From the water, to the source.

My childhood was defined by illness. Chronic breathing difficulties, long stints in hospital, long stretches away from school, a lot of time on the sidelines while other children played. As a child you don't name any of that as limitation. You simply live it. And what it gave me, though it took years to understand, was the ability to observe.

I had to sit a great deal, and to be patient. From a hospital bed, or the edge of a field, you watch. You take in the whole of a thing rather than only your small part in it. And because breath was often short, I learned young to stay calm, to soften, to drop into something close to a meditative state simply to find air. I think of that now as one of the quiet gifts of my life. It gave me a deep sense of connection, to myself first, and through that to everything else.

I don't share this as a story of pushing through. There are people who meet real limitation and drive straight at it, and I had my own version of that. But the truer thing for me was learning to recognise the gift in the way I was built, rather than to fight it. That instinct, to turn inward and listen to what is true for me, has guided me ever since. It feels more needed now than ever, in a world that asks us to measure ourselves against everyone else and forget what is true for us.

The Call of the Deep

The water is where all of this became tangible. Against all conventional advice for someone with compromised lungs, I was drawn, again and again, to the ocean. I became a scuba instructor in Sinai, and later an underwater photographer and filmmaker, with a dream of exploring the world and showing people the immense beauty of its depths. For years the water was not only where I felt most free. It was where I grew strong for the first time in my life.

I dropped into the depths of the Red Sea, into the blue, along dramatic drop-offs. These were deep dives, not casual ones, into a landscape of extraordinary beauty. It was demanding, physical work: fighting currents, leading dives, carrying tanks. Through both scuba and freediving, I learned to regulate my breath and stay calm in the deep. And somewhere along the way, my lungs healed. The part of me that had defined my childhood became the strongest thing about me, and I have never had an issue with my lungs since. I think, without the language for it then, I was intuitively drawn to something like hyperbaric therapy in the deep, years before the world spoke of it that way. I would never suggest anyone take that risk. But it was mine to do. That underwater life carried me around the world, and in time to Mexico.

Seeking answers, building sanctuaries

The same instinct, to question the accepted way and seek a truer one, ran through everything I built next. One question sat underneath all of it: how do we nourish ourselves at the deepest level, while caring for the world we share? I built Sanara, a place in Tulum whose name means "you will heal." And I built The Real Coconut around food that was conscious, healing and quietly rebellious, first in Tulum and later across the United States, in restaurants and on shelves. I championed plantain, coconut and cassava, low-impact crops, as my hero ingredients, and set myself the challenge of a menu that turned away from the globally dominant, industrially mono-cropped staples, the soy, the corn, the wheat. Food that was good for us and good for the planet, at the same time. I even gave the question to a cookbook, and named it Nourish Yourself, Nurture Our World. The forms kept changing. The question never did.

The smallest life

More than a decade ago, that question narrowed to something very small. I became fascinated by marine phytoplankton, the microscopic life at the base of the ocean, among the oldest and most resilient living things on earth. There was a symmetry to it I couldn't ignore: this tiny, ancient life is the origin of breath itself, the maker of much of the oxygen the rest of us depend on. The thing I had spent a life reaching for turned out to begin here.

I'll admit something I only fully understood recently. For years I held all of it in my mind as, simply, "marine phytoplankton." My old cookbook even has recipes that call for phytoplankton powder as though it were one settled thing. I knew the strain I used then by name, Nannochloropsis gaditana, yet I had no real idea that beneath that single name sits an almost unimaginable diversity, hundreds of thousands of strains, of which only a handful have been studied at all. We have seen the very tip of the iceberg. I didn't know that then. I only knew I had an affinity for it, and a fascination that wouldn't leave me.

From a drink to a discipline

Years ago I served phytoplankton in drinks in my restaurants, something I have still never seen anyone else do, and people loved it. But the thing that changed everything for me was a shift in understanding: that the way forward was not simply more of a good idea, it was precision. A single strain, grown in a controlled environment, where the mechanism, the quality and the purity can genuinely be understood and verified.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. So much microalgae is widely available now, the spirulina, the chlorella, the blue-green algae, even things labelled simply "marine phytoplankton," and much of it may do real good. But unless you know exactly where and how it was grown, you are trusting a name, not a standard. People are waking up to this. The questions I hear now are about third-party testing, heavy metals, real scientific validation. Those are exactly the right questions, and they are the ones we built phytovive to answer.

Where I see this going

So this is where I've arrived, and it feels less like a departure than an arrival. phytovive takes the instinct of a lifetime and gives it rigour: the oldest, smallest life on earth, cultivated with precision, studied properly, brought into the body to support what it already knows how to do. Longevity, from the source.

And I believe this is only the beginning. The world of marine microorganisms is one of the largest and least explored libraries of life we have, with a great deal still to teach us about our own health and the health of the planet that holds us. That is the bigger picture I keep returning to. Not a single product, but a way of being: caring for ourselves at the highest level so we can keep showing up, present and purposeful, and caring, in the same breath, for the world we share.

I'm so glad you're here for it.

With care,

Daniella