Episode 60: Studying the Biomarkers of Professional Football Players

Joel Totoro:

This is the Thorne Podcast Performance Edition. The show that navigates the complex world of sports science and explores the latest research in diet, nutritional supplements, and the human body. I'm Joel Totoro, Director of Sports Science at Thorne. As a reminder, statements in this podcast have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Any products mentioned are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Joel Totoro:

Hello, everybody. And welcome to the Thorne Podcast Performance Edition. We're excited to welcome back friend of the pod, Dr. Laura Kunces. Dr. Kunces is the Senior Vice President of Medical Strategy at Thorne. She hold a PhD in exercise science, a master's in both kinesiology and nutrition and is a registered dietician. Obviously, a wealth of information and one of my all time favorite colleagues. Welcome back, Laura.

Laura Kunces:

Hi, Joel. Thank you. Nice to be here.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah, we've got a ton to get to today and I think we could probably record about 10 podcasts worth of episodes. But today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about recent publication in The Journal of Strengthened Conditioning Research that you worked on, that looked at the nutrient status of NCAA athletes entering the NFL draft. Can you talk a little bit about how that project came to be and what your initial goals were?

Laura Kunces:

Yeah. So it's really funny. A couple years ago, we had a great opportunity to work with the football guys who had just the left their collegiate season, it was January of the year, and they were all training at the same facility for the NFL Combine. So about six or eight months before this project actually started, we were like, "Hey, this is a really unique group of people. And there's really little research on these people in between this collegiate season and the NFL career." So we put together a study, knowing that we would've access to these guys. And a lot of us got around a table and started brainstorming what we wanted to do. And we had these grandiose ideas and the budget was really high.

Laura Kunces:

And we were thinking to ourselves, "We only really have like seven weeks with these guys. So they're going to come in, they're going to train, we're going to do something with nutrition, and then they're going to go off to the NFL Combine," which for anybody who doesn't know what that is, it's essentially like the biggest tryout of your life, the biggest interview for the NFL draft. And so, yeah, the study came about. We initially really wanted to do, like I said, something grandiose. So we wanted to do blood draws, we wanted to do performance measures, we wanted to do strength measures, speed, essentially like a mini Combined, but we really paired it down to just focus on nutrition this time.

Joel Totoro:

One of the important things to mention is that these guys were all coming from Power 5 conferences, where they have a slew of sports, dieticians, they have strength and conditioning, physical therapy, sports psychology, just really surrounded by unlimited feeding. Right? So just surrounded by all the ability to be, as ideally fueled as possible. What were some of, kind of your expectations going into it? What did you think we were going to see? And then we'll talk about what we actually found.

Laura Kunces:

Yeah. So it's funny you say that, they did come from... They were cherry picked, right? So each team only sends a few guys maybe at best to the NFL Combine. So these were the best of the best from every team. So it's essentially cherry picking from every team and the collegiate, at least the teams that are probably ranked. So yeah, going into this study, I had great expectations. I was thinking to myself, "You know what, these guys are literally at the peak of their career, pretty much everybody just came off of a bowl game, everybody's in the best physical condition of their life," that I was like, "This is going to be kind of a boring study. We're just going to pull blood from these guys and they're going to be Like, 'Okay, everything's great. Wonderful.' But it was quite so surprising. And it was a little bit the opposite, I would say.

Laura Kunces:

And it's really funny because we were looking, and just anecdotally, we didn't really capture this in the study, but we were asking guys like, "How do you feel?" Like, "What's going on? Are you sleeping good? Are you eating well? What's going on with you?" And really these guys had no complaints. It was like, they were nervous, they were anxious, they had seven weeks before this interview, and so across the board, I would say a lot of these guys were feeling like A okay and at the top of their game. So it was quite surprising when we actually dug into the study and dug into their results, what we saw.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. And I think that's another thing to kind of tell our listeners about. So the Combine is all they do for seven weeks, right? They live together, they have meals prepared for them, there's no focus of school, there's no academics. It's legitimately train, rest, recover. Right? So I think a lot of times we, and even people working at the elite level, we confuse fit with internally healthy and optimal. So I think it's going to be interesting. So actually know what let's just dive into it. Let's just talk about some of the things you found and some of the really surprising outcomes we found.

Laura Kunces:

First, I would say, one of the most surprising thing is, that not everybody likes needles, believe it or not. A lot of these guys were like, "Wait a second. I have to get poked by that?" And of the 30 guys that we looked at, I would say anecdotally, a lot had never had the like drawn before. So, first and foremost, that was just straight up surprising. But we pulled 79 selected biomarkers. So we went into this like study with no sort of preconceived notion of what we were going to find, we just wanted to do a pretty optimal panel that a person, an athlete, whoever, could get done at like a Quest Diagnostics or through their doctor. So nothing super, super specialty, but something that probably should be done at like a yearly physical. So of these 79 biomarkers, across the board, I would say at least one person, if not more was suboptimal for what American standard ranges are for different biomarkers.

Laura Kunces:

So, I mean, we looked at things like cholesterol, we looked at hormones, we looked at a few different inflammation markers like hs-CRP, homocysteine, we looked at the general insulin resistance markers, like regular serum glucose, insulin, hemoglobin A1C. We pulled a few different vitamins, just a few B vitamins, vitamin D, some minerals like red blood cell, magnesium, calcium, ferritin, zinc. And we also did a unique panel, which is a red blood cell measure of fatty acids, which does the entire composition of your red blood cells, what they're made up of fatty acids. So it's a really big breakdown of, I think 24 or 26 different fatty acids, but it will give you Omega 3s and DHA and EPA, AA and every other fatty acid that you could possibly name. (silence)

Joel Totoro:

As we kind of dug into it, there was kind of like five major biomarkers that we saw kind of pretty consistently low, which I know surprised me, especially having worked at that level. We had done some work with vitamin D and I was surprised at how low those were, but it was winter in Michigan, so I was like, "Okay." But these guys were from all over the country, they were training outside in Arizona. Can you talk a little about those five specifically, I think were really insightful.

Laura Kunces:

Yeah. So across the board of these 79, if there were one or two people abnormal within the ranges, we didn't necessarily think it was too alarming. But across the board, the majority of guys, and when I say the majority of guys, I literally mean like 97% of these guys had a low Omega 3 Index. Okay. So Omega 3 Index is the measure of omega three fatty acids in those red blood cells. And most people probably want that around eight to 10%, and our guys we're averaging right around 4%. So we're looking at things that are going to change a slew of different ways in the body. And we can get into that specifically. But we saw homocysteine, which is an inflammation marker to be elevated in the group of these guys significantly so, and I think that was around 40% of the guys had elevated homocysteine when comparing that to a regular standard reference range.

Laura Kunces:

Vitamin, he was low in most of these guys. And as you mentioned too, right, like they are practicing outside, but it is winter, it was January. And most of these guys, when they are outside, they have full clothing on, helmets, everything, so very little skin exposure out to the sun, if anything. So that wasn't super, super surprising, but we also saw low red blood cell magnesium level, and then we also saw elevated AA to EPA ratio, which is the arachidonic to eicosapentaenoic acid. So those five biomarkers across the board averaged anywhere, like I mentioned, between like 81%, 97% of the guys being abnormal. And so what's also was super interesting is that we kind of took this blood panel, as I mentioned, and went through it, and we were like, "What are the similarities between these biomarkers that were abnormal?" Like, "What pathways are these influencing?" Like, "What are these guys now at risk for now that these are all like abnormal or out of range?"

Laura Kunces:

And coincidentally, these all have significant impact to brain function and networks, metabolic networks that might affect concussion if or when these guys were to get one. And they're in a sport where they have the highest risk of concussion. These guys, NHL or hockey players, soccer nowadays has really high instances of concussion. And so thinking about putting these guys on the field in a sport where they're more likely to have a concussion with suboptimal levels of biomarkers that are going to be influencing the outcome of the concussion just seems mind boggling.

Laura Kunces:

So we had to think about these biomarkers in a different reference range, right? Like we shouldn't be comparing them to the reference ranges that somebody like I'm using, or my mom or somebody of a general American status, we should be thinking about these in the sense of like, "What do athletes in concussion instances, like what levels should they be at for optimal outcomes?" And so, through the literature, we were able to find some references that were suggesting different, tighter, or higher, or lower reference ranges than what the general American population would be compared to. And so we actually saw that these guys across the board, 90 to a hundred percent of the athletes did not meet those ranges in these five specific biomarkers that we looked at.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. So I think kind of it's alarming and these are things that people generally don't get access to. Right? You get your pre participation physical and that checks make sure sickle cell gene isn't there, maybe if you're lucky your university is this test vitamin D. But this whole idea of the nutrients that kind of fuel brain health, making them kind of adequate to start with, I think is kind of an emerging topic. And I think it's one of those things those of us in the sport have always assumed there was some sub optibility there, to prove it and to really see it in your face like that, was pretty alarming. So for our listeners, I think the one we hear about the most, and are more likely to interact with is the idea of Omega 3 Index. Can you talk a little bit about what that is, what that means? And some of the ways to kind of support that in the diet bowls, food and supplement and whatnot?

Laura Kunces:

Yeah. Omega 3 Index it's probably one of the coolest biomarkers that people don't test often enough, is what I would say. It's really inexpensive to do and it will give you a ton of information. Actually, it has applicability beyond concussion, beyond athletes. It's actually a biomarker that pregnant women should be looking at, or kids growing up in their cognitive abilities. Omega 3 Index has really big associations with cognitive flexibility, with mood and sets up that postpartum depression. So pregnant women, it has different associations with personality, there's a lot of military studies with Omega 3 Index, also with brain function.

Laura Kunces:

And there's high associations of a very low Omega 3 Index with high rates of suicide too. So it's an actually... There's a lot going on in the brain and the brain needs the capability of the cells to be working at their optimal functioning capabilities and structure really dictates how function can work. And so making sure that the structure of every cell is really optimized will work in your benefit. So I think Omega 3 Index is one of those biomarkers that if you have the capability of measuring it, that you should.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. And then is the answer just supplement? How do you figure out what the right Omega for you is?

Laura Kunces:

Yeah. That's a great question. So there are some really cool calculators online to help you figure out like how many grams or milligrams of what type of Omega 3 you should be taking. So whether you should be focusing on DHA, or EPA, or combination of the two, there are ways to do that. So there are things online where you can type in your level and then the level that you want to get to, and it will spit out like a calculation for you. So you might only need to be taking 1000 milligrams or one gram, and I might need to be taking double that. And I personally think the best way of measuring this is to measuring it on like a consistent basis. And so your red blood cells have a turnover rate of around three to four months. And so I wouldn't necessarily test it any sooner than that, and I wouldn't go too much longer than that, if you are looking to optimize it. So every three to four months, which really works well for some athletes and they're in and out of season schedules.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. So we talked a little bit in this study, obviously because of the risk factor involved in playing football and TBIs and concussion. But those nutrients are our brain nutrients, right? So like if I have a brain I'm using it, I need those nutrients as well. Right?

Laura Kunces:

Of course, yeah. This is not just for athletes or for people in high risk situations. Like I mentioned, I think there is a normal reference range for the standard American and it's the same sort of situations that these biomarkers are related to, things that are related to your mood, your anxiety, depression, brain function, things like plasticity and learning and memory. A lot of these biomarkers that we found abnormal are going to influence so many pathways, things like platelets and how you clot with your blood. I mean, just, all of these pathways are connected, which is the funny thing. Right? And so when you think of Omega 3 Index and you look up the research, you're going to see a lot of research on cardiovascular disease. And NFL athletes are at high risk for cardiovascular disease, especially in their retirement years just from being like larger individuals. But if you think about the pathway and you think about what the mechanisms are happening, it really does boil down to influencing so many other pathways because they're all so connected.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. So the question we usually get when we try and like apply learnings that we have in a professional athlete group is, we always get the question, "Well, I'm not an athlete, does that apply to me?" So is part of this just because their needs are so much higher or can we go the other way and be like, "Hey, they had every access to..." We all know what it's like trying to fit a perfect meal plan into our regular schedule. Right? So they had access, they were doing it for them all this stuff. And is it the other way? Is it, "Yes, they have higher needs, but they also had higher access." So what does this mean to the average person, the weekend warrior, the casual exerciser?

Laura Kunces:

Yeah. It's like the chicken and the egg conundrum. So I think it's a little bit of both. Like yes, athletes have higher needs in some instances, I do think that the average person should be just as concerned about biomarkers in general. I think all too much, we think about athletes in the sense that like, "How can we get them healthy today?" Or "How can we get them healthy for the game on Saturday?" Whereas, we really should be thinking about like, "How can we extend their career to the next year? How can we make sure that they're going to make the Olympics four years from now? How can we make sure that they're still playing in next decade?"

Laura Kunces:

We're too much in the focus of here and now, but we ultimately like they're humans, their health matters just as much as any individual. And we always should be thinking about that as people who aren't professional athletes. I'm not a professional athlete. We should be thinking about things like, "How can I make sure that I am not needing to see a doctor a hundred times a year when I'm 50 or 60?" It's like, what things can you be doing now that will prolong some of the age related issues that typically come about later in life?

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. I think listeners of the podcast will recognize, I often say that over the years of working in human performance, I found a majority of my impact has been at what I call the human level. Right? You have to be a human before you can be a human performer. So two of the biomarkers in the study, magnesium and vitamin D, I think a lot of people are relatively aware of the idea of vitamin D and that it's a poor food source, and if you live in the Northern climate or you wear sunscreen. Magnesium, I think is we're finding as prevalent, if not more, depending on the person in a suboptimal to even, we see it clinically low in athletes. Can you talk a little bit about the role of magnesium, and kind of how important it is?

Laura Kunces:

Yeah, I think magnesium is probably one of the most undervalued minerals in the body. I think I read a statistic somewhere that it's involved with like 400 plus different reactions or chemical processes in the body. But I mean, in the brain, it's doing a lot, it's doing [inaudible 00:17:13] learning, memory, et cetera, but in the muscles it's helping them relax, which also includes your heart. It has effects on your bone, it has effects on your GI tract, it has effects on your skin, your hair, your health, it's super important.

Laura Kunces:

And I think a lot of people don't get enough of it because it is in fruits and vegetables, yes. But it is in the like nuts, and I find a lot of people have an allergy to certain foods, or they're avoiding food groups, or it's just one of those foods that like people don't always think about and get enough of. So I think that magnesium supplement is something that is generally a great option for a lot of people, it's in my own supplement plan, to be honest. And so I do think it's one of those undervalued nutrients, especially for general Americans as well.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. And I would say it's hard to pick your favorite supplement or nutrient, it's like picking your favorite child, but magnesium is very high on my list as well. So Laura, we're coming up on the halfway point. Normally we take a break here, and get to some listener questions. Anything else kind of about the study you kind of want to make sure to mention? Or any findings that kind of surprised you, or you think are important to talk about?

Laura Kunces:

I would say that one thing that we did do with this study was that we did take this information and we optimized the athletes plan afterwards. So if anybody reads the study and they're like, "Oh wow, you found this information. What did you do with it?" We did. So don't worry. These guys got like a nice precision nutrition plan afterwards that included diet, supplementation, and even some other additional like lifestyle type suggestions to help optimize some of these factors. One of the things we didn't specifically touch on was homocysteine and just how there is a genetic component to some of these measures that we looked at. And while we didn't do genetic testing in these guys, I do think that, that's something that would be nicely paired with biomarker testing in athletes and general people. So it is something to consider when you are doing this.

Joel Totoro:

Awesome, like you said. So much information to get through, but we're going to take a short break here. And when we get back, like I said, we're going to get into some questions from our listeners. So we'll be back shortly. (silence)

Joel Totoro:

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Joel Totoro:

And we're back. All right, Dr. Kunces, let's get into some questions from our audience. So we get this a lot and you briefly touched on it earlier, but we get the question of, "How often should I of retest? And can I test again too early?" And I know that's going to be different for everything, but kind of just in general, what's kind of, if you have some general recommendations on retesting, what would they be?

Laura Kunces:

Yeah, that's a great question I do get a lot as well. Some of the stuff that we were measuring here is in the red blood cells. So like I kind of said before, I wouldn't necessarily recommend retesting until after about three months, but you got to make a change in the meantime, right? There needs to be some sort of intervention, whether it's diet, lifestyle, exercise, whatever it may be. And so I would say usually three to six months would be great. For teams looking to do testing, usually budget is a constraint and I always like to talk to them about what the options are. And I usually say, if you can only do testing once, do it preseason, do it before people are put into a situation where their health and their wellbeing, and their profession is on the line.

Laura Kunces:

And so, then you have the most opportunity to maybe making the changes, right? So the earlier the better. I do recognize that some of this testing can be expensive. And so, there are options, right? If you're working at a collegiate level, look to see if there's any research studies you can get your team involved with that is not risky, obviously to the season, but could include some sort of free testing. In the professional level, I know there's still budget constraints, and I think it's one of those things that you always have to pose the question to the rest of the medical staff, and the managers and who are controlling the budget, just to say, "This might be expensive now, but it's going to be way more expensive if this athlete's sitting on the bench." So you got to think about it. And for everybody else, people who are doing this for their own health and wellbeing, it's expensive, yes, but it's totally worth it. And sometimes the solutions that you need to do to fix anything abnormal can be very inexpensive. So it's necessary.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. And I think you hit on a good point that I've been talking to a lot of teams about is, it's great to have a baseline, which is super important, but do you see it where we can get to the point where maybe checking some biomarkers mid-season or whatnot, can be predictive of maybe under recovery, injury risk increase? If some of these nutrients are starting to drop, can you be, not necessarily a hundred percent active, but maybe inform some decisions on how the team trains and recovers? Is that something you think we can easily get to?

Laura Kunces:

Definitely. And the way I see even testing going is, the prices tend to get a little bit cheaper as technology advances. So yeah, I would definitely recommend that I would do comprehensive testing at the beginning, and then through the season biomarkers that you need to be checking. Check the status of vitamin D, knowing that your athlete has been training inside for the last six months. I was a swimmer, everything was indoors for me, I didn't have the luxury of swimming in California. So I can imagine that a lot of us were vitamin D deficient through the winter season. So, it's one of those things that as long as you know up front, then you can make those tweaks through the season as necessary with smaller and more precise panels.

Joel Totoro:

So I'm going to hijack the listener questions for a second and ask you a follow up that I have, that I get asked a lot. So there are so many different ways to test now, I get a lot of, you mentioned testing the red blood cells. I get a lot of frustration for people, there's tests out there that are white blood cell test, so when you compare the results, people get really confused and it's frustrating because you're not apples to apples. What is the difference between white blood cell and red blood cell testing?

Laura Kunces:

Yeah, that is a good question. That brings up a great point to make sure that whoever is administering the test is choosing the right constituent or the right medium of where you're measuring some of these biomarkers. So like I mentioned, specifically in this test, we chose red blood cell magnesium. That's different than serum magnesium. Do not compare the two to each other. Things in the red blood cell tend to be more of a reference of stored, or what your body actually has in it. Things in serum tend to be a little bit more transient or it could probably change a lot quicker. White blood cells have some value to them as well. They're again, another, probably a measure of a little bit more of stored capabilities, and there are things that you can measure in white blood cells, but it just brings up a really a great point of making sure that you know exactly what you're testing and in what medium.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. So we've talked a lot about athletes who again, have access to team docs and whatnot. This next question comes from Alyssa and says, "I don't have access to my doctor for blood work. How can I know if what I'm doing is working?" Loaded question, but what are your thoughts?

Laura Kunces:

Yeah, I would look for companies that have the capability of ordering your own testing, right? So become empowered, take life into your own hands here and start to figure out where you can get blood work done yourself. Thorne, obviously has testing options, and there are other companies out there doing it as well, but look for a place where you can pay for it out of pocket, go get it done and then have a nice visual of your results with education and a plan. And that's one of the things that Thorne does really great, is that personalized plan of like how to fix it or not, if you don't need to do anything. I've read people's recommendations before and they literally says, "Keep doing what you are doing." Which means you're doing it right. So that is an option as well. But I would just say look for doing it on your own, if you can't do it through your doctor or through your own insurance.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. And I think that's a big shift in kind of just medicine in general is owning your own information, but you having access to it forever. You couldn't be like, "Hey, what is my three year average of cholesterol?" Right? Unless you happen to save your notes, right? That all lived with a doctor. How does Thorne handle that kind of... How do I know? How can I trust Thorne with my personal health information?

Laura Kunces:

Yeah. We do a really great job of our firewalls and our protection. And one of the other cool things about our website is that you can share it with your doctor, right? So you can choose to send it off to them when they'll have access to being able to view your results. And I've done that before with different tests and I find that to be really useful. But yeah, you can be sure that Thorne does everything necessary and then some, to make sure that your information is private and only viewed by you.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. I mean, it came in super helpful for me. I just moved across country, had to get a new primary care physician. So just being able to roll in, with my existing lab work, he'd be like, "Okay, this is where we're starting. This is where we need to..." So he knew so much more about me than like, and not awful about talking about myself. And even though I flew in medical terms, but I'll just be like, "Yeah, I mean, I'm okay." Right? But then he is like, "No, your numbers say differently." Right? So it's always good. I just think it's so important to kind of be consistently watching it. And I love nothing more than, we're seeing a lot of this with the people we work with who we mentioned earlier like, "We tested, we found something wrong." I'm working on it. I want to prove that what I'm doing is working right.

Joel Totoro:

And my favorite is same as yours, is when we get a follow up back and we're like, "Yeah. No, keep doing what you're doing. It's working amazing." Right? So I think that's super important. I'm going to hijack another question here. So this is just the Joel question hour. But we've talked a lot about blood work, but one of your expertise, and this is a whole other podcast, but is what we're being able to tell and predict and learn about you from a biome test. Right? So your blood work is super important, but can you give just a brief overview to those who may not be familiar, what the biome can tell us about your body? And like you said, red blood cells tell you this white blood cells tell you that, serum tells you this. What can I learn from the biome? And how does that kind of support blood work? Should I do both?

Laura Kunces:

Ideally, yes. If you can. I would definitely say, yes. But the gut microbiome is like such a cool frontier. And I do see a lot of athletes doing it now. And I mean, clearly many, many general people, but it really is entering the athletic space as well. But yeah, from a small stool sample, very, very small, so don't get skived. You can tell a lot so that the GI track in your mouth all the way down to your anus is harbored with bacteria, and there's only so much real estate in there. So if it's right now filled with a lot of bad bacteria, the goal is always to like try to optimize the good, so it can take over the space of the bad.

Laura Kunces:

But all of these bacteria have so physiological processes, and it's really interesting because we're still learning day to day what everything is doing and what it means to health. But the bacteria, there can be predictors of long term chronic health, they can be predictors of short term, acute immune function and digestion, and absorption capabilities. There can be markers of information in there, there can be a bunch of things that, again, if you're looking to optimize health, it's so complimentary to blood work and very non-invasive, so pretty easy to do.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. Awesome. And there's just so much to think about, but I'm going to get back to the listener questions. And this is one we see all the time, and you briefly mentioned this earlier as well but, "What's the difference between adequate and optimal, when it comes to nutrition recommendation? And am I okay just taking the recommended daily amount?"

Laura Kunces:

So I think in some instances, yeah, the recommended daily amount might be okay for people. But I think there are people who are looking to turn adequate into optimal. I think my own personal definition of adequate is like what I need to be doing to just like get by. And I think optimal is like what I need to be doing to be top 1% in anything. Right? Whatever your profession is, if you're an athlete, that's your profession, but if you're a normal human being that is just a general day to day worker or a mom or, or whatever, you have a different profession, different goal. So I think thriving is a little bit different. So I don't ever recommend people doing huge dosing or going way over numbers without knowing what you're doing and what we're even talking about specifically, but I think, yeah, there's a lot of practices that you can be doing and sometimes a combination of supplementation, but lifestyle changes and diet and exercise changes as well. So to me, I think adequate and optimal are two totally different things.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. But that is a common misconception. Everyone's like, "Oh, it says I got a hundred percent of my daily needs." And I'm like, "Well, that's kind of to prevent disease in the average person. That's what that I'm is. That's like, don't die. We're trying to be awesome." Right? And obviously it's different for each nutrient, but yeah, that is a question we get all the time. And I was like, "Oh no, this is like 2000 times by daily amount." And I was like, "Yeah, you probably need it. It's okay to..." But yeah, no, it is a lot to learn. And that's what we're here for ,is to educate people on stuff like this. But my favorite it question that happens, inevitably, we always get asked, "What is your supplement routine? And why?

Laura Kunces:

Oh my gosh. People might freak out about this because I do take a lot of stuff. But mine actually is quite seasonal. And right now I live in Arizona, so we are entering what I call the time that I spend a lot more time outside, because it's actually reasonable to be outside, so I've stopped taking my vitamin D. But my morning routine includes Thorne Basic Nutrients, two a day, a NiaCel 200, which I just recently added to my routine, and I love it. I have upped my Meriva from one in one morning, one at night to two in the morning, two at night because I'm starting to train for a marathon that's in February, and that makes me actually feel really good when I wake up in the morning a little bit less stiff than usual.

Laura Kunces:

My daytime routine includes collagen. I sometimes do our weight protein or aminos depending on like what my workout might be. I drink aminos sometimes like pre-work, post and then usually if I'm drinking, and it would be post workout. And then before I go to bed, I take two more of my Meriva and I do our magnesium bisglycinate, which is I think my all time favorite product on our line. But mix that into a little bit of water, down it with my Meriva and I sleep like a baby.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. It's yeah, it's rare that I'm, you can't see me, but I'm glowing and smiling because I just love the magnesium and how much it impacts just kind of, for me sleep quality and just overall health. But you mentioned NiaCel, that's a relatively new product for a lot of people. Can you just quickly give kind of own overview on what it does and why you've added it to your routine?

Laura Kunces:

Yeah, it does a lot. I mean, I think the way that we talk about it at Thorne is like our healthy aging category. And I don't love that name because I feel like I'm a little too young to be thinking about aging. But I think about it as like aging gracefully. It's a product that it's nicotinamide riboside, which is going to support production of NAD plus in the body. Which if anybody wants to think back to like eighth grade biology, NAD is a molecule that's used in so many processes of glycolysis, and Krebs cycle, and oxidative phosphorylation, if you can even remember those, but essentially it's energy production in the body. And so you make a lot less as you age, and so I'm just looking at it from a standpoint of like, "Okay, I'm trying to work out. I'm still trying to run like I used to five years ago or 10 years ago." And so day to day, it's my insurance policy, if you will.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah.

Laura Kunces:

I imagine at some point I'm going to have to up that to the 400, though.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. Hey, forever young, right?

Laura Kunces:

Yeah.

Joel Totoro:

But I think that's something good to point out, is that there are things in the body and nicotinamide riboside being one of them that legitimately do drop as you get older. Like there's nothing you can do, I mean, there is something you can do about it, but biologically it's going to happen, it's a fact. Right? So it's kind of inevitable. So I think it is important for people to realize like, "Yeah, your supplement, just like yours, it's seasonal your cell tone's at 20, 30, 40, your kind of biological needs change or what needs the most attention. So yeah, I think that's a really interesting product, and I think the more people learn about it, it's going to be pretty impactful across a lot of different populations. But we have time for one more and knowing you and I, and the conversations we've had offline, this could be another hour, but we'll keep it relatively short. Our final listener question is, "Thorne seems like they're always ahead of things. What are you excited about in the future?"

Laura Kunces:

Oh my gosh, so many things. I don't want to get in trouble, but I believe we're going to be having some new testing options in 2022. So I'm really jazzed about that. We have a few new product launches coming out too, and so that might switch up my routine moving forward. But I would say that we have some really cool innovation going on, that's even behind the scenes and like our manufacturing and I'm excited for this just further personalization. Right? Like making sure that what I'm taking is for me and what you're taking is for you. And we're really moving the needle in that space.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. And I think that's one thing people don't realize is that science moves fast as far as like ability to gather information, but for the first time in decades, we're blessed with the problem of, "Great. We can identify these things," but a lot of your work is in validating. So can you talk a little bit about just kind of overview, just let people know how much goes beyond the scenes of validating our tests? I know you, and I know it's a big part of your job. So I think it's just super interesting to see a little bit behind the cloak.

Laura Kunces:

Yeah. We have teams of people working on these tests that we put out. I mean, we have data scientists, we have medical doctors, naturopaths, dieticians, PhDs, we do research on everything that we do. We're pulling all the research, we're talking to experts. Many of the experts are on our team. So I mean, it's a multi multifaceted approach to designing these tests and designing the education that goes behind them, and then like the interventional recommendations as well. So I would say that they're very high class and they're better than you would ever get from just one single doctor. You get to look at your own results, you get to view your plan, you get to decide if you're going to do it or not. And then ultimately, retesting is in your hands as well too. So it's a very multidisciplinary approach to healthcare.

Joel Totoro:

All right. Well, that's all the time we have. Laura, thank you for giving us access to your brain, your time. For our listeners, if you want to learn more about some of the topics we cover today, Dr. Kunces has done a previous episode where she dug pretty deep into some biomarkers and some of that kind of stuff that we glossed over that has a lot of science behind it. So check out some of our previous podcasts, look forward to future ones, and then head over to thorne.com and check out the Take 5 Daily section, which is a huge library of articles on all things health, wellness performance. So there's so much more to learn out there that we couldn't cover in this topic. Laura, we'll have to have you on again. There's so much to cover, but thank you so much for your time and we appreciate you being here.

Laura Kunces:

Thank you.

Joel Totoro:

All right. Excellent. That was Thorne Senior VP of Medical Strategy, Laura Kunces. Thanks everyone for listening.

Joel Totoro:

Thanks for listening to the Thorne Podcast Performance Edition. Make sure to never miss an episode by subscribing to the show on your podcast app of choice. You can also learn more about the topics we discussed by visiting thorne.com and checking out the latest news, videos and stories on Thorne's Take 5 Daily blog. For this Performance Edition of the Thorne Podcast, I'm Joel Totoro, reminding everyone to stay active and stay hydrated. (silence)