Sometimes you want to look under the hood of what lies behind a brand. On the penultimate day of our equity crowd sourced funding campaign it is a good time to share more about the engine that drives our system of sustainability and health. Our team at PhycoHealth is all about delivering the sustainability story of Venus Shell Systems, our parent company, through the amazing health benefits of the ingredients developed by our sister brand PhycoLife, and delivering them to you in the best and easiest way we know how - by connecting to you through food that you can eat, everyday.
Our deeper motivation
Beneath the surface is an excitement in our work from the deeper motivation of driving impact through connectivity. As the founder, my journey is marked by my awe of interconnectedness - hence the name of our parent company "Venus Shell SYSTEMS." Coming from a background in marine molecular ecology, I view our planet as a vast, intricate network of molecules orchestrating the dance of life.
The Butterfy Effect is real
Think of it like the Butterfly Effect: a seemingly small action of the flap of a butterfly's wing, resonating across continents and creating a typhoon somewhere else on our earth, shaping the course of events.
This concept, though widely accepted, is often treated as a standalone phenomenon, confined to a single, possible, yet remote scenario on our planet. However, this could not be further from the truth. In reality, it serves as a metaphor for everything within and around our planet, every day, all the time. It is, indeed, this amplification of cause and effect that has led us down the path of less desirable processes on earth; now threatening the status quo of the world we live in. But, equally, we can harness this amplification effect to reverse or regenerate the systems in our favour. Indeed, I believe it is the ONLY way we can have a return to the global systems that we have evolved with and that we rely on.
Breaking the silos to unleash the butterfly
In our mission and the ethos, we aim to shatter the silos of academia, industry, society, and exclusive financial sectors, and to reconnect the system of flows around this planet. This isn't mere philosophy; it's a quantifiable reality of the systems of molecules, nutrition, atmosphere and biosphere that sustain life on Earth and ensure our comfort as inhabitants of this planet.
Imagine this scenario that exists each day: It begins with the capture of excessive amounts of nitrogen from the atmosphere, utilized for fertilizer production, which eventually finds its way into our food supply chain and our much beloved protein and collagen in our skin. However, a stagering portion of this process leaks from the fields of food, the factories of formulation, and it all flows out to coastlines all around the world triggering increasing deoxygenation of coastal zones, now 10-fold more than in the 1950s. This pollution goes further and resurfaces as nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas that is 300 x worse than CO2.
A global challenge presents an opportunty of global scale
Nitrogen represents the foremost planetary biogeochemical boundary we've crossed according to the Resilliance Alliance. This was the focal point of my Master's research at Stockhom University back in 1998, where I meticulously mapped nitrogen budgets, identifying sources and sinks and how to reverse this challenge. That led me to the powerhouse of nitrogen regeneration in our seaweed today.
Now, consider this: these nitrogen flows are intricately linked to the realms of food and finance, manifesting as serious imbalances on the planet and in human health. See - it is all connected. However, we aim to transform this imbalance into an opportunity. We seek not only to restore nitrogen cycles and safeguard coastal zones crucial for our survival, but also to improve food production, and now, through our sister brand PhycoLife and our reverence for the amazing seaweed that we grow, we have discovered magic molecules that can revolutionise the world of human health and medicine.
New frontiers have emerged
Our research on seaweed has uncovered not only its remarkable potential as a carrier of essential nutrition, but of remarkable connective tissue that mimics that of humans and other animals. This discovery holds immense promise, as it could revolutionize human tissue healing by replacing animal-derived or genetically modified sources of hyaluronic acid with a natural plant-based alternative, for the very first time! The opportunity is there to relieve or prevent disease, heal wounds, support better longevity in skin, resolve tissue damage such as in dry eyes, improve mouth and to gut health, or even medical intervention in osteoarthritis.
The complexity of this system of connective molecules across lifeforms, organs, tissue and cells, is a frontier of medical research that some biologists dub the "dark matter of biology" - the hidden codes of life that synchronize across the all life forms and are only just revealing themselves to medical research. It is an elusive and scarily powerful future of discovery that is untapped - and here it presents itself as the opportunity from a solution to planetary change.
Global transformation can happen when global challenges converge with opportunity and we all start flapping our wings
Our passion lies in the transformative power of seemingly small actions such as your purchasing choice and support of what we do, to support your health, while we heal coastlines and mend human tissue. It's an extraordinary concept, but the ability to harness the potency of a butterfly's wing to create a typhoon of positive change is real, just by reconnecting our disconnected world of silos. We don't need to talk about solutions in the future - we can flap our wings today.
