The Problem With Meal Replacements, Soylent Knockoffs & A Radical New Superfood.

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. And I am sorry. No, I really am sorry. Because last week I released a podcast episode that was a parody of biohacking and a parody of things like ketosis and our sometimes orthorexic approach to nutrition and fitness. And it turned out that the gentleman who I interviewed on that podcast episode, JP Sears, who has a hilarious YouTube channel and is quite a funny gentleman. He's someone who I think many of my podcast listeners, possibly you actually weren't familiar with. I made the erroneous assumption that just about everybody knew who this guy was and would kind of think it would be funny that I interviewed a dude who's got this very entertaining YouTube channel that allows us to all poke a little bit of fun at ourselves. But it turns out that I wasted many folks time. Understand that your time is valuable. I wasted a lot of people's time, specifically people who listened to much of that episode without realizing it was a joke and got a little bit upset about the time that they had wasted listening in. And also the fact that I did the whole thing but never actually let on the whole time that it was a joke. Now, in addition to that, that particular podcast episode was actually supposed to come out on April Fool's Day, and we recorded, and it was something that we recorded later than our planned date. And I decided that it was funny enough to me, at least, to where I decided to just push it out at a later date. And the whole thing just kind of wound up blowing up in my face. Even though if you listen to it in the context of it being a parody, it actually is pretty funny. I just should have told you, maybe before you jumped in, that it was a parody. So, anyways, I'm sorry. I don't want to drone out about it too long. And if you have no freaking clue what I'm talking about, you could go back and listen to that particular episode if you'd like to. If you want to listen to it, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Spiritual. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com spiritual spiritual, if you too, want to be offended. So, anyways, I promise you, I promise you from the bottom of my heart, I won't anymore put out any kind of, like, parody, jokey podcast unless I tell you at the very beginning of the podcast that the whole is a complete joke. And no, today's podcast is not a complete joke. It really is about this new, like, brown powder that I use in my smoothies, which sounds like a really boring podcast episode. But it actually is, it's a pretty, it was like the number one food campaign on Indiegogo of all time. It fricking tastes good. And the dude that makes it is a rock star. And I know him. I helped out with the product. And it's, it's actually, it's a pretty, pretty cool little, little deal. So you're gonna like this one. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, if we can increase the amount of fibers that have been shown to increase microbiome biodiversity, then that is sort of the goal here. Turns out about only 10 or 20% of most fibers are absorbed by the small intestine. The rest of it, which is, you know, the 80 or 90%, reaches all the way to the large intestine. The biggest and most important thing is to have enough fiber, which also adds to satiety as well as, you know, just being a very, very important source or fueling the gut microbiome.

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Hey, hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And this morning I actually woke up and I took this strange looking brown powder and a cup of ice and I dumped my cup of ice into a blender, dumped this powder over the ice. I put a little bit of my personal favorite way to blend a smoothie, a little bit of bone broth in there, and I blended it up. And this is a practice I've been following for days on which I don't have the time to go find a whole bunch of wild plants and put them into a blender. It's also something I've been doing quite a bit when I travel. I've been using this new superfood meal replacement powder. The name of this stuff is Ample. I've had a chance to try it a few times over the past year and a half or so. As the inventor, a friend of mine who I know now from having hung out with him at two different Paleo FX conferences, he keeps sending this stuff to me to check out, to taste, to try. And I finally decided because I've been using it so much to actually get him on a podcast to ask some important questions about it. Because it turns out this was actually the number one food campaign of all time on Indiegogo. This special meal replacement powder. It's a super unique approach and the inventor's name is Connor, Connor Young. He's with me on the show today. And basically Connor is. He's a nutrition nerd, he's a fitness freak, he's a self proclaimed biohacker. He's obsessed, possibly just as much as I am with optimizing the human body. He's got a degree in biology. He co founded a CrossFit gym over in Nashville, Tennessee. But then he eventually sold that CrossFit gym and started working in surgical care. During the time he was working in surgical care, he really got into a little bit more kind of entrepreneurship, physical therapy, food and healthy food and began to formulate this balanced meal replacement powder. That is actually a very, very unique approach that we're going to delve into today. So everything that we talk about as you tune in, you can check out if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com ample podcast because that's the name of this meal replacement powder is ample. BenGreenfieldFitness.com ample podcast if you want to get this stuff as you listen in, I'll also put a code for you. The code is GREENFIELD. That gets you a big fat 15% discount on Ample if you just go to amplemeal.com or go to the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com Ample podcast All right, I'm going to shut up now, Connor. Welcome to the show, dude.

Hey, thanks so much, Ben. Appreciate it.

Hey, the last time that I saw you, you were wandering around Paleo FX and you had like a few random bottles full of this mysterious brown powder. And I know a lot happened leading up to that point and a lot has happened since then, especially with you guys being the number one food campaign on indiegogo. So fill me in on the ample store. Like, how did this stuff actually come to be before we take a deep dive into the ingredients and everything.

Yeah, sure, sounds good. And I will say no. I definitely think that you are more nerdy about this than I am. So let's just get that straight off the bat. But I appreciate the compliment.

Nerdy and better looking.

Well, all right, that one remains to be seen.

But it's radio. Nobody knows exactly.

We have no idea. So like you said, I had, I had started a CrossFit gym, had been into nutrition since basically I was 17 when I was playing tennis and very, very early on got into kind of optimizing my own performance as well as that, trying to optimize my clients. Did the whole medical device thing for a while, realized oh no, we're not actually solving problems, we're kind of putting expansive, expensive band aids on people. So quit that. Came to San Francisco to run a physical therapy startup.

And if I could interject before you keep going, that's exact what happened to me. Because I don't know if a lot of people know this, but my first job out of college was surgical sales. I worked for Biomet and I lasted about five months at that job. It was to be my stepping stone into medicine. I had been accepted to a bunch of medical schools and was planning on going to medical school and I wanted to work in the private sector and save up a little bit of money first. I took on that job and got a completely nasty taste in my mouth when it came to modern medicine. Overpriced implants getting installed in people, unhappy doctors, unhealthy hospitals. Hospitals. And I kind of pivoted back into the fitness industry. And it sounds like you had kind of a similar experience.

This is the exact same thing that happened with me. Yeah, 100%. I mean I was in the Cleveland Clinic and you know, there's this, you know, world renowned heart surgeon or like you know, orthopedic surgeon who's then taking out a person's knee and replacing it. I'm like, well, we're just replacing a knee. We're not actually solving a real problem. And the real solution comes either on the physical therapy before end beforehand or the nutrition. So definitely wanted to do something that scaled a lot more than a CrossFit gym, but was in the health space. So yeah, I went out to San Francisco and gave my first, well, I guess second at this point, entrepreneurial kind of muscles, a little workout with the physical therapy thing. And what's really interesting is I was in a 50 person hacker house, basically an entrepreneurial house with.

What's a hacker house?

It's like so, you know, there's a lot of Silicon Valley startups these days and, and there's so many new, I guess, engineers who, who move to the area. And so it's like almost like a co op where 50 people would all live together and basically just bounce ideas off each other. You know, most of them were starting companies of their own, a lot of them were software developers. And it was honestly an amazing opportunity to kind of get into the startup Game to understand how to grow a business quickly and scalably and everything like that. And so when I got there, of course I was sort of the resident health expert and I still coached CrossFit on the side. And so people would always ask like Connor, how do I optimize my diet, how do I lose weight, how do I gain muscle, all this other stuff. So I, I started teaching them how to cook and then actually put when that didn't kind of wait.

How'd you know how to cook?

Oh, I don't, I just, I make only three things but it's as much as I needed. So it's like, you know, Brussels sprouts, grass fed beef, a little coconut oil, sometimes mix it up with broccoli. But honestly for them, you know, even the thought of using a frying pan was just.

It sounds kind of like, it sounds like Tim Ferriss four Hour Chef. Right? Like, oh, you really need to know how to it do what to make is scrambled eggs. If you know that one thing you can get by with with about a million different versions of scrambled eggs and impress a lot of people.

Exactly, exactly. So they literally called it the Connor special to make eggs and Brussels sprouts. And luckily that caught on but it wasn't helpful during their day to day lives. I mean, so a lot of these guys were really health conscious and they were reading all the things and a lot of blogs, but unfortunately when you're in the middle of a busy day or you just work out or you're on the go, you often don't have time to go grab a skillet and fry up some brussels sprouts. So instead I developed a nutrition lecture series for these guys and try to teach them how to eat and what to eat rather than just teaching them to kind of cook. So the problem is at the time there was a couple of these meal replacements that came out in the startup community and they're questionable at best. Using a bunch of GMO corn, maltodextrin, a lot of synthetic multivitamin mixes and soy protein and that kind of caught on as the meal replacement or the quick kind of convenient meal for, for Silicon Valley tech people.

Right.

And so for me, from my, my CrossFit and, and Paleo background, I was like that, that doesn't really fly.

You mean, you mean meal replacement powders? Like, like soylent type of stuff?

Yeah, but I didn't want to mention.

The name so I don't mind all that. So you did.

So yeah, there we go.

I've written articles about soylent it's, it's. I mean, and, and I think a lot of people who are listening in probably know just a little bit about Soylent, but it probably was the most hyped up meal replacement powder of the past decade, I'd say. I mean, it's pretty popular stuff. And it's also based on the article, if you go to BenGreenFitness.com and do a search for Soylent, I've written about it, but it's pretty much just soy protein, canola oil, sugar, and a whole bunch of really nasty stuff all thrown into a powdered food.

Yeah, exactly. And so. Well, the funny thing to me was that it was sort of geared as being, hey, this is your one meal and you no longer have to eat food on a regular basis. You can basically replace your entire diet. And so that basically I had this negative visceral reaction to this, and a couple of my friends were doing this on a, on a relatively routine basis. So one of my friends, it didn't sit well with him physically. And he asked me what didn't sit.

Well with him physically.

The Soylent didn't actually.

Didn't fit well with a lot of people physically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he gained liquidity. He basically got small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And so came to me saying, hey, Connor, can you make something better? I, I still need, basically, I still need some sort of packaged food, you know, to just whenever, like in the middle of my day, you know, if I'm traveling, whatever the case may be. But if, if Soylent's not good, and if, and if none, none of the other, you know, packaged foods around the industry are good, well, then what is good? And I honestly couldn't give him an answer. And at that point, when I realized that the food industry itself is actually concerned a lot more about seeming healthy than really being healthy, I was like, oh, this is, this is a real problem. And I think that in that case as well, a real opportunity. I mean, if you can actually be the one food company that's more concerned about being healthy and not just seeming healthy, then I think it's a quantum leap in terms of the quality of the food that you're able to make.

Yeah, that's certainly one of the issues that you see with a lot of these meal replacement powders. I don't know what caused your friend's small intestine bacterial overgrowth, which is essentially fed by a lot of these fermentable carbohydrates and a condition of overgrowth of bacteria where it's not supposed to be in the upper digestive tract, but you look at the soylent label and maltodextrin, along with isomalculose, two highly fermentable carbohydrates, are pretty much at the top of the list, right under the soy protein and the canola oil. So it's no surprise that he had sibo and likely, I would imagine, a little bit of inflammation as well from the soy and the canola oil.

Yeah, definitely. And so with this kind of backdrop, I was like, all right, well, I know I can make a much better thing, and it seems as if the world needs it, so I should be the one to do it. And so basically, I just. Having done a lot of research over the last several years, about nine at the time, reading a couple hundred clinical journals, and really having gotten into the biology, I created, effectively, a idealized version that, at least for a first product, would be good for about 80% or 85% of the population to use on a routine basis. And of course, I never wanted to replace real food. I mean, obviously, it's just absolutely essential, but, you know, for the one or two meals a day that people can't get those good calories, and I think it's. It's important to have something that can fill that gap.

Yeah, yeah, certainly. And I mean, like, you know, in some cases, it is a matter of time. In other cases, it's a matter of if you have something like small intestine bacterial overgrowth or if you have some type of digestive inflammation and you're just, like, scratching your head about which of the hundred foods in your refrigerator you can't eat. Sometimes it does come in handy to just be able to throw some pea in the blender, just mix it up or toss them in a cup and just mix it up and know that it's at least satisfying your requirements if everything else is just a little bit too dizzying and intimidating for you to be able to figure out right off the bat. For me, that's not the case because my wife is a complete foodie and makes meals all the time. But when I'm traveling and I need a go to kind of hypoallergenic. We'll get into the ingredients here in a bit, but, yeah, it can be pretty convenient compared to airport food or the random meals you might encounter elsewhere.

Definitely. Yeah. I mean, and especially for the person who, you know, they're. They're starting their journey into becoming a lot more health conscious, but they're not all the way there yet. And for them, the informational overload is too intense to kind of get get schooled up on so quickly. It's. It's that. It's that type of person who I want it to just be like, all right, while you're. While you are schooling yourself up, here's a. Here's a kind of an easy solution where we've already done a lot of the thinking for you and can help you also think about how to optimize the rest of your diet as well. And so I basically got a bunch of these. I mean, the things started in this hacker house, got a bunch of these ingredients, a couple of them on Amazon, a couple of them I couldn't find on Amazon. So I went directly to the ingredient suppliers themselves. It was unpalatable. For the first three months, I didn't even eat it myself. But eventually it became good, and I was able to verify the quality of the ingredients as well and got into an accelerator, which is one of these San Franciscan startup accelerators called 500 Startups, and then eventually ran this Indiegogo campaign as sort of a test to kind of validate the viability of the business. And it was a lot more successful than I expected. In fact, there were 45 people who bought lifetime supplies without even trying the product first for more than five grand, which was pretty. Pretty intense to me. And I think it's at that time that I talked to you last time. In fact, the Indiegogo campaign was going on while we were at Paleo FX last year, and then got a little bit of investment and kind of scaled up the product. Got also another great food scientist on board as well. She was actually the VP of R& D for Clif Bar, Pillsbury, and Target before Ample. And so we just launched in January and have been growing ever since. Yeah.

Let's delve into the nitty gritty. Let's start with the actual. I want to get into the actual ingredients. But first, what's the macronutrient breakdown of this stuff? What's the protein fat carb percentage?

Sure. Yeah. So the calories from fat are about 52%, calories from net carb, about 21%, and the calories from protein, around 70. Sorry, 27%.

Okay. And why'd you choose that particular breakdown?

Sure. So in general, the goal here was to have a sufficient amount of healthy fats just for fuel and both saturated and monounsaturated fats. So there's a sufficient amount of coconut oil and macadamia nut, as well as Chia seed oil as well. And then also a sufficient amount of protein. I expected that a lot of the customers are going to be both, some of them are going to be athletes. And regardless, having enough protein for society purposes is definitely a plus there. And then to have a low enough carbohydrate content where it's not necessarily in the ketogenic range. Well, I guess for some people it can be depending on their activity level. Actually for myself, I'm able to maintain mild ketosis using an apple, but certainly something that's not geared exclusively for ketosis, but still has this low carb, low glycemic and certainly low sugar type of content. And then also I think the biggest and most important thing is to have enough fiber, which also adds to satiety as well as, you know, just being a very, very important source for fueling the gut microbiome. And so that type of macronutrient breakdown seemed to be, from my research to be an effective macronutrient breakdown. And then after having talked to us a lot of. I've actually been working quite, quite heavily with our mutual friend Chris Masterjohn, who I know has been on the podcast of yours several times. And so having him as sort of a mentor from the food nutrition science perspective has just been absolutely phenomenal.

Yeah, I want to ask you about that in a little bit because it sounds like you're doing like some clinical trials on this stuff too with him. But before we do that, that's pretty high fat percentage. What fat? Like what's the lipid blend in this?

Sure. So it's coconut oil, macadamia nut oil, chia seed and sunflower lecithin. And so I would say the majority of it is the coconut and the, and the macadamia nut. So the saturated, the monounsaturated fat.

Okay, got it. And is there any particular reason that you chose those as like the lipid blend? Those just mix well, taste well. I mean, were you choosing this based on like, like the, the stabilization of the fats under heat processing or what was your reasoning on the lipid blend?

Totally so well, from the coconut oil's perspective, that was kind of self evident. I mean, coconut oil is just straight up great for you in terms of the mcts. And. And the more difficult part was the monounsaturated oils because there's actually not a lot of good monounsaturated fats that taste good and also don't have a lot of omega 6 fatty acids. So if the goal was to target ideally like a 1 to 1 omega 3 to omega 6 ratio. I wanted to have something that was high in omega 3 or high in monounsaturated, low in omega 6s. But that leaves a few oils, and chief among them is olive oil, avocado oil, and macadamia nut oil. Macadamia nut tastes by far the best, even though it is massively expensive. There's just not a lot of. You probably just don't see it all that often in these things. So the supply is relatively limited coming from Australia or South Africa. And yeah, so that's where the rationale for the fat blend came in. And then also as well, seeing if they're able to have a minimal amount of carbohydrates. So just to kind of give you guys a little bit of a food science lesson, I know that we often talk about just nutrition science, but never do we kind of get a good sense of how things are processed, how they're made. And so what's interesting is that if you're going to put fats in a solid form, they have to effectively have a carrier. And almost always, unfortunately, the carrier that most people use is GMO corn maltodextrin.

I got it.

Yeah. Which is the reason why you'll see all these things on food labels. And so 99% of the time, that's what they put in there. And it basically you'll kind of spray the lipid. Almost like imagine a perfume bottle. You spray the lipid onto this carbohydrate. And so what our goal tended to be was to say, all right, A, we want to have a minimal amount of carbohydrates in here. So we're targeting a 70, 30 blend of lipids to carbohydrates. And then B, to have these carbs come from tapioca starch instead of non GMO tapioca instead of corn maltodextrin. And so that was sort of the goal here from the food science perspective. And so trying to negotiate with some of these larger suppliers tended to be an uphill battle. And so we finally got good suppliers who were able to do this with all four of our lipids in the way that we wanted. And so that whole custom lipid blend was really one of the main things that I think we did amazingly well within ample.

Gotcha. Okay, so you got this lipid blend, and you've managed to make it stable with the coconut oil, macadamia oil, sunflower lecithin, and omega 3 chia seed extract. And that's how we're getting up to 50 to 60% fat in this stuff. And then you have a protein blend. Now the protein that you have is a, it's a grass fed whey, a hydrolyzed pea protein and a grass fed hydrolyzed collagen protein. Why'd you choose those three as the blends for the protein in this?

Sure. A couple reasons. So one, we wanted to make it, we wanted to have a PDCAS of 1. And so what that means is we wanted to have basically just a complete protein. So within your nine essential amino acids, there's basically a scale that people use to kind of determine how complete a particular protein is. So whey protein is 1 and so is, let's say eggs. So they are complete proteins. Whereas other proteins, like, I don't know, rice protein is actually, it's less than 1, it's like 0.7 or something like that. And so what that means is that what you want is to have this PDCAs of one, which basically means that the protein that you are ingesting is both digestible and also has all the amino acids that you need. So the way A has a PDCAS of 1, B, because it's so abundant in cysteine, glycine and glutamate, which are all three, basically the three amino acids required for glutathione. Whey has actually been shown very dramatically to be able to increase glutathione after consumption of whey protein. So obviously though, we have a lot more than just the need for whey in our diet. And so for the same reason that you make things with bone broth is the same reason why we put collagen in is for the glycine, the alanine and the proline that comes from this collagen, which basically makes up elastin, which is the main component of our skin and joints and hair. And so that's where the whey and the collagen come in. Now what we also wanted was to have a diversity of proteins and one ideally that was plant sourced. The other reason as well is that from a functional perspective, we needed ample to be filling, right? So if it's not filling and if it's basically thin and it tastes very, and it has a very flat viscosity so that you almost feel like you're tasting water. A lot of times people over consume or they have another bad food choice 10 minutes after they drank it. So we needed to increase the viscosity of ample to the point where it was actually filling. And so what's interesting is that A couple of plant proteins do this very well. Pea protein and rice protein. And so one of the reasons why is because they have a lot of hydrogen bonding points and therefore basically bind to water. And in a similar way that fiber does this.

Okay.

These proteins do as well. And so we looked at a bunch of proteins. Basically we narrowed it down to pea and rice. We actually used rice protein in our first version. We're switching over to P in our second one. And the reason why we're using that one is because A, it was a little bit more reliable from the sourcing perspective, because to get non gmo, really anything at a high enough supply that's reliable and with low heavy metal content is actually quite a. Quite a difficult thing to do. Now, from the P perspective, though, we also wanted to make sure that it was very low in lectins, because for the kind of hypoallergenic crowd, that can be sort of a concern.

Yeah, that. That was something I was interested in because. And I've been. I've been, you know, studying a book about this called the Plant Paradox, where he goes into, like, you know, peas, for example, and how they're not such a great idea because of the lectin content and how that can cause some disruption of cell wall integrity. So what's the difference between, like, a pea as a legume and a lentil or a lectin that could potentially damage the gut wall and like a pea protein isolate, like, what happens to the lectins?

Yeah, totally. So. Well, first of all, let's kind of define lectins a little bit for the listeners. So lectins themselves are proteins with basically a chain of carbohydrate on them. And so they bind to these sites along the gut lining and sometimes can disrupt the gut lining, also can cause some autoimmunity issues. Now, there are many different types of lectins. So the body itself also creates lectins. Like, we don't. Not all of the lectins that we consume are bad, and not all the lectins in our bodies are bad. But certainly there's things like phytohemaglutinin and just agglutinin, which are the sort of negative or the bad lectins that we're kind of solving against. And so those are generally in quite high quantities in raw, uncooked peas. And so what the. With the kind of manufacturing process, basically, in the same way that you would do it when you're just at home, you. You, you soak lectins or you soak peas or beans or anything like that. And then you also cook them. That basically denatures the lectins themselves to make them. To either get them out completely or to make sure that they're. They're inert or don't have any deleterious bodily effects. And so in this case, basically what they do is they dry it first and then they put it in water. And so this water then allows it to be in sort of a solubilized kind of an aqueous environment. And then they basically do a centrifuge. And this centrifuge basically spins really, really, really fast and sort of separates the lectins from the other proteins in the sense that. Well, the good thing about lectins is that because they have this carbohydrate end to them, they can kind of separate from the regular proteins, which are more hydrophobic than are the lectins themselves. And so then you can kind of separate them out. And then also there's a low heat process for a long time afterwards that also, if there were any lectins that did have, you know, get kind of taken as well with the regular protein, then they're able to be, you know, slightly denatured. But it's a relatively low temperature. I wish I could tell you the exact temperature and exactly how long, but I'm an under a non disclosure agreement. Gotcha. Unfortunately, that's okay.

So basically we've gotten rid of the lectins. And then also, why do you need to do P along with whey? Why do you need two different types of proteins?

Yeah, well, I mean, I guess we have three. So like I was mentioning. So for the whey and the collagen, those are more for the glutathione as well as for the additional glycine to create elastin. Now, from the pea perspective, this actually increases the viscosity of ampoule. And so it allows the thing to be a lot more viscous and a lot less flat. Because you mean like more thick when you mix it. Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

So it makes it a lot more thick, which is nice, because then it gives the sense of fullness so that when people actually drink it, they're not just like starving again in another 10 minutes or they drink too much of it.

Right, right. Okay. And by the way, for those of you listening, I'll put the full label and everything with all these ingredients we're talking about over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com amplepodcast if you wanna look at that. That was one thing. I also wanted to ask you, Connor, regarding the texture. Cause I like my drinks and my shakes to be really thick. I literally like to eat them with a spoon. So when you mix this. Because a lot of times if I have a blender, I just get a whole bunch of ice and I put the whole bottle in ice and then I blend it for two. Tastes like chocolate ice cream. But if you want to make it as thick as possible, let's say I'm traveling and I don't have a blender and I don't have an ice. What's the best way to mix it to make it as thick as I can?

Sure. Well, I'll first just describe the process of making ample in general. So ample actually comes as powder in a bottle. And so it's basically a single serving bottle. And it either comes in a 400 or 600 calorie version. And so we designed it to be intensely convenient so that all you have to do is add water or milk to the bottle itself and then you.

Screw that 400 calorie version. By the way, I'm a big old boy. I go straight for the 600 calories.

I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do.

2, 400 calories.

That is a good one. And so for me, what I do. And I'm with you, I want viscous. And so there's a couple of ways you can do it. One is just adding slightly less water to it. So you're going to add either water or milk. Oh, by the way, adding milk to it instead. If you want to do like almond milk or if you don't have any lactose intolerance, then regular milk as well can be great to increase the viscosity. Also letting it sit for a little bit of time. So if you let it sit for, let's say, 10 or 15 minutes, what that allows for is that like I was talking about with the, with the pea protein as well as if we had rice protein still, it allows for these. Well, also from the fibers perspective, there's soluble fiber in there, and it allows all of the fiber and the, and the protein to absorb water and therefore make it a lot more thick. And so I would say that either reducing the amount of liquidity, putting milk in and then also letting it sit. Also if you have access to a refrigerator, if you, if you're not on the go and you're just like chilling in your house, or if you're at the office, put in the refrigerator for, you know, 10, 10, 15 minutes after you do it, it'll Also kind of.

Make thickens if you get a cold, huh?

Oh yeah, it does.

Okay, what if I just leave it and let it sit in there for like, you know, 10, 15 minutes after I mix it? Does it get thicker that way? Like a lot of, like a lot of shakes and stuff?

Dr. Yeah, it does exactly. Just because of the, the fiber and the protein there. It absorbs the water in there.

Okay, got it. Now you also have this like this prebiotic, probiotic fiber blend. You talked about how Soylent, for example, gave your friend small intestine bacterial overgrowth. But you know, a lot of people whenwhen they consume, you know, like fibers, fermentable things, probiotics, prebiotics, etc. Like they also have issues with fermentation, for example. So this stuff doesn't give me the farts or anything like that. But I'm curious, like why'd you choose the carbs and the prebiotics and the fibers that you chose for the carb and the prebiotic and the fiber blend that comes after the protein blend and the lipid blend on this label?

Totally. So couple, couple of reasons. Well, the, the, the carbohydrate blend is, well, carbohydrates. The, the, the starch blend is quite, quite simple. So tapioca, for the reason I mentioned before with the fat and then the additional carbohydrate that we have is organic sweet potato. Sweet potato just tends to be a very, very clean, relatively slow, slow burning carbohydrates. And so that's the reason why we put it in there. And, and as far as the fiber itself, a couple reasons, well, a couple kind of things that we were trying to solve for one, of course, is that, you know, fiber itself increases B vitamin. So it's going to pass all the way through your, through your small intestine. Well, it's going to pass. About I was actually just talking to Dom d' Agostino about this. Literally it was on Monday, two days ago, I was talking with him about fiber and how much of it is actually absorbed by the small intestine. And so turns out about only 10 or 20% of most fibers are absorbed by the small intestine. The rest of it, which is the 80 or 90%, reaches all the way to the large intestine. And so in this case, so first of all, why do we want it? One, it's, it's to basically create this butyrate or the short chain triglycerides that your enterocytes are, I guess you could say the large intestine cells, the cell lining itself. So to increase, basically it gives them food and then also it creates the B vitamins that are essential for that as well. So folate, B9 and then also B12. So what's also important as well is to increase the microbiome diversity. And so what I was solving for here is that if, and it has been shown that increasing gut microbiome diversity has been shown to have this anti inflammatory environment which is necessary for metabolic health. And so if we can do that, we can also control blood sugar levels as well. And so what we're going for is to have a diversity of fiber that has a. Because one of the reasons why people end up getting things like sibo or whatever is because they effectively have too much of one particular type of fiber. And so it's kind of like a monoculture where like if you think about a, if you think about the analogy of a rainforest to a, to a cropland, right, A rainforest itself has thousands of different types of species of plant. And so it basically makes that environment a lot more robust. Whereas if you only have one, if you just have corn, if you just have a soy field, that field is actually a lot more susceptible to increasing pathogens or any sort of stochasticity. And so if we can increase the amount of fibers that have been shown to increase microbiome biodiversity, then that is sort of the goal here. And so we've done it in four ways. And so because the four kind of compounds or components of it that have shown to increase gut microbiome diversity are the soluble fiber, insoluble fiber, resistant starch, and then fructooligosaccharides.

So you need all four of those, the resistant starch, the fructooligosaccharides. And what'd you say, what were the other two?

Oh, soluble and insoluble fiber.

Okay. So if you have all of those, that's how you would actually develop the right type of bacteria in the gut. And so what you're saying is when you have this probiotic blend, like you've got all these different probiotic strains and you add the carb, the prebiotic and the fiber blend, what you're trying to do is populate the digestive tract.

Exactly. And so thank you for like mentioning the probiotics. I didn't get into that, but yes. Okay, so if we are trying to populate the basically optimized gut microbiome diversity here and therefore reduce inflammation, all the other aspects of what just a healthy gut in general we want to be able to formulate this prebiotic blend in conjunction with the probiotic blend. And so the resistance starts from green bananas, the acacia fiber, which is a fiber, and the psyllium husk as well, as well as the fructooligosaccharide, which is basically inulin. Those in conjunction with the six strains of probiotics tend to have sort of a symbiotic relationship in that they help proliferate a healthy gut microbiome.

Okay, so you chose those specific strains to. So if somebody has been on like antibiotics, for example, they could actually use this to repopulate their microbiome using this blend of resistant starches like the green banana, and then also the probiotics, the prebiotics, the inulin, everything else. So essentially what you're doing is you're restoring the population of the gut at the same time that you're adding the proteins and the lipids into the body.

Exactly. In fact, actually, that's one of the. I was talking with Chris Kresser a couple of months ago and he's like, hey, I actually am very curious to use ample as sort of a gut reset for some of my patients who do have some of these issues with, you know, they go on these like very intense antibiotic treatments and they need to be able to recover from them quickly.

Okay, cool. I like it. It's an interesting twist. And my gut actually feels really good when I drink it, so I guess that says something. Nothing's exploded down there yet. You also have this kind of interesting, like a plant based micronutrient blend where you had cocoa or organic cocoa, organic wheatgrass, organic barley grass, and organic chlorella. Why did you choose to add those into Ample?

Basically, we're trying to go for micronutrients and antioxidants now at the same time as well. I don't want to oversell the fact I think that I'll step back here and say, okay, what the hell is the purpose of ample? What our goal over the next three, four, five years is to really optimize nutrition, as in to make the perfect, the perfect meal. It was as perfect as a packaged food could possibly get. And so this is likely going to result in a few different key products that kind of target different either macronutrient ratios or sort of lifestyles or dietary restrictions. And so what I think we're at here is we've already optimized the macronutrient ratio for ample, and I'm very happy with that. I think where we have some room to grow here is actually with the micronutrients. So I won't claim that we're exactly where we want to be in terms of the quantity of greens there. And so I do, like, I just, I can't stand not being transparent. So I will say that we have them and they are amazing for, let's say, B vitamins and antioxidants. But I'm still really excited to be able to kind of work with the formula over the next year or so to increase the amount of plant based micronutrients in a very. In a very sustainable but also good tasting way.

Okay, got it. Makes sense. But there's still some micro. Micro greens in there.

Basically 100%. Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

All of them are organic as well.

Gotcha. Okay, so the next one that you have in there, we talked about the probiotic blend, but then you've got certain ingredients that are just like added ingredients. And it looks like the sweeteners that you've chosen, you've got dried honey, cinnamon, natural vanilla flavor, lemon juice, monk fruit, and stevia. What was your reasoning behind this particular blend of sweeteners?

Totally. So I will say I'm not an expert on food science and I'm really glad that we have Julie, our food science person, who's been able to help tremendously. Because, I mean, honestly, if it wasn't for her, like, if we wanted to achieve the same level of sweetness and flavor in apple, we would have had to double the sugar, you know, without her expertise. But luckily we were able to get the sugar to just 4 grams per 400 calories, which I'm, you know, just 4% of calories coming from sugar. I'm, I'm like insanely pleased with.

Yeah, it's really low.

Yeah, no, it's super low. And I'm, I'm really excited about that. But so you, you mentioned cinnamon. Cinnamon tends to give it a little bit of a. Well, a. It actually has one of the highest Orac capacities of any supplement ever.

Cinnamon does. Really, in terms of antioxidants.

Oh, dude, it's insane. Yeah, yeah, check it out. It has something like. Well, I don't want to make up numbers here, but if you google just Orac in general Orac and check out cinnamon, it's something like fifth most of any ingredient ever. So that's awesome. As well. Of course it provides a little bit of taste to it. The vanilla. We wanted to make sure that it was actual vanilla instead of. Basically what they can do is you can create Vanillin, which is Basically out of wood. And it's kind of like this synthetic vanilla. But we wanted the actual stuff from Madagascar and so. Which is basically one of the only places in the world to really get vanilla, real vanilla. And as for the sweeteners themselves, so what's interesting about the sweeteners is that you can kind of think about the sweetness from. I guess the best analogy that food scientists use is to compare it to music where you have low notes, middle notes and high notes. And so when you are, when you're putting a sweetened sweetener blend together, if you were to just put sugar in, it's got a good taste to it and it's a full taste, but it's kind of just a normal. It doesn't add a lot to the flavor. So a lot of people have to add too much of it. But what's interesting is that if you add monk fruit and stevia. Monk fruit is sort of a mid tone and stevia is a little bit like a high tone, if we're comparing it to this music analogy. And so the three of those actually end up to be being synergistic. And so it's sort of like one plus one plus one equals six instead of three, which you'd expect. Which is one of the main reasons why we're able to get the sugar so low is that we have this synergistic effect of the honey, the monk fruit and the stevia. And by the way, the stevia and the monk fruit are actually super low to the point where, you know, the vast majority of people who say that they're either sensitive or just they don't like the taste of stevia. They love ample. They can't even detect it because we don't really need that much of it. It has, it sort of pulls more weight.

Okay, cool. Yeah, I mean, I think the flavor tastes pretty good. I realize I'm sounding like a complete zealot and disciple of your product here, but honestly, so far I'm sold it. It's clean, it's good. You've got the protein blend, the lipid blend, this carb, prebiotic and fiber blend, the plant based blend, the probiotics, and then these other ingredients like the natural vanilla and the cinnamon and the stevia. One thing that concerned me though is the bottle's plastic. What's going on with that, man? Why do you choose plastic? Especially with concerns about BPA and leaching and estrogens and stuff like that. Sure.

So it is pet, which doesn't contain bisphenol, a And so, but, but I, but I totally understand that the, the thoughts for like, let's say phthalates. And so what's interesting though is that when you like, like phthalates themselves are, are I guess, bad for, bad for someone if there's a, if there's sort of an aqueous solution on the other side of it. So what's interesting is. Okay, so think about like, how do I put this analogy? If you have, if you have a rock and then there's water next to this rock, the water itself does a lot better job of leaching ingredients or minerals out of this rock than would if you put a rock next to powder. Because powder itself is not liquid. It doesn't leach things out of it. And so one of the reasons why we have powder in this bottle instead of just the straight up liquid itself is because that actually reduces the ability for dramatically thousands of times more reduction in a potential for things to leach out of the bottle. And regardless, the bottle doesn't contain bpa. So that's kind of the reason, one of the reasons why we used the plastic in the way that we did. At the same time, I totally respect the need and the desire for people to conserve waste. And obviously it's 100% recyclable, but we are going to be sometime down the line introducing a bulk container as well that allows someone to basically just get a couple of scoops of ample and kind of titrate it as they will.

Okay, got it. So, so the plastic, probably the, if you want to be like super duper safe, just do like I'm doing and like dump it out into, into your glass cup or your, your blender or whatever. When, when you blend it and don't necessarily mix it in the bottle.

Yeah, if you want to be super, super safe. Okay, totally.

All right, makes sense. The, the other thing I wanted to ask you of a couple other things. First of all, what if someone's like vegetarian or they're vegan or they're lactose free? There's obviously a, a few things in here that they'd probably want to skip. Like the whey protein obviously would be a big one. Any options there? Or are they just pretty much screwed when it comes to this stuff?

They are not screwed. We do have actually two versions of ample. There's Ample, the one that you have, and then we also have Ample X. And so Ample X, which is actually in about a month, its name is going to be changed to Ample V. But yeah, so Ample X right now is vegetarian and and basically it has a protein, comes from organic brown rice, and then actually in a month from now, it'll come from organic brown rice and organic pea protein. And so those two things combined actually equal that PDCAs of one that we were targeting. It's as if the deficiencies in one protein help the deficiencies in the other protein. And so they kind of balance out to be a complete, complete protein. And so it's also, in about a month, at the end of June, we'll be releasing Ample V, which also doesn't have the honey and instead just has another sugar, just a couple of grams of it. That is vegan as well. So right now it's vegetarian and in a month it'll be vegan. Long story short.

Okay, all right, cool. And by the way, for those of you interested, I think the discount that we're giving people for Greenfield, does that give them a discount on Ample X too, when that comes out?

Yep, it gets. Well, Ample X is already out and an Ample V will be out in about a month. And so the discount is applicable to all of them. I will mention that our supply, like I was mentioning before, the supply on some of these really high quality organic proteins is limited. And so we may sell out of that relatively quick. If we do, we'll go on backorder and likely get, you know, other basically more in the next month or so after that. So that is just one supply constraint. However, Ampler Original should have, you know, as much supply as we. Well, as we need.

Okay, gotcha. So speaking of, like, discounts and everything, like, if you were to add this up in terms of the actual cost, because you've been sending me some bottles, admittedly, like, full disclosure, people listening in, like, I have, I've been buying it because Connor just sends me this stuff to like, try. And I've even had a chance to like send it back. And I believe you made it a couple of little flavor iterations based on my feedback.

Totally.

But what, how much would it cost? Like per, I guess, like per, you know, per serving or per meal if I was just going to drink this as a meal?

Sure. So it depends on the volume of things. So basically the 400 calorie version goes for between $5 and 6:50ameal, and then a 600 calorie goes between $650 and $8ameal. You know, so if someone's, if someone's getting, let's say 30, you know, 30amonth, a lot of people just do this, you know, once a day and then they subscribe, then it's, you know, somewhere, somewhere in the low $6 and then, you know, low $5 on the 400 side.

Okay, gotcha, gotcha. Which knocks a little bit off, I guess, with the discount. But either way it's cheaper than a. Guess cheaper than a meal of fast food price. Dr.

It's a heck of a lot cheaper than that. Yeah.

Also like the big elephant in the room because I haven't seen many meal replacement powders actually get studied. But you mentioned Chris Masterjohn and I'm curious, what kind of study are you doing with him? Is it he that's actually overseeing the study of this thing?

Totally, yeah. He's the principal investigator of it. I'm really excited to begin the study, in fact, in a relatively short amount of time. I can't give specifics for that, but we're going to be recruiting 102 study participants to see how one ample per day for six weeks affects people's metabolic markers. And so Chris has been both amazing as a mentor as well as just been able to, to help design the study as well. And so basically what we're doing is we are, we're going to be doing a full chemistry panel, a hematology panel, insulin, triglycerides, HbA1c, HSCRP, glutathione, body weight, BMI, waist circumference and blood pressure. And those are all of the aspects that people will. That we're studying. And so we're basically just trying to determine. Oh, and then one other thing is we're going to be giving people a ubiome test.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For gut microbiome diversity. And so we're very excited to see, to determine the effect of AMPLE on markers of metabolic health, oxidative stress and inflammation, as well as to determine how ample alters the intestinal microbiota. And so it'll be double blind, you know, placebo controlled, all of this stuff, while it'll actually be a crossover study because of course everyone's going to know that they're going to be consuming ample. So what's the efficacious way of doing it is to say, well, how did it compare to before and after someone had it? And it'll be split into two cohorts. So we've gotten IRB approval for that. And so in a little bit of time, as soon as actually my next round of funding comes in, which is actually going to close in a very short amount of time, knock on wood, we'll get right on the study and I'm super excited to see the results.

Nice. I like it. Well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put the discount code and a link to the nutrition label and everything else you need to know to learn more about this stuff or to try it. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com amplepodcast that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Ample podcast and I recommend just grab a bottle, try it. And my favorite way to prepare it, just so you know, if you want like chocolate ice cream is you put it in a blender and just like blend it for like two minutes with a bunch of ice. Again, I like I've been using bone broth as my actual mixer just to add a little bit of extra collagen and extra goodness in there. So you could probably use coconut milk or you could use bark tea or any other little concoction, but that's the.

Way I do coconut milk. Coconut milk or almond milk are sort of mymy go tos.

Yeah.

And I'll just mix it here at the office.

I love it, baby. Alright, well that's it folks. If you wanna try this again, the discount code is Greenfield if you go to amplemeal.com or you can just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com amplepodcast for the show notes, the nutrition label, everything else. So Connor, thanks for coming on the show and sharing all this stuff with us, man.

Heck yeah, man. Thanks, Ben.

All right folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Connor Young from Ample signing out from Ben Greenfield Fitness. Have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.