The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
Dallin Hardy: The Science Behind Micronutrient Supplementation
Unlock the secrets of enhanced physical and mental health through the power of micronutrients in our latest episode! We sit down with Dallin, a brilliant biochemist from Hardy Nutritionals, to uncover the transformative impact of their flagship formula, Daily Essential Nutrients. Dallin offers a deep dive into the origins of Hardy Nutritionals, founded by his father David Hardy, who innovatively applied principles from animal nutrition to human health. Discover the critical role of broad-spectrum micronutrient supplementation and how it parallels between human and animal nutrition, emphasizing the importance of preventive care.
Curious about the ongoing debates around essential nutrients like silica and lithium? We've got you covered. Learn about silica's role in soft tissue development and bone formation, and lithium's significant impact on mental health. Dallin explains the importance of addressing soil deficiencies and nutritional gaps that contribute to chronic diseases and mental health issues. Hear compelling stories of transformation driven by Hardy Nutritionals' products, inspired by personal experiences and fueled by ongoing research without financial incentives—all aimed at improving mental health and quality of life.
Finally, we delve into the profound effects of micronutrient supplementation on maternal and infant health. Discover groundbreaking research that shows significant improvements in infant development when mothers with depression take Daily Essential Nutrients during pregnancy. We explore the potential of these nutrient-based interventions to optimize physiology, enhance mental health, and create long-term benefits for mothers and their developing babies. Don't miss this enlightening conversation that underscores the transformative power of proper nutrition for mental and physical well-being.
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Welcome everybody to an interview today with Dallin, who is a biochemist and an employee of Hardy Nutritionals. You can see the sign in the back there. Hardy Nutritionals is a micronutrient, it's a supplement, it's a nutraceutical company. It originally came out of Canada but is a global company and their area of expertise is in providing humans with micronutrients. So vitamins and minerals and amino acids and other sort of cofactors has been taken up by universities all around the world that are willing to say we want to research the impact of nutraceuticals but more importantly, like the actual micronutrients on physical and mental health. And so there's a new study that just came out. On Monday so this is Friday, so as of like five days ago a new study just came out that was really interesting. So I wanted to interview Dallin and get him up on the podcast to help people understand the research that's happening around the role of micronutrients in our health and mental health. So welcome, dallin.
Dallin:Thank you, thanks for having me. Yeah, we're really excited about this study. Our founder, david Hardy he's the one who formulated the main formula daily essential nutrients which was used in this study, and he was really passionate about maternal health and getting people a good start in life from, you know, in utero and when they're born, and he really believed you know our new tagline we just came up with a new tagline for Heart and Nutritionals and it's mental wellness, naturally and he really believed that lifelong mental health and physical health was really that trajectory was set in utero and in the first few years and it can be recovered. Our experience is definitely we can recover that health later in life, but it's so much better. My dad would always say so.
Dallin:David Hardy was my father and he would always say it's better to have a fence at the top of the hill than an ambulance at the bottom.
Dallin:It's better to use nutrition preventatively and he came from the animal industry where that's where they did the ranchers and farmers and feedlot owners. They want their animals healthy enough that they don't have to pay a vet. Meanwhile, as humans, we eat food off the, and so they supplemented those animals heavily, but we eat food off the same soils grown off the same soils as those animals, and we don't supplement at all. We just wait till we get sick and then we go pay the doctor a bunch of money. It's like any farmer would go out of business doing that, paying the vet a whole bunch of money with sick animals, right. So he was really passionate about this and he knew in animals that if you get the mother healthy and start the babies off right, then you are miles ahead. And start the babies off right, then you were miles ahead and it made a big difference to profitability in the animal industry to keep animals healthy and unfortunately for humans, it's the other way around. We're more valuable to our healthcare system if we're sick, so it's a little bit backwards.
Florence:Yeah, yeah. And I think there's just this mindset that it doesn't really matter all that much, like, ah, you, ah, you know vitamins they don't really work, or or there's, they're harmful. I remember seeing studies that showed that that omega-3 supplementation fish oils weren't that helpful. Well, this whole new major meta study just came out I just read about it yesterday was showing that both in humans and in mice that it absolutely is helpful. So the thing with science is that we get like one person says this and this study says that and we're all confused and but I just feel, I feel like it's just stands to reason that vitamins and minerals and cofactors like obviously they support health. Like how can it be a bad thing? I want to go back a little bit to have you talk a little bit about how you decided to come up with what ratios. So how did you decide what it is that humans need at base levels to stay optimally healthy?
Dallin:That's a good question and I'm very glad that it wasn't me. I was a teenager at the time, young teenager, while my dad was switching from animal nutrition to human nutrition and I think a big benefit was that he came from having a lot of experience 20 years experience formulating animal feed. So he had, and some animals like no offense to humans, but like pigs, they're monogastric and they have very similar nutritional needs. So, like guinea, pigs are used in studies a lot. That's kind of like a term that people recognize that if you're studying something you use guinea pigs and it's because they're monogastric and they're they're omnivores and very similar to humans and um anyway, so we had that experience and so what they, what they would do in animals is they would supplement broadly, so broad spectrum supplementation of the micronutrients and they would supplement at doses that were quite robust.
Dallin:And in humans, the way nutrition science developed was in the early 20th century. What they would do is they would remove once they figured out that there was an essential nutrient. So these are nutrients that you have to get from your food. Your body can't make them, so the vitamins and minerals are those for humans and there are others. There's some essential amino acids. So that's protein and essential fatty acids, that's the omega-3s you were just talking about. But the um the vitamins and minerals is the biggest category of essential nutrients. There's there's nearly 40 of them and the uh and there's three essential fatty acids and there's, and your body can convert them into any of the other ones. And then there's there's nine essential amino, eight or nine essential amino acids, depending if you're the babies can't have a hard time producing one of them, but the depending on how old you are. But so for the vitamins and minerals, there's a lot of essential nutrients, micronutrients, and they would supplement them at high doses.
Dallin:But in humans, they discovered. They discovered that the vitamins were essential for humans, basically over the years late 19th, early 20th century, by depriving people, either intentionally or in many cases there was just sicknesses where they would discover that the people were deficient in these things During the wars, for example, when there wasn't a lot of food and depriving people of these nutrients and then putting them back in up to a certain amount where the deficiency disease went away. So, like vitamin C and scurvy is one that people might know about, it used to plague ships that went on long journeys because vitamin C is from fresh fruits and vegetables. It's really hard to get vitamin C at least it was back then vitamin C to not degrade in storage. Now we have dry tablets of vitamin C that are good for many, many years on the shelf, but back then, you know, fruit juices, it would degrade. And so these, you know, sailors are called limeys because they'd suck on limes and that would keep their teeth from falling out, keep their gums from bleeding.
Dallin:So these overt deficiency diseases where they discover a nutrient and then put it back in and you can prevent the illness. So we sort of discovered the baseline, the low limits, like if you have less than this you're going to have an overt deficiency disease, and that became the target. So all of our recommended dietary allowances, all the rdas, if you see, and all the percent daily values on the labels that you read at the score store, the nutrition panel or the supplement facts panel on the packaging of the products, all of the target people are shooting for in their minds, like I got to get 100% daily value of this vitamin or whatever. That target is the bottom end. That will prevent the deficiency disease. You're just trying to get away from scurvy when you're targeting that as the goal. So my dad's concept was hey, let's supplement broadly, but the goal is not to just prevent disease. The goal is to optimize health.
Dallin:And so there's this huge safe range. This is not like drugs, it's a whole different category of substances. These are natural, the body is familiar with them and he's like there's a huge safe range for every vitamin and mineral, from the minimum intake that prevents illness to where it can get toxic. And some of them there's no upper, like they've never found any dose that's toxic at all. Many of the B vitamins, that's the case. And so the goal of daily essential nutrients, really what it does is it brings all those nutrients in a balance and I'll talk about how we came up with the ratios before. But all the way up to a therapeutic range, it's still below anything toxic. And they're safer, by the way, when they're in balance, because if you take high doses of just one, the body's very interconnected and you can create a relative imbalance of another if you just supplement one. So there's a lot of safety in supplementing all of them and then up in that safe range where you're getting to optimization instead of just preventing like a terrible disease with a minimal intake. And yeah, and the ratios between them, he did, he had his experience from animal industry and then he did. I remember when I was a teenager. There's just stacks of scientific papers. He just scoured books and papers everything that was known at the time of the ratios between the nutrients and how they balance each other. He studied physiology really well. It's one of the reasons I went to biochemistry to really understand how the body works and how these nutrients are involved and how they interact with each other. And so that's why, on the so coming up with the ratios, that he did, and some of them he refined after his first version of the product. So he put it out and people started using it and then he tweaked the ratios and if some people were poorly responding to one of his formulas, he developed a new formula. So the daily essential nutrients formula as it is today has been developed by people using it as well since the beginning concept, and so it's gotten better and better, and so it's not just built on theory, it's built on real life experience observing the health of animals and then later of humans themselves.
Dallin:What's the optimal formula? And that's why the percent daily values. If you look down the label in supplement facts they're all over the place. A lot of supplements. They formulate them. You know, I'm a formulator, so I know, know this. They formulate them to have nice even numbers 25, 50, you know, if you see a nice even numbers down the supplement fax column, that's not, that's not how your body, uh, that's, those aren't necessarily the ratios that are that that are balanced in the body, and uh, the daily essential nutrients formula is going to be a lot closer to that and and their percentile values are all over the map and some of them, like I say, really high. It looks like man, this dose has got to be toxic, but that's just in those nutrients where there's no toxicity that's ever been found, and so they're all in safe ranges.
Florence:But yeah, it's a very unique formula and that's one of the reasons it gets unique outcomes, and I thought as well that a part of figuring out ratios was something to do with breast milk. There was an analysis of breast milk. Is that what they did with animal husbandry as well, as they figured out what was in the breast milk and then supplemented and then they brought that over to human studies? Or did that start with the human?
Dallin:Yeah, so with the micronutrients, vitamins and minerals, um, there was a little bit of that. The hearty nutritionals has another product with the amino acids in it, the essential amino acids, and that was that's definitely form that's formulated to human breast milk, the the protein ratios in human breast milk. But yeah, there there are studies. There were studies that he reviewed that and an experience that he had from animals that was across the board in their physiology, like they're not just what's in the breast milk but optimal breast milk production in the animals. Like these are things that that industry cared about and he was bringing that knowledge over to humans.
Florence:Yeah, it's so interesting. And do you think it's possible that there's still essential nutrients that we don't know about, Like when you look at the hundreds and hundreds? If not, I don't know if there's thousands, but there's hundreds and hundreds of micronutrients and phytonutrients and I don't even know right. Is there still so much more that we need to understand about?
Dallin:There's so much more. Yeah, and if, unfortunately, like, there's the pharmaceutical industry you know, ever since the World Wars, where a lot of chemical companies were born as part of the chemical production that happened for bombs and chemical weapons and stuff in First and Second World Wars weapons and stuff in First and Second World Wars that has gotten a lot of funding since in agribusiness and as well as in human health and in animal health that you know there's been a focus on that. But if all of that, those resources had just been put towards understanding the natural mechanisms and how, what it is in food and in the body and how it actually works, we wouldn't, we would be so much further on this. It really frustrates me. But yeah, there are definitely and there are some active debates about essential nutrients. So one example would be silica and it's known that it's beneficial for soft tissue development, especially like joints and collagen formation, and it lays down part of the framework. It's part of the framework that lays down for bone to be built on when people are growing, but they've never found a deficiency disease because you just can't get silica, is kind of ubiquitous on earth and you just can't get it out of the food enough to figure out if there's a deficiency disease. But you can see differences in musculoskeletal health, for example, with different intakes around the world of different intakes of silica, and there are studies of silica, you know, after menopause preventing osteoporosis in osteopenic women, and so on and so forth.
Dallin:And then there's another one that's really debated nowadays is lithium. Lithium has some distinct beneficial health effects in mental health, which is the focus of Hardy Nutritionals. That's our mission and there's some debate. It's definitely, uh, it would be one of the trace minerals, so you just need small amounts of it. But there there's such a distinct benefit and a distinct loss at when you know below a certain low intake of lithium that that, uh, that there are. Are people actively arguing now that it should be called an essential nutrient and there's some technical terms to get that, or there's some technical requirements to get it officially recognized as an essential nutrient. Mechanisms have to be known and a deficiency disease has to be demonstrated. And sometimes it's hard to do those things and that's the reason it's not like widely accepted as an essential nutrient. But the reality is it probably like I think, a lot of these, these two for example, I think they are essential.
Florence:Got you.
Florence:So one of the things that really I find very important to share what you're doing with my audience is that, because of the soils deficient, because we've all been hooked into a food culture malfunction where each generation seems to be more nutritionally deficient, there's more depression and anxiety, there's more autism, there's just rising rates of chronic diseases.
Florence:Like we know, we're in the middle of a health crisis in human beings and knowing that there are supplements that could come in, that are well researched, that can come in and help early on to support future generations to be healthier, to counteract all the deficiencies that they deficiencies that are being sort of passed down the generations. So, with respect to the latest study, so before I even talk about this latest research, I want you to have an opportunity to talk about why do universities all over the world call you guys to study your product? Like I can just imagine that every nutraceutical company on the planet would be like well, pick us. There's lots of, there's lots of incredible companies that are that are producing and sharing thoughtful, quality nutraceuticals, but for some reason, hardee's is picked up by universities and say we want to study your product. Why is that?
Dallin:Yeah, it's really. It's really a personal experience with our products that the researchers have. That's really what it is. And the first studies were my, my dad from in the animal industry. He knew if you got you had to get a study to sell the big feed lots, the big accounts that are going to buy lots of animal feed. You got to really convince them to switch their operations because it's millions of dollars per pound right or per day, if you can get them to market one day faster. And so he was knocking on doors at the University of Lethbridge, university of Calgary in Alberta, canada, and trying to get people interested.
Dallin:And there's this one researcher in the psychology department at the University of Calgary and she said, oh, mental health, huh, I've got this family member that is just treatment resistant, terrible mental health difficulties. If you can help them, I'll study your stuff. And sure enough that helped them significantly. And she was very impressed. And then she started studying and then it's just sort of cascaded from there. So one of her graduate students that was working on some of her early research in bipolar disorder was just so impressed with the change it can make in people's lives, these mentally ill individuals, that she later became a full-fledged professor doing her own research and she just kept going with that. She had a grad student who is now doing studies in ADHD, and so it's just sort of it's moving, it's motivating to see someone's life change.
Dallin:And the thing with mental health is, when you improve someone's mental health, you can save families, you can save relationships. You can save someone's ability to it can be someone's ability to work or not can save someone's ability to it can be someone's ability to work or not. Like we have. We have staff members who used to be not able to hold a job for more than three months in a row, just because they're so unstable and and they worked for us for 15 years and and just great employees, some of our best and and they have personal experience too, so they can relate to our customers and customer service.
Dallin:And one of the things that struck me most about one of these staff members is she loved paying taxes. She said I love paying taxes because I was always a drain on the system for like 20 years of my life and um, I've been able to contribute for the last 20 years and um, like who thinks that way honestly? But it's such an improvement in quality of life that it's really compelling. That's what motivates these researchers. They just love to improve people's lives and it turns their crank, and so we don't have to fund it. They get their own grants. We just donate the product and we don't control the design of the studies.
Florence:We just let them go and they love it financial interest whatsoever Like this is just, they're doing research, we're supplying the product. Please tell us, does it actually work? What are you finding? And and the the all the different directions people are going. Oh my gosh, there's so much to say, but let's talk about the latest study, because it's about moms and babies and I just I love this, I feel fine, it's so hopeful.
Dallin:Yeah, yeah, and in the Hardy family we've we've known this was a possibility for a long time. It took a lot of bipolar and autism and ADHD research and depression research before the researchers are like, okay, wait, they finally believe us. When we tell them, hey, you should study this, um see if you can get grant funding for this. We see in our customers like this is really reliably benefits and we don't have any data to support it yet other than testimonials and anecdotal. And they start researchers like to publish positive trials. You know you can publish something that's like, hey, we didn't find anything, but that's not as exciting, right? And so they've started to believe us when we tell them you could study this with that same formula and you'd get a positive study. But yeah, so this latest study was depression in pregnancy and so they recruited women that were depressed, and this was a researcher in New Zealand. So this research was done in New Zealand at the University of Canterbury, and she recruited unmedicated. They had to be unmedicated to join the study and they had to be clinically depressed. They had to qualify with a clinician evaluation as having depression, and many of these women would have had depression and postpartum depression in previous pregnancies as well. And yeah, then they for 12 weeks of the study, 12 weeks of the pregnancy. Now, just the way the, the way the at a university to run a study on humans, you have to run it by the institutional review board. So each institution, each university has a review board, a board of reviewers, other peers basically of the researcher, who look at the ethics and review the ethics, use it as a prenatal all the way through. Because the review board said we're going to, you know, first trimester is particularly sensitive time, so you have to start in second trimester. So she started in second trimester. And then they also said in New Zealand they recommend iodine in pregnancy. It's a national recommendation. Um, interestingly, in north america we recommend folic acid. So that's a national recommendation for pregnancy. You have to get folic acid. But they they rely because, like elsewhere in the world, new zealand fortifies their foodstuffs. So we have these flowers, the grains that are refined and all the nutrients get stripped out of them and then we put some back in, right, so we put in, put in some, some folic acid, and in new zealand they rely on the food fortification program to be sufficient for folic acid. And but they do, um, uh stipulate that that in pregnancy you should be taking iodine, so and then.
Dallin:So the placebo actually wasn't a placebo. They call it in study, they call it an active placebo. So it's comparing the daily essential nutrients formulas broad spectrum, high dose thing to the national recommendation for iodine. And there was actually another nutrient in there too, riboflavin. So a lot of people will know that B vitamins, they can color the urine and so this was a placebo and an active. And the researchers really want the participants to be confused about which one they're getting right. So they don't. So there's no expectancy effect. So they don't think they're on the active one, or at least everyone thinks they're on the active one. And so riboflavin colors the urine a bright neon color. It's a. It's a riboflavin metabolite. After your body uses it it excretes. The rest. Um has this bright color and so the, the placebo was not a nothing. It was two nutrients, both beneficial in depression at slightly lower doses, but it was that against the full spectrum and um and they, they found that.
Dallin:So second trimester for at least 12 weeks, and then they followed up with the babies and I'll talk more about the babies later, but in the first month of life they evaluated the babies that were born to these mothers. So it was women with depression that they recruited and then they assigned them randomly to an active or active placebo or the broad-spectrum micronutrient formula, daily essential nutrients and for at least 12 weeks, and then they had clinician ratings and self-ratings of depression. They also took other measures and the significant findings were that the depression on clinician and self-rating beginning to end of the 12 weeks was significantly improved in the micronutrient group over the placebo group. And they also took another clinician-rated questionnaire called global assessment of function. So this is not depression only, although they were recruited for that. It's how the person is functioning generally in their lives. It takes a lot of the factors of daily life and being able to be a functioning human into account and that was very significantly improved over the active placebo by the daily essential nutrients formula in these women.
Dallin:And another thing that they found was sleep. So they were tracking the women's sleep and the women taking the broad-spectrum micronutrient formula improved in their sleep more than placebo. And those are the big findings. And another interesting thing that they found was there was a couple of things that really predicted. So at the beginning of the study they learn a lot of things about the individual as much as they can, and then at the end of the study so they check the primary measures I just talked about some of the primary measures and then they do secondary analysis, which is not the main focus of the study, but anything they can glean from the data. And one of the things they found is they had asked the women if they had tried antidepressant medications before, if they had a history of medication use, and they also took another clinician-rated scale that was called the. It was a personality difficulty scale. So it's the standardized assessment of personality, abbreviated scale. So this is personality difficulties that would be associated with personality disorder and what that is.
Dallin:I have the SAPA. It's called the SAPA scale. It's difficulty. It's just seven or eight questions. Do you have difficulty making and keeping friends? Would you normally describe yourself as a loner? Do you trust other people? Are you untrusting? Do you have difficulty making and keeping friends? Would you normally describe yourself as a loner? Do you trust other people? Are you untrusting? Do you lose your temper easily? Are you impulsive? Are you a worrier? Do you depend on others a lot or do you have independence and are you a perfectionist? And three or more of those. If a person scores three or higher on that, they have a high probability 86% probability of being diagnosable as having a personality disorder. I read over those and I was like goodness, I'm right on the verge of a personality disorder.
Florence:I think I have my moments too, anyways.
Dallin:So they found that these two things if a woman had a history of trying antidepressants, then they responded much better to the micronutrients, and if they scored high on this personality difficulties score, again, they were much more benefited by the micronutrients. And there's we don't how to interpret this, it's, it's unclear. It could just be that the placebo effect doesn't happen very well in these individuals. They're jaded because they've already tried a treatment that didn't work. You know bad medications, um, and so the they, they don't just get better by thinking they're taking something great, um, and because it's the comparison between the groups that was really divided by these two variables, and they're like wondering. So we don't really know why these variables played an impact. We just know that they correlate and you know it. It could be as well that these individuals who had tried medications before, another possible explanation is that they're just, they were treatment resistant. They didn't respond well to the medications, and the reason they didn't is because they didn't have the nutrients necessary to respond well to the, to the medications, and so maybe it's just the nutrients. They are in particular need of them, right? Um?
Dallin:And then the, the, the personality difficulties, that one, I don't know what to make of that, other than it's very exciting that like this, those women were particularly benefited. And imagine being pregnant with with difficulty making friends and you're a loner and untrusting and like friends and you're a loner and untrusting and like. And the fact that a supplement, just micronutrients that go into your body and they're little cofactors that help your cells work better, can change those things that you don't. Most people don't draw a direct correlation between nutrition and that. That's like socialization, right, that's learned behavior, that's what people think, but our physiology being compromised can actually affect that. And by optimizing the physiology and the neurobiology with these micronutrients, those women were dramatically, more dramatically benefited than women who didn't score highly on that personality difficulty score.
Florence:Yeah, I mean, that just blows me away and it's such a testament to the fact that that things are those sound like trauma responses to me like right. So you could spend all this work on on on beautiful trauma work and it's absolutely going to be beneficial, no doubt at all and yet not get the traction that you could get if you supported yourself at the physiological level right, the whole idea that physiology influences how we respond to things and how we heal from trauma and how they all support each other in coming together. But you could spend 10 years on in psychology appointments trying to work through why you don't trust people or why you're a perfectionist and you take a multi-micronutrient supplement for three months or 12 weeks or six months and all of a sudden things just start shifting and you're like but this is psychology, I have to work with the mind and my past right, and maybe, maybe there's a missing link here.
Dallin:Yeah, yeah, and that's a really good point. The therapies are synergistic in that sense and one can be a limitation on the other, are synergistic in that sense and one can be a limitation on the other. So we know for sure that the broad-spectrum micronutrients do not solve everyone's trauma. We have individuals, in fact a lot of individuals of our customers are on medications as sort of like a numbing agent, we found. So they get on the micronutrients. They do really well. They don't need their medications anymore. They titrate carefully off and this is not a place to discuss about how to do that safely, but definitely with clinician oversight and with someone who knows how to do it. And they've observed it or they've done it before. Their memory, their memories of the trauma are more clear and they they realize that they've just been numbing that.
Dallin:And we've had customers who are scared by that and just don't want to face that and just want to drop the micronutrients and go back on the drugs, just because it's easier than working through it. But, uh, but if they work through it then then um, it's a much more beautiful outcome on the other side of the journey and, it's true, healing right. But we've seen that side of it too, where the and all that stuff to come out on the other side. But the flip side is true, and that's where we started the conversation. And if your physiological tools that you're working with, your brain and your body are incapable, then it's going to be really sluggish and the improvements that you make are going to be less durable. There's going to be a lot more backsliding, things like that. So either side can be the limitation. That's the two together that gives true healing Totally, totally, totally.
Florence:All right, let's, that's the two together that that gives true healing, totally, totally, totally. All right, let's get to the really exciting part about those beautiful little babies. One month, one month later, tell us about the difference.
Dallin:Um, I really, I really want to share, if I can screen share the yeah the uh, the graphs because it's it's really visually um you can see.
Dallin:So let me describe a little bit before I share, just so people don't get too overstimulated with an explanation. Explanation so the what they did to evaluate the babies is um and this, by the way, is totally revolutionary in mental health care to study in pregnancy. Pregnancy studies are very hard to do because the ethics boards are very hesitant to approve those studies, and so there was a lot of safety data about daily essential nutrients that was used to justify doing the study at all, giving it to pregnant mothers and um. And then. So that's revolutionary. And there are no pharmaceutical antidepressants that even go there. They don't study these things. They don't study any pharmaceuticals really very few in pregnancy. For this reason it's hard to do these studies ethically and the um. You have to have a really safe intervention to even justify it and the um. But to look at second generation effects, to then look at, evaluate the babies as well, it's unheard of, it's truly revolutionary. And so to have something now demonstrated with efficacy in the moms for their depression and global functioning, overall functioning as well and sleep, you know there's other benefits. And then look at the babies. So what they did is they took the. So the mothers that had had depression to start out with, many of them didn't by the end of the 12 weeks of taking daily essential nutrients but, um, and then they were given daily essential nutrients and then as a comparison group, instead of taking the, the moms on placebo and how their babies did it was active placebo. But they recruited new um comparison groups. So they recruited mothers just from the community in new zealand that had no mental health diagnosis, were taking no medications, healthy women, um, and they and they could even be taking other prenatal vitamins they didn't exclude that. So these many and many of them, like 60% plus, were supplementing with regular prenatals. So this is like really healthy cohort and their babies compared with the babies of these moms that were depressed and then took daily essential nutrients, so they were already starting at a disadvantage compared to this group. And then for a depressed mom comparison and how their babies did, they recruited also women from the community in New Zealand who were taking pharmaceutical antidepressants through the pregnancy and so there was sort of two depressed groups one on micronutrients, one on pharmaceutical antidepressants. And then there was a control group no mental health problems, healthy, using regular prenatals was allowed and the baby data is just phenomenal. So it's really something so I'm going to talk about.
Dallin:Can you see my screen here? Yeah, so I'm just going to introduce these measures. So, on the graphs, I'm going to spend most of the time on the graphs but the access titles on the graphs are really small. I don't know why they published it that way. It's really hard to read. But up here in the table, close this so it can be bigger. In the table you've got the different measures. So they evaluated these baby zone official measures called the Brazelton measures and or the Brazelton scale, and it's in seven different categories. So I'm just going to explain those.
Dallin:Habituation so what habituation means is the baby is disrupted, the infant is disrupted. Either it's woken suddenly or it's passed to a new environment or a new individual, and how quickly they calm down and get used to the new environment. Okay, and then there's orientation. Orientation means there's a sight or sound stimulation, you know a toy or a visual cue, a light, and if they orient to it, if they respond appropriately. So this would be like looking in someone's face or following a sound. Then there's motor control how smooth their motions are and how well their muscles are working. There's range of state. Now states would be like happy, sad, crying, content, laughing. Range of state is the ability to experience all of those. That's a measure of that. And then regulation of state is how quickly you get from an undesirable state, that, how quickly the baby comes back to calm. So from all these things the babies can experience excitement, sadness, how you know how quickly they'll come back to a regulated state.
Dallin:And then autonomic stability is autonomic. The autonomic nervous system is what runs the subconscious actions of the body. So, breathing, heart rate, those are the two biggest measures in this particular evaluation here. Um, if the heartbeat you know heartbeats can be irregular, have intermittent irregularities. And breathing I don't know if you've been holding an infant and it's breathing along. Maybe it's asleep and suddenly there's a little catch in the breathing, and so that would be an autonomic disruption.
Dallin:And then reflexes Babies rely on reflexes for almost all their development. To grab something. There's a reflex if you press in the palm, sucking reflex, obviously it's real important for a survival. Um, and and there are other reflexes, some as adults we still have a few reflexes. The classic one you hit yourself under the knee, you know. So there's some motor reflexes that are still pretty fun to play with as adults, but babies have a lot more and they just really rely on them. So they looked at abnormal reflexes, um, and normal reflexes.
Dallin:So now let's go through the data. So in each of these graphs the way the graphs are made, is that the group on the left, there's three sort of I-shaped bars and what that means is the measure and then a statistical range of variability. So with statistics, you take a measured value, you measure something. You took so many individuals this was 60-some moms in the micronutrient group and you measured how well their babies did and then statistically, to try and extrapolate that to a whole population, you have to acknowledge that there was probably people, probably variability, that you didn't take into account with this sample of like 60 people, right? So they estimate. Here's the effect we measured and if we estimate the true effect for the population, it's going to be within this range. For the population, it's going to be within this range. We're 95% confident that this intervention or this population in this situation, it's in this range. Whatever we measured is close and this range is definitely where it is.
Dallin:And so on the left you can see the micronutrient group and then in the center you see the healthy controls. And then on the far right it's the babies, the evaluations of the babies from the moms who were taking antidepressants. These two, the left and right groups, were moms who had original diagnosis of depression. In the center there's no mental health issues. So here's habituation how quickly they'll adjust to a new environment or disruption. And you can see the micronutrient babies they calm down really quickly If you give them something new and they'll take it in, process it and be okay with it really quickly.
Dallin:And that was significantly better. Not only did they outperform the babies from mothers who are taking antidepressants but they outperformed healthy controls, many of them taking regular prenatal vitamins. So these micronutrient babies, we call them daily essential nutrients babies den babies is our sort of colloquial term for them around the heart and nutritionist office. They are more normal than normal on this. They're more quickly adjusted to disturbances and disruptions. And then here's orientation so if they orient appropriately to sights and sounds and faces and connecting, and here the micronutrient babies did not outperform the healthy controls statistically, you can see there's a trend towards betterment in all these cases. But they're indistinguishable statistically from the healthy controls.
Dallin:But far outperformed the babies, those poor babies from moms with antidepressants. They get a bad rap in this study. They always were poorer. And here's motor control. And in this case the statistical analysis showed that the daily essential nutrients babies again outperformed healthy controls in the smoothness of their movements and their motor function. And again, those babies whose moms had taken antidepressants were poorer in their motion. And here's regulation of state, so how quickly they can go from one state back to another, one state back to another.
Dallin:I remember actually I saw like a TikTok video recently of a baby who was like flipping from laughing and crying and laughing and crying. It was going viral because it was so funny. But that baby would have scored very poorly on regulation of state. It was not controlling its state pretty well. Again, there was no statistical difference between controls and the daily essential nutrients babies in regulation of state. But there was definitely a trend and it's definitely far better to have taken micronutrients for your depression than the pharmaceuticals in terms of how the babies um formed.
Dallin:And here's this last one is autonomic stability and the uh. Here the daily essential nutrients babies were just really this is the most marked difference their heart rates and breathing with all the subconscious is where the central nervous system is running itself was running really smoothly. So this would be like vagus nerve kind of stuff and the um and uh, the. Again the antidepressant group did poorly. But but so those were the. Those were the three measures where, um, the habituation, motor control and autonomic stability, where the micronutrient group actually outperformed the healthy, regular prenatal group. And on all the measures all these five outperformed the antidepressant group.
Dallin:And then here are the other two graphs. For the other ones Whoops, I'm right on the verge of the page here. So this is range of state and reflexes. And on those other graphs it was a better score if it was higher. If it was a higher score, it was better higher number. On these graphs it's a better score if it's lower. Range of state this was the only one where there weren't differences between the groups. So thankfully, all the babies could experience excited, they could experience sad, they could laugh, they could cry. All the babies were able to do that. So that's range of state. That's the only one that wasn't different, were able to do that. So that's range of state. That's the only one that wasn't different.
Dallin:And then this is a measure of abnormal reflexes. So the reflexes are not working well, so that's why a high number is bad. And again, the micronutrient group from mothers with depression, far outperformed babies whose moms had taken pharmaceutical antidepressants. But this was not different from healthy controls statistically, but their reflexes were working really well. There was only, on average, about one reflex that didn't, whereas this one was two and a half on average for the group right. The reflexes didn't work like they were supposed to, um or or, as what would be optimal. So, yeah, um outperforming antidepressants on six of the seven measures and um outperforming healthy, uh, babies from moms who were healthy and no mental health issues and taking regular prenatals um on three of the seven.
Florence:And it, it, just it makes me feel so excited and so hopeful for future generations. That and and I I don't just share my enthusiasm for this research to plug hardy's nutritionals. They're right like it's an amazing company and one of the things I really like is that you can their customer service is stunning. You can call and talk to scientists. You can talk to people who've been on the product for years Absolutely think the company's fantastic, but this is so much bigger than just Hardee's and the work that you're doing to show the world that nutrition matters. And right now we're all deficient for lots of reasons Quality of food, quality of food, quality of soil, stress. We're burning through our micronutrients more quickly. There is hope that we are getting enough research through products, through companies like you and universities that are studying. Cambridge and Harvard have got peer-reviewed blind studies researching your product right.
Dallin:Yeah, a lot of universities. I think the list of universities is upwards of 12 now. Just where collaborators or primary researchers on all of the many studies we've got I don't know. We're upwards of 50 publications now. Obviously, several publications can come from one study this was the same study, the moms and the babies, you know but a lot of studies and, yeah, the researchers collaborating on this are really. It's infecting, it's going through, it's impressing more and more researchers that collaborate on these studies and it's beginning to pick up at more and more universities.
Florence:Yes, yes, yes, yes. So for all of us who are looking to improve our health and mental health, like micronutrients are essential, but if we're really thinking about, when we're pregnant, what we're going to do to set our children up to be on a totally different foot than most kids are these days, because the trend lines are all going down, kids are less healthy, more anxious, more depressed.
Dallin:Yeah, more anxious, more depressed. Yeah, so, yeah, yep, for sure. And there's one other thing that might be interesting to your viewers about the moms. So they did look at at blood levels of nutrients and and and other measures, other markers in the blood, biomarkers of that can be risk factors or or signals that something good is happening, and they didn't see much. They saw vitamin D went up from taking the micronutrients folate, b12. And this is consistent with other studies that those nutrients will go up in the bloodstream. A lot of the other nutrients, although daily essential nutrients is supplementing them heavily, the body actually controls the blood levels. Daily essential nutrients is supplementing them heavily. The body actually controls the blood levels and so it's hard to measure in the blood the body's actual status of those nutrients, but some of them you can measure in the blood and those three went up. And then there was one thing in all of the immune markers and other biomarkers that they measured that went down and it's homocysteine.
Dallin:So homocysteine is a byproduct of amino acid metabolism, methionine metabolism, and high homocysteine is correlated to a lot of bad things. It's correlated to dementia in the elderly, it's correlated to heart disease, cardiovascular issues, negative cardiovascular outcomes and it's correlated in pregnancy to a lot of negative outcomes as well. So in pregnancy, high homocysteine can cause things like miscarriage or I shouldn't say can cause, because these are correlational studies for the most part but neural tube defects, recurrent miscarriage, preeclampsia, preterm delivery, partial placenta detachment, fetal growth restriction and gestational diabetes. All you know, when people have those issues, homocysteine is often elevated and so daily essential nutrients brought down homocysteine and actually there's one measure that I forgot in the baby study because I was focusing on those Brazelton measures. There's one outcome that I forgot to mention and this homocysteine correlation reminded me of it.
Dallin:So preterm delivery is correlated with high homocysteine. Uh, correlation reminded me of it. So preterm delivery is correlated with high homocysteine, daily essential nutrients brought down homocysteine. And the babies from the moms taking the micronutrients were more likely to be full term. Wow, yeah, so they were. They spent more time in utero getting developing before they had to make it on their own and uh, and that correlates with a lot of. You know, if you look at, do a literature search on that that preterm birth correlates with a lot of negative, uh, negative things later in life, and so that even just that getting to full term can make a huge difference for these kids.
Florence:Incredible, and this could go on and on and on. There's studies around diversity of microbiome. Yeah, we should talk about that another time. I agree, I agree. I was just kind of mentioning that there's other, different angles that you can all look at this. But the bottom line is this is that there's a lot of hope that companies like hardy's is doing doing the behind the scenes formulations that universities are saying we'll study that and what the body of of research, with the science is starting to show us is that nutrition matters for mental health.
Florence:It matters for, like our sleep, to socially connect yeah, personality personality, our children to be able to function, come right out into the world in that best, high functioning way, like it really, really matters. And you know, it's not just enough to break up with the junk food, which is my thing, get on to whole foods. It's not enough potentially anymore, and that we need to look to what are, you know, what are companies, hardee's that can come and bring us the supplementation to get us beyond just the bare minimum, up into optimum levels, and then see who we are and how we feel and how we think and, yeah, the quality of life we're all looking for.
Dallin:Yep, yep, and we can make make changes faster. It's like a, it's really and and it's it's catalytic to to change that you want to see in your relationship, in your life and with your mental health. But that's a, that's a macrocosm of the microcosm in the body. That's the mechanism of. These micronutrients are catalysts. They help every reaction that your enzymes do to be more efficient and to to do the work of producing your, your, your body's, energy and digesting and and modifying your food, changing whatever you put into mouth, your mouth, into you. And it's a lot of work that your body does every day. And those workers in you, those enzymes, they need tools, they need the capacity to do their job. And those micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals, are the catalysts.
Florence:Thank you, Dallin. Is there any final words you'd like to say before we wrap up today?
Dallin:No, just that. We're so excited to finally have what we've seen in our own children for so long validated, and we just want to help more people. So thanks for getting the word out there. We just want people to. What motivates us every day me coming to work every day is, uh, is that I hear stories of people taking our products and their lives are dramatically benefited, and, and that's that's what matters to me- so thank you so much for all the work that you guys do and for sharing the latest research.
Florence:I really appreciate it.
Dallin:Thanks for having me on.
