How Prebiotic Fiber Makes a Gut-Friendly Bread – Uprising Food : 969

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Formerly Bulletproof Radio, A state of high performance. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today I'm recording this episode for you on the road because it's my son's 13th birthday as I'm recording it, so I am taking him to grandpa's house. So if you see a weird background or I sound a little bit different, well, now you know. And this episode is a really cool one because it's about bread. And you could say, what do you mean, bread? I thought bread was bad for you. Generally speaking. Yeah, it's full of grains. And I have ever since I first went on the Atkins diet. If you remember that in the the late 80s, early 90s, that was basically the grandfather of keto. And you could never get a low carb bread that tasted like anything you'd want to eat. It was always like eating an omelet. I mean, truly atrocious. I have made hundreds and hundreds of different types of gluten free, low carb bread that would be suitable on a keto phase of a diet or just a general lower moderate carb diet. And I failed every single time. I published weird recipes with whey protein and like, this is the close I could come, but I kind of gave up on it and wrote it off as impossible. So this show is to tell you about how you actually can do that and how it works, because I found a guy who does it, a company who does it with a new ingredient, an ingredient that I had previously written off many, many years ago, especially for my time as a raw vegan. So we're going to get into that. So if you're interested in prebiotics, you're interested in the role of fiber during ketogenic diets, bulletproof diets, or any other kind of diets, or you're interested just in bread that you could use to make a grilled sheep's cheese sandwich or avocado toast that actually tastes like something you'd want to eat. This is the episode for you. Our guest and expert on this is called the loafer and chief of Uprising Foods named William Schumacher. Now, full disclosure, I am an advisor to Uprising Foods. I'm an investor in Uprising Foods because I actually think this is a product that not only would I like and do I like, but that my kids want to eat. My daughter actually says, hey, do we have any more of those cubes so I can make a sandwich on our sandwich grill? So this is a thing that Actually works. And as you know, that's really what I care about. I like supporting entrepreneurs. I like supporting technology and stuff that should exist but doesn't. Low carb bread that you want to eat, that's actually good for you. That's why he's here. William, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Dave.

Oh, man, it's my pleasure. You're a biohacker like me, and you have been for a while. How did you get into biohacking? And did you get into biohacking before you started uprising or after you started uprising?

Yeah. So my origin story with biohacking really starts probably eight years ago now. My origin story with biohacking really starts probably eight years ago now. Back when I was actually working in banking at the time, went to put my dress pants on and quickly realized something had changed in the past four years. And I looked in the mirror and said, wow. I didn't realize how far my health had changed, how I. The weight I had gained kind of unknowingly over time, and just had like a harajuku moment where I was like, something's gotta change. I'm not accepting this as the rest of my life. And so I immediately said, okay, I've gotta dive into understanding what makes my body do what, and I want to have a healthy life for the rest of my life. I don't want to just go the way that many people end up kind of being a victim or consequence of all the things that small choices, the food system, everything that ends up happening to folks. I wanted to take control of my own personal health and get to the bottom of this. And so that sent me down a journey of listening to podcasts, listening to thought leaders, actually listening to your podcast and figuring out what can I do to take back control over my own biology and really reclaim my health. And so I really went down deep down the weeds of the biohacking journey. I was taking blood tests, I was sharing my little experiments, my friends and family probably at times being looked at as like, wow, that's a little weird. But it became such a passion for me. And since the time I was a little kid, I really just loved the idea of people getting help healthy. And so it really resonated with me, learning how people get healthy, what's going on in the body, and that ultimately led me to have a set of strategies and things that really made my body perform best. And so I started sharing that with folks because I wanted others to enjoy that type of transformation.

All right, so you're what I'm going to call a true believer. Anyone who's dealt with with bad health ends up realizing, well, maybe there's something I can do about it. And you tend to get a little bit evangelical. This happened to me where it's like I just would just tell everyone, you have to stop eating all that sugar and grain. This is way back when. I lost that first 50 pounds a long time ago. And then I realized most people are like, shut up. I don't want to hear anything about it. So you go through this evangelical phase, and you realize, I'll just be quiet about it. I'll just eat what I eat. And then when people ask, I'll tell them about it, which is what sane and healthy people do instead of people who believe they have to tell everyone else what to do. So if you want to be a food activist right now, shut up and go away. If you want to be a food activist, shut up and eat. That's all you do. And let people ask why you look so good. And if your food activism is vegan, you won't look good for very long, so you don't have to worry about it. You'll never have to be an activist. But aside from that, the next thing you do is you say, I believe so much in this. I'm going to put my money and my time and my intuition, my creativity into making something in the space. And that's why I think entrepreneurship is such an amazing thing, because it means you're actually all in on something. And so you did that here with bread.

Yeah. So I went down the same path as you, Dave, and I wanted so badly for my friends, my family to, you know, have control of their health, have the best possible health they could. And like you, people would ask me, what are you doing? So I would send this, like, email that I had that was like, my collection of what worked. And what I saw over time was that, you know, people would maybe try doing what I was doing for a day, a week, two weeks, and then they would fall off the wagon, and it'd be back to the old habits, the old systems, et cetera. And at the same time, my father, his health was plummeting. He was type 2 diabetic, he was over the road trucker, his kidney function was declining, all these various things. And I'm trying to help him simultaneously while he's five states away. And I'm quickly realizing this is way too hard for people. Way, way too hard. And if I actually wanted to help people get healthy, I needed to make better products for people. That simplifies these sophisticated concepts, these. The latest research, the most modern science. I needed to boil all of that down into a product. Now, I happen to also, at the same time, be working at Procter and Gamble, the home of consumer products, who helped me really understand the power of. If you can create a product that changes people's lives and you scale it, what that could actually do for people.

Like lunchables or something. I know that was craft.

Well, you know, Pop Tarts, that's.

I keep getting all these big CPG companies confused because they're kind of all the same, right?

Yeah. Bingo. So, you know, the huge portion of the food system and the consumer product system is really owned by these monopolistic multinational companies, right, who can control 60, 70, 80% of the grocery store categories that people are trying to shop. And what has happened over time is, you know, those categories that have been scaled, the breads, the chips, the pastas, et cetera, that everybody lives on, they were industrialized in the mid-1900s when we were just trying to feed people. We're trying to give food to soldiers who were, you know, at war in the. In the 40s, and we preserved things. We needed to figure out just how do we scale food and keep it at a level where people can eat it and everybody can eat. There's a ton of unintended consequences of that inflammation. Ingredients that we had no clue what they were going to do over time of people ingesting them day in, day out. And the companies that were really built in those decades, you know, they're built on totally different ingredient profile. And, you know, here at Uprising, we want to create a food revolution. We want to fix a fundamentally broken food system that's keeping us sick at scale. And we want to create a food system where the staple foods actually power your health and make you healthier over time versus creating a medical annuity.

You did something where you said, all right, instead of trying to put protein in bread, you can have some protein, but too much protein, it doesn't work. So you had to find a fiber that was a prebiotic fiber that actually worked and didn't create the bad side of prebiotic fibers. So when you came to me, I actually didn't take your first call. Remember that? Like, you emailed me and I.

Yes.

So. And now this is something that listeners probably maybe imagine or something. I get a lot of pitches, like, I'm an investor in a good number of companies. I'm an advisor to dozens of companies, and so I hear these things. I'm like, oh, God, another keto bread company. Like, I've seen 20 of these things, and they all taste like shit, and they're all the same recipe, and I'm just not interested. Right. But you kept harassing me. I think you sent me some. In fact, this is different because you actually went down the fiber path instead of the protein path, and you did it in a way that didn't make people explode with gas and all the other problems that I thought were unsolvable. So you got my attention. And then I said, all right, fine, I'm actually going to invest and I'm going to be an advisor and to help you out, because I think this actually matters. So many people eat a sandwich that's made with uprising bread and whatever else they like in sandwiches, and they're provably better off on every variable than if they ate one made out of wheat or even rice bread. Agree?

Yes. Yes, 100%.

The problem was that fiber didn't work and that protein didn't work. And what did you do to make fiber work?

Yeah. So, you know, when we were thinking about, hey, what are we going to actually put in the uprising loaf and what ingredients are we going to choose? You know, we wanted to construct a loaf that was going to give people the most help, health benefits that we possibly could. And we wanted to do that in the least amount of ingredients. And so we went through a wide range of ingredients when we were first inventing and getting in the kitchen and figuring out what can we make, what can we do for folks. And what we figured out over time is that in the research process, that psyllium has an incredible amount of research out there. Okay. But to your point, not all psylliums are created equal. Fiber also has a ton of research out there, but not all fibers are created equal. So we needed to go deeper and figure out what is really at the root of when you can get the benefits out of fiber, and then what is at the root of when you can get the benefits out of psyllium. And so we created what we have, what we call activated psyllium, which what we figured out was, hey, if we do a proprietary set of processes and source a very specific variant of psyllium. And in the early days, we were shipping all sorts of psyllium in from India to figure out, well, what does this psyllium do? What does this psyllium do? What does this do? We figured out that we can really tune up the prebiotic nature of. Of psyllium and we, we create in this activated psyllium, a psyllium that is gentler on the gut, but is also highly digestible and absorbable in the body. And so the actual, the, what ends up happening is it operates at almost an optimal level in the digestive system. And so people end up, over time, they're like, wow, when I get this amount of prebiotic fiber in my system from your activated psyllium, it does something fundamentally different than if I just take metamucil or I just take psyllium husk, you know, off of Amazon or, or wherever.

It's actually dangerous to take psyllium husk off of Amazon. And the reason I quit using it years ago, I was really looking at fixing my gut. I took antibiotics every month for 15 years because of chronic sinusitis that was caused by living in toxic mold. Right. So I had, you know, room clearing, gas and bloating and just all kinds of problems I don't want to even go into. And so of course I tried psyllium. But then you read the studies, it turns out whole psyllium gets caught in little folds in your intestines and causes actually worsening of problems. Even though it might solve a short term problem, it's going to actually be really harsh on the gut and actually damage the brush border in there. So that was something that I'm like, this is a non ingredient. I don't recommend some husk. I've even written that in books. But you're like, no, no, no. You didn't look at particle size and sourcing and you get the particle size right. Like you said, the amount of research on fiber is overwhelming. You get these carnivore guys who are like, fiber is bad. There's hundreds and hundreds of studies. That's why I made a prebiotic formula. And you can even use it during fasting, because prebiotics, when they're done right and they don't harm the gut, they actually turn into short chain fatty acids that are pro ketogenic. I just didn't think you could do it with psyllium. But you figured out the way.

Yes, yes. Over many, many, many hundreds of experiments, we finally figured it out. And once what we really live for here at Uprising is seeing the consumer transformation. And so once our customers started writing in and telling us stories like, wow, I, I couldn't leave my house because of the digestive issues I was having. And I went to my gastroenterologist and I tried literally everything they said. And then I randomly found your Bread. And I tried it, and immediately my life changed. We were like, okay, all the science, all the research that we put into this product, it is actually happening for people. Which what. That's what we set out to do in the beginning was like, I wanted it all to be simple. I wanted it to be, you know, whether you understood everything about particle size and psyllium or you knew nothing and you were like my dad, just a trucker on the road, like, what do I even do to protect my health? I wanted it just to be bred that simple. And what we've seen is that that's what actually happens for people. And the research, the benefits of psyllium. You know, there is a number of things that psyllium has been shown to do, but to your point, you have to have it in a form where the body can activate off of it. And so that's, that's what we are most proud of, is that we have a product that really works for people. But it's in the form of the first food, bread.

Hold on, the first, the first food was meat? Come on, let's be really straightforward, like, no.

Okay, fair enough.

Dave, Caitlin did not make bread. It might have been the farming food, but. No, no, no. Give me that. Give me that bison drumstick or something, I'm sure.

Okay, fair enough, fair enough.

You do something different, though, because I think with the research on psyllium, like, here's all the benefits, but here's all the bad stuff. So that's why I'm like, look, I don't want the bad stuff that comes from psyllium, which is all about particle size and what it does to the gut. A lot of people don't understand what a saccharide is or a polysaccharide. Can you talk me through the science on polysaccharides and what those are and why that matters? Can you talk me through the science on polysaccharides and what those are and why that matters?

Yeah. So a lot of listeners of this podcast are probably more familiar with the fat world and the, you know, maybe the medium chain triglycerides and the benefits of kind of that domain. However, here at Uprising, what we went really deep on is the benefits of bioactive polysaccharides. So first off, polysaccharides are really chains of carbohydrate molecules. And so, you know, we're talking, you got fats, proteins, carbs. This is really the carbohydrate based world. And bioactive polysaccharides are those within that world that have been found through research to have some sort of bioactive beneficial property in the human body. And so that is really what underlies everything that's happening from a cilium perspective. The end benefits that consumers actually see when they eat our product. It's all about the bioactive polysaccharides. And people have found all sorts of different types of benefits with bioactive polysaccharides, from anti tumor effects to blood sugar control to cholesterol support. I mean, there is a range of research out there on what various bioactive polysaccharides can do from a health perspective.

So polysaccharides are really funny because in medical science, especially in research, researchers have a history of labeling things as junk. So have you heard of junk DNA?

Yes.

Okay, so they're saying, well, we don't know what it does, therefore it's junk. No, that might be a bit of a problem because going back a generation, they said these cells are covered with junk sugar. Let's scrape off the junk sugar and look at what's inside, because we know the proteins are most important. Now, it turns out the cytoplasm, the liquid in the cell, is also very important. And so is that junk sugar coating, which is bioactive polysaccharides. It's actually how the immune system of the cell works, or at least a major portion of how it works. So it makes good sense that certain polysaccharides would be bioactive. And indeed, there's lots of research that supports that they are. So what you, you're getting from the, the particle size, very fine size there is the beneficial polysaccharides, which is basically long chain carbohydrates that your body can't use, but that are a signal to your body. And like you said in the last decades, it's, you know, hyperlipidemia. In other words, too much fat in your blood, hyperglycemia, too much sugar in your blood, diabetes, you mentioned even things having to do with tumor formation, which is intimately tied, it turns out, with metabolism. Now genetics. So that's weird. You fix the metabolism and like the amount of extra fat or sugar in the blood would go down because your metabolism is able to use those. And when your metabolism works, you'd have less diabetes, which is a disease of your metabolism not working. Oh, and then your cells would make energy, well, so they wouldn't turn into cancer via the Warburg effect. Holy crap. You fixed the metabolism. It works. And bioactive polysaccharides would be part of that. So that's in there. And something though, that I didn't know about until doing the research, until working with you was about mineral absorption. Can you talk to me about mineral absorption and what you've got going on in Uprising?

Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that Uprising bread and what we've done with the product does around through the digestive system is actually allows for a better uptake, better mineral absorption of water soluble vitamins. And that is specifically because of what our activated psyllium is doing as it is going through your digestive system. So, you know, a lot of folks, I think at least you know, after talking to so many customers, they don't fully understand how the digestive system actually works. Right. And so you kind of have, you have multiple stages of, of things that have to happen in order for you to actually digest and get the benefits out of your food. So, you know, you've got the stomach and at a super basic level like that kind of prepares the food for digestion. Then you have the small intestine and that's where a lot of the nutrients, you know, that's where people get the things that they kind of understand or hear a lot about is in the small intestine. Then it's, it's transferred to the bloodstream and whatnot. And then you have the large intestine and that's where a lot of the micro microbiota is. And that's the kind of last stage where we are feeding different colonies and you are getting the benefits of when you have fiber, make it all the way there. And so we are really proud of the fact that people with this bread can actually increase their mineral absorption and in the digestive tract.

This is funny because most fiber, especially fiber, which is a bulking fiber like psyllium, normally is looked at instead of the way you're treating reduces mineral and vitamin absorption. So what you've done with your particle size and with the selection and processing that you're doing is you're doing something phenomenal because you're taking the PH of the gut and this is going to sound totally crazy, you're decreasing the ph, which means you're making it more acidic, not more alkaline. Yes. Because it turns out when the gut is more acidic, you can absorb minerals better. And it also kills bad stuff in the gut. So when people say, oh, your body should be alkaline, it's probably because they're like on a celery juice fast and don't know what the hell is going on. Your gut should not be alkaline. In fact, if you drink alkaline water with the meal, you will not digest the meal because you turned off the stomach acid. And as you age, you get less stomach acid. So even past the stomach acid in the gut, the ph matters greatly. And anyone who does microbial fermentation will tell you ph controls what can grow and what won't grow. I know this because my company, Homebiotic, does microbial fermentation to make microbes that are. That work against mold. So we have, you know, a factory where we ferment stuff that you can spray around your house that's anti mold. But in order to get that right, the manufacturing process was really hard because we had to keep controlling ph. And if it gets just a little bit off, the stuff won't grow. Right. So in your gut, it's the same way. So when people are eating Uprising bread, like I thought I was eating bread, but they're actually making their gut more acidic, where it needs to be acidic to kill the bad stuff that's already in there or bad stuff that came in on the sandwich, they're increasing mineral absorption. But normal bread, which is full of phytic acid and maybe oxalic acid, that stuff blocks mineral absorption. That's why I put minerals in danger coffee, because we have an epidemic of a lack of minerals. And you're like, how about this? You know, have some meat, which has minerals in it on some bread from Uprising, and, oh, my God, you're actually going to absorb the minerals in the meat versus if you put it on normal bread, which would block the absorption of minerals. Like, it's a big deal. And since it tastes like bread and it's something you want to eat, I think you actually made it so it's convenient and it's pleasant. And those are the health changes that people do. That's why people put butter in their coffee. Well, because I was going to drink coffee anyway. I put butter in the coffee. It actually tastes good. I enjoyed it, and it worked better than before. But if you had to put kale in your coffee, no one would drink it. They'd spit it out even if it was provably good for you, which is not Kale's gross. But it's the provably better experience and provably better results that creates behavior change. And that's why I'm like, okay, I'm kind of interested in this stuff. If people can't tell.

Yeah. And the research shows that psyllium ingested before food does not give you the same benefits. As psyllium ingested with food. So imagine, you know, the combination of what you're eating at the same time also matters to whether you're going to get the benefits or not. And bread is arguably one of the most combined foods because often you're, you know, putting something on the bread, you're putting other nutrients, other foods with it to make your sandwich, to make, you know, whatever dish you're creating. And so it really is a super convenient form because it's going to be often in combination with the other great things that you're eating, which they work synergistically together best.

Can you, I know it's a proprietary process and all stuff. Can you share anything with listeners? You're not just grinding it smaller, but is there, is that anything you can talk about?

Yeah. So obviously we worked very hard to develop our method for creating activated psyllium. But one thing that we figured out in the process was that there's a piece of it called hydrolysis which is required in order to bring out the benefits of psyllium. And essentially that's just leveraging water to basically take the molecules and make them do different things. And so what we figured out was our process for first off, getting the right psyllium, having a very specific particle size, sending it through. Our hydrolysis process in baking ends up creating this absolutely magical instate. And we've tried various different types of breads, we've tried various different types of instates as far as how, how long they are baked, how short they're baked. And we found that our loaf that we currently sell is like this perfectly optimal end state that people end up just loving.

Now, what are the other ingredients? What else is in there besides obviously it's not just a block of psyllium.

Yes. So psyllium gets all of the shine from a ingredient perspective. But it's really, it's a very simple ingredient list. It's psyllium, eggs, almond flour, golden flax, and then just salt water and baking powder and that's it.

That makes it super straightforward. And you also make chips, though, which are really good and I like the flexibility there with the chips. You've got the low carb, low calorie chips, you've got some that are medium carb that have buckwheat. And in your marketing you call it plant based buckwheat. And I'm really pissed you didn't have animal based buckwheat. But anyway. And then you also have low carb, higher protein, which are made with collagen and collagen's a good binding agent as a protein. As. As we both well know, I'm kind of the guy who made collagen a billion dollar business. So, like, I'm all about that. When you're doing chips, though, fried, baked, what's going on with that?

Yeah, so, absolutely, we only do baked chips. We bake at super low temperatures. We really figured out that folks, they absolutely love our bread. But there's a huge thing also holding a lot of people back, which is the sensation of crunch. And at the end of the day, it's a deeply primal thing. You really crave that sensation of crunch. And within the salty snacks world, there are so many food tricks going on that light up people's brains that, you know, destroy neurons, that make you addicted and want the. The chip over and over and over. Plus, it's crunchy, so it's like a double whammy.

And MSG is in most chips, which is part of that salty flavor. And then there's a whole bunch of flavor research about the ratio of time from crunch to when it melts in your mouth. And all that's so tuned in so that some part of you feels like you're biting into the femur of your enemy when you eat them or whatever the heck primal stuff they're pushing. But it's. It's probably not for our benefit. And you know that because you come from. From big food not to pick on PNG like this is. This is the last hundred years of big food research.

Exactly.

Any of that? No. No Frying in bad oils. No MSG. Are you using any sort of fake MSG? Like the stuff that's 73% MSG by weight but is labeled as, you know, spice extractives?

No, that's, you know, that's something that a lot of people are unaware of, is that there's so many other names for ingredients. So when you walk down the healthy food aisle, you know, you might see, you know, yeast extract. Okay, that doesn't sound so bad. Well, that's another way of saying this has MSG in it. And so there's a lot of tricks in food which we want to make. Products that can compete on taste, blow people away from a health perspective, but also have zero tricks in them. We want things that people can actually trust.

One of the rules in the bulletproof diet is. And. And I. I talked about the bulletproof diet, like longtime listeners probably have read the book, but, guys, this is a major bestseller in 16 languages. People have lost £2 million and Counting on the bulletproof diet. And it's funny, it's grass fed, eat the right kinds of fat, low in omega 6, cyclical ketosis, intermittent fasting, and it's okay to eat low inflammation plants and fruit, just not excessive amounts of it. So it, it's, it helped to put keto on the map. And it's funny, a lot of carnivores now evolving to oh, you had to eat something besides meat. I'm like, yeah, eat those less inflammatory things. So I like to think it was directionally. Right. One of the things that's in the book and there's a lot of little details, but don't eat food that's spoiled because of mycotoxins and histamine and lipopolysaccharides. But don't eat food that won't spoil because the preservatives that are in a lot of food actually screws up your gut bacteria. Right. So then you're like, how do I do this? And historically, well, you'd use rock salt, which is full of minerals and that would be a great preservative and you'd rinse as much of it out as you could. Then you'd eat whatever the beef jerky or salted fish was. You get a ton of trace minerals, which is good. That's why they're back in danger. Coffee. But that was you were eating food that would spoil once you remove the salt. So how are you going about solving that problem of selling me a loaf of bread or arrives not moldy without putting stuff in there that I don't want? Right now your body might be wasting energy on stress instead of healing. That's why your gut feels off, your brain feels dull, and your immune system keeps letting you down. What if you could switch your healing state back on without meds, stimulants or guesswork? Vibrant Blue Oil's parasympathetic essential oil blend is, is a powerful, non invasive way to activate your nervous system and shift your body into healing mode just through scent. A drop behind your ears can help switch off your stress response, calm inflammation and support digestion, detox and immune function. And it can even help clear up your stubborn brain fog. It's natural, easy to use and thousands of happy customers already love it. And right now, the Human Upgrade Podcast listeners can grab a full size Bottle for over 50% off at vibrantblue oils.com Dave that's vibrantblueoils.com Dave don't wait to start feeling like yourself again. You're listening to the human upgrade with Dave Asprey. So how are you going about solving that problem? Problem of selling me a loaf of bread that arrives, not moldy, without putting stuff in there that I don't want?

Yeah. So this is really twofold. One, we have a proprietary formula, obviously that we developed, you know, from a health perspective. But our formula is also amazing in that it can, it can be fresh and last longer than a traditional farm market bread, but not nearly as long as, you know, something that has preservatives. And so by virtue of the ph levels, the hydration levels, all the things that we tinkered with and dialed in over time, at the end of the day, once you get it to your house, it will last for three to seven days on the counter, one to four weeks.

You said three to seven days on the counter.

Yep. Three to seven days on the counter, 1 to 4 weeks in the fridge, or 6 months in the freezer, which is, you know, if anybody's shopped at a farm market, they understand like, okay, a normal artisan bread is going to be significantly less than that. And so that gives people an awesome amount of flexibility. But at the same time, we didn't put any preservatives in there. And so what we did was we figured out, okay, how do we really solve this with science inside the loaf and science in the packaging. So how do we keep oxygen out when the product is on its way to you? How do we make sure that we dial in exactly how long FedEx or UPS is going to take to get it to you? We actually pay for expedited shipping on behalf of the consumer so that we know when you get a product from Uprising, you're going to get the closest thing you possibly can to, to being at a farm market. But it's at your doorstep. No preservatives, as fresh as it gets, and at the end of the day, no spoilage. And removing that, that inflammatory ingredient profile that you typically would have to have in order to get something like this.

All right, I'm going to ask you some hard business advisory questions now because we have a lot of entrepreneurs listening and other people who are food entrepreneurs and whatever. Okay. You're available in about 250 grocery stores. A major Midwest grocery chain, one that also carried bulletproof products, probably still does. Can you name the chain?

Yeah, Meijer.

It's a Meijer. Okay, cool. It wasn't making sure if that was proprietary or anything. Okay, so Meijer, which is great and congrats on that. But you know, from your experience At Procter and Gamble, that shelf life is what drives grocery volume. In other words, if, if you had, if you added that potassium bromate or any of the other nasty benzoates or something that you could put in there, that would increase your shelf life, then it would be a lot easier to handle the groceries. How's it going? I mean, is this something that really should just go by subscription? Just like, we'll mail it to you because we can make it today, ship it out at the end of the day and you get it two days later? Or is this really something you can scale through grocery stores?

So this is definitely something that we will make available at all grocery stores over time. You know, that's our vision, that's what we want to do. It's not a product that is going to go right next to white bread or necessarily Dave's Killer bread because we don't want to compromise on ingredients. It's as simple as that. What we will do is you will eventually see Uprising Bread in the frozen section of every grocery store. And in America, if we have our way. And people know, especially people that are living a healthier lifestyle, know that a lot of the best products are in the frozen section when you walk into a grocery store because they don't have the preservatives. And those categories are growing tremendously right now because everybody's waking up to the fact that, wait a minute, the stuff that is not in the frozen section or not around the outside has all sorts of horrible things in it. I got to go to basically these two places in the grocery if I want something that I can trust and feel safe putting in my body.

So you're going to sell it as frozen. And it's funny, some of the other gluten free products are already there anyway because that's what you expect. And like you said, it doesn't spoil something most people don't know about too. Even if you're saying, oh, that, that fresh bakery bread within 24 hours of being baked, if you look at the mold levels, even though you can't see it yet, but you culture it, there's a lot of stuff growing on that bread. And it just gets worse and worse and worse over time. And given what we know about the types of mold that are in other parts of the grocery store, including toxic ones, they're very common around the coils in the freezers and refrigerators. I'm not sure that I'd want my bread sitting there as a petri dish, but I don't eat anyway but, yeah, those crunchy French breads, like, get them as soon as they come out of the oven, but if they were cooked yesterday and they're not in plastic, you probably don't want to do it. And I don't want to waste plastic either, so I don't know. It's a tough call there. I love a good, fresh baked bread. I don't need it anymore, but it tastes good. But the old stuff. But what you're doing with the freezer is you're taking it right out, you're packaging it effectively to block out the oxygen, and. And you already have a shelf life that's way better than normal bread, because you can go, you know, three to seven days just at room temperature, but you're shipping it frozen. And I can testify it does spoil, because I had one that I was filming that stayed in a filing cabinet for two weeks. And so, yes, it will spoil, which is a positive thing. And it freezes perfectly, because when I get it, I throw in the freezer, and you take it out, defrost it, and it cuts just normally, and it's. It's. It's totally good to go. So you have to defrost it before you cut it. But it's. It's cool. And it's one of the things. I got my prebiotics. I. I really quantifiably and noticeably changed the quality of my digestion. And I got to eat a sandwich or with the kids, I've been making French toast with it, which. Which is really good. You get an extra protein from an egg. You know, you put some cinnamon, some other stuff on it, and they're loving it, Right? A little bit of fruit, vanilla bean sometimes. So it's. It's really good. And you can do, like, sandwich, like, stuff that. That maybe you're missing. I kind of gave up sandwiches a long time ago, so I'm. I'm super stoked at it. You guys are@unprisingfood.com which people have probably figured out now. You came up with the toast cleanse, which, by the way, makes me happy compared to the stupid celery juice, by the way. Celery juice can actually be good for you if you have a glass of celery juice. It's got some structured water in it, and it can actually help with some potassium and things that could help with bloating, but as a way to cure diabetes. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of, and I just have to say that straight up. But a toast cleanse sounds Completely ridiculous. But it's something that every generation Z with their avocado toast is dreaming about. What is a toast cleanse? Because it's funny.

Yes. So obviously we wanted to poke a little fun at the idea of cleanses and all the bad things that are out there. But we also wanted to get people's attention and again, package up something that could be powerful, that could give you a quick demonstration of what prebiotic fiber can do for you and is easy and achievable. So we put together this three day toast cleanse and we have a guide on our website. If you go to Uprising food, you can click on Toast Cleanse in the menu. And really it's a three day protocol where you leverage our bread as your kind of foundation core. You eat between three and five slices per day. If you're low on fiber to begin with, you want to titrate up to that. And then we give you a short menu of options for how to modify the toast between adding different oils, different spices. So MCT oil, olive oil, avocado oil, various spices. You can try it with kimchi, with sauerkraut, but it's really meant to put a, a significant amount of prebiotic fiber in your body in a three day span, clean out all of the other, you know, other things you might be eating. So you can isolate what this does and then at the end feel the difference and that's the toast cleanse.

Nice. Basically getting all of that, all the activated psyllium as a prebiotic is going to noticeably change how you feel. Probably your skin would be the, one of the biggest things you'll see because when you reduce inflammation and fix the gut, you usually see it around the eyes. You see it where the meridians go on, on the cheeks. Pretty cool.

And we found that the dose of psyllium really matters. So once you get to two to three slices a day, you start to get up into that level where you actually notice the difference if you, you know, one slice a day. Great. Fantastic. We love you. Like, you know, thanks for eating our toast, but we want you to get the max benefits and you know, there's different recommendations out there around how much fiber per day you should eat. But most people are fiber deficient, you know, and we can argue a little bit about like, what's the exact number, how much exact prebiotic fiber should you have? In general, it's probably way more than you're eating today. And so what, one of the things that toast cleans does is help you experience what it's like to get a step change different. You got nine grams of fiber in one slice of our bread, so you get two to three. And now you're up into the range where things start happening. At least in our experience.

Based on the research in Superhuman, my anti aging book, my goal for soluble fiber, I'm going to count activated psyllium as a form of soluble fiber. Even though psyllium is typically counted as insoluble because you activated it. My goal is 40 to 60 grams per day based on thousands of studies showing that this extends human life. Like it is a big deal. Actually, all the studies don't show it extends human life. Thousands of studies showing it's good for you and studies showing that it's reduces all cause mortality and stuff like that. So 40 to 60 grams, that's what I do on a daily basis. How many pieces of uprising bread am I going to need to eat to do that?

You're going to need four to five.

Okay, so I'm going to have to have like the Big Mac style with two grass fed patties and three pieces of this for dinner. And then at lunch I'm going to have some. You know, it's doable just from eating four or five pieces of this bread or you can use this. And you know, if it's okay to have other sources of soluble fiber like cooked in cooled rice and things like that if you're not keto.

And what's crazy, Dave, is most people are down in the like 10 to 15 range. And then in the keto world, especially a lot of folks who are new to keto or they're just kind of getting going, maybe they're being influenced by a friend or an Instagrammer. They go down the carnivore ish path or the Atkins ish path and their fiber consumption could be less than five. You know, it is abysmal and the impact of that is significant.

I am, I am unconvinced that we need, that we need insoluble coarse fiber. One of the guests on the show who knows a lot about the guys said, oh, it's a scaffolding for soluble fiber to grow bacteria. So maybe you need some, maybe you don't. I am convinced that you need soluble fiber to have the best gut bacteria. However, most soluble fiber is packaged with so many anti nutrients that you don't want to have it, which is the conundrum. Right. So when people go keto or carnivore or whatever, they cut out all soluble fiber. And I think it's Ruinous and usually after six weeks of a straight carnivore, something like that, maybe after 12, which is how long it took me when I did this years ago and I was stress testing the edges of the bulletproof diet. I had one serving of broccoli a day and the rest was just meat, actually meat and some butter. And what I ended up with was just a destruction of sleep. The morning, morning kickstand wasn't that interested. Ended up getting all kinds of just sleep disturbances, thinning of hair. This happens very reliably when people over fast or they don't consume carbs for a long period of time because gluconeogenesis is biologically difficult to take. You can even pull it off and maybe not good for you. So yes, I pissed off a few really aggressive keto people with that, but this is my own experience and adding a scoop or two of prebiotic fiber could change that. Or eating a piece of Uprising bread or two or five is going to make a massive difference. And since it's compatible with the keto diet, you can a b test it. Go a week with nothing, go a week with some and see which one makes you work better. I promise that I can already tell you the answer, guys. Uprisingfood.com Dave use code Dave. They'll save 10 bucks. You know the deal. You listen to an episode with someone who has something to sell, I ask for a discount for you because, well, it's only fair. They're sharing knowledge, you're sharing your time and so that's putting their money where your mouth is. So give it a, give it a try. And if you look at the ingredients, make sure you're okay with eggs. Make sure you're okay with whatever's in the spot specific one. You're trying. But this is a very clean label. It does work. It does what they said it did. And I was highly skeptical when I first was introduced about a year and a half or so ago. But I've looked at the research, I've tried the product, and I gotta say, they actually did something I didn't think you could do. And that's why we're talking about it. Have a wonderful day and thank you very, very much for providing being online. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

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