Top Toxins in Protein Powder + Best Clean Options
with Oliver Chamby
Dr. Wendy Myers
Hello, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. On this show, we talk about everything related to heavy metals, chemicals, detoxification, the health issues caused by these toxins, and a lot of other advanced topics in biohacking. I also love to touch on anti-aging and bioenergetics. On today’s show, we have Oliver Chamby. He’s going to be talking about the toxins in protein powder, which ones to choose and which one is best. I know millions of you are taking protein powders, but buyer beware. There are some distinctions that need to be made when it comes to choosing your protein powder.
On today’s show, we’re going to be talking about all the different heavy metals that are in different types of protein powders and how whey protein is really so important. It’s superior to plant proteins in a lot of different ways, including bioavailability and amino acid profile, and it’s generally cleaner as far as toxins are concerned than plant-based proteins. We’ll talk about how the chocolate protein flavoring like cacao can contain cadmium and lead, and how soy can be very high in pesticides and is almost always genetically modified. You want to avoid soy protein isolate protein powders. We’ll talk about how hemp protein is particularly prone to high cadmium levels and why organic certification doesn’t guarantee low heavy metal content.
We’ll also talk about fish oil and how fish oil quality depends on the source, processing speed to prevent oxidation and rancidity. We’ll talk about how fish oil made from small fish like anchovies and sardines have much lower mercury and environmental toxin levels and how fish oil oxidation is a major issue. It causes inflammation and damages your health. A lot of people are taking fish oil as well. We’ll also talk about how capsules are more stable than liquid fish oil after opening because the liquid goes rancid off for about one week. We’ll talk about how high EPA and DHA concentration is really important. We’ll also talk about how Oliver’s brand Puori emphasizes purity and transparency, testing every batch of their supplements for heavy metals, contaminants, and oxidation. It’s really a good show today. You’ve got to tune in because we’ve got to be making a lot of distinctions when it comes to choosing, purchasing and consuming various supplements.
Our guest today, Oliver Amdrup Chamby, is the co-founder and CEO of Danish-based health and food supplement brand, Puori. With more than 15 years of experience, Puori is a front runner in third party batch testing based on testing all products in final consumer batches for the most environmental toxins. In the last few years, Puori has pledged to be part of the transparency promise driven by the Clean Label Project, a project that gives consumers third party full transparency on what’s actually in their products. It’s a long term goal of Puori to be a part of making environmental testing a regulated process for foods and food supplements considered in the risk group of toxification.
Oliver holds a Bachelor in International Business Development Communication from SDU in Denmark and an executive program from Stanford. While studying, he started a personal training business, which grew into the first CrossFit gym in Denmark. In 2007, he launched a corporate fitness app, which was acquired nine months later. He went on to work as a regional director of CrossFit from 2011 to 2015, alongside building Puori, and before moving to San Francisco to solely focus on the growth of Puori. In 2009, he founded Puori together with Julius Hessel, with the goal of creating the cleanest third party tested fish oil and protein powder on the market. Oliver is a true health nerd, passionate about stoicism, and is known for having spent the last 20 years testing different health training on longevity routines. You can learn more about him and his amazing line of supplements at pouri.com. Oliver, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Oliver Chamby
Thank you for having me.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into the health industry?
Oliver Chamby
The short story is I got really passionate about physical activity and training when I was studying business right after high school. I started and fell in love as a personal trainer with the idea of helping others and myself in improving health and wellness through things you could do yourself. So, I got into that space. Then I started a gym, CrossFit gym. It was actually the second CrossFit gym in Europe. It was in very early days called CrossFit Denmark before there were CrossFit gyms all over the place, but then my passion was always along the line of food and what I could do more with food. That made a turn into being first an interest in some of the key micronutrients lacking in our diet. So, we were looking a lot on optimizing diet based on blood work and data, but also just general macro movements of how we are consuming food in general. I was pretty interested. My co-founder and I were diving into the omega three – omega six fatty acid balances and understanding the Western diet versus a more optimal diet from the past on richer in omega three fatty acids. We were going into, how can you actually supplement this to make it easier than just getting it from food? Because it might be hard to get enough from food.
When we went down that path it took us to, just remember as a lot of different scientists and doctors guide us, if you’re starting to consume something on a daily basis, just make sure it’s pure and clean because we know fish can be polluted. That can be heavy metals. That can be toxins in the oceans that might accumulate in the fish and you will get it from the fish oil. So, we were like these two happy young people that were like, okay, that makes sense. I’m going to find out exactly how many past billions of lead or mercury is in the fish oil that I can buy. We walked to the stores and at first we couldn’t really get any answers. It was like, this is interesting. Everybody agrees here on something on the food side, which was interesting to us because in the training and wellness space, everybody disagrees somehow. There are various routes to a let’s say a healthier body and so on but when it looked at the toxin load, everybody agreed that a little lead is not good and a lot of lead in your body is really bad. There was nobody saying you need a little more lead in your diet. So, we were interested and asked a lot of questions because it didn’t make any sense when people were so focused on this. Why were there no data points on it?
At the time we couldn’t get, we were based, you can probably hear it on the accent, based out of Copenhagen, Denmark, and we couldn’t find any brand through either pharmacies, health food stores, or anything that would actually give us the actual test report on that fish oil that we were trying to buy. So, we felt there must be an opportunity for a brand that will share that on their homepage as first thing, hey, look, we tested this from this. When we started looking into this, it’s back in 2007, 2008. It’s quite some time ago.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, that’s great. That’s right before I started my website also focused on toxins. It’s really amazing how little information at that time and still a lot of companies are not really testing their products, not testing for heavy metals and chemicals. It’s a little shocking. That’s why I love that your brand is so focused on testing all of your products for heavy metals and clearly posting that on your website. We’re going to talk about protein powders and I think people don’t realize how many heavy metals are in protein powders. They can get organic, think about organic ones and not worry about the chemicals, but there’s more to it than that. Can you talk about some of the problems with various types of protein powders today because most people are taking those on a daily basis?
Oliver Chamby
For sure. I think it’ll make a lot of sense to touch more on that because you’re also consuming a larger amount. That’s why for a powder, you might consume 20, 30, 40 grams a day, where I would say some other food supplements might be less of a risk because you’re consuming smaller amounts. They can be very concentrated for sure, but like when we talk about protein powders, you’re potentially consuming 30 grams of protein powder on a daily basis. What we’ve seen is pure origin. What we’ve seen in our journey was that we have to start by sourcing the purest ingredients we can. And then there’s some ingredients when you mix them in, whether it’s a protein powder, you want a flavor component. It can actually be the flavor component that is more toxic, or at least if we look at protein powders, vanilla versus chocolate, if you have the same whey protein as a general foundation whey is one of the cleaner proteins we’ve seen compared to plants, especially on the heavy metal side. But if you take a cleaner protein like a whey, and then again, we can dive into the quality of how clean and where was the cow grazing, what were they eating and so on and go deeper down that hole in a second, but if you just take those two, if you then add the cacao and cacao is a great natural ingredients, and it’s a healthy ingredient full of retinoids and other good antioxidants, if you add a cacao bean that potentially is polluted, we have seen a very big difference.
When we are sourcing organic high quality, we’re trying to source the highest quality on the market. When looking for it, we’ve been through probably 10, 12 different cacao manufacturers. What we see in these cacao beans is potentially a pretty high amount of cadmium and could also be lead and so on is what we’re most commonly seeing. So again, the flavor can have a component to it, the source of a region can have a component to it. That’s what we’ve been trying to do now over the last 15 years. We are trying the purest raw ingredients possible and they can come from all over. We mainly source from Europe and the US, but we also source a little bit from Canada and New Zealand now and then, depending on product quality. And that is what I think a takeaway is here as well. That is compact. It’s a data point. Toxic load is a data point.
We can compare apples to apples if we want to. But unfortunately, very few brands are still testing their final batch. The consumer batch product is rarely being tested by a third party or even by the brands themselves. It’s a good start. But potentially and preferably in the future, every single brand in risk or every single category of food in general food supplement in risk of contamination should be tested on the highest risk heavy metals. For example, you could compare that it is hard for the supply chain to set it up, but it’s not that expensive. And think of the impact over time consuming a protein powder that had maybe two or three times the daily safe, if there is any safe limit, because there’s probably not, but the daily recommended maximum level or threshold set by whether it’s proposition 65 or European regulations a day in a protein shake. It’s so counterintuitive when you’re trying to do something good for yourself.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
What you mentioned was cacao. If you have a choice between cacao and vanilla protein powder, if the company you’re buying it from doesn’t have any testing, you should probably choose vanilla. But there are companies like your company testing and really being rigorous about the sourcing of their ingredients, which is so important because there’s so many reports all over consumers reports about the lead in chocolate. There are so many problems in that industry, even in organic, because remember organic means chemical free, nothing to do with heavy metals. There’s no regulatory agency. There’s no label. There’s no one. There’s no label on a package that you can find to deduce whether this has low levels of heavy metals or high levels. There’s no regulatory agency working on that, unfortunately.
Oliver Chamby
Unfortunately, no. This is something that we work very closely with the Clean Label Project, which is a non-profit out of the U. S. because Clean Label Project have done in the past some quite big category studies where they go out and buy up to 80 percent of what American consumers can get their hands on. It could be pet food, it could be protein powder, baby food. Any category that they wanted to focus on. When they bought protein powders, they had a big study back in 2018. And when they bought that, they saw a host of different things that they wanted to improve. A lot of products that had high levels of heavy metals and whatnot. Actually, in that test, we reached out to them afterwards and said, this is great. But it’s the snapshot of the category. This was actually interesting talking with Jackie, the executive director of the Clean Label project, because we said, we would love it if you would upload and test every single batch of all our products, because at the moment we were doing lab testing ourselves.
In the fish oil industry, there was the IFAS program, which is somewhat similar to Clean Label Project. It’s a testing facility, but again, it’s not mandatory to test every single batch, which I think is a big difference. Testing a lot of it is like. sporadically testing 5, 10 percent of what a brand is doing over a year, but what we’ve seen in the supply chain, and this is not, whether it’s farmers or manufacturers anything being purposely misleading, but what we have seen in the supply chain is even from the same rate origin, we see a big variation. It could be a 10-time variation on heavy metals. So, we know if we don’t test that final product, like on every single batch of every single product, it is just like, it’s a little bit of safety for sure, and it’s better than not, but I think we should be able to move in that direction and we call it a Clean Label Project, the Transparency Pledge or the Transparency Promise.
We’ve done that now with our brand. There’s a QR code on every single batch of protein powder or fish oil or whatever product that you have from us. You would scan that QR code and you would be able to find a lab report on that exact batch. It’s quite a lot of lab reports running around also because underneath the lab report, we might be testing for heavy metals, but we might also be testing for residual solvents or it could be microbial. It could be the protein content. It could be various different things that are at risk of that product. That has changed a little bit from product to product now. But, if you have that data, at least you can go and look and see for yourself, like in this batch, I feel pretty comfortable doing it. If you take us as an example, we also have a cacao protein powder on the market and we have set a standard internally, which is probably slightly lower than proposition 65, which is, I would say the strictest real regulated standard in us for a little bit overboard
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think it goes way too overboard. In my opinion, I know it’s to protect consumers, but it goes a little bit overboard. That’s overreaching a little bit.
Oliver Chamby
You think so?
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah.
Oliver Chamby
You don’t think it’s the way to go in the future that having those data points or?
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, no. I feel like in California, it unfairly hurts the supplement industry, whereby a lot of like food-based supplements just naturally contain lead and a lot of food products we buy potatoes root vegetables contain a lot of lead, but those aren’t tested. But the supplements are right. What am I trying to say? It unfairly targets the supplement industry, though. I’m all about heavy metals and detoxing your body, but I think the prop 65 is a little bit too strict, in my opinion, and singles out the supplement industry. I think to a certain degree on purpose it makes them look bad and makes it another hoop to jump through. I think it unfairly favors that out though. I’m all for protecting consumers and going with companies like yourself that are very meticulous and that are doing testing on their own and that are setting a high standard for toxin levels in their products.
Oliver Chamby
I think going down that, there should be some food products that are tested as well. I think we should expand the testing probably more so that we look into at least those high-risk groups and find a way, because again, some of the things that are good with human nature are we’re inventive. If there’s an issue and a problem, we can try to solve it. I think there should be ways to solve that as well for these food groups so that we’re not just trying to get super high-quality protein powders. But then again, I use this example at home as well. The dark chocolate that I love at home, I have no idea what’s actually in that beam, in the one line consuming. The only thing I can do right now is change brands now and then and go from different areas so I don’t maybe get too much of one, even though we know that a brand can have various fields that they’re sourcing their cacao beans from. So, it doesn’t need to be, but again, that’s the best.
I think the level of technical finesse that we’ve created around the world, we should be able to find a system at least for that. I also hope we should find a way to know our earth crust and areas a little bit better if we could map that out. Internally we’ve mapped that out. We’ve seen, okay, this area generally we see better quality raw ingredients from when it comes from here versus this area. But think of being able to map our planet. We use the planet the best way possible, or at least just our countries, the best way possible.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, because we do heavy metals testing here at Myers Detox and we see people from different countries have different heavy metal toxicities that are more prevalent because there’s more different toxins in the soil and same thing with coffee or the cacao. It can have more cadmium in it based on the region or the soil in which it’s grown uh for sure and also that brings me to thinking about other types of protein powders like hemp. That’s a really popular plant-based alternative, but it can have really high levels of cadmium. The hemp plant is very adept and tobacco as well as drawing out that cadmium from the soil. I used to take hemp protein powders 15 years ago, but I would never take that today. I would only do whey protein powder based on what I know as far as nutrition and as far as toxins and various types of protein powders.
Oliver Chamby
Yeah, and I would agree. That’s the one I would consume on a daily basis. I think we’ve played a little bit with pea proteins. We found some pretty high quality, fairly clean proteins out there. So, that’s what we’ve done. Again, we have a community of people who are maybe vegan focused and still having a hard time hitting their daily protein targets for various reasons. So, we’ve played around with that. And for that, we actually didn’t create any flavoring or anything. It’s a super straightforward product, but very simple. But again, it’s all about the raw ingredients. How pure can we get it? It doesn’t taste as good, I would say. And that’s my personal opinion. Taste is different, but like personal opinion on where the whey protein can be. I think easier use on a daily basis
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk the differences in whey protein powder. There’s regular old whey protein powder from regular cows in the U S that can be fed GMO corn and soy, and there’s whey protein isolate, which you want to avoid like the plague. And then there’s the grass fed and then there’s grass organic. There’s a whole spectrum of quality within that just that one type of protein powder. Can you talk about that?
Oliver Chamby
If I didn’t have the transparency testing in our end where I could actually see there’s no pesticide residue, there’s no antibiotics and so on in there, I would go for an organic, grass-fed pasture raised way. If I didn’t have any other information, that’s where I’d go. But, what we’ve seen actually and we can have areas that might not be big enough to be organic certified, but they’ve always grass. They have cows that are living outside year-round or most of the year, depending on where you are on the planet. We could actually buy that and feel equally good about it if animal safety and so on was at high quality. I think that’s what I like about organic as well is at least you get that check mark as well. We do that research ourselves with the different farms that we work with. But if you do that, we could actually use something that’s not organic as long as the cow is going outside. We test in that final product for pesticide residue and GMOs. Again, GMO is not something we see in Europe, but non-GMO obviously. Antibiotics are some of the other things and heavy metals for sure.,
For heavy metals, organic doesn’t need to be better off. We’ve actually seen slightly more and I think that’s more of a hit and miss thing, but that’s at least what the studies have shown when we looked into the data point.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, that’s not for me. There’s plenty of products I buy that are not USD organic, but as long as the cow is not given hormones and not given pesticide laden food, it’s technically organic. I have a ranch that I go to. They’re not certified organic, but I see their processes. I talked to the people that work there and there’s no hormones or pesticide anywhere near that ranch. I know that my meat and my raw milk and my raw butter are totally safe and healthy.
Oliver Chamby
And that is also another thing, right? Think of how we’ve labeled that reverse. Now conventional is using chemistry and organic where we’re back to how the cow was living in the past. Is now the special, like that’s the one that needs to certify it. It should be so opposite, right? It should be chemically processed or whatever we would give it a name and then conventional should be the organic but that’s not the way it is and unfortunately, again, depending a little bit on markets and countries. I think, 15 to 20 percent in Denmark, of all the different products that are manufactured that are organic certified. To your point, if you know the local farmer that has done good job with their produce and products for a long time, they do not need to necessarily be certified organic. But again, when you’re buying a protein powder, it’s rarely coming from a super small little area. It’s harder to figure out where that raw ingredient actual come from. That’s where that final testing in the product can give you a lot of security in what you’re consuming on a daily basis.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about whey. Why is whey superior for protein versus other types of protein powders?
Oliver Chamby
I think one of them is if you say that the bioavailability of how easy you actually absorb a gram of protein and there’s a lot of people out there, there’s way more specified. Dr. Gabriel Lyon is very good at ranking protein sources and how effectively they are absorbed and so on. But I think in general, what we see is way is really on top of the food chain. If you get 20 grams of protein from way you get a really high amount of bioactive protein into your body. Whereas a plant could be, let’s say, 50 percent of the same per gram. It lies a big difference in the quality of the combination of amino acids that is underlying he product and so on. I think that’s why whey is a very convenient and superior product, in terms of the protein you actually get, because when you’re the essential amino acid profile and protein. That’s why you’re doing it.
It’s rarely for there to be a taste or that type of experience, but most people do it for increasing their protein intake. I would say that that’s at least one component over the plants many people take a post workout. It’s more important how much protein you’re getting in a day than necessarily a window off the workout to have a certain amount. But again, it is easily absorbed and that’s why a lot of people also prefer that to other sources.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and it tastes a lot better too. Whey protein is so creamy and nice. I’m lactose intolerant, but whey protein doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t have any lactose in it and it doesn’t have any milk sugars. You’re fine, even if you are dairy intolerant, so to speak. There are different components of the dairy. You can be sensitive to the casein. You can be sensitive to the milk sugars, the lactose, but it’s very rare for people to have a problem with whey.
Oliver Chamby
It is, and we’ve had a lot of people also saying exactly what you’re saying, Oh, I couldn’t consume this product or I was lactose, so I don’t do, but I actually don’t feel anything when I’m consuming this. I think you should try and listen to your body as well, how you feel. That’s an important part of it as well.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So, you’re pouring away protein powder. You have vanilla and you have chocolate. Do you have any other flavors or those are the two main ones?
Oliver Chamby
Those are the two main ones. Then we have the plant-based that is non-flavored. There’s no flavor component to it, but those are the two ones we’re playing with different flavors. We want to do more. I think protein is also something where people like, if you are shaking it up every day, at some point, it’s nice to have a little bit of a flavor change. The good thing about vanilla, I think is you can blend it into so many different things. You can mix it into whether it’s oats or it’s the shakes. It’s all the different ways you can use it. If you use more of heavy berries, sometimes if I’m really into a cacao, like chocolate flavor, I would add some raw cacao powder into it. You can do that too. But again, strawberries, all the different berries, you can even do it with green stuff, which I think most people don’t do, but I like in the mornings a heavy green, like lots of high-quality frozen vegetables, even maybe a little bit of coconut water if you also want that to get a little bit of sweetness and you can actually mix that into and have something that tastes really good.
I can say we can get kids to drink it too because it is one thing having adults that want different things, but personally, having people and kids able to taste stuff like that. It tastes good. It’s a good way to get more vegetables in them at the same time.
Dr. Wendy Myers
My daughter will drink a smoothie all day long and she won’t always touch certain vegetables. You’re vegetarian or you’re vegan protein powder. Is that pea protein?
Oliver Chamby
Yeah. It’s pea. We’ve been playing with a lot of different peas. We found one that we feel now the source we’ve had has been, I say the supply chains out of our team would say, oh, we have such a hard time with this product. We think at least what the consumer is getting is consistently clean. But we’ve seen even in manufacturing us buying tons of peas from the same area. Then we package up first batch, send that to testing and then the second half of the batch, we don’t see the exact same numbers. So, there is variation when you’re talking raw ingredients. That’s the point of doing a lot of these testing. If you go to the clean labels website and look up the purest protein powder, you would probably find 20 or 30 lab reports that are products that are potentially in the market right now. On every single batch, there’s one. We might not make the biggest batches. We are not the biggest company. We make small batches. We’re very quality niched focused on that. You’ll see a lot of batches in there, but the pea protein is the same, but if you ask in our supply, they would say we’ve had so many more times where we said this raw ingredient was not clean enough to live up to our standards. This one was not clean and they’ve been scrambling a lot. The pea and cacao beans have been, I think, two of the big hustles in the protein side.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, I love how meticulous you are with assorting the ingredients because it’s it is challenging to find clean ingredients, I manufacture supplements myself and it’s very challenging. Let’s talk about Omega 3 fish oil, because this is a product that a lot of people take. Most people that take supplements are having some sort of omega 3 supplement and they have a lot of problems with contamination and with mercury. Can you talk a little bit about that, about the prevalence of mercury in some fish oils?
Oliver Chamby
I’ll give you a little bit of background probably on the fish as well. The smaller the fish in the food chain, we tend to see less environmental toxins in general. They build up over time. So larger fish, tuna and so on, we know that you shouldn’t eat it every day. There’s like a risk of heavy metals in the fish. The smaller the fish, the cleaner the status in general. When you go to anchovies, sardines, mackerel, those are small fish. We go to salmon and so on, you got to be aware of other things. But fatty fish in general that are small, they’re great. When you look at that, I generally see if we’re fishing only in the South Pacific Ocean at the moment. That’s where we work. We have a fishery partner there that’s Friend of the Sea certified. They don’t overfish or buy catches. They’re very environmentally protective of the area. They’re fast reproductive, the small fish. So, you have a fairly stable school of fish basically in the same area, and they’re small. We haven’t seen a lot of pollution issues on that.
I think the biggest thing we’ve seen in fish oil, again, there’s other sourcing different fish from around the world. I’m sure there are different mercury levels in those products. Generally, again, I would say the larger the fish, the more aware I would be of that. The other thing we see on the fish oil side is actually oxidation, which I think is really destructive for a quality fish oil. What we’ve seen when doing tons of different testing on our own products, but also all the data we can find online and so on, keeping that low oxidation, like TOTOX, which is the measurement of the oxygen in the oil, keeping that low at consumer level is so critical for a first high-quality product. We know that omega 3s are fairly unstable. They can go rancid pretty quickly. So, you want to be very meticulous in the production, starting from the small fish, the first press of the fish, how quickly can you actually do the molecular distillation of the fish oil, you’re concentrating the EPA, DHA, and then how good are you to getting it into capsules?
There are actually a lot of difference between a capsule and liquid. Generally, I say capsules are more stable at home when you have them because you know it’s encapsulated. They’re protected by the capsule liquid so they can be fresher sometimes when you open it. But it goes rancid so much quicker because they will get oxygen into the fish oil immediately after opening. So, if you’re not consuming it within 5 to 7 to 10 days, even though it says 20 days or 30 days on the label, I would normally not prefer the liquid. On the different heat trials and non heat trials that we’ve seen on how fast does the oxidation actually goes. It goes almost exponentially up over time. So that liquid is something to be aware of, but other than that, I don’t know if I didn’t answer your mercury question specifically saying like small fish is a good starting point. And then IFAS or Clean Able Project or some of the other testing facilities out there, we can go in again and see what’s actually in this batch of fish oil that I consume. I think IFAS is doing a good job because they add the oxidation level testing to it, which I think is critical.
Dr. Wendy Myers
That’s so important because one of the bigger issues with fish oil is a rancidity factor. You just open the bottle and smell it yourself. I used to just gobble up fish oil like nobody’s business, but I on occasion smell the bottom. Oh my God, it just smells horrifying. I’d go to put it in my mouth and my body would be like, please, no, please don’t take that. But I’m taking it because I think it’s good for me. You want to take it for your brain, et cetera. When I was pregnant, I was taking in the omega 3 fatty acids a lot, but I think people just don’t factor that in especially say they’re shopping on a budget, say they’re buying that huge bottle at Costco or Sam’s Club and it’s very inexpensive. Omega 3 fatty acids is not something you want to buy based on price. You really want to shop on quality because that fish oil is usually cheap because it’s the cheap manufacturing process and is more than likely going to be oxidized and cause you more harm and more inflammation and more oxidative stress in your body than it is health promoting. So, we don’t want to be doing something for our health and then have the opposite result.
Oliver Chamby
Yeah, which is crazy again. I think really on that side, it’s more common that they’re rancid than they’re not rancid, even capsule products. That’s what we’ve been seeing at least. If you even just go through the IFOS testing site, international fish oil standard testing site, you can find a lot of brands in there that do a good job. It’s not every single batch of every single product. Knowing you’d probably send your prettiest baby or your prettiest product to your test, if you’re testing one out of 10, you would probably do that. But even if you scroll through there, there are a lot of products, in my opinion, has fairly high oxidation levels in their oil. I think these are the good ones. We call it the sushi official. When you’re taking a capsule, we always encourage people to chew in it.
Smelling is a great part, but a lot of brands are using different essential oils or different components to mask smell and odor. So, we say take a capsule, tune the capsule, swallow the fish out, have a little food or something nearby because it is like having a big scoop of olive oil. You can also feel a burn in your throat. So, have some food, but taste it. If it tastes like fish and it disappears right away. It’s probably fresh. There’s a good chance it’s fresh. If that fishiness continues hanging in your mouth, it’s probably a rancid. There’s a good chance that it’s rancid and you would never eat sushi at a restaurant where you would have that feeling. You would never do that to one capsule. Take the product you have at home and do the test yourself. It is a simple test. It’s not like a hundred percent accurate test, but it gives you really good input on if it’s actually a fresh product or not.
I think the final component in that is as well to be aware that you can even have great products and great brands, but if transportation, and we see that a lot in Texas during the hot month, even though we’re trying to give as much information to our couriers as possible, but if a package is left outside a door in 90 degrees Fahrenheit sunshine, that fish all is very quickly going be melted. The pills might be melted together. It might be super rancid and so on. If you ever experienced that from us, just let us know. We’ll send a new one. That can happen as well. So how long has this product been on the road to get to you or where it has been stored? That’s also an important part.
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We’re talking about how you can have rancid rancidity and oxidation from the manufacturing process, from it being too old sitting on the shelf and based on heat because heat will oxidize and break down oils and cause them to go rancid. I think it’s also really important to have them in dark bottles. If oil is exposed to light, it’s in a clear bottle, it’s bad news. You don’t want that either. Can you talk to us about some of the rigorous processes that you go through to ensure that you have that the highest quality omega three fish oil.
Oliver Chamby
It obviously starts with the fish. Like we’re saying, what we’ve seen is the South Pacific has been the best areas for us to fish anchovies, especially that’s what we’re using the most. Then that first press, how quickly can that go from being fresh caught fish to a press of crude fish oil. And then from there on, how quickly can we molecular distill it? We actually do that right off shore of the fishery. The partner we have worked with does this in a very short period of time. We’ve seen the more we’ve been doing this for plus 15 years, the more knowledge we’ve gotten into all the different phases, the capsulation phase, and so on, the better we’ve have been able to reach our goal. We’re looking at a goal, which is around five. That is the oxidation TOTOX number that we’re going after. That’s what we’ve been aiming for in the finished product tested by independent third party, like IFA.
So, it’s not the crude oil that we’re seeing. We can be almost zero in that, but as we get into that final consumer phasing product, which is what matters basically, that’s the key. The second part is as we talked a lot about purity. We tested from all the purity perspective. We talked about the oxidation, but the final component of eating and consuming omega 3s is getting actual omega 3s. It’s pretty easy to have a clean product with a low amount of EPA, DHA that’s just less of the actual fish, that’s of the actual product. having a high concentration so that you get more basically paying for your buck, the percentage game, so to speak. If you take 100 percent fish oil in what we would say out of our products, it would be minimum 80 percent concentration. That is EPA, DHA or other omega 3 fatty acids, which is the only reason why you’re really consuming that pill. There’s no instant gratification. There’s no like benefit of saturation or anything. Iit is to get those omega 3 fatty acids long form. I think that’s the key high concentration, freshness, TOTOX oxidation markers and good purity markers across everything from the heavy metals, but also dioxins, furans, and all the things that are found in fish. IFAS is a good way of looking it up. Just be aware again that most brands don’t do every single batch of every single product, which I again think is critical because there’s so big variation in what you actually end up with as a consumer.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Tell us about some of the other products that you have. What is the name first of the fish oil? And is there a product name?
Oliver Chamby
Yeah, we call it Omega 3. So simple enough. It’s very simple. It’s basically an O3. That was our first product. I think that’s again where the Puori, pure origin story really started and the data that we can have behind and so on. We also do a magnesium product, which is different forms of organic magnesium with zinc. It’s fairly simple, but it gets you a high dose of organic, good forms of magnesium. That’s an easy example for the bodies. We have a protein. We have a collagen product as well. We have single like bovine collagen, same concept as the protein, clean, the concentration of collagen is there and then obviously all the different purity markers that we want. So that’s another product that we also see. We have a probiotic prebiotic product. We see less issues with environmental toxins in those type of products because they’re more lab made. They’re bacteria strains that you ferment and so on. It’s a different process. I think it’s the one where you have the largest amount of natural ingredient. Those are the ones I would be most interesting in figuring out getting from a really pure source. But again, the transparency plates go across our entire portfolio from vitamin D, magnesium, omega three. These are the key. We call them the health essentials. We also have a multivitamin, but then it’s a fairly narrow portfolio of the few protein skews, the collagen and so on.
Products that we’re not the ones coming out with the newest, hot biohacking ingredients or any newest thing that is tip of the spear in terms of research and so on. We practice virtuosity for the ingredients that we’ve seen heavy amounts of evidence-based data on. There are so many studies pointing in the direction of consuming and omega 3 has an impact. And then we’re trying to do that as pure and simple. We can’t basically, because it’s something I use myself as an example. I have been taking. This will make a three for 15 plus years. I’ve been gone on a larger dose than I would recommend based on blood work data and working with functional and that’s your pet doctors and doctors in general, that we’ve been playing with different things. So using ourselves, giving pigs, that’s not my background. I don’t recommend others to do that, but I think it’s interesting to go down the blood route and seeing, do I actually have solved these different things that I’m consuming? Do I need to do any adjustments? Will there be any health adjustments down the line of doing less or doing more of something?
I think that’s something we’re deeply passionate about here as well and something that we’ve been playing a lot with, and we believe also in a future where the actual, let’s say I needed three capsules a day, but you needed four capsules a day, or I needed six capsules and one needed one. I think that would be really nice to know at the end of the day, if the variation of what is actually our individual optimal level, what we’ve seen so far is Giving two grams of omega 3 fatty acids as a supplement to the diet based on what diets we’re having is a really good add on. There’s a lot of studies in that. That’s a good place to start. And that’s what you get out of three capsules in a serving size of omega 3. So, that’s how we’ve tried to do it with every single product. It’s not like I might do a larger dose for periods.
I had concussion. I was speaking with a lot of different concussion experts and specialists, and we were playing with some high doses of various different things. I eventually got over the concussion. I don’t know, I can’t say if that’s the case. I did a lot of different things, but that’s how it is. When you have an injury or anything, you’re doing a lot of different things. It’s very hard to single out one thing. But, I think in general, if you can get more personal blood work as well, I think that can be beneficial for your individual supplementation needs as well.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I love what you said that you want to be the virtuoso or have virtuosity in the basic supplements that the majority of people need. Most people need to increase their protein. They’re not getting enough omega three. No one’s eating fish every day. It is very rarely.
Oliver Chamby
A lot of magnesium, vitamin D is low, right?
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, everybody needs so much more magnesium. Even the people taking magnesium usually need more than what they’re taking. I love that your company Puori has committed itself to having the best quality ingredients testing rigorously of every, and that’s why I take it. I take your whey protein powder. I love it. It tastes absolutely delicious. I have peace of mind. I was talking to you before this podcast about the rigorous testing that you go through all of your products. I take the Omega three product as well and they’re just fantastic. I highly recommend them because I think there are a lot of companies out there. You go to whole foods or you go to natural food stores here where you’re looking for high-quality ingredients because you’re taking these things for your health, and it’s really disappointing. The quality level that’s out there of protein powders, Omega three of even collage, it’s really disappointing quality and the mass production, the companies that have the big majority share of the shelf space or that’s in every single store, you’re going to lose quality in that mass production. I think it’s better to go with more of a boutique brand like yours. It’s doing small batch, doing rigorous testing, doing rigorous quality control. You’re going to get more of what you’re spending your money on. You’re going to get what you’re actually paying for.
Oliver Chamby
I appreciate that and I appreciate coming in from you as well. So, you’re so into the toxic side of things and the detoxifications and everything. We do obviously support that. I think the people that appreciate the most what we’re doing,for most people, it’s more of safety back of mind, I feel confident and so on. But the people that actually scan the QR codes and understand the data points, like, wow, there’s almost like the no traces of lead in this protein powder or no traces of that or oxidation levels so low. We truly appreciate that nerdy part of ourself. To your point, we have a little bit of a dream as well. We do believe that even the big manufacturers and so on, can do better if they had the data and if the consumer was actually asking for that data. So we do believe that, and we do hope for more people will go the Clean Able route and certify their product. That’s probably the step one. Eventually take the Transparency Pledge, which unfortunately, no brands yet have done beside us, that’s the 100 percent Transparency.
There are a lot of people getting certified and we really want them to go in that direction because ingredients vary. If we can get in that direction, we’ve seen now with the baby food safety act that there’s actually coming legal thresholds for how much lead there should be in baby food, which makes sense. If we can go in that direction and we can show a way it’s doable, I think in general, what we’ll see is a much bigger attention to the quality of raw ingredients versus what have gone now is the price of raw ingredients. I think that’s been the focus point. So yeah, at least that’s maybe a little bit of an idealistic dream, but we hope that it will go in that direction. At the end of the day, you’ll be able to compare apples with apples. A fish oil should be fairly easy comparable to another fish oil’s g rams of omega 3, oxidation and purity.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, absolutely. I think people listen to this show are very adept consumer. They have a lot of discernment and what they’re putting in their body and supplements that they’re taking. I think we vote with our dollars and people listening to this and consumers in general, especially with RFK Jr, head of the Health And Human Service are going to be demanding purity. It’s shining a light on the toxins that are in our food and in our food supply, and I think there’s gonna be more and more discerning consumers out there with that and with more education in the work that you and I are doing, trying to educate people about this stuff. I think more and more people are going to be questioning what they’re putting in their body and looking at the ingredients and caring more. So just really have a lot of hope with the RFK Jr, coming into office to do his work that he was destined to do.
Oliver Chamby
Fingers crossed. That’s the direction we totally believe and see the same movement. I would say, even in Europe, we are starting to see more of that attention. So, I totally agree. I think when we look back at when we started, where it was almost like you were trying to say a weird city in Russia or something like that when you’re talking about environmental toxins or oxidation level in fish oil. We’ve seen that the population and audience is getting more and more educated. We see more and more people that are researching, going deep online. I was looking for the purest and cleanest whey protein. I found this old study. This looks good and I can actually see that the measurements of lead and so on. That was when we got going. That was us as the consumer, what we luckily started to see is a bigger attention on that with more people like yourself and others educating more focus when we get into the age of having kids and so on, we normally see that’s actually probably our biggest audience we call healthy moms, because it’s at that point, you’re also starting to become more aware of heavy metals, like what do I pass on to my child or through the milk or various different ones. Hopefully, this is a movement that is slowly, like you say, voting with the dollars and pushing the industries towards more transparency and better products at the end of the day.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Where can we find your products? What is your website?
Oliver Chamby
It’s puori.com spelled P U ORI. It’s a contraction of pure origin, dot com. You can find anything in there. All the different products we talked about here, you can find them there. I highly encourage that. I’m pretty sure that at the time this podcast is airing, you’ll have a setup there as well. I think it’s just gonna be puori.com/wendy. Am I correct?
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes. Fantastic. Just go to puori.com/wendy. You can check out the whole line of products. Like I said, I take these myself. I absolutely love the whey protein powder. I love the omega three fish oil that you have as well. I definitely want to try your magnesium. I haven’t tried that yet but yeah, I’m a huge fan of taking magnesium. People need five times their body weight in pounds per day. So, if you weigh 200 pounds, you need a thousand milligrams per day of magnesium. It’s really important. So, check out the magnesium as well. Thanks so much for coming on the show. That was really informative. I think people don’t realize the toxins that are in the protein powder that they’re taking every day. They just don’t have any concept whatsoever. Most people are just taking a soy protein isolate or whey protein isolate and have no clue that it’s going to be causing them digestive issues or adding toxins to their health regime, unfortunately. So, thanks for shining a light on that.
Oliver Chamby
Thank you so much for having me and for having us and for everything you do. Hopefully more people will get less environmental toxins in their life as a consequence.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, everyone, thanks so much for tuning into the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers and I love doing this show, bringing you guys little pieces of the puzzle, little clues that help you upgrade your health because you deserve to feel good. That’s why I do this show, because I want to help you shine a light on these little areas and every little area of your life. I want you reassessing it and making better choices, one step at a time. So, thanks for tuning in.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
