Empowered Patient Podcast Harnessing the Power of Bioactives to Improve Health Outcomes with Sofia Elizondo Brightseed
Sofia Elizondo, COO and Co-Founder of Brightseed, discusses the company's focus on bioactives and their potential to improve health outcomes. Bioactives are small molecules found in nature, such as plants, fungi, or bacteria, that activate human biological receptors and positively affect the body. Brightseed uses its AI platform, Forager, to identify and commercialize these bioactive compounds in foods, supplements, and over-the-counter medicine. As part of the food is medicine movement, Brightseed's goal is to make these superfoods more accessible to a broader population.
Sofia explains, "To bring us back to the source, caffeine is a small molecule. It’s a natural chemical that a seed produces. And so we take these coffee seeds, grind them up, and then extract the caffeine and other tasty flavors with water every morning."
"When we take a sip of our coffee, it’s actually very well understood what happens with caffeine. We absorb it in our stomach lining. The caffeine molecule goes into our bloodstream, goes into our brain while our blood is circulating around our body, and docks with a biological receptor called the adenosine receptor in our brain. What happens is it interacts with this receptor, and then we feel a bunch of downstream effects. We feel focus and energy, and maybe too much of an adrenaline rush sometimes."
"But this is a great example that many of us can be familiar with of the power of such a small molecule. It’s just one bioactive in one bean of one plant that can have this very precise and recognizable effect. In this case, science knows very well exactly what it does."
"In the big picture of bioactives, there are hundreds of thousands of them in plants and foods that we eat every day that we may not know or may not have cataloged. Science, in most cases, doesn’t exactly know what it does when we ingest these bioactives, at least not yet."
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