The Power of Peptides and Bioregulators With Nathalie Niddam

Lisa: Well hi everyone, and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Today I have the famous, infamous, amazing Nathalie Niddam with me. Nathalie, welcome to the show. Fantastic to have you.

Nathalie Niddam: Thank you so much, Lisa. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Lisa: I'm super excited to have you. I listen to your show regularly, every week, and I'm always amazed at the guests that you manage to get on. You have an incredible podcast and you have a community, and we'll get into all of that. But Nathalie, tell us about yourself a little bit, your backstory. Who are you, what do you do?

Nathalie Niddam: Sure. Thanks, Lisa. Thanks for everything. So I started off in this business really as a holistic nutritionist, and that was after a career in advertising, which was most of my professional career. But in many ways becoming a nutritionist kind of took me back to my roots, because when I was in university I studied human physiology, and then I was a fitness instructor pretty much my whole life. So I always kind of had a hand in health.

Nathalie Niddam: After one too many mornings of waking up thinking, "I can't possibly be getting paid enough to do this," I thought, "You know, I don't think I am getting paid enough to do this. This isn't really making me happy." And I've told this story on a couple of podcasts — I was having a conversation with my chiropractor and downloading to him yet another philosophy. I think at the time it was the paleo diet, because I'd just finished reading Robb Wolf's book and I was like, "Oh my God, this is so amazing, you've got to hear this." Well, unbeknownst to me, he's communicating this to his patients, and he comes back one day and he goes, "You know, I have a guy, I told him what you told me and he's dropped 10 pounds and feels amazing. You should be getting paid to do this." And it was like this little light went off in my head and I'm like, "Maybe I should." And within a week I was back at school in a classroom, like five days a week for a whole year.

Nathalie Niddam: And so then I became a nutritionist, but at the same time I kind of had a foot in this whole biohacking space that was really just starting to happen. And pretty quickly, within a year or two after I finished my nutrition programme, Dave Asprey announced that he was launching this Bulletproof human potential coach programme, so I signed up for that. So that was a whole other piece of the puzzle. And the cool thing about that programme, it was really much more about coaching people to help them to make change than it was about the Bulletproof diet, which was one of my big fears, right? I was like, "Oh, I signed up for it, I paid all this money," and I was like, "Holy geez, I hope I didn't pay all this money just to learn about the Bulletproof diet." But actually it was a really nice training programme around just coaching people out of their stories.

Nathalie Niddam: Because if you think about it, Lisa — and I'm sure you come across this all the time — there's no shortage of information in the world.

Lisa: No.

Nathalie Niddam: And what people really need is, number one, how are you going to make all these things out there relevant to me? Which is why I got into genetics and epigenetics — that was my next stop. But also, we tell ourselves all these stories, and as an uber athlete you know this: how do we overcome the physical discomfort that we have to, to get ourselves to our goals? Well, very often the obstacles are not physical, they're mental, they're in our head, they're the stories we tell ourselves, they're the blocks we put up for ourselves. So learning to help people to get past some of this stuff was really a big piece of it for me.

Nathalie Niddam: And then I got into epigenetics, and that was really cool, because I was always a very big proponent of, "Yeah, the paleo diet sounds great, but is it really going to work the same for everyone?" And I firmly believe not.

Lisa: Yeah, exactly.

Nathalie Niddam: And then my last stop — although as you know, we never stop learning, we're always learning new stuff — was this whole world of peptides and peptide bioregulators, which I just kind of stumbled on at a conference.

Lisa: And that's — I definitely want to get to peptides and bioregulators in this conversation, so we'll earmark that one, definitely come back to that, because that's my new area of study. So very, very fascinated, and I've been learning a lot from you about peptides and things, and how to use them and what to do. And it's a completely new field in New Zealand. Nobody — I haven't found another Kiwi, and I'm sure they are out there, I'm sure they're in their rooms somewhere, because you guys are biohackers, man.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, we've got a beat.

Lisa: Yeah, there's lots of biohackers and things, but I haven't found a single doctor that knows about peptides, even the functional, integrated. And I haven't found anyone who's actually doing peptides. It's very hard to get them into the country. And yeah, I think, as usual, I'm like two or three years ahead of the curve, which brings me the same problems, because our country is a little bit backwards when it comes to anything. It takes time to trickle down from the States and for these things to come in.

Lisa: But before we go to the bioregulators and stuff — epigenetics, one of my areas of study as well, and genetics. And I agree with you. I was always wondering when I was working — so I worked with my coach Neil Wagstaff, shout out to Neil, great exercise scientist, changed my life, my career, got me on the right path, and I had my most successes under his tutelage, if you like. And we had a company called Running Hot Coaching and we were coaching lots of athletes in running and stuff. And we would be like, "Hmm, why, if I take 20 people, put them through boot camp for 12 weeks, give them the same diet, why do I get four total responders, four who don't do anything, and four who get fatter and put on weight and get unfitter and more stressed?" And we're just like, "Well, we're doing the things we've been educated to do and there's a missing piece here." This person gets fabulous results and that person doesn't. And in the first instance, of course, you go, "Well, maybe that person's eating the chocolate cake behind the..." you know. And I have to go and apologise, really, because no, that's not the case generally.

Nathalie Niddam: Generally, yeah.

Lisa: It's your genetic makeup, and you have to personalise health. And I think we both agree on this, that this is the age of personalisation. It's here, it's coming even more in the area of drugs — what drugs are you going to respond to, statins, are you going to respond to SSRIs, how are you going to react to the pill — these basic sort of personalisation things. And then it's becoming more, but on the framework of your life: the nutrition, the diet, the exercise, what types of exercise should we do, at what time of the day. All of that is up for grabs in this personalised health world. What was your thing that — like you said, you started with paleo and everybody do paleo, and then you come to realise, huh, it's not the case.

Nathalie Niddam: Well, and it's funny, I still think that out of all the — if you want to call them diet trends — that have come out over the last, let's say, the last 15, 20 years, the paleo template, and I'm going to call it a template not a diet, the paleo template is probably the one that is the most versatile and the most adaptable to different eating patterns. So I just think that what I like about the general guidelines of paleo is that we focus on whole foods.

Lisa: Yeah, right away you're in a better place.

Nathalie Niddam: Right. Removing, at least initially, removing things like grains and seed oils and even dairy for so many people is a good move.

Lisa: Yep, and gluten and wheat, that kind of stuff, definitely.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, but I would say that some people do great with dairy. They don't need to be deprived of dairy for the rest of their lives. Some people really need a Mediterranean type of paleo diet. Some people are going to do better with a higher fat type paleo diet. So to me, we use the paleo template and we personalise it for people. We can make the paleo diet ketogenic at times when it's needed, we can even skew it to carnivore at times when it's needed. But these are all, to me, interventions. I haven't really seen that you want someone to be ketogenic all the time, or carnivore.

Nathalie Niddam: And I know the hardcore carnivores would be coming through the screen at me right now going, "It's the only way." And I respect their passion, and I know that so many people have been healed by carnivore and I applaud that. But I also think that there are a lot of train wrecks left in the wake of carnivore. It just doesn't necessarily work for everybody. It's genetics, it's your stage of life, it's your state of health, and the other thing that we forget is your microbiome.

Lisa: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: I wasn't able to take whey protein for years. I was like, "Yeah, I can't do whey, I can't do milk, I'm a mess, man." I did Joel Greene's gut reset — I've been drinking whey protein to my heart's content ever since I did that. And all it was, it was about rebalancing the bugs in my microbiome. So we can't forget that most people's microbiomes are a hot mess. And they can be rebalanced. Joel does it mostly with food, using resistant starches and HMOs and polyphenols. Then you get people like Dr Grace Liu, right? I mean, she's hardcore in the probiotics and this and that. But these are people who kind of get the fact that nothing's going to shift until you address that microbiome. And if you're an athlete, it's going to have a massive impact on your microbiome, just as much as if you're a couch potato. So it keeps coming back to personalisation, right?

Lisa: Yeah. And you've just uncovered there, in a couple of sentences, the complexity of the human being. And we all have these simplistic "I'm paleo, I'm keto, I'm an athlete, I'm not an athlete" — these boxes that we put ourselves into. And actually, I often think we're playing in a sandbox and we have only just scratched the absolute surface as far as science goes, and none of us should be coming from an arrogant point of view of "we've got 100% right". That's not to say that you then throw in the towel and go, "Well, stuff it, I'm going to eat donuts and pies and chips all day." It is to say that we do know a lot of things that are generally right — whole foods, not processed, no additives, preservatives, gluten probably I would put in that category, as we know it's not good for any of us, some of us more damaged.

Lisa: ...imaging than others. So we've got some general guidelines there, but then when you throw in the complexity of the microbiome — often I was giving supplements to people and then thinking, why the hell are they not responding to the supplements? And a lot of it's because the microbiome is a complete mess, and that's probably where we should be starting. So now when I'm doing some baseline testing — and this is always resource allowing, sometimes we have to get creative when you can't afford the test — but if resources are willing, I look first at hormones, because hormones just drive everything. And then I look at the microbiome as step number two, and then organic acids, and then epigenetics and genetic testing and stuff. If I can, I get all that baseline testing done, because then I've got the data and the lenses to look through — multiple lenses, which gets very complicated as a practitioner.

Lisa: I could make my life a lot easier if I just stuck to one thing. I've tried to go, oh, I should just outsource and refer my patient or my client to someone who's an expert in the microbiome, and I have done that, but I find I need to know enough to be dangerous in that space in order to be able to build a proper programme that's going to actually consider all these aspects. And yes, there are times when I have to get in the big guns, the absolute deep experts in an area, but we start off with foundations, we start off with the foundational stuff.

Lisa: I don't know how you approach this, but if I've got a cancer patient, for example, a client who's come to me and they want to do a metabolic approach to cancer and so on and so forth, I'm still going to be looking at that person as a whole. I want to know their genetics, I want to know what their microbiome's doing, I want to know these other aspects. And people are like, shouldn't we maybe just be focusing on the cancer? And I'm going, well, you got there because of XYZ reason, and we've got to find out what that XYZ is, so that we're not only dealing with the cancer but dealing with the whole person and the reason perhaps that they got there. We don't always know exactly, but a case in point: I had a prostate guy that I've been working with, lovely, lovely gentleman, and when we finally got around to his microbiome testing, there was something in there that often causes prostate cancer. We looked into the literature — there was one particularly nasty thing in there — and it was like, okay, right, maybe we're going to deal with that as well, because that could be causing it.

Nathalie Niddam: And even to support conventional treatment, right? Sometimes — look, I mean, when it comes to cancer, sometimes you've got to reduce that tumour load. Many a person has unfortunately lost their life very focused on using alternative methods, which isn't to say that alternative methods don't ever work, but sometimes when you've hit that point of imbalance where a cancer has kind of gotten the upper hand in the system, sometimes you have to go to a conventional treatment. But that doesn't mean, to your point, that you abandon ship completely and you stop everything. Sometimes you have to pause, because if you're doing chemotherapy, radiation, that's going to make a mess of things. But on the other side, do we take the time to rebuild and rebalance and address the microbiome? And this is where bioregulators can come in, in helping the immune system to recover from those treatments. A lot of the literature on the immune bioregulators is that they can be helpful post-chemo, post-radiation, to kind of help bring some of that function and balance back.

Lisa: Wow, that's — I want to dive a bit deeper into that. You've probably read this on the website and stuff, but my mum obviously had aneurysms and I wrote the book and rehabilitated her — miraculous, miraculous. Well, it wasn't miraculous, it was freaking hard work.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, we'll dive into that on the podcast when you record. Yes, absolutely incredible story.

Lisa: But then she got cancer as well, like 18 months ago. So we've been dealing with a lymphoma, a CNS lymphoma. I did some of the conventional stuff. I did advanced genetic testing so that I knew which of the conventional therapies would work with her, which chemotherapy, which immunotherapy would be effective with her genetics. And that's something I wasn't offered, by the way — they just said go home and die, there's nothing we can do, there is no chemo, there is nothing. And I said, no, I want this particular chemo based on this genetic testing, and I want this immunotherapy in the mix.

Lisa: So my approach is very much, let's have a look at the whole bag. And with hers, I did put all that in because it was a very, very aggressive cancer that was going to kill her fast, so I had to go both sides of the thing. That was one of the reasons I put it all into the mix: hyperbaric, intravenous vitamin C, off-label drug combinations, 100 supplements literally, as well as immunotherapy, as well as chemotherapy — temozolomide, a mild form. We didn't do radiation, we didn't need it because it was gone by the time we went to look at that, 12 weeks. We managed to get rid of the tumours in the brain, which is where she had it, and we've managed, touch wood, to keep it there. And I don't ever want to say that we're cured, because we've all got cancer cells every day that we're producing, but if you can get the immune system —

Lisa: And this is why the bioregulator discussion I want to dive into with you now. I have peptides in the mix with her. I have thymosin alpha 1, thymosin beta 4, we have BPC-157 in the mix. What else have I got in the mix? Cerebrolysin, Recycle, on and off. And these things are bloody expensive, so I want them all, I can't have them all. I'm very interested to get your thoughts on one I don't know if you know about, but it's called PNC-27, which is an anti-cancer peptide.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, I haven't looked into it much, only because I don't really deal with cancer, but yeah, that's a really interesting peptide for sure. So how are you getting — I mean, you don't have to tell me, because this is going to get out there — but how the heck are you getting your hands on this stuff?

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, yeah. And that's high commitment, right? I mean, my goodness. Your mum's a lucky lady.

Lisa: I have to — we can just leave it at that. And I have doctors who prescribe these things as well, but not New Zealand doctors. So yeah, it's very difficult, but I hope that's going to change soon. I won't hold my breath, but that's what I'm hoping for.

Lisa: But I think we need to know about the theory and the science even if we can't get everything. We can, however, get the bioregulators — they're a hell of a lot easier to get. And so I have started to look into Professor Khavinson's work and trying to make heads and tails of that, but I'm new to that space. Because it's easier to get hold of, I want to know: what's your take on bioregulators? I know a lot of people are saying, well, we need more research, because most of the research that's coming is just out of Professor Khavinson's lab and we need other independent data.

Nathalie Niddam: I mean, yeah, it would be nice to have other data, but at the same time you have 40 years of clinical research, a lot of it on humans. The bigger problem is that a lot of it's in Russian, so it's hard to get. But I know a few doctors whose mission is to dig up these papers, and they use Google Translate, they use every means at their disposal to translate them, and there's some real gems in there.

Nathalie Niddam: The challenge is that — and for reasons I don't know and will not speculate on — they're not terribly forthcoming in terms of letting us share this information with the world. Khavinson's not out there necessarily educating the whole world on this stuff. He's got the Institute of Gerontology and Bioregulation in St Petersburg, they do a lot of work. They do crazy stuff with people who have diseases like retinitis pigmentosa, which is a genetic disease where you basically become blind over the course of your life, and it is intractable. It's a disease that 99% of doctors outside of Russia would say, sorry about your luck, see what you can while you can, because this is intractable. And they have shown that with the bioregulators they can stall it and even reverse it.

Lisa: Wow.

Nathalie Niddam: So not to 20/20 vision, but these people will not necessarily lose their vision, depending on how advanced they are. It's funny, even with peptides — when it comes to BPC and TA1 and TB4 and all those guys, there's hardly any human research, there's very little human research. And yet, you have two choices, right? Particularly when you're dealing with things like cancer, when you've been told by a medical doctor, you know what, there's nothing we can do, off you go, get out of my office, I'm going to help the people I can help — which I get, right, I'm going to put my resources where I know I can be helpful. At that point, to be able to say, well look, here are these compounds, we know there's evidence that they can do this, we're not going to make it worse — that's not a bad place to be, as long as the patient is informed and aware and willing. And clearly you're a person who does her homework and isn't just willy-nilly throwing stuff at the wall.

Lisa: No, and I have some really good doctors and guidance. With Mum's case, I have like 15 doctors in the mix and she has her executive CEO team.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, and that's number one, because she's so knowledgeable. I mean, she's studying this stuff, she understands the pathways. You need both sides. You need to have an understanding as much as you can, because we don't have a full understanding of the pathways and how the peptides are working, but if you have a decent understanding of the body and what's happening there and some understanding of the peptides, then you can start to put them together. And clearly it's working.

Lisa: Yeah, she's sitting there on the bike and she's just come off her red light therapy session this morning, and later this afternoon we'll be in the hyperbaric after the gym. It's full on, but I'm a full-on person, so that's okay.

Lisa: With your clients, do you have — this is the area I do struggle with — I'm very much, here's all the fantastic information that I've gathered for you from around the world from the best people, have at it, and

Lisa: ...crickets, often.

Nathalie Niddam: Well, they feel it's overwhelming. It's overwhelming. I'll be honest with you, these days I'm not taking a lot of clients, and I don't work with people who are very ill, because you need those medical doctor partners when you're working with people who have cancer or serious illness. We can be as passionate as we want, we can be super great at researching, but we need like-minded doctors who are in this space, who are going to walk with us and guide us and do the doctor work, right? Do the stuff we can't do. So I don't have those doctor partners right now, and if I don't have a doctor partner, I am not going there, because you just end up crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed.

Lisa: Yeah, because you really have to know. I think that's the biggest thing.

Nathalie Niddam: One thing I will say for your clients — and this is one of the things I learned in the coaching programmes that I did — is you've got to pick a starting point and you've got to start them with one thing. You know what the steps are, but if you throw that whole journey at them, it's too much. Most people will freeze, and first of all they'll be like, I can't afford this, I can't do this. Whereas if you are able to chunk it down and start them on one thing, then they're like, wow, I think I feel a bit better, I might have a bit more energy, but what's the next thing? What do you got for me next?

Nathalie Niddam: It's a little bit like if I'm dealing with the gut and we're using the right pre- and probiotics, let's say we get that to balance a little bit, we throw in some BPC-157 and a couple of peptides that help with healing the gut, and people are like, wow, I feel better. And now not only do they feel better, but it's almost like they have more energy to do more.

Lisa: Yeah, and they've got the brain space, and their brain fog is lifted, perhaps to a degree where they can actually make executive decisions about what's really worth them putting their time into.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, so I think it's really important to understand and meet people where they're at. And this actually can be the hardest part for us — to understand what's the first step, where do we begin.

Lisa: Yep, it is very much. And especially, to your point about not working with people in acute care settings, really, really sick people — it's a debate I've been having with myself. I need to pull back on that. I need to focus more on having a bigger impact via groups, by other mechanisms, because a ton of your energy has been sucked up by just half a dozen clients, because they're high intensity, deep research. And it's this juggle, that you've only got one of you, and you want to have as big an impact in the world as you can possibly have. That's why podcasts are great, because you can reach people, get them started. It's a trade-off all the time. But then someone will land on your doorstep literally saying, please help me, and what are you going to do? Are you going to say no? It's very hard.

Nathalie Niddam: I do find that having a good referral network is key. I spend a lot of time directing people to other people.

Lisa: Yeah, I've probably — I don't know how many people I've sent to Elizabeth over the years.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, me too. As a matter of fact, the woman I was just talking to — she's having arthritis pain and joint issues and this and that, and I'm like, you need to speak to Dr Elizabeth Yurth.

Lisa: Because there's this stuff called pentosan polysulfate. I've seen it and I've been trying to get pentosan polysulfate from another doctor in New Zealand and Australia. So I'm like, you have to talk to Dr Yurth. Half of my clients have high-level overseas support, which is just great. But she's one person, too.

Nathalie Niddam: Oh, I know.

Lisa: This is the problem. There's not that many savant genius-type people that you can get access to, and when you find them, you're going to hold them tight.

Nathalie Niddam: I mean, you hope with someone like her — what she's doing also is she's training other people. I think the biggest thing that people like her can do is to bring other professionals along with them so that they create an army. Like you said, you're only one person, she's only one person, and at the end of the day it's about, how can I help other people to do what I do? Sometimes it's a little bit hard, because you're like, well, I do what I do, this is my thing, this is mine, this is my superpower. But I think it's important to open the door and share with people. And the podcasting is a big piece of that, right?

Lisa: Yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: It's really about projecting and opening people's eyes. I'm never more excited than when I'm interviewing a doctor or researcher who's doing something so fascinating in the space and they're moving the needle. I don't know if you listened to it, I released a podcast a couple of weeks ago with a woman who's actually reversing ALS.

Lisa: Yes, I did listen to that one, and I have a client and I'm like, you've got to listen to this. Because there's hope for you, because these people are being told by the conventional medical system there's no hope.

Nathalie Niddam: And it's not a slam dunk, it's not going to be easy. When I told her about bioregulators, I got her attention. She was like, where do I learn more? Because even her — she's having success, but every one of these things is going to need other things to work with it. There's no one thing.

Lisa: Like the hyperbaric oxygen therapy — it's not the one thing.

Nathalie Niddam: I spend a lot of time talking to people when they come to me for peptides and bioregulators. They can be a really powerful piece of the puzzle, to move the needle in ways that very few things can. But 99 per cent of the time they're not the only thing. Even BPC-157 to heal the gut — you've got to be doing the diet, you've got to be managing stress, you've got to be doing the sleep. You can't be running a marathon every day, because guess what, that's going to destroy your gut lining too. All the things together. It's just that we have these new tools that are filling gaps that maybe weren't being filled before.

Lisa: And it's magic. I put hyperbaric oxygen therapy as one of those — as big as the peptide space, in its own way — because it's hitting base level, getting massive amounts of oxygen and nutrients to the hypoxic cells, getting it through the blood-brain barrier, helping with the brain. So it hits the disease process right at that deep cellular level so that the body can heal itself. A bit like stem cells. I listened to Dr Rand McClain and went, wow, again, stem cells — we can't get that here, really.

Nathalie Niddam: We can't get them here either, if that makes you feel better.

Lisa: Yeah, even you guys are struggling. But these are things to have on your radar, because in five years' time it'll be a different story. Hyperbaric now — when I started hyperbaric eight years ago, seven and a half years ago, nobody knew what hyperbaric was here in New Zealand. And because of that work — not just because of me, but maybe that was part of the thing — now there are clinics right through New Zealand and there are more and more opening up every year. There's just more and more people becoming aware, and it's usually people who have had their life saved from hyperbaric oxygen therapy sessions that have then gone on.

Lisa: My colleague was over in Australia with Dr Jason Sonners, who you have to have on the show if you haven't already. Put that one down: Dr Jason Sonners, hyperbaric expert extraordinaire. He's a trainer, clinician, and he writes the textbooks, does the clinical research. Amazing. My colleague Dr Dan Carter was just over there to get his hyperbaric technician certificate, which is going to help out with our clinic and so on. Brilliant. And he met a guy there who listened to my podcast — he had a brain injury, he was an ultra runner actually, had a brain injury, heard about hyperbaric, got into hyperbaric, it healed him, changed his life, and now he's training in hyperbaric and he's going to open a clinic. It's just like, wow, from my little podcast, that's gold.

Lisa: I've had four messages this morning from people who have said that the podcast has changed their lives, and this is what I've done since listening to that person. It's not me, it's the people I have on.

Nathalie Niddam: But it is you, because you've created the space. It is you. And you've got this intellectual curiosity of going out and getting these fabulous people.

Lisa: Which I have, and I just sit at their feet. Like Dr Dayan Goodenowe — I was listening to you and him the other day, earlier this morning. Another amazing man, and I've had him on as well. I have plasmalogens in the mix with many of my clients and my mum. Just fascinating, the depth, the 30, 40 years of research that these scientists have dedicated to one thing. I could never be so focused.

Nathalie Niddam: I know, but that's okay. We need butterflies and we need the people that hone in. We need all the things so that we can share this. There's actually another guy you may want to talk to, if you haven't already listened to that podcast. His product is called StemRegen and his name is Christian. His product is a supplement that mobilises stem cells in the body. He has the clinical research that shows you take this supplement and it will help you to release up to 10 million stem cells of your own into your circulation. So when you're trying to heal something, you kind of mega-dose this. And it's all herbal, it's really cool. It's this blue-green algae, and then there's an aloe plant in there, but it's a really specific aloe that only grows in Madagascar, and there's a sea buckthorn extract, but from sea buckthorn berries that only grow in Tibet. So he's kind of travelled the world and found these things and put together this formula.

Nathalie Niddam: We're talking about how getting stem cells is really hard and it's expensive and it's not available. Well, what if you could mega-dose a supplement like this with someone who's had a traumatic brain injury, let's say, and you're putting them in the hyperbaric, which also creates stem cells —

Lisa: Which also stimulates it, yes.

Nathalie Niddam: You're doing that and you're doing this, plus maybe you're taking some anti-inflammatories, some BPC-157, this, that and the other thing, and all of a sudden you have the body marshalling its own resources too.

Lisa: It's lovely. And that's really where you can make the body do what

Lisa: — it was meant to do, and what it did when it was young. If we look at the ten-year-old who produces a heck of a lot of BPC-157, who produces the thymus, has a huge great thymus gland that does its job — we don't have those as we get older. Those things drop off a cliff and we don't have the hormones and we don't have the peptides. And so by going in and replacing these things we can actually...

Nathalie Niddam: So Christian Drapeau — was it a question? Okay, D-R-A-P-E-A-U. His episode with me.

Lisa: I missed that one.

Nathalie Niddam: Well, probably because it's a bit earlier. I'll look it up if you want and you can check it out.

Lisa: Oh, definitely, show notes for them, because I can imagine the synergy of that and hyperbaric. That could be very interesting, for brain rehabilitation and other things. Brilliant. So tell me a little bit more about peptides and bioregulators. What do you prefer and when do you use what? And mitochondrial peptides — what are your favourites?

Nathalie Niddam: Well, the mitochondrial peptides — there's really, I'd say, three, right? You've got MOTS-c, which is your exercise mimetic; you've got humanin, which is your calorie restriction mimetic; and then you have SS-31, which is kind of like the mitochondrial biogenesis one — it helps to make more mitochondria, it helps to heal mitochondria. They're really interesting peptides, all three of them. I think the challenge with those guys, and particularly MOTS-c and humanin, is there's not a huge amount of human research. And my beef with that is we don't know enough about mitochondria. So I'm very cautious with them. I know some people use them and have a massive response — like a very positive response. I kind of like to take care of mitochondria first and then bring those on board maybe afterwards, if I'm going to bring them on board at all. But the SS-31 is more of a first step in my mind.

Nathalie Niddam: Now, SS-31 is very hard to get your hands on because it has now been patented as a drug by a drug company. So now it's a lot harder to get, it's very expensive, and I think the dosing is like 20 to 40 milligrams a day, so it's expensive. And then with MOTS-c and humanin you're now looking at also very pricey, and you kind of want to do like a four- to eight-week cycle with those guys and then you've got to lay off. And I would say that if someone uses it and has a Herxheimer reaction, I think in that sense you have mitochondria that are not ready. It's like you're taking an engine that's full of gunk and you're trying to rev it — and what's going to happen? We don't really know. And maybe what you're going to end up doing is more harm than good.

Nathalie Niddam: So for me, when I use peptides — whether it's the BPC-157, Thymosin Alpha-1, TB4 — those guys, to me, you're looking for a much more immediate response, because they're more of like a signalling molecule. They're going to initiate cascades in the body. The bioregulator peptides are very different in the sense that they are purely epigenetic switches. Purely.

Lisa: Okay.

Nathalie Niddam: So they're only two to four amino acids long, so that gives them the privilege, the superpower if you will, of getting into the nucleus of the cell and binding to DNA and upregulating the production of proteins.

Lisa: Because I always struggle with: if I take some sort of protein — whey protein, steak — it's got all the amino acids, it's got all the ingredients that are in the BPC. The magic is how they're assembled.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah.

Lisa: It's counterintuitive how you think a longer strand that makes up a protein — a protein is 50 or more amino acids strung together — something like a steak would have, I don't know, 560 or something ridiculous. And then these peptides, and the bioregulators, are really tiny, like up to ten?

Nathalie Niddam: No, they're two to four amino acids. They are naturally occurring in food, right? And you do get them from food. Because how does the body break down a protein? There are certain cleavage sites at certain points, and so that's how things get broken down into elements. But when you're using a bioregulator supplement, you're getting — think of it as getting a therapeutic dose of just that amino acid chain.

Lisa: Yep.

Nathalie Niddam: And look, I'll give you another example. Thymosin Alpha-1 — I want to say maybe it's 19 peptides, however many peptides. In Thymosin Alpha-1 you have two repeats of the sequence of a different immune bioregulator embedded in the Thymosin Alpha-1. So we don't know: when you give someone Thymosin Alpha-1, does it stay whole for the whole time, or does it over time get broken down and then you get these two pieces of bioregulator — I think it's Vilon, it's one of the other immune bioregulators — that's going to go and do its thing?

Nathalie Niddam: So bioregulators to me are really interesting also because they come from food. They're actually being extracted from cow tissue, glands and organs. If people eat organ meats — those few people out there who eat organ meats are probably getting access to bioregulators in much higher degrees than just counting on regular food.

Lisa: And if you look at the websites of the guys that are making these organ meat supplements — Heart & Soil, Ancestral Supplements, those guys — people are getting transformative health events. And you think that that's actually maybe connected to the bioregulators?

Nathalie Niddam: I almost — oh, I've lost you.

Lisa: Oh, sorry, Nat, I lost you. Yeah, my mic just dropped, it went down. So can you repeat that last bit?

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah. So when you're eating the organ meat, you're getting the whole complex. Like think about liver. What do we get when we eat liver? We get vitamin A, vitamin D, you get the methylated Bs in there. You're getting a food-based multivitamin, and you're also most likely getting the liver bioregulator peptides at the same time.

Lisa: Wow.

Nathalie Niddam: Right? And same with things like desiccated thyroid and things like that.

Lisa: Wow. Because you're using the whole organ being processed into a capsule.

Nathalie Niddam: And so the interesting thing about the bioregulators — peptides, they have, to me, a higher safety profile in the sense that you can't overdo a bioregulator, because the bioregulator is only going to restore homeostasis to the system. It's never going to push it into overdrive or suppress it. You get someone with a wonky immune system that does too big a dose of Thymosin Alpha-1 and the poop hits the fan — they feel awful, they feel like they have the flu, they're feeling terrible. You can take a thyroid bioregulator and give it to a hypo- or hyperthyroid person and it's going to modulate their function.

Lisa: I love things that are adaptogenic and modulating, the things that actually go, "Okay, what does this person need?" so to speak. If a cell could talk, it would say yes. So you're saying that the bioregulators — and then the argument that you can't take bioregulators orally, they're not going to get through the gastric system?

Nathalie Niddam: No, no, they do, because bioregulators are different than peptides. It's almost like because these are made for us, the body recognises them, and again it's about those cleavage sites. When you get deep into the literature about bioregulators, they talk about there being very specific sections where they get chopped up, which leaves in integrity that two-to-four amino acid chain, which — I think they're called channel-penetrating peptides — so there are almost specific sites where they get through. So it's actually mechanisms that are built into our physiology that we don't even really know about.

Lisa: And then these go to the DNA, so to speak, and it's like a recipe book: make this thing.

Nathalie Niddam: It binds to the DNA. If you look at the images — there are some images in some of these books — you see this 3D structure of DNA and you see the bioregulator come in, and it just wraps into the helix and the helix unfolds, and you start to see the production of protein. The RNA that goes in, the endoplasmic reticulum that does the thing.

Lisa: So it's like a master recipe.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah.

Lisa: And then go out into the world and make this protein. I mean, this is epigenetics.

Nathalie Niddam: This is what it is. These are switching keys off and on. And then you have, in the family of traditional peptides, you have things like GHK, the copper peptide. It's only three amino acids, so I've had physicians who said to me, "I actually think that is a bioregulator, it just hasn't been identified as such." But GHK-Cu, we know, flips over a thousand genes up and down. It restores the genome to a more useful expression.

Lisa: Wow. Because I use the GHK powder and put it in my skin creams and things, but I haven't injected it. Can you use it as an injectable as well?

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, absolutely. So as an injectable it's got all kinds of other benefits. It helps to break down scar tissue, it helps to prevent scarring. I had a very minor surgery last summer and I was told by the surgeon I was going to have a major scar. I'd challenge anybody to find it. It's in a bad spot so I'm not going to show it, I'm not doing that. But I threw everything at it. The plastic surgeon said to me — she tried to put me off, I had a cyst — and she's like, "This is going to scar, this is a really bad spot." I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, you just do what you've got to do."

Nathalie Niddam: And I was using topical copper peptide, I was using topical nitric oxide serum, I was using BPC-157 topically, I used a fragment of Thymosin Beta-4 that is anti-fibrotic, then I was injecting GHK, I was using the STEMREGEN like by the handful.

Lisa: Holy crap, you're even worse than me. You're more full-out than I am.

Nathalie Niddam: Oh yeah, no, I was doing all the things. I didn't want this thing, and sure enough, you can't see anything happening there.

Lisa: Wow. And scar tissue, of course, has a different substance and it really causes trouble in the body. It pulls it out of shape, so to speak.

Nathalie Niddam: It attaches, it binds things.

Lisa: Yeah, so you don't want scar tissue forming. Wow, okay. So not just — I've been using the GHK-Cu topically in my skin creams to keep this...

Nathalie Niddam: Topically it is great, but I would say that it is also very powerful, and it even has cognitive benefits. Go figure. GHK is one of those peptides where the more you research, the more stuff there is. Now again, there's not a huge amount of human research here, but definitely topically, it's a no-brainer.

Lisa: Yeah, I mean, your skin —

Lisa: You just know yourself that your skin looks better after using that for a little while. Okay, so what are some of the other ones? So BPC-157, it's quite a famous peptide, and a lot of people, if they've heard about anything, they've probably heard about that one. Body Protective Compound. You can have this orally, so like with my mum — she had a GI bleed, and I had her on the injectable BPC-157, but I didn't have the oral, so I scavenged around to get the oral for her. Because taking it orally, that's going to help the digestive system more than the systemic BPC injections?

Nathalie Niddam: I mean, the systemic will help the GI tract, it's just you end up having, when you have a lot of demand, you use more, right? The oral, at least it's getting there, it's going exactly to where you want it to go. Which is part of the reason why I think taking it orally is less effective for musculoskeletal issues, because it's going to get used up along the way, right? It goes right to where it's been sent first. And how many people don't have an issue in their GI tract somewhere? How many people don't have some degree of leaky gut?

Lisa: Yeah, that needs to be addressed.

Nathalie Niddam: And so BPC-157, I kind of call it the Swiss Army knife of peptides, right? Because it has benefits for the brain, it's anti-inflammatory, it can help with pain, it can help with mitigating the downsides of steroids. It offsets the negatives of non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. Let's say somebody really needed them, NSAIDs — BPC-157 can help to mitigate the downsides of that. I know I'm forgetting stuff.

Lisa: And this is a bioregulator? Is it? Because it's in a tablet form, it's not considered a bioregulator, even in the tablet?

Nathalie Niddam: Too big. Yeah, it's too big, and it doesn't — the bioregulator only binds to genes. BPC-157, I actually do believe it has some impact on certain genes, but most of its action is done because it attaches to receptors, right? So what's really cool, sometimes when we think about what peptides would work really well together — there's a category of peptides called growth hormone secretagogues that help the body to release more growth hormone, right? And typically it's not going to do it in a super physiologic way, it's not as powerful as using actual growth hormone. But what's really interesting about BPC is that it upregulates the expression of growth hormone receptors in the body. So when you're using it at the same time as the growth hormone secretagogues and you're trying to address an injury — how cool is it that now all of a sudden you have more growth hormone floating around and you've got more catcher's mitts hanging out waiting for growth hormone?

Lisa: Wow, I didn't know that.

Nathalie Niddam: So things like CJC, Ipamorelin and Tesamorelin combined with BPC are very synergistic when you're trying to heal injury.

Lisa: Oh wow, that is just — let's go. And to just back up and explain to people, because peptides are still a new thing. So the peptides are usually subcutaneous injections, and that puts a lot of people off. You have to get bacteriostatic water, and you have to get syringes, and you have to mix it.

Nathalie Niddam: Which is actually so minor. Like honestly, I can't even feel it when I do it. It doesn't faze me at all.

Lisa: You don't feel it at all. When you get a prickle on the lawn, that's worse.

Nathalie Niddam: Exactly.

Lisa: But it is a bit of a barrier at the beginning, and then the dosing and the dosing protocols and things. And on that point, you've got a group, BSP, that's on Mighty Networks. Can you tell us a little bit about that group, so that people can maybe join that?

Nathalie Niddam: So it's called the BSP Community on Mighty Networks. BSP: Biohacking Superhuman Performance. I didn't have the heart to use that whole name again.

Lisa: Yeah, it's a long one.

Nathalie Niddam: It's bad enough it's the name of the podcast. I was not using it again for the group. And so that's a membership community, and it's much more intimate than the Facebook group, which is Optimizing Superhuman Performance, which is amazing, but it's a monster community. There's 15,000 people in there. But the BSP Community is much more intimate. It allows me to interact with people more. I started off doing monthly live Q&As, I'm now doing weekly live Q&As with those guys, and I'm bringing in other experts to do Q&As. As a matter of fact, Dayan Goodenowe came into that group and he offered them the opportunity to do his 30-day brain and metabolic reset, that a lot of us are coming to the end of in the next few days.

Lisa: How the hell did you manage to pull that one off? That's just amazing, that he offered it and did that. That's like, wow.

Nathalie Niddam: I asked. And the other thing about guys like Dayan is he's like you, he's a data hog, right? And that protocol is a beast. Your first round of — you have four rounds of supplements a day, the first round is the worst, it's 20 pills. It's epic, right? And he's really asking you to stop almost everything else that you're doing. But we tested our plasmalogens, then we're doing the 30 days, and then we test our plasmalogens again. And it's funny, because 24 people stepped up in the group to do that, and at the time it was a much smaller group. What's interesting is some people are having — they're like, "Oh my God, I feel amazing." Or one woman went to high altitude and she normally feels horrible, and she hasn't had any symptoms. You've got other people that are like, "My sleep is so much better." The next person, "My sleep's actually gotten worse." Somebody else is like, "I feel nothing." So for Dayan himself, he's all about the research, so even for him it's so fascinating to see how different people are responding to the same protocol. So in that community we get to do stuff like that.

Lisa: Wow. Yeah, and it's all private, and it's not censored.

Nathalie Niddam: It's a private scene, so there's no censorship.

Lisa: Which is so important.

Nathalie Niddam: And then people who join annually get my peptide crash course, which I'm just having redone. So the peptide crash course 2.0 should be out in the next two weeks. And that one will be available for sale outside of the group if people are interested, or they can join the community, and if they join as an annual member, they'll automatically get it as part of their membership.

Lisa: Okay, that's just absolutely amazing. And this is like when I'm watching Dr Yurth's group, and then groups like yours, and I'm like, "Geez, I need to do that as well."

Nathalie Niddam: And it's bandwidth. You've got to be careful.

Lisa: Yeah, it's totally painful to say. I bet you're taking on less and less clients one-on-one in order to do that, hey? And it's always a juggle between what you do with your energy. But then you must be feeling like you're building — these are your people, these are your tribe.

Nathalie Niddam: It's a gift having a community like that, because number one, they're very open, but number two, they're knowledgeable. I learn from them all — and I mean both communities, I learn from them all the time. And the smaller, more intimate community is a little more homogeneous. There's only a certain type of person who's willing to — and it's not, you know, even fifteen dollars a month, it's not a ton of money, but it's still money. And these days people are —

Lisa: Everything's more, and we've got lots of subscriptions.

Nathalie Niddam: Exactly. So I'm very grateful to them for being part of it. But they come in and they're all in, right?

Lisa: The value you get is just next level. I'm in a couple of groups, and you just get so much value. And I definitely want to do the peptide crash course and be in your community too, because especially with peptides, it's really hard to find good information — dosing schedules, all of that sort of stuff, where you get the stuff.

Nathalie Niddam: And you'll find even in the course, we have to be really careful with dosing on peptides, just because from a legal perspective, legally we're not even supposed to give dosing. But we give starting doses. One thing I think — and you probably are learning this or have seen this — it really varies from person to person. Some people do really well with BPC-157, some people it makes them super anxious. Some people you could give them the Thymosin Alpha-1 at the 1.5 milligrams a couple of times a week; 1.5 milligrams for another person is going to blow them up, throw them into some kind of a crazy flare-up. So that person needs like 50 to 100 micrograms, and we start to titrate them up super slow. The next guy comes in and has a very acute injury — you might start that person with like 10 milligrams of BPC and 10 milligrams of TB4 all in one shot, just to stop it, right? And then taper down from there. So it's all over the map. There's no real rules at this point. To me the only real rules are: try to understand a little bit about the person who's in front of you, and don't be afraid to start really, really low. And you can always bring people up.

Lisa: And then also to work with people like Dr Elizabeth Yurth, especially for more serious conditions. We have to find those doctors and practitioners.

Nathalie Niddam: We need more of them. We need a ton of them educated in the space.

Lisa: Look at this field of medicine, because it is burgeoning and it is exploding. And people think — I've talked to a couple of doctors and they just haven't heard of it at all. Or it's like, "Oh, that's just a minor thing over in the States, that's a little bit of a treat." No, this is huge.

Nathalie Niddam: But it's moving the needle. And I think for you, with the work you're doing with people, as you're able to share case studies with these guys and show them — I once had a woman who had a non-union fracture in her wrist and she was heading for surgery. And at the time I was working with someone else, and he helped me to develop a protocol which was the BPC, the TB4, and CJC/Ipamorelin. And I think it took eight weeks, and she went back to her orthopaedic surgeon and he just about fell off his chair. That non-union fracture that they'd been trying to heal for months and months and months had suddenly unionised.

Lisa: Wow, that's just — I just love hearing all these amazing stories that weren't meant to be. And the funny thing is that doctors don't then go, "Well hang on, what did you do?"

Nathalie Niddam: Well, it depends. Sometimes you get a doctor that's like, "Wait, wait, I need to learn." There's one guy I interviewed last —

Nathalie Niddam: — year, his name is Stephen Barrett and he's a peripheral nerve neurologist, and he tells the story on the podcast that he heard about BPC-157 from somewhere and he was like, "That sounds really interesting." And then he kind of had a case that came in the door and he thought, "I think that BPC stuff might be helpful." And so he tried it out and it knocked his socks off, and he's now hydro-dissecting nerves with it. He fell down the rabbit hole.

Nathalie Niddam: So what you want to find is the doctors who have the time and the space and the bandwidth to be curious and open. And those are the doctors typically — and I don't want to fault the other guys, because sometimes they're just busy, they're too busy, they're overwhelmed, they've got too much on their plate, whatever the reason is. But when we can find those doctors who are still —

Lisa: Where the system and med school didn't just crush the curiosity.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, exactly. They're the ones that are diving into this stuff and doing amazing things.

Lisa: And thank goodness we do have lots more and more coming to looking at the latest research. And then there are people like you and I who sort of sit in the middle and outside of it and educate and just have these very interesting conversations.

Lisa: I wanted to just touch on before we wind up — nearly — semaglutide and tirzepatide. And I know you had — I've forgotten the gentleman's name.

Nathalie Niddam: Caleb Greer.

Lisa: Caleb, that's it. Tirzepatide versus semaglutide. Semaglutide is a peptide that is a weight loss — well, it was for diabetes initially, and then it's become a weight loss peptide. And now there's a new one, well, it's relatively new, called tirzepatide. I've got my husband on semaglutide currently and I'm like, oh, should I have gone to tirzepatide?

Nathalie Niddam: It doesn't matter, you can always switch. I mean, semaglutide works really well for some people, and tirzepatide is like the new shiny toy, or newer shinier toy. There's another one coming down the pipes.

Lisa: Oh really?

Nathalie Niddam: Oh yeah. So semaglutide is just a GLP-1 agonist. Tirzepatide is a GLP-1 and GIP agonist, so now it hits two different receptors. Semaglutide only hits the one receptor, tirzepatide hits two receptors. The new one coming down the pipes is going to be hitting three receptors. And the new one is actually frighteningly effective.

Lisa: Wow.

Nathalie Niddam: To the point where — I think the study that I read was they gave people a single six milligram dose and they lost, I want to say, like 14 pounds over eight days, and it stayed off for 43 days.

Lisa: Wow. That's a new one. Have you got a name?

Nathalie Niddam: It starts with an R and it ends with a -tide. I just don't remember what's in the middle. But it's coming. You know what, if anybody wants to research it, it's coming from Eli Lilly, which is the same company that makes tirzepatide. So anyway, semaglutide, tirzepatide, they're really effective, they're great. Where I find people go a little wrong with these things is they use them and they don't change much about their diet and their lifestyle.

Lisa: And then they're dependent on it.

Nathalie Niddam: And then they come off of it and they're eating and now — right. Because they've barely eaten anything for however many weeks and months they've been on it. So to me, you have to eat a very nutrient-dense diet, because you're not going to be eating a lot. It hits the brain centres for cravings, right? So what happens is you don't have much appetite. Some people say, "Oh, I only want healthy food." But other people are like, "Wait, I just figured out I can have a donut and a chocolate bar and I'm still going to lose weight, so I'm not eating much else. Big whoop." Well, the bad news is you're going to end up nutrient deficient. And I mean, that's an extreme example. But you want to make sure that you're eating protein first, because you want to preserve that lean mass. You want to make sure that you're exercising, because you want to send the signal to the body, "Hey, we still need muscle." You may lose a little bit of lean mass, but if you're not losing strength — look, big muscles are overrated. At the end of the day, what you want is functional and strong muscles, right?

Lisa: So you've got to get strength from Netflix apparently.

Nathalie Niddam: I mean look, there's different examples out there, but to me these peptides more than anything need good coaching.

Lisa: Yep, yep. And I think always you go to the diet, the genetics, and you look at what that person should be eating and when they should be eating it, and you look at hormones and thyroid and things like that. But I've got clients who've done all of that, and especially menopausal women, and someone can't go on HRT or whatever the case may be, and they are not shifting the weight no matter what you throw at them. And this is where I think for those types of people that are eating well and not moving the needle — this is going to impact your health, because if you've got obesity, you've got a domino effect with fat mass and the mess that makes of the body. Then this is when I think these things are really going to be gold. But as you say, you want to make sure that you're eating correctly and getting enough protein. Because I've heard that one too, that you're not hungry, so you're not eating as much protein. So I've noticed with my husband, he's just not interested in things like beer that would have been calling his name.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, which is great, right? Because you want to protect the pancreas. Another tool that's really, really helpful when you're using these peptides is essential amino acids.

Lisa: Oh right. I'm a huge fan. I have PerfectAmino, so Dr David Minkoff's.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, I love those. I have basically everybody on those.

Lisa: Because I think that's your baseline repair. Yeah, 100% on that. Have you had Dr Minkoff on the show? He's gold.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, isn't he lovely?

Lisa: Oh, you have too. I've listened to it. Yeah, he's coming back on shortly. Okay, so tirzepatide even better than semaglutide, probably because it's hitting two of those receptor pathways.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah. So what happens with semaglutide sometimes is people just kind of hit a wall. I think the receptors get a little overdone and so they don't respond as well. But the tirzepatide seems to move the needle for those people. Also, these are peptides you want to start very, very low, because if you go too high too fast you could get really nauseous and have a few very unpleasant days. There is a small percentage of people that even the smallest dose will make them violently ill, so it's just not for them.

Nathalie Niddam: But what's cool about them is they make you more insulin sensitive, which is amazing, and they do it at the skeletal muscle, which means that eventually it makes exercising easier and better, because your muscles are more receptive to whatever glycogen or glucose is around. So I think there's a lot of good about them. I just think we have to be mindful. There are a couple of black box warnings on these things, where you have to stay hydrated for sure, because it can be hard on the kidneys. Someone with a history of pancreatitis, this is a no-go for you, because it can cause pancreatitis in some people, and it can cause pancreatitis even in people who haven't had pancreatitis. So I know some practitioners, doctors, who like to give their patients BPC-157 alongside these, just because body protective compound happens to be also organ protective. So it's protective of the pancreas and the heart and the liver. And then thyroid — anybody who's had thyroid cancer. There's never been a case of thyroid cancer in humans yet, it's only ever been seen in rats, and we are not rats, but we just need to be mindful. So if someone has a history of thyroid cancer, you probably wouldn't choose these compounds.

Lisa: Yeah, and these are the sort of things you need to be under the guidance of professionals.

Nathalie Niddam: Exactly. There's no free lunch.

Lisa: No, there's no free lunch.

Nathalie Niddam: Now I will tell you, and I'll share this with you, like in that community that I run, the private membership community, there's a guy who just posted something last week about a new supplement coming from one of these really great new supplement lines, and he started taking the supplements a little over a month ago and he said he's changed nothing and dropped 10 pounds.

Lisa: Wow.

Nathalie Niddam: And it's a very interesting stack of all the cool fat burning compounds, like L-BAIBA. It's got obviously berberine in it, it's got bitter melon in it, it's got a couple of — the berberine that's in here is the dihydroberberine, which is the more effective one. And it's got grains of paradise seed extract in there. So it's actually Shawn Wells — I don't know if you know him — but Shawn Wells released a book a few years ago, and he's a formulator, and he kind of did research on all these novel fat loss compounds, and what these guys did is they threw it all together in a bottle. So I don't know that it's going to work the same for everybody, so now of course I've started talking about it.

Lisa: So what's the company?

Nathalie Niddam: Oh, the company is called Healthgevity, and the website is healthgevity.com, and this particular product is called Ignite.

Lisa: Ignite, okay. Well, I'll be joining your community and then hearing how that goes.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, because I've just started. I just thought, okay, I'm going to give it a shot for the next little while. I don't have a ton of weight to lose, but I'll just see what happens.

Lisa: Yeah, and you and I, biohackers, we do a lot of things just to see what happens. "What happens if I do this?" It's quite exciting. I love trying out new things. And sometimes I'm probably guilty of having too many things in the mix and you're not quite sure what did what and what didn't.

Lisa: Hey Nathalie, you've been absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. Thank you for all the wonderful podcasts that you put out there, for the community that you run on Facebook and on Mighty Networks. We will put all those links down in the show notes for sure. Where can people follow you as well, on other platforms and stuff? Tell us a little bit there.

Nathalie Niddam: Sure, thanks Lisa. So on Instagram it's just Nat Niddam — and Nathalie has an H between the T and the second A. My website is probably a really good place to go, it's natniddam.com, because you'll find the BSP community through that as well, and the podcast. I've got the peptide course coming up, and then I've got a women's retreat coming up this fall in the Dominican Republic if anybody's interested in hanging out for five days. And yeah, that's about it.

Lisa: Wonderful, wonderful. Nathalie, thank you so much for all you do. I think you're absolutely marvellous and you're just such a really good educator and a fount of knowledge. And I love your interview style and everything you do, so thank you so much.

Nathalie Niddam: Well Lisa, right back at you. Thank you again, it's been a pleasure.