The PricePlow Podcast #055: Sara Perez Ojalvo - Nutrition21 at SupplySide West 2021
On October 29, 2021, Ben interviewed Sara Perez Ojalvo, the Director of Research & Development at Nutrition21, the ingredient development powerhouse that’s behind key sports nutrition, dietary, and performance ingredients like Nitrosigine, nooLVL, Chromax, and Velositol.
Meet Sara Perez Ojalvo and the Nutrition21 Way of Doing Things
Sara has been with Nutrition21 for seven years. When she first started, the brand’s focus was on Nitrosigine, a new patented nitric oxide booster in the form of inositol-stabilized arginine silicate, but it only had one study published at the time. Sara’s job is to design new research to demonstrate to the scientific and consumer communities that the ingredient is safe, efficacious, and beneficial for its purposes.
Sara graduated from the prominent Wesleyan University in Connecticut with a degree in Biology. She decided against medical school and lab-work, wanting to be in science yet not in the lab on a day-to-day basis.
When she began, Sara oversaw three simultaneous studies with funding the company had available. It’s her job to work with sales and marketing to see what consumers and brands are asking for, and to see if they can deliver an ingredient that works both in the lab and in the real world.
The full story is below, but you can subscribe to the PricePlow Podcast or watch the embedded video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1UFaA2i3l0
Nutrition21 the research company
As we’ve said numerous times on PricePlow, Nutrition21 is more of a research company than just a novel ingredient developer. Much of this is covered in our article titled The Evolution of Nutrition21’s Sports Nutrition Ingredients. Ben also brings up the unique Arkansas study that pitted Nitrosigine against citrulline malate, and showed that Nitrosigine was comparable to citrulline malate at less than a fourth of the dose!
Nitrosigine and cognitive function… leading to nooLVL
When funding studies, Nutrition21 enjoys collecting as much data as possible, because you’re never sure what you’ll find. While Nitrosigine is a pre workout ingredient, they figured they would study some cognitive function parameters as well, not fully sure if they’d hit anything big. It turned out that Nitrosigine did improve cognitive function — within 15 minutes — and this eventually led to the creation of NooLVL, which was focused on gamers.
NooLVL was then studied on gamers in their gaming studies, played with modern games, and much of that is covered in our article titled nooLVL: Next-Gen Focus Ingredient for Gaming Supplements. Mechanistically, the effect makes sense – the increased nitric oxide from both Nitrosigine and nooLVL don’t just increase blood flow and oxygenation for the muscles, they work for the brain as well!
Future nooLVL research
Sara discusses where nooLVL research may go next: in previous research, they allowed gamers to play their favorite games between their cognitive battery tests. However, because of this, there was too much variability, and they couldn’t collect consistent data regarding in-game performance data. In future studies, it’d be great to standardize on a single game altogether to look at performance as well.
The latest nooLVL research is covered in our article titled…