Your cart is currently empty!
Our Story
By Scott Anderson
“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”
—John Dewey
A few years ago, before my wife Candyce and I started Scanderson Labs, I was formulating prebiotics for a company in beautiful Ohio.
At the time, very few people had heard of prebiotics.
It’s easy to confuse prebiotics with probiotics, but prebiotics are actually food for the good microbes, AKA probiotics, that inhabit your intestines.
Prebiotics are things like fiber and polyphenols, a fancy Greek word for “many phenols”. These are found naturally in veggies and fruit, where they provide color and flavor.
Fiber consists of linked sugars called oligosaccharides, a fancy Greek word for “a few sugars”. They provide structural stability so plants can grow tall.
None of our stomach acids or enzymes can digest these tough molecules. So they make it intact to the colon where trillions of microbes are waiting, rubbing their little cilia together, ready for the feast.
When you feed them prebiotics, these microbes secrete a lot of different substances, among them a special molecule called butyrate. Butyrate is both a food and a salve for the cells lining your gut.
This is how your microbes thank you for a nutritious meal.
Butyrate also makes its way to the brain where it helps the brain repair nerve cells and even grow new ones.
All this magic comes from prebiotics. It’s weird and wonderful.
A surprise about prebiotics
We noticed in our testing that people who took our prebiotics didn’t just have a better gut; they had a better attitude as well. Less brain-fog, more cheer.
If you’re a person who needs to surveil for toilets at all times, you can appreciate how fixing your gut might make you happier. But we saw these same changes in people who didn’t have obvious gut issues.
Our testers had significantly improved measures of mood and cognition. It was unexpected and exciting.
I scoured the journals to see if anyone else had noticed cognitive improvements with either prebiotics or probiotics.
Psychobiotics are born
I came across the work of John Cryan and Ted Dinan, and a gong was struck. These two prolific scientists from University College Cork had just coined a new term: psychobiotic. Akin to psychoactive drugs, psychobiotics refer to microbes that can lift your mood.
Recently, John and Ted added prebiotics to the psychobiotic club. Had I been making psychobiotics all along?
I was intrigued enough to get in touch with John and Ted, and they were gracious enough to talk with me. A friendship developed and I proposed that we write a book on this powerful gut-brain connection. To my delight, they agreed.
We convinced National Geographic that the time was ripe and they commissioned the book. A year and a half later, it was published as The Psychobiotic Revolution.
Our book takes you on a tour of your gut, showing you how microbes can work either with you or against you. It also follows the development of gut microbes from a newborn baby to an old poop.
It shows the many ways the gut and the brain communicate with each other.
The connection between the gut and the brain is changing the way people approach diet and psychiatry, not to mention overall health.
Our book was a surprise hit. We were blessed with wonderful reviews from the top researchers in the field.
“This authoritative yet engaging book provides up-to-the minute research and practical advice on the gut-brain axis, perhaps the most exciting area of science today. Written by some of the leaders in the field, it gives terrific insight into what is going on in the gut, how to change it to improve mood, and the largely unappreciated links between mental health and the gut microbiome.” —Rob Knight, Director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation, University of California at San Diego, author of Follow your Gut and Dirt is Good.
“Cryan and Dinan are at the forefront of scientific inquiry into the connection between our brains and our gut bacteria. We have been fans of their work for years and are delighted that they have translated their ground-breaking discoveries for the everyday reader…. No pseudoscience or exaggerated claims here, just solid scientific information that can benefit us all.” —Justin and Erica Sonnenberg, professors of microbiology, Stanford University, and authors of The Good Gut.
“Brilliant. Insightful. Highly readable…. Offering microbial-based solutions for the most pressing mental and physical issues, this book is a must read.” —Rodney Dietert, professor of immunotoxicology, Cornell University, and author of The Human Superorganism.
“Anderson, Cryan and Dinan have infused life into cutting edge research that is often still mired in the scientific language…. The authors take on a near impossible task, to translate 150 years of research into the infinite complexity of human behavior and make it digestible. This is brain food!” —Jack Gilbert, Professor, Department of Pediatrics and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and coauthor of Dirt Is Good
The prestigious journal Lancet said, “Overall, this is a great book that encourages you to take charge of your gut to optimize your mind and your mood. This is a book that you would reluctantly lend to friends, in the fear that they might not return it.”
This was spectacular praise from the titans of gut-brain research. It was heart-warming and humbling.
If you want to learn more about our book, psychobiotics, and the intriguing connection between the gut and the brain, check out the web page we set up for the book here.
We also have some articles right here at our website that explore psychobiotics in greater detail.
Buy The Psychobiotic Revolution right now at Amazon.
Books are cheap and they keep your mind limber. They also look great on that bookcase you use as a zoom background.
One of the big lessons from gut-brain research is that a diversity of microbes is the key to health. Like any other ecosystem, when you lose diversity, a few bully species can dominate.
At that point your gut microbes are no longer on your side.
Instead they look at you as lunch, and they attack the delicate lining of your gut. They burrow into your body and hitch a ride in your bloodstream. Your heart doesn’t know any better and pumps these nasties to every organ in your body.
“All disease starts in the gut.”
—Hippocrates
This kind of systemic inflammation lies at the root of almost all chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s, heart disease, obesity, colon cancer, and Alzheimer’s.
Astonishingly, these diseases and more start in your gut.
To prevent or hopefully cure these maladies, you need to restore a healthy diversity of microbes. And the way to do that is to eat a wide variety of fiber-containing veggies and fruit.
In our hectic world, that can be difficult.
The curse of fast food
Food manufacturers haven’t helped. In fact they are largely responsible for our current predicament. A clue to the problem is right there in the concept. I’m old enough to remember when food was grown, not manufactured.
For the last 70 years, manufacturers have been eliminating fiber from their foodstuffs in order to make them whiter and blander—the better to color and flavor them. That timing correlates well to the epidemic of obesity and depression clouding the land.
We started a company
In 2020, with my wife Candyce, I started Scanderson Labs to take advantage of everything I learned from John and Ted’s lab, as well as my own research. Having spent over a decade developing prebiotics, I turned my attention to how to use them to optimize mood and cognition.
I tested dozens of formulations to come up with a product that my wife, my kids, and I can use every day. We call it Clarity.
Boost mood and cognition by optimizing your gut health via the gut-brain axis. Vegan, soy-free, gluten-free, non-GMO.
It is tasty and contains a rich blend of fiber and polyphenols, and it works to keep our gut microbes happy and our minds clear.
Give it a try. You’ll know in a couple of weeks if it’s going to work for you.
Start with small doses, because it is potent. If you have a little gas, that’s because your good microbes are starting to reassert themselves.
Over time, they will collect a cooperative community of microbes that will help to neutralize the gas. After that, a scoop a day will keep the pathogens at bay.
Sweet offerings
A while ago my daughter Brooke, who has a PhD in microbiology and is a science advisor to Scanderson Labs, asked me to make a prebiotic sugar substitute. “I need something for my coffee,” she said.
That sounded like a splendid idea, especially considering that most sugar substitutes are artificial and not much better than sugar.
So we embarked on another research project to discover a mix of prebiotics that could be a one-to-one substitute for sugar.
Remember that fiber is composed of chains of sugar? So, it’s not surprising that some of them taste sweet. After a year of testing, we finally found a formula that was healthy and delicious.
Brooke said “It tastes better than sugar.”
We named it Preet.
Can a sugar substitute make you smarter? Preet is made with prebiotics designed to improve your gut microbes and thus your mental state via the gut-brain axis. All-natural and vegan, it’s the perfect one-to-one substitute for sugar in drinks and cooking.
Like Clarity, it is a blend of prebiotics designed to boost the diversity of gut microbes. It has turned out to be even more popular than Clarity, which is why you should listen to your kids on occasion.
If you are interested in optimizing your gut microbes to boost your mood and cognition, give our products a try.
And stay tuned; we’re working on exciting new prebiotic and psychobiotic products right now. We’re on a mission to get the fiber back into our lives, and we are thrilled with the feedback from our customers.
We hope you’ll join us in our quest for health from the inside out.