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cover of episode 321. Lactoferrin: The SOLUTION To Iron Issues, Gut Health, Immunity & Beyond

321. Lactoferrin: The SOLUTION To Iron Issues, Gut Health, Immunity & Beyond

2025/6/2
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Boost Your Biology with Lucas Aoun

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Laura Katz: 我是一名食品科学家,在创立Helena之前,我一直在产品配方领域工作。我注意到,虽然替代乳制品和肉制品领域涌现了许多创新,但我们是否可以将这些创新应用于制造更健康的食品呢?我开始思考,未来的健康食品应该是什么样的?营养应该如何发展才能改善我们所有人的健康?我发现,过去二三十年的许多创新都源于母乳。母乳既是食物又是药物,我们是否可以从中学习,并将其作为未来营养的平台?与此同时,我听到了关于美国母乳黑市的播客,运动员、癌症患者等都在寻找母乳中独特的生物活性物质。既然我们有技术复制这些生物活性物质,为什么人们还要冒风险购买母乳?这就是Helena公司成立的初衷。

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The information provided in this podcast episode is for entertainment purposes and is not medical advice. If you have any questions about your health, contact a medical professional. This content is strictly the opinions of Lucas Owen and is for informational and entertainment purposes only.

The references, claims and scientific information linked to any products are only applicable to those listeners who are based in the US. If you are outside the US, this information does not apply to you. It is not intended to provide medical advice or to take the place of medical advice or treatment from a personal physician. All viewers of this content are advised to consult with their doctors or qualified health professionals regarding specific health questions.

Thank you for listening to the Boost Your Biology podcast. My name is Lucas Owen. I uncover the most cutting edge health information on the planet, ranging from hormones, nutrition, supplementation, fat loss, biohacking, longevity, wellness, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Boost Your Biology podcast.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to the Boost Your Biology podcast. Today's special guest is actually a food scientist and is the founder and CEO of Helena.

And she quickly became the NYU's youngest ever adjunct professor in food science and technology in 2017 and was featured in Forbes' 30 under 30 list in 2022. Laura Katz, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me, Lucas.

Awesome. Awesome. So Laura, we were just briefly talking about a little bit how you got into this sort of space. And maybe you want to sort of elaborate upon that. How did you find yourself in this like health and wellness space?

Yeah, so as you mentioned at the top, I'm a food scientist by training. So I had been in the world of product formulation prior to starting Helena, and I saw so much innovation going into alternative dairy, alternative meat products, all of these alt things using really sophisticated technologies to make these products taste better.

And I thought, okay, that's cool. Like I myself buy a lot of these products, but what if we can channel innovation towards making our foods healthier? And what does healthier look like in the future? Where does nutrition need to go for all of us to improve our health throughout our life?

And really quickly, you look at where innovation has come from in the last 20, 30 years. And so much innovation has stemmed from breast milk. And I thought, OK, well, that's interesting. Is there something we can learn as this

product, this thing that we all start life eating, it's both a food and a medicine. And if we can learn from that, can we really use that as our platform for the future of nutrition? At the same time, this was many years ago, I was listening to a podcast about the black market for breast milk in the US and how parents go on the internet to buy breast milk from strangers, but it's really not just parents. It's

athletes, it's cancer patients, it's people from all walks of life who are looking for the bioactives in human milk that you can't get anywhere else. And so I thought, okay, this is, there is something here. Why are people doing that when we have the technology to replicate these bioactives? And we're seeing that in the alt meat and alt dairy. And so that's really where Helena got started in my brain. This is, I don't know, probably

eight, nine years ago at this point. And, you know, it took some time to be able to save money and do what you need to do to start a company, which we did in 2019. And that was the inception of Helena.

Incredible, incredible. So my question to you, Laura, is in terms of looking at the early bioactives, I mean, did you want to sort of explain to my audience because they're probably wondering like, you know, what might be some of these key constituents that are found within like breast milk that maybe people might be familiar with or, you know, produce some of the therapeutic effects?

If we look at breast milk or colostrum, because really a lot of this stuff is concentrated in colostrum, you can break it down into the simple components, proteins, carbs, fat, water.

And if we look at what really has been innovated from human milk and colostrum over the last few decades, it's been on the fats. So omega-3s, ARA and DHA, which I'm sure your audience is familiar with. Those were really developed in the 90s through algae-based fermentation. And, you know, the world has really figured out how to make those accessible.

the sugars in human milk. There is lactose, which of course we all know lactose, it's the sugar in human milk. And then there's also what are called HMOs or human milk oligosaccharides. They're little fibers essentially found in breast milk that are important for our gut. And the industry has figured out how to replicate those in the last 15 or so years. And then what's left here is the proteins.

The proteins are bioactive proteins, which means that they're not just nutritive, they're not just providing calories to our body, but they're providing a lot of other different functions that is really important for our overall growth and development. What's interesting about the bioactives in human milk is that they're not just found in human milk.

They're found throughout our body. And when we started Helena, we really looked at what moves the needle for health outcomes in people who take colostrum or human milk. And these bioactive proteins were both a category of nutrients in human milk that have never been touched or replicated for consumer nutrition broadly. And they also pack a punch. They have the biggest impact and they're found throughout.

So there's a handful of really, really interesting bioactives in human milk. But the first one that we've decided to tackle is lactoferrin, which we'll get into a lot of detail in our product. Afera is a human equivalent lactoferrin that is found

in colostrum, in human milk, in our sweat, in our tears, in our saliva and vaginal secretions, all over the anywhere we have a microbiome, we have lactoferrin. And it just plays such a critical role in our overall gut health, immune health cognition. Yeah, incredible. And just to put it out to my audience, Laura, I guess, maybe I'll sort of share like how I got into lactoferrin, but it's what sort of piqued my interest.

So many years ago, I was investigating ways to optimize iron absorption, metabolism and distribution in the body. And I came across lactoferrin as a unique way to support the body's ability to just self-regulate its iron levels and also help with absorption in the gut.

And then I researched it further and came across some profound research around its beneficial effects on the immune system. And then I'm not going to mention the C word, but I saw some recent studies on it, you know, helping with the virus that was sort of, you know, floating around quite a lot. So lactoferrin, in my opinion, is a superstar bioactive, like an immune, would you consider it like an immune peptide?

Yeah, it's an immune protein. That's what it is. Yeah. So for me, lactoferrin stood out as not only an ingredient that can help with gut health, supporting the growth of beneficial bacteria, regulating iron levels, which I know many people have issues with some sort of iron dysfunction where it might be improper absorption, they can't balance their ferritin levels, things like that.

So maybe do you want to sort of just elaborate on like what piqued your interest with lactoferrin? Was there any particular, I guess, like pathway that excited you? I mean, to me, the mechanism of action, one of the core mechanisms of action that lactoferrin has is its role in binding and transporting iron and effectively allowing our body to use iron. Through that, it does many different things.

What is interesting to me about lactoferrin is, of course, its role with iron and then what it means for our overall immune health. I think to me, what's very interesting about lactoferrin is that it's found throughout the body.

We endogenously produce this and our levels fluctuate through different points of our life. So if we think about other ingredients that have made a really big impact in nutrition, collagen, for example, we endogenously produce it and there's been benefit, you know, we've seen to show supplementing with call it exogenous or out of the body produced collagen. So that is really interesting. We also know humans, ourself,

We produce a lot of lactoferrin in colostrum and in human milk, much more than cows. So the only available lactoferrin in the market today comes from cows because that's where we can get it from. We can purify it out of cow's milk. It's found in such small quantities because

you know, over time from an evolutionary perspective, cows didn't need it as much as we do. And so, you know, the fact that it's in human milk in such high quantities and in colostrum and even higher quantities to me pointed to something that could be really interesting for us to commercialize. And then I'd also say, you know, taking away, you know, and we're purely looking at this from a health perspective, but if we look at the supply chain, it's not the most sustainable to take, you

10,000 liters of dairy, of milk, and turn that into a kilogram of lactoferrin. It's not sustainable. There's only so much the market can make, and the demand is incredibly high. So we've looked at, are there alternative, more sustainable ways to make

this protein, make it more accessible and make a version our body recognizes even better. We know all of the benefits that it has. And I think we're even just scratching the surface on the role it plays in with estrogen because it's an estrogen mediated protein and the impact it can have in women's health. So there was also a lot of when we thought about where do we start as a company? Because there's a lot of really interesting bioactives

It was, you know, all of these things coming together to say, we really think that this is going to be the next most important nutrient of, you know, the next decade of nutrition. And when it comes to like positioning the products, Laura, in terms of like educating consumers about the benefits, like are there like top three benefits that you would like, you're trying to like educate on or like how are you approaching that?

Absolutely. We right now are really focused on the gut barrier integrity and what lactoferrin can do, specifically our product, Afera, to improve our overall gut barrier. And there's a few different ways that this can happen. There's a few different mechanisms of action.

The first thing that it can do is decrease or help to dampen the inflammatory cytokines that may interrupt the gut barrier and may cause disruption in tight junctions. That is really important as we think about things like leaky gut, we think about overall nutrient absorption, which of course happens in the gut.

as well as the ability for lactoferrin to bind iron and bind iron away from the things that may infect us and may cause distress in the gut. And so that for us is a really key focus area right now. And then the other focus area for us is, of course, as you've mentioned, the role it has in interacting with iron.

You mentioned this and it's so true. There's so many people who struggle with iron, whether it's high iron or low iron or poor iron absorption, anemia. Iron is such a key nutrient. It's one of the most critical nutrients that we can consume. It's one of the only nutrients that is required.

required to be labeled on nutrition packs in the US because it has been identified as a nutrient that we constantly see people deficient in and lactoferrin's role in binding and transporting iron can be effective in providing iron homeostasis or balance of iron for people who are either low in iron or have too high of iron levels. So I'd say those are two really big focus areas for us right now.

Yeah, I might also mention as well, this is really exciting because I know a number of like a lot of my audience is hyper obsessed with like the carnivore diet at the moment, which is like, you know, basically they're eating a lot of red meat. And I look at blood work very often. They send me their blood test results. They want me to analyze them and give them feedback. And a lot of the time, funnily enough, even though a lot of these guys are eating a lot of red meat,

they still, some of them have major issues with either ferritin, like as in some guys don't have enough ferritin and don't have enough iron, even though they eat according to their blood test results. So therefore it's like, well, what is the reason for this? It can be due to low stomach acid. Yes, I'm aware of that.

but it could also be related to like they're just not properly utilizing iron. And that's where I've looked at lactoferrin as an integral intervention that can help to resolve this. So did you want to also sort of point out, Laura, like the impact that like free roaming iron can have as it's like it can be a damaging mineral when in elevated amounts. So do you want to sort of talk about how

it can, you know, like feed pathogenic bacteria, things like that. Yeah. And cause oxidative stress, right? Oxidative stress is one of the key things that leads to inflammation.

aging, like our body, it's putting stress on our body where that's one of the key things that can drive inflammation as well. And so lactoferrin can protect cells from reactive oxygen species, ROSs, which is a really important thing to help to mediate our iron levels. Iron-free irons floating around is not necessarily valuable. So this has been suggested through some research

I don't know how definitive, but there's been some correlation between free iron floating in our brain and different types of cognitive decline related diseases. And so as we think about the role that excess iron or free iron plays in our body, having lactoferrin come in and we call it kind of like mop it up, bind it so it's not floating around causing that distress.

could be very impactful for a lot of different people, especially men. We see high iron levels is not so uncommon in men as they age. And so there's a lot of different types of comorbidities that can result out of that. This is a supplement at the end of the day,

We're not curing disease, but we are potentially playing an important role in the iron that is floating around in our body and how we can provide homeostasis or balance to the available iron that's there. Yeah, yeah, fantastic. And in terms of the ability for lactoferrin to...

I guess like, did you want to sort of explain how some pathogenic bacteria somehow like use iron in the gut and sort of explain that process? Exactly.

Our gut is filled with different bacteria, some good, some not so good. And different bacteria require different nutrients to live and grow. So just like we as people need nutrients, the things in our gut need it as well. Lactoferrin's ability to bind and kind of call it take the iron away from the thing that may infect our gut helps to reduce infection.

This is one of the big roles that it plays in a baby. So if we think about a baby drinking milk or a baby building their immune system for the first time,

Everything happens through oral exposure. So the baby's first line of defense is their gut. And so as we've evolved, it's become really important to build things in milk, specifically lactoferrin, that can help protect our gut from infection. And so it takes the iron away from those potentially pathogenic bacteria, which helps to foster the right environment for the good bacteria in our gut to grow.

Also, Laura, in regards to its ability to, does it have the direct ability to stimulate the growth of beneficial bacteria such as lactobacilli and bifidobacteria? So far from what we've seen.

Read in the literature it does and I will also say that we are running research on this as well. So what I can say about a fair specifically is. We've replicated human lactoferrin and what that means is we have the same structure.

So we have the same amino acid sequence, the little building blocks that make up the protein. It's folded and it's kind of creating that exact same 3D structure that we see of the regular one found in our body. And not only that, but we're now showing, okay, does it have the same structure? Does it have the same function?

we are running our own research to look at the micro the microbiome diversity through stool samples that we are analyzing because we've seen in the literature that this

This does, in fact, upregulate good bacteria like bifidose that are really valuable for our gut health or, you know, our gut to function well. And we're now going to ensure that not only does this, we say this looks like a duck, this quacks like a duck, it has feathers. It is a duck. And we're constantly running more research because, I mean, that is our job is people who are really,

Carving the path for nutrition is to constantly be validating and running studies and understanding this better and better and better. Yeah, it's incredible. In regards to the fact that the FRR is like a human equivalent version, does this mean that the dosages comparatively to the cow's milk lactoferrin differs?

or finding that this could be more effective at lower doses for a few different reasons our body actually recognizes this better and has a higher binding of the human version of the protein our product is a fara the human equivalent lactoferrin compared to the cow's milk version we also saw in our clinical study that we ran a little over a year ago we had

the participants take a ferrous human lactoferrin and also an arm that took the cow's milk version of the protein bovine lactoferrin. In that study, we saw that the immune system is producing antibodies against the cow's milk version of the protein, suggesting that it's trying to, you know, get it, remove it from the body. It's producing these antibodies, identifying it as foreign and removing it from the body.

The participants who took Afera didn't have any antibodies produced against the protein. The body recognizes it as ourself.

And so what that means and that would that suggest to us as well is you don't need as much because your body's not fighting against it compared to the cow's milk version. You know, this is also not an allergen and there's a lot of value and benefit to this being human equivalent. But the dose for us we're seeing, you would need less to have just as much or better impact than what's commercially available in the market.

Yeah, incredible. In terms of the study dosages so far, Laura, what have you sort of investigated? We've investigated a few doses and we have more studies to come at different doses at varying levels. At 340 milligrams, we actually did an upper, like a 10X version of that. So we did 3.4 grams because we wanted to evaluate the safety at a really high level and everything looked good. It was incredibly safe.

For us, we want to really understand a strong range, especially when at the end of the day, a customer is taking this and we can't control how much they're taking, we can recommend. And we also have studies currently running at lower doses

And we've seen efficacy between 50 to a few hundred milligrams. So it really depends, especially on the application and the person taking it and the type of benefit and outcome that you're looking for. And typically, are you looking at, is it suggested to be like a course, like an antibiotic course, like a four-week or like a one-week stint? Or is it something that you encourage people to use ongoingly?

We believe this is foundational as we think about maybe other nutrients that we're incorporating into our daily life. This we've seen, um,

really good data to suggest long-term exposure is not just safe, but beneficial, especially as we've seen in target populations where iron homeostasis, for example, is really important if we think about pregnancy, for example, or different points in our life, but something that we believe can be foundational because it's multifunctional. We know that, you know, we take a

Probiotic and that has a specific benefit, or we take a certain nutrient. It has a specific benefit. This has so many different mechanisms of action in the body almost too much because that doesn't make it the easiest for us to explain the value proposition because this lactoferrin does do so much.

through the ways that it works. And we believe that that should be incorporated into a lot of people's, a lot of different demographics, foundational daily nutrition practices. Yeah, remarkable. There was one particular study that I came across, it was probably about a year ago, where they were looking at, I'm not sure if you've ever seen this research, but of course, I'm very passionate about men's health and testosterone optimization.

And I came across an article mentioning how lactoferrin can stimulate or protect the testes of men and to help with testosterone production. At least it was in an animal study. I think it was a mouse or rat study. And I was completely blown away. And then all these other men's health coaches started posting about it. And then they all started experimenting with it. And they were mentioning beneficial effects on their blood work in terms of testosterone.

So that was also another really interesting point that I, I mean, it's not a human study. I'd love to see it replicated maybe with, with your one. But that was really, really fascinating. I mean, if we think about some of the challenge, like through the men's health lens, some of the challenges that men can face from a testicular health perspective, one of the biggest things that comes up is oxidative, oxidative stress and inflammation. Yeah.

So my hypothesis here is that that would be how this is working. But you're spot on. We need to do more research. There's so many things that we want to study in where this nutrient can be really valuable. And I think that what we're building here is the next step.

we can say the next probiotic or the next collagen. We're really the first ones to be pushing this research in such a assertive way to make sure that we're looking at this from all angles. But there's so much that we can uncover here. And I think we're really early days in understanding all the different valuable ways that lactoferrin impacts our health.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I just managed to get the study up on screen. It was actually lactoferrin restoring mold, a type of mold-induced disruption in spermatogenesis. So basically protecting the testes against mold from damaging blood testes barrier integrity. And you mentioned exactly via the antioxidant capacity test.

So yes, spot on. So I think, look, there's many potential applications. I find it really fascinating. In terms of oral consumption, have you looked at, like, I'm actually really curious to know the pharmacodynamics, sort of like, does it enter the small intestine or is it getting absorbed in the stomach? Like, what's the path? It's mostly absorbed through the small intestine. So what we've seen, we've run digestion models ourselves

And we've compared our athera human lactoferrin to the native human lactoferrin. So we purify it out of breast milk and we use that as a control. And we also look at bovine lactoferrin. What we've seen and what we know about the native human lactoferrin is it starts to break down in the stomach into bioactive peptides and they're all well-characterized.

Lactoferrin, for example, is one of the bioactive peptides it breaks down into. But a good amount of that intact lactoferrin is absorbed through the small intestine and it can make its way into the blood intact.

We've seen regular people who've donated blood. We've measured intact lactoferrin in their blood floating around. And so there's a lot of interesting things for us to try to understand there. We also know that it passes through the blood-brain barrier as well.

Yeah, that's awesome. In terms of, yeah, so the fate was sort of mentioned there. We've looked at the iron regulation, we've looked at the immune system. I want to go circle back to gut health. Have there been any clinical studies that have been looked at, investigated in terms of like IBS and or like diarrhea, constipation, that sort of thing?

Yes, that's been a big focus for lactoferrin as we've seen in the literature. We're right now in the process of running a gut study and we've seen the role that it plays specifically what it does in improving the gut barrier integrity and the tight junction proteins in the gut in IBS patients. We've also seen

research, a good amount of really interesting research on infants with neck or necrotizing enterocolitis and the role that lactoferrin plays there in helping to restore the gut. It's a devastating gut-related disease that happens in more commonly premature infants that don't have a developed gut. And when supplemented with lactoferrin, there's, you know, a

a pretty strong improvement in these babies conditions. So the role that it plays in the gut can be really valuable for, you know, a lot of different people with mild GI symptoms. So maybe, you know,

We can call them the walking wounded. They're not necessarily in a disease state, but they have some GI issues, discomfort, distress, all the way through folks with, you know, call it more serious gut-related challenges where the anti-inflammatory properties are really important in helping to regulate the

tight junction proteins and the integrity of our gut. And as well, of course, the antimicrobial properties, right? If we have, you know, call it a acute GI issue. So we face foodborne illness or something like that, something where we have

pathogenic bacteria entering the gut, there's an antimicrobial effect that we see of lactoferrin through its iron binding ability that can help to alleviate some of those challenges. Yeah, incredible. You just got me thinking about a hypothetical food poisoning or traveler's diarrhea protocol. I'm just going to spit it out. I'm just going to share it on the podcast, but I'm thinking of... Yeah. Yeah.

I was going to say the combination of like a number. I'm going to bring together a stack and I'm going to do it live on the podcast because I know my listeners love looking at protocols. And it's theoretical. This is not medical advice. But I'm going to say number one would be activated charcoal.

as like a sweeping effect to just potentially mop up. Number two, I would do delay that maybe like half an hour to one hour later, I would do the FRR lactoferrin because you mentioned the immune, like the balancing effect. And then I would stack that with the Saccharomyces boulardii, which is a really well-known probiotic strain, which you'd be familiar with.

one two three and then i'd also do like a berberine or something like that as because i know that has powerful antimicrobial effects so it's interesting you say this because colostrum which is now becoming really popular if you talk to

I'm going to call them nutrition nerds or even folks probably outside of the U.S. and parts of Asia in particular. People travel with colostrum and they have for decades because they use it for traveler's diarrhea.

And what's in colostrum that's really valuable? There's a lot of things that's complex, but lactoferrin is a really big component. And we've thought about this idea for a while, actually, of using this when you travel as call it like a prophylactic type effect. Hopefully that can help to mitigate any things that come your way or at least help to alleviate symptoms if you have any type of issue when you're traveling.

Yeah, I mean, I'm very confident that it's probably going to be a staple component of my supplement protocol for the next many, many, many years. I don't really see myself withdrawing from usage. I'm probably going to use it like people would use supplements.

Some people take like vitamin D for their immune system. Me personally, I try and optimize vitamin D through sunlight exposure. So, but like I would, I wouldn't say it's comparable to vitamin D, but I know it has the immune benefits that I'm looking for. And there's quite a lot of talk about lactoferrin acting as an antiviral, as an antiviral agent. So do you want to sort of, yeah, expand upon that?

There was actually a group around where you live that is exploring lactoferrin in a nasal spray. How cool. I don't know if you've heard about this, but the idea is that it coats the inside of your nose as you potentially come across airborne viruses and bacteria to help kind of fight against them. There's emerging evidence through, again, through the iron binding properties that can help

To be supportive in times where we may be infected or again, act kind of as like a prophylactic. So preventative idea. And I think that there's a lot of really interesting research to come in that area. There's actually all of the things there's a lactoferrin conference that happens every two years that we'll be at this year. And it's a lot of.

the lactoferrin nerds of the world. And there aren't that many of us and hopefully it grows over time. And we've learned from that. And we've met a lot of folks in this space who are doing some really interesting antiviral research. I really do appreciate and respect different routes of administration. So like if you're looking at nasal delivery, that actually doesn't surprise me to consider it in that format, given that

when people get like the sniffles or they're getting like they're getting a head cold usually they present with with like actually what i've found is like at the onset of symptoms in regards to a typical like cold that people catch it's like usually they get the they start sneezing first and i think about that as like a they start sneezing they get a chill they get cold they're

My dad's mentioned to me that he thinks that it's related to temperature changes in the nasal area that might trigger an imbalance in the immune system. So it doesn't surprise me that something like lactoferrin might be considered as part of like a nasal delivery method. It just really does not surprise me at all. Yeah, nasal spray. I mean, I can tell you all the different ways we've seen it show up in products. I would say the most interesting is

Vaginally, so we've seen. Clinical research to show how lactoferrin can help to. Treat bacterial vaginosis.

Through its ability to fight off infection vaginally, we produce it vaginally. It's produced through vaginal secretions, and it does play an important role in balancing the microbiome of the vaginal microbiome and throughout the female reproductive tract. I think it's interesting. We've also seen lactoferrin toothpaste.

Our saliva contains lactoferrin as an antimicrobial agent, and we think that it could play a role in helping with our oral microbiome and oral hygiene. I think that's a really interesting one. And we've also seen skincare specifically for acne, both beauty from within, so supplement type approaches, as well as in topical applications. So

We think that supplements may just be the beginning of what we're working on, food and dietary supplements. And there's so much opportunity with this. Just like we see probiotics are now everywhere. They started as capsules and

And we find them in skincare, in our foods, in all kinds of things. And I think what we believe and what we're realizing is that we have microbiomes all over our body and they each need their own support to keep us healthy. We have more...

Bugs than we do our own cells and that to me means that anything that interacts with our microbiomes, we know probiotics is fun, but we know lactobacillus is another probably plays an important role in how we think about our supplement. Regiment our oral health, our skin, and we need to be thinking about these really holistically.

Yeah, I really do. I like that. The fact that it's being utilized in different like routes of administration. I mean, the toothpaste pathway for me that I think I'm going to, I know what I'm going to be doing tonight. I'll be sprinkling a little bit of lactoferrin on my, on my toothbrush and,

Yeah, and see what happens. The company that makes it is in Italy, so I don't know how accessible it is, but it's really interesting. We've seen mouthwashes with lactoferrin, so try it. It's a good excuse for me to head back to Italy. I was there last year, so make a holiday out of it. Incredible. Yeah, so in terms of my audience will probably be wondering like,

if they want to get their hands on your specific lactoferrin, some of the notable brands maybe that are utilizing your ingredient,

There's a few things launching soon and so I'll talk about what's public because there are some things that are coming out that aren't public yet. We have a partnership with a great practitioner brand called Healthgevity. It's really practitioner focused, really strong studied ingredients that go into their supplements and you can find us there. We have a product coming out with a

wellness brand that focus on cycle health for women. So it's a women's health protein powder with a ferret in it. The company is called Lavelle Nutrition. We have a partnership with the wellness brand called Chroma and their product's going to come out soon. And there are a few more product launches. So how we work

as a business is we partner with great brands that we believe are going to really well represent what we're doing and also cover and reach different types of audiences. And we sell them our affair. So there's many more products to come. And maybe I would say selfishly for anybody listening to here, if you're interested in working with us, reach out because we want to make sure that we are making this as accessible as possible.

Yeah, that's phenomenal. I might mention, I'll share something that I haven't shared on the podcast before, but my future product ideas that I have for my own supplement range, which my audience will know about in before, that's the new supplement brand. When it comes to a gut health formulation that I'm planning on formulating, I'm very, very, very confident that your lactoferrin will be an included ingredient in my formulation range.

Yeah. Right. And depends on where I will say we, you know, the other thing that we're working on as a business is the regulatory process in every different geography, because our goal is to make human bioactive proteins accessible to every baby and adult in the world. So we're working on Australia and New Zealand right now and a lot of other markets where we think this could be really impactful.

Yeah, yeah. Well, the good thing is a lot of my listeners on this podcast and even like the YouTube, they're about 70% to 80% are US-based. So I'll be launching in the US market. Okay. Yeah. Great. From day dot. No, that's incredible. Was there anything else, Laura, you maybe wanted to share or mention in regards to like future research maybe you're really excited about? Like, yeah, anything else?

There's a lot that we're excited to do. I would say as a startup founder, you see all the possibilities and then you have to focus because you have to really put one foot in front of the other and make sure that you're

you're not doing too many things at once because that's what makes it really challenging to grow a business. So we are just starting our clinical journey. There are so many things that we want to investigate from women's health outcomes to different mechanisms it has in the body, really understanding

how this works with iron at a much more granular level. There's so many studies that we want to run, and we just can't do them all at once. So I would just say that we're very excited to be on this path and to be uncovering, I think, science that no one has really done. I mean, there's preliminary research, as you said, there's a lot of stuff in mouse models and rat models, but

It's clinical data that is really valuable here. And I would just say, if there's anybody listening, we're really open-minded to establishing these partnerships because we can't do this all alone as one company. For us to have the impact that we believe this can have, we need to be working with the best folks across the industry in different areas so that we can be continuing to bring rigorous research and helping people with that.

Yeah, fantastic. For anyone listening to this podcast right now, I will make sure to leave Laura's company in the podcast show notes linked there. If anyone else is also interested, I've already covered an extensive, elaborative YouTube video talking about the beneficial effects of lactoferrin. And actually, funnily enough, I just checked on YouTube. If people search lactoferrin on YouTube, they'll

Now my video will be on the top five, I think, ranked there. So it's got some, like you said, it's a relatively unknown bioactive, but I think with the help of guys like myself and other health educators, we can bring awareness to this incredible thing.

And hopefully we start seeing it be being utilized in different supplement protocols and more practitioners prescribing it and recommending it to their patients instead of just giving them massive dosages of iron.

That's a problem. That's the old school way of treating low iron. - And it doesn't work. I've spoken to a lot of hematologists and they'll say, just taking a lot of iron, you can keep taking more and more, you're not really gonna absorb it, right? It's not effective. And we're seeing more people who get iron infusions

in these medical interventions, which the end of the day is your own decision, but I don't know that that's sustainable to be doing that. I mean, I, you know, now six weeks postpartum, I just had a baby through my pregnancy journey. I, you know, always at every appointment, I'd ask my OB questions about iron because I want to, I think it's really interesting. And

there's no good recommendation. It's take an iron supplement. And I remember I spoke to her about an iron infusion and there's risks. There's risks involved with what that could mean. And so there's just so much opportunity here, especially for people who struggle with their iron.

Yeah, no, it's definitely, I truly do believe it's like a game changer in the iron homeostasis realm. And if any like nutritionist, health coach, anyone that's listening to this podcast knows

I'm not going to tell them to stop prescribing iron, but I'm just going to say there are other ways to restore iron levels. It doesn't have to be through blasting them with big dosages of iron because it has side effects. Some people get the GI upset. There's a reason why you get the GI upset from high dosages of iron. It's not because it's a good thing. It's because it's creating dysfunction. It can cause oxidative damage. So I think it

The body is so smart. Inherently, I think it knows that. I mean, when would you ever get 100 milligrams of iron in one serve without the cofactors if you're taking it in a pill? In Mother Nature, it's basically impossible. Yeah. If you're going to eat red meat, at least it's got some copper. It's got some zinc. It's got some things to balance it out. But

the direct iron supplementation route i think is old school and i think now hopefully people understand this that this is the new way to like restore iron levels um and and with all the other benefits it's got the immune benefits it's got the gut health benefits it's got the antioxidant effects anti-inflammatory antiviral like it's it goes way beyond um so yeah

Well, thank you so much, Laura. Thank you so much for featuring again, six weeks postpartum. It's an incredible effort on your behalf. It's because of, I tell everyone, I'm producing a lot of lactoferrin right now. Probably more than...

I have a lactoferrin expert that lives with me is what I say. So this is, to me, this is so important. We really want to get the message out because we think that this is going to fundamentally advance people's health.

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Well, thanks for coming on the podcast. If anyone's listening to this episode, you will find all the links that I mentioned or if you want to learn more about this particular lactoferrin, it will be linked in the podcast show notes. And as always, if you did enjoy the episode, please leave it a five-star review. It does help with the algorithm. That's it for me today, guys. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.