Advanced Biotics co-founder says working at NutraIngredients played ‘vital’ role

31-Oct-2022 - Last updated on 31-Oct-2022 at 16:43 GMT

Related tags Gut health Gut microbiome SANSE Probiotic Prebiotic

The journalist-turned-entrepreneur sat down to discuss his time writing about gut health and how his reporting informed him on his current venture.

Nathan Gray, co-founder of Advanced Biotics, was recently featured on a panel at the Sports and Active Nutrition Summit held in Amsterdam. While he’s been on that stage many times before, this time was different.

Gray previously worked as a journalist for NutraIngredients, often writing about the gut microbiome. He said that’s what led him to where he is today.

“My founder story is that I was a journalist writing about this industry for 10-12 years and at one point you get itchy feet because as a reporter, you are always quite objective. You're on the outside looking in which is great. But when you start to see things and see opportunities and you talk to people about it at these conferences and say, ‘this is a really good idea, why is no one doing this?’ And then a year later, you're still having the same conversations. Eventually you sort of go, ‘You know what? I think I'm going to do it myself.’”

Gray said that one of the key takeaways from the event was athletes have to start off healthy to perform and recover better.

“You can't perform at the top level if you're unhealthy to begin with. So when you think about the microbiome and a lot of the science that's happening there, it's linked to so many areas of health, I think there's some stat that a university put out that 90% of all diseases and health states have been linked in some way to the microbiome.”

When formulating the Daily Microbiome Booster gut health supplement, Gray said the team was looking at the sports marketplace and the active lifestyle nutrition marketplace through the lens of the microbiome. After looking over the data, they decided to include collagen.

“There is some data recently on collagen, being able to reduce bloating in the gut and have different impacts on the microbiome, there’s preclinical data on things like got barrier integrity, intestinal permeability, tight junctions, things like that where collagen is suggested to play a role. So it's a nice synergistic ingredient,” Gray said.