Claudia von Boeselager (00:50)
Welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle podcast for us. It's such a pleasure to have you with us today.

Forrest Smith (00:54)
Super excited. I can't wait to dive in with you. Thank you so much for having me.

Claudia von Boeselager (00:58)
I'm really excited to dive in. Red light, one of my favorite things to discuss and of course, exercise mobility. And as you'll know, Forrest, that so much of the longevity talk centers around diets and supplements, but obviously mobility and pain are equally vital and often as we know that studies show that adults with mobility limitations have twice the mortality risk compared to those that stay active. So this is so fundamental. Why do you see pain management and movement as such critical?

pillars of healthy aging.

Forrest Smith (01:26)
It's an excellent question and there's a number of different things to dive into. So we'll start with a couple of these. I think there are the risk factors. And so the risk factors for mortality, but the bigger risk factor that we're finding with kind of some of our older cohort is living in an aged and kind of feeble way is not what people want to do. And the only way to stay out of that is to keep yourself mobile and to reduce inflammation in your system.

and really to kind of take action.

promote this with my parents as well, and we've kind of been pushing them into, you know, a core foundation of resistance training, you know, at least once or twice a week, because you have those, you know, that tendency to kind of drop off in muscle mass, and that's a really big kind of impact as well. The mobility, getting out, getting walking, getting back into movements so that when you do have inflammation, when you have joint-based

kind of osteoarthritis or ongoing chronic inflammation that you have some way to reduce that and just your energy levels and I think those are you know really you know what what people to see and you know if you can extend your lifespan but not your health span is that is that really an attractive thing to do or can you get kind of a or a more optimistic approach to be able to reduce inflammation and increase muscle mass and really live your your best life.

Claudia von Boeselager (02:34)
So many people accept pain as an inevitable part of aging, right? My father's 87 and he's just like, oh, this is normal aches and pains, et cetera. we that chronic pain can reduce life expectancy by up to 10 years. So it's really, really critical. What are the biggest myths you hear about pain and aging and how does Kenyon challenge them?

Forrest Smith (02:53)
I think the myths about this are kind of the gold standards that have been set by the medical community in many cases. you know, take, you know, my doctor told me to take these NSAIDs to reduce pain. That's a non, it's an anti-inflammatory drug. Well, yes and no. So it's really not helping you. I think there's, we've done ourselves a disservice using pharmaceuticals as a crutch culturally. And, you know, there's a lack of education on the alternatives.

But you thankfully there's there's a really kind of optimistic approach to this which is instead of thinking of technology as something where we're doom-scrolling and blue light and microplastics and all of actually some really great things happening in Technology that can help us take a more proactive approach for preventing downstream issues by reducing inflammation increasing blood flow increasing cellular level and

It's just great to be a part of something that can bring so much hope and optimism and tools to help people move forward in a way that's going to make them healthier.

Claudia von Boeselager (03:50)
Absolutely love it. So Kinian's Move Plus Pro is leading the charge in home-based red light and laser therapy, but let's unpack what's really happening inside the body. So love to start with, listeners new to light therapy, they might be like, what are they talking about this light therapy, right? So how would you explain in simple terms what's happening? What is light therapy? What is red light therapy? And what's happening at a cellular level when we use red and near infrared light?

Forrest Smith (04:15)
All right, love it. That's a great question. We tend to talk about kind of four main pillars that you impact with red light therapy. And we can talk about the kind of mechanisms that go into that. I would talk your ear off about that. spend tens of thousands of hours in the research, but from a high level, increasing cellular level energy production. So your mitochondria are your powerhouses of your cell. How do we make them a factory that works effectively increase the amount of energy that they Increased blood flow.

Claudia von Boeselager (04:26)
Sure. Let's go. Love it.

Forrest Smith (04:42)
when you use red light therapy, you introduce more nitric oxide and we can talk about again the mechanisms of how that happens, that's a dilation factor for your blood vessels and helps deliver more blood and more oxygen to the tissue. Reduced inflammation, and I think this is one of the core and most key ones. We're seeing more and more now from a research standpoint as imaging and as our research technology gets better, devastating chronic

inflammation can be. And to give one example of this, a great study from Harvard and the NFL over decades what kind of impact do you see from inflammation from things like ACL tears. And so you would anticipate in most cases, or at least I did coming into it, you tell your ACL maybe you have some local inflammation that's increased over time. But what we see is not just local. When you've

torn your ACL as an generates inflammation that causes longer term degradation of the soft tissue in the knee. also causes the regional impact of not delivering blood flow as well to the quad above the knee because of the same then you also see a 50 % increased risk of severe cardiovascular events over decades. And this is people who have, this is professional athletes who have had this gone back on the field,

continue training, continue playing, and decades this massively increased risk. And that's because of that inflammation doesn't stay local or regional. actually to go throughout your body and you see stiffening of the cardiovascular endothelial tissue and a much higher risk long-term. So isn't something where you tear your ACL, I had a slap tear in my It healed and I'm back into playing sports or it's...

kept going in your body. It's kept generating this negative impact from the inflammation standpoint. then the last pillar is oxidative stress. And so when you can reduce oxidative stress, when you can keep oxidative stress within a band, a healthy band in your cells, it's a very similar outcome to what you see from exercise. It actually teaches your body how to manage this oxidative stress in a way that is super healthy, ongoing, and can really contribute to a number of different things from.

cardiovascular to immune health to neurological benefits. these are still relatively unknown. So I'm happy to kind of unpack any of that that you'd like to dive into.

Claudia von Boeselager (06:55)
And I just want to maybe just pause, or maybe you can expand a little bit on the red and near infrared lights as well. Because once I had a client ask me, she's like, well, you can I just buy a red light bulb on Amazon? And so you explain what their wavelengths and what they do and what's the difference, let's say, from this type of red light versus even a red light sauna?

Forrest Smith (07:12)
absolutely. So red light saunas are typically kind of not near infrared. And they're doing things like heating up your tissue. And there are benefits to that. There's massive benefits to saunas. We do it quite frequently. And in my middle age, trying to keep an extra few years of competitive sports in and these type of things. So there's super good benefits for long infrared and heating your tissue as well. But the difference for kind of the bulbs and the sauna approach is this is near infrared. And there are near infrared bulbs as well.

Claudia von Boeselager (07:26)
You

We all, yeah.

Forrest Smith (07:41)
But what we've done with Kenyon is we've spent tens of thousands of hours looking at what are the actual physiological responses that we're triggering. So we know we have eight different key photo acceptors in the body, and we know what triggers each of those. And we know kind of the order of magnitude in which they exist. So how many of these, for example, kind of

broadly known molecule in your body is hemoglobin. People know hemoglobin as a carrier molecule. One of the things that we do with, and with hemoglobin, it's one of the things that is a very big trigger for near infrared in particular, are these heme cores. So an iron core these different molecules in your body. When we trigger hemoglobin with near infrared,

Hemoglobin is a carrier molecule that not just oxygen, but also nitric oxide. There's four different binding sites on hemoglobin that are competitive for nitric oxide and what we do is we help parse with near infrared, remove the nitric oxide. dumps nitric oxide into your bloodstream, helps the bloodstream that those blood vessels open up and deliver more blood.

but it also opens up a binding site for oxygen so that you can bind an additional oxygen in there. So you get it kind of a lift in both sides of the equation there. You can actually deliver more blood and each kind of blood cell has more oxygen in it. So that's a one example, but again, there's eight of these. And so one of them is in your mitochondria and then some of them are ion channels kind of balancing different things from outside your cells to inside your cells.

The key point of what makes a good laser therapy or light therapy or red light therapy device is how is this dosed? So how are we dosing each different individual area of tissue that we're working with? And that's where the tens of thousands of hours comes in is we build models showing how photons distribute through to these as effectively as possible, and then we test those. And so it's very difficult.

with bulbs or with LEDs to be able to penetrate into the internal tissue as an example. So if you wanted to treat your skin, things like panels and LED products are not bad. You see an increase in fibroblasts, you see an increase in type two collagen. But if you'd like to treat internal tissue and start treating some of these, I think one way to describe it would be inflammation fountains in your body that cause so much risk.

Claudia von Boeselager (09:53)
Mm-hmm.

Forrest Smith (09:54)
like these injured knees or the synovial tissue in your knees, your hips, or your elbows, or any of these places where you've had an injury, treating the internal tissue is key, and having lasers is the key to be able to do that. And so it's more complex to go build those products, but it just delivers better outcomes for the users.

Claudia von Boeselager (10:10)
Yeah. So I love my Kenyon Move Plus Probe because I put it on my shoulder and I love the fact that it's flexible. So a lot of these like red light devices that you see out there, they're not flexible to go around the joints. So I already feel like after using it, already feel the difference, less inflammation as well. I'm a huge fan.

Forrest Smith (10:25)
I really appreciate you saying that. We're mission driven

so that you couldn't tell me anything that made me happier in the world.

Claudia von Boeselager (10:30)
And that's what I love as well, that you guys really spend so much time in the research and understanding it and really dig deep. And that makes such a difference and you can tell that the quality of the products are just there. So yeah, absolutely love it and highly recommend it. So dear audience, you have any things that are bothering you, be it your neck, your back, the flexibility of it is just absolutely phenomenal that it gets around the joint. Like a shoulder is so complicated, right? It's just such an awkward position. And you guys

thought about the engineering and putting it on as well. So it's super easy, super lightweight. And also I think what I found really exciting when researching for this was that, you know, from Harvard, the research found that the red light can boost ATP, which is the energy, right? Produced in the mitochondria, the energy packs of the by up to, and I couldn't believe this number, was like, is this a typo? By up to 50, 50 % and lowers inflammatory cytokines by 40%.

I was like, there too many zeros in here or not? But that is absolutely phenomenal. So how do you translate those mechanisms or how did those mechanisms translate into real world results users are seeing with Kenyon's MovePlus Pro? Maybe you can share some anecdotes that you've been seeing as

Forrest Smith (11:35)
of my favorite things. We're a mission-driven company and our mission is to increase the quality of life for the largest number of people we can in the most measurable way we can. So we do a lot of follow-up with a lot of different users and it's been amazing to see how this has been so life-changing. But I would say it's kind of on a spectrum. So on one end of the spectrum is we work with 60 different professional sports teams, Olympic people who are really at the performance and really, I have to say in a lot of cases,

from a repetitive stress standpoint, kind of abuse their bodies. They're just getting after it. The CrossFitters and the Olympic weightlifting teams are great examples. It's repetitive stress on knees, lower back, and it's really cool to see those guys. I think one of our friends who's a CrossFitter was a good example. Tore's bicep off the bone was going to have to miss a year for that.

came back and went through his recovery process with the using the move plus and came back six months before he was anticipating it and actually won the championship that year. So that was that's on the kind of performance side. But I think one of the things that really kind of focuses and motivates our team is the other in the spectrum where we see people who have been in chronic pain. I can think of a number of them that we actually keep up with on a personal level as well.

were early adopters and just gave us great feedback for it. who haven't been able to 10 years through the night because of chronic pain, being able to sleep through the guy's wife couldn't walk up the stairs and, She just wants to be able to walk up and down the stairs and get back into her walking routine. And then within a month, she's able to do that. And kinds of things on the other end of the spectrum where this is actually adding years to people's lives and adding functional

movement and like health span, not like being able to enjoy the life that you have versus kind you know, just existing we're building a company, a small company is never easy. There's a lot that goes into it, a lot, you know, not enough sleep. You're always behind on of the work. But when you go into these groups that we share with our internal team see these life changing impacts, it's just so motivating and it just gets everyone's energy back up to go.

Go do more.

Claudia von Boeselager (13:36)
And I think another important part around pain and then obviously pain relief, it influences your mental health and obviously longevity behaviors, things like sleep, exercise and optimism. How have you seen influences on that too? I think people neglect that they think pain is pain, but it will affect you. So what are some things that you've seen or how does it, can you help like that?

Forrest Smith (13:56)
I, you some of the best things that we've seen around this are those reduced pain points seem to not just stay within the individual, go to their family and their community as well. And I think that's one of the most exciting things that we've really seen for this only with pain, but also with other pathologies. So we have gut and brain device coming out later this see really powerful impacts different neurological.

and you know, it's the the science is still not a hundred percent theory out on the on the sensing side of this but what we're seeing is cognitive impacts for people like like Alzheimer's or other types of Pathologies for their neurological tissue those are things that we're really targeting longer term because it can change people's Quality of life just so much but I think right now, know pain pain from gut is another one where there's been a chronic pain and there's a lot of people who have

IBS and all sorts of colitis and these different type of gut-based pathologies that are just so life-impacting that it's just amazing to see them getting out of that. And again, you can see just with our follow-ups with them, how that trickles on into improved relationships, improved confidence levels, improved recovery. this one blocker, kind of like a small dam in the river that kind of stops the rest of their life.

being watered or kind of growing the plants that it would grow otherwise and seeing those blockers come out and people to be able to take on their full life again, it's just awesome. I'm so excited to be part of this

Claudia von Boeselager (15:18)
So exciting. I love your enthusiasm as well. And I think for people, know, that gut brain access is so important. And my audience obviously knows, but my mother sadly passed a few weeks ago from Alzheimer's. So it's a huge passion of mine as well. And what is so possible, like the majority of doctors and neuroscientists that we saw from traditional worlds, They don't know about red lights and the power of red light as well.

Forrest Smith (15:38)
Your brain's kind of the center of so much that it's nice to able to have an impact on that and give people hope and optimism. And particularly the earlier you can start these type of preventative treatments, the better.

Claudia von Boeselager (15:48)
% and a lot is inflammation in the brain as well, right?

So, for us, the biohacking and recovery tech world is booming, but of course not all devices are created equal and consistency seems to be the real differentiator. I saw some statistics around the global wearable

and of itself is supposed to exceed 170 billion by 2030. So it's really booming. How do you see devices like Kineon fitting into the mainstream shift from

treatment to preventative and proactive longevity? And what are certain protocols that you recommend for users trying to keep fit and healthy for as long as possible?

Forrest Smith (17:43)
Well, that's an awesome question. think, you know, one of the things that we work on, again, our mission is to not just help people kind of improve their quality of life through pain management and inflammation reduction and these type of things, but to be able to measure it. So our long-term roadmap is exactly online with what you're saying. It's, you know, how do we measure, and we're working on some technology that will launch next year. How do we measure and display for happening in their physiology? What are we triggering that's going to help them? And then,

people can see that from our early tests, they really stay on their therapeutics a lot longer. But our goal has been to reduce, when we started Kenyon, and it's still very much the case, laser-based devices are much more effective, but they're really kind of only available in clinical level, $30,000 $50,000 devices that plug in and that sit on a desk. And at the best, you're going to be able to use kind of once a week or once a month whenever you go see your clinician.

Those are very good devices, we wanted to be able to do from a design standpoint was how do we drive better adoption and make this something that people can use in home instead of having to take pharmaceuticals? Because a lot of people don't want to take pharmaceuticals, but there's not really any great options and alternatives outside of that. So our goal was to reduce the price by customizing our lasers and get this into something that's wearable, that's

easy, that's low friction for people to be able to adopt and use from a habit forming standpoint. So we really kind of push habit stacking. And I have to say, and this sounds funny, but it's really true. We found a lot of people using aspirational habits. So like, hey, so I do this with my meditation that every morning. It's like, well, how many times you meditated in the last two weeks? Once you're watching Netflix every day, do it with a Netflix. Let's use.

Claudia von Boeselager (19:22)
Exactly.

Yeah.

Forrest Smith (19:25)
pragmatic

kind of habits to stack this with. one thing that's super exciting that I think we've, that I've actually taken on as part of my daily usage of the device and has had amazing impact for me is we work with a Japanese lab who helped develop a protocol called the proximal priority therapy where you treat basically the largest kind of easily accessible blood vessels in your body or in your neck. So you put it around your neck for 15 minutes and then you put it around your lower gut.

Claudia von Boeselager (19:28)
Mm-hmm.

Forrest Smith (19:51)
And so I just kind of we have an extender strap, but I just kind of tuck it into my waistband in my my in my pants. And then I do 15 minutes in 15 minutes. And the impact for this, both from the research standpoint, but also from my personal anecdotal experience and then kind of we've as we start telling users about it, their anecdotal experience is impacts are just amazing. You just don't get sick anymore. And then after about two weeks of this, you see these

Claudia von Boeselager (20:13)
Wow.

Forrest Smith (20:16)
really powerful lifts in energy and in focus and just in cognitive kind of awareness and in mood. in the research, this is typically labeled affect. So there's different ways through surveys that they kind of follow up on the affect or the mood and energy levels of people, but it's just awesome. You just feel good. so that's one of the ones where

We were working with a couple of different labs and actually with some really cool supplement companies that are kind of focused on gut health. But it looks like from what we're seeing that it's just endemic to have kind of poor tight junctions in your gut to leak inflammation into the rest of your body. And so when you can reduce that inflammation in your gut, shore those up, you stop leaking the inflammation into the rest of your body and

Claudia von Boeselager (20:52)
Yeah.

Forrest Smith (20:58)
there's some really powerful impacts both from a neurological standpoint, from that gut brain axis also insulin sensitivity. Just your body just responds to reducing inflammation in a really powerfully healthy way. And so you just feel better from that. that's one of the ones that's been most exciting for me over this last year.

Claudia von Boeselager (21:16)
That's really exciting. And so it's 15 minutes around your neck. And is it anything to do with the thyroid at all? Or is it just because the blood vessels are here?

Forrest Smith (21:20)
Yes.

if you treat your thyroid, this is another one that's been really fun to research on, you can actually treat the thyroid as well. One of the things that's come up in the literature around this very recently, my business partner had Hashimoto's. And so we were digging in to see if there's anything we help him with that. And we did in the end, there's a great protocol that we can of send through, but it's essentially treating your thyroid for 15 minutes per day and then taking

vitamin D3 and selenium and they triggered different benefits and so they're stacking synergistic outcomes for it. But one of the things that's actually come up from our interactions with our users about this is the really broad hypothyroidism that you see around paraminopause and menopause. Our research team leans male and so it wasn't really on our radar until my partner Hashimoto's kind of brought this in for us.

But it's really, it's something like 70 to 80 % of women going through perimenopause and menopause, it triggers this hypothyroid. And this is something that you can absolutely target with the red light therapy. And also again, see those synergistic kind of supplement impacts as well.

Claudia von Boeselager (22:28)
Absolutely amazing. Yeah, so many women are suffering and it's just that so many years the women were completely forgotten out of research. So glad that you are addressing this as well. And so you do, okay, so you do 15 minutes and then I'm just curious around the gut. So you do around your waist band of your pants, right? so that's helping with leaky gut. Is that what that's helping with?

Forrest Smith (22:48)
right, gut-based inflammation. we see typically what you'll see is, this is microplastics and lot of environmental factors, but also just really kind of not the best diet that we have now as a general society. But you'll see mucosal lining, which can be damaged by that environmental stress. And then you see the inflammation in the gut actually causes the...

Claudia von Boeselager (22:59)
No.

Forrest Smith (23:08)
those tight junctions to open up and for you to see much more systemic inflammation. And so this is also one of the things we were talking to our friend from Just Thrive, Kieran, about really have a spore-based product for gut health that stacks synergistically with what we're doing. So we'll be doing some ongoing work with them in that space.

first step is this poor diet and environmental factors causing these tight junctions to open And then you go through a number of different things, so metabolic dysfunction, what we're thinking of with the brain right now is kind of a type three diabetes is neurodegeneration. So there's a lot of really negative impacts downstream from this inflammation.

Claudia von Boeselager (23:42)
Yeah.

Forrest Smith (23:48)
that you can get ahead of and really take a much more proactive and useful approach to.

Claudia von Boeselager (23:54)
Absolutely amazing. You're not getting sick. So you're more active as well. So it's a win, win, win, which is great. looking forward for the chronic inflammation, which we know contributes over 50 % of deaths worldwide. What are your go-to tips to reduce inflammation naturally? So you stack with Kinion and what other advice could you give for my audience?

Forrest Smith (24:12)
So do couple of different things from a training standpoint that I think have been quite effective. But I would say outside of training, which I can dive into shortly, and not everybody's going to want to go crazy on the training like I do, but I don't mind sharing Ice, kind of ice plunge, cold plunge, ice barrel. Try to get that in four or five days a Sauna has been very useful as well. then also kind of the combination of those with contrast therapy.

then diet is a huge driver for this. So kind of more whole foods, less processed foods is a very simple and easy and straightforward way to make a really big impact. And then obviously less kind of added sugar. The sugar is a kind of inflammatory fixture in so many diets. It's just crazy now. But yeah, and then obviously the laser therapy. And in the training, think two big pieces for that. One is

Claudia von Boeselager (24:49)
highly.

Forrest Smith (24:59)
Building more muscles is great. So kind of approaching through time under tension based protocols for some level of hypertrophy during the week. And then kind of training both types of energy systems. So that the kind of lower, longer zone walks, kind of low, low kind intensity. And then get in a couple of high intensity ones when you can. And those can be.

as short as 30 seconds on an assault bike is, they call it the devil's tricycle. It is painful, but it's very effective for triggering, research terms for this will be intensity interval training or sprint interval training. And those really have kind of additive effects in combination with the muscle growth and the lower intensity training as well.

Claudia von Boeselager (25:42)
It's amazing. Yeah. have a Carol bike as well, which is quite fun for the VO2 max training.

Forrest Smith (25:46)
my goodness, I love those guys though. It's a really powerful tool.

Claudia von Boeselager (25:49)
Rick is amazing. Yeah. it's so funny. The first time I was like, what's going on? It was hilarious.

before we finish up today for us, I want to ask you, what is the biggest misconception about red light therapy? You would like to demystify for people listening so that they really understand how important it is to focused on red light therapy in a daily practice.

Forrest Smith (26:06)
I think you mentioned one earlier, which is, well, can just go to bulb and get these benefits. And you may get some level benefits. Again, skin benefits, some level of wound healing. But you might be at the 10 % level of what you could actually do with that versus taking on trying to find what's going to move the needle the most. And I think one of the other things that I

I really see as a big kind of systemic opportunity that people can embrace is you look at the poor outcomes that we have, whether that's obesity, type two diabetes, neurological disorder, cardiovascular disease, think of these as kind of bad products rolling off a production you see a bad product rolling off a production line,

Going to fix the product is probably not the best approach. Let's go take all of these and start trying to fix each one. I'll take this pills for this and that pills for that. And then I'm going to have an intervention for each one of those bad products. better approach for it is let's go look at the production line and why it's generating these bad products. What are the steps here that we can get ahead of? And so we really see those as inflammation and a lot of these upstream kind of preventative measures we can

we don't want to sell it as like the only thing you should be doing, but it's an incredibly powerful tool for your toolkit to fix that production line and just get ahead of, save yourself 10, 20, 30 years down the line. Your joints will thank you, your entire body, you will just be a healthier human being by being able to prevent these

I think that's how we'd really like people to think about the preventative side is let's go in proactively and take the tools that we have are the best in the world to go try to get ahead of this and you'll see the benefits for it over time.

Claudia von Boeselager (27:45)
Amazing. Where can people find you, Forrest and Kinian? Where would you like to send them to? And we'll link everything in the show

Forrest Smith (27:51)
that's fantastic. Thank you. Kenyon.io, K-I-N-E-O-N, dot I-O. And we publish a lot of really cool blogs and they're trying to kind of bring forward some of the science and put it into a kind of easily digestible and reasonable way to kind of let people know what to expect of this. So that we're not kind of making claims or promises that aren't in line with what we can deliver, but that we are letting people know what this is actually going to be changing in their physiology and what they can expect from it. So come check us out. And I really appreciate you taking the time with me today. This has been awesome.

Claudia von Boeselager (28:19)
I do too and I really appreciate all the research and passion you put into it. Do you have any parting thought or message for my audience today for us?

Forrest Smith (28:26)
Yeah, invest in yourself. There's only one of you. You had this one life. Take care of your body. This is an awesome meat machine and it's going to make you healthier and better if you invest in it and if you take care of yourself. So yeah, and you're doing a great job in spreading these awesome tools and messages and educational pieces. So I really appreciate again for taking the time and letting us kind of bring our little piece of that in as well.

Claudia von Boeselager (28:50)
We appreciate what you guys are doing and helping so many people stay mobile. So thank you so much. Thank you for taking the time to come on the show. Thank you to your audience for listening. It's been such a pleasure.

Forrest Smith (28:58)
Likewise, thank you.