[Transcript] – The Ultimate Superfood You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

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Transcripts

Podcast from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2014/04/oceans-alive-phytoplankton/

[0:00] Introduction

[1:53] About Phytoplankton

[2:48] Why They Got Involved

[3:09] Phytoplankton's Nutritional Profile

[4:23] Bioavailability

[7:18] Discovering Different Strains

[8:12] Growing and Harvesting Process

[11:23] The Technology They Use

[13:10] Difference Between Strains of Phytoplankton

[15:09] Genetic Improvement

[19:17] Cell Stability

[25:48] Using the Phytoplankton

[28:30] Phytoplankton and Injuries

[30:34] How Ian discovered Phytoplankton

[32:30] Why get it from them

Introduction:  Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast.  We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon, and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation.  So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non-run-of-the-mill, cutting-edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Ben:  Hey, folks.  This is Ben Greenfield and we've talked about nutrient density a few times on the podcast before, but what we're gonna talk about today kinda goes to the next level when it comes to nutrient density, and I was actually completely unaware, until almost exactly a year ago, of what we're gonna talk about, until someone actually handed me a bottle of this extremely dark green substance that you're going to learn more about today and it's some very, very interesting stuff.  Intrigued me.  I found out more about it and I finally got the guy who founded the company that makes this stuff on the call today.  

Ian Clark is my guest and he has studied high, high level health concepts for the past couple of decades.  He's the owner and the CEO of Activation Products and the pioneering founder of something called Ocean's Alive Marine Phytoplankton.  So, Ian.  Thank you for coming on the call today.

Ian:  Hey, Ben.  Yeah.  Thank you for having me.  It's a pleasure.

Ben:  So, I'd like to start right here because I think this is kind of a wooh-wooh concept for a lot of people, this whole plankton type of thing.  Can you explain from a scientific, or a biological standpoint exactly what marine phytoplankton actually is?

Ian:  Yeah.  Very few people on the planet really know what it is.  They may have heard the term.  NASA did a big study on it, Jack Cousteau talked about it for, you know, decades, but, you know, sort of in passing on documentaries.  A major study was done in Europe starting in the 60s when they found out that marine phytoplankton, which is a microscopic microalgae that grows in the ocean all over the world, it is actually the foundational food for the entire life of the ocean.  So there's some 40,000 different known strains that they've discovered now and they all, you know, provided different functionality in the ocean.

The reason we got involved with marine phytoplankton is because they determine through many different clinical studies of different uses of phytoplankton that there was a couple of strains that were optimal for human nutrition, and the match for nutritional profile pretty much perfectly.

Ben:  Well, I was gonna ask you, I mean, what is it about phytoplankton that makes it, you know, such a good food, you know, in the ocean?  I mean, what's the exact nutrient profile of this stuff?

Ian:  Well, it has all the essential amino acids that you need for your nutritional profile.  It's got essential fatty acids, primarily EPA, and, depending on the strain, we have one coming up with a large amount of DHA.  So the EPA is the fuel for your brain, your nervous system, your eyes, it's for your heart.  It's just a fuel, you burn as much as you can get a hold of and it's always limited in availability and we're getting to more of the functional aspects of why the marine phytoplankton essential fatty acids and amino acids are, by far, more effective than anything else out there.  

It has all of the pigments, the plant minerals, and very specific set of enzymes, that there's one that we can't even announce right now because of patents that are being applied for, but that will be rolled out in the summertime, that information.  But these, you know, enzymes, the very specific ones, will remove oxidative stress out of your body more effectively than anything on the planet.

Ben:  Wow.

Ian:  So, there's some very exciting news coming in the future.

Ben:  Interesting.  So, in terms of the whole EPA and the fatty acid profile of this stuff, you know, there are things that, you know, vegetarian or vegan sources of fatty acids, you know, like flax seed oil is one big one, and an issue there is absorption and bioavailability.  So it's always kind of an issue, especially among people who aren't getting enough fatty acids or who, perhaps, aren't eating wild-caught fish or something like that to be able to get adequate brain-building DHA, what's kind of the bioavailability, if I can say it, status of this stuff compared to something like a flax seed or another kinda plant-based source of fatty acids?

Ian:  Well, plant-based sources, this is a plant-based source which is, interestingly enough, it's a replicating seed in the ocean that proliferates to the trillions and quadrillions, but the bioavailability is maximized because the nutrients inside each cell, and each cell is only 2 microns in size, so to get a relative aspect of that, a red blood cell is 9 microns, so it's almost five times smaller than a red blood cell.  In the inside that cell that opens up as soon as you consume it, it releases millions of nanonutrients in the microscopic world that go into your system and just proliferate all over your body.  I mean, your body knows exactly what to do with each molecule, each nutritional molecule.  So you digest it, you assimilate it, you, you know, the bioavailability, like, you say, is maximized.  We believe that you get 100% bioavailability from our product.

Now, seed oils are another thing.  It's a different type of omega.  Generally, when people press flax oil, it's damaged through the mechanical cold-pressing process and that, that disturbs the molecular size.  They oxidize, bioavailability drops off and there's all kinds of issues with that, but we have a whole different realm of dealing with seed oils in our company.  We have the only, and not to get off topic, but the only German technology that presses seed oils at the maximum level for bioavailability and stability, but back to the nutrients inside the cell, that is the most bioavailable.

Now, think about how things are supported in the life cycle, for example, in the ocean.  The, the smallest microscopic nutrient has never eaten anything else other than sunlight, the minerals in the ocean, the CO2 that's produced from the life around the planet, and the, so there’s photosynthesis and conversion of all these different nutrients into one little ball of energy, it can reproduce itself rapidly, every day, and it's just phenomenal.  So we don't harvest it out of the ocean.  We can't.

Ben:  Really?

Ian:  You can't.  No, because it's impossible to do that.  It would be in the blend, who knows where it is around the world, they had to go and select batches of ocean water, study what was in it, and choose the various different strains for study.  That took three decades.  In 1982, they discovered the nannochloropsis got a ton and which is the strain that we use for the human nutritional product and that is, that took another 20 years from 1982 to 2002 to have the advanced technology to grow it safely and correctly on land in its natural habitat.  Not in a farm, but in what's called a photobioreactor.  So this is not farm-raised or farm-grown.  This is done under super high-tech environment to create the exact natural circumstance that the marine phytoplankton would enjoy in the ocean and it won't grow otherwise.

Ben: Yeah I want to ask you a little bit more about that harvesting process, but first just to make sure I understand this properly, basically this stuff is floating around in the ocean and it's taking the seawater, it's taking minerals, it's taking sunlight, it's taking carbon dioxide, and it's basically turning that raw material into nutrients like vitamins, amino acids, fatty acids, and, you know, carotenoids, other minerals, et cetera?

Ian:  Right.

Ben:  Okay.  Gotcha.  So, if one of the components that it's using for this process is seawater, don't we kinda need to be careful about, you know, ocean pollution, you know, Fukushima, a lot of the stuff that's kinda floating around in seawater if we're eating this, in the same way we'd want to be careful if we were, say, like, you know, eating an apple that was grown in an orchard sprayed with herbicides and pesticides?

Ian:  Yeah, that's a major factor, and from radiation to every imaginable type of pollution, unfortunately has been dumped into the ocean.  So what we have is a completely sealed, environmentally safe photobioreactor system where we have ocean, we have to actually use natural ocean water, but it's filtered through two and a half kilometers of a sand, a natural filter which is the sand.  It pulls it in, comes up a well, comes into the facility, we have to, it's double, triple checked for everything imaginable that should not be in there, and in a natural condition.  It has, goes through UV, ozone.  There are no other strains of marine phytoplankton allowed to be in there.  It's microfiltered.  It goes through this really intense process until we have ultra pure ocean water and then it's inoculated in a lab environment then is brought out into the photo bioreactor and, which is all sealed and using natural sunlight to proliferate.

So, if you have any contaminations, or other bacterias, or anything in there that would disrupt it, you lose the whole batch.  So it takes 90 days to grow from start to finish, until you have enough concentration of this single strain to harvest it.  So it, this is the most pristine, cleanest possible nutrient on the planet because even organic food is subject to all of the, just look at two huge pollutants in the land-based growing of fruits and vegetables.  No matter how organic it's grown, you have 1.8 billion pounds of rubber dust, microscopic rubber dust floating up above the highways from all the tires wearing out.  You've got 50,000 flights taking off and landing of raw kerosene, jet fuel pouring into the atmosphere, let alone all of the carbon monoxide from all the cars.

So we know that the environment we live in is high-stress and we have to become more and more acutely aware of making sure that what we're getting is clean.  Plus you mentioned Fukushima with radiation that can be dropping out in the world, who knows which way the currents are going.  I'm not an expert on that, but I'm certain that there is a problem there.  So, yeah, we are hyper aware of those things and we've definitely dealt with every one of those issues.

Ben:  So you actually had this, what you call photo bioreactor built, and you're actually growing this phytoplankton in what amounts to almost like a filtered, ultra pure ocean water, and then you've got natural sunlight, and so you kinda have this closed off environment where you're creating this stuff without the pollution, and the waste, and the heavy metals, et cetera?

Ian:  Yeah.  Well, fortunately for us, we didn't have to come up with all that technology.  We have an exclusive agreement with the world's number one producer of marine phytoplankton in Europe and they have gone, they are the ones, they are the geniuses, researchers, scientists, engineers.  

The team that put this together is phenomenal.  So much so that they were able to apply, and if you'd never heard of this, but most people don't know what it is, but a novel functional food is a very rare thing.  So that means never before done, it is a functional food in the human body and you apply to the EU, to the European Union, for that status and almost every company that applies for that gets rejected.  ‘Cause if you get that approved, you've got pure gold because the EU is so strict on these things.  It took four years for the engineers and the scientists to prepare to even apply for that.  You have to pay 1.4 million Euros to the EU to do the testing on your product to tell you whether it's going to be accepted or not.  And both of the strains that were submitted for approval were both accepted by the EU this year.  So this is a huge breakthrough, you know.  No other micro algae anywhere in the world comes even close to that kind of certification.

Ben:  Now, you mentioned this a few times already about a strain of phytoplankton that you specifically use and I'm curious why you used this particular strain that you use and what kind of the difference is between strains?  Why you'd choose one strain versus another for delivery, you know, into the human body?

Ian:  Well, that research was done in the University of Cadiz in the south of Spain and this strain they were using was discovered in 1982 by a Dr. Lubien.  And what he was looking for was, like as far as for human nutrition, was a digestible cell wall.  So there's different cellulose cell walls that are not digestible.  There's diatoms that are not digestible.  So you'd have to crack it open, you have to do all these things. The nano crops has got a ton of, it's a very soft cell wall that's instantly digestible in human stomach and that immediately release that, so that's one of the big criterias.  The main criteria was to make sure that it had the maximum amount of all of those things you would like to see for your human nutrition profile, and that's what they were looking for.  There were other strains that were okay, but they weren't absolutely the greatest.

 So when you're gonna go into a very expensive operation like a photo bioreactor setup, which is tens of millions of Euros just to set up a basic one, the, the fact is you want to make sure that whatever you're growing in there is gonna be the greatest of the greatest because, otherwise, why would you do it, right?  Well, that's how they determine that they were, they're meticulous out of, the entire university over there is actually dedicated to marine science and I've toured the facility.  It's an incredible thing to see.  They've got full time staff every day keeping all of these strains alive.  Every 15 days, they have to change the little dishes that they're in to keep them going as they're studying them and going on.  Have you ever heard of genetic selection?

Ben:  Yeah.

Ian:  Or genetic improvement?

Ben:  Mhmm.  Yeah.  Absolutely.

Ian:  Yeah.  In the industry, it's, a lot of people don't know, but I had actually never heard of it myself until I went to Europe and I was wandering around the photobioreactor one day and the head guy came up and he said, “Have you ever heard of genetic improvement?”  And I said, “Well, that sound very good,” and I was like, “Genetic modification?”  He goes, “No.”  He said it's the exact opposite of genetic modification.  Genetic modification is where you attempt to go in and alter DNA or blend different DNAs together to accomplish some further goal of improvement.  Well, I personally would be very scared of that because I think that men messing with creation is not a great idea, especially at a DNA level, but it goes on all the time and many of the seeds now that are planting our crops are GMO, and so we've run the other direction from that.

Genetic improvement in the marine phytoplankton world is astounding and it's only been done one time, and it's been done at this facility where there's a natural phenomena that happens every year.  If you were to plant a garden with the best soil of microbes and minerals and all the good things in your soil, and you had heirloom organic seeds and your planting your rows of tomatoes, and cucumbers, and so on, at the end of the harvest time in the fall when you're picking all your fruits and vegetables, if you had a two million dollar lab set up, or somebody that had like that, you could take the seeds from all your vegetables that you harvested, and fruit, and determine by analysis which were the better of them all.  So there's a phenomena, 15% improvement of 10% of the garden is what happens every year.  So 10% of your fruits and vegetables are 15% better than the entire rest of the garden, but there's no way that you and I can determine that because we're not geared for that.  We don't have money to go on, I mean nobody's going to do it.  

So what they found at a year over year, it will do that, year over year.  15% on top of the 15% this year.  In 20 years from now, you would have a garden that would blow everybody's mind with the beauty, the taste, the energy you get from it.  You know, they go like, “How do you do this,” right?  So they were able to do this in the marine phytoplankton bioreactor facility because every single day, the marine phytoplankton replicates, and they can check it for genetic selection.  That means you don't wait a year, you wait a day, and they did eight months of genetic selection and replanting the higher grade of the same strain that was naturally occurring just from creation until they had the whole entire bioreactor only planted with the absolute top level.  And in earlier years, they tried different tweaking, you know, you try this and that to try to create an even finer environment for the marine phytoplankton to get higher quality.  They couldn't even get a 1% improvement over what was already amazingly high-quality coming out of the ocean way back.  So now they've been able to take that ultra high quality and they estimate a 35% increase, which is on an exponential curve.  35% doesn't like much, but it's thousands of times better.

Ben:  Yeah.  Interesting.  So you've basically got this strain of marine phytoplankton that matches the human nutritional profile, and you're growing in this bioreactor, kinda protecting it from pollution in the water, and toxins, and climate change, and stuff like that, but these are living cells.  I mean, you know, there's literally, you know, if I understand this correctly, billions or trillions of cells in these marine phytoplankton sources, right?

Ian:  Right.  Yeah, in one drop of our Ocean's Alive product, which is, not all, you know, just the percentage of the marine phytoplankton in there, ‘cause it's stabled in a very intellectual property-based sea mineral combo, that has 5 Billion individual cells in one single drop, so the whole bottle is 10 Trillion.  Yeah.  It's actually quadrillions.

Ben:  Okay.  So you've got all these cells and, cells, I know this, can be unstable once you kinda take them out of their natural environment just like, say, something like fish oil can be unstable once you've put in a bottle and tossed it on a shelf or something like that.  So how are you actually ensuring that the cells don't especially die once you package them up?

Ian:  Okay.  Well, each of the plant cells which is a living cell, but not an animal, it's a plant life that replicates itself.  Like instead of planning a seed at the start of the season and getting thousands of seeds at the end, as I said, it does it every day.  So the shelf life is almost zero on fresh harvested marine phytoplankton.  You know, you would, a day, day and a half, you've got a complete mess, you're throwing it all in the garbage.  If you harvest it and you have it just sitting there without replicating.

So, while it's in the photobioreactor, it's moving the entire time.  It's enjoying CO2 that's all sequestered, super pure.  It's enjoying the sunlight.  It's off-gassing huge amounts of oxygen and it gets to a certain level, they harvest it, they spin it in a centrifuge system, a very high-tech centrifuge that knows the exact speed to just get the water from all around the cell, but to leave the water inside the cell.  So each one of those little cells have the tiniest amount of water inside and then it comes out like thick bubble gum.  So it goes in like a liquid, comes out like thick bubble gum, and that is called a biomass paste and it's just quadrillions the power of quadrillions of these phytoplankton cells.

So, traditionally, they would take that and put it through what's called a lyophilization process which is a very high-tech type of freeze drying, nothing like what you see with regular freeze drying powders.  It takes a long time to get this lyophilization done and as it's being done, it's completely stable and that's how they were stabilizing it.  They still do it that way for various purposes.  That powder has to be put into a vacuum pack, kept in a cool place, and kept totally dark, or it will begin to go off within about six months.  So when I proposed a discovery that I found down in the bottom end, into the underworld, you know, way down under, I should say.  Not underworld.  That wasn't very nice. (laughs)

Ben:  You didn't go to hell to get your phytoplankton.

Ian:  No, we went south of the equator to discover a major thing that had happened in Australia where they had found out how to stabilize any green living substance for an indefinite amount of time.  At that time, they'd already had a 10 year shelf life and there had been no change, and we're talking about intensive testing of the product.  You know, not just saying, “Oh, it's cool.  Looks great.  Smells great.”  No, it's tested to the max and because you're talking about consuming something and you don't want to put something that could be rancid or going off into your system. So that discovery, I brought that to Europe because I was given allowance to use it and I, when I presented to the scientists in Europe they just laughed at me and said, “You can't.  That's ridiculous.  Don't tell us about that.  That cannot be done.  We've tried every which way from Sunday to stabilize this and the only way you can do is lyophilization.”  So I was rejected.  

A second team of scientists that we approached, they were more into, you know, an upstart situation than trying to copy the real experts.  They were, they said, okay, you know, they said the same thing to me, but they didn't reject.  They said, “If you want to waste your money, and you want to send that stuff to us and we do this and we do that and we put it together the way you tell, then fine, it won't work, and if we give it to you, you can't sell it because it will be a liability until we have thoroughly tested this and proved to ourselves that this cool”.  I went, “Okay.  Great.  Fine.”  So I didn't.  It wasn't some massive amount of money, it was thousands of dollars, but it was no big deal, right.

So we did that.  It took, that took about four months to complete because of all the shipping time, and waiting, and back and forth, and they got back to me, actually after the first week, and they said, “It looks like it's stable, but we can't tell.”  That's way, like it was a two month window.  They said if it goes two months, it will go for an indefinite amount of time.  So at the two month point, the extremely good news came in and they said, “You have got something that is a major deal.”  This is, we're finally able to get a fresh harvested product instantly stable and it doesn't change because, when you lyophilize it, you're still removing all of the moisture out of that biomass until you have a completely dry original phytoplankton powder, and they would grind it up and that's how it's sold in a powder form where they put it to a tablet and that's a good product.  The powder is fine.  It's not as a high level as the liquid because the liquid has never ever been touched or processed.

So the destabilization process ensures that there's no contamination they can get in, no bacteria, weird stuff, no E. coli.  Nothing can get in there and survive, and it's squished down into like a little diamond in the stabilization process so that all the nutrients are kept intact.  When you rehydrate it in regular water and take out of the solution, and look at it under the microscope, you can't tell any difference between the day that it was produced and harvested to that moment.  Now, you don't let it sit around at your glass of water all day.  That's a crazy, right?  You want to drink it within 15 minutes because that's, it just like going out into your garden and picking a salad.  You don't want to sit around for a week or a day.  You want to eat it right away, in 15 minutes you get full volume, you know, some plant life source.  So this enables us to have that original life energy stored in there.  Now the question is, will these phytoplankton keep growing?  After that?  No, they will not keep growing after that because they have been suspended in, like a suspended animation.  When you release them, they're to be consumed, right?

Ben:  Gotcha.

Ian:  Because, like when you harvest…that's…

Ben:  Yeah.  I remember actually asking you when you gave me a bottle to try out just to see how I felt and I had thought about like putting in my bike bottle, and taking it on a long bike ride, or using it during Ironman, or something like that, but it turns out that a better way to do it is to just like use it before you actually go out and do a workout or, for example, like in the morning right, when you wake up.  So this isn't something folks would necessarily want to like put in a bottle and kinda let it sit there all day, right?

Ian:  That's correct.  Yeah.

Ben:  Okay.  Got it.  Okay, so you've got this strain of marine phytoplankton.  You're growing it in the bioreactor.  You're now stabilizing it in this liquid, ionic solution and then it's in a, it's basically it's in this little dropper bottle.  Now, once you've got this delivery mechanism down, how do people actually use this?  I mean, is this one of those things where you take like one dropper full if you're feeling sick?  I mean, is it something that you take every day?  What exactly is the way that folks can use this?  And kind of as a follow up to that, what are you looking for?  Like what can you expect to feel if you're using phytoplankton?

Ian:  Okay.  So on the uses side first, it's just like, it is a food, it's a whole food.  So you would consume it just like a food.  I like to have it, one, two, or three times a day depending on how active I am that day.  If people that are doing big projects, this is the ultimate brain food because this feeds command central and when you feed command central and give it all the nutrients it wants, your cognitive level goes way up, your body's ability to monitor its own functions and perform at a much higher level is improved dramatically over the night, in the first 90 day period that you take it.

Ben:  Now, can I interrupt you for just a second ‘cause I don't want to get too wooh-wooh.  When you say feed command central, what do you mean by that?  Like are there specific nutrients that are being used by neuronal cells?  Or how exactly is this working?

Ian:  Yes.  Yes.  So your brain wants amino acids and the essential fatty acids together in the combination.  That unlocks the blood-brain barrier to allow the nutrients in and they're already in the nano realm.  So they will go, and your brain burns these fuels all day long.  It's just like if you just, if a person does a tremendous amount of work, they're burning a lot of fuel.  The essential fatty acids, the amino acids, the magnesium, all those things are burning and if you don't replete that all the time, you lose brain power.  So this ensures a full power to the brain, and when I'm talking about command central that is your brain, to operate your whole brain through your spinal cord, and all the trunks of branches of all the nervous system going throughout your whole body, is able to be far more efficient at keeping track of everything 'cause it's just got all the things to fire on.  You've got all the fuel that you're firing, all the processes on without getting too scientific.

Ben:  Okay.  Got it.  

Ian:  And everybody feels it.   If they’ll consistent, they take it for 90 days, they will be a different person cognitively within 90 days for sure, and the other, and it also floods the whole rest of your body.  So this is the nutrient that goes in without an inflammatory response because there is literally no waste matter for it to really put out.

Ben:  I have a question about injuries.  We're seeing like stem cell injections, stem cell therapy, things of that nature, these are obviously cells that you're eating.  Have you seen any studies or have you seen any evidence in terms of like recovery, post-workout inflammation, things of that nature?

Ian:  I wouldn't say that that's where we've done any study at all.  There is a known fact that material to build stem cells is in microalgaes.  There is even a company called Stemtech, but we have done no clinicals on that and with our product to prove yay or nay, or say yes to that answer.

Ben:  Okay.  Gotcha.  That would be super interesting.  I just, you know, you see something like this with that many billions of living cells and, you know, you'd think that it have some kind of an effect.  So in terms of usage, is it literally like a dropper full a day?  Or how exactly do you use it once you get it?

Ian:  Well, I always suggest that people start with a few drops, you know, that pills, like it literally it just a few drops and they put that in a glass of water.  They also got, they need to pay attention to their palate.  Some people love ocean flavor stuff, other people can't stand it.  So it just depends, they've gotta find, you know, any juice.  It just makes juice taste better.  If you have a favorite juice, use it.  It makes it quite a bit better.

Ben:  Yeah.

Ian:  And we recommend, the average is 15 drops in a day.  So that's your maintenance only.  If you're under high duress, you're gonna do 75 drops in a day, like five dropper fulls.  So you're really gonna be reading your own body and seeing where you need it and just play with it.  Experiment and see how much energy you can store up because it does go in like recharging the body of the candle, like rebuilding the body of the candle.  So you have a very stout, super clean fuel throughout your whole body.  That's the plan is to have that clean burning fuel in your system so you don't have all that inflammatory stuff that goes on otherwise.  And you want to remove oxidative stress, you want to, you know, support the immune system, you want to be detoxing properly, those three functions alone are supported by the phytoplankton.

Ben:  Gotcha.  I'm just curious, how did you discover phytoplankton?

Ian:  That's a quirky kind of a story, I had some, I had an MLM back in the day when I was really searching for something like the Holy Grail, you know.  I was, there's got to be something out there.  That's just the thing, right.  Well, you know, we know that there's no one thing that is the thing, but you go good, great, greater, and greatest, and I was always thinking, “Man, the greatest is out there. How do I ever find it?”  This guy got a hold of me and he showed me this video where this guy was saying, “Hey, I took this marine phytoplankton and I got rid of the worst type of lung cancer.  I was going to be dead eight months, and blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff.  

So I was like, wow that sounds pretty impressive, but it was from this MLM.  So they sent me the case of juice.  It was just fruit juice with this tiniest amount of phytoplankton inside this great big bottle.  I had 38 milligrams or something.  So I downed the whole bottle, never felt anything, but when I thought to myself the next morning when I woke up, if the MLM has won, and I'm not against MLMs, they're a wonderful way of marketing, getting people to learn about, you know, products, we don't use it ourselves at this point, but it's a way of educating and I thought,  “There's got to be somebody out there that has the real thing,” and sure enough, I went Google and only two weeks prior to that, somebody put a website up in Vancouver, Canada about this super concentrated, raw marine phytoplankton in a powder form.  And that's how I found out about it.

Ben:  Interesting.

Ian:  Through that guy, and that guy still a very good friend of mine, his name is David Hunter, and he lives in the east coast of Canada, he is deeply involved in the studies of marine phytoplankton and he connected all the dots for us through Europe and made sure that we had everything all smooth.  He was all, he believed in what I told him [0:32:19] ______, he's not a scientist, you know.  Yeah.  That's how I found out about that.  That was in the kind of the end of 2006 going into the beginning of 2007.

Ben:  Okay.  Got it.  Now, I'm gonna put a link in the show notes where folks can go and get this phytoplankton that you're talking about, but why couldn't we just go to Amazon and grab phytoplankton off of there, or from the local health food store?

Ian:  Well, there's very few companies the produce it right now.  We're the only company that's completely certified on every level, from ISO-2000:2005, all the way through the EU certifications, and so on.  So there are some out there, you will not find anything that is stable in the liquid with the original full marine phytoplankton single strain.  There's a couple of companies that do an extract.  I have not seen any results from that personally, but that may not be the case with other people.  There are some powders available in market, but the issue with the powders is whether that company has made sure that that powder was kept in a super stable environment in a vacuum pack, in the dark, in a cooler, and quite often that's not the case.  So it's the product could be, have already lost 50% of its value, or 75% of its value, or even have gone into a rancid condition by the time they get it.  So that's one of the issues.  I never know.  I don't take any marine phytoplankton powder unless I know it's absolutely fresh from the bioreactor that I personally picked up right from ourselves kind of thing, right?

Ben:  Right.

Ian:  So it's, you know, it's not well known.  It's just, there's Sunfood, Sunfood out of California has our product in their bottle in a private label called Sunfood Oceans Alive, or they call it Sunfood Marine Phytoplankton sometimes, and you'll find that in the store shelf.  That's the exact product.  So people can find it in some of the stores, it'll come more in the stores in the very near future, but for the most part it is sold online.  The vast majority of our sales have been direct to consumer online.

Ben:  Okay.  Got it.  Cool.  Well, I know you're also offering, you guys pretty much let people try it out.  They take a dose and, what you say is, “Take one dose a day for 60 days and feel the best you've ever felt in the last 20 years or you pay nothing.”  So you guys have a pretty good guarantee on this stuff.  I liked it quite a bit and it's, you know, the taste actually, I thought it just tasted like a really, really dense kale shake, almost.  Just like some very dense greens.  

So what I'll do is over in the show notes for any of you listening in, over it bengreenfieldfitness.com/ocean.  That's bengreenfieldfitness.com/ocean, I will, I'll show you where you can get this Oceans Alive stuff, try out some marine phytoplankton, see how you feel on this super dense, super food, and I look forward to hearing from our listeners and our fans how they actually feel after they try some of this stuff out.  So, Ian, thank you so much for coming on the call today.

Ian:  Yeah.  Thank you, Ben.  And also, we're adding in the, a special coupon with you so they'll get an even better price from you, buying it online.  So that's something that, a special that we can help out with.

Ben:  Oh, nice.  Awesome.  Okay.  Well, I'll also put that coupon over in the show notes, again at bengreenfieldfitness.com/ocean.  So, until then, this is Ben Greenfield and Ian Clark signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.  Thanks, Ian!

Ian:  Thank you, Ben.

This is bengreenfieldfitness.com for even more cutting-edge fitness, nutrition, and performance advice.

 

 

You’ve probably never heard of it.

It’s at the very bottom of the food chain.

Yet it feeds over 99% of all ocean life and supports 100% of all life on the face of the planet.

If this unique superfood ceased to exist, life on Earth would rapidly die off.

According to NASA research, it is responsible for producing up to 90% of the Earth’s oxygen… (compare this to a mature tree which only creates enough oxygen for two human beings)…

Its main “job” is to turn inorganic raw material (like seawater, minerals, sunlight and CO2) into over 100’s of living edible, organic nutrients…(This includes vitamins, bioavailable minerals, all amino acids, essential fatty acids, carotenoids and more)…

Now – imagine how you would react when you put just one dose (a total of 170 billion cells in a single dropper) of this superfood into your body. You’re about to find out.

This stuff is marine phytoplankton, and in today’s interview with Activation Products CEO and Founder Ian Clark, you’ll discover:

-What is marine phytoplankton?

-What type of nutrients are in phytoplankton?

-Aren’t the oceans polluted, and how can you eat phytoplankton without getting this pollution?

-What about bioavailability issues with phytoplankton?

-Are there different species of phytoplankton, and some type that is best?

-How is this stuff harvested?

-And much more.

Read more https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2014/04/oceans-alive-phytoplankton/

Ask Ben a Podcast Question

One thought on “[Transcript] – The Ultimate Superfood You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

  1. suzanne says:

    Ben, I want to try this amazing product. Listening to you today on 4/18/20 with Darin Olien. My question: Since this contains Vit. D, magnesium, etc. how the heck do I determine if I still need my many supplements and at what dosages? A few include: Fish oil with DPA and EPA, D, K, dessicated liver (for A), rhodiola, ubiquinol, curcumin (for pain – 69 age female) and more….
    I listen to you and Mercola almost daily. A nutritionist was no help. Forget a primary care doctor!!! Naturopaths have also been less than helpful. Got the DNA testing, yearly lab tests…. I really struggle with this. I live not too far from you in Port Townsend, WA. My Dad taught WWII pilots to fly at Gonzaga. Thanks!

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