Dear Friends,
Here is Part 2 of the astaxanthin interview I did with Dr. Karen Hecht and Dr. Susan Hamrahi from AstaReal. Dr. Hecht is the Vice President of Science and Dr. Hamrahi works in Scientific Communications.
In Part 1 we covered what makes astaxanthin unique, and how it helps vision health. Other key benefits of astaxanthin are discussed in Part 2:
Carl Pradelli: Let's switch to another benefit of astaxanthin that's getting a lot of attention these days and that's the appearance of the skin, which is really becoming an area that's growing for people of all ages, both younger and older. So, does astaxanthin help keep the skin looking more youthful?
Dr. Karen Hecht: Yes. So astaxanthin is actually found in all of the skin layers. And it helps to have a supplement that's able to access different parts of the skin because they have different functions. So, if you can imagine in the deepest layer of skin in the hypodermis there's a lot of blood flow that needs to bring in oxygen and nutrients to help those cells regenerate. Every 28 days we get a new layer at the surface, and so think about how much nutrition that requires. We have seen in several studies that astaxanthin supports capillary and peripheral blood flow as well as blood flow in the back of the eye and the retina. So it’s helping to nourish all the tissues of the body.
And then in the dermis which is the next layer up, we have fibroblasts which are these amazing cell factories that create many structures like elastin, collagen, and hyaluronic acid, all responsible for maintaining the elasticity tensile strength and hydration of our skin. Astaxanthin helps to support the health of those cells, which means we're helping to maintain our collagen factories and collagen bank. In addition, astaxanthin protects the collagen network itself because it can become damaged through oxidation.
And then lastly there's the topmost layer of skin the epidermis and then the stratum corneum. You could think of it as basically this brick-and-mortar structure. You've got your corneocytes, and then around the corneocytes the “mortar”, with all these really sensitive wonderful lipids. Their role is to lock in the skin's moisture, and astaxanthin is very good at being in “lipidy” environments. That's the scientific term: lipidy, and it's able to protect those lipids and help to promote our skin's ability to lock in moisture. So that's another way, in addition to supporting hyaluronic acid, that astaxanthin can help to promote skin hydration.
Carl Pradelli: Susan, is there anything you'd like to add to that in terms of skin health?
Dr. Susan Hamrahi: I want to mention that in 2023 or 2024, a research group presented at the American Academy of Dermatology annual conference and reported the results of their work, which was a big broad view of all of the research and data on skin health ingredients. This meta-analysis looked at hundreds of nutrients and ranked them based on strength of the evidence for skin health benefits. The number one ingredient was collagen. And the number two ingredient was astaxanthin. Number three was omega-3s. So there's a lot of research and data to substantiate the use of astaxanthin for the skin.
Carl Pradelli: This again illustrates the versatility of the astaxanthin molecule itself, right? Not too many nutrients are going to be able to span all three layers of the skin and add important value.
Dr. Karen Hecht: I agree, based on the data with no biases. The thing that is important in my role as we think of innovation, is that we're always led by the data and the evidence. And so, that's my main consideration. Then we also want to make sure that we make an impact in an area that matters to people, solving everyday problems and matters of public health. So of course this is why it's kudos to the company for really focusing on innovation and research and investing so much.
Carl Pradelli: I’d like to transition to how astaxanthin can help with muscle endurance and recovery, which may be a nice segue into some of the more recent work that you have been doing at the company. This topic is how a lot of people are introduced to astaxanthin – because of how it helps salmon. Astaxanthin is a very important part of the salmon species' survival because it helps give it the endurance to make that journey upstream - which could be up to 900-miles of swimming to where the salmon then spawn. I had this wisenheimer say, "Yeah, so astaxanthin is so great, salmon swim all this way, but they die." There's always someone who's a wise guy, right?
Dr. Karen Hecht: But it's not just about the journey because the astaxanthin gets passed on to the salmon eggs. That's why salmon eggs have that color, and that helps the future generation survive because they lay those eggs in really shallow streams, right? And it's fully saturated by UV which causes oxidative stress. And without that antioxidant protection, those eggs fry and would never survive. So that's part of the secret of astaxanthin, protecting the lipids that those developing fish are depending on for nutrition and development and growth.
Dr. Susan Hamrahi: And I have to add to that, those salmon swim that 900-mile journey without eating. So the astaxanthin is protecting their fat stores and their energy production on that swim.
Carl Pradelli: There you go. So if that gentleman's listening today, now you have an answer from two professionals. Let's talk a little bit more about muscle endurance and recovery and the role of astaxanthin, and I'll toss it to any one of you who want to begin.
Dr. Karen Hecht: I love this topic and it's definitely been an area of focus for us in the last few years. We've been very fortunate to collaborate with a lot of excellent researchers in this space. Dr. Kreider, Dr. Gonzalez, Dr. Waldman to name a few. And they have been building on a foundation of what we understand about astaxanthin working in the mitochondria to support mitochondrial health, substrate utilization, endurance, and recovery. So there was a lot of data from the early to mid 2000s that supported the function of astaxanthin for endurance athletes. There were studies in soccer players showing that it reduced muscle damage markers throughout a training period and reduced the systemic inflammation marker C-reactive protein. There were studies in cyclists showing it increased power output and the time to complete a 20-kilometer time trial.
What we didn't have a lot of information on is resistance-trained athletes and looking at recovery. So there's a connection that you can think of which is astaxanthin quenches free radicals. Free radicals are part of what's contributing to muscle damage from exercise and exercise-induced inflammation, which leads to soreness and slower recovery times. So what we knew is that astaxanthin reduced the systemic inflammation marker from exercise, CRP, and that it reduced muscle damage markers in soccer players, but actually the early studies didn't show any benefit to resistance-trained athletes.
So we decided to question this and see if it’s just a different type of benefit that we need to look at because different populations have different redox balances. They have different performance goals and so the mechanism of action may be different. Even the muscle composition between endurance and resistance-trained athletes is different. So what we found in our recent studies is that there is a benefit for resistance-trained athletes in terms of delayed onset muscle soreness for both men and women.
Now we have some sense that astaxanthin doesn't only impact endurance and performance in endurance trained athletes like runners and cyclists, but also potentially recovery in resistance-trained athletes, and that is really important in cases where you have back-to-back training or a lot of events that you're preparing for, and you need to be able to keep a consistent, high-volume training schedule.
Carl Pradelli: Interesting. Susan, do you want to add to that?
Dr. Susan Hamrahi: I think one of my favorite things about muscle recovery with astaxanthin is that in endurance-trained athletes, it was as little as 4mg that made a difference. For the soccer players, we looked at the baseline CRP, and those that were supplementing with astaxanthin had a zero increase in their CRP. So that systemic marker of inflammation for those soccer players did not increase. It did maintain that ability to quench the free radicals associated with exercise-induced inflammation. So, I think astaxanthin is able to help maintain that muscle performance to keep everybody going every single day. It's helping with that delayed onset soreness or stiffness that can potentially cause people not to stay in the gym.
Dr. Karen Hecht: So that's a good point Susan because not all of us are elite athletes. I'm not pointing at anyone here today, but actually Susan is a recreational athlete, and I think it is worth mentioning and talking about recreational athletes maintaining muscle and mobility as we enter new life stages. And also, what about untrained athletes, right? It's so demoralizing to go to the gym and try to make a change and then feeling absolutely destroyed the second day, and asking like how am I ever going to go back? So, if there's a tool out there that can help to ease that and help maintain motivation, I think that can make an impact for everyone.
Carl Pradelli: So much of staying active and getting results is consistency. And look, anytime you don't feel good, you're less likely to do your exercises or daily workout activities. So recovery is very underrated and especially as you get older, I'm turning 60 this year, it gets harder and harder. The fact you have data both on strength training as well as cardiovascular type of activity again shows the versatility of astaxanthin and how it really can help in a lot of ways.
So being a powerful antioxidant, you would think that astaxanthin could be a good ally to our immune system. Is there any research out there that, either of you find interesting with respect to astaxanthin and immune health?
Dr. Karen Hecht: I think so. I think there's an understanding that antioxidants can have an impact on immune cell health and supporting a healthy immune system. And there's certainly data with astaxanthin both in untrained and trained populations showing that it helps in soccer players, for example, to maintain the secretory immune function throughout a prolonged period of training, which does introduce some physiological stress to the body.
In Dr. Gonzalez's study of active firefighter participants, astaxanthin helped to actually reduce markers of physiological stress in response to a fireground test which is a twice annual physical test of nine different fire suppressing activities that they do. And then in untrained populations we also see again it helps to maintain or increase immunoglobulin A in the saliva.
Astaxanthin has been shown in untrained population to support both the adaptive and innate immune response. In the adaptive immune response we do see an improvement in T-cell and B cell activity and through the innate immune system we see an increase in natural killer cell activity. So there are benefits. I would say that this is not the strongest area of focus for astaxanthin research, but there are some studies out there showing benefits at between 2 to 8 milligrams a day.
Carl Pradelli: We already talked about the benefits of astaxanthin on vision health, and what's connected to our eyes is our brain. So with the lutein and the zeaxanthin isomers, we see benefits for both the eyes and in brain health or cognitive function. Is this an area where you think astaxanthin can also be helpful?
Dr. Karen Hecht: Absolutely. So astaxanthin does cross both the blood-retinal and the blood-brain barriers and existing studies already show that astaxanthin improved reaction time to delayed recall tasks in middle-aged persons. But I think what's exciting is that this is an emerging area of research and that there are studies coming out very soon in different populations, young healthy populations as well as middle-aged healthy populations, where we have seen improvements in cognitive functions and particularly in executive cognitive functions. So that means more complex tasks that require planning, and in some cases, spatial reasoning.
And I can speak to what may possibly be part of the mechanism of action based on a pre-clinical study that was done in mice. In that study, they looked at what's called adult hippocampal neurogenesis. So the hippocampus is kind of like the gateway to memory and learning. We used to think that adults couldn't really add new neurons to this part of the brain. That was it. Your learning was done. It turns out that's not the case. And it is possible to create new neurons, not just new neuronal pathways.
And in this particular mouse study what was observed is that supplementation with astaxanthin helped to promote new neurons in mice and improved their learning behavior in the Morris water maze. So of course we don't use animal studies to support any kind of claims in humans for supplements. But there are studies that do show in humans that astaxanthin had an impact either alone in the Katagiri study, or in combination with vitamin E in the Hongo study. The supplementation had an impact on mental fatigue, and also their ability to conduct mental, arithmetic and reaction time to various computer-based tasks. And there is a new study, Susan, with astaxanthin combined with grape seed extract and a couple of other ingredients.
Dr. Susan Hamrahi: They looked at episodic memory and they saw an improvement, and also on what was called an Everyday Memory Questionnaire. In addition, there was an increase in brain-derived neurotrophic factor which helps to support brain health and neurogenesis as well.
Dr. Karen Hecht: So there are some indicators, and that was not astaxanthin alone, but it just adds to the evidence that there are indicators that astaxanthin may do quite a lot and we do want to keep investigating that. I'll send you those papers Carl when they're published.
Carl Pradelli: We’d love to see them. Are there any other studies or emerging areas of research with astaxanthin that you're excited about or want to share?
Dr. Karen Hecht: I think we'll see more coming out in terms of how astaxanthin is working in muscle tissue and muscle stem cells and what does that mean for aging muscles and combining astaxanthin together with training.
Carl Pradelli: So Susan, I'll ask you this as perhaps our last question. A lot of times we get the question “how much astaxanthin should I take daily?” What would you suggest?
Dr. Susan Hamrahi: Well, our research spans quite a broad area. Anywhere from 4 milligrams, even 3 mg in some of the skin work, all the way up to 12 milligrams in some of the endurance and resistance-trained athletes. Personally, I take 12 milligrams of astaxanthin daily myself, but I would say it really depends on the person. We're all just such different individuals and it depends on what your goal is for your outcome, what your own condition is. I know we are hearing this term consistently in the journals about personalized supplementation and personalized programs and that truly is where it is. It really is about you individually.
I will say I usually recommend 12 milligrams a day for people just because of the stressors in our life that our bodies are going through, whether it's environmental or it's induced ourselves because we're exercising in a gym.
Carl Pradelli: Karen, I just think Susan's trying to sell more astaxanthin for the company. I don't know. What do you think?
Dr. Karen Hecht: Yeah, I think she's a keeper. But it's important to think about where you are in your balance. I would say if you're a very active athlete, if you're taking on a new event, if you're finally thinking about running that marathon that apparently everyone I know is now, not me, but well, everyone I know is striving to do a marathon at some point. Or if you're older or if you're just in a particularly stressful life stage, you know, then you may benefit from a higher dose. And the reason is that we're just trying to achieve a balance. So what is your level of oxidative stress? And that sort of dictates how much antioxidant you might want to consume.
And think about that through your diet as well because we want to consume an antioxidant-rich diet that has a lot of different types of antioxidants in there. So all the colorful fruits and vegetables and then whatever you feel that you might have an insufficiency of, that is difficult to get from diet alone like astaxanthin, in that case you might want to reach for a dietary supplement and I think that for maintenance I would say 4 or 6 milligrams is sufficient but again if you are looking ahead at some big event that you think is going to be rather stressful or if you're older and your natural antioxidant capacity is maybe not what it used to be, then a higher dose like 12 milligrams is probably a good idea.
Carl Pradelli: We recommend 6 to 12 milligrams depending on circumstances and personal needs of course. We always try to guide people based on what's happening in their life as best we can and we always want you to share what supplements you are taking with your practitioners to make sure it's appropriate for you as well. Right?
Dr. Susan Hamrahi: Exactly. Yes. So it is a complementary tool in your toolkit and always consult your health professional because they know the whole you, hopefully, and what your needs are and how that's going to fit into your personalized health toolkit. So that's very important to take into consideration.
Carl Pradelli: Well, both of you have been terrific. I think it will be very valuable for all those listening. We’ve been working together with AstaReal for many years and really enjoy the relationship. If viewers are interested in some astaxanthin products, we have two options for you. Our TrueAsta soft gels have 6 milligrams of astaxanthin per soft gel. You could decide whether to take one or two a day.
And more recently, we introduced another product with AstaReal astaxanthin in an enhanced delivery system. So you can get the benefits of astaxanthin with only 3 milligrams, but the delivery system actually helps improve its bioavailability, so it's closer to 6 milligrams. And we had to do that because we need some more space in the capsule. That's our TrueNuGrow+ Hair & Skin formula. It's power-packed with researched-backed ingredients.
Yours for Good Health,
Carl Pradelli
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