For the past one year, you will see me focusing on topics I come across as an business operator in longevity space. Today’s note is the paradox in this space.

Today’s read

1. The fitness paradox

2. When eating well makes life smaller

3. The price of living longer

4. The more we know, the more we manage

5. Is balance even possible?

Let’s get started.

1. The fitness paradox

One of the biggest changes since getting into longevity is that I have become far more serious about fitness. I used to exercise before, but it was not such an important part of how I planned my week or met people. Now I run regularly, have trained for Hyrox, do strength work, and I am preparing for a marathon.

Fitness has also changed my social life. More of my interactions now happen around running, races and training, rather than only food, drinks or going somewhere. Running itself is mostly individual, although run clubs and races make it communal. Cycling seems even more social because people ride in groups.

This is obviously positive. I am fitter, I can do more, and I spend time with people who also want to remain active. The problem is that almost everyone who takes fitness seriously seems to have an injury story. Runners have knee, hamstring or ankle issues. People lifting weights have shoulder or back problems. Some recover quickly. Others carry the same injury for years. I have noticed this more during the marathon training. As the volume increased, there is more soreness, fatigue and recovery to manage.

This is where the paradox begins. Exercise is one of the clearest things we can do for a longer and healthier life, but the same activity can also damage the body. Training requires stress because without stress there is no adaptation. Individuals also become more competitive - faster running pace, lower heart rate, longer distance, heavier weights and so on. Pain/injury becomes something to overcome instead of something to understand.

At an older age, the consequences can be much worse. An injury can reduce movement, confidence and independence, and sometimes the person never fully returns to past capabilities. I have seen this in my own family as well.

So perhaps the goal is not to remain completely injury-free, because that may not even be realistic. It is to avoid the injuries that permanently reduce our ability to participate.

2. The food paradox

Food is another area where longevity creates rules/barriers. Once you learn more about health, it becomes difficult to eat without thinking about protein, fibre, sugar, type of olive oil, meal timing and how processed the food is. Some follow intermittent fasting. Some stop drinking alcohol and avoid late-night meals. Some resort to becoming vegan.

But food is not only nutrition. It is also one of the main ways people spend time together. Families meet over meals. Friends plan dinners. Weddings, birthdays, festivals and travel are all connected to food. Even work relationships are often built over lunch or coffee. The meal may not always be healthy, but the experience can still be valuable.

The stricter the rules become, the harder it is to participate without thinking about them. Someone practising intermittent fasting may miss breakfasts or late dinners. Someone avoiding alcohol can still attend, but many events may be organised around drinking. Every rule creates some cost in convenience, spontaneity or the ability to join without needing others to adjust.

At the same time, health can become a useful filter. We may spend less time with people whose social lives revolve around drinking or late nights, and more time with people who train, sleep early and eat similarly. That can be positive, but if we can only spend time comfortably with people who live exactly like us, then the circle becomes small.

Social connection and belonging are part of living well. It would be strange to protect every biological marker while losing the people and experiences that make the extra years valuable.

3. The price of longevity

There is a basic version of healthy living that does not need to be very expensive. Walking, running, sleeping properly, eating reasonably well and basic strength training are accessible to many people. But once someone enters the longevity space, there are new layers available.

There are biomarker panels that cost 1000-2000 dollars, clinics selling programmes that cost USD 10K or more, and then scans, glucose monitors, red-light therapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy and supplement protocols. Some may be useful, but together they can make longevity look unaffordable.

People buy these services not because they enjoy optimisation. They are afraid of becoming sick, losing mobility or becoming dependent on others. If someone says a test may identify a future risk, it becomes difficult to ignore. Longevity businesses are ultimately selling some sense of control over things that have traditionally felt uncontrollable.

Here comes the contradiction. To afford this version of longevity, most people need to earn more. Earning more often means working harder, sleeping less and carrying more stress. People work hard enough to afford an optimisation health plan and then need the plan partly because of how hard they are working. Strange, right?

I see some version of this in my own life. Running a longevity company does not automatically make the process healthy. There are periods when the stress of building is possibly the biggest health hazard, even while the business itself creates products meant to improve health.

This raises the question of who longevity really belongs to. Is it for everyone, or is it becoming a premium category for people who can afford to test everything and intervene early? The most important things are still the simplest ones - movement, sleep, quality nutrition, and healthy relationships.

4. The more we know

The more I learn about health, the more I find things that need to be managed. Sleep becomes duration, consistency and recovery. Exercise becomes strength, Zone 2 runs, intervals and mobility. Eating becomes protein, fibre, glucose and timing. Then there is sunlight, alcohol, air quality, body composition and a growing number of biomarkers (anywhere from 100 to 500 biomarkers are tested now).

Technology makes this easier and harder at the same time. A watch can tell us how we slept and whether we recovered. A glucose monitor can show what happened after a meal. A blood test can identify something we would not otherwise notice. This information can be useful when it leads to a clear decision.

But it can also begin to control how someone feels. A bad recovery score can change the mood before the person has left the bed. A slightly unusual blood marker can create weeks of anxiety. Exercise can stop being about how the body feels because the watch has already decided whether the session was productive.

I am not against measurement. We are building a longevity company, and I think measurement will become a much bigger part of preventive health. But every measurement should ideally answer a question or lead to an action. Otherwise, it becomes another number occupying mental space. Knowledge needs a filter, or longevity can slowly turn from preventive health into preventive anxiety.

5. Where is the balance?

Balance is the obvious answer to every paradox in this note. Exercise, but do not overtrain. Eat well, but enjoy social occasions. Test your health, but do not obsess over every number. Spend on health, but do not create financial stress. It all sounds sensible.

The problem is that balance is much easier to describe than to practise. There is no universal point where exercise becomes too much, eating becomes too strict or testing becomes excessive. The answer depends on age, health, money, ambition and what else is happening in life. A person preparing for a marathon will accept more fatigue and a higher risk of injury. Someone recovering from surgery will need the opposite.

Balance also keeps changing. What worked for me before marathon training will not work during the highest-volume weeks. I had to quit my 6 year routine of intermittent fasting when I started the training. So balance may not be a fixed position that we discover and maintain. It may be something we keep adjusting as life changes.

Perhaps the better question is whether what we are doing is expanding or shrinking our future capacity. Is this training making it more likely that I can continue running later, or am I repeatedly ignoring an injury? Is this food rule improving my health without damaging my relationship with food and people? Is this test likely to change a decision, or is it only creating another concern?

Every choice carries a cost. Hard training costs recovery. Strict eating costs flexibility. More information costs mental space. Advanced healthcare costs money. The goal may not be to remove these costs. It may be to understand what we are paying and whether the benefit is worth it.

Closing notes

I do not have a solution to these paradoxes, and that is possibly why I wanted to write about them. The deeper I go into longevity, the less I believe there is one ideal way to live. Exercise can strengthen us and injure us. Food can nourish us and isolate us. Knowledge can protect us and make us anxious. Money can buy better healthcare and require a lifestyle that damages health.

What I have started believing is that longevity should make life larger. It should allow us to move more, experience more, build stronger relationships and remain independent for longer. If longevity makes someone afraid of food, afraid of missing a workout, afraid of every test result or unable to participate in normal social life, then something has probably gone wrong.

At the same time, living without any rules is also not freedom. Ignoring sleep, eating badly, never exercising and refusing to understand our health will eventually reduce our choices. Many of the freedoms we enjoy when we are younger are possibly being borrowed from the body we will have later.

I will continue training, eating carefully, testing my health and experimenting with things that may help me perform and recover better. I will also continue getting some of these decisions wrong, and then I will have to adjust again. Perhaps that is the closest thing to balance I can find right now: paying attention, understanding the trade-offs and remaining willing to change.

Longevity cannot only be about adding years or optimising every biological marker. It also has to preserve the reasons we want those years in the first place.

Thanks for reading today! See you next Sunday!

Cheers,
Shan

Every supplement brand claims to be backed by science. They cite research papers, reference published studies, explain biological mechanisms, and build credibility from work that has already been done. That’s where we started too. For the first few years, our focus was on understanding the science behind every ingredient we used, writing scientific white papers, working with researchers, partnering with universities, and making sure every product had a strong scientific foundation.

The question that kept coming back, however, was much harder. When does ingredient-level evidence stop being enough? One of the earliest discussions around Protocol X captured it perfectly. The ingredients have evidence, but where is the evidence for the formulation itself? That question changed how we think about research. Instead of asking how to find more papers to support our products, we started asking how to build an organisation that gets better at generating evidence every year. This article is the framework we’ve developed so far.

Today’s read:

1. Borrowed Evidence

2. Own One Problem

3. Consumers Don’t Buy Biomarkers

4. Evidence Compounds

5. Build the Machine

1. Borrowed Evidence

Every science-first consumer brand begins by borrowing credibility. You study the published literature behind the ingredients you’re considering. You understand the biological mechanisms, look at clinical trials, evaluate doses, and decide whether the evidence is strong enough to justify building a product. Every responsible company should do this. If there’s no scientific rationale behind an ingredient, it probably shouldn’t make it into the formulation in the first place.

But something changes as your products become more differentiated. A formulation isn’t simply a collection of ingredients. The dosages change. The ratios change. Ingredients interact with one another. Delivery systems evolve, whether that’s liposomes, micro-encapsulation or something entirely new. Over time, the finished formulation becomes something that has never been studied before.

That’s when the question changes too. You’re no longer asking, “Is there evidence behind this ingredient?” You’re asking, “Is there evidence behind this formulation?” Ingredient-level evidence gives you the confidence to start, but it doesn’t automatically prove that the finished product delivers the same outcome. At some point, that responsibility shifts from the scientific community to the company building the product.

This was exactly the question that came up during discussions around Protocol X. Our Scientific Advisory Committee challenged us on a simple point. The individual ingredients had evidence, but where was the evidence for the formulation itself? It was a fair question, and one we didn’t have a good answer to at the time.

That conversation changed how we thought about research. Instead of looking for more papers to support our products, we started asking a different question:

How do we become a company that produces evidence instead of simply consuming it?

That shift eventually led us towards human studies, laboratory collaborations, and a much larger ambition, not to run individual studies, but to build a repeatable system for generating evidence across every product we launch.

2. One Product. One Problem.

One of the biggest mistakes a science-first brand can make is trying to validate every possible benefit of a product all together. We made that mistake ourselves.

Pick any longevity supplement. It could potentially improve energy, recovery, cognition, inflammation, healthy ageing, exercise performance and sleep. If you ask the formulation scientist, they’ll probably add another five benefits to the list.

But consumers don’t remember products with ten benefits. More importantly, designing a study around ten different outcomes almost always results in a complicated protocol, weaker conclusions, and marketing that tries to say everything but ends up saying nothing.

Instead, every product should begin by owning one clearly defined consumer problem.

For example, a sleep product could focus on sleep duration. A joint product could focus on knee discomfort. A cognition product could focus on memory. A longevity product might focus on fatigue or exercise recovery. There may be many other benefits, but the first objective is to become known for solving one problem exceptionally well.

This changes both the research and the positioning of the product. Once you’ve identified that primary problem, everything else becomes simpler. You know which population to recruit, which outcomes to measure, which questionnaires to use, and ultimately what story you’re trying to tell. The research becomes more focused, and so does the marketing.

That doesn’t mean the product only has one benefit. It simply means you earn the right to talk about the second and third benefits after you’ve established credibility in the first. Evidence, much like brand equity, compounds over time. Trying to prove everything on day one usually achieves the opposite.

When we started mapping our own research pipeline, this became one of the principles we kept returning to. Every formulation has multiple possibilities, but every formulation should start with one problem. Build strong evidence there first. Expand later.

3. Consumers Don’t Buy Biomarkers

As we started planning human studies, one question kept coming up.

What should we actually measure?

Scientists naturally gravitate towards biomarkers. They’re objective, quantifiable and often provide a better understanding of what’s happening inside the body. Whenever possible, we should absolutely measure them.

The problem is that biomarkers rarely mean much to consumers on their own.

Take NAD as an example. We completed a human study on Protocol X showing an increase in blood NAD levels. From a scientific perspective, that’s valuable. It demonstrates that the formulation is biologically active and provides evidence that it’s doing what it was designed to do.

But almost nobody wakes up wanting higher NAD.

They want to feel less tired during the day. They want to recover faster after training. They want to stay mentally sharp through a long meeting. They want to have enough energy left to spend time with their family after work.

Those are the outcomes that matter.

That doesn’t make biomarkers less important. It simply changes the role they play. Biomarkers explain why a product works. Consumer outcomes explain why someone should care.

The best studies connect the two. They demonstrate a biological change while also showing a meaningful improvement that people can recognise in their daily lives. That’s where science becomes useful beyond the laboratory, and where research becomes much more powerful as a tool for building trust.

When we’re designing studies today, we spend as much time discussing the consumer outcome as we do the scientific endpoint. Both matter. One gives the research credibility. The other gives it relevance.

4. Evidence Compounds

Once you’ve identified the problem you’re trying to solve and how you’ll measure it, the next question becomes straightforward.

What should the first study look like?

For most consumer brands, the answer isn’t a large clinical trial.

Clinical trials are expensive, time consuming, and difficult to execute well. More importantly, if you’re still learning which population responds best, which outcomes are most meaningful, or even whether your hypothesis is correct, jumping straight into a large trial can be an expensive mistake.

We think about evidence as something that compounds.

The first study should answer a simple question. Does the product appear to help the people we designed it for? It doesn’t need to answer every question. It just needs to provide enough confidence that you’re moving in the right direction.

If the signal is promising, the next stage is to strengthen that evidence with more objective measurements. That could include biomarkers, cognitive testing, wearables, blood work, or any measurement that’s appropriate for the product. At this stage, you’re moving beyond what people report and beginning to understand what’s changing physiologically.

Only after building confidence through these earlier stages does it make sense to invest in larger, controlled clinical trials. By then, you have a much better understanding of who the product is for, what outcomes matter, and how the study should be designed.

Each study reduces uncertainty. Each study answers one question and raises the next. Over time, you aren’t just collecting publications. You’re building confidence in the product, confidence in the formulation, and confidence in the decisions you make as a company.

That’s why we think of research as a long-term capability rather than a series of isolated projects. Every study should make the next study better.

5. Build the Machine

The biggest lesson from all of this is that we’re no longer trying to build studies. We’re trying to build a machine that produces them.

Every study teaches us something beyond the results. We learn how to recruit participants, which populations respond best, which endpoints are meaningful, which partners are good to work with, where participants drop off, how long studies actually take, and how to translate scientific findings into something consumers can understand. Even when a study doesn’t produce the outcome we hoped for, it still makes the next study better.

Over time, that learning compounds. Research stops being a project and becomes a capability. Instead of asking whether we should conduct another study, the organisation naturally becomes better at identifying the right questions, designing better protocols, choosing better outcome measures, and generating stronger evidence across every product we launch.

I think that’s where science-first consumer brands can truly differentiate themselves. Every company can hire scientists. They can cite published papers. They can commission a clinical trial if they have enough money. Very few build an organisation where generating evidence becomes part of how the company operates.

We’re still at the beginning of that journey ourselves. This framework will continue to evolve as we launch more products, run more studies and inevitably discover where we’re wrong. But the objective is much clearer today than it was when we started.

We’re no longer trying to prove that our products work.

We’re trying to build a company that gets better at proving it every year.

Today’s write up is based on the last 3 years of trying to be stronger science company, as well as to support the longevity space. I am afraid of brands that enter this without knowing anything about longevity, borrowing evidence and making claims that endanger the entire ecosystem.

I vividly remember how difficult it was for me to initially claim that we are a “longevity brand”. I was afraid what will consumers perceive of this word and what will be their expectation. The fear is still with me. I want to have better answers to the question - “What is longevity?”

That’s all for tonight. I will see you again next Sunday!

Cheers!
Shan

We are currently moving our entire webstore from BigCommerce to Shopify. BigCommerce can continue serving us for years, but most of the e-commerce ecosystem is now built on Shopify. More tools, integrations, analytics and AI product have deeper integration with Shopify, and staying where we are increasingly means building everything ourselves.

This is not the only part that we are rebuilding. In three years, the products have evolved, the prices have evolved, the website has been rebuilt several times, the social media looks completely different, and the people building the company have changed too. Our approach to marketing, manufacturing, hiring and market expansion has gone through several versions. Sometimes I feel that we have finally put one part of the company in place, only to discover that another part needs to be pulled apart again. I used to find this frustrating. Now I am beginning to think that rebuilding the company over and over again may be the actual work.

Today’s Reading

1. Before It Breaks

2. Expiring Playbooks

3. When Growth Breaks

4. Rebuilding Teams

5. Learning to be a “Boss”

1. Before It Breaks

BigCommerce works fine. It takes orders, collects payments and runs the website. Payments are actually one of the better parts of the platform. You can customise all parts of the store. If all we wanted was a functioning online store, we could probably remain there for years.

The problem starts when we try to do anything beyond basics. Our WhatsApp marketing platform lacks revenue attribution on BigCommerce. We can see that messages were sent, but we cannot clearly see how much revenue came from them. The deeper Shopify integration already does this.

The same thing happens with customer service. Gorgias can bring the customer conversation and the order into one place on Shopify. The support team can edit an order or issue a refund without moving between dashboards. On BigCommerce, much of that remains manual. Judge.me, which we used for reviews, stopped supporting BigCommerce earlier this year. Almost every time we look at a new tool, Shopify is supported first and BigCommerce is either supported at a basic level or missing altogether.

Our developer is very good, so we kept finding ways around these gaps. We built custom integrations and added features ourselves. That worked for a long time. It also meant that every improvement became a small technology project, followed by maintenance whenever one of the systems changed. We were spending time rebuilding things that already existed elsewhere.

AI made the gap more obvious. We want to use AI to help customers understand our products, compare formulas and receive useful science-backed answers while shopping. The tools are improving quickly, but most of the companies building them are starting with Shopify. On BigCommerce, we would have to build much more of that layer ourselves.

I know Shopify will create its own problems. Its payments setup can be frustrating, and customers in some markets may face currency conversion charges. We will discover more issues after the migration. Still, the upside looks larger. We should gain better integrations, better customer information and much more room to test what is happening in e-commerce now.

This is the strange part of rebuilding. BigCommerce has not failed. We are leaving because it is becoming harder to evolve on it.

2. Expiring Playbooks

Our marketing has gone through the same cycle. Something starts working, we become confident, and then it changes.

TikTok paid ads became so inefficient that we stopped them for the last 3 months. TikTok Shop itself has also been inconsistent. A large part of the sales depends on livestreams, and even those results have been patchy from one month to another. Shopee has been different. It continues to deliver, so we continue to spend there.

This has made us far more strict about where money goes. We cut campaigns quickly, change creatives often and keep moving money away from channels that are not working. We still have a lot more to do in content production, both for organic reach and paid campaigns (that is another major area of focus right now).

Among markets, Hong Kong has been so confusing. We entered in 2025 and it started well. The early growth made us feel that the market would continue moving in the same direction. Then the numbers dropped. Paid ads did not do much, and adding more money and Instagram affiliates did not solve it. The strongest results came from credible creators, especially people who were willing to explain the products properly on YouTube.

We are now trying to rebuild Hong Kong around that learning. It is slower than buying ads, but it fits the way people seem to discover us there. The Singapore playbook would have pushed us towards more livestreams, marketplaces and performance marketing. Hong Kong is asking for something else. This may also be a better way to test a new market than starting with paid ads. A credible creator can explain the product, answer the obvious doubts and show us whether there is genuine interest before we spend heavily.

We spend much less on marketing than many brands around us, and still generate strong returns. It came from repeatedly stopping things, moving budgets, changing people, questioning agencies and refusing to keep a weak campaign alive because we had already spent money on it.

The frustrating part is that the learning never really becomes final. By the time we become good at one version of the game, the game has usually started moving again.

3. When Growth Breaks

November 2025 was one of our strongest sales periods and one of the most uncomfortable periods in the company.

Demand was high, but manufacturing and fulfilment could not keep up. Orders were delayed. Customers kept asking for updates. We kept apologising and giving new timelines. It was embarrassing because the marketing had worked, people had trusted us with their money, and the rest of the company could not fulfil that promise at the same speed.

For the next few months, most of the focus moved from demand generation to operations. Plans were shelved. Product work slowed down. Expansion discussions became secondary. Revenue also suffered later because we had to stop pushing the engine while repairing it.

That period (and similar periods before) changed how I think about volume. We cannot operate as a high-volume, low-price brand with our current manufacturing setup. When volume rises too quickly, the system cracks. We also cannot spend $50-100 acquiring a customer and rely on a $20-$30 product. The economics are weak, and producing more units creates more operational pressure (cash flow, space and focus).

So the products evolved, the price points evolved, and we became more selective about what we wanted to scale. We moved towards stronger formulas, more differentiated (and industry-leading) products, with price points that could support the work behind them.

These also shaped where we expand. Singapore remains the core. Hong Kong and Malaysia are close enough for us to serve without building an entirely new operating setup. The shipping economics are manageable, even if the markets remain relatively small without larger marketing investments. Australia and Europe are different. Shipping is expensive, and without local marketing they remain small. Scaling them properly would require local registration, inventory, marketing and time before we see returns.

Thailand is another example. The regulatory work is complicated enough that entering the market becomes a project by itself. We can solve it, but solving it requires money and attention. Right now, I am not sure it makes sense to spend heavily on a new market and wait a year for returns while we are still strengthening the base business.

Three years ago, entering more markets felt like obvious progress. Today, I look at how much cash it will take, how long registration will take, where inventory will sit and what else the team will stop doing. The ambition is still there but the sequence has become more deliberate.

4. Rebuilding Teams

The team has gone through more versions than any other part of the company.

Initially, we hired people with experience. We assumed that someone who had done the work before would know what to do and would need less support. Then we realised that experience in a mature organisation does not always translate well into a startup. There may be no process, no benchmark and no clear answer. You have to test things, unlearn what worked elsewhere and build a process that fits the company in front of you.

I also had an expectation that people should know how to do their jobs without me teaching every part of it. I wanted them to take decisions, and I felt disappointed when they did not. Over time, that disappointment became frustration. They could feel it, even when I did not say everything directly. Trust went down, and resentment built. I remember going for long walks and runs simply to manage my emotions almost everyday. I am sure it was a difficult period for the people working with me too (and possibly still is).

After that, I changed the hiring model. I stopped prioritising experience and started hiring interns and fresh graduates who could be trained. The intern-to-full-time model worked well when I already knew the direction and needed someone to execute it. It also gave us people who were excited to trying new approaches to marketing.

Then that model reached its own limit. Not every good intern becomes a strong full-time employee. Short internships meant we were hiring, training and starting again every few months. Just when someone understood the work, they left. We stopped accepting short internships and started looking for longer commitments.

We also placed managers in the functions where continuity mattered most. The aim was to create a core team that could keep the company running while interns, freelancers and junior members moved in and out around it. That structure is much more stable today.

The latest hiring shift is probably the biggest one. For most of the last three years, I came up with the ideas, campaigns and ways of working, and the team executed them. I needed people who could understand my ask and figure out how to get it done.

That is no longer enough. I am now looking for people who can make the brand more interesting, bring ideas I would never have, and challenge my own thinking. When I look at our social media today, it already feels very different from four or five months ago because more people are contributing to what it can become.

Earlier, I hired people who could follow my thinking. Now I need people who can take it somewhere else.

5. Learning to be a “boss”

While the team was changing, I was also learning how to be the final decision-maker.

Before Xandro, I had senior roles, but I was never the person who could take every call. At Xandro, I wanted people to own their areas. When I had to step into someone else’s role and make a decision, I felt bad. It felt like I was taking their responsibility away. At the same time, I was frustrated that the decision had reached me at all.

That hesitation created its own problems. Some decisions sat for too long. Sometimes I waited for someone to reach an answer when the company needed a call that day. Then I would step in late, already irritated, and the conversation would become harder than it needed to be.

I am faster now. I can usually tell when someone needs time to work through a problem and when I need to jump in. I do not feel the same guilt about taking a call anymore. The company still needs an answer even when the ownership is unclear or the person is not ready.

I am also more conscious of what happens after I step in. If I keep making the same decision again and again, then I have not solved the problem. Either the person needs more context, the role needs to change, or the system is badly designed.

I am still learning how to do this without becoming impatient or controlling. The difference is that I no longer avoid the responsibility because it feels uncomfortable. Three years into building Xandro, the company has been rebuilt several times, and so has my idea of what my own job is.

I used to think that once the right products, people and systems were in place, the company would finally feel settled. I do not think that anymore. We fix one layer, grow into a new problem, and start again.

Thanks for reading this. It’s my own little journal + learning platform. I love sharing these experiences and speaking with people who are building.

On a side note, all this rebuilding has created a strange feeling. I sometimes crave the idea of starting from zero again. It would be risky and full of uncertainty, but surprisingly, the thought does not scare me. It feels quite exhilarating.

Until next Sunday,
Shan

This week, I spent the weekend in Melaka and came back thinking about culture. It is a word we use a lot in marketing. Every brand wants to build culture ( or be part of a culture). Brands wants to become a movement. It sounds good, but I am not sure we always understand what we mean when we say it.

Index

1. Melaka roots

2. Culture and marketing

3. Beyond the products

4. Ladder to culture

5. Who are we?

6. Identity problem

7. Culture for a longevity brand

8. Unfinished business

1. Melaka roots

When we talk about culture in a city, it feels easier to understand. Culture is the food, the buildings, the people, the way they dress, the way they speak, the way they behave, the pace of the place, the businesses that have survived, and the stories that people keep repeating. It is the feeling you get when all of these things come together.

Melaka has that feeling. You see it in the old shophouses, the colours, the Peranakan food, the temples, the mosques, the cafés inside old buildings, the narrow streets, and the small shops that have been around for generations. But the more interesting part for me was not only what I could see. It was the connection between Melaka, George Town and Singapore.

I live in Singapore. I have lived here for five years now. When you go to Melaka, you realise that this part of the world has always been shaped by trade. Melaka was once one of the larger trading ports of the region. George Town became another important node. Singapore became the dominant one later. Trade moved, people moved, wealth moved, power moved, and with all of that, culture also moved.

Businesses and brands are probably similar. Relevance does not stay in one place forever. A city that was once important can become historical. A company that was once growing can become stagnant. A person who was once sharp can become outdated. You have to keep improving. You have to keep asking what the next version should be.

A city becomes interesting because of accumulation. No single building creates the culture of Melaka. No single dish does it. No single shop does it. It is the combination of all these things, repeated and preserved over time, that gives the place its character. Culture is accumulated behaviour. It is what people repeatedly do, value, preserve, copy, improve and pass on.

2. Culture and marketing

In marketing, people use the word culture very casually. It makes a brand feel larger than life. It gives them emotional weight. It makes people feel that they are working on something bigger than sales, packaging or advertising.

For a city, culture can be seen in physical form. A brand does not have streets, old shops or centuries of history in the same way. A brand has products, packaging, advertising, founder stories, customers, content, creators, events, communities, colours, design language and some reasons for existing.

Maybe a brand is also like a small city. It creates a world around itself. There is a type of person it serves. There is a language it uses. There are products that solve certain problems. There are stories about why the founders started it. There are rituals people build around the products. There are communities that form around the identity.

Over time, if enough of these things are consistent, the brand starts feeling larger than the product. That is where culture begins. It is created when people outside the brand start behaving in a way that is connected to the brand. Sometimes the brand starts it. Sometimes the customers start it. Sometimes the brand only notices it later.

3. Beyond the products

A few days ago, I was having a conversation with my marketing team. I was trying to simplify what Xandro Lab stands for. Colgate helps you keep your teeth clean. Red Bull gives you energy. Nike helps you train and perform. Decathlon helps more people access sports. These are simple ideas, and because they are simple, they are powerful.

Then I asked myself the same question for Xandro Lab. What do we do? The obvious answer is that we provide longevity solutions. That sounds correct, and it is probably what we would say in a deck. But it also sounds too broad.

So I started going product by product. Sleep On helps people sleep better. Magnesium helps with sleep and muscle function. LPC Neuro supports memory, alertness and brain health. Protocol X supports energy, recovery, nutrition and longevity. All of these are useful. All of these solve real problems. Some of these products are already successful. Some have strong repeat usage. Some have very strong science behind them.

Still, the answer felt incomplete. These are features, benefits and jobs the products perform, but they do not fully explain the culture the brand is trying to enable. A running vest carries water, but that is only the functional layer. It enables a longer run. It helps someone go further without worrying about hydration. Over time, it supports the behaviour of becoming someone who does long runs.

A carbon-plated shoe helps someone run faster and with less fatigue. I spent around $400 on a Hoka carbon-plated shoe before my first half-marathon because I wanted to run better and protect my legs. I could have run in a basic shoe, but I know it would have been much harder on my body. The job was not only to make me faster. It enabled me to participate in a culture of training, racing and trying to improve my own performance.

This is where products become interesting. A product has a function. A good product solves a problem. A strong brand reinforces behaviour. When that behaviour is repeated by enough people, the brand slowly becomes part of a culture.

4. Ladder to culture

A framework has stayed in my mind since I started thinking about this. A brand moves through these stages.

1. Sell a product

2. Solve a problem

3. Support a habit

4. Represent an identity

5. Build a community

6. Become shorthand for a culture

Most brands never move far beyond the first two stages. Selling a product is already hard. Solving a real problem is even harder. But culture starts later. It starts when the product becomes part of a person’s routine. It grows when that routine becomes part of a person’s identity. It becomes powerful when that identity is shared with other people.

Another way to look at it is this.

1. Product

2. Ritual

3. Habit

4. Identity

5. Community

6. Culture

Nike did not create running. It reinforced training, performance and athletic ambition for decades. Red Bull did not create adventure, but it attached itself to energy, risk, action and extreme performance until people started associating the brand with that world. Puma did not create HYROX. HYROX was already growing as a hybrid fitness culture, but Puma entered the space, committed to it, and became visible inside that community.

ASICS has stayed relevant because people still see it as a serious running brand. It may not always look the coolest, but runners trust the shoes. New Balance has managed to stay relevant in both running and lifestyle, which is not easy. Salomon moved from mountains into running and then into fashion because the world it represented became desirable. Even people who do not climb mountains started wanting to look like they belonged to that world.

The interesting thing is that none of these brands fully own the culture. They participate in it. They support it. They give it products, symbols, language and sometimes spaces. People create the culture, and brands earn their place inside it.

5. Who are we?

In that same conversation with my team, I realised something uncomfortable. We have built successful products. These are meaningful science-led products. We have built a brand that many people in Singapore now know. We have done events, worked with creators, run livestreams, supported sports communities, tried sampling, founder-led storytelling and many things over the last three years.

But when I asked, “What identity do we represent?” I did not have a clean answer. The team did not have a clean answer either. That is probably the problem we have now reached. At some point, growth becomes less about explaining the product and more about representing an identity.

For a while, we were becoming known as a sports brand. People would take our products to sports events. Athletes, recreational runners and fitness communities would post our sachets, capsules and products around their activities. That was a form of culture. It may have been partly pushed by us because we were spending money, supporting events and placing ourselves inside those moments, but something was still happening. People were starting to associate Xandro Lab with performance, sport and active living.

That should have told us something. Culture is not always what the founder writes in a brand deck. Sometimes culture is what customers repeatedly do with your product. Sometimes the market shows you where the brand naturally fits before you are able to explain it yourself.

This is why I have been thinking about identity. We have successful product lines. We have technology. We have operations. We have distribution. We have repeat customers. These things matter, but they may not be enough for the next stage. If growth is becoming stagnant, perhaps the issue is not only that we need to sell harder or explain better. Perhaps the issue is that we have not yet made it clear what identity we represent.

6. Identity problem

This is where I am still confused. Some founders have very clear answers. They say they only do running, only serve mothers, only build for climbers, only create for women, only make products for one specific community. There is strength in that because focus gives clarity. People know what you stand for. Product decisions become simpler. Community becomes easier to find. Messaging becomes sharper.

At the same time, focus has a cost. A brand that only serves one specific culture may become deeply loved inside that culture, but it still needs scale. It needs enough people who care. It needs enough repeat behaviour. It needs enough commercial strength to survive. I have seen brands with sharp cultural focus, and while I admire the clarity, I also know that clarity alone does not build a large business.

Breadth creates a different problem. Xandro Lab has sleep products, longevity products, brain health products, joint support and many other things. That gives us commercial breadth, but it also creates confusion. Are we a longevity brand, a performance brand, a sports brand, a wellness brand, a supplement brand, a health brand or a science brand? All of these are partly true, and that is exactly the problem. When too many things are true, nothing becomes sharp enough.

A narrow brand can be culturally strong and commercially small (or irrelevant - though there are successful niche brands). A broad brand can be commercially strong and culturally weak. The difficult part is finding the place where both can exist. I do not have the answer yet. I also do not think there is one universal answer. Every founder eventually has to decide what they are willing to become known for, and what they are willing to ignore because of that decision.

7. Culture for a longevity brand

The hardest part is applying all of this to longevity. Running culture is visible. You can see the shoes, vests, gels, medals, running clubs, Saturday long runs, coffee after runs, Strava screenshots, race photos, injuries, jokes and shared suffering. HYROX culture is visible too. You can see the events, training videos, race photos, shoes and the identity of being a hybrid athlete.

Longevity culture is harder to see. People say wellness, and people say longevity, but both words are now used so often that sometimes they mean everything and nothing. For us, the culture cannot just be about taking a pill every day. A supplement brand cannot build real culture only around consumption. A longevity brand has to enable a way of living.

Maybe it starts with better questions. When do you eat? How do you sleep? Do you strength train? Do you recover properly? Do you know when to push and when to stop? Do you understand your blood markers? Do you know what is changing in your body as you age? Do you want to live longer, or do you want to live better?

Even in my own training, I have been thinking about this. Two weeks after my half marathon, there was a Friday session I was supposed to do, and I had already trained three days in a row. I had pain around my hips, and part of me still wanted to push through it because skipping a session always feels like a small failure. But I decided to stop.

Tiredness is information. Pain is information. The body is always speaking, and the problem is that many high-performing people are trained to ignore it. You can take something and push through. A painkiller, a stimulant, more caffeine, more motivation, more discipline. Sometimes that works for a day. Sometimes it creates an injury that pulls you out for weeks.

So maybe longevity culture is also about knowing when to stop, when to recover, when to sleep, when to train, and when to respect the signal your body is giving you. That is also performance. It is just a different kind of performance.

The world is aging. There are more people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s who still want to work, travel, train, think clearly, move without pain and live with energy. Some want to retire early. Some want to keep building. Some want to run marathons. Some just want to play with their children or grandchildren without feeling broken. A longevity brand has to understand these people more deeply than simply saying, “This ingredient is good for you.”

Maybe the role of a brand like ours is to help people build rituals around sleep, food, training, recovery, testing, supplements and self-awareness. Over time, those rituals become habits. Habits become identity. Identity attracts community. Community becomes culture.

8. Unfinished business

This brings me back to Melaka. Melaka was once one of the most important trading ports in the region. Then history moved. Trade moved. The centre of gravity moved. Today, Singapore is one of those centres. But no city, company or person gets to keep relevance forever just because they were once important. Relevance has to be renewed.

At Xandro Lab, we have built products. We have solved problems. We have found customers. We have created momentum. But the next stage is harder. We have to understand what identity we represent because products can get copied, features can get copied, packaging can get copied, claims can get copied, and even science can eventually become available to more people.

The question I am asking myself now is not only what we sell. I am asking what kind of person becomes more successful because we exist. Maybe the answer is people who refuse to let age define what they can do. Maybe it is people who want to stay sharp, active and useful for much longer. Maybe it is people who want to perform today while protecting tomorrow. Maybe it is people who want to live with energy, while also respecting the body.

I do not know the answer yet. Culture cannot be created with a few influencers, a few events, a few nice videos or a good founder story. Those things help, but culture needs repeated behaviour, rituals, a point of view, time, and people who feel that the brand is for someone like them.

Until the next write-up,
Cheers!
Shan

I am a sensitive sleeper. I stopped wearing sleep trackers because the devices disrupted my sleep. My current protocol is magnesium glycinate, a warm shower, and a fully dark room. I used to sleep with the curtains open because I liked watching the sky at night. I gave that up. The room is dark now. I have a noisy highway outside I cannot fix, and a phone habit I am still working on.

I also shifted my sleep window, in bed by 10-1030 PM, up by 6-7 AM. It helps my marathon training that’s always in the morning.

We also just launched Sleep On, our first sleep health product. So for this week, I want to share what I have actually learned about sleep.

In this post:

1. Why sleep is an compounding asset

2. Most people are treating the wrong problem

3. The sleep aid stack, mapped

4. How to actually choose

5. What no supplement fixes

1. Compounding asset

Every health input we make, training, nutrition, supplementation, stress management, gets processed overnight. Sleep is where memories get consolidated, muscles get repaired, stress hormones get reset, and creativity gets rebuilt for the next day. When sleep is bad, we start losing the benefits of everything else we are doing right.

The consequences stack up faster than most people expect. A systematic review and meta-analysis published in Sleep Medicine Reviews found that in otherwise healthy adults, even short-term sleep disruption is linked to increased stress reactivity, mood problems, and cognitive decline, and that chronic disruption raises the risk of hypertension by 54% and type 2 diabetes by 63% compared to normal sleep duration (Johnson et al., Sleep Medicine Reviews, 2021 — read the study). These are not outcomes from clinical insomnia. They are outcomes from ordinary, chronic bad sleep in people who considered themselves basically fine.

When sleep breaks down, the body does not switch off the way it should. Stress hormones stay elevated, recovery slows, and everything downstream suffers.

Research on athletes makes this tangible. A review in Current Sports Medicine Reports found that better sleep duration and quality is consistently associated with improved performance, faster recovery, and lower injury risk (Watson, Current Sports Medicine Reports, 2017 — read the study). The same logic applies off the track. If we are not sleeping well, we are not getting the full return on everything else we put in.

Sleep is the one lever that amplifies or discounts every other lever we pull.

2. Wrong problem

Most people treating their sleep are treating the wrong thing. They buy something, it does not work and then they try something else. The problem is they are skipping the diagnosis.

There are five types of sleep problem and they do not respond to the same things.

The first is an onset problem. You cannot fall asleep. Mind is running, you are lying there for forty minutes before anything happens. This is usually a circadian timing or anxiety-driven issue.

The second is a maintenance problem. You fall asleep fine but wake at two or three in the morning and cannot get back. Stress and worry keep the nervous system from settling. It is not the same as an onset problem and treating it like one does not help.

The third is a depth problem. You sleep through the night and get your hours, but wake feeling unrestored. HRV is flat, readiness is low. Deep sleep is not happening, and no amount of melatonin fixes that because melatonin signals timing, not depth.

The fourth is circadian disruption. Your body clock is shifted through late nights, screens, travel, or inconsistent schedules. Sleepy at the wrong times, alert when you should not be.

The fifth is age-related change. Research published in Sleep Medicine Clinics found that normal aging brings more frequent night wakings, reduced deep sleep, and a weaker body clock, independent of other health factors (Li et al., Sleep Medicine Clinics, 2017 — read the study). If you are over 40 and sleep has gradually shifted, this may be part of it.

Before choosing anything, know which category you are in. If you have a wearable, look at your sleep stage data. If not, track three things: how long it takes to fall asleep, whether you wake during the night, and how you feel ninety minutes after waking. That profile gives you a better direction than a “sleep score”.

Note: Some sleep problems are clinical. They need a doctor, a proper assessment, and sometimes medication. If you have done the basics consistently and nothing is improving, please see a sleep specialist. Singapore has some good sleep specialists, and a proper diagnosis can change everything. Supplements are a lifestyle tool. They are not a substitute for medical care when medical care is what you actually need.

3. The stack, mapped

The visual below maps the main sleep aid ingredients on two axes. Left to right is your problem type and top to bottom is evidence strength from published human clinical data. Orange rings mark what is inside Sleep On.

A few things worth noting.

Melatonin, both synthetic and phytomelatonin, addresses sleep onset and circadian problems. Based on a 2024 systematic review published in the Journal of Pineal Research found that melatonin reduced sleep onset latency by 9.31 minutes and increased total sleep time by 19.67 minutes compared to placebo (DOI).

The same study found that efficacy peaks at 4mg per day, and that taking it three hours before the desired bedtime, rather than the typical thirty-minute window, produces significantly better results. The standard clinical advice of 2mg at thirty minutes before bed has an efficacy close to zero according to their model.

GABA sits in a different part of the matrix. It is the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. When your nervous system is running too hot at bedtime, whether from a long day, screens, or unresolved stress, GABA is what helps bring it down. Based on a randomised placebo-controlled trial using exactly 200mg of GABA daily, the same dose in Sleep On, showed improved sleep efficiency and increased heart rate variability over 90 days (DOI).

Holy basil, the Holixer extract in Sleep On, addresses the third mechanism. Its role is to calm the mind and bring cortisol down. Cortisol is your stress hormone. When it stays elevated into the evening, it keeps you wired when you should be winding down. Holy basil is an adaptogen, meaning it helps the body manage stress more effectively over time. The evidence for holy basil on stress is stronger than its direct sleep data, which is why it works best as part of a full stack rather than on its own.

For people whose sleep problem is primarily stress and cortisol-driven, ashwagandha and phosphatidylserine are also worth understanding. Ashwagandha has several RCTs showing HPA axis regulation and cortisol reduction. Phosphatidylserine blunts the cortisol spike that tends to hit high-output individuals in the evening. Both sit in the moderate evidence tier and are most relevant if your problem is the maintenance or stress quadrant of the matrix, waking at 2am, inability to wind down, or sleep that feels light and unrestored despite getting the hours.

Magnesium glycinate does not sit inside Sleep On but remains one of the most broadly useful additions to a sleep stack. It supports GABA activity, muscle relaxation, and slow-wave sleep continuity. I take it every night.

Valerian root is popular but the trial evidence is mixed across preparations and populations.

4. How to choose

The logic is simple once you know your problem type.

• Onset problem, go left on the matrix. ⬅️

• Maintenance or stress-driven, go right. ➡️

• Depth problem, start with magnesium glycinate and glycine.

Then look at evidence strength. Prefer compounds with multiple published human trials. Most supplement marketing does not make this distinction clearly. You have to look for it.

The important thing to understand about Sleep On is what it is not. It is not a sedative. It does not force you to sleep. If you are looking for something that knocks you out fast, that is not this product and it is probably not what you actually need.

Sleep On is built around three mechanisms working together. Phytomelatonin handles your circadian signal, telling your body when to sleep. GABA quiets the neurological noise that keeps you alert when you should be winding down. Holy basil addresses the upstream cortisol load that, left unmanaged, keeps the system in a wired state even when you are tired. Together they support the conditions your body needs to sleep well, consistently, over time.

Current sleep aids in the market target one mechanism. Sleep On supports the entire system. It is a different product philosophy and it is why the results build rather than plateau.

5. What it cannot fix

Supplements support a sleep system. They do not build one.

If you are on your phone until midnight, no stack corrects that. I know this because I am still working on it. If your room is warm and lit, melatonin is working against the environment. If you are drinking regularly, deep sleep architecture is impaired in ways that supplements do not reach. If you are running a chronic sleep deficit, you need more hours, not better compounds.

The foundations are boring - Consistent sleep and wake times. A dark, cool room. A wind-down period without screens. Alcohol reduced or removed. Exercise, but not within two to three hours of bed.

The gap between where my sleep is and where it could be is not a supplement gap. It is a discipline gap. So, build the system first. Then use the stack to optimise it.

Until next week,
Shan

Today I am writing this a few hours after crossing the finish line of the Phuket Marathon 2026, my first ever half marathon. I am still a little emotional and I want to get it down before the feeling fades. So this week, no business notes, no longevity science. Just what happened today morning.

The excuse to not run

When I started running long distances, I often needed a few toilet breaks. In Singapore road running, you will find enough public toilets or mall toilets to stop at. These toilets are clean and I did not expect the race toilets to be anywhere close. I had heard horror stories, imagined scenarios, and decided marathon was not for me.

This was one reason why I chose to go for Hyrox - Max 90 mins inside a well facilitated and controlled stadium. Short enough time to not need a toilet break, and even if you do, good toilets are available right beside. Bonus point for being air conditioned almost always. But I knew I wanted to take the risk of running a marathon someday and needed a trigger. The trigger was a call from one of our partners at the start of May. I said fuck it, lets do it. Lets see what happens.

So, today on the 14th of June 2026, I ran 21 kilometres through Phuket. I used toilet twice during the race. Both were clean. I was dreading going to the first toilet, but then I knew I had to. So I did, and was pleasantly surprised. They were not disgusting as I made myself to believe for last few years.

Raw feeling

I expected pain. I expected to be managing myself through the second half, calculating how much was left, negotiating with my body. That is not what happened.

The entire 21 kilometres felt like happiness.

I know that sounds wrong. I am not someone who cries. But somewhere around 5K, my eyes started to swell. Not from pain or exhaustion. From something I still don’t have the right word for. It kept happening. At 10K. At 15K. At the finish line. I wanted to cry so many times during those two hours. Maybe it was the feeling of: I can actually do this. I can do it. I am going to do it.

My coach, Keane Ko, Singapore national athlete currently training to break Singapore’s long distance national record, had told me to aim for a two hour finish. I started at the three hour pacer, just to be safe. My daily long runs were at a 6.5 min/km pace or slower. Most were in the 7 to 8 zone. I genuinely thought finishing in 2.5 hours would be lucky.

Around 8K, I caught the two and a half hour group and moved with them. When I spotted the 2.15 pacer ahead of me around kilometre ten, I felt something rise up again. Eyes full. Not crying. Just full. Every time I passed a pacer, every time I passed another runner, I felt it. I was running at 5 to 5.50 min/km for almost the entire race without slowing down. I did not know this was possible for me. I think that is what kept making me want to cry. Some mix of pride and disbelief. I realise I love watching myself do new things.

At 5K I knew I would finish. At 10K I knew I would finish without difficulty. At 15K I knew I had more left in me. The question by the end was not whether I would make it. It was how fast.

When I came to the finish line, I had planned to record the moment and document the crossing. I didn’t. I was running too well to stop. I kept the pace. I crossed the line.

Flashback to 2020

In late 2020, I was 80 kgs. I had a full face, a body I would not call fat but not fit either. At the time I felt okay about it. I was happy with where I was professionally, and how life looked from the outside. It is only now, looking back at photos from that period, that I see clearly how much weight I was carrying and how far I was from resembling physical health.

I was living in Dubai. It was winter, December 2020 or January 2021. Dubai winters are genuinely beautiful, cool air, good temperatures, the kind of days that make you want to be outside. At the office, people were talking about running. My boss and a few colleagues were discussing getting back to it, doing 5K, 10K, how hard it was to restart but how they were managing. Most of them were older than me.

Something in me said: if they can do it, why not me? So I went out that the next morning. I could not run even 1K. My lungs and legs gave up, so did my mind. I stopped and walked back.

I left Dubai a few months later. But before I did, I made a note of things I wanted to do. One of them was run a 5K.

That 5K happened about two years later, in Singapore, after I had started running properly. And once it happened, it quietly became the start of something bigger. HYROX came in 2025, which was its own goal but also, I now realise, a test. A controlled way to build race experience before attempting something longer. Max 90 minutes, good facilities, air conditioning. A stepping stone I did not fully admit to myself was a stepping stone.

Today was the next step. Six years from that evening in Dubai where I could not run a kilometre, I ran 21K.

Training in four weeks

I had a very short training interval because I chose to register last moment.

I reached out to Keane, and he graciously decided to help me out. The structure was simple: Mondays off, Tuesdays an easy 30-minute run, Wednesdays track intervals, Thursdays 8 to 10 kilometres easy, Fridays or Saturdays a long run of 10 to 15 kilometres, Sundays an easy 10K. Weekly mileage was meant to be 45 to 55 kilometres. He wanted my long runs to hit 15 to 17 kilometres regularly before race day.

What he did was compress everything. Under four weeks of real training before the race. In that window I was running 45 to 55 kilometres a week, more than I have ever run in my life. My previous monthly maximum was around 70 kilometres.

The last long run before race day, I finally hit 16K. That was the first time I came close to what he had been asking for all along. It was enough. The race proved it was enough.

At the start line

Before the race began, someone started talking to me. He was around 55. He had run 25+ marathons. He was fit, easy in his body. His next destination was Gold Coast Marathon in Australia few weeks from now. He was going to run 10K and then the full 41K marathon. I was silently amazed.

That is the person I am building towards. Not just for myself, but in terms of what I think is possible. A 55-year-old who has the endurance, the health, the body to still be doing this.

It is also, in some way, why I do what I do professionally. The people I am building for are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, asking whether they can still perform, whether the body they have now is the best it will ever be, or whether there is still something to build.

I believe there is. I am building towards it personally. And whatever comes next, it will be about that question. Human performance in later life years. How you get stronger when most people assume the trajectory only goes the other way.

I am in my mid-30s now. I can feel what is possible at this age. I want to figure out what it looks like at 45. At 55. That is the work.

A regret

At the finish line, there were people everywhere. Runners coming in, supporters waiting, the particular energy of a race ending. It was the kind of moment where strangers are unusually open, where conversation happens naturally, where you could ask someone about their run and they would tell you everything.

I didn’t. I stayed within myself. I observed. I watched the surroundings. I took my phone out and recorded a bit. But I did not talk to people. I did not make friends.

This is a gap in how I move through the world and I know it. I am not good at initiating with strangers, at turning a shared experience into a connection. In a finish line environment, where everyone is euphoric and the walls are down, I still stayed behind mine.

That is something I want to work on. Not for any strategic reason. Just because I think it is a better way to be.

The sun was fully up by the time I finished. The race had started in the dark and ended in the light, which felt right for a first.

I did not know I would feel this much today. I did not plan to write about this either. But I said I would be here every Sunday, and this is where I am today, a little emotional, 21 kilometres done, already thinking about the next one.

See you next Sunday.
- Shan

How do you actually measure it? Let’s get into it.

Today, we will talk about:

1. The wrong question

2. The age problem

3. Capability wins

4. The framework

5. Where this is going

1. The Wrong Question

The entire longevity industry has built itself around a single obsession: making you feel younger than your passport says. Or “reverse-aging” as they say.

The implicit promise is always the same. Submit your blood, your saliva, your cells. We will tell you how young you really are.

Epigenetic age. Biological age. Organ age. Metabolic age. Heart age. Brain age. Each company has their own clock and methodology. Each produces a number that compares your biology to what is typical in someone younger. The goal is always to be younger.

I think this is wrong framing and approach. The question “how old are you biologically” leads somewhere uncomfortable. It implies the goal of longevity work is age reversal. And age reversal is a contested concept that most serious scientists disagree on, most consumers are skeptical of, and most regulators will not allow you to claim. You are building a measurement system on a foundation that is neither scientifically settled nor socially accepted.

There is a better question. I will get to it.

2. The Age Problem

Bryan Johnson spends approximately USD 2 million a year on his biology. He has a team of doctors, daily blood draws, continuous monitoring, and a protocol that most people could not follow even if they wanted to. He publishes his results publicly and in detail. He is the “most optimised human” on the planet (self-claimed).

And his most quoted line is some version of: my body is performing like a much younger person’s - heart, skin, libido and so on.

Here is what I think: so what?

Not because I doubt the measurements. But because knowing that Bryan Johnson’s cardiovascular system benchmarks like a 25-year-old tells me nothing about what Bryan Johnson can do. It tells me something about his cells. It tells me nothing about his output, his capability, or his recovery. It is interesting as a data point. It is not a useful goal.

And when you say it to a normal person — they find it slightly absurd. “You’re biologically 15 years younger than you are.” The claim is too abstract to land. You cannot feel younger. You can feel stronger. You can feel sharper. You can feel like you recovered faster than you expected. Those things land because they are about capability, not age.

Bryan Johnson is not the only one. There is a whole ecosystem of longevity “activists,” as I would call them, whose communication is built around this frame. Some of them are doing genuinely important science. But the measurement story they tell the public is still stuck in age. Younger. Reversal. The language of undoing rather than building.

I think it is the wrong language and the wrong goal. And I think it is holding the field back from a more honest and more useful conversation.

3. Capability Wins

Here is what I actually care about when I think about my own biology and the biology of the people we are building for.

Can you lift 1x your bodyweight at 70?

Can you run 30K a week at 65?

When you push your body hard, how fast does it recover? Are you back in twenty-four hours or are you back in four days? That gap is enormous, and it tells you more about your biological capital than almost any blood marker.

Can you stay sharp for a twelve-hour day? Not occasionally. Consistently. Can you process information, make decisions, stay present when the stakes are high, and do it again the next day?

These are capability questions. They are output questions. They do not ask how old you are. They ask what you can do.

A seventy-year-old who can lift twice their bodyweight and run thirty kilometers a week is not just “biologically younger than their age.” They are a high-performing seventy-year-old. That is a different and better claim. It is concrete. It is something other people can see and verify. It is something the person themselves can feel every single day, not just when they get a test result back.

This is what biological capital actually looks like when it is accumulated. A demonstration of what your body can produce.

Recovery deserves its own paragraph because it is underrated as a metric. Anyone can push hard once. What separates high biological capital from low biological capital, especially as you age, is the speed and quality of recovery. How quickly does your heart rate variability return to baseline? How many nights of sleep does it take before you feel normal again? How quickly does your strength return after a hard training block?

4. The Framework

We have been working on the measurement framework for Biocap. I want to be clear that this is early-stage and ongoing. But the direction is clear enough that I want to share it.

The early framework is built on six asset classes.

Cardiovascular output. VO2 max is the anchor here because it is the single most powerful predictor of all-cause mortality in the literature. Research following more than 6,000 men found that each meaningful step up in cardiorespiratory fitness was associated with a 13% improvement in survival, independent of age, smoking status, and cardiovascular risk factors (Myers et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 2002). Beyond VO2 max, gait speed — how fast you walk — turns out to be one of the most reliable predictors of functional independence and survival in older adults, with a pooled analysis of 34,485 people across nine cohorts showing it predicts survival better than most clinical measures (Studenski et al., JAMA, 2011).

Musculoskeletal health. Not body weight. Not BMI. Grip strength, skeletal muscle mass, and the functional question of what you can actually lift and carry. Sarcopenia — the age-related loss of muscle mass — is a clinical condition that predicts mortality, hospitalisation, and loss of independence (Cruz-Jentoft et al., Age and Ageing, 2019). Grip strength alone predicts survival: a large study across 17 countries and 142,861 people found that each 5 kg decrease in grip strength was associated with a 16% higher all-cause mortality risk, independent of other factors (Leong et al., The Lancet, 2015). These metrics have population-level data, validated cutoffs, and direct relevance to what you can do every day.

Metabolic health. HbA1c, fasting insulin, the triglyceride-to-HDL ratio, inflammatory markers. The metabolic system is the engine underneath everything else. When it breaks down, every other asset class is compromised. When it is well managed, everything else performs better.

Sleep. Duration, consistency, efficiency, architecture. Sleep is probably the highest-leverage single intervention available to most people, and it is one of the most trackable. The consistency metric — how variable your sleep timing is from night to night — is underused and highly predictive.

Cognitive function. Processing speed, working memory, sustained attention, executive function. The operational question of how sharply your brain performs under real-world conditions, and whether that is improving or declining. I believe this will gain more traction in the coming decade.

Cellular health. This is the deepest layer and the hardest to measure affordably right now. Biological age from epigenetic testing, NAD+ levels, inflammatory markers. Costs are falling and tools are improving. This is where the “younger than your age” data sits — and it does have value, just not as the primary metric.

Each of these asset classes produces a score. The goal is to build consistently over time, across all six, so that the total number compounds. That compounding number will be your Biocap.

The other element that makes this different from a snapshot health score is the consistency dimension. Ten years of strong sleep earns more than ten weeks of strong sleep. Twenty years of cardiovascular training earns a multiplier that someone who just started cannot yet access. This is the biological equivalent of compound interest. Time in the asset matters, not just performance at a single point.

5. Where This Is Going

Let’s talk about what is solved and what is not.

The framework exists. The asset classes are defined. The weighting methodology is grounded in mortality prediction literature and functional independence data. We have built a pilot model on NHANES data — the US national health survey — that produces the three lifetime trajectories we expect: consistent builders compound upward, late starters turn it around, non-builders draw down.

What is not solved is the population-level reference data at scale, the measurement methodology for each asset class in a real-world consumer context rather than a clinical one, and the validation work that turns a framework into a peer-reviewed scientific instrument. That work will take time, the right scientific partners, and a serious data infrastructure. We are building toward all three.

The goal is a Biocap number that is as real and as trackable as a credit score. Something you can check, something that moves in response to real inputs, something that tells you whether you are building or drawing down, and something that holds up to scientific scrutiny. Not a marketing number. A scientific one.

This is a long endeavor. I say that not to hedge but because I think it is worth being precise about what kind of work it is. Redefining how a field measures itself can take years. It requires data, partnerships, and the willingness to be wrong about things along the way and correct them publicly.

What I am confident about is the direction. Capability over age comparison. Output over organ benchmarking. Compounding biological assets over snapshot biological clocks.

A seventy-year-old who is stronger, sharper, and recovering faster than they were at sixty is not reversing aging. They are doing something more interesting and more achievable. They are building.

That’s it for today. See you next Sunday.

Cheers,
Shan

In this post:

1. Lifespan, healthspan, peakspan — and what is still missing

2. What Biocap is

3. The measurement problem we are building toward

4. Why this is bigger than supplements

5. What I am personally building

6. Where this goes

1. Lifespan, Healthspan, Peakspan — and What Is Still Missing

The longevity conversation has evolved fast in the last decade.

The first frame most people encounter is lifespan — how long you live. David Sinclair, Bryan Johnson, the geroscientists running rapamycin trials and epigenetic clock research. The goal: extend the biological ceiling. The science is real and the people behind it are serious.

Then came the pushback. What is the point of 120 years if the last 30 are miserable? That gave us healthspan — not just how long, but how well. Disease-free years. The ability to sleep through the night, move without pain, stay sharp. Preventing the things that steal quality from the second half of life.

Then peakspan — a frame I have been using more recently. Not just living longer or avoiding disease, but extending the years where you are actually operating at your highest level. Sharp at work. Strong enough to compete. Present enough to build. For me personally, peakspan means being a high-performing CEO at 55 the way I am now. Competing at HYROX at the same level I do today. It is the frame that resonates most with people who are driven, early, and want to stay that way.

Three good frames. All useful. All describe where you are trying to go.

But none of them describe what you are actually building to get there.

You can want to live healthily to 90. You can want to stay sharp at 60. You can want to peak at 50 the way you peaked at 30. But what is the thing you are accumulating, day by day, decision by decision, protocol by protocol, that determines whether any of that actually happens?

That needed a new framing.

2. Enter Biocap

Biocap is biological capital.

The logic clicked when we stopped thinking about health as a state and started thinking about it as an asset.

Financial capital accumulates. It compounds when managed well. It decays when ignored. It responds to strategy. It rewards consistency and punishes neglect. You can deploy it, protect it, or draw it down. The decisions you make early have a disproportionate effect on what you end up with later.

Your biology works the same way.

NAD+ levels, mitochondrial function, cognitive output, cellular repair capacity, structural resilience — none of these are fixed. They decline with age, and they decline faster without the right inputs. But they respond to strategy. They can be maintained, and in some cases improved, when the right protocols are applied consistently over years.

That is not health in the reactive sense — the kind you notice only when it disappears. Biocap is the proactive accumulation of biological resources that compound in your favor the earlier you start building them.

Think of it as a portfolio with five assets.

Cognitive Function. Focus, memory, processing speed under sustained pressure are not personality traits. They are biological outputs. Sharper at 50 than at 40 is not luck. It is the result of what you have been building since your 30s.

Performance and Recovery. How hard you can go matters. How quickly you come back matters more. Recovery built into a protocol from the beginning compounds differently than recovery treated as an afterthought.

Cellular Energy. NAD+ is the molecule at the center of this. By the time most people start thinking seriously about longevity, their NAD+ has already halved from its peak. The engine that drives every other system is already running at half capacity.

Longevity Pathways. Cellular repair, metabolic efficiency, the mechanisms that determine your biological age — not chronological age, but how old your cells actually are. This is the pillar that separates a Biocap protocol from a performance supplement stack. Its returns are measured in decades, not days.

Structural Resilience. Joints, connective tissue, oxidative defense. The infrastructure that holds the whole system together. Biocap cannot compound if the foundation underneath is quietly deteriorating.

These five assets are not independent. Cellular energy enables performance. Performance drives recovery demand. Recovery activates repair. Structural resilience protects the capacity to repeat the cycle. Build all five, deliberately, over time. That is what compounding looks like in biology.

3. The Measurement Problem We Are Building Toward

Here is the part I think about most, and the part that is honestly still being built.

Every serious longevity framework has found a number.

Healthspan age. Metabolic age. Epigenetic age — and every epigenetic testing company has their own version, their own clock, their own methodology. Biological age became a category because it gave people something to track. A number that moves. A score that reflects the work they are putting in.

BioCap needs the same.

Biological capital accumulates, but in what units? What does a strong BioCap look like at 35 versus 55? How do you measure the decay? When the inputs stop, how fast does it draw down? What does twenty years of consistent building look like, compared to someone who started at 50?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the design problem I think about every week.

The answer will not be a simple score from one to a hundred. That flattens too much. It needs to capture accumulation across five assets, show decay when inputs stop, and reflect both short-term signals — energy, recovery, cognitive output — and long-term ones — cellular markers, structural health, biological age.

I want to be able to tell someone: this is your BioCap today, this is what is contributing to it, and this is what is drawing it down. That is the tool that makes this framework genuinely useful rather than just conceptually interesting.

We are building toward that. It will take time, clinical work, and rigorous data. But that is the direction. And I think about it the way an engineer thinks about a problem that is solvable but not yet solved.

4. Why This Is Bigger Than Supplements

Three years of building XANDRO has taught me something uncomfortable: supplements are not enough.

They are part of the answer. The right compounds, at the right doses, applied consistently, do things at a cellular level that matter. I believe that. I have built a company on it. But I have also spent enough time talking to researchers, professors, and clinicians to know that the gap between “this works in a study” and “this changes your life” is enormous — and it is filled with lifestyle variables that no pill can bypass.

The person who is chronically under-slept, sedentary, and living under structural stress is not going to get much out of a well-formulated NMN sachet. The supplement is rounding error compared to the structural problems.

This is why XANDRO has been moving into clinical work. Working with doctors. Engaging with regulated spaces, functional medicine practitioners, and the diagnostics layer. The problem of longevity is too large for supplements plus a nutritionist. It requires a broader solution set.

Exercise is probably the single most powerful Biocap intervention available. Sleep is foundational. Structural stress — a job that is draining you, a city that is wearing you down — can draw down Biocap faster than any protocol can build it. Diet matters in ways that are deeply personal and still poorly understood at the individual level.

Supplements occupy a specific role in this picture. They address gaps that food cannot fill, reinforce pathways that lifestyle alone cannot maintain, and in some cases target mechanisms that nothing else currently reaches. That is a real and important role. But it is not the whole role.

What I am building toward is a model where BioCap is the framework that connects all of it — diagnostics, clinical guidance, lifestyle architecture, and targeted supplementation — into something coherent and measurable. A doctor who understands functional medicine, physical health, and mental health together. Or more likely, given the complexity involved, an AI layer that can hold all of that simultaneously and surface what actually needs to change for a specific person at a specific stage of life.

That is the long game. XANDRO is the focal point of how we get there.

5. What I Am Personally Building

I track my own biomarkers. I test the products I sell. I race HYROX, run, and track recovery on Whoop. My Vitamin D is still not where I want it. My B12 is borderline. My leg development lags behind my upper body in ways my BIA scan makes uncomfortably visible.

I do not take everything that is out there. I am careful. Skeptical, even — which is an uncomfortable position when you run a supplement company and believe in the science. But holding that skepticism firmly and letting the evidence lead is the most honest thing I can do for the people who buy from us.

My father fractured his knee — his second leg fracture — from a simple fall on uneven ground. He never trained his muscles the way he should have. He is terrified of falling now. That fear makes movement harder, and harder movement makes everything worse. That trajectory is not just a family story. It is exactly what Biocap is trying to interrupt, decades earlier, in people who still have the chance to build.

My mother has knee issues and limited mobility. When I think about what I am building at XANDRO, I think about her too. Not just the customers. The people I was not present enough for. The generation that did not have this framework when they needed it.

Biocap, to me personally, is the ability to measure what I am building in my own body, know whether it is compounding or drawing down, and adjust. That is what I want for myself. And that is what I want to make available for everyone paying attention early enough to do something about it.

6. Where This Goes

BioCap is not a finished idea. It is an opening one.

The category will get sharper. The measurement framework will develop. The clinical evidence will build. The connections between the five pillars will become more precise as the science matures. What works for a 35-year-old athlete will be distinguished from what works for a 55-year-old executive, and both will be different from what is needed at 65.

I also expect the concept to be contested. The name carries an intentional tension — can you cap your biological capital? Is it finite? Should it be called something else? That debate is exactly what I want. Good frameworks survive discussion. Weak ones need protection from it.

What will not change is the direction. Deliberate. Research-backed. Long horizon. The opposite of chasing the next trend.

Your biology is either compounding in your favor or drawing down by default. Biocap is how you make that deliberate.

Build yours.

Shan, CEO and Co-Founder, Xandro Lab

A few weeks ago I was in a meeting with a potential investor. They were sharing their thesis on a doctor-led longevity care startup here in Singapore. Sharp argument: the science is maturing, the demand is there, but the clinical infrastructure to deliver it at any real scale doesn’t exist yet. Whoever builds that layer wins.

Somewhere in that conversation I realized they were describing exactly what I’d been circling around for months.

What struck me more was this: two years ago, this same investor was skeptical of longevity as a category. I asked what changed. He said he’s older now and recognises what he didn’t then. That’s the shift. It’s not just investors. People in their 50s and 60s today are not the same generation that said “whatever happens, happens.” They’re researching, tracking, spending on their health. Post-COVID accelerated it. The demand is real and growing. The infrastructure hasn’t kept up.

That gap is what this post is about.

Today’s reading:

1. The gap is real, and I see it every week

2. Someone is already building this

3. Why doctors, and why now

4. Where this goes

5. Where Xandro fits and what I’m watching

1. The gap is real, and I see it every week

The evidence isn’t in market reports. It shows up in my inbox and phone.

I had a customer, 60-plus, busy professional, call me to go through everything he was taking. He wanted to know what to stack, what to avoid. I told him to speak to his doctor. He said: “I did. My cardiologist told me he doesn’t know what this is and I shouldn’t be taking it.”

Two failure modes in one story. The doctor who doesn’t know. And the doctor who doesn’t know but still says no.

I’ve also had a doctor, 40-something, email us directly asking for advice on what to take. A trained clinician going to a supplement company because she had nowhere better to go. That’s a system gap.

GPs today are trained to treat disease. It’s just what medicine was designed for. Longevity care requires a different orientation entirely: pattern recognition across biomarkers, understanding emerging evidence, knowing what to test and track before something goes wrong. Most GPs aren’t there yet. And the pioneering longevity clinics that do get it charge SGD 40–50K a year. They started the movement. But the movement needs to go a lot wider.

Affordable, doctor-guided, evidence-informed longevity care barely exists in Asia. That’s the missing layer.

2. Someone is already building this

In the US, a few companies have figured out a model.

Function Health. Superpower. Mito Health. The approach: high-volume biomarker testing, AI-interpreted results, a physician layer on top. Function Health charges around $365 a year and has raised over $350M. It works because testing is cheap in the US, the market is large, and people like Peter Attia spent years making longevity medicine intellectually serious rather than fringe.

Closer to home, Protocol Health in Singapore is doing comprehensive panels at around SGD 650+ a year. Proof the model is solvable here. The barrier is scale.

India and China have the cost advantage but a different challenge: people aren’t yet in the habit of investing in their health before something goes wrong. Most startups there are targeting HNIs first. Singapore is different. Awareness exists. People are spending. The infrastructure just hasn’t caught up with the demand.

3. Why doctors, and why now

The piece most people in this industry underestimate: a doctor isn’t just a clinician. They’re a trusted intermediary. That trust changes everything about how a recommendation lands.

Simple example. Our magnesium glycinate is called Pure Magnesium Glycinate 500mg. It delivers 100mg of elemental magnesium. Customers regularly panic thinking they’re taking 500mg. If a doctor had recommended the same product and explained the difference in ten seconds, there’s no confusion. There’s compliance. There’s outcome.

That’s a distribution function, not just a clinical one.

The deeper point: most people have no framework for making sense of health information. There’s too much of it, it contradicts itself, nobody knows who to trust. A longevity-trained doctor becomes the person who filters, contextualizes, and recommends. That unlocks protocols that sit in the “interesting but not sure” drawer for years.

But here’s what makes this moment different from five years ago: you can’t manage what you don’t measure. The biomarker layer changes everything. When a patient walks in with twelve months of blood test data, wearable trends, and a clear baseline, the doctor has something real to work with. They’re not guessing. They’re pattern matching. That’s a fundamentally different clinical conversation.

AI makes this more powerful still. The knowledge base on Claude, GPT, Gemini is strong enough now that a doctor who uses these tools well is a significantly more capable practitioner than their training alone makes them. Clinical judgment is theirs. Research synthesis, pattern recognition across thousands of studies, cross-referencing emerging evidence in real time — that’s where AI changes the equation.

The model itself is simple. You get a blood test every six to twelve months. Results feed into a system. A doctor reviews when something shifts. If there’s a change worth discussing, they reach out. You don’t wait until you’re sick. You maintain a baseline and adjust before things go wrong. Pull instead of push. Proactive instead of reactive.

The 24/7 wearable question is still being worked out. Life isn’t consistent. One bad night, one stressful week can move numbers significantly. Point-in-time testing plus trend analysis is probably more useful than constant noise. The industry is figuring this out.

4. Where this goes

Longevity medicine won’t stay generic. It’ll fork the way most medical fields do.

Women's hormonal health and menopause is the most underserved area right now. Conventional medicine's answer has been inadequate. Longevity medicine takes a different approach: biomarker-guided hormone management, properly administered HRT, strength training protocols that account for where a woman actually is hormonally. These aren't experimental ideas. They exist. They're just not accessible to most people yet. And as the science matures, more solutions will come.

Next, muscle and active aging matters more than most realize. Not about being athletic. Muscle mass is one of the strongest predictors of how you function in your 70s and 80s: staying mobile, staying independent. Getting there requires interventions that start well before 70.

Cognitive health is where I hear the most anxiety from our customers. Memory, focus, response speed. It comes up constantly. Pills alone won’t solve it. Memory training and lifestyle changes alongside supplementation. We haven’t moved into that territory at Xandro yet, but the need is clearly there.

The best version of all of this won’t just be medicine. It’ll be a mix of medicine, nutrition, and real lifestyle changes, tailored to where someone actually is. That’s harder to deliver than a prescription. But it’s what actually moves outcomes.

This also matters beyond individual patients. Supplements and longevity protocols live in a credibility gray zone right now. Some of that is deserved. The mechanism that pulls things from “interesting claim” to “validated intervention” is institutional scrutiny. Doctor-led care forces documentation, outcome tracking, peer comparison. That’s how a field grows up.

GLP-1s are the proof of concept. A drug class that started on the edges of metabolic medicine is now global, mainstream, rigorously studied. Peptides will follow. More compounds will come. The question is whether they get validated properly or stay in “biohacker on Twitter” territory indefinitely.

Doctor-led care is what systematic looks like.

5. Where Xandro fits and what I’m watching

We started as a supplement company. That’s not changing.

But we’ve been looking at longevity clinics. GP training and enablement specifically interests me because GPs are the most accessible touchpoint for the mass market. You don’t scale doctor-led longevity care by building private clinics. You scale it by bringing existing doctors up to speed. Alongside that, distributing the right products through clinical networks, working with specialists, and eventually the pharmaceutical industry as this field matures.

In Singapore, operating in one narrow lane isn’t enough. The market is small. You need depth across the full stack to build something durable. That’s not ambition for its own sake. It’s just the reality here.

We’re at the supplement end, moving deliberately. But the direction is clear.

As for what would tell me this is moving faster than expected: a Singapore hospital launching a real longevity program, not a wellness screening; a GP curriculum that includes metabolic and longevity medicine; testing costs dropping below SGD 400 for a comprehensive panel; a supplement or longevity company in Asia formally partnering with a medical practice.

None of these have happened at scale yet. But they will. And when they do, the missing layer won’t be missing anymore.

See you next Sunday.

Shan

Last month I was at our regular longevity meetup — a monthly evening hosted by Kamil Pabis, a researcher at NUS, run in collaboration with TSquared Health, a new-age longevity clinic on Robinsons Road. The room is always a good one: people who take their health seriously, read widely, and who care. That evening, Prof Jan Gruber was presenting his work on biological clocks and what they tell us about how we age. It was, as always, worth every minute.

After the talk, I found myself in a cluster of attendees who were mostly in their fifties and sixties. We started talking about supplements — specifically creatine — and what followed was one of those conversations that reminded me why writing about this stuff matters. A few of them were taking it, but inconsistently, 1-5 grams a day. Several had heard that high doses work better for brain but were uncomfortable going higher because of stomach issues. Nobody was confident they were doing it right. And almost all of them had framed creatine in their heads as a gym supplement — something for performance, not for people like them.

That framing is the problem. And it is what this piece is about.

In this post:

1. What creatine is actually does?

2. Kidney concern and deficiency perspective

3. Who benefits most?

4. Where the science still needs to go

1. What creatine is actually does?

Creatine is not a drug. It is a naturally occurring compound your body makes from three amino acids and also absorbs from food, primarily meat and fish. Your body uses creatine as a rapid energy buffer. When cells need energy fast — whether that is a muscle fibre contracting or a neuron firing — they reach for phosphocreatine to quickly regenerate ATP, which is the actual energy currency of every cell you have.

Think of ATP as the cash in your wallet. Phosphocreatine is the ATM. Without adequate creatine, that system slows — and the tissues that suffer most are the ones with the highest energy demands. The two most demanding organs in your body are skeletal muscle and the brain.

2. Kidney concern and deficiency perspective

Before I get into the evidence, let me address the creatinine worry directly, because it came up at the meetup and it comes up constantly.

When you take creatine, your body metabolises it into creatinine as a waste product, and creatinine is what doctors measure in a blood test to assess kidney function. So when someone on creatine supplementation shows slightly elevated creatinine, their doctor may flag it. This has caused enormous confusion over the years and led many people — including several of the people I was speaking to — to quietly stop taking it.

Here is what the research actually says - elevated serum creatinine in someone supplementing creatine does not indicate kidney damage. Instead, it indicates that their creatine metabolism is higher than average, which produces more creatinine as a byproduct. Studies following healthy individuals on creatine for years, including older adults, have found no evidence of impaired kidney function.

If there is pre-existing kidney disease, that is a different conversation and you should consult your doctor.

For a healthy person in their fifties or sixties with normal renal function, creatine at sensible doses (up to 5 grams daily) is not a kidney risk. The creatinine elevation on your bloodwork is a measurement artefact of supplementation, not a warning sign.

Now, on dosing. The stomach discomfort that some people experience is real but avoidable. It almost always comes from taking a large dose all at once on an empty stomach. Splitting the dose across the day, taking it with food, and staying well hydrated eliminates most of it. There is no benefit to taking more than five grams a day in a single sitting regardless of your goals.

On to the deficiency question. A large study using data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey — one of the most rigorous population health datasets in the world — found that older adults over sixty who consumed more than about one gram of dietary creatine per day scored meaningfully higher on cognitive tests measuring processing speed than those below that threshold. The association held after adjusting for education, income, and nutritional variables.

A separate NHANES analysis across over 22,000 adults found that those in the lowest quartile of dietary creatine intake had depression rates nearly 2x those in the highest quartile. The protective association was strongest in women and in adults not on antidepressant medication. These are observational findings, so they show correlation rather than proven cause. But the biological mechanism is coherent and the signal is consistent across different data waves.

Your brain accounts for around 2% of your body weight but consumes about 20% of your total energy at rest. Neurons depend on a steady ATP supply to support memory, mood, attention, and executive function. The phosphocreatine system is central to maintaining that supply during high-demand moments — stress, poor sleep, complex cognitive tasks. As brain energy metabolism slows with age, the buffer that creatine provides becomes more important, not less. And yet we routinely screen older adults for Vitamin D and B12 deficiency while barely thinking about creatine insufficiency. That gap is worth closing.

3. Who benefits most from creatine?

Not everyone is at equal risk of running low. A few groups stand out clearly in the literature.

Older adults who have reduced meat intake are the most obvious. Creatine in the diet comes almost entirely from animal sources. If you have cut back on red meat for cardiovascular reasons, or your appetite has declined, your dietary creatine may have dropped without anyone noticing.

Vegetarians and vegans have dietary creatine intake close to zero. The body compensates by synthesising its own supply, and interestingly, brain creatine levels in vegetarians are often comparable to omnivores for this reason — the brain is largely independent of dietary intake. But that same independence means supplementation can produce a stronger response. Their system is more sensitive to any exogenous increase. A modest daily supplement could make a meaningful difference here, at very low cost.

Women navigating perimenopause and menopause represent an emerging area of interest. Estrogen appears to play a role in stimulating creatine synthesis and uptake in neural tissue. As estrogen declines, some researchers are beginning to ask whether part of the cognitive fog and mood disruption many women experience during this transition reflects reduced brain energy availability — and whether creatine could help buffer that.

People under sustained cognitive or metabolic stress — caregivers, people managing chronic illness, those sleeping poorly — also appear to benefit more. Several studies show creatine’s cognitive effects are strongest when the brain is under energetic strain. The stressed aging brain upregulates creatine uptake.

4. Where the science still needs to go

I want to be honest about the limits of what we know.

The clinical evidence base for creatine and brain health in seniors is real but earlier-stage than the muscle literature. But this is my interest and something I am working towards to build.

The RCTs are fewer. The question of optimal dose for brain benefit specifically — as distinct from muscle — is not fully settled. Current evidence suggests you probably need at least 5 grams per day consistently over weeks to meaningfully raise brain creatine levels. The one gram that came up in the meetup conversation, taken inconsistently, is unlikely to produce a detectable cognitive effect. It may have some value simply as a buffer against baseline insufficiency, but it is below what the brain-focused trials have used.

What the field needs is what muscle research had: properly powered clinical trials with brain-specific endpoints, to actually measure brain creatine changes across different doses, in stratified populations — by diet, sex, hormonal status, age, and baseline intake. That research is underway in various labs but is a decade behind where the muscle science sits.

Here is what I keep coming back to though. Creatine monohydrate costs almost nothing. Two kgs of it — roughly a year’s supply at five grams a day — costs less than a single specialist doctor visit. Its safety profile across decades of human research is excellent. For the vast majority of older adults with healthy kidney function, it is safe, affordable, and practically simple to take.

That shift — from thinking of creatine as a gym supplement to thinking of it as a longevity nutrient for older adults — is worth making now, not after another decade of trials.

If you are in your 50s or 60s, eating little meat, or navigating the cognitive and physical demands of aging, creatine is worth a conversation with your doctor. It might be the most overlooked and most affordable lever in how we think about aging well.

References

1. Kreider RB et al. International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: safety and efficacy of creatine supplementation in exercise, sport, and medicine. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. 2017;14:18.

2. Buford TW et al. International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: creatine supplementation and exercise. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. 2007;4:6.

3. Ostojic SM et al. Dietary creatine and cognitive function in U.S. adults over 60 years. Aging (Albany NY). 2021.

4. Bakian AV et al. Dietary creatine intake and depression risk among U.S. adults. Translational Psychiatry. 2020;10:52.

5. Solis MY et al. Brain creatine depletion in vegetarians? A cross-sectional ¹H-MRS study. British Journal of Nutrition. 2014;111(7):1272–1274.

6. Smith-Ryan AE et al. Creatine supplementation in women’s health: a lifespan perspective. Nutrients. 2021;13(3):877.

Shan is the co-founder and CEO of Xandro Lab, a Singapore-based longevity science brand. Xandro makes science-backed supplements for people who want to age aggressively.

Last week we closed year three at Xandro.

I often get asked about how the business is going, and I find myself saying this: I don’t want to be a small brand. Either we become something very large, or I’d rather be building a different game entirely. There is no version of this where I am happy running a SGD 2 million lifestyle business for the rest of my life. There is not much pie left at that size, and I am not interested in the leftovers.

So let’s talk more about this today.

In this post

1. Is Singapore market too cyclical?

2. The online math I’m actually fighting

3. A hundred thousand a month is not a business

4. Turf keepers

5. The leap I don’t yet know how to make

6. What year three actually looked like

1. Is Singapore market too cyclical?

I started writing this piece with a different question in my head. I wanted to understand why consumer businesses in Singapore feel so cyclical. You see the pattern if you live here. A brand opens, weekends are packed, TikTok is full of it, and six months later it is forgotten. Rent, manpower, competition. The usual suspects get blamed. The deeper reason, I think, is simpler. The market finds you, loves you for a quarter, and then moves on.

I assumed this was a Singapore problem. The more I looked at it, the more I realised it isn’t.

Allbirds sold for 39 million dollars last month after being valued at 4 billion five years ago. A 99 percent destruction of value. The brand that defined the sustainable footwear wave became a fire sale because it had one great product and built a company as if that product was a permanent business. It wasn’t. It was a trend. When the trend faded, there was nothing underneath.

Allbirds is not unique. An entire generation of venture-backed DTC brands is going through the same realisation. They mistook early momentum for durable demand. They confused cultural heat for category ownership. They raised money on the assumption that the consumer economy they were riding would still be there on the other side of a CAC increase, a privacy change, or an algorithm update. It wasn’t.

So Singapore is not uniquely cyclical. Singapore runs the cycle faster because the market is smaller, digital penetration is almost complete, and the expat population rotates every few years. It is a compressed version of the same pattern playing out globally. The cycle is the thing. Singapore just makes it easier to see.

2. The online math I’m actually fighting

Once you accept it isn’t a Singapore problem, the next question is whether it’s an industry problem or a me problem. The honest answer is both, in different measures.

Here are our numbers.

You can see the shape. A strong first eighteen months. A plateau in the last several.

I look at people I know in the space and I see the same shape. Moon Health grew very fast for last year and has flattened over the last few months. Founders I talk to in wellness and supplements are seeing TikTok numbers stagnate or decline after a year of being their best channel. TikTok Shop itself, which was the most exciting thing to happen to Southeast Asia e-commerce in 2023 and 2024, has slowed as a platform.

So it is an industry problem. Across DTC globally, customer acquisition costs are up 40 to 60 percent over the last two years. The numbers are similar for us. That’s structural.

At the same time, it is also a me problem, because while I see the industry flattening, I also see a few brands crushing it. IM8, the supplement brand championed by David Beckham and built by Prenetics, went from zero to around 90 million US dollars in revenue in its first year. They have something like 170 million US dollars in capital at their disposal, so they can throw money at every problem and solve them in parallel rather than sequentially. That is a different game from the one I am playing.

I have also watched myself grow past or draw level with Singapore brands a decade older than us. Some of the names that were considered established in longevity and wellness when I started three years ago are now smaller than us, or the same size. That is both a confidence signal and a warning. Confidence because it tells me the products work, the science works, and the operator work have been real. A warning because those brands are still in business. Still shipping. Still collecting revenue. They don’t have to win. They just have to not die. That is a different kind of competitor, and they don’t go away quietly.

The last thing I have to name, because it is mine to own, is that Xandro is not an affordable brand. Our price points sit above mass market. In a rising market that is an advantage, because premium can be marketed as premium. In a flat or softening market that is a headwind, because the discretionary dollar tightens first for anything that isn’t essential.

So the math I am fighting is a combination. Rising CAC. Flattening category demand. Better-capitalised entrants from abroad. Older local brands with survival inertia. Premium price in a market getting more price-conscious. None of that is existential on its own. All of it compounds.

3. A hundred thousand a month is not a business

Meanwhile, in Singapore specifically, I keep seeing a pattern where founders hit SGD 100,000 in monthly revenue and start calling themselves a brand. Hiring. Pitching investors. Telling LinkedIn about the milestone.

SGD 100,000 a month is 1.2 million a year. At a generous 50 percent gross margin, that is 600,000 in gross profit. Subtract the founder’s salary, one marketing hire, one ops hire, a part-timer, platform fees, warehousing, shipping subsidies, returns, creator seeding, compliance. You are left with nothing to reinvest, nothing to fund R&D, nothing to build a moat, nothing to survive a bad quarter. It is a side project that looks like a business from the outside.

I say this not to be harsh. I say it because before Xandro, at Myntra, I managed 20 plus business units doing about 550 million US dollars in annual revenue between them. The things you can do at 50 million dollars in revenue that you cannot do at 1 million are not incremental. They are categorical. You buy differently. You market differently. You fund science differently. You attract people you could not dream of hiring at 1 million. The gap between a SME and a scaled brand is not a continuum. It is a cliff with a long climb to the top.

4. Turf keepers

A recent conversation brought up a phrase that has been rattling in my head since. Turf keeper.

The idea is that the businesses that survive in the long run are not the ones with the best brand or the most cultural heat. They are the ones who have staked out a piece of ground so expensive for anyone else to take that nobody seriously tries. Supply chain depth. Real estate footprint. Private label economics. Category captaincy. The brand is downstream of the turf.

The hardest part of applying this idea to Xandro is that I cannot find many Singapore consumer brands I actually look up to as examples. The obvious turf keepers here are supermarkets and kopitiam chains. Different line of business, different economics. Among Singapore consumer brands with any global ambition, Charles & Keith is the only one I can think of that has clearly built real turf. Most others are either subscale or riding a trend that will eventually pass.

That is useful information for me. It means there isn’t a local playbook I can copy. If I want to build an enduring consumer business in health out of Singapore, I have to write the playbook as I go.

What I can say about my own work, without getting specific about moves that are still in progress, is this. We are not trying to build a supplement brand in the usual sense. We are trying to build around a piece of science that, if we execute correctly, becomes very difficult for anyone else to replicate at the same quality and credibility. Everything else we do, the brand, the content, the creator work, the email program, sits downstream of that core piece. The brand is a consequence of the turf, not the other way around.

In year one you are desperate for attention. You say yes to almost anything that gets you in front of customers. In year two, you have enough attention to be selective, but you are still optimising for growth above everything else. Year three is when the growth curve flattens, the cost of attention goes up, and you have to make a choice. Do you keep grinding against the rising CAC, or do you start investing in things that compound for years? I have mostly made the second choice. It looks slower. It is slower. The alternative is a treadmill that gets harder every year.

5. The leap I don’t yet know how to make

I get asked what the next layer looks like. I ask myself the same question.

I have ideas. Going deeper into health, closer to clinical and therapeutic positioning. Going wider into wellness, but in a disciplined way that extends the existing science rather than dilutes it. At some point, perhaps a pharmaceutical company that makes and sells actual drugs, which is something I have quietly wanted to do for a long time. At another point I was obsessed with medical devices. I will figure out which of these is right over the next two or three years.

What I am certain of is the filter. The next bet should extend the turf we are already building, not scatter us across four turfs we cannot defend. Medical devices is a second turf. Pharma is a second turf. Deeper health is extending the current one. Wider wellness, if done lazily, is diluting it. The shape of a good leap is one that makes the existing moat deeper, not one that asks us to build a second moat while the first is still half-dug.

The other leap we are already working through is new markets. Korea. Europe. US. China. In every new market we have explored so far, the bottleneck is not capital. It is people. A recent Korea conversation was instructive. The local team we were working with was supposed to tell us which products would work best there based on their market knowledge. Instead they asked us to tell them. That is useful, because it tells me exactly what skill sets my partners have and don’t have, and where I need to cover the gap myself. But it also means I cannot shortcut the product thinking even in a market where I am hiring local expertise.

I don’t have a crisp plan yet. I have a direction, a filter, and a timeframe.

6. What year three actually looked like

Let me walk through the three years honestly, because that is more useful than abstractions.

Year one ran April 2023 to April 2024. We hit SGD 100,000 a month in less than twelve months. That was the confidence year. We had cash. We could invest without worrying about profit yet. I was building the team, testing channels, finding what resonated. Everything that worked, worked fast.

Year two ran April 2024 to April 2025. This was the discipline year. Having hit 100K a month, we had to prove we could survive without burning ourselves out. Marketing spend came down. Channels got selective. TikTok, which was our fastest-growing channel and the only one that could scale 2x and 3x in months instead of quarters, became the focus. Livestreams were a uniquely powerful format for us. Then in late 2024 we developed the propositions for Protocol X and LPC NEURO, and those two products carried us into 2025.

Year three ran April 2025 to April 2026. We built out Protocol X and LPC NEURO as full product lines. In mid 2025 we launched new products that we thought would open the next growth curve. They didn’t. They failed commercially. Not catastrophically, but enough to tell me that the team, the agencies, and the playbook that got us here were not going to get us where I want to go next. We ended the year with revenue intact but with every part of the operation flagged for an upgrade. Production capacity. Marketing maturity. Talent depth. By end of 2025 we had replaced every one of our major agencies with world-class partners. The team has changed materially in the last few months.

Three things I carry into year four.

One. Year three is the honest year. Year one and two let you ride momentum and founder energy. Year three is where the market tells you whether you built something that compounds or something that fades. We are still standing. Standing is not the same as winning.

Two. At this stage, the only viable strategy is to become unreasonable. Reasonable, on current industry benchmarks, means accepting the treadmill. Reasonable means chasing every new channel, every new format, every new creator partnership as if effort alone will beat structural math. It won’t. The brands I watch now are the ones saying no more than yes, concentrating their effort on the one or two things that might actually move the needle for a decade.

Three. I don’t want the SME outcome and I’m not willing to optimise for it. That means taking swings that will either compound or kill us. I am willing to wait. I am willing to put the effort in. I am not willing to settle.

Year four starts now.

Note: I borrowed the word “turf keepers” from a conversation with Dr. Cheryl Kam.

If this resonated or you have thoughts, reach out. Always open to the conversation.

Shan

Three years in, I still find it genuinely hard to explain what longevity means. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realised how complicated and contested the concept actually is. I’ve talked to researchers, scientists, NUS professors, biohackers, doctors, and thousands of consumers. I also live it, in the sense that I track my own biomarkers, experiment on myself, and race HYROX while running a company that sells the very things I believe in.

Here's what I've actually landed on.

In this post

1. Lifespan, healthspan, peak span

2. What consumers actually think

3. The cost problem nobody talks about honestly

4. Longevity is an ecosystem problem

5. Longevity is also about freedom

6. What I’ve actually learned

1. Lifespan, Healthspan, Peak Span

At the most surface level, longevity means living longer. That’s the obvious read. There is a large scientific community chasing that idea hard - to prevent aging as a form of disease. David Sinclair and Bryan Johnson are the poster children. Beyond them, there are serious researchers and geroscientists working on the biology of aging, on senolytics, on epigenetic clocks, on drugs like rapamycin that show promise in extending life in animal models. The idea that humans could live routinely to 120 or 150 is no longer science fiction. It’s a research hypothesis with serious people behind it.

But some practitioners and consumers have moved away from pure lifespan as the goal. The counter-argument is obvious: what’s the point of living to 150 if the last 30 years are miserable? That framing gave rise to healthspan, which is about how many good, functional, disease-free years you get out of your total life. Not just how long you live, but how well. Preventing the things that steal quality from the second half: cancer, falls, fractures, dementia, Parkinson’s, poor sleep, cognitive decline. The ability to sleep through the night, to move without pain, to remember things, to not be a burden to the people around you. These goals resonate more viscerally with real people than adding years to a lifespan counter.

Then there’s a third framing I’ve started using more, one that Dr. Rhonda Patrick talks about: peakspan (Rhonda’s blog and the peakspan paper). Not just living longer, not just avoiding disease, but extending the years where you’re operating at the highest level. For me, that means being a high-performing CEO for 30 or 40 more years. Being able to compete at HYROX at 55 the way I can now. Maintaining the physical and mental output that makes work meaningful and not just endurance. Peak span is the most personally motivating frame for me, and I think it’s resonating more with the kind of driven, performance-oriented people who are starting to take this seriously in their 40s and early 50s.

These three frames aren’t in conflict. They’re layers. Most people who get into longevity start somewhere on that spectrum and over time find themselves caring about all three.

2. What consumers actually think

Here’s the harder truth: most people don’t buy any of it.

When I say longevity to a consumer, the first response is scepticism. And when I follow that up with “we sell supplements for longevity,” the scepticism doubles. That’s a reasonable reaction. The supplement industry has a long history of overpromising, and the longevity space attracts both genuine scientists and complete charlatans in roughly equal measure. Distinguishing between them requires work most people don’t have time to do. (I plan to cover this is in depth when I write about “everything wrong with Singapore longevity ecosystem.”)

In Singapore, I’ve found people to be more open than I expected. It’s a health-conscious market, the population is educated, and there’s a cultural tendency toward preventive health that makes the conversation easier. When I’ve had the same conversation in India, the dismissal is faster. Though that’s shifting. The Indian market is changing quickly, especially among the urban professional class.

But even in receptive markets, there are very different camps among people who do take longevity seriously.

On one end, you have the devotees. These are people who cook exclusively with olive oil, who’ve eliminated gluten, who monitor every variable they can. They know their intolerances and act on them completely, not partially. Some are precise about air quality in ways most people would find eccentric. Bryan Johnson walking out of a major Indian podcast because the room’s air quality was too poor that his air purifier couldn’t fix, sounds absurd, until you realise he has built his entire life around measurable environmental inputs. These people are not performing wellness. They are genuinely optimising every input they can control.

On the other end, you have people who believe that life is for living. That you shouldn’t deprive yourself of social meals, a glass of wine, the small pleasures that accumulate into a full life. Their argument is that stress about optimisation is itself a health burden, and that the research on community, friendship, and emotional connection is as strong as the research on any supplement or intervention. They’re not wrong either.

Both camps have evidence on their side. The difference is in how much of your life you’re willing to reorganise around health as a primary objective. Tbh, most people are somewhere in the middle and moving slowly toward more structure as they age.

3. The cost problem nobody talks about

There is a structural problem with longevity that doesn’t get enough honest conversation: almost everything in this space is wildly expensive.

Whole-body MRI scans. Comprehensive biomarker panels. Continuous glucose monitors. IV drips. Longevity clinics charging thousands for programmes. Medical spas. High-end coaching. The supplements themselves, if you’re buying quality. Stack all of this and you’re looking at a lifestyle that is simply unavailable to most people on earth.

The medical field compounds this. I say this as someone who sells supplements and knows we’re not exempt from the critique: the healthcare and medical device industry charges what it does not purely because of the cost of science, but because it can. The US healthcare system is the most dramatic example, but the dynamic runs through the whole industry. Innovation in longevity that stays expensive isn’t really innovation in population health. It’s a premium product for people who were already going to be okay.

Supplements occupy a strange middle position. More accessible than medical interventions, but more expensive than food. There’s pressure on companies like mine to justify that cost with rigorous science, with transparency, with real evidence. That pressure is good. The companies that survive the next decade in this space will be the ones that earned the trust, not the ones that had the best marketing.

4. Longevity is an ecosystem problem

Longevity is not one industry. It’s several industries that haven’t fully accepted they’re in the same business.

Food is foundational. Sleep is foundational. Exercise, increasingly understood to be the most powerful longevity intervention available, is foundational. Then come supplements. Then coaching, diagnostics, clinical interventions, devices, and so on. These things interact. Someone popping an ashwagandha capsule while living in a city with bad air quality, chronically under-slept, sedentary, and socially isolated is not going to get much out of the ashwagandha. The supplement is rounding error compared to the structural problems.

Exercise has had a real moment in the longevity conversation, especially resistance and strength training for older adults. What I found interesting recently was someone I know who exercises based on how his joints feel that day. Not a programme. Not a number. How his joints feel. At 30, you don’t train like that because you don’t have to. At 55, if you push something wrong, you’re in pain for two weeks. That attentiveness, that calibration, is a form of longevity wisdom that no app has properly captured yet.

This is actually where two things matter - senior specific coaching and senior specific devices.

On coaching: not generic personal training, but trainers and coaches who actually understand the older body — how recovery works differently at 60, how an irreversible injury at 55 can cascade into years of setback, how the goal shifts from building a physique to preserving function. A pulled muscle at 30 is an inconvenience. A bad fall or a torn ligament at 65 can be the beginning of a long decline. That expertise is still rare and expensive where it exists at all.

On devices: the ones that could give an older person a meaningful signal: can you safely lift 20 kilograms today, or should you do something lighter? Is there a way to quantify joint readiness, inflammation state, recovery quality, before you load up? We don’t have cheap, reliable answers to those questions yet. When we do, the exercise-longevity connection will get much more precise.

Both problems are solvable. The coaching one is solvable now, if the industry decides to prioritise it.

5. Longevity is also about freedom

This is the part that took me a while to say clearly, but I believe it now.

Longevity is partly about biology. But it’s also about your ability to make choices that serve your health. And that requires a kind of freedom.

Singapore has a real problem with stress. It’s a high-output, high-cost city where the professional bar is constantly rising. Can you solve that with ashwagandha? Partially. It has evidence for cortisol modulation and stress resilience. But no supplement fixes a 70-hour work week, a relationship that drains you, or an environment where the air is bad and the light is wrong and you haven’t seen a park in a month.

What I mean by freedom is this: do you have the actual capacity to change a situation that’s harming your health? Can you leave a toxic job, a toxic relationship, a city that isn’t working for you? Can you choose where you eat, how you sleep, how you move, who you spend time with? Not everyone can, and that’s not a personal failing. It’s a structural one. Longevity at scale has to reckon with this.

The technology side will help. AI tools are already compressing the time it takes to do complex work. In theory, that should free up time and reduce certain kinds of cognitive load. In practice, it raises output expectations at exactly the same rate, so the stress doesn’t go anywhere. It just changes form. This is the treadmill problem of productivity.

Slowing down, actually and structurally, not just meditating for ten minutes before opening Slack, is one of the hardest longevity interventions. And I think it requires more than willpower. It requires building or finding a life in which the pace is something you control.

6. What I’ve actually learned

Three years of building in this space has left me with something I’d call informed humility.

The science is real and emerging. Certain compounds do things at a cellular level that matter. NAD+ decline is real (its need is still questioned - rightly so). Mitochondrial dysfunction with age is real. Neuroinflammation is real. The research on LPC-DHA crossing the blood-brain barrier more efficiently than other omega-3 forms is real.

But I’ve also learned that the gap between “this works in a study” and “this changes your life” is enormous, and it’s filled with lifestyle variables that no pill can bypass.

I’ve learned that the people I trust most in this space are the ones who are honest about uncertainty. The researchers who say “the evidence suggests” rather than “the evidence proves.” The practitioners who track outcomes and change their minds when data changes. The consumers who experiment carefully and don’t claim more than they observe.

I’ve learned that longevity means genuinely different things in different places. A 50-year-old in Singapore worried about cognitive decline is in a different conversation than a 50-year-old in a polluted, high-stress city in Southeast Asia trying to manage chronic inflammation from environmental exposure. The interventions, the priorities, the whole framing is different.

And I’ve learned that longevity is ultimately about the quality of time, not just the quantity. Most of us are going to live long lives whether we try or not. Unless something sudden and unfortunate happens, we’re going to be alive for a very long time. The question is whether those years will be spent building, creating, connecting, moving, thinking clearly, doing things that matter, or managing decline, dependence, and regret.

It’s not a supplement pitch. It’s just what I believe after three years of thinking about almost nothing else.

The ecosystem is wide. The sub-industries are many. The science is still young. And the conversation, at least among people who are paying attention, is finally becoming more honest.

I’m glad I ended up here, even if I got here broke and by accident.

More thoughts on longevity consumers

If this resonated or you have thoughts, reach out. Always open to the conversation.

Shan

That space was longevity.

I’m also a mid-30s guy. Athletic, reasonably healthy, obsessed with biomarkers and recovery. Tbh I’ve never been a caregiver. I haven’t been with my parents through their older years the way I should have. That sits with me. Building for people in their 60s and 70s, while having no lived experience of that reality, frightens me a little every single day.

But maybe that’s exactly why I need to do this. Maybe this is my way of doing something meaningful for a generation I wasn’t fully present for.

Today I’m starting a series on the longevity ecosystem in Singapore. What I see, on the ground, as someone who is operating, selling, and competing inside it every day.

Welcome to part 1.

In this post

1. How to think about the ecosystem

2. Diagnostics — advanced but fragmented

3. What people actually worry about

4. Interventions — easy vs hard

5. Who is building here

6. The gaps nobody is filling

7. Singapore as a testing ground, not the end market

#1 How to think about the ecosystem

Before jumping into names and categories, it helps to have a mental map.

The longevity ecosystem, at least how I think about it, breaks into three core layers.

1. Diagnostics. What can you measure? What signals does your body give you, and how do you capture them?

2. Concerns. What are people actually trying to solve? What pain, fear, or aspiration is driving them to act?

3. Interventions. What do people do about it? What are the tools, products, and protocols that sit between a problem and an outcome?

And then there is a fourth layer sitting on top of all three: platforms. The brands, clinics, apps, and companies that package one or more of these layers into something a person can actually access.

This is not a perfect framework. But it gives you a way to look at the space without getting lost in the noise.

Every player in this ecosystem is operating in at least one of these layers. The most interesting ones are trying to connect two or three.

#2 Diagnostics are advanced but fragmented

Singapore’s diagnostics infrastructure is, tbh, pretty good on paper.

You have DEXA scans for body composition and bone density. Blood testing is widely accessible and reasonably affordable. Urine and stool testing covers gut and metabolic signals. MRI scans exist. DNA testing companies have set up here. Wearables give you real-time heuristic data continuously.

But here’s what actually bothers me.

The infrastructure exists, but it doesn’t talk to itself. You do a DEXA scan at one place, a blood panel at another, a gut test through a third provider, and nobody is synthesising that into a single picture of you. The data lives in silos. The actionability is low.

A few specific gaps worth calling out.

Omega-3 index testing is still not easily available in Singapore. For a country where fish consumption is high and omega-3 supplementation is one of the most widely recommended interventions in the longevity space, this is a surprising blind spot. We sell a lot of omega-3 at Xandro, and not a single customer has ever come to us with an actual omega-3 index test result.

Advanced biomarker panels exist but are scattered. Different clinics run different panels, use different labs, apply different reference ranges. There is no standard. If you’re serious about tracking your biology over time, you’re largely on your own trying to stitch things together. Consumer awareness on longevity biomarker panel is weak as well.

DNA testing is the most overhyped layer right now. There are two meaningful players locally, Nalagenetics and CircleDNA by Prenetics (IM8 parent company). The actionability gap is wide. People get their results, find it interesting, and then have no clear idea what to actually do differently. “Nice to know” versus “must act” is not the same thing, and right now most DNA insights fall into the first bucket. In fact, we retail one of the DNA tests, and have not been able to market it well.

The opportunity is not more diagnostics. It is integrated, actionable diagnostics.

#3 What people actually worry about

This is where I want to be direct - nobody wakes up thinking about longevity.

They wake up thinking about their weight. Their energy levels. Why they feel foggy by 3pm. Why their knees hurt. Why they’re not sleeping well. Why their libido has quietly dropped. Why their father doesn’t recognise them anymore.

These are the real concerns driving the longevity market - the lived experience. Let me walk through what I actually see people caring about.

Weight and body composition sits at the top. It always has. And fwiw, solving for body composition probably solves 40 to 50% of everything else downstream. Energy, inflammation, metabolic health, joint load, mood. Weight is the master lever that too many longevity conversations skip past because it feels too obvious.

Energy and brain fog is the second biggest driver, especially for people in their 40s and 50s. NAD+ has absorbed a huge amount of this conversation, and every year the hype around it grows. There’s real science behind it. There’s also a lot of noise.

Muscle strength and physical independence is growing fast as a concern, especially as people start to genuinely understand that muscle is the organ of longevity. I walked around East Coast Park recently and saw people in their 60s and 70s who were muscular. That’s intention. Those people will age very differently.

Alzheimer’s and dementia sits in the background of almost every serious longevity conversation. It’s not an immediate action driver for most people, but it’s the fear underneath. The “what if” that motivates a lot of quiet behaviour change.

Menopause for women and andropause for men are large, underserved, and often still spoken about in hushed tones. Testosterone levels shape how men feel, perform, and recover from their 30s onwards. This is not a fringe concern. It’s a mainstream one that mainstream healthcare still handles poorly.

Joint pain is enormous in Singapore specifically. Osteoarthritis is one thing. But gout in particular is disproportionately common here. The pain is unbearable when it hits and the demand for solutions is very real.

Sleep rounds out the list. Almost everyone has some version of a sleep problem. It sits at the intersection of stress, hormones, environment, and lifestyle. And poor sleep makes everything else worse.

There’s one more observation I want to make here. Singapore is about to become a super-ageing nation. By 2030, nearly one in four residents will be above 65. The concerns I’ve just described are not future concerns. The market is already here.

Something I didn’t expect to see but genuinely love: senior parkour groups are starting to appear. Older adults training specifically to handle falls with balance, strength, and grace, rather than avoiding movement altogether.

#4 Interventions. Easy vs hard

If you want to understand why supplements dominate the longevity space, the answer is simple - they are frictionless.

You don’t need a prescription or a doctor’s visit. You don’t need to changeyour diet, or your routine significantly. You order online or walk into a pharmacy, and you start. That accessibility explains why supplements won the first wave of consumer longevity.

Training culture in Singapore is stronger than most people assume. Walk Marina Bay at 7pm, East Coast Park on a weekend, or any heartland park on a weekday evening and you will see people moving across every age group. Running is embedded in daily life here. Commercial gym culture has matured fast too. CrossFit boxes and boutique studios are in plenty. In a BFT class I attended recently, the majority of people training around me were in their 40s and 50s.

The gap is not participation. It is the design. Most gym programming is still built around aesthetics, and the education layer is thin. Women in their 40s and 50s largely don’t know what body fat percentage they should be targeting for their age. That information is not coming from their gyms. It’s not in government health materials either. Personal training exists but at SGD 70 per session at the lower end, the math doesn’t work for most people trying to train consistently.

Drugs are where things get complicated.

Metformin and rapamycin are getting attention in longevity circles globally, and that conversation is starting to reach Singapore. But both require a doctor’s guidance, both carry genuine risks if misused, and access is controlled. They are not everyday consumer products.

Peptides are a different story. There is a grey market for peptides in Singapore, with a lot of sourcing happening through unregulated channels, often from China. The science behind some peptides is interesting. The sourcing and quality control around them is, however, concerning. This is an area to watch but not one to romanticise.

Doctor-guided longevity is one of the fastest growing segments I’m seeing right now. More physicians want to be in this space. The aging population is creating real demand. The economics for a well-positioned longevity clinic are attractive. And the consumer is increasingly willing to pay for personalised guidance rather than generic advice.

TCM sits quietly alongside all of this and shouldn’t be underestimated. It has deep cultural roots in Singapore, strong practitioner infrastructure, and a loyal patient base that doesn’t necessarily engage with Western longevity frameworks but is pursuing very similar outcomes through a different lens.

#5 Who is building here

Let me map the major categories and give you my honest read on each.

Consumer supplement brands

The main players I’m aware of: Xandro Lab, For Youth, AVEA, Elivity. Each is taking a slightly different positioning approach. Supplements are the most commercially mature category in the consumer longevity space right now. Product is accessible, margins are workable, and consumer education is improving.

There is a clear gap in longevity-focused food and everyday nutrition beyond protein powders, bars and food. Someone will fill this. It just hasn’t happened yet.

Longevity clinics

Elyx, Chi Longevity, TSquared, Matter, Morrow, Eternami are the names I see. All are growing. None are at scale yet. The economics are still being worked out. The value proposition varies a lot by clinic. But the tailwind is real, and the consumer appetite for this kind of offering is building.

Diagnostics chains

Innoquest is the dominant infrastructure player. Consolidation has already happened in this space. Diagnostics is essential, but it is infrastructure. It is not, by itself, a consumer moat.

DNA companies

Nalagenetics and CircleDNA. High interest, genuine science, but the actionability gap is still wide. This category will matter more as the interventions that connect to DNA insights become clearer.

Gut health

Amili is doing genuinely strong scientific work in this space. It remains niche for mass consumers. The science-to-consumer bridge hasn’t fully been built yet.

Recovery and lifestyle spaces

Saunas, cold plunges, contrast therapy. These are popular, especially with younger and more affluent users. But they are not yet integrated into a true longevity pathway. They’re wellness-adjacent, not longevity-core. At least not yet.

Longevity fitness centres

Almost non-existent. Clinics are awkwardly trying to fill this role. The economics don’t quite work. The positioning is unclear. But the white space is real. Someone with the right model will figure this out.

#6 The gaps nobody is filling

This is the part I think about the most.

Senior care. This is probably the single biggest opportunity in the entire longevity ecosystem. It is also the hardest to build. It requires operational depth, not just branding. It requires genuine empathy for a population that is often invisible in consumer market thinking. Most people want to live well at 80 and 90. Very few companies are actually building for that reality. I include ourselves in that honest assessment.

Affordable longevity. Right now, longevity in Singapore is premium and urban. The clinics, the diagnostics, the supplements that are worth taking. All of it skews toward a specific demographic. The real long-term opportunity is making healthy aging accessible at scale. Not just optimising for people chasing 110. Building for people who want to live with dignity and function at 80.

Integrated platforms. Diagnostics, supplements, clinics, lifestyle protocols. Everything is fragmented. No one owns the full stack. The person who connects these dots in a way that actually works for a consumer will build something very significant.

Actionable diagnostics. We can measure more than ever. But the gap between a result and a protocol remains wide. What do you actually do next? That question still doesn’t have a good enough answer for most people.

#7 Singapore as a testing ground, not the end market

Here’s my honest read on where Singapore sits in the global longevity story.

It’s a great place to build and test. Fast adoption. High spending power. Educated, discerning consumers. Regulatory environment that is challenging but navigable. A government that takes aging seriously as a national priority.

But it is also a market with high churn and relatively low loyalty. Singaporeans will try something, assess it quickly, and move on if it doesn’t deliver. That keeps you honest. It also makes building a sustainable consumer brand harder than it looks.

Singapore is not the end market. It is the testing ground.

If something works here, across a sophisticated, demanding, multicultural population of six million people, it has a real shot at working in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Korea, Australia, and beyond. That’s actually why I think it’s the right place to build first.

The longevity ecosystem here is still early. Supplements won the first wave. Clinics are catching up. Diagnostics are building quietly in the background. The next wave will be about integration, affordability, and real outcomes that people can feel.

That next wave hasn’t arrived yet.

This is something new I am trying to write. Let me know if I should capture any specific area in depth, and I would love to go down and figure out the business model and consumer feedback on the space.

Next week, I will write on why we decided to manufacture in Singapore. This has been a bone of contention - well wishers as well industry experts want us to move the production to China, Korea, Batam or Malaysia. However, I am fighting back unless it becomes dire. I would explain this better. So if you are keen to know more, keep a look out for outofsg email next Sunday.

See you next Sunday
Cheers!

Last week I sat across from the CEO of one of Europe’s largest krill oil companies. Sharp guy. Decades of business behind him. Somewhere in the conversation, we discussed sleep and he mentioned that getting 7 hours is a luxury. He wakes at 5 or 6 a.m., before the alarm goes off. His body just decides it’s done.

Intrigued, I sent him few questions for this post. His response, lightly edited and kept anonymous at his request:

“I sleep 5 to 7 hours during the week. I get off to sleep easily and quickly. I sleep deeply for 4 to 5 hours, then wake and go back to sleep lightly. Then my mind starts being active and thinks of the work schedule and challenges I’m facing. I also travel about 150 days a year across different time zones, Asia to Europe. I see the stress as positive energy. I love my job. I have accepted this as somewhat normal but would like to put more focus on my longer term health.”

He doesn’t know it, but he’s describing the textbook aging sleep pattern with clinical accuracy. And I think about my parents (65 and 75), both sleeping 4 to 5 hours most nights, both reporting they sleep “well.” They’re not wrong. But they’re also not sleeping the way they used to.

This post is the science behind that shift. Not what to do about it, just what’s actually happening, decade by decade, and why.

Today’s reading:

1. What Sleep Actually Is (And Why the Stages Matter)

2. The Numbers: What Changes, When, and By How Much

3. The NAD+ Question: An Emerging Connection

4. The Parenthood Detour

5. Nocturia: The Most Underrated Disruptor

6. Young Sleep vs. Old Sleep

7. A Few Things That Stand Out to Me

#1 What Sleep Actually Is (And Why the Stages Matter)

Sleep isn’t one thing. It cycles through distinct stages: NREM stages 1 and 2 (light sleep), N3 or slow-wave sleep (deep sleep), and REM. A healthy adult cycles through these roughly every 90 minutes across the night.

Deep sleep is where serious physical repair happens — growth hormone release, tissue restoration, glymphatic clearance of metabolic waste from the brain. REM is where emotional memory is processed and cognitive patterns consolidate. Both decline with age. Understanding the stages matters because when people say their sleep has “changed,” what’s almost always happening underneath is a shift in this architecture. The hours may look roughly similar on paper, but the structure inside those hours has fundamentally changed.

#2 What Changes, When, and How Much

The Foundational Data

The most-cited reference in sleep science is a meta-analysis of 65 studies covering 3,577 healthy subjects across the lifespan, published in the journal Sleep by Ohayon and colleagues. It found:

• Total sleep time decreases at roughly 10 minutes per decade in adults — 8 minutes per decade in men, 10 in women.

• Deep slow-wave sleep decreases at approximately 2% per decade up to age 60, then plateaus.

• REM sleep declines at about 0.6% per decade from age 19 to 75.

• Wake after sleep onset (WASO) — time spent awake after first falling asleep — increases by approximately 10 minutes per decade from age 30 to 60.

• Most of these changes stabilise after age 60 in healthy adults.

One exception: sleep efficiency (the proportion of time in bed actually asleep) continues to decline slowly even after 60, unlike most other parameters.

The Trough: Ages 46 to 55

This is the finding that surprised me most when I went deep into the data.

A Scientific Reports study from Duke-NUS used objective Fitbit data from 23,680 users across 553,559 nights in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. On weekdays, sleep duration showed a clear U-shaped curve across the lifespan, with a trough between ages 46 and 55. Not in your 70s. Right in the middle of peak career years.

The people most responsible for major decisions in business are systematically sleeping the least of their lives. They adapted to the decline gradually. They don’t know what they’ve lost because they lost it slowly.

On weekends, the trend was more linear — sleep duration decreasing steadily with age. Researchers suggest reflects a biological decline in sleep capacity, not just occupational pressure.

The Singapore Reality

The same Fitbit dataset carries numbers worth sitting with. On weekdays, only 27% of Singapore users were getting 7 or more hours — compared to 61% in Australia and 66% in New Zealand. East Asian users slept an average of 32 to 43 minutes less than Oceanians on weekdays, driven primarily by later bedtimes rather than earlier wake times.

This gap persisted even on weekends. The researchers note it could reflect cultural attitudes toward sleep — in Asian professional cultures, long hours signal commitment in a way they don’t in the West. We have built a culture that is very good at adapting to sleep loss.

What Oura’s Real-World Data Shows

In July 2025, Oura published analysis of aggregated, de-identified data from over 25,000 members, led by scientists Iman Alikhani, Mari Karsikas, and Max de Zambotti. It’s one of the largest continuous wearable sleep datasets available and it puts concrete numbers on the decline:

• Total sleep dropped from an average of 7h 21min in the 20–25 age group to 6h 43min by ages 80–85.

• Deep sleep declined by 50% from the youngest to the oldest group — the single most striking number in the dataset.

• REM sleep began declining after age 35, with smaller but consistent decreases over time.

• Light sleep increased substantially with age, eventually comprising 70 to 75% of total sleep in the oldest group — well above the healthy target of 45 to 55%.

• Wake after sleep onset nearly tripled: under 40 minutes in the youngest group, over 1 hour 20 minutes in the oldest.

• Women slept an average of 16 minutes longer than men across all age groups.

• Sleep timing shifted earlier with age consistently — earlier bedtimes, earlier wake times — the phase advance that the academic literature also describes.

Users in their 30s and 40s spent the least time in bed of any age cohort. Younger and older users both spent more time in bed, but for entirely different reasons — younger because of social and sleep-phase delays, older because the gap between time in bed and time actually sleeping widens progressively with age.

The Hormonal Layer

Published in Sleep Medicine Clinics in 2018, a Penn Medicine review documents the hormonal cascade driving much of this:

Growth hormone secretion declines exponentially from young adulthood to middle age, then more slowly. Since deep sleep and GH secretion are tightly coupled — each promoting the other — their parallel decline is probably not coincidental.

Cortisol rises at night with age as circadian amplitude decreases. Elevated nocturnal cortisol is associated with both reduced deep sleep and more frequent awakenings.

Melatonin secretion declines significantly with age. The nocturnal peak in older adults is substantially lower than in young adults, which weakens the circadian signal for sleep onset and contributes to the phase advance — the biological tendency to fall asleep earlier and wake earlier — that characterises aging sleep.

Testosterone decreases progressively in men after age 30, and loss of its normal diurnal pattern correlates with increased sleep fragmentation. In women, the menopause transition drops estrogen and progesterone levels, disrupting sleep initiation and maintenance while increasing the risk of sleep-disordered breathing.

Decade by Decade

Your 20s. Sleep architecture is at its best. High deep sleep early in the night, substantial REM later. Circadian rhythm is strong. Recovery from disruption is fast.

Your 30s and early 40s. Deep sleep begins declining. If you have young children, you layer external fragmentation on top of the biological trend. REM percentage starts dropping after 35, per the Oura dataset — earlier than most people assume.

Your 46 to 55 (the trough). Total sleep hits its floor. Work pressure, travel, career peak, and possibly young children or ageing parents — all colliding with a body that is biologically less able to sustain deep sleep. Growth hormone secretion is a fraction of what it was at 30. This is exactly where the CEO in my intro sits.

Your 60s. Most objective parameters plateau — but at a reduced baseline. Less total sleep, less deep sleep, less REM, more awakenings. Nocturia becomes a major disruptor. The phase advance is significant: waking at 5 a.m. or earlier is biologically normal, not pathology.

Your 70s and beyond. Normal total sleep may fall to 5 to 6 hours, with significant fragmentation. A 70-year-old spending 8 hours in bed may be getting 5 hours of genuine sleep, with the rest spent in light stages or brief wakefulness they barely register.

#3 The NAD+ Question: An Emerging Connection

Here’s where I want to be precise, because this space is easy to overstate.

NAD+ is a coenzyme involved in hundreds of biological processes — energy metabolism, DNA repair, sirtuin activation, mitochondrial function. It declines with age, dropping roughly 50% between your 20s and 50s. Disrupted sleep-wake cycles and circadian rhythm degradation are also features of aging. Whether NAD+ is causing the sleep changes, whether both are downstream consequences of the same aging processes, or whether they form a feedback loop — that is still an open scientific question.

What the published evidence shows is that NAD+ and the molecular circadian clock are connected. A study published in Molecular Cell by a team at Northwestern University found that NAD+ levels influence the behaviour of clock proteins — specifically a repressor called PER2 that regulates the circadian cycle. In older mice where NAD+ had declined, circadian oscillations were dampened. When NAD+ precursors were given, some of those oscillations were restored. That’s a mouse study. The human data is less direct.

The honest framing is this: NAD+ is likely one part of a complex picture, not a single explanation for why sleep degrades with age. The circadian clock, melatonin, cortisol, growth hormone, testosterone, estrogen, sleep homeostasis — all of these are moving parts. NAD+ may sit at an interesting intersection of several of them, and the research is genuinely worth watching.

#4 The Parenthood Detour

Before you even reach the natural age-related decline, a lot of people get hit first by something else: having a child.

A study published in the journal Sleep, tracking nearly 4,700 parents from 2008 to 2015, found that after the birth of the first child and up to 6 years after, mothers and fathers sleep duration and satisfaction do not fully recover to pre-pregnancy levels.

Six years. Not six months.

Sleep deprivation peaked in the first three months. Between the third trimester of pregnancy and three months postpartum, sleep duration was 87 minutes shorter in women and 27 minutes shorter in men. Even four to six years later, mothers were sleeping around 22 minutes less.

What’s happening physiologically is fragmentation. Newborns have no mature circadian rhythm. Their sleep is scattered across 24 hours. Every awakening forces their parents out of a sleep cycle, usually from a lighter stage — which means the parent never completes the deep, uninterrupted stretches needed for hormonal restoration and glymphatic clearance.

The subtler effect is what happens to the nervous system. Even after children sleep through the night, the vigilance doesn’t fully switch off. Getting back to the uninhibited deep sleep of your late 20s becomes its own challenge, separate from the child entirely.

For a 35-year-old new parent, the trajectory can look like this: biological sleep quality beginning its natural decline, layered with 2 to 6 years of externally fragmented sleep, arriving in their 40s at the documented trough with a cumulative deficit and a reshaped baseline.

#5 Nocturia: The Most Underrated Disruptor

This is the one nobody talks about at dinner.

A study in Sleep Medicine surveyed 1,424 people aged 55 to 84 and found that nocturia — waking at night to urinate — was cited as a cause of disrupted sleep every night or almost every night by 53% of the sample. More than four times the rate of the next most common cause, which was pain at 12%. In multivariate models, nocturia was an independent predictor of both insomnia (75% increased risk) and poor sleep quality (71% increased risk).

The prevalence scales sharply with age. Research from Harvard’s Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders found that while fewer than 5% of young adults report nocturia symptoms, about half of those in their 60s are affected, rising to nearly 80% of the oldest age groups.

The causes are multiple:

1. Reduced bladder capacity

2. Decreased antidiuretic hormone secretion at night

3. Prostate enlargement in men

4. Pelvic floor changes in women

But the underlying sleep mechanism is equally important. Because older adults are spending more time in light sleep, they are more easily woken by a filling bladder — whereas a 25-year-old in deep slow-wave sleep might not register the same signal until morning. The nocturia and the sleep fragmentation are mutually reinforcing: lighter sleep produces more awakenings, those awakenings trigger voiding, and each trip to the bathroom interrupts the architecture that makes re-entering deep sleep possible.

#6 Young Sleep vs. Old Sleep

A healthy 25-year-old sleeping 8 hours will spend a substantial portion of the early night in N3 — deep, restorative, growth hormone releasing. They’ll cycle into REM as the night progresses. Minimal arousals. Strong circadian drive. Fast recovery if disrupted.

A healthy 65-year-old spending 7 hours in bed tells a different story. More time in lighter N1 and N2 sleep. More awakenings, more time awake after sleep onset, less deep sleep, reduced REM. Melatonin response to darkness is blunted. The circadian phase has advanced approximately one hour relative to young adults — waking at 5 a.m. or earlier is biologically expected.

The Penn Medicine review makes a careful point here: the decline doesn’t mean older adults need less sleep. It means their capacity for it has changed. Healthy older adults who reported no sleep problems were measured by polysomnography and found to have objectively impaired sleep — 33% of women and 16% of men. They felt fine. The machinery was running differently.

That gap between subjective experience and objective measurement is important. It means the decline is happening regardless of whether you feel it acutely.

A Few Things That Stand Out to Me

The CEO in my intro is not failing at sleep hygiene. He’s navigating 150 days of trans-meridian travel a year, crossing 8-hour time zone differences between Singapore and Europe, on a biological system that becomes progressively worse at adjusting to phase shifts as it ages. He’s running a major business on a sleep structure that any sleep scientist would immediately recognise as mid-life biological norm, layered with chronic circadian disruption.

Contrast that with Alastair Hunt, who runs The Whole Health Practice. He sent back the most reassuring set of answers: 7 to 7.5 hours, wakes naturally, feels refreshed. He strength trains regularly and notes he consistently sleeps best on training days — a finding the research on slow-wave sleep and exercise supports directly. He manages occasional nocturia from training hydration, and ruminative thinking when it arrives, with a deliberate system. He attributes his current sleep quality partly to lower stress than in earlier career periods. He’s not immune to the biology. But he’s made choices that slow its expression.

The Singapore numbers: 27% of users getting 7 or more hours on weekdays. The gap between Singapore and Australia is more than half an hour, driven by later bedtimes. We go to bed late, wake at the same time as everyone else, and call the gap between the two “enough” because there’s no other option in the schedule.

None of this is fatalistic. Understanding the mechanism is the first step to thinking clearly about the problem.

I want to hear from you.

Reply to this email and tell me about your sleep. I’m genuinely curious and I’m building a picture of what sleep actually looks like across different life stages here in Singapore and beyond.

Share whatever feels relevant: how many hours you’re getting, whether you wake at night, what you think is driving it. And a little context helps — your age, whether you have young kids, how demanding your work schedule is, how much you travel. You don’t need to write an essay. Even a few lines gives me something real to work with.

Out of Singapore goes out (almost) every Sunday. If you found this useful, share it with someone who’s been waking at 4 a.m. and calling it fine.

For more on the Xandro research program and our ongoing Singapore NAD+ study, start here.

Three years ago, I did not know how to run a company. I had spent years at Myntra running revenue operations across large business units, but that was a big organisation with specialists for everything. Here, it was just me, and I had to be all of those specialists at once.

I did not know how to write marketing copy. I did not know how to make an e-commerce website. I had built websites as college projects, but nothing like this. I did not know compliance or regulatory requirements. I did not know how to make a landing page that actually converted, or how to put together a presentation that looked professional, or how to brief a designer when I did not have a clear picture in my head.

And I was supposed to do all of this while also building a product, finding suppliers, managing cash flow, and figuring out who our customers actually were.

The timelines made it worse. Everything came with minimum 2-3 week estimate. A landing page revision: two weeks. A product description rewrite: one week. A compliance check for a new ingredient: 2-3 weeks. I remember doing the math early on and thinking: at this pace, in two years we will still be in the same place.

I am going to say something plainly. A significant part of why Xandro has gotten to where it is today is because of AI. It allowed me to punch above what my skill set and budget would have allowed. If AI was not there, I think I would have failed much earlier. The execution would have been impossible.

That is an uncomfortable thing to say. But I think it is the most useful thing I can tell you.

Today’s reading -

1. How I stopped spending 8 hours writing a single blog post

2. Regulatory work, compliance, and market entry

3. 25 landing pages in one month, versus a few pages in 3 years

4. From expensive shoots and stock images to building a film series

5. From watching 200 session recordings to reading a summary in an hour

6. Agents, automation, and AI that acts without being asked

7. AI is not replacing the team. But it is changing what matters.

#1 The beginning: ChatGPT and the basics

I started using ChatGPT in late 2023 for the most basic things. Drafting copy so I was not starting from a blank page. Rewriting product descriptions in a different tone. Grammar checks. Getting a first version of anything written quickly.

Even that changed the pace of work immediately. Tasks that used to take me three hours started taking 15 minutes. The blank page problem, which is paralyzing, disappeared almost overnight.

The blog posts are the clearest example I have.

I used to spend close to seven or eight hours on each one. Sometimes more. First figuring out what to write about, which itself would take a long time. Then writing it word by word, sentence by sentence. Then revising. Then revising again. By Sunday evening I had written one post and done nothing else with my day.

Now I can write at 9:30 PM, after a full day of events. Throughout the day I drop voice notes into my phone. A thought during the run. Ideas while talking to someone. By the time I sit down at night, I have most of the raw material. Then I structure it, refine it, and the actual writing will take maybe 1-2 hours instead of a full day.

If the post is not good, it is because the thinking was not strong enough, not because I ran out of time. That is a completely different problem to have.

#2 How it spread beyond marketing

What I did not expect was how quickly AI stopped being just a marketing tool and started running through everything.

Regulatory work is the example I keep coming back to. Supplement compliance is one of the most specialist-dependent parts of this business. Ingredient approvals, label formats, market-specific restrictions, supplement fact tables. Every market has different rules and getting it wrong has consequences.

When we started working with our Korean manufacturing partner on complex formulations, including a methylated multivitamin and an LXP weight management formula, we were dealing with the most complicated supplement fact tables I have ever seen. These were not simple capsule blends. They were vitamin pre-mixes compressed into tablets, and traditional Korean herbs that were not commonly used in Singapore, in dosing structures I had not worked with before.

The regulatory team was stressed. I was stressed. The format was completely new to all of us. AI made the back and forth manageable. We could check formats, flag potential issues, understand ingredient interactions, translate complex base formulas into something that could pass review. Not perfectly, and not in one pass. But at a speed that would have been impossible if we were waiting for consultants at each step.

#3 The landing page moment

Two years ago, building a landing page was a production. You needed copy, then a Figma design, then a developer to turn it into an actual webpage, and the whole thing took weeks. We tried. We produced only a few - it took me several months to get the website where it is today.

However, in the last month I have generated close to 25 landing pages. Every one talks to a different angle on Protocol X. Some speak to doctors. Some to athletes. Some to recovery. Some to cognitive performance. Different entry points, different hooks, same product. And all it took was a few hours of notes and directions. I got ready made HTML pages. Let me share some examples below (these are not live yet).

1. Xandro For Her

2. Xandro For Doctors

3. Xandro For Athletes

4. Joint Recovery - Hyrox

5. Joint Recovery - Chronic Pain

Protocol X currently has one public-facing page. We are about to release around 20 different angle-specific versions of it.

That volume was not possible before. The bottleneck is now thinking, not production. If I can be clear about the angle and the audience, the execution follows fast. That is a completely different constraint to be working against.

Last week there was a sudden need for an updated investor presentation. It took less than 6 hours to finish. I knew the story, I just needed it shaped properly. I do not have strong presentation design skills. AI handled the design. I handled the story. We started at 80% of the way there and I spent the remaining time getting the voice right.

That 80/20 idea has become how I think about everything now. I am not starting from zero. I am starting from a draft, and the real work is the last 20%.

#4 What is happening on the creative side

This one surprised me more than I expected.

We used to either shoot everything or use stock images. Shoots are expensive and slow. Stock images are generic and everyone recognises them. Today if I need a product visual with a specific mood or background, I take a good base photo, run it through an AI tool, and rebuild the environment around it. If I want to build something from a moodboard, that is now possible without a full production team.

We are working on two major content workstreams right now. One is high-volume TikTok content, with a target of around 50 videos a week. The other is a project that I care about a lot, which is building an AI universe around longevity. A film series - imagining what it really looks and feels like to age powerfully.

What would have required tens of thousands of dollars in production can now be done with creative direction, the right tools, and iteration. The barrier is no longer money. It is vision.

#5 Understanding what is actually working

One area where AI has saved a quiet but significant amount of time is data.

I used to watch session recordings on Microsoft Clarity to understand what was happening on the website. If someone spent ten minutes on a page, I would watch all ten minutes. Drop-off points, scroll depth, rage clicks, abandonment moments. It was thorough but completely unsustainable. 200 sessions would have taken me days.

Clarity now summarises all of it. I can understand what is breaking, what is confusing, where users are dropping off, in a fraction of the time. 200 sessions in under an hour. That changes how fast I can find the problems and how clearly I can brief the team on what to fix.

The same shift is happening with email performance. Running analysis faster, generating hypotheses about what is underperforming, coming to the team with a brief rather than a pile of raw data. From analysis to new copy generation is a maybe an 15 min work. In fact, I could have ready made new emails every morning based on performance of individual campaigns.

#6 Where this is going

Everything I have described so far is still me using AI as a very powerful assistant. The next phase is different.

I am thinking about agents. Inventory forecasting that runs on a schedule. Weekly performance summaries that arrive already structured. For simple operational problems like incorrect pricing, direct action without me needing to initiate it. The logic exists. I have not fully built it yet. But it is the direction.

I also think we are not far from website experiences that personalise in real time based on what a visitor is doing. A lot of what currently requires manual testing and campaign iteration will start happening automatically. The front end of the business will start making more decisions on its own.

AI is moving from telling you what to do, to doing it.

#7 What it means for the people around me

I want to be honest about this because I think it is easy to get it wrong in both directions. AI is not replacing the team. The work requires judgment, relationships, creative direction, and the ability to make decisions under uncertainty. None of that is changing.

But what matters has shifted. The people who are most valuable now are the ones who can direct AI effectively. The ones who can write a brief that gets 80% of a landing page done in one pass. The ones who can look at a data summary and know what question to ask next. The ones who can take an AI-generated first draft and make it actually sound like the brand.

I call it - targeted, high volume, quality outputs.

That is a different skill set from three years ago. I think about this when I hire and when I design how we work.

P.S I started Xandro not knowing how to do most of what running a company requires. I am still not an expert in most of it. I am a generalist who has learned to move fast by knowing which tools to use and when.

AI gave me access to a level of execution that my budget and skill set alone would not have reached. The playing field has shifted, and I think it is shifting in the direction of people who are willing to learn fast and direct clearly rather than just the ones with the most money and the most specialists.

The tools that exist in two years will make what I am describing here look like the beginning. I am moving as fast as I can to stay ahead of it.

Until next Sunday,
Shan

A year into building Xandro, we made a conscious decision. We could keep launching products built on commodity ingredients: safe, proven, relatively easy to market. Or we could innovate. Build formulas that don’t exist yet. Take positions on emerging science. Push the boundaries of what a supplement brand can stand for.

We chose the harder path.

But here’s what nobody tells you about being an innovator in longevity science. When you develop a novel product, you don’t just get to point at existing research and say “the science backs this up.” The science backs the individual ingredients. What’s missing is evidence for your specific blend, your specific formulation, the way these compounds interact in the human body together. That evidence doesn’t exist until you create it.

In some ways, we operate less like a supplement brand and more like a mini pharma company. Every new product is effectively a new compound that needs its own body of evidence. That’s the cost of innovation. You don’t just build the product. You have to lead the scientific dialogue around it.

Which brings me to this Sunday’s topic. We are currently running what I believe is Singapore’s first privately funded human clinical study on NAD+. No government grant. No CRO handling the heavy lifting. Just us, piecing it together ourselves. Acting as our own clinical research organisation, building the protocol, managing the logistics, and figuring it out as we go.

Last Saturday, I left all my plans to deliver blood samples to the lab because there was no delivery rider available. I genuinely wondered for a moment: am I the CEO, or the delivery rider, or just the Chief Everything Officer? That’s the reality of doing this as a small team. And that’s the story I want to tell today.

In this post:

1. Why we committed to research from day one

2. What the study actually is

3. How it actually got built

4. Why this matters

1. Why we committed to research from day one

When we decided to build Protocol X, we made a commitment early: the individual ingredients have solid science behind them. That part we were confident about. What we didn’t have, and what nobody has, is research on how this specific blend performs together in the human body.

That gap matters. Anyone can take a dozen well-studied ingredients, throw them in a capsule, and call it a formula. What’s harder to answer is: what happens when they work together? Does the effect compound? Does it change? That’s what we needed to find out. Our Scientific Advisory Committee, who reviewed the formula back in 2024, made this point clearly. If you’re building something novel, you have to back it up.

So almost from the day Protocol X was conceived, a clinical study was part of the plan. We didn’t launch first and then decide to do research. The intention was always there.

2. What the study actually is

NAD+ is one of the most important molecules in longevity science. It’s involved in cellular energy production, DNA repair, and dozens of metabolic processes. As we age, NAD+ levels decline, and that decline is linked to many of the things we associate with aging: fatigue, reduced resilience, slower recovery.

NMN is one of the most studied compounds for boosting NAD+. Protocol X includes NMN as part of its blend, but also includes other ingredients that may influence how the NAD+ pathway functions.

So the question we’re asking is simple: does Protocol X raise NAD+ levels differently than pure NMN alone?

We’re measuring NAD+ and NADH at five blood collection points across 12 weeks. Participants are split between Protocol X and a pure NMN group. We’re keeping the focus tight, just this one pathway for now. Future studies will look at other markers. Beyond this human study, we’re also working with NUS on in-vitro work on senescence and other longevity markers. The research pipeline is broader.

3. How it actually got built

Here’s where I want to be honest, because this part doesn’t get talked about much.

We began working on the study design around July 2025. I was keen to get it off the ground by September. It finally launched in February 2026. That’s a five month delay, and every week of that delay was a lesson.

Finalising the protocol took far longer than I expected. We’re not a CRO. We don’t have teams of people who do this for a living. Getting the methodology right, what to measure, how to structure the timeline, how to design informed consent that would also hold up for IRB approval down the line, required real help from people who knew more than we did. Professor Jorming Goh and Researcher Kamil Pabis were instrumental in shaping the protocol. Our in-house lead scientist Toby led the execution. And we had strong support from our lab partner who offered the testing at no cost, which made the whole thing viable.

Still. If you had handed this to a CRO, they would have charged somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 to run it. We’ve done it scrappily, by figuring out each piece ourselves.

Finding a blood draw clinic willing to work within our study structure was harder than I anticipated. The clinic and the lab are two different locations, operating at different hours. Getting fresh blood samples from point A to point B within a narrow processing window, on a consistent basis, with no dedicated logistics partner, is difficult.

That Saturday I mentioned in the intro is a good example. No Grab. No Lalamove. I picked up the samples myself and dropped them to the lab. And the lab owner, and I want to acknowledge this, came in on his weekend to process them. These are the kinds of things that don’t show up in any grant application or research paper. People extending their goodwill to make something happen.

We also had a case where a participant’s product box was left outside their door. They were unhappy about it. I get it. We sent a replacement without much debate. Is it possible someone took it? Maybe. But you don’t run an investigation over one box. You move on.

We started with 30 participants. We’re now down to about 17, and I expect we’ll finish with around 12. People’s schedules change. Someone missed their day 7 blood draw, came on day 8, and it creates a protocol problem. An intern who was helping us manage coordination got a better job offer mid-study. I couldn’t match it, and I wouldn’t want him to turn it down for us. We found someone else, and things kept moving.

What this will likely produce is a pilot study, not a large-scale trial. The numbers are smaller than planned. But as a foundation for what comes next, it’s meaningful. The learnings from just running this thing have been enormous.

4. Why this matters

We are not the first company to sell NMN. We are not even close to being the biggest. But we might be the only supplement company in Singapore that has run a human study on NAD+ in this way. When we reached out to the community for participants, we had 50+ signups in the first few weeks. Nobody else had done this here. People were curious because the molecule hasn’t been studied widely, and they wanted answers.

Most supplement companies rely on the science of individual ingredients. That’s not dishonest. The science on NMN, for example, is real. But it’s different from studying your specific product, your specific blend, in real people. That gap is where most of the industry quietly sits.

We chose not to sit there.

Week 6 and Week 12 blood collections are still ahead. We expect results by end of May. Whatever those numbers show, we’ll share them. Because that’s the point.

That’s it for this Sunday. I will you next week with a new update.

Cheers!
Shan

Peptides are all over my feed right now. And they’ve been in my head even longer. At Xandro, we’ve been quietly evaluating one specific peptide, BPC-157, for last few months. I haven’t talked about it publicly until now, because we still haven’t figured out whether we can bring it to market in a form that actually works.

That’s the story I want to tell today. But before I get to our journey, let me explain what peptides actually are - the science here is genuinely interesting, and also genuinely complicated.
(insider note - the scientist was blown away reading the results from peptides)

In this issue:

1. What peptides actually are

2. The ones worth knowing: GLP-1, BPC-157, GHK-Cu, Retatrutide and others

3. A 100-year-old unsolved problem: why oral delivery is so hard

4. The grey market flooding in from China and what HSA and FDA are saying

5. The Hims & Hers episode: what happened when the company skipped the science

6. Where we are at Xandro with BPC-157

1. So what even is a peptide?

Proteins are long chains of amino acids, sometimes hundreds of them linked together. Peptides are just shorter versions of the same thing. Our body produces them naturally. They act as signals - telling your cells to repair tissue, regulate hormones, manage inflammation, control hunger. They are molecular messengers.

The reason people are excited about synthetic peptides is this: what if you could take a specific messenger your body already uses and give yourself more of it? What if you could send a louder signal for tissue repair, or for fat burning, or for gut healing?

That’s the promise. And the early research is genuinely exciting.

Isn’t this just like collagen peptides?

I get this question a lot, especially from people who train. It’s a fair one, because the word “peptide” gets used for everything from gym supplements to grey-market injectables, which creates a lot of confusion.

Collagen peptides and dipeptides — the kind you find in protein powders, collagen drinks, and recovery supplements — are short, simple 2-3 amino acid chains. They’re food-derived, structurally straightforward, and your gut has specific transporter machinery designed to absorb them efficiently. They work as building blocks, providing raw materials your body uses to rebuild tissue.

The therapeutic peptides we’re talking about today are a completely different category. They’re longer, structurally complex molecules engineered to bind to specific receptors and trigger very precise biological responses. Think of a dipeptide like a two-word text message — easy to read, hard to misinterpret. A therapeutic peptide is more like a legal contract. Every word and punctuation mark matters. Destroy one clause and the whole document is useless.

This distinction matters a lot, because it’s the reason that what works fine in a collagen drink becomes genuinely unsolvable in a therapeutic peptide context. The gut that easily absorbs a collagen dipeptide will systematically destroy a BPC-157 molecule before it can do anything.

2. The peptides getting the most attention right now

GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) mimic a gut hormone that regulates appetite and blood sugar. The weight loss results from clinical trials were unlike anything the industry had seen before. They are already reshaping how the world thinks about obesity and metabolic health.

Tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound, Eli Lilly) is a dual agonist — it hits two hormone receptors, GLP-1 and GIP. Stronger results than semaglutide. Already approved and widely prescribed.

Retatrutide is where the pipeline gets genuinely remarkable. Still in Phase 3 trials, but the data from Eli Lilly is staggering — up to 28.7% body weight reduction in 68 weeks. It’s a triple agonist, activating GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon receptors simultaneously. Analysts forecast FDA approval around 2027. The pharmaceutical industry keeps escalating — from one receptor to two to three — and the results keep climbing with each generation.

BPC-157 (Body Protection Compound 157) is a peptide derived from a protein found in human gastric juice. Animal studies show accelerated wound healing, tendon recovery, gut repair, and neuroprotective effects. For someone in their 40s or 50s dealing with chronic inflammation or an injury that won’t resolve, the promise is obvious. The challenge is that almost all the research is in rodents. Human trials are sparse.

TB-500 is a synthetic version of thymosin beta-4, involved in tissue repair and regeneration. Similar profile to BPC-157 in terms of the excitement and the evidence gaps.

GHK-Cu and AHK-Cu are copper-binding peptides that your body naturally produces. Their levels decline significantly with age. GHK-Cu drops from around 200 ng/ml in your 20s to about 80 ng/ml by age 60, and that decline tracks closely with the body’s decreasing ability to regenerate tissue. Research shows GHK-Cu stimulates collagen and elastin production, supports wound healing, and has anti-inflammatory effects — which is why it already appears in high-end skincare. AHK-Cu works through similar copper-binding mechanisms with a focus on scalp and hair follicle health. Both are interesting from a longevity standpoint specifically because they’re not foreign compounds — they’re things your body made abundantly when you were younger. The research here is more developed than BPC-157, particularly for topical delivery, though systemic delivery remains an open question.

The overarching idea connecting all of these: the goal isn’t to introduce something foreign. It’s to amplify processes your body already runs — just louder, and for longer.

3. A 100-year-old unsolved problem

Here’s the fundamental challenge that doesn’t get enough airtime in the peptide conversation.

Your gut is essentially a 30-foot disassembly line for proteins. Stomach acid, digestive enzymes, the mucus layer in your intestines — the whole system’s job is to break down anything that looks like a chain of amino acids into its component fragments. Collagen dipeptides were designed by nature to be absorbed this way. Therapeutic peptides were not.

Sean Geiger wrote a sharp breakdown of this history that’s worth reading in full. The numbers are sobering. The first attempt at oral insulin was in 1922, one year after insulin’s discovery. Since then, 13 different companies have tried to crack oral insulin delivery. Not a single commercial product exists after a century of trying. Peptide drugs on average have oral bioavailability below 1-2%. For comparison, metformin — one of the most common diabetes drugs in the world — has bioavailability of 40-60%.

So when Novo Nordisk announced an oral semaglutide pill, it was a genuinely remarkable scientific achievement. They did it using a molecule called SNAC — a permeation enhancer that took decades to develop, required a $1.8 billion acquisition of the company that created it, and involved over 9,500 patients across ten Phase 3 trials.

The result? 0.8% bioavailability. Meaning 99.2% of what you swallow is still destroyed. That 0.8% is the entire product. And SNAC is so molecularly specific to semaglutide that when Novo tried it with liraglutide — a closely related GLP-1 drug that differs by a handful of amino acids — it didn’t transfer. The technology doesn’t generalise.

Why does it matter that the stomach breaks them down?

This is the question I kept sitting with. Here’s the answer.

When your body produces a peptide naturally, it doesn’t send it through the digestive system to reach its target. It produces it locally — right at the site where it’s needed — or releases it directly into the bloodstream from cells or glands. The stomach acids are never in the loop. GHK-Cu is cleaved from proteins in the extracellular matrix right at the site of tissue injury. BPC-157 is present in gastric juice as part of the gut’s own protective system — it doesn’t need to travel anywhere to do its job.

When you take a therapeutic peptide orally as a supplement, you’re asking it to survive a process it was never designed to go through. The amino acids might still be absorbed — but the specific sequence that makes the molecule biologically active is gone. It’s like shredding a contract and then absorbing the paper. The material gets in. The message doesn’t.

This is why research settings default to injectables — bypassing the digestive system so the compound reaches circulation intact. But that creates its own problems for consumer use: sterility, dosing accuracy, refrigeration, and the simple reality that most people are not going to inject themselves every day.

4. The grey market problem

Here’s what access actually looks like right now.

I get multiple messages a week from peptide suppliers, most of them based in China. Injectable BPC-157, TB-500, and GLP-1 analogues are being shipped directly to home addresses across the world with essentially zero friction. No prescription. No clinic. Just a credit card and an address.

Singapore’s HSA has issued warnings about this. The FDA in the US has too. Both specifically flagged the risks of using injectable peptides without medical supervision and much of what’s circulating has no quality verification at all. You genuinely don’t know what’s in the vial. Contaminated batches, incorrect concentrations, unsterile preparation. And that’s before asking whether the compound is even what the label says it is.

I understand why people do it anyway. The promise is “promising”. The wait for proper clinical validation is measured in years, sometimes decades. For someone dealing with a chronic injury or a condition that conventional approaches haven’t fixed, years feel like a long time. I get it. But the risk profile is real.

5. The Hims & Hers episode

The most instructive case study in this space played out almost entirely this month.

Hims & Hers had been selling compounded injectable semaglutide since 2024, positioning it as an affordable alternative to branded GLP-1 drugs during a supply shortage. Then in early February 2026, they announced a compounded oral semaglutide pill at $49 per month versus Novo Nordisk’s $149.

Within days: Novo Nordisk filed a lawsuit. The FDA announced action to restrict the active pharmaceutical ingredients being used in knockoff products. Hims pulled the pill almost immediately.

But the deeper criticism was scientific. When Reuters asked Hims what absorption technology their oral pill uses, the company said “liposomal technology” and declined to elaborate. No published pharmacokinetic data. No bioavailability studies. No human clinical trials. As Geiger notes — Novo spent decades and over a billion dollars developing SNAC, and still only achieved 0.8% bioavailability. Hims had none of that.

The FDA referred the case to the DOJ. Hims’ stock dropped over 60% from its highs. And the regulatory grey space of 2024 had by early 2026 narrowed into something much less forgiving.

6. What we found when we looked at BPC-157

Over the past few months, our team has been evaluating BPC-157 as an oral compound. We focused on it because it’s considered one of the more stable peptides in this class (a more realistic candidate for oral delivery). We cannot do injectibles since that falls under the medicine purview.

Challenge is - “More stable than other peptides” is not the same as “stable enough to work.” What we have found was discouraging: in standard oral delivery formats, BPC-157 may degrade before it reaches systemic circulation in a meaningful concentration. Not harmful. Just potentially useless.

I am not willing to put a product on a shelf and charge people for something that’s probably useless. That’s dishonest at best, and it takes money from someone genuinely trying to improve their health and gives them nothing in return.

So we haven’t launched. But I haven’t given up either.

We’re currently exploring whether specific encapsulation technologies could protect BPC-157 through the digestive process and allow for effective oral delivery. It’s a genuine open question. If you are someone working in this field, and would like to speak more, drop me a note at shantanu@xandrolab.com.

The tension of building in longevity and health

There’s a version of this story where I just announce a BPC-157 product and ride the wave of interest that’s clearly building. People are asking about it. Competitors are preparing launches. The commercial pressure is real, and I feel it.

But here’s what I keep coming back to. We’re not Unilever. A company like that can make mistakes and still be fine five years later because of scale. We don’t have that cushion. In this industry, a brand can die with a few bad months — from a product that doesn’t work, from regulatory action, from a reputation hit with the audience.

So we wait. We work. And when we have something worth putting in front of people, I’ll write about that too.

Closing note

Peptides are not a fad. The biology is real, the pharmaceutical investment is enormous, and the pipeline keeps escalating — from GLP-1, to dual agonists, to triple agonists like retatrutide, with each generation producing results that would have seemed impossible a decade ago.

For the supplement world, the question isn’t whether peptides will matter. It’s whether we can get delivery right — oral, accessible, effective — without cutting corners on the science.

We’re still working on the answer.

Cheers
Shan

The science section of this post was informed by Sean Geiger’s excellent piece A Brief History of Oral Peptides — strongly recommended if you want to go deeper on oral delivery.

Additional note - peptides also present a huge regulatory hurdle for dietary supplements companies. They are regulated like medicines. However, oral forms are somewhat in grey area like BPC-157. Xandro operates in the non-regulated dietary supplements space as of now. So we will need to tread carefully. In future, we do wish to move towards the regulated space with required licenses. It’s a few years away though.

Last Sunday morning I was at the National Stadium, doing my usual run on the track, and I saw something that stuck with me. A group of seniors, in their 60s or maybe early 70s, were training. Resistance bands, dumbbells, and kettle bells. And it hit me: this is what the future looks like. Not people winding down at 65, but people training at 70 so they can stay independent at 85.

My dad isn’t one of them, and I wish he was. He broke his knee with a single fall last year, and the recovery has been brutal. Not because the injury was catastrophic, but because he didn’t have the muscle mass, the bone density, or the resilience to bounce back quickly. One fall, and suddenly everything changed.

That’s the thing about aging that nobody tells you when you’re young: it’s not the big diseases that take away your independence. It’s the small falls, the loss of strength, the inability to recover. And the only way to fight that is to build your body up now: muscles, bones, metabolic resilience. So that when life throws something at you at 75 or 80, you don’t break.

If you’re in your 40s or beyond, your nutritional needs have fundamentally changed. You’re not optimizing for beach muscles in 12 weeks. You’re optimizing to be autonomous at 85. And that requires a different approach entirely.

Protein is at the center of all of this. We know now that we need significantly more protein than we thought. Close to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight if you’re serious about longevity. That’s not a bodybuilder target anymore. That’s a baseline for anyone who wants to stay active and autonomous into their 80s and 90s. And the reality is: food alone won’t get you there. Not consistently. Not for decades. Which is where supplementation and fortified foods come in.

But here’s the problem. Most protein options we have today (whey isolate, pea protein, soy protein) weren’t designed for people in their 40s, 50s, 60s who are planning to live actively into their 90s. They were designed for gym performance in your 20s, or plant-based diets, or cost efficiency. None of them were built with the assumption that you’d be using them to maintain muscle, support autophagy, feed your gut microbiome, and stay metabolically healthy for the next 40-50 years.

And here’s something most people don’t realize: modern diets are catastrophically low in fiber. The average person gets maybe 10-15 grams of fiber a day when they need 25-35 grams. Fiber isn’t just about digestion. It’s about feeding the gut bacteria that regulate inflammation, produce neurotransmitters, support immunity, and even influence how well you age. Protein powders strip fiber out completely to hit high protein percentages. With protein powders, you’re solving one problem (protein intake) while ignoring another (fiber deficiency).

That’s why I’m betting on fermented fungal protein. It’s the first protein source actually designed for longevity. It delivers complete protein, yes, but it also delivers fiber, naturally occurring spermidine, and prebiotic effects that support gut health. It’s not trying to replace whey for a 25-year-old powerlifter. It’s built for someone in their 40s, 50s, or 60s who wants to be training with resistance bands at 70 and still traveling independently at 85.

This isn’t a product pitch. It’s an explainer on why fermented protein is different, what the alternatives look like, and why I believe this is the future of protein supplementation for people optimizing for healthspan, not just muscle mass.

Today’s Reading:

1. The landscape: what we’ve been working with (soy, pea, whey, clear whey)

2. Why none of them were built for longevity

3. Fermented fungal protein: what makes it different

4. The comparison: how different proteins stack up

5. Why fortification makes more sense with fermented protein as the base

1. The Landscape: What We’ve Been Working With

If you scroll through protein options online, you’ll see the usual suspects: soy protein, pea protein, whey isolate, whey concentrate, and more recently, clear whey protein. Each of these has its place, and each came about for specific reasons. But none of them were designed with longevity in mind.

Soy protein was one of the first plant-based complete proteins to hit the market. Complete, meaning it has all nine essential amino acids your body can’t make on its own. For a long time, soy was the go-to for vegetarians and people avoiding dairy. But then the phytoestrogen debate happened. Concerns about soy’s estrogen-like compounds and whether they’d mess with hormones, particularly in men. The science has mostly settled (it’s fine for most people in reasonable amounts), but the reputation never fully recovered.

Pea protein became the darling of the plant-based movement over the last decade. It’s hypoallergenic, it’s sustainable, and it doesn’t carry the baggage that soy does. But here’s the problem: pea protein is low in methionine, one of the essential amino acids. To get around this, most brands blend pea with rice protein or other sources to balance out the amino acid profile. It works, but you’re already starting from a position of incompleteness. And beyond that, pea protein tends to be lower in leucine, the specific amino acid that triggers muscle protein synthesis.

Then you’ve got whey protein, the gold standard for decades. Whey isolate, in particular, became the default for anyone serious about building muscle. It’s a complete protein, it’s high in leucine, it absorbs quickly, and it’s been studied extensively. Bodybuilders loved it. Athletes loved it. And for good reason: if your goal is anabolic response (muscle building), whey delivers.

But here’s what whey doesn’t deliver: anything beyond protein. No fiber. No longevity compounds. No support for your gut microbiome. Whey was built for one thing: getting amino acids into your bloodstream fast so your muscles can recover and grow. If you’re 25 and training hard, that’s perfect. But if you’re 55 and trying to build a body that stays resilient for the next 40 years, whey is just one piece of a much bigger puzzle. And it’s a piece that doesn’t address metabolic health, autophagy, or the gut-brain axis. All of which matter more as you age.

Whey concentrate is similar to isolate but less filtered, so it has more lactose, fat, and sometimes a bit more bioactive compounds. Some people prefer it because it’s less processed, but for anyone lactose-intolerant, it’s a non-starter. Clear whey protein is just whey isolate that’s been hydrolyzed (pre-digested) so it doesn’t turn thick and milky when you mix it with water. It’s basically whey isolate repackaged for people who hate the texture of traditional protein shakes. Still whey. Still limited to muscle. Still missing everything else.

So here’s where we are: the plant-based options (soy, pea) have incomplete or suboptimal amino acid profiles and need blending or fortification to compete. The dairy-based options (whey) are great for muscle protein synthesis but terrible for everything else that longevity demands. None of these were designed with the assumption that the person drinking them wants to be independent and active at 90. They were designed for short-term goals: muscle gain, plant-based diets, quick recovery.

And that’s the gap fermented protein fills.

2. Fermented Fungal Protein: What Makes It Different

Fermented fungal protein (also called mycoprotein) comes from fermenting specific strains of fungi. Products like Quorn use Fusarium venenatum. Newer proprietary strains are being developed for protein powders. The fermentation process is what makes this different from every other protein source on the market.

Here’s why it matters.

It’s a complete protein with high bioavailability. Fermented fungal protein delivers all nine essential amino acids. In terms of digestibility and amino acid quality, it scores 98-102% on the DIAAR% scale. That puts it well above pea protein (77%) and soy protein (87%), though still below whey isolate (115%). The fermentation process partially breaks down the protein structures during production, which makes it easier to digest and absorb. For older adults (whose digestive efficiency naturally declines) this is a real advantage. And this isn’t just marketing talk. There’s actual research backing this up, with ongoing clinical trials measuring digestibility, metabolic response, and even how it affects satiety hormones and blood glucose.

It’s naturally high in spermidine. This is the killer differentiator, and the main reason I’m so bullish on fermented protein. Spermidine is one of the few key compounds with longevity research behind it. It induces autophagy, the process where your cells clean out damaged components and recycle them. It supports cardiovascular health, cognitive function, and has been associated with populations that live exceptionally long lives.

Here’s the thing: whey has zero spermidine. Pea protein has zero spermidine. Soy has trace amounts at best. The only foods naturally high in spermidine are fermented foods: natto, aged cheese, mushrooms, wheat germ. Because fermentation is what creates it. Fermented fungal protein concentrates this naturally. The minimum spermidine content in Fermotein (produced from Rhizomucor pusillus fungus) is 160mg per 100 grams of powder. For perspective, our standalone spermidine product is 10mg per serving.

To put that in perspective: wheat germ has about 15mg per 100g. Natto has 10-50mg per 100g. Fermented protein has 160mg per 100g minimum. That’s 3-16 times higher than the next best natural food sources. When you’re taking a serving to get 30 grams of protein (about 82 grams of powder), you’re getting roughly 131mg of spermidine. Studies on spermidine supplementation typically use 5-15mg per day and show measurable benefits. You’re getting 10-25 times that dose just from your protein shake. (Yes, this could be a concern and this dosage has been tested for safety.)

You’re not adding spermidine as a supplement afterward. It’s intrinsic to the protein source itself. That’s a fundamentally different product.

It has fiber. Most protein powders strip out fiber to hit high protein percentages. The goal is usually to get 80-90% protein by weight, which means removing everything else. But fermented fungal protein keeps fiber intact because fungi have cell walls made of chitin and beta-glucans. These are complex fibers that your gut bacteria thrive on. Fermented protein contains 30% fiber by weight. That’s 30 grams of fiber per 100 grams of powder.

Of that 30 grams, roughly half (about 15 grams) is chitin and chitosan, which have been shown to support cholesterol management and have prebiotic properties. The rest includes beta-glucans (about 0.3 grams) and other beneficial fibers (about 14.7 grams). This combination feeds beneficial gut bacteria, helps regulate blood sugar, and contributes significantly to your daily fiber intake.

The average person gets 10-15 grams of fiber a day when they need 25-35 grams. A single serving of fermented protein (around 82 grams to get 30 grams of protein) delivers about 24.6 grams of fiber. That’s almost your entire daily requirement in one scoop. Whey and other proteins don’t do that. This is complete protein plus fiber for longevity.

It’s sustainable and scalable. This isn’t the main argument, but it’s worth mentioning. Fermentation is far more resource-efficient than dairy farming or large-scale pea agriculture. You don’t need massive tracts of land, you don’t need livestock, and the production cycle is measured in days, not months. As the world ages and protein demand increases (and it will, because everyone’s going to realize they need 1.6g/kg to stay functional), fermented protein is one of the few sources that can actually scale without destroying the environment.

It’s built for longevity, not just muscle. This is where everything comes together. Whey was optimized for anabolic response, getting amino acids into muscles fast. Pea protein was optimized for plant-based diets. Fermented fungal protein is the first one optimized for healthspan. Muscle, yes. But also autophagy, gut health, metabolic function, and cellular resilience. If your goal is to be independent and active at 85, you need spermidine to keep your cells cleaning themselves out. You need fiber to keep your gut microbiome healthy, because gut health affects everything from immunity to brain function. You need a protein source that works with your biology as it ages, not just against muscle breakdown.

That’s what fermented protein does. It’s not a replacement for whey or pea protein in the traditional sense. It’s a different category entirely.

3. The Technical Case: Why Fermented Protein Wins

Let me break down the technical advantages more specifically. This isn’t just marketing talk. There are real biochemical reasons why fermented fungal protein outperforms the alternatives when your goal is longevity.

Amino acid profile and leucine content: Fermented fungal protein has a complete amino acid profile, but let’s be honest about where it stands. Whey isolate still has the edge on leucine content and overall DIAAR% score (115% vs fermented protein’s 98-102%). Leucine is the amino acid that activates mTOR, the pathway responsible for muscle protein synthesis. It’s especially important for older adults because they experience something called anabolic resistance. Their muscles don’t respond to protein as efficiently as they used to. You need higher leucine intake to get the same muscle-building effect.

So if your only goal is maximum muscle protein synthesis per gram of powder, whey still wins. But here’s what the DIAAR% scores tell us: fermented protein is significantly better than pea protein (77%) and soy protein (87%) at delivering usable amino acids. And more importantly, it delivers that protein alongside everything else: the spermidine, the fiber, the prebiotic effects. Whey gives you protein and nothing else. Fermented protein gives you slightly less efficient protein delivery but compensates with compounds that whey can’t provide at all.

Spermidine concentration: The spermidine levels in fermented fungal protein are significantly higher than in any other protein source. The minimum guaranteed content is 160mg per 100g of powder (1600mg/kg). When you take a serving to get 30 grams of protein (about 82 grams of powder), you’re getting approximately 131mg of spermidine.

Fiber and gut health: The fiber content in fermented fungal protein is 30% by weight. That’s 30 grams per 100 grams of powder. Of this, approximately 15 grams is chitin and chitosan (powerful prebiotics that support cholesterol management), about 0.3 grams is beta-glucans (known for immune support), and the remaining 14.7 grams consists of other beneficial fibers. All of these are prebiotic, meaning they feed beneficial gut bacteria.

There’s growing evidence that gut health influences everything from immune function to mental health to metabolic regulation. Most protein powders ignore this completely. They strip fiber out to maximize protein percentage. Fermented protein integrates it by default. When you take a serving to get 30 grams of protein (82 grams of powder), you’re also getting about 24.6 grams of fiber. For context, that’s more fiber than the average person consumes in an entire day, and it’s approaching the full daily recommended intake of 25-35 grams.

You’re not just building muscle. You’re supporting the microbiome that regulates inflammation, nutrient absorption, and even neurotransmitter production. For someone in their 50s, 60s, or 70s, that’s critical. Gut dysbiosis (imbalanced gut bacteria) is linked to frailty, cognitive decline, and metabolic dysfunction. Fermented protein works against that. Research has shown that the chitin and chitosan in fermented protein can increase short-chain fatty acid production and promote the growth of beneficial Bacteroides species. These species play important roles in fiber fermentation and even produce polyamines like spermidine.

Digestibility for aging populations: As you age, your digestive enzymes become less efficient. Protein that’s harder to break down just passes through without being absorbed. Fermentation pre-digests some of the protein structures, which makes fermented fungal protein easier on the digestive system. Older adults often struggle with whey or plant proteins because they cause bloating, gas, or just don’t digest well. Fermented protein bypasses a lot of that because the fermentation process has already done part of the work your gut would normally have to do.

This isn’t just theoretical. In vitro studies have shown that fermented protein has good digestibility. Better than soy and pea, scoring 98-102% on the DIAAR% scale compared to whey’s 115%. Human clinical trials are currently underway examining post-prandial glucose and insulin response, GLP-1 response (the satiety hormone that’s become famous because of drugs like Ozempic), and spermidine levels in blood after consumption. Early indications suggest that fermented protein doesn’t just deliver protein. It has favorable metabolic effects that go beyond what whey or plant proteins can offer.

There’s also emerging research on fermented protein’s prebiotic effects, specifically looking at how it influences short-chain fatty acid production and microbiome composition through ex-vivo intestinal tissue models, which simulate how the protein interacts with your gut lining and microbiome.

No allergens or intolerances: Fermented fungal protein is naturally free of lactose, soy, and common allergens. Whey isolate is low in lactose but not zero. Soy has the phytoestrogen issue (real or perceived). Pea protein is generally fine, but some people find it hard to digest. Fermented protein sidesteps all of that. It’s hypoallergenic by nature, which makes it accessible to a wider population.

The protein content trade-off: Here’s something I need to be honest about. Whey isolate contains 82.9% true protein (measured by amino acids). Soy and pea protein isolates are around 64-67% true protein. Fermented fungal protein sits at 36.6% true protein by weight. That’s significantly lower. Why? Because fermented protein retains the fiber (30%), beta-glucans, chitosan, vitamins, minerals, and other compounds that come from the fungal biomass. You’re getting less concentrated protein, but you’re getting significantly more of everything else.

What this means practically: if you’re trying to hit 30 grams of protein in a serving, you’ll need about 82 grams of fermented protein powder versus 36 grams of whey isolate. The serving size is 2.3 times larger. The cost per gram of protein is higher. This is a real limitation. It’s why fermented protein won’t replace whey for someone in their 20s whose only goal is cheap, efficient protein delivery for muscle building.

But if you’re in your 40s, 50s, or 60s, and your goal is longevity, the calculation changes. Muscle maintenance plus autophagy plus gut health plus fiber intake plus metabolic support. That 36.6% protein content isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. You’re choosing to take in less concentrated protein in exchange for a more complete nutritional intervention. That 82-gram serving gives you 30g protein, 24.6g fiber (almost your entire daily requirement), and 131mg spermidine (10-25 times the studied dose). It’s a different calculation entirely when you’re optimizing for independence at 85, not aesthetics at 25.

4. The Comparison: How Different Proteins Stack Up

Here’s how the major protein sources compare across the metrics that actually matter for longevity:

When you look at it this way, the difference becomes clear. If you're in your 20s or 30s and optimizing purely for protein delivery efficiency and muscle building, whey isolate still wins: higher protein percentage, better DIAAR% score, smaller serving size, lower cost per gram. But if you're 40 and beyond, fermented fungal protein is the only option designed from the ground up to support the biological systems that determine whether you're independent and functional at 85.

5. Why Fortification Makes More Sense with Fermented Protein

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is fortification. The idea that daily foods and supplements should be fortified with specific compounds to meet the health goals of this generation. We’re not dying at 50 anymore. We’re living into our 80s and 90s, and we want to be active and independent during those years. That requires a different nutritional baseline than what traditional food provides.

Fortification isn’t a new concept. We’ve been fortifying milk with vitamin D, flour with folic acid, and salt with iodine for decades. But what’s changing now is that we’re starting to fortify for performance and longevity, not just to prevent deficiency diseases. We’re adding creatine for muscle and cognitive function. TMG (trimethylglycine) for methylation and heart health. Vitamin B12 for energy and neurological health. Vitamin D3 and K2 for bone density and calcium regulation.

The question is: what’s the best base to fortify? And I think fermented fungal protein is the answer, for a few reasons.

It already contains longevity compounds. Unlike whey or pea protein, which are nutritionally one-dimensional, fermented protein comes with spermidine and fiber built in. When you add creatine, TMG, B12, D3, and K2 on top of that, you’re not just cramming random ingredients into a powder. You’re stacking synergistic compounds that work together. Spermidine supports autophagy. Creatine supports cellular energy and muscle. TMG supports methylation pathways that decline with age. B12 supports mitochondrial function and nerve health. D3 and K2 work together to regulate calcium and bone density. These aren’t isolated ingredients. They’re part of a system. And fermented protein is the perfect scaffold for that system because it’s already aligned with longevity, not just muscle.

It turns supplementation into a protocol, not a product. I’ve written before about how longevity isn’t about individual ingredients. It’s about protocols. Blends that address multiple pathways at once. Fermented protein, fortified with the right compounds, becomes more than just a protein shake. It becomes a daily intervention that supports muscle, bones, cognition, cellular cleanup, and metabolic health all at once. That’s what people actually need. Not five different supplements they have to remember to take. One thing, every morning, that covers the bases.

It’s easier to justify the cost. Let’s be honest: fermented protein is going to be more expensive than whey or pea protein, at least in the short term, because the production is newer and less commoditized. But if you’re getting protein, spermidine, fiber, creatine, TMG, B12, D3, and K2 in one serving, the cost per nutrient is actually competitive.

This is where I think the market is headed. Not just protein powders, but fortified protein protocols that are designed around the assumption that people want to stay independent and active into their 90s. Fermented fungal protein is the only base that makes sense for that, because it’s the only one that’s already built around longevity from the ground up.

6. Closing: Why I’m All In

I started Xandro because I wanted to build something that actually helps people live longer, better lives. Not just extend lifespan, but extend healthspan. The years where you’re strong, sharp, independent, and able to do the things you love. And the more I learn, the more convinced I am that fermented fungal protein is going to be at the center of that.

Not because it’s trendy. Not because it’s novel. But because it’s the first protein source actually designed for people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who are planning to stay active into their 80s and 90s. Whey was designed for 25-year-old bodybuilders chasing muscle gains. Pea protein was designed for plant-based eaters avoiding dairy. Fermented protein is designed for people who want to be at the track at 70, training with resistance bands, still independent, still strong, still metabolically healthy.

I think about my dad and his broken knee. I think about those seniors I saw last Sunday at the National Stadium. I think about what I want my own 80s and 90s to look like. And I don’t think whey isolate is going to get me there. Whey gives me protein, but it doesn’t give me the fiber my gut needs, the spermidine my cells need for autophagy, or the prebiotic support my microbiome needs. I don’t think pea protein is going to get me there either. It’s incomplete, lower quality, and still missing everything beyond basic amino acids.

Fermented protein might. Not on its own. Nothing works on its own. But as part of a larger protocol that includes strength training, sleep, recovery, stress management, and the right nutritional foundation, I believe fermented protein is the piece that ties it all together. Complete protein plus fiber for longevity. Not just muscle maintenance, but cellular health, gut health, metabolic health, all delivered in one daily intervention.

That’s why I’m betting on it. That’s why we’re building it. And that’s why I think, five or ten years from now, this is going to be the standard for the 40+ crowd. Not whey, not pea, but fermented fungal protein fortified with the compounds that actually support healthspan.

We’re just at the beginning of this. The production is still being refined (we’re using Rhizomucor pusillus fungus through a patented fermentation process). The research is still emerging. The market is still figuring out what this even is. But I’d rather be early on something that makes sense for the next 40-50 years of my life than late on something that was designed for someone half my age with completely different goals.

Fermented protein isn’t just better protein. It’s complete protein plus fiber, designed for longevity, built for people who understand that independence at 85 is built in your 40s, 50s, and 60s.

Author’s Note: This piece was written with the assistance of AI, using data from the manufacturer and publicly available research. The opinions and positioning expressed are entirely my own.

👋🏼 Until next Sunday
— Shan

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