By Dr Chun Tang — MBChB (Manchester), MRCGP, MBA · Practising NHS & Private GP · Founder, Little Ox

The Little Ox stand at the Travel Entrepreneurs Event — London, April 2026.

What I Learned From a Roomful of Entrepreneurs Who Asked Me About Their Health

This weekend, the Little Ox team set up at a Travel Entrepreneurs Event hosted in association with our brand ambassador Kerry Katona. Kerry herself was unable to make it on the day, but the event went ahead with a strong turnout of UK business owners — many of them women in their 40s, 50s and 60s building successful careers in travel, hospitality, beauty and wellness.

I went along with the team. We expected the day to be about samples, brand visibility and a few new contacts. What it actually became was something more interesting — and more useful — than any of us anticipated.

The First Two Hours — and What Changed

For the first part of the day, while presentations ran, we waited at our stand. Honestly, the room wasn't quite sure why we were there. The brief introduction we'd been given hadn't fully landed, and Little Ox is a relatively young brand — most of the people there had never heard of us. There was polite curiosity, not much more.

Then the presentations finished. People started drifting over.

What followed was unlike any other founder event I have been to. The conversations weren't about what most consumer brands get asked at events like these — packaging, retail strategy, pricing, marketing. The conversations were medical. The room had quietly registered that the founder behind Little Ox is a 26-year NHS GP, and once that connection was made, what people actually wanted was a doctor's opinion on the things that had been quietly bothering them for years.

We made sure every person who came over left with two free samples — one of NMN Pure (our flagship product), and one of whatever else addressed the concern they raised. By the end of the day, we'd had genuine clinical conversations with most of the room, and we had collected emails from almost everyone there — including, charmingly, the bar staff who got curious about what we were doing.

The Three Conversations I Had Most Often — and What I Told People

What struck me as the day went on was how repeatable the questions were. Three concerns came up in roughly two-thirds of the conversations I had. They mapped almost exactly onto the cellular biology of being a successful founder in your 50s — and the answers, in each case, are well-supported by evidence and accessible without breaking the bank.

What Entrepreneurs Actually Need to Know About Cellular Biology

Underneath the three specific concerns — skin, sleep, metabolism — sits one biological reality that most people are not told clearly enough: NAD+ levels decline by roughly 1–2% every year from your mid-30s. By the time you are 50, you can have half the cellular metabolism substrate you had at 25. This is not a metaphor or a marketing line. It is a measurable, verifiable cellular phenomenon, and it sits behind almost every "I'm just getting older" symptom that successful, otherwise-healthy people in their 40s and 50s describe.

The skin changes that drove the collagen questions? Partly oestrogen-related, partly NAD+/sirtuin-mediated cellular repair slowing down.

The sleep difficulties? Partly hormonal, partly NAD+-regulated circadian clock signalling losing precision.

The metabolic shift? Partly hormonal, partly the cellular insulin sensitivity that NMN was shown in a peer-reviewed 2021 trial to specifically improve.

You can address each of these symptoms with targeted supplements — collagen for skin, magnesium for sleep, berberine for metabolism — and they will help. But the underlying cellular layer is the same in all three cases. Restoring NAD+ via NMN supports all three indirectly, alongside whatever specific intervention you add for the surface symptom.

This is the case that the world's most analytically rigorous founders — Sinclair (Harvard, takes 1g NMN daily), Huberman (Stanford, takes 1–2g daily), Bryan Johnson (Blueprint protocol) — have all arrived at independently. NMN sits at the foundation. Other interventions stack on top.

What This Event Confirmed for Me

Little Ox was founded on a simple belief: that high-quality, independently tested supplements should not cost £40 or £70 a month, and that real clinical advice should be available to people who would benefit from it. This weekend was a small but powerful confirmation of why that matters.

The room was full of successful women — entrepreneurs running real businesses, raising children, looking after parents, making things happen. They were not asking for shortcuts. They were asking for honest answers about what was happening in their bodies, and what — if anything — they could do about it. They appreciated being spoken to as adults, with real evidence, by someone who had no incentive to oversell.

That is the kind of conversation that converts attendance at an event into a brand someone wants to buy from a year later. Several people gave us connections to spas and wellness venues who might want to stock our range. The organiser has invited us back to the bigger event later in the year. And the email list we left with — including from people who had never heard of Little Ox before this weekend — represents a community of people who now have a personal connection with the founder behind the products.

The Bigger Point — Why This Matters For Anyone Building a Business

Whether or not you were in the room this weekend, the cellular reality is the same. Building a business in your 40s and 50s — at the age when your career has the most leverage and your responsibilities are typically heaviest — is happening on top of a biological foundation that is quietly changing underneath you. The NAD+ decline. The mitochondrial efficiency decline. The collagen synthesis slowdown. The sleep architecture changes. None of it is dramatic in any single year. All of it compounds.

The founders who maintain peak performance over the long arc of a business career are not the ones with superhuman willpower. They are the ones who notice these biological changes early, take them seriously, and build cellular support into their daily routine the same way they build any other operational habit. NMN is one of the simplest, lowest-cost, best-evidenced interventions available to that kind of person.

If you are running a business, and you are over 35, and you have been quietly noticing that your energy and recovery are not what they used to be — this is the conversation I would have had with you at the event if you had walked up to our stand. The good news is the answer is straightforward. high-quality NMN raw material, independently tested for purity. £9.99 a month. Take it consistently. Pair with good sleep and movement. Give it 8–12 weeks. See what changes.

Shop NMN Plus — from £9.99 → Shop Magnesium Glycinate — £9.99 → Shop Collagen Complex — £9.99 → NAD Level Test — £249 →

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. The conversations described reflect general clinical guidance given in a public event setting and should not replace personalised consultation with your own GP. NMN, magnesium, collagen and other supplements described are food supplements, not medicines. If you have an underlying health condition or take prescription medication, consult your GP before starting any new supplement regimen.