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

Today is a bit different. I couldn’t finish last week’s writing, it didn’t feel right. In the end I decided against publishing it. Instead, I decided to turn that into an open letter today.

Before you start reading, I’m Shan, and I’m building Xandro Lab, a longevity science brand in Singapore. Every week I share raw notes on building, marketing, and navigating the messy world of health and performance. Today is personal.

Here we go.

There’s this phase in business that doesn’t get talked about enough. It’s not the beginning. Beginnings are messy but exciting. You’re allowed to be wrong, to look amateurish. And it’s not scale either. Scale has its own chaos, but at least the direction is clear.

This is something in between. The messy middle.

Somewhere along the way, in last 6 months, I stopped doing things I used to enjoy.

I used to create content almost every day. It didn’t come naturally at first. I hesitated for a long time before posting anything. But once I started, I stopped overthinking. Just posted. It reconnected me to old friends, colleagues and even my school teachers. Even now, months later, people bring up those posts.

Then I stopped. Told myself there were more important things. Operations. Growth. Fires to put out. But I don’t think that was entirely true.

The business took a hit. August to November was supposed to be big. I had forecasts, prep, inventory. Month after month, reality didn’t match.

The shock came in Sep. Much lower revenue than I anticipated. October wasn’t promising either. Then in November, even after months of stocking up, we didn’t have enough inventory to sell. Production couldn’t keep up. Orders came in that we couldn’t fulfill. Watching demand show up and not being able to meet it was a different kind of frustration.

I lost it. Multiple times. I couldn’t understand where the problem was. I was trying my best but the system wasn’t supporting it. I kept asking myself if I didn’t create enough urgency. If I was too careful. Too cautious with timing.

In a strange way, I failed quietly. No one outside a few people in the company would know. Revenue looked stable from the outside. But inside, I knew we missed what we were capable of. It could have been life-changing for the entire company - new markets, new products, more visibility, so many more consumers and large strategic investors.

What hurts is the math. I had already started spending heavily to take the brand to the next level. 2-3x more than usual. The bet was that scale would come by November and make up for everything. Instead, I was left with large bills and the same revenue I started the year with. That bet wiped out almost all the profit we made.

In a way, it taught me that growth and scale are not linear, and definitely not guaranteed. Few months can be great, and a lot more months can go worse. Even when you’re putting in more effort than ever.

I also have been trying to elevate everything. People. Content. Product quality. Packaging. I keep telling myself I want to build a global brand, not just a Singapore brand.

But then another thought creeps in. If we don’t have die-hard fans here, does it make sense to aim for the rest of the world? Without a strong core, global just feels flaky.

And yet. Isn’t that how business works? You try multiple products, markets, users. See what sticks. If you don’t keep trying, you don’t create options. When things turn bad, you’re left with nothing.

Somewhere in the middle of this is the question of focus. I still don’t know what focus really means - one brand? one product? one team? one market?

Sometimes I say something that sounds neat. “My focus is longevity.” But what does that actually mean? Longevity supplements? Which ones? For whom? I keep things generic. Maybe because I’m scared of getting cornered into something specific and losing the ability to do other things.

It reminds me of dating. Always looking for the next best thing keeps you moving. But it also stops you from pouring everything into one thing. One product. One team. One brand.

There’s also this strange desire to stay a little independent. A little uncommitted. I want to be recognised for building something meaningful. But I’m afraid of letting it become my identity.

If it becomes my identity, can I carry it? Am I credible enough? Will I do justice to it? Will I now have to start doing Ironman and change my whole life? Not a bad choice, honestly. But still.

And then the darker thought. What if this fails badly and destroys my reputation? What if I take the fall for something shaped by suppliers, scientists, systems, decisions outside my control?

This fear has been with me for a long time.

Beyond business, my own identity feels conflicted too.

I left home in 2011. Studied eight hours away for four years. Bangalore for five years. Dubai for one. Singapore for MBA, then entrepreneurship. This whole journey has been thousands of kilometres from where I started.

In some ways, I’m grateful for the distance. It lets me take risks. No constant social pressure. No uncles and aunts projecting their fears onto what I’m doing. Being far away makes it easier to ignore the noise.

But it creates a conflict too. Culturally, people return home. From work. From holidays. From life phases. I don’t return anywhere. I return to myself. Literally.

Maybe that’s also part of the messy middle. Far enough to be free. Far enough to feel unanchored. Still building. Still unsure. Still questioning whether this phase is teaching me something or quietly asking me to change course.

In fact, this is the first time I’m writing in two weeks. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The blog, the content, meeting people. All of it stopped.

But I want to return. To writing. To creating. To trying new things to grow the business. To meeting people. To building myself again.

Thing is, I don’t have answers yet. I’m still inside it. In some ways, I have started to like this messy middle feeling - failing and figuring things again, and again.

I’ll know what this phase meant once I’m out of it. For now, I’m just here.

A chilly Sunday at Hiroshima,
Shan
2nd February 2025

Last week, during a feedback session, one of our livestreamers asked a pointed question about LPC Neuro: the DHA dosage looks low compared to regular fish oil, yet it’s one of the priciest on the market. What’s the justification?

Rather than just defend the product, I wanted to use this as a starting point for something bigger — what do “science-backed” and “evidence-based” actually mean in supplements? And how can you, as a consumer, cut through the marketing?

Consider this your insider’s guide.

In this post:

1. Why “science-backed” is legally meaningless

2. Three tiers of evidence in supplements

3. Why the form of an ingredient matters more than you think

4. Dosage theatre: studied vs practical

5. Proprietary blends vs transparent formulas

6. When science meets regulatory reality

7. How to fact-check any supplement claim yourself

1. “Science-Backed” Has No Legal Definition

Walk through any supplement aisle and you’ll see “clinically proven,” “research-backed,” and “scientifically formulated” on every other bottle. These phrases sound authoritative. They’re also essentially meaningless from a regulatory standpoint.

Unlike pharmaceutical drugs, supplements don’t require clinical trials proving efficacy before hitting the market. Companies can reference research that’s tangentially related to their product and call it “science-backed.” The research might be on a different form of the ingredient, a different dose, a different population, or even a different compound entirely.

This isn’t always deception — sometimes it’s the best available evidence. But consumers deserve to understand the difference between “we conducted a clinical trial on this exact product” and “there’s a study on one of our ingredients.”

2. Three Tiers of Evidence

When evaluating any supplement claim, it helps to know which tier of evidence supports it:

Tier 1: Direct product research. Clinical trials conducted on the specific formulation at the dose being sold. This is the gold standard but rare — trials are expensive and products aren’t patent-protected like drugs.

Tier 2: Ingredient-level research. Published studies on individual ingredients at specific doses. Most legitimate supplement claims fall here. The key questions: Is the form the same? Is the dose the same? Was the study in humans?

Tier 3: Mechanistic or preclinical evidence. Cell studies, animal research, or theoretical mechanisms explaining why something should work. This is where most “emerging” ingredients sit. It’s not worthless — it’s how science progresses — but it’s not proof of efficacy in humans.

The problem arises when marketing presents Tier 3 evidence with Tier 1 confidence.

3. Forms Matter More Than You Think

Here’s where it gets interesting. The same compound can exist in multiple forms with very different research profiles.

Magnesium is a well-studied mineral for sleep, muscle function, and bone health. Historically, most large-scale outcome studies used magnesium oxide and magnesium citrate — they were cheaper and more widely available when the trials were conducted. Today, magnesium glycinate (bisglycinate) has become the popular consumer choice.

Is glycinate under-researched? Not exactly. It has solid bioavailability data showing it’s well-absorbed and gentler on the stomach than oxide. Recent double-blind trials show modest but real effects on sleep quality. The research base is growing. But if you’re comparing volume of published outcome studies, oxide and citrate still dominate — not because they’re superior, but because they have a head start.

Then there’s magnesium L-threonate — marketed specifically for brain health. It’s patent-protected by one company, and virtually all published studies on it come from that same company. This isn’t unusual in the supplement world. It shows how commercial interests shape what gets researched and how.

CoQ10 exists as ubiquinone (oxidised form) and ubiquinol (reduced, active form). Ubiquinol is marketed as superior because it’s “body-ready,” but the research base is mixed on whether this matters for most people.

NAD+ precursors have been studied as nicotinamide, nicotinamide riboside (NR), nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN), niacin, and plain vitamin B3. Each has different absorption, metabolism, and research profiles. When someone says “NAD+ boosters are proven,” the immediate question is: which form, at what dose?

The point isn’t that newer forms are scams — some may genuinely be better. The point is that research on Form A doesn’t automatically validate Form B.

4. Dosage Theatre

Creatine monohydrate is one of the most well-studied supplements in existence. The research spans doses from 3 grams (maintenance) to 20 grams per day (loading phase).

But here’s what the labels don’t tell you: your body already makes about 1 gram of creatine daily, and if you eat meat, you’re getting another 1-2 grams from food. Red meat and fish contain roughly 4-5 grams of creatine per kilogram of raw meat. The catch? Cooking degrades creatine significantly — a well-done steak may have lost most of it.

So how much meat would you need to eat to hit the 5-gram daily dose used in studies? About 1 kilogram of lightly cooked beef. Every day. The 20-gram loading doses some protocols recommend? That would require 4-5 kilograms of meat daily — obviously absurd.

This is why creatine supplementation makes sense for athletes and heavy trainers: food simply can’t deliver study-level doses. But for the average person eating a balanced omnivorous diet, you’re already getting 2-3 grams daily between endogenous production and food. The question becomes: do you actually need to supplement to 5 grams, or is that dose based on research designed to show maximum effect rather than practical benefit?

This is dosage theatre — where labels and protocols advertise amounts that sound impressive but may not reflect what typical consumers actually need.

When Bioavailability Flips the Dosage Script

Sometimes the “low dose” product is actually delivering more of what matters. This brings us back to the question that sparked this post: why does LPC Neuro have such a low DHA dose compared to regular fish oil?

Standard fish oil supplements compete on milligram counts — 1000mg, 2000mg, triple strength. The assumption is intuitive: more is better. But this ignores a fundamental question: how much of what you swallow actually reaches the target tissue?

Traditional fish oil delivers DHA in triglyceride form. Your digestive system breaks it down, repackages it, and distributes it primarily to adipose tissue (fat), heart, and liver. The brain? It has a specialised transport system — a protein called Mfsd2a discovered in 2014 — that only accepts DHA attached to a specific carrier molecule called lysophosphatidylcholine (LPC).

Standard fish oil barely produces this form. Your liver can convert some, but the process is inefficient, especially as we age or if we carry certain genetic variants like APOE4.

This explains a puzzle that’s bothered researchers for decades: populations that eat fish regularly show better cognitive outcomes, but fish oil supplement trials often fail to replicate these benefits. The DHA in whole fish exists partially in phospholipid forms that generate LPC-DHA during digestion. Concentrated fish oil is almost entirely triglyceride-bound — the form your brain struggles to access.

When you deliver DHA in the LPC form directly, animal studies show meaningful brain uptake at doses that would seem trivially small compared to conventional fish oil recommendations. You’re not compensating for inefficiency; you’re bypassing it.

Is the human clinical evidence conclusive? Not yet — those trials are still building. But the mechanism is well-established, and it illustrates a broader point: milligrams on a label tell you what’s in the bottle, not what reaches your cells.

I wrote a deeper dive on why traditional omega-3 supplements have underdelivered on brain health promises here:

5. The Blend Question

You’ll sometimes hear that “blends don’t have research behind them.” This is partially true but oversimplified.

Some ingredient combinations are genuinely well-studied. Caffeine and L-theanine together have solid research — the theanine smooths caffeine’s jittery edge while preserving alertness. Caffeine and taurine combinations appear repeatedly in energy drink research. These aren’t random pairings.

The real problem is proprietary blends — formulations that list a combined weight but hide individual ingredient amounts. When a label says “Energy Matrix: 3000mg” followed by eight ingredients, you have no idea whether any single ingredient is present at an effective dose. The first ingredient might be 2900mg of cheap filler.

Any formula that fully discloses individual quantities — even if the specific combination hasn’t been clinically tested — gives you enough information to cross-reference against published research. That transparency matters more than whether someone ran a trial on the exact blend.

At Xandro, Protocol X is technically a blend. But we disclose every ingredient amount. And we’re currently running a human study in Singapore comparing it head-to-head against pure NMN for NAD+ outcomes — the first study of its kind here. That’s what building real evidence looks like: not just citing ingredient studies, but testing your actual formulation.

6. When Science Meets Regulatory Reality

Here’s something most consumers don’t realise: what’s “science-backed” in one country may be illegal in another. Regulatory bodies have their own interpretations, and they don’t always align with the research.

TMG (trimethylglycine) is a well-established methylation compound. Betaine Anhydrous — the common supplemental form — is not approved for sale in Malaysia, while Betaine and Betaine Hydrochloride are permitted. Same compound family, different regulatory status.

Methylated B12 is considered the more bioavailable form of vitamin B12. But in Korea, methylcobalamin is restricted to pharmaceutical products — it can’t be used in dietary supplements. When we manufactured our methylated multivitamin in Korea, we had to use regular B12 instead. This year, we’ve decided to focus the product on Singapore only and update the formula with methylated B12. Such are the realities of ingredient science meeting regulatory fragmentation.

NAC (N-acetyl cysteine) has a complicated status even in the US. The FDA technically excludes it from the dietary supplement definition because it was approved as a drug first (in 1963). But they now exercise “enforcement discretion” — effectively allowing sales while the regulatory status remains unresolved. It’s been sold as a supplement for over 30 years.

Berberine in Singapore was historically restricted under the Poisons Act due to concerns about jaundice in G6PD-deficient infants. Since 2016, HSA has permitted Chinese herbs containing berberine, with Chinese Proprietary Medicines allowed since 2013. But it’s still not freely available as a general health supplement ingredient.

The lesson: “science-backed” often conflicts with on-ground regulatory realities, supply chain constraints, and regional health authority interpretations. A well-researched ingredient might simply be unavailable in your market.

7. How to Fact-Check Any Claim Yourself

The good news: you have better tools than ever to verify supplement marketing. AI assistants can now query research databases directly. You’re not limited to reading brand blogs that cherry-pick studies.

Step 1: Identify the specific claim. “Supports brain health” is too vague. Look for measurable claims: “increases NAD+ levels,” “improves cognitive function scores,” “reduces inflammatory markers.”

Step 2: Find the cited research. Good companies link to studies. If they don’t, ask. If they can’t provide them, that’s your answer. (simple way would be go the white paper on the product).

Step 3: Check study relevance. Is this the same form of the ingredient? Is the dose similar? Were subjects human? Who funded it?

Step 4: Look for replication. One study isn’t proof. Multiple independent studies showing consistent results is more convincing.

Step 5: Use AI tools. Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI or Perplexity: “What does the research say about [ingredient] at [dose] for [outcome]?” These tools draw majorly from published literature, not marketing content. They’ll surface limitations and contradictions that brand materials omit. You can question the results cited by the AI tools, asking it to verify claims rather just giving an answer.

This is genuinely new. A few years ago, your options were Google (which surfaced brand blogs and affiliate content) or PubMed (which requires scientific literacy to navigate). Now you can ask plain-language questions and get synthesised answers from research databases.

Try it: “What dose of NMN has been studied in human trials?” or “Does magnesium glycinate have more research than magnesium citrate?” You’ll get more nuanced answers than any product page will give you.

8. Use This on Us Too

I wrote this as an insider sharing how the industry works — not as someone claiming exemption from scrutiny.

Everything in this post applies to Xandro’s products. Ask us which tier of evidence supports our claims. Ask us why we chose specific forms and doses. Ask us what isn’t yet proven.

If we can’t answer clearly, that tells you something. If we can, that tells you something too.

For a deeper dive into why traditional omega-3 supplements have failed to deliver on brain health promises — and what the emerging LPC-DHA research suggests — I wrote about it in detail here: Spilling secrets on omega supplements.

The goal isn’t to find supplements with “proven” benefits in some final sense. Science doesn’t work that way. The goal is to make informed decisions based on the best available evidence — while remaining open to updating as new data emerges.

The tools to verify are in your hands. Use them.

Questions about evaluating supplement claims? Drop them in the comments — happy to dig into the evidence together.

See you next Sunday!
- Shan

I have an important update - this blog is now completely free for everyone. No more paid subscriptions.

Last week, I asked our community a simple question:

What’s the one health goal you need help with this year?

The responses were overwhelming and came almost entirely from women in their 40s and 50s:

• “I want to lose weight, but nothing works anymore”

• “I’m in perimenopause and my body won’t respond”

• “I know what to do, but I can’t make it stick”

This hit me hard. So I spent time talking to women in this phase, consulting with practitioners, and combining that with what I’ve learned over years of working in this space.

What follows is my honest attempt to address what’s actually happening and what genuinely helps.

Why This Is the Hardest Phase

If I had to rank which demographic struggles most with weight loss, women aged 40-55 would be at the top.

Not because they don’t know what to do. Most women I know in this phase are extremely informed. They’ve tried diets, gyms, trainers, apps, supplements—everything. Yet the weight either won’t move, or it comes right back.

Two things collide simultaneously:

1. Biology Changes

• Estrogen and progesterone fluctuate wildly during perimenopause

• Insulin sensitivity drops (your body handles sugar less efficiently)

• Sleep becomes fragile and light

• Stress hormones stay elevated longer

• Fat gravitates toward your midsection

• Muscle naturally begins declining without intervention

The rules your body operated under in your 30s no longer apply.

2. Life Gets Heavier

For most women in this age group, life isn’t something they fully control anymore:

• Teenagers who need you

• Aging parents requiring care

• Households to manage

• Demanding careers

• A constant mental and emotional load that doesn’t show up on any calendar but drains energy daily

A personal contrast: I live alone. No kids. No family living with me. I control my food, sleep, training schedule, and social calendar. That level of control makes health changes far easier than we admit.

Most women in their 40s and 50s don’t have that luxury. When hormonal chaos hits on top of life chaos, weight loss becomes genuinely difficult—not impossible, but far more complex than any Instagram fitness plan suggests.

What Actually Works: Build Muscle First

The single biggest shift needed is moving away from “cardio for weight loss” thinking. Walking is great. Cardio is fine. But what really matters now is muscle.

Here’s why: Muscle is metabolic tissue. More muscle means:

• Higher resting metabolism (though the effect is modest—about 13 calories per kilogram per day)

• Better insulin sensitivity and blood sugar control

• Stronger bones and joints as you age

• More independence in later years

What this looks like:

• Strength training 2-3x per week

• Basic movements: squats, lunges, presses, rows, deadlifts

• Start with bodyweight, progress to dumbbells or resistance bands

• You don’t need a gym to begin (YouTube has quality tutorials. Just be careful and don’t hurt yourself)

Making it sustainable:

• Group classes remove decision fatigue and create accountability. In Singapore, many classes now specifically off classes for the 40-50+ demographic.

• Personal trainers (even for 8-12 weeks) can eliminate the fear of doing things wrong. If that’s not affordable, ask someone in your circle who trains—you’d be surprised how many people will help if you simply ask

• Structure over motivation: Your training sessions must live in your calendar like meetings. You cannot rely on motivation when life is this full.

Get Protein Right

Most Asian diets are carb-heavy: rice, noodles, bread, convenient snacks. Meanwhile, protein—the nutrient that preserves muscle, stabilizes blood sugar, and keeps you full— gets neglected.

The simple shift: Make protein the foundation of every meal.

• Eggs, fish, chicken, tofu, tempeh, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, lentils, beans

• If non-vegetarian: Focus on lean sources (chicken, fish, lean beef). Avoid fatty cuts and processed meats as your default

• If vegetarian/vegan: This gets trickier. Protein powder becomes extremely useful. 1-2 shakes daily can simplify everything. Consider adding creatine (safe, well-studied, helps preserve muscle)

Build awareness: Track your food for 2-3 weeks. You’ll learn where your calories actually come from and what you can adjust without suffering.

The goal isn’t perfection. It’s building a pattern you can maintain for years. Extreme diets rarely work long-term in this phase of life. Sustainable changes, repeated consistently, do.

The Hidden Layer: Hormones, Gut, Sleep, Stress

Even with good movement and nutrition, these factors quietly determine whether your efforts actually translate to results.

Hormones

During perimenopause, estrogen and progesterone become unpredictable. This affects:

• How your body stores fat

• Water retention and bloating

• Cravings and mood stability

• Insulin sensitivity (making blood sugar harder to control)

What helps: Some women find liver support useful—compounds like DIM (diindolylmethane) and calcium-d-glucarate may help process hormones more efficiently, though research is still emerging.

(Disclaimer: Always discuss hormone-related interventions with your doctor)

Gut Health

Your microbiome influences metabolism, inflammation, and how efficiently your body uses calories.

Simple tools:

• Increase fiber through vegetables, seeds, and whole foods (most people eat far too little)

• Quality probiotics with specific, well-researched strains can help, though results vary person to person

Sleep and Stress

These might be the biggest silent saboteurs:

• Poor sleep worsens insulin resistance and increases next-day hunger

• Chronic stress keeps cortisol elevated, signalling your body to store fat

• Together, they create a vicious cycle that’s nearly impossible to break if ignored

This is foundational work. No supplement compensates for chronically poor sleep or unmanaged stress.

(Disclosure: At Xandro, we’ve developed supplements specifically to support this phase—LXP for metabolic health and weight management, Protocol X for overall metabolic support. They’re tools that work best when foundations are already in place, not replacements for them.)

The Timeline No One Tells You

In your 20s or early 30s, a few weeks of effort could move the scale. That timeline no longer applies.

For most women in their 40s-50s, meaningful, stable change takes 6-7 months of consistent effort. You’ll notice energy improving first. Then sleep. Clothes fitting differently. Strength increasing. The scale often comes last.

This is where most people quit—after 3-4 weeks with minimal change, assuming their body is broken. It’s just responding at a different pace. Hormones take time to stabilize. Muscle takes time to build. Gut bacteria take time to shift. Stress patterns take time to calm.

Move beyond the scale: For women, body fat percentage will naturally be higher than men. Chasing extremely low numbers isn’t realistic or healthy.

Better indicators:

• Strength levels

• Body composition (how clothes fit)

• Energy throughout the day

• Blood markers: fasting insulin, HbA1c (blood sugar control), lipid panel, CRP (inflammation), vitamin D, ferritin (iron), thyroid markers (TSH, free T3, free T4), hormone levels (estradiol, progesterone, FSH)

These tell a far more accurate story than your bathroom scale.

Why This Really Matters: A Personal Note

My mother is in her 60s. She has knee issues and struggles with movement. She tries to eat less, but it’s extremely difficult. She never learned about protein and strength the way we understand it now.

Last week, my dad fractured his knee—his second leg fracture. He’s in his 70s. This happened from a simple fall on uneven ground. He never trained his muscles when younger. Now he’s terrified of falling, and that fear makes movement harder and riskier.

I share this because it clarified something for me: Strength offers independence. It’s about how well you get to live in your later years.

This is also why compassion matters so much in this phase. Many women are being brutally hard on themselves for something deeply influenced by biology, life structure, and accumulated stress.

That doesn’t mean giving up. It means approaching the journey with patience and respect for what your body is going through.

The Bottom Line

If you’re in your 40s or 50s and struggling with weight, your body is asking for a different kind of care now:

1. Prioritize strength training over cardio alone

2. Make protein central to every meal

3. Address sleep, stress, and gut health—they’re not optional

4. Think in months, not weeks

5. Track meaningful markers beyond the scale

6. Be kind to yourself—this phase is genuinely hard

With the right approach—and realistic expectations—things can improve.

It just needs time.

See you next Sunday.
- Shan

P.S. This blog is free and always will be. Share it with anyone who might find it helpful.

I have thought about writing this for a long time. I have thought about putting these thoughts down on paper and sharing them with people, about being honest about who I am and what I have become, but I keep stopping myself. A big part of that is fear.

I worry about what people will think of me, how they will judge me, and what it means to be this open about myself in public. There is always this anxiety about being seen too clearly, about saying things that I cannot take back once they are out there. Still, I feel like I need to write this now, because the last few years have changed me in ways that are too important to ignore, and keeping all of it inside no longer feels right.

Over the last 5 years, I have changed more than in any other phase of my life. Not in one dramatic moment, but slowly, through a lot of failure, uncertainty, small wins, exhaustion, and conversations that nobody else ever sees.

It is much easier to write about business, markets, products, or numbers. Writing about yourself when you know you are still becoming something feels a lot more uncomfortable. But this piece is not about the company or the brand. It is simply an operator’s note about me, the person underneath everything else.

2021: Lost and Hungry

Back in 2021, I was lost and hungry. Hungry to do more with my life, hungry to build something meaningful, but completely lost on how to get there. I had decided not to take another job and to go all in on entrepreneurship. I burned through all my savings, tried idea after idea, worked with different co-founders, chased ex-colleagues as clients, and for the longest time nothing really worked. Every few days I would convince myself that I had found the next big idea, the thing that would finally change everything. After a few conversations and half-baked attempts at building something, I would realize that the idea was bad. That cycle repeated for months.

Eventually I had no money left. I had to take a loan from a friend just to survive and find some work. That period crushed my confidence. I started doubting my ideas, my judgment, the people I chose to work with, and slowly, myself. At the same time, the hunger never went away. Even when I was tired, even when I was disappointed, even when I was embarrassed by how little I had to show for all the effort, I still wanted to build a different life for myself. I just did not know how yet.

When My Body Was Falling Apart Too

Around the same time, my health was in a bad state. My energy was low, my sleep was poor, my habits were messy. I used to drink a lot, ate too much, had a beer belly, and felt sluggish most of the time. I was 80+ kilos and could not seem to bring it down no matter what I tried. I remember that I tried to run on cool winter morning. I could not even finish 1 km.

I remember sitting in my apartment in Dubai in 2021 and writing down 5 life goals for next 5 years. One of them was to run 5km. At that time it felt almost ridiculous. My body was heavy, my focus was all over the place, and emotionally it made me feel incompetent, like I was failing at basic things that other people seemed to manage without much trouble.

Imposter Syndrome and Overdrive

When I started building again, I was drowning in imposter syndrome. The first group of people I worked with did not really trust me (that’s my perception) and I could feel that every day. I overworked, rarely switched off, and was constantly chasing whatever I felt was missing. I compared myself to other founders, other brands, other companies. I pushed my team hard because I was trying to prove something, to them and to myself. That this would be a serious business. That it could become global. That all this struggle would eventually change everyone’s life if we just kept pushing and did not do anything half-heartedly.

For a long time I carried this quiet fear that someone would eventually find me out, that I did not really know what I was doing and that I was just figuring things out as I went.

How Confidence Actually Got Built

That feeling did not disappear because I suddenly became special or smarter. It faded because I stayed in the game long enough to learn. Writing ads. Running campaigns. Learning TikTok. Managing livestreams. Making difficult decisions. Hiring and letting people go. Failing publicly. Solving problems over and over again. That repetition slowly builds something inside you.

There was no single moment when I suddenly felt like I had arrived. The shift happened gradually, through many small milestones. Watching ideas work and fail. Seeing numbers move. Building products that people genuinely cared about. Getting feedback from the market, from my team, from people who had watched my journey closely. Solving problems that once felt impossible. At some point, I stopped seeing myself as someone trying to be a CEO and started seeing myself as someone doing the work properly.

Rebuilding My Relationship With My Body

My relationship with my body changed slowly too. I started showing up more consistently, training, moving, pushing myself a little further each time. Over time I went from not being able to run one kilometer to running fifteen. From being scared of signing up for HYROX to finishing multiple races and actually wanting to do more. Today I know that running a marathon is not a question of ability. It is a question of training and making a mental decision.

That shift in how I think about my body ended up spilling into everything else I do.

Who I Am Now

Today I am more confident than I was before, not in a loud or dramatic way, but in a grounded one. I trust myself more. I trust my ability to learn, adapt, and survive whatever situation I am in.

The biggest difference between the person I was in 2021 and the person I am now is that I no longer feel like I am lacking. Back then I constantly felt behind, as if I was missing something fundamental that everyone else had figured out. Now I understand that growth is built through staying in the game longer than most people are willing to.

I am more ambitious now, more direct, more honest with myself and with others. I care deeply about people, but I also care deeply about execution. I have learned what focus actually means, how to hold many ideas in your head but commit fully to pushing one thing forward. None of this feels finished. This is not a story about arrival. It is simply a record of becoming, and I am still very much in the middle of that process.

Closing Note

When I quit and everything felt like it was falling apart in early 2023, I started writing this blog. At the time, I did not think of it as “content” or a newsletter or anything public-facing. It was simply a way for me to journal my journey, to capture how I was thinking, the decisions I was making, the mistakes I was repeating, and the things I was learning along the way.

Over time, it has become a reflection of where I am today and how I look at the future. It holds my fears, my hopes, my doubts, my confidence, and all the messy thinking in between. In all honesty, this blog is written by me, for me. It is something I want to come back to years from now, when I am stuck somewhere again, in business or in life, and need to hear my own voice reminding me that I have been here before and I found a way forward.

Today is the last Sunday of the year - I wish you a Happy, Peaceful and Prosperous Year Ahead. I hope you take a moment to look at your own life, at who you are, what is working, what is not, and what you want to do differently going forward. Life is not constant. It is a continuous evolution of you as a person, shaped by the choices you make and the signals you receive from the world around you. The more honestly you listen to those signals, the more clearly you can move forward.

If anything I write here helps you reflect on your own journey, I am grateful for that.
But at its core, this is me talking to myself.

And today, this is what I needed to say.

Longevity as a space is gaining momentum, but it’s still small. People are still figuring things out. I’ve been involved since 2023, and being close to the ecosystem has given me access to information, perspectives, and experimentation that I try to put to good use, both in products and in what I share here.

One question that comes up again and again in this space - What do your biomarkers actually look like?

So today, I’m sharing my own longevity test results. These tests were done with Dr. Hisham. To be clear, I’m still due for a proper consultation with him, and I’ll get a more refined medical summary once that happens.

What you’re reading here is my current understanding, built using the data I have and the tools available today, including current AI models. This is not medical advice. It’s a transparent look at where I stand, how I’m interpreting it, and what I plan to do next.

What This Post Covers

To keep this readable, here’s how this is structured:

1. Why I started testing
   What pushed me to start measuring biomarkers instead of relying on how I felt.

2. What a longevity test actually includes
   A practical breakdown of what goes into a longevity test, beyond just “blood work.”

3. My longevity biomarkers
   A direct walk-through of my data. What looks good, what needs work, and what I’m watching closely.

4. A stricter longevity lens (Medicine 3.0)
   A short section on how some biomarkers look fine by normal standards, but need tighter targets if longevity is the goal.

5. Where I’m heading next
   Lifestyle, training, supplementation, and what I plan to measure going forward.

Let’s start.

1. Why I Started Testing

I started testing because I was already working in the field of longevity.

I was building products that claim to help people live longer, recover better, stay sharper. And at some point, I felt uncomfortable selling solutions without knowing, for myself, whether any of this actually made a difference.

Almost anyone who’s spoken to me for more than a few minutes has heard me talk about diagnostics. Because the real question is simple. Do the interventions we talk about actually change anything?

Supplements.
Lifestyle changes.
Sleep.
Strength training.
Even things like stress management.

Do they move real markers in your body, or do they just make you feel like you’re doing something? That’s why I started measuring.

Blood tests.
DNA testing.
Sleep and recovery tracking using Whoop and Garmin.

There are deeper tests I haven’t done yet. Full-body MRI. Some advanced imaging. A few niche diagnostics. Those will come later.

For now, I wanted clarity on the basics. The fundamental biomarkers that actually tell you where you stand. It was about knowing my starting point, and knowing what to fix.

2. What Does a Longevity Test Actually Include?

Note: If you don’t want to bore yourself with medical terms and details, and are interested at my test results - please go to section 3.

When people hear “longevity testing,” they often think it’s one thing. It isn’t.

At a very basic level, it starts with three main inputs:

• Blood

• Urine

• Body composition

Blood is the core. This is where most longevity biomarkers come from. Urine adds another layer, especially for kidney health and hydration. Body composition tells you what your weight and training are actually doing inside your body.

In my case, body composition was done using a BIA machine. You can go deeper with a DEXA scan if you want, but for most people, it’s not strictly necessary.

Beyond this, there are optional layers:

• MRI scans

• CT scans

• Brain imaging tests

I haven’t done those yet. They’ll come later. For now, I wanted clarity on the fundamentals.

What Blood Biomarkers Tell You

A standard longevity blood panel usually covers multiple systems, not just one.

Hematology

This is the most basic layer.

• Red blood cells : Measures how many oxygen-carrying cells you have. Too low affects energy and endurance; too high can thicken blood and increase cardiovascular strain.

• White blood cells : Reflects immune system activity; chronically high levels can signal inflammation or ongoing physiological stress, while very low levels may indicate immune suppression.

• Platelets : Involved in blood clotting. Abnormal levels can increase bleeding or clotting risk.

• Hemoglobin : Shows how well oxygen is transported to tissues. Low levels reduce stamina and cognitive performance.

These markers tell you about oxygen delivery, immune function, and whether anything obvious is off.

Inflammation

People talk about “high inflammation” very loosely. If you actually want to know whether your body is inflamed, you need to look at hs-CRP.

hs-CRP (high-sensitivity C-reactive protein) : One of the best markers of low-grade, chronic inflammation. Elevated levels are linked to higher cardiovascular and cognitive risk over time.

Diabetes and metabolic screening

This includes:

• Blood glucose : Measures current blood sugar levels. Chronically elevated values indicate impaired glucose handling.

• HbA1c : Reflects average blood sugar over the last 2–3 months. Higher values increase long-term risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

• Insulin : Shows how much insulin your body needs to manage glucose. Higher levels often indicate insulin resistance.

Lipids and cholesterol

This is where most people stop.

• Total cholesterol : A broad measure that includes different cholesterol particles. Alone, it’s not very informative.

• HDL cholesterol : Associated with lipid transport and metabolic health. Higher is generally protective.

• LDL cholesterol : Often called “bad cholesterol,” but it’s a rough proxy. Particle number matters more than LDL alone.

• Triglycerides : Reflect how the body handles fats and carbohydrates. High levels often signal insulin resistance.

But there’s a more detailed layer that matters more long term.

• ApoB : Represents the number of atherogenic particles in the blood. One of the strongest predictors of lifetime cardiovascular risk.

• ApoA1 : The main protein component of HDL. Higher levels are generally favourable.

• ApoB to ApoA1 ratio: A balance marker between harmful and protective lipoproteins.

• Lipoprotein(a) : A genetically determined risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Less modifiable by lifestyle.

This is what people like Dr. Peter Attia talk about when they discuss lifetime cardiovascular risk.

Cardiac biomarkers

This includes things like:

• Creatine kinase : Reflects muscle breakdown and recovery. Elevated levels may appear after intense training.

• High-sensitivity troponin-I : A marker of cardiac muscle stress. Persistently elevated levels are linked to higher future cardiovascular risk.

These markers give insight into cardiac stress, recovery, and long-term heart risk, even in people who feel fine.

Kidney health and urine biochemistry

This is where blood and urine work together.

• Creatinine : A waste product filtered by the kidneys. Used to estimate kidney function.

• eGFR : An estimate of how well the kidneys are filtering blood. Lower values suggest declining kidney function.

• Electrolytes like sodium and potassium : Key electrolytes that regulate hydration, nerve function, and blood pressure.

• Urine albumin : Detects early kidney damage. Even small increases are linked to higher cardiovascular risk

These tell you how your kidneys are functioning and how well your body is managing fluids and electrolytes. This is also where you get clues about salt intake.

Bone, joint, and iron status

This includes:

• Calcium and Phosphate : Essential for bone strength and muscle contraction.

• Uric acid : High levels are linked to gout and may correlate with metabolic stress.

• Iron : Needed for oxygen transport. Too little causes fatigue; too much increases oxidative stress.

• Ferritin : Reflects iron stores in the body. Both low and high levels can be problematic

These matter for strength, recovery, and long-term structural health. Iron is especially tricky. Too little is a problem. Too much is also a problem.

Minerals and vitamins

This is where a lot of people get surprised.

• Magnesium : Magnesium is involved in muscle contraction, nerve signalling, sleep quality, glucose control, and stress regulation. Low levels are associated with poor sleep, cramps, insulin resistance, and higher inflammation over time.

• Vitamin B12 : Vitamin B12 is essential for nerve health, red blood cell production, and brain function. Borderline levels can show up as fatigue, brain fog, or long-term cognitive issues even if blood counts look normal.

• Folic acid : Folic acid supports DNA synthesis, cell repair, and red blood cell formation. It also helps regulate homocysteine levels, which are linked to cardiovascular and brain health.

• Vitamin D : Vitamin D plays a role in bone strength, immune function, muscle performance, and hormonal regulation. Chronically low levels are associated with weaker immunity, poorer recovery, and higher long-term disease risk.

You can train hard, eat well, and still be low here. I was.

Liver function

This includes:

• ALT (Alanine aminotransferase) : A marker of liver cell stress or damage.

• AST (Aspartate aminotransferase) : Found in liver and muscle. Interpreted alongside ALT

• ALP (Alkaline phosphatase) : Related to bile flow and bone metabolism.

• GGT (Gamma-glutamyl transferase) : Sensitive marker of liver stress, alcohol exposure, and metabolic strain.

• Albumin : Reflects liver synthetic function and overall nutritional status.

Your liver is doing a lot of silent work. These markers tell you whether it’s coping well or under stress.

Thyroid function

• TSH : Signals how much stimulation the thyroid needs. High levels may indicate underactive thyroid function.

• Free T4 : The active thyroid hormone influencing metabolism and energy levels.

This affects energy, metabolism, and how “on” you feel day to day.

Hormonal health

This looks different for men and women. In my tests, this included:

• Total testosterone : The total amount of testosterone circulating in the blood.

• SHBG (Sex Hormone-Binding Globulin) : A protein that binds testosterone, reducing how much is biologically active.

• Free testosterone : The fraction of testosterone available to act on tissues.

• Free Androgen Index (FAI) : A ratio estimating how much testosterone is bioavailable.

• Cortisol : A stress hormone that affects metabolism, immune function, and recovery when chronically elevated.

For men, testosterone plays a big role in muscle, recovery, and motivation.

For women, hormonal interpretation is different and more contextual. Cycles, estrogen, progesterone, and thyroid often matter more than a single testosterone number. The point is not comparison. The point is baseline and trend.

Urine analysis

This includes:

• Urine pH and specific gravity : Reflect hydration status and kidney concentrating ability.

• Protein, glucose, ketones in urine : Abnormal findings may signal kidney stress or metabolic issues.

It gives another view into kidney health, hydration, and whether anything unusual is happening quietly.

3. My Longevity Biomarkers

Below is a system-by-system walk-through of my latest longevity test results.

🟢 looks good
🟡 worth watching
🔴 needs work

Blood and Hematology

• Red blood cell count 🟢
  Healthy oxygen-carrying capacity, supporting endurance and energy.

• Hemoglobin 🟢
  Normal levels, supporting stamina, exercise performance, and cognitive function.

• Hematocrit 🟢
  Within range, suggesting good hydration and blood viscosity.

• White blood cell count 🟢
  Balanced immune activity, no signs of chronic immune stress.

• Platelet count 🟢
  Normal clotting function.

• ESR (erythrocyte sedimentation rate) 🟢
  Low, suggesting low baseline inflammation.

Inflammation

• hs-CRP 🟢
  Very low. One of the strongest signals for low long-term cardiovascular and inflammatory risk.

Metabolic Health and Diabetes Risk

• Glucose (random) 🟢
  Normal short-term glucose control.

• HbA1c 🟡
  Within normal range, but not aggressively low from a longevity perspective. Worth monitoring.

• Insulin 🟢
  Low, suggesting good insulin sensitivity.

Lipids and Cardiovascular Risk

• Total cholesterol 🟢
  Within a healthy range.

• LDL cholesterol 🟢
  Low and not concerning.

• HDL cholesterol 🟢
  Reasonable and supportive of metabolic health.

• Triglycerides 🟢
  Very low, usually a sign of good metabolic flexibility.

• ApoB 🟢
  Low and within the range many longevity-focused clinicians aim for.

• ApoA1 🟢
  Healthy and supportive.

• ApoB/ApoA1 ratio 🟢
  Favourable balance between risk and protective lipoproteins.

• Lipoprotein(a) 🟢
  Low, reassuring given its genetic risk component.

• High-sensitivity troponin-I 🟢
  Low, suggesting minimal cardiac stress.

Muscle and Recovery Markers

• Creatine kinase (CK) 🟡
  Within range, likely influenced by training load. Not concerning.

Kidney Health and Electrolytes

• Creatinine 🟢
  Normal, consistent with good kidney function.

• eGFR 🟢
  Healthy filtration capacity.

• Urine microalbumin 🟢
  Very low, reassuring for both kidney and cardiovascular health.

• Sodium and potassium 🟢
  Balanced, suggesting hydration and salt intake are appropriate.

Bone, Joint, and Uric Acid

• Calcium 🟢
  Normal, supporting bone strength and muscle contraction.

• Phosphate 🟢
  Within range, supporting skeletal and cellular function.

• Uric acid 🟡
  Normal, but worth watching over time, especially with diet and training volume.

Iron Status

• Iron 🟢
  Normal circulating levels.

• Ferritin 🟢
  Healthy iron stores.

• Transferrin and saturation 🟢
  Balanced iron transport.

Minerals and Vitamins

• Magnesium 🟢
  Adequate, supporting muscle function, sleep quality, and metabolic health.

• Vitamin B12 🟡
  Borderline. Not deficient, but not ideal for long-term neurological health.

• Folic acid 🟢
  Adequate, supporting red blood cell production and homocysteine control.

• Vitamin D 🔴
  Still low. One of the clearer gaps that needs fixing.

Liver Function

• ALT 🟢
  No signs of liver cell stress.

• AST 🟢
  Normal, interpreted alongside ALT.

• ALP 🟢
  Normal bile flow and bone-related activity.

• GGT 🟢
  Low, suggesting minimal liver and alcohol-related stress.

• Albumin 🟢
  Healthy liver synthetic function and nutritional status.

Thyroid Function

• TSH 🟢
  Normal thyroid signalling.

• Free T4 🟢
  Adequate active thyroid hormone levels.

Hormonal Health (Male Context)

• Total testosterone 🟢
  High-normal, supporting muscle, recovery, and energy.

• SHBG 🟡
  On the lower end of normal. Not a problem, but worth watching with sleep and metabolic health.

• Free testosterone / Free androgen index 🟢
  High, explaining muscle mass and recovery capacity.

• Cortisol 🟢
  Within range, suggesting stress is not chronically elevated.

Body Composition

• Body fat percentage 🟢
  Low and healthy.

• Visceral fat 🟢
  Very low. A strong longevity positive.

• Overall muscle mass 🟢
  High for my size.

• Leg muscle development 🟡
  Slightly behind upper body and core. Not an issue now, but a clear signal to bias training toward legs.

4. Stricter Medicine 3.0 Audit

This is how my biomarkers would look like in a stricter Medicine 3.0 audit by Dr. Peter Attia, without his 6 figure consultation fee.

🟢 The Wins (Optimized)

• Cardiovascular Defense: My ApoB is at 66 mg/dL and Lp(a) is a low 5.8 mg/dL. This is the “Gold Standard” for low cardiac risk. Combined with a hs-CRP of <0.40 mg/L, there is virtually no systemic inflammation.

• Metabolic Efficiency: My fasting Insulin is 4.2 mU/L. Even though my HbA1c is 5.6%, the low insulin suggests I am highly insulin-sensitive and processing fuel efficiently.

• Androgen Status: My Total Testosterone is robust at 23.0 nmol/L. This supports the high muscle mass seen on my InBody report.

• Organ Reserve: My liver and kidney markers (ALT, AST, eGFR) are all in the top tier of healthy ranges.

🟡 Worth Watching (The Nuance)

• SHBG & Free Androgen Index: My SHBG is at the lower end of the range at 25.8 nmol/L , which pushes my Free Androgen Index to 89.1%. While this helps with muscle building, I want to ensure my SHBG doesn’t drop further, as it can be a lead indicator for metabolic stress.

• Vitamin B12: At 238 pmol/L, I am technically “normal,” but in the lower third of the range. For optimal cognitive energy, I’d prefer to see this closer to 400-500.

• Physique Balance: My InBody scan shows my upper body is at 116-123% of ideal lean mass , while my legs are at 104-105%. I’m not “weak,” but I am definitely upper-body dominant. It’s time to hit the squat rack.

🔴 Needs Work (The Gaps)

• Vitamin D Deficiency: This is the clear “fail” in the report. My level is 20.3 ng/mL , which is below the 30.0 ng/mL threshold for sufficiency. This impacts everything from immunity to bone density and needs immediate fixing

Closing Notes: Where I’m Headed Next

I’ll stop here for now. This was already a lot of information, and I don’t want this to turn into a data dump.

Going forward, on the measurement side, I’m keeping an eye on a few things:

• VO₂max, currently estimated via Whoop, with a proper lab test planned next year

• A DEXA scan, not because I see risk, but because it gives a clearer view of body composition

• Simple strength and movement markers, like grip strength and balance, where I’ve already spotted asymmetries

Some of these small tests surprised me. My right-hand grip is weaker than my left. My foot pressure sits more on my ankles than my toes, which explains recurring foot pain. These aren’t headline metrics, but they tell me how my body is actually functioning day to day.

Lifestyle-wise, sleep is the biggest drift. I used to sleep earlier. Now it’s closer to midnight or later, and I wake up around 8. Exercise volume has dipped too. I still train three to four days a week, but it’s shorter and less structured than before. That needs correcting.

Health-wise, my priorities are clear. Sports and athletic performance matter to me. HYROX has been a big anchor, and I’m doing at least two, possibly three events next quarter. That means muscle mass, recovery, and inflammation control aren’t optional.

Supplement-wise, I’ve kept things fairly consistent:

• Protocol X daily, covering creatine, NMN, taurine, and a broader base

• Vitamin D, which has improved but still needs work

• Magnesium, which I take consistently for sleep, muscle recovery, and cramps

• Turmeric curcumin recently, mainly for throat inflammation

• Ashwagandha to manage stress and temper the aggression that’s crept in during a very demanding phase

I’m not chasing more supplements. I’m focusing on consistency, then retesting. Vitamin D, in particular, is something I’ll recheck in about six months.

That’s it for my 2025 longevity audit.

I’ll test again mid next year or towards the end of next year, and I’ll share what’s changed, what improved, and what didn’t move at all. Longevity, for me, isn’t about being extreme. It’s about staying honest with the data and adjusting before things break.

I will see you next Sunday. Cheers!
Shan

Every Sunday, I write about what we are building, what I am learning, and how the journey feels from the inside as someone operating at the intersection of health, performance, recovery, and business. Most of these notes come from the backend of the business. From decisions that don’t look clean on slides. From moments of doubt. From things that work quietly and things that break loudly.

Health shows up often in these notes because building a longevity brand forces you to look very closely at your own life. You can’t talk about resilience, performance, and long-term health without eventually asking uncomfortable questions about how you live day to day.

Over the last few years, helping more than 30,000 people improve their health has slowly turned into a personal mission. Not in a dramatic way. More in a quiet, consistent way. I want to reach a million people eventually. With habits that actually survive real life.

I’ve been quiet for the last two weeks.

That wasn’t intentional. The past couple of weeks were packed with two of the biggest events of the year for us. HYROX and Singapore Marathon, where we ran our biggest booth yet and met hundreds of people face to face. It was also the first time we seriously tried selling products offline. It wasn’t perfect, but it taught us a lot.

Inventory was tight, so we could only sell so much. But the learning was valuable. Seeing people try products in real life, ask questions, hesitate, come back, and eventually decide was eye opening. Some customers switched from other brands, others knew from existing channels, again some new about the ingredients and were glad it was Singapore made. I also met fair share of sceptics and non-believers. Talking to them and understanding their perspective was gold to me.

Today’s reading

1. The change I made in 2021

2. Why skipping breakfast looks harmful in science

3. Skipping breakfast vs intermittent fasting, and why context and nutrition matter

4. Men vs women, and why fasting has to be phase-based

Let’s start.

1. The change I made in 2021

In early 2021, I made a very simple change.

I stopped eating breakfast.

At the time, it had nothing to do with longevity or metabolic health or mental clarity. I wasn’t thinking in those terms at all. I was just trying to lose some weight. There was a 30-day challenge running in the office, and one of my colleagues casually suggested that I try removing breakfast from my daily meals.

That was it. Just a suggestion that sounded slightly uncomfortable but doable.

When I first stopped eating in the morning, it felt wrong. Almost like I was doing the opposite of what I had been taught for the last 30 years. Breakfast was supposed to be important. Essential, even. Something you don’t skip unless you’re careless or irresponsible.

My parents were worried. People around me kept asking if I was okay, if I was trying something extreme, if I was harming myself.

The first six months were uncomfortable.

My stomach would growl. Loudly. In meetings. In the office. Around people. I felt embarrassed, distracted, and oddly ashamed, like I was cutting corners in life or being unnecessarily harsh on myself.

Mentally, it was harder than the hunger itself. Like the day hadn’t properly started because I hadn’t eaten. Walking around with an unresolved task in the back of my mind.

At some point during this phase, I came across an explanation that shifted how I thought about it. During fasting, the gut goes through its own cleaning and motility cycles. That growling sound wasn’t hunger in the dramatic sense I imagined. It was the digestive system doing maintenance work between meals. The intestine essentially cleaning itself. And if you’re constantly eating, this process doesn’t really get a chance to happen.

That didn’t suddenly make it pleasant. But it made it less alarming.

Almost without realising it, about six months later, breakfast had disappeared. Eating two meals a day became normal. Not something I thought about. Not something I planned around. Just normal.

And somewhere along the way, something unexpected happened - My days started to feel lighter. I would wake up. Train. Have my coffee. Go to work. And I wouldn’t think about food.

Around noon, I’d eat lunch. Sometimes I’d snack if stress was high. I’d have dinner around seven or seven-thirty. No food before bed. No constant planning around meals. No mental negotiation about what to eat next.

I didn’t have to decide what to eat three or four times a day. I didn’t have to cook in the morning, order food, or think about where my next meal would come from. A whole category of small decisions simply disappeared.

Over time, the results showed up without effort.

In early 2021, my weight hovered around 80 kg. For almost four years now, it has stayed between 64 and 66 kg. Even during phases where I’m not running much or lifting regularly, my weight stays stable. I don’t manage it consciously. I don’t think about it much at all.

My blood work has been consistently good. No major vitamin or mineral deficiencies, apart from vitamin D, which has nothing to do with food timing. Fat levels are normal. Muscle mass has improved steadily as I’ve trained more.

Mentally, I feel sharper. Not wired. Not euphoric. Just clear.

The only times I eat it now are when I’m travelling and staying at a good hotel, or when I’m home with my parents. Even then, it’s usually late. More of an experience than a routine.

This is what the habit really is. Time-restricted eating or Intermittent Fasting. Creating a longer window where your body isn’t constantly digesting. Nothing more dramatic than that.

And for me, quietly, over time, that made a bigger difference than I expected.

2. Science is against skipping breakfast. Why?

If you search PubMed for “skipping breakfast,” the results feel almost moralistic.

Skipping breakfast is associated with higher risk of diabetes. Higher cardiovascular mortality. Poorer mood. Lower vigor. Higher anxiety. Worse metabolic outcomes.

On paper, the case looks settled. Breakfast matters. Skipping it is harmful. So why does this clash so sharply with the lived experience of so many people, including mine?

The answer sits in an uncomfortable place where epidemiology, behaviour, and physiology get tangled, and where skipping breakfast is often studied as a proxy for disorder, not as a deliberate metabolic strategy.

Let’s unpack this carefully.

Most “anti-breakfast” science is observational, not interventional

A large share of the evidence against skipping breakfast comes from observational cohort studies, not controlled experiments.

For example, “large meta-analyses have reported that people who skip breakfast have higher risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease compared to those who eat breakfast regularly. One such analysis covering nearly 100,000 participants found a roughly 30–50% higher relative risk of diabetes among habitual breakfast skippers, even after adjusting for BMI”

On the surface, that sounds damning. But observational studies answer a very specific question:

“What kind of people tend to skip breakfast?”

Not:

“What happens if a healthy adult intentionally practices time-restricted eating?”

And those are very different questions.

When you look closely, habitual breakfast skippers in these cohorts are more likely to:

• Sleep poorly

• Smoke

• Eat irregularly

• Consume more ultra-processed food later in the day

• Have lower socioeconomic stability

• Exercise less consistently

Skipping breakfast here is not the intervention. It’s a signal of a chaotic lifestyle.

In epidemiology, this is called residual confounding. You can statistically adjust for BMI, smoking, or income, but you cannot fully adjust for patterns like stress, sleep debt, or disordered eating rhythms.

So when the conclusion reads “skipping breakfast increases disease risk,” what it often really means is: “People with unstable routines tend to do worse over time.”

“Breakfast is the most important meal” is not a scientific conclusion

The idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day is deeply cultural. It emerged from agricultural labour patterns, early industrial workdays, and later, cereal marketing.

When researchers have tried to test this claim directly, the results are surprisingly underwhelming.

Controlled trials from the Bath Breakfast Project and others show that, in both lean and obese adults, regularly eating or skipping breakfast does not reliably change body weight, metabolic rate, or total daily energy expenditure when calories are controlled.

What does change is behaviour.

People who eat breakfast often compensate by being slightly less active later. People who skip breakfast sometimes compensate by eating more later. The body adjusts.

Which brings us to an important point that rarely makes headlines: Skipping breakfast does not automatically create a metabolic advantage. And that is exactly why many breakfast studies fail to show benefits.

3. Skipping breakfast vs intermittent fasting are not the same thing

This is where most of the confusion lives. In many studies, “skipping breakfast” simply means: Eating late at night, sleeping poorly, delaying the first meal randomly, snacking inconsistently.

Intermittent fasting, by contrast, is defined by:

• A consistent eating window

• A prolonged fasting window

• Zero or near-zero calories during the fast

• Alignment with circadian rhythms

Time-restricted eating, the form I practice, is a structured intervention. When researchers study intermittent fasting directly, the picture changes.

Controlled trials and mechanistic reviews show that intermittent fasting can:

• Improve insulin sensitivity even without weight loss

• Reduce inflammatory markers

• Increase metabolic flexibility

• Improve gut microbiota diversity

• Lower fasting glucose and blood pressure

These effects are seen precisely because the body is not constantly digesting.

Fasting creates metabolic transitions. Breakfast skipping (with bad lifestyle practices that impact sleep & recovery), as studied in population surveys, usually does not.

Nutrition matters

One thing I should be very clear about, because it’s often misunderstood, is that fasting only works when nutrition is complete. Skipping breakfast or compressing eating windows does not mean eating less of what your body actually needs. Protein still matters. Carbohydrates still matter. Fats still matter.

The goal is not deprivation, it’s timing. On days where training volume is higher, stress is higher, or recovery feels off, eating earlier or eating more is not a failure. It’s adaptation.

4. Men, women, and gender considerations

Men and women do not respond identically to fasting.

Hormonal environments are different. Stress responses are different. Energy availability signals are processed differently. Anecdotally and clinically, many women report that fasting feels harder, especially when layered on top of poor sleep, high training volume, or chronic stress. Irritability, fatigue, cycle disruption, and anxiety are not uncommon when fasting is applied too aggressively or without adequate nutrition.

At the same time, intermittent fasting has shown benefits in specific female populations, particularly women with insulin resistance or PCOS, where improvements in metabolic and hormonal markers have been observed. The difference, again, is context. Lean versus insulin-resistant. Sedentary versus highly active. Well-rested versus chronically stressed.

This is where I think fasting is often misunderstood. It doesn’t have to be static.

Fasting does not need to be an everyday, forever rule. It can be phase-based. There are phases of life where longer fasting windows feel effortless and supportive, and phases where they feel draining. Training blocks, work stress, travel, sleep debt, illness, even emotional load all change how much fasting the body can tolerate.

Some weeks, fasting simplifies life. Other weeks, eating earlier is the more intelligent choice.

Longevity is not just about discipline. It’s about adaptability. The right eating pattern is the one that supports sleep, mood, work, training, and recovery at the same time. If fasting enhances that balance, it’s useful. If it erodes it, it’s the wrong tool, regardless of how popular it is.

For me, the habit survived because it reduced stress rather than adding to it. That is the litmus test I would use for anyone considering it.

Closing notes

The biggest takeaway for me, after four years of living this way, is not that skipping breakfast is superior. It’s that removing unnecessary friction compounds in ways you don’t notice day to day, but feel very clearly years later.

This habit worked for me because it simplified something fundamental. It reduced decisions. It reduced noise. It gave my body longer stretches of rest from constant digestion, and it gave my mind longer stretches of uninterrupted focus. It survived work stress, travel, family life, and changing training loads. And anything that survives real life for that long is worth paying attention to.

That doesn’t make it universal. It just makes it useful.

Before I end, I want to zoom out for a moment.

If you’re one of our consumers, I owe you an apology. The last month and a half has been difficult operationally. We hit a new revenue milestone, but we failed on execution. Some orders took far longer than they should have. Production and inventory cycles became our biggest bottleneck, and we felt the consequences of running too close to the edge.

November was especially hard. We dropped prices too aggressively, took more orders than we could fulfil, and made very little margin doing it. On paper, it looked like growth. In reality, it strained cash, operations, and trust all at once. That’s a tough combination.

We also spent on marketing heavily. Out-of-home ads, MRT placements, marketplace platform spend, events like HYROX and the Singapore Marathon. We learned a lot, especially from selling and speaking to people face to face. But the costs were real, and the timing wasn’t forgiving.

Right now, the focus is simple. Stabilise. Fix inventory cycles. Improve delivery timelines. Get back to healthy margins. Serve existing customers well before chasing new ones. Make structural changes to production and team capacity so the system doesn’t crack every time we push it.

Personally, this has been a stressful period. I’m not pretending otherwise. When multiple problems show up at the same time, the only way through is to solve one thing at a time and not panic. I know this won’t be the last hard phase. There will be many more. But getting through this one matters.

And maybe that’s where this essay quietly connects back to the habit I wrote about.

The things that last are usually not dramatic. They are the boring decisions that reduce load, conserve energy, and give you enough room to deal with what comes next. In health. In work. In life.

I’m back to writing now. Back to routine. Back to thinking clearly on paper.

Until next Sunday.
Shan

This week, I want to write about 11.11.

Singles Day is the one day in the year that reveals the truth about where a brand stands. All the work that happens across the year, from product development to communication to demand creation, shows up in a very honest way on this one day.

It is a strange mix of excitement and pressure. The friction for consumers is the lowest, everyone is actively looking for deals, and the willingness to spend is at its peak. If things go well, it means you did many things right in the months leading up to it. If things don’t, it means the market has already given you the answer.

For me, 11.11 this year was a complicated experience. We achieved a milestone we had never hit before — crossing 100k in a single day — and yet, it didn’t feel as satisfying as I imagined it would. The growth was there, but so was the ceiling. Some parts of the business broke, some parts surprised me, and some parts made it clear that we still have a long way to go if we want to build a truly large company. This is my attempt to break it all down: what worked, what didn’t, where we hit limits, and what I need to fix going into next year.

In this week’s note, I want to break down our 2025 Singles Day in detail: the ads that worked, the surprising behaviour around bundles, how different channels performed, the cash flow constraints that shaped our decisions, and a sincere look at where the culture and execution fell short. This is an honest operator breakdown of our biggest month so far, and why it still didn’t feel like enough.

Today’s reading:

1. The Ads That Carried Us

2. The Shock of the High-Value Bundles

3. Channels and Markets

4. The Cash Flow Crunch

5. The Culture, the Team, and the Comedown

1. The Ads That Carried Us

When I looked at our top-performing ads for 11.11, one thing stood out immediately. Three of the top eight ads were nothing more than the words “11.11”. No brand name, no SKU, no product image, no offer. Just the date. And they performed exceptionally well.

That is the psychology of Singles Day. People already know the deals will be good. They know this is the biggest sale of the year. When someone sees “11.11”, their intent is already high, and they click.

Early access ads also did well. Our simplest ads outperformed the more complicated ones. We could have made ten variations of the plain 11.11 ad and they would all have performed.

Another ad that surprised me was the Apple-style Protocol X ad we created months ago when the iPhone 17 launched. During 11.11, it resurfaced and became one of the strongest performers. It reminded me how cultural familiarity drives action. People recognise a format and respond.

We also had a Marvel-inspired ad from a creator — the “mutant series” — which did well entirely because it was entertaining during a period when everyone is bombarded with similar messages.

But the biggest winner was something far simpler: stock updates. When we started running out of inventory, we pushed a few “selling out fast” and “sold out” updates. These converted incredibly well. Urgency works best when it is real, and during 11.11 we could see it in the numbers. If I had pushed daily stock-update ads, I believe they would have driven even more lift.

One year-old NMN ad focusing on “rigorously third-party tested” also came back into the top tier. The lesson is clear — trust-building phrases matter, especially during high-intent periods.

Looking back, we missed founder-led ads and employee-led ads. That could have added scale.

The biggest learning: Singles Day rewards simplicity. The more obvious the ad, the better it does.

2. The Shock of the High-Value Bundles

If ads were predictable, bundle behaviour was not.

The single $1,111 mega bundle — the one I thought only a few people might buy — became the highest revenue driver. It outperformed the combined revenue of all Buy-1-Get-1 deals. It even beat Buy-2-Get-1. The only set of offers that beat it were the 11x bundles: 11x LPC, 11x Protocol X, 11x Metabolyn Pro.

This tells me something important about our audience: when people trust a product, they don’t want one bottle, they want a year’s supply.

The challenge is that new customers rarely buy these large bundles. They are almost entirely driven by existing, confident users. That means next year we will need a dual strategy — high-value large bundles for repeat customers, and simple, frictionless entry packs for new ones.

Channel placement also mattered. The 11x bundles performed incredibly well on TikTok and Shopee, but we didn’t put them on the website. That was a miss. Website users would have bought them. Meanwhile, the Buy-2-Get-1 deal was website-only, which helped differentiate but likely limited volume.

Product-wise, our top performers stayed consistent: Protocol X, LPC, Metabolyn Pro, Magnesium, Joint Recovery, and Turmeric Curcumin (driven by Hong Kong demand). Even NMN 500, one of our oldest SKUs, returned to the top list.

There was one painful learning: if a product isn’t launched by July, it will not matter for Singles Day. New products take six to seven months to mature. All six new SKUs we planned for September are now pushed to January and February. We left revenue on the table simply because the launches didn’t happen.

3. Channels and Markets

TikTok led the way, as expected, and matched October’s total revenue within the first ten days of November. But there were signs of saturation. Livestreams felt flat. We had more livestreamers this year, ranging from celebrities to doctors to singers. However, the audience did not grow. Our livestream approach was simpler — fewer user guests, fewer experimental segments, but different and credible hosts — which made operations smoother but slowed discovery. Nearly 70 percent of our TikTok buyers were repeat customers. That’s loyalty, but it’s also a ceiling.

The website, however, performed extremely well throughout the month, starting from 1 November. Much of this lift came from Hong Kong. We ran a small set of ads there, and because Hong Kong users only had the website to purchase from, all demand concentrated there. It’s not a huge market (yet), but the traction gave me confidence that Hong Kong can grow meaningfully next year.

Shopee continued to show a much healthier mix of new and returning users — almost a 50-50 split. It remains one of our most reliable channels for discovering first-time customers.

What bothered me was that business-as-usual days dipped sharply. People were waiting for 11.11 instead of buying in early November. That shouldn’t happen. A growing brand should see its BAU days lift alongside sale days. This is something we need to solve through better pacing and social hype.

In terms of new versus existing buyers:
• TikTok: mostly existing
• Website: balanced
• Shopee: balanced
• Hong Kong: almost entirely new

There is a clear message here. TikTok has hit its ceiling (not a good thing). The website and Shopee have not. However, Shopee and wesbite are not as consistent and don’t match the scale of TikTok.

4. The Cash Flow Crunch

Behind the scenes, the hardest part of 11.11 this year was cash flow.

We couldn’t produce enough inventory on time, and we didn’t have the cash cushion to run aggressive large-scale marketing or take risks in new markets. No maximum-delivery campaigns, no scaling up Hong Kong, no testing Australia or the US.

This wasn’t due to lack of revenue — August did well. The problem was the timing. Higher operating costs, higher ingredient costs, and our investments in community and offline activations meant cash was already tight. The plan was that September and October would replenish our cash for Singles Day.

Instead, both months dipped. Revenue fell. Expenses stayed high. Inventory bills were large. And we entered November with almost nothing in the bank.

We had to turn to credit terms with vendors and short-term loans. By the time 11.11 started, we had to treat every marketing dollar like it had to return immediately. We had no margin for experimental campaigns.

The sale ended up profitable, but we definitely held back on potential scale. With more cash, we could have pushed far harder.

This also made something else clear: we are hitting a ceiling in multiple parts of the business. We need to figure out which part is slowing everything down — content, funnels, product mix, production speed, or communication.

5. The Culture, the Team, and the Emotions

This year also exposed cultural and organisational gaps. People were missing during the most important weeks. Production did not fully understand the stakes and couldn’t deliver inventory on time even when ingredients were ready. The bottleneck was a mix of capacity and mindset. This is something I need to fix.

Our ads agency underperformed the entire year. D2C stayed flat. I should have intervened sooner, replaced them, or built a stronger internal flow earlier. The consolation is that we learned how to make ads ourselves, which will help next year.

There’s a deeper cultural question I keep thinking about. In my 2016–2020 days, nobody went home during big events. We stayed in the office past midnight, refreshing dashboards, changing creatives on the fly, fixing issues as they emerged, and reshaping the strategy hour by hour. The momentum came from a shared sense of urgency.

I haven’t built that culture here yet. I’m also not sure whether we should replicate that exact pace. But I do know we have more control than we think. A new ad concept can shift the energy of a sale. A surprise deal can lift a stagnant stream. Social hype can change demand patterns. And our creator and affiliate networks — both currently too small — can be built into much stronger engines.

Production remains our biggest bottleneck. The gap between forecast and output needs structural fixes — space, equipment, and people — but this will take time.

We crossed 100k in a single day for the first time, but I didn’t feel ecstatic. It felt like a number we had to fight too hard to reach. It should have come more easily. I didn’t know whether to push harder or simply let things run. I chose the latter.

That’s where we are today: a brand with momentum, hitting ceilings, learning new things, missing obvious things, and trying to build a system that can hold a much bigger future.

Closing Thoughts

When we ran out of stock in the middle of the event, I had a decision to make. Do we stop the sale completely and avoid long waiting times? Or do we continue, take limited orders, and tell users clearly that everything from that point onward would be a pre-order?

I decided to continue the sale, slowly and carefully. We informed people across channels that orders would take time, and I only allowed a limited number of pre-orders each day. Instead of scaling aggressively on the biggest day, I found myself watching inventory numbers and production timelines, trying to calculate what we could actually fulfil in the next month. It was the opposite of what a Singles Day push is supposed to feel like.

It has been almost twelve days since the sale ended and we are still fulfilling orders. We will continue fulfilling for another fifteen to twenty days. Some consumers are understandably impatient. We received a few complaints, but surprisingly, far fewer than I expected — fewer than ten so far. Clear communication helped. People appreciate transparency even when the situation is not ideal.

The real consequence of not producing enough inventory is not just the tail end of 11.11. It’s everything that comes after. Black Friday is the second biggest window of the year, and we had no stock for it. Everything became a pre-order again. We have livestreams lined up in early December with no clear idea of which products will arrive in time.

But this is also the reality of running a business. These things happen. Complaining doesn’t solve them. Fixing them does.

For now, the focus shifts to two major offline events — HYROX and the Singapore Marathon. We will be present at both. If you’re coming as a spectator or participant, come meet us. Try the products, experience the new testing kits we are rolling out for upcoming launches, and speak to the team. These events matter. They build trust in ways ads can’t.

After that, we close the year with a short break, reset as a team, and prepare for what comes next. A new year means we get to wipe the slate clean. Whatever went wrong this year stays here. Whatever we didn’t fix in time becomes the first thing we improve in January.

Next year needs to be big. It needs to be more disciplined, more structured, more creative, and more ambitious. We will overhaul production, expand the team, rebuild agency support, scale the creator network, deepen our markets, and tighten every part of the machine. There’s a lot to do, and I want to bring everyone along with me — the team, our partners, and all of you who follow along each week.

This 11.11 showed me where we stand. Next year will show what we are capable of.

That’s all for this week.

P.S. These Sunday notes help me think clearly, but I also want them to be useful for the people reading them. If there is anything here that felt unclear, too detailed, not detailed enough, or if there are parts of the business you want me to unpack in a simpler way, please tell me. If these writings are helping you understand the journey better, or if there are topics you want me to go deeper into, I would love to hear that too.

Until next Sunday. Cheers, Shan

Every Sunday, I write about what we are building, what I am learning, and the questions I keep wrestling with as someone working at the intersection of longevity, performance, and recovery.

If I look at everything people struggle with in health, protein quietly sits at the top. Not because people do not know it matters, but because almost no one I meet is actually getting the amount their body needs.

Experts say ‘eat more protein’, yet our meals keep shrinking in protein. Outside food is mostly carbs. Vegetarian and vegan meals are often even lower. Costs are rising, portions get smaller, and at the same time, every supermarket aisle is shouting protein. Shakes, bars, yogurts, everything has a number printed on it.

So what is real?
How much do we actually need?
Why do experts disagree so much?
And why does it feel almost impossible to reach even the moderate range through normal eating?

This is also something I have been struggling with. Experts quantify protein requirement at about 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. I am 65 kilos, so that makes my daily range around 80 to 105 grams. I rarely hit it.

Since 2021, I have been on intermittent fasting. Two meals a day, in a six to seven hour window. It has been one of the best habits I have ever built. I feel sharper and lighter. I run long distances, and I train frequently. I do not have to worry about weight. I was 80 kilos in 2021. Today I hover around 64 to 66. I can eat almost anything without thinking about weight gain.

But the downside is clear. Getting 100 grams of protein in two meals is difficult. On good days I hit maybe 70 grams. On other days, 50 or 60. I am not lazy or unaware. I just get tired of eating so much meat. Every lunch and dinner looks identical. Chicken, eggs, meat, sometimes fish, lentils or yogurt. My canteen aunty knows my order without asking. And because I focus so much on protein, my vegetables have gone down. I know that is not ideal.

So today, I want to unpack protein.

Today’s Reading

1. The Real Challenge

2. What Experts Say

3. The Fatigue Factor and Supplementation

4. How to Choose Your Target

5. What I Am Going To Do Next

6. Closing Thoughts

1. The Real Challenge

I’ve been on intermittent fasting for 4+ years now. Most days I eat between noon and 7 p.m. Two meals a day. Snacking in between is common during high stress days, although lately I have been able to control that quite well.

This system works best for me. I have tried other timings and routines, but this is by far the most productive one. I feel alert, my digestion is better, and my energy stays steady through the day. The only downside is protein. It becomes much harder to eat enough of it.

I need about 80–100 grams of protein daily. That is the number most experts recommend for my weight and activity level. I try to get it from food, but the volume required is huge. Once you break it down, the numbers are almost comical.

Here’s what 50 grams of different protein sources actually give you:

• Chicken breast (grilled): about 16 grams of protein

• Lean beef (cooked): around 13 grams of protein

• Fish like salmon or white fish: usually 11–12 grams of protein

• Firm tofu: roughly 6 grams of protein

• Tempeh: around 9 grams of protein

• Eggs: one egg is about 6 grams, so eight eggs to reach 50 grams

• Greek yogurt (unsweetened): a 150 gram cup gives 6–8 grams of protein

• Cooked lentils: around 5 grams of protein

• Protein shake (around 30 grams powder): usually 20–25 grams of protein

Of these, I mostly eat chicken and eggs. Sometimes fish, lentils, or other meats. Yogurt is occasional. My everyday meals usually look something like this:

• Half chicken, around 120–150 grams of meat = 36–50 grams of protein

• A noodle or rice dish with fish or chicken = 100 grams of fish gives 20–25 grams protein, 100 grams of chicken gives around 30 grams

So on days when I am careful with my food choices, I get around 60–80 grams of protein. That is on the good days. Reaching 100 grams consciously is a task. I would need to add combinations of chicken, fish, eggs, yogurt, and meat in quantities that stop feeling natural after some time.

Most days I am eating outside and that does not help either. Meals in Singapore are built around carbs. Rice, noodles, sauces. Protein is usually a small portion on the side. Clean protein-heavy meals are limited.

The more I speak to people, the more I realise it is not just my problem. Even people who train regularly hit 70 to 90 grams on average. Most older adults I know barely cross 40 or 50 grams.

2. What Experts Say About Protein

Protein is one of those topics where everyone has an opinion, but almost no two experts speak from the same framework. Some look at longevity. Some look at muscle. Some look at metabolism. Some look at performance. Once you see that, the wide range of numbers makes sense.

Let’s start at the base.

The RDA: The Bare Minimum

The Recommended Dietary Allowance is 0.8 g/kg of body weight. This number exists to prevent deficiency. It is not built for training, recovery, metabolism, or aging well.

Singapore’s guidelines follow the same structure:
• Adults aged 18 to 49: around 0.8 g/kg
• Adults above 50: around 1.2 g/kg to counter age-related muscle loss

Almost every expert agrees that 0.8 g/kg is not enough for anyone who cares about:
• Muscle
• Strength
• Insulin sensitivity
• Body composition
• Healthy aging

So the real conversation happens above the RDA.

Before we go into expert views, here is an important distinction that almost never gets mentioned.

Protein Needs for Men vs Women

Many women think they need far less protein than men. This is not true.
The difference is usually in total body weight, not biological protein requirement.

The key drivers of protein needs are:
• Total body mass
• Lean body mass
• Training load
• Age

Women have smaller average lean mass, so their absolute protein number is lower. But on a per-kilogram basis, men and women need almost the same range.

The differences between men and women are less about biology and more about lean mass and life stage.

Now, let’s look at how experts look at protein.

Valter Longo: Protein and Longevity Risk

Longo’s world is shaped by cancer biology and long-term disease models.
He is cautious about protein because amino acids activate growth pathways like mTOR.

His recommendation:
• 0.7 to 0.8 g/kg if you are below 65
• Mostly plant protein
• Fish two or three times a week
• After 65, increase protein slightly to protect muscle

His priority is long-term disease prevention.

Peter Attia: Muscle as Longevity Currency

Attia sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. To him, muscle mass is the strongest predictor of healthy aging.

His guideline:
• Around 2.2 g/kg
• Spread across meals
• 30 to 50 grams of protein per meal
• Protein after workouts
• Prioritise high-quality protein sources

Attia thinks the RDA is far too low for anyone who trains regularly.

Huberman and Andy Galpin: Protein for Performance and Recovery

Their work looks at strength, recovery, hormones, and performance.

Their typical range:
• Around 2.0 to 2.2 g/kg
• Eat more protein earlier in the day
• Focus on leucine-rich sources
• Split intake across meals for better muscle protein synthesis

Rhonda Patrick: Muscle as a Metabolic Organ

Patrick connects longevity, metabolism, and performance.

Her focus points:
• 1.2 to 1.6 g/kg for most adults
• Older adults need around 0.4 g/kg per meal
• Active people can safely consume higher levels
• Sedentary people should be more cautious with excessive protein

Her core message: protein becomes harmful only when paired with inactivity.

Dr. Brad Stanfield: The Practical Middle

Stanfield aims for balance and long-term sustainability.

His guidance:
• 1.2 to 1.6 g/kg
• Enough to support muscle
• Low enough to minimise unnecessary growth signals
• More plant protein, fish, and moderate poultry

Alastair Hunt (Whole Health Practice): It Depends on Age and Activity

Alastair Hunt, who coaches and studies longevity here in Singapore, takes a very practical approach. His summary is one of the clearest I have seen.

His ranges:

• 0.8 g/kg for sedentary adults
• 1.0 to 1.2 g/kg for light to moderate activity
• 1.2 g/kg for adults over 50
• 1.4 to 1.6 g/kg for majority people resistance training (the effects rapidly lessen from here upwards)
• Up to 2.2 g/kg for body recomposition or elite bodybuilding goals
• 20 percent extra for plant-based diets due to digestibility

His note that I like the most: Protein does not build muscle by itself. You must lift.

He also highlights that the majority of people in Singapore eat enough protein to survive, but not enough to thrive. You can read more at Daily Protein Intake. How Much Protein Do We Need

Why These Opinions Look So Different

Once you zoom out, the reason becomes obvious.

• Longo is optimising for cancer risk
• Attia is optimising for longevity through muscle
• Huberman and Galpin are optimising for performance
• Rhonda Patrick is optimising for metabolic health + muscle + healthy aging
• Stanfield is optimising for balance

They are not contradicting each other. They are talking about different outcomes, for different people, at different stages of life.

3. The Fatigue Factor and Why Supplementation Becomes Necessary

After reading all the expert views, the real problem comes back to something simple. Most people cannot eat that much protein consistently. Eating that volume of food every day is tiring and inconvenient.

I feel it myself. Two meals a day. A busy workday. Evening training. Eating huge portions of chicken or fish every day is not realistic. You stop looking forward to meals. You get bored of chewing. Even the healthiest person will struggle with that level of intake from whole foods alone.

And it is not only me. Most people in Singapore eat outside. Most meals are built around rice, noodles, sauces, and carbs. Protein is usually a supporting actor, not the main part of the plate.

So when experts say “just eat more protein,” they are not wrong, but they are not living your life.

Even people who train regularly barely reach 70 to 90 grams of protein from food. That is already a good day. For many older adults, even 50 grams is rare. Most of them are not blending whey shakes at home or weighing portions on a scale. My dad, my brother, many people I know in their forties and fifties, are not going to change their eating habits overnight.

This is where supplementation becomes helpful. To make the target possible.

A single scoop of protein gives 20 to 25 grams of high-quality protein without volume, chewing, or time. It reduces the stress of trying to pack everything into two or three meals. It also protects protein intake on days when appetite is low, meals are rushed, or training loads increase. (But protein powders also taste like chalk)

When I break down my own targets, even the moderate range needs support:

• 73 grams per day at 1.3 g/kg lean body mass
• 80 grams per day at 1.6 g/kg
• 123 grams per day at 2.2 g/kg

On most days, I hit 60 to 70 grams from food. The rest has to come from something simple.

This is also why I have now started experimenting with protein supplements seriously. We have been exploring new plant-based protein formats at Xandro. I used to think I could meet my needs through food alone. After four years of time-restricted eating and consistent training, I know I cannot. And most people in the real world cannot either.

So for most people, especially those eating two meals a day, the answer is not “eat more food.” The answer is “make it easier to hit your baseline.”

4. How to Choose Your Own Protein Target

With all the expert opinions and scientific ranges, the real question becomes simple. How much protein do you actually need for your life right now?

The easiest way to answer this is to stop chasing the perfect number and start thinking in ranges. Your target should match your age, your activity level, your goals, and the season of life you are in.

Before we go into numbers, there is one principle that makes everything clearer.

Always use lean body mass when calculating protein. Lean body mass is your weight minus fat. It is a cleaner way to set protein targets because men and women carry very different fat percentages on average.

Most men sit around 12 to 18 percent body fat. Most women sit around 25 to 35 percent. So a 50 kg woman with 30 percent body fat has a very different protein requirement from a 50 kg man with 15 percent body fat. The amount of muscle is different. Lean body mass solves this calculation problem instantly.

You can measure your lean mass using any BIA machine. Omron and Hume Health sell home devices. Most GPs have these machines too. And we are building one for next year.

Once you know your lean body mass, your protein range becomes very simple.

If your goal is basic health

Aim for 0.8 to 1.0 g per kg of lean mass. This keeps you out of deficiency. It is enough to support normal function. You can meet this with balanced meals and no supplements.

If you train two to three times a week

Aim for 1.0 to 1.2 g per kg of lean mass.

This covers most working adults who exercise regularly. It supports muscle maintenance and recovery. Most people can hit this with food and an occasional protein shake.

If you lift weights or play sports consistently

Aim for 1.2 to 1.6 g per kg of lean mass.

This is my preferred range for people who care about long term muscle and metabolic health. It is still realistic to follow. Most people will need protein one shake a day here.

If you do high volume or endurance work

Aim for 1.6 to 1.8 g per kg of lean mass.

HYROX, marathon training, long runs, or heavy strength cycles. Your repair and recovery needs increase, so your protein has to keep up.

If your goal is maximum muscle gain or body recomposition

Up to 2.2 g per kg of lean mass.

This is the range used by Attia, Huberman, and performance athletes. Most people do not need this. Benefits taper off quickly after 1.6 g/kg unless you have specific physique goals.

What These Numbers Look Like in Real Life

Here are three simple examples that make the math easy for both men and women, once you factor in different body fat percentages.

If you have around 50 kg of lean mass

Typical for many healthy women. Some men also fall here.

• 50 to 60 grams per day is maintenance
• 60 to 70 grams supports light training
• 70 to 80 grams supports lifting
• 80 to 90 grams is a high performance target
• 110 grams is the bodybuilding range

If you have around 60 kg of lean mass

Common for average sized active men. Some athletic women fall here.

• 60 to 72 grams for basic health
• 72 to 96 grams for lifting and sports
• 120 to 130 grams at the upper end

If you have around 80 kg of lean mass

Typical for larger athletes and strong men.

• 80 to 96 grams for health
• 96 to 128 grams for performance
• 160 grams if you are pushing the far extreme

The simplest rule

Pick a number you can follow for the next six months, not six days.

• If you train, start at 1.2 g/kg
• If you want a little more strength, move toward 1.4 to 1.6 g/kg
• Increase only if your training or goals make it necessary

The target that fits your appetite and schedule will always beat the target that looks perfect on paper.

5. What I Am Going To Do Next

Writing this made one thing clear. I have been under-consuming protein for years.

I have been training harder this year. More running. More strength work. More HYROX sessions. But my protein intake has stayed the same. Two meals a day. Mostly outside food. The cleanest thing I can find is chicken rice without the rice, or herbal chicken from the shop near my house. It helps, but it is not enough.

So here is what I am going to do.

I am going to start supplementing with protein deliberately. Not occasionally. Consistently. One scoop a day. On heavier training days, maybe two. I will still get most of my protein from food, but I am done pretending I can reach 80 to 100 grams naturally with my lifestyle. I want to train well, recover well, and age well. This is part of the equation.

This also aligns with what we are building at Xandro. We have been looking at new protein formats for months. Plant-based options that taste good, digest easily, and do not carry the heaviness or flavour fatigue that many people experience with traditional whey. I used to think I didn’t personally need it. Now I know better.

I am also going to track this properly. A simple two-week check: measure how I feel, how I recover, how I sleep, and whether my evening runs feel smoother. I have done enough experiments in my own health to know that consistency reveals answers quickly.

More importantly, I am doing this because I want to stay strong in my thirties, forties, fifties, and beyond. Muscle is one of the biggest predictors of healthy aging. It protects everything else. Joints, metabolism, energy, hormones. It is insurance.

And I think this is the part most people need to hear. You do not need to overhaul your diet. You do not need to triple your meal size. You do not need to eat chicken breast until you cannot look at it anymore. You just need a plan that removes friction.

For me, that starts with adding one shake a day. For someone else, it might be adding one more serving of fish, or choosing higher-protein meals when eating out.

Whatever your number is, choose the version that fits your life. The version that keeps you consistent. That is the real protein strategy.

6. Closing Thoughts

There is one thing I want to make clear before signing off.

Protein is important, but it is not the whole story. It is easy to fall into the trap of chasing efficiency. More protein. More supplements. More optimisation. A cleaner macro here, a purified compound there. But health is not built like that.

When you drink whey isolate, you are getting almost pure protein. That is useful. It solves a practical problem quickly. But it does not give you what real food gives. There is no fibre, no phytonutrients, no minerals, no antioxidants, and none of the small compounds that we still do not fully understand but know matter for long-term health.

This is why people tell you to eat fruits, vegetables, beans, and real food. They are not protein-rich, but they offer the rest of the equation. If you cut them out in the name of “optimising protein,” you win one battle but lose many others.

So I think the real question is not how much protein you can push into your day. The real question is how you want to meet your needs in a way that respects the bigger picture. You can use supplements when needed. You can fill the gaps. But the foundation should still be built on food. Whole meals. Vegetables. Fruits. Beans. Fish. Real ingredients.

We should not end up in a future where every nutrient gap is fixed by another bottle on the shelf. The goal is not to outsource your entire diet to powders and pills. The goal is to support your food habits, not replace them.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading again. It’s always a pleasure to write on Sundays.

Sometimes I wonder what is the point of writing, but every time I open this Substack, I feel proud of the last three years. I am going to treasure these pages for the rest of my life.

See you next Sunday! Cheers!
-Shan

Every Sunday, I write about what’s happening behind the scenes — how we buil…

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This week’s note is about competition. Not the kind they teach you in business school — think SWOT analysis, BCG Matrix, or Porter’s Five Forces — but the kind you feel when a new brand shows up on your feed, prices its product 50% lower, and starts outselling you. The kind that makes you question your pricing, your speed, and your strategy. I’ve realized over time that I don’t just tolerate competition. I love it. It’s the most honest signal in business — a mirror that tells you where you actually stand.

Because every industry report lies. The $500-billion market reports. The consultant projections. Even the Google Trends charts everyone screenshots to show growth. None of that reflects your reality. It doesn’t tell you how many people are actually buying, or how quickly they’re switching, or whether they’ll buy from you again next month. Competition, on the other hand, is real-time data. It’s the purest signal that something is working — either for you or against you. It’s also the only metric that can’t be faked. You can buy ads, pump vanity metrics, raise rounds, or spin PR stories, but you can’t fake what happens when another player enters your space and the numbers move.

That’s why I don’t see competition as a threat. It’s a pulse — a living, moving feedback loop that tells you what consumers are actually paying attention to, and what they’ve stopped caring about.

Today’s Reading

1. What competition really tells you

2. The reality of being undercut

3. What competition reveals about your goals

4. The Singapore problem — easy markets, fast imitators

5. How I benchmark competition

6. Framework for response — cost, innovation, community, distribution

7. The race you choose to run

Let’s start.

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