The Future of Genetic Testing & Supplementation - Mike Kesthely

What's up, Fitness Family? Welcome back to the Future of Fitness podcast and interview series. I'm your host. My name is Eric Malzone, and this is episode number 41. And I get to talk to Mike Castelli. And I was wondering if I got that name right, and I'm pretty sure I just nailed it. So Mike is the CEO and founder of Nova3 Labs. He is also an extremely experienced sports nutritionist. And I'm going to tell you all about this interview in a second, but I want you to do three things after you listen to this and hit pause and do them. So number one, please go to iTunes or Stitcher wherever you're listening to the audio. Subscribe to it and rank us favorably. That would be amazing. Number two, go to our YouTube channel under Fitness Marketing Alliance and subscribe to the show there. If you didn't know, we also do video. And number three, if you like this episode or any of the other episodes, please share them on social media and tag me, Eric Malzone. I'm on all the platforms Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, you name it, we have a presence there. So that would be great. I greatly appreciate it. So the thing that really fascinated me about this discussion was genetic testing and how that's coming into nutrition and exercise prescriptions. And it's really going to change the world. I mean, it's already here. Let's be honest. It's already here. And when you look at services like 23andMe, you can just uh, you know, send away for your genetic profile, and it's mind blowing. And it's only going to get crazier and it's only going to get faster. And if you're not keeping an eye on it, if you're within this field, you're crazy and you're going to miss out. So without further ado, let's get into it. Uh, Mike tells the story way better than I do. So this is episode number 41, Mike Costelli of Nova 3 Labs. Hey fitness fans, welcome back. It is the Eric with the Future of Fitness podcast. And I'm really excited for today's guest. I am Mike Costelli. Sorry, Mike. I'm going to say that over and over again. He is the CEO of Nova 3 Labs. And Mike is an absolute wealth of information when it comes to nutrition, supplementation, uh the science of the human body. So we're going to try to cut right to the crux of the valuable topics for fitness professionals. But before we do that, Mike, tell them, tell people who are listening who you are, what you do, who you serve, and then we'll get into the meat of everything.

Cool. Okay. Well, thanks for having me on, Eric. I really appreciate it. Yeah, so I am the CEO of Nova 3 Labs, and Nova 3 Labs is a nutritional consulting and supplement company. So we do two things. One, I design supplements, predominantly for the performance-based crowd. But a lot of the supplements do carry over into other demographics. And I do nutritional consulting, and that's really where everything started. I drank the CrossFit Kool-Aid back in 2006-2007, and really after that, I didn't look back. I started to, I've always been interested in nutrition, but I really got into it then. I got into the CrossFit world late in life. I was about 35, and I realized I needed to do a lot of things to keep up with the young guys. And one of them was nutrition. And I kind of poured my heart and soul into that. And and really long story short, um, my company over the past few years has gone through a number of evolutions. And originally I was uh dynamic nutrition, uh, that evolved into driven performance labs and that changed into Nova 3 Labs. Um, so that's that's how that came about. And initially started with just nutritional consulting. Um, one of the big catalysts, I guess, in my career was I got to work very closely with James Fitzgerald of formerly OPT, now OPEX, and that was from 2011 to 2014. So I got a lot of access to a lot of great minds, including James, and a lot of really high-end athletes, and that's kind of where everything catapulted from.

Yeah, I actually had the pleasure of working with you, I think it was circa 2012 when I first started working with James. Uh, he was coaching me, and you were the nutrition uh part of the service. And I I have to say, um I thought I knew bits and pieces about nutrition. You know, I was a CrossFit guy, I'm like, I know paleo, what else do I need to know? Right? A little bit of like just throw paleo at everything and it'll fix it. Exactly. Uh and then I got into the science of it with you and really refining what my own nutrition was. And I learned so much within a short period of time, and it changed really. I mean, I had you know low, you know, signs of adrenal fatigue that you you helped me work out of. I was just not eating enough, you know, carbohydrates, which at the time was just you know, you don't need carbohydrates, right? That was that wasn't for CrossFitters. Uh yeah, so it's you you you really uh you really helped me quite a bit. So um, you know, I just want to thank you for that.

Oh, yeah, you're welcome. Yeah. Yeah, but that's that's basically where everything started from. And and you know, to give a lot of credit, James's way, he introduced me to hormone testing with athletes. Um, he introduced me initially to the original supplementation protocols for athletes. So um those over the years have have changed dramatically, and that's why um my original company name was dynamic nutrition, because the nutrition industry is really interesting in that it's constantly evolving and constantly changing. And there's there's definite science in it, but it is it is always an ebb and flow and and and very dynamic and changing. What I did last year, what I did five years ago, is vastly different than what I'm doing today. And that's that's that's part of the intrigue is keeping up and seeing how we can improve with our nutrition and supplementation.

It's it's fascinating to me, Mike, because you know, we've humans have been eating food since we started on this planet, right? Nutrition is just this world of mystery and it's constantly changing. I I you know, I I it's uh it bewilders me at times. I mean, do you have any insight into why we really haven't nailed down nutrition for humans? I mean, I know we're gonna talk about genetic testing coming up pretty soon too, and how that's a huge piece of it. But um Yeah, what what what is it like how is it the way that the science is being done? Is it um like what is it about the industry where we're having it? Is it the individuality of it all? Like what is it about it that that's making it difficult to nail down?

Well, I think it's three things. And I think so, and I'll list them off just so I don't lose them in my head here. Um I think the first one is human beings are wired to get to from the shortest point from A to B. We're always looking for the magic bullet. Um, two, there's been a lot of misinformation and very, very poorly controlled science in the nutrition industry right from the start. And and three, it's the amount of information that we have accessible to us in this day and age, right? So if I go back to A, um, number one, we're wired to get from A to B the shortest point. And that really served us well in the primal setting, right? And that's why we evolved. We're we're very um adaptive and try to find the quickest way to kill an animal or get some food or whatnot. Um, I think in today's day and age, people are looking at, they're like, okay, how can I get these six-minute abs, six-pack abs, you know, okay, boom, I'm gonna do the keto diet. We're very extreme, right? We'll try to find something so extreme, implement it in our lifestyle, and think that that's the one thing that'll change. And whether that's keto or paleo or if it fits your macros or whatever, um, people will take things to an extreme and try to find the singular method that works best. And what we know to jump ahead here, we know that that doesn't actually work. You know, you need consistency in a well-rounded lifestyle for stuff to happen. Um, number two would be the misinformation. And this is there's some really, really good history behind this. Like if we go back and look at some of the history behind Ansel Keys, or you know, at the time when Gary Tobbs wrote um uh why is it good calories, bad calories? Um, at the time, we know essentially for all intent and purpose, that's a history book. And it might not be entirely accurate. There's been a lot of criticism thrown that way, but at the time when I read it, and I read it multiple times, you know, it really shed some light on how nutritional recommendations come about and they're they can be really poorly controlled. So there's that piece of it, right? You know, we've been told, eat this, and obviously that didn't quite work out well, right? And then number three, in today's day and age, the information we have available at our fingertips is just massive. Like, really, you can find anything you want on the internet in a matter of seconds. And while that's a really good thing, it can be extremely overwhelming for people. The number of people I have coming to consult with me already have a really good base knowledge, but they're confused. They're like, I know all this stuff about keto, about paleo, about supplementation, about macros, but I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to do with it. Tell me what to do with it. So people are looking for concise information. And I think that's why the nutrition industry is still very confusing for a lot of people. Yeah.

And I would definitely put myself in that category as you know, I have a, you know, when I especially want to start with you, and I had a broad knowledge of a lot, but I didn't really, it was just confusing. There was just so many things I could try, and you only have so much time to try things, right? And you have to give everything a certain amount of time to see if it works. So in your journey, Mike, when you you've gone from um nutrition consulting and now you've gone into supplementation, talking about that journey. What are the supplements that um you know, kind of the key ones that Nova 3 does, and and how was that getting that business off the ground? How did that go?

Yeah, I I like that term. Uh I think I used it last time, the reluctant entrepreneur. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I you know, I was I was sitting here at this very desk one day, and um, you know, in in my practice, I use I use a lot of different supplements with different clients. And and I had this, I had a few clients recently that had some fairly sick significant levels of you know, cortisol dysregulation and HPA access dysfunction. And I use a lot of different supplements from different companies. And and as I was sitting here, I was like, man, you know, I just don't like that. I have to use like one, two, three different supplements for really one purpose. And I I wonder if I could create one supplement that would work for these clients. And the planets kind of aligned in that I found a man, like I really had no idea what I was doing. I found a manufacturer, I had the formulation, turnkey production where they would do the bottling, the production, the labeling, everything. Like I just had no clue, right? And it worked out well. They were Canadian based and I'm in Canada, and it just happened. And the formula worked really, really well. And I would, I got really lucky on a number of fronts there. And from that, that was really what catapulted the the supplement side. After that, I was like, okay, I had an idea for a sleep supplement. I had a very specific idea of what I wanted to see in pre-workout supplements. You know, I really wasn't happy with 99% of the stuff on the market. And I wanted to, you know, part of this is honestly to be completely transparent, a little bit self-serving. Um, these are the like the supplements that Nova makes are the supplements that I want to use and that I use every day. And this is really what I wanted to bring to the market. And luckily for me, this resonated with a lot of the athletes that I deal with. So so that's that's kind of how it started. And and we've grown now, you know, we have a manufacturer, we have a shipper, um, and the manufacturer I I work with is is very, very knowledgeable. So we're able to bounce ideas off one another, and he can tell me, oh, you know, I can't get this or this source is bad. So we have a very close working relationship, which which is really important to me because um one of the things about the supplement industry is that it is really, really unregulated. Um and that's that's one of the things that I don't like, is that when I would look at a supplement, I'd be like, first thing I look at is the ingredients. And I'm like, okay, it has this in it, cool. And what I want to see is that it's labeled and it has the milligrams per serving of exactly everything in there. And a lot of the supplements I was looking at had things like proprietary blends, and they wouldn't tell you what's in there, right? Or you go to a website and you had to dig around for like 10 minutes to find supplement facts. I'm like, why don't they make this right out there? So one of the things we have on our website is that it lists every ingredient, and I've got all the published studies that I've looked at when I've been formulating, and I put those on the website. So it's completely transparent on why the ingredients are in there. So that's that's sort of the evolution of where the supplement end has come from.

Awesome. Yeah, that that's quite a journey too. And I I think, you know, like any entrepreneur, whether they're reluctant or not, right? A lot of it comes from many times it success comes from scratching your own uh itch, right? Finding something that you that you need, a problem you know in your life or something close to you that you need to solve, and then you solve it. And then turns out you're not the only one with that problem, right?

Yeah, and that's that's really been the journey. And it's been like when I say reluctant entrepreneur, I've I've never been in this for the money side of things. Uh now I understand the value of time and money, but it's it's always been about the passion of supplementation. Like I remember, you know, being like 14 years old and going down to like the health food store and like looking at all the stuff on the shelf and thinking, man, you know, I wonder what all this does and can this improve my life? And not the stuff a normal 14-year-old kid should be doing, but that's what I was into at the time, right? And you know, just trying to absorb as much knowledge as I could about it. But uh, and that's today, to this day, that's still there. Like, you know, like I we just and I I can't release it yet, but we've just created another formula for another supplement that'll be coming out that I'm super excited about, but it's something that's improved my life dramatically and it's worked incredibly well. And and really that's what it's about. It's about the passion. It's you know, it's not about the money or the company or whatever, right? It's it's just about helping other people and being passionate about what you do.

So yeah, I love that, man. So let's let's segue a little bit. Let's talk about, you know, if I'm a fitness professional, um, what do I what do I need to know about recommending supplements to my clients? You know, as far as like the common good, you know, how how can fitness professionals be be um an advocate for good supplementation and not overstep their bounds?

Yeah, that's a really good question. Um, when I initially started doing my consulting, I had like a phase one, two, three consult. Um, and you probably remember this. And you know, there's specific topics in phase one and two that I bridge, and then by the time we got to phase three, that was the supplementation. And I like to save that until the client had a really good base and handle on their food quality, their food quantity, et cetera. Um, and I think that's a pretty good um template to utilize with clients. The supplement industry is, and the amount of knowledge you have to have is massive, especially if you want to do no harm. And just because something's over the counter doesn't mean that it's not going to be potentially harmful to a client. There's certain clients that absolutely should not be using probiotics. Probiotics are over the counter, right? You think they're totally benign, but there's some people, it can mess them up extremely badly. Um so so to answer your question, what does what does the fitness professional need to know? Um, well, number one, you have to do your due diligence and try to educate yourself as much as possible. Um, number two, be comfortable saying, I don't know. Um, if a client comes to you and says, Hey, should I take the supplement? Um, don't say yes, don't say no if you don't know. If you don't know, say I don't know. I'll look into it. And then you need to research that. If you're not comfortable and you haven't prescribed those supplements, don't. Um, the one thing that people seem to forget, and this is this segues into why I'm a reluctant entrepreneur and I don't really promote my business quite well, um, is that supplements are a supplement. That's all they are. You do not need them, right? You do not need them. Are they potentially, you know, performance-enhancing, ergogenic? Can they improve your life quality? Absolutely. But um, in my seminars, I have this great image and it's a pyramid. And right at the very top, there's supplementation. And it's not at the top because it's the most important piece, it's at the top because it's the least important piece. It's that sort of if you think about the classic CrossFit triangle, you know, at the base, we've got nutrition and then we've got our conditioning. And, you know, as it gets up to sports specificity and at the top, you know, we'd have supplementation. It's it's not needed. So if you're not comfortable or you don't see a definite need for that supplement with a client, don't worry about it. That is not the make or break. Supplements are not the make or break in an athlete attaining optimal body composition or health or performance, right? There's other things that the groundwork needs to be laid prior. So that really doesn't answer the question. Um, you know, some of the good sources I'd say to look at would be like um examine.com. That's a really, really great resource that uh Saul and Curtis Frank put together years ago and it's really grown. Um it's a big compendium of a lot of the supplements that are out there and the research behind it. Um, another one would be like Subversity. Um, off the top of my head, I can't remember the name of the guy who writes for that. But basically taking science of supplementation, looking at the studies, seeing how it pans out in the real world. Uh another one would be ergolog, ergo e-r-g-o, uh, I think it's hyphen log.com. Um, similar to subversity, where they'll put out published studies, they'll talk about the supplementation, whether it's green tea extract or branch chain amino acids. Um, those would be my three go-to's if someone said, Hey, where can I learn more about supplementation? Um, prior to that, you had to be digging through PubMed. But um, it's a big, big, wide world. And if you don't feel comfortable with it, don't freak out about it. Um, it's only supplementation. Awesome.

So you work with a lot of athletes too, right? Especially in the world of CrossFit. You know, there's some trends. I mean, as of right now, today's uh this recording is December 13th, right? Yep. 2017. There's some trends going on. I know some things that we talked about prior to this to this recording. Uh, do you want to touch on that and kind of what you think people should know?

Yeah, uh, you know, one of the one of the topics right now, and it's kind of recently been a hot topic. I I wrote a little little blog about it, but um, it it's always been around. And it's one that I'm fairly passionate about is you know, does chasing performance as far as your training modality, does chasing performance always equate to optimal body composition? And this always stems back to um, I mean, I I predominantly deal with the performance-based athlete. I might have maybe one or two clients that are not performance-based, that are strictly, hey, I'm I want to look good in a bathing suit kind of people. But I've always been interested in the performance side of things. And um, but at the same time, every single, without a doubt, 100%, every single performance-based athlete is always concerned about body composition. And I think it's human nature. We want to look good. Um, performance-based athletes, especially in this day, 2017, you know, we're flipping into 2018 here. Social media is a very powerful presence. And to be a successful performance-based athlete, um, you have to have a good social media presence. That's part of it. It's not part of being on the podium, but it's part of the career process. So you're always under the limelight. So I understand where this comes from. Um, for some people, chasing performance does not equate with optimal body composition. And I've heard from some very knowledgeable coaches say the exact opposite that chasing performance will always equate to better body composition. You just need to train hard. Train hard, eat well, and yep, those abs will come. And that's absolutely not true. Um, training is a stressor, food is a stressor, caloric deprivation is a stressor, and everybody's gonna respond a little bit differently. And that really comes back to your hormones, how healthy you are, how you respond to that stress. Someone might do really well if they got phenomenal DHEA and testosterone to having you know fairly significant caloric deprivation and training. Boom, they might get shredded really quick. Other people, their body might freak out and be like, whoa, whoa, what's going on? I'm in a famine, I'm running from the bear. Okay, well, I better hang on to some of this body fat, or I won't let this body fat go. It's a very, very complex topic. Um, and to simplify it, I would just say it's very individually dependent. One person's stressor is another person's, you know, goal or or path to better abs and better biceps, right? So very, very individually dependent.

Awesome. Yeah, I've I've uh there's one trend that I can I can see for sure, not even a trend, just a fact, is that uh the more knowledgeable a coach gets uh within their field, right, the more often the answer to the question is it depends. Right. That is so true. That that's just the like if you're if like in your first couple years of being a fittest professional or coach, you have all the answers, but then as you keep going along the path and picking up years and decades, it's always it depends. And that's the only honest answer you could possibly give people. So uh I I love that, Mike. And I want to pick your brain on another topic too, because I I'm just fascinated with it is the future, right? The technology, the melding of supplementation and um all the technology that's coming out now. Where do you see some things going? Where what insights can you give us into what may be coming down the Row the next few years.

Yeah, I see, I see better and easier and more cost-affordable access to genetic testing. And then that genetic testing giving a highly individualized supplement regime for that person. And some there might be listeners out there who are screaming, oh, that already exists. And yeah, I've seen, I've seen something similar. You know, when you combine some of the data from, let's say you take your raw data from 23andMe, run it through some of the third-party programs, and they'll say, Oh, you know, you don't metabolize saturated fats very well, or oh, you because of this genome, you have a higher requirement for vitamin D. And it exists already in a very sort of rough, fragmented format. But what we're going to see is the ability for a company to take your data, run it through a third-party app, and say, boom, boom, boom, these are the these are the supplements you need. And and you know, I've seen I've seen stuff similar from let's say, um, I believe it's Genova Diagnostics. Um, maybe it's not Jenova, maybe it's a different lab. There's lots of different labs out there where I've seen individualized prescriptions come back. I don't necessarily agree with all of them because a lot of what I see on there is like very generic. It's like, oh, you need this level of vitamin B1, and you know, you got you require this much ascorbic acid, but they're not really testing your levels based on that. Um, that's where I see it going, right? Um, and yeah, it does kind of exist already, but but where I see it is being very streamlined and easy, right? And it might even get to the point where, boom, you know, you take a drop of blood from your own finger, um, you have an iPhone app that's plugged in and it tests that. And right away, right on your iPhone or your smartphone or whatever, it's telling you exactly what you're low and deficient in, what you're high in, where your 25 OHD levels are at that time. Like that's where the testing is going to go. Um I think some of the stuff we're seeing now is a little bit of paralysis by analysis. I do see overtesting happening. Um, this is a little bit of a tangent. Um, I am actually testing athletes as far as hormones a lot less than I used to. Um I think sometimes it can give either some false data or it doesn't exactly tell us what's going on. There might be more to that story than just the four points of cortisol and the DHEA and et cetera. So I don't think testing is always the best thing to do, but I do see that's where it's going for supplementation.

That's awesome. Yeah, I agree. You know, I you you have your functional diagnostic nutrition certification, right? And I did 15 years ago. And I started looking at reports, I started pulling um you know labs on people and things like that, and I noticed almost everybody came back suboptimal, right? It was like, well, am I gonna do this? If everybody's suboptimal, then what the heck, right? Like just what's the point? So I think, yeah, I think testing, um, I think there's a lot of opportunity to hone in that process uh and make it better. But it's it's scary cool some of the stuff that you're saying right now that could be coming down the pipe in the next five years and uh real-time biometrics stuff like that is just uh my my mind blows when I think about it. It's exciting, nerve-wracking a little bit too.

Yeah, it's very exciting for sure to see where we're gonna go with this.

So yeah, so let's talk about the future of your company. What's what's up with Nova 3 Labs? Where do you guys see yourselves going in the next few years?

Yeah, so what uh right just just around the corner here, we're gonna release our uh our mentorship program. And this is something we've been people have been hounding us for years and years and years, and and it's something I've wanted to create, but I realized if I was gonna do it, um, I wanted it to be done right. Um, I didn't want like a Mickey Mouse mentorship program or something without a very solid curriculum or textbook uh assigned to it. And and it's so it took a long time. And and one of my nutritionists, Kylie, um, probably the best nutritionist that I know, um, is is heading this up. And I'm extremely, extremely proud of the work that she's done on this. So that's right around the corner. Um so that's a big piece. Um we're still gonna continue offering our nutritional consulting to athletes. And there's lots of other companies popping up. Um, we've been doing it quite a long time. Um so I think our our nutritionists have a wealth of knowledge in that regard. And we do it a little different. It's not just, you know, email or templates or anything like that. Like we're doing face-to-face consulting, which I think is really important because the nutritional consulting always goes beyond food. You're always getting into life stressors and sleep quality and relationships. And it's I hate the term life coaching, but everything spins into if an athlete wants better body composition or performance, it's not just the food that affects that. It's everything in their life that affects that. So as a coach, you need to be able to dial everything in and understand where those stressors are coming from. And then as far as the supplementation end goes, yeah, so we have a few supplements we're gonna be releasing in 2018. Um we're expanding our line, obviously. Um we're adding adding a few more supplements, which I kind of want to keep under the wraps right now. Um But uh I think 2018 is gonna be an interesting year for us. We've been approached by a number of bit different people outside of Nova 3 Labs who want to do collaborations. So we're looking at that. Um people like the idea of a brand that stands behind science and isn't just pitched based on marketing. So um we've we've we've perked the ear of a few other folks out there, so they're interested in doing some stuff. So yeah, we'll just we're just gonna keep on keeping on and doing what we're doing. So I'm gonna do my stuff. I'm gonna play with the supplements and be the geek that I am. And then uh my business partner, Chrissy, um, I didn't mention her earlier. She's she's co-owner of Nova Three Labs. She's the one who does really all the hard work and runs the company from tip to tail and understands every iota of everything within the company. So yeah, so she is she's the lifeblood of the company, and I'm just the dork behind the computer.

So and uh Mike, where where do people find you? If they want to get a hold of you, if they want to ask you questions, where do they go?

Yeah, they can check us out on uh they can just go to nova3labs.com. Um if you're in Canada, you'll automatically be redirected to Nova3labs.ca. Um, same company, just our Canadian distributor in Canada. Um, you can get a hold of me at Mike at Nova3labs.com. Uh you can find me on Instagram, uh MikeDynamic. Um haven't changed it. That was my old name. So yeah, you can just fire me an email, shoot me a text, drop us a line on the website, and we'll get back to you. And chances are it'll probably be me. So I like I like that contact with the crowd.

So awesome. Well, Mike, I really respect the uh integrity and transparency you bring to an industry that tends to be very confusing for people. So uh keep up the great work, man. I appreciate your time and insight. This was a lot of of great uh knowledge for for fitness professionals and and people alike. So keep up the great work, man. I know you and I will be in touch soon. And uh thanks.

All right, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

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