➡ Oysters, being a natural source of nutrients, are beneficial for human health. They are rich in zinc, copper, and manganese, which are essential for various bodily functions, including hormone production, eye health, and energy levels. Synthetic supplements can cause deficiencies, unlike oysters which provide a balanced intake of these nutrients. However, the supplement industry lacks clear regulations distinguishing between natural and synthetic sources, leading to a need for more transparency.

➡ Oysters are rich in about 59 trace elements that our bodies need, including zinc. French doctors often use oyster extract to help patients with metabolic syndrome conditions, as it provides all the necessary trace minerals to correct imbalances. Interestingly, having enough zinc in our bodies can prevent heavy metals from binding to certain sites, acting as a detoxing agent. Therefore, consuming oysters can be beneficial for our health.

Okay, thanks, everybody, and welcome to another edition of conversations with Dr. Cowan and friends. And you know, lately we’ve been doing a number of these conversations to highlight people, sometimes young people. Stephen’s not such a young person compared to me. He’s young to. Who are doing interesting, innovative things, particularly around how to improve our nutrition, our health, our Overall well being, etc. And, you know, so. So it’s basically just helping people get a forum to just describe what they’re doing. And so today’s guest is Steven Hauser. I think you say your name. What’s the name? Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh. Oh, I got the name wrong. Okay, I’ll call you Stephen. What? Kavanaugh in the States. And you are the owner and founder of oystermax, is that correct? Correct. Yeah. So, Stephen, the only thing I’m going to say is introduction is the, you know, like every doctor and you know, person who learned science in conventional circles, we, we learn a very reductionist way of thinking. In other words, the reason you eat broccoli is because it has sulforaphans in it, which is weird, right? Because the actual reason you eat broccoli is either because you like it or you don’t like it.

And even I’ve come to question whether it has sulforaphans or not. It’s an interesting thing when you start looking into how they just, how they prove that that chemical exists. It’s pretty wonky stuff. And so I’ve come to think when I’m choosing what to eat, like, I do it from an ecological point of view to a certain extent, and from a visual point of view to a certain extent, but mostly from the point of view of A, do I like the food? B, how do I feel when I eat the food? And see, is there actually any studies that show or, you know, that people who eat this food do better or not, or historical examples of, you know, everybody who ate broccoli dies young or something.

So then I don’t eat it. And I’m not so interested. Not that it doesn’t. It’s not relevant at all, but the sort of self orofan or whatever else argument there is. Having said that, I love eating oysters. I mean, I eat oysters almost, not every time I go out to dinner, but to a restaurant that serves fresh oysters, I always get them because they’re not that easy to get. And the other thing is, I once got a bag of oysters and did it myself and I stabbed myself in the, in the palm of the hand and that was not fun.

That. That. That did not feel good. So I don’t do that anymore. So the only time I eat oysters, when somebody else shucks them for me. And so, you know, so I could say, I mean, I could give you some reasons why. You know, it’s got zinc, and it helps with, you know, potency and fertility and all that stuff. And so I guess what I’m saying is I like eating oysters. I think traditional people ate oysters, and they did really well, and that helps me. And so, given that, I would just like to welcome you and find out if you could give us some background how you got into this and what you know about oysters and why somebody would want to eat oysters.

Well, as an Irish poet said, as Jonathan Swift said, it was a brave man who ate the first oyster. Right? Yeah. They’re sort of weird at first, right? Yeah, yeah. Most people look at them and they think it’s something that I meant to see. My patient coughed up and they walk away. Yeah. I don’t remember when I ate my first one, but I immediately liked it, especially with a little bit of our hot sauce on it. It’s really good. Yeah. So on the seafood spectrum, they’re kind of at the far end of it. They’re one of these things which either love them or hate them.

There’s no real in between with oysters. Yeah. Right. And if people don’t like fish, they’re certainly ain’t gonna eat oysters. Yeah, but. But, yeah. Interesting what you say about how you choose food. So gastronomy is foremost for me as well, you know, when it comes to foods. Do I like them? What do they do to me? Feel good, you know, and. Yeah, absolutely. You know. So tell us a little bit who. Who you are, how you got into this gig. Well, when you mentioned gastronomy, kind of. Well, I started originally as a marine biologist. I studied marine biology in college.

So that’s my. My academic background as a. As a marine biologist. And then after working for a few years in the oyster industry in Ireland and then in a. Washington. Washington state, in Alaska, doing salmon surveys with the Forest Service in New York, America, I came back here and there wasn’t much to do. So there was lots of. Here is Ireland. Ireland, yeah. Ireland. Yeah. So this side of the pond, so you’ve got to. These big oysters around, and these are like big west coast oysters. These are. These are west coast variety that you would know.

But when you’re saying you’re going to a restaurant that’s the kind of oyster you’d be getting. That’s a. Yeah, right. Strong oyster. This is a big brother. We’ve been in the sea about 15 years longer. Same oyster, same species. If you leave this guy in the water for another 10 or 15 years, this is what you get. Lots of these big oysters that have naturalized here in Ireland. They brought them here in the 70s to farm them because they grow much faster than the native species. But they weren’t supposed to naturalize because the waters are too cold for them to spawn and for the larvae to survive.

But they managed it in some bays. But I had a lot of big oysters, even from the aquaculture industry and from these now that are kind of a wild fishery. And nobody knew what to do with them. So we actually started smoking them. This is, we’ll go back 24 years now. We started smoking them and the first couple good few years of the business we were in gastronomy, that’s where we were. And about five or six. When you say we, who do you mean? We? Oh, the company, Marine Health Foods. Ah, family business. You know, my, my partner and the kids and they’ve all worked in it.

So. Yeah. And now the crew we have, we’ve got a crew there, about 12 staff. So. So in other words, you, you, you had a, you knew about marine biology, knew about fisheries and stuff. And so you saw these huge oysters and thought, I might as well try to do something with them. Absolutely, yeah. Somebody knew what to do with them because they were only interested in these restaurant grade oysters which have been sent to the hotels in Paris and restaurants. And nobody wanted the big oysters, although they have this fantastic meat and this incredible source of nutrition.

Yeah. And after a few years of doing that, I ran into a company with. So it was very tough trying to start a business in gastronomy as an artisan food producer. But it was a fantastic journey. But we used to supply Harrods in London and Gallery Lafayette in Paris and heck, in Milan. These are some of the top retail food stores in Europe. Incredible. You know, and we used to do the slow food movement in Italy. We used to attend their trade shows and bring our oyster bar there. And it was a great journey. You know, we do all the food tastings of everything and learned about slow foodie ethics and producing really good quality food and all that kind of stuff.

And. And you were using these big oysters then? Yeah, big oysters we were using, yeah. And then you were eating them raw, smoked or smoked? We were smoking Them. We also had an oyster bar in the. An organic food market in the center of Dublin. And we traded there for 15 years. We had an oyster bar there. So people used to come in every Saturday and get fresh plate of fresh oysters and a glass of wine and all that. But they close us down on the first lockdown. They closed the market down and we never recovered.

So we haven’t got back to that. Yeah, ruined the market. Lovely little gem of a market that would be there for 25 years in the center of Dublin. There’s about 27 organic producers in there. So you got started by. You were like the first person to market these big oysters and you were able to do it to slow foods and fancy restaurants and markets and all these places all over Europe. Yeah. Because of the nature of oysters, you are forced into the higher end of the market because they’re an expensive product and people need. Right. You know, unfortunately, when we get to this in a minute.

Unfortunately. Now, oysters are kind of a discerning dish. They’re only available in fine dining restaurants. Or you will get them in your fish moulders. But like you said earlier, not everybody knows how to open them. I’ve got the scars to prove that. And they don’t know how to open them. They don’t like them, or they’re not. They’re not exactly the quickest food or whatever, you know. But they’re more associated now with fine dining, whereas they were a staple of our diet. And we’ve had this hiatus from oyster nutrition for about 120 years now. Tell us more about what you know about oysters as a staple of a diet.

So if we go back to the history of oysters, of eating oysters, there’s a theory that they saved humanity 250,000 years ago because Homo sapiens started foraging for oysters on the shore. And they think that Homo sapiens could have been reduced to as few as 600 individuals. And by foraging for oysters, they found this new source of protein. It was very good for omega 3s. They’re very high in omega 3s and also very high in certain elements, especially zinc and copper, which would have led to higher reproductive success. And they think that by foraging for oysters that are shellfish, it gave them a huge evolutionary advantage over Neanderthals.

And they out competed them and they exploded from. From the south coast of Africa where they were confined to, where they nearly went extinct. And they came from there to inhabit the whole planet. And that’s the story of Homo Sapiens. But going back 250,000 years now, oysters have been around for 300 million years. Homo sapiens have been eaten for 250,000. We think they’re a big part of our success from an evolutionary perspective. And when you come up through the Roman and Greek times, there’s loads of depictions of people eating oysters and Roman reliefs and mosaics and so forth.

Up through the Middle Ages, lots of the Greek master or the Dutch masters portrayed people having oyster feasts and that sort. There’s quite a lot of literature there to back up this fascination. Seems to be a lot of the time, it seemed to be something associated with the upper classes and the aristocracy and stuff like that. But again, where you have coastal communities and what would have been classed people who would have been classed as peasants and fishermen, there’s huge oyster middens in those areas. And oyster mittens are just these layers of oyster shells around human settlements that are evidence that they used oysters, or they ate lots and lots of oysters because they discarded the shells, and the shells last forever.

So they knew everybody seemed to be eating them. But when you get to the 1800s, it gets really interesting because that’s the golden era, we call it, when peak consumption occurred, when fishing methods had improved, that we could fish oysters in deeper waters. And as an example, in 1890, the average New Yorker was eating 600 oysters a year. Now today, it’s 0.4 and like that, it’s all in restaurants and so forth. But oysters were cheaper than beef or pork or chicken. They were cheaper than fish, and oyster stew was a staple of the diet in America.

A lot of them came out of the Chesapeake and Boston and places like that. They had massive oyster canning plants that they took the oysters and they shook the meat out and sent it all over the US. This is a huge industry, and for about three or four decades, near the end of the 1800s, it was a staple of the diet. So we kind of had oysters from 250,000 years ago, right up to 1910, 1915, when they became extinct because of overfishing and poor management. And we, at that point, we lost 99% of our oyster beds globally, and to the point that today, no living biologist today knows what a proper oyster reed looks like.

No, we don’t know when that’s a big part. We get into that later. Maybe that’s part of our restoration and conservation work that we’re doing. But we had this hiatus from that oyster nutrition in the. In the 60s and 70s, we started again with oysters farming. From like 1915 or so to 1970, there was no oysters because they. They basically the white. They were sort of wiped out. Just some. A few oysters swimming around in the bays. Yeah. People in coastal communities might be able to pick a few here and there. They’re quite gregarious animals and they like to live in big beds and big communities.

So when you thin them out too much, they don’t do very well. Yeah, it would have been very rare, but 99 of them, like. There was an oyster reef off the south coast of Australia. It was 2000km long, bigger than the Great Barrier Reef. Completely wiped out the fishermen here in Ireland, in the town I live in here in 1860, the recorded catch to the British Admiralty at the time was 60,000 barrels of oysters. These were herring barrels. They filled with. Half filled them with oysters and then filled them with seawater and shipped them off to the hotels in London and Paris.

And the oysters from where I live here were the most highly prized in Europe at the time. But 20, 30 years later, the catch was 14 barrels from 60,000 to 14. That reef potentially took because this was covered in ice 10,000 years ago. That reef took 10,000 years to form, and we wiped it out in 26 years. Wow. Overfishing. But it had. Had been fish for 100 years prior to that, and it was very valuable income. But regulations and overfishing and stuff, really, that that pressure came in that peak consumption, that. Those peak consumption decades that we talk about, they became very fashionable.

Everybody wanted oysters. They were cheap. They were a really good source of protein. Like you said earlier, people felt good when they were eating them. But as soon as you eat oysters, you get this burst of energy. The fertility rate goes up too. And interestingly, from 1910, there’s a period from about 1910 where the world’s population doubled. So I don’t know if the correlation with the oyster consumption, but they are. They’ve been hailed as an aphrodisiac for years, you know, since time immemorial, because people feel the effect when they eat them. And we now know, of course, that there’s science behind that.

Of course. Yeah. All right, so let’s go. So take us through. What’s the seventies until now? Where. What happened since then? Well, then in the 70s, you. We started at farming oysters. So aquaculture started becoming a big, big thing because people taught wheel world fisheries, wild fisheries were declining, and everybody was looking to aquaculture to make up the shortfall. But you started to see all this trout farming and salmon farming, which are awful operations in my opinion. I don’t go near that stuff. But shellfish farming was starting too. And when there was evidence that there was kind of attempts at oyster farming back through the centuries, but it really became big in the 70s onwards to the point that today, from aquaculture alone, and it’s this species, namely the giga species, what we call the Krazos tria species, sorry, we’re at about 6 million tons globally being produced, but 85% of that is produced in China and consumed in China.

At the last Wise Traditions, I gave a talk on oysters and I showed a picture of an oyster farm in Quinzhou in China. And that farm produces 234,000 tons of oysters a year. And that’s almost, that’s very close to the entire production for Europe and North America combined from one farm there. That we’re. We way off the mark when it comes to our. What was traditional oyster consumption for us, you know. So what do you. What’s your take on these oyster farms? Are they reasonable or are they another like salmon farming kind of thing? Totally different.

And there’s no real difference between a wild oyster and a farmed oyster other than the fact is we, we interfere with their life cycle. But we have to say they’re, they’re cultivated or farmed. Yeah, but it’s. Oysters are sessile, so they cement to it, they form reefs, they don’t move. They’re happy to sit there for their entire life. They, they feed naturally from the seawater. There’s no antibiotics involved with no artificial diets involved. They’re feeding naturally from plankton in the water. They get this to reproduce a couple of times in their lifetime before we eat them.

So in terms of animal husbandry, it’s as good as it gets for an animal. And it’s actually the reason I, when I was studying aquaculture in college, it’s the reason I went with oysters because I actually planned. My final year project was on shrimp culture shrimps in Ecuador. And I was going to Ecuador to get into shrimp farming until one of my professors said to me, says, can you drive a bulldozer? And I said, what do you mean? This is when the bulldoze nano the mangrove ecosystems to put these shrimp farms in. And I thought, well, I can’t do that, you know, so I have to leave my empathy at immigration to do that.

So I looked at oysters and as far as cultivating animals goes, it’s as good as it gets. You know, oysters, mussels, and eating shellfish. Very, very environmentally friendly, very sustainable. And one of the really beautiful things about farming oysters is when you farm oysters, that that water that they’re farmed in becomes designated for human food consumption, which means nobody can pollute it. And then oyster farmers become guardians of the coastal waters. And as we’re doing some very interesting trials there around restoration, around oyster farms and stuff at the moment to bring that back, you know. So oyster farms is basically then just putting some sort of reef that they can attach to or some sort of structure and then letting them do their thing.

Well, I used to. That’s where I started in the oyster business. We, we had a hatchery, so we get the males and females, we get them to spawn, but they have a. Have a free swimming larval stage where it’s like a little larvae swims around the water for four weeks and then they settle. It’s called settlement. And they get one shot at it. They got a little spent land and they stick to something. We don’t get to mess it up. We don’t get a second chance. So it’s very important part of their life cycle to get their settlement right.

And they like to settle where other oyster shells are because that’s kind of. They use various cues to know that scents and other proteins and stuff that they detect to decide where to settle. But they, like I said, they only get one shot at it. And so we used to grow them in the hatchery and rare them till they’re about 4 or 5 millimeters in size. And then we give them to the oyster farmers. They put them in bags, these mesh plastic bags out in the ocean, and from that point to the restaurant site, they just grow naturally in the seawater.

Got it. They grade them and they shake them to give them a good shape and stuff. But there’s no feed. There’s no messing around with antibiotics or drugs or anything like that. You can’t, because right in the middle of the ocean, you can’t administer drugs to them, you know, so, yeah, it’s a really, really good. So in terms of quality, there’s no difference between a farm than a wild, in my opinion. But what is vitally important with oysters is the source and the quality of the water, because they’re filter feeders. And if there’s heavy metals or anything bad in the water, pesticide residues, any of that stuff, they will accumulate in their body, and then you’re getting A higher dose of it.

So that’s where you have to be careful. Now the west coast of Ireland was 2,000 miles of clean water between us and the US and very little industry over there. It’s mostly small scale farms and agriculture and that. So it’s very clean water. And the example I get of Quinju, you see this oyster farm in the background. You just phenomenal city. Like I don’t know what the population is probably being China, there’s probably tens of millions of people in it and all the effluents in there has been pumped out across those oyster beds. So I wouldn’t be a fan of eating them personally.

I’m sure they grow very fast there and they grow well. But I don’t know what the nutrient profile is like or what heavy metals or chemical residues would be like in them. You know, just depends on what’s coming out in the water. The water’s clean, they’re fine, you know. Yeah. Okay, so we got these filter feeders and, and so what. Tell us what you’re currently doing with oysters. Like what? Tell us about your business now. So, yeah, we, the first few years we were in gastronomy and then when we got into the supplement end of it, I ran into a company who wanted us to make oyster extract and put it in capsules.

And that’s when we kind of went off the deep end with nutrition. And we, they were only interested in selling their product in France, so we decided to launch our own brand of that product in the. In France or not in France, sorry, in the U.S. and that’s when we got involved with organizations like the Wise Traditions and the Western A Prize foundation and some other organizations there. And that’s what we do now. We take the oyster meat. We don’t actually do smoking anymore because we give it up just before the lockdown. It would have been wiped out anyway with the shutdowns for those couple of years.

And we make oyster powder, we sell it in bulk bags as a. Something you can add to your broth so your stocks and stuff like that to really supercharge them. And we sell them as capsules as a dietary supplement. So walk us through from, you know, where the oysters are grown and, and how you harvest them and then how you, how you process them into powder. But the oysters are caught off the west of Ireland. These big guys, fishing boats catch them. The mixture of catching them with boats and hand picking them as well at certain times of the year.

So you own the, the, the sites you’re just buying? Yeah. You buy them from the fishermen? Yeah, the fishermen don’t know the sites either. It’s a wild fishery. So they have like, they’re obviously licensed to catch them and there’s all sorts of sales notes and records kept of the catches for regulatory reasons and so forth. So they’re shipped across the country to us, to our plant which is in County Wicklow, we’re just south of Dublin. And the oysters come into us there. We shook them and slow dry them through a dry. A convection drying process. We don’t free to dry the material.

We put it through a slow drying convection process. We powder it. When it’s dried, it’s powdered and put into capsules. We do very, very little to it. We don’t add any kind of flow agents. You know, a lot of people use dextrin or maltodextrin and different starches for flow agents. We don’t do that. It’s because. And thank the wise traditions for that actually. But when we were talking to them, they didn’t want anything in their supplements. They put a silicon dioxide and micro. What’s the other one? Magnesium stearate. There are various flow agents and anti caking agents that go into some supplements.

So nobody wanted anything in them. So we hand filled these with an art by an artisan process which still didn’t bother us because we’re already artists and we’re already Americans in production. So we put, we push it into the capsules, polish the capsule bottle and when it goes out it’s completely natural. But when we, when we take the dried oyster, we powder it. That’s still a food. But when we put it in a capsule we shift into dietary supplement regulations. And while we argue this at the time, it’s because it’s going in the capsule. It has to be called a dietary supplement.

But in reality it’s just a really nutrient dense food. A capsule. There’s nothing else in it. You know. Do you do any kind of. You say you. There’s concerns about metals and other residues. Do you do any kind of testing of the oysters or the powder or anything? Every single batch. People, people wonder at that, why we do that. But it’s not that expensive. We do about 14 batches a year and roughly, roughly one a month, maybe a bit more. And we send every batch off. We test for heavy, full heavy metal suite periodically. We do all pesticide residues and that.

We have all that information. If anybody ever wants to get it, we send it on to them. We test Every batch for certain trace minerals and elements and vitamins then, because we make claims on them. So we test for copper, zinc, selenium, iodine and vitamin B12 because they’re actually so high in the product that we can make a lot of health claims on them. So in Europe, people may not realize this, but if you say that something’s an excellent source of say, zinc, it has to. In the US that means it has to have over 20% in, in a daily dosage.

So you see a lot of supplements on the market and say, oh, this is a really good source of whatever, a B vitamin. But they don’t put the level of B vitamin on there. Yeah. So that’s not really playing ball. That’s not proper. Because now you don’t know how much B vitamin is in it. But if you say it’s a good source, it’s an excellent source, or even if you say it contains all of their statements, their nutritional statements and they have numerical values and then you’re supposed to represent that in your supplement. Fat spots. There’s no other food.

And because of that we can make about 40 health claims on our product in Europe. And there’s no other food product that you can do that with other than an oyster. There’s nothing so nutrient dense as an oyster. It is absolutely by a mile. It’s the most nutrient dense food on the planet. Just to be clear, because I know people are always interested in this and you know the people who listen to me. So you’re not putting any zinc in, you’re not putting any B vitamin. There’s no chemical selenium added to anything. Right. Food source naturally occurring in the oyster.

It’s just oysters. Dried oysters. 300 million years of evolution in a castle. Dried oysters. That’s it. I’ve learned, I’ve learned one thing over the years. More humans stay away from nature, the happier nature is. Got it. Okay. So we’re not talking any chemicals, synthetic vitamins, nothing like that. Just oysters. Yeah. So this is what pushes our buzzer big time. And it’s a thing in the supplement business because I could go and get synthetics. Zinc, for example, zinc piccallinate or glycinate or whatever. And I can put 5 milligrams of that in a tablet and then sell the tablet and make all the zinc claims.

And there’s about 10 or 12 zinc claims that you can make on that. But that’s synthetic zinc. Now I can do the same with oyster. But that natural zinc with co factors like copper and manganese and that’s a totally different beast. Yeah, that’s a holistic product. The synthetic zinc you’re taking can cause copper deficiency and manganese deficiency in the body. And it’s not a level playing field for us in the supplement industry. So a lot of the brands, a lot of the synthetic stuff out there, you know, they’re going through the route, they’re following the regulations, but we’re, we’re a different thing.

We’re a natural source. And that’s, it’s an awful pity that’s not a designation in the regulations that you have. Like you have organic and free range almost. But in the supplements you say it should be more specific and say this is an artificial source of zinc. This is a natural source of zinc. You know what I mean? That’s not there, but that’d be, that’d be better. Well, obviously better for our business, but it’ll give people more information about what they’re actually taking. They have better, more transparency than what they’re actually getting. Yeah. So basically we’re talking about dried oysters as a nutrient dense food source.

So can you say something about what you are, have learned or what the literature might say about what the benefits of the oysters or the nutrients in oysters, you know, do for people? Okay, I go, I’ll give you some of our testimonials that people come back or how the doctors and therapists that are using our product doing at the moment. But just quickly on zinc, and this is really interesting because the oyster is the only animal that actively accumulates zinc in its body. If you take an oyster and a mussel and you put them in the same body of water, let’s say there was heavy metals in that water, they’ll accumulate the lead, the mercury at the same rate, passively.

But the oyster will accumulate zinc much higher rate and accumulates it actively against the chemical gradient. So it has to expend energy to do that and it stores that, that zinc intracellularly. So the reason for that is still being debated and there’s not a lot of research going on on this, but I’m pretty sure that it’s to do with the stressful oxidative environment that the oyster lives in. But they, when they form reefs and the tide goes out, they’re exposed to the air. And when they’re exposed to the air, you’ve got extremes of temperature, of oxygen, salinity, a lot of predation.

It’s a very stressful environment for them to live in. And they Get a buildup of free radicals, super oxide radicals from, from that oxidative stress. And they have to be neutralized that they’ll damage cell membranes and organelles and DNA and so forth. So they have this huge antioxidant network and they, they need a really high level of zinc and copper and manganese to do that. So they have 10 times more zinc in the next source, which is beef. And that’s a really, really interesting biological effect. And when you couple that with the fact that we’ve been eating them for 250,000 years and they probably gave us an evolutionary advantage over our competitors, the Neanderthals, there’s something very, very interesting there about this type of nutrition that we, that’s our mission is to get people back to this, to get back, get them back to eat a couple of oysters a week and make a part of their diet whatever way.

Like if they get fresh oysters, great. But if they’re going to go for oyster extract is the next best thing. But make sure it’s a good one because there’s a lot of garbage on the market, you know. Yeah, no, it sounds like if you’re going to eat fresh oysters or oyster max, that’s your choices. So in terms of conditions and indications for the product, like some of the areas we work with, people say, what’s it good for if you just take one element? Let’s say you take zinc. Zinc controls about 2 to 300 enzyme reactions in the body and about 2000 transcription factors.

So it’s what’s it good for? Good for everything. Specifically, fertility and hormonal issues are huge for us. Zinc is very important in the prostate. One of the highest levels of zinc in the body is in the prostate. It’s important for testosterone production. It’s very important at the back of the eye. You get a lot of oxidative damage there. So again, it’s making all these antioxidants, helping make antioxidants in the back of the eye to neutralize free radicals from UV damage, fatigue. First thing most people notice is their energy levels increase when they, when they encounter oyster nutrition.

And that we believe is working on mitochondria because zinc builds. Very interesting. The three master of the antioxidants in our body, superoxide, Disney pains, glutathione and catalase. They’re what we call metallo enzymes. And they need zinc, copper and manganese in certain ratios. And in oysters, Superoxide dismutase is 60% similar to human. So we’re getting the right nutrition to make those macromolecules. And they’re coming to us through oysters from oysters. True peptides and amino acids that our body can then take and make up human forms of those master antioxidants. Superoxide dislocates glutathione catalase and they act on the superoxide free radical.

So when cells metabolize oxygen, the superoxide free radical is produced. It’s very damaging to DNA and so forth. It has to be neutralized very quickly. The superoxide reduces it to hydrogen peroxide and then catalase and glutathione further reduce the peroxide to water and oxygen and it’s harmless then. And that’s a very important biochemical cycle. But we need zinc and copper and manganese in the right ratios to do it. And our buddy in the ocean, he’s the guy who gives it to us and we’ve had that for years. And there’s some really important synergy story biochemistry between us and the oyster that we need.

Right. We’re reconnect with, you know. Yeah, it’s like the, our inner oyster here. Yeah, absolutely. You know. All right, yeah. So it sounds like there’s a whole lot of reasons why this would be good for people. I, I, you know, obviously the ones most people talk about are so called immune system, which I would say is just help with detoxification and hormonal issues. Prostate issues are big, you know, that’s a big things. So it sounds like we’ve really looked into there. So we’re talking about a ecologically friendly source of whole foods nutrition, very nutrient dense, that’s pretty easy to get either in food or for those who can’t, in a sort of capsule form.

Absolutely. So from a health perspective, interestingly, on the hormonal end of things, a lot of women who had menstrual cramps, they say cures straight away. I, I don’t know how that’s working. Could be working on progesterone or something like that. Yeah, got it. Because oysters are natural product. Big, bigger companies, the pharmaceutical companies won’t do this kind of research when you can’t patent an oyster natural product, you know. Right. So there’s a lot, interestingly, in China they’re trying to breed. A lot of the research on these species of oysters is happening in China and they’re trying to breed oysters that have higher zinc content.

They’re aware of this, you know, they want this natural chromosinc in their diet and they’re Very interested in it. I’d love to. Something we’re trying to work on. We actually tested our oyster powder in human cell lines in vitro and showed that it increased superoxide dismutase production significantly. So that’s something I’d love to go back and do, but we’re a small company, we can’t do human clinical trials, you know. Yeah, right. And nobody else will do it because they can’t get their 20 year patent to make millions and millions and billions. And so. Okay. I think we’ve given people a pretty good look at this subject and I’m excited.

I may even start taking my oystermax again. I took it for a while and stopped and it sounds like something that a lot of people would benefit from. It’s sort of one of those fundamental human nutrition ideas. Yeah. I’m a big fan of Linus Pauling’s work. He’s a famous biochemist and come across them and he said that every ailment, every illness can be traced to mineral deficiency. Yeah. So in oysters, like, while we only test for those five, we talk a lot about copper and zinc and those, those elements, they actually have all the trace elements the body and body needs.

And that’s debated. But I, I reckon from my research there’s something like about 59 trace elements that the body needs. And they would, I’m sure, because they’re basically processing seawater, which. Yeah, yeah. Source of all the elements. And they’re all in there at varying concentrations in the oyster. So see, that’s the way the French doctors, when we started this with the extract, I said, how do you, how do you use it? They said, well, when we get people presenting with kind of metabolic type syndrome conditions and we’re not sure what’s wrong, we put them as part of their recovery or their, their protocol.

They put them on a high dose of oyster extract. And they know by doing that they’ve got all the trace minerals they need that are correcting all those imbalances. And then it’s still problems. They start looking elsewhere, you know, But a lot of the time people are. It catches a lot of stuff, you know. Yeah. And it’s like they’re estimating that 80% of us are zinc deficient. And interestingly, what you say about detoxing, zinc has a higher affinity for some of the heavy metal binding sites, especially cadmium. So if you don’t have correct zinc nutrition or zinc homeostasis as we call it, then the cadmium can bind to those sites.

But if your zinc is topped up and in top shape, then the cadmium can’t get a foothold in the first place. Yeah, that’s one of the theories of why some people accumulate heavy metals is they’re actually looking for the valence that the zinc or the magnesium or calcium would otherwise give them, but they’re deficient in that, so they hang on to lead instead. That’s right, yeah. Yeah. So the oyster has a zinc in there, has a detoxing effect. Yeah. All right, Stephen, it’s been a pleasure. I think. I think we’ve given people a good look at this, and we will put it out and continue to work with you and see you at the nourishing traditions conferences.

I’ll be at the next one. So everybody, I hope they can get out there and get their hands on some good oyster somewhere. Yeah. Thank you. Bye.
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