Why You Shouldn't Let Modern Baby Food Anywhere Near Your Baby (& What To Use Instead To Make Your Baby Stronger & Smarter).

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

To me, it makes sense that if we feed them the diet nature intended for them to eat, their meat contains the nutrition that nature intended for us. That nutritional superiority is key because everybody counts. It's very hard to feed a baby. Half of it ends up on the floor and support these farmers who are doing it right. And if we don't buy the meat from the farmers who are doing it right, the farmers doing it wrong will always win.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Hey, welcome to today's show. I am going to talk to you all about baby food on today's show. Baby food. And before we jump in and talk about baby food, and even if you don't have a baby, this is going to be a cool episode for you because I actually eat the baby food that we talk about. It's that good. I'm serious. I have in my pantry now a box of this baby food. And remember how I've talked before about my ambassadorized carnivore diet and how I'll do like mashed sweet potato and mashed pumpkin as a little bit of like a tuber carbohydrate for that diet? Well, this stuff fits the bill. It just blends that kind of stuff with wild salmon, grass fed beef, uncured bacon. It's the best baby food ever. And we're going to talk about it on today's show. All right, I got a fun fact for you today to start off today's show. And that's about fat. And fat babies specifically, or rather how much fat babies actually need. It's 30 grams of fat per day. That's a lot of fat that a growing baby actually needs to be, be smart and to build a healthy brain and to regulate their hormones and to have a strong immune system. And if you actually look at just about every brand of modern baby food, not only does it not even come close to touching that daily requirement, but of course, as you're probably already aware of, it's just chock full of preservatives and added sugars and non organic GMO ingredients and a lot of toxins and additives that harm a baby's muscular growth, their skeletal growth, their cognitive, their immune system, and a lot more. And even though my kids are 11 now, I work with a lot of moms who are expecting or families who have young children or babies. And so I'm always kind of keeping my ears to the ground, so to speak. On what's out there in the baby food sector. And I was very pleased when I recently discovered a baby food that I could get behind. I actually found out about this company because I do a lot of investing in the health and the nutrition sector this company recently launched, and I actually not only invested in them, but tried some of the baby food myself. And it's so dangerously tasty that I suspect that you as a parent, might start stealing it from your baby if you get some. And we'll definitely delve into the ingredients on today's show. But I can tell you with confidence that this baby food is called Serenity Kids Baby Food, designed and formulated by my guests on today's show, is the only packaged baby food that at this point, I would ever recommend any parent feed to their baby. And it's kind of funny because my wife tried to launch a healthy baby food company 11 years ago when our kids were born, because she was actually going out and buying a bunch of fresh produce and organic fruits and gelatins and all sorts of things, and then flash freezing those, keeping them in the freezer and feeding those to our kids. And even then, we weren't including enough fat. We weren't including dha. We didn't know enough at that point. But somebody finally did it right. So my guests today are Joe and Serenity Carr of Serenity Kids Baby Food. And Serenity is somebody who develops innovative, nutrient dense products and is really passionate about wellness after leaving a career in tech and logistics to instead pursue health coaching. And her husband, Joe has a really cool story that he can share with you, but he's currently an autism activist. He works with autistic adults and youths, and he's also active with something called the Mankind Project that helps men develop more power in their own lives. And he's the president of Serenity Kids. So together, Joe and Serenity are figuring out how to get more fat into babies and how to make baby food that actually is something that. That I personally think tastes like crack cocaine. So it's good stuff. Feed your babies crack. So, Joe and Serenity, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Ben. We're happy to be here.

Yeah, this is great.

Yeah, I'm super stoked about this because I actually have never done a baby food podcast before. I've done baby podcasts before, but never a pure baby food podcast. And this is something I think is really important. So I know you guys have an interesting story, especially Joe, your story with autism. So can you give me the background of why you even started looking, looking into healthy baby food in the first place.

Yeah. So we'll start with me, and then we'll flip to Joe. So Willie. The paleo lifestyle completely turned my health around. My mom was a vegetarian when she was pregnant with me because back in the 70s, that was the healthiest thing she knew. And we didn't know at the time that I don't tolerate wheat or dairy. So I got my first ear infection at 2 weeks old. My first ear infection and round of antibiotics. Right. And this happened multiple times a year throughout my childhood. I eventually developed mad stomach problems. You know, I thought that stomachs were supposed to hurt at one point because my digestion was a wreck and my immune system was really compromised. So I was a sick little kid. I was always uncomfortable. It was horrible.

If I could interrupt real quick, I used to just drink. Like, I would go to Albertsons in Lewiston, Idaho, Shopping with my parents, and I would put the milk in the cart because I loved the big plastic jugs of 2% commercial milk so much. I would go to bed every night with this tummy ache, horrible acne. Even as a teenager. And my parents just thought I got, like, the stomach flu a lot. And it took me until I was like 20 to realize I was dairy insensitive. But, yeah, I just grew up punishing milk every day to make me big and strong.

Same thing here. And I, you know, you're lucky. 20 is not bad. I was 35.

Yeah.

Until, you know, my heart just got so bad. I mean, I started, you know, chewing down tums when I was a teenager. I was really happy to have gotten a car because I could drive myself to Walgreens and buy my own Pepcid Ammonium tums. You know, all the things, right. And that. All that over the counter stuff stopped working when I was about, I guess it was maybe 33, it was about almost 10 years ago. And I went to the doctor for some stronger medicine because my heartburn was so bad that all food was hurting. And even water at one point, like, something was really wrong. And so I took that pill every day for two weeks and went back to the doctor. And I'm like, okay, I feel better. Thanks, doctor. I'll see you later, you know. And she said, no, no, no, hold on. Don't leave till I write you a refill. And I said, well, how long do I have to take this? And very dramatically, she said, every day for the rest of your life.

Lucky you.

And thank goodness you, because I was like, forget it. I don't know what I'M gonna do, but it's not this, you know. And I called my dad, who had been paleo for about a year at this point, and I thought, honestly, I thought Paleo was the dumbest thing I had ever heard. Like, eat like a caveman, you know? He didn't explain it very well, and I just thought it was so stupid. But he sent me Rob Wolf's book and Mark Sisson's book, and I was desperate, so I tried it, right? I went gluten free right away. I eventually cut out all grains, cut out all dairy, and that was almost 10 years ago. And my stomach is so much better. I don't have to take any of those pills anymore. I sleep great. You know, I thought I was just an anxious person. Well, that's not necessarily true. My gut was compromised. Right. We know the gut brain axis. And so my anxiety is severely lessened, My skin is cleared up, my hormones are balanced. Like, I have the best quality of Life. And I'm 42 now, and it's great.

Yeah, that's. Your story is a little bit similar to my wife's in that I think she was in her late 20s when she came home. I remember I was at my condo in Liberty Lake, Washington. We already married. And she came home because she was just like, struggling with acne and eczema, like, horrible acne and eczema. She came home with this crappy little book from the library that was like this coil bound printed PDF of Lauren Cordain's book, the Dietary Cure for Acne, which was the first time I'd ever heard of this thing called the Paleo Diet. And I was actually, during that time, in the process of launching my own podcast. And there were very few podcasts out there at that time, but Rob Wolf's podcast was out there too. And so I watched my wife read that book, implement its recommendations, and her acne and eczema cleared up nearly overnight. And then I actually started listening to Rob Wolf's podcast and kind of started to take a deep dive into nutrition from an ancestral standpoint. But, yeah, my wife is the instigator for me, even considering anything other than the stereotypical fitness approach using whey protein, maltodextrin, fructose, a lot of grains, healthy whole grains, and tuna fish out of the can, which was the way I was living up until that point. So how about you, Joe? How'd you get into all this?

Well, I was autistic, or am autistic, really. I was undiagnosed autistic as A child. They didn't know what was wrong with me. I had a really intense energy. I was, you know, just took over any situation I was in. They labeled me adhd, but, you know, that wasn't accurate at all. So that didn't help. So I think my official diagnosis was obnoxious. Basically, it was just everywhere. Just called obnoxious all the time.

And the annoying thing, Trouble.

Just the annoying kid. I didn't have any friends. I was always excluded. I was bullied a lot, was in trouble all the time. Like, I couldn't sit still in a classroom and, you know, be quiet and do all this stupid, boring stuff that they were telling me to do. You know, I was literally incapable of it, but they didn't understand that. So I was just always in trouble, you know, just constantly punished. My mom discovered that I was a gifted performing artist. She was desperate for something that I could get into. And this big energy turned out to be really great for onstage. I could, you know, really take over an auditorium. So I became a professional actor, you know, in theater and musicals as well as TV and commercials, and just kind of really took over Kansas City's theater and television scene. What little one there was, I was like the kid actor in Kansas City. And so onstage was great, but offstage was. I was a mess. And then in middle school, this semi popular girl, I was probably annoying her. Her name was Kelly Beckett. I was annoying her in English class one day, and instead of being mean to me, she turned around and said, you know what? My friends and I, we're gonna teach you how to be cool. And I was like, I will do whatever you say, you know, And I. And they did. They taught me social skills, basically. And I learned the most important lesson in my life, which was that I could take feedback and become better. I could be a better version of myself. I wasn't stuck being any certain way. And that ethic, you know, continues to this day as I'm always looking for ways to improve and learn from my mistakes and take feedback, be a better person. And then in high school, that translated to changing the world. I realized that not only could I change myself, but I can make a difference in the world, in my community. And that really, that's what I'm. What's going to make me happiest. I'm going to be happiest if I am pursuing a moral and just path, really involved in social justice activism. And actually, I became a vegetarian and a vegan at that point, because I thought that was the, you know, the Most ethical thing to do. And, you know, but after college, really realized I wanted to change the world for children, that really. I couldn't change the whole world, but I needed to pick a direction. And given how difficult my childhood was, you know, I was passionate about making a world where children are accepted for who they are, are included, are treated with respect, and now are fed well, are given the foods that they need to, you know, be physically, mentally, emotionally healthy. I met Serenity when Serenity had left her job to, as you said, she had a career in logistics. She left to become a Paleo coach and my boss. I was working for a social personal growth startup in Austin, and my boss brought her in to be a speaker to do a little lecture on the Paleo diet for our staff and anybody else in the community that was interested. She signed me to be her handler. So basically, Serenity has been handling me ever since she introduced me to the Paleo diet. Made a lot of sense. You know, I fell in love with her at the same time I fell in love with Paleo, basically. And, you know, I was always looking for ways to be better. And changing my diet really helped. Like, it was one of the more dramatic things I'd done to help manage my autism. So I'm way less anxious. I'm much more grounded. You know, I had a lot of skin issues also that were better. I was, like, burping hundreds of times a day. I was just burping constantly. I don't burp anymore. Like, you know, there's. The Paleo diet was really dramatic. And I've also always wanted children. I drew pictures of my future children when I was five. I drew a boy and a girl. Jason and Brittany were my future children that I decided I wanted to have and never lost that. I've always wanted to have kids.

Do your kids now look like the ones that you drew?

We only have one.

Curious how your manifestation skills are there in the picture?

They're about the same age as I was. They were both about five, so I will know in four years.

They have eyes, a nose, and ears just like the picture. So when did the whole baby food thing enter the picture?

Yeah, so we were at Paleo FX 2016, and we started talking about starting our family someday, and I got all fuzzy and maternal, and I'm like, joe, let's go find the baby stuff. Let's find the food and all the baby products that are here. And there were none. No food, no baby products at Paleo fx.

You mean a baby can't have coffee? With CBD and beef jerky with chocolate and bacon in it.

I wasn't sure. At this point. I had no idea. I went up to Michelle, the CEO of PaleoFX. I'm like, Michelle, where's the baby stuff? And she said, I asked myself that same question every year. I thought, well, maybe babies don't need to be paleo. I didn't know. I'd been paleo for six years by this point, but I had no idea what babies needed. I wasn't a mom. That really kicked off my summer of nerdom. That summer I read everything I could. I listened to every podcast I could on infant nutrition, including mainstream ones. You know, I wanted to see like, what the USDA said babies should be eating and that they actually were fairly in line. They were the ones who said 30 grams of fat a day. They cautioned against a vegan and vegetarian high sugar diet. They played up the importance of proteins and amino acids. I was actually impressed by that one. But so once we kind of had the idea to do the baby food at the show and then Joe went to a, you know, we live in Austin, Texas, and there's a lot of tech startups and all kinds of startup meetups and things. And he was at one and he came back from it and he said, we've got to start the baby food company. It meets all these five criteria. And you know, it's a white space. It's something we know people want, people are asking for. And so really that's how we were born.

Yeah, I had been working at that startup. It was like 90 hour weeks, you know, crazy startup sales. And I was just burnt out. And I was like, there's gotta be. And we were talking about having a family. So I was like, I can't keep doing this if I'm have a baby. Like, I can't live this lifestyle. So I was like, there's got to be a better way. So I quit not knowing what was coming next and picked up Tim Ferriss 4 Hour Work Week and opened my eyes to this idea of starting a product. Up until that time, I'd been all services. You know, I was teaching, I was coaching, I was organizing, I was doing lectures, I was doing workshops. But this is like hour for hour, it's so limited. And I was like, wow, we could create a product. So I started looking for a niche market with a product gap that could be filled. And we discovered the baby food right in that. I think it was about two weeks later that we were PaleoFX and discovered this lack of Paleo baby food. And we were resistant to doing it at first. It was really hard. Tim Ferriss would definitely say, don't do that one. That's way harder than a four hour work week kind of thing. But I was working with another coach at the time who, you know, realized that my mission for children and changing the world for kids and Serenity's mission for making people healthier and recognizing how food is medicine was just a perfect blend of our two purposes in life as well as we really good skill set, balance that we're good business partners. Serenity is really meticulous and organized and cautious and I'm really fast and relational and visionary. So creative. So together we make this kind of perfect business blend. And the baby food was it. So we decided to do it.

Yeah. Now I'm just curious, just having watched my wife, like I alluded to earlier, mixing stuff up in the kitchen, is that how it started or did you guys start off with getting access to like a local kitchen where you could prepare organic or gluten free food? Or how did it start as far as you guys actually creating food and testing it?

Yeah. So that summer when I was looking into what was on the baby food aisle and what babies really needed to eat, I started wondering, oh, no, what if there's no Paleo baby food because babies won't actually eat it? So I got stressed out and I called Joe and I'm like, joe, we've got to make some baby food. We've got to get some babies to taste it. So we did it actually just in our kitchen at home. We made the first several blends of different meats and veggies. They were all meat and veggie combos. And then we started calling all of our friends with babies and asking if they had any friends with babies. And we had the, you know, we would deliver the food to their house and give them a questionnaire about how much the baby liked the texture and the color and, you know, what they thought about everything. And so that's how we kind of got started. And that's how we actually chose our first few flavors based on what those babies really liked.

Yeah, and I definitely want to get into your flavors because, you know, just so you guys know, we're talking about things like salmon with organic butternut squash and beef and baby food with bacon in it, uncured bacon, chicken, beef kale, sweet potatoes. Like, we'll get into the actual ingredients here in a little bit, but before we do, you know, you've talked about Your initial research into what was available as far as baby food goes in the average grocery store aisle or even in the health sector. And I'm curious what you found as far as deficiencies or problems with modern baby food.

So basically Serenity's data determined babies need 30 grams of fat a day. They need meat and animal products and they don't need sugar. So we went to the aisle and it was the polar opposite of what literally the USDA government says that babies need. This isn't some radical paleo nutritionist, right? This is like legit science. Babies need meat, they don't eat sugar. Sugar's bad. Go to the aisle and it's all sugar. Like we did a study of, we gathered together all 246 organic baby food pouches. At first we only looked at organic. We're like, let's just only look at organic. The healthiest of the baby foods. And of all those baby foods, they had an average of 9 grams of sugar per pouch. You know, it wasn't, mostly wasn't added sugar. It's from fruit and organic fruit in this case. But that's a lot of sugar, even just from fruit, you know, and this is for a 15 pound baby. So if you equate that to 150 pound adult, that's 90 grams of sugar in one pouch. And because it's only fruit with a little bit of veggies, they don't, it's not very satiating. So these babies, they're eating two, three, four of these a day. Plus their sugar is addictive, including fruit sugar. So they want more of it after they eat it. Which moms like, right? They're like, oh, my baby wants to eat, that's great. You know, so they keep buying them, keep giving them to them, right? And, and ultimately they end up with sugar addiction. They end up with inflammation, they end up with deficiencies because leaky gut, tummy issues, stool issues, all kinds of different problems that come from. I mean, imagine if all we ate was fruit. We'd be sorbol, hungry, unhappy. Especially without the fruit and protein or without the fructose.

Doesn't grow a nervous system. Not that fruit is bad. I have nothing against it. Fruit, I think that sometimes it's unfairly vilified. And I in no way believe that like fructose is poison. But at the same time it does not grow a healthy nervous system, it does not grow bones, it does not grow teeth or hair. My wife too, I think she made that mistake when she was trying to launch a Baby foods company and formulating baby food for our kids. I think they should have had more fat and more protein and fewer of the fruits. But fruits are just so darn easy to mash and to squeeze into a little portable package for a kid.

And they're quick calories, you know, so it seems like it'd be nourishing, but it's really not. And meat and fat, of course, are extremely nourishing. Is the most nutrient dense food, you know, that humans can eat. And there was almost none of that on the aisle. Less than 4% of all organic baby foods had meat. So almost none had meat at all. None of that meat was well sourced. There was no source disclosure. So it was organic meat, but it's organic feedlot meat. Right. It's definitely not as fed or pasture raised or, you know, any kind of good sourcing. And then there was no fat. So they're using like very little amount of meat. They were usually mixing it with grains, so it'd be like a, you know, chicken and rice kind of baby food. And so there was, there was no amount of fat, like less than 1% had 2 grams or more fat. So essentially zero fat.

Right. Which is far different. Not that a child, once they've been weaned from the breast, needs to continue to eat the exact composition of human breast milk. Because really, human breast milk is more like ice cream, really. Which is why I think adults like ice cream so much. That's one reason, actually. It's the blend of sugars and fats that causes that dopamine release. But at the same time, it's got appreciable amounts of fats and ketones in it. Appreciable amounts of ketones. Not much fructose at all. It's mostly lactose. And as lactose tolerance kind of down regulates as a child ages, which is often, but kind of dependent on genetics, you know, lactose might not be the preferred form of sugar, but still, like all the baby foods out there that I've seen, they're nowhere close to what breast milk would be or nowhere close to the actual fatty acid composition, particularly that children would need.

And you know, breast milk has a lot of carbs, but it doesn't really taste particularly sweet. If you've ever tasted breast milk. Now, it depends on the woman on the timing, but it has more of a sour kind of rich flavor. And one of the other issues with fruit and baby food is that babies form their palates at this age. They call it the flavor window, where what they eat early on affects their preferences later in life. Giving these kids lots of sweet tasting foods early actually taints their palate towards sweet and has it be harder to get more nutritious foods, meat, veggies, other kind of tasting more different flavors in their diet later.

Right. Which is probably one reason that there are so many articles out there about turning yourself into a fat burning machine or creating metabolic efficiency or upregulating ketosis, when in an ideal scenario a human being would never have been ripped out of that state of metabolic efficiency in the first place. They never would have been shifted into Cheerios and sweet baby food and a high amount of carbohydrates in their lunch packets and then reach the age of 20 or 25 or 30 and have a host of metabolic issues and then discover ketosis and then go through all the keto flu and all the issues with restoring their body's metabolic efficiency that that shouldn't be the case. My kids have grown up since getting past those early stages where mom was experimenting with fruit, etc. On things like sardines, anchovies, avocados, coconut milk, and a wide variety of proteins and rich sources of fats. So I would hope that river and Taren are not going to reach an age where they're like, what is this ketosis thing? I think I need to shift my body's metabolic efficiency. That's just, you know, it's kind of a relic of the way that we feed infants and children these days.

In my opinion, that's why we're in this business. Like this is hard. You know, being an entrepreneur and having a one year old and working with your husband, it's hard. But, you know, being able to set this next generation of babies up for success from the very beginning, you know, from when they're eating these complementary foods with breast milk, really introducing them, starting them off on the right foot, like that's what keeps me going and what makes it all worthwhile.

Okay, so if the current recommended choices once a child has been weaned essentially are comprised of fruit purees and starchy veggies and watered down mixtures of processed meats and over steamed veggies, and then a shift eventually into all of our fluffy sweet grain based snacks, what about the healthy baby food sector? Because I know that there are other organic or natural baby food companies out there. I'm curious how those compare as far as macronutrient ratios or anything else. Obviously you guys still saw a need even when other natural organic baby food sources existed.

Yeah. So that study we did actually only look at the natural organic baby foods. We didn't even include the Gerber and the Beechnut and all of the conventional baby foods in our study. We were really just looking at what is the healthiest baby foods out there, what do they contain. And those all had average 9 grams of sugar, less than 4% meat, no good sourcing of the meat, and almost no fat.

It sounds to me ultimately that the biggest elephant in the room is the glaring lack of essential fatty acids and also the sourcing of the protein and the quality of the protein used even in a lot of these organic or natural baby products.

That's right. And the overwhelming presence of sugar that they're all way too sweet and not enough fat and meat.

Did you guys look at all, even though it's not a paleo diet per se, into much of the research from the Wesson A. Price foundation when it comes to. To nourishing a growing baby?

Yeah, the Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby and Childcare was one of the only sources I found during my summer of Nerdom that actually seemed comprehensive and rooted in science. The other ones were like people blogging about random things or writing a book based on their particular dogma, but this one talked a lot about nutrient density. Gram for gram, how much nutrition are we squeezing into every little bite? Because everyone who's a parent knows how hard it is to feed a baby, right? Getting every little bite of food in is really important. You only want to. You're only going to get so many chances, so many spoonfuls, right? So you want to make sure that you get as many nutrients in there as you possibly can. And I loved their ideas about baby food and about first foods to feed your kids. We did a lot of those recommendations with our kid and they were about. Are really foundational in how we formulated our recipes.

They actually do teach that babies produce functional enzymes like pepsin and proteolytic enzymes and digestive juices like hydrochloric acid that primarily work on proteins and fats, likely because in an ideal scenario, that baby has been consuming some form of breast milk or if the mom isn't breastfeeding, perhaps a more natural formula like a goat milk, for example. And that makes sense because the milk, the breast milk, is about 50 to 60% fat. And I know that in Weston A. Price's research and the teachings of the Weston A. Price foundation, that book you mentioned, which I have a podcast on, by the way, and I'll link to that podcast too if you guys go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Serenity if you're listening, BenGreenfieldFitness.com serenity I'll link to everything we talk about in today's show. But you know, the Wesley Price foundation teaches that children should be eating things like eggs and chicken. And I know that the Wesson A. Price foundation teaches that in some cultures a mother is recommended to eat 6 to 10 eggs a day and a whole bunch of chicken and pork for at least a month after birth to ensure that the breast milk contains adequate healthy fats. But it makes sense that a baby is actually better equipped in that scenario to have a whole bunch of enzymes for digestion of fats and proteins. And so, you know, and that's something that should be considered too, like if you're going to shift your baby into a healthy baby food like this that's comprised of higher amounts of fats and proteins, but they've been drinking some kind of a soy formula or another fat and protein void formula or relatively void formula leading up to this point. You know, that's not an ideal scenario. Like in an ideal scenario, a baby would go from breast milk or goat's milk or something like that straight into a food like this. If you were really going to follow the type of advice from folks like the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Exactly. I mean, the formula is actually a big issue and it's near and dear to my heart. I had a little bit of low supply when Della was about 8 months old, and I was really careful to I drive way out to a farm near Austin to get some fresh goat's milk. Well, it's raw, raw, fresh goat's milk to supplement all those really important amino acids and especially the fat level.

That's really, really important in terms of the ingredients that you guys use. I want to go through some of the flavors and some of the options that you have available. But you've alluded to the sourcing of the ingredients. And like I mentioned, when my wife was trying to formulate food for our babies and launch a baby food company early on in the day for she, of course, would drive around to a lot of these organic farms and get organic produce and, you know, choose everything non GMO organic. But how are you guys actually sourcing on a scalable level, your ingredients like, like walk me through what you're doing as far as farms are concerned, as far as, as far as choices are concerned for sourcing.

Yeah, we, you know, we knew we wanted blends of meat and veggies that, that was the most nutritious foods. And we knew from the Paleo community that sourcing matters, that, you know, we are what we eat, eats. And I also, my mom grew up a family farm in Southern Missouri. So I got to grow up visiting them and seeing that lifestyle and experiencing, you know, the small farm lifestyle and how serene it can be, but also how challenging it can be economically for them to compete with big farms. So we knew we wanted really good sourced meat, you know, grass fed, pasture raised, you know, animals that were fed diets that are more similar to how they lived in nature because that creates the most nutrition. But given that family farm connection, I really wanted to try to support small family farmers also. So it was a big mission, especially as you said, scalable. But fortunately we got introduced to Taylor and Katie Collins from Epic Bar, who are also Austin based company pretty early on. And they were six months pregnant at the time. And they said, you know, this is going to be huge, like we want to help you. They had actually said they'd considered starting a baby food if Epic didn't keep them on after General Mills acquired them. But since they stayed on, they were down to help us do it. So they really helped us establish our sourcing and really connected us with farmers and with other industry experts to help really dial that in. And what we discovered were we found some co ops that are basically grass fed, pasture raised, regenerative farm co ops where one farmer who's maybe better at business than the other farmers will gather together all the other farmers doing it with the similar standards and then sell the meat that way. Because most farmers aren't very good with business. So these co ops are created to help sell their meat to people like us who can buy it in larger quantities, which also ensures that we have the quantities we need to supply our baby food, but also gives them guaranteed customer for this meat that is more expensive to produce. It costs more to raise animals on pasture to make sure that they don't get agrochemicals or GMOs to regenerate the land and practice regenerative agriculture, which means rotational grazing in a way that mimics the way herded animals behaved in nature. That makes the soil better each year. Eventually these farmers can make a really good living with these practices. But, but consumers do need to pay more. They need intermediaries like us who are willing to take their products and turn them into more convenient access. And so we got connected with these amazing farms. We went and visited some of them in Missouri, got to visit some of our pig farmers, some of our cattle farmers and really see how connected they are to the land and how much respect they have for the animals. And not to mention the nutritional superiority. I mean, it's night and day grass fed beef versus conventionally raised beef. It's almost not even the same food. When you look at the amount of the quality of the fatty acids and the vitamin content, the mineral content and the quality of the protein and amino acid profiles, all of it is vastly superior. There's quite a bit of data on this. It's pretty well documented that pasture raised animals who are not fed just grain and pens all day, that their meat is superior. And to me it makes sense that if we feed them the diet nature intended for them to eat, their meat contains the nutrition that nature intended for us. Just when you're talking about babies, that nutritional superiority is key because everybody counts. It's very hard to feed a baby. Half of it ends up on the floor. So any amount of food that gets in their little mouths, you want maximum nutrition for every bite that goes in there. And so getting the best sourcing of the meat ensures maximum nutrition, while also contributes to our mission to not only improve the world for babies, but to ensure a sustainable food supply and health for all people and support these farmers who are doing it right. And if we don't buy the meat from the farmers who are doing it right, the farmers doing it wrong will always win. So, you know, we were really excited to support these farmers and we also even donate a percentage of our profits to the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which helps support these small farmers and advocate for them so that they have a legal and legislative voice to compete with the large farms.

Now, four of your flavors, the sweet potato, carrot, beet and olive oil, the squash, butternut, pumpkin and olive oil, the squash and spinach with avocado oil, and the sweet potato and spinach with avocado oil, don't contain any meat at all. Why did you, why did you include four flavors that don't have any meats?

Yeah, so you know, babies have, when you don't taint their palates with hyper palatable foods, you know, all these processed, processed foods, they have an innate sense of what kinds of foods they need to eat. And on occasion they don't need a ton of protein. Right. So if you look at the macronutrient profile of breast milk, you're right, it's about ice cream. Right. It's about half fat, about half carbs, and a little bit of protein thrown in there. And so we wanted to give an option for when the babies might be on a protein strike. Maybe they're not eating a whole bunch of protein right now. Maybe they have an allergy to something. Or maybe the mom wants to give this pouch to an older kid who, you know, could take a side. A side dish. Right. It could be their side dish in their lunchbox. For a veggie option for the day, we wanted to give another option that's still high fat. Right. And it's still low carb veggies in general. I mean, not all of them, but from a total profile, we generally stuck to low sugar content. Total. And to round out our line and sticking. Like you said, fat's where it's at. And so that's really what we want to be known for.

Yeah, I wasn't sure if you guys were also considering like vegans and vegetarians who still want to choose healthy options because that's a glaring issue with a lot of vegan, vegetarian and plant based diets is extremely high amounts of starchy carbohydrates with a relative deficiency of fat.

Yeah, it was definitely an added bonus of those products that, you know, we have some vegan friends and with babies and at least I know when they're our foods they have fat because, you know, they're veggie based, but they include avocado or olive oil, a fair amount, like 5 grams of fat per pouch. So they're at least getting a good, healthy, clean, well sourced fat in there even if they're not getting animal products. And it's also, I think, a good intro product for some moms. Like some people Meat Nepal, it just sounds gross to some people. They're maybe not quite ready to buy meat in a pouch for whatever reason. So it's a way they could, as an entry point to our brand and try it out and then hopefully we can convert them over to the meats also.

I don't know, I just went and bought meatinapouch.com and I think I'm going to launch a baby food company that's going to put you guys out of business. Speaking of meat in a pouch, you've also got four meat flavors. Grass fed beef with kale and sweet potatoes, free range chicken with peas and carrots, uncured bacon with kale and butternut squash, and my favorite, wild caught salmon with butternut squash and beet. Now for any of these flavors or the vegetable flavors that I mentioned, what are you guys doing as far as like preservatives or additives? I'm just curious if you could go through. Just choose any of those and tell me what the typical ingredient profile would look like for the average pouch.

Yeah. So for the grass fed beef, the ingredients are organic sweet potato, grass fed beef and organic kale. And so we don't use, we don't add any preservatives. The way that the puree is made shelf stable is similar to like a canning process if you were canning something at home or eating a can of chili. So we use, instead we use some pressuring heat for a certain amount of time to kill any potential pathogens and then that makes it shelf stable and.

That'S okay for the vegetables or for the nutrients to be exposed to pressure and heat.

We get this question a lot. So you know, does, does this high heat, high pressure harm the nutrient content? And there's a lot of mythology around this that like, oh, it's, you know, there's no more nutrition if it's, if it's preserved in any way. And you know, first of all, pressure and heat does not harm fat, does not harm protein, it does not harm minerals, doesn't harm amino acids, you know, so it doesn't harm carbohydrates. So vast majority of it is still completely intact. So vitamin content there, you know, has been studied in different ways. And we haven't done elaborate studies of our vitamin content like before, before and after the processing. But vitamins, A vegetable starts to lose vitamins as soon as it's picked. It starts to lose, it loses on the truck. It's got about half the amount of vitamins, I shouldn't say half because I actually don't know the stats on it. But it's a lot less by the time it gets to the shelf. Then you bring it home, it sits in your refrigerator, then you cook it and a lot of vitamins are lost. Our purees are made, the veggies are harvested and turn into purees and frozen pretty quickly. So they have proven that frozen foods actually have a lot more vitamin content. Frozen vegetables have more vitamins than fresh produce. So our vegetables are similar to that. They're harvested and pureed and frozen really quickly, maintaining a lot of vitamin content. And there are some studies on pressure cooking vegetables. It turns out out you preserve more of the vitamins by pressure cooking it than by boiling it. So we're preserving quite a bit of the vitamin content even after the pressurization process that makes it shelf stable. But especially it allows us to not have to add any kind of other additives. We don't have to add acid of Any kind of the reason they're fruit based is because they can do a different kind of process called hop fill, where they essentially boil the foods so that it's pasteurized, basically, and then put into the pouch after being boiled, which does harm more of the nutrients, but requires it be a certain level of acid for it to be shelf stable. And the fruit provides that acid content. And if they don't have acid, they sometimes add lemon juice or citric acid in order to. To make those shelves stable. So our process is more complicated, it's more expensive, there's fewer factories that can do it, but it is, you know, much superior to adding those other kinds of ingredients we don't want in there. And turns out it preserves the nutrients even better.

Now, what about the pouches themselves, as far as, like, BPA metal, things like that go? I mean, I know the packaging is something that we need to be concerned about. What approach did you guys use for that?

Yep, this was probably one of the ones we really struggled with because, you know, we did the market research and we looked at what was selling, and baby food jars are just, if you've been to the baby food aisle anytime soon, you know, they're just going out, like, every year. Jar sales go down. Every year, pouch sales go up. And so just from a marketing perspective, we felt like it needed to be in a pouch in order to compete with the other baby foods that are right there super convenient. And so we were like, okay, let's pursue the pouch option and learn more about that. Even though it's plastic and they're not recyclable in a traditional recycling system. So we didn't like that, but we wanted to learn more about it. But as we dove into it, it turns out pouches are way better for the environment than jars or cans for that matter, because they're flexible plastic. You know, shipping them empty takes up way less space, a lot less weight, so their carbon footprint is a lot lower. You can ship, you know, it takes 26 trucks to transport the same amount of jars as it takes one truck of pouches. You know this in terms of just how many, and that's when they're empty. And a lot of these packaging gets moved around while empty. So that's a huge carbon footprint. And then, you know, about one out of, you know, about four out of five recyclable items end up in a landfill anyway. Like, Americans are actually very bad at recycling. And so four out of five of those jars end up in the landfill even though they're recyclable and so in the landfill, these flat empty pouches take up a lot less space than these jars do. From a practicality standpoint, the pouch is actually better. From a health standpoint, the plastic is BPA free. They do quite a bit of testing on it. It's highly food grade plastic. We've done testing after the preservation process as well to test for heavy metals or any kind of other chemicals. And there are no detectable levels of any kind of toxin that's being released in there. We've done shelf life studies so, so we've got it studied it. It's got an 18 month shelf life. And so we've sent them through accelerated shelf life studies that mimic they turn a month into a week into a month where they somehow make it age quicker. And we've done the test at the end of that. So we've done quite a bit of testing to make sure that there aren't things being leached into the food. And it seems pretty good to.

And what's the actual shelf Life?

We put 18 months on there. It's technically infinite. You know, like if you can dig up a canned good from the 30s and it's still shelf stable, like there's no bacteria, it doesn't taste very good, so the taste degrades. But as far as bacterial growth, it's, it's a can. You know, it's 100% preserved. You know, our factory actually makes half baby food pouches, half MREs for the military. You know, they make these meals that the military uses for many, many years, you know, feeding to soldiers, these that are basically meat and veggies and fruits and things in shelf stable pouches.

Now I'm curious because this was something that, you know, as an athlete who's always kind of like occasionally using packaged foods less now that I'm doing fewer of the long endurance events, you know, the long bike rides, et cetera, where I've got pouches and things like that in my, my jersey pocket. But I'm just curious if you guys have had many adults, cyclists, triathletes, marathoners, who want something to chew on as an alternative to a fructose or a maltodextrin gel using this stuff? Do you guys have a second market when it comes to adults or I guess even pets as well, just because this stuff seems biologically appropriate for that type of scenario too. And again, it tastes amazing.

Yeah, I mean, right before this call, we were actually just talking to Melissa Hartwig Urban, the founder of Whole30, and she said she Eats one of our pouches about one a day. It's like one of her main food sources at this point because they taste really good. They're a really easy, quick way to get a dose of fat or fat and protein if you eat the meat ones. And it's just super convenient. There's very few shelf, stable, ready to eat meals out there that you can just open and eat. They all require to be rehydrated or they require a microwave or they require a bowl with the pouch you just open and eat it. So it's super convenient. And we've really dialed in our flavors. We really made sure that the taste is really good, both so that babies will eat it and also because we think babies have a right to to good tasting food. But it turns out it tastes good to adults too. So a lot of parents say that, you know, it's like one bite for you, one bite for me, one bite for you, two bites for me, you know. But there's a lot of adults who need purees that we don't think about. There's like gastrointestinal patients who have trouble with digestion. There's people with jaw or tooth surgeries, you know, or problems that have them need purees. There's older people sometimes need purees. So doctors are prescribing baby food puree basically to adults all the time. And before they were essentially living on fruit purees because that's all they could find. And now they have an option that they can eat.

And what about for the babies? At about what age does a baby start to eat this stuff?

You know, it's a good question we tend to say about that. Our foods are mainly designed for six months to about a year and a half is the kind of prime baby food puree eating age. But it's getting older and older. The kids kind of associate the pouches with a pleasurable experience. And so moms often keep using them well into toddlerhood as a snack, as a treat. And moms we surveyed, over half the moms we surveyed said they'd feed our pouches to their kid three years and up. So there doesn't seem to be an upper for pouches. And now pouches are being marketed to adults. We have a lot of. We see a lot of adult pouch products, mostly fruit purees. There's a keto company, I think, actually a fuel for fire, it's called, that are selling low sugar keto pouches, food snacks in a pouch. So you can check those out. But we see that pouch format Just really starting to replace other formats because of its convenience and, you know, even better for the environment.

Cool. I dig it. And I know this concept of baby led weaning is just that idea of letting the baby decide when they're ready to start eating food like this. I know it tends to be like six months or so. I think when. I believe that's about when our kids started onto this type of stuff.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, so we have a, we have a one year old. So we've just gone through baby lead weaning, which is really, you know, watching your kid for cues that they're ready to start eating. So in order for them to swallow food properly, they have to be able to hold their upper body upright on their own. So they must be able to sit upright so that they don't hunch over and get that food lodged in their throat. Also, of course, paying attention to how interested they are in your plate, what you've got going on, you know, and baby led weaning is a lot. We really liked the strategy. And it's a lot about letting the babies feel and touch whole foods. You know, hand them a stalk of raw broccoli and let them hold it and lick it and smell it and nibble on it. You know, they won't actually be able to get a bite when they're six months old because, I mean, even our baby, she had a ton of teeth at six months old, but still she didn't bite. Big, big things that we would try to give her to just experiment with. And then also there's a misconception too about baby led weaning and purees. You know, some people think that if you do baby led weaning, you can't do purees. And a lot of it is because of the pouch issue. So some people think that pouches are all bad. And you know, if you only fed your baby pouches and only let them suck out of the pouch for the whole first year they were eating foods that would not be good. You know, from a, from mouth formation, babies need to move their tongue around and chew and move their jaw and experiment with their fingers. You know, the dexterity of learning how to pick things up. From their brain development perspective, it's really important motor skill for them to learn. So if parents are concerned about that, the best thing to do with purees is to just spoon feed them to your kids because that's, you know, baby led weaning totally supports that. And so it's about balance. It's about trusting your gut as a parent, you know, I mean, as a parent, you have a good idea of what feels right to you and what's right for your family. And so trusting that is really important part of parenting. We found out.

Yeah. And obviously, I mean like feeding your baby off your own plate or maybe making your own fresh purees using ingredients like this. Because let's face it, the ingredients are pretty simple. You know, it's, it's meat and really good, high quality fats and you know, preferably non, non sugary type of vegetables or lower glycemic index fruits. That's always going to probably be the first, freshest and healthiest option. But man, I mean, like, for a busy parent who doesn't want to cook and chop and clean and put everything into the silicone molds and freeze it or, you know, or the kids are going off to, you know, to grandma's or you know, or babysitters coming over, I mean this, this stuff is pretty darn convenient. It's pretty darn tasty. And I'm very, very stoked, like I said this, to finally find a baby food that I personally can get behind. So good on you guys for doing all of this. And one last question for you. Any top secret flavor mixes currently being planned for additionals or are you guys sticking with these eight core flavors?

We actually have two new flavors that are going to come out in September, so pretty soon, so I can tell you about them. We have a pasture raised turkey with organic pumpkin and sweet potato and beet that is quite, quite tasty. And then we also have a regeneratively farmed bison with organic kabocha squash and spinach and avocado oil. The bison is actually coming from Rome Ranch, which is a ranch started by the founders of Epic that is all exclusively regenerative farming. They have five species that they're raising there as a model for how to regenerate. And a year in, they've already demonstrably. Two years in actually they've demonstrably improved their soil. Like they're publishing their soil studies each year and showing how they're making their soil better and better by raising these different species of animals in a regenerative way. So we're really excited to be featuring their bison in our bison product. And it's super good. I don't know if you've had kabocha squash, but it's a, it's like a low carb, great tasting squash that mixes so great with this bison. So we'll definitely send you some.

Wow. You guys are going to like be raising a whole new generation of Buff future CrossFit Games champions fed on Bison since they were six months old. That's crazy. I wish. I wish I grew up getting fed bison. That's amazing. Wow. And yeah, definitely send me some once it's ready because I'll that stuff will be my post workout meal. Well, you guys, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing this stuff with us. And for those of you interested, I have, I have negotiated ferociously a discount code and some cool discounts on all the different variety packs that they have available on the Serenity Kids website. And I will link to those if you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Serenity and I'll also link to things like my previous podcast about this whole idea behind the Weston A. Price Recommendations for Healthy Babies and Healthy Kids, the Nourishing Traditions book for babies. All the things that we talked about in today's show you can find@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and over there you can also leave your questions, your comments, your feedback, and either Joe or Serenity or myself will hop in and reply. So it's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Serenity with an S. Joe and Serenity, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing all this stuff with us. You guys are, you guys are doing really good work.

Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

Yeah, we love it.

All right, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with with Joe and Serenity Carr from BenGreenfieldFitness.com signing out. Have an amazing healthy week and go eat some baby food, baby. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.