960 Leslie Kenny:

Wings of Inspired Business Podcast EP960 – Host Melinda Wittstock Interviews Leslie Kenny

Melinda Wittstock:

Coming up on Wings of Inspired Business:

Leslie Kenny:

Around age 26, in our late 20s, the production of spermidine begins to decline. And then we are much more dependent on getting it from plants. And also, if we can get it from production by the healthy bacteria in our gut biome. So that is the, that is the compound. Now the first time I heard the name, I just immediately said, well, the name has to be changed right away. So, I have renamed it Primeadine for the new prime of life. And I figured that my 86-year-old mother would not be completely embarrassed if she went to the store and asked the woman working in the supplement aisle for some Primeadine.

Melinda Wittstock:

Who doesn’t want a long, healthy life? The business of longevity is booming as people look for surefire ways to halt the aging process. Leslie Kenny is busy redefining the longevity landscape. Today Leslie shares her remarkable journey from being diagnosed with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis at age 39—during a pivotal IVF round—to discovering breakthrough science at Oxford University and launching her own premium supplement brand, Primeadine. We dive into the science of aging, explore the power of the base ingredient spermidine, and hear Leslie’s firsthand perspective on regulating the immune system, reversing inflammation, and overcoming the challenges of bringing an innovative health product to market. 

Melinda Wittstock:

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m all about paying it forward as a five-time serial entrepreneur, so I started this podcast to catalyze an ecosystem where women entrepreneurs mentor, promote, buy from, and invest in each other. Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together and lift as we climb.

Melinda Wittstock:

Before we get started today I just want to say a few words about the darkness, the heaviness many of us feel about the world today. I am so shocked and saddened by the senseless death of Hollywood director and actor Rob Reiner and his wife—a terrible tragedy, made worse by yesterday’s senselessly cruel, depraved and unhinged comments by the President of the United States. These deaths—after a weekend of shootings from Brown University to Bondi Beach, and ongoing senseless loss of life from Ukraine to Gaza and beyond—remind us how precious life is. In dark times, our choice as always is to let light and love shine brightly within ourselves to defeat the darkness of cruelty, fear and division. Enough. Just enough. This year has been painfully hard for so many, and my sincerest wish for humanity, and our sliver of it that innovates with entrepreneurship to help others and even solve seemingly intractable problems, is that we never allow ourselves to become numb—and instead shine our brightest light, in gratitude and love, to make a meaningful positive impact in the world.

Melinda Wittstock:

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who is pioneering a path towards longevity with an anti-aging supplement called Primeadine. Leslie Kenny is the CEO and Founder of Oxford Lifespan and she’s on a mission to help the world reverse the aging process after she herself reversed her own Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, and infertility—giving birth naturally at 43. Now 60, with a biological age of 21, Leslie shares how her food-derived supplement, and her ethical product development process, is changing the game of longevity.

Melinda Wittstock:

Leslie will be here in a moment, and first:

If you’re enjoying this podcast and what you learn from all the inspiring women I interview every week, almost a thousand episodes now, please go ahead, hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and share it with your friends and colleagues. We really appreciate ratings and reviews on Apple and Spotify – it helps more entrepreneurs like you find the wisdom, tips, and epiphanies they need to grow their business. It makes a difference. Thank you. 

Melinda Wittstock:

At age 39, Leslie Kenny found herself in the midst of her fifth round of IVF, determined to become a mother despite using donor eggs and investing heavily both financially and emotionally. During this tumultuous journey, Leslie was unexpectedly diagnosed with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. Desperate for a solution that would allow her to continue with her embryo transfer, she confronted her doctor, only to be told that even a successful pregnancy might leave her with just five good years to live due to her condition. Back in 2004, treatment options for lupus were limited and a cure remained elusive. Leslie’s diagnosis, delivered at such a critical and hopeful moment, set her on a path of resilience and advocacy, shaping her future work and commitment to health innovation.

Melinda Wittstock:

Today Leslie shares her journey, how she discovered the efficacy of spermidine, and how during Covid she perfected her process to bring the supplement Primeadine to market. She talks about the lack of transparency in supplement ingredients and labeling, and how she’s sourcing clean ingredients and a clean manufacturing process for her product.

Melinda Wittstock:

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Leslie Kenny.

[INTERVIEW]

Melinda Wittstock:

Leslie, welcome to Wings.

Leslie Kenny:

Thank you very much, Melinda. I’m so pleased to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, you know, longevity is the hot topic of the moment, unless you’re talking about AI, of course, which may have something to do with longevity or not. You had a personal experience in your own life that, that made you want to tackle this big thing. Tell me about that. What really got you into the longevity space?

Leslie Kenny:

Well, it starts 21 years ago when I was age 39 and I was in the middle of my fifth round of IVF. The stakes were high. I was using donor eggs, there was a lot of financial and emotional investment, and I was diagnosed with lupus rheumatoid arthritis in the middle of my fifth IVF round. And I sort of pushed my doctor to come up with a solution because I was so desperate to go ahead with this embryo transfer. And my doctor just looked at me and advised me not to do the embryo transfer because she said even if I was successful, I only had a good five years left. And this was all based on my. On my lupus. At that time in 2004, there really was no treatment and there still isn’t a cure for lupus.

Leslie Kenny:

So, it made me begin to wonder if what she was saying to me was true. And long story short, I did what some motivated patients do. I went to the bulletin boards, the patient bulletin boards, as I had done with IVF when I was researching. And I found on the lupus patient boards a transfusion that had been studied in Germany with lupus patients. And every single one of the 13 participants had improved. It was called intravenous immunoglobulin. It’s still around now, but it astonishes me how few rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, or other autoimmune patients know about it. And it strikes me as unusual how few of their doctors know about it as an actual viable alternative to the immune suppressing drugs that we’re all put on.

Leslie Kenny:

And the side effects of being on immune suppressing drugs are that not only can you not fight against pathogens like pneumonia or, you know, Covid, but you can’t. Your immune system can’t surveil for cancer. So autoimmune patients are at a much greater risk of getting cancer down the line because of continually suppressing their immune systems. So, so when I was introduced, you know, fast forward a number of years, I’m living in the university town of Oxford, England, and I had working with spin out companies from the University of Oxford in the area of regenerative medicine, because I really wanted to get these breakthrough. I wanted to get companies around breakthrough science that could cure disease, not just manage and treat it. We all want to cure it all patients, we don’t want to be managed, and we don’t want the diseases we have. I was attracted to these regenerative medicine companies. And somebody, the person who ran the biotech portfolio for Oxford Science Enterprises, which is a half a billion-dollar fund here, said, hey, you’re a rheumatoid arthritis patient.

Leslie Kenny:

There’s some interesting work happening over in rheumatology, and some immunologists there are rejuvenating elderly immune cells. And I thought, what? Well, wait a second. That’s what I had. I had essentially elderly immune cells. They were prematurely aged. I went to meet the two scientists, two female scientists, Professor Katja Simon and Professor Gada Al Saleh. And they told me about their work. But then I started digging and I found study after study after study saying spermidine actually inhibits stem cell dysfunction, mitochondrial dysfunction, shortened telomeres, inflammation, gut dysbiosis.

Leslie Kenny:

And these, by the way, are five of the 12 pathways down which we age. All in all, spermidine inhibits nine of the 12 pathways down which we age, which is why the New York Post calls it the Swiss army knife of longevity compounds. And there’s good evidence that it might even inhibit a 10. So, when I saw that, I thought, this really needs to get out to market. And I think I’m going to hold up my hand to do it. And I did ask Oxford Science Enterprises would they fund me. And they thought it was a great idea that I was doing this. But no, they said they couldn’t fund me because there was no patent behind it.

Leslie Kenny:

I thought that was just a terrible reason not to bring an efficacious compound to market. Because anybody who knows anything about branding knows that Coke and Pepsi, they might have a secret sauce, but it’s not patented. And I thought, well, this compound has merit. I’m going to bring it to market. And then Covid hit and. Yeah, and I had another, you know, one of those moments. Should I.

Leslie Kenny:

Should I continue or not continue? And I called up Katja Simon at the Kennedy Institute for Rheumatology here at the University of Oxford. And I said, Katja, I’m not sure if this is the right time to bring a product to market. It was April 2020. And she said, Leslie, we don’t have anything else to fight Covid. Are you kidding? This might actually help. You have to bring this to market. And I’m a good student, so I listen to my teachers. And so, I thought if, if she says this is a good idea, I should go ahead and do it.

Leslie Kenny:

So, I press play. And of course, all the retailers were, were shut. So, we had to go direct to market. And the rest is kind of history. Here we are five years later and it’s, we’ve certainly been part of this, the development of this category of compounds known as longevity compounds. And we’ve been busy trying to educate people around this idea that you can slow and possibly even reverse aging. And that’s something that I’m personally testament to and I can tell you more about that later. But you know, we want people to understand that all the diseases that we associate with old age, they actually, we can compress the time during which we might be ill.

Leslie Kenny:

And we don’t have to get them all if we just slow the pace at which we’re aging. You know, it’s like driving your car. Rather than going 100 miles per hour towards the age of 100, the biological age of 100, we can drive more slowly. And if we drive at 20 miles per hour, we’re going to be able to delay the onset of all the diseases we associate with aging, like cancer, like cardiovascular disease, like Alzheimer’s and dementia. We can delay those until much later. And that is what we want to tell people is possible.

Melinda Wittstock:

That is so interesting. So, tell me a little bit about the product itself. What is it, what’s it called? What does it do? Well, what’s the expectation of it?

Leslie Kenny:

Yeah, sure.

Leslie Kenny:

The compound has a really unfortunate name. It’s called spermidine and it was named by Antony van Leeuwenhoek, a 17th century Dutch biologist. And it is present in semen, so sperm. And it is, however, something that is also present in copious quantities in breast milk. And in fact, we all make it when we are young. We make it in great quantities. So, at infancy, our tissues will be producing great quantities.

Leslie Kenny:

But, but we’ll also be getting a lot from our mothers in mother’s milk, assuming we’re breastfed. And around age 26, in our late 20s, the production of spermidine begins to decline. And then we are much more dependent on getting it from plants. And also, if we can get it from production by the healthy bacteria in our gut biome. So that is the, that is the compound. Now the first time I heard the name, I just immediately said, well, the name has to be changed right away. So, so I have renamed it Primeadine for the new prime of life. And I like that a lot better.

Leslie Kenny:

And I figured that my 86-year-old mother would not be completely embarrassed if she went to the store and asked the woman working in the supplement aisle for some Primeadine. That would be so much better than asking her for spermidine.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s amazing. So how does it work? Is it like a pill, is it an elixir? What is it and how do you like and what are the expectations you start taking?

Leslie Kenny:

Right, so it’s a supplement. And we have, we have two different types, two different raw materials. They’re both derived from food. All the safety trials in humans have been done with food derived spermidine. There are no safety trials for synthetic. The one product has a raw material which is highly concentrated wheat germ. And we remove the omega 6 fatty acids that often go rancid. So, wheat germ is about 50% oil.

Leslie Kenny:

And so, we take that out and then we’ve added a prebiotic fiber that feeds the healthy bacteria in your gut that are capable of making more spermidine for you. And so those are in capsules, but we also provide it in a powder so that you can just add it to your smoothies, put it in your porridge, sprinkle it on top of your acai balls. And earlier this year I did a longevity dinner at Six Senses Resort in Portugal. And the head chef there said he liked the taste of it. It actually has a taste slightly sweet. It’s a little bit. Some people say it tastes like milk powder, other people like me say it tastes like nuts. And some people say it’s slightly malted flavor.

Leslie Kenny:

And he said, you know, I’m going to put this in some ice cream together with some honey, with some, you know, honey from our beehives. And it tasted fantastic. So, we don’t put any fillers or flow agents there. It’s just the, you know, the raw material, the food derived spermidine. And then we have a gluten free product. And so many patients, autoimmune patients who heard me talk about my remission from these autoimmune illnesses said, hey, we’re on the autoimmune paleo diet. We can’t take any lectins, and gluten is the most famous lectin of them all. And even though there’s a small amount of gluten in the.

Leslie Kenny:

In Primeadine original, which is the wheat germ derived product, it’s still too much for people who are recovering and definitely not good for celiac. So, I looked all over the world for. For a good alternative. And just like the wheat germ product, I found it in Japan, this time in Okinawa, which are known as the Longevity Islands. And it’s made from a unique strain of chlorella. I had to try to test over 100 different sub strains to find this. And I think we’re the only people in the world who commissioned the growth of this particular strain. And it’s grown in freshwater ponds on the island, and I’ve been to the freshwater spring source.

Leslie Kenny:

And then we add to it some Okinawan turmeric and some Okinawan lime peel, which has another compound called Nobiletin. Now, Nobiletin and spermidine have the ability to activate a cell renewal process called autophagy. I don’t know if you know it. I don’t, but you’ll certainly. Okay, well, you’ll be familiar with it because it’s one of the big benefits from fasting. And so, both spermidine and Nobiletin will be fasting, what we call fasting mimetics. They mimic the cell renewal and recycling benefits that you would get if you were fasting. And as a matter of fact, a study came out of Germany last year which said that people who are fasting, but whose tissues and gut biome are not producing spermidine anymore, and who do not have spermidine coming from plants, they actually do not get the cell renewal benefits from fasting.

Leslie Kenny:

They will get the weight loss benefits from fasting, but they will not get the cell renewal benefits. And that is the bit that keeps you young. So, I should have talked more about autophagy, which was the subject of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, given that the Nobel was. We’ve just had more announcements today on the Nobel Prizes. So, autophagy is, for me, is a kind of holy grail of anti-aging, because if you can renew and recycle your cells, they’re the foundation of every organ tissue, every part of your body, your muscles, everything. And then spermidine also activates a process called mitophagy, which is renewal of the mitochondria inside the cell. So basically, what it does is it’s like Marie Kondo. She comes to your home for you.

Leslie Kenny:

You know those TV shows that she had, I think on Netflix where she comes in and she just makes everything Zen like and it just functions so much better. All the clutter is gone. But then she’s put this electric source to the, the house that she’s just cleaned up for you. Well, that’s the mitochondria and that is what spermidine can do.

Leslie Kenny:

So, in terms of dosage, the minimum effective dose which we put in every daily dosage is 1 milligram of spermidine. And so, in the human clinical trials, they could see that people with subjective cognitive decline. These are people who are saying, I don’t know why, but I keep leaving my, my keys in the fridge. My glasses, where are they? They’re at the end of my nose. These individuals were given 1 milligram of spermidine over a 90-day period. And at the end of the 90 days, their, their memory improved. So that is where that minimum effective dose comes from.

Leslie Kenny:

And the European Food Safety Authority has looked at food derived Spermidine and said, you can safely take up to 6 milligrams of this a day.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s amazing. And so, what’s it been like bringing this to market? Like, I, I, I always like to talk about the, the, you know, the struggles of entrepreneurs because it’s one thing that you did all this research like, like personal stories, you overcome all these things, you get interested in the research. There you are at Oxford University doing all of this. That’s not easy, what you’ve done. And then, then the challenge of expanding market share. And in a market where people make all kinds of claims.

Leslie Kenny:

Right?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, but it’s hard for consumers to really know. So, what have been some of the challenges in getting this out there? And, and tell me a little bit about where you are in terms of, you know, your, your growth.

Leslie Kenny:

Sure. Well, I think that the hardest thing has been educating people. So, there are two, there are two sort of pain points. One is what I talked about earlier, that no one believes that you can say, slow the process of aging or that you can reverse that. And I think that the rise of a number of biological age testing companies has helped a bit with that. Just so your listeners know, we all have a chronological age which corresponds to the number of candles on our birthday cake, but we also have a biological age. And they don’t have to be the same. You could be 45 years old, but have the biological age of a 60-year-old.

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Melinda Wittstock:

And we’re back with Leslie Kenny, founder and CEO of longevity company Oxford Lifespan and the supplement Primeadine.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

Leslie Kenny:

And we all know people. We’ve seen them. They don’t look healthy, they look tired, they look haggard. These people are aging biologically faster than their chronological years. Or you could be. You know, there are people, and I’ll take myself as an example. I’m 60. But when I did my biological age test last year through Glycanage, a testing company based here in Europe, I was biologically 21.

Leslie Kenny:

Now, I’m not saying, yeah, I’m not saying that’s amazing. Now I’m not saying that, you know, I’m well past menopause, I’m not having babies, right? So. But what they were measuring for was inflammation. And for an autoimmune patient like me, that’s all I care about. I want to make sure I’m not going to get any autoimmune flares. I’m not going to be debilitated by these illnesses that I was told would cut my life short. And so that. That was really meaningful to me that I had such a low biological age.

Leslie Kenny:

So, I think people are beginning to come around to this idea that we can push on biological age and that there are inputs, and the inputs are greatly correlated to lifestyle. And exercise has got to be number one. Diet, right? Eating the right things, not eating the wrong things, and sleep, stress, not being around toxic people, but surrounding ourselves with people who bring us joy. So that’s been one of the big challenges, was getting that idea across. The other problem was, frankly, the name, trying to talk to people about this and. And the number of people who have said, okay, so what’s the source of this? And actually saying, how did you get this? Is this from. Is this from male animals? Is this from men? And me saying, no, let me try and explain where this comes from. We all make it.

Leslie Kenny:

Your grandmother makes it. Right. But luckily, when I had my last startup, which was an online matchmaker in 1999, I remember then I had this kind of, what are you doing? Look and sense of disbelief. And people. People kind of equated online matchmaking at that time with pornography. So, I couldn’t get a payments provider, an online credit card payments provider, because it appeared to be porn, even though it was just online matchmaking, which we all now accept. So those were really my two biggest challenges. But again, having faced some of these challenges many, many years ago, it was just kind of par for the course.

Melinda Wittstock:

You know, all entrepreneurs who are pioneering entrepreneurs where you’re really innovating something and you’re changing a mindset, you’re changing behavior. Those businesses are so much harder because there is such an educational component.

Leslie Kenny:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think if everybody wants to feel younger and, and look younger and, and feel better and have more energy and all these things. So, this is like a no brainer, like why would someone not do this?

Leslie Kenny:

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And as a patient, I’m very much a food first kind of person. I don’t want people saying, oh, you can only get it from my product. You’re going to die with that. That’s not true. You can get it from food. So please, anybody listening, try first to get it from things like shiitake mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, from legumes, from peas.

Leslie Kenny:

I will advocate for the traditional Scottish diet, which most people don’t talk about, which is salmon and mushy peas. Well, mushy peas have loads of spermidine and you know, you get your omega 3s and the salmon. So, I say to people, food first. But you can, you know, you can top up with a supplement. And what’s most important is that you get a food derived version of it. Because our bodies recognize these food derived molecules and in a way that they don’t with synthetic. And we’ve co evolved as a species with plants and they are really the best chemists on the planet because they’re constantly responding to environmental stimuli and recombining chemicals or producing chemicals in their leaves or their fruit as a way to respond to the environment. And when we eat those, those plants, we then they confer their protection to us.

Leslie Kenny:

It is an educational process. It does take time. I think I’m passionate about it because I’m a patient and I’ve seen the studies that show that this helps with autoimmune conditions, that this decreases inflammation, that this helps modulate the immune system. Which is very similar to what happened to me when I used this transfusion back in 2004 to put myself into remission. That was an immune modulatory transfusion called ivig. Ivig. And the fact that spermidine is also immune modulatory is, you know, is really exciting to me. But it’s my passion to serve other patients first and to really give them, give them the real skinny is there are a lot of, there are a lot of less scrupulous people, unscrupulous people in the supplement world.

Leslie Kenny:

It’s very lightly regulated, that can be a good thing. And that you can get things earlier, then you might normally say a drug, but that can also be a bad thing. And one of the things that, that I’ve noticed just coming to it as a patient, when I looked at manufacturing, so many manufacturers who were going to encapsulate, you know, put the powder into little capsules said, oh, it’s really hard to work with your powder. You know, it’s getting stuck in the hoppers that feed into the little capsules. So, you’re going to need to get a flow agent which will help it move faster through the equipment. And I said, oh, what’s in the flow agent? And they said, well, it’s a magnesium steroid. And I said, oh, well, what is in the magnesium steroid? And then I learned that something like 75% of magnesium stearate on the market is hydrogenated oil. And I thought, right, and that’s being.

Melinda Wittstock:

Taken out of a supplement that’s completely, that’s supposed to help you, but it’s actually causing inflammation.

Leslie Kenny:

Yeah, exactly. And that was, that was so shocking to me. But Magstaride is one of the most common ingredients in supplements. Just look at the back of your labels of the less expensive supplements. And talc was another one. And I thought, I can’t even believe this, right? I can’t believe it. And then I’d say, but this isn’t good for the consumer. And they’d say, well, it doesn’t matter, it’s such a small amount.

Leslie Kenny:

And I’d say, but some people are taking quite a lot of supplements and if they’re chronically microdosing, that can’t be good, right? You don’t want hydrogenated oils in your blood because they then become part of the outer membrane of the cell and you can’t have that be inflamed. So that was one of the things that really shocked me was people accept that to make an efficient product or to manufacture efficiently, you put things in the product people are ingesting that have no benefit to the consumer, only benefit to the manufacturing equipment and to the bottom line of the supplement manufacturer. As a patient, I was appalled and I thought surely we could do things better. So, I had to search for companies that have semi-automatic equipment where you can stop the line, you can put a metal pole into the hopper, you can disperse the powder, so if it’s kind of clogged there, you can unblock the clog, and it carries on its merry way. But you don’t need these things that frankly, have no business in our food supply. We’ve already legislated to take them out of the American food supply, but yet they’re still there in our supplements. That’s just wrong.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, that’s amazing that you figured that out like, because I think a lot of people wouldn’t take the time or go to the expense of, of doing that or it’s perhaps just ignorant.

Leslie Kenny:

It’s expensive.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s expensive and it takes longer to manufacture your product. So how does that, how does that work then? How, what kind of, you know, how does that work in terms of your business and your margins, your price point, all that kind of stuff?

Leslie Kenny:

Well, we’re a premium product and for me, I have always invested in my health. I invest in my health in the way that I would vet invest in a pension plan. It’s like my health pension plan. So, although I live in the United Kingdom, which has the National Health Service free to us all, there are many tests which you frankly just won’t ever get run as a typical patient here. And so, I go to a private functional medicine doctor, and she runs all the tests that show me whether or not I have somehow slipped and have, have become inflammatory again. So, it’s not just tests like C reactive protein CRP, which is a very comm and cheat test of inflammation, but it’s more specific immune biomarkers like cytokines and tumor necrosis factor alpha. And these are expensive to test. So, I’ve always invested in those things rather than investing in, say, a branded handbag.

Leslie Kenny:

And at the end of the day, I feel like having a healthier, biologically younger body will serve me better than the expensive designer product. That means that I’m the kind of person who is willing to pay more for a supplement. And I have a feeling there are other men and women out there just like me who want to invest in their health and they want the best. If they’re going to do it, they want to do it right. And that’s why, you know, we’re at a higher price point. Our customers can rest assured that we are doing research at the University of Oxford on our specific product. We know it activates autophagy hand on heart.

Leslie Kenny:

I know that and I have the evidence to prove it. I don’t know if other competitors can do that. And we also go to the trouble to test every single batch to make sure it has the exact amount of spermidine that we say it does on the label. We test at the Japan Food Research Lab In Japan. Then when we bring it into, say, Canada, the United States, the EU or the UK where we manufacture, we test again locally as well to make sure that we’ve got the right amount of spermidine there, as well as the usual testing for heavy metals, mycotoxins, things like this. And a premium price is also justified, I think if you do what I do, which is I actually go and see the farms. So, I’ve like I said, I’ve been to the spring water, the mountain spring water source in Okinawa was filtered by volcanic rocks. And I’ve been to the fields where the Okinawan turmeric is grown, where the farmers have proudly said, look at my weeds.

Leslie Kenny:

Most farmers don’t like weeds, but this farmer loves weeds because it demonstrates he’s not using pesticides. There’s no glyphosate there. Same with the Okinawan lime trees. These are grown on volcanic rocks. They don’t need pesticides. They’re unbelievably hardy. I’ve never seen a plant like this, but it literally, its roots go through the holes, the porous holes, the sponge like holes in the rock, and draw out nutrients from the volcanic rocks on which they grow. So same with our concentrated wheat germ product that is made from Japanese wheat and also some imported wheat.

Leslie Kenny:

But Japan, for instance, does not allow the import of food products that have been sprayed with glyphosate for drying purposes. So much of the damage to American wheat is done at the drying stage. So, they’re harvesting it and because they don’t want it to grow moldy, they spray it with glyphosate, this pesticide, to desiccate it, to dry it and draw the water out so that they get a better price at market. But of course, glyphosate is not our friend, and not when we ingest it every day in our bread, cereal, pasta. That can lead to leaky gut or gut dysbiosis, which is one of the hallmarks of aging down, which we can prematurely age. So those are some of the things that I just feel I didn’t know I would have to go to these lengths. But the more that I learned about, about the supplement industry, the more I realized I had to do this the way I wanted it.

Leslie Kenny:

And I’m proud of the products that we have.

Melinda Wittstock:

Amazing. So where, so how do you sell it? Is it just all direct to consumer or is it also sold in stores? Or how, how do people find it?

Leslie Kenny:

Primarily direct to consumer? So, we started in, I guess we launched end of June 2020. And the only way you could sell this was online at that time. So that’s how we started. And we’ve actually enjoyed doing that because we have a better relationship with our customers that way because we can send them emails. We’ve got a 1, 800 number, an 888 number. If they want to call us, they can reach us. We can interact with them more easily. We recently have gone into retail.

Leslie Kenny:

We had some requests so Erewhon, which you’ll know because you’re also living down in southern California. The 10 Erewhon shops in Southern California wanted to stock our products, so we agreed to do that. And Six Senses Resorts where they did the ice cream with Primeadine Original powder, they stock us at their Douro Valley resort where we did that longevity dinner. And that is really, there are a couple of other stores in California and New York that you know that have worked with our wholesaler, with our American wholesaler to get it onto their shelves. But it’s been very much, you know, them coming to us and them wanting it on the shelves.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s very exciting. I mean, when you have people coming, coming to you, that’s.

Leslie Kenny:

Yeah, it’s a nice problem to have.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s a nice problem to have. And so, someone listening who’s not in Southern California or New York or in some of these places that are a little more forward looking. Do you just literally go to your website, Oxford Health Span.

Leslie Kenny:

That’s right. Oxfordhealthspan.com – a span just like the span of a bridge. And, and, and you can find it there.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s amazing. And, and Leslie, I, I imagine you’re all over social media as well.

Leslie Kenny:

I am.

Melinda Wittstock:

Leslie’s new prime.

Leslie Kenny:

That’s right.

Melinda Wittstock:

You’ve got a YouTube channel; you’ve got all that stuff going on as well. So, this is really exciting. Like, I feel like you’ve done a really good sales pitch for me. I’m thinking, well, I’m going to be, you know, I, I, you know, when I, when, when I’m, I go back and forth between Vancouver, Canada and like Santa Monica. I’m gonna go pick myself some Primeadine up, see how that, see how that works.

Leslie Kenny:

We can send you some. Do, you know, we manufacture in Canada, so if you’re Canadian and you want to get a complete Canuck product, you can get it.

Melinda Wittstock:

Okay. That’s really, really good to know. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today. What an inspiring story and a story of perseverance, self-healing, but just your whole approach is really uplifting because, like you said, there’s a lot of unscrupulous people in the supplement space. So, thank you for doing what you’re doing.

Leslie Kenny:

Thank you so much. And thank you for having me on today.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

Melinda Wittstock:

Leslie Kenny, founder and CEO of longevity company Oxford Lifespan and the supplement Primeadine.

Melinda Wittstock:

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Melinda Wittstock:

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