Why I Built Veraroot

What happens when a pharmaceutical research scientist applies real evidence standards to the performance nutrition industry

For 24 years as a research scientist I designed studies, evaluated real-world evidence, and made sure findings held up to scientific scrutiny before they influenced anything important. That was my standard at Eli Lilly and Company, one of the most respected pharmaceutical companies in the world. Every claim had to survive peer review. Every conclusion had to be supported by the weight of evidence. Every finding had to be grounded in evidence that could withstand scientific, medical, and regulatory scrutiny.

That standard wasn't optional. It wasn't a preference. It was the floor below which nothing was acceptable.

When I left Lilly in 2025, I had time — maybe for the first time in my career — to turn that same lens on something I'd been quietly curious about for years. I'm a serious endurance athlete. I've always cared about nutrition. And I'd always had a nagging suspicion that the performance nutrition industry wasn't operating anywhere near the standard I was used to.

I was right. It was worse than I expected.

What I Found

The performance nutrition industry is largely unregulated at the product level. The FDA doesn't approve dietary supplements before they reach the market the way it approves pharmaceuticals. Manufacturers are responsible for ensuring their own products are safe and accurately labeled, which in practice means many aren't.

What I found when I started evaluating products the way I'd evaluate a clinical study:

Proprietary blends that hide ingredient doses. A proprietary blend lists the ingredients but not how much of each is included. This is legal. It's also a way to use a small, ineffective amount of an expensive ingredient while still being able to list it on the label and charge a premium for it. Without disclosed doses there is no way to evaluate whether a formulation actually delivers what the research supports. That's not a standard Veraroot will accept.

Third-party certification treated as optional. NSF Certified for Sport®, the gold standard for supplement verification, requires independent laboratory testing to confirm that what's on the label is actually in the product, that nothing on the World Anti-Doping Agency banned list is present, and that the facility meets quality manufacturing standards. Most supplement brands don't do this. The ones that do are worth knowing about.

Marketing dressed up as science. Ingredient X "supports" performance. Compound Y "promotes" recovery. These are structure-function claims regulated by the FTC and they don't require clinical evidence to make, which is why they're everywhere. In pharmaceutical research, a claim without evidence is a claim that doesn't exist. In the supplement industry, it's standard practice.

Nutrition content promoted by influencers with no training, no credentials, and no accountability. Nobody asking whether the claims actually hold up. Products endorsed without evidence, sold to athletes who deserve better.

No source of truth for serious athletes. Despite thousands of products and brands, there is no marketplace where every product has been independently verified against a non-negotiable evidence standard. Athletes who care about quality are left to filter, read labels, and guess, or trust brands that have every incentive to market rather than inform. A curated marketplace where every product is guaranteed to pass the same rigorous bar simply doesn't exist. That gap is what Veraroot was built to close.

What Serious Athletes Deserve

Serious athletes invest significantly in their training. They spend thousands of dollars on race entries, equipment, and coaching. They track their watts, their heart rate variability, their sleep. They are not casual consumers who don't care what they put in their bodies. Whether they're chasing a Boston qualifier, a podium finish, or simply performing at their best as they get older, they bring the same intensity to their nutrition that they bring to everything else.

They deserve performance nutrition products held to the same standard as any other health science. They deserve a curated marketplace where every product has been independently verified, not just claimed to be high quality but actually tested and confirmed. They deserve to shop without having to filter, read labels, or guess whether a product is what it claims to be.

That resource didn't exist. So I built it.

The Veraroot Standard

Every product in the Veraroot marketplace passes a specific, non-negotiable bar before it appears on this site:

Third-party certified — independently verified for purity, label accuracy, and banned substances. NSF Certified for Sport is the benchmark — the gold standard for athletes who cannot afford to put an unverified substance in their body.

Simple ingredients — no proprietary blends, no fillers, no ingredients that exist to pad a label. Fewer ingredients is better. Simplicity is a sign of confidence in a formulation.

Backed by science — grounded in peer-reviewed evidence, not trending ingredients or anecdotal endorsements. I spent 24 years holding scientific findings to the highest evidence standards. That standard applies here.

Plant-based — not because of a dietary philosophy, because the evidence supports plant-based formulations as the cleanest fuel for performance and longevity. The science doesn't care about your dietary identity. Neither does Veraroot.

This standard applies equally to every product in the Veraroot marketplace. It doesn't change based on partnership agreements, commission rates, or what's popular. A product either passes or it doesn't.

What Veraroot Is

Veraroot is an evidence-based performance nutrition company for serious athletes. The source of truth for performance nutrition, a curated supplement marketplace where every product is independently verified against the same evidence standard I spent 24 years applying to pharmaceutical research. No filtering required. No label reading. No guesswork. If it's here, it passed. And this, Field Notes, is where I'll share what the evidence actually says about performance nutrition, supplementation, and what it takes to perform and recover at the highest level as a serious athlete.

The name is the promise. Vera is Latin for truth. Root is the foundation everything grows from.

Rooted in Truth. Fueled by Data.

Welcome to Veraroot.