Hi,

My favorite origin story is Fitbiomics, the company behind the V-Nella probiotic. Yes, they beat Spiderman. Suck it, Spiderman.

Back in the late 2010s, a group of researchers from Harvard took poop samples of marathon runners before and after the Boston Marathon. Yes, please. And the research (which was eventually published in Nature Medicine) showed that Veillonella atypica was elevated post race in the fastest runners. That could be an incidental finding, right?

The researchers followed up, finding a potential mechanism--enhanced lactate utilization in the gut. After Nature Medicine published their work, the researchers peaced out of academia and started Fitbiomics. Science, meet capitalism.

The world of research on probiotics is quite good (we did a big overview of that early in 2026), but most of that research faces a big problem: the gut microbiome is weird as heck. It changes rapidly, and those changes might be related to everything from performance to sexual function to even mood (the gut-brain connection seems real!). But it’s rarely as simple as saying “this change causes this outcome,” since the confounders distort most of the individual signal. 

V-Nella harnesses the research for an allegedly “fatigue-reducing” probiotic. Does it succeed at that mission? We don’t know for sure. Just like at the Boston Marathon that started this whole adventure, gut microbiota changes so rapidly that it’s too complicated to make definitive statements.

But there is promising research. For example, a pre-print study (before peer-review) looked at a 4-week supplementation window for 146 athletes, finding that Veillonella atypica was “associated with reduced day-to-day fatigue interference and increased voluntary physical activity, with convergent evidence of sustained behavioral engagement in mice.”

What about performance? The scientific jury is out, likely behind the courthouse doing burpees or something. Anecdotally, lots of the pro athletes I coach take V-Nella, and they also have been running world-class performances. Are those related? I’ll give you the answer that might always characterize probiotic research until there are breakthroughs in how we understand these chaotic systems: maybe or maybe not, but when you pool together enough people, it seems more likely than not to help some athletes. 

Either way, how cool is it that we can isolate microbiota associated with performance and health, and that it may even enhance motivation? Weird stuff! Uncertain stuff! Scientifically sexy stuff! 

My guess is that the world of probiotics rapidly advances in the next 20 years. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re all taking individualized daily probiotic pills for health, performance, and longevity while our AI robot gives us pedicures or whatever. 

Until then, I love V-Nella. And hey, it may improve my motivation to go out and get that pedicure I’ve been putting off.

- David