Science & Sunshine Club

June 8, 2025

Welcome to Issue 136 of Science Says! Our weekly newsletter where you’ll learn the latest healthy aging and C15:0 research news that our team of doctors, scientists, and experts are most excited about—without having to go search for it.

Eric and Steph
Co-Founders, Doctors, Nerds

What Dr. Stephanie Venn-Watson, our co-founder and author of The Longevity Nutrient and over 80 peer-reviewed scientific publications, is reading.

Healthy Aging

Translating Science into Sunshine

This past week, our team launched the Science & Sunshine Club to expand our ethos and movement to improve global health. We are proud to be nerdy do-gooders, and with 240,000 email subscribers to Science Says!, we know we’re in great company. So, let’s dive into why science should come with sunshine.

So, how does science typically work?

As humans, we tend to silo ourselves into groups. There are philosophical thinkers. There are scientific researchers. There are roll-up your sleeves community workers and do-ers.

Often, scientists are doctors who:

Identify a specific problem
Develop a research hypothesis to address that problem
Get funding to test their hypothesis
Run the experiments
Report their results in the peer-reviewed scientific literature

By doing so, research advances – primarily in the literature, at the rate of about 2 million scientific papers a year, across 30,000 journals. That’s a lot of science. Ideally, those research advances cross over from the science world to better the community. And that’s where the sunshine can happen. Like, new cures for diseases.

Where philosophers come in.

Before figuring out how our biological widgets work (and how to fix them when they don’t), there is a need for bigger thinking to enable new worlds of hypotheses to test. That’s where our philosophers come in – to challenge how we see and think about the world, resulting in entirely new insights into how we solve problems (or even, how to define the problems we need to solve).

And then, there are the community do-ers.

These are the folks that put science-backed, philosophical-driven discoveries to work. Entrepreneurs bringing new discoveries to the market. Businesses developing products that make our lives better. Moms helping their babies be healthier… and adult-kids helping their parents live happier and longer.

Here’s the global challenge.

While philosophical thinking, altruistic hard core science, and product development are the strongest paths to enabling meaningful change to our society and world, it can be hard to break from our silos. By breaking down these barriers, however, we can think beyond just treating diseases and focus more on unabashedly maintaining our overall health for as long as possible.

Enter, Our Science & Sunshine Club

By holding to a strong philosophy, following rigorous science, and delivering effective health products to the world, our team is aiming to improve global health.

Our philosophy: For the past two decades, our founders have followed the philosophy of One Health. By taking care of our planet and the life on it, humans can become healthier, too. This approach has led to entirely new ways to think about solutions to our health problems. For example, how the Navy’s half-century efforts to continually improve the health of older dolphins have unlocked C15:0’s secrets to healthy aging in humans.

So, let’s continue to take care of the world around us, because there are more amazing discoveries that nature has to offer.

Our science: We and the world have followed the most rigorous approaches to science on C15:0, including the following:

Purity: Using the same pure C15:0 compound across studies.
Determine mechanisms of action: This includes understanding C15:0’s dose-dependent mechanisms of action to explain how C15:0 works, and at what optimal concentrations.
Demonstrate human cell-based and in vivo efficacy: It has been important to demonstrate that C15:0 has direct, clinically relevant, dose-dependent efficacy and safety in human cell systems and relevant models mimicking various health states.
Provide longitudinal studies: This includes large prospective cohort studies following tens of thousands of people over more than a decade, which repeatedly show that people with higher C15:0 levels have better cardiometabolic health.
Demonstrate oral bioavailability: We now have deep understanding of C15:0’s bioavailability and oral dosing needed to achieve active concentrations to support its long-term benefits.
Show safety: Extensive safety testing has been completed, including across all panels as part of NIH’s Tox21 program and garnering Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status from a panel of independent experts.
Conduct randomized, controlled clinical trials: This includes targeted clinical trials with pure C15:0 that have demonstrated bioavailability, pharmacokinetics, and optimal C15:0 concentrations to effectively support liver, cholesterol, red blood cell, and gut microbiome health.

Our sunshine: Lastly, as part of our founders’ military backgrounds and thanks to the Office of Naval Research funding, our goals have been to:

Understand the problem: How long-lived mammals break down with age (aka, how low C15:0 levels result in fragile cells and accelerated aging).
Figure out how to fix it: Reverse aging at the cellular level (aka using targeted doses of pure C15:0 to effectively stabilize cells and protect long-term health).
And then fix it: Developing a safe and effective product that is available to the public and Navy dolphins (aka, fatty15).

The result? Today, C15:0 has 100+ peer-reviewed studies, and fatty15 has 100K active subscribers and 20+ awards, including:

2025 CNBC Changemaker Award (for Dr. Steph)
2025 Mindful Awards Best Overall Supplement
2025 Wellness Awards’ Best Breakthrough Supplement
2024 Newsweek Readers’ Choice Award for Best Supplement Brand
2024 & 2022 Fast Company World Changing Idea in Wellness

Most importantly, fatty15 has over 5,000 5-star reviews from people feeling and seeing meaningful benefits within months. They are sharing how they are regaining their energy, sleep, and long-term health. By doing so, they are walking. And reading. And cooking. And engaging in their communities. Proof that we can be nerdy scientists and advocates together, who can make a true difference.

Welcome to the Science & Sunshine Club. Have a wonderful week, everyone!