Epigenetics and nutrition with Balchem

Sebastian Krawiec: So, healthy aging is a big trend that we're seeing at the show of course, it's been a trend for some time in the past, kind of about aging gracefully or cosmetic beauty, but that is evolving as we learn more about kind of epigenetics and stuff like that. So can you briefly describe what epigenetics are and the role that nutrition plays in that?

Lauren Eisen: Yeah, sure. So epigenetics is kind of a wider category, but in this category that is growing for our consumers, they are targeting a variety of platforms for what they're calling healthy aging, longevity, and then, even more specifically, cellular health. So when we think of the term epigenetics, that's really what it looks like, as what changes are from your environment, your epigenome, without your DNA sequence changing itself, but those effects from stress, sleep, your eating habits, all take a toll on your body as we age, and the process or the mechanism of DNA methylation itself is what is the reaction of those changes to your epigenome. Nutrition is really important and that plays a role in that and our ingredients, like folate through Optifolin+, choline, Vitacholine and MSM and OptiMSM are all methyl donors, and they help contribute to the methyl pool, which then contributes to DNA methylation which help with that gene expression. So we think about gene expression, those are like turning your genes on and off as a little switch in order to help control those biological processes which keep everything working, which then in turn help respond to those environmental factors, which helps with epigenetic health. So there's a nice story to ladder up to our consumers, as they want to live better as they're living longer. So when we think about healthy aging, the term of epigenetic health really is how we respond to those structure and functional mechanisms, and how we can contribute from nutrition into that story as we grow together, from helping with the biological age against our chronological age.