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Ahmad (00:00.736)
Indeed. Yeah. How far did you travel to get here? It took me just over an hour and a half. I stopped for a coffee in Beaconsfield, which I haven’t been to for many years. why do you know Beaconsfield? I have no idea except that I did. I used to have a girlfriend who lived not far from Beaconsfield and I used to go there quite a lot.

Yeah, that’s it. That phone call we had, you had girlfriends all over the place. Well, you’re quite the guy when you’re younger. We’re not recording this, are we? Well, we are. No, yeah, yeah. was a long time ago. Long, long time. How you been married for? 30 years. Obviously you’ve faithful since then. absolutely. More or less. Right. Listen, tell me something.

Why did you get into seaweed of all things? We’re recording now, aren’t we? Yeah, we are now. Yeah. OK. I tell you what, I’m I thought about that and I thought that’s bound to be the first thing you ask me, because that’s what people usually do. I’m predictable. If anything, I think it’s it’s an interesting little story, but I I feel I want to preface it. I want to D.

I want to defunct a sort of major myth, first of all, about seaweed because I want to just go into the sort of the real meaning of seaweed for human nutrition. And that sort of explains why I’m doing it. But then I’ll come to that if I may. Because the that, you know, you hear that there are, you know, 10,000 species of seaweed in the world.

70 % of the planet is ocean. So, you know, there’s more ocean than there is agricultural land to grow our land foods. it’s a very, very ancient plant. And we’re not even sure it’s a plant because it actually is in many ways more like an animal. It actually has sperm and eggs, you know, so it’s really, yes, it’s not a, it’s not a, it’s not a vegetable at all in a true sense that people normally accept.

Ahmad (02:20.354)
because we talk about land foods and land vegetables. This thing is quite opposite, really opposite in many ways, and it’s quite different. So with that starting point, there are really, really, the real truth is that there are really two kinds of seaweed. And the first kind is for our a sort of daily foundation for our daily nutrition.

And it’s a foundation because it’s the home, it’s the residual place where all the micronutrients are. You find all the micronutrients in seaweed. And that applies to most of the species. So first of all, it’s a normal food source. And it’s the only food source, because it comes from the ocean.

all the micronutrients. So it has all the minerals. The ocean is the great repository of natural minerals and soluble minerals, which I’ll come back to. So it’s a way of getting into the body, tiny, tiny amounts of all the micronutrients, at about 144 nutrients in seaweeds. So this is the first.

reason that we should use it and it’s the real meaning of seaweed to get all of those micronutrients back into our daily, into our body and into part of our daily diet. So that’s a very special thing. It’s not something to eat once a week, once a month as some kind of gourmet food or some kind of glamorous vegetable. It’s not. That is a way that people use it and that’s fine. It’s fine.

But really seriously, foundation of our daily diet is really critical. And then the second way is in therapy, is as a therapeutic food. And then the only difference is that you’re using much larger amounts. What I’ve got to put, again, put, what I got a little bit of evidence for that is that when we started out, which is now 27 years ago,

Ahmad (04:48.102)
During the first 10 years, we didn’t actually know a lot about what was in our seaweed. We done all the compositional research that we’ve done since. But a lot of practitioners started to use it. And they came back and said that, you know, we’re using what you said, use it in the daily diet as a foundation for the diet around a gram a day, which is a tiny, it’s a quarter of a teaspoon of dried particles of seaweed.

We’ve been using it at sort of four grams, five grams and above, and we’re finding some amazing results, more therapeutic results. It’s actually having effect on bodily conditions, on health conditions. In 2007, which is almost 10 years later, I went to Japan and I got some interesting statistics, which included that up until the late 60s, when the last statistics were really kept.

In the traditional Japanese diet, seaweed was being taken at around 4.6 grams per person per day in the traditional diet. How does it get into the traditional diet? In you get it at almost every meal. If you go and stay in a traditional home in Japan, even today, you’ll get seaweed pops up in breakfast, lunch, supper, whenever it is. And it’s always there in some little form. Right. Even if it’s just a flavoring in the soup.

Yeah, it’s a stick of kombu or whatever it is, it’s there. So these minerals particularly are getting into the into the diet. But the the interesting thing was that this corresponded to what our practitioners were telling us that when they sort of quadrupled the daily dose, it seemed to become therapeutic rather than just an input and helping to remove deficiencies in the body. So those are these these two really important

different ways. And then you know, okay, as I see you’ve got the third way, which is, you know, it’s a nice, interesting gourmet food. But the trouble is that, especially when I talk to many, many people, and groups of people, and I asked them, you know, what do you know about seaweed? The first thing that most people say is, well, it’s, it’s from East Asia. And it’s, it’s mainly the Far East. And it’s sort of, it’s the Japanese seaweeds that everybody knows about sushi and kombu and all these, these

Ahmad (07:15.176)
names, yeah, GK and so on. Whereas, as we said, seaweed is all over the world. It is it is a plentiful and abundant food. And we have some of the finest seaweeds around the British Isles. So coming back to your question, why did I get into this? Yeah, because I got into it when I was I was I got involved in a company in Norway.

which with a Swedish client of mine, I was consultant, management consultant. And he had acquired some land in Norway on the coast, and he had fish, he had seaweed, and some mineral business and so on. So I was asked to look at what the possibilities were for this, developing this business. And we got into using the seaweed in horticulture.

And we found that one of the biggest customers for the seaweed was a British company called MaxCrop, and it was a world leader in seaweed for irrigation. lot of development in Israel and India and places where they were using it to irrigate particularly new soils and new crops and so on. And what I noticed was that the…

there were some really interesting things going on with the micronutrients. For example, it had more potassium than sodium. That was interesting. It had not just a of a group of nutrients, but you could see that it had all the minerals, all the minerals and trace elements, not just some, but, and then the proportions of those things were very akin to the

proportions that we have in the human body. I went to university in Sussex and I studied psychology and neurology in those days, which you could do together. And what interested me was that all of the information I had about micronutrient deficiencies around the world, really this seemed to respond to that. There was this incredible balance and proportion.

Ahmad (09:37.642)
of nutrients in the seaweed. And I thought, well, this has got to be interesting. But at that time, we were really much more knowledgeable about the things that related to plants and to horticulture. So we were looking for gibberellids, which are the growth promoters in seaweed. And we were looking at the pigments like valosanthan and chlorophyll and all these things that are wonderful in the body, but they’re more interesting for…

for plants and horticulture. And there’d been a lot of research in animal feed as well, but very little as human food, particularly with the species we were working with. These are not the Japanese hijikis or sushi seaweed. So I thought, why are we not eating this stuff? Why?

because there’s no real tradition. Because it’s wet and slimy and rubbery. slimy and it’s disgusting and it smells, you know. And we were boiling this stuff, by the way, to reduce it to a liquid form for irrigation. So it really did stink. And in fact, had at the time we had a factory in Corby in Lancashire, Northampt, And the people say they could smell it for five miles around. So, you know, this was…

And I’m saying to the board of directors of this company, you know, we really, we really should think about how we could use this as a human for human nutrition. It the profile is is fantastic. But it wasn’t for about 10 years that we actually managed to start doing really serious and very expensive big studies on the composition of these seaweeds. Just one second.

I really do like nowadays to explode this myth that you know the seaweed is some sort of gourmet food interesting thing and it’s you know it’s just for the sort of organic middle classes and you know it’s not it’s it’s it’s actually something that every one of us especially our children and our pregnant mothers should have. Step on our diet. Yeah absolutely.

Ahmad (11:57.152)
Okay, tell me then when you said therapeutic, what do you mean by therapeutic? What therapeutic usages are there for for seaweed? Like, what can I help with? Well, I know, know, can’t let it not curing cancer and stuff like that. But like, what can it help with? Well, again, just to go back to the fact that, you know, when when probably it was introduced into the Japanese diet, I mean, hundreds of years ago,

I don’t suppose they had done actual research on the seaweeds. They didn’t know the total composition, but they knew it was very rich and probably very rich in minerals and so on coming from the ocean because they’re good stuff. really, until that time and from 2008, that’s when we started doing our research, about 10 years after we started. And that began to show us that

This really is a very, very important component of human nutrition. that, know, just from the sort of deficiency point of view, it means that you’re putting into the body all of those tiny micronutrients the body uses to do almost everything. I mean, no nutrition, no nutrient, no group of nutrients works by itself.

It needs a complete environment of other nutrients. Absolutely. It needs everything. And if it doesn’t have everything, it will start to grab for them, not find them and can’t perform what it needs to do. So very important element in the body to get the body functioning properly. And then when you when you look at what the therapeutic uses are, then you you find that

If you, when we started our research after doing these major compositional studies, and by the way, we study every time we harvest our seaweed, we do these complete profiles. So we constantly monitor the seaweed. So we have about 17 years of data, which shows everything that’s in that seaweed, the good stuff, the bad stuff, everything that’s in there.

Ahmad (14:20.898)
And that is absolutely crucial because if you’re going to use it on a daily basis in kids, in infants, in people who are ill, people who have gut dysbiosis or sorts of things, then it has to be, you have to really know what you’re putting in there. And at the sort of levels that we were using at the time around a gram, certainly no more than four grams, we were…

very, very cautious about how much of this stuff you could put into the body. Then we, but then we said, well, now we know what’s in it. We can see it’s, it’s really perfectly harmless. There’s no reason why people shouldn’t use more of it, but the body doesn’t need a lot of micronutrients. It only needs tiny, tiny amounts. for that’s why it’s micro. Yeah, it’s micronutrients for a reason. And, and, uh, you know, to, to, make sure that you

your body has all the bits that you need on a database. You don’t need more than a gram or two grams in a normal healthy person, a normal person who’s eating well and has got a very, fairly varied diet. But then we say, well, you know, what effects would this have if we began to put, you know, maybe five, maybe 10, maybe 15 or 20 grams into the body? What would we achieve? Some of the first

research we did was on getting rid of salt in manufactured foods, replacing salt in manufactured foods where, you know, up to five grams a day being used. And so we first of all did about three years study and we were able to show that the seaweed is an excellent replacement for salt. And at the same time, you could be getting up to five grams of

salt, five grams of seaweed into the body instead of salt. So we better do some research and find out what’s what’s the purpose of that? What what could be done with that? What difference could that make? So the first area we began study was obesity. One of the things was top of our list. And we found that using up to 15 grams a day and we were using this in

Ahmad (16:46.456)
We’re using this in a breakfast. This was done at Sheffield Hanlem University and the Center for Food Innovation. And we were using it in a group of obese people, overweight people. And they were taking this stuff every morning. And during the day, they were reducing the amount of carbohydrate that they were taking in, the amount of food they were taking in.

and they actually were showing a gradual loss of weight, gradual losing weight. So and there were there were there were reasons for that, that they they were getting much better nutrition. So they were less hungry. We’re having, you know, the feeling of sudden hunger. And the there were in the we found in the seaweed, there were certain

certain inhibitors of digestive enzymes, which didn’t stop the digestion, but prolonged the digestion. So there was a much better digestion of the food and more complete release of nutrients over time. So these are the sort of things that we started to look at. And we went on to look at the antioxidant profile and what that could do as a…

what do you call it, a cleanser of the gut, you like, against free radicals, against oxygenation. So there were many other things that followed on from that. And there are a number of key areas where to use the seaweed at those higher levels of 10 or 15 even grams per day.

you then then it’s different because then you’re using that seaweed for short periods. You’re not it’s not a daily thing and it’s not going on for very long, maybe going on for a month or two months. So even though you’ve got certain certain groups of nutrients and nutrients that you wouldn’t want to take at higher levels for long periods because micronutrients can become toxic at high levels. Well, like iodine, if you take too much, suppress your thyroid function. Absolutely. So

Ahmad (19:11.438)
So you would have a high intake of C-groups of iodine for some time, for short period, maybe months, and then you go back to your normal one or two grams a day. those kind of short periods don’t have any bad effect at all.

So, yeah, so that’s so. So one of the things I like about the micronutrients in seaweed is it’s natural. So I’ve read a lot of stuff about vitamins, for example, and they’re all synthetic. They’re all made based on petrochemicals and God knows what else. They’re not biocompatible. It’s not the same as having vitamin C from an orange or getting vitamin D naturally from the sun. And iodine, you know,

If it’s from a plant and from seaweed, I think it’s much better than getting it from drops. I used to take the drops until Zach Cox told me to take it, it’s sea green. But it’s got iron in it, it’s got magnesium, so it’s a good way of getting magnesium in your body. Calcium, potassium, zinc, which we know supports the immune system. Selenium, powerful antioxidant, very important for your thyroid and immune system.

Copper and manganese, copper we know about, it’s very, important. So many different metabolic pathways, including iron. It’s got your B vitamins in it, particularly B1, B2, B3, B9. Some even have B12 in it. It’s got vitamin K, which is again, very important for blood clotting and bone health. And it’s got some unique compounds, polysaccharides and alginates and other stuff. I mean, it’s pretty amazing stuff, isn’t it?

It all it even has all the amino acids, which you don’t find in any other food. Really? All the amino acids. You’ve got all the precursors of protein. So it’s very good protein food. I don’t know that. Yeah. And the other thing you didn’t mention there, pretty good summary is all the essential fatty acids and they are in an amazing proportion. They are almost ideal. I mean, they’re they’re really, you know, it’s if you want to give if you wanted to formulate.

Ahmad (21:26.994)
a group of essential fatty acids. That’s pretty much what you would get, what you get in the seaweed. And these things do vary. mean, I’m not saying that all the seaweeds are the same. So by the way, you’re right. I’m questioning you, but it’s got nine essential amino acids, glutamic acid, which is important for supporting neurotransmitters function, arginine.

supports blood flow and immune modulation. Taurine, that’s very important for our bio acid metabolism and antioxidant. Glycine, which supports collagen synthesis and gut lining integrity. Proline, also collagen supportive. And while the total protein content varies, norian spirulina have up to 30 to 50 % protein by dry weight. Fatty acids contains both omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids.

has EPA, ALA. It’s got quite a lot going for it. Yeah. This is insane. Now let me tell you a little story that I tell you because I know you’ll appreciate it. There’s one seaweed. There is a group of seaweeds that are prolific around the coasts of the British Isles, Norway, the whole North Atlantic. These are all North Atlantic native seaweeds. And the

predominantly interesting ones for us for human nutrition are the ones that grow between high tide and low tide. They’re not the ones that grow out in deep waters. No, those are not suitable really for human nutrition. They tend to have extremely high iodine sum up to 5000 micrograms per gram. They tend to have more heavy metals because because the water is deep because they’re growing deep water. Same reason for the iodine.

But the best ones for human nutrition are these intertidal seaweeds. And the most prolific of those are what we call the rack species. are WRACK. They’re ones that you kind of, when you walk on the beach, you see as the tide goes out, it gradually reveals four or five or half a dozen species, most of which are the rack species. And they’re all brown seaweeds. These are the most

Ahmad (23:50.392)
balanced and most complete nutrition. I can just picture it now down at rock down at Damer Bay. Yeah. And you’ve got the brown ribbony type of seaweed. You’ve got other series with little round bubbles of air pocket bubbles in them. I don’t know what they are. But yeah, and you carry on. So the reason for this story is that we started with one of the sort of most abundant, which is called Aska film, which is it’s a sort of

the lowest point of the intertidal species and it’s the one that grows most. And this is an extremely good seaweed. has a wonderful balance of everything that’s there. And then you come up the shore a little bit and you’ve got Fuchus or bladderwrack, which most people know about. And that’s very similar and it’s a very close relationship. And then you’ve got

another species that really sort of ends pretty much after you get into the water. It grows half out and half in the water. And its name is called channel rack because it has a little channel inside, which when the water goes out, it holds the water. Yeah. So this channel right is one of these three species that really constituted the major part of our early research. And this this

particular species called Pelvetia. Pelvetia canilliculata. It’s a channel rack. And this is a very tiny seaweed. It’s like grows no more than that. It’s, you know, four or five inches. And it’s very delicate. It’s tiny. It grows so close to the shore that even a baby wandering down to the sea, down to the seashore would pick that one first.

Well, it’s interesting because it turns out that that one has three times the essential fatty acids of these other two species in the same family, these rack species. So it’s absolutely ideal for children. Not only that, but it has the least quantity of iodine, which is also good for kids. You don’t want to give them huge amounts of iodine. You give them a half or a quarter of the amount that you would give to an adult. here you have…

Ahmad (26:15.662)
growing right next to the land where a child could reach it. And in fact, the pigs used to eat it, in Norway they call it pig’s seaweed. But the child could eat this, and this would be the most ideal thing for a child to eat, the best seaweed in the world, really, absolutely ideal. It’s got all of the other nutrition, but it’s got these certain changes in its balance, which make it absolutely ideal for kids. So tell me.

And yeah, Karen, no, the sort of clench in the story is that when we started this, it was 1997 when I first started this business. And just that year, they introduced a thing called the novel, the novel food regulations, which was a European Union and EU regulation, which started telling us that

We should only eat apples of a certain size and, you know, certain breeds and bananas have to have, you know, a special curve in them. And otherwise, you know, there was all this sort of stuff going on. If you remember that. Yeah, I remember. Okay. Madness. And, know, and somehow or other they got the seaweeds into there. You know, it wasn’t just, it wasn’t just the stuff that we normally eat. was the stuff that we might eat if we’re really lucky. And

Seaweed sort of got into these novel food regulations and they only approved, you know, less than half a dozen seaweed species and Pelvisia was not one of them. So for the last seven, for the last, you know, literally the last 27 years, we’ve had this little battle going on with the regulations. Pelvisia should be one of the most.

abundant species in the world. mean, it’s just one the something that everybody should eat, especially kids. But we’re still legally not allowed to sell it. And we’ve come up against this. We came up against this throughout the EU states. We had lots of discussions and individually, we’ve managed to get the countries to approve it. And, you know, even in the UK, we’ve we’ve had, you know, trading standards and we’ve had the the government of Italy has approved it. And, you know, all these things.

Ahmad (28:35.128)
But nevertheless, it’s given us enormous obstacles to getting these wonderful seaweeds into the daily diet. Just as an example, it’s not all, it’s not been roses. It’s not all been easy. And there are still massive battles to fight, battles against stupidity. In that sense of, you know, government regulation and so on and so forth. We’re still carrying on. We’ve also got battles to fight against the

in my opinion, rather myopic and sort of reductionist kind of science, the approach to science. When we did those first studies in obesity, we had a team of researchers who had previously studied extracts from seaweed. That’s all they ever studied. So they’d taken all the polysaccharides out of seaweed and…

these polysaccharides used have been used traditionally in many weight loss products. Yeah, over the years, but they, they cause all sorts of bad side effects. They have a metallic taste, they upset people’s guts. They are basically bulking agents, they fill up the gut. So you, you think you don’t want to eat anything. And of course, they reduce nutrition. They actually, you know, if you did it for long enough to kill people. So

We were the first people to do research on whole seaweed, not only whole seaweed as a whole food, and we were doing the same studies that had been done previously or replicating those studies, but using the whole seaweed. But we were the first company to do research on seaweed that people could actually then go out and buy in any health food store or by mail or whatever. So these were also two…

very, very groundbreaking things to do at the time. one of the, you know, every time we so wanted to do a new study in a certain area, the natural inclination of the academic was to look at, okay, well, what’s the thing that’s really causing that in the seaweed? What’s the active ingredient? What’s the most important nutrient? What’s the group of nutrients? What can they pay to? Well,

Ahmad (30:57.55)
many times commercially certainly so that people can patent them. Yeah, that’s what I mean, patent own them and then yes, and then make more money out of it. But even without that, the natural inclination was to search for little bits of the thing. And we’re going, well, that’s not what people are going to eat. That’s not what people want people to go and buy. We want…

people to eat the whole thing because it’s the relationship between those nutrients. And we don’t even know, we don’t even understand, we can never, at the moment at least, we can never understand the precise relationship between those nutrients. I mean, it is so subtle and so esoteric, if you like, that the…

the relationships themselves are hidden from us. mean, we cannot possibly study that level. You could never formulate a supplement that would replace seaweed. could never formulate that strata, that ratio of all of those nutrients. You couldn’t put that together in any kind of artificial form. So.

to take things out of the seaweed, then we’re not studying seaweed at all. We’re studying merely a group of nutrients or a substance. And of course, a lot of that is still being done. we had this constant battle all the way through. And I mean, we’ve done 15 years of research and a dozen studies. And every time, we’re always facing that. And the other thing that

think you would appreciate too is that it’s not just that the natural inclination is to do that. But then when they write it up, when they write up that study, when they talk about it, they then talk about, you know, they talk about seaweed generically, they say, well, see, we can do this, like, we can, can, you know, help people to lose weight, or, or see, we can help to, you know, can help diabetics.

Ahmad (33:18.094)
or it can improve dementia. can help us against the degenerative diseases. When they say that, they’re denying their own science because if you’ve done research on a particular species or a number of particular species that have their own profile, they have their own distinct relationship between all the nutrients in that seaweed.

then you cannot say that you just can’t buy any old seaweed, however it’s produced, whatever is in it. The compositional studies we have done on the seaweed, the first studies we did in 2008 were pretty comprehensive. I mean, because even the universities didn’t want to do research on it until we knew exactly what was in it. So we did these early studies relating to the…

replacement of salts in manufactured foods because we didn’t know what was going in there. But then we did and those studies were pretty comprehensive. But then four years later in 2011, we were able to through government grants and through using government laboratories and we did a comparative study of seaweeds produced in four different countries.

all the same species that we were using, but produced in different places by different methods. And we studied the entire composition, not just nutrients, but also all the contaminants or possible contaminants. And this study was, you know, this was 60 to 100,000 pounds worth of study. So huge study, the first ever study on the total composition of these seaweeds. And…

the sort of scientific, the scientific inaccuracy, the sort of non-science of then taking pieces out of that and the non-science of saying that we’ve studied these seaweeds where we know the composition, we know exactly what’s in there and we know what that can do and then going out and saying in a paper, in a scientific paper, well,

Ahmad (35:44.396)
You know, any seaweed seaweed does this sort of generically? Yeah, you just it’s it’s that’s not science. It’s not scientific. There’s a lot of things that are not scientific. These are the kind of yes, there’s a lot of things that aren’t scientific science. Science is just I’ve lost faith in science. I’ve talked about in the podcast quite a lot. The corruption, the conflicts of interest, the biases. Yes. And there’s a lot wrong with science. A ton.

But listen, I want to ask you a few more questions. So I struggle. You should see my little kids, they’re tiny. They won’t swallow the capsule.

And I’ve got some of the flaky stuff that you put on your food, your salads. They don’t like green stuff. How do you get into kids? How do you get into kids? Yeah. Well, can you not make a gummy type thing? The trouble with the gummy thing is that in order to make a gummy thing, you can only get a very, very limited amount of nutrition in there. Right. It has to be an enormous amount of gummy. they’d be happy with that. They would. They would. But much more clever.

and much more devious is is to use tiny we have very fine granular form. Never buy a seaweed powder because powdering a CV destroys the nutrients. Okay, but these very, very small granular form, you can mix into anything you put in a soup, you can mix it into you can even mix it in a glass of water, but it’s great in apple juice, for example, something with you know, flavor that is compatible with it.

So you can you can put these things into anything they’re eating basically and particularly the things they like even if it’s popcorn. So what when is that called? Because you’ve got so many different things in your shop. Well, for example, there’s a culinary ingredient. We call it a culinary ingredient. It’s actually the least expensive form as well. And that’s a sort of fine granule that you can put into almost anything. We got it. We have something even finer called called

Ahmad (37:50.104)
food granules and the food granules are the same as the capsules, but without the capsule basically. And those are fine things. Also, they’re a little interesting. You say this because I remember when I first started in in the sort of early 2000s, I was in all the food stores in London and know, Planet Organic has started and I was going around all the stores talking with the customers. And I remember distinctly having these tiny children coming out.

and the mother would push the pram up and she’d start asking about the seaweed. And I would say, try this in your tiny child in the pram. Then I would give them little pieces of the pelvisha, the very small seaweed I talked about right up on the high on the beach. And these little kids would take this stuff and they would put it in their mouths and they’d chew it around and da da. And I remember this one little kid.

He was putting out his hand. I mean, he was too young to speak and he put out his hand and he wanted more of this stuff. And his mother was just completely, she was, should he have all that? Should he eat that stuff? This was a normal experience. So kids actually love that. It’s like dogs that get down to the beach and they’ll eat the seaweed because it’s just wonderful, wonderful minerals that they need. Okay, I’m gonna try again. I’m gonna renew that, visit that.

So listen, another thing you said, you were measuring the composition for 17 years. Yeah. Has it changed in the 17 years or is the composition state pretty static? That’s a really good question. So glad you asked it. OK. I would never have thought to answer that. yeah, this is the astounding thing. First of all, if you eat vegetables, land vegetables, it depends entirely where they’re grown.

They even grow the vegetables that you eat, buy in the supermarkets in the salad packets and so on. They’re growing it in water. I know. Where’s the nutrition? Sorry. I know. So the soil is completely raped of all its nutrients. I know that. know that. So I’m also worried about the fact that a lot of the, the sea water around the UK, it’s pumped to sewage and garbage, especially down in Cornwall. Okay. So we get down there and we’re always being told, the

Ahmad (40:06.818)
The water’s not great. let’s address the nutrition. I mean, let’s address the contamination issue. Yeah. Over the last 17 years, what’s happening? But the point is that with your average daily diet, you may be buying all sorts of wonderful things, but there is no such thing as a standard which says that these have a minimum nutritional profile. And we’ve developed a thing called the seaweed, the nutrition’s nutritious seaweed food standard.

with the Biodynamic Association, which is all about a minimum nutritional profile. So that’s one thing. But you asked about the level of nutrition over many years. Now with your land foods, it’s going to vary hugely. And the consumer has a real job to know what exactly they’re eating. And the one thing, and the reason that we’ve done this, the reason we’ve been so…

religiously disciplined about this, you know, about this monitoring our profiles is because I feel that if you’re going to, especially in therapy, especially if you’re going to use these things for therapeutic purpose, and if you’re going to give them to the population on a very big scale, you really have to know what’s in there, and it’s got to be consistent. And so the astounding thing is that over those years,

the, as I think you’re asking, the levels of the nutrition have changed very, very little indeed. And it changes even, I mean, we now harvest in four different places. We started in Norway, then we moved to Scotland and we started the first harvesting specifically for human nutrition in Scotland in the outer Hebrides. We then moved to the west coast of Ireland and now we’re up in Iceland as well. So.

Interestingly, we can now look at the profiles of these nutritional profiles in these different places. And we do see some slight changes. For example, we have much higher iodine in Iceland than we do in Scotland, for example. But overall, these are minor differences. They’re not really important, not significant in terms of using the stuff.

Ahmad (42:29.454)
What it does say is that between different parts of the world, there are going to be some differences. Certainly there are differences between the species. But over all these years, I mean, the changes are within 10, 15%. I mean, it’s nothing. It’s not significant. So you have a very consistent, because the ocean is very consistent, and it really doesn’t change. I mean, there are places in the ocean which will change.

Some are more nutritious than others, depending on the waters. But overall, no, I mean nothing like the land. The land is entirely inconsistent. And don’t forget that species as vegetation and as animal life evolved on the planet, the more it evolved and the longer it went on, the more individual species had to find places where they could survive. So they limited their.

you know, either their soils, they would only grow in certain places, or they grow in certain climates. Whereas the sea weed is the same, it’s the same all over the world. So it doesn’t have that degree of refinement. So that’s why it has all the nutrients in it. Whereas land foods have very, very narrow spectrums of nutrients. I get that.

And the thing is, you don’t even know whether nowadays organic is even organic. You just don’t know what they’re pouring over the food. No. And frankly, mean, the organic from the seaweed point of view, that’s one of the reasons why we started the Nutritious Food Seaweed Standard Quality Assurance Programme, because from the organic point of view, it’s more about what doesn’t go into it. So, OK, you as long as you haven’t spread chemicals all over the beach.

It’s organic seaweed, but it could be completely dead. could be, know, just windblown seaweed could be taken off the beach. And it’s and it’s called organic as long as clean. But that’s that’s not what we’re about. It’s about what’s actually in it. And I think that’s going to have. So your comment about the contamination to really important two aspects of that one. One is the sort of natural contamination. And you get heavy metals, for example.

Ahmad (44:52.846)
ranging from, know, cadmium, lead, all these things, along with the minerals, they will be there everywhere. I mean, they’re in all our foods and to some extent. So in seaweeds, as I say, you know, the further out you go in the deeper water, you will have heavier heavy metals. But in these in the intertidal seaweeds that we’ve studied, again, it’s extremely consistent. I mean, we’ve we’ve been well under the European, you know, safety

safety levels for all these years. We don’t have a problem with that. Interesting case, we had a lot of problems originally with the regulations on arsenic because arsenic is something that there are different forms of arsenic and you’ve got organic and inorganic arsenic and the…

the arsenic that’s a problem for people that can be toxic is literally, it’s a fraction of the total arsenic. But when we first were harvesting our seaweeds, we were being pulled up left, right and center because we had these high readings for arsenic. But within that arsenic, mean, most of the arsenic just goes straight through the body and out. It’s not a problem.

but you’ve got this tiny proportion of inorganic arsenic, which is a problem. But the regulations didn’t specify that. They just said it’s how much arsenic. So we had to go through, we had to produce white papers and all kinds of stuff in America and here to prove that actually the arsenic should be regulated according to the inorganic content, not the total arsenic. So there’s all these kind of issues about the contaminants.

But the other form of contamination which is important is the allergens. We wanted to go for kosher certification quite early on. had a lot of Jewish customers in London and particularly in the therapeutic side, we were using high levels. So we wanted to make sure, and for kids especially, there were no allergens and you can get cross contamination with crustacean and fish and so on.

Ahmad (47:20.974)
So again, we did massive analytical studies for, I mean, you know, four or five years before we were able to, we went to the Bethden in London, we said, you know, here you are, there’s proof, you know, there is no crustacean, so we got the Kosher certification. But again, I’m not aware of any seaweed producers in the world who have bothered to do that, because they’re not generally producing seaweed for nutrition.

in the sense of a child taking it every day for life. It’s okay if you have little bit of crustacean, a piece of seaweed that you’re going to eat once a month in a nice meal, that’s fine. But the way that we’re using our seaweed, and to me this is the true meaning of seaweed, it’s for our daily use. It’s for the completion of our food.

If I know this a bit disjointed, but if I could go back to what we talking about earlier, the land vegetation and its evolution has become more and more specific as we as we as species have become more and more specific, more and more refined, if you like. And and but but our bodies, our bodies are still what they were, you know.

millennia ago, mean, eons ago, even if our minds are different and we’ve got new technologies and everything else, we’re still the chemistry in our bodies is such that we are still dependent on something. You’re talking about that is is primordial. You’re talking about evolutionary biology. haven’t changed. Yes. Our biology has stayed the same 100 percent. And it’s sad we’re on an island and we’re so disconnected from the sea.

You you go to the Mediterranean, you go to Portugal, you go to Sardinia, you go wherever, one of these coastal places. You go to the local supermarket and the fish aisle is just incredible. They’ve got all this produce. They’ve got eels and sharks and big fish and small fish and a million different types of prawns. And you’re just like, your eyes are like, wow, wow. And you take it home and you cook it and it just tastes incredible.

Ahmad (49:41.996)
And you know, when they did the excavations in London, I mean, back in the 70s, they reported these huge numbers of of of shellfish that were pulled up from the foundations of the ground, because that’s what people were eating in all the pubs. You know, beer and all big plate full of scallops. This is what I say. And like now, now we’re on this island and our supermarkets have got this pathetic option of

fish. Most of it is from halfway around the world, Madagascan prawns or God knows what Sri Lankan prawns. And you know what I’m saying? It’s just like the food is either farmed, farmed, farmed, farmed, farmed, farmed salmon. And that’s it. Like it’s just really pathetic options here on an island. Yeah. What we have. And like you said, like we’re also then disconnected from everything, including the seaweed. It’s just quite sad. But, you know, I wanted to say that’s

What you were saying earlier, you mentioned this evolutionary biology. And to me, that’s what ties us with the seaweed. That’s our connection with the seaweed. Because then there’s no other place we can get that connection with our own, the primordial past of our own chemistry. And that chemistry is replicated almost exactly in the seaweed. It’s so much where we came from. if we don’t have that, that’s what we’re missing.

Mm. It’s wow. It’s you can tell like therapeutic benefits of seaweed. I mean, it supports the thyroid, right? Especially kelp and kombu and hormone thyroid hormone production. And if you’re low in thyroid, hypothyroidism, you get sluggish metabolism. You’ve got low energy. You get detoxification and heavy metal binding. So alginase, fusadine, laminarine help bind the heavy metals, radioactive elements and toxins in the gut.

They promote elimination through the bowel and reduce reabsorption. It’s good for blood sugar and metabolic regulation. The polysaccharides like flu coxanthin improves insulin sensitivity and may help reduce fat accumulation. Seaweed fiber slows glucose absorption and improves glycemic control. It’s great for your cardiovascular support. It’s rich in potassium, magnesium, omega-3s, EPAs, reduce

Ahmad (52:06.666)
LDL cholesterol, inflammation, clotting risk. It’s anti-inflammatory and has antioxidant effects. It’s good for immune modulation. It’s good for gut health and microbiome nourishment. It’s good for your skin and joint health. It’s got minerals like silicon, sulfur, zinc, magnesium. Topical seaweed extracts can be used for treatment of psoriasis and eczema and wound healing. It’s good for your cognitive and nervous system support.

And it’s also got antiviral, antitumor and anti-obesogenic potential. So I got a lot of good things going for it. Can I just pick up on one of the things you said that was just interesting. And that’s what a lot of people, when they hear about seaweed, they hear about kelp. And it’s another sort of myth that it’s worth busting. If we could have another explosion, explode the myth. Kelp is

Kelp is called kelp because the Americans call all seaweeds kelp because their seaweeds are big, long, specific, very deep water forests of seaweed. so they think, you know, they call it kelp and it is like, it’s like the wild racks. There are the rack species and there are the kelp species. The kelp species are the deep water seaweeds, laminaria and so you say deep, how deep are they?

50 meters? Yeah, from sort of four meters down to 100 meters. Yeah. 100 meters? Enormous, enormous forests of Wow. These are very big seaweeds. they’re the actually kelps are not the family of seaweeds that I would put into human nutrition. We don’t need that. got plenty of the other stuff.

And maybe it’s worth addressing another issue that has many, many times come up, especially when we first started about the amount of seaweed that there is, you know, is there enough? we, we going to denude the planet of seaweed if we all start eating it? And the answer is this. By the way, it’s, it’s some say they go down to 200 feet, which is about 61 meters. 200 feet. Yes. Yeah. So normally it’s about 30 meters, a hundred feet.

Ahmad (54:27.512)
but it can go down further, down to 53 meters. I mean, that’s still bloody tall. It is, yeah. This is a real forest. Beautiful. Absolutely wonderful. Right. Would love to go diving in this forest. I’ve never done that yet. But where are we? You’re talking about the difference between kelp and seaweed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And sorry, completely lost. So kelp, kelp is not.

Kelp is not part of like nutritional bioavailable. It’s not what we use for human nutrition because we, well, that’s the point is do we need to go to the kelps to find enough seaweed for human nutrition? No, we don’t. It’s very good for agriculture. It’s great for animal feed. It’s great for, you know, plant nutrition and horticulture and all the other uses for seaweeds. And there are many, many, But for the human nutrition,

the most important bit is the intertidal species. And I was going to give you an example of how much of that there is. I mean, in one, you will know the Outer Hebrides on the Isle of Lewis in one particular lock that I’m remembering from, I think it was like 2013. We’re in this lock, we’re going down the lock. is when we just, loch, we just loch. When we just started with a,

what we call a motorized mower and it cuts the seaweed. That’s how we’re doing it. And so it’s cutting the seaweed as we go. And we’re in the middle of this loch. And the loch is seven miles long. And in the morning, only in the morning, we’ve gone about probably no more than 200 to 300 meters. And we’ve harvested about 35,000 kilos, right? So.

huge amounts of seaweed and that’s going to be around 5,000 dried, 5,000 dried kilos, 5,000 kilos. Five tons of seaweed. I just want to ask, that’s answering one of my questions. was going to ask you like for one of those capsules, how much seaweed do you need? About five times to get it dry. Five to seven times, okay. Yes, so by that time we’ve harvested it’s…

Ahmad (56:50.254)
5,000 kilos of seaweed for human nutrition. And then by the evening, we’ve almost doubled that. that’s, and you know, we’ve gone meters. I mean, and there’s seven miles of that loch and it’s full of that seaweed. So this is just one loch. And there are thousands of lochs, not just in Scotland, but in Norway, in the British Isles, you’ve got all sorts of islands and bays and you know.

It’s it’s enormous. And this is one part of the planet. America has the same north, the northern part of Canada and and and the basically all this resource literally at our feet around the world. We haven’t even talked about Russia yet. But, you know, I mean, the just huge amounts of seaweed and all wonderful to eat. And you only need tiny, tiny amounts. So, you know, there’s plenty of seaweed and then it

It gets me onto one of my favorite hobby horses of cultivation. There’s huge amounts of public money, government grants, funding, all this sort of big industry that we’ve created of people putting money into crazy schemes. But a lot of it is going into cultivation. even around the British Isles, we’re seeing, I mean, I know of half a dozen new seaweed farms that are being started.

If you remember what they did with fish, with fish farms, we created these new species called salmon. You know, it’s fine. I love salmon, but it’s not a salmon. You know, it’s something else. You know, it’s skin, it’s flesh isn’t even pink. They have to dye it. It’s gray. It’s horrible. It’s disgusting. Some of it’s better than others. You know, it’s very, very anyway. The point is that with seaweed, when you cultivate, look,

natural seaweed, the seaweed we harvest is wild seaweed and we will never cultivate that seaweed unless we find a very clever way. But that seaweed has been there for what, 350 million years, you know, it’s survived. It is strong. has antioxidants are way over, you know, even green tea comes nowhere near seaweed for antioxidants, fruits.

Ahmad (59:13.646)
fruits, nuts, seeds, whatever, come nowhere near seaweed for antioxidants. This is their protection. This is what they’ve developed over these eons of time. An amazing being, an amazing life form that is just all over and it’s survived and it’s and it’s survived. And that’s what we’re eating. That’s what we’re putting into our bodies with this perfect ratio and relationship.

When you cultivate seaweed, what do you do? You cultivate some spores in the lab, you transfer those spores to a rope or to some often plastic now substrate and you put that in the ocean and after three or four months, it’s very quick growing, you harvest that, you cut it off. Now, what happens when you’ve done that for 100 years or 50 years? You’re creating a different species. It’s not what, it’s not.

They will never face the conditions that seaweed is faced. These are the generations of a seaweed that will completely change over time. So again, we’re interfering with nature. We’re not going back to the realm of what I call the realm of cause, which is dealing with the things that we have and then going back to the causes.

is to be found in the chemistry of the human body and is to be found in the chemistry of the natural wild seaweeds. You’re dealing with, know, again, the problem is that we need lots of seaweed. So the easiest way is to create a machine, basically, an infrastructure to harvest it, which suits us. It’s, you know, we’re going to grow loads of stuff. We’re going to make lots of money. It’s going to be very easy for us to harvest.

not it’s not easy harvesting in the wild. Very difficult and very time consuming and dangerous. And I’m going to ask about that in a second. Yeah. But but you know, but again, we’re we’re we’re going in the the realm of pharmaceuticals really, where we’re looking at a problem that we’re dreaming up a completely artificial solution for to solve that. And we’re we’re merely we’re merely dealing with the symptom of our own problem.

Ahmad (01:01:35.15)
Yeah. And, and let’s, let’s, be honest. You’re just thinking how you can make a bigger buck and increase your profit margin. Yes. What’s easier and the most convenient way and the most convenient way. How can you just make the biggest bang for your buck? That’s it. That’s what it all comes down to, but you’re refusing to go to, I didn’t even know that you could cultivate, um, seaweed, but anyway, forget all that. Very good that you’re not doing that. Well done. Okay. No, cause I’m a, no, but what I want to ask you is

How do you harvest seaweed and where do you harvest it from? Like so much of the British Isles that are pumping garbage into the seas, you don’t want anywhere near Sellafield where it’s like nuclear reactors. How do you find where you’re gonna harvest it and what is it like? What’s the logistics like? What machinery do you need? And well, containments and all this 35,000 tons, 35 tons of stuff. Where do you put it? And how quickly does it decompose? How do you process it? And how do you…

put it into that capsule form or dry powder. And like you said, you’re not crushing it. So it’s granules. Like, can you just talk me through the whole production process? Sorry, it’s a big question. No, it’s a wonderful question. And thank you. And I mean, often, you know, why did we spend 10 years messing around with our seaweed before we even started to do research? The reason for that is because I started with seaweed that we were producing for horticulture.

Yes, it was very good. Yes, it was analyzed. We knew that it was safe for human use as well. We had very high standards in Norway, but we didn’t know enough about it. And what I immediately realized was that A, we have problems with the allergens. We have issues with contamination because of where we’re harvesting it. For example,

We’re harvesting, we were harvesting it very close to the shore and we needed to stop doing that because close to the shore, the closer you are to the shore, the more you get these crustacean appearing on the fronds because they climb up the seaweed. So in order to deal with those sort of issues, we had to change the way that we harvest the seaweed. And in Norway, I was very fortunate. I got, after we started, I found a

Ahmad (01:03:54.382)
partner factory in the far north of Norway up in the Lofoten Islands, which is up in the Lapland that’s way in the Arctic Circle. But the guy there was a wonderful man who I worked with seven years on this very project of how do we change our method of production so that it is specifically for human nutrition, so that I can give this to an infant.

of three months old. That was my sort of criteria. And we developed a wonderful little, was a little aluminium machine. was the size of this room, slightly smaller, and it had a little cockpit. And underneath we developed this cutting device, eventually a rotary arm. And we kind of, it’s like a fly motor. What do call those things?

They cut the grass with nowadays. Yeah, lawnmowers. Not even lawnmowers. These little things that go round and round and snip the grass, that sort of thing. and then we would collect that seaweed that’s being cut. This meant that we could go out a bit deeper away from the shore. So you custom made a device? Yeah, because it was originally was hand harvesting. I mean, these people were cutting the seaweed from a boat and then collecting it in a big rope and taking it to the shore.

You know, so now you’ve got a submersible machine that goes on not submersible, but on the surface, but it has a cutter underneath and you can see that and we’re cutting. we’re we’re like we’re like cutting lanes of seaweed. We literally we’re going through a bed of seaweed and we’re cutting. They were only taking about 300 right. 30 centimeters from the top. Yeah. Originally we’re taking 600 and we found that that was too much. We’re still getting crustacean. So we so we minimize that.

And I’m only dealing with one aspect, just just. what it gets sucked into what in the back? Then we bring it up. We had to develop stainless steel, all stainless steel materials for these machines. So we like food quality machines. So we’re collecting the seaweed and then we’re putting it into a sack basically. And then we’re taking it. And the other rule that we had was unlike the horticultural seaweed, which we were quite happy to dump on the on the concrete surface.

Ahmad (01:06:20.59)
leave it for a while. The rule we made, because we had to get it as fresh as possible to keep all these very, particularly the delicate nutrients like the essential fatty acids and so on, and some of the minerals, the vitamins. We had a rule that we must never touch the ground. We must have no contamination with the ground at all. So had to be bagged on the vessel.

and then that bag would be transferred to a little boat and taken to the shore. And then it would go as fast as possible. It would go into the drying at the factory because that’s the way you preserve it, preserve the nutrients. So this was, it took years. mean, it’s like a lot of the things we were sort of learning as we go is all trial and error. Yeah. And, you know, we sort of gradually, then we were doing our analysis and finding that, you know,

there was a definite correspondence between the levels of the nutrients, particularly things like vitamin C and the B vitamins and the essential fatty acids. We were getting much higher levels as we decreased the time before we actually dried it. So the faster we could do this process, the better. And that affected how much we could harvest at one time and how quickly we could get it. So there were all these factors.

And we used our analysis, we used our analysis of the seaweed each time to guide us. So we built up this data and we were able to sort of see where we were going wrong. I mean, another thing, for example, was common sense. But, you know, it took a while to realize it. We were getting quite high levels of silicon. And we didn’t realize that that was a high level. We just thought that was natural. Anyway, we found that in the deeper water where we were taking this 300

millimeters now from the top of the seaweed, we weren’t getting the high levels of silicon. Well, that was because the silicon wasn’t the silicon like mineral in the the seaweed. was it was we were churning up sand from the from the bottom of the sea, you know, and that was the silicon. Right. So we said, OK, so what is a real you know, what is the what is the optimum level of silicon that we should that we should expect to have in the seaweed? So we finally arrived at that with no

Ahmad (01:08:44.728)
what we would call contamination, no, you know, silicon mineral from the sand. And in Scotland, very interesting because out on those islands, we’re in a very, very ancient part of the world where some of those minerals, this thing called gneiss, for example, g-e-s-s, forms of sand, basically, forms of silica.

that come from ancient rock particles and the sea is particularly full of these rock particles. So we were getting some very, very high counts on some of these rock particles. And again, it sort of took us a while to realize what was going on. And so we eventually put in because we were selling, by the way, we don’t just sell our products for consumers and for practitioners, but our main dream has always been, and it’s now the sort of half.

half of our business is getting ingredients into ordinary everyday foods that people eat. That was the principle method by which we thought we could actually get seaweed into everybody’s diets, not through rather expensive, nice consumer products, but getting it as ingredients, and hence the research we did on salt replacement. That was the idea of getting, if we could get it into foods instead of salt, that’s going to almost everything perfect.

Anyway, the reason I mention it is because that explains why it was so important for us to understand everything about our seaweed. mean, our sort of primary goal with the Seagrease project was that we would know more about our seaweed than anybody in the world. And we would then have the confidence to do what we’re now doing and trying to get it everywhere. this sort of, the process by which we,

eventually evolved the production methods was very driven by, you know, looking at our end product and then going back and see what created that and what should we have and so on. And then when we go from basically after we’ve dried the seaweeds, we have our raw ingredient and then we can make that into different forms. We use milling process to make the fine granules.

Ahmad (01:11:09.334)
and we use chopping devices to chop into small pieces. then we, very important, we learn to blend our seaweeds so that we, and I think we’re the only people who actually do this, we use our data, our analytical data to be able to blend our seaweeds so that we can produce, now we can produce a mix as we did with our food capsules with, you know, the sort of optimum

mixture of the different species so that we have those high essential fatty acids and we have our lower iodine or whatever it is that we want to achieve. this is something that we can then mix those ingredients and we can either mix them for customers to put into, let’s say, for particularly allergen free foods or free from foods.

and special diet foods for diabetics, for example. And so for many different reasons, people will want to angle their nutritional profile. And then you ask about encapsulation. mean, again, when we started encapsulating,

we used a company that was able to encapsulate without any additives, without any of the normal flowing agents or binders and stuff. Binders and things like this, yes. And we didn’t tabletize because it’s too many binders and things. So. Because all the other vitamins, they all have binders in them. Yeah, Karen. Yeah, so we created our capsules using vegan vegetable capsules with nothing else in them.

So we’ve always sold and this is a sort of this is more about the policy of the of business of Seagreens that we we only produce seaweed. That’s all we do. We don’t we don’t formulate it for know headaches or we don’t we don’t make formulated products. We leave that to our customers. So you know if a customer is particularly a specialist in digestive issues.

Ahmad (01:13:31.448)
then they will create a formula and they will probably use other ingredients as well to address those digestive issues using our seaweed. But that’s what I like about your products. It’s just natural. It is just what it is. It’s just seaweed. So where do you harvest it again? Like it’s all around the British Isles? Is it anywhere particular? Not all around in Scotland. In Scotland. Just in Scotland? Yeah. But we started in Norway and we ended up in the Slavokan Islands up in the north of

in the north of Norway. We then used that knowledge after it was about 10 years later. It was 2009 we first started in Scotland. So 1997, we were in Norway. 2009 we started in Scotland. In 2014 really we started in the west coast of Ireland, near Galway. Beautiful, beautiful spot again, very remote, very…

you know, full of islands and wonderful, the equivalent of a loch, I’ve forgotten what they call it in Ireland now. And then we went up to Iceland, where we have in the north of Iceland, we have a bay which is called Brydofjorda. It’s about 25 miles across the bay and it’s just full of tiny islands. And all around these islands you have this wonderful seaweeds.

So these are amazing. Yeah, this is this is you got to do some nice traveling. Yeah. I’m so glad I started this business and I was, you know, forty seven when I started. So I have been to places that I would never have otherwise visited. And I’ve had the most wonderful experiences in nature. I’m so glad. How often do you does the harvest have to take place? How often do you have to go and harvest? How often does this take? Or is it just once a year and get this massive?

batch of? It’s once or twice a year and depending on the species it can be more often. Those very small species also that have different times of the year. I mean there are certain species which it’s best to harvest in September, October and the others in spring. So you know our ascofellum we harvest in the early months of the year. And then once you’ve dried them out I mean they must have a shelf life of years and years and years. I it’s not something that goes off.

Ahmad (01:15:54.718)
No, extraordinary, extraordinary experiences with that. It’s very, very resilient stuff. mean, if you wanted a food to take to the moon or whatever, you know, that would be it. done, lasts for years. We’ve done analytical tests five years after our dried seaweed and we found absolutely, we found even less bacteria than there was to start with.

you know, it resists back. mean, it’s antibacterial in a big way. So, you know, you don’t get mold growing on your seaweed, you know, and the nutritional profile, I mean, some of the some of the more delicate nutrients like the vitamin C will go down and fairly rapidly, I mean, over a year or two. But generally speaking, you can go back to you. I mean, I found some old seaweed. Literally, this was I found some that we’d

we’d stacked to the back of a warehouse and we actually sort of forgotten about these bags and they were dated 2015. And I said to the guys, I’m going to try this because I want to see, you know, how it tastes. And it was absolutely beautiful. I mean, absolutely. Yeah. I couldn’t tell the difference between what we have today in 2015. Wow. And you know, the seaweed that we, that we’ve got here in Atlantic, is it the same seaweed in the Pacific, in the South, in the North?

in the Indian Ocean or do the species really change quite a bit? Oh, yes. Is there one common species that you can find around the world or is it definitely? No, it’s more or less, it’s more or less, it’s more or less regional. Right. So that this species that we harvest, for example, when you, as you come down from the, from the far north, you come down to the south and when you get sort of Spain and Portugal and the Iberian peninsula, it’s beginning to, that’s gone really. And then you get new species.

and then you go over to the Far East and these are, but they are similar, they’re obviously related and in fact, I have a Japanese godson and he was so delighted when I found this palvesha and gave it to him and he said, we have something that’s so similar to this, but this is fantastic taste, we don’t have the same taste. So.

Ahmad (01:18:19.182)
There’s a mean it’s a fascinating world and it’s and it’s it’s so full of similarities, but it’s so full of differences, you know, around the world, there are all these different species waiting for us to explore and and so on. And what about any other companies making seaweed capsules like you are not that we want to talk about your competition, but how unique is your company? We are at amazingly.

Amazingly, we’re still unique. There are a couple of companies now, one in Canada, and there are a couple of companies that have tried to do what we’re doing. And they’ve started doing ingredients with their seaweed and so on. But they don’t have the background that we have. They don’t have 25 years of research and analytical data. So we’ve got a lot that’s really special, and we’re really proud of it.

I was saying on the on the international front, you know, with all these different species, I believe that we’ve only just I keep telling everybody and in fact, I’m just writing a book, first book on sea greens. And in the book, I I stress, you know, this last 25 years, we have just been beginning. I mean, we just we’re just beginning to really know what we’re doing. And we know nothing compared to what I can see. We need to learn. We can extend that to.

cover everything. and because honestly, I know nothing. No, no, no. Because as you said, there are all these different species. mean, we started a company two years ago in New Zealand. And in New Zealand, they have the most wonderful seaweeds, and they’re not harvesting them at all for human food. They’re harvesting them in a very small way for agriculture. And agriculture is very big in New Zealand. But

There are wonderful, wonderful seaweeds that are very similar, not in looks or in species, but they will have similar nutritional profiles to the ones that we have here in the North Atlantic. And there are seaweeds in Japan and there are seaweeds in China, bless them. There’s also a lot of contamination out there and there’s a lot of, I mean, most of it is, 99 % of it is farmed. They’ve gone big time into farming for volume and volume and volume.

Ahmad (01:20:41.336)
But for human nutrition, is a tremendous future. really is. I wanted to just, it reminds me, we were talking earlier about, I forgot what it was, some of the things we’ve learned. And I was talking about blending the seaweeds. And the things that I’ve seen that I wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t been doing this business. I remember when I first started in Norway, and don’t forget, I was…

I was 40, 48, 49, 50, you know, I was a bit more active than I am now. I’m 75 now. But I… You look great for 75. Thank you. I went up into the… I used to go up into the hills and I used to film the wild elk that would come down from the mountains during the night. Because you know, it’s light, it’s semi-light all night up there in the…

Lapland and these these these elk these huge beasts would come down from the mountains when you know everything was quiet and they would they would go down to the water and they would start to eat the seaweed and I watched them and they’re really big creatures and they weigh tons I mean they’re huge I know they’re massive yeah big feet and then they were good and among the rocks you know they would they would go out and they would they would

not, no, they never submerged themselves, but they got very long legs and they would go out quite far. And I saw that they were making an effort to go to the different species. They were not just standing at the edge and, you know, hogging a particular species. They would go and select. And I thought there must be an incentive. There must be a reason for them to do that. And it stuck with me.

And when we started to do this analysis and we realized how actually how different these different species are, that was when, in fact, even our one of our earliest products is the food capsules. That wasn’t the first one we did. But after a while, I realized that there was a purpose in mixing these things. And it was because I’d watched those elk, you know, going to such an effort to graze across the species.

Ahmad (01:23:03.37)
Well, that’s what we’re going to do. We’re to replicate that. So that’s where the blending came from. Lovely. Right. He told me before. Yeah. I just remember your nephew, Jeff, has created a code for my listeners. Yes. So if they use the code doc Malik D O C A L I K all capital letters, they will get 10 % off their order. So guys, if you’re listening, go visit Seagreens, the shop. It’s a different website. So it’s a great stock shop.

Yeah, see greens dot shop and and use my code doc Malik and you get 10 % off. You know, I don’t have any sponsors like you’re not sponsoring me to do this episode. I don’t have any sponsors. My sponsors are all my listeners. You know, a few hundred people pay five pounds a month to support the show and pay for everything and two thirds of the episodes are free for everyone to listen to. But I’ve got a few affiliate codes. I have hunter gather, which do great mayonnaise and

collagen and ketchup, but it’s all, you know, there’s no rapeseed oil. There’s no, again, the founder, Jeff Webster is fantastic. Wanted something really healthy. Didn’t want to give people toxic garbage. So he’s wide awake. And then I’ve got a sauna company, Heracles Wellness, and then a distilling company. I get a little kickback, 20 pounds for every distiller sold. And now Sea Greens, welcome on board. Terrific.

I’m really glad that, you know, we’re able to work together and do this. And you’ve got these wonderful people like Zach Cox who come on here as well. Yes. Well, I’ve got a lot of that. Do you know how that came about? I don’t know whether he told you the story. Tell me back in back in the early 2000s, my wife, who’s a psychiatrist, she had a friend in Imperial called Dr. Jack Levinson. Jack was

He was head of environmental medicine at the two big private hospitals in London and various other things. And he is a practising dental surgeon. And he started to use capsules for detoxing mercury in post-operative amalgam extraction. He was very keen on mercury-free dentistry, and he is the guy who started the Society for Mercury-Free Dentistry.

Ahmad (01:25:29.564)
in this was back in the late 90s. And so we came across him in about 2001 2000. Yeah, just we’d only been going for a couple of years. So he started to use because he picked up on the ability of this stuff to extract the heavy metals. So although they’ve got heavy metals in them, again, it’s about the really the ratio of all the nutrients. So they’ve got they’ve got some heavy metals in them, but they’ve also got

much more polysaccharides and iodine and the things that are needed to to take the heavy metals out of the body. So he started to use this and gradually over a couple of years, he was using all kinds of I mean, he was using pharmaceutical drugs, but he was also using things like charcoal and various other things to do this extraction to do this detoxification. And he in the end, he said to us, you know, there is actually nothing out there.

that you don’t have in your seaweed. You know, even in the drugs, they don’t have anything there that your seaweed can’t do. So he got into using this and he used it for around two years and he did a lot of research on the fecal studies of the patients that he was working with. It’s quite clear and now there is a lot of research on the ability of the seaweed to remove heavy metals.

But anyway, what happened was that the fact that autistic kids have lot of problems with the retention of heavy metals, either through dysfunctional gut or because they’re not metabolizing food properly or whatever. This was picked up on by lot of clinicians working with autism. And it was something that led us into the whole field of autism.

It also led us into funny because when I first came and I saw you got a book here by Sally Fallon of the Western Price Foundation, she was on my show. And, you know, she’s talking about nourishing traditions. I mean, she’s talking about traditional foods. And this whole thing came together because a lot of the a lot of the practitioners who working with autistic children are going back to.

Ahmad (01:27:53.44)
basically nutrition, traditional diets, traditional foods, in order to solve these problems, these kind of problems. And one of her, I wouldn’t say disciples, but one of the people that Western Price worked with very closely was Natasha Camel McBride. Also been on my show. Really amazing. Well, she had begun to use, we didn’t know at the time, but she was using our capsules for her son as an autistic child.

And so she has taken on and developed this. the whole evolution of our work today has started because of people like Natasha Kamel-Bride, Salih Khan, people like Zach Cox who picked these things up, find their own uses and learn and read what other people are doing and talk to other people. And it’s that.

It’s that ferment of human relationship and genuine good intention and commitment to doing things that are worthwhile and useful that is that has taken us forward. And, know, by by by doing what we’re doing, I hope that we are creating a kind of a culture around this true meaning of seaweed and true uses for it. Respectful uses.

useful uses. No, listen, just listening to you and talking to you, I sense that you’re not just a capitalist businessman trying to make money. You’ve got a love of this product. You love seaweed and you want to respect it and honor it and share its bounty. Nature’s bounty with humanity. And I can see that I can sense that. But listen, you also brought some gifts.

And while you’re getting those gifts ready and explaining what they are, I want to do a quick shout out to my listeners. So as you folks know, I do a consultation service now. So if you’re contemplating surgery or you it doesn’t even have to be surgical. If it could be it could be medical. If you’re not sure about your medication, you want to review your diagnosis, you want to see, understand what it actually means for you. If you’ve come out of a consultation rushed with more questions and answers.

Ahmad (01:30:19.552)
If you’re just feeling like, what is going on? What are my options? What are my mainstream medical options? What are my alternative options? Book a consultation with me. So here’s a review. This was the one actually, when you came in, Simon, this chap was just on the Zoom consultation with me. And this is a review he’s already left. So this is from Phil. I organized a consult with Doc Malik following a somewhat depressing diagnosis and consultation with an orthopedic surgeon.

here in Australia, Doc Malik walked me through the anatomy of my issues and discussed a number of possible options that I wasn’t aware of. The consult was relaxed, well, I was doing it in my garden as you saw, comprehensive and all of my questions were answered. I came away feeling like I had control over my situation again with a plan that I am able to execute. Well, listen, thanks Phil for the review and everyone listening, if you think you could benefit from my knowledge,

I’m acting as a health advocate. Please book a consultation with me. You can visit my website, docmalloc.com or docmalloc.setmore.com. Both of them will lead you to the consultation pages. All right, back to you, my friend. What have you brought me? Thank you so much, by the way, for all of this. Okay, I brought you, what is it? I love gifts, by the way, so thanks for that. More than six months supply of food capsules. And I hope that, you know.

you’ll let me know how it goes. Amazing. Thank you so much. a day, religiously. you know, I so pleased if you can tell me how you get on with that. I wrote it. I wrote it. Thank you. Two a day is all you need. And if you’re feeling crap, just double the dose at least. Okay. And if you feel a cold coming on, it to six a day. All right. This is the kind of use of it. Go by what you feel. These are two condiments that we make, which all came out of the replacement of salt.

with seaweed. So one of those is 25 % salt instead of 100 % salt, 25 % salt. And the other one is 50 % salt. So the beautiful thing is you can still use your fault. But instead of having too much sodium chloride, particularly sodium, you’re balancing that out with all the other minerals. So it’s completely harmless. There was some research done in Japan. Wow, okay. Where they they gave

Ahmad (01:32:44.608)
They gave rats so much salt that they died from a heart attack basically. Then they gave them 50 % salt and 50 % seaweed, same amounts of salt, but they were fine. Why? Because all the minerals in the seaweed were balancing out. It’s the relationship again between the nutrients. When you have the right sort of relationship between things, they’re fine. When you don’t, it all goes to hell.

Yeah, we could say that we could say a lot about our society in the same way. Absolutely. Anyway, all right, I’m just going to read this out. So the Ruby one, all the minerals quarter the salt. And then you’ve given me the mineral salt, which is twice the flavor, half the salt. Love it. And it’s seaweed dried ground frond of Dulce, Palmeria, Palmata and winged kelp, Alaria, Esculenta. It’s very difficult to pronounce these.

And then the other one is Seaweed Dried Ground Frond Knotted Rack. I love all these names. It’s brilliant. Fantastic. Listen, thank you so much. OK, and you got some books and leaflets. So talk me through this. What is all of this? Into the mic. This is the one on the left. I don’t know if you can see that. The one on the left is the kind of… Hold it up to the camera. Yeah, mean, the one on the left is the kind of consumer side and…

This is what nutritionists work with and consumers can use this stuff direct and so on. And then the other one here, which is this one, is all about our ingredients for mainly the food industry, food and beverages, but also for a lot of companies producing formulated, mainly natural remedies and nutritional.

nutritional supplements around the world. wow. And you got all your you’ve got all your nutrient data and everything. Polyphenols, why polyphenols important? Polyphenols are so important because they’re the antioxidant capacity there. There are the cleanses of our bodies. Exactly. The fighters against free radicals in the gut and in our blood. Yeah, the cleanses really.

Ahmad (01:35:08.166)
And they’ve got a piece about iodine insufficiency. And then there’s something, this is something that everybody should get. It’s called Something for Everyone. And it’s the story of how we developed the nutritious food seaweed standard, which I was talking about. it talks about, it puts it into an international perspective. Many, many people, a lot of small companies working with seaweeds.

And there is a sort of, there is a seaweed community out there and it has a long way to go. It’s just beginning. It’s very exciting. And there’s one about our quality standards. Do you know what? I, there’s a lot of love into this, isn’t there? You put a lot of love into this. Yeah. And I, I hope that in the next 50, a hundred years, many others like my nephew will, you know, gradually, gradually develop the whole thing and we’ll do it slowly step by step.

with people like Zack Cox, with some of your other people like Natasha Campbell-McBride, all these people. Me? Yeah, you, Ahmad Malik. You know, we’re part of the business. Yeah, it’s not my business. It’s our business. I’ve created a trust. We’re not selling the business. We have, you know, we’ve only just started. Why sell it? You know, we will be a global project, hopefully.

And we’re beginning to be, sell in 16 countries. We have. countries do you sell it? So I have a lot of listeners in America, Canada, Australia. in, we’re in America. We’re not in Canada yet. We’re in America. We’re in Australia. Very big time, very successful in Australia. We’re in New Zealand. we’re in most of the European countries, particularly successful in Scandinavia and in Slovenia. Funnily enough, we have a young couple in Slovenia who took this on about 10 years ago.

And they were as passionate about it and still are as I am. And they’ve developed the most fantastic business in Slovenia. They’re in all the all the stores and you know, she’s a nutritionist. So, yeah, we have some wonderful people involved around the world. So one last question, actually, I just suddenly remembered again. So, know, like the soil is. Deficient and, you know, all him, all life, all life, biological life, plant, animal, birds, everything.

Ahmad (01:37:35.104)
relies on like one feet of topsoil. Yes. And we’ve raped it. Absolutely. And then we dump phosphates and fertilizers on top of it. Yes. And imbalance it the same way we do our diets. Exactly. it is lacking organic matter. The organic matter has gone from 75%, 80 % to like 5%. And we just dump all this chemical garbage on top. Instead of using phosphates and

you fertilizer, can they just use this? Yeah, and I, how much does this help in terms of what you see, what you seem to be touching on is the whole need to rebalance rebalance our bodies in terms of our nutritional profile, but rebalance our bodies in terms of our energy and the relationship of our chemistry really inside. That’s very, very important.

And that will have an effect on our behavior and our thoughts and our inspiration and our openness to one another and to God and to the same with the soil. Soil is terribly imbalanced and the soil needs that same conditioning and the restoration of relationship and balance in the soil. And all of it comes out of what you mentioned earlier, which is about respect. You know, if you respect something,

If you honor something, it’s temporal as well as it’s sort of spatial context. You will do for that thing what’s best for it. Just the same way as you would do it for your friends, your own community. So it’s that to me is the heart of it because if you’ve got the intention right there, then your action comes from that. Whatever you do, whether it’s to do with the soil or to do with your health, your body, your balance, you’ll do it because it’s

It’s coming from you. It’s not something imposed from outside. It’s welling up, just like the seaweed’s welling up, I think. And it’s coming back to us from our own past. It’s part of what we are. But how much could this help the soil today? We talk about regenerative farming. Could…

Ahmad (01:39:59.306)
this huge seaweed help if this was sprayed on top of all the soil, how much could it do in terms of healing the damage? A tremendous I mean, we supply many organic and bio dynamic farmers, particularly at the moment, we’ve sort of gone for that sector, because there people who really care about it and understand it. We, for example, we have a wonderful cattle farmer in West Sussex where we are based, and they put it on

one half of their fields and they put it, they left the other half without the seaweed. And they told me that, and then they opened the whole thing to the cattle and all the cattle were found on the side where the seaweed was grazing, you know, they know, they know, you know, that’s the, that’s the place to go. Got the seaweed. So that’s just something on the soil. But one of the, one of the things that we have done a bit of research on this already, and we are, we are starting an innovation center in Sussex in, in

the Warren Estate where I live and where we have the base. We’re starting an innovation center. One of the projects is on composting, because I think that, you know, it’s not just putting seaweed back into the soil, but it’s putting soil back into the soil. We are able to create the soil. And so to actually produce the compost with seaweed in it, which is…

which is what is going to feed the life in that soil is the really important thing. And then you’re putting something back into your soil that has that nutritional balance. And then you can can spray it on crops. It’s very it’s very therapeutic to spray it on crops. One of the big proofs is one of the big proofs that we learned in the in the MaxCrop business is that it it protects that helps protect the crops.

So you get a difference. can tell you, you get a difference of one to 2 % in if you if the temperature drops one or 2%, it can kill the plant. So and it will it will make that difference of one or 2%. So keeps the it keeps the protection up to the effect of one or 2 % temperature just alone. know, these are these are real effects. Real, real protective for the the for the plant.

Ahmad (01:42:19.904)
So that there are many ways that you can get it back into agriculture and into the soil. And there are companies doing this. There are companies, there are lots of companies in the horticultural side with seaweed. But again, most of them are not using the whole plant. They’re extracting, like they’ll extract the minerals and they’ll put it into a mix because it’s cheaper and it’s, you know, and it’s easy to distribute it. It’s a shame. But yeah, it’s what we’re trying to promote and what I

As you can see, I’m really passionate about is is using what nature has given us. Funny, actually, when I first came in here, I looked at Sally Fallon’s book that was on the table and I and I and I thought, well, when we start talking, let’s let’s start from there, actually, because let’s start with what we’ve got. I’m a great believer in starting with what we have. Don’t dream about what you should have or you you have to strive to get before you can actually do what you want to do.

You know, we should take what we’re given. We’re given the seaweed as a whole. Don’t try to break it up and take pieces out of it that you might think are good. It’s the whole seaweed, which is perfect. Have you ever been to a fancy restaurant and been given deconstructed desserts?

No, can tell you. I haven’t. can tell you right now. I believe it. I like my tiramisu like it is. I like my apple pie like it is. Exactly. I don’t want a deconstructed apple pie. What is it? What? Yeah. What the frack is that? Like what do you get? You get nothing. You get art. You get something that looks like art, but tastes like art. Right. Yeah. I don’t want that. I want an apple pie.

Yeah, don’t deconstruct something that works so well. True. I try to avoid Michelin star restaurants, not only because of the price, but because the you know, it’s too pretty. And it doesn’t taste of anything. Yeah. Well, there was a time when when I was earning big bucks as a surgeon, and I loved food and we would we would go to Michelin star restaurants. And when we did, it was the one star that we we realized were the best.

Ahmad (01:44:31.068)
because this chef was striving and it was close to normal food and it was delicious. Two star was hit or miss. Three star was just garbage, expensive pompous and looked like art, tasted like art. Right. Actually just complete waste of time. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. And now it’s very hard for me to find food in a restaurant that I think is better than what I can cook at home or my wife can make at home. You know, you know, we just, we just

I get my meat from a local farmer, regentive farmer, and the meat is just delicious. You know, when put it on a barbecue, it doesn’t need much. And we have, I make lovely, you know, potatoes, roast potatoes and beef fat. I sprinkle your granules already, or the flakes over it already. I’ve got some of your stuff already, my friend. And yeah, it just tastes wonderful. You go to restaurant, you pay for your roof, everything’s cooked in rapeseed oil and

I don’t think they put the same love into it. It’s about the love and honoring. Absolutely. The ingredients and everything. Absolutely. That’s what it’s all about. Like I put a lot of love into my podcast. You do. can see. I think think I think that’s the secret to success actually is making sure that whatever you do, you love for the sake of loving it and honoring it and respecting it. money and profit will come if you’re successful and good at what you do.

It does. But if your main driver is to just make money, you might have some short term gain, but it won’t be sustainable in the real sense of the word sustainable, or it will make you a lot of money, but it will hollow you out from the inside. Yeah. So what do you want? You know, just just be passionate about whatever it is that you do and honor and respect. That whatever it is. Yeah. And and my other rule for Sigourney’s is go at our own pace.

Don’t think that we have to rush. We’ve been trained to catch. We are the train. From time to time, we’ve been worried over the years, will somebody get there and wipe us out because they’ll have more money than we do and get there faster. And they haven’t. And it doesn’t matter. We’ll go at the pace that is right. And with demand, we’re not.

Ahmad (01:46:56.896)
We don’t want to create a demand. We just want to respond to what’s needed to be done. Beautiful. Couldn’t have said it better. Right, last question of the day, my friend. Yeah. You’re on your deathbed, hopefully many years from now, but it could be next week. I mean, I don’t know about you. I’m not scared of dying. never know. I’ve had a good life. I’m 50 at the end of this week and it’s fine. It’s all good. Listen, you’re about to meet your maker.

Before you do, you’ve got your loved ones around you. I don’t know if you’ve got any children or not. I don’t have children, no. OK, but you’ve got loved ones. This is one of my children, I guess. Yeah, exactly. But you’ve got your loved ones and your friends and family around you. Before you pass on and meet your maker, what words of wisdom and advice would you give them? To these to these people around me.

I would just say that you’re here for a reason. You’re here for a purpose. You may not even understand what it is. Just do what seems to you good, seems to you the best. Don’t try to change anyone. Don’t try to change anything. It’s fine the way it is. Enjoy it and take your part in it. Make your part in it and do what you have to do and do it as well as you can. That’s what I’d say.

Great place to end. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming. Okay, lovely to see you.

Ahmad (00:00.59)
So this is, I have a really nice outro music to my podcast. And some people who are like really the proper diehard fans, they stay right to the better end. And sometimes I leave this little Easter egg so they get a little bit extra bonus chit chat. And yeah, I just, I want to tell you this on air rather than just off air. You know, I was just saying, beginning to say to you,

You know, I’m really glad you’re here on this planet and you’re making this wonderful thing. I’ve moved as you from giving my kids lugal iodine and everything. I’ve been saying to them like we need to do this and I’ve been actually sprinkling in their food. I haven’t got them to take the capsule yet. But you’re doing a lot of good work and I think what greater pleasure can there be in life to know that you’ve contributed a net positive.

to this world, that you know what, you’re leaving it better off than when you arrived. And I think you have with sea greens tapping into this beautiful, bountiful nature thing that it’s giving us and saying, right, I’m going to get it out the sea, I’m going to put it into people’s food and diet. Good for you, Seriously. Thank you, thank you. That’s very nice. That’s just brilliant. Brilliant you’re doing this. Yeah.

And did anyone like if someone ever looked into the past to see like 200 years ago, was this people in Scotland eating seaweed 300 years ago? Like, yes, they have. And I there’s a big chapter in my book about the history like that. And I’ve been trying to find out what was done and what what initiatives, if any, were similar to what we’re doing. And I have found two or three in the past. I found during the Second World War in Norway.

I found that there was a woman, a priest, the first woman priest in Norway. She wrote a little book about how, this was in 1942, she wrote a little book about how the Norwegian people should start to use the seaward around the shores because they were starving. mean, they were in terrible state. The economy was gone completely. mean, people were starving in Norway, believe it or not.

Ahmad (02:18.869)
I mean, it’s not a country where they have loads and loads of food they have to import. So she read this little book and saying, you know, use the seaweed directly in your food. Use these species. And she’s talking about the species that we’re harvesting. And she said, use it in your garden. Put it in your, you know, start to grow your own vegetables and put it in the soil and stuff like that. And so she was one of the first examples I could find of really an attempt.

to influence a population to get it into their daily food. And then I found after the war in Germany, funnily enough, there was a guy who was, he was a baker. And there was a sort of community of bakeries, like an association of bakeries, if you like, in the north of Germany around Hamburg. And this guy who, he was,

He was born very close to the Danish border and he developed a special bread mix containing, funnily enough, Norwegian seaweed. So there had been some interaction clearly. And I found that he had tried to get the seaweed into the daily bread. That was his idea because after the war, of course, in Germany, were very nutrition was a big, big issue as well. And he got government support for it.

And finally they wound up with about 50 bakeries making this what they called black bread. In those days it was pretty basic seaweed. wasn’t wheat. That didn’t go to the effort that we do for human trade. was just, you know, taking the seaweed straight out and half burning it in the mill, you know, and drying it and putting it into the seaweed. So it’s called black bread. It made it go black. And he got it into, you know, probably a huge part of the population.

And that coincided with the 19 late 1950s. You’ve got the sort of introduction of everybody was going for white bread and everything was, you know, people were turning to mass produced foods and, know, the sort of consumerism was really beginning to come in in the late fifties. So nobody wanted to eat black bread anymore. It was like, you know, white processed bread is the best thing, you know, best thing since sliced bread. That needs to be fortified. Absolutely. Now needs to be fortified.

Ahmad (04:44.205)
But then I found another example at about the same time as this guy was doing the bread exercise and they may have been related. I can’t find any connection, but there was a guy in Norway who actually registered in America. He took out a patent on a mixture for a bread mix containing seaweed. So that these two may have had a relationship, but I can’t find any. But he introduced

very much the same as we didn’t. And don’t forget, I didn’t discover this until 2008, 2009. So long after we’d started. But he was also doing the same thing. He was clearly trying to develop ingredients that would go into people’s food. And he was developing little like capsule products, except he didn’t have capsules. It was like tablets that people would put. And he had a he made a little video, which is on our website, actually.

And it shows the father of the family is taking a capsule with his coffee in the morning, wearing his suit for breakfast. the little daughter is mixing some seaweed in a glass of water. That’s it. And the woman is cooking at the stove and she’s putting the culinary ingredient effectively, the ground seaweed into a pot of potatoes that she’s cooking.

So clearly that, you know, there have been people with this inspiration before, but they were, they didn’t get anywhere that died. You know, maybe it wasn’t the right time. Who knows? But I do think the right time is now and we’ve been going for 27 years. So there’s a chance we might continue and succeed. Definitely. You will. Yeah. It’s funny. There’s so many things that people ate and it was normal, like awful meat, you know, heart.

liver, kidney, not waste anything. Don’t waste anything. And all of it is good for you. And now people look at and actually even if you look at things like dandelion, dandelion has got so many beautiful properties. Every part, the flower, the stem, the roots, everything can be ground up. You can make teas out of it. Everything. I’ve had Barbara Wilkinson, who’s head of the British herbal society on talking about everything. Common rule, know, common hedge roll type plants.

Ahmad (07:09.836)
you can just use for so many different reasons. that knowledge has been lost. And now these things are ridiculed. it’s just a weed or offals. That’s for that’s cheap cuts. That’s not who would want to eat that. Yuck. And now we just want processed burgers from McDonald’s that actually, you know, or any fast food joint, which if you leave on a kitchen shelf, won’t rot or go moldy for years because even the mold doesn’t want to eat it because it’s so dead.

It’s so plastic. It’s so artificial. But we, you know, we just think all this convenience food is great for us. Actually, convenience food is not convenient for your health. And all these things like liver is great for you and heart is wonderful for you. And seaweed is good for you and all this stuff and bone broth and all this stuff that is nourishing, nourishing, wholesome. All these traditions have been mocked and ridiculed and deemed quackery and

consigned to the bin of history. But no, we need to revive these things because humanity is heading off a cliff right now. And I think, yes, progress is great, but it’s also important to conserve. And the reason why is because a lot of our traditions and lot of the things we do have been built up over decades, centuries, and millennia. We have learned that these things work.

whether it’s looking after the family unit and having a community or whatever it is, these things need to be preserved and conserved and valued and respected. But also new things need to be embraced. But we seem to want to discard all of our tradition and just embrace this unknown future of science, apparently. When it’s exact opposite of science. And as you said, foods that are foods that are

Definitely devoid of real balanced and complete nutrition. You question whether it’s even food. Manufactured foods. Yeah. Yeah. So much manufactured foods. Frightening. I’ve been when I started this, I spent some time in supermarkets watching people’s trolleys and just looking at what is actually going out there every week in the family trolley and more than 50 % manufactured foods, foods that are

Ahmad (09:36.045)
as you said, deconstructed and constructed again and fortified and messed about with very little that is actually real. Exactly. That’s got to affect people’s behavior. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. All right. Let’s wrap it up now. Thanks, by the way. Thank you. All