Dripping with all the health and beauty benefits
MANILA, Philippines — Health is wealth, and many of us understand this today more than ever. With the rise of mindful eating at home and home gyms come nutritional supplements, and local tastemakers like Apples Aberin and Richard and Ruffa Gutierrez and even doctors themselves aren’t just getting them from tablets and capsules, but straight into their bloodstreams via infusions.
Locally, IV therapy used to be associated with “Gluta," shorthand for glutathione, usually mixed with Vitamin C, but real talk, not all drips are created equally, and not every provider is giving it to you potently and safely. Wellbeing is the new goal to aspire to, with beauty being a desirable bonus.
Reviv is a UK brand focused on this. They have administered over 500,000 infusions with clinic branches on six continents, 41 countries and 90 locations, with Manila being the sixth branch in Asia, after Hanoi, Delhi, Lahore, Karachi and Hong Kong. Launched while the city was in community quarantine last year, Reviv started operations here with a spacious and comfortable mobile van before opening its flagship in Bonifacio High Street, all observing careful safety protocol for the staff and patients. It’s a big team of over 250 recently joined by Max Johnson, Platinum Fitness gym co-founder, as well as North Face founder and CEO Kenneth “Hap” Klopp.
Reviv has infusions that range from hydration to immunity boosting to beautifying, but because everybody’s different, a medical consultation with a doctor takes place before every appointment. To learn more about it, we spoke with Dr. Michael Barnish, Reviv’s head of genetics and nutrition.
Ystyle: We get nourishment from food and oral supplements, so who are the drips for? What added value do they have?
Dr. Michael Barnish: We are absolutely designed to get our required nutrition from our food. It is how we are designed. Supplementation, however, has become heavily relied upon throughout the world, to be able to meet our requirements. Our world is increasingly more toxic, with exposure to more and more chemicals, industrial solvents, pesticides, disruption of electrical devices and pollutants finding their way into our food, drinking water and air we breathe. This helps to use up a lot of the body’s nutrient stores as it works hard to detoxify itself from this attack. We lead more stressful, busy lives, again creating a further depletion in nutrient stores. Couple this with poorer, more convenient processed food choices, industrialized farming techniques and overuse of soils, and the food itself is less nutrient-dense than you may expect. This is a global pandemic and can be seen across the world. Therefore, supplementation does become important.
Supplementation, I believe, is one solution, although considerations of what to supplement should always be done under professional guidance. What IV therapy offers is an extremely fast and effective way of improving nutrient levels in the blood, and for many nutrients, this means increased cellular levels. IV therapy bypasses the absorption rules of the gut to allow for higher dosing (that is safe). Under medical guidance, it is now entirely appropriate for people to safely undergo IV therapy to help correct these nutritional deficiencies quickly, so that individuals can improve their protection, with the nutrients, from the increasingly toxic environment and poor food quality. For people that are not functioning optimally, the benefits here are the resolution of their symptoms and reaching their health goals much faster. Of course our medical professionals will also implement lifestyle changes, our approach is a systemic one, not just focusing on one area of nutrition. After all, we are specialists in personalized nutritional solutions.
We now also live in an era where we can determine our genetic weaknesses and have knowledge on how to overcome them, often with the increased dosing of micronutrient intake, revolutionizing the recommended daily allowance determined on a population-based scale.
How did Reviv come up with the vitamin drip combinations and how do they work together?
The infusions were designed using an expert panel of scientists, doctors and pharmacists to determine the most helpful combinations for supplementing with key nutrients for our different customer groups. Not all nutrients can be mixed together, so careful considerations of ingredients must always occur. Once designed, the infusions underwent vigorous laboratory testing for sterility, density, endotoxin formation, particulate formation, pH and osmolarity to determine their safety. Even our personalized IV, designed based on someone’s genetic need, is laboratory tested and we are one of the only companies in the world to make this commitment to safety. Reviv also wanted to offer recovery infusions, for symptom management of minor illness. For this the doctors designed an amazing blend of nutrients, within the IV fluid, coupled with some commonly used medications, to alleviate symptoms of minor illness, such as cold and flu. The same safe laboratory process, always being adhered to.
Have our nutritional needs changed from before the pandemic happened, and how are Reviv’s drips addressing that?
I believe this pandemic is just highlighting the greater pandemic of nutritional depletion and increased toxin exposure. I think for the first time, with no treatment for COVID-19 set in stone and with global vaccination efforts not really across the starting line yet, people have begun to look at their health and how they can improve it. We live in a golden age of information and so people are reading about the benefits of nutrients and exploring their options, including in IV therapy and nutrigenomics like never before. Our nutritional needs have not changed, the nutritional environment and issues have been around for decades, possibly with a slight worsening of the situation. It is more now that people see their greater need for nutrients, brought on by this pandemic. Our IV service is almost a decade old now and was always there for nutritional support. It has taken a global virus, that has no easy treatment regime, and in the early days, no vaccine, to see a shift in more people considering and approaching nutritional services like IV therapy. IV therapy offers a fast and effective way of increasing the body’s nutrient stores.
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Reviv is located in One Bonifacio High Street Mall, Bonifacio Global City Taguig or book the mobile van. Contact Reviv at (0917) 5673848.
