165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder

Giving spotlight to a game-changing snack company that’s literally saving our livers one chip at a time (while tasting incredible) — Ancient Crunch. Founder Steven Rofrano started his journey with a simple question: why are we still putting seed oils in everything? This led to Steven challenging himself to create chips that actually nourish, rather than destroy cellular health. Remember: Americans used to spend 30% of their income on food in the 1950s. Today, it’s just 11%. We’ve sacrificed quality for quantity, and our health is paying the price. MASA CHIPS - GET 20% OFF YOUR FIRST ORDER: https://bit.ly/40LVY4y Join the Ultimate Human VIP community and gain exclusive access to Gary Brecka's proven wellness protocols today!: https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg Connect with Steven Rofrano: Instagram: https://bit.ly/435ybxf TikTok: https://bit.ly/4j0p9WP X.com: https://bit.ly/3GSTZmS LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/454xu8v Thank you to our partners: H2TABS - USE CODE “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4hMNdgg BODYHEALTH - USE CODE “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV BAJA GOLD - USE CODE "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa EIGHT SLEEP - SAVE $350 ON THE POD 4 ULTRA WITH CODE “GARY”: https://bit.ly/3WkLd6E COLD LIFE - THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: https://bit.ly/4eULUKp WHOOP - GET 1 FREE MONTH WHEN YOU JOIN!: https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW VANDY - USE CODE “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/49Qr7WE AION - USE CODE “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD HAPBEE - FEEL BETTER & PERFORM AT YOUR BEST: https://bit.ly/4a6glfo CARAWAY - USE CODE “ULTIMATE” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3Q1VmkC HEALF - GET 10% OFF YOUR ORDER: https://bit.ly/41HJg6S BIOPTIMIZERS - USE CODE “ULTIMATE” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4inFfd7 RHO NUTRITION - USE CODE “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: https://bit.ly/44fFza0 GENETIC TEST: ⁠https://bit.ly/3Yg1Uk9 Watch the “Ultimate Human Podcast” every Tuesday & Thursday at 9AM EST: YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8 Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3RQftU0 Connect with Gary Brecka: Instagram: https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs TikTok: https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo X.com: https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf Facebook: https://bit.ly/464VA1H LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/4hH7Ri2 Website: https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU Merch: https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1 Newsletter: https://bit.ly/47ejrws Ask Gary: https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:20 Steven Rofrano’s Story and Journey to Masa Chips 08:23 Why Remove Seed Oils in Our Diet? 19:27 Non-Organic & GMO-Foods Toxicity 20:34 Founding of Ancient Crunch (Masa Chips) 28:08 Nutrient Density in Foods 32:41 From 30% to 11% Household Budget for Food 35:02 Masa Chips Production vs. Big Snack Industry 39:28 Avoidance of Using Artificial Additives & Preservatives 49:20 Where is Ancient Crunch Going? 52:53 Sourcing of Raw Ingredients 57:07 Final Question: What does it mean to you to be an “Ultimate Human?” Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not intended for diagnosing or treating any health condition. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before making health or wellness decisions. Gary Brecka is the owner of Ultimate Human, LLC which operates The Ultimate Human podcast and promotes certain third-party products used by Gary Brecka in his personal health and wellness protocols and daily life and for which Ultimate Human LLC and / or Gary Brecka directly or indirectly holds an economic interest or receives compensation. Accordingly, statements made by Gary Brecka and others (including on The Ultimate Human podcast) may be considered promotional in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Frito Lay North America, which sells Doritos, Tostitos, Lays, et cetera. People buy $30 billion worth of that a year. So when we say massive problem, food in general is big.

• 0:09Gary Brecka?

  The organic and the non-GMOs, that industry is one of the most toxic sources that supplies our food system.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  If we understand that fixing food is the way to fixing our health, then I think we need to be focusing more on this area.

• 0:19Gary Brecka?

  Is there an antidote to our current incredibly unhealthy snacking habits without just killing your snacking habit, but replacing it?

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Tortilla chips, they're junk food, right? Could have good tortilla chips that you like to eat, but could be made well. We make moss chips, which are tallow fried tortilla chips. So the fact that you have something here that's healthy enough for me, the health freak, and also delicious enough for the people that don't care about health at all.

• 0:40Gary Brecka?

  But where is the brand going? I mean, is this an expansive snack category that you actually wanted to expand into?

• 0:46Speaker 00

  People buy $2 billion of Doritos a year. So like, hmm, obviously people want.

• 1:04Gary Brecka?

  Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything. Anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today's guest made his way into my house through my kitchen. And you know, with, with one of the best products that I have in my kitchen, one of the best products on the market. And this is never a podcast about products and services, as you guys know. But in this particular case, I wanted to go deep down the rabbit hole. Food safety on the backs of the Baha movement and what we can do and add to our kitchen to maybe replace some of the toxic compounds that our families and our kids are eating. Great ways to add snacks to your, to your daily routines.

• 1:48Gary Brecka?

  And you know, I have an episode called What's in Gary's Kitchen? And I do lateral shifts where we take all kinds of different foods that you love to eat and swap them for things that are more nutrient dense, that feed your cellular biology. And so if you're into that, today's podcast is going to be a much must watch. So welcome to the podcast, Stephen Rofrano.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Thank you. Great to be here.

• 2:08Gary Brecka?

  So what's your role with? Masa and then I want to take a step back and I really want my audience to kind of get to know you and know a little bit about your story and what actually brought you.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 2:19Gary Brecka?

  Brought you here.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  I'm the CEO and co-founder of Ancient Crunch. We make moss chips, which are tallow fried tortilla chips and also Vandy crisps, which are tallow fried potato chips. And I started this with a friend about almost three years ago at this point, two and a half years ago. We, one of my friends was eating a bunch of Tostitos one morning. I think this is.

• 2:37Gary Brecka?

  This is college?

• 2:38Speaker 00

  Uh, this is after college. This is like a New Year's trip, actually in Fort Lauderdale.

• 2:41Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  Not too far from here. Uh, yeah.

• 2:43Gary Brecka?

  Just in Fort Lauderdale.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Basically, New Year's, uh, two years ago, plus a month. Uh, my friend eating Tostitos and this is after the whole seed oil summer. I like to call it 2021 when seed oils really became mainstream.

• 2:54Gary Brecka?

  Yes. And I. Wait, when the news about them.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, when the news about.

• 2:57Gary Brecka?

  Right, right, right. They've been out there for a long time, but like, people started exposing.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  The term seed oils, like, people started talking about it then.

• 3:03Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so I was just kind of going on a rant to my friend about why are you putting this in your body? Seed oils are poisonous. This is toxic. What are you doing? And he's like, I'm just trying to eat, like, like, I'm hungover. I'm just trying to eat my breakfast, man. Like.

• 3:14Gary Brecka?

  Which is worse because he's like, he's already recovering from alcohol and now he's gonna back in the seed.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's like the liver thing too, right? Cause alcohol and seed oils are processed with the same liver enzymes. And so it's like, this is, yeah, already a horrible situation. Anyway, so I'm not helping it by lecturing him about why he's making poor dietary choices. But ultimately, we get to talking about how there could be, you know, he's like, um, tortilla chips, well, they're junk food, right? And like, no, you could have good tortilla chips that you like to eat, but could be made well. And I started describing ingredients that could be made to put into tortilla chips that, uh, that would actually be healthy for you. And he starts listening, is like, okay, intrigued. All right, well, where can I go buy, where can I go buy these? And I said, well, that's the thing you can't. They don't exist.

• 3:57Gary Brecka?

  This is in theory in my mind.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  This is in my mind, literally in my mind.

• 4:00Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  Yes. I just come up with a recipe on the spot. And then, so he basically challenges me like, hey, uh, why don't you go make them, you know?

• 4:07Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  If I can't buy them, go ahead. And so I'm like, all right, challenge accepted. And then a few months later, I, I, I got a turkey fryer, a box of tallow and some corn tortillas and fried up the first prototype.

• 4:17Gary Brecka?

  In your, in, in your house?

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Uh, in my parents' backyard, actually.

• 4:20Gary Brecka?

  Really?

• 4:22Gary Brecka?

  So you got, so first of all, where'd you just go get beef tallow? You went to Whole Foods and you bought?

• 4:27Speaker 00

  I, I think I got it online. I forget which brand it was, but I think it was Amazon. I just found some like grass fed beef tallow, bought it online. And the turkey fryer, I think it was Costco.

• 4:37Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  You know, Thanksgiving turkey fryers, I think RFK's video.

• 4:40Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, a lot of people blow themselves up doing that.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Turkeys are much harder to fry than tortilla chips, I'll say that.

• 4:46Gary Brecka?

  You know, it's crazy not to get off topic, but I actually, I, I heard that you can't put the turkey into the fryer when it's frozen or can literally explode. It has to be room temperature.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:56Gary Brecka?

  And like every year around Thanksgiving, thousands of people that are actually frying these things for the first time, take a bone frozen turkey and drop it in there and the whole thing blows up.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, and they do it fast. And I mean, if you put ice cubes into a deep fryer, like that's not fun.

• 5:08Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Right, because like the act of frying is basically rapidly boiling the water. And so if you have like the, the ice, I don't know, it's, it's denser or something because it doesn't spread out. Whatever. Yeah, it's not, it's not a good time.

• 5:20Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Don't do that.

• 5:21Gary Brecka?

  It's not a good time.

• 5:22Speaker 00

  Don't do that.

• 5:22Gary Brecka?

  So, so you're in your parents backyard and you, and you take like flour?

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Uh, I got tortillas, actually. I found a guy who made organic corn tortillas and like ordered a case from him. He's based in Massachusetts or something.

• 5:35Gary Brecka?

  And they're, they're flexible at that point, right?

• 5:36Speaker 00

  It's like you go to a Mexican restaurant, the tortillas, they come in that little bowl with the weird little lid that with the paper.

• 5:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  That kind of thing.

• 5:43Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Um, I chopped them up on a cutting board into triangles and I tossed them in the fryer outside, of course, not indoors.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  And the first thing I noticed about them was that they didn't taste beefy or anything, which would kind of surprise me at that point.

• 5:56Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, beef tallow, yeah.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  I was expecting, hey, if we, if we use beef tallow, it might taste meaty or greasy or kind of weird. But I was very happily surprised that they were neither greasy nor beefy. And so the, the ultimate test came, this is actually at Easter, uh, some, my extended family was over. The ultimate test came when I brought them inside and started feeding them to my extended family, a lot of whom are not interested in health.

• 6:17Gary Brecka?

  No.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  And so these are the type of people, uh, who, as a lot of people are out there, who, who might say something like, I'd rather enjoy my life than be healthy. I'm sure you've heard this a billion times.

• 6:26Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, a billion times.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so, yeah, healthy is nice, but they want to eat what tastes good. And and other sort of things. So you expect the same people that have made fun of me for eating beef liver.

• 6:36Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I kind of envision you out there in your backyard, you know, with the fryer and like being like, hey, anybody want to invest? This is my startup company.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  Not yet. That would come later.

• 6:46Gary Brecka?

  Your seed rounds starting like right out there in the backyard with your Uncle Joe, you know?

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have my PowerPoint, my my business plan.

• 6:52Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, business point. No, guys, really, this is gonna be a big thing. Who wants to? Who wants to get in now before we launch?

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Well, I didn't even know any of that yet because again, I would I had just found out five minutes prior that they didn't taste beefy. So it was like news to me. So I fed this to my my family members who ate them and were like, wait, this is actually pretty good. Because I have a lot of, you know, these are people who if I fed them liver, they would freak out.

• 7:16Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  You know, or like they would not want any part of what would normally be considered health foods. And so the fact that they liked them, that set a light bulb off in my head because most health foods, as at least people think of them, taste bad. It's kale smoothie, it's chia seed pudding, it's like, eh, gross. And on the contrary, most things that taste good are considered unhealthy. You know, McDonald's, fast food, chips, you know, candy, whatever. So the fact that you have something here that's healthy enough for me, the health freak at this time. And also delicious enough for the people that don't care about health at all, that's a pretty novel thing. And that was that was the idea that I was like, wait, this could actually go somewhere. This is actually impactful. Because I think one of the reasons, we were talking about this before the show, one of the reasons why a lot of people don't adopt health

• 8:00Speaker 00

  is because they perceive it as either unpleasurable or inconvenient. And so people like us, you know, will go be healthy either way. But if you're if you want to eat things that taste good and you're prioritizing that enjoyment, which I'm not saying there's anything wrong with, that's 95% of people, if the health foods are unenjoyable, you're not gonna eat them.

• 8:17Gary Brecka?

  Right. Yeah, so true. And and I mean, you and I see eye to eye on seed oils. In fact, you know, before we got on the podcast, you were talking about how you were watching my Rogan podcast. When I was actually a guest on Joe Rogan.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 8:29Gary Brecka?

  And and I was talking about seed oils and that was going back a little while. And Paul Saladino was really, I think, probably one of the earliest movers in our space that I recall anyway, talking about seed oils because he was. Was actually breaking down the different forms of these polyunsaturated fatty acids and talking a little bit about the history of it. And I remember being suspect of the seed oil history being so sinister. I was like, there's no way that these are machine lubricants. And, you know, here we go with the next conspiracy theory, right? It's a machine lubricant. And, uh, you know, and then after the war, we had all of this excessive machine lubricant. We didn't know what to do with it. And so we started actually putting it into food supply. And, and, uh, knowing what I know now, um, nothing surprises me. We do it with florsolic acid as fluoride.

• 9:15Gary Brecka?

  We use commercial bleach chlorine to, to, you know, chlorinate water. And then we don't filter it back out, which I'm okay to sanitize with chlorine, but then filter it.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  Get it out.

• 9:23Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, get it out. But, um, um, so for the few folks of mine that, that are listening to this, that aren't really sure what a seed oil is, what is, what, what? Why are they so damaging? And, and maybe why, you know, such a high percentage of our snack foods are deep fried and normal. Everything you find in the grocery store is deep fried in seed oils or even not fried in seed oils. They're just a part of the base ingredients. One, because they're dirt cheap.

• 9:53Gary Brecka?

  But give me your take on, on seed oils. Why, why they need to be removed from our diet, especially from our kids' diets?

• 10:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think a good entry point into this discussion is the history of seed oils. So the first commercially available food seed oil for consumption was Crisco. And Crisco is hydrogenated cottonseed oil. And it was, I think, first sold in 1924 or 1912 or something in the early 1900s. And the issue was the Procter and Gamble had a lot of cottonseed oil left over from something. Uh, I forget what industry it was that they were in.

• 10:27Gary Brecka?

  What were they using the cottonseed oil for?

• 10:28Speaker 00

  Well, so it was a waste product. So you had the cotton gins and you would pull the seeds out, right? Cause the cotton gin separates the cotton fibers, uh, cause that's what you use to make clothing. And you separate the seeds out of it. And so you had all these seeds left over and it was waste product. They didn't know what to do with. And if you are in industry, you will have mountains of waste of whatever kind. If you can sell that, that's new revenue line and you want to do that. So I think for a long time they had been trying to sell it for something, but it had never worked because at that time Americans did not eat oil. Like, literally, olive oil wasn't a thing, the Italians hadn't brought it over, they were not, you know, Mediterranean culture hadn't shown up yet. Coconut oil was certainly not a thing, even though it's solid at room temperature. Avocados, no one had even heard of an avocado in the US in the early 1900s.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  So, and there were no vegetable oils. There was the only fats that Americans, and I think I heard Max Lucovere talk about this on your podcast too, I think 90% of fat consumption was animal-based fats.

• 11:23Gary Brecka?

  That's right.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  Butter, lard, and tallow. So, Americans didn't eat oil at all. And so, what shall we call it, Procter & Gamble was unable to sell a liquid oil product to American consumers. So, it kind of sat on the shelf for a few decades until some guy invented a process to turn the liquid oil into a solid fat. This is called hydrogenation. Anyone who lived through the 90s knows about hydrogenated fats.

• 11:45Gary Brecka?

  Margarine.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  All that stuff. And so, that guy invented this process that allowed them to turn cottonseed oil into a solid. And now, all of a sudden, people, because it was consistent with American culture, hey, we can eat this. It looks like lard, it looks like tallow, it's a solid thing, I can scoop it out, that's familiar to me.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  And so, they began selling that, and it was obviously so cheap, right? Because you're taking this waste product, it's basically free. You know, or you'd even pay to get rid of it in some cases. So, you have this thing that's basically cheap, that's basically free, and now you're selling it to compete with something that actually costs money, whether it's lard or tallow or something. So, you can undercut everyone else on price, and a lot of their marketing at the time was touting this whole, like, futurist, modernist idea of, like, develop technology, like, it's sort of that dirty animal fat with those smelly farmers who have pig poop on their boots. You know, eat this thing made by science in a lab with guys in white coats. And that, that sort of idea, which is kind of the opposite today, most people think, if it's made in the lab, I don't want it.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Back then, it really resonated with the American culture, who was like this forward-looking, like, scientific, like, we want this kind of technology in our lives. So, that's kind of how it got started, and then that was a very, very big success for them, obviously because the inputs are so cheap. And ultimately, led to them starting to sell liquid seed oils, starting in the 50s and beyond. So, anyway, all of that's to say- That this entire category of products was invented. There was a point in time in history when people did not eat this at all. That's not true about corn, that's not true about wheat, well, at least in recent memory. People have been eating all these things, uh, you know, butter, they've been eating, they've been drinking water. For example, they've been eating sugar for at least hundreds of years, if not thousands.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Seed oils were not eaten in any form or fashion, like these types of oils, the industrial processed ones, prior to, say, the early 1900s.

• 13:34Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  So I think understanding that history makes it a lot easier to understand why we shouldn't really be eating them. Because anyone who understands this idea of like, you know, how we're evolved, right? We talk about we're evolved to get sunlight. You talk about how we're not supposed to be wearing sunglasses outside because we want to get the sunlight in our eyes. And that helps us make the melanin that we need to protect our skin. All these things, like live how we're evolved, same thing with food. No one has evolved to eat seed oils. It's not possible that anyone's evolved to eat seed oils.

• 14:00Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's kind of like this shocking, and, and the last piece I'll say about this that I've been talking for a minute is that it went from zero, literally zero, to 25 to 30% of the average American's calories. Calories.

• 14:12Gary Brecka?

  Wow, a quarter of their calories, wow.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, or more.

• 14:14Gary Brecka?

  And, and by the way, those types of fats should be 2% or less of your total dietary intake.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 14:19Gary Brecka?

  Just as, as a matter of reference, so, um, if it's, if it's 10, 11, 12 times that, you know, there's a whole other cascade of issues.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:28Gary Brecka?

  And, and the challenge with a lot of these is that you don't get sick right away. Like, you know, if you ate some of these highly processed foods and, you know, it instantly made you nauseous, you know, that would be its own self-correcting error. The problem is that it makes you chronically ill.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Right.

• 14:44Gary Brecka?

  And, and chronically ill is just a moderate rate of suffering over a prolonged period of time.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 14:51Gary Brecka?

  Right, it's not extreme suffering because that would drive you to the ER, the urgent care. And, um, you know, it's just a sort of a low grade.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  And even worse, extreme suffering would drive you to go sue the person who caused your suffering.

• 15:03Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  And so then, like, if seed oils were that acutely toxic, then some product again will get sued and then it would stop making them.

• 15:10Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I talk about this all the time, the difference between cumulative dose toxicity and single dose toxicity. Single dose toxicity theory. Theorists say, all right, well, the doses determines the poison. Okay, so, um, but I always use the analogy, well, nobody got, you know, mercury poisoning from a single piece of tuna fish, right? But if you had some mercury in, in, you know, tuna fish and you ate it every single night over a long period of time, you could end up, you know, mercury toxicity. It wasn't the single dose, it was the cumulative dosage. And I think, you know, the awareness now of the amount of cumulative toxins that are in, you know, the toxic burden, fluoride, chlorine, uh, microplastics, pharmaceuticals,

• 15:53Gary Brecka?

  glyphosate, you know, herbicides, pesticides, pesticides, preservatives, that all of these, you know, uh, quote unquote, generally regarded as safe, um, toxins that have safe levels in a single dose, um, accumulate and they like exhaust, right? They back up and they blow the engine. If you know me, you know, I'm a huge believer in the benefits of hydrogen water. H2 Tab delivers cost-effective portable tablets that generate ultra-clean molecular hydrogen at 12 parts per million, one of the highest concentrations on the market. With over 1,300 published studies showing benefits of oxidative stress, energy, recovery,

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• 17:05Speaker 00

  The biggest problem is that all of these things, or many of these things, might be processed by the same, you know, like biological pathways, overloading them. So when you do the test on, oh, I'm going to feed the mice this one toxin and it takes this much to kill them or this much to cause them harm. Well, what about, like you said, all the toxins going through the same pathways, it decreases the amount you can be exposed to any one of them because if you add all of them up together, the total quantity of toxins, whatever they are, will overwhelm the liver, the kidneys, or whatever the detox pathways we're talking about. I mean, we mentioned this before. The same enzymes that process ethanol in the liver, it's called aldehyde dehydrogenase, that processes polyunsaturated fats and which come from seed oils.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  So it's quite likely that your total dose of both alcohol and seed oils should be lower if you have both than it would be one or the other.

• 17:56Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  Right, and so I think it's, there's a, this is a pet theory I have, I've, you know, not confirmed this, but I'd be interested to hear your take. There's a common thing on the internet about how the founding fathers, after they signed the Declaration of Independence, like rented out some bar in Philadelphia and just like drank obscene quantities of alcohol, even for like the most, you know, alcoholic of modern, you know, say frat bros or whoever. Just like handles of whiskey per person, like this kind of thing. And I can't help but wonder, and I know people used to drink a lot more in the past, actually. Like if you go to the cafes and bars in Europe, you have these, you know, big giant shelves of liquors and stuff. No one's drinking that anymore.

• 18:32Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  And people talk about how Gen Z doesn't drink that much, yada, yada, yada. I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that we literally can't process alcohol the way that our ancestors did because our livers are so tied up with, I'm sure, you know, seed oils, but I'm sure other things too, but predominantly seed oils.

• 18:48Gary Brecka?

  And that's another thing, you know, we talk about the toxic burden in a lot of these snacks, it's not just the seed oils. I mean, what originally drew me to ancient grain, you know, a friend of mine told me about you named Ben Greenfield and who I'm a huge, huge fan of, and he brought my attention to you guys and I started looking at your ingredients, you know, non-GMO corn, organic grass-fed beef tallow, sea salt, you know, spices I could recognize. I think, I think in your traditional ones, that's, that's all you got in there was the grass-fed beef tallow and sea salt.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  Grass-fed tallow, organic corn, and then the salt or, organic were better spices.

• 19:23Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, and that's, the organic and the non-GMOs is another one because that industry as a whole, in my opinion, is one of the most toxic food sources, you know, sources that supplies our food system. And what happens is, as a base ingredient, it makes its way everywhere. Like, it's like, you know, seed oils are kind of like the root and they go onto this trunk and they just branch out into all these different, you know, if you pick up a salad dressing on the. You know, on the grocery store shelf, you know, very likely it's

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Corn and soy are basically in everything, even things that aren't food, right? There's corn in your gasoline. I don't know how many people know that. A lot of plastic, especially the biodegradable plastics made of corn. Soy protein is pretty much everywhere. Cliff bars, even people like, normal people think that's like a healthy protein thing. Cliff bars, it's like soy protein.

• 20:11Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's

• 20:13Speaker 00

  It's everywhere.

• 20:13Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's literally everywhere. So, so, you know, it's, it's, it sounds like it's a really interesting journey. And, and so you get your family to love these chips. And you really, you know, the light bulb goes off in your head, ding, you know, I'm onto something. And how did this transition into an actual operating business? Because I'm always fascinated by people that, and I'm making an assumption about you, so tell me if I'm wrong. But who don't have any specific expertise in a certain market. I assume you didn't have

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I have zero professional experience in food or

• 20:46Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Anything.

• 20:47Gary Brecka?

  And, and, you know, but I also find, and I say this all the time on my podcast, you know, some of the most passionate, driven, purposeful entrepreneurs I've ever had on this podcast, including yourself.

• 20:59Gary Brecka?

  They solve some kind of problem in their life and, and they're actually solving a big problem for other people. I mean, you're solving a massive problem and that is, is there an antidote to, you know, our current incredibly unhealthy snacking habits without just killing your snacking habit, but replacing it. You know, I call this lateral shift. And, and the answer is clearly yes. I mean, so it's a massive problem. And so talk a little bit about this transition from backyard turkey fryer

• 21:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:26Gary Brecka?

  to when it became

• 21:28Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 21:28Gary Brecka?

  a real thing.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Just a point about the massive problem, just for some context. Frito Lay, North America, which sells Doritos, Tostitos, Lays, et cetera. People buy in, in North America, people buy $30 billion worth of that a year.

• 21:44Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. So when we say massive problem, this particular, like food in general is big. Snack foods is huge. Food is even bigger, but like just this one tiny little industry. Tortilla and potato chips, basically.

• 21:57Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  Thirty, and that's just free to lay.

• 21:59Gary Brecka?

  I found fascinating that you, I heard you on another podcast, talking about this. And one of the things you said, it was, it was just a podcast. It wasn't video. And one of the things you were talking about how the manufacturer actually manufactures possibly for multiple brands, maybe ten, maybe dozens of brands. And so you're essentially getting the same source, different labels, but you're essentially getting the same ingredient.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. So.

• 22:22Gary Brecka?

  Packaging around it.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  So, and that's one of the things we had to navigate. So to your question before about how we turned, you know, turkey fryer chips. So the first thing we realized was that it tastes good and it's healthy. So it satisfies these two competing, often competing interests in a way that's helpful to everyone. The second thing we did was like, okay, how are we going to go make it, right? I can't be turkey frying on my backyard and sell that on the internet, right? So we hired a food startup consultant to, these are characters that basically come in and say, you don't know anything about, you know, food, the food industry, but you have grandma's recipe or your recipe. How do we turn it into a business? The first thing he told us after thinking about it for two weeks, he comes back and says, yeah, this isn't gonna happen. You can't make this. I'm like, well, what do you mean? Why not?

• 23:06Speaker 00

  And he said, there are no factories that exist that will make your product in grass fed beef tallow for you. I'm like, okay, interesting. So what are we gonna have to do? And he said, well, you could use coconut oil or avocado oil if you want to avoid seed oils. But that's pretty much it. If you want to get a factory to make it for you, you have to do one of those two things. And I said no to that pretty quickly because I don't think coconut, well, first of all, I don't like the fact that you have to import coconut oil from across the Pacific Ocean. It's just like a wasteful thing. It's like costly, burns a lot of energy. You have to deforest, rainforest. It's just, it doesn't seem right to me to like sell a product in the US that's heavily dependent upon some ingredient from very far away.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  Possible, but not ideal to me. Avocado oil also is like fraught with, you know, issues, that whole industry. Eighty-five or eighty-six percent of avocado oil in the market was tested to either be fake or rancid. By some people in UC, I think.

• 24:06Gary Brecka?

  EWG.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  UCSD.

• 24:08Gary Brecka?

  Environmental Working Group?

• 24:09Speaker 00

  Oh, no, this is University of California.

• 24:11Gary Brecka?

  Okay, EWG, not published, but broadcast this.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. Anyway, avocado oil is the whole issue, and then drug cartels own avocado farms in Mexico. So whatever. I was like, I maintain that tallow is the best frying fat, not only because it's high in saturated fat, it's not seed oils. It's also nutrient dense, unlike plant fats. So it does have vitamins, it has fats, a lot of vitamins in tallow. And the last thing is it doesn't make stuff greasy. I've, I've fried some coconut before, it comes out greasy, shiny, you know, it gets on your fingers, like, I don't know. I don't like that. So tallow is the ideal frying fat. We couldn't get someone to make it for us. Then we were like, okay, crap. So we're gonna have to go make it ourselves. That was the next fundamental realization. And so we thought about like, how are we gonna do this? We're gonna rent a commercial kitchen, because you have to have, you know, a food safe place to make your products.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  We ended up finding one not too far from, as I said, my parents' house, which is where the prototype was made. So this is where I grew up. So I know the area well. We found a kitchen. We had to go buy a fryer. We had to get people. We had to buy a machine to get the pouches. We had to do all that stuff. And we were like, as we were planning this out, we quickly realized, this is gonna cost a lot of money.

• 25:16Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  This is gonna cost a lot of money.

• 25:19Gary Brecka?

  I assume you weren't just independently wealthy on your own.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Uh, no.

• 25:23Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  No, still I'm not.

• 25:25Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  But.

• 25:27Gary Brecka?

  Such is the life of an entrepreneur, brother.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Yes. So we realized it was gonna cost a lot of money. And so we were trying to like, figure out how this is gonna work. I looked at the price on the shelf of like, Doritos, and I'm like, this doesn't even make sense. Not, not even about the ingredient quality, because of course, tallow is way more expensive than seed oils. Or organic corn is way more expensive. All the, the salt is way more expensive. Even ignoring all of the cost of the ingredients, it, the math still wasn't adding up. We could use Frito-Lay quality ingredients, and still, it was gonna be too expensive. So we figured that, we learned more about this, we realized that the reason why Frito-Lay is cheap, is not merely because they use bottom barrel ingredients. Frito-Lay, as I mentioned before, this is like thirty, people buy thirty billion dollars worth of this a year in the US and Canada.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Frito-Lay has thirty factories in the country.

• 26:15Gary Brecka?

  Thirty?

• 26:15Speaker 00

  That's about, like, one factory for every two states. They have a giant factory with, like, robotic equipment and giant fryers and, you know, assembly lines and all that stuff. Thirty factories. They have two hundred, two hundred fifty distribution centers.

• 26:30Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  Uh, around the countries. That's like five on average per state. Frito-Lay's facilities. Um, they have, I don't know, tens of thousands of employees. All, all this stuff. They also have negotiated special deals with grocery stores that allow their products to appear on shelves with a lower markup than other people's products.

• 26:49Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  So, like, for example, if I'm on the, on the shelf at Publix, um, or a similar, I'm not naming Publix specifically, but that kind of store, if I'm on a shelf, uh, Publix might take thirty-five to forty-five percent of the sticker price.

• 27:02Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  For their margin. Uh, for Frito-Lay, they might take twenty-five percent because Frito-Lay has this massive volume, they negotiate this better deal, yada, yada, yada. So, so many structural reasons, um, why, oh, oh, and the last, the last thing, reasonable, and, and Frito-Lay's bottomland ingredients are not only cheap inherently, they're even cheaper because the government subsidizes them.

• 27:20Gary Brecka?

  Right, yeah.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  AKA your tax dollars.

• 27:22Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  AKA the listeners' tax dollars subsidize this.

• 27:25Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  So, so there's a lot of reasons why it's, it's cheap. And so, thinking about this, it's like, obviously, we're going to have to make this more expensive in order to survive, in particular, to survive without accepting a ton of outside investor money, which we didn't really want to do because we intend to control and own the business for a long time.

• 27:44Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  Um, so, we realized that the products are gonna have to be expensive, which, um, I think, all things considered, right, for me personally, if I'm not eating Monster Chips, I'm not, just not gonna eat them.

• 27:55Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  You know, um, they're more filling. I, I would prob, people.

• 27:59Gary Brecka?

  They are actually more filling.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:00Gary Brecka?

  So are the Vandy chips, by the way.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:02Gary Brecka?

  Like, you really can't overeat them.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:03Gary Brecka?

  Which, which, you know, one of the things I talk about a lot on the podcast is nutrient density. And, you know, I mean, uh, chips and snacks really shouldn't be the main source of our meal, you know, it shouldn't, that shouldn't be the main thing.

• 28:18Speaker 00

  It's an accessory.

• 28:18Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, it's an accessory. And nutrient density is what our GLP-1 responds to, you know, now we have all of these Ozempic, Wegovy, and. You know, Manjaro, essentially trying to mimic what we already make in our gut. And we make more GLP-1 in response to nutrient density. If you actually look at side by side trials with, and Mark Hyman talks about this all the time, side by side trials of highly processed diets versus deeply nutritious or, you know, whole food diets that have nutrient dense foods. You'll find that even when they gave the exact same amount of calories, highly processed calories versus nutrient dense calories, the highly processed group got hungrier more

• 29:02Gary Brecka?

  frequently and hungrier faster. Yeah. And so the important point about that is that when you eat satiating nutrient dense foods, you have a less of a tendency to overeat. Right. It's really hard to overeat ribeye. It's hard to overeat avocados. You're not going to sit down and eat five avocados. Right. Because they're just too nutrient dense. Right. I feel the same way about these because, you know, they're, they're a lot more nutrient dense and caloric and fat dense than, than their counterparts. So you're not going to sit down and eat bags and bags of these. Right. Hi guys, Gary here. I want to take a few minutes of your time to invite you to my ultimate human VIP community. This is a private community with front row seats to my most advanced health protocols,

• 29:44Gary Brecka?

  exclusive monthly Q and A calls, a private podcast where you can ask my guests and me your most pressing questions and my own personal wellness blueprints and everything you need to optimize your health. You'll connect with like-minded folks in this community. You'll get firsthand access to cutting edge insights and enjoy special discounts on products that I trust the most. And here's the best part, membership is just 97 bucks a month, a fraction of the cost my private clients pay for the same deep dive guidance. If you're ready to supercharge your wellness and skip the guesswork, I'd love for you to join us. Head to theultimatehuman.com/vip. That's theultimatehuman.com/vip right now to become one of my ultimate human VIPs.

• 30:28Gary Brecka?

  This is your fast pass to better health, so don't miss it. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  There's an interesting layer on this, in addition to the vitamin content, because, you know, vitamin A, we talked about the nutrient density, but the saturated fat versus seed oil thing is interesting. There's a guy, Dr. Michael Eads, I don't know if you're familiar with him, he talks about, there's a very, very cool study where they took a bunch of kids and they said, hey, like, it was lunchtime, whatever, I think it was a school lunch related study. They said, hey, we're going to feed you kids, we're going to split them into groups and feed you as many calories of a particular meal that you want until you stop eating. And, you know, eat as much as you want, we're going to measure how much you ate, and when you're done, we're going to, we're going to figure out the calories you consumed. There were a few different groups, they were all variations of a carb, of a carbohydrate plus a fat, seed oil versus saturated

• 31:18Speaker 00

  fat, and I think most of the carbs are potato. So basically, we had a baked potato with butter versus like seed oil fried, french fries, this kind of combination. And the seed oil plus carb group ate on average 250 to 300 more calories in their meal.

• 31:34Gary Brecka?

  Wow. In a meal?

• 31:35Speaker 00

  In a meal. And their kids, and their children, in one meal.

• 31:40Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Eating several hundred more calories until they were full. And like you said before, who knows, I'm sure they're getting more hungry faster than, than the kids that ate the saturated fat. And so there's an added layer, and Michael Eads talks about the whole like metabolic reason for this, there's like FADH and NADH ratios involved, it's all very complex. I think you'd really like it, I'll send this to you afterward.

• 32:02Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, send it to me, I would really love it.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a whole, it's a very interesting framework of like our cells telling us when to stop eating based on caloric density from the fat.

• 32:12Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, satiation, nutrient density, caloric density, totally agree.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  That's it, you will eat more calories when you're eating seed oils. And obviously, people count calories, I'm not a big calorie counting fan myself, but I think it's somewhat helpful for, for some people. But yeah, people will eat more calories when they're eating seed oils as their fat instead of tallow. So there's, um, yeah, and then the other thing about cost, which I think is very interesting, is something about expectations, right? So in the 1950s, 30% of our household budget went to food.

• 32:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, that's.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, like a third of people's income.

• 32:46Gary Brecka?

  That's a sizable amount of money.

• 32:48Speaker 00

  Right? Nowadays, it's 11%.

• 32:51Gary Brecka?

  Wow. So it's a third.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  A third of what it was in the 50s. And 100 years before that, it was like your entire life was a farmer, because 97% of people in our country are farmers. So like the.

• 33:01Gary Brecka?

  You, you worked to eat.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, you worked to eat.

• 33:04Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  So it was like 100% of your income, basically, or your time or whatever.

• 33:07Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  Equivalent. So over the past like 200 years, we've progressively gone from our entire lives were dedicated to food. To now 10% of our income is due to food and we complain about it. Obviously, financial circumstances are what they are. However, people's diets, like the, the quality of the food that your dollar purchases has suffered because of this.

• 33:30Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  So if we're thinking, if you're of the mindset, we're like, okay, food actually affects health. If you understand, oh, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna save money on food now and I'm gonna be sick later and that's gonna cost even more money. In addition to the suffering, like what about suffering? Like money is one thing, but like being physically healthy and vibrant is, is worth more than money, in my opinion. So if you add up all these factors, we, we actually are spending, I think, way too little money on food collectively.

• 33:55Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  And I'm not just saying that because I sell expensive snacks. Don't even buy my, my snacks. Go to the farmer's market and buy grass-fed beef instead of going to Costco and getting whatever the heck they're importing from God knows where. Right? Like, if, if you increase your, if you're an average American and you spend 11% of your budget on food. If you, if you were to increase your food budget by 50%, that would only have a hit to your overall budget of 5%.

• 34:20Gary Brecka?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  Right? Because 11% turns into 15.

• 34:22Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  But that's the 50% growth. It's like a relative risk.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  So it's like, if, if we understand that food is the, is the, fixing food is the way to fixing our health, then, then I think that's certainly like, we need to be focusing more on this area.

• 34:37Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. You know what? I, I love that we were starting to talk about it, you know, before the podcast, we were eating lunch. And you talked about constantly pushing in the, you know, the, the capacity of ancient grain. And I'd love for you to talk about that. How, how you will, you know, you are eventually looking to get the price point down. And dramatically increase production, I think.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 35:00Gary Brecka?

  You told me you're having, you know.

• 35:04Gary Brecka?

  20 people involved in making 2,000 bags and eventually you'll have eight people involved in making 10,000 bags.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's insane.

• 35:12Gary Brecka?

  And that would, you know, that'll eventually.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, going back, going back to that free to lay discussion. So one of their factories is like a massive automated machine. In contrast, because we didn't have a factory, we couldn't, you know, going back to that story, we couldn't find a factory. We had to do it ourselves. These factories that make everyone's, these, these are the factories that make everyone's food for them. And so they have, I don't know, they're 400,000 square feet. They have huge amounts of equipment.

• 35:37Gary Brecka?

  400,000 square.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, we know of one, um, uh, some people, the guys that are making our potato chip equipment for an upcoming factory that we're building. They have an installation in Pennsylvania, it's 400,000 square feet. It's like casual, you know?

• 35:51Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, casual.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, massive, massive operations. And so there's like, I don't know, a dozen, a hundred, maybe, maybe prob, whatever, a thousand. A very small amount of actual food factories in the country.

• 36:04Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  That make the vast majority of packaged foods. Your protein bars, all of them made in the same factory or same handful of factories.

• 36:10Gary Brecka?

  Yep, yep, that's so true.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  Same handful of factories, your chips, snacks, cookies, crackers, all of it's same handful of factories. And so when you go to the grocery store and you look at this apparent diversity of options, and you think, oh, wow. We really got all the bases covered. I have 20 different cookies that I can choose from.

• 36:26Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  They're probably coming from like three different factories. And so that's just like the, the, the reason for this is that food production lends itself to scale. And so for costs to come down, it's, uh, like you really want to be making large quantities at once. And so this is, was our problem from day one and it's, it's still our problem today. Uh, Vanny is a good example. So the potato chips sitting over there. We make those, we, we make that eight hours a day on our second shift and we have about 24 people in that crew.

• 36:54Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  And we make 2,000 bags in that shift. So it's like, what is that? Uh, like, why can't I do math? That's like a hundred bags per person about.

• 37:03Gary Brecka?

  And you're, you're going to transition this to much, much bigger scale. I mean, talk a little bit about how you're going to do that.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So you think about, and the reason for this is we have, uh, Row of deep fryers. And we have baskets and we have like a few like glorified salad spinners and like pots where we spray filtered water to rinse the potatoes. We got, um, we have this little potato slicer device, but we have 24 people basically manually frying, like dipping a tray in. And if we're, you know, not watching a video, it's like making the frying motion. And then you're pulling them out, your, your quality control, you're putting salt in them by hand with a salt shaker. Stick them in bags by hand, sealing them with a machine by hand.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  And so that is a very labor intensive process and that greatly contributes to the expense of the products.

• 37:53Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  So in contrast, uh, we're looking at some equipment right now. I just got back from visiting the equipment vendor. It's a whole production line for potato chips. This set of machinery does the same process with our same ingredients. And it will, you know, we have to modify some things for tallow compatibility and whatever, but same ingredients. And it will make, I think, what did I say? Uh, it's about 10,000 bags of those chips.

• 38:23Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  In an hour.

• 38:25Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  And eight people run the line.

• 38:28Gary Brecka?

  So 24 down to eight?

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. And. 2,000 down to 2,000 in eight hours to 10,000 in one hour.

• 38:34Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, that's incredible.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that's the type of thing that you get when you're big in the snack industry. And part of the issue is that most startups have some amount of access to that type of scaled manufacturing capacity. Cause they go to one of the thousand, they're called co-manufacturers, these companies that make food for a lot of different brands. If you can go to one of them, you can benefit from their machinery and you can benefit from their, you know, economies of scale. But if you're us and you're over in a commercial kitchen with a, you know, bunch of manual fryers. Doing this by hand.

• 39:06Gary Brecka?

  Turkey fryers.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  You don't, you don't get to benefit from any of that. But again, the reason why we do this is because, uh, the big factories only, they're, they're seed oil factories. They don't, they don't like working with new fangled ingredients, which is ironic because the entire industry of food production 100 years ago was frying everything in tallow.

• 39:23Gary Brecka?

  I mean, I completely agree with you, but, um, so how do you avoid using, um? Artificial additives, preservatives, or other compounds. Because, you know, when you, when you look at a, you know, commercial chip, I'm not gonna name any brand names, but everybody knows the brand names. You don't, you don't just have the seed oil. You've got the MSG, the monosodium glutamate. You've got the, you know, multiple red dyes.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:48Gary Brecka?

  And other dyes, orange dyes, yellow dyes. Just look at the number of dyes. You often have something called keratine. You have quote unquote, "natural flavors", which is, can be fine, but in most of the time, it's sinister cover up for, shouldn't, shouldn't be there. And then you have the food dyes. And so when you think about the kind of bomb that you're putting in your body between the seed oils, the, the iodized table salt, the, you know, the, the food dyes and the monosodium glutamate. I mean, the, these things substantially add up. Not, uh, setting aside the fact that they're not only not organic, but they are GMO. They're, they're part of that genetically modified.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, that's a great question, and it often goes underlooked. And I think seed oils are easy to talk about because it's so obvious. They're 25% of calories. I think it's a very high impact thing to look at. But if you're, if we're optimizing, which of course you do, we're looking at everything, right? We wanna look, every, every single thing on that label needs to justify itself. And the short answer, how we do this is, it's a lot of freaking work. That's how.

• 40:46Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  And that's why no one else does it.

• 40:47Gary Brecka?

  Well, it's like very, it's very labor intensive, right?

• 40:50Speaker 00

  So I'll, well, I'll tell you a story. So our lime chips, which were our second flavor that we ever came out with. And the reason why is because, you know, everyone knows Tostitos lime, hint of lime, or whatever. Like, it's a very common tortilla chip flavor. So if we're gonna make flavors, we're gonna branch out. Obviously, we should go with lime. I thought, okay, that seems easy. It's just one thing, right? Can't be that hard. So I started looking around for lime powders on the internet to try to find a supplier. And I couldn't really find anything. Everything was not organic. If it was organic, it had meltdextran or some other filler or whatever. I'm like, huh, that's weird. How do these other people do it? So then I went to a grocery store and I went through all, I went to the chip section to look at all the lime chips. And we're trying to find out, like, on their ingredient label, what they used.

• 41:31Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Maybe I could copy that. So I forget the exact full list, but basically, there's two camps. You get lime juice powder, which has meltdextran in it, and lime juice.

• 41:41Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  And I think that's probably what Tostitos uses. And then there's, this one shocked me, actually. This is, and then the, the health, some health brands, which I don't wanna name.

• 41:49Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  Their lime chips were lime oil and citric acid. Citric acid, as I'm sure we know, comes from like these giant bioreactor farms in China. It's like black mold, basically produces citric acid. So citric acid was there for the sourness and the lime oil was there for that like fragrance of lime. But there was no, there was no lime in any of these chips. And I was just like sitting there like thinking like the healthy chips and the junk chips, all of the lime flavors. There's no limes. Where are the friggin' limes? And we actually ran a few ads after like a while back, just where the headline was, where is the lime? And we showed like our ingredient label and other ones. And so in order to make this work, I had to, I was like, hey, we have to go get some limes. We got some limes, sliced them up with a deli slicer by hand after washing them, organic limes, of course.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  And then we stuck them in a dehydrator, like in rows of like little lime discs. Like you would see in like, uh, sometimes you go to a bar, you'll see these dehydrated lime discs. And we ground them up into a powder and that was, that was our lime chip for like six months. Was some guy's full-time job slicing and dehydrating and grinding limes.

• 42:54Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, this is a super labor intensive process.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Super labor intensive. And then ultimately we, um, we, we found a guy who has a dehy, uh, freeze drying factory. And I, I learned about freeze drying, um, it's better than dehydrating because it preserves the vitamin content. It doesn't like lead to oxidation because dehydrating, it's not high temperature, but it's high enough that it causes oxidation. So like the dehydrated limes, the slices would be a little brown, but then when we freeze dried them, they, they remained like pale green. And so vitamin C content is preserved and all that stuff. So let me start at freeze drying. And then we kind of outsourced that, but still the lime powder today remains our single most expensive spice ingredient.

• 43:31Gary Brecka?

  Really?

• 43:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like $40 a pound.

• 43:33Gary Brecka?

  Cause, cause you're buying actual?

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, cause we're buying pounds of organic limes and then grinding them up into a slurry and freeze drying. And freeze drying itself is expensive.

• 43:42Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  Um, so yeah, our lime powder is $40 a pound, which like, that's just a lot of money for spices.

• 43:49Gary Brecka?

  But you know, like we said, you know, eventually this is working its way down. Right? Because you're going to automation.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, you get, you gotta, you buy your own freeze dryers and to be fair, the seasonings themselves, like of course they contribute, but like the seasonings are relatively, are relatively. Small percentage of our overall like.

• 44:08Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, when you look at things that are in some of these other ingredients like MSG, um, you know, which is also seasoning, you know, the one that's not even good to me. That, you know, very often you'll see caragean or, or other, other kinds of binders like a, a soy lacithin or, you know, something even in. Um, snack foods that are competing with.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're supposedly healthy. Yeah, well, MSG, that's an easy one. That, um, vegan companies use that to mimic the flavor of cheese. Because cheese naturally has MSG. It's like the umami flavor or whatever they call it. And so you'll have, uh, again, don't want to name names, but you can easily find this if, if, you know, you go to a healthy grocery store. A lot of the vegan cheese or vegan queso, this and that, whatever, like it'll have either MSG right on the label or they use the term yeast extract. Because yeast, yeast produce MSG. And so if you take an extract of yeast, it's MSG.

• 44:59Gary Brecka?

  It doesn't sound as sinister.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  But it doesn't sound sinister, like, oh, yeast, that's in bread or that's like, uh, that's natural.

• 45:04Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, it's like when we put folic acid in the food supply, we call it fortified or enriched, you know.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  Ooh, that sounds like a vitamin.

• 45:10Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, it's fluorinated water, but it's really fluorosilic acid water. But if you said fluorosilic acid, people like, wow, that sounds.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  Sketchy.

• 45:17Gary Brecka?

  That sounds sketchy.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, so a lot of vegan foods will use, um, uh, like for example, I actually don't think Doritos. Uh, their nacho cheese flavor has MSG. I'm pretty, like, they actually have cheese in it.

• 45:28Gary Brecka?

  Um, I think one of, one of them.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  I'm sure one of them does.

• 45:31Gary Brecka?

  It's gotta be Cheetos or can we look that up?

• 45:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, but, um, but, but yeah, you'll see yeast extract. Um, and so I think that's a big one. Uh, the, the food colorings, I think there's just no excuse for that.

• 45:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  Like I think our Copanero chip is, it's spicy. It's like, um, like, I don't know, tomato.

• 45:48Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, you've got redmond salt.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:51Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's, there's tomato powder, there's bute powder for a little bit of sweetness and like that creates a pretty nice color, honestly, like I don't.

• 45:57Gary Brecka?

  Not easy to create a good color.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:58Gary Brecka?

  I, it's, see, I think this, um, I think the dis-uniformity.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:04Gary Brecka?

  You know, brings us back to something that's more in its natural form.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:08Gary Brecka?

  Like, you know, avocados are not perfect when you cut them open. You know, one of the things I noticed about seed oils, for example. In the grocery store, you ever just notice how you go down the aisle and like the Weston oil or the vegetable oil, they're all exactly the same color, like exactly. And then they're exactly the same consistency. They have that beautiful yellow hue to them. They got the heart healthy label on there.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:29Gary Brecka?

  And you know, that's not how things occur in in nature. I mean, if you if you compressed a hundred or a thousand

• 46:41Gary Brecka?

  seeds and produce the oils and you put them into all these bottles, they'd be all kinds of different.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it should be very.

• 46:45Gary Brecka?

  Some be light, some be gray, some be darker.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. We have this like with our potatoes, for example, like our potato, we have two harvests. There's two different suppliers, one's in Idaho, the other's, I think, Florida, I forget. So we have potatoes for six months. They're stored well, but because we don't use toxic storage methods, so there's this thing called CIPC. I actually forget what it stands for. Eighty-five percent of potatoes in the US are sprayed with CIPC. And it prevents the spores or the eyes from sprouting. Because obviously, there's there's only two potato harvests. If you want potatoes all year round, you gotta storm somewhere.

• 47:18Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  And so we have to prevent them from spouting. And so if you just like gas them with this toxic crap, like, yeah, you can you can prevent them from creating eyes, but we can't, we won't use that stuff. So, yeah, you can do things with temperature and humidity and keep them dark, right? Potatoes actually are sensitive to light, like literally, they will wake up. So you have to trick them into thinking they're underground, all these things. But even still, they will change and over time, some of the starch is turned into sugar in potatoes. And so that creates like, there's about a, you know, six month cycle of variation in our potatoes where you'll see brown spots and whatever stuff. But it's like, you want a potato chip that's not made with crap, that's what you're gonna get.

• 47:56Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  It's actual potatoes, it's like french fries in a bag. I think someone said that earlier today. Like, that's what it tastes like, that's what it is.

• 48:02Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  You know, it's not like Frito Lay, like Lays, where everything is the same shape and color and texture and size and consistency. It's like, that's not, that's not how food works.

• 48:11Gary Brecka?

  Right. When it comes to snacking, masa is flipping the script on what real food should look like. Masa chips are crafted with grass-fed beef tallow, one of the healthiest fats on the planet. These chips are packed with essential vitamins like vitamin. A, D, E, and vitamin K2, all of which play a role in keeping your skin vibrant, your immune system strong, and your bones solid. But here's the real magic about masa. Masa's corn goes through an ancient process called nix-stimulization, which makes it way easier to digest and it amps up its nutrient profile. Plus, these chips are low in PUFA, so you won't find any of the inflammatory seed oils that you find in most snacks. And instead, masa uses pure Redmond sea salt, giving you a natural hit of minerals that keep your cells hydrated and your energy steady.

• 48:56Gary Brecka?

  So don't just snack. Reach for masa. It's real food, real health, without any of the junk. Grab a bag and I promise you'll feel the difference. Now, let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. Now, for you, where is this? So Ancient Grain is the parent company.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Ancient Crunch.

• 49:13Gary Brecka?

  Ancient Crunch, sorry, is the parent company. And I almost, and I like that because I identify most with your masa brand. But then when I started, you know, eating the dandy and feeding those to my kids, to my family, it's actually a great way to make. I used it this season when I made party platters for the holidays. Because people are always like, well, how can you make a healthy platter for the holidays? And the interesting thing is, you can actually recreate it in a way that is really nutrient dense and healthy and kind of guilt free.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  And it's not like any compromises. Like, it's actually good.

• 49:54Gary Brecka?

  And it actually looks really good, too. You know, it's aesthetically pleasing. You can lay it all out on there. I get a lot of these raw cheeses from my local farm here and local Amish farm, which I love. And yours make a nice mix with that. But where is the brand going? I mean, is this an expansive snack category that you actually want,

• 50:18Gary Brecka?

  you know, Ancient Crunch to expand into? Are you going to get into other?

• 50:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we started out with masa. That was, and back when we started, I was like, this is literally, we're only doing original, one flavor. I didn't even have ambition for other flavors. I'm like, what other flavors do you need?

• 50:32Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  But then I'm like, oh, wait.

• 50:33Gary Brecka?

  Tortilla, that's it.

• 50:34Speaker 00

  Buy like a billion dollars of Doritos or god knows what, two billion dollars of Doritos a year. Yeah. So like, hmm, obviously people want the spices and the fun thing about the spices is that there are no artificial flavors in the sense that like the flavor, like there are artificial substances that create flavors. Mm hmm. But the flavors are all real. There's vanillin, which creates a vanilla flavor. Right. There's lime oil and citric acid, which creates a lime flavor. But none of the flavors, it's like, is there a fake color? All the colors exist, like they're just real colors. Yeah. It's like, so the fun thing about spices is that any flavor that exists in the junk food world, we can just make with real stuff. In any, in, in most cases, it'll taste even better. Yeah. We're not using, the reason why they do their fake stuff is not because they want a fake flavor, they just want to save money.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  And so if we're not beholden to this idea of like, we have to get the cheapest thing possible in every single way, because we don't, we want the, we want the realist thing possible. Yeah. Not the cheapest thing. We can make better flavors, right? Like the cheese that are just gonna go into the one day moss and nacho cheese flavor is gonna be better cheese than the cheese that goes into Doritos. Yeah. Right? And it's still gonna taste like cheese. It'll just taste better. So we realized we could do the flavors. So then, then we got to thinking with this whole, the whole long-term idea here is that there's, there's a certain, like, American snacking is like a big part of American culture. You go to the center of the grocery store, there's like four aisles dedicated to these things. It comes in bag, comes in bags and boxes that people snack on. And that's, it makes up a lot of our calories, for better or for worse. And so our goal is to. For worse. Yeah. Yeah.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  Um, I mean, not as, so, yeah. Not with you guys. The snacking is also an activity is like, yeah, I mean, I actually don't really snack on these things. I eat them as part of my meals. It sounds like you do too. We had lunch earlier today. But regardless, Americans buy this stuff. They want this stuff. And so my job is to go in and say, alright, that's next. We're gonna do that, but like, make it real. If it's bread, it's gonna be sourdough. It's, you know, you get the idea. Right. So, so our whole goal with Ancient Crunch is to like, have a portfolio of these mini companies, brands, of a, of a classic American snack product that people really enjoy. That's not going anywhere anytime soon. We're just making it the, like. Turning up all the dials on the real food.

• 52:46Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  And making it as best as it possibly can be.

• 52:48Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, and, and, and talk a little bit about the, the sourcing of the actual raw ingredient, the corn.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:54Gary Brecka?

  And what are the detriments of, I've talked about this before, but I'd love your opinion on the detriments of, the genetically modified corns.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:03Gary Brecka?

  And this area of snack foods, you know, wheat, soy, corn.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:08Gary Brecka?

  These are some of the most, not only pesticide laden and, and chemical laden crops, but also they're, the majority, if not all of them.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:19Gary Brecka?

  Are genetically modified.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:22Gary Brecka?

  Why is that an issue?

• 53:23Speaker 00

  So I, I think the, the main issue from, from my perspective, understanding with GMOs is that, it's not to say, cause a lot of people are like, you don't believe in science, like GMOs, it's like, what's wrong with that? And it's like, and then some people say, you're playing God. And it's like, that's not the strongest argument. In my opinion, the problem with GMOs is not that they're modified, it's that what are they modified for? And the vast, vast majority of cases GMO crops are modified to be more resistant to pesticides.

• 53:48Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  And that's pretty much.

• 53:50Gary Brecka?

  Round up ready.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. So more resistant to pesticides means that the farmers can put more poison on it. And that means you can eat more poison and the crops don't die.

• 53:57Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  So it's not like, if someone were to GMO something and like make it more nutrient dense, I'd say maybe, but also, food when properly grown is as nutrient dense as it needs to be. Like it's, it's already there for us. Like nature put it there.

• 54:10Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  Like you don't need to make it better. Like we're not going to put more vitamin A in beef liver, right?

• 54:16Gary Brecka?

  Right, right.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  There's enough, there's enough where it is.

• 54:18Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  So I think that's the main issue with GMOs. And corn is an especially nasty crop. Like parts of the Midwest are just like, the groundwater is literally polluted with atrazine. And like glyphosate is everywhere.

• 54:30Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:30Speaker 00

  And it's like, it's not just the food, it's also the, like, corn farmers have a lot, uh, get cancer at higher rates than, you know, other professions. It's like absolutely devastating. And I think, um, it's either only 1% or 7% of corn in America is not GMO. And among non-GMO corn, it's a lot of it's still not organic. And so I think for us, organic corn is like the absolute bare minimum standard. Uh, over the next two, three years, I was mentioning this before, I want, uh, all our corn to be regenerative organic, which is, you know, possible.

• 55:00Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I love that. You're going for organic and then eventually regenerative organic. And you know, a lot of what we talked about before the podcast was what you're doing with your factory in Pennsylvania, you know, and the automation, really getting the, uh, labor cost down, which is your highest cost, cost of goods sold now. And, um, once this happens, do you foresee, you know, price points, um, in your, in your products dropping?

• 55:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, across the board.

• 55:26Gary Brecka?

  And availability increasing because.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  I think the main thing, yeah, I mean, it's, it's kind of supply and demand at this point, right? Like we're really tapped. I think we made, uh, we can make, um, I don't know, uh, a hundred thousand ish approximate bags a month. And, you know, we can get a little bit more out of that with our manual methods. Um, however, uh, the real issue is that we like, why are we not on shelf at some big grocery stores? I don't have enough product to put there.

• 55:50Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  Right. Um, so I think that's the, the real thing is like, the more availability is like the laws of supply and demand just kick in. As of right now, it's like, oh, why is it, uh, you know, why is it, why is this flavor out of stock or whatever? It's like, I, I can barely keep up. I think, so today's Friday.

• 56:05Gary Brecka?

  High class problem there.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  Right. Today's Friday, we're making chips that were likely sold, I think Wednesday. So, and we're shipping them today. So it's like a two day kind of backlog. Um, so it's like, I can't, I can't keep up. I mean, I'm trying.

• 56:19Gary Brecka?

  That's great though. You know, it's, it's amazing to see products and services like this getting back into demand. And, um, you know, I'm a, I'm a huge fan. My audience is a huge fan. Uh, I love that you're on the seed oil bandwagon and the, and the artificial ingredients bandwagon and the non-GMO bandwagon, because you didn't just fix, fix one of the problems, you fixed all the problems.

• 56:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:40Gary Brecka?

  And, you know, uh, and first of all, and I really want to, I appreciate you coming on the podcast. I'd like to actually do a follow-up with you as you start to expand, you know, your lines and whatnot. But every guest that I bring on to the podcast, I, I sort of wind things down by, by asking them the same, uh, question. And there's no right or wrong answer to this question. Um, but what does it mean to you, uh, to be a, an ultimate human?

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Hmm. Um.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  I can't, I'd be lying if I said I didn't prepare for this, cuz I

• 57:10Gary Brecka?

  He's watched enough, he's like

• 57:12Speaker 00

  I was listening to your episode in the car, and I'm like, oh, oh, okay, that, that one. Um, I actually think, I've thought about this before, though, in my head, even when I heard the question for the first time, I was like, ah, I know the answer, my answer. Um, it would be potentiality. So I think, um, organisms are designed to be able to do a certain set of things inherently. And as humans, we can typically like stretch the amount of things that we can do. Um, but at the same time, we can also shrink them, right? If you're sick, or you know, you have brain fog, or you're overweight. Uh, that limits, say, your ability to play with your kids, or go climb a mountain, or go mountain biking, or do whatever. Um, like, if you have brain fog, it limits your ability to like, I don't know, read books, or do play chess, or any sort of, you know, mental, physical activities, kind of things.

• 57:57Speaker 00

  And so I think as we're talking, especially in the, in the realm of biohacking, health optimization, all this stuff, the goal, of course, we're always talking about how to make ourselves healthier. But for me, it's like, once I'm healthy, then what? I don't just, not just, I wanna be healthy just to sit around and be healthy all day. I wanna go do stuff, you know?

• 58:13Gary Brecka?

  Right, right. Sit around and be healthy all day.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  Right. And so I think, uh, I think we want to be like maximizing our ability to go do stuff, basically. And that's what I think, uh, it's easy to forget in the health space, where, you know, I was talking about trends and how to optimize this variable, which is all important. But then at the end of the day, like, how can we take our health and mental acuity and all the stuff that we have? That, you know, we're frankly blessed with relative to the standard state of health in the modern world, and do that, and like do something useful with that.

• 58:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  So that's what, that's how I answer that.

• 58:43Gary Brecka?

  That's amazing, brother. Um, Stephen, I, I, I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. I'm excited to see where this journey, you know, goes. Um, for us, I'm a big fan of what you're doing. My, my audience is, is a huge fan. I appreciate more and more companies like yourself coming in and being diligent about their ingredients. Being diligent about the way that they're sourcing their nutrients and actually making nutrient-dense foods. Because what's really, really ironic about what you're doing is you're just circumventing the system and just going back to the basics.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  I literally invented nothing.

• 59:15Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean, you're just going back to the basics.

• 59:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, I am a time traveler from 1940, and I make tortilla chips and potato chips, and here they are, present day humans.

• 59:23Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:26Gary Brecka?

  Well, brother, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

• 59:28Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 59:29Gary Brecka?

  We're gonna have you back again. And until next time, guys, that's just science.