Science Behind the Scenes with Dr. Stephen Phipps

Robert Rountree - INTRO

This is The Thorne Podcast, the show that navigates the complex world of wellness and explores the latest science behind diet supplements and lifestyle approaches to good health. I'm Dr. Robert Rountree, Chief Medical Advisor at Thorne and Functional Medicine Doctor. As a reminder, the recommendations made in this podcast are the recommendations of the individuals who expressed them and not the recommendations of Thorne. Statements in this podcast have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Any products mentioned are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

Robert Rountree

Hi everyone, and welcome to The Thorne Podcast. Joining me this week is one of the brilliant minds behind many of Thorne’s formulations, my colleague, friend and returning guest of the pod, Dr. Stephen Phipps. Dr. Phipps is the Chief Innovation Officer at Thorne. He has an ND degree in Naturopathic Medicine and a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Science. So Stephen, how are you doing today? Anything interesting going on in your life?

Stephen Phipps

Same as always a lot of fun stuff going on here at the epicenter of Thorne's R&D group here in South Carolina. I think it's going to be great to talk to through with you all. Kind of give you just a little bit of background on why I love R&D so much. Came in like, you said, with the Naturopathic medicine degree and the pharmaceutical sciences, but really started off in ethnobotany, which is where I got some of my research chops started, and really looking at an interaction of how community groups utilize plants, whether that be for medicine, for agricultural practices, for things like trade, building out ropes and turpentine, the like. Really saw that, you know, the natural world as a way to get a sense of how we've been able to over time really evolve and grow into understanding how to use it compounds that come from it. And the overarching, I think, themes of health, wellness and interactions with our environment that kind of give us what we see at Thorne. So all in all, I think a lot can be said from this area and there's still a lot to go for and look at as we get more and more detail coming at us on how our environment and nature work. So it should be fun.

Robert Rountree

Wow. That's definitely a lot to think about and talk about. So I'm sure we'll have an interesting conversation. As an aside, I'm in the middle of reading a book that's about 20 years old. It's called “Why Some Like It Hot” and it's written by an ethnobotanist named Gary Nabhan from University of Arizona. And he talks about the exact thing you're talking about, which is all these phytochemicals in our environment interact with different people in different ways. And I mention it because it again opens a lot of doors to the whole concept of what nutritional supplements are all about. I think in the mainstream media you get the idea that all it is is the alphabet, you know, the B vitamins and C, D and all that and that. That's the end of the story. And I'm hoping that today you'll have a chance to tell us what some of the other supplements are. Why don't we dive right into the topic and look behind the scenes? How does Thorne actually make supplements? Where does the idea come from? How is the science collected and what kind of testing is done before you end up with a finished product? You know, the public just sees a bottle with capsules in it or a canister with powder. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Right?

Stephen Phipps

That is, that is, and so what probably is the longest part is what I would call the fuzzy frontend of development. And this is kind of like that primordial goop that you're starting to try to build something from. Right. So you're asking lots of different people, lots of different questions. Right? And sometimes we'll ask obviously our clientele that might be physicians, may be consumers who come to Thorne.com or to Amazon, that may be what we would call key opinion leaders. Right. So different doctors are PhDs or researchers really, that have been trying to understand some of these, you know, these pathways or these networks and then look at the overall ways that we can explain this stuff and what people are are interested in. And so all this kind of first part comes together, try to synthesize a storyboard, of sorts, or a story that someone can really start to walk through and give what I would call the elevator pitch. And I'm sure you've probably heard some of these, Bob, in your career where someone might come to you be like, I have the perfect product for you or for your practice or whatever it may be, right? And they try to pitch it to you and they give you the reasons to believe why it should work. And the science behind why it should work and how they've done it differently to those before them. And that's kind of a standard story, right? But I think what tends to happen sometimes is that you can take a little bit less time than you should on the, I would say, data behind the story.  The science horse behind the marketing horse rather than them being side by side and building something that would be quality by design driven. So we expect the efficacy. The efficacy itself then tells the story and then that story can be communicated and then hopefully felt by the people taking it. And that's when that all comes together, I think in the perfect harmony of a good product. To me that's the fun very first start piece. And I'd like to hear your thoughts too, because I know this has been a topic of yours that has been of interest. And obviously with areas like genes and foods and cultural diversity and your reading list, I'm sure that it brings about questions on how to start to ask some of these things on the front end of ideas right.

Robert Rountree

Well, I mean my starting point as a practicing physician is just recognizing that there's a lot of chronic disease out there. There's more diabetes, there's dementia going on, there's cancer, and the solutions being presented right now are not adequate. They're either super expensive or they've got a lot of side effects, not readily available. So there's the chronic disease. And even with acute conditions, gosh, just yesterday I was talking to a friend who had developed a respiratory infection with not COVID, just something she picked up maybe in an airport and had been prescribed  an inhaler and she went to the pharmacy to get it. It was $500 for an inhaler, for a simple respiratory infection. And, you know, she said to me, there's got to be something better than this. I mean, this is this doesn't make sense. So as a as a physician, I'm always looking for something better that's less expensive, that's less toxic, etc.. And so why not turn to our ancestors and say, well, is there a tea that people have consumed, you know, or a ground up herb that people have consumed? And if so, is it possible that we could do a more concentrated version so it's more likely to be effective in that acute scenario or for a chronic illness? So I would say I always have my ears on for what's out there and what's next.

Stephen Phipps

So that's that initial question that stimulates you to go out and look in the literature or to stream through these things to gather up what those things may be, right? and kind of get a sense of what we would call the molecular network behind a problem. Right? So as a physician, your patient comes to you with a problem, much like someone developing a product. We're trying to bring a solution to a problem that is out there. And then we based on those three ingredients and from there, the ingredients will have a mechanism and we'll try to weave that mechanism in through those initial idea phases and really target how they're working and focus on that. I think you brought up a good point of they might have had an herb, but is there ways to utilize that herb in a more concentrated or standardized way so that our expectation is, is it will act on the body each time, the same time in the same way, right? So it's consistency. And so that's what we would go out and do. So if you could be looking at something like, you know, like coptis, for example, you might go out and go and get, which is an herb that's been used for lots of different things, immune on on top of others.

Robert Rountree

Coptis Chinensis, the Chinese herb?

Stephen Phipps

Yep, that's the one. And then you’d look into the literature and say, okay, well there is berberine, proto-berberine, and all in a litany of other things in there that have been working over time. So, you know, you may go and say, okay, well, you know, for this particular thing, I might focus in on a broad spectrum, but more rich extract because the more I, you know, taper it down, the more narrowed my mechanism of action become. Right? So, you know, I might kind of miss it altogether or don't have as much of a response because the thing that we see typically on herbal extract is, you know, we've standardized to a couple of different molecules, but there's only a very few amount of botanicals that you're going to standardize to almost a specific or a pure amount. You know, only think of a couple, you know, enough to be on my hand. But that's kind of the thing that we see, is that we're making a fingerprint or a chemo type. And that's really how we would drive that through. So say we got all that done in, we got the ideas hammered out and we'd go in and we would then build a prototype, and that prototype would be at the level of a bench, right? So making something thats 100 capsules or 100 servings if it's a powder or something, Right. To really get a sense of, okay, here's our idea. We're taking it. We've talked to all of our different people. We've come to a consensus that these are really the key areas of focus. Went out and sourced our ingredients. We've worked with our trusted suppliers or in some cases, we may decide to build our own extract or extraction process. So we work through that and we get our stuff together and we make our our recipe, right? And then that recipe lives in the prototype. If it's a complex product needing more understanding, we may do some focus group work or some beta testing, and that might be that we allow a few physicians to try it out and see how things go. Or, you know, we may just ask a bit more, you know, in a marketing setting of how the experiential things become or if it's really complicated and we really want to have an understanding of how things may be working, we may put it through a clinical trial and really get at where these things may live with what we would call claims or or evidence that they're working in certain ways. We may put them all together and say we need to really make sure that this works like we think it is, you know, with a clinical trial and work through that system. And so I think one great example of that that's on Medarchive right now would have been like the SynaQuell work right where we were looking at how brain function alters in a season with junior ice hockey players. And then from there, how does it change when we give them numerous nutrients that are going to support a couple of different pathways within the neurological system to hopefully support, optimize brain function over the the season? What we know there could be some repetitive head impacts that are non-concussive in nature that can cause some overarching diminishment of function over time. Right.

Robert Rountree

Yeah. Let me just clarify. So SynaQuell is a product that is a powder that was I believe, designed by a neurologist with a specialty in head injury. And Thorne collaborated with that neurologist, correct?

Stephen Phipps

Yeah. Yeah. So you know that was kind of where we took in a key opinion leader and really worked through how to best kind of layer some of this in. There was obviously some back and forth in different iterations. You know, that came within this last one that just recently was launched that included Nicotinamide Riboside and CoQ10 Phytosome to kind of bolster up some of the energetics was the one that we put through the trial.

Robert Rountree

Now does Thorne sponsor, a lot of studies, either animal studies or clinical studies?

Stephen Phipps

Yeah, so what we'll do is we'll partner quite a bit within clinical settings. So we will have a what I would say both a sponsored and a non sponsored tract which you know, the non sponsored is, you know, being able to support, you know, different clinicians or different physicians or different researchers with the material needed for their trial designs. And we can do retesting to kind of support, you know, making sure that it's consistent throughout the study, work with them on how to get all of that out in a proper way. And then, you know, we both benefit from their work on the claims. That may not exactly be what we want to study, but we do want to push the science ahead and feel like it was a good way of doing that. And so we've always been very, I think, involved in the overarching clinical science side and trying to make sure that we increase the amount of scientific rigor that comes into the dietary supplement development and also just in general marketplace for that for that very reason.

Robert Rountree

So I got to say, when when people read in mainstream media that nutritional supplements are not studied or they aren't research, that's simply not true.

Stephen Phipps

Yeah. Correct. I think there's always going to be a spectrum and there may be, you know, groups out there that are doing that aren't doing that. But, you know, that's not going to be anything Thorne ever gets behind or has done. That's something that in general, when we look at, you know, a lot of the good players in the industry and us included there is a want for there to be a scientific rigor behind what we're doing, because I think it resonates right? Like if people can feel their product and they know what's going on and they know what's in it and they understand that there's science behind it, all those things make for a better product design, or we typically call that on our side is quality by design, right? So that's kind of both the science behind it and kind of also to how we test and how we develop the testing so that by the time it comes to market after prototyping and then, you know, at scale like there's that ability to consistently have that quality aspect of what's going into the product, being exemplary of what's been tested in the scientific community or what's been sourced. So it's continuing on that ability to kind of trace through how we've decided to design a product.

Robert Rountree

So how long does it typically take from the time that you or somebody on your team first hears about a product to the point where it shows up on a consumer's shelf? Is this an extended process? What's a typical kind of time frame?

Stephen Phipps

You could see 3 to 5 years being a normal kind of piece. But even simplistic things, you know, you're never going to if you're doing it right, you'll never really truncate below at least you know, a year and a half. And the reason why is that that that fuzzy front end that ideation phase is really important. And I know things change and obviously all your working things change. So you have to be ready to pivot. So while we may have one prototype, you know, underneath it, we have at least two or three other ideas that kind of go after some of the core potential what we call pitfalls or problems, if we were to go one way or the other, basically knowing that there may be some things along the way that could slow us down. Right. So one great example would be something like, you know, Rhodiola, right?

Robert Rountree

Arctic Root, also called Arctic root right?

Stephen Phipps

Exactly. The Arctic Roots already it Rhodiola Rosea definitely comes from that more arboreal region, you know, across the globe, but mainly in areas like Siberia, Siberia, Canada has a few but we don’t really use those and then like the Norwegian Scandinavian area, has a few chemo types that have been used too. But if you look at it like recently, you know, the Rhodiola has hit the, you know, the endangered species list, in some of the areas that now need more rigorous thought sourcing and licensure, Right. Those sites list or cities list, is what you'd be looking at. And so if I was to develop in there, the risk would be if we were not careful in sourcing and understanding that kind of geographic and also ecological impact, you know, that could be an ingredient where you would have to go back in and redesign a prototype around knowing that you didn't spend enough time making sure that you got the right types of supply in place to make sure that you had a product that held up to that ecological standard. You know, we've had you know, we take that list very seriously and in the past have definitely developed products. Again, knowing that there would be some herbs on the way to that list. And we want to make sure that we do not impact their time on this planet because obviously they have been very important to a lot of different people for a long time. And so making sure that we can sustainably source that and be stewards and responsible users is a huge need for our product design.

Robert Rountree

Are most of the herbs that Thorne uses are they cultivated herbs or more of them gathered by?

Stephen Phipps

You know, I think it's a mix. You know, there are wild crafted aspects that we use those alongside cultivated use. But what's interesting though is if you look at like the wild crafted versus cultivated and the like, they're still good harvesting practices are kind of aligned to how we think about using those. Right. So, you know, no matter what, you want to make sure that, you know, those good harvesting practices are set to that. And then also, you know, that the economic streams of wild crafting and making sure that you understand some of that and some of the potential issues that can arise is another thing, right? We want to make sure that those that are, you know, being used in wild crafting, you know, or their knowledge of being used in wild crafting is something that's upheld. And there's a lot of great groups that do that. And the reason I bring that up is, you know, back in the day when you had like paclitaxel being developed, that was like the I think.

Robert Rountree

From yew trees, right?

Stephen Phipps

Yeah, from the Pacific yew trees, Right. And it turned and they turned it into a drug before they were able to come up with a novel chemical synthesis pathway. That was kind of easy. They did wild craft, they wild sourced all the bark, right. And so but that knowledge didn't come from the guys that own that proprietary information. It came from the individuals that knew those trees and have been using it for centuries. And so that whole kind of economic stream of wild crafting kind of got brought out because you had a lot of people making a lot of money off of that drug. And the gains that came from it came from areas of information and knowledge that weren't necessarily upheld and respected. Other things could be where it's grown, you know, even if it's cultivated or not, like making sure that you understand where an herb’s natural presence is can be very helpful, right? Because as it changes environment or it changes growing conditions or, you know, the ecological set points, you can definitely see changes in the chemo type, right? The potency of those things. So specifically flavonoids, polyphenols, you know, all of these things that are used as qualitative pest management systems for the plant that our body uses for good, they all change when the environment changes, right?

Robert Rountree

So you've got the you know, the first big issue seems like sourcing where you're asking is this is this an herb that we want to sell, you know, and will be able to sell? Because who knows what the supply is going to be? And then it seems like the second big issue is, is this stuff that we're buying real. If it even if it is real, does it have things in it, contaminants or adulterants that are either deliberate or or.

Stephen Phipps

Or otherwise. Right?

Robert Rountree

Yeah. Like so tell me about, you know, how you how you go through that process of making sure that you're getting the real stuff and you're getting stuff that's not contaminated.

Stephen Phipps

I think the big thing is, is, you know, we build out the testing part of it, right? So that's why and it's many, many rounds that we look at to kind of get a sense. So we typically look at multiple lots. And what we're looking through and looking at really is identity, right? So there's ways to test that that aren't just going to be like one or two compounds that says, is this truly the, you know, the part of the plant that is specified and the genus and species of the plant that's specified? And one way of doing that, the technique called HPTLC. So a way that it kind of makes a little picturesque fingerprint that can be treated in a couple of different ways to show numerous compounds. And then you would have a reference standard that would be consistently like a botanical speak in a reference standard so that you would be able to extract it in the same way and show it to say, look, this is the extract coming from these individuals. This is the extract coming from the thing that I just made that the reference standard. And then from adulterants. You know, you can look at it from a couple of different ways. Sometimes people might add things in to kind of get to mere what you would be expecting to see. So if there's supposed to be a lot of quercetin in there, they may put something else that still kind of looks like quercetin on certain ways of testing it but doesn't on others. And so knowing kind of what the range of expected ingredient or chemical in that ingredient might be is, that is another good things. We'll run a couple of different assays to kind of look and see what the overarching chemical fingerprint looks like. But also what the ratios are between them to make sure that they're as expected even when you are making an extract. So even with an extraction, the majority of the time, you're always going to increase the overall purity of the fingerprint. But the aspects of the fingerprint stay relatively the same. Right? So if I'm looking at ingredient X, Y and Z, and they're supposed to be at certain percentages, they're never going to change. If I make the extract, except for they'll be more potent as they come up. Right. And then lastly, we look at environmental contaminants, so heavy metals, bio burden, which is going to be you’re your microbial components. And then for botanicals, we actually go above and beyond what we would see in some of the regulations and look at what's called benzopyrenes. So those are indicative.

Robert Rountree

That’s for burnt organic material, right?

Stephen Phipps

Exactly. Right. So that's like your barbecue phenomena.

Robert Rountree

Cigarette Smoke.

Stephen Phipps

Or anything kind of combusted. And so, you know, it's small amounts. They're still considered to be, you know, carcinogens. And so we test that because what you can see is if you're looking at botanicals, they have to be dried, right? So how an individual is controlling, drying those and making sure that they're enriching the product correctly is another key aspect of quality. So if we see those coming up and being above our our limits, which are very, very low, we're talking about parts per billion. That is another aspect of making sure that we have a quality ingredient in our product.

Robert Rountree

You know, what I'm really getting from this is to a consumer. If you're going to buy product, make sure the people that are selling it know what they're doing.

Stephen Phipps

Yeah, I mean, you know, hands down.

Robert Rountree

There's a lot that needs to be known.

Stephen Phipps

Yeah. And I think that's the beauty of it. And when I think that when you get groups that are passionate about these things, it'll come through, right? Like they're going to want to look at these things, They're going to want to make sure that it's a safe and efficacious product, and that it works how it’s supposed to every time.

Robert Rountree

Well, I think we're going to need to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to answer some questions about all this stuff we're talking about that have come in from our listeners.

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Robert Rountree

And we're back. So now it's time to answer questions that have come in from our community. The first question that has come in this week is from a listener who asked, I'm unclear on exactly what a vitamin is. There are minerals like iron, potassium, zinc. You can see those on the table of elements. I assume vitamins are compounds of elements. Which ones? When we eat minerals are they compounds or do we get the pure element. So it seems like this is time for a chemistry discussion, Stephen.

Stephen Phipps

And a great one. And I know it can be confusing.

Robert Rountree

People get the idea that everything is a vitamin, right?

Stephen Phipps

Right. So I get that it's kind of like almost like a spice drawer, you know, everything becomes an herb and no one knows what a spice is or vice versa. But, you know, the minerals, I think were walk on so you can have those minerals that like iron, potassium, zinc in a couple of different forms. There's an inorganic form which is kind of alluding to the table of elements, right?

Stephen Phipps

So molecular zinc, molecular iron and the like. And these.

Robert Rountree

Are these are not vitamins.

Stephen Phipps

Not yet so we're going to tackle the mineral one first, then I think we can go back around. And then so what I would say with that is, is that we're going to get the majority of the time in the supplements that I think are meaningful and organically chelated version of that. And that's the same in your food, right? So something with with a more of an organic compound to it. So it has carbon, hydrogen. Those types of things will be linked to the mineral one that everyone might see or know would be something like magnesium citrate or magnesium bisglycinate. But generally that's how they're stored in the food that we eat, you know, with some semblance of an organic tail to them.

Robert Rountree

But that doesn't make it a vitamin that just makes it better absorbed.

Stephen Phipps

Exactly. But that organic compound was kind of the segue and the swing, right? So that's where we start to delineate a vitamin. And there's a very specific kind of definition to that because it's a group of organic compounds, but not every organic compound is a vitamin to your point, Bob. We can use that organic compound to chelate and like we can do that, we can have a certain subset of those be a vitamins. What delineates that is that they have to be seen as essential for normal growth and or nutrition. They need limited quantities, so a very small amount. So micro nutrients. And then these cannot be synthesized in our body. So we'll go through them. Anything that you see, like vitamins with a with an alphabetic behind it, vitamin B, vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin K, the B vitamins are split up into numerous ones. That could be folate, riboflavin, vitamin B12, which is cobalmin all of these kind of fit that bill of an organic compound that we don't make that is essential to our body working. That is something we need in small amounts versus an organic compound. We need in a large amount would be a macronutrient or protein, carbohydrate, fat, or botanicals, which will also be organic compounds, which some may argue may fit into that realm of definition of a vitamin. But unfortunately they're not. But they do do a lot for us in the organic realm, and they come specifically from our diet and we don't make them, but we cannot they are not completely essential for our development. So that's why we kind of make that split, if that makes sense.

Robert Rountree

So we have vitamins that basically help our chemistry work better in our body, and then we have minerals that also help our blood chemistry to work better. But they are separate. Separate chemicals.

Stephen Phipps

Exactly. Exactly. One being inorganic and on the table of elements, right to your point, minerals are all inorganic and bound to something else. And then the vitamins are all organic and they're made of different molecules.

Robert Rountree

Okay. The next question is why do some Thorne products come as a powder and some come as a capsule, for example, magnesium citrate versus magnesium bisglycinate, now thought that most products were in a powder or an oil.

Stephen Phipps

That's the thing. So if you think about it, like the capsule is just kind of the scoop, you know, condensed down. So most everything we have is in a in a powder. Right? That powder can be encapsulated in a little capsule or free floating. And you mix it into water. But you know, the constraints to that or why we do what we do differently, come down to a couple of different things. Right? Some one may be the dose. So if you look at magnesium citramate as an example, you're going to see that overall that you're going to have with the two different sources and one capsule about 135 milligrams of magnesium, and that's again coming from citrate and Malate. So versus the magnesium bisglycinate, which is going to have a powder form that's going to be, you know, upwards into the 200s for how we have our dose. And so, you know, as we start to try to dose that some things don't fit in the capsule or they fit in a lot of tablets. And so making sure that we can get something for an individual so that gets them the right dose in an easy way so that they stay. What I would say adherent to what the label's asking them to do is a big thing. The other reason might be is also going to be why we're using that dose, right? So you might notice, well, the magnesium content is going to be higher in both five and eight, but the scoop is a bit larger than that. Right. And so a lot of that is going to be glycine, which has its own benefits. Right. And it pairs well with magnesium. So if you think about magnesium as the mineral, it has about what, 300 different things that it can do in the body, Right. Like it's a cofactor in numerous enzymes, numerous functions, neurological, musculoskeletal, cardiac, overarching stress and metabolism for energetics, the like. And so, you know, the glycinate and the glycine is going to be a great pairing into neurological support because of that kind of neuro modulated glycinol which pairs well with the musculoskeletal components or the neurological components of why we want to use that. So sometimes that will be the other component that changes within powder versus capsule, which is why we're trying to get in there. The rest of the ingredients that would make up the formula.

Robert Rountree

The other thing I might throw in is that some things just don't taste good as a powder. And that is my favorite. My my favorite example is N-acetyl cysteine or NAC. Well, yes, it's very sulphur-y. And sometimes a capsule will crack open in a bottle and people will bring it back to me, to my clinical practice and say, Oh, there's something wrong with this, and I smell it and I go, No, that's what NAC smells like.

Stephen Phipps

It just got out of its capsule. It's a great point that, you know, I would say that and another one that I think a lot of people’s list, if it does leak out onto the capsule, is berberine. Just because it's so bitter. That's the other piece for sure that some of these things you don't want to have in the mouth and also in a capsule, sometimes we want to make sure that it gets into the small intestines to your point. So it may also drive into having what we would call a delayed release where the contacting will be more basic in the stomach. And at that point, the capsule would and allow for that potentially sensitive material to be released. Right. So you'll see that probiotics is a great thing.

Robert Rountree

So the next question is from a long time Thorne fan. This says a few of the products I've recommended over the years have been reformulated. What motivates changes to already successful formulas?

Stephen Phipps

Yeah, and I think that's a great question. I can tell you that we really don't want to reformulate if we don't have to, right? We're all, all of us working within the R&D and Medical Affairs department at Thorne are very fond of what we do and what we build. But there are some cases that we have to. One of them being, you know, over time the nature of what we're doing evolves and there may be an ingredient that we had kind of thought should have been in there or a form that should have been in there, but it wasn't ready yet. And so we had to wait. But we think it's worthwhile to make it better and I bring this one up back to phytosomes. One of our favorite things that we like at Thorne for increasing how much of an ingredient gets into the body. And so if you look at our berberine, we recently added in more berberine phytosome because it kind of balanced things out because we wanted to really get to a formulation that kind of pivoted into the most what we would think of as effective manner of getting this in and spreading out the ways that we think about Berberine in the body, which are some related to the GI system and some related internally.

Robert Rountree

So new ingredients sometimes come along that we've been waiting for and they're finally there and, and I assume that other ingredients may suddenly become hard to get. And I know that one example that I think we can talk about is we used to sell a lot of Valerian root and we had a lot of problem sourcing that.

Stephen Phipps

We did. We did. And that's the main other category. And you hit that right on the head. And there's either things within our quality system that we are facing that we no longer have been able to find, you know, a issue. And that's where Valerian Root came in. I think beginning of the talk we describe the benzo(a)pyrenes and for a long time, that was one of the things we were finding was that it was really hard to find sourcing that was consistent on benzo(a)pyrene levels for the extract. And so reluctantly, because we all know it's a great herb does really good for sleep support. We had to pull back and I can tell you we're still we still comb and look for Valerian Root and find the time to be able to bring that back around. But we'll take it out of the limelight if we feel that it's going to disrupt what we think is our quality product. Based off of some of those metrics. Picrorhiza was another one that kind of fell out that was used in some of the formulations, you know, back to the example of Rhodiola.

Robert Rountree

That was an old liver formula, wasn't it, the Picrorhiza.

Stephen Phipps

Yes it was then it was and then Picrorhiza for a while and for a long time had been thought of as a great piece. So but we had to move away from it because of that. It was that much like Rhodiola. It was around that ecological constraints and constructs that were causing there to be a reduction in the species.

Robert Rountree

Well, all right, folks, that's all the time we have for this week. Dr. Stephen Phipps, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. If people want to follow your work and what you're up to specifically, where's the best place for them to go to keep track of you?

Stephen Phipps

Well, we can always find new products online at thorne.com and happy to show you what we're doing and the things we're looking at on LinkedIn, either on Thorne or at Stephen Phipps, ND, Ph.D.

Robert Rountree

Great, Excellent. As always, thank you everyone for listening. Be sure to tune in next time when Dr. Phipps and I will tackle the topic of our metabolism and what we can do about it with dietary supplements. Until then!

Dr. Robert Rountree - Outro

Thanks for listening to The Thorne Podcast. Make sure to never miss an episode by subscribing to the show on your podcast app of choice. If you've got a health or wellness question you'd like answered, simply follow our Instagram and shoot a message to @ThorneHealth. You can also learn more about the topics we discussed by visiting Thorne.com and checking out the latest news videos and stories on Thorne's Take 5 Daily blog. Once again, thanks for tuning in and don't forget to join us next time for another episode of The Thorne Podcast.