Franco Cavaleri’s unique combination of body-building experience and biomedical research is providing groundbreaking strategies for athletes. Franco’s experience in the gym, crafting his body for competition, instills in him an understanding of the discipline, sacrifice, effort, and strategy it takes to become a successful athlete at all levels.
Cavaleri began weightlifting at a young age to improve in his chosen sport, soccer. He wanted to add muscle tone to compete. That wasn’t his only reason, unfortunately. He also needed to make himself less of a target for school and neighborhood bullies.
“I began to teach myself how to overcome this physically and mentally,” Franco says. “I did a deep dive to learn more about fueling physical and mental performance at first for survival, and that eventually led me to succeed in business.”
This early successful foray into research changed his career and his path. Franco not only became fit and competitive in bodybuilding, but he also may have saved his own life due to his research in nutraceuticals. Franco continued entering body-building competitions.
“Within a year, I had won Mr. Vancouver, Mr. British Columbia, and Mr. Western Canada, just applying knowledge and hard work to get there.”
Cavaleri was studying human nutrition and performance at the University of British Columbia in his undergrad years. He was working on curcumin, extracted from the spice turmeric, to fine-tune its anti-inflammatory properties when he was diagnosed in 1991 with chronic ulcerative colitis. He had been preparing to go to California and compete in Mr. North America. Doctors recommended surgery to remove much of his large intestine.
Cavaleri realized that this incident had happened two months earlier and slowly progressed when he had stopped taking the curcumin compound he had been researching.
“I had been working with curcumin since my first to second year at the university to try and optimize its activity,” Franco says. “It was ready. At that time, it was a rudimentary herb very few people used or even knew about. I knew it had anti-inflammatory activity based on research that had already been published, so I began to study it further. And lo and behold, without knowing it intimately at first, I could see that it was taking the edge off of my disease.”
He continued research on curcumin and taking the supplements he’d developed. A year later, Franco Cavaleri won the IFBB Mr. North America contest in Redondo Beach, California.
Franco knew he couldn’t continue in the bodybuilding arena as before because he knew something would ‘break’ in his health. He cut his losses with this high profile win and started a sports nutrition company launched off the marketing platform. He worked on various compounds, including the curcuminoid. He built a successful company within three or four years and was able to fund research to advance his knowledge and eventually sold it to a public company. That’s when he began to focus on the research with a new vigor.
“I stayed in the training and fitness arena, not competitively, but continued with a focus on optimizing fitness and biological age. I used the corporations I’d created and sold to larger firms to fund my research. And that was the goal,” Franco says. “Most people build a company to make a lot of money, but for me, the money was funding the research to better understand what was happening here and build future opportunities to do more of what I had done at the next level. So I built a sports nutrition company with my previous research.”
Now Cavaleri runs Biologic PharmaMedical, which is primarily a drug research company working in drug discovery but using fractions and isolates of nutrients and nutraceutical-based agents. He creates and sells nutraceuticals, drug-status agents, and other health innovations wholesale to companies that distribute them to consumers. However, what differentiates Biologic and Franco in this arena is the fact that they work with as many as fourteen patents they have founded based on his focussed pharmacological research – outcomes of which he calls ‘precise pharmacology.’
This understanding and experience instill a respect and appreciation that ensures his research and offerings to athletes, helping drive them to their goals, are accurate and effective. These discoveries also assist patients fighting their way to recovery, those of us aging to age more gracefully. Franco Cavaleri’s time has not been wasted, and the results of his efforts and sacrifices continue to change the lives of athletes everywhere. At age 57, he walks his talk to look fit, lean, strong and vigorous like most 20-25-year-olds wish they could be! He attributes this to a combination of continued workload (strategic exercise) and strategic nutrition and nutraceutical ant-aging prompts that keep metabolic syndrome in check and general subclinical inflammation at a minimum – prompts researched by him and his lab team.
