How the Endocannabinoid System Could Transform Women’s Health

286. How the Endocannabinoid System Could Transform Women’s Health

[00:00:06] Caitlyn Krebs: I found this list of 200 chronic conditions that Cannabinoids had supporting data for. You know, they weren’t these large randomized control trials, but there was data to show that cannabinoids work for I. Diabetes, obesity, immunology, inflammation, sleep, stress, weight loss, and that’s what got me so excited about the ECS, is that you can unlock the therapeutic potential of the ECS for so many different indications.

[00:00:36] And that’s why I got excited about it and started Nalu Bio.

[00:00:42] Ellen Scanlon: Welcome to How to Do the Pod, an award-winning podcast helping you feel confident about cannabis. I’m your host, Ellen Scanlon.

[00:00:59] You just [00:01:00] heard from Caitlyn Krebs, the CEO and co-founder of Nalu Bio, a San Francisco based biotech firm harnessing the power of the endocannabinoid system for a healthier future. In last week’s episode, I talked with Caitlyn about what it’s like to have endometriosis, a disease that affects one in 10 women.

[00:01:20] Thank you for the very kind feedback. It’s a little hard for me to talk about it, and I really appreciate your support. I talked about endometriosis with Caitlin because Nalu bio is pioneering a new approach to treating the disease through the endocannabinoid system, or the ECS Caitlin’s passion for helping women is why I wanted to share her story with you.

[00:01:42] I. FDA approved drugs can take five to 10 years to get that approval. And if you don’t have five to 10 years to wait, you can try a new product from Nalu Bio called MELD Today, meld products are specially formulated for women and focused on [00:02:00] solving for pain, stress, sleep, and inflammation in a smarter, safer way.

[00:02:06] For a limited time how to do the pot. Listeners can try the MELD products for free and directly contribute to research improving women’s health. This is your chance to try these blends before they’re even available to the public and to be part of something bigger, improving women’s health outcomes. All you have to do is sign up for their newsletter on their website, meld science.com and I’ll add all the details in the show notes.

[00:02:33] In today’s episode, Caitlyn and I break down why understanding the ECS is essential to better health and wellbeing for women, and how to solve the Goldilocks problem of finding the right dose for relieving stress, sleep, and pain without trial and error. I have an update about the Webby Awards. Sadly, we did not win, but being nominated still feels pretty [00:03:00] amazing how to do.

[00:03:01] The Pot was recognized by the Webbys for our series on how the AIDS crisis in San Francisco led to the legalization of medical cannabis. Congratulations to this year’s winners in the health science and Education category. The winner is The Nature Podcast and the People’s Voice winner is called Beyond My Years.

[00:03:21] I’m excited to listen and learn from these shows. Thank you so much to everyone who voted and supported us. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Caitlin. This episode is not providing medical advice and please reach out to your doctor if you have questions related to your health.

[00:03:53] Part of the reason that I got into the industry is because I was realizing the benefits that cannabis has specifically for women [00:04:00] and with the ECS and its role in diseases that disproportionately affect women. Let’s talk a little bit about the endocannabinoid system.

[00:04:08] Caitlyn Krebs: Yes. I talked to people about the ECS endocannabinoid system all the time.

[00:04:13] Most people don’t know they have one. So that’s kind of the first thing. It was discovered in the early nineties by a chemist outta Israel, Raphael Tulum, and so it’s new, but it is really the master regulator of your body. It impacts pain, inflammation, your immune response, fertility, thermal regulation, stress, anxiety, and people don’t know about it since we.

[00:04:40] Are making cannabinoids in our therapeutics through chemistry. We want it to be trustworthy, ultrapure consistent. You know exactly what you’re getting because if you do extract these things out of the plant, sometimes you can get heavy metals, sometimes you can get pesticides. Our products have none of that, and so just having.

[00:04:59] Very [00:05:00] specific cannabinoids for a specific use case we believe is better than throwing the kitchen sink in it. I can tell you the FDA does not like that. If you look at the FDA, they wanna know exactly what’s in a medicine and how it’s working.

[00:05:13] Ellen Scanlon: I’ve talked before about the Goldilocks problem with cannabis, where you kind of have to try it, you know, if it’s a little too much, if it’s not quite enough.

[00:05:23] And I feel like you are trying to solve for that for consumers. And consumers today do have the option of finding the Goldilocks effect.

[00:05:32] Caitlyn Krebs: That’s right. We don’t want you to have to try, you know, the big bed and the medium bed and the just right bed. We’re making it for women, right? We’re tailoring 1% of supplements are made for women, which is mind blowing.

[00:05:42] I. Like only 1% are tailored for women. And so we wanna be that tailored, trustworthy brand that’s melding science and nature.

[00:05:50] Ellen Scanlon: I think that with cannabis and broadly with CBD, needing more during extra pain periods makes sense [00:06:00] to me. Like I used to get headaches and I would take one aspirin or or one Tylenol if the headache was bad.

[00:06:06] Two, if it was worse, like I knew that sometimes I needed more and it didn’t mean that I was becoming addicted or that I was. Becoming dependent, and I think that because of the history of cannabis and its association with being a drug, when women, when people are using cannabis as medicine, it can feel complicated to figure out what your dose is and realize that on day one, two, or three of my period, I needed to be taking like.

[00:06:32] 200 milligrams of CBD, which is a lot of CB, D. You know, I take a little 25 milligram capsule and so that’s a lot of capsules. And I talked to enough doctors that I felt comfortable doing that and I actually felt like that was the right course of action. But I think for many people, I. Especially when CBD started to really become prevalent 20 18, 20 19, people were taking CB, D and it would be like five or 10 milligrams.

[00:06:56] It just wasn’t very much. And so can you talk a [00:07:00] little bit just about dosing and how you are thinking about it and what the realities of dosing today are?

[00:07:08] Caitlyn Krebs: Yeah, so what people don’t know is that you have this endocannabinoid system. You have all these receptors in your body, the cannabinoids that come from kind of the external world.

[00:07:17] So if it’s you know, from the plant or like us, we make them through chemistry. Your body actually only absorbs, like with C, B, D, 20% of what you put into your body. These compounds are actually, we call them. So they don’t like water. They don’t like to dissolve in water, and so your body can absorb them. And so if you take, let’s just say 25 milligrams of CB, D, you’re really only absorbing five milligrams of that.

[00:07:47] So there is the right dosing. And so we’ve done studies and with our supplements, we believe 25 milligrams. Is helpful going up. You’re absolutely right. If you wanted to take two of our [00:08:00] gummies to go to 50 Epidiolex, which is the CBD approved drug for child epilepsy, that’s 1200 milligrams per day, and the FDA still says that that’s safe.

[00:08:12] All of that to say people have been taking them for 3000 years, they’re very safe, but there is a right dose for them and we’re backing our supplements and our therapies obviously through, through data and studies.

[00:08:25] Ellen Scanlon: It’s such an interesting time to be in cannabis. I think we’ve sort of reached a cannabis 2.0 mm-hmm.

[00:08:30] Where things are different now. Access is different. The industry itself is really changing. You have sort of high potency products for recreation and then lower dose that are available for wider access all over states that are. Still illegal. And then you have products like yours that are really trying to just be state agnostic and just add to the routines that women have and make them more effective and more targeted.

[00:08:56] And so it’s an exciting time. I think my [00:09:00] perspective is that it feels like these paths are not connected in a coherent way. For the consumer, and so I’m trying to sort of meet women where they are. Yes,

[00:09:12] Caitlyn Krebs: yes. I mean, I hope that we’re providing a solution for consumers that they can trust and that is accessible and familiar.

[00:09:20] You know, with your vitamins, if you’re taking D three, if you’re taking B12, you know, adding a cannabinoid to that. Is not as scary and backed by science and data. So that’s really what distinguishes us, is that we understand exactly how these molecules bind in your body and how they’re working.

[00:09:39] Ellen Scanlon: What inspired you to focus on ECS targeted therapies for women’s health?

[00:09:43] Caitlyn Krebs: I’ve been in a number of different startups. I’m an entrepreneur at heart and I’ve been at diabetes companies. I’ve been at cognition, so Alzheimer’s companies. I’ve been in cancer genomics. I. I call ’em therapeutic areas, but usually in an area of health and wellness, you have compounds. If it [00:10:00] works in diabetes like the GLP one, ozempic, it works in perhaps obesity.

[00:10:06] It might expand maybe into cardiovascular or if you’re in inflammation and immunology. If it works in rheumatoid arthritis, it might also work in osteoarthritis. But I found this list. Of 200 chronic conditions that Cannabinoids had supporting data for. You know, they weren’t these large randomized control trials, but there was data to show that cannabinoids work for diabetes, obesity, immunology, inflammation, sleep, stress, weight loss, and that’s what got me so excited about the ECS, is that you can unlock the therapeutic potential of the ECS for so many different indications, and that’s why.

[00:10:47] I got excited about it and started Nalu Bio.

[00:10:51] Ellen Scanlon: Let’s talk a little bit about the meld pain supplement and the opportunity that we have for our listeners to try it.

[00:10:59] Caitlyn Krebs: [00:11:00] Sure. So we did this very large AI study. So we looked at thousands of vitamins of probiotics, of proteins, and then there are actually 140 cannabinoids.

[00:11:12] So we looked at a hundred cannabinoids and we said for sleep, for pain, for stress. For weight loss, what are the best combinations? And women are already taking vitamins. They’re already taking probiotics, but women are scared of cannabinoids. Your listeners might not be, but there are a lot of women out there who are scared and they don’t know how it’s gonna interact with their body.

[00:11:38] And so we looked at putting the best combination together. Through AI based on clinical studies, and we came up with four products. We call them meld, melding, science and Nature. That’s the brand because we’re backed by science, but these are all naturally occurring compounds. So we did this project and we put these, basically they’re gummies [00:12:00] together and you know, women are already taking C, B, D and THC for for endometriosis.

[00:12:06] And so. Our move supplement, move free. It has a cannabinoid in it called CBC, so that cannabinoid is very focused on inflammation and binding to the CCB two receptor, and we added to move free vitamin E. Because vitamin E also has significant anti-inflammatory effects. So this is really about mobility and pain.

[00:12:33] Stay calm is about stress. So that is C, B, D, and vitamin D. And then the third one, sleep well. A lot of women have problems sleeping. I take this every night. I wake up less, I have more deep sleep, and this is a cannabinoid called CBN and B12. So we added vitamins to these because women are already taking them, so it brings them in.

[00:12:53] It’s not as foreign. It’s like taking a vitamin versus taking cannabis. They look like a normal vitamin that you [00:13:00] would see in a shop versus you don’t have to go into a dispensary to get these things.

[00:13:05] Ellen Scanlon: The thing that’s been so interesting for me, when I take a lot of CBD, I can get to a point where I might feel like a little bit spacey or that anandamide the bliss feeling.

[00:13:15] Yeah. I might kind of just feel like a little bit blissful. It is not unpleasant, but if you are expecting. To feel nothing. CBD does have effects. And what I felt with MELD was it was almost like, it was like targeting my stress, but not bringing on any of the bliss, any of the like potential spaciness. And I don’t wanna overplay what a lot of CBD does because it is, it is very mild.

[00:13:43] But I am extremely connected to what’s happening because I’m sort of my own research project always. But I really felt like. The product was extremely effective. And maybe you can talk about how the supplementing and bringing different things, like what [00:14:00] is that doing? Because I am such an advocate for CBD, I tell so many people to use it and then they kind of are like, I don’t really feel anything.

[00:14:06] I don’t know. And it, it requires a bit of a commitment and I, I don’t know that I’ve cracked the code on getting people to believe it, but I feel like this meld product is closer because the effects. Felt very real to me.

[00:14:22] Caitlyn Krebs: Yeah. So with the MELD product, with stay calm, we spent a lot of time, I mean, we’re, you know, we’re scientists, we’re melding science in nature.

[00:14:31] We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the best vitamin to pair with it for stress. Also the dose and making sure it’s backed by clinical studies. And so you’re absolutely right. We wanted to bring cannabinoids into the mainstream, right? Make them accessible, reduce the stigma. And we hear the same thing from women who take sleep well, you know, they’re sleeping better.

[00:14:56] They’re not groggy in the morning like they are with some of the [00:15:00] other supplements or sleeping. Therapeutics that they’re using. And so we’ve spent a lot of time really understanding the science and biology behind these and making sure that it’s the right optimized dose and optimized experience for the, for the woman.

[00:15:17] And so it’s important, right? Because there are a lot of supplements out there that don’t have data behind them and that they’re not trustworthy. And so making something that physicians can trust and consumers can trust is the most important thing.

[00:15:30] Ellen Scanlon: If you’re curious about trying meld, don’t wait while supplies last.

[00:15:35] And just for how to do the pot listeners, you can try three. No high products designed to support your body throughout the day. Move free, stay calm, and sleep well. All for free. Go to meld science.com to sign up and receive your free product so that you can spend a day with meld. This is a rare chance to get early access to something that could really help [00:16:00] you and other women.

[00:16:02] Your feedback will directly support Nalu Bio’s goals to improve women’s health outcomes. I’ve tried meld. These products are great and I’m excited for you to try them too. Sign up for their newsletter on their website, meld science.com, and all the details are in the show notes. Visit the site today while supplies last.

[00:16:28] For lots more information and past episodes, visit do the pot.com, and that’s also where you can sign up for my Substack newsletter. If you like how to do the pot, please rate and review us on the podcast platform that you use for listening. It really helps more people find the show. Thank you to our producer Nick Patri.

[00:16:49] I’m Ellen Scanlan, and stay tuned for more of how to Do the Pot.