Welcome! This newsletter is an unfiltered, nerdy analysis of stuff that’s happening in the health startup world.

- Shân

🧀 On cheese, fermentation, and longevity

Any warm-blooded human who has switched from eating dairy to forgoing it will tell you how much they miss cheese.

Yes obviously Shân you may say, who doesn’t like cheese? Psychopaths, but also a small percentage of the French (the betrayal!) population whose cheese-aversion confused scientists so (relatable!) that they stuck them in fMRI machines to figure out what was wrong the neural basis for it.

Now that I have exhausted my parenthesis quota in a single paragraph let us move on to the point, which is not up for debate: no non-dairy cheese has ever come close to the real stuff.

Until now. 

Turns out there’s a Japanese fungus, called koji, from which one can make fermented cultures. Tasty cultures. They’ve been used to create umami-packed miso soup and soy sauce for centuries. 

Now, startup Formo is crafting these cultures into vegan cheese.

How good is this cheese? $61M good, apparently.

For its first wave of animal-free cheeses, Formo is actually just fermenting and harvesting koji proteins, then sending these off to cheese makers who work their magic like they’d do with regular milk.

But here’s what really piqued my interest: scientists believe koji may be the connection between the Japanese diet and longevity, thanks to its effect on the gut microbiome. 

Now, of course, we need a bunch more studies before we get really excited. But as it stands:

• Low-sugar fermented foods, like koji, are already associated with higher gut microbiome diversity and lower inflammation (both good things)

• Consumers are very interested in gut health and longevity

So while Formo will focus on European consumers for now, a slew of koji-based options will likely enter the American market next. Someone’s already making koji milk in California (obviously) …for $9 a quart. 

Expect the next wave of koji products to be geared toward the gut microbiome and longevity.

Tidbits

💆 A $35k/year longevity center in LA is the first of 25 luxury wellness projects planned by hospitality mogul Sam Nazarian and entrepreneur Tony Robbins. Members will receive all the usual preventative tests: blood analyses, full-body MRIs, DEXA scans, etc. I’m as bullish on longevity as the next health nerd, but I think it’s time to slow down on the luxury clinics and bring longevity science into the everyday.

🤔 Delivering longevity drugs to the masses requires the FDA to recognize aging as a disease — which it has been very firm on not doing, despite years of pleas. Another obstacle is the lack of a clinically validated biomarker that accurately defines aging (like blood iron levels for anemia). So while longevity-focused services will continue to pop up, we’re still a far way off from FDA-approved longevity drugs. Just a little reminder.

🍶 I’m surprised water kefir, kombucha’s milder cousin, hasn’t been ‘kombucha-fied’ yet. Given the American hard kombucha market is worth $40M+, hard water kefir seems like a real untapped opportunity. As do other niche versions of the health drink (mystical kombucha, brewed according to the lunar cycles, is legit a popular thing). 

Thank you for reading! If you find yourself frequently enjoying these essays and you’re inclined to forward one to a friend, please do. Nerds are terrible at self-promotion. We mean to focus on growing our lists, but we get too busy digging into random stuff. 🚜

P.S. In case you missed it, we recently covered the high-protein low-calorie snack space and the business of human rewilding.

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