Powerful Science-Driven Tools To Upgrade Cognition, Longevity And Sleep​

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Oh, thank you for having me. It’s always wonderful to get to chat with you.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

So you and I have worked together a little bit at Neurohacker, and like you said, it’s always a fun time when we get together, because I learned so much from you. Every time we talk about formulations, products, about Qualia products, about other products or science that’s out there, the newest and the latest and greatest in brain health, I just get this download that I immediately put into practice clinically, and also usually for myself personally. So I can’t wait to dive into it. Where I wanna start today is like the big vision of Neurohacker and what you guys are doing with the Qualia line of products and what the stamp on the world is from the team at Neurohacker.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Sure. So I think in two words, Neurohacker is about performance optimization. So I mean, there may be different areas that we focus on over time. We started obviously with the brain, with the original Qualia stock. But the original reason for Neurohacker collective was to help people perform better. And I go back even to like decades in nature pathic medicine, and what drew me to that and what most resonated with me going through school and early on in practice was kind of a question of what does health look like and then how do we get there? And so, you know, it’s just a very different way.

And it’s one that bio hackers now embrace and there’s self experiments and there’s lots of practitioners as well. But I think though that same mentality is where Neurohacker Collective comes from. It’s very much like, all right, let’s try to understand as best as we can what’s going on in this incredibly complicated, complex adaptive that’s our body, which is functionally network layered within network, right? Like our neural networks and our immune network and our mitochondrial networks. And anyways, Neurohacker Collective to me is just a group of like-minded people coming together, endeavoring to understand more about what’s most important to help people perform better.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

And then what I love about getting together with people in Neurohacker is that the emphasis isn’t just on like performance, as it relates to like productivity or how much money we can make, or how much we can influence other people, or any. It’s really, it’s like, how can we show up better tomorrow than we did yesterday? It’s all about, like whenever I talk to some of the other moms, they’re like, “Oh, I’m reading this parenting book, or have you heard about this strategy?” Or “How’s it going with your strategy?” And it’s really encouraging and collaborative and it’s about just showing up as more whole versions. And that is the optimization. 

And I think this is a big shift from maybe what was going on 10, 20 years ago. You know, I think of the Silicon Valley guys that were like working literally overnight 24, 36 hours, and even physicians right in residency, just pushing through. And the idea was to push and push and push until you would drop. And this perspective is so different. It’s about wholeness and optimization in a really healthy, balanced way.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Yeah so I don’t know if this would make sense to the audience, but I tend to like to draw two camps when it comes to thinking about health and this is way over simplified. So take it with a grain of salt. But on one hand we have the idea like oh, I’ll just figure out and control the body into what I want it to do. You know so that’s been whether overtly or not the approach to weight loss going back, for the history of weight loss, right? Like the vast majority of the approach has been eat less and exercise more, the idea of, if you just control calories in, calories out, you can have any body you want, which of course, that doesn’t work, right? And so on the other side, we would have trust your body, which is all right, my body’s is an amazing thing. 

It’s trying to learn to adapt to everything that it encounters. So my relationships, what I eat, how I live my life, everything that I’ve done in the past, frankly, everything that maybe a couple generations before me did. And so my belief is that it’s trying to do the best it can with what it has available and what it knows how to do. And so my job as a formulator is to give it more of the resources it might need to be able to accomplish those things better, as opposed to let’s block and tackle and figure out how to slow this and block this and up-regulate this. 

So because of that, a big part of my emphasis is starting at the beginning, say with something like immunity or with sleep, and what’s the body trying to do then. And are there resources that may be missing, the resources that we tend to cater a lot to vegans and they’re very health conscious. And in that subset, there’s just some things in the diet they don’t routinely get as much of, right. So could those just filling the tank, like not trying to have incredibly large amounts of them, but just filling the tanks. Is there something there or something for cognition? So Qualia falls into that. 

I think, what I’ve read from the Institute of Medicine, a major health body in the U.S. is about 80% of adults in the U.S. just don’t get enough coli They’re getting some, but they’re just running a slow deficit. So my belief is you don’t have to give three or four times what would fill the tank. You just need to make sure the tank’s full for most people. And so when we craft formulas, I think, or I think I know we come much more from that idea of like, let’s trust this amazing system, this network of networks and make sure we’re doing a good job, giving it all the resources that it might need to do a better job performing in this area. So.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

So we’re here talking about reversing Alzheimer’s and you started with the Qualia Mind product and that’s been about optimizing cognitive function. So tell me a little bit about what’s in Qualia Mind, what the mechanisms are, how to dose it, how you formulated it kind of with these strategies in mind.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Yeah, so I guess stepping back when I think of like the brain, I think of it in like buckets of skills. So, and this would be pretty common and like in medicine. So you’d have like your attentional bucket, you have what would usually be called social cognition. So those are your empathy, your ability to read facial expressions and body language, and also your ability to be in tune with the emotions going on inside yourself at any moment in time. Then you have executive function. So those are your ability to hold things in your head when you work with them. 

So working memory, and you have your ability to it’s called cognitive flexibility, but basically change your mind or put yourself in another’s shoes to understand. So it’s slightly different than social cognition. And then you have your memory bucket, you have your language bucket, you have your visual motor skills. So you have these different buckets. And so within those, Mind was really created. So the Qualia Mind was created primarily with several buckets in mind, but the focus, the memory and the executive function would be the big three. 

And the key pathways that most need support, they are acetylcholine and dopamine. So, and when I think of Sapolsky, he was the author of “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers”, and he’s got a newer book. It’s about eight years old now on the brain, I’m drawing a blank on it. But I love one of the things he says in it. And he’s talking really about the prefrontal cortex, but it’s like, this is the part of the brain that gets you to do the hard thing when it’s the right thing. And so when I think of Qualia Mind, to me, a lot of it is on that. And that’s that executive function, like, what are the resources you would need to more routinely do the hard thing when it’s the right thing, because what you see a lot in workplaces, but even in our lives, we’re often gonna do the easiest thing because it’s all we have the resources to do in that moment.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Well, that might be something as simple as exercise or getting to sleep on time.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Yeah.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Right, it’s getting that effort to go, okay, stand up, get off the couch, brush your teeth and get in bed so that you actually get rest or sleep or wake up a little earlier so that you can get to the gym or get outside and make those really good decisions.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Yeah, it would be one of my, I guess my filters. So even for myself, yeah, I’ve been working from home for a while now, but before I used to stop in the gym, either on my way to work, or sometimes after work, depending on the season. When the days got really short, I’d be much more likely to go after work, ’cause there was no sun to enjoy. And if I found myself like on my way home driving past the gym, instead of stopping at it, then I knew like I’d tapped out. Right? Like there was that do the right thing when it’s the hard thing muscle had been used up for the day. 

And so I think you’re right, like where a lot of the things we’re asking both patients to do, but of ourselves when especially when we’re starting new things or learning a new skill that actually, so I don’t know if you would know this, but I didn’t know it. So one of the things I learned recently in a book I read, I think it was “Incognito.” But the gist of it was when an expert is doing something they’re expert in, they use relatively little amount of brain energy. But when a new person is trying to learn that skill, their brain’s going crazy. And so when we’re asking people to do new things, they’re actually needing more brain resources, then they’ll eventually need to do that same thing.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

And we see this at Marama, at the resident or care facility. Doing new things it’s something that’s always in a reverse Alzheimer’s protocol because if it does, it stimulates those new neural connections as new synopses and new memory formation. And you can literally watch it on people’s faces, the effort it takes to learn chess or to learn even, even things that maybe they used to know before putting puzzles, like just doing puzzles, gardening, learning the names of plants, the effort on their face is apparent, you can just see it and then they’re exhausted. 

They need a nap. And so what you’re saying is, it’s very clear and I think a lot of people will relate to that. The other thing I think of is that in society right now, we are getting more and more and more hits to do the easy thing. Right? It’s very easy to just check Instagram or check Facebook, check email and buy something. You know, it’s so simple to do and easy to do the easy things and there’s more and more and more of them to do so we can fill our day very quickly with all the easy stuff when we know it isn’t really what’s best for us.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Yeah. So one of the metaphors, I really like when thinking about the brain is by Daniel Kahneman. So he’s the author of the book “Thinking Fast and Slow.” And in that book, he introduces these two characters, System One and System Two. So System One is really the character that would take over when we don’t have a lot of energy, but it’s the automatic behaviors and going towards the easiest thing, whereas System Two is much more akin to what we were talking about with the executive function. 

It’s, you know, like essentially overriding impulses and checking our behaviors and being much more effortful in what we do. And so the way I would tend to think of it is that yeah, a lot of us unfortunately you spend or too much of the time System One’s running the show. And that’s great if we’ve got ingrained behaviors that the autopilot’s gonna get us the result we want. Not so great if the autopilot’s gonna be driving past the gym because it’s difficult. So I think a key part of what I think about even with, so this would be Qualia Mind or when we developed the Qualia Nootropic Energy shot was can we give more resources so that System Two will show up more and be able to run the show more of the day?

Heather Sandison, N.D.

That’s awesome. And then the other piece of making sure there’s enough resource during the day, is getting really good sleep. And so you guys have created a formula that really, it took me a little bit to grasp this because we’re so used to saying a sleep formula it’s about going to sleep and maybe staying asleep. And this is where the benzodiazepines come in. You know, the Ambien, the Xanax, the whatever the next one is. Those come from this idea of, I need to take something to get to sleep. 

Even melatonin is this idea, 5-HTP to some degree, a lot of the sleep formulas are about actually getting to sleep, whereas you guys have completely changed the conversation. And you talk about sleep as a nighttime routine and how do we get the best out of our rest? So I wanna hear more about that and then how it goes back into this idea of having more resource for that system too, for that good executive function and energy.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Okay, so what you are describing, I think of as a fall asleep product, like, which, I mean, there’s no shortage of those on Amazon, the health food store, or whether it’s herbal or medications. And we thought about that. We actually tested out a few and it just was not like a sexy idea to me. And part of it is my story. I know there’s some people legitimately falling asleep is a huge challenge for them. But a lot of people, to me, at least, my story is sleeps like a bus. It pulls into the station on a schedule. If you don’t get on and it pulls out without you, you don’t get to decide, well, I want you to come back ’cause now I’m ready to go to sleep. You have to wait for the next bus. And so to me, the most important thing is starting to become more in tune to like, oh, the sleep bus seems like it’s about to arrive. 

I should drop what I’m doing and go to bed. As opposed to jeez, I’m going to bed and I’m struggling to fall asleep. I’m still awake 35 minutes later. It’s because the bus isn’t in the station. So anyways, to me, it’s one of those non-problem problems for a lot of people that the key thing would be teaching them to be more aware of the feedback, the sleepiness feedback basically. And so when we developed Qualia Night, part of it was with that idea of like, can we make a stronger sleepiness signal, right? So that’s less likely to be missed. And the way to do that is to start well in advance of when you go to sleep. 

You know, so Qualia Night, we recommend taking at dinnertime, about three to four hours before you plan on going to bed. And what we did is we crafted it with things that, again, like resources to build melatonin, so tryptophan would be the building block. The co-factors like magnesium and B6 that work in the enzyme cascade to make it, but not crazy high amounts. Just let’s make sure there’s enough. And tryptophan is this interesting amino acid, things like L-tyrosine that a good diet we’re talking grams of L-tyrosine in the diet. A good diet in tryptophan may only be 800 milligrams. 

So you don’t need to do like crazy high amounts to top off the tank for someone that’s running a little bit low with tryptophan where tyrosine, you’d have to do more to proportionally move the needle. So that was one part. The other part is like a huge part of problems, both going to sleep, but then not having good restorative sleep is, would be called hyper arousal. So you know, that wired and tired syndrome where you’re fatigued, but you go to lie down and it’s just not easy to get the brain to quiet itself and go away.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Greg, this isn’t supposed to be about me.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

But anyways, those were things like much more to me, those are much more exciting things to try to address nutritionally than something that would be more sedating that you’d take just before sleep. And then you’ve got like a few other things. So it’s called the homeostatic sleep drive is how sleep researchers talk about it. So it’s basically two things balding it out across the day to make us alert and then make us sleep. So one is our circadian wake drive and one’s this like homeostatic sleep drive. 

So just think of them as things that are running against each other over the course of the day. So the sleep drive, the longer we’ve been awake, the more the drive to sleep is built up. That’s the kind of simple way to think about it. And the circadian drive actually gets stronger all the way through the day. That’s how we can stave off this greater and greater sleep drive. And then one of the things that melatonin cues is like, oh, it’s time to like, take my foot off the gas on this wake drive. And then at that point, that descends enough that the sleep drive takes over, right. You drop off into sleep. 

So anyways, you have these two competing things. So melatonin would be the key molecule in the circadian wake drive, or at least in the darkness end of it. Cortisol is probably the key molecule or achy molecule at the wakefulness in the bed at the beginning of the day. And then adenosine and the adenosine pathway would be the classically, the key molecule in this sleep drive pathway. So that’s where caffeine comes in. Caffeine works as an adenosine blocker. So if you take a lot of caffeine and it hasn’t cleared out, we’re blocking the sleep drive molecules that are built up from signaling their receptor. 

And so things like that were just when we were developing night, those were what we were thinking. Like, are there things we can do for this hyper arousal, the wider entire system for this adenosine system to make sure that the body can make melatonin when it needs it, as opposed to let’s give it to it. And then the last system is GABA is kind of the breaking system for the brain. So, you know, we wanted to have things like Ashwagandha and like, there’s another one that’s called Brahmi Ayurvedic medicine, but Centella asiatica and gotu kola. That’s like works in that GABA system. 

So we wanted to make sure we supported all these interacting things, you know, and one of the things, like we test out a lot of recipes sometimes before we launch a product and we knew sleep was gonna be hard. So I bet we did five or six bouts of testing, each one, feeling like, oh, we’re getting a little closer before we eventually landed on Night.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Well, I tease that this isn’t supposed to be about me because I definitely relate to that wired, but tired. And yet there are so many people who are in that space of exhaustion, utter exhaustion, because they’re balancing a busy schedule, parenting, work, what have you, caring for elderly parents? And the headlines lately, one of the recent studies was that having a sleep deficit in your 40s, in your 30s and 40s sets you up for Alzheimer’s. And so it increases your risk in measurable ways. And so it’s so important that we get enough rest. Not only for that executive function the next day, I think we can all relate to, you know, days or nights of travel or something that’s really disrupted our sleep and that our cognitive function suffers tremendously the next day. So we can directly experience it. And yet those small shifts in sleep quality, also it can influence cognitive function, especially over time.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Hugely. I think because we’re asleep, there’s almost this assumption that our body’s not doing anything important than either, but our brain is crazy active during sleep. My understanding is the highest surge of ATP. So the brain’s energy molecule happens just at the beginning, as we start to go into deep sleep. And the reason is there’s these like incredibly powerful, they call them sleep spindles, but bursts of energy, that migrate things we learn during the day to other parts of our brain during deep sleep. And so during deep sleep, there’s a lot of essentially memory consolidation. Some memories are gonna be pruned away. Others will be made stronger, things I can remember studying for exams in nature pathic school, and I’d go to sleep that night, and it would seem like all I did was dream about what I was trying to memorize. That’s your brain doing that, right. 

It’s trying to do that. And then you have, it’s usually called the glymphatic system, which touches in with that risk factor. So that’s basically like the system that cleans the brain for lack of a better way to describe it from all the metabolic waste that builds up since it’s like a voracious energy consumer. And note again, at least my recollection is that that happens mostly during deep sleep. So, you know, the better quality of sleep we have, not only would it impact memories, but it helps this repair and cleaning that should be going on at night. And if we don’t sleep well, or, when I was in the Navy in the ’80s so this goes back quite a while, sleep was just not a priority for the Navy back then. I have no idea if it’s the same, but you know, I spent months at a time, we call it port and starboard, but six hours on, six hours off, six hours on, six hours off. And in your, at least one of those six hours off, you still had to do your job, like the six hours on which just is your watch station, you still had all your other responsibilities. 

And so at most, you would have a six hour window to sleep. But even that meant like, well, where was the gym gonna fit in and where was eating gonna fit? So, anyways, it was like, I did this crazy sleep deprivation through my 20s. And it was fascinating to me in the nineties, in nature pathic school, and then encountering, lots of really smart nature paths and functional medicine MDs, how few of them had sleep on the radar back then. Like, it almost seem like a good friend of mine. I remember we were doing a project together and the company rented a place for us in Redondo Beach, right by the pier. It was amazing. So the first night I’m there at like six in the morning, he comes and wakes me up. 

He’s like, let’s get up and roller blade the boardwalk. And I’m like, dude, I’ve only been sleeping for six hours. Like leave me alone. And his mental story back then was sleep is a weakness. So I can’t indulge it. And like, I have to be up and doing something healthy. And in mind at that point, it’s like, I’ve already done the sleep deprivation thing. Like there’s no upside to that one. Let me be rested. And then I’m happy to join you for your like roller blade. So, yeah, I think we’ve come a long way in the couple of decades since, but I think it’s still an area that it’s easy to, again, in that like controlled trust analogy we started off with, I completely trust my body. If it wants to sleep for seven hours tomorrow and nine, the next day, like whatever you need, you know, better than I do, how much sleep we need, given whatever work you need to do. 

And you know, my job as I view it is to make sure again, I gave a good resources and that like, I’m listening for it. And the more regular people are with their sleep schedule in general. So I like more or less like 10, 10:15, is my normal bedtime, but somewhere usually right in there, I’ll feel sleepiness coming and whatever I’m doing, it’s like book closed, TV off, you know, pause the movie. Like my only job is to listen for the feedback, not to try to make the sleep bus come when I want it to come.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

You mentioned that you guys found some unexpected results when it came Qualia Sleep and its effect on immune function. So we talked a bit about detox being one of the priorities during sleep and the memory making and kind of making sense some emotional processing, some processing that happens at night. And then you guys also noticed that immune function was better when you get better sleep. Right. Did I understand that right?

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Well, there’s a lot of ingredients that are in, it’s Qualia Unite would be the sleep product also happened to be really beneficial for the immune system. So like reishi it’s a Chinese mushroom would be one of those it’s classically thought of as a Shen tonic. So Shen would be that kind of the idea of like peaceful centeredness, would be like a quick summary of it, right? It’s that quality. So while we’re asleep, while we’re sleeping, the immune system’s also still busy, but I think a lot of what it’s doing is communicating from, what it encountered during the day and getting ready for whatever it might encounter tomorrow. 

So one of the things that this would be a complex systems thing, but it’s super important for the brain, super important for immunity. Network’s main job is about predicting the future. So like the way, like, I think exercise is something people can relate to. And we talked really quickly about weight. But like my metaphor for lifting weights 30 years ago was, oh, like, my muscle is gonna get bigger because I lift weights. Right? So like the more I lift it, the more frequently, the better where my story now is, no, my muscle gets bigger because it thinks I might do that again in the future. Right? So like my only job is to convince it, I’m gonna be doing this thing in the future. And so, and a lot of that, like ability to predict smartly into the future, I think gets, or is impacted by what happens during sleep, because that’s when all the repair and the communication quiets down and things like that. 

So I think for the immune system, if a product’s doing a good job on restorative sleep, it’s generally gonna do a good job on the immune system, ’cause it’s just hard to have like think of fever dreams, you know, which most people have experienced, maybe not knowing that term. But when someone has like an acute flu, they’ll usually have very fitful sleep with really weird dreams, right? When an immune system is doing a lot of work, we don’t sleep restfully. And if the immune system, and I think what you might be confusing is the other product quality immune. When we tested Qualia Immune, we started getting this feedback from people saying, wow, like my sleep was so much better.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

That’s exactly what I was thinking of, yes. Thank you for clarifying. Yeah, and I wanna kind of draw, connect the dots there because sleep is so important. I mean, just absolutely paramount for good cognitive function. And immune function is also so important for cognitive function because in the realm of Alzheimer’s, what we find on autopsies of people with Alzheimer’s is that those beta amyloid plaques and tau proteins are often a defense mechanism against immune invaders. 

Things like pure gingivitis that live in the gums, things like herpes simplex and also our lyme spirochetes, other spirochetes, of course, syphilis has a neurosyphilis manifestation. So a lot of these immune things that are gonna trigger the immune system, a lot of these microbes are really, really important that we have a functional immune system that can fight back to prevent cognitive decline.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

And so when I think of the brain’s immune system, like the first word that pops into my head is microglia, right? So there’s like this special type of cell in the brain that functions as the brain’s macrophages, which those are the ones that kind of, you know, gobble up the debris and things that is essentially the after effects of trying to counter whatever the challenging thing is. And, you know, the immune system, I think, we tend to think of it mostly for its role in invaders, but it does a huge amount for just repair, right? So if we lift weights, our immune system has to be working super hard. If we’re, you know, my guess would be doing more brain training types of things, right? 

Like all of those things are gonna cause more requirement to do healing and our immune system, that’s a huge part of its role. So yeah, I think of like one of the interesting things to me, like is you tend to have, this is just in terms of how the ingredients would be pitched to me as a product developers like, “Oh, you like Dr. Kelly, we have these nootropics and we have these ergo genics for exercise. And we have this product for the immune system and oh, and we have these ones for sleep.” And one of the things Neurohacker likes to do is, and Daniel Schmachtenberger, one of our founders would say, this is like, “We like ingredients that do more than one thing.” And we also like to make sure for an important thing, we’ve got multiple ways we’re doing it. 

And so, you know, something like Night also has immunity built in and cognition built in and something like Mind while it’s a nootropic stack, one of the fairly frequent pieces of feedback we get is, and so Mind you would take first thing in the morning, right? It’s very like, it’s the kind of the opposite of pain. It’s to get all these neurotransmitter pathways in the brain ready to go so you can have the executive function and system too can show up and work for more of the day. But oftentimes what you do at the beginning of the day will have a ripple effect on the flip side of the coin or sleep. So one of the early pieces of feedback we got from people taking Qualia Mind was that quite a few said, oh, you know, I’m sleeping much better, which wouldn’t surprise you because everything’s connected. You make the brain work better at this part of the day. It’s not, it’s at least shouldn’t be crazy. Like, you know, like this absurd thing to understand that it might do better at the other end of the day as well.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Yet so many of the interventions these days that come from conventional medicine and even some supplements are not that right. It’s very much the control side of your analogy instead of the trust side. It’s that we’re gonna knock you out at night and then, good luck, hope you’re not drowsy in the morning.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Yeah, so anyways, those are the things we would look for, right? Like, so like the externalities, right? Like where they said, well, immune, it was a positive externality, right? By meaning like, you know, like one of the unexpected things that showed up as well, like 45% of the people that took it told us they’re sleeping much better. And I was one of those.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

That’s great.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

It’s like I use an oura ring to measure mine. And I think like, I don’t think I’d ever had an hour of REM sleep. I always had pretty good deep sleep, but REM was always, you know, like 40 to 60 minutes. And the first week I was on it, I had a couple of nights that were two, two and a half hours of REM sleep, which, you know, it didn’t stay that way, but it definitely affected that part of my sleep dramatically initially.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Had a big impact. So another one of the pieces that you’ve already mentioned is ATP production. And that happens in mitochondria. So you guys developed a product called Qualia Life that helps with mitochondrial function. I’m curious specifically why that’s important to cognitive function.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

So I mentioned earlier that the brain is a voracious consumer of energy and by energy, I was specifically meaning ATP, the molecule you just spent. So the general estimate is that the brain uses about 20% of all the ATP that’s made in the body every day. So the, I guess the like shortest and simplest explanation is the brain just can’t do all of this work if it doesn’t have enough energy. So what I remember, so this was probably about a year and a half ago. 

There was like I read science daily every day and neuroscience news, I get in my, but anyways, the gist of this was, it was a study on 20 year olds to 30, somewhere in that age range. And it was about empathy. And the gist of it was some people were really good at it, but for most of them, it took a lot of mental energy. Like essentially it felt like work so they weren’t good at it. And that idea of after, or like being able to put effort into things mentally shows up in, you know, like it would show up in a lot of cognitive decline with aging. It shows up in a lot of like the common complaints we would hear as doctors with patients, you know, brain fog or inability to follow through on our intentions and things like that, right. 

That effort piece, that’s energy, like mental work takes energy or like the same types of resources that physical work would. So at least the way I would think of why is mitochondria performance and ATP important for the brain is because that’s the busiest muscle that of everything, right. It’s never not working, you know. Different neurons may be shut down or not working as hard at any given moment. But the brain itself is working hard 24/7. So I think Dave Asprey in, I believe it might’ve been his second book, but it was, was it “Headspace” anyways, like his, that book. 

And I’m sorry about not having a title right. But that book, he goes into the main focus of it is why mitochondria us so important for the brain. So, yeah, I think like, again, all of our products have in common that there’s some mitochondrial support because to do better in anything, mitochondria are important and the brain, they’re the most important in. I mean, part of the reason we started with Qualia Mind, like a brain product is our story was most people aren’t gonna get better in other areas unless we can make the brain work better. And a big part of making the brain work better is that acetylcholine and dopamine and neuroplasticity and supporting those things. But another big part is making sure it can create enough energy to do all these things.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Yeah. That’s so exciting to be able to give people the resources. And I certainly of course use these products both clinically and personally, and have seen really, really great benefit, profound benefit for patients and experienced it myself and these resources as we age are also a little harder to come by. It’s just like getting gray hair and for some of some of us balding and for others, not as much, but part of the process, the natural process of aging is that we don’t have as many digestive enzymes to digest and assimilate our food. So it’s harder and harder to get things just from what we eat. 

We also tend to, you know, as we age, you know, not cooking for a big family, maybe it’s just one or two of us. And so the tea and toast diet is very common amongst seniors. And, you know, of course a big part of our work as naturopathic doctors is suggesting a great diet and supplements, although they should be supplemental, can be really, really, really important part of actually getting that cognitive optimization because of the way our digestive system ages. So these products in particular, you know, I’ve seen such great clinical benefit with, and I’m really excited to have you here sharing what you guys have seen and how you came up with that at all.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Oh, well, thank you. And you’re right. I think it’s like the populations I think about that are most resourced out are as we age, for sure, for a lot of reasons, especially what you shared, but then people that are on really strict diets often will inadvertently be, you know, running a deficit in one or more nutrients because of their efforts to eat a really controlled diet. And I think there’s lots of upside to things like being a vegan, and we’re a vegan company, but you could go down choline, carnitine, creatine, vitamin B12.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

B12.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

There’s just a lot of things that are gonna be more challenged to keep enough of if you’re not supplementing the diet in that case.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

So tell me who shouldn’t try Qualia products. I always want to talk about contra indications at least at some level. Are there some people that you would steer away from using these products or certain ones in the line?

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Well, we don’t like our products aren’t intended for women that are pregnant, lactating or trying to get pregnant. We tend to be very conservative. So if something isn’t proven safe and useful for them, we would just say like, you know, wait, do other things then. Our products really haven’t like, we don’t make them thinking of kids or teens. So, you know, that’s something like if someone is choosing to do, it’s not something that we would have tested out as extensively on our own. We are really thinking of our products primarily for adults. So those would be the… I know you and I both, you know, well individually maybe work with someone that’s like a late teen, but it wouldn’t be something that as a company we would suggest doing.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Yeah, I have clinically seen some great results with Qualia Mind in teens. And yet, I think that having that conversation with the doctor is important. Making sure it’s the right thing for that individual. I think people who are suffering more severely with anxiety or depression as well should work with their doctor.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Yeah, I think like in general, it’s always a good idea to check with your doctor. The truth is for a lot of our products, we would need a doctor like you to understand whether it would be prudent to do, but for any of the more challenging mental, emotional disorders, those are just really hard anyways. And so, yeah, I don’t think those, like our products we would say are not suited for people that are on anti-depressants, anti-anxiety medicines, things like that.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Dr. Kelly, it’s such an honor to have you here. I really appreciate your time for breaking down these products and for enlightening us all about how they work, how they’ve been formulated. I’m so impressed with Neurohacker. Obviously, that’s why I show up and collaborate with you guys so often it’s because the integrity is so high and really the value you bring to the spaces is phenomenal. So thank you for showing up, for doing what you do and for being here and joining us.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Sure. And I did just want to mention to anyone that’s listening to this, is there is a coupon code for $25 off Qualia Mind for any of the listeners and it’s RAS for reversing Alzheimer’s.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

We are going to have that in the show notes.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Okay.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

And everyone will get an email reminder of that as well, so that they can access that coupon code. Am really excited for more people to get access and try it out and see what happens.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Well, thank you. Thanks again for having me. It’s always, like I said, as we opened, it’s a pleasure getting to talk with you.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Every time. Thanks, Greg.

Gregory Kelly, N.D.

Okay, bye.