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Miriam Bair is a wife and mother to 6 beautiful children. She and her husband Chris developed and built their own business called Keto Chow. Keto Chow is a ultra low carbohydrate complete meal replacement shake. Miriam enjoys learning and teaching her children about the ketogenic lifestyle and how to be healthy. She is kind and happy and enjoys serving those around her.

Our website https://www.ketochow.xyz/

Chris’ why I make Keto Chow link. https://www.ketochow.xyz/2016/09/why-i-make-keto-chow/

Keto Chow Promo code anyone can use ketocarole10 for $10 off a purchase

Transcript:

Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Keto Chat. I am your host, Carole Freeman, certified nutritionist. Today I’m honored and happy and excited to bring you an interview with the founders of Keto Chow. Miriam and Chris are here. You guys are in Utah, right?

That’s right.

Yeah.

Excellent. They … If you guys haven’t heard about them yet, they are the founders of Keto Chow Company, which gives you a ultra low carbohydrate complete meal replacement shake. They enjoy teaching their children about a ketogenic lifestyle and how to be healthy. And so I got to hang out with Miriam on the low carb cruise, the 11th annual low carb cruise in 2018. We got to hang out and do some crazy pizza fest thing.

The pizza.

That was awesome.

The pizza Jenga challenge we called it. We can talk about that too. But welcome, you guys, to the show.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Alright, just to start out with, will you guys just share your back story? What was your background before you started this company?

I’ll let you take point.

I just stay home with my kids, actually. So my background is pretty boring.

Have you lived in Utah your whole life?

Yeah, I grew up here and Christ grew up here and I actually went to school for interior design.

It’s like beauty school dropout.

How’d you guys meet?

On a soccer field before a Halloween dance, actually.

Oh cool.

It was kinda random. We had, it turns out, a mutual friend who was … there was a big Halloween dance going on. We wanted to play soccer beforehand. I got to the dance before Miriam and her friends did so I was at the front of the line. And they saw somebody they recognized so they butted in line with me and I just hung out with them the rest of the time.

Single guy with four girls. No problems, right?

Then two and a half weeks later, we were engaged because I waited a week.

Yeah, we got married real fast.

Oh my gosh. So I was gonna ask if it was love at first sight and apparently, I don’t know, maybe it took a week to fall in love.

Not for her but for me, yeah.

Aw, that’s so sweet. I love that. And you guys have been married for how long now?

18.

18 years.

Oh my gosh, that’s amazing! I love that story. Congratulations.

Thanks

Thanks.

Well, Chris, what’s your background? What were you doing before you started this company?

Well, because I’m doing the whole nutrition thing, obviously my background is computer engineering.

Okay, yeah.

I guess I’m in the rarefied era of Dave Feldman an Ivor Cummins. I don’t know.

I was gonna say, we’ve got a lot of engineers in this keto, low carb space. So it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah it’s kinda funny how it all works out. But yeah, I was … I got started in this whole thing because there was this guy, computer engineer, Rob Ryanheart, who would come up with a … he was tired of food and so he wanted a shake that you could mix up that was all of the nutrients. And that really captivated my attention. I was like, “That sounds … I kinda like that idea.” He called it Soylent, you might have heard of it. But they did a crowdfunding thing, kept on missing their release dates, so I started doing do-it-yourself Soylent, just mixing up a recipe on my own. And that worked out okay but it was a high-carb low-fat typical standard American diet. It had all the vitamins and stuff but … And I was doing that mainly because I wanted to lose weight.

Okay, so this was pre-keto, you hadn’t discovered keto yet, you were just looking for a guy that’s an engineer that wants to simplify his life and just drink stuff and don’t waste time eating or cooking, right?

That’s exactly right. And so I did that and I lost weight, gained it all back over nine months. And we had heard about keto before and I knew that keto was a thing and there were a couple of keto recipes. So without doing really any research, which was bad, I just jumped in. And it turns out the recipe I picked was done by a guy who had never done keto, didn’t really know much about keto other than high fat and low carb so there was quite a bit of MCT in it but there was also a lot of coconut flour and chia seeds and all this other stuff. It was awful. Absolutely awful.

Sounds really gritty.

It was like somebody put a … and there was raw chocolate in it, cocoa powder too. It was not good. Well, then I have a friend named Ted Tiken, who, he started making one called Keto Soy. There’s no soy in it though.

Yeah.

And he sent me a sample of it to test, and this was at the very beginning. And I was like, “Wow, that’s actually pretty good.” It was way better than the stuff I was doing. And so another guy had a recipe that was using heavy cream as the primary fat source. I’m like, “You know what? I’m gonna make one that actually tastes good.” So I went for the whole melted ice cream thing, eliminated any grit because I was gritted out after all that.

Yeah.

The coconut flour. So yeah, that’s just kinda how it started. The original recipe is still open source on the do-it-yourself site. I have it on our site too. But originally I was mixing it up one batch at a time, mostly for me. But turns out other people are lazy just like me. But then Miriam was helping out a neighbor lady doing crafting stuff and I convinced her that it would be better if she came and helped me. So she stated doing that and things just kinda grew from there. Miriam is our Chief Operating Officer.

Yeah.

And she kind of ran the entire business. I would do the customer support, figuring everything out, mixing everything, but she did the day-to-day stuff, especially when we got to the point where we had to start hiring people. She was kinda running everything which was cool.

Nice. So this video will live on forever so this is 2018 that we’re recording this, when did you guys sell your first Keto Chow packet or however it came in the beginning?

It was early January 2015.

Okay.

And like I said, it was all mixed by hand …

At our house, in our kitchen.

And then shipped on our kitchen table. And we’ve come a long way, we’ve got cool bags that it’s all done in a co-packer and we can scale up. It used to be that we would have to invite everybody with a pulse that we knew over to our house to work all day Saturday and then we would barely get enough done to last the week.

Wow. So demand is pretty amazing for this, huh?

Yeah, it’s gone pretty nuts. And to back up a bit, we had heard about keto before. You wanna tell that story?

Oh, sure. We heard about keto from a doctor, actually, our son Max was diagnosed with epilepsy at three and he was on multiple medications to try to get it under control and it wasn’t until the 12th medicine they said, “If this medicine doesn’t work, we want you to put him on a ketogenic diet.” And so they gave us some papers and they were gonna admit him into the hospital and give him four eggnog shakes a day, get him into ketosis and then monitor him and stuff. And then that medicine worked.

Oh.

And so we didn’t really pursue it at all at that time. And I look at it now, and knowing what I know about keto, I just think, “Why couldn’t that have been the first option?” Why couldn’t they say, “You can try medicine but you can also do this. Or you can do both at the same time.” Wasn’t there something else? 12 medicines and he had so many reactions to all these medicines, it was crazy.

Oh, it was awful.

It was so sad.

He’s like a year and a half behind everybody because he was so drugged up that entire year.

Oh, how old’s he now?

He’s 12.

Okay. Yeah, I’ve gone to conferences for healthcare providers for epilepsy ketogenic diets specifically for epilepsy and that question is asked all the time. And the doctors say, “Well, it’s just too hard to follow it. So we don’t recommend that first.” And “We’re not quite sure the long-term safety of it.” They feel like the drugs are what they know and it’s just easier to get somebody to take a pill than it is to change their diet. So hopefully we’re getting to a tipping point soon, I hope, where that perception will change, that we can actually see that it actually … especially with something like Keto Chow and the other things that are out there that make it a lot easier to follow keto. It doesn’t have to be hard. And these doctors also are used to the old fashion, when keto was first brought into place, it was just, feed the kids a shake full of soybean oil and they just had no creativity when it came to food and now we have a really delicious ways of doing it and tons of recipe books.

So, yeah, I’m so sorry you guys had to go through that. What year was that that you first heard about it but didn’t actually implement it?

It was 2009.

Oh yeah.

Okay. So you started hearing about keto through just the meal replacement type things and then describe how that was of making that switch yourself and then how’d your family come on board with that?

So, like I said, I didn’t do any research and the guy who was doing it hadn’t ever done keto. And I got keto flu really, really bad. Enough that I was laying in bed just wallowing in freakish misery and I got out my phone and I actually googled keto flu and I was like, “Oh, that’s a thing!”

You didn’t even know it was.

I had no idea.

You must have been eating a lot of sugar, refined carbs before then maybe?

Well, yeah. My diet was atrocious. Yeah, so I went and made some chicken broth and about five minutes after I drank it, I felt fine. It was fantastic. And so any time anyone starts talking about keto flu I’m like, “It’s completely preventable.” But then when I was formulating the recipe for my own stuff, for Keto Chow, well number one, I didn’t ever wanna go through that again. And so I wanted to make sure that … it’s what I eat for most meals except for today because we’re both fasting because Miriam is doing a clinical trial and the effectiveness of fasting.

Oh, wow!

Yeah, we all applied for it, Miriam and I and one of our friends and she’s the only one that got in because my LDL was too low. It’s like, “Okay, whatever.”

You’re too much of a risk for us, we can’t take this on.

Yeah, well it’s to see if fasting, doing two 24 hour fasts a week will lower your cholesterol. And so I actually tried to cheat and spike my cholesterol by restricting my calories, pulling a Dave Feldnman protocol. And apparently I didn’t do it well enough because my cholesterol did not go up high enough to qualify me for the thing. But Miriam got in. And beforehand she was like, “If one of us gets in, we should all do it.” Because we just needed something to push us to fasting.

Yeah.

Because we wanna do it more and, well, this was it. So we’re fasting today. That’s what … well, we had water for breakfast.

Okay.

But anyway, let’s see, I was talking about keto flu. So I used Keto Chow for maybe 70% or higher of all my meals because I think it would be disingenuous to sell something that I’m not using myself, primarily. And to that I’ve actually gone for four and then six weeks at a time where it was the only thing I ate. Just to prove a point that, yes, this is viable as food. Now, most people aren’t going to use that as their only food, that’d be kind of silly. But it can serve as … well, to replace all the stupid meals where you’re like, “Crap, I forgot to get food, I guess I’ll just go to McDonalds and get a bunless hamburger.” Well at least with this you’re getting a third of your potassium, a third of your magnesium, a third of the selenium.

You’re getting … Cary Brown and Danny Vega are kinda freaking out because we have five methyl tetra hydra folate. Which is, well it’s a methylated B vitamins. And for people with the MTHFR gene mutation, it’s a big freaking deal because they can’t methylated their own B vitamins and so, while it was really easy for me to add it, I don’t have the MTHFR gene mutation but for people who do, they’ve been … when we went to Keto Con, people have been freaking out because, I guess we don’t promote that fact heavily enough. That it’s not just nutritionally complete but it’s nutritionally complete for people who have all these other problems as well.

Yeah, it’s a really high quality of B vitamins and most, first of all, most supplement manufacturers don’t even … they aren’t even aware that there are different forms of it and it makes a different. So most of them just go for the cheapest version. So I’m sure that that one cost you more but it says a lot that you put that higher quality version of it in there.

It wasn’t too much more expensive though. And it was a simple thing. Actually the harder thing was figuring out which form of magnesium to use. You never wanna use magnesium oxide, that looks really good on a label but it really sucks when you start getting cramps. But we’ve used magnesium citrate and we recently just switched to magnesium malate because it’s magnesium bound to an amino acid, so it’s a lot more bio-available, works a lot better. And my whole family, my brother, my mom, we all have this crazy high requirement for magnesium, otherwise I get cramps in my legs and so, well, if you’re getting Keto Chow you’re getting my recommended amount of magnesium whether you like it or not. But most people do. I actually had a lot of people who were really excited when we did the new formula and they wouldn’t have to take their magnesium supplement anymore.

So you’re making it really convenient and easy and perhaps even saving them some money if they’re not having to buy a bunch of different supplements.

Yup.

So let’s go continue on the story or your family coming on board. So Miriam, when did you join him? Did you see what he was doing and think, “That’s crazy. What are you doing?”

Yeah, well I was doing paleo while he was-

And Whole 30.

Yeah Whole 30. And I really liked that and I kinda feel like it’s a natural movement from paleo to keto. But yeah, it was hard to cook three different meals every day, it was getting a little old. He would have Keto Chow or I would make a keto meal and then I’d make a paleo meal and a lot of them you could put together but you couldn’t put cheese on mine and just random stuff. And then the kids would have whatever with their potatoes and carbage that was attached. So it was getting old and I finally just said, “Okay, I’ll just do it.”

Yup, she started keto.

And yeah, so it’s been almost two years, I think, for me. And Christ has been three, right?

Three and a half.

Yeah, so we’re loving it. We actually put our kids, well, tried to put our kids on and have been working on it since Keto Con of last year, just going to the talks at the multiple conferences and just listening to all the things that they have to say has just inspired us so much. Two of our daughters have depression and so one of then’s very, very strict keto and she noticed right away when she would do keto and have a cookie, she’d just plummet, her mood. And she’s like, “I just feel so awful and sad.” And so she really is super strict about her keto and that just treats her depression and it’s so good for her.

And so much so that they recently went to kind of a summer camp and … well the two of the daughter that are doing keto, I actually, when I was signing them up I put on the dietary restrictions line, I’m like, okay here we go. I put, “High fat, ketogenic diet.” And I’m like, we’ll see what they do with that. And turns out the people at the program, they were able to accommodate them pretty well.

Yeah we were super excited when she called us and she was like, “I got lettuce wraps and berries instead of sandwiches and brownies.”

Oh my gosh! That is amazing! Wow, that’s impressive.

Because they’re teenagers and they know how to do it well enough that they can just eat around it but it’s hard when you feel like you can’t have anything.

That is amazing that the chefs, the cooks, the staff figured that out. Yeah that’s really cool.

It was probably the gluten free one but still, it was fantastic.

Well gluten free could just be gluten free bread and buns, though, and a pile of rice.

Potatoes are gluten free.

Yeah, yeah. So is sugar.

But it’s interesting to see, when they want to do it themselves it’s so much better because you can’t really force them to do it. You can try but then it becomes a punishment and we don’t want it to be a punishment, we want it to be something that they want to do. I don’t eat carbs because it makes me feel like crap. I would rather eat brisket. Miriam got a shirt when we were at Keto Con.

Oh yeah, it says, “Tell me I’m pretty and feed me brisket.”

Is that from Terry Blacks?

Yeah.

Nice, nice. So three and a half years for Chris, two years for Miriam. What have you guys noticed change wise? Body, subjective, objective measures, what all has changed for you?

Mostly we’ve lost weight. My big one is clarity of mind. And I notice it most when I’m driving. When I get there and I can make a snap decision to turn here, I can go, I don’t have to go, I don’t have to wait and think, “Are they driving fast?” I just have quickness of mind and clarity and I can focus and think and that is so huge for me.

I’m 77% the man I used to be so that’s good.

I thought you were gonna say you were 77. I was like, “Oh my gosh! Look at that-

I do have some gray showing up in my beard but, yeah … anyway. And it’s been interesting, when we started off, our family and friends were … to say they were skeptical is a bit of an understatement. Because, it’s funny, the people that you’re closest too it seems like they’re like, “Yeah, here’s another thing that they’re gonna try.” And “Oh, you’re gonna lose weight drinking shakes of heavy cream? Good luck with that one.

And eating bacon.

But as time has gone on, more and more and more of our friends, family and neighbors have at least tried it, if not gone full on keto. And that’s been really nice, especially when we … we had a … was it last year? This last year we had Thanksgiving at my mom’s house.

Oh yeah. It was awesome.

At least one third of the people there were doing keto.

Wow.

And so you had some people that were doing … there was, well, we call them funeral potatoes, it’s sour cream with … what is it?

Hash browns.

Potatoes, hash browns and cheese and onions and stuff. So there were regular funeral potatoes but we also had keto ones.

Cauliflower ones. They were good.

There was all this keto food available and it was a full-on … we had keto Thanksgiving and keto Christmas.

It was good. For Easter our kids only got keto treats. They got jerky and keto cookies which is now [inaudible 00:23:20] cookies.

Nice. Okay.

And there wasn’t enough Epic Bacon to go around.

There wasn’t enough bacon. But anyway, one thing we’ve done with our kids is we don’t have non-keto food in the house as much as possible. They’re allowed to bring it in, of course, if they want to go buy it at the store.

Or if one of their boyfriends decides to get them ice cream bars.

Yeah. That happens sometimes. But we try to keep it out as much as possible and then we also do meal planning with our kids. I just get a calendar and I have them pick a day. What day of the week do you want and what do you wanna make? And if you wanna get out cookbooks, we’ll just get all the keto cookbooks out and look at them and they can pick what they wanna make and I’ll buy the ingredients and we can try all these different things. And it doesn’t have to be hard or expensive. You can spend a lot of money doing keto but you don’t have to.

And then they’re owning it too.

Yeah. I was gonna say, that’s so great and, background, long before keto I had experience working with families and helping the entire family make healthier choices, right? And getting the kids involved, people think that, “Oh no, they have to wait until they’re like 15 until they can help in the kitchen.” But even at two years old or younger they wanna help, they wanna be part of that and helping them, I love that you give them a date and they get to pick whatever they want. That’s so empowering, like you said, it’s not a punishment it’s them picking what they want and noticing how they feel and then that is gonna help them stick with it but also just noticing how much better they feel.

My son is the same way, that when I started in 2015 I never told him he had to do it, it was several months in where we had another one of my grandmothers that died from complications of dementia and he asked me, “Mom, how can I avoid that?” And I said, “Well if you wanna join me on this keto thing, that’s probably the best way to do it.” And he’s like, “Alright, I’m in.” And for him it cleared up his cystic acne that he’d had all his teenage years and depression and anxiety as well. And he’s had some times where he’s kinda got off it a little bit and then he notices how much worse he feels and then he’s like, “Alright, I gotta get back on this and take care of myself.” So he’s almost 23 now and doing really, really great.

But yeah, it’s all about empowering and letting them choose and have a say and participating and meal prep and having meals as a family is all great ways of getting the kids to notice what makes them feel good.

Yeah, they also like it when we make five pounds of bacon.

You can have more than one piece.

Yeah, it used to be, oh man, before I started keto, we would cook up bacon and they would have to ask for each strip of bacon and now it’s like … we had some neighbor kids come over and I cooked up, maybe it was three pounds or something like that. But all the kids were like, “Can I have more bacon?” I’m like, “You can have as much as you want. There will probably be leftovers.” And they were like … Because we were having these kids come over and we were doing this activity and I was like, “I will promise you that we will not have any sugar treats.” So we had bacon one time and one of our friends went to a cheese factory so we got this giant five pound bag of squeaky cheese.

It was so good.

They devoured that.

Okay so how do you make … what’s the cooking process that you can cook enough bacon to not run out of it? Because I can’t even do that in my house and we have three people here.

So the best way … there’s a couple ways you can do it. You can bake bacon in the oven.

That’s the way I like to do it. Okay so you just keep putting it in and out, right?

Yeah, well that’s nice because you can be doing other things while the bacon is going. Very hands-off, that’s fine. I was doing that … remember I told you I did the four weeks where the only thing I ate was Keto Chow? I didn’t even have diet soda or gum. That was right around Halloween and I had mentioned in passing to one of my daughters that … we live on a circle and all the people on the circle usually get together on the circle for Halloween and have kind of a potluck and then set up chairs in a big circle and the kids come and trick or treat.

Pull a fire out.

Yeah, there’s a fire and … but I had mentioned to one of my daughters that we could wheel our … we have a Blackstone griddle, it’s a bacon making machine is what it is. It’s a health device, medical device. There you go. But it’s just this big giant griddle and all I ever use it for is making bacon but we went to Sams Club and Sams Club sells a 10 pound box of bacon.

The restaurant style …

Restaurant style.

So it’s already on a sheet of parchment.

Yeah, you just pull it out, slap it on. Oh, it’s fantastic.

Oh my gosh. I love that.

[crosstalk 00:28:41] Yeah, you leave it there for about 10 or 20 seconds and the paper lifts off the bacon. So you just pull it off and throw it away and it’s fantastic. But I had mentioned that we could take the bacon down to the potluck and have that while the kids are trick or treating and one of my daughters, she’s like, “Well you said you were gonna do that.” I’m like, “Yeah, but all I’m eating for the next two weeks is Keto Chow. I’m not eating bacon.” She’s like, “Well you said you were gonna do it.”

You said, you said.

So I did it. I made 10 pounds of bacon, didn’t eat any of it. But yeah, you can cook up, if you’ve got a big skillet whether it’s a Camp Chef or a big one of those that’s propane fired, you can make bacon pretty fast, especially with the restaurant style.

Yeah, I gotta look for that. I don’t have a Sams Club close by but we’ve got a Cash and Carry that’s restaurant supply so I gotta go look. They normally just … All I’ve seen is the bacon slab or whatever. But I’ve gotta look a little more closely and see if they have that on the parchment, that would be awesome.

There you go.

Yeah. Nice. Okay so I promised a the beginning we would tell the little story about the pizza Jenga because people are probably wondering. Maybe. I don’t know, maybe they forgot by now. But Chris, did you see the photos [crosstalk 00:30:06] story?

So to back up, our kids were in school when the low carb cruise was gonna happen and so I sent Miriam on the cruise without me. Plus the business had to keep running.

What a good husband.

Yup, so her and one of our employees who’s also one of our friends from way back in …

15 years ago.

Yeah 15 years ago.

We had kids at the same time.

We just hang out with them all the time. So Miriam and one of our friends went on the low car cruise without me and without the friend’s husband. And so I was just keeping the kids alive and everything was fine. But then all the sudden on Facebook or Instagram I got all of these … we got tagged all these times. And I open them up and I’m like, “What’ the heck?” It’s a tower of pizza. It felt so good though.

It was so fun. So we had a little shenanigans, a outing one night. I don’t remember, did we go to karaoke before?

Yeah, we were at karaoke.

And so we decide- there were a group of about, where there eight of us?

Yeah, something like that.

Eight of us that, we’d gone to karaoke and we decided we were hungry and there was a pizza place on the ship and it was all you can eat pizza, basically. So somebody, one of the people in the group had said they’d done the, take the toppings off the pizza and eat that at the pizza place. And I’d never even done that my entire keto journey, right? And so it just sounded like this fun thing. So we all decided, we’re gonna go and make this a thing and see how much … we were gonna save the crusts and stack them up, see how ridiculously high we could make this with eight of us sitting there eating only the toppings off of it.

And so we go into the pizza parlor on the ship and they would give you two pieces at a time. And so we kept going back and back and back and ended up naming it pizza Jenga because it was this stack that, probably, it was close to two feet high by the time we were done. The wait staff would walk by and see us saving all these crusts there and they would walk by and be like …

What?

What the heck are you guys doing? You’re wasting the best part of the pizza, right? And we were talking about how we knew that eating as much pizza as we wanted, just the toppings, none of us were gonna feel miserable later. None of us were gonna feel like in a carb coma. Interestingly there was some controversy about that. So Kim Howerton was with us and she has a really big Facebook group. And so she had some people commenting saying, “What a waste. Look at all that food you’re wasting.” I have some things about that but what do you guys think about us wasting all that crust?

Well I always, every time I do that, I always offer it to the person saying that it’s being wasteful and say, “Well, do you wanna eat it?” And they always say, “No.” And I say, “Neither do I.” But, I don’t know, yeah, it’s a bit of a waste because you’re not eating it. I don’t know. You’re also removing it from somebody else getting sick off of it. There’s a pizza place here in town named Four Brother’s Pizza, well not here in town but it is relatively close. The owner is doing keto and so she just introduced fathead pizza crusts.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah. It’s an extra five bucks but they’re pretty good and they consistently sell out every day. But she also has what she calls a keto bake. Which is just a pie tin with all the toppings that they run through the oven, then you don’t have to scrape it off.

Yeah, so great.

I wish more places would do that.

Oh my gosh. That is awesome. We had a place here in my town called Zaw, Z-A-W, that did a paleo crust that would work that was super paper thing almond meal and I think egg and rosemary. So totally would work.

It’s a cracker.

It was a take and bake one and it was gourmet toppings and they just closed the one that was here in town because they …

Oh sad.

That was the best thing we had here, but I’m waiting. Interestingly Seattle’s kinda behind the times in the food scene. We still have vegan restaurants and things here that are a thing. So we’re kinda behind a little bit. You go down to Portland and the food scene is way better than here. So maybe we’ll catch up eventually. But we don’t have really good barbecue like they have down south. Hopefully we’ll get there.

Well, my take on the wasted crust is that if we could just do the mental experiment of … pretend like all of us got together and we weren’t on keto and we decided we were gonna go eat pizza in the evening, we would have eaten just as much pizza and we would have eaten the crust as well. And so because we didn’t put it in our body and we put it in the garbage instead, how is that a waste? We didn’t poison our bodies with that stuff, we didn’t have to feel sick and whatever, what does it matter? It’s a waste whether it goes onto our waist and hips and poisons us than it is a waste if it goes in the garbage, right? So that’s my take on it is that it wasn’t that we ate more or that we created more waste than we would have otherwise, just because we’re eating only the toppings, we’ll end up eating less total calories and total volume than we would otherwise and we just feel better afterwards too.

And it would have gone in the “garbage” eventually anyway coming out the other end.

Right.

And it’s funny you were talking about the food scene there in Seattle. It’s interesting here in Utah. Our cities aren’t nearly as big as they are in some other places but we have a whole bunch of keto businesses popping up near close to us. We’ve got one, they go by KetoCakesUtah.com and they just sell cupcakes. And they actually …

Oh my gosh, I’m gonna have to come visit you guys now.

Well we’ll take you out for steaks if we do but …

Okay.

But yeah, so there’s that one, there’s another one called Oh Hello Keto Bakery that’s doing stuff as well. And then there’s another lady that’s just south of us who, she moved from … did she move from Texas?

I can’t remember.

And she bought a bakery and then she went keto.

So she has this bakery, this regular bakery and she also has a shelf that’s keto treats. Well now she has two shelves that’s keto treats. And she posts on it on her Facebook page and then they just get sold out every day.

Yup.

Wow. That’s so cool.

People are doing it. I maybe can’t see them but they’re there.

[inaudible 00:37:20] just have to look, see if they’re keto bakeries.

Oh I would know if they were around here. They’re not yet. I got a vegan bakery in town but …

Oh wow.

Yeah, this is fun. Okay, so Keto Chow is available in individual packets and big packets. What’s the packaging right now. You showed the one. Is that like a pound?

Well, so we’ve got the smaller ones. Now, we’re right in the middle, as of this recording, we’re in the middle of doing a product transition. We used to use whey protein isolate but we switched to milk protein isolate because it’s got a better nutrition profile, digests slower, less of an insulin spike and it has more calcium and phosphorus among other things. Plus it makes for a really good texture. It mixes up really nice and thick. So we don’t have samples in the new stuff just yet. They were supposed to be ready before Keto Con, now it looks like we might get them either just before or just after Keto Fest, which sucks.

Just in time for Low Carb San Diego though!

Yeah. We’re going to Low Carb San Diego. We’re actually gonna take our family to that.

Oh sweet.

But yeah, we’ve got big bags. There we go, there’s a big bag.

Okay, is it a pound?

It’s 21 meals worth, weighs two pounds. This one’s two pounds 3.9 oz. But the idea is … Oh go ahead, sorry.

I was gonna say, like a three week, if you’re doing three meals a day, three weeks.

It’ll actually last you one week

Three meals a day.

Oh, I’m doing the math wrong. Yes.

People are like, “How long would that last if I did two a day?” 10.5. “What about one a day?” 21. I can do that math real easy.

What about every other day? What about …

Now take the money away. But it kinda goes back to the, it was originally designed so that I could eat it three meals a day so each bag would last a week. But it doesn’t have hardly any fat in it at all the way that it is. And that’s … some people think that that’s a problem, I consider it one of the major selling points, that Miriam can use avocado oil and go for 500 calories a shake, which she often does, right? Isn’t that about what you hit?

Or 400.

I personally prefer to use mostly heavy cream with some MCT oil and I go for 2000 calories a day. So I’m doing 667 calories a shake. So you can hit whatever calorie goal you want using whatever fat you want. So you’re not locked into something. And that’s one of the reasons we don’t use powdered MTC, we don’t use powdered heavy cream, we also don’t use exogenous ketones or anything like that. It’s all about your liver making it yourself. And with a lot of flexibility. And so every once in a while we’ll get someone, “How can you call this keto if it doesn’t have fat?” You add the fat. However much you want.

Well and one of the biggest misunderstandings is that ketosis and a keto diet has zero to do with fat. You can eat fat and enjoy it but you do not need to consume a certain amount of fat to be in ketosis or be on a ketogenic diet.

I’ve got a lot of fat in storage still.

So you’ve got the 21 serving packets and then the small ones, are those just ones that you have as samples at shows or do you actually sell them in individual packets.

Yeah, we have the individual ones. We will be getting the new stuff and we’ll actually have … so we started out with eight flavors when we launched our version 2.0. With version 2.1 I went a little bit nuts on the flavors.

Just a little.

Well because, once again, I’m making this for me. It’s whatever Chris wants is what it is. I have a real thing for eggnog and root beer and pumpkin spice and a bunch of other ones so we have 10 new flavors that are coming out.

Oh cool!

And one of them I’ll talk about in just a second but we’re going to be having a sample pack of the original eight and it comes with a blender bottle as well. And then we’ll have a variety pack of the new 10. Because a lot of people … and it’s frankly really amazing how many people are buying the new stuff without samples. They’re just flat out buying a bag. Almost all of them love it but I consider it a really big compliment that people are trusting me enough to buy it. But yeah, so we will have the variety pack available plus the individual samples if you just wanna get 10 pumpkin spice caramels so you can have that on an autumn morning. But one of the things that a lot of people are real excited about is the savory chicken soup flavor.

Oh interesting. Okay.

And that was just kind of a … my younger brother, it was like two years ago, he was like, “You should make one that’s nacho cheese flavor.” I’m like, “I don’t know about that.” And I looked into nacho cheese flavoring and all of it was like 50% carbs. It was crazy. But it still stuck with me and so I was kind of on the lookout for something I could do that was savory, because a lot of people don’t want to have any sweetener at all. Or they want to use a natural sweetener which is why we’re coming out with a strawberry that has monk fruit.

Okay.

But the whole savory thing, that was really fascinating to me so we tried a bunch of different ones, nailed it first time with the chicken soup flavor and everybody got really excited about that. We got it in last week, just before we left to Keto Con and sold all but one of the bags that we brought with us to Keto Con and now they’re going like crazy. The only problem is I put a typo on the bag.

Oh no.

And so we have to have this sticker that we’re putting over top of the instructions and you have to take a marker and cross of sucralose because there’s no sucralose.

There’s no sweetener. There’s no sweetener at all.

Yeah. My bad, my bad. This is what happens when you’re doing your own proofreading.

So speaking of sweeteners, so sucralose is the sweetener in most of them then, is that correct?

Yeah.

And then you’re coming out with a strawberry monk fruit version.

And the reason why we went with sucralose, some people have a real issue with it. Sucralose, as far as we’ve tested different once, we tested Stevia, we tested erythritol, we tested monk fruit, and sucralose just, flat out, for the majority of people tastes better. And I would rather have … and going back to sucralose, all of the studies that have shown that it has a problem with guy flora and things like that, that’s always been in mice or rats, rodent I guess I could just say. There’s never been any indication that sucrolose causes a problem in humans. But besides that, we went with sucralose more than anything else because it tastes better. And I would rather have something that some people can’t use but the people who do use it absolutely love. And it’s not this, “Oh crap, I gotta drink my diet drink.” It’s, “Dang it, I am out of chocolate peanut butter!” And from the get go that’s always been what we’ve gone for and people, when they try it, they generally, it’s actually really funny, we go to the trade shows and people taste it and almost every time the reaction is, “Wow.”

Wow, that’s really good.

Or they’ll even say, “That’s actually good.” I’m gonna take that …

When you’re sampling it are you mixing it with heavy cream or how are you sampling it?

Well we do heavy cream and we do avocado oil in the chocolate. And then the vanilla and salted caramel we usually do with just heavy cream.

Okay.

But it’s just really funny because it’s like, I’m gonna take that as a compliment when you say it’s actually good and not be offended that you thought it was crap. But yeah, so we use 80 milligrams of sucralose, it’s a little bit less than a 10th of a gram. I actually used to use 100 milligrams, a 10th of a gram but when we went to Keto Con last year … it’s really funny, people who have been doing keto a long time would be like, “Oh, that’s really sweet.” People who are new would be like, “Why is that so salty?”

Oh, yeah, yeah,

So we lowered the amount of sweetener but the new stuff, because of the milk protein, mixes up a bit thicker so you have to add more water, which ameliorate the saltiness quite a bit. And so the flavor isn’t quite as strong as it used to be and the sweetener isn’t quite as strong but it really … when you’re done drinking an entire meal, you’re like, “Yeah, that was good.” So that’s kinda what we go for.

Really cool. All right, so anything else? I’ve got one closing question for you guys but before that, was there anything else that you were wanting to share or hoping I would ask you about?

No.

We just got our fasting drops.

Oh yeah, tell them about that.

Well, when we were at a nutrition expo and we ran into a company … so we’re from Utah, we ran into a company that, they take the water from the Great Salt Lake, concentrate out the magnesium, which is really hard to get a good quality source of magnesium, and this stuff is ionic magnesium chloride. It’s actually dissolved in water so you don’t have any problems with uptake. So they concentrate that out and then add potassium and then sodium back in because everybody’s all about low salt, which is … on a keto diet, whatever. But it’s really hard to get magnesium and so we talked with them and just came out with … we went through a bunch of different names, I wanted to call it fasting juice but she …

That sounds gross.

She killed that.

Miriam knows.

Yeah, so we call it fasting drops and it’s just an electrolyte supplement. It just has magnesium, potassium and sodium with chloride and you put it in the water. It comes in a little bottle. Oddly enough I don’t have one right here. Wrong one. We just have a little bottle and a big bottle. And you fill up the little bottle with the big bottle and you can use the lid to measure out how much you want. I always put double the amount because…

It doesn’t really taste like anything if you do the recommended dose, it just tastes like your water so it’s nice because it’s not flavored. I know there’s lots of flavored electrolyte supplements out there and this is nice because you can just put it in anything.

Yup. And we’re actually goin on a hike, a multi-day hike this week and we’re in charge of a bunch of kids and I’m gonna sneak some into the water.

We won’t have to sneak it, we’ll tell them we’re putting it in. But then they won’t get dehydrated.

They won’t get dehydrated and they won’t whine as much. It’ll be great.

Yeah, yeah.

So that’s kind of a fun thing that we just came out with because fasting goes really well with a ketogenic diet. And a lot of times people … well, one of our things with Keto Chow is, it’s an easy meal. A lot of times people are like, “Why don’t I just fast?” I’m like …

Good. You should.

Go ahead. That’s fantastic. But this is … I’ve been known to just suck on rock salt, because it’s real easy to get sodium, very difficult to get good magnesium and potassium. So that’s why this kinda fills the gap.

Cool! I can’t wait to see it next month.

Oh yeah, because we’re gonna have some of it at Keto Con, I mean, Keto Fest, oh my gosh there’s so many of them.

[inaudible 00:50:23]

Alright so my closing question for you guys is, today is your last day on earth, the meteor’s coming at us, we’re all gonna die, what’s gonna be your final meal?

Whatever it is it’ll be with my family

So if I get to pick, I did not like brisket up until about four years ago. And actually, Miriam had made some corned beef that, I don’t know what it was but it was like gelatinous.

Laced with fat.

And like this web of fat.

You couldn’t do the fat.

And I didn’t like fat back then. I didn’t like fat at all. Since then I’ve learned what brisket is. And I think Miriam’s final meal would be the beef ribs that they have at Black’s.

Yes! Those are so good.

So good.

She’s going on about those for a year.

Still. Oh, my mouth just watered.

And we went to Texas on the airplane fasting because she has to fast twice a week and we get to Black’s Barbecue and we order four of the ribs plus a bunch of brisket and a bunch of sausage.

Because we were hungry and then we ate like hardly any of it.

Yeah, I didn’t even finish a rib.

I know, they’re massive. They’re like Fred Flintstones sized. They’re so good, you’re right.

And calorie wise I don’t even think I hit, I might have hit 1500 calories that day but it was just so satiating it was insane. So I might go for that but I really like brisket now.

Okay.

And I’ve learned how to make it really well in my [inaudible 00:51:59] and then you finish it in the smoker.

Okay. Nice. Well, excellent. Thank you guys so much for being here. We’re gonna have all your contact info linked down below. If you guys like this interview, give us a thumbs up. Hit the subscribe button if you wanna see more. Thank you guys for being here. I can’t wait, I’ll see you guys next month for sure and thanks for watching everyone. Bye

Bye.

Thank you.