Best Job in the World
Who would like a job where you get to go to great sporting events, nights at the opera and eat in London’s best restaurants. All this and get it paid for by your employer? Having a night out on the pay-roll effectively.
If so, then become a corporate lawyer because that’s what you get, as much of it as you can take or arrange. In inner circles, this is called, unsurprisingly, as selling your liver for the Firm.
I did this on or off for about 25 years after training with a boutique banking firm. Mixing with sports personalities, investment bankers, securities traders and City accountants and entertaining them at the Firm’s expense was literally part of the job. If not the most important part of the job.
If you had the knack of building close relationships then the theory was that you would be the lawyer “your contacts” would pick up the phone to. Whenever they had a legal quandary or better still a transaction requiring legal structuring, advice and documents!
However, if you do this a lot over many years then you will feel the toll eventually. In my Founder’s blog—here—you will get the full story of how sense* started as a result.
Getting a Head’s Up
But today I want to tell you more about the early stages of product development, namely the building of sense* for having a night out. Without any training or expertise, I set out to find a way to assist the body deal with excess alcohol.
It started after entertaining a few clients at an international rugby game in Cardiff (being Welsh this was one of the highlights of the year).
The resulting hangover was equally stupendous (not!). I had just separated from my wife and had no-one to answer to and thus was living quite large. But ended up (as you generally do) feeling very sorry for myself on Sunday morning! After all alcohol is a depressant and needs to be taken seriously.
Not to be out done though and based on my belief that there is always a cure somewhere on the planet for any ailment, I took to the internet. It didn’t take me long (which was good because I doubt whether I would have maintained the interest level too long at that time!).
What I found was a number of relatively old scientific papers explaining how the body processed alcohol.
It explained the substances that we all use to do the processing and how to take the ingredients together before and during drinking.
This is to enable you to target the real nasty toxin “acetaldehyde” which is 30 times more toxic than alcohol itself.
Basically, I found out that all these ingredients were readily available. If you provided your body with enough of these ingredients, it could keep up with the amounts that you drink. Metabolising the alcohol so you didn’t produce the toxin that gave you a hangover.
Finding a Scientist with a Helping Hand
Really?! Is it that simple? Why hasn’t someone produced a pill that did all of this? Surely, there is a catch.
Never one to be deterred, I took the details of the scientist who produced one of the papers and emailed him. It was a long time ago so he probably wouldn’t get it.
But lo and behold, he comes right back with an answer and seems really pleased to hear from me. I asked him all the questions above and he tells me that this was no trade secret.
Is society ready for a hangover pill?
In fact there had been some attempts to commercialise one of his formulations but he felt that perhaps the time wasn’t right.
Also it seemed society didn’t want to give people the ability to drink and get off scott-free. This has been born out by all the research that we have done too. Drinking is a complex subject it would appear!
The mortar and pestle approach
However, I knew how to put my hands on supplements. So when the US scientist sent me his own personal hangover formula, I went straight out and bought as many of the ingredients that I could find.
I found my mortar and pestle and literally ground down the different ingredients he suggested. I then tested it on myself and friends and family. It worked brilliantly even if it took a few bad Sunday mornings to get the mix just right!
Imagine, having a night out and being able to drink with impunity. Why hadn’t anyone come up with this before. I was amazed. What to do?
The Healthy Option
Well my body decided this for me, it called time on my lifestyle and I ended up fighting an auto-immune disease called multifocal choroiditis.
Basically I nearly went blind. My immune system was eating my retinas in both eyes (the part that projects the image that your brain sees at the back of your eye).
Small holes caused scarring on the back of my eye that resulted in me having reduced sight down to one line on a computer screen. Eventually, I got through this, as you can read in my founder’s article here.
So having discovered the holy-grail, my new self didn’t want to go out drinking all the time or to simply benefit from other people’s vices. I now wanted to help people through the ups and downs of life and to share the knowledge I had obtained by getting well. I wanted to offer healthy options for your lifestyle in the form of other health supplements.
However I still like to drink but just much less
Why not be able to enjoy a night out, particularly if you, like me get really horrendous hangovers on amounts of drink that others simply breeze on through! That’s just not fair.
Also, alcohol is bit like a two-faced friend. Great when you are out on the Town, encouraging you to have a great time – more drinks! Hang out with friends and meet new people – more drinks and then, have fun dancing -more drinks!
But the next morning you find out that alcohol is no longer your best friend but actually has an insidious side. All those things that help you have a good time. Lowering social inhibition, also lowers your capacity for judgement, doesn’t it?
It is the only product on the market that has an inbuilt ability to make you buy more of the same product when you don’t really need it. And then you wake up in the morning feeling like rubbish, self-esteem through the floor. Wondering what follies you may have done the night before.
Well the biggest folly is that you have literally just doused all your key organs in a pretty nasty toxin.
Everyone deserves protection from this two-faced friend don’t you think. I certainly do, and so I didn’t ditch all my previous work and sense* for a night out became a reality. But as part of a range of healthy, natural food supplements for Your Lifestyle. No matter what you get up to.
But always remember Drink Sensibly! See our nutritionist’s article here for tips on how to look after yourself when having a night out. Alcohol needs to be treated with respect, it is a toxin but having a night out can still be fun!
Enjoy!
