The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 69. Justin Mares | Food Industry Secrets, How Our Government Is Funding Unhealthy Farming

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

Key takeaways you’ll learn in this episode: What shortcuts are companies taking that are hurting the United States food system? How food studies are funded and where numbers are being manipulated. Check out Everything happening with Kettle & Fire: ⁠https://www.amazon.com/shop/garybrecka/list/19RWEFULAF1SL?ref_=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_aipsfshop_aipsfgarybrecka_H6P14QW099RETVXPSP83⁠ See if Truemed can help you put your pre-tax HSA/FSA dollars to work: ⁠https://www.truemed.com/⁠ Get weekly tips from Gary Brecka on how to optimize your health and lifestyle routines - go to ⁠https://www.theultimatehuman.com/⁠ For more info on Gary, please click here: ⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/thegarybrecka⁠ ECHO GO PLUS HYDROGEN WATER BOTTLE ⁠http://echowater.com⁠ BODY HEALTH - USE CODE ULTIMATE10 for 10% OFF YOUR ORDER ⁠https://bodyhealth.com/ultimate⁠ Are you frustrated by the lack of nutrition in our food system? Gary Brecka is sitting down with Justin Mares, an entrepreneur and the founder of Kettle & Fire, America’s leading bone broth brand, and the co-founder and CEO of Truemed. They’re discussing how decades of compromises and shortcuts by food companies have led to a broken system that actively harms our health. We dive deep into the benefits of bone broth, the challenges of scaling a health-focused business, and the innovative solutions Truemed is bringing to the healthcare system! 00:00 - Who is Justin Mares? 03:00 - How did he start “Kettle and Fire” bone broth? 09:00 - What are the benefits of bone broth and how is their process unique? 13:00 - Why are New Zealand cattle healthier than the United States? 16:00 - What shortcuts are companies taking that are hurting our food system? 18:15 - Where does Kettle & Fire source their ingredients from? 26:00 - Crazy statistics about deficiencies in food leading to deficiencies in the body, leading to disease. 31:30 - Why did he co-found “Truemed” and how are they improving the healthcare system? 38:00 - What is the process for Turemed to put their pre-tax HSA/FSA dollars to work? 43:15 - How food studies are funded and where numbers are being manipulated with bias. 48:00 - What environmental toxins stay in our food and impact our hormones? 51:50 - Why Europe has made 150 pesticides illegal that the United States allows on our food. 59:00 - How we change our food system change. 01:02:00 - How the government subsidizes poor farming practices. Follow Justin Mares on X: ⁠@jwmares⁠ ⁠https://x.com/jwmares?lang=en⁠ Connect with Kettle & Fire on Instagram: ⁠@kettleandfire⁠ ⁠https://www.instagram.com/kettleandfire/⁠ Check out Justin Mares’ Book: ⁠Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth⁠ Subscribe to his newsletter, The Next: ⁠https://justinmares.substack.com/⁠ Gary Brecka: ⁠@garybrecka⁠ The Ultimate Human: ⁠@ultimatehumanpod⁠ Subscribe on YouTube: ⁠@ultimatehumanpodcast⁠ The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka Podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice, and no doctor/patient relationship is formed. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast is at the user’s own risk. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their health care professionals for any such conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I've seen how and why the big food companies have made all of these health trade-offs to shave a little margin here, a little margin there. Making these small compromises over decades leads to the super messed up food system we have today. You look on the back of so many of these products, it's just half the ingredients you don't understand. The average American visits 28 different types of doctors before they die. It shows that the deficiencies that we have in food lead to deficiencies in the body, which are the expression of disease. Disease is not something that's happening to us. It's something that's happening within us. Bone broth is basically unbeatable. You know, right now,

even today, almost no one knows what bone broth is. Bone broth has enormous benefits. But how do we wake America up to this? How do we take the next step towards actually impacting the food supply? I think the answer is actually... Welcome to the Ultimate Human Podcast. Today, we have a remarkable guest with us, Justin Mayers. Justin is a visionary entrepreneur who's made significant strides in both the tech startup and health and wellness sectors. He's the founder of Kettle and Fire, America's leading bone broth brand, and the co-founder and CEO of TrueMed, a pioneering company that allows Americans to use

pre-tax HSA and FSA funds for health-promoting products. Justin is also the author of the best-selling book, Traction, a must-read for any startup looking to achieve explosive growth. His passion for health advocacy and functional foods has driven him to create solutions that not only support wellness, but also make it more accessible. We're excited to dive into his journey, beliefs, and the incredible work he's doing. Welcome, Justin, to the podcast. Hey, guys.

Welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist, Gary Brekka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. We have a really special guest for you today as you hear from his bio. I just spent the whole last night and this morning biohacking with him. So I think we've done two cold plunges,

a couple of sauna sessions, vicious workout. Breath work. We did some breath work. So we've done two cold plunges, a couple of sauna sessions, vicious workout. Breath work. We did some breath work. So we've done a red light therapy. Yeah, we've kind of done it all. And then we had a nice Amish meal of grass-fed steaks and some raw dairy, which is only for use in dogs and cats. But I had a little bit of my pet's dinner last night. So in any case, guys, welcome

to the podcast. Justin Mayer, who's the founder of TruMed. He's also the founder of Kettle & Fire, one of my favorite, if not my favorite bone broth brand. If you did my water fast, you know all about Kettle & Fire bone broth and the benefits of bone broth. And he is the founder of that company as well. So welcome to the podcast, Justin. Stoked to be here. It's been fun hanging out today as well. Yeah, man, it's actually been such a blast. You know, it was kind of funny.

My cameraman, we were doing this kettlebell workout and we finished and he's like, hey, can you do a few more so I can get this shot? Justin's like, come on, man. I'm smoked. I'm trying to look like I'm fit over here. But you had a really interesting journey to building Kettle and Fire. I found it fascinating because, you know, who wakes up one day and is like, I want to boil a bunch of bones and take the broth and box it and sell it.

No one who wants a good dating life. I'll tell you that. I'd love to see how that went on your first date. What do you do for a living? Well, I chop up cow bones, I boil them, and then I take the water, I put it in a box, and I sell it.

Check, please. Right? Make sure to do that with humans or just with cows? Probably launching right around the Jeffrey Dahmer episode. Okay, so that terrible intro, terrible intro. I should stay away from comedy and stick to biohacking.

But in any case, man, I'm really happy to have you on. Let's talk about the journey to Kettle and Fire. We actually met because I featured Kettle and Fire on one of my water fasts. And, you know, I very often will shout out brands and really give a platform to brands that I just think are doing a great job. You know, we had no affiliation deal at the time. We had no revenue share agreement. And you were like, hey, man, thanks for all the business. And I said, look, I really love your brand. I really love your brand. I really love your product. I love the fact that you're going the extra mile because in a lot of the conversations we've had over the

last few days, you and Tim and I were sitting in the kitchen last night and we were really agreed upon one major thing. If we don't solve the food crisis, we'll never solve the chronic disease crisis. And it's going to take an army to do that. So I'd love to hear about your journey to what led to Kettle and Fire and how's Kettle and Fire doing? It's going great. I mean, the business has been great. Honestly, it's been, you know, it was going great. And then it really inflected after, you know, you and Dana kind of did your thing late last year, like Dana's, you know, 82 hour water fast or whatever it was with Kettle and Fire was a huge thing for our business, which was awesome. But yeah, I mean,

the story really started in college. I went paleo basically in 2011 when no one that I went to college with knew what paleo was. Like I was like, there was a big book that came out around that time. Yeah. Mark Sisson. Yeah, exactly. He great guy. Exactly. Yeah. And so I was a college student, you know, and all of my friends are like pure, you know, beer, pasta, pizza, like kind of doing that thing. And I was like the weird guy in the fraternity that was not doing this for a bit. And literally after two weeks of watching what I eat, eating clean, eating paleo, my sleep was better. My acne went away. Like I just felt like, whoa, this is, this is like a material change in, you know, in, in how I'm experiencing life. And it was the first thing that now might sound a little trite or stupid,

but it was the first time in my life. I was like, what I put in my body actually determines how I feel my energy, you know, like these, these different skin and other like biological conditions. And so I kind of had gotten to paleo then when I moved to San Francisco, I was doing CrossFit in San Francisco and in 2015 had a bunch of friends there that were talking about bone broth for gut health, like buy it at this farmer's market stall, do this, you know, here. And I was starting to get into it. And around that time, my brother, I'm the oldest of seven kids. And one of my brothers, he tore his knee playing soccer and was like, got surgery and was looking to heal. And after talking to my CrossFit

coach, I was, they were like, you should send him some bone broth. And so I went online to just buy him some or tell him to buy some in rural Pennsylvania where he was living. And no one was making anything. And so at that time, we decided to. Yeah, exactly. There's the light bulb. And so it was really then that we were like, hey, Nick, my brother, you should skip college and we should start this, what we thought would be like a small kind of family bone broth business.

And man, we like we emailed hundreds of ranchers to figure out. I was just going to say, like, I don't even know. I'm so curious. Like, how do you go about like, Hey, you guys got any bones? I mean, like, where does it start? Like, I'm just so like every other business entrepreneur that I have on here, I have a clear understanding of how they started. I just, I wanted to be a fly on the wall in your office when you guys were calling ranchers and they were like, yeah, we throw those out. Yeah. Well, they literally did at the time. I mean, we, we would talk to ranchers that, you know, had amazing like pastured grass fed practices and they were just dumping all of these bones or grinding them up and turning it into like fertilizer. And so our first couple

farms, you know, we emailed, they were like, yes, please, like take these off our hands. Uh, after a while though, they were like, we understand that this is becoming a market. Like people are starting to look for this, but we literally just emailed hundreds of ranchers all over the U S we also had to find a manufacturing partner, which we found when, uh, my brother, he cold emailed Mark Cuban and was just saying, I'm a 19-year-old entrepreneur. How do I do this? I love that. I mean, that's ballsy. Super ballsy.

And Mark Cuban was like, talk to my food person. And that person put us in touch with our manufacturer that we still use today. Wow. So Mark Cuban actually responded to the email. That's good. Mark, you are about to get inundated with emails. Yeah. So he basically put us on the path to finding the manufacturer.

And from there, we made our first couple batches. Was it called Kettle and Fire out of the gate? We launched it with a horrible name called Bone Broths Co. because I bought... Oh, my God. That hurts me, dude. It's so bad. Every marketing entrepreneur right now just got a pain in their ribs. It was so bad So we couldn't buy bone broth calm, but we could buy bone broths calm Which at the time we figured would be good for SEO

This is like how much we were not thinking there would be a massive business And so we bought bone broths Co And I dumped my life savings into our first production run and was like, well, you know, worst case, I guess I'll have 30,000 boxes of bone broth to drink over my next 10 years of life. And so we did that, did our first production run. And four months, four to six months after we launched the rebrand to Kettle and Fire, after consumers roundly said, this is a horrible brand name. That's amazing. And so, first you got to source the bones, then you got to find somebody to take those bones and boil them.

Yeah. Right. And then you got to extract the... 24 hours. Yeah. You got to... So talk a little bit about the process because I don't think that it's gone lost on any of the health nerds that are watching this podcast or listening to this podcast that, you know, bone broth has enormous benefits. And I could go into a lot of those and not the least of which is digestion. It's one of the best ways, in my opinion, to break a fast. It's one of the best ways to ease your way into the fast. And I used it on both ends of the water fast that we did because it's, you know, very low caloric, has proteins's it's satiating um and yours is delicious man i mean it really is thank you um and so so talk a little bit about that you start sourcing these bones but then where do you where do you find a manufacturer to you know mass boil these and extract the fluid

and it was really hard i mean so we were talking to manufacturers and this is where like it gets into some of the food system stuff we can talk about later. But we were talking to manufacturers and they were like, hey, we're making soup sauces and glazes where we throw a bunch of stuff in the thing. We cook it for two hours at high temperature. We rip it out and we like run another batch. And so when we come in and we say, hey, we want 24 to 48 hour cook times. We want you to boil down these bones like we want, you know, to do it the way that you or I would probably make it at home. They were like, we literally don't cook anything more than four hours. Like if you, you know, before we launched, this was everyone in the

bone broth category was just, they would throw like bad cuts of muscle meat and some bones that don't have a lot of nutritive value. Don't have a lot of like the joint and connective tissue and stuff like that. And a lot of the marrow, which you need to have like a highly nutrient dense bone broth. And they would throw it in a kettle. They would cook it for four to six hours. And then they would, you know, put it on shelf.

And like, that's that. And so we- Would they add things to it, like sodium and things like that to try to beef up the taste? Add a lot of sodium. I mean, you also saw a lot of like nutritional yeast and other things being added to try and jump up like protein and other sort of contents.

And so when we came into the space, a lot of the manufacturers that we talked to were just like, this is a big ask. Like, we don't know who you are. You're not funded. You're two guys with a horrible name. Like, why are we gonna like cook for 24 hours for you guys? And we convinced one with the help of Mark Cuban to take a risk on us.

Really? Yeah. Is Mark Cuban an investor? He's not an investor. He responded to a cold email, put us in touch, and then he never invested. Wow. Hilarious. And so you get this manufacturer and you're starting to boil the bone broth.

You're starting to extract it. And then bone broth's got to cool before you put it into the package, I assume. And then you seal it. And then how do you go about getting distribution? How do you get shelf space? How did you get the brand off the ground? Because in a minute I want to talk about where the brand is now. Yeah.

But how did you get it off the ground? And then I really want to go back to some of the nutritional content in bone broth and the process that you use, because I feel it's my duty very often to give a platform to the best companies. And I think that you're the best in space. And I want to talk about what steps you go through to make sure that people are getting the most nutritious bone broth. Yeah. But talk first a little bit about, so you do this first couple of batches and where is it manufactured? It's manufactured in the Midwest. In the Midwest. Okay. So these are U.S. cows, so it's a U.S. company.

Well, we source from U.S. and Australia and New Zealand. And why Australia and New Zealand? Basically because they, you know, frankly, in New Zealand and Australia, the food system is just not as toxic as it is in the US. We buy from cattle that cattle down there are by default pastured, grass fed, grass finished, just a really high quality of animal welfare down there. And in the US, that's much harder to find. we scaled tens of millions pounds of bones bought per year. We decided to go international rather than sort of sacrifice our sourcing standards, which unfortunately is just the reality

of the food system in the US right now. Yeah, I think the people listening to the podcast are happy that you do that, right? I mean, because rather than for convenience or for profit, when you start, and I think that happens to the best of companies. I know when I was formulating my multivitamin, I was making a methylated multivitamin, every manufacturer that I spoke to without failure was really pressured me to say, well, you know,

you don't have to use the hydroxycobalamin or adenosylcobalamin form B12. Number one, it's more expensive. It's harder to source. We can use the cyanide-based form called cyanocobalamin. It's cheaper. We got tons of it lying around. We're never gonna run out of production. I said, no, the ingredients matter. And they said, sourcing methylfolate

is way different than sourcing folic acid. Let's just use folic acid. You can even label it. They told us their tricks on the label to put folate and then in parentheses put as folic acid. And he's like, that gets around most people's concern about folic acid. And I'm like, I'm not trying to trick the consumer, right? I'm trying to get this ingredient into their body. And we held to our standard too. So I know that it's difficult. And for some of these manufacturers, they said, all right, well, we'll get back to you on whether or not we want to compound this.

We want to capsulize it. And we have a phenomenal manufacturer now. And then same thing with fillers. They want to use cheap fillers. I wanted to use organic rice, rice flour, because you do have to, when you're mixing a capsule, you've got to spread the ingredients out so you actually get the right milligram strength. And I think sometimes people that have never gone through that process don't know the intricacies and how much of an absolute pain and chore it is to really build a supplement or a brand like what you guys are building. I remember, you know, so we fought about ingredients.

We fought about capsules. We fought about what the capsules were in, whether they were gel or plant sterols or any number of other things. And I had a very specific set of nutrients that I wanted in there. And then the frustration for us was, you know, there's only a certain number of milligrams and you fit in a capsule and you push a milligram in, it puts, pushes a milligram out. So if you really want something in, something's got to go. And, and, um, eventually we solved it by having multiple capsules, but I'm digressing. But, um, so you, you, you, I mean, we've seen the same thing. Like we, the number of times our manufacturer

has basically said, uh, and, and especially when we were interviewing manufacturers, why don't you just dial down the cook time and like throw in some natural beef flavoring or something like this or or any number of these things that provide no nutritional value, but that make a product taste like more like the real thing. Right now is is crazy. Like just running this company, growing this company, it has been abundantly clear to me, like I've seen how and why the big food companies have made all of these health trade-offs and, you know, to shave a little margin here, a little margin there and production time, totally shelf life, all of these things. And, you know, making these, these small compromises over decades leads to the super messed up food system we have today,. And, you know, making these, these small compromises over decades leads to the super messed up food system we have today, where these, you have these companies that,

you know, are selling Franken foods that are just, they're not real foods. They're like not real things. Basically. Yeah. You look on the back of so many of these products, it's just half the ingredients you don't understand. Half the ingredients are in their most processed, most sprayed, most like toxic form. And that's just a result of decades of decisions to get a little bit of margin, you know, across all of these different ingredients. Hey guys, I think the most important website

you may ever go to is theultimatehuman.com. That's theultimatehuman.com. Because on this website, we can directly interact with one another. You can give me suggestions for podcast guests and topics that you'd like to see me cover you can ask me any question that you'd like more importantly you can sign up for my entirely free newsletter it comes out every single week i write this so i can get the information to the masses on how to live a

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like and get my free newsletter theultimatehuman.com I promise you that information will help change the trajectory of your life and now back to the ultimate human podcast so what goes into making a really high quality you know organic bone broth that's nutrition you know has a high high level of nutritional value um and and and nutrients i mean is it i mean you've got bones you got connective tissue you got obviously some meat still on there you have the bone marrow um what bones are better than other bones and then how do you guys ensure uniformity between, that's the other thing between, I mean, after all it's bones in a bowl. How do you ensure that quality control throughout and like what goes into really making a good, nutritious, high quality organic bone

broth? Yeah. I mean, the first one is sourcing. So we have like a bone mix that is a blend of, you know, sort of knuckle, patella, ribs, a bunch of like joint bones that effectively have a lot of their connective tissue and have a make bone broth with that. It'll have some nutritional value, but not nearly as much as if you take the thing that still has like the tendons, the ligaments, like the connective tissue all part, because you throw these things, you know, in, into, um, a cooking device and you cook it for 24 hours, which is at least, which is like the other big part of what we do. Is it really high temperature? Is it the cooking time is to really extract the nutrients? Yeah. It's just to have it like slowly break down and extract the nutrients. Okay. And so you cook like quality bones for a long period of time. And what you get, especially if you're using high quality stuff, is you get a really gelatinous, you know, high in protein, high in gelatin, high in collagen, high in amino acid product that I think from a nutrition

standpoint, like if you have good inputs, you have this amazing output that, you know, for most people, I'm sure you know this better than I do. Most people are not getting enough amino acids, gelatin, collagen in their diet. You know, the average American is just eating when they eat meat. It's always a muscle meat, rarely with any sort of like gelatin or amino acids that help with the digestion and help like build those parts of the body, the connective tissue, the gut lining, the skin that, you know, where those compounds act as building blocks for these different functions in the body. And so you get these and you put them in, it's 24 hour cook time. And then how did you

guys go about getting distribution? How'd you get on your first shelf? Because, you know, I've got to also believe that even at the time, even in the health food industry, you know, bone broth wasn't as big or accepted as it is today. And they want to give shelf. They're like, well, it's not really a soup. It's kind of a soup. Yeah. So talk a little bit about that, especially not having a big name behind you and getting off the ground. So that was actually the big reason that we launched online was so that we could try and find our people. The paleo community for us in the early days was massive. Like we were one of the first, we were the first bone broth brand on Thrive Market when they were like going through their sort of. I love Thrive. Yeah. Those guys are great. So we're the first bone broth brand on Thrive Market when they were like going through their sort of. I love Thrive.

Yeah, those guys are great. So we were the first bone broth brand there. We launched with Wellness Mama. Ben Greenfield was an early supporter. Mark Sisson was an early supporter. A bunch of these people were just like. Mark is right down the street. He's right here in Miami.

Yeah, and a bunch of these people were just like, yes, this is a product that we think is important. We think it fits with the paleo philosophy that we've been preaching in a nutritional philosophy that we've been preaching. And this is like a product that I can get behind. And so as soon as we launched online, we had truly like a, you know, maybe 30 to 50% of the early big paleo influencers kind of getting behind us just because it was a good product and it was a category they cared about. And we turned that into, um, one of the whole foods buyers saw, I believe Mark Sisson talking about kettle and fire. And he was like, Oh, I want to bring this into my store and just see, you know, let's see how this moves on shelf. And so in, I guess that was 2017. Um, we went into, we got into like 50 Whole Foods in Colorado and some parts of the West. It was on shelf at $9.99.

So it was $10 a box, which was significant, even for Whole Foods. And we just had like one little facing like way up there in the corner. And even with that, even with us not knowing what we were doing, even at a high price point, the product just sold and did better than the category average. And so we got a Whole Foods national rotation like six months later. And how do you go from having just a small few Whole Foods because the parabolic difference in supply that you need and supply chain management is everything. It's hard. The worst times in my business were when we started to nearly collapse

under the weight of our own success. It's like the most oxymoronic thing in the world. I think it happens to a lot of network marketing companies. They have this parabolic success and the infrastructure can't keep up. And so this is when, in my opinion, the really tough decisions are made because do we downgrade the quality of the product?

Do we start compromising on some of our core values? Or do we hunker down and expand with a real manufacturer? Because you just can't go overnight to 10x your production. So what was that like? How did you, how did you deal with those choices and, um, and how did you overcome them and eventually supply to somebody like a Whole Foods? Yeah. I mean, supply chain has been a thing that we've spent a ton of time trying to get our arms around. So we've invested at this point, millions of dollars in building out, supporting our manufacturing partner, uh, and like building out a real manufacturing line that can support our

growth. So you went with the same partner and helped them expand their facility. Exactly. So we got really, we got lucky. We worked hard and we like put a ton of company money into making sure that we could scale, you know, every year, like we could at least double or had the possibility to do that. And it hasn't been easy though, honestly, like every year for the last four years, we've had at least one period where we've been out of stock for a period of time just because demand outpaced what we could do from a supply chain standpoint. And if I had to, like, say, I think that that part of the business has been especially before we brought on professionals and people that knew what they were doing. My brother and I managing supply chain was a nightmare.

We were just like in stock, out of stock all the time. Hey, you started as Bone Brosco. Yeah, exactly. I already know a lot about your brother. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, that was a challenge that just took a lot of time, investment and hiring professionals that actually knew what they were doing, where I feel like we have our hands around it. Where's the brand now? I mean, how are you guys doing now? We're doing fantastic. I mean, from when I told my brother we should start this company, I pitched it to him as like, I think this can do like 10 grand a month. You know, like this is sort of the vision. He was like, wow.

Yeah, right. He was 19 in rural Pennsylvania, you know. Like five grand a month if we split it for a 19-year-old is more money than God. That's a lot of beer. Yeah, right. He was 19 in rural Pennsylvania. Five grand a month if we split it for a 19-year-old is more money than God. That's a lot of beer. Yeah, exactly. And now we're going to hit the nine figures in revenue this year. Wow. We're in 20,000 plus stores.

We're going to be— 20,000? Yeah. Wow, congratulations. Thank you. We should be in your local Costco at some at some point next year for not already. And so I'm just so, I've been amazed by the response that we've seen from the market as people have started to understand and appreciate the benefits of bone broth.

I've been overwhelmed by like the way that consumers are excited about our brand and the values. And I'm just fired up, honestly, to use kettleettle and Fire as a mechanism and as a tool to continue to try and change what I did not know, were that the richest American men live 15 years longer than the poorest American men, almost entirely due to nutrition. You actually put the source, and I'll put these in the show notes for the science nerds too. The average American visits 28 different types of doctors before they die. 28 different types of doctors. That's not 28 physicians. That's 28 different physician specialties.

And 17.6 prescriptions are filled per person per year, and 19% of adult women take an antidepressant. I mean, it just—it shows that the deficiencies that we have in food lead to deficiencies in the body, which are the expression of disease. I mean, that's long been a philosophy of mine that, you know, disease is not something that's happening to us. It's something that's happening within us. And the majority of the time it happens within us is because we lay fertile ground for it to exist. You know, we deplete the soil and then we wonder why the plant's sick.

And then we deplete the nutrients in the human body. We wonder why the organism is sick. And then we deplete the nutrients in the human body. We wonder why the organism is sick. So where does bone broth fit in? So for a healthy consumer that wants to incorporate bone broth or maybe on those days where you're eating a little lighter, there's a large trend emerging now out on the backs of intermittent fasting, which is not just time-restricted eating, but fast mimicking. And I think Dr. Walter Longo's research has really laid ground for this. I actually had him on a podcast recently and his book, The Longevity Diet, using days of lower caloric intake or periods of lower caloric intake, not necessarily fasting, which is where I think bone broth fits in amazing, with days of regular caloric intake and all the benefits of that. But my point is, where does bone broth fit in for somebody that is adopting a really healthy lifestyle? How do they incorporate bone broth into their...

Yeah. So I think there's three things that are worth talking about. I think one is fasting, bone broth is basically unbeatable. Yeah. Easing in and easing out. Totally. Yeah. Like I think if you're going to do a three-year, five-day fast, you know, doing like two... You said three-year or five-year. You meant three-day or five-day, right? Right.

Okay. Yes. Three-day or five-year. You meant three-day or five-day, right? Right. Okay, good. Yes. Three-day or five-day fast. I've never seen a single study on a five-year fast. I'd love to see that one. But yeah, I think if you are going to do a three- or a five-day fast, starting day one and having a box of bone broth or two boxes and ending in the same way I think is basically unbeatable. I think if you're trying to

lose weight, having something that is low carb, high protein, like bone broth first thing in the morning and get towards like you talk about the 30, 30, 30 thing. I think that using bone broth as a tool to achieve that 30 grams of protein first thing in the morning is amazing. Like you just don't get as hungry later in the day. You don't have the cravings. You don't have all these sorts of things. And so it's something that we do as a team every year at Kettle and Fires. We do like a team fast that people kind of opt into. That's cool. Yeah. And everyone will have bone broth first thing. And then the last thing I think is like I alluded to earlier, the average American, they're getting most of, if you're eating meat, you're getting most of your,

like you're almost always eating cuts of muscle meat. And so you're missing out on the full spectrum amino acids, collagen, things like that, that help support a healthy gut, healthy joints. Things that are coming from bone marrow, connective tissue. Even organs. Exactly. Yeah. And so I think that, you know, if you look at it, at how humans ate ancestrally and historically at no point, except today, societally, would people only be eating cuts of muscle meat, like organ meats, bone broths, connective tissue has a long cultural history, uh, as part of being part of like the food story of humanity. And I think that people today are just not eating,

you know, not eating the organ meats. They're not eating the sweet breads and like all these sorts of things that, that people ate historically. And I think bone broth is basically the easiest way to get the glycine, the gelatin, the amino acids and the collagen into your diet. And, and, and so for the continuation of your brand, where do you see, where do you see your bone broth brand going? I mean, are you adding, I noticed that you have turmeric and you've added, you know, other kinds of flavors. So do you, are you trying to build out an entire suite of bone broth to make it more palatable to a larger audience? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I think that there is a, you know, right now, even today, almost no one knows what bone broth is. Almost no one drinks it on a daily

basis. And so I think that we have a huge opportunity to truly like blow up the category, own it, and then create a bunch of products that people want where they go, Oh, I really like the turmeric ginger bone broth or the lion's mane mushroom bone broth, like both of which we have. And if you have a seasoned version that you like, it's gonna be much easier for you to incorporate this into your health routine, your health stack, all these sorts of things. Yeah, you don't wanna tolerate it. You wanna really like it.

You wanna enjoy it. And it's good. Yeah. You know, something else I find fascinating is you are the co-founder of another business, which really doesn't have anything to do with bone broth, but it really has a lot to do with the business that I'm in. And I think a lot of times when we talk about bio-optimization or biohacking,

longevity, aging, it seems to be a sophisticated person's and more of a well-off person's option, if you will, right? Especially when you start talking about modalities and other things. And I often labor on how do we get not just the message to the masses, but how do we get the masses in a position where they can take advantage of it? Like, for example, I do this thing called lateral shifts, where I'll take any food that somebody likes to eat and I will give them a more nutrient dense option. And I promise them two things. One, I don't change the flavor profile. And number two, I don't, um, add a dollar to their budget. Okay. So if you're, if you're eating

Doritos, then, you know, we're going to shift them to this. If you, if you like, uh, you know, processed yogurts, we're going to, we're going to make them this way. You know, we're going to make them this way. We're going to use whole fat Greek yogurt and blueberries and nuts and maybe monk fruit. But the whole point being that to try to take away the stigma that it's really expensive to be healthy, that you can't afford to eat organic, you can't afford to make good food choices. And one of the projects that you started that I find really fascinating was TrueMed. And, you know, this is a way for people to use their health savings accounts, right? Which right now are pretty restrictive on what you can use them for, for healthcare, and use them for things like nutrition, maybe even some biohacking modalities

and coaching, things like that. So I want you to talk a little bit about TruMed because these are projects that I think really are gonna impact humanity because you're gonna give people access to things with funds they already have. That might change the entire trajectory of their life. That's our hope, right? Like why, why I started TrueMed with my co-founder Callie is at Kettle

and Fire, I was just looking like, and if you walk into the grocery store and the food that is worse for you is also the cheapest, you know, it's, it's like cheaper to not have a gym membership than it is to have one. And the American healthcare system almost incentivizes people to get sick because they go, oh yeah, we're not gonna spend any money on prevention. You know, literally less than 2% of the entire healthcare budget goes towards prevention. And yet, as soon as you get sick,

you know, if you're on Medicare, Medicaid, the American taxpayer will pay 2 million on average to handle like your diabetes per year. And so- Per year? Yeah. Wow. It's Crazy. And so I think that like these incentives in the system are just so insanely broken. And what we saw with true med is that HSA FSA accounts are health savings account. Yeah. Health savings account, flexible

spending accounts. They're, they're these accounts that are super underutilized. But what they do is they basically say that you can use these tax-free dollars to invest in things that treat, alleviate, or prevent a given condition. And given that almost every American, unfortunately, today is either struggling with or at risk of one or more chronic diseases, it is fully compliant and Americans are eligible to use these dollars to pay for things that, you know, clinically are effective. Like if you have a supplement and you have a methylation, you know, the MTHFR genetic mutation or something like that. And there's a rationale for it. Right. Yeah. Like there's a rationale for it. I mean, supplementing someone with that condition

and tying the purchase of that supplement to an intervention is going to do wonders for that individual. Like getting someone to work out for 150 minutes a week just because they can now afford a gym membership, that intervention works better than any pharmaceutical drug that we are aware of today. Wow. The recent study came out from a, it was a meta analysis of like 16,000 people that were struggling with treatment resistant depression. And they found that things that worked better than SSRIs for treatment resistant depression were dancing, weightlifting, yoga, cardio, meditation, just like the whole stack of things that you and I care about that most people, when they think of medicine, don't think,

oh, wow, I need to hit the gym for 150 minutes a week. Yet, if you look at the studies, the evidence shows that these sorts of interventions work better than pharmaceutical ones. And our goal with TruMed is basically to drive more and more dollars away from a very, very broken healthcare system that's purely reactive and towards one that actually helps people treat and prevent chronic illness through a litany of like very effective tools, programs, things like that, that I think you and I are probably on the same page about. Hey guys, if you've been watching the ultimate human podcast for any length of time, you know, that one thing I do not do is push

products. I do not just let any advertiser into this space because I believe that the products that appear on the Ultimate Human Podcast should be things that I use every day in my life to improve my own physiology. One of them is something called the Echo Go Plus. The Echo Go Plus is a hydrogen water generator that you can take on the go. You essentially take the top off of this bottle, you pour bottled water in this and repeatedly it will make high part per million hydrogen water you press this little button you'll see these bubbles going up in the water that's hydrogen being created in the water there are all kinds of peer-reviewed published clinical studies on the benefits of hydrogen water including reduced inflammation better absorption of your supplements better absorption of your supplements, better absorption of your

foods, better balance of the stomach acid, and it feeds an entire class of bacteria in your gut. Hydrogen water, in my opinion, is the most beneficial water that you can drink, and now you can take it wherever you go. You can go to echo, E-C-H-O, H2O.com. That's echo, h2o.com. That's echo, e-c-h-o, h2o.com. Enter the code ULTIMATE10 for a discount. Echo H2O. Enter the code ULTIMATE10 for a discount. And now back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I mean, what are some of the stats on HSAs, FSAs? I've had them two or three times throughout my career. Now as an entrepreneur and self-employed, I don't have an HSA or FSA, but I know hundreds and hundreds of people that do. And the majority of them don't use them. They build up cash and the employers sometimes pay into these. And I think they think of them as rainy day funds for an emergency, not just something,

you know, like broken ankles, vehicle accident, things like that. They don't think of it as ways to actually supplement their optimal health journey. Right. And so what are some of the things you've seen with, with, with TrueMed? First of all, somebody's interested in TrueMed, go to truetomed.com. Yeah, truetomed.com. And what do you do, evaluate whether they can use that FSA? Yeah, you can see a list of a bunch of our partners that, you know, like the Pelotons, Athletic Greens, you know, the brands like Eight Sleep, brands like this, that we work with, where assuming that someone qualifies, like they'll be able to spend HSA, FSA funds with these brand partners. Wow. So yeah, they can just go to true med.com,

but we, I mean, there's, there's, you know, almost 40 million Americans that have an HSA or FSA today, over a hundred million Americans are eligible. There's close to $150 billion in these accounts as a whole.

And like you said, they are totally under optimized. Yeah. I just don't, I don't think that people have a good fundamental, including myself, completely understanding of an FSA or HSA. But, I mean, if you have one and you've got a couple thousand bucks lying around in there, this might be a way to unlock it for something that's preventative and can really serve you.

And what's that process like? Yeah, so basically what happens is someone says, you know, here's's imagine like an intake that someone would do at the doctor. Like, what are your risk factors? What are sort of your markers? Do you have high cholesterol? You know, do you have a family history of heart disease? Things like this. And based on that, we have a medical practitioner in our network go through and they go, OK, based on your set of risk factors or your specific conditions, you are eligible for y and z intervention that treats this underlying disease or condition wow and the intervention that they

can prescribe could be exercise could be improving their sleep via eight sleep could be you know a sauna like multiple times like both the product and a protocol and then basically they issue something called a letter of medical necessity that says here is why the justification for this purchase being hsa fsa eligible because here are the studies and the research that show this you know this thing is eligible and is going to treat or prevent this chronic disease uh they issue that and that makes the purchase compliant wow and then they can go and use their and then then they use the card or submit for reimbursement to their administrator. Yeah. And what kind of things are you seeing that TrueMed is getting reimbursed?

So it's like a typical client. And what are you seeing them have access to that they might not otherwise have access to? Yeah. A big one, honestly, is things like a sauna, things like a cold plunge, things like an eight sleep. Like some of these products that have very tangible benefits, but are in the many thousands of dollars from a purchase standpoint, are the things that we kind of see people get excited to spend money on.

And by going through TruMed, by using tax-free money, they're effectively saving like 30% to 40%, depending on their tax rate on these many thousand dollars. Yeah, because these are pre-tax dollars, right? Yeah, exactly. And today, as a married person, you can put almost nine grand into these accounts tax-free per year, about $4,000 as an individual. So it's not insignificant. Yeah. I mean, $9,000 for the average American family is a big deal. Totally. So when we talk about living a good nutrition-based lifestyle, you came in with a lot of stats before the podcast. You're welcome to share them with the audience.

But I think a lot of people wonder, where do I start? Yeah. Right? I mean, and I ask a lot of my guests this. What's the foundation of good, healthy, nutritional plan for your kids and your families without breaking the budget? What are some of the things that we should be pulling off the shelf? Yeah. travesty in the US is that 80, 90 years ago, basically, my great-grandmother would live in rural Pennsylvania, did not participate in diet culture, didn't read anything about biohacking,

did nothing. She was healthy and lived to 98. She didn't have weight issues, anything like that. She just participated in a food system that wasn't actively trying to poison and kill her. I basically think that today we have a food system that is actively trying and harming, you know, millions, tens of millions of Americans. And what do you mean by actively trying to do that? Like if you look at the food system and the big food companies that are behind it,

something like 12 companies are responsible for almost 80% of calories consumed in the U.S. Most of these are ultra processed foods. They're foods that are very profitable. They're addictive. They're hyper palatable. And they have basically no nutritive value. Think of like a Twinkie, an Oreo, DiGiorno's pizza, or any number of these things. And as these companies have grown and as they've gotten more profitable, what they have done

is they have started to fund research that says their stuff is maybe not that bad for you. I use Coca-Cola as an example of this where Coca-Cola, after decades of lobbying, basically, between 2011 and 2015, they spent $150 million around this campaign that they called the Global Energy Balance Network. And this campaign was... I already don't like the name. Yeah, exactly. I'm already suspect of these guys.

Global anything, you know? You should be. You should be. And so... I'm already suspect of these characters. So what this campaign was, it was a reaction to a lot of doctors and people starting to say, maybe you shouldn't be drinking super, you know, 50 grams of sugar in water. Coca-Cola said, no, no, no, no.

The problem is, through this Global Energy Balance of sugar in water, Coca-Cola said, no, no, no, no. The problem is through this global energy balance network that they funded. The problem is that not that you're eating anything bad, what you eat doesn't matter. It's that you're not moving enough. You're not, your energy balance is off. So whereas if you're balanced energetically, if you're working out, then you can have that Coke. And so they fund, you see this happen with big food, like over and over again over the last 60 years is they basically say, we want to fund research that research that shows that what we are doing and the food products we're creating and everything is not actually as toxic to Americans as it is. Um, and I think that that core thing, can I give you another example? Yeah. Yeah. I want, I want as many examples as you can do that.

So I think one of the biggest travesties that has been funded, uh, in the last couple of years is last year, um, Tufts nutrition school of nutrition came out with something called the Tufts food compass. It was an NIH funded study, partially funded study funded study, that took three years and, like, PhD time to research, where they were doing this full nutritional analysis of, like, you know, we're going to look at every food that we possibly could and rate it from a nutrition standpoint. And the results of this study,

which Danone and other big food companies contributed to, found that there were 68 brand-name cereals that were healthier than ground beef. So like lucky charms. I heard something about this. Is that true? Is it really true? Yes. A hundred percent. 68 brand name cereals. And what was healthier about the cereal than? This was like the rubric, the science behind it that they use, where they basically, if you look, of course, they're looking at studies that say red meat is killing you. Red meat is bad. Cardiovascular disease. Exactly. Saturated fat. Exactly. And so, and so what they're saying is they did this, you know, multi-year analysis and, uh, I believe it was Cheerios are like a 95 out of a hundred ground beef is like a 29 and pita bread

was like a one, which is also weird, but yeah. All that to say, again, another example of corruption is like Danone, one of the funders of this study, one of their top selling products is a chocolate almond milk. Turns out chocolate almond milk is like in the 70-ish range from a points score, i.e. eat as much as you want. It's good for you. And what I think is happening is we can look at the Tufts nutrition study and go, this is clearly bullshit. Like this is just bad. It's a joke that this is even called research, but what's happening is you see like big food companies are outspending the NIH 11 to one from 11 to one. Yeah. From a nutrition study standpoint, uh, which means that they've funded 50,000 nutrition studies in the last three years. And these studies are not making Americans healthier.

They're not meant for us. They are meant to inform policies that then like a lawmaker, regulator, whatever, can point to when they decide we're going to roll out Lunchables in school lunches across America, or we're going to go plant-based Monday and Friday, or we're going to have sodas in every cafeteria across, you know, 85% of us schools have contracts with major soda companies to serve sodas in schools. And the reason how they justify this is pointing to this fake biased research thing, stuff that they call science that I just think is like that system, whatever we want to call that, that like corruption, I think is what is making and has created a food system that is so adversarial to the average person and is actively making Americans sick. And I mean, it's hard to not be one of the conspiracy theories when you start hearing this. And I think that this happened slowly over time. And we were talking last night about the glyphosates and some of the herbicides or pesticides, insecticides, what have you, that are actually not necessary.

And also how the government determines whether or not they're safe. And we'll just put safe in quotations. There's a prevailing wisdom that the dosage determines the poison, which I think is true in some things. But I also think there's something called the cumulative dosage, which means that, you know, a single dose, you know, infrequently certainly is not likely to cause you harm, but consistent dosing, especially multiple dosing, you know, can really lead to serious consequences. And in the food supply, you have so much non-food, you know. And so talk a little bit about like the, you know, the glyphosates and herbicides, pesticides, some of the things that you talked about in the report that you sent me, and what kind of effect those are having on our health span. I think that this, what I would broadly bucket in this like environmental toxins bucket, I think that these compounds, glyphosate, atrazine, different pesticides, a class of chemicals,

you know, that's sort of like pesticides. There's another class of chemicals called PFOS or like the forever chemicals that companies are. And what is a forever chemical? It's basically a compound that is bioaccumulative. So your body has a hard time clearing it. And it seems it's a polyfluoro alcohol substance. Your body has a hard time clearing out these substances. And it seems like, data is very early, but it seems very likely of these PFAS when they're pregnant, it impacted the likelihood of the fetus that was developing. It impacted the likelihood of that dog to be a hermaphrodite by like a huge amount. It impacted the development of their hormonal system, like how well they slept, their likelihood of being obese or anything like this. And I think that like we already are starting to see some studies around microplastics being associated

with four and a half times greater risk of heart attack or heart disease. Yeah, the number one killer. Yeah, exactly. And no one, like we are only at the cusp of starting to understand what exactly these compounds are doing to us. Like one quick thing I want to say is I think that the way that regulators approach these

compounds, I think is completely backwards where we are running this large scale America sized clinical trial of what happens to 330 million people when you introduce these chemical compounds, these pesticides, these, you know, into the food supply, into the water supply. What sort of cross,

you know, side effects do you have when you get overexposed to glyphosate and then you get like a nice dose of microplastics? Like, we don't know. We're like running the experiment live. And we've done these, and very often we do these experiments in isolation.

You know, we just look at one compound, one nutrient, one toxin, if you will, and we don't see a negative outcome in that dose. And so they go, okay, it's okay to repeatedly dose it. But, you know, we were talking about this on another podcast yesterday, how human beings behave in communities. We live in communities. And so when we put single compounds in the human body, we only look at one biomarker. See, the inflammatory marker didn't rise. And then we go, okay, this food is non-inflammatory.

And I think it allows us not, I think it allows not just food manufacturers and the government to get away with certain things. It also is really confusing to the consumer. Completely. And I think this is one area where regulators should be doing a better job. Like the U.S. basically uses 150 pesticides that are not allowed in Europe. I didn't know it was that high. It uses 150 pesticides that are not allowed in Europe. I didn't know it was that high. It's 150 pesticides that are not allowed in Europe.

Yeah, so about 25% of the total pesticide load that's used in the U.S. each year is illegal in Europe. You can't do it. Wow. Which maybe, in my opinion, is one reason why people will remark they go to Europe and they eat bread, they eat pasta, and they feel fine. They eat bread here and they like break out and destroy their gut. They have all sorts of health issues. I've seen a lot of that myself, you know, firsthand. Totally.

And I think the other thing that I think is extremely broken about our regulatory approach is that I think Europe does a better job of is in the U.S. Basically, we require manufacturers self-certify that when they are using a new chemical, it's safe. They basically can just go, hey, we ran a study. Like, here's using a new chemical, it's safe. They basically can just go, Hey, we ran a study, like here's the study. It says it's safe. And it's looking exactly at the things that you're talking about, which is like one compound on one small marker that the FDA or EPA goes like, yep, this is fine. In Europe, they're running much more intensive. They sort of have a new chemicals are more likely to cause harm than good. And so we're going to be conservative in the things that

we allow. And I think that that approach generally has a lot of wisdom to it. And I think that it leads to Europeans not being anywhere near as poisoned as the average American is today. Wow. And when you say they're not as poisonous, because they're not using these things like glyphosate and, and other herbicides or pesticides or genetically engineered foods, to the same extent that we're using them here. Totally. And I think that's for two reasons. One, the European regulation, like regulatory bodies are much stricter on new chemical compounds that are being introduced to their food system. The second piece of that is I think that the U S one of the original sins of our food system is that we, like I said, we have like almost 80% of our calories run through about

12 big food companies. And so that is astounding to me. That's astounding. Yeah. And so when, when you think about, uh, why do we need all these pesticides? Why do we need all of this, the PFAS that goes into food packaging? Why do we need all of these things? Well, it's not to, we don't need any of these compounds to pick a thing of kale and drive it 20 miles into a city center and then sell it like the same day or the day after, like the reason that we need all of these pesticides, additives, you know, food flavorings, packaging material, like all this shit is because we have this massively centralized food system where something is harvested in California. It's then

put through some process and it ends up on shelf two to three weeks later and in the consumer's mouth almost a month later. Wow. And like like that the way that the food system functions with that gap between harvest and actual consumption has all of these unnatural requirements pesticides you know additives all these things that that i believe are poisoning americans not to mention like you've talked about the nutrient density stuff yeah you know like if you i i've read lack of satiation in the brain totally but but like in america because of how our food system works have you ever looked at like this very nerdy but nutrient decay curves and vegetables and stuff like this so this one study that i was looking at it it showed it

measured basically if you were to pick a leaf of spinach now and then eat it the same day it has like effectively all of the nutrient it's it's about 100 nutrient dense right if you pick a leaf of spinach and eat it five days later that is about 70 less nutrient dense than it was when you picked it because i know a lot of people buy that stuff in bulk and they just throw it in the crisper drawer and totally they not use it for a week. Yeah. And I think that this is like, again, one of these huge issues that's in the food system that almost no one is thinking about is not only has our food become less nutrient dense over the last 60 years due to our soils being less nutrient, having fewer minerals and other nutrients in them due to the presence of pesticides, which lead to higher yield, but lower nutrient dense kind of crops.

But we also have a system that the average crop is like harvested and then eaten something like two to three weeks later in the U.S. Most of us have a very difficult time meeting our protein needs and certain protein sources like whey protein and others can be as little as 20% absorbable. This is 99% absorbable and it has all of the essential amino acids that the body needs to build lean muscle, to recover, to improve our exercise performance, and most importantly, to repair after we have intense exercise. So this is called Perfect Am by body health it's like i said 99 absorbable it only has two calories eventually the caloric intake has virtually no caloric intake it will not break a fast it tastes amazing you mix it in water i take this literally every single morning if you're working out in a fasted state you have to take a full spectrum amino acid prior to your

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bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate i love their lab tested products you can actually see the absorption rate for all of their products they've got great electrolyte protein combinations my favorite is the perfect aminos bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate and now back to the ultimate human podcast wow that's shocking to me you know i read i read that about bottled water about how stagnant it actually is and how how many months and very often how many years it's actually been sitting in the bottle before you drink it. And there's one of my favorites, the hydrogen water. Huge fan. And, you know, I was just really astounded by the paucity of nutrition in a lot of water in a way that, you know, the gases, you know, are exchanged out of it. You know, sometimes the mineral content is virtually zero. So whereas you could be hydrating and getting really good you know mineral input

you're hydrating in a way that actually is dehydrating you because you're stripping those minerals you know right right out of the body because the water's coming in its unnatural form it's not flowing in a stream with magnesium and zinc and molybdenum and selenium and sulfur and all the things that you would find in a running stream, they're essentially, you know, non-sources of nutrients, especially when it comes to water. But how do we wake America up to this? I mean, how do we take the next step towards actually impacting the food supply? I mean, obviously Kettle and Fire is doing that. It's going to take some kind of regulatory action at the top to say, hey, we cannot put these things into our food supply anymore.

So I used to think that it would take some regulatory action. I'm still hopeful that some will come. now that the answer is not to hope for regulators to like regulate the existing big players in a very already broken system that I think basically doesn't work for anyone. I think the answer is actually people buying whole foods, uh, buying locally as much as you can, because just by buying, I mean, we were talking last night about this like Amish farm that you sourced everything from. Yeah. Like how good was it? It was amazing. Yeah. It was amazing. And night about this like Amish farm that you sourced everything from. Yeah. And how good was it? It was amazing. Yeah, it was amazing.

And like those the Amish farm there, not because they're Amish, but just because they're a local farm has no need for, you know, spraying their crops with a bunch of stuff to make sure it's preserved, making sure that pesticide, you know, that like pests are not going to overeat their monocropped field, which would cost them hundreds of millions of dollars like happens in the midwest um like when you grow things and have a local food system oriented around whole foods oriented around smaller farmers i think that a lot of these problems just sort of go away yeah and that's like the that is my ideal of how we break this very broken food system or at least one path. I think the other path is through what we're trying to do with Kettle and Fire, build a better type of food company. And then what we're trying to do with TrueMed, which is make companies that are doing the right thing also more affordable than the crap that you can buy in the center of the aisle at Walmart or whatever, the highly processed big food stuff. Right. And, you know, I always tell clients to shop the perimeter of the grocery store because on the perimeters where you're going to find mainly the things that are going to expire

in a short period of time. Like, you know, you walk down the street in Paris or Italy and they'll have day old bread. Like, well, what the hell is day-old bread? Well, it's bread made the way it was supposed to be made because in 48 hours, you can't eat this anymore. So they cut the price in half the next day. In France, it's actually illegal to sell a baguette more than a day-old. Illegal.

Go France, man. They're screwing up a lot of stuff, man, but they're getting some of these things right. Their food system is great. You know, Putin has made it a felony in Russia to grow GMO foods. Wow. So, yeah, you can actually go to prison for it. And I know that Italy just banned lab-grown meats.

I was reading about their lab-grown meat ban and, you know, some of these other food initiatives that are taking off here that, you know, the Europeans and the Italians and the Spaniards are going, hey, guys, this is not in our best interest. But there has to be a way, you know, I had a very interesting, I don't want to take too much time away from you, but I had a really interesting trip that I put all over social media the other day was a, one of the most successful single grocery stores in the country. It's called Seed to Table. A friend of mine, Alfie Oaks, owns it. And I watched him for years starting it. What fascinated me was we actually got on, he came over here to Miami and he picked us up and we took a helicopter. We hopped around to

some of his fields and he was showing me how, and I told the story, he was growing his produce and vegetables organically for less than he could actually spray the crops and with poison. And I found it really fascinating because he used things like reflective cellophanes to scatter these white flies and, you know, push them towards the woods and away from the crops. So there was no poison on there. There were these natural remedies and, you know, they had to hand weed these fields, but that's actually creating more jobs. And at the end of the day, the strawberries and, you know, the peppers that he was growing were identically comparable in price to something that was non-organic. And so then it starts not making sense to me if we can actually grow organic produce and grass-fed meats and things like that at or below the same price.

Why are we going this extra route to put, I mean, there's a chemical industry, maybe we're trying to support the chemical industry, I haven't put all those pieces together. I mean, my view on this is subsidies. So the government basically spends, I think it's $6 billion a year subsidizing corn, soy, wheat, mostly.

Funny enough, the government spends about- Three most genetically modified or genetically engineered foods on the planet. Funny enough, the government spends about- Three most genetically- Exactly. Modified or genetically engineered foods on the planet. But that's the reason why, right? Like the reason that they are the most genetically modified, the most sprayed, the most covered in chemicals is because farmers who grow them

literally can't lose money on it. Like the government subsidizes them growing these things, which then it makes the chemical industry go, okay, we're gonna invest in making sure that these wheat crops are the most productive, don't have pests, all these sorts of things. And it creates this vicious cycle that, you know, the like farm subsidies are introduced. And basically 20 years later, uh, you know, Coke is using rather than sugar, they're using high fructose corn syrup. Why are they doing that? It's not because sugar and Coke is,

like high fructose corn syrup tastes better. We're not consuming 20% of, the average American gets almost 20% of their daily calories from soybean oil because it's just like in every processed food, every restaurant, everywhere. Wow, I did not know that. It's not because everyone is like, oh my God, I love soybean oil.

It's because it is the cheapest possible input. And because it is so cheap, it makes its way into everything. And like, same with corn. I see it in all the salad dressings. Exactly. All of the, yeah, all canned veggies. And so I think that that is one of the issues is like you're saying,

it is totally possible for us to have a food system that where organic is the default, where it's not unnaturally more expensive. I think the unnatural thing that is happening in a food system where organic is the default, where it's not unnaturally more expensive. I think the unnatural thing that is happening in our food system is we have these subsidies that are making things artificially cheap. And then once they're artificially cheap, the incentive of all of these big food companies is to put them everywhere in everything.

And that's why you see mostly like wheat in its most processed form, high fructose corn syrup, soybean, you know, like most of the subsidies that goes towards soybeans, only about 7% of that is for human consumption. The rest goes into soybean oil, cattle feed, or into like other sort of alternative uses. Yeah. And so it's crazy. Yeah, it is. It is so fascinating. And I was so inspired by this trip because one of the things and I know a lot of, you know, municipalities and a lot of grocery stores don't have the luxury of being able to have a farm in close proximity to where they are. I mean, there's rural areas, there's weather issues to consider. farm visit that I did was the, I watched the strawberries get picked that morning,

go to a facility, get washed and processed, get on a truck, and then drive the hour and a half, two hours to the store so that by one o'clock in the afternoon, a strawberry that had been picked that morning was actually available on the shelf. And the nutritional value and the value that that has for the consumer and just the difference that that has for the consumer and just the difference that that's going to make in their body in a nutritionally dense food is astounding. It's crazy. So bringing it all back together, you know, Kettle and Fire is, first of all,

a brand I'm a huge fan of and I think bone broth is something people should be incorporating into their daily lives. And TrueMed is a way that they might be able to use these HSA and FSA accounts. Is there a possibility that they could use those for food products? At some point in the future, that's our goal. Okay. Yeah. I mean, basically- Is to have practitioners be able to link this you know the payments from these accounts to actually more nutritious foods yes exactly and we are going to make a big push in the future to make specific medically tailored diets or you know people who are saying you have this chronic condition you should be allowed to eat x y and z foods at foods and use tax-free funds to pay for it. That is absolutely where we want to go as a company.

It'll probably take us about a year to get there, I think. This is great. Listen, man, I love having guys like you on. I hope that you're going to come back again and sit, and we're going to run another podcast. I want to keep up with the progress that you're having in TrueMed, the progress you're having in Kettle and Fire. Where can my audience find you?

Where can they find Kettle and Fire? Where can they find out more about TrueMed? Yeah, so Kettle and Fire, you know, any grocery store around the country, fortunately, at this point. Yeah, that's good. I write my own personal newsletter just for fun on health and the food system. It's called The Next, if you just Google Justin Mayers and The Next. And that's M-A-R-E-S. M-A-R-E-S. Yep. And yeah, those are, and then trumed.com if you want to check out some of

the brand partners and other services we work with. Yeah, if you've got an FSA or HSA. Totally. You should be going there. And where do they find you on social media? I'm at JW Mares on Twitter and then Justin.mares on Instagram. Fantastic. I end every podcast by asking all my guests the same question. If you've been watching the podcast, you know it's coming. There's no right or wrong answer to this,

but what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? For me, it means really being present and grateful and enjoying every minute that I have. I feel so strongly to tie it back to my mission in life and why I've started these companies. I feel so strongly that it is so much harder to enjoy your life, to enjoy the present moment that we've all been given. If you're not healthy, if you're dealing with chronic conditions, if you're low energy or any of these things. And I think that today we have systems that are robbing people of the ability to fully enjoy

their lives in a healthy present state. And, you know, I experienced that for myself. Like I've had a great time hanging out with you today. And you really are grateful and thankful you've been so cordial. You know, you're staying here at my house and you're super into all the biohacking stuff too. And I love bringing guests and friends and all over and eating a good meal and doing breath work and doing all the biohacking things because I think it just helps us really create a community and get to know each other. But you're definitely practicing what you're preaching. And I hope you come back on and continue to tell your story on

The Ultimate Human. Thanks, man. And as always, guys, that's just science.