A serial entrepreneur, Nicolina first displayed her gift for enterprise by selling frogs to her classmates in kindergarten! She has since undertaken a variety of startups and ventures ranging from property to biological testing.
GlycanAge is a simple, groundbreaking test that analyzes your glycobiology to determine your biological age. With over 70% of diseases being preventable, the team at GlycanAge believe that our health is in our hands.
In this episode, we are introduced to glycans and biological aging - and reversing it - and consider the links to everything from diabetes to perimenopause. We also discussed the true effects of dieting and exercise and how GlycanAge testing can help clients to prevent chronic illnesses and promote health and longevity. Please enjoy.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Welcome to the Longevity & Lifestyle podcast, Nina. It's a pleasure to welcome you here today.

Nina Lauc: Thank you, Claudia. I really appreciate you having me.

Claudia Von Boeselager: I'd like to start with what it was like growing up with two parents who are scientists and created a brain awareness week in your hometown in Croatia.
Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Nina Lauc: Yeah. So I probably couldn’t even put the titles before their name correctly for a long period of time. They would always ask me in school and I would get it wrong. My mother's neuroscientist. It was really her initiative. And it was coming from the fact that school books were created 10, 20 years in the past. So when you're teaching, you have to follow the script. You don't have an opportunity to teach about everything new that's going on in all of the latest research. So she wanted to expand the curc - the curr -

Claudia Von Boeselager: Curriculum, yeah.
Nina Lauc: Yeah, and make it more accessible to more people. So they organize this, which is like a one week long - daily from morning to evening - lectures about the brain.
And every time it was a different topic from foods to how our brain responds to foods, to everything, flavors, our connection with owls and everything else.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Wow.

Nina Lauc: So it was kind of cool for me to go and see that. I think the first one was when I was about 11.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Those were the weeks you spent in childhood learning all about the brain.
Clearly this has been since an early age and how revolutionary for your parents as well to come up with an initiative like this. And we're many people coming to this? I mean, what type of people would be in the audience?

Nina Lauc: I’m from a quite small town in Croatia, probably 80,000 people. And it was a nice student town.
You had a lot of universities and young people, and it would be mainly students, but then they would bring their parents and there'd be all kinds of other people just coming in and enjoying it. And I always enjoyed what my parents do, and they always integrated me somewhere. And I'm also highly dyslexic, same as my mother, so I learn in a different way. I have to have, kind of, more interactive images, storyline, than the classical textbooks.

Claudia Von Boeselager: A lot of creativity that comes through as well. So you have other superpowers, which I think is really cool. And we'll talk about GlycanAge, the company you co-founded and are CEO of shortly, but first, can you talk about your incredible serial entrepreneur journey that you've taken, from the childhood having two scientists as parents and trying out different businesses successfully over the years?
Can you talk a bit about your journey?

Nina Lauc: Yeah, I think that was always the confusion I had two super-intelligent parents, and then I was a dyslexic kid and I did very poorly at school. So it was a complete mismatch in a way, but I always had this other natural gift, which was more entrepreneurship oriented. So I think I always struggled with the classical academia, but I did really well on everything else I did on the side of that.
Claudia Von Boeselager: You and Richard Branson, right? He has the same situation.

Nina Lauc: A lot of others, it's, like, a really - we just don't fit into that environment and we kind of, it doesn't really do you good. My mother is also, dyslexic. And she went to her doctor's degree, but she had a father who literally beat her every time she had bad grades. And for my generation, they come from this new, your kids be free and what they're supposed to be.
That's why I ended up in art school when I probably would have done better in biology! So I think that -

Claudia Von Boeselager: You think it was too liberal by then?

Nina Lauc: Yeah, it was probably a little bit too liberal. I had little, like, ventures as a child from kindergarten. I would collect tadpoles. They grew into those small frogs and then I sold them to other kids.

Claudia Von Boeselager: I love that.

Nina Lauc: And then I had hamsters probably at age 11 or something, and they, I kind of created a little farm where eventually there were 50 of them, but I wouldn't sell them to boys - but you have to eventually - the house would be full of hamsters. And that was really, really good until we went on holiday and there was a lady who came to water the flowers for us and feed the hamsters and when she was feeding them, she would open up all the cages and then go for the food. And then by the time she walked back, all the hamsters were out of the cages. So when we came back, there were like 10 hamsters in the cages and 40 running around the house. It was amazing. I had to, yeah, I had to shut down the business... after that one.

Claudia Von Boeselager: One way to end the business - the goods escaped! That's really, really cool.
Before we jump into GlycanAge in more detail, I'd like to ask you some rapid-fire questions, Nina.
Thinking of the word successful, who is the first person that comes to mind and why?

Nina Lauc: So for me, it's not the traditional people you would name. ‘Cause it has to have a really good other meaning, more moral compass behind it.
So I would say Dame Stephanie, Shirley. She's an engineer from the 1960s, 80s who created the first women’s software company.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Wow.

Nina Lauc: And took it to a $8 billion business eventually, but she started in her kitchen with no money, employing women working from home and even hiding the fact they were women. She would call herself Steve and that's how they got more business.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Wow.

Nina Lauc: Yeah. And they were called freelance programmers, I think.

Claudia Von Boeselager: And why do you find it so particularly inspiring? So, just because she had the courage to, to go out and do that, or because of what she built, what are the particulars about her that really inspire you?

Nina Lauc: Well, she had an amazing character. And she was the first. And it didn't matter how society was back then. And back then you needed your husband's approval to open up a bank account. She really did something amazing. And initially all of the people employed were women, women working from home and back then that was really something rebellious to do. Some would not tell their husband they're working.
But they built it into this huge business where they even programmed the black box in airplanes. And that was given women to working from home. So say - I think what she did was absolutely amazing. And then there's other people I liked like Muhammad Yunus, who's more behind the micro-financing and the whole movement around that. He even got a Nobel prize for it.
So I like the concept of the social business, where it's not just about the profit. We have a really good purpose incorporated into that.
I obviously love Richard Branson, that’s because he was the first dyslexic entrepreneur I learned of. So I was obsessed with him for a little period of time!

Claudia Von Boeselager: Yeah. I've read his books. I love his work as well, and his personality is just so gregarious. It's amazing.
Do you have any particular morning routine to start your day as a success, Nina?

Nina Lauc: I wouldn't say as a success, I would say as my way. And that would be to enjoy a coffee in a calm environment. It kind of sets me up for a non-stressful day - no matter how stressful it is - that kind of 20 minutes after the coffee, 20 minutes to really enjoy it. And that's all I do. And I just think!

Claudia Von Boeselager: And then do you think about work or do you try to focus on visualization? Like how you want your day to go? Is there anything in particular you think about?

Nina Lauc: I think about everything that's ahead in the day, but in a more, kind of, calm way. And it's probably a very Croatian thing to do.
We will sometimes drink coffee for hours, so -

Claudia Von Boeselager: They have a good quality of life there.

Nina Lauc: So I took it down from like a couple hours to 20 minutes.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Exactly. You've done the London pace of the Croatian coffee thing. Yeah. But I agree that it's so important to have that calm before the storm almost, right, to start your day. So, yeah.
What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love, Nina?

Nina Lauc: I like to run at night. I don't know why, but it, kind of and it can be 11:00pm. It's more of, like, also space to think and to get some fitness in when I usually don't have time during the day. It's really, kind of, this alone time and where I am at, it's quite safe, but also, kind of, the parks are really nice - or going around them ‘cause they closed them anyhow.
But I don't know. It's something I do quite often. Maybe it's a little bit weird.

Claudia Von Boeselager: No, I think it's quite interesting. And you basically use it to think and then I to get your exercise in as well. And is it just because of timing or is there something calming that you find about night running?

Nina Lauc: It's something calming because there's not a lot of people around.
So I get this alone time.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Yeah. Oh, very interesting.
Nina, in the last five years or so. Is there a new belief or behavior or habit that has improved your life?

Nina Lauc: There's probably many. One thing that was really good for me, maybe about 7 years ago, was this meditation called Vipassana. And it's like a 10 day silent meditation retreat, where you literally rewire your brain in the way, but in a way, how you respond to stimulants.
So there’s a positive and a negative where you realize - where your body realizes - that nothing is permanent, no pain or pleasure. I think that helped me really deal with stress as an entrepreneur because before I would lose months of sleep, I would constantly be anxious or nearing a burnout. And a lot of it was self-created or recreated and -

Claudia Von Boeselager: Yeah.

Nina Lauc: Well, that really had a permanent lasting impact on me in the way that, when I came back from the retreat, my environment didn’t change but I just wasn't stressed. It slipped away. If I had a bad day today, tomorrow is going to be a better day. Or if it's a bad morning, the evening is going to be a new evening.
So it kind of changed my perspective.

Claudia Von Boeselager: So the one 10 day course. And do you do a daily practice or was that one 10 day course still - has the knock-on effects?

Nina Lauc: I do it every couple years. The prescription is once a year and supposed to be two hours a day. I don't have that time. So I do maybe a couple a week, but I think just this rewiring that happened there was permanent in a way.
I didn't expect it at all. I didn't believe in meditation and I was super hyperactive. So it took me six days just to learn how to meditate, to start with, but they did this one thing that works great, where they kind of make you stay in the same posture for an hour three times a day.
And they prepare you mentally the day before. They say, you know, you're going to feel pain. Like, pain in the back or pain in the leg and - no pain is permanent. It won't be there forever. And then you're like, okay, I get the concept. But when your body goes through that - so it's a connection of body and mind - it really rewires it. Your body learns that this stimulant is really going to go away.
So I had like a 40 minutes dead leg, where it was absolute agony, and then it turned into pleasure and it was 10 minutes of pleasure. And then it went back to pain, but it was 10 minutes of pleasure as well! So, my body really realized that nothing is permanent and it really helped me survive as an entrepreneur afterwards, ‘cause you deal with an incredible amount of uncertainty, anxiety, risk, and living through that is hard unless you know how to manage stress levels and anxiety.

Claudia Von Boeselager: That sounds amazing. And if I understood you correctly, so, one is how to re-define what is actually pain. So if there's anxiety and stress and things like that as well, but would you say it also increased your pain threshold?

Nina Lauc: Maybe, in terms of you not recreating it. So I think the problem is when you experience something negative, you keep having this subversion of it's going to happen again.
Then you recreate it. I did this with sleep. I had, like, one poor day of sleep and then went to bed the next day and thought, oh, I'm going to have a poor day of sleep again. And then I had six months of poor sleep. Until I read the book with a woman who had 14 years of poor sleep, until, in the end, she realized the only thing keeping her from sleeping was her mind.
So the mind is really powerful and we're the only creature that can self-create stress. If you're an animal running from a threat, you're just going to be stressed in that period running from a threat. But we actually are stressed all the time because of all kinds of stupid things of, like, what is that person going to think about us or what's going to happen tomorrow?
It's not - we're not running from any threat, but we're living as we are. So that - that I think helps manage that better.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Oh, I really like what you said there, yeah. We create our own realities, right? So we create it as stressful or not as stressful as well. And it's our choice, what we choose to focus on. So yeah, I'm still a student on this journey trying to understand it better, but wise words, Nina.
I'd like to change gears and dig into the incredible work that you're doing at GlycanAge, but first would like to start with a quote from your website that I really liked. And I quote: “Health prevention is unfortunately still a very small segment of our healthcare system, less than 5%. And most prevention happens outside of the system (wellness), while over 70% of disease is preventable. This means our health is in our hands. To guide it correctly, we need the right tools. Tools that can warn us of upcoming problems before it's too late.”
Can you talk about this incredible quote and some of the statistics as well and what you're seeing happening in the overall healthcare system?

Nina Lauc: I wrote that when somebody asked me why I'm doing what I'm doing now, and I think for me the journey, well, it started with my father's research and he was convincing me to join in on this for about a decade.
But I think the first time he told me about it I was about twenty, so I didn't really care about age or aging. It was more about not admitting my age!

Claudia Von Boeselager: Or trying to be a little bit older, right?

Nina Lauc: Yeah, saying you’re older than you are. But then, I think putting it into more perspective, what it really is, it's - aging is a decline in function.
And what we do now, we wait until it gets severe. So it turns into a particular disease. And then we treat the symptom of it, or we treat the problem while the cause is actually coming from this initial decline. That perspective is still a bit of a taboo in a way I think, because of what happened in this anti-aging space, it's like, it needs a rebranding, it's been wrongly branded. It's like a stigma. It's not something you want to say, oh, I'm treating my biological aging. It sounds like plastic surgery.

Claudia Von Boeselager: It sounds like you’re pretty old - exactly - already.

Nina Lauc: And nobody thinks about it as health prevention, but that's what it really is. And if we're working on that before things start to break down we’re really managing our health to be healthier for longer. And I think for me, all the other businesses I had were very successful financially. And I think I always looked for a little thing there that was motivating beyond that. I would get pretty bored as soon as we did so well, and I could never get bored doing this ‘cause there's so many exciting things happening around it.
And it is a tough space because if you're going to any type of healthcare route or NHS, there's no space for prevention. They're just putting out fires and it's this whole contradiction that's going to take a very long time for them to change. And also, healthcare is seen as something that somebody is taking care of us, but really your doctor's not gonna eat the food for you or cook it for you or take you out for a run or all of these things. It's you. So I think that's where the mismatch is as well.

Claudia Von Boeselager: I completely agree because I think they call it healthcare, but it's almost disease care, right? The way the system currently is is that - have the disease, get the diagnosis and then take the pill that a lot of the time, it's not going to actually cure you, righ?.
It might help or prolong things or alleviate some of the pain in the short term and different areas. So I also think - really interesting - Dr. Jason Fung in Toronto. He made a really valid point. I think that, you know, if you look at the medical training of most doctors, if at all that they have, in their five to seven years of medical training, one hour of nutritional training - that is already doing really well.
So one hour in seven years, and actually it's the medicine we feed our body every day. So I think there is slowly picking up this trend and shift in thinking around so many things are preventable. It's what you do consistently on a day-to-day basis. And then through the help of tools that your company provides.
And I'd love to talk about that. Now, can you talk a bit about what is GlycanAge? Why did you found it, and why is it so important as an indicator of biological health?

Nina Lauc: Glycans are a very neglected space in our biology, but they're hugely important. So you probably know about them because you have an ABO blood group because of glycans or blood cells. They're very important in making us individually unique. And that was the first also successful personalized medicine was blood transfusion. And also right now, we have this one size fits all, but it doesn't fit our biology. And with GlycanAge, we look at these sugars, but sugars on your immune cells as a structural component, and they have a power to change your feature from more pro-inflammatory to more anti-inflammatory.
And then when we look at this with aging, it's really the accumulation of damage here, looking at over-activating the immune system over time. And then you have this low grade systemic inflammation, which stays and increases with age. But it's moldable. So it's something we have an influence over and we can change, and we already know how you can change it.
So not just that we can tell you that you have a problem, so a high biological age or infla-aging, but also what you can do to change it and reverse the trend into going backwards.

Claudia Von Boeselager: That's really exciting. And can you explain for people that are not that familiar, Nina, what exactly is a glycan, maybe in a little bit more detail, and why this is such a successful measure for biological age?

Nina Lauc: Yeah. Glycans are sugars, but not the sweet sugars. We can't put them in tea or coffee, they’re sugars as a structural component of our cells, and all of our cells have sugars. And the most exciting thing about them is that they have this complete picture where about, we know 40 to 50% is influenced by genes, and everything else is behavior in the environment and even past environment for epigenetic influences.
So it gives us a very holistic view of what's going on. And in this case, we're looking at antibodies. So it's glycans and IgG, or IgG glycanization. And it's the most abundant antibody we have in blood, and it's key to our immune function. And our immune system keeps us alive. So if we can keep it younger and healthier for longer, then we know already it correlates with lifespan and healthspan, but we also know that you can move the needle.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Can you talk about biological age contributors? So some people - there’s results and you have testimonials on your website - have a biological age as a result of your GlycanAge testing, that is - say they're 50 years old and they're coming back as 20 something. And I'm sure you see also cases where somebody is maybe 40 coming back as a biological age of 70.
So what would you say are the main contributing factors that influence that and what would be a typical advice that you would give? You have, I believe, consultants in place that help one, when one receives the test results to optimize biological age.

Nina Lauc: Yep. So our dataset was based on 150,000 people that - some were followed over 20/30 years.
So we had samples from biobanks. There were some collected 30 years ago. And including TwinsUK. So we have a really good baseline for over 27 different populations. We know that this average, so your GlycanAge, on average, is nine years older or nine years younger. So there's far more variation than, for example, epigenetic age, which really seems to be following your chronological age with a smaller error margin.
And this variation is your biological age. So having a bit more of a variable marker, we have a bit more space to influence. And some things are very obvious. So, like, one really obvious one is BMI. People with higher BMI will have a higher glycan age, but we just published a twin study where we know that twins which lose weight or are losing weight, they age slower. While the twins who are gaining weight, they age faster and it's even true in identical twins. And this is actually the first study where you demonstrate changing of a biological clock with statistical significance. So it's a clock that we can functionally use and get feedback if our lifestyle is working for us.
So I think this was back maybe 2016 - 2014 we published the first publication and then we thought that going to the gym will make everybody younger. So we had this big misconception that some kind of magic happens in the gym and we all should be two hours in the gym every day. And we're all going to live a healthier life for longer.
Really we see it's very easy to overtrain. So we did several studies. We know that, for example, interval training or high intensity, in short periods of time, does work in a positive way. And it made a group of people, in this case guys, younger right within three months. So exercise is good, for us, we should have it,
But also you can very easily overdo it. So we see with competitive sports, and we looked at competitive bodybuilding, it's actually much, much older. And then along with the training and the way that they start relatively close to their baseline, and then they become very pro-inflammatory in high in biological age as they compete. And then they recover some months after, but also some of this damage accumulates and every year they have more of a pro-inflammatory baseline.
Whenever you train, you're doing tissue damage. And that creates scar tissue and it activates this natural system we have to repair tissue. And if we have just the right amount of damage and repair sometimes it even benefits, it makes us a little bit younger because we activated the system, which was asleep in a way.
But if we overdo it and do more damage than we can repair, then we're actually causing harm. And that's probably why athletes have a very short career time. And now we're working a lot with sports medicine to see if we can offset that damage and extend their career time. And some of it, we even know how the mechanism works in terms of causing harm.
For example, for women, where they suppress the reproductive system. And their periods would stop or they will have a whole number of things, which are a little bit less obvious to see in guys. Very common then, a woman also doesn't have her cycle. And a lot of them are not aware that this could be their training. They will blame something else.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Interesting. I know - I did gymnastics years ago - but I know it was very typical that gymnasts, because of the extreme amount of training, things like that also were affecting their cycle too.
Would you say more cardio exercise is better for bringing down biological age? Or would you say that weight training is more detrimental or it's just a balance?

Nina Lauc: It's just a balance. Here, we did interval sprints and that worked really well. Probably yoga works in the same way. There's a lot of different sports or work in the same way where you have stress and then you relax, and it kind of if it's the optimal dose. But you can take everything to an extreme. So I think, unfortunately, we have this mentality sometimes of all or nothing or more is more - and more is not always more.
But one - on the gymnasts you mentioned, and actually in a lot of sports, particularly when they're started young and that's in ballerinas - they, on average, get their cycle at age 19. The average age is like 12 or 13 usually.

Claudia Von Boeselager: That’s a huge delay.

Nina Lauc: And it's one thing we - we don't think about enough. And that's probably one reason why weight loss in the gym doesn't really work, as well.
So we all still have this misconception that just sweating it out will fix the problem. But a lot of times we don't achieve the weight loss really well in the gym. And one of the reasons is the we overburden immune system where we suppress it to point that you get into a survival mode where you shut down digestion, you shut down immunity, and you shut down reproduction.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Super helpful.
So you've mentioned a few different contributing factors. One was BMI and training, but I guess there's some other environmental factors. I would think stress as well would probably be a contributor. What are some other things - maybe also nutrition? Have you found that these are different contributing factors?

Nina Lauc: So when I say exercise, I see it as physical stress. A little bit of it, or intermittent stress is great. Chronic stress is not so good. With diet it's more complicated. When we just look at weight loss, it is like a - but it shouldn't be too low BMI. So we see, even, if you go too far, then you're going to have the same negative effects.
So it's a balance. It's a healthy weight, not too high, not too low. When we did a diet study, which hasn't been published yet, but it's going to be in draft in maybe the next month or two, with 600 people on five different diets, followed over a year. And we see that in every single diet group, no matter that it was controlled for calories and nutrient proportions, half people benefit, half people don't.
And that's why we have this whole debate in nutrition. We are different. There is no one size fits all. There's no magic diet. It's about finding the right diet for you. And we do see that you can use this as a tool to see if your dietary change is working. So we see some people really have a good response from keto or high fat, then other people have a really negative response. It's about finding which one are you.
One other thing that's one thing that we see is that men and women age very differently. And that's one thing that a lot of the other plaques don't - they don't see this gender difference and we see it in a way women are protected against inflammation in reproductive age, and then they have this inverted U curve around perimenopause and menopause when they switch roles and catch up with men and even move a little bit faster than them.

Well, men are really lineral. They just go up and down in a very straight line, accumulating these bad glycans and losing these good glycans. So there's a very interesting hormone connection because it dips in a very short period of time.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Have you found the secrets to maintaining that? Is it hormone replacement or what is recommended in order to keep the youthfulness for longer?

Nina Lauc: So there's still a lot of - same taboo, misconception, lack of education. And I think now, particularly in the UK, there's really good momentum and advocacy around HRT, and we have way less stigma around the contraceptive pill, which has in a way, the same components of the drug, and far more around the HRT and HRT is also very different.
So contraceptive pills are still synthetic, HRT has changed that we now use - or you have the body identical transdermal HRT, which has the same molecules as we produce. So it's natural and it's extracted from wild yams. So it's - it's not the old form which was made from pregnant horses’ urine 20 years ago. It's a new drug. It still sometimes comes with the same stigma. And it works.

Claudia Von Boeselager: And by how much let's say, I mean, maybe you could just walk through like a typical case. So have you done a study with someone who doesn't take any replacement and the bioidentical hormone replacement? What differences have you noticed in measuring their biological age?

Nina Lauc: We did a proper placebo control trial, and this was done 10, 20 years ago with Harvard, but they biobank the samples. And this was a cohort of 46 women, premenopause, who were chemically induced menopause. And then - and they can recover six months later.

Claudia Von Boeselager: I know, I was going to say, I don't know who volunteered for that one, but -

Nina Lauc: It was done 10, 20 years ago. I think more like 20, so, then it was a good experiment, but it's a great feedback from us. ‘Cause if you want to do real science, you need the proper placebo controlled trial. And half of these women go on a placebo, half on the estrogen patches and the placebo ages 9.1 years within five months. While, the ones on estrogen patches remained in this healthy range. And then both of them recover six months later, but that's the first time we saw this huge influence - and keep in mind, it's not so easy to change your glycan age, with weight loss lifestyle, it's far more gradual and it takes some time - but this really had a dramatic 30 to 50% change in the short period of time. So we - I first was also very skeptical and the first person I called was my mother. And she said HRT causes breast cancer. But, well, it wasn't her field. She hasn't really read enough about it.

And now looking back, it really comes from one poor study done a long time ago that was done on women who were 13 or 12 years post-menopause. So they haven't had hormones for a very long period of time. And then when they were introduced, it was like a big shock, and your body in a way rejects.
So there's a lot of things coming out of that saying, where it's being broken down and you're seeing actually if introduced in the right time and the right type, and also is different now, there's no risk or there's even reduced risk of breast cancer on the estrogen only. So I think that's kind of the sensitive space that we're doing a lot of work in now, but we do see it influences your immune system and it influences your risk of Alzheimer's and dementia and probably cardiovascular disease and diabetes as well. So same as aging, where you have this controversy of - it's natural, we should live through it or suffer through it. Actually this inflection point for all the chronic conditions we have later on.
So if we address this now, we can delay the condition for as long as possible.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Which is really amazing. Can you talk about one of your favorite success stories? What were - the path that this person took to improving their biological age and how much were they able to improve it through following advice that your consultants recommend?

Nina Lauc: There's one story I really like, and that was even before we were commercial, that was 2017 or 18. We tested this group of 30 nutritionists. And one of them came back eight years older than he should be. And he then actually told me about this microbiome conference he was on 5 years ago where it was the first microbiome testing company in London and they tested 20 of the UK top nutritionists, and then another 20 people from the lab as controls. And then when they got the results, the nutritionists had much worse microbiomes than the guys in the lab who ate everything and anything. It really highlighted later on when they dug into it that there was this big misconception about elimination diets, and everybody was following elimination diets, where you actually minimize diversity. And they even kind of created these false theories that stop eating a food for three months and then try eating it after three months and if you have an intolerance response, you were always intolerant to that food, you're just more sensitive now. But what actually happened is you had the certain bacteria that digested this food for you, you didn't feed this bacteria for three months, so it died off. And now when you try to eat this food again, you have an intolerance response. So we didn't understand the biology. And we had a wrong concept about nutrition and we minimize diversity instead of optimizing it, which is good for our microbiome.
And he told me that story. So he was like, okay, maybe I'm doing something wrong. And he was on a very strict keto diet. And he ran some other blood tests, which showed that he had oxidized lipids and his glycan age was eight years older. And he was also fasting, which was the magic pill for longevity, for 18 hours.
And if you fast, too much, you can also suppress your immune system. So we tested them again this year, and instead of being 8 years older - and he's 40 now - he was 28 or 12 years younger, which is a complete shift.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Wow.

Nina Lauc: And he changed his diet. So he stopped the keto, went to more lean proteins and added back in healthy carbs. He reduced fasting. He still fasts, but only 4 times a week, 16/8. Increased his training load. But, it actually had a positive effect because everything else was not too much. So I think admitting, sometimes, that we may be doing the wrong thing, although in the best intentions, it's something that's really exciting for me because most of our early customers are really the health enthusiasts or the health optimizers. And it's hard to convince them they may be doing something wrong, but it's really powerful when they can realize that, oh, maybe fasting is good, but now if I do it every single day for three years, or, you know, maybe the gym is good, but not if I do it every single day for three hours and things like that.

Claudia Von Boeselager: And that really resonates with me as well, because you know, I've tried different things, and the keto diet, I find that temporarily it's excellent. And as a, like a reset, but it's not for me personally as a long-term thing. And then obviously the intermittent fasting as well. And I found with male friends, the intermittent fasting works better than for females in general.
But also thanks to someone who was also on the podcast as well who's a gut health specialist. And actually she's used GlycanAge herself. I was in touch with her about you. Elena Letyagina from Gut Philosophy. I don't know if you -

Nina Lauc: Oh, yeah!

Claudia Von Boeselager: Yeah, exactly. And she picked up - interestingly, because I was testing a Silicon Valley startup Levels Health, which shows your metabolic score. And I was hypoglycemic during the night. So my blood sugar was dropping so low because I thought I was doing so well taking long fasts from early dinner to the next day. And I wasn't doing my body any favors. So I'm very curious to get my GlycanAge results. But she said, you know, to solve it, have a spoonful of healthy almond butter with no palm oil or sugar at nine o'clock at night.
And, you know, I wear the Oura Ring, so I see my sleep tracking, and I didn't have these cortisol response during the night where I was waking, not even realizing it - but instead I'm getting much better quality sleep. And it just - it's just such a game changer on energy levels, on fitness levels, etc. So it's so exciting to be able to have these tools, to see how you're doing and then tweak accordingly, because you just feel so much better and you can really maximize every day to another degree.
Can you talk a bit about your team at GlycanAge and the wealth of experience your team brings?

Nina Lauc: So we come from this research lab, which is the largest glycan research lab in the world. It's also the main analytical facility of the human glycome project.
And that's a team of 50 academics and one admin person. So that's where we came from. We're a spin-off from there. So they’re a research lab, they don't want to be commercial. This is the first translation of it. And on that side, we really had to mix the team up a bit because when there was just the scientists and the academics, it was very technical. It was completely non translating to the normal person, or even the fanatics were a little bit confused about what it was.
So we got to this more common language, and we also realized that to be a complete product, you kind of need this service. So it's not just a test, just giving somebody a number doesn't mean much, but if we can give them the right type of guidance. So it's combined now with - if you like, if you just want the number, you can have that too. And you can have all of your raw data, you own the data as our customer.

But if you want us to help interpret it and help guide you on what to do with it, then we have an extra help profile where you give us about 50 questions on your lifestyle. And then we have a little system that makes conclusions already to say, maybe this person's over-training, maybe this person has a hormone imbalance, or maybe it's mental health or something else. And then we also pair it with the human being, in the form of telemedicine, who's a specialist. The algorithm helps us decide which one. So that could be somebody more in mental health or diet or a sports scientist. And they would help you understand this better and tailor an action plan on what you can do next.
And we find that this human thing is really important if the results are high, because if you have a high biological age and you can have a very high biological age with GlycanAge, in a way it’s a personal insult - which can be motivating if taken in the right way, but it can also be dismissive.
So having somebody who takes you through finding why it could be. And you at least testing if it is that, is quite encouraging for you to do something about it rather than just dismissive and say, oh, this is rubbish. I'm 20 years younger, not older, or I should be 10 years younger.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Well, the body doesn't lie, right? So, and I mean, you have a solution for it. It's not like, you know, okay, well you have this and that’s it.

Nina Lauc: It's a biological test. We can’t hack our biology, sometimes we want to and people try it - well, we can, but - we can kind of game it, in a way. We see this a lot when they go and they try and overdo things like, oh, I'm going to do all of these 10 things in 3 months and that's going to help me, and it does the reverse. And then when you take it down a notch and you take it step by step, it actually works how it's supposed to work. So it's completely objective.

Claudia Von Boeselager: So, yeah, you have the formula. So you have the tools, the testing, and then you're able to provide the formula to successfully reverse it. So I'm very curious to see what comes back and take it from there as well.
And you've had phenomenal success. If I understand correctly, you grew 500% in the last year.
Can you talk about this success? What trends you see happening in the space that there's such an awareness around longevity and health maintenance?

Nina Lauc: Yeah, well, we only really started like a year and a half ago now. I was really just in research before and we had some ideas, but it was stuck with the academics and they kind of never moved with it. Going on to one decision that we made last year in February is also to open up consumer.
We do work with clinics. So we have a B2B to C side, and they're also doing great work, but when something's new and there's lot of education around it, then you have to get to know your customers, having this direct contact with them is far better. So we learned very, very quickly and we changed the product about 10 times last year.
So it went through all kinds of different models.

Claudia Von Boeselager: All pivots, yeah, exactly.

Nina Lauc: And now, I think we've hit the right note and it's also not the stand, we don't really advertise. We don't really spend much advertising budget at all. It's more - education, awareness, and then finding the right advocates, which are mainly doctors or specialists in the field who can really understand it, both to narrow it down to something that fits their community. So quite a bit of influencer marketing.
And one very interesting application that we didn't think about. So in research, we before saw something happened around menopause because of the age group, but we never really knew what stage of menopause or what it was. And then having these women who had higher GlycanAge, and we would say, oh, maybe it's related to your menopause. And they would say, no, I still have a cycle, I’m not in menopause. We learned about perimenopause, and we learned that perimenopause can last an average of four years before actual menopause, which is diagnosed 12 months after you haven't had the cycle. So it's diagnostics from the 18th century. Nobody's going to tell you one year after you've had arthritis and one day reveal you have arthritis. It’s really backwards. But it can sometimes last even 10, 15 years.
So when women enter it in their early forties, they really don't know. And they don't get diagnosed for up to seven years. And the symptoms of it are going from mental health, brain fog to joint pains, to so many different things. They're so easily misattributed. So the majority of women just get prescribed an antidepressant, instead of something that's really going to fix the problem.

Claudia Von Boeselager: It's incredible because you're offering basically the opportunity to pick it up on time. And, you know, I think I really like that you focus on education because I think if more people were in tuned and knew about listening into symptoms, like the brain fog and different factors that the body's actually telling, you know, needs more support.
And obviously traditional medicine doesn't pick up on that, like, oh, you're fine. Or as you said, they get antidepressants, which clearly is not the answer instead of maybe a hormone replacement therapy. Right. So it's exciting times that we have here.
What other trends in the longevity space do you foresee and how do you see glycan age playing a role in that?

Nina Lauc: Yeah. So, what I like about the test and then of course I'm biased. But we’re the first one that actually responds to interventions. And it's not one, it's usually the right one for the right person, but you can really see a high response. So it does need to have proper science until we can have claims. And we don't claim anything until we had a proper placebo controlled trial and good indication that that could be so, but one other one is maybe managing insulin or Metformin. So Metformin is being trialed as a longevity drug, and it may not be for everybody, but we do know that this regulated glucose response or high HbA1c and insulin resistance are correlated with longevity. Very highly. And we only have individuals who are trying this now and it doesn't work for all. And I've actually seen a few women who haven't had a good effect or had a negative effect who tried it, but we saw a few men who had dysregulated glucose response who reversed 11 years within four months.
So we did hit the target for those people. So now( doing a proper placebo controlled trial, I'm very optimistic about it. And also probably Metformin is not the only way to manage it. We can self manage it with having the information and then the glucose monitors, and then tweaking our diet accordingly, or even some natural supplements, like maybe berberine or other things, which are harder to get a clinical trial in but could be a great alternative for it.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Yeah. It's so exciting. Like what levels health is doing. I look forward to when they come to Europe to have access to it as well. But when I was doing it, I used to always think sweet potato soup would be really healthy, but I had such an insulin response from that. I mean, it was such a peak from, from nothing else.
And it's knowing your personal body, how it reacts to certain things. And it's a game changer. It's really exciting times.
Nina, has there been a piece of advice that has been a real game changer for you over the years?

Nina Lauc: Unfortunately, my advice mainly comes from my experience. When people tell me things I'm really stubborn until I've actually had some solid self proof on it.
I guess this is not advice, but I had a very successful startup, which was actually in the property space. And I walked into this flat with this cleaner because we had something happening last minute and there was some leftover pizza and I was really hungry cause I usually skipped breakfast, and we've got a fresh pizza and I was so hungry I went for a slice and I told the cleaner, “Hey, do you want to slice?” And he looked at me. And he said, “I would never put that in my body.” And I just looked at him, I was like, okay, I still have the pizza! But what he made me realize is that he had something that I didn't, and I think I was about 24 at the time. I had quite poor health. I had all kinds of allergies, all kinds of skin responses. They just have everything. And I always felt crap. My energy was low. There - like, I feel so much better now than I did at 24. And I realized that it was really this - no matter that the company was turning over a couple million and we were in a really good place financially, and the cleaner was paid 10 pounds an hour while we technically made a lot more.
I didn't have this high self-worth that he had. He valued his gut more than I valued mine. And I think having this realization that you are - no matter the monetary circumstance, it's really this self-worth that you also need to have - really changed my habits. So I think that's when I did everything the reverse.
So I tested probably a million and one different things and got into sports back again and found time for myself and meditation and everything else. So I think unfortunately all of my big advice comes from some kind of realization. That's probably a story or an experience.

Claudia Von Boeselager: First of all, thank goodness for that cleaner, right, who opened your eyes, otherwise you probably would be in a very different space right now. And also the fact that you acted on it by it, right? So maybe you'd have just shrugged your shoulders and said, “Their loss, some more pizza for me and continued your way”. So it sounds like you already changed everything around, which is exciting.
Nina, do you have any exciting purchase that you've made over the last six months that you absolutely love now?

Nina Lauc: I think toys are really fun, but you can get bored of them. One I really love, but I just don't usually have time to use it. It's called the Inne Lab.

Claudia Von Boeselager: What is it?

Nina Lauc: I think they're a year in the market. It's a startup and I love startups. It measures your progestogen and the daily level. And you can use to, kind of, get to know your cycle. They use it now for pregnancy planning, but it can probably be so many different applications in women's health and I’m just using it for fun. So I'm not planning pregnancy.
 I got just - I didn't even know how it works when I first got it, I just got excited about it - and I loved it, for at least a month. I think maybe if I was pregnancy planning I’d be using it more often. But I think having this hormone self data is really important, particularly for a woman because you are technically two or three different people within the month.
And my partner would tell me that I'm a different person every two weeks or something like that.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Men tend to say this, yes. I think women don't really realize it as much, but yeah. And tell me how it works. And just to recap the name, it's Inner Lab, is it?

Nina Lauc: inne.com or .co, but it's Inne Lab as a - I N N E. They're based in Berlin.
I loved also their motto, I think it was “radical self-knowledge” or something like that. That, that was the thing that got me. And I think what they're doing is really, really cool. I do think taking this daily, you have to be motivated to do it, it's like a little strip with saliva, then you put it in and 5, 10 minutes later, it gives you a result.
And it used to be every day. Now they're going to be saying, you know, do this after five days or do this at this day. So I think it won't be even every day later, but, yeah -
Claudia Von Boeselager: And it’s saliva, so you don't need to prick your - prick your finger, which is great.

Nina Lauc: No blood. Yeah.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Okay. Oh, very cool. I'm going to check it out. Thank you. For people interested in understanding glycans and longevity better, what resources or books would you recommend they start with?

Nina Lauc: Oh, I wish we had some popular science book. We really, really need it. I think that would change the space dramatically. I wish we find one of the other scientists, but I definitely will be the last one to write more because I'm quite dyslexic.
But where to learn about it, we try and put lots of resources on our website. So we have a self-care blog, which is more commercial audience. And then the science blog, which is written by all the researchers from the lab. And they try to translate it into far more popular and understandable terms. And we do lots of these Instagram Lives with different specialists and doctors and all kinds of lectures everywhere.
So, just typing into Google, GlycanAge, or glycans, you're probably going to find our chief scientist somewhere or the human glycome project. The lectures are really good.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Could you just, for everyone interested. Just say the - your web address and the handles on social media? So people know where to follow and find you.

Nina Lauc: So it's all GlycanAge.

Claudia Von Boeselager: So www.glycanage - G L Y C A N A G E - .com. And on social media, you're on Instagram and the handle is

Nina Lauc: Just GlycanAge.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Perfect. And I'll link it also in the show notes, of course, as well.
And for people looking to try your product and service, I guess, where can they find that?

Nina Lauc: On our website. We have a few plans, either one with a consultation or two tests where you do an experiment in between and you have two consultations around it.
They can use your discount code.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Oh, that’s kind, thank you.

Nina Lauc: So it’s LONGEVITY - all in capitals - and it gives it a 15% discount at checkout.

Claudia Von Boeselager: Thank you Nina, perfect. And I’ll link that in the show notes as well.
So those listening who would be interested in finding out their biological age and improving it for longevity, LONGEVITY is the discount code. Thank you so much.
Nina, do you have any final ask, recommendation, any parting thoughts or message for my audience?

Nina Lauc: Yeah. So just one thing I didn't mention that really goes into the prevention space is that - what's really exciting about this site is that glycans change years and years before the onset of a condition. So this was first seen for the years in arthritis where we saw glycans change 10 years before onset, but then we also looked at diabetes and cardiovascular disease and we see them change 5, 10 years before.
So when we translate these into new biomarkers, which are already very - some very close to market, like the diabetes one - we can tell somebody effectively you're 10 years away from this happening. Or you’re 5 years away from this happening. And if you change your diet or your behavior in this way, you can delay it or it may never happen.
So we can do actual prevention instead of what we're doing now, where we're in healthcare looking for the disease markers, which is already when it's too late, when you're symptomatic, when you're looking for the individual organ that's not working, instead of going more at the start of it. They have a particular pattern, so this is all looking at inflammation that link to these particular things that you can see where you personally could break down and stop it years before it could happen.

Claudia Von Boeselager: It's so exciting. And one of the other people I had on the podcast was Dr. Dale Bredesen, who has a protocol for reversing Alzheimer's.
And he says, also it's a 20 year plus disease. You can see it coming, right? So if you catch it on time, it's reversible. And I have one of the ApoE 4 genes, speaking of genetics before, that means that if I don't do anything about it, I would have a 30% lifetime chance of developing Alzheimer's. But because of the fact that I know I can actually do certain tests and prevent it as well.
So, it was really amazing to have you on today, Nina, and so amazing what you're doing at GlycanAge as well. Thank you so much for joining the show.

Nina Lauc: Thank you. Thank you for having me.