SCOTT: Welcome everybody! This is the Life Enthusiast Podcast! I am Scott Paton, your co-host, and joining us, as usual, is Martin Pytela, life coach at Life Enthusiast! We are very excited because today we have two special guests. The first one is Dr. Curtis Braun, the CEO of Regenurex. He has a Ph.D. in chemistry, and he received post-doctoral training in the Institute of molecular biology and biochemistry. He has over 14 years of experience in operational management, 8 years as vice-president at biotech-type companies. Our second guest is Shane Lander, the founder of Regenurex. He has more than 20 years of experience running a successful chemical manufacturing and sales company, and he has a lot of experience in algae production. So we are going to be finding out from these gentlemen today what all of that really means. So guys, welcome to the show!

CURTIS AND SHANE: Thank you!

SCOTT: So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about the background of your company? How did it get started, and where are you headed?

SHANE: I started this company about seven years ago with a business partner James Irwin, and he had been introduced to Astaxanthin that was derived from a very specific type of algae, that is called Haematococcus Pluvialis, and he had grown algae for biofuels, and it just didn’t seem to be a very viable industry. But when we looked at Astaxanthin, and we read all the things that it would do, we thought that this stuff is just too good to be true. There were studies on it already, but we thought the best thing we can do is try it. So we contacted one of the manufacturers in Hawaii that grows it in open ponds and harvests it, we bought bulk amounts of this product, and we started giving it to our friends and family, anybody that would take it actually. 

We started feeling the benefits ourselves, and we got a lot of positive feedback from our family and friends, and we thought: “Wow, if the stuff that we had heard about this is really true…” We found that as long as people were taking enough of the product to get the effect if they had any kind of chronic injury, any inflammation, these guys were getting results in about two weeks’ time. The only time that we didn’t have anybody reporting anything major back was when they were just taking one pill a day. It was probably doing things for them, but they just didn’t notice it, because the dose was too small.

We got really excited about this kind of feedback, and we started growing the product.  We kind of hit the same wall that everybody else did –  it is really difficult to grow in large bio-reactors. So we spent a lot of time on designing and building these bio-reactors that could be done on large  scale, we perfected those systems, and as we started getting that online, we still had some biology issues. So that is when we brought in Dr. Curtis Braun a couple of years ago, he was able to take it to the next level, and now I’m really proud of the amazing systems that we have, and we can produce a very high-end product. We don’t only grow the same product everybody else does, but we also have a proprietary extraction system. Everybody else in the industry uses supercritical CO2, it is a very high heat system to extract the Astaxanthin from the algae, but our system actually uses cold infusion. We never have to bring it to high heat, so we really feel that our product has quite an advantage in the marketplace. And we have got this feedback from extreme athletes and many others that can see a significant difference between the competition’s product and ours, so we are very excited about that.

MARTIN: Great, that is impressive. This process that you guys use sounds kind of industrial. I guess the good part about it is that it is probably easy to control the purity of what goes in it, right?

SHANE: Yeah, maybe Curtis should comment on this.

CURTIS: Yeah, absolutely. Our process, as Shane said, is a wet extraction method, and it actually keeps the Astaxanthin in its natural form. The nice thing about it is that we are able to control a batch to batch reproducibility, and as Shane was mentioning, we are getting customer feedback that our product actually is outperforming other brands, and we are talking about some major players in the Astaxanthin space. We are very proud of what we do. It is different from what most people do, but we are finding that the quality of the product, the taste of the product, the smell of the product are superior to what you would get out in the industry today.

MARTIN: That is exactly what excited me about you when we first met. This is different, this is not like everybody else’s Astaxanthin.

SHANE: I think to comment on your industrial question, yes, this is a very robust system that can be scaled up, so as we get additional clients, we can continually scale our process. Nature is a wonderful thing, and it produces some great products, but some of the open pond growers have a hard time with contamination, they have a hard time with consistency, the amount of sunshine, so their product will change from batch to batch, some years are good and some years are bad. With our system, we can generate a very consistent product. People might argue that the sunshine is better, but we are seeing that from our systems, with us having full control, we can actually get better results in the human body than some of the other products that are grown in more natural conditions.

MARTIN: I suppose you might be using LEDs or something like that, so you can control the wavelengths quite nicely, right?

SHANE: We are using a combination of technologies right now, but we have some LED and some fluorescent, but we are definitely moving towards LED technology for the whole system. There are so many advantages, LEDs have come a long way for growing plants. In the last two years, the LED technology has grown incredibly. You get more longevity, you get more light per watt, and you generate less heat, and in our case, all those things are advantages for us.

MARTIN: And so you are avoiding the flock of ducks to land on your pond and leaving you with the nightmare of viral and bacterial contamination, right?

CURTIS: Our product is identical in terms of the distribution that you would get from natural sunlight. The technology that Shane has developed mimics what happens in nature, but because it is in an internal photo bio-reactor, we can control contamination, absolutely. The other thing that I want to just quickly add is that with our wet extraction, we actually have some brand ambassadors that are finding that they can use half the amount of product that they use from other suppliers, so we believe we have a control process, plus we believe we have one of the most potent products on the market.

SCOTT: I’d like to jump in right now and say I’ve never heard of Astaxanthin. Can you tell us about it? Is it a brand new thing? Has it been around forever? Just a little bit of the history of this particular antioxidant.

CURTIS: You bet. Astaxanthin is a carotenoid, so it is an antioxidant. Most people would be familiar with antioxidants such as beta-carotene. This is also in the carotenoids family. Astaxanthin has been coined to be the king of the carotenoids. It crosses the blood-brain barrier, it crosses the blood-retinal barrier, and it is one of the few carotenoids that actually has those properties. It is able to protect the cell from the inside and the outside. A lot of people will take antioxidants because they know it is good for them. People that are taking our product are actually feeling better, they experience pain relief, more energy, especially people who are active adults or people who are working out at the gym, they’re able to do more when they take our product than they could before.

SCOTT: Terrific! We have a large group on Facebook for people who are suffering from things like fibromyalgia and chronic pain. Will antioxidants, and particularly this one, help people with chronic pain?

CURTIS: I will let Shane talk, because he has a lot more experience with customers who have seen the benefit, but I just want to say that our antioxidant actually prevents oxidative stress, and when you stop oxidative stress, you stop processes like inflammation from occurring in the body. So what we are noticing for people, especially in active adults who have joint pain, for example, once they’re on our product, within two weeks, they’re finding that pain will go away and they can actually function again. We had a customer who loves tennis, but he couldn’t play, he had a tennis elbow. A few weeks after being on our product, he was able to pick up the tennis racket back again and enjoy the sport that he loves.

SHANE: We hear this over and over again with knee problems, or back issues. We had a gentleman that broke his back, and this guy was a very active man, in business and in life. He has been in pain ever since breaking his back. So he started taking it. This product allows people to basically get back to enjoying life without pain. It is not like taking a painkiller that will numb you out. It is actually getting rid of the actual issue that has been causing it in the first place. So it is very exciting. This thing has been on the planet since day one. Algae has been in our diets forever, salmon flesh gets its dark red color because of this carotenoid they are consuming, and it allows them to swim for such a long time without dying, it gives them that fantastic muscle recovery and all those things. And then we eat the salmon and we actually wind up with that inside of our bodies, and we get the same enjoyment and benefits from it. We have always had this in our diet, but now we are eating greenhouse vegetables that don’t have Astaxanthin in them, we are now eating farmed salmon that doesn’t have it… So it is a good idea to supplement this antioxidant.

MARTIN: All right. Let’s discuss dosage, we have this bottle of either 60 or 120 capsules. How much would a person take?

CURTIS: For most people, the average dose should be probably two capsules. One capsule has 4mg of Astaxanthin. If a person is suffering from acute injury, they can even go up to as high as six caps. There is no known toxicity, for example, here in Canada, we are allowed to take up to 10 caps. But around three is probably the typical dose that we recommend people take. One of the things that we like about our branded product is that we grow it internally with photo bio-reactors, and we have a wet extraction method that keeps it in its natural form. We grow it here in Canada, so it is a Canadian product. We have high quality, pure water, probably the purest water in the world. It is a very high quality product.

MARTIN: All right, so I guess it is mixed with some carrier oil or something like that, right?

CURTIS: Yes, our carrier oil is safflower oil. We have talked to many customers who have tried different brands of Astaxanthin, and the one thing they always comment on is how good our product tastes and how good it smells. And again, I think it is because of our controlled natural process.

SCOTT: Great. Shane, could you maybe share a couple of stories of people that have used the product? You have got some success stories on your website, and we will make sure we share them in the show notes, but I thought it might be a good thing to just highlight some of those stories.

SHANE: Yeah, we have so many! I’ll go through maybe three that I think are pretty fantastic. As I mentioned before, we have people suffering from chronic pain. There is one lady with chronic ankle pain, and she is the world’s strongest woman, she does the extreme heavy lifting, and she had a real ankle issue that was causing her severe pain. One of our athletes that you can see on our website, Paul Romero, he knows this lady, and he told her: “Hey, just get on this Astaxanthin!” And he gave her a high dosage, 10 caps a day. It was I think about a week, and she was able to get rid of the pain, and the following week she had a personal record lift! So that was a really exciting thing from an extreme athlete side of things.

We have a number of baby boomers that are investors in our company, and they got on board and started taking the product. One gentleman was on a handful of pills from his physician. I don’t suggest anybody gets rid of their medication, but this guy was able to wean himself down to basically just taking the Astaxanthin to manage the pain. He also had some heart issues. Astaxanthin is also a natural blood thinner, so it was very helpful for him in a lot of his daily activities. The interesting thing about Astaxanthin is that it will only thin your blood if your blood requires thinning. It doesn’t thin blood that is already too thin. It is almost like a blood regulator.

CURTIS: I have a couple that came out that I think would be very helpful. We had a person who was on our product, and when he went to the doctor to get his eyes checked. He went there six months after being on our Astaxanthin for three months, and the optometrist said: “Last year you came in, you were a 62-year-old with 69-year-old eyes. You are now 63, you have the eyes of a 52-year-old. What has changed?” And the only thing he could think that he changed in his diet was he started taking the Astaxanthin supplement. We have countless examples of people who went in for laser eye surgery, and they’ve been on our product, and a doctor said: “Your eyes are healing a lot faster than I would have expected.” So people with both acute and chronic issues are benefiting from being on our Astaxanthin. We have seen people who actually had to reduce their prescriptions at the optometrist. A lot of ladies who ended up taking our product noticed that their skin quality has improved, the fine lines have improved, so it is also great for the skin. It also is a natural sunscreen, even if you take it internally.

MARTIN: So other than the carotenoids, are there any essential fatty acids in the capsule? Or is it just the straight Astaxanthin with nothing added to it, except the carrier oil?

CURTIS: Well, it is a natural extract, so it is primarily Astaxanthin, but because we use this natural process, we are bringing over anything that is beneficial from the algae, so there is probably a mixture of beneficial compounds in there in some trace amounts, but the primary ingredient is Astaxanthin.

SCOTT: I had a sort of similar question: is it organic? Does it have GMOs in it? Does it have gluten? Also, are the capsules vegetarian?

CURTIS: Good question. It is a fully organic process. We don’t actually have to use any harsh chemicals in our process, we want it to be as mild as possible. It is GMO-free. The capsules we use are gelatin, so it is an animal product. But it also is one of the cleanest products that we know with regards to gelatin. We are exploring some options for vegetarian-friendly capsules for future production though.

MARTIN: So now the gelatin capsule is probably collagen-based, right?

CURTIS: Yes. We have had the product tested, and we have documentation to prove it is disease-free.

MARTIN: I guess I should ask for my Jewish and Arabic friends: Is this sourced from pork?

CURTIS: No, it is bovine.

MARTIN: Okay, so it is a cow.

CURTIS: Yes, we ended up using the bone and the connective tissue for the gelatin caps.

SCOTT: Cool! All right, Martin do you have any last questions?

MARTIN: I am impressed and excited about this product! To summarize all this: We have this totally trustworthy company from British Columbia, the most pristine part of North America, still left untouched by industry and whatnot, getting the glacial water straight from the mountains, with a touch of the high technology. I think it is the best possible play of all possible factors coming in. Plus, look at these guys, they look clever, don’t they? (everyone laughing)

SCOTT: Yes, they do! So, Astaxanthin by Regenurex is available on www.life-enthusiast.com, link is going to be in the show notes. So, gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us, Dr. Curtis Braun and Shane Lander! We really appreciate you taking time out of your busy day to share this important information. And we are very, very excited to be working with you on getting your product out into the world. Thank you very much for your time!

MARTIN: If you need more information about this product or any other products we have in our store, I am happy to answer any questions! You can call me at (866) 543 3388!

SCOTT: Thank you! You have been listening or watching the Life Enthusiast Podcast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet! Thank you for joining us, everybody, and we will see you next time!