Most supplements don’t fail in the bottle. According to Juvenon chief scientific officer Dr. Luke Bucci, they fail because people quit long before their biology has time to respond.

Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Dr. Luke Bucci, chief scientific officer at Juvenon, the longevity supplement company founded by Dr. Bruce Ames, to look back on four decades inside the supplement industry. Bucci explains how acetyl-L-carnitine carries fuel into the mitochondria, and how alpha-lipoic acid helps drive ATP production while soaking up the oxidative “sparks” that come with it. He names the three supplements he thinks everyone needs (vitamin D3, omega-3s and magnesium), and he argues for krill oil over fish oil based on how omega-3 phospholipids get into cell membranes. That leaves a hard question: can a market built on instant gratification support products that take weeks or months to show results?

Luke Bucci, PhD, is chief scientific officer at Juvenon and a former expert advisor on supplements to the United States Olympic Committee. Website: https://juvenon.com

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What happens when your polygenic risk score says one thing and your body says another? Broad Institute geneticist Dr. Nikolas Baya studies the people who don't match their genetic prediction, and the rare variants that often explain the gap.

Dr. Jeremy Koenig talks with Dr. Nikolas Baya, a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute, about his recently published UK Biobank study showing that people who deviate from their polygenic score are enriched for rare variants in genes linked to rare disease. Nik explains why that makes polygenic scores useful as a filter for rare disease diagnosis, how protective variants in genes like PCSK9 have led to new drug targets, and why an estimated 240 million people worldwide live with a rare genetic disease. He also walks through the BRaVa browser, a free tool for the Biobank Rare Variant Analysis consortium that pools rare variant results across ancestrally diverse biobanks, which he built with Claude Code in about two weeks. And he explains why he still writes by hand, comparing heavy AI use to eating cake: you feel full and productive, but it isn't intellectually nourishing.

Dr. Nikolas Baya is a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, with a DPhil from the University of Oxford's Genomic Medicine and Statistics program.

Connect with Nik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikolas-baya/

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Engineer Mark Talbot was tracking his weight, food, steps, and sleep across five apps when his weight loss stalled, and none of them could tell him why. One question to AI about a year of his own Apple Health data gave him the answer. It also pointed to a bigger gap: doctors never see what happens between visits.

Dr. Jeremy Koenig talks with Mark Talbot, co-founder of Lifecycle Health, a platform that brings patients' wearable data into specialist practices. After going from about 5,000 to 12,000 daily steps and losing five to seven pounds in under a month, Talbot shared the idea on LinkedIn and heard from more than 80 people in under 10 days, including cardiologists, menopause specialists, and weight loss clinics. He explains how a practice can go live in about 10 minutes, how each patient is flagged red, amber, or green against their own baseline, and how cardiologists can watch blood pressure readings come in after a heart attack instead of waiting for the next appointment. They also discuss an early pattern from a small informal group of women wearing Oura or WHOOP, where skin temperature rose a few minutes before a hot flash, and ask whether longitudinal health data could replace "How have you been?" at every GP visit.

Mark Talbot is co-founder of Lifecycle Health and a former mainframe systems programmer whose career runs through British Airways, IBM, and two decades building software partnerships.

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Dr. Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen has spent years reviewing the research behind the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R), a tool that helps shape parole, prison placement, and even capital sentencing decisions. What he found is that many of the core claims about psychopaths aren't supported by the evidence.

Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Larsen, a philosopher of science at the University of Toronto Mississauga and author of Psychopathy Unmasked, to look at what the psychopathy diagnosis actually rests on. Larsen's group is building a database to synthesize the roughly 2,300 studies that use the PCL-R. He explains why common claims, like psychopaths lacking emotion or empathy, haven't held up in that research. He traces the idea back to a 1786 speech by Benjamin Rush and walks through how a score of around 30 out of 40 can follow someone through the justice system, even though there's no solid evidence those individuals are meaningfully more dangerous than other offenders. That leaves forensic psychology with an uncomfortable question: if most human wrongdoing comes from psychologically ordinary people, why is the psychopath still treated as a separate category?

Dr. Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen is an Assistant Professor of Forensic Epistemology and Philosophy of Science at the University of Toronto Mississauga and author of Psychopathy Unmasked: The Rise and Fall of a Dangerous Diagnosis (MIT Press, 2025). Website: https://www.rasmusrosenberg.com | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rosenberglarsen

LINKS:

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Here's the link for this week's episode: https://drjeremykoenig.substack.com/.

High fructose corn syrup dominated health headlines for years, then the conversation went quiet. Chris Mearns argues the research on fructose metabolism only got stronger, and that one enzyme called fructokinase may explain why cravings spike, why energy crashes an hour after eating, and why restrictive diets stop working around week three.

Chris Mearns, founder of LIV3 Health and creator of the Fructose Model, walks Dr. Jeremy Koenig through the mechanism: metabolizing fructose depletes cellular ATP along the path to uric acid, which drives mitochondrial fission and a low-energy, inflammatory state the brain reads as scarcity. He explains why diet alone often fails, since the body also makes fructose endogenously through the polyol pathway in response to high glycemic carbs, salt, alcohol, dehydration, and sleep apnea. The conversation covers why GLP-1 drugs blunt cravings without restoring energy, why people with essential fructosuria who lack fructokinase entirely appear largely protected from metabolic dysfunction, and a four-week approach that pairs sugar reduction with compensatory slow carbs and MCT oil while taste preferences recalibrate. Mearns is also direct about the limits of his own case for luteolin as a fructokinase inhibitor, which has been studied in liver cells and rodent models but not in living humans, leaving the question of whether this enzyme is the central lever in metabolic disease still open.

Chris Mearns is the founder of LIV3 Health and the creator of the Fructose Model, a systems-based framework connecting fructose metabolism to cellular energy and chronic metabolic dysfunction. Website: https://liv3health.com | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chrismearns

Your Free DNA of Things Starter Kit:
https://liv3health.com/dna

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What do fighter pilots and founders have in common? Mental performance consultant Gustavo Ruthes explains why the same stress inoculation techniques used to train NATO fighter pilots can rewire how anyone handles high-stakes decisions.

Gustavo Ruthes, a Registered Psychotherapist and Mental Performance Consultant who trains fifth-generation fighter pilots at Canada's International Tactical Training Centre, joins Dr. Jeremy Koenig to unpack the neurobiology of performing under pressure. Ruthes discusses explicit monitoring theory and why choking under pressure often comes from overanalyzing instead of trusting your training, and he breaks down why even one week of six-hour sleep can impair cognitive performance as much as two full nights of no sleep at all, without the person noticing. Drawing on his own path from Brazilian soccer and Jiu-Jitsu into military aviation psychology, he explains why self-compassion, not harsh self-criticism, is what actually builds resilience in high performers. The conversation closes with a candid look at how AI is reshaping cognitive habits in both classrooms and cockpits, and what parents should be doing about it.

Gustavo Ruthes is a Registered Psychotherapist (RP Qualifying, CRPO) and Mental Performance Consultant (MPC, CSPA) and the founder of Perfect Mind Mental Performance, where he works with NATO fighter pilots, athletes, and entrepreneurs. Website: https://perfectmind.ca

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Tim Maloney, Dalhousie University's Assistant Vice-President, Athletics & Ancillary Services, has spent over a decade proving that student-athletes can win conference championships and top the honor roll at the same time — so why do so few programs believe both are possible together?

Maloney oversees Dalhousie's athletics and recreation department, where student-athletes carry a 3.4 average GPA and 54 percent earned Academic All-Canadian status last year, both ahead of the general student body, while the Tigers have won 78 conference championships over the past decade. He explains how the Kinduct data platform and GPS tracking, driven by strength and conditioning coach Brett Armstrong, reshaped training for the women's soccer program down to individual player minutes. Maloney also unpacks the "energy vampire" concept borrowed from the New Zealand All Blacks and the counterintuitive advice he gives every recruit's parent: let your kid lead. The conversation raises a bigger question for any competitive program — can rigorous academics and elite athletics genuinely reinforce each other, or does one always come at the other's expense?

Tim Maloney is Dalhousie University's Assistant Vice-President, Athletics & Ancillary Services, overseeing varsity athletics, recreation, club sports, and facilities across Dalhousie's Halifax and Truro campuses.

Website: https://daltigers.ca/

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Andrew Steele went from Olympic sprinter to co-founder of DNAFit to CEO of Stride, and he thinks biological age testing is the "Wild West" of consumer health, with no standardized way to measure it.

Dr. Jeremy Koenig talks with Andrew Steele, Olympic bronze medalist and CEO of Stride, about why single-test health platforms leave people stuck self-triangulating their own data. Steele explains how Stride combines genomics, gut microbiome testing, and advanced blood work (75 to 100 biomarkers per draw) with human practitioner coaching to move consumer health from raw data toward accountable outcomes. He also details a recent grant from Innovate UK, the government's research and innovation arm, to help standardize biological age testing, and shares why Stride has seen over 90 percent member retention past the first year. What would it take for an entire industry built on dashboards to start taking ownership of results instead?

Andrew Steele is the co-founder and CEO of Stride, an Olympic bronze medalist in the 4x400m relay, and the former co-founder of DNAFit, which was acquired by Prenetics ahead of its NASDAQ IPO. Website: https://www.getstride.com/ | Instagram: @andrewsteele

Catch Andrew's first appearance on the show: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-43-from-olympic-tracks-to-health-tech-with/id1738771019?i=1000686629712

LINKS:

https://www.drjeremykoenig.com/
https://www.instagram.com/drjeremykoenig/
https://www.youtube.com/@drjeremykoenig

Here's the link for this week's episode: https://drjeremykoenig.substack.com/.