Nutrition Gateway

Episode 028: Seaweed: Sustainable Superfood Revolution Dr Pia Winberg

• Sally-Anne Kearns

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Guest: Dr. Pia Winberg, Founder of Phyco Health

  • The hidden nutritional power of seaweed
  • Iodine's critical role in human health
  • Gut health and the magic of marine micronutrients

Podcast Takeaways:

  1. Iodine Insights
  • Essential for brain development
  • Prevents preventable brain damage
  • Delicate balance crucial for health
  1. Gut Health Revolution
  • Seaweed slimes support microbiome
  • Can reduce inflammation
  • Potential links to managing chronic conditions
  1. Sustainable Nutrition
  • Seaweed as a complete nutritional source
  • Regenerates nutrients from food production waste
  • Potential to address global nutritional deficiencies

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Pia:

Eight the fundamental elements, again, that that plants and seaweed take up so that that was sort of my that's my thinking. It's how I work with seaweeds. I follow the nutrient flows into them, but then that leads to, well, we actually need to put them back in the ecosystem and our diet. So then I look at how the nutrient flows out of them as well. And so looking from the sustainability angle of seaweeds, remediating nutrients, then we have seaweeds, it automatically leads to, well, those nutrients have now been converted to really exciting organic compounds and molecules that are actually fundamental to human health, because we have evolved with seaweeds and seafood, and so understanding that, again, in a modern world, has been the mission that I've been on.

Sally-Anne Kearns:

And it's a mission that you that I feel in every email that you write, every post that's put out, and it's so exciting to see people so passionate about bringing back these tools that have, essentially, as you say, been forgotten. And we, you know, as practitioners, we're looking at things through the lens of bio availability, like, how does the body respond to the stimulants of those micronutrients and iodine is such an incredible story at the moment, because we're we know that clinically, there's a relationship between iodine deficiency and thyroid function, which sadly, a lot of women do view their health through their weight, and there's this interesting assumption that I want to lose weight, I want to lose weight, but we're never sort of saying to ourselves, I want to I want to nourish. I want to nourish. It's an interesting story. And you have an incredible little blog called The irony of iodine, and it touches on some really exciting things in relation to health. But why do Why do you think from from what you've seen through the microscope, what do you feel? Why is iodized homosoft Just not cutting it anymore? And why does see vegetables kind of

Pia:

Trump? Yeah, yeah, the Yeah. The irony of iodine is, it's, it's, it's such an important molecule to our health, yet we need it in such small doses, and the consequences of not getting those small doses are quite extreme, and the consequences of over reaching and getting too much iodine and in the wrong forms is is also not good. And so the balance of iodine is such a sensitive balance, and we've really, yeah, we're far away from getting it right at a population scale. And then the irony again, is that it's actually so easy to get it right at an individual level, if we know how to. And so that's, that's, there's a many ironies of iodine, and it's one that one of the health issues, as you've mentioned, is, of course, the thyroid and the imbalances in thyroid are are real, and we very many women, especially, experience that in in Australia today, and whether we just didn't get enough growing up and triggering thyroid issues, or in, in some cases, not getting enough and in or getting too much, in some cases, has actually happened in Australia as well, and that's through the food system, not knowing how to dose dose iodine Well, the consequences go beyond thyroid. Iodine is essential to the development of children's brains, and it's known by the World Health Organization to be the leading cause of preventable brain damage in the world today.

Unknown:

Wow.

Pia:

So again, such a powerful thing is the collective brain. You know, maybe we wouldn't need AI if we'd been maybe not that extreme, but we really do have the potential across the world to elevate, you know, brain capacity a little bit through making sure everyone gets iodine. And really you just need a little bit of seaweed and some seaweeds, tiny, tiny bits of seaweed to address the iodine needs globally, and because we've been deficient in iodine, government and the governments know that China knows that they started a large scale kelp farming industry because they knew the soils were deficient in iodine, and that is a strategy to get iodine to the brains of of the Chinese population. So although there's that you don't need a lot of it, there's a lot of people. So they needed to start an industry around that. And it's actually a requirement to have iodine naturally in in in salts and in China to get the right dose. And salt is often seen as a vehicle for iodine, because it's not something you can overdose on, and that's where people are using it as as the best format to get your iodine. But it doesn't have to come in a format of the mined iodine byproducts from mining industry. We just need to put a bit of seaweed in salt. It's that simple. And then we would get it, and then you get a nice, rounded aromatic kind of a salt. It's not offensive at all to have seaweed to, you know, taste buds and and aroma in that way. And it's really an easy way to get it. In fact, in Australia, the way we used to get it was when the milkman left the milk bottles on the doorstep and went and washed them. They they were washed in iodine as a sterilization method, and in cow teats were washed in iodine. And so that was actually a supply of iodine for the Australian population, and it became noticeable when we stopped doing that process, but that's sort of not the process humans should rely on to get their iodine is washing your milk bottle. So really, we need to revisit what is the source of iodine? Where did people get it? And how do we do that again, in the modern world, and adding a bit of seaweed to salt is the easiest way to go about it if you're not having seaweed in your diet on a regular basis?

Sally-Anne Kearns:

Yeah, it's really interesting. I have tried to encourage my children to have a variety of the you know, dietary input, and we recognize that chlorine sort of stops the upregulation effectively, of iodine as well. And so we're having chlorinated water to resolve our water systems. And so we've got these co factors of things. And this is what people don't necessarily always understand about the human body. It likes things in a certain way, and because we're also beautifully individual,

Unknown:

this journey of health

Sally-Anne Kearns:

can't be a one size fits all. And I love the salt. It's like, you know, you read these recipes and it says salt to taste, and it's my version of salt to taste. Every day is different. And one of the things that I love is using a Celtic sea salt and popping it under my tongue and popping it in my water bottle, just to really help me cellularly hydrate. But I am making sure that my water filter has also deep originated the water as well. So I just watched the habits the kids, and I've always encouraged them to

Unknown:

to be curious

Sally-Anne Kearns:

about what their body needs. And so quite often I'll find them, you know, snacking on Nori and or bringing a seaweed salt to the table and, you know, salting their eggs or veggies and stuff like that. And it's we've kind of gone right away from this, using these foods in a therapeutic way. And I love what you're doing, because I think what it's doing is it's normalizing, using your pantry as your pharmacy. In a way, it's using the beautiful things that we're putting on our skin as another process of loving ourselves and nourishing ourselves externally

Unknown:

and internally.

Pia:

Yeah, and what you raised there about your children, and it's been really fascinating for me, because I've been able to see how the Western world has adopted some nori sheets and snacks in the supermarkets, and how the younger generation is actually just not consciously, unconsciously, just embracing and going, I want seaweed snacks. The number of people that tell me their kids want seaweed and it just shows you that the body does know and it when it needs some sort of a mineral, if we, if we just allow ourselves to start listening again a bit more to what, what do I actually feel like eating today? And like you said, some days you actually you can feel when you need salt, you can feel when you don't need salt, and and that goes for so many of the other nutrients as well. And yeah, children are, children are tuning into seaweed, that's for sure.

Sally-Anne Kearns:

Yeah, definitely. And so, is there a better alternative for children than, say, your standard store bought nori like, is there something that you stock that you found that children are really resonating with?

Pia:

Yeah, yeah, for sure, and not, nor is just been the the seaweed product that's hit the modern food shelves, you know, and there's as many diverse seaweeds as there are plants and beyond. And so that's that's in part why we actually don't tend to sell just seaweed straight because we sort of started there, but realized the food manufacturers don't know what to do with it, and the customers don't know what to do with it. So we need to put it into formats that are familiar, that mean that you just have to pull off the shelf what you normally eat. And the traditional dish of Australia, if you didn't know, is bag ball. And so put it in the pasta. So so we try and put it into things that are familiar. And sometimes that does add some additional flavor or depth. But usually we've found we've made, been able to make it so acceptable to people and yeah, one of the snacks that I that we have for kids, that they love, is a fruit jerky stripe putting 15% seaweed in with just straight fruit. So it's like a dried fruit energy snack. That's it, seaweed and seaweed and fruit vitamin. We've got a good iron dose in our seaweed as well. So the vitamin C and the iron together make that a nice, absorbable product and and then the iodine there naturally. So yeah, there's, there's no reason why we can't diversify the number of snacks that we make that give you just a little bit of seaweed. Dose you need. We do coat, you know, macadamia nuts and roast them for for a snack treat as well. So, so, yeah, it's just animation and food system that still is restricted in how it embraces seaweed. And our mission is, yeah, we can get seaweed into everything,

Sally-Anne Kearns:

and this is the bit that I love. It's called biohacking. It's like doing small changes in your family's health that make macro change in terms of their well being. And we want to empower our young people. A lot of people, mothers ask me, like, how do you get your kids to eat something healthy? Well, I get them involved in the story, and I tell them, This is what we use this for. This is what we use this for. And so when you're feeling like that, that's what we do here. And I think this is part of what we've lost. We've lost this innate wisdom of being able to use the tool for the job. Now I'm curious if you talk a lot, actually, on there's a unique Australian seaweed species. And I'm a little bit curious about this, because I guess I'm looking at it through your lens, and I'm going, oh my goodness, like this is like a forest, if you wish, under the sea. And so you're seeing so many different variabilities. But what is exciting you about this SP 84

Pia:

Yeah, so we are more familiar with the seaweeds that are cultivated overseas, because the sea Australia, as of yet and prior to us, doesn't really have a seaweed industry. And so we know things like the nori in the supermarket shelves. Some people are familiar with wakame and kombu, which are giant kelp species, but beyond the sort of Asian store shelf or an Asian seaweed salad that people might see with wakame and the fish, fish seafood stores at the moment, yeah, we're not very familiar with what seaweeds there are around us, and so we went and looked at the taxonomy of different Australian species. We've got kangaroos, flowers and gum trees on land, and we similarly, have very species in the oceans. We have our very own nori species that are endemic to Australia. We have our very own kelp species. People will be familiar with the little bubbles joined together. You know, that's a homocyra banks. I named after Sir Joseph Banks. Of course, named it when he saw it in Australia. Those are Australian species. And we looked at Green species in particular. And the reason I looked at Green seaweeds was because one, they could actually regenerate nutrients very quickly, like like nitrogen, and they can actually become more protein rich than some of the other seaweeds. And again, I'll bring the irony of iodine in here. Our seaweed has low iodine compared to the other seaweeds. But that doesn't mean it's low. It's just that some of the other kelps, like kombu, for example, has got such extreme levels of iodine, such high levels, but that you really shouldn't eat much kombu. You and the Asians eat it in sort of broths and things like that. They're not sitting there munching on giant pieces of kombu. So if we'd put kombu into pasta, like we do our seaweed into pasta, we would overdose people on the iodine in a dangerous way. And as we spoke of before, iodine is so essential and and limited in people's diets, but you just can't have too much. It's such a Goldilocks kind of a ingredient in food. And so that's where we went, right? Well, this is a really nice kind of a staple seaweed that could go into foods and replace, say, we're so in the wheat in the pasta, for example, we're replacing 10% of the wheat in the pasta. And you couldn't do that with all of the seaweeds. And so that's why we see that this green seaweed that we grow as a staple kind of seaweed, and then when you can eat more of it, it actually opens the door to the other trace elements lying behind the iodine there as well, as I mentioned, iron is rich in our seaweeds, boron, strontium, and all these little wacky trace elements that we're losing from our soils, and we're not going to sit there being able to calculate the dosage of getting them right. And that's where just a bit of seaweed in your diet every day just covers the basis of so many of these little quirky minerals that we actually need in different weird processes in our bodies and and that's why seaweeds, this kind of seaweed for us is, then, like, you know, a bit of a guarantee that you've covered at the end of all the bases that you need for a complete nutritional diet when, when you're getting great food from land, just add a bit of seaweed and that would just top off the completeness of it. That's the sort of strategy we're on, and this species really fits the bill for that and and can also be very unique in its it's got B 12, which is quite unique in seaweeds and plant land plants as well, and very rich in protein and all of the essential amino acids as well. So really can become a part of this staple pantry, ingredient shelf, I feel like

Sally-Anne Kearns:

you're about I feel like you're ahead of your time in a way, like I'm

Pia:

just going back in time. Maybe

Sally-Anne Kearns:

I know, but I'm just like, this is a conversation that excites me, because it's we're now, you know, we know that our soils are depleted because of our mono cropping, and we've got, you know, lots of different inputs and outputs, and food just isn't really what it used to be. Because we're not, we're not really creating it in in that sort of bio dynamic system which the ocean has naturally. And, you know, it's just such an interesting time for food. I think, you know, the cost of living, people are really kind of scrambling to get the foundations met. And it's what we were taught. We were taught, you know, seasonal, local, nutrient dense Whole Foods so the body recognizes them and goes, Hey, I'm going to take what I need, you know, the boron and all the other things and those micro minerals, and I'm going to then use that to, sort of, I kind of think of it as a as an unlocking of some of the other functionality that's taking place in the human body, and when we look at dysregulation and dysfunction, these sorts of things are paramount. So I love where you're going with it, and I love that you've compared this local seaweed to some of the others and gone, okay, well, these are our points of difference, and nature's not stupid. It's not to do such a complex system, okay? And so with I just want to pivot a little bit around so that SP, 84 how does that compare? To link back into the thyroid conversation that we had earlier. Like, do you feel it's more complete?

Pia:

Yeah. So we find that that that this seaweed is one that you can sort of put into foods, and know that, you know you don't have to limit yourself to putting it in salt. You can actually put it into because it's it's not something you have to be so cautious with the dosage of, like kombu.

Sally-Anne Kearns:

So you could

Pia:

put kombu in salt because, you know safely, because you know you're not going to go and eat 20 grams of salt a day. So you can dose it there and feel that that's safe, but our seaweed you can put into pasta, into muesli, into fruit straps, and just know that you're not you're going to get your iodine, but you're not going to overdose on it either. And as I said, it just complements with all of the other minerals and trace elements from the ocean and, yeah, and that's why it's nice that you can not have to turn to salt during your thyroid health. It's because people now, because it's been put in salt as a vehicle to take it into human health by, you know, nutritional strategies at a government level, which is great for a population scale, but, but as a but on the ground and your personal choices, you know you don't have to Use salts to make sure you get your iodine. If you're choosing a different salt, that's de iodized. The challenges as well. You know salt, iodized salt is required to go into bread manufacture, because that's also a way to get make sure everybody's getting some iodine. Is, it's, it's it's in the bread that the salt went into. The irony there, though, again, is that organic breads and sourdough breads don't like iodine because it stops the the yeast, the fermentation processes and those and things like that, so and so organic people as well. The sources are not so organic. So organic breads choose not to put iodine in them. So the the problem there is that if you're eating organic sourdough breads, you're actually getting less iodine that than people are eating tip top white bread on stuff, which is so ironic.

Sally-Anne Kearns:

I think any of our listeners are eating tip top, but you don't know, like, if you are okay, there is a bonus, but we're going to move away from tip top.

Pia:

But the white bread on the shelf, you know, that's that actually does have iodine, true of, you know, food industry system, which is a good intent, but it's not the best bread. And the best bread is, you know, your local sourdough, whole grain breads, and then they tend not to have iodine in them, because they're not using iodized salt. And so that's where we need to have other sources of iodine in our diet. And it doesn't just have to be in the salt. It can be in your muesli, in your snack, in your pasta,

Sally-Anne Kearns:

yeah, so get, I mean, have fun experimenting with some of the range I know. I'm going to be looking for the fruit straps and and just to bring that into the, you know, because I'm looking for alternatives where the kids can, you know, self select their nutrient profile. And they're not silly. They they know. And I talk to clients all the time and going, what are you craving? Like, what sort of foods are you craving? And that, to me, is like, I work backwards and go, Okay, so if you're craving that food, then we can work backwards to finding another form of that food that your body clearly wants, but it only recognizes that you're going to give it to it in that format. So for example, chocolate, if women are just craving chocolate, I'm like, Okay, so is it a blood sugar issue, or do you actually just need magnesium? Yeah, and copper. And we can, can we start to find other more nutrient dense forms of those nutrients? And when people get it right, they don't crave anymore. It's just what I find so fascinating.

Pia:

Yeah, the craving. So again, going back to something like white bread, to get the kind of mineral dose that you need, you actually need to eat the whole loaf. That's why it's not a good thing. So, you know, we go back to these nutrient, mineral rich products, and you're not craving the whole loaf anymore. It really is that what happens and

Sally-Anne Kearns:

people are viewing themselves as broken going, Why do I, you know? Why am I insatiable for this particular thing? And it's like, well, let's just look at it quite holistically and go, that's just your body enabling you to have that nutrient, but let's find a way that we can do it more sustainably. That's not going to have the other side effects of inflammation, etc. Talking of inflammation, have you looked into the relationship between the microbiome of the gut and seaweed and inflammation? Because I'm kind of, whenever I think about the lining of the gut, I'm thinking about foods that, and I say to clients all the time, think about slimy foods. So we've got things like artichoke and chia seeds and Apple salts and like okra and like things that, when they're rendered down, they kind of, you know, they're slimy. And seaweed, by nature, has that texture. So does it have a role in, in in that place of the gap?

Pia:

Absolutely. And each seaweed has its own unique slime. And this is such an exciting world of science for me. Is that, you know, I've gone all, all Biochemistry in, in that space now, because slimes are the future of human health and medicine, in my view, it's, it's, we've just scratching the surface. And, you know, we are a whole lot of slime inside ourselves. And the gut is a, is a slime fermenting pot, really. And we know we love fermented foods. Those fermented foods are, are producing a different slimes, and they're all really important for our immune system, our gut signaling. You know, the gut is 80% of our immune system, and it's all about a whole host of different signaling pathways and and the slimes, or the they're actually very, very complex polysaccharides or giant sugars, that's what they are. But the word sugar is a bit tainted, but they're giant polysaccharides, and these things have such an important signaling system with the evolution of our gut from birth in childhood, human breast milk is quite unique in the sugar. We call it or slime codes that are mother's best milk isn't so slimy, but there's slime sugars in there and and those codes are really important for the development of a child's immune system. And those those signals are not present there, for example, in in cow milk. And that's why one of the reasons the immune system is our children's development is so, so important. And yeah, so this field of slime is something we started to look at in human gut, and did two human clinical studies to look at, well, how does this work, and what does it do? And we could actually measure specific bacteria that responded to taking the slime of our seaweed, we actually extract the slime and and can deliver that to Pia wow and and that that means that we can see which bacteria increase species, different species of Bifido bacteria that people are familiar with, Certain lactobacillus, acromancia. And these are all sort of species when you know broadly to be beneficial, but we do shift the gut flora by adding the seaweed slimes of different types, and that is actually flowing on and we can see responses in the inflammation markers in the body. And we even started to link some of these inflammation markers to skin disorders like psoriasis. So today, we know that it's probably like 75 health issues, chronic health issues in the Western world, that are linked to gut health, which is pretty much a deficiency of fiber. And a big chunk of these fibers need to be the slimes, yes, and, and we need to be putting them back in our diets, because, you know, it's, it isn't just the traditional, insoluble, roughage fiber that we used to know when we were growing up was important. It's, it's these slime fibers and soluble fibers, and they need to be different, and they need to be abundant. And there's so many, whether it's diabetes, lupus, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, all of these things now are recognized as having links to inflammation that can be triggered from poor gut function.

Sally-Anne Kearns:

Oh, you've just opened up Pandora's box. In my mind, I can only imagine how exciting it must be for you to see the relationship between how the humble, you know, seaweed, grass, effectively or plant, is now correlating to human health. And whenever I think about slimy foods, I just I, I actually crave them. So things like soaked chia seeds and, you know, the artichoke that I mentioned, and obviously bone rocks and fermented fruit like these are things that, when I think about them, my whole body goes, Yes, yeah. And so how are you getting the slime in? Because when I think about that, like, how do you keep it in that format? Because a lot of our modern foods are dry. They're white, they're refined, so they they're really drying for the body, whereas, yeah, we're talking about going the opposite there.

Pia:

Yeah, we are, but we but to make it shelf stable, we can actually dry. And that's what's nice with seaweeds, is that they are so easy to dry as nutrition that you can take with you. And these limes are very resistant molecules, so you cannot so that's what I mentioned at the beginning, you know, the middens in the inland of South America. And what we found in the inland middens is all residues of different seaweeds that you can put dried seaweed, like dried fruit, like dried you know, historically, humans have stored foods that they know they can store in different ways, like dried berries, or it's why you conserve certain berries in different ways, and you can travel with food in that way. So people could travel from the coast inland, and know that they're taking their iodine with them. They the Maori Battalion in the Second World War. They love nori. They call it kerengo, and they went to the second world war with nori in their satchels, and I am sure that they were the only non constipated battalion in the Second World War, for sure. So, so traveling with seaweeds and the drying, you know, you know Nori, and we roll it that the stretchiness of that Nori, when you've got the moisture and rehydrating it. It's about the slime molecules in the nori rehydrating and stretching out again, because they can actually absorb moisture very quickly, bounce back and recover, straight back to the slime form from whence they came. They're some of the most water absorbing molecules on the planet, and so you can actually dry them out, rehydrate them little bit like chia seeds, you know, they'll just bounce back, and then the slime starts coming out. So, so that's how the seaweeds can work as well. And it's easy for easier for us to dry them out and then put them in fiber powdered blends. Or people tend to want capsules. That's something we've we deliver it through food, but then people say, I just want it in a pill. So we're like, okay, Phil, will give you an appeal, but effectively, it's food in a pill, and and, but you can just eat, say the pasta or the fruit strap, and you'll get the same benefits as if it was in a pill, some people just feel mentally that they're getting something more because it's in a pill. And we have to try and teach people and move away from that you're actually getting more if it's in the fruit strap, but, but,

Sally-Anne Kearns:

you know, like we're just we need to deprogram ourselves.

Pia:

Yes,

Sally-Anne Kearns:

from from this, and

Pia:

when you think about the scale of the deficiency globally, and that's also where today, unfortunately, to be able to get the dose of fiber back into people's diets, and these types of slimes is they're still putting the same off the shelf, and that's not going to change overnight. And so if we can dose up the fiber and the and the slime by just adding it to what they're pulling off the shelf every day, then that's going to have a huge impact, you know, across the board, of fibers, slime and roughage and everything. You know, we we're recommended to have about 30 to 50 grams a day. Westerners are getting about 15, and we know that probably the 30 to 50 grams is even underestimated, and we should be looking at 100 to 150 grams, because these, this is the true fermented food. It goes into our guts and has a really nice microbial processing of fermentation and and creation of new vitamins and molecules that are essential for our health, and we really need to use those fibers to feed that natural gut, gut flora that will feed us.

Sally-Anne Kearns:

Cool. I feel like I could talk to you for days, but I'm also aware that you're a very vision driven one, and that you've got lots going on at the moment. Do you want to touch on what's next for Bico health? Like, where? What are you excited about, and where are you kind of driving it?

Pia:

Yeah, well, we feel like we've unlocked a little bit of a of a platform, because now we know we can cultivate these seaweeds by regenerating lost nutrients from food production systems. We currently catch carbon dioxide and nutrients from food manufacturing facilities where some of the largest lost food streams exist. It isn't just the, you know, the tomato vine that is the is the food waste in food systems. It's food nutrients are leaking whenever we process foods and everywhere. We've shown we can recover nutrients from mushroom production, from from wheat processing waste, from fermentation to gin and even even cheese processing plants. Everything goes back to nitrogen, phosphorus and minerals, and we add the sea, ocean minerals, and then we can grow seaweed. So our mission now is to look at, where can we start to have the sort of permaculture systems of seaweed integrated with the land, to see nutrient losses and and then how, and what do we turn all these seaweeds into? Because it's not just it's the iodine is amazing, and it's a major, important part of human nutrition, but there's so many things. There's the iron, there's the gut fibers, there's more sustainable proteins, there's B 12, then we can make materials from it as well. So we feel like we need lots of partners now to start taking on the the seaweed and helping us do all of these many things, because I guess we've sort of led the way by example, I felt that I couldn't actually explain to people as an academic. All of this in scientific papers. It wasn't going anywhere. So I had to make the pasta. I had to do the muesli, to show people, this is what you can do with it. And now I feel like we've achieved that. So our next step is for other people to start joining us and start making things with the seaweed and recognizing it as one of the really exciting missing ingredients, if you like, in a more sustainable and a more nutritional food system that has to be integrated at scale to turn around the sort of nutritional deficiencies that that we've created. So scaling some farms is what we're currently looking at, at at doing in New South Wales, is where we've started and and, yeah, that's that's our next step. But we also have a whole host of biotechnology slime researchers, because they also recognize that, you know, burns victim, wound healing, oral health, mucosal health in the eyes, in the mouth, not only the gut, all mucus areas can be affected during different illnesses, radiation and chemotherapy, for example. So we collaborate with other researchers that could benefit from using our slime in different, if different applications.

Sally-Anne Kearns:

So incredibly exciting. I think this is definitely going to be the future of trace minerals, micronutrients, activating and unlocking, you know, the broader function in the human body, finding ways that are fun, that we can integrate into our pantry. We feel empowered. I love just that slime element. I just think it's really fun. I just encourage the audience to have a little play on your website, which is really interesting, and just follow your journey. Because you're an Australian, you're a small, medium enterprise, you've got your focus on the future human health is at the core of everything that you're doing. And I can just feel, you know, you're running just getting started.

Pia:

Yeah, it will use the years I've got left to try and make this have a big impact, and to hand the baton on to so many more people and kids that are excited by it, because it's novel and it's eye opening for so many people. And the fact that you can actually eat the solution, it's really tangible. You can feel like you're actually doing something, both for your health and for sustainability with each bite you take, and it's not always that you get to actually feel like by taking this and eating it, I'm making a difference on many levels.

Sally-Anne Kearns:

So where do people find you?

Pia:

Yeah, so people are absolutely welcome to come and visit us in our factory on the south coast of New South Wales, and many people know of Jervis Bay

Sally-Anne Kearns:

area. So we're very

Pia:

there. We're with our factory and a beautiful community and amazing beaches. So if you are nearby, you're welcome to visit us on scallop street in huskisson, Jervis Bay and but otherwise you can find us in our foods in New South Wales, in Harris farm markets and also online. Otherwise, we ship everywhere around Australia every day. That's the main way we sell products. So that's at FICO health. FICO is Latin for seaweed and algae. So Fico health.com.

Sally-Anne Kearns:

Beautiful. Thank you so much for your time. I feel really blessed and totally inspired, and I just wish you well on your journey. And thank you. Thank you.

Pia:

Thanks. Sally Anne,

Sally-Anne Kearns:

awesome. Oh my gosh. All right. So what I'll do as as I start, do you want me to once I get it live, I'll send you the links if you feel like cross promoting, but I'm going to get the virtual assistant to just do some sort of videos, little snapshots of you like, just the highlights, the big kind of kaboom moments, and I'll just start playing with that on social media. Do you want me to tag you at FICO health in those? Or do you want me to just send you the raw files?

Pia:

Yeah? Yeah. Glad for you to, yeah, tag me like that. And if there's anything fun, yeah, you're welcome to send too, but, but, yeah, happy just to be tagged and I'll, uh, share or collaborate, or however you want to do it on the social

Sally-Anne Kearns:

media. Oh, thank you so much. That's just the slime thing just has totally got me, because I'm constantly gathering on about Sally foods and so finding something that's yeah, in that space is really cool.

Pia:

It's so exciting, the that part of it all and people really don't appreciate chemists never really appreciated it, because they always used to think, oh, that's just the filling in material. There's nothing to it, but the complexity of those molecules is just blowing everyone's minds away of what they do and how they communicate. So it's, yeah, it's going to be exciting to see that knowledge grow in the future.

Sally-Anne Kearns:

Ah, alright. And if I'm down that way, we're up near Newcastle. So if you're up that way, you can always drop in for a cup or a bed, yeah, Brendan, port, Stevens

Unknown:

region. But if I head down south, I'll definitely stop in,

Sally-Anne Kearns:

I, I'm so lit up about these sorts of food systems.

Pia:

Yeah, great Eliane well thanks for your patience in me, canceling the last one, we're not turning up. Yeah, and we've got it done. Yeah,

Sally-Anne Kearns:

exactly. All right, Austin did through when it's finished.