Halle Berry Opens Up About This ‘Second Act’ Of Her Life Today And Her Involvement In Pendulum Therapeutics

For decades now, Academy Award winner Halle Berry has been best known for capturing our hearts and minds up on the big screen with her wide variety of Hollywood roles, both in front of and behind the camera. Today, Berry, 56, is taking on a whole new role as she chooses to invest her time, energy and money into the cutting-edge world of probiotics, by sharing her own journey toward better gut health with others.

Berry recently joined Pendulum Therapeutics as its Chief Communications Officer, as well as becoming an equity owner and investor in the biotech company. Founded in 2012 by Colleen Cutcliffe, John Eid and Jim Bullard, Pendulum credits itself as pioneering the next frontier of metabolic health through its microbiome-targeted products.

I spoke exclusively with Berry about her involvement with Pendulum moving forward, asking her first about how these products and this company initially came on her radar.

“I’m from Cleveland, so I first heard about it from a friend of mine in Cleveland who happens to work at the Cleveland Clinic,” Berry tells me. “She reached out to me and she said ‘There’s this revolutionary product that the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic are backing and because I know you’re diabetic, they have this new product called Glucose Control to help Type 2 diabetics manage their sugar.’ So, I think ‘Yeah, I am always up for something that is going to help me and other Type 2 diabetics. So, I got the product and started to try it and in three-four month’s time, I noticed a real big difference in my ability to manage my sugar. While I’ve always had it under control, it became easier with Glucose Control. I had to think about it less than I used to. Then I had this problem with cheilitis in my mouth – this fungal thing that I had been struggling with for about four years and I noticed that my cheilities was getting better. I thought ‘I wonder if this Glucose Control was helping my cheilitis.’ So, I started to read about Glucose Control and I started to realize that it was about having better gut health and fixing your microbiome and how when that’s healthy, that can affect so many other parts of your body.”

Berry adds, “So after six or seven months of trying the [Pendulum] product, I thought ‘I want to reach out and find out more about this and see if this is something I should start talking about on my rē•spin website. Should I start telling people about this?’ – just more information. That’s when I met Colleen – she’s the person they put me in touch with when I said I wanted to learn more about it and learn more about my diet and things that could help me. After two or three months of learning all about it, I finally went to them and I was like ‘Hey, I not only want to invest in this but I think this is the future. I want to be ahead of the curve and I really want to be a part of letting people know about the product and all the science that you put into it and the years of research, and I want to really understand the importance of having a healthy gut and how that affects everything else in your body.’ They said ‘Yes!’ I said ‘Okay, great (laughs).’”

I also spoke with Pendulum Co-Founder and CEO Cutcliffe, asking her what initially inspired her and her team to get involved with probiotics and bring their breakthrough discoveries to the world today.

Cutcliffe responds, “That’s a great question. For me, I think we all know probiotics have been on the shelves for decades and decades. I think what people don’t necessarily know is that there hasn’t been a new ingredient in the probiotics industry for over 50 years. Even so-called new strains that come on [the market] are really just off-shoots of the same-old strains that are out there. From a scientific and clinical standpoint, there was a big opportunity to identify ‘Are there new strains? Are there new probiotics that we can bring to the market that are actually founded in science and medicine?’ All of that came about because DNA sequencing enabled us to now understand the microbiome and have it be a science. The microbiome is just this big chance to tap a part of our bodies that we really haven’t explored in that way.”

For Cutcliffe, her motivation to make a difference began with her own family in mind. She reveals, “My first daughter was born premature two months early. She was four and a half pounds when she was born. She spent the first month of her life in Intensive Care, getting multiple doses of antibiotics. When she was five or six [years old], she had all these food sensitivities and these food allergies that were different from the rest of our family. It just all came together for me – it’s because she was on those antibiotics when she was a baby! Now she’s set up for potentially a life of all kinds of GI (gastrointestinal) issues and metabolism issues. So, we could create a company that could help millions of people, including my own daughter.”

Berry adds about Cutcliffe’s trailblazing efforts with Pendulum, “That’s why she created it – because she is a mom. She’s thinking about something she can do for her children. I think the best inventions always resonate from someone having a personal need, a personal want and desire for something that they can’t find, that isn’t on the market yet. I learned that there’s this one strain of probiotic called Akkermansia that nobody has been able to figure out how to grow. If you can’t grow it, you can’t offer it to the public. It was her singular mission to grow this Akkermansia. It took her 10 years but she did it! To me, that worked because she had a severe need for it herself and to make her family healthy. She understood the components of microbiome and she put her money where her mouth was. She put her time, her energy into developing how to grow this strain. I think that’s the game-changer for the company. I’m sure that’s why Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic backed it, because they know she came up with something revolutionary.”

As I continued my conversation with Berry about her own health today and teaming up with Pendulum to help get the word out even further about this company to the widespread public, I was curious how Berry’s Type 2 diabetes has affected her everyday life, since being diagnosed with the condition in her early twenties.

“Well, you know, part of healing or sort of managing my diabetes wasn’t always coming from a healthy gut,” says Berry. “Twenty years ago, when I was struggling to manage my diabetes, nobody told me back then that having a healthy gut could actually help me metabolize sugar better and help my insulin levels. I just went about it with a diabetic doctor who got me to realize that I hadn’t been exercising in a very continuous way. I had to be very mindful about everything I ate. I cut out carbs, cut out processed sugar, even cut out fruits to some degree. I got an education about how to eat and exercise and live better, but it was only through the past year and half of really stumbling upon Glucose Control and Pendulum that I really started to realize when I was eating and when I was exercising, I was feeling my microbiome. Taking probiotics that can help heal my gut in a faster way, this [Pendulum] one is like the bullet train to a healthy gut and I was on the slow train.”

Cutcliffe next shared with me the value of having Berry a part of the Pendulum team as the new Chief Communications Officer, saying, “I think fundamentally, it elevates the brand of the company. We’re very aligned on the brand, so I think what she will be able to do is – all the people who are following her, all the people who are looking to her for guidance on health and wellness, she is going to be able to help educate people on that. She is going to help explain what the product has done for her and what it could do for them. So in my mind, she can lean on our science and we can lean on her brand-building and together, we’re really going to be able to bring these products to millions of people.”

Berry adds about her hopes and objective within her new role, “I want to continue to collaborate with the team at Pendulum and help them continue to develop products that I think everyday people can use. Because I’m a mother and I’m also in the public eye, I think that I have a voice that might cut through some of the noise that’s out there about products. I think I have a loyal following over the course of my career. I haven’t gone out publicly speaking about a lot of products, put my name in and certainly not invested my dollars in. So, I’m hoping that the relationship and good will that I’ve built with the public over all these years when I come out with my reasons why they should pay attention to this product, the reason why I believe this can really help them, I hope this will resonate because I really believe it with all my heart. I’ve tested it out for over a year, so I have real experience with this product. I just want everybody I know to start taking their gut health seriously and realize how easy it is to do that.”

I followed up by asking Berry why she feels it is so important for us as a society today to not only continue to prioritize our mental and physical health, but also not shy away from beneficial products like Pendulum to aid us in our personal goals.

Berry says, “I think mental health has been so taboo for awhile and luckily, thankfully, as we’re evolving, we’re coming to terms with that we all need to take note of our mental health. I think the pandemic helped us realize that we needed to take care of our mental health because everybody suffered with depression in various degrees during that time. I don’t care who you were – in the whole world, you suffered and you dealt with either lightweight or deep depression during that time. It was a very frightening time – we’re all isolated and it was really hard. I think taking products like Pendulum, taking Metabolic Daily and Glucose Control – having a healthy microbiome and a gut allows you to not only sleep better but when you sleep better, you feel better. That’s a part of stress. When you’re so stressed out and your brain is going a hundred miles per hour, you can’t rest well. When you can’t rest well, you can’t be stress-free. It’s a cycle – it’s like you’re a gerbil on a wheel and you can’t get off. So, having a healthy gut helps you rest better, helps you digest your food better because you’re getting the nutrients from your food actually into your bloodstream that also helps your mental health. You’re metabolizing food faster, so your weight is better under control – therefore, you feel better about yourself and less stress. So, it all kind of works together.”

Berry goes on to share with me that having a healthy gut remains her top focus today, as she strives to take less supplements and get more nutrients through the foods she is eating, which she says she has been able to digest better, thanks to Pendulum. She adds, “I’m actually walking around in my best body and feeling my best self and telling everybody I know about it because I think it’s that important.”

Being best known to many for her celebrated Hollywood career, including her historic “Best Actress” Oscar win in 2002 for her outstanding performance in the 2001 film Monster’s Ball, I wondered how Berry would say that her priorities and her interests in business with choosing projects have evolved over the past two decades.

Berry reveals, “Well now, certainly my business interests have evolved. As I’ve – I won’t say gotten older, I’ll say gone down the path of life. As you get down that path and you become a mother, my priority used to always be ‘Me, Me, Me! What am I going to do for my career?’ When I stood on that stage that day and I received that award, I had reached a pinnacle of success that I set out to achieve for myself. As I’ve gone from that moment, I’ve been thinking more about ‘Okay, you achieved that. Now what else is there for me to do in this life? – which is why I started my rē•spin brand. I started thinking about legacy, like ‘What will I really leave here? What will I leave for my children? What will I leave humanity when I’m gone?’ It’s great to leave great movies. We need entertainment but I’ve been on the second act of my life as I’ve gone down that path, trying to think about ‘What can I really leave that might help change the lives of people as they go forward and what can still be changing their life, well after I leave here, when I’m long-gone? What can I put in place that will still remain valuable and still be able to help people?’”

As I began to wrap up my conversation with Berry as she continues to embark on these latest adventures in her life today, including her passion project with Pendulum, I asked Berry what supportive message might she have for people out there struggling with their own mental and/or physical health and seeking guidance to get on a healthier path.

Berry says, “I would say have no fear, have no shame. Don’t worry about being judged or what people will think about you. If you need mental health, go see a psychologist or a psychiatrist. If you need a nutritionist to come, if you need to search out on the internet – there’s a wealth of information on the internet about what foods are better for your brainpower, what foods can help kill depression. Workout, work your body hard. Start to feel strong inside yourself. Attack your mental health as if it were the most important thing in your life, because it is. Your mind, body and spirit have to be complete. Think about a great probiotic. Think about Pendulum, think about Metabolic Daily. Think about things that you can ingest that will actually help your mental health while you’re sleeping. There are things you can do for yourself. Do the research. Make yourself worth it because you are worth it.”