So, welcome to today's edition of the 2026 Empower Podcast. The podcast is all about empowering you to build your businesses, empowering you to just have a great year. We're excited to be here with Dr. Joe Chang, our chief science officer and chairman of our scientific advisory board. Dr. Joe Chang, thanks for being here.
Thanks, Ryan. Great. Yeah, exciting. 2026.
Unbelievable. The year of the horse, Joe.
Absolutely. The year of the horse.
We're going to gallop, right?
That's right. Year of the snake was all about shedding the skin that doesn't fit.
Now it's all about the horse running. And Joe, so everyone knows you on this call, but I'm going to talk a little bit more about this because every time you and I sit down to talk, I'm always impressed with the accolades and the accomplishments and the degrees. I'm more impressed with your ability over 30 years, well, it's not quite 30 years at Nu Skin, but pretty close, to translate this high science, high pharma background. And we went through on the last podcast, we went deep on your background, but into intelligible, interpretable layman language. Which you did all throughout your book. In fact, The Aging Myth. We're here and that's why we're here together is we're talking about the new edition, the next edition, the updated version of The Aging Myth. So New York Times bestseller, Dr. Joe Chang, significant accomplished scientist and amazing marketer.
Is that a good enough intro?
No, right. Your wife and your fishing expeditions, but yeah, we can talk about that in a different podcast, but right now, let's focus on that.
So, Joe, we were speaking offline and Kathy, we're breaking the fourth wall, said, 'You guys just sit down and have the conversation.' So, that's what we're going to do.
Great. You were just starting out to talk and we talked about The Aging Myth, but let's back up and talk about why did you write The Aging Myth book V1. Yeah. And then why so compelled to update it?
Well, you might not remember the first original book copy of The Aging Myth was actually published in 2011. That's about 14 years now. In fact, going on to 16 years. And there's a lot of things that have happened since then. Right. So when we first started, we're thinking about writing a book or putting together in a book about what we are doing in Nu Skin and how we are using science to really help us not just develop products but to understand our products better. Okay. And one thing led to another because at that point in time we were all sort of including ourselves in Nu Skin were thinking about, yeah, if we make products that can actually alleviate the symptoms of aging, and that's our focus. You know, we're an anti-aging company and so on, that's good enough. Everybody's doing it. It's easy. You know, you cover it up, the symptoms, and then you look good. But we sort of thought, and that's the beauty of the scientific team and what we do here in the ethos in Nu Skin, if you will, is the fact that we like to look a bit deeper. And that's where we want to ask this very simple question. Are there indeed sources of aging in the body? All right. That was the fundamental question that drove us, right? We said, can we do better than just symptomatic relief? You know, everybody's doing it. We can't go get any further than that. So that's where we one thing again looking at the literature looking at what science has produced at that point in time back in the year 2000 and so on we arrive at the conclusion that it's really at the genetic level. We are nothing but a genetic machine. Correct. Everything how we behave how we think and how we function, all those things are driven by genes. And say if that is so, right, if that is so then there's a corollary to it and that is aging must be somewhat built and incorporated within the genetic level. So that's how we started it.
Joe, I remember we were at a strategy offsite in probably 2007 or 8 and I had just returned from Europe and it was over at a building nearby and you came into the meeting and there had been kind of a life event in my view that shaped and changed the Dr. Joe Chang I knew through the Pharmanex acquisition. You were already into prevention versus cure. You made that jump from your pharmaceutical background of curing into prevention with Pharmanex and that's why you founded it and co-founded that. But there was a next evolution and I recall you telling us from a management side about this life event and you specifically were referring to your mother versus your father. Correct. And the way I think your father had some pretty severe ailments, but this felt to me was that was this unlock in your brain of moving now from prevention into almost like causation and we need to get to the root cause of aging and why people age differently. But can you expound upon that, your mother and your father and what and was that what I interpreted?
It was in a sense and every time I see something because being trained in a scientific background I tend to provoke some questions in my mind right. So looking at my parents and you're right my dad was literally he was an invalid for a lot of years more than five years you know. He was alive but he can't do things that a normal healthy person should be doing. He can't even shave on his own. Right. You know he needs...
By what age I mean what...
That's not very old, right? So, I mean, he has to have somebody help him to shave. I mean, if you talk about it for a male, that is a loss of a lot of self-respect, right? So, it's not the quality of life is not there, right? And then on the other side of the coin, I look at my mom and it's always I chuckle. It's because my mom has never ever had a day that she cannot actually scold me, if you will. All right. Her mind and her physical health is that good. She will refuse any help from anybody. Okay. Same age. Yeah. Except one is a mom, one is a dad. What's the difference? Even arguably similar lifestyle choices. They had been married that long. Right. They eat the same food and they go places together and so on and yet, you know, something happened. And that's what triggered my questioning is in the sense that what happened? Why is there so different between both my parents, right? And that's what once again there was another tip or hint that I should be looking at a genetic level because at that time a lot of people think ah there's nothing you can do about the genes. You're born with your genes, you're done. Whatever your genes do, you cannot change. Well, I think the science at that point was starting to tell us you don't change the genes physically. But what you do do or what you can do is to influence the expression of the gene. Yep. Yep. It's a very subtle you know even for a lay person even for scientists even I'm not changing the idea and the notion was not to change the physicality of a gene because that would be I mean that's what cancer is actually is a physical defect at the genetic or a particular gene. No I'm not doing that. I'm just cleaning off the genes in a way because our lifestyle dirty those genes over time.
And that's what people don't understand right I mean we layman perspective which is why the book came to be yes was to help us all understand that. Joe I remember I'm going to get the sequence out of order here of that strategy discussion there were a few other things that stuck out to me so one was this kind of evolution of thought where you said there must be a reason that my mother's aging process and my father's aging outcome is different and you talked about this notion of and I remember you putting it up on the chart lifespan health span. Absolutely. Yes. Let's go into that like because I thought that was truly breakthrough. And by the way, now I listen to all kinds of great podcasters, expert doctors, scientists, Stanford, you know, MDs, and they're literally reciting exactly what you talked about and included your book in 2011. I've even heard lifespan. So showing the lifespan that you length and then this health span notion that and I hear this all the time as though it's novel. This is like 15 years ago 16 17 years ago that you first presented this. So what talk about that?
Well again going back to my parents they both died at roughly the same age. My mother just closed her eyes and say goodbye. Yeah. No pain after scolding me. Yeah. After scolding me. No pain. Yeah. No sitting in a wheelchair, bedridden, nothing. She just closed her eyes and said, 'It's time for me to leave.' My dad had five, six years of being bedridden and having people to help him. Okay. So that's lifespan, right? That is would you really when you start thinking about it, right? Conceptually the sense even if I help you or our science help you live longer but if you don't live it in the healthiest level ever what's the point? Yeah. And that's what driving me more and more and looking at the science it's way more realistic and feasible to help you live as long as you can. Not to live as long as you can at the best at the highest quality of life. So if lifespan is the number of years lived, yes, health span is the healthy number of years that you correct. And in your mother's case, yes, she lived all how many years healthy? 98. 88 years healthy and your father? No, not good. Had a much shorter health span and therefore the degeneration of that was huge.
Going kind of going back to then to that earlier point because most people when it's my DNA it's in my genes. How many times do we hear that that it is in my DNA, it's my genes, and I can't control my DNA. But as you said, and I remember you using the term, so we're going to have to connect dots for me, Joe. But you have this knack, as I said at the beginning, to not just explain complex science, but to put it in a way that we can then market it as a marketer. And you came up with the term, and I remember the first time you said it was in the strategy session, you used the term youth gene clusters. Yes. And you started to explain that guys, your genes, but they function very differently than I think each of us or most of us were taught in school. We've learned new things about these youth gene clusters and how does that relate to what we're talking about with DNA and what's fixed, what's variable, what can we influence, what we can't.
And again, right, we have roughly around 25,000 genes in our body. Okay? And many folks have been going around when they tout a certain paradigm or a certain concept. Oh, it's all because of one gene, right? Okay. Is this particular gene I'll use a specific example. Oh, it's a sirtuin gene. Well, yes, but the body is too complicated. Okay. The body is a multifactorial system. You cannot just assign the whole aging process to a single gene. It's not possible in that sense, right? It's a symphony. Mhm. And therefore we start thinking we have to think in terms of groups of genes and that's where we came up with the youth gene clusters. These are the clusters and this was backed up. So happened we were lucky to establish a collaboration with University of Wisconsin with some geneticists over there and they also subscribed to this notion that it's about clusters of genes and so on. So we got into collaboration with them. They are more into the basic understanding whereas we in Nu Skin we are more in terms of applied we like to use that knowledge to develop products. So it was a good marriage and then combination. So we came up with that using clusters to explain.
And that partnership. This is exactly where I'm going to go because the other two things at that strategy session that you showed us that blew my mind. Yeah. And we'll talk about them in this order but or whichever order you want that make sense. One was the monkey study that literally I think truly anchored it in all of our minds. It was like here's my mother father experience then it's taken into the lab with the monkey study and then the third layer of that was with LifeGen Wisconsin was the heat mapping correct process that you guys went through those discoveries for me were and again we're spending all the time on literally 15 year old science and we're going to springboard this into now what's changed in the last 15 years but maybe touch on the monkey study and this heat mapping of how we actually measure that because that was to me breakthrough and continues to be breakthrough. I haven't seen anything.
No, it's a couple of things. The monkey was perhaps the duplication. I think everybody on this call or podcast will understand what I mean by duplication, right? We want it science is about reproducing something. It cannot be a once off phenomenon and we can never repeat it. So when we saw the monkey study and that's why we established a collaboration with the University of Wisconsin scientists is because they were the ones who had that colony of primates. Yeah. Okay. And I'm trying to remember if we had a picture keep going. I think in the book there's a picture somewhere. And essentially what happened Dr. Weindruch mentioned oh we have this colony of primates have been keeping for the last 20 years. I say what are you doing with primates for 20 years? Oh we're not doing anything. We're just observing them. We're not doing surgery on them or whatever. We're just feeding them whatever and we're just going to study their lifespan. They all related to each other. They all about the same age and so on. And say, 'Well, let me show you a picture.' Yeah. The picture. That's what I was looking for. The picture was unbelievable. Let me show you a picture of...
And they were twins or they were brothers?
Brothers. They were brothers. Two brother primates. Yeah. They were brothers born within less than six months of each other.
Weren't they like 30 years old? Yeah.
And he showed me and I said, 'Joe, what do you think?' I said, 'That monkey on the left.' Yeah. Oh my goodness. It looks so frail. It looks like he's only at one foot in the grave. In fact, it's that bad. This fur is all scraggy and it's unbelievable. It looks horrible. Right. So, and then I said, 'The right one, oh my goodness, that looks like a really vibrant primate.' And I think it's so strong. And he said, 'Well, they're the same age, you know.' I said, 'What?' Yeah. What happened? He said, 'Well, the monkey on the left actually was what we did was at that time he calls it we restricted the... we say one we caloric restrict and the other one he can eat whatever he wants.' Yeah. And the one on the left, the one that looks scraggy and all was the one that's eating anything that he wishes. Yeah. And caloric restriction wasn't just about the calories. It was the nutrient value of the caloric diet. Correct. Other insight that we tend not to remember, right? And that is you restrict calories. You do not restrict micronutrients, the vitamins, the minerals of the world that you have to keep, you know, and that's what Weindruch did and that monkey was it. It really was amazing.
But then as you know, you always take this complex science and these results and then you put it in real terms and it's you know my grandmother used to always say you are what you eat. Yes. You know anytime I grabbed a candy bar she's like Ryan if you keep eating those candy bars what's going to happen? You're going to get fat, right? But not only that it's probably even more than that the sugar impact the impact of sugar on overall enzyme production at the cellular or at the genetic level we can in fact influence the... How would you define that? We you can't influence your gene like you are born with your genes but you can influence...
We can influence the expression. The expression gene expression. There's only one thing people and technically I mean there's only one thing genes do there's only one thing it doesn't do anything and that is to produce a protein. And that protein can function in many many different ways depending on the gene an enzyme is a protein. Structural collagen is a protein it's a genetic product and so on you know. So it controls all kinds of things and that's the function that's the outcome of genetic expression. So and if that is so and what we find and typically this is what happened at the different level at the functional level we starting to see some of these proteins the level go down.
So let's talk about how you see that and again we're talking about the heat mapping. So because we're going to build into now devices into the future, but back in 2010, you and Wisconsin together had developed this heat mapping, right? The genetic heat. So we can see that, right? So these heat map cluster, right? So yeah. So talk about Joe this heat mapping thing.
So the color is heat map. I mean, even in marketing, I believe it's not just restricted to science. A lot of people use heat maps to explain certain things, right? But it's just a different color that we use to denote the expression level of particular gene. There are hundreds of genes in there, not thousands. Literally, each little rectangle in there represent a single gene. And I stopped counting after the 10. So anyway, so the red shows a gene that's highly active and the green shows a gene that is not that active and different shades of that in between. Right. So once we and we can measure it now that's where the technology came in. Yeah. You see is that now we can measure it on a biochip and all these things all these are produced by looking at biochips. It's like a computer chip literally. It's like a computer except they put DNA on it to assess that part because gene is a snippet of a DNA. So we just put that on and any gene that will come it will bind to that. Yeah. So simply put.
What fascinates me and you know obviously being in the beauty and wellness industry the vast majority of beauty companies or wellness companies tend to find science that's already been articulated or defined and then they effectively build products based on that proven science. Yeah. You know, having been here for 30 years now and watching you work for the last 27 28 years where you've invented science or at least you've discovered new breakthroughs through novel approaches, heat mapping or otherwise to then find the youth gene cluster and then build solutions. I don't think people fully understand that's highly unusual to discover and then all the way go to market, isn't it? I mean, that's more pharmaceutical it than it is typical beauty or wellness.
Yeah. And again, it's driven by the fact that the current science at that point in time doesn't allow me to do better develop better products. You know, if I it's like if you keep on repeating what you do, you're always going to get the same result, right? So that drives us the team to go in and look for new science or new insights. Mhm. And that's insight we came out is the genetic level. It's the gene expression.
Yeah. It's fascinating. Okay. So before we flip the chapters to now again so what's happened in the last 14 years that you're so excited about have we left anything out of the first of the journey up until from 1996 or so until 2011 in the book I mean these to me those are my highlights but is there anything else?
Not really on the science side I think it covered all the bases. We only discovered through the science side that genes can be the expression of the genes can be impacted by our lifestyle habits. You could ask so what, right? You think, well, the so what is that AgeLOC that we put it all under that particular umbrella, it developed and it generated over $10 billion worth of revenue.
Yeah, it's unbelievable. Product sales literally and we always have this weird from a marketing side, we always talk about is AgeLOC is it a brand? Is it a set of products? Is it a brand? Is it a science? Yeah. Or is it literally like a revolutionary breakthrough that is just reshaped the way products should be built at the end of the day. And I think that's pretty amazing.
Yeah. As you said, $10 billion in revenue, right? It's all of the above. Who would have thought, right? And surely you can also conclude the fact that there's no way you can generate that kind of revenue if those products didn't work.
No, that's true. That's true.
Is it not? Right. You can sort of pull wool over somebody's eyes one time. It's hard to pull twice or the third time.
Yeah. And so this scientific approach actually translated to you know this discernable and very products that actually work. So that's good. So that's good. It turns out that that matters, right? It's not a marketing slogan that matters. It's a product that works. Okay, Joe. So that was 2011. Yes. So the last 14 years whenever we talk you are more excited today than you were in 2011 when you wrote the book or in 1996 and Pharmanex. Although you're always pretty excited about what you're working on. What has happened since then with respect to the aging process with respect to the aging myths that are out there that kind of hold us back? I mean what are the big breakthroughs? In other words, what's contained in the book since okay 2011?
14 years is a lifetime in science. So there a lot of things happen but it comes back to a very simple question. We get all these huge gene clusters they're all changing and we can get all these heat maps. Okay. What does it actually mean in terms of functionality? It's sort of a translation issue you know and we are all beginning to realize yeah we can talk about gene expression and all that but at the end of the day it could well be too abstract an idea you can't relate to it that much but more importantly even for the scientists we have to figure out when you have a change in gene expression what is the function or functionality that follows that change. I'll give you an analogy, right? Back 150 years ago, we all went, well, our ancestors anyway, we go to Egypt and we go and look at the pyramids and we saw all these funny cartoons written on the wall and we call them hieroglyphics. And we thought it doesn't mean anything. It just so happened some Egyptian artist at that point in time 5,000 years ago decided to decorate the pyramids and start drawing these figures. We never knew it was a language. We never knew that. Then in 1850 or thereabouts 1830 1850 Napoleon conquered Egypt. And that little guy had a scholar with him archaeologist go and bring back all the artifacts and they found a slab of stone. This slab of stone is not the whole stone just a slab had three languages on it or three things written on it. The top bit they recognize immediately to be the hieroglyphics. Okay. And then the middle bit was ancient Greek and then the bottom bit was more modern Greek which even now you can read it very well. You don't need a scholar to be able to read that. Most people can read it. So you have three things and they were all talking about the same subject and topic. Wow. Wow. That was the impetus and that was the dictionary, whatever you like to call it, that translated the hieroglyphics and say it means something. Now we're beginning to understand and know what the pharaohs were doing back 5,000 years ago.
Was that the Rosetta Stone?
That is called the Rosetta Stone.
Okay. It's not a language app.
It's not a language app. That's why they use it for language.
I guess it was the early version of the language. Yeah, they used a giant stone.
Yeah, giant stone. But they use... That's fascinating. Is in a British museum, right? That's the translation. So when I think about that, I say I maybe after 14 years I think I've got it that we can translate that AgeLOC the gene expression language and it will reveal even more insights into how we age. All right? Because now I can link it to the biochemistry that's happening in the body, the physiology that's happening in the body, you know, how the skin behaves at the functional level, not at the genetic level. I've raised it and then be able to use that translation to develop new and better products too and starting to understand which area what exactly when we talk about these youth gene clusters which area of function is it referring to. In fact that actually what led us to develop Meta.
Because I was going to say let's dive a couple of examples on that but one of my favorites is AgeLOC Youth right or Youth Span lifespan that one and then Meta has been a second favorite but maybe define like how does this science apply to those two products.
Okay well Youth when we develop it that's a culmination of the AgeLOC approach in fact that one we felt we have enough knowledge and what happened is we apply that knowledge and start using the knowledge to screen a variety of ingredients and again the same approach applies here. Not a single ingredient can do a lot. You notice many of our products here in... Right. It's always a blend. Always a blend. Always a blend. It's never a single ingredient and we're going to say that's the mother of all ingredient that can do everything. No, the science doesn't tell us that. So, and then after, you know, three or four years of working with University of Wisconsin, we had enough knowledge to select about 20 ingredients, I believe. Yeah. That we can actually say if we put these 20 ingredients in the right way, we have Youth.
So, is that a product that's built to activate a certain set of youth gene clusters or is that too narrow?
Throughout the body. So, that focus on a particular organ...
And I remember Joe, I've taken that product religiously. You came to Japan shortly after we launched and you did that tour with us and you and I asked you one night. I said, 'Joe, if you could only take one product the rest of your life, which one would you say?' And you said Youth because it's optimized for it. Now, we have some all amazing products, but I so I've been taking it every day since then. Yes. Off of your recommendation, and I have to tell you, I think it works really well. Yeah. And we're going to talk about how to measure what works in a little bit because you have a chapter on that. But so, so that's amazing. What about Meta?
Yeah. Meta then it also drove us then to say you know something is happening in the body right with Youth and so on what is it affecting and we started to look and in general we managed to encapsulate all the things is driving what they call the biochemistry in the body. Okay the chemistry and if I take it one step further to something that we can all relate to is actually about metabolism. Yeah for sure. All right chemistry is metabolism everything chemical reactions happening in the body so and say Well, we're now talking about metabolic health. Yeah. All right. That's an area we should get into. That's an area I think we have enough knowledge to go develop a product that is really focused on metabolic health. Okay. So, and that's how we develop. And in fact, what is it now? Oh my goodness. We did Meta about five or six years ago. Yeah. There's now a company out there that's trying to reposition itself into the world of metabolic health.
Yeah. It really is amazing how many of these discoveries have actually turned into multi-billion dollar businesses. I mean to your point for us tens of billions for or at least 10 billion for other companies that are trying to literally take one simple breakthrough or not simple but one breakthrough and turn it into billion dollar industries. And Meta is that is that Joe I was just looking because chapter nine so you added three chapters to this book and chapter nine is specific so we skipped eight but it's unlocking power but your end factors so that's where you dive to metabolic, microbiome and what was the other one? Mental wellbeing. That's right. Coming to this. So, so from the aging process, so everyone understands if we dove a little deeper on metabolism. Yeah. Or even microbiome, right? The gut. Yeah. I don't think the layman myself would ever ascribe microbiome or metabolic health to longevity or health span instead it's I always think caloric calorie burn metabolism is all around burning the calories getting energy and losing weight. Yes. How does it relate to health span?
Okay. So let's go back to the monkey study. What was the intervention if you will in that particular study? It was all about nutrition, right? Yes. Albeit they focus on calorie reduction if you will, but it's still something to do with it's related to nutrition, right? That was the first insight that we had. Okay. So, and then when they say it's rather vague nutrition, what on earth does that mean? Right? But it was enough to let us know. And then they're looking at other studies that they came along and so on. We started to say well when you eat what happened I mean it's an energy equation. Yeah. The energy is in the food. You have to convert that into energy for the body. How does it do it? It goes into the stomach. It gets absorbed. It gets metabolized. Yeah. Right. So that's really one thing led to another. That's the connection of the dots if you will and therefore it's something related to metabolism and metabolism governs a lot about metabolic health.
Joe, this is fascinating. So for me, you're connecting dots for me because when you first described the monkey study 15 years ago and you said they had a calorically restricted diet, I didn't understand the translation to longevity or to healthy longevity. Maybe, you know, it wasn't they were living longer, but the health span again was better. But you're saying, listen, all aging is a metabolic process. Yeah. And therefore, when we talk about the impact of metabolism, are you referring I maybe that's the clarification is when you talk about metabolism, we're not referring to it solely as a caloric restriction.
Oh, no. Yeah. Okay. All the different types of biochemistry that is occurring with carbohydrates with proteins with lipids and so on. Yeah. Okay. Carbohydrates unfortunately it's very much of the caloric restriction notion but there are other things that the metabolic health involves as well. Okay. So yeah okay the whole thing.
And maybe before we shift off of for me metabolism and food always goes hand in hand again as a layman. Yeah. Chapter eight was all about the food intake into that. So I want to make sure we touch on that as well and the importance of food. Maybe that relates to the microbiome will naturally take us there. But how do you connect those dots? I guess how do you take chapter 8 to chapter 9?
Fine. I just follow what you put in your mouth. Okay. You put... I just think more than we think. More than you think anyone understands what we put in our mouth. We think it's straightforward but no we take the food goes in your stomach right there's some acid but really all the digestion happens in your lower intestine and that's where the absorption happen. How does it get absorbed how does it get degraded the food is not going to go in let's say a potato chip I'll use the words it's not going to go straight through into the bloodstream it's got to be digested right and get converted to carbohydrates something smaller that can go through the intestinal wall. Who's doing that? Yeah. Yeah. Who's doing that? Why are there so many bugs living in our gut? Why are they there? They're foreign. We have more bugs in our gut than our own cells. Do you know? Yeah, that's disgusting. Yeah, that's disgusting. Why did we evolve to a state where we let a foreign agent living in our body? Over the years. In fact, this is as an aside. In fact, one of those things actually got itself incorporated into our cell and it became the mitochondria. That's another story. Yes. We're talking evolution back. Yeah. Decided to stay that mitochondria form of a was a of our microbiome or no was a different type of bacteria type somehow it went to sneak itself into the cell and they say well if you're going to live here I might as well make use of you so I'm going to make you as an energy battery so live with me forever and now we call it a mitochondria. So anyway so the bugs are there they serve a very useful purpose.
And then when you look at some of the clinical evidence, why do you think that when people get antibiotics when they take antibiotics chronically for a month, they get diarrhea? Yeah. Invariably kills every time. It's killing everything. It kill everything. It's not specific, right? So therefore, once you get rid of your diarrhea, once you get rid of your bacteria, you get diarrhea. There's something not good. So your bacteria flora is a very important part of you and it's helping everything not only to break down and digest but then you kill that off. Yeah. Nothing's digesting.
Nothing digested. That's the problem. Yeah. That's the most evident benefit of a bacteria. But the last 14 years we have learned they do more than that. Yeah. They do way more than that.
So before we get to the what do they but getting into that I remember you and I were traveling in China and you said hey one day we were down in the breakfast at morning and you said hey Ryan do you know how to get the good bugs? This is before microbiome was a big conversational topic for ordinary people non-scientists right and I said no no how like how because I was you know I was concerned sensitive stomach whatever and you're like eat the local yogurt the first thing you should do Ryan wherever you go is eat the local yogurt so again something I do now in every place I go is I always try to find local yogurt why when you talk about replenishment is that replenishing my microbiome or is that...
No that what's that doing it's adapting your microbiome to the local environment.
Say more of that. What does that mean?
That means my microbiome is every place around the world. They either don't eat the same diet as you do here in Utah, or the environment, the foods that they have and so on are very different. So they have developed a microbiome. A microbiome, by definition, is a population of bacteria that lines your gut. That population varies. There are hundreds of bacteria that can populate your GI tract. So if you go to a place like Mexico, they have a slightly different microbiome. So when you go there, that microbiome has adapted to accommodate the foods that they eat. So if you don't adapt your microbiome to it, that food could create some problems for you.
So to clarify, that is when I'm eating that yogurt or whatever the local food is, they're bugs. So I guess I'm putting new bugs in, the local bugs that will help me now adapt my diet.
