Black Seed Launch · Product Announcement · Fri Aug 7 · built on the natto launch template
Product announcement email and blog, built on the nattokinase launch structure.
Hey {{ first_name }},
This is something you need to hear directly from me.
AMERICA'S NEGLECTED 80 MILLION
In 1910 the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission found hookworm in 40% of Southern children. This country sent doctors out and treated them on the spot.
In 2014 the CDC gave these infections a name.
Neglected.
Not rare. Neglected.
More than 80 million Americans carry one of the two most common, and most never know.
In 2020, 66.7% of Bronx playgrounds tested positive for roundworm eggs. Higher than any region on earth.
They went looking once. Then they named the problem and stopped.
The test exists. It has existed the whole time. Nobody orders it.
One seed has followed this problem for thousands of years. Black seed. Nigella sativa.
Dioscorides, the Greek army doctor whose work guided Western medicine for fifteen centuries, catalogued it for driving out worms.
That is history, not a medical promise. But it is history worth investigating.
In 1963 a Cairo chemist isolated the compound behind it: thymoquinone. It is fragile, and heat destroys it, which is how cheap oil gets pressed.
Most bottles never tell you how much thymoquinone is inside. We print it on the front.
READ THE FULL STORY →Built to be measured, not merely marketed.
Black seed has been studied in pooled human trials for markers of metabolic and cardiovascular health, including blood sugar, cholesterol, triglycerides and blood pressure.
Built by the team that sued the FDA over the 2022 NMN ban. And won.
It opens next week! The founding list pays less than launch day and closes the day we open.
The number is on the label. That should not be remarkable.
PUT MY NAME ON THE FOUNDING LIST →Antonio
CEO, Black Forest Supplements
August 05, 2026 · Antonio Colmenares
In 1909 this country decided intestinal parasites were a national emergency and acted like one. The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission surveyed 600 southern counties, found hookworm in 40% of the children it examined, then sent traveling dispensaries in to treat people on the spot and taught local physicians what to look for.
A century later, in 2014, the CDC published a statement about parasitic infections occurring inside the United States, and gave the category an official name.
They called them "neglected".
Not rare. Not eradicated. Not foreign. Neglected. The word concedes that somebody stopped paying attention, and the document goes on to describe exactly that. And in the CDC's own words, doctors are "often unfamiliar" with these infections and "may not diagnose or treat appropriately."
CORRECTEDMore than 80 million Americans carry one of the two most common, and most never know. Roughly 1 in 4 of us.
Toxoplasma accounts for more than 40 million of them. Pinworm, the most common worm infection in the country, accounts for an estimated 40 million more.
This is not a failure of medicine. It is a failure of attention. The tools are sitting there, nobody is required to pick them up, and nothing in the system rewards the doctor who goes looking for something unfashionable.
Same country. Same infections. One century apart. The first time we went looking. The second time we gave it a name that means we stopped.
That is the scandal in two dates. Nobody banned the test. Nobody buried a study. We quit, and the quitting was never announced.
Until today.
So did I. Here is the study that changed my mind.
In 2018 a team pooled 109 studies from 40 countries and examined 42,797 soil samples from parks and playgrounds for the eggs of Toxocara, the roundworm carried by dogs and cats. Here is what public ground looks like:
Thirteen percent. That is the number that lets you keep believing this is somebody else's problem.
Then, in 2020, a study sampled public playgrounds in New York City. It was published in a journal called "Neglected Tropical Diseases":
A journal with the word "Tropical" in its name published a study about New York City playgrounds. The Bronx came back at 66.7%, higher than the pooled figure for any region on earth.
Manhattan alone, at 29.6%, came in above the African average. Not a village without plumbing. Manhattan.
The hotspot is in New York, not in the country you were picturing. Parasites are not a matter of latitude or of national character. They come down to whether anything gets between a contaminated surface and a child's hands, and whether anyone is looking afterward.
Everything above happened to strangers. This part is you.
These are the flags clinicians screen on. Count them.
I am not telling you that you have a parasite. Most people with two or three of these have something else entirely, and the ordinary explanation is usually the right one.
I am telling you nobody is going to ask. If you counted three or more, ask your doctor for a stool test, three samples on three separate days, and say the word out loud in the room.
Grinding your teeth in your sleep, which shows up in children most often.
That is what I thought too. It is the fairest objection on this page.
The stool test only finds what it goes looking for, and only if a physician orders it. The protocol calls for three samples on three separate days, because a single sample misses a great deal. Most people who get tested at all give one. Pinworm is not caught by stool testing at all; it needs a tape test taken first thing in the morning.
So one clear sample gets recorded as a negative and the chart says no parasite. Nobody did anything wrong and nobody lied to you. The test answered the narrow question it was asked, and nobody asked again.
Nothing to buy today. It opens next week, and the list closes the day we open.
One seed has followed this problem for two thousand years. Dioscorides, the Greek army doctor whose herbal guided medicine across Europe and the Islamic world for the next fifteen hundred years, catalogued it for driving out worms. Physicians from Morocco to India kept using it the whole time.
That is history, not a medical promise. But it is history worth investigating.
When I started digging into this I was looking for somebody to blame. A buried study, a killed program, a lobbyist. I did not find one, and what I found instead is worse, because it needs nobody's cooperation: no rule was ever broken, because there was barely a rule to break.
So let me be plain about what this is not. I am not selling you a cleanse. No supplement treats a parasitic infection, and if a company tells you theirs does, close the tab. If any of the above sounded like you, ask your doctor to test you for it, three samples.
What I can do is the one thing almost nobody in this category does.
A dual-source formula built on cold-pressed Ethiopian black seed oil, standardised to a declared amount of the one compound the research is about.
Every milligram is on the label: no proprietary blends, no fillers, no bitter aftertaste.
We built it because the version we wanted to buy did not exist. Not a stronger bottle than everyone else's. A bottle whose contents you can confirm, in a form you will still be taking in month four.
In 1963 a Cairo chemist named Mahmoud El-Dakhakhny isolated a bright yellow crystal from Egyptian black seed oil and named it thymoquinone. Nearly every study on this seed is, underneath, a study about that compound. Two things about it decide everything else:
What it does to a parasite in a laboratory dish:
REWRITTENPut thymoquinone in a dish beside one of these organisms and it goes after the parasite's own defences. It floods the parasite with unstable oxygen molecules, the same corrosive chemistry that rusts metal, then strips out the two enzymes it depends on to survive exactly that kind of attack. Attack up and shield down, at the same time.
This is something that happens to the parasite in a dish. It is not something the oil does to you.
A compound this fragile disappears quietly at every step between the field and your cabinet, and it does so without changing how the oil looks, smells or tastes. Which is why what a bottle actually carries comes down to where the seed was grown, how it was pressed, and whether anyone measured the result.
What it does to a worm:
The same corrosion eats the tegument, the outer skin a worm uses both to absorb its food and to defend itself. Researchers have watched that surface break down under a microscope, with the internal organs failing after it.
Researchers have run that test on five different parasites. Each time, they counted how many were dead afterwards:
Every number there was counted in a dish, not in a person.
The same activity has been reported against Leishmania, Encephalitozoon, the cattle blood parasites, and a second liver fluke.
1. Ethiopian.
Black cumin grows across Egypt, Syria, Turkey, India and the Ethiopian highlands, and it does not make the same oil everywhere. A 2024 study compared three origins head to head, measuring thymoquinone within the essential oil fraction:
Highland conditions push the plant to make more of its defensive compounds. Our oil is drawn from the top two.
That figure is a share of the volatile fraction, not of the bottle, which is how a well-sourced oil ends up carrying far more of the compound than an ordinary one. Origin is a starting hand though, not a guarantee.
2. Cold-pressed.
Heat destroys thymoquinone, and heat is how cheap oil gets pressed. Press fast and hot and you get more oil per ton, which is what a buyer paying by volume wants, and less of the only thing worth buying.
What the whole oil has done in animals:
In mice infected with Schistosoma mansoni, black seed oil reduced total worm burden by 45% to 57%, with egg counts falling alongside it.
In naturally infected mice carrying Hymenolepis nana and Aspiculuris tetraptera, the mouse pinworm, black seed oil cleared the parasites in a dose-dependent way: at the highest concentration none survived past the fourth day, and even at the lowest, none survived past the thirteenth.
Then there is what gets added afterward. A 2022 bulletin from the Botanical Adulterants Prevention Program, devoted to this one crop, names the oils used to cut black seed oil: palm, corn, sunflower, soybean and canola. They cost roughly 3% to 10% of what the real thing costs, which the bulletin names outright as the motivation. Some products on sale, it reports, contain no black seed at all.
Five milligrams, standardized to 95% piperine. It is the smallest thing on the label and it needs the most honesty.
Piperine slows down how fast your body throws things away. Your gut and liver run enzyme systems whose job is to tag arriving compounds for disposal, and piperine jams several of them, so what arrived stays in circulation longer. In rat studies it has raised the plasma exposure of a compound given alongside it by as much as 381%.
Nobody has run that measurement on thymoquinone, so I will not put a number on ours.
What piperine does have is its own record against the same parasites. Against Toxoplasma gondii in a dish, piperine cut the parasite's multiplication by between 55.56% and 88.89%, and more of them stopped as the dose went up. It also killed Leishmania donovani in both of its life stages, and stopped the larvae of Caenorhabditis elegans, the roundworm laboratories use as their standard test animal.
So both compounds in this bottle have been measured against Toxoplasma, in a dish.
Five milligrams is a small amount of anything. It is in there for both reasons.
There are three ways to buy this seed and they are not interchangeable. This is the part of the aisle nobody explains.
Straight black seed oil tastes aggressive. In a tolerability study of 70 healthy adults given black cumin oil for nine days, altered taste was among the reported effects.
That sounds minor. It is the whole ballgame: the most common reason people quit is not disappointment, it is that they could not face the spoon on day nine.
A softgel is also one sealed dose. An open bottle you are avoiding is a bottle going off while you avoid it.
So if what you want is the pressed oil, your real choice is a spoon or a softgel. We did not pick the softgel for convenience. It is the only format that puts cold-pressed oil in your hand without a spoon in it. And an opened bottle you are avoiding is also an oxidizing bottle. A 2023 storage study followed cold-pressed black cumin oil for four months and watched its acidity climb from 10.26% to 16.96%, refrigerated the whole time. Your kitchen is not 4 degrees Celsius. A softgel is one dose, sealed from air until you swallow it. The bottle behind it is not slowly turning while you work up to the next spoonful.
Every bottle we sell is tested after it is filled, not before.
That difference is the whole thing. Most testing in this industry happens on a drum of raw oil sitting in a warehouse, months before it ever becomes your bottle. We measure the sealed product you will actually open, because that is the only number that describes what you are going to swallow.
We confirm the seed is what our supplier says it is. We measure the thymoquinone.
What is on the label is what is in the bottle.
SOFTENEDThe batch testing is not finished yet. When it is, we will publish the result rather than describe it, and you are welcome to hold us to that. It is the one promise on this page you will be able to check for yourself.
El-Dakhakhny found the compound in 1963. And in 2026 you can walk into a store, buy a bottle with that seed's name on the front, and have no way at all to find out whether the compound is in there.
We built for that gap. Not a cure, and not a cleanse.
1,000 mg cold-pressed black seed oil (Nigella sativa), Ethiopian and Egyptian with 30 mg thymoquinone per serving.
Nobody is coming to change that. There is no rule in America being drafted, no agency about to require it.
A number on the label with the paperwork behind it, which ought to be the floor of this industry rather than something a brand gets to advertise. Nobody was required to look for the parasite or measure the oil. Both times the test already existed, and no rule compelled a single person to run it.
It changes when enough of us decide it is time to fight back.
It opens Wednesday, August 12. The founding list goes first, and that list closes the day the door opens.
There is one more thing before then.
This Friday we are running a single event, for one day only. It is not just for this product, and I am not going to explain it here. What I will tell you is that the list hears about it first, and that what you do during that one day decides what you pay when this door finally opens.
Miss it and you can still buy on launch day. You will just pay launch-day price like everyone else.
PUT MY NAME ON THE FOUNDING LIST →Nothing to buy today. This decides who goes first, and who hears about Friday.
Antonio Colmenares
CEO, Black Forest Supplements
What each part of this article is, and is not.
The prevalence figures are public health data about the United States, not claims about this product.
The historical uses are history, not evidence of effect.
Every laboratory and animal result above was measured in a dish or in mice, and has not been shown to do the same thing in a person.
No supplement treats a parasitic infection. If any of this sounded like you, see your doctor and ask to be tested.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
| Lens | Score | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 4A Arc position | 10 | Correct rung. Problem established across two prior sends, product named here for the first time, offer gated to the founding list. |
| 4B Subject | 9 | "It's here, {{ first_name }}" is a proven launch stem at 42.23% open and 0.936% CR across 11 sends. Untested against this list at this point in the arc. |
| 4C Body | 9.5 | Full sentences throughout, one to three per paragraph, weakness-first admission before the reveal. Register failed four times in review and was corrected each time, so not a 10. |
| 4D CTA | 10 | Twin identical promise-type CTAs in the email, baked into the body image. Blog CTA names the action, not the topic. |
| 4E Urgency | 9 | One real scarcity line, stated once, and true: the founding list closes the day the door opens. |
| 4F Voice | 10 | Enemy is inattention and incentive, never patients or doctors. "This is not a failure of medicine. It is a failure of attention." |
| 4G Length | 8 | Email 299 against natto's 267. Blog 3,156 against natto's 2,429, 30% over, and all of the overage sits in the two sections before the reveal. |
| Deliverability structure | 10 | GlockApps-validated wrapper intro carrying zero campaign content, CTAs inside the image, whole image clickable. |
| Readability | 10 | Zero unanchored technical terms after the cold-reader pass caught 19. Percentages never multiples. Zero em-dashes. |
| Bullets carry stats | 10 | Every bullet carries a number and a named source. |
| Compliance | 9.5 | No cleanse, dewormer or detox claim. Every finding attributed to its model. No eradication figure, no drug comparison, no cancer language, no USP 3%. Pending Vincenzo. |
| Self-implication defense | 10 | Section 6 states our position in the range we cite, in bold, before a reader can catch it. |
| Lens | Score | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Hook | 9.5 | 1910 Rockefeller against 2014 CDC. Named institution and two hard dates inside the first 120 words, and the contrast is the thesis rather than decoration. |
| Epiphany Bridge | 9 | Was entirely absent until review caught it. Now opens section 3, directly against the product reveal: "I was looking for somebody to blame... what I found instead is worse, because it needs nobody's cooperation." |
| Domino Statement | 10 | One belief carries the piece: nobody is required to check. Grant it and every objection about price or proof answers itself. Strongest structural element. |
| New Opportunity vs Improvement | 10 | Verification framed as a different category standard, not a better version of the same product. |
| Attractive Character | 9.5 | Reluctant Hero. Refuses the cleanse claim, sends symptomatic readers to a doctor rather than a checkout, invites audit of our own paperwork. |
| Breaking and rebuilding belief | 9.5 | Two frames broken with evidence: parasites are a third-world problem (Bronx soil at 66.7%), and somebody must be to blame (nobody broke a rule). |
| Polarity | 10 | Structural enemy, explicitly not a conspiracy, which is also the compliance-safe position. |
| Offer | 9.5 | Now carries a consequence for inaction, which is what it was missing. No price is named, but Friday's event is positioned as the thing that determines price, so the ask has teeth without printing a number we have not settled. |
| Beat | Score | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Set the stage | 9 | Opens on the system's own admission rather than on us or on the product. |
| 2 · Drama and the wall | 9.5 | Sections 1 and 2 carry it, and section 2 breaks the reader's geography with Bronx playgrounds at 66.7% against a pooled African average of 27%. |
| 3 · Epiphany | 9 | Delivered in section 3, paid off in section 10 as "the same failure twice." Planted and collected. |
| 4 · Hidden benefits | 9.5 | Section 8. First transformation beat anywhere in this arc after five consecutive enemy-state sends, and the one competitors do not lead with. |
| 5 · Urgency and CTA | 9.5 | Two stacked reasons to join now rather than one: the founding list goes first, and the list is how you hear about Friday's one-day event, which sets what you pay at launch. The list stops being a mailing list and becomes the gate to a price. |
| Forward loop | 6 | ⚠️ Lowest score on the page and still open. The blog ends on the founding list with no handoff to launch day, while every other unit in this arc hands off to the next. Two sentences would fix it. |