Jeffrey Bland started Big Bold Health six years ago with big dreams and bold objectives for his line of dietary supplements. The company is a culmination of 50 years of experience in science and nutrition, and Bland is going for a grand finale, hoping to build the business into a multi-million dollar juggernaut in the next few years.
In July, Big Bold raised $3 million and shared preliminary results from a scientific study on its flagship product, a supplement derived from Himalayan Tartary buckwheat. The product claims to “bring your immune system into rhythm with the raw strength of nature” and costs $82 for a two-month supply.
Big Bold is part of America’s booming dietary supplement industry, which is worth an estimated $60 billion and is expected to keep growing. Health aisles at the grocery store are stocked with a vast number of products to support and boost just about anything. The selection online is even more extensive.
However, the supplement industry operates with limited scrutiny, and medical experts express mixed views on whether the benefits outweigh the costs of these products. Because dietary supplements are regulated as foods and not drugs, they don’t undergo the rigorous clinical study required for pharmaceuticals.
There were 4,000 products on the market in 1994 when Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act to oversee the industry. Now there are more than 100,000.
Despite questions about the sector, Big Bold is gaining traction and seeking scientific evidence to back its assertions of health benefits. Its products have been endorsed by Mark Hyman, a popular figure in the diet-related health sector, and the startup received funding from S2G Ventures, a Chicago-based venture capital firm focused on innovation in food and agriculture. Initial investments largely came from Bland and his wife. The company has 10 employees.
Over his career, Bland has started more than a dozen companies. He launched Big Bold Health to try to understand the origins of chronic disease.
“I said ‘OK, let’s give it one more shot. Let’s focus our attention,'” Blend said. “I’ll be an angel investor in my own idea and let’s see what we can do.”
The Big Bold backstory
Bland trained as a biochemist and directed nutritional research at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine at Oregon State University in the early 1980s before turning to business.
He has written several health-related books and founded multiple institutes to educate medical professionals and the public on “functional medicine,” a type of alternative medicine that examines the root cause of health symptoms.
Big Bold Health is headquartered on Bainbridge Island, just outside of Seattle. Its quiet offices sit in a business park tucked off the quaint main street, but the products are all sold online where consumers can take a quiz to match them with their supplements. Website visitors are asked about their fatigue, stress, cognitive function, and whether they’re concerned that “immune cells may be attacking healthy cells” in their bodies.
The startup’s star offering is its Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat line, which includes flour, sprouted powder and several supplement blends, and it also sells fish oil-based products and probiotics for the gut microbiome.
Himalayan Tartary buckwheat is a flowering plant native to northern China. It’s related to common buckwheat but tastes more bitter and thrives at higher altitudes. Buckwheat is rich in polyphenols, which are compounds that plants produce to protect themselves against infection and environmental stress. Studies show that polyphenol-rich diets can boost health, but there’s no recommended dose for the compound.
Bland said he discovered Tartary buckwheat in the footnote of a research paper on hypertension that touted its ability to stimulate immune function.
“It just lit me up with interest,” said Bland.
In what he calls a “serendipitous” series of events following the discovery, Bland met a researcher in China studying Tartary buckwheat and found a farm in upstate New York that grew it. Big Bold bought the farm and became the sole producer of Himalayan Tartary buckwheat flour and sprouts in the U.S., according to Bland.
Although there are many distributors of common buckwheat flour in the U.S., Big Bold appears to be the only domestic source of Tartary buckwheat flour. There are other companies making supplements from Himalayan Tartary buckwheat and it is also available as tea.
Weighing the supplement options
Roughly three out of four Americans take supplements, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Manufacturing companies are responsible for making safe products and cannot market supplements to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent disease. Experts say that supplements’ results vary.
The products can help fill in nutritional gaps for people with specific medical conditions and dietary restrictions, said University of Washington dietician Kelly Morrow. She has several patients with Parkinson’s disease who benefit from B vitamins, and studies show that turmeric can help protect against neurodegeneration.
But it’s important not to overstate the potential impact of a supplement, she said, calling it a “gentle nudge” compared to medicine, which is more of a “shove.”
Judy Simon, a clinical dietician at the UW, also takes a measured approach to supplements.
“The first thing I look at as a practitioner is what they are selling and how much it costs,” said Simon, who added that she has patients spending hundreds of dollars a month on supplements that have many of the same ingredients, making them redundant.
Seasonal produce and foods, such as buckwheat soba noodles, have a lot of beneficial nutrients, including polyphenols, Simon said. Because buckwheat is cheap and easy to incorporate into a diet, she’s unconvinced that a supplement is necessary.
The National Institutes of Health tracks safety information in a database of more than 178,000 supplement labels but neither the NIH nor the FDA regulate efficacy, offering little guidance to consumers who are left to navigate an ocean of proposed benefits alone.
Big Bold’s Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat supplement, HTB rejuvenate, costs $82, the two-pound bag of flour costs $32, and the sprouted powder is $45.
“That buys a lot of fruits, vegetables and whole grains,” Simon said.
‘We know there’s something here’
Big Bold drew on previous studies by other researchers to design its products, citing clinical trials as the scientific basis for its probiotics and fish oil. But data on Himalayan Tartary buckwheat is limited, so the startup funded a clinical study on the supplement’s impact.
The study tracked 50 participants who took HTB rejuvenate for 90 days and looked for changes in gene expression at sites in the genome associated with immune function and longevity. The results were posted in July on a preprint server, where researchers post scientific papers before they have been peer-reviewed by outside researchers or accepted for publication in a scientific journal.
Andres Cardenas, a Stanford University epidemiologist who is not affiliated with Big Bold, noted several limitations to the study. Cardenas found it did not have enough participants to be conclusive and lacked important neutrality controls, which account for the placebo effect and other external influences that might skew the results.
Cardenas said the study’s approach was not “problematic” per se, but might “introduce some biases.” He called the results “interesting” and said he’d like to see a more comprehensive follow-up.
Stanford nutritional genomics researcher Lucia Aronica did not comment on the Big Bold study specifically, but cautioned consumers against attaching too much meaning to a single measure of health when the net effect matters more. With so much variability and nuance, diet and lifestyle studies are complicated, but Aronica said it can be dangerous to fixate on a specific genetic target without context.
Calorie restriction, for example, can activate biological pathways that appear to slow down the rate at which cells age, she said. However, depriving the body of nutrients can pose serious risks over time.
Although food can provide essential nutrients, many people’s diets have nutritional holes.
“In an ideal world, people would be eating an incredible, diverse range of plant-based foods and healthy foods each day, three times a day,” said Austin Perlmutter, Big Bold’s director of science, research and development.
But because that’s not the world we live in, Perlmutter said, Big Bold is looking for the “next best alternative.”
Three years after launching its Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat line, Big Bold reports having thousands of customers and has attracted influencer support for its supplements, which Perlmutter defended as more cost-effective than competitors and priced to reflect the high quality of the ingredients.
Perlmutter acknowledged the shortcomings of the recent study and said this was the first step in figuring out what to look for in future research. The startup is now studying how different growing strategies impact nutrient levels in the buckwheat. To understand the benefits of the products, Big Bold would need to do a larger study like Cardenas recommended incorporating meaningful controls. Perlmutter said they are looking into this, but the timeline is unclear.
“We know there’s something here,” Perlmutter said. “We just don’t know exactly what it is.”