Session Preview: Joey Savage Discusses Mitochondrial Health and Longevity Ahead of The Outlook on Active Nutrition

As a preview of the upcoming The Outlook on Active Nutrition, Nutritional Outlook managing editor Sebastian Krawiec interviewed Joey Savage—CEO, president, and founder of Savage Nutra, and founder of the Future Nutra Foundation—for a look into the formulation insights he'll bring to the conference stage.

At the event, Savage will dig into longevity and cellular energy, a topic he says is moving from niche interest to priority for active nutrition manufacturers. The throughline, he explains, is mitochondrial health, now understood as central to metabolic disease, energy production, and overall health span. Savage previews a conversation that will go beyond familiar names like CoQ10 to explore ingredients that support mitochondrial production and replication, and even help clear out dysfunctional mitochondria.

Looking ahead, Savage also shares what excites him most about where active nutrition is headed: a widening scope beyond traditional sports performance into general health and wellness, with sports-nutrition brands increasingly venturing into sleep, stress, and longevity categories. He points to a wave of new ingredients and measurement tools poised to bring real-time validation to this experimentation.

Watch the full interview for a first look at the science and strategy Savage will unpack live at The Outlook on Active Nutrition.

Learn more and register for the conference here.

Transcript

Sebastian Krawiec: Hi everyone. I'm Sebastian Krawiec, managing editor of Nutritional Outlook. I am joined today by Joey Savage, who is a CEO, president, and founder of Savage Nutra, as well as the founder of the Future Nutra Foundation. Thanks so much for joining us.

Joey Savage: Yeah, thanks. It's great to be here.

Krawiec: So we have the privilege of having you as a speaker at our upcoming The Outlook on Active Nutrition, so I just want to take the opportunity to give our attendees and audience kind of an understanding of what you do and who you are. So I wonder if you can kind of just start off by telling us a bit about your background and your company, Savage Nutra.

Savage: So my background is involved with being a formulator for a lot of different companies, and since then I've decided, you know, to become a formulations consultant. So I'm involved in the prenatal product development process before a product goes to a manufacturer and goes to market. So I help out with formulations of active ingredients, flavoring components, and hand that off to contract manufacturers that I connect with my clients and get their products to market.

Krawiec: Fantastic. So you're going to be talking about longevity and cellular energy at The Outlook on Active Nutrition. Can you talk about why that's an important topic for manufacturers in the active nutrition space?

Savage: Because the demand for these products is going to be increasing, and this all centers around mitochondrial health, which there were whispers of this term back 5 and 10 years ago, but now it's reaching fever pitch where all of a sudden people realize that mitochondrial health is at the crux of all kinds of noncommunicable metabolic diseases. If your mitochondria dysfunction, then that results in a myriad of different things because you don't have the ability to produce energy, and the more energy your body can produce the more metabolically active you are, and the longer that you're going to have that that health span that you're looking for. So, by taking care of your mitochondria, you're taking care of your health through the long run. And this is central to things like antioxidants. Antioxidants are things that your mitochondria produces, but it's also things that can help your mitochondria stay healthy, and we're going to be talking about things that go beyond thing ingredients like CoQ10. So we're going to talk about things that help mitochondrial production, the replication of mitochondria, how to selectively kill off dysfunctioning mitochondria, and how this plays to an overall scope of how this plays such a crucial role in health, and these I mean in addition to being the powerhouse of the cell that makes all your energy, this is where all the carbohydrates get burned. This is where all the fat gets burned, and the metabolic consequences, the exhaust of that being produces free radicals. So, working on that balance of how the food that you eat gets transformed into energy and how to optimize that process is what we're going to talk about.

Krawiec: Fantastic. Look forward to it. To kind of close, I wonder if you could just tell us some trends that excite you about the active nutrition category right now,

Savage: One of the things that we're starting to see is active nutrition suddenly taking a bigger and broader interest into general health and wellness, and that's starting to trickle into subcategories where sports nutrition brands have previously not bit their toes in before things like sleep or stress, or even this longevity category, and we're starting to see the experimental nature of sports nutrition start to be applied in these other realms of general health and wellness and longevity. And it's super exciting because there are so many new ingredients, so many new tools that we're going to get access to to start quantifying this and seeing results in real time.