lupus. I said,
I did what Brene Brown always says to do. Ask: is that true? … You have to ask, is that [00:21:00] true? Normally, it’s the thoughts in our own minds [where] we’re saying, is that true? But in fact, sometimes when *other people* tell you things like: you are infertile, you are immune-compromised, you are autistic, you will never do this-that-or-the-other.
It’s very important for us to equally ask ourselves, is that statement true?
So, we have to keep pushing the boundaries and saying: is that true? Am I my diagnosis? Might I be able to reverse this? Because the body is complex and mysterious and sometimes …there are examples of spontaneous healing and there are examples like mine where I actively did something to remove the triggers of my autoimmune attacks and also put the immune system back into balance.
And, oh, look! – There’s the cure that worked.
Liz Wolfe: So what did that look like for you? If you, if you care to share, what did it look like for you? What did you put into place to move yourself from this person with an autoimmune [00:22:00] diagnosis to a person who was actively trying to change, optimize their health and move forward without that label?
Leslie: So in the beginning, I of course accepted the box of, uh, syringe syringes that were filled with immune suppressing drugs. So I did nru and Humira, and I did inject those, but I really hated them almost in the same way that I really didn’t like doing the injections for I V F. They just felt, it somehow felt wrong, right?
Like, what’s wrong with me? That I need these things. And in particular with immune suppressants, you know, I’m thinking, right, my immune system is overactive and you’re, but is an immune suppressant good? Because the doctor’s telling me to stay away from kids with colds cuz my immune system won’t be good.
Do I really wanna live in an immune compromised manner? Um, what if I just brought my immune system back to balance, to homeostasis? Is that a [00:23:00] better goal? And so that idea, which is very classic yin yang type stuff. Right. Uh, these wonderfully balanced opposing forces. Uh, I really began to think, let me try and do that.
And I did a lot of research and I came across this treatment called intravenous immunoglobulin. And at the time there were not a lot of people who had done it, but there were enough who had had success with it that I thought, well, if I have five years left, I may as well, right. If there’s nothing else I can do, I don’t want to.
Lead, um, you know, a compromised quality of life. So why not do this? And at the same time, I thought I need, if I’m going to balance my immune system, I also need to re identify and remove the triggers that are causing this autoimmune attack. And of course, now, in [00:24:00] 2023, gut dysbiosis, leaky gut is known as one of the 12 hallmarks of aging.
Back then, nobody, nobody knew about it. Or if they did, they thought it was crackpot science, right? And so, uh, you know, I believe having had Canada overgrowth but on the contraceptive pill for 10 years, all these things not good for gut permeability or rather they lead to gut permeability. And, uh, I could tell that the things that I was allergic to were, uh, gluten big offender and dairy.
And so I removed those things from my diet and I put into place lots of anti-inflammatory foods and things that were nutrient dense. And I was going from the book that Dr. Barry Sears had written at the time called The Zone, , anti-Inflammatory Diet. And I just followed his example. I was taking loads of fish soil.
I was making my own [00:25:00] almond milk, and which is actually not that hard to make for people who buy it. It’s really not that hard to make. And, , and eating lots of, lots of healthy plants, a lot of fish, , clean fish, smaller fish, so that I didn’t have like high mercury load or anything like that. And doing those things along with, Walking.
I lived, I was living in Boulder, Colorado at the time, so I was in a good position to go walking in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Anitas. I would go walking there. I was doing yoga. I did, I trained in Mayan uterine massage. I, I have had that before.
Liz Wolfe: Have you? Yes. We have a practitioner here in Kansas City and between children, I did, do, I, I saw her several times.
It’s fantastic.
Leslie: The Arvigo method. There we go. Yes, yes. So I learned to do it. I was doing it on my uterus every night, and, and I had a tipped uterus. And by the way, that can, you, can, you can unt tip it. Yeah. Whereas when I went to the [00:26:00] IVF doctor, he’s like, oh, tipped uterus. We can, we can operate for that.
But every time I think about him saying, we can operate for that, I just think, oh my God, there’s so much that modern medicine has not caught onto, right? Yes. Because you can just manipulate it yourself. So I did all of these things and um, when I went back to test again, the doctor, you know, I went to see her.
She came out and said, well, you don’t, you don’t have lupus or RA anymore. I had to let it sink in because what’s going on in my head is if I had not thought back, if I had not said, is there a chance this could be wrong? Can I test again? I would’ve just kept taking the drugs and I would’ve just lived out this [00:27:00] identity.
I would’ve done nothing. Right. Because of course at that time you ask a doctor, oh, does my diet, is there anything in my lifestyle I should change? And their stock answer in 2004 five was, oh, no, the food doesn’t matter. There’s nothing. Right? So, uh, the other thing about that which is a bit more radical is, is it possible the doctor was not telling the truth?
Maybe they should have said they didn’t know it looked like these things, or that this was how it was. At this point in time, you have this diagnosis for this day and this hour and this blood test. This does not need to be how it is forever. And that is, that’s powerful to a patient. And it gives you, it would give you motivation to, [00:28:00] you know, to move heaven and earth to not have that be the case.
Right. If you told a patient you get a do-over, how great is that? I mean, I, I love do-overs and kickball when I was in a kid, so doover with a blood test where they’re telling you, you have five years left, that’s really good. It feels like that
Liz Wolfe: should just be standard practice, and obviously there’s a spectrum if somebody comes to a doctor in full on crisis, obviously.
Yeah. You know, you start with the most powerful intervention that you have, but there’s a spectrum of people that come in that are diagnosed with these ailments and for a doctor to say, Exactly what you said. This is what it looks like right in this moment. Here are some things that you can do and we test again in a month because some people have that time, some people have that opportunity.
And to give someone hope like that is physiologically it can change things. I just talked to someone who has a, uh, a platform that aims to help migraine sufferers, and one of the things [00:29:00] he focused on the most was if somebody doesn’t believe that something can be done and someone doesn’t have reason to have that kind of agency, and who better to hand agency to someone than a doctor?
I mean, obviously agency is something that is endogenous. It comes from us individually, but there are times where we need permission, right? So if a doctor can use that power and say, you have agency here, go. You can do these things, and then we test again in a month. Some people would say, no, no, I think I, you know, I’m just, I’m just gonna take the medication and I’m gonna do my best for the next five years.
And that’s, that’s their choice. But to be able to empower people that way, the way you empowered yourself is just, man, it should just be fundamental foundational to the process.
Leslie: I would, I would agree with that. There’s actually a professor at N Y U Steven Bergman who writes a lot about this, about the need for doctors in their positions of authority to give that agency to their patients.
And as you said, not every patient is [00:30:00] going to want to or be in a position to try to change. Sometimes there are mental blocks, but I, uh, I have a friend who’s an MS. Patient. And I remember when she learned about things like fish oil and salmon being helpful to the myelin sheath that gets, uh, attacked with ms.
And she went to her doctor and she said, there’s a diet I can go on that will help with this. And he said, oh, I know. And she said, why didn’t you tell me about? And he said, it’s really hard to do. It’s a really hard diet to do. And she said, I have three kids. I am motivated. And this, this particular person actually had a PhD and Wow.
So it’s, it’s very interesting as a patient, obviously there are some wonderful doctors, but I wish that all doctors understood the position of authority, that they assume when they put that white jacket on and this, you know, this [00:31:00] certificate, the graduation, uh, uh, certificate on the wall behind them, that carries a lot of power and.
Also, I think we, we need to even think about things like the placebo effect, right? If you do a clinical trial in the United States, they actually hamper your results by saying some of it will be due to placebo effect, right? And so everyone in the scientific world knows that placebo effect is real, and yet we don’t use it.
You know, in this relationship between doctor slash healer and patient, we must try to empower patients and give them hope.
Liz Wolfe: Absolutely. So at what point in this journey, one of the reasons I was dying to have you on the show is because you are the founder of a company that produces a supplement that I use, one of the very few supplements that I use every day.
And I’m wondering when in this process you felt that. Not just taking sperm aine, but [00:32:00] also like actually creating a company around it. When did that become possible? When did that enter your consciousness? And tell me about that process.
Leslie: Well, I, I honestly took a big break from my career, um, and I was very lucky.
I adopted a little girl from China, and then a few years later I got pregnant at 43, delivered a healthy baby, and then started going to the school gates as you do, and began to meet other parents in this wonderful town of Oxford, which is full of scientists and poets and economist. So I’d strike up conversations, many scientists here, many medics they’d tell me about.
Amazing research, and I’d say, wow, that’s incredible. Transcranial stimulation for depression. Gee, uh, how do we, how do we get ahold of this? I know somebody who’s got depression who might wanna try this. Um, how do they do it? Oh, no, it’s just [00:33:00] research. And I’d say, I think you need to get this product out, right?
This needs to be a part of the standard of care. Oh, no, I don’t wanna do that. I’m not a business person and I, I don’t like asking for money. I just do, I do grant applications and I. Hmm, well, I have a business degree. I have some experience. Maybe I’ll do it. I’m not afraid to ask for money. Let me do it.
And so I began to, uh, collect some of these scientists and the, the ones I was very keenly interested in were the ones who were doing regenerative medicine. So there are quite a few people here who do, uh, pharmaceuticals for me less interesting. I’m much more interested in finding ways to allow the body to heal itself because again, like my belief with my autoimmune condition that I wanted to just bring the immune system back to balance.
I believe that. Actually, we don’t give our bodies [00:34:00] credit for all that it can do. It has this innate wisdom and if we can just put it in the right environment, it will know what to do. And regenerative medicine is really about that. So there were a couple of companies that raising stem cells or expanding umbilical cord stem cells, uh, or looking at circadian rhythm or at ketones.
And I thought, these are my people. I’m gonna go raise money for these companies. And as I did it, the, uh, the folks at the university, somebody at the university said, Hey, you know, there’s someone in immunology and rheumatology that’s working on this kind of cool molecule, but no, no pharma company is gonna go near it cuz it, it’s just, it just occurs in food, right?
And so it’s, and it can’t be patented. And, uh, and so I thought, That’s interesting. It’s in rheumatology. Well, as a rheumatoid arthritis patient, yeah, I’m kind of interested. Let me meet them. And [00:35:00] so I met a woman named Katcha Simon and another scientist named Gata Sk. And loved them both, both women, uh, really hit it off with them.
And they began to share with me their research on their mouses research, how sperm aine, uh, was rejuvenating these, the elderly immune system in. In, in mice. So you take mice that have been age matched to elderly humans and they exhibit the same immune system, very similar immune system response to ours.
It just begins to fail, right? And we’ve all seen this, we know that elderly relative who gets pneumonia at age 70, and you think, Ooh, that’s not good. But of course if, if a 20 year old gets it, you’re sort of like, yeah, that’s a bummer. That’s, that’s not good. But you fully expect them to recover, but you don’t have that same expectation with a 70 year old.
So, um, [00:36:00] they were, they were showing the, their words, not mine, rejuvenation of the elderly immune system. And this was very exciting to me and I said, Well, if it’s a food, there’s no downside to getting more of this into our diet. Um, how do we do this? And they said, well, you could eat nato, which is fermented Japanese soy.
Or you could, uh, you could have a lot of mushrooms. High content in mushrooms. It’s an all plant material. Um, you could get it that way. It’s also in high concentrations in the endo sperm of grains of seeds. And so we charm and, uh, rice brown, things like this. So I thought, okay, well why don’t you just do, why don’t we just do a product?
And they said, oh, but you, we can’t, we’ve talked to the university about this. There’s no patent around it, and the university wants a patent, [00:37:00] uh, otherwise they don’t ship in money for these companies. And I said, well, haven’t they ever heard of a brand? I mean, I don’t think Coca-Cola has a patent, right?
They don’t have a patent on brown sugar water. And, and, uh, and so Ka gata, were like, oh yeah, that’s true. And I said, why don’t we just try this? And covid, you know, fast forward a few months. During which I had looked into manufacturing and sourcing, um, COVID had taken over. We were on lockdown. I think this is April of 2020, and I.
Called Katcha and I said, I don’t know if this is the right time to launch a product like this. Nobody’s able to go out. And she said, Leslie, this is, this is the time more than ever. People’s immune systems need this. And I thought, Okay, well, if Kaia says, and she’s a lot smarter than I am, all right, let’s, let’s try this.
So it was a bit of throwing wet spaghetti against the wall and seeing [00:38:00] if it stuck. And to my delight and surprise, it did stick. And, uh, we, we’ve continued to just keep on going. We did another product, which was a gluten-free sperming because, uh, as an autoimmune patient, uh, and knowing other autoimmune, uh, paleo people, right, who are trying to heal themselves by using that protocol or using the low fud mos diet, I wanted to have, uh, something that they could have.
It took me nine months to a year to actually figure out how to do that in, uh, you know, in a really clean way and a, and, uh, you know, an easy to manufacture way. But we did get it out and that that stuck too. So, yeah. Here I
Liz Wolfe: am. Here we are. And you, you mentioned Covid, so we’re gonna have a Covid warning now on the podcast, so let’s just lean into that.
Ooh, no, it’s good. Everybody has a Covid warning on their podcast nowadays. Okay. But we’ll lean into that, and I’ve [00:39:00] said this before, I actually started taking Prim adine when as a measure to support. I don’t wanna say it in a, you gotta use the right language. Basically. I started taking it for post covid hair loss, and we’re not making any medical claims here.
But in looking at many of the reviews on the website, I noticed I had, I had heard this peripherally and went through a lot of the reviews and noticed a lot of anecdotal reports of this being really profoundly helpful post covid. And one of the things that made me such a believer was that literally, I, I can’t say that that taking sperm stopped my post covid hair loss in its tracks, but I know the typical duration of Postviral shedding.
Um, and I know that I was losing about 200 or 250 pairs a day for. No, I can’t remember how long. And within about a week and a half to two weeks of taking sperm aine, [00:40:00] it just stopped. And I don’t know that there’s a mechanism for that. I don’t know that that’s actually what people are using it for, but it was a very profound delineation between losing hair and no longer using hair that was well inside of the typical duration of post-viral shedding.
So for me, that really piqued my curiosity. And then I started to look into it more, look into a lot of the what is presented on your website, find out more about it, and just thought, wow, this is something that I think is really, is worth taking. And not just for that reason, but for a multitude of other reasons and longevity and uh, and all of the things that it might touch, which I would love to have you share about to the degree that you’re comfortable and not using any kinda medical lingo or promises.
Leslie: Sure, sure. Well, so, you know, hair, um, hair growth, this is. Considered a beauty claim and not a health claim. Okay. There you go. Good. Right. And so if we think about hair, skin, and nails, um, the F FDA is not going [00:41:00] to say unless you have a skin condition like eczema. They’re not going to say, oh, you know, a product that gives you better skin.
Well, that sounds like face cream, right? This is a beauty claim. This is not a health claim. Hair, skin and nails have high cellular turnover, just like the lining of the gut, which basically. You know, it replaces itself every 72 hours when you have a molecule like sperm aine. Uh, and we have the, the sort of full spectrum of polyamide and prim adine, original, so sperm, adine, sperming, and risine.
And they all work together as a virtuous recycling loop, just like other vitamins and minerals in nature come, you know, your tomato is not just lycopene. Lycopene. Mm-hmm. It’s going to be other things too, right? Vitamin C and other things. It’s the same with the polyamide. They don’t [00:42:00] usually come just sperming in itself.
Uh, you often have some risine, often you have sperming. So, uh, these three things together do have a positive effect. And we know from animal studies that have been done in Japan that if you give pri matine specifically to, uh, two sets of. Mice groups, you know, you have one that is the control and you have another, that is the one that gets the prim adine enriched chow, that the prim adine enriched chow group will get stronger claws and they maintain their healthy coat as the.
Their matched partner begins to lose fur, and the fur loses color. They still maintain color in their hair, and they maintain thickness and shine of, uh, of that, that fur. So that’s the math studies. Uh, we do know in humans that sperm aine itself, if you put that into a [00:43:00] Petri dish together with some hair follicles, and they took this from, uh, people who’d had, I guess, facelifts.
And so when you lift up, you, I guess you lose some of these, or maybe here around the ears, you lose some of the, the hair follicles. They put those hair follicles into a Petri dish and then they subjected them or put in some sperm adine. And within six days, the hair follicles that were in the shedding phase, Also where there’s no pigment.
Those, uh, something like 23%, 25% of those hairs moved back into the growth or antigen phase. And antigen is also the only time when meis or pigment production takes place. So it is something that for those of us who don’t want to have to dye our hair, um, it is, you know, it is, it is interesting to know about what [00:44:00] can we do to keep those follicles in the antigen phase as opposed to the shedding phase.
And that’s also why, you know, as we get older, it gets harder to grow longer hair because we just, we end up shedding much faster, those longer hairs because we’re spending, you know, more of the scalp is spending more time in the shedding phase as opposed to, to, in the growth phase. Um, so yes, definitely it has, you know, it has a real impact there.
And, uh, I also wonder if we could say that it’s a proxy for what’s going on with the gut lining, because again, uh, the gut lining replaces itself every 72 hours. If hair, skin and nails, those cells are turning over faster, then does it also make sense that the gut is actually able to, um, to shed and replace [00:45:00] and also repair faster?
So there are studies about, um, you know, polyamide and gut muc homeostasis and also about permeability. And we know that sperm aine does reduce inflammation of the gut and it does help seal it up. And, uh, again, as an autoimmune patient who. Experience leaky gut. Um, that is, that’s a really important quality for me is the fact that it really does help keep those, keep the integrity of the gut lining.
Can we
Liz Wolfe: talk about autophagy as well? That process of cellular cleanup? When I was researching when to take my prim adine, I decided that it’s probably optimal to take it in the evening to sort of augment that natural autophagy that happens during sleep. Can you tell us a little bit more about autophagy, how prim adine or sperm adine, I, I guess we should say prim adine, because [00:46:00] your product, like you said, is sort of a complex, more than just an isolated, uh, compound.
Exactly. So we’ll say pri adine, how prim adine is involved with the process of auto.
Leslie: Sure. So for those who don’t know autophagy, uh, it’s a, it’s a Greek word and it just means self and eating. It’s not self cannibalization. It really is more like self-cleaning. And I like to, uh, I like to think of it, uh, as Marie Kondo for yourself.
Imagine that every single one of your cells has a little Marie condo there who’s constantly bagging up all those old toys that your kids never play with anymore. All those things they’ve outgrown and they are just getting it out of the cell. And we all know, just as with clutter in the home, the less clutter we have, the better everything functions, right?
So, The clutter that’s being gotten rid of through autophagy are things like misfolded proteins, [00:47:00] um, damaged organelles, um, damaged mitochondria, or dysfunctional mitochondria, could even be dysfunctional stem cells. Um, all of these things can be bagged up. Also, things like lipids that are bad can also be taken out too through a process known as lip.
Um, so all of this stuff, all of this waste is being bagged up and gotten out of the cell. And as we know, health begins at the cellular level. These are the building blocks of our body, our tissues and organs, all of us. Everything starts at the cellular level, so better inputs lead to better outputs. And autophagy is the, the QC.
Process that says, right, these inputs are good, these bricks are good, and you can safely use them to build a really solid house. Right. And so that’s autophagy and it is one of the [00:48:00] 12 hallmarks of aging. So now, as of January, 2023, we now have three new hallmarks of which autophagy is one gut dysbiosis or leaky gut is another, and inflammation is, is the third there.
And, um, sperm aine will hit sperm, aine, sperming, these poly aimings will hit all of them.
Liz Wolfe: Wow. And so would you say that evening is the best time to take prim adine to, to double up on that?
Leslie: I do. I, I take it, um, before bed and I also take it when I wake up. And the reason why I do this is I’m bookending sleep and the autophagic process that naturally is induced.
By not eating during sleep. And, um, our puddle actually says to try it with food. And the reason why is that some people can’t take the prebiotic fiber that’s in there and, um, they just seem to, uh, they have trouble with it. And so the, the way [00:49:00] that seems to ease things in is if they eat it with other food for some reason, they, they seem to tolerate it better.
Um, but if you’re someone who has no trouble with vegetable matter or fruits, then by all means try before bed. Uh, and or first thing in the morning when you wake up. I actually do both and I do the gluten-free in the morning and I do priming original, uh, right before bed, but I know other people who do, you know, gluten-free right before bed as well.
Sure. Now I’ve
Liz Wolfe: also read reports of prim adine helping with sleep. And I do notice that I have more vivid dreams when I’m consistently taking
Leslie: it. Can we talk about that? So I really like this. I know not everybody is going to like to remember their dreams. I like it because I like lucid, I like lucid dreaming and I think it’s a really cool thing.
But, uh, but some people are [00:50:00] like, I don’t wanna remember my dreams. So it kind of depends on, I was talking to a neuroscientist at University College Cork about this yesterday, and he said, oh, it’s going to be, pardon me, it’s going to be, uh, down to the emotional state of the person, right? But yes, you will remember your dreams.
You’ll have better. I believe. Now I don’t have any scientific studies on this, but we got so many reports and people, some people really do want to remember their dreams because it’s like accessing, , you know, it’s accessing your, your subconscious and, some people like to use it to solve problems, and so they want to remember what, how they work something, , in their mind overnight.
, but yes, it’s, it does seem to have that effect. We have those AEC many anecdotal reports on that, but it is not, it is not for everyone. I will caveat it. Well, I should know
Liz Wolfe: this, but is there not some [00:51:00] suggestions in this, in the science? This is separate from, from prim adine, but just that more lucid dreaming is indicative of better quality sleep or better quality of a certain
Leslie: phase of sleep.
That’s possible. I can get you that answer after the show. Cause I know some sleep scientists here. I can ask.
Liz Wolfe: I should, how dare you not be a sleep scientist on top of everything else? What, what is wrong with you? Well, I have actually a quality question as well because I’m curious about, like, I’ve heard of things like liposomal sperm, aine.
I’ve heard of like synthetic sperm aine, and I know people are gonna go out and Google. Yeah. Sperm adine and Prim Adine after, yeah, after the show. And different things are gonna pop up. So can you gimme a rundown on maybe quality, concern issues? What
Leslie: do you think about those? Yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s a, it is a big concern of mine.
So, synthetic sperm aine has never been tested for safety or efficacy in humans. And I know a lot of people will say, oh, but [00:52:00] I take, you know, I’m taking synthetic this or that. I don’t care. You know, who cares? And if it’s on the market, it must be, it must be fine, actually, no. You know, because it’s not a drug, it’s not regulated by the F D A, , this is a supplement.
And honestly, until something adverse happens, I am not sure they will actually. Step in. Now, the European Food Safety Authority has said that you can safely take up to six milligrams of food derived sperm aine per day. They don’t say synthetically derived sperm aine per day. And I know, again, a lot of people say, well, what’s the big deal?
It’s the same chemical structure. And I’ve always said, right, did you know of a drug called thalidomide? Thalidomide had exactly the same chemical structure to another. Thalidomide memetic that appeared to be safe. We gave thalidomide to pregnant mothers who [00:53:00] had Moree sickness. It was perfectly safe in rodents.
And this is what people say to me. Synthetic sperming is safe in rodents. I’m like, we’re not rodents. Right? You know, rodents and dogs, they can all make their own vitamin C. We, we don’t have that ability. Think of these differences. Be be between mammals, right? So, uh, thalidomide work great in rodents did not work so well in humans.
And that’s my caveat there. The liposomal sperm edine is liposomal synthetic, uh, so they always use synthetic in liposomal, um, sperming. If you, if you were going to put a lipid around something, the idea is that uh, you will allow it to cross the blood brain barrier and you will allow it to, uh, get into a cell cuz you’ve got the cell membrane is a lipid, as you know, and, um, you want it to be able to get in the cell.
The thing is, is that there are loads of transporters [00:54:00] to take sperm aine into the cell already and it easily crosses the, uh, the intestinal lumen. And I don’t like the idea of liposomal sperm aine because so much of the good stuff that sperm adine does is in the gut, right? I want the gut to be exposed to these poly Amys because they will actually help knit together the, you know, the lining.
If somebody’s got leaky gut, we want them to have that exposure in the intestine, and you will miss that if you just put it, you know, directly into the bloodstream. So that is one of my problems with, with that. The other thing is polyamide. It’s in the name, it is made from amino acids and we all take amino acids, but I don’t see us all going around getting liposomal amino acids.
So this is, to be honest, this is a bit of a gimmick [00:55:00] to, , to encapsulate it in a lipid. And, , finally, you know, with synthetics, we don’t know what metabolites were missing. If you just put straight sperming in, you don’t have the virtuous recycling loop that comes when you get the spectrum of Amys together.
, what else is, what else is made? What happens in the gut? Not. Through the fructooligosaccharide, but what happens with just the food bit of it, we know when we eat food, other metabolites are made. And I, Terry Walz, who, , who’s one of my heroes has often said she likes to eat the rainbow because you, you just can’t get all of these things that the body needs from supplements because there’s so many things that we haven’t discovered yet.
Right. And that’s why a food derived source, a whole food derived source is a good idea because there are probably things in there that we just, we ha we haven’t discovered. [00:56:00] It’s kind of a miracle of nature. So I’m going with nature, uh, not with synthetics until proven safe and efficacious. Um, and I also don’t want the liability issues, quite frankly.
Sure.
Liz Wolfe: One of the things that I think people are really keen on these days is like testing and screening of, yeah. Supplements of skincare products, . Are you all doing any screening of your products for contaminants, that type of thing? Yeah. And are there challenges the, the nuts and bolts of the supply chain?
I know Japan, I think is where you source, raw materials and I’d love to hear maybe a little bit about that if you care to share.
Leslie: Of course. So the Japanese are pretty slavish when it comes to quality control. You might have heard that when coffee is exported to Japan and it doesn’t pass quality control at the port, , and they do all their QC of all food at the port, by the way, , they actually turn the ship around and send [00:57:00] that coffee to the United States.
So, , I wanna go to a country that is really picky about food. , the Japanese have great quality control systems. There is an independent. Research group called the Japan Food Research Institute. They do all third party testing and they can test everything. So we take the raw material, we have the sperm, aine, sperming put ricin content tested there.
But then we’re of course looking for all the things that you would want. The mycotoxins, the heavy metals, mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium. , we also do things like e coli, salmonella, any of these bacterial, , things. Fungi we’re molds we’re looking at for all of these things. And then we send it to the us.
And we encapsulate in the US and both of the Manuf manufac, both the manufacturing facility in Japan [00:58:00] and the encapsulation facility in the United States. They’re both f D a registered and inspected. They’re both good manufacturing process, , compliant. , and then we encapsulate now because we’ve added a vegan capsule in the United States, we test again.
So we then send it, sometimes we send it to Eoin, sometimes we send it to Delta. It kind of depends on what backlog there is, but always to a third party, uh, testing agency that the US F D A itself uses. And then we say, okay, does this answer match the answer that we had in Japan with the Japan Food Research Institute?
It does. Terrific. Great. So now we know it’s kind of like in accounting. You know, you’re, you’re, you’re looking in both columns. Here’s the number that you should get at the bottom. Does it balance out? Right? And so once that’s done, then we feel confident we can release this,[00:59:00] , , to the public. And, I will say one other thing, one thing that Japanese do that is unusual, and we’re the only distributor in the world for our product, like you won’t find our product in any other supplement because we are the only source of it globally.
, they actually, there are other wheatgerm, , derived products out there. There are some other grain derived products where they soak the grain in synthetic sperming and then they dry it and sell it that way. But, , but most of these actually have, , omega six polyunsaturated fatty acids that they leave in.
And I know you know about the lipid layer around the cell and how you don’t want a, , a crop or crap, , oil to, to become part of it. Yes. You did read my book. I did read your book. Yeah. You don’t want, , you know, a crap oil lipid, , to be incorporated into the outside [01:00:00] membrane of yourself. And so when I saw wheat charm, it turns out is, you know, is extremely high weight by weight in omega six fatty acids.
And I thought, , I was talking to the Japanese, they said, we wanna take this out because if you leave it in, it’s going to go rancid. And other people have told us that other companies that leave it in, , over time, if you open the capsule and you look inside, it becomes like a gelatinous plug. And that is the, that’s the oxidation process.
Mm-hmm. That’s what we can visibly see. So ours is just a powder and you know, you can open it and it’s still a powder. And, , so many thanks to the Japanese for saying, let’s remove it because I don’t want my cells to have oxidized lipids, , incorporated into the membrane. So those are many [01:01:00] of the, the different quality control steps we take.
And honestly, if I had come into the business without being a patient, I probably would never have done those things cuz I can see what everybody else is doing. They’re putting magnesium stearate in there, which something like 75 to 80% of all mag steroid is hydrogenated oils. Right. Which we’re getting rid of in the food supply.
Ah, but look, supplements aren’t not regulated and they’re used there. So if you take 30 supplements a day and they all have magnesium steroid, guess what you’re getting? You’re getting these hydrogenated oils. So I didn’t want any of that. I didn’t want any fillers. and I, you know, the guys that we’ve worked with have said, well, then you’re gonna force people to have to have three capsules.
And I said, but at least it’s a clean product. Right?
Liz Wolfe: Yeah. I don’t mind taking my three capsules at all, and I’m not a big supplement taker, but also when you see results from something, a, again, it’s the same thing as like [01:02:00] agency. It’s a self-propelling kind of thing where it’s like, I’m definitely, I’ve taken a million supplements, I’ll try, I’ve tried anything and everything, and oftentimes it’s just total du, you know, just like, eh, this did nothing.
But when you see something and you believe that you’re actually getting results from something, three capsules is nothing. It’s nothing
Leslie: good. I’m so glad. I’m really, I’m really pleased to hear that you got, that you got good results and that you also, that your dream recall is something you like. That makes me great.
Liz Wolfe: It’s another you don’t always like it. I had a very upsetting dream the other day and I was like, oh no, I didn’t like that. Um, but it, it tells me that, that it’s doing something. And I do believe there’s some research around like lucid dreaming and, and there being some kind of underlying physiological processes that are beneficial.
, but I do believe that it’s having an impact. I am actually like very happy with my hair right now and I, you know, went to my hairdresser and she was like, wow, your hair looks great. She’s like, how old are you? And I was like, well, I’m 39.
I’m feeling pretty [01:03:00] good. You know, I’m just kind of riding the wave while I can, but I’m very happy. Your hair
Leslie: does look very, it’s very shiny. Yeah, it is.
Liz Wolfe: Well, I did shower today.
Leslie: We’ve got, um, we’ve got a client who’s 63 who has been using it for about two years, and she said, About nine months ago, she said that she didn’t have to do a Japanese keratin treatment.
She said every six months she was spending I think 500 US dollars. She’s in San Francisco. She said she was spend, it’s a lot. I had no idea because I do zero. I don’t do anything. I’m kind of, um, well, you have great hair, but I, I do, I do nothing. I do, it’s very bouncy diet.
Liz Wolfe: Look like a pant ad over
Leslie: there.
That’s nice. And yeah, I, I literally don’t do anything. Um, but this was, this was what was so funny because I’m a, I’m very kind of low makeup, low maintenance in that respect. When Covid hit and, you know, we could walk down the street and we could see people with a raccoon stripe. [01:04:00] Yes. People, my friends were looking at me like, oh my God, how are you getting your hair dye?
And I said, but I’m not. And they were like, but you’re older than I am. And I said, I don’t know. I didn’t know you dye your hair. I had no idea how many of my friends were dying their hair. And I think that, uh, you know, it’s not, I’m not going to say it’s just the primate. I think it’s everything that I do.
Right? Optimize the thyroid. Make sure you’ve got enough iron. Make sure you have enough selenium. Make sure you’ve got enough copper. That copper zinc balance, right? This stuff is, is important. Vitamin D is important. Um, All these things mean that even though I’ll be 58 in June, I don’t have to dye my hair and I hope it stays like that.
But now that we’ve got these other people saying that they don’t have to do certain treatments or they don’t have to go in and dye their sparkles, um, you know, once every three weeks, but they can go six weeks, they’re happy. [01:05:00] Right. And, um, also extensions. I didn’t, I had never, I didn’t know anything about extensions, so, but I do have friends who’ve done extensions and they said they were done with doing it because it was pulling their hair out and they were so pleased that now they didn’t have to think about trying extensions because it was growing back in.
So that’s, um, you know, sperming inhibits nine of the 12 hallmarks of, of aging bot. As great as that is. As much as we want happy, healthy stem cells and mitochondria, and longer telomeres and autophagy and low inflammation, the proof is in the pudding. If you don’t look in the mirror and feel happy with what you look at, then that’s not great, right?
And so many people have said that they see a difference in their brows, their lashes, their hair, their skin in their nail. That makes me, oh my gosh,
Liz Wolfe: please. I [01:06:00] just realized that my brows are thicker. I’ve been That’s so funny that you say that. I didn’t even think about brows cause I was getting a little thin in certain spots.
I had a little bald spot right here that I got microblading for. What? And I was just looking at my brows the other day and I was like, I don’t think I need to go back. The microblading has kind of faded away. They filled in here.
Leslie: Wow. I’m sure. Let’s realized that. Yeah. So that’s, that’s what that is. Yeah.
And because I was, you know, in the nineties when Gwyneth Paltrow was plucking her eyebrows. Oh yes. All of us were doing this. And now of course the look is different. We all want thick eyebrows and, uh, so, you know, Chinese girls, we don’t often have like really super thick brows, but, um, but mine are, you know, mine are not.
Liz Wolfe: Did I cover earlier? I just kind of got absorbed in the conversation. Did I cover earlier why it was you went for sperm aine, or that you went for these polyamide as sort of a missing link in your health and then wanting to bring [01:07:00] them to market?
Leslie: the more that I began to look at polyamide, the more excited I became. So I was introduced to them around, um, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, and the immune system. But the more that I dug, the more exciting the results appeared to be. And there were over 13,000 papers on Poly.
Amys Poly. Amys have been studied for decades. Uh, even the name Sperm and Sperming. This comes from the 17th century when father of microbiology, Anton Van Liven Hook, looked under a microscope at his own semen and was like, oh, what are these crystals? I’ll call them sperm something, right? It is
Liz Wolfe: actually related to real life.
Leslie: It is. It’s really life sperm. Yes, it is. It is. And that’s, that is, but that also tells you how important it is. Anything that has to [01:08:00] do with reproduction is probably vital to the survival of the species. And so sperm aine in. Semen in sperm. Why is it there? It’s because you can actually wrap DNA n a around it.
Normally, DNA n is wrapped around a histone bond, which is too big to really fit into the sperm. Um, and it would make the sperm slow solo motility, but, but sperm adine, you can wrap it around sperm adine and it, the, the sperm can swim still very fast. And so that’s one of the things it does. But it turns out that when men make sperm, it’s a very high reactive oxygen species event.
And as a result, if you’ve got sperming nearby, it can actually, uh, act as an agonist to all that r o s activity. So, uh, you know, anti-inflammatory, right? So that’s why it’s in, why it is actually in sperm. And uh, of course [01:09:00] we’ve talked about how it’s in breast milk as well. Um, very high amounts in breast milk.
And we all make it, we all make it all of our lives to some extent. When we’re babies, we have the highest concentrations because we’ve got to grow. We need it for growth, and of course we’re getting it. Hopefully all of us are getting it from our mother’s breast milk. And then, um, we will continue to manufacture it in our tissues, our gut biome, and then we get it primarily from plant material.
But you can get it from things like, , chicken, liver will have sperm. So, , you can get it from, , also duck’s liver too. And, , and that’s, that’s really important. But yes. So, , so the more that I looked into the things that it could do, the more excited I got and I decided it has super safe, , profile in humans because it’s an all food and we make it ourselves.
So there is no problem on the safety side as long as it’s food [01:10:00] derived right. And, , I could also see from the studies that the healthy centenarian populations around the world, you know, Loma Linda Nacoya Peninsula, Okinawa, Sardinia icar. They had high levels of sperming. And what was it about them that allowed them to do this?
Well, they, they were eating high sperming diets so high in foods that were fermented and had high sperming and sperming, uh, ricin content in them. So things like cheese, sheep’s milk cheese in aria, uh, Sardinia and Nacoya. And then in Okinawa, we talked about this briefly. Uh, two-thirds of the diet is purple sweet potato.
Unlike the rest of the Japanese diet, which is white rice, and the okina ones have better health outcomes than the rest of Japan. And I posit [01:11:00] that the purple sweet potato, the fibers there are helping the gut biome manufacture many other things, possibly more of these polyamide. Possibly other things, uh, that are good for human health, we just don’t know yet.
But, uh, yes, the more that I looked at the prevalence of these poly aimings in the healthy centenarian populations, I just got very excited. But right. We need to play catch up here in, uh, you know, in the west and find a way to get more of these into our diet. And if it has to come by way of a food derived supplement, then so be it, right?
Liz Wolfe: . So, Prim Adine has, you have the gluten-free source of sperm aine. I don’t know. Again, maybe I should call the sperm aine complex because it’s not just sperm aine alone, but you have the regular version, which, which I take. I also have the [01:12:00] gluten-free version, which I’m a little bit less accountable for taking.
I’m not as good about that one, but I’ll throw it on there if I ok. If I remember. But it’s great as well. I’m, I’m totally good with the, the wheat germ. I didn’t have any concerns about like gluten, cross reactivity or sensitivity, so I do that one. What else do you all have in the pipeline or right now? I know you said something about a, a new box, a new product in the us.
Leslie: Well, so we’ve got, um, we had so many people who, who loved Prim Adine Original, which has a very small amount of gluten. Each daily dose has around the amount of gluten that you’d find in one, uh, 100th of a slice of bread. Uh, so it’s small, but it is there. Um, we had so many people who love that product that just said, I don’t wanna take all the capsules.
Can I just get it as a powder? And so I said, alright, fine. But because the powder actually is, it’s expensive. I mean, the raw material is expensive for us to buy. People are like, oh, you’re taking the mick, you [01:13:00] know, this is an expensive, you’re, you’re charging too much. And I’m like, well, the raw material is expensive.
We’re not actually making you know that much. And, , so I wanted to bring it to market, but I really wanted to have it in a receptacle that was worthy of how precious this actually is. And so I found a, uh, a designer in Japan and I saw the, these caddies that were actually intended for tea.
And they’re made out of wild cherry bark, which is naturally antiviral. Naturally antibacterial, because the bark protects the inner part of the tree, right? So it has to be, and they, um, they can only get the bark from trees that are at least 80 years old or older because only the old trees can regenerate the bark.
And when I, when I, I, I saw that, I thought, okay, this is, [01:14:00] this is the perfect receptacle for the powder. So for people who want to dose higher, and you may dose up to six milligrams per day. Then you could do it like this and you just throw it into your smoothie and, or put, mix it in with your porridge or, um, you know, stir it in with your yogurt.
Something like that. That was, that’s all that it is. It’s actually the same raw material, but just in powder format. But we will have other products, more gut biome focused products coming out in the future. Fantastic.
Liz Wolfe: Well, I’m excited about the, the, the scoopable, the, the non capsule product, because I do, you know, I’ll do like a protein shake and Yeah.
Put in some creatine, put in some you, you’re familiar with Joel Green? I use his vest, yes. Love him. Love his products.
Leslie: Is your client? Yeah.
Liz Wolfe: Oh, great. Yeah, so I use the, uh, the young Reds a couple of times a week, so I’ll throw stuff all together. My, I’m curious whether there’s any issue with like [01:15:00] water or spoilage or anything like that.
Is there anything people should be aware of when they’re using that product?
Leslie: Um, if you, if you mix it with, uh, with liquids, don’t use a boiling liquid. So once you, once you mix it with a boiling liquid, then you will lose 8% of the potency. And so I can’t, you know, I can’t guarantee a hundred percent potency with boiling.
Boiling. Well, that’s not
Liz Wolfe: too bad. Eight, 8%. It’s
not
Leslie: terrible. Well, it’s not terrible, but it’s still something. I mean, I’d like everybody to get the minimum effective dose, the one that we know has worked in human clinical trials. And, , so that’s why I, I say try and have it, , you know, warm drinks fine, just not boiling hot, right?
Mm-hmm. , and , in terms of water, yes, if you. Do not take all the powder and mix in water and leave it there for four days because it will begin to go off. , and that is, that is the, the [01:16:00] prebiotic. Right. And so that’s, that is then the issue. That is then the issue there. So, , okay. You can add a liquid so long as you are about to, you know, drink it or eat it in the next 24 hours.
Liz Wolfe: And does it dissolve fairly, fairly well?
Leslie: I use a match of whi. So I, I really like that. Or you could use a frother, , if you’re putting it in with your, , if you’re putting it in with your smoothie, no problem, obviously. , if you’re mixing it in with your yogurt, I’d say it mixes in about as well as chlorella.
, if you’re putting it straight in with water, then that is going to be, that’s going to be an issue. Then you need a match of whisk or a frother at that point.
Liz Wolfe: Okay. Good to know. I’m thinking maybe mixing that with my tea in the evening or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Not boiling. Not
Leslie: boiling. Not boiling.
Yes. Not boiling. Yeah, definitely not boiling. And if you’ve got the gluten free one, you can grind it up with a mortar and pestol uhhuh. So yeah, [01:17:00] that makes it a bit easier to, , to use in a drink.
Liz Wolfe: Beautiful. Is there anything else that you would like everyone to know about prim adine, about sperm adine, or about anything that you’re up to?
Uh,
Leslie: no, I’d love everybody to, to buy your book. Right. I love your book. I just thought it made so much sense and I saw somebody put on Instagram an egg white, um, you know, omelet the other day and thought, no, eat the yos. Don’t
Liz Wolfe: do. I can’t believe we’re still doing that as a society, that people are still still making it white online.
They’re just so disgust.
Leslie: Throwing it away. Throwing it away. Exactly. All the good stuff. All the lovely bee vitamins, right. So Yes. Anyway, the Colleen, everything. Eat Theos people. Yeah, exactly.
Liz Wolfe: Exactly. Well, it is incredibly validating that someone as intelligent and as successful as you has read my book and, and gives it the thumbs up.
So thank you for
Leslie: that. Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you for, thank you for having me today. It’s been a real honor. Thank
Liz Wolfe: you so much, Leslie.
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