Where did the vision come from?
And yeah, what does that look like?
Yeah, it's interesting that you asked that.
So it really has come from an organic ground swell
from within the movement.
There's been this rise of what many talk about
as the food is medicine movement.
And that is the recognition
that we have an unsustainable problem.
Diets are the number one cause of chronic conditions,
the number one cause of mortality and morbidity.
And 85% of our healthcare costs
are in some way related to our diet.
And yet we don't look at that.
We don't treat it that way.
They cost the economy $1.1 trillion.
And yet the food and health ecosystems live,
I would say in really different universes.
They rarely connect and they rarely collaborate
in any meaningful way.
The exception to that is in the area of advocacy,
public policy and increasingly research.
So there's funding that's happening,
there's research that's happening,
there's advocacy work that's happening,
but actually getting the leaders together as innovators
to find common ground and to advance private sector,
market oriented innovation
is kind of where we're most passionate.
And we see it's something that the world is asking for
and it's something that just doesn't exist.
And the ironic thing about it is that
consumers with bad diets just become costly patients.
So it's really us, we're innovating for us.
Absolutely.
So going personal perhaps, maybe not,
maybe it overlaps your profession.
What's the story behind your why?
I'm curious about your why too,
but I'm also curious how you found it.
Yeah, it's interesting that you asked that.
So my why I would say is three things.
Number one, I almost died as a result of an appendicitis
that I contracted in the mountains of central Honduras.
In there, that sucks, that hurts.
Yeah, it spiraled out of control
and ended up causing me all kinds of problems
and ended out of the hospital
and for nine months, crazy health journey.
And so as a result of that,
I became personally deeply interested
and motivated around health and especially gut health.
Number two is I had two parents who were not healthy.
They're no longer with us,
but they both suffered from heart disease, from strokes.
My dad was diabetic
and as I looked at the way they ended their lives,
it's not the way that I wanna live
and the way I wanna end my life.
And so wanting to take greater control of my health
and see this as an opportunity.
And then ultimately it's also has deep spiritual roots for me.
I just sort of see that my body is a temple
and needs to be treated as sacred
and I have a stewardship responsibility
to really treat it that way.
I've only got one life.
And so it's an opportunity to really look at this life
and really invest in the right ways to empower my own health
journey.
You know, you use the common word,
but I know you see the difference
that we have that opportunity.
And I know you believe that too.
That's right, this opportunity
to really fully maximize the vessel that is the body.
And so that's so cool.
I appreciate you bringing up that you treat it.
You treat your body like a temple as well
because a lot of people haven't internalized that,
you know, especially people who are maybe not religious,
but if you think about a temple,
you've got super, super clean environments
where you're trying to maximize like the beauty
of that structure.
And we have that same opportunity with our own bodies.
Thank you for diving into that.
I wanna go into where you're going with the vision,
but instead of just simply asking the question,
I started to watch, in fact, no, I already watched it.
I started to rewatch it with my kiddos.
There's a Netflix documentary, no, Amazon documentary
called Eating Our Way to Extinction.
And in that documentary, they talk about, you know,
how all the challenges with pretty much the meat industry
and what's going on with the world in relation to that.
Does that relate at all to this cause of what you're doing?
I'm a layman when it comes to this type of stuff,
but I'm a nerd.
I like to find out what's going on.
Well, we have food shortage problems.
Is the quality of our meat completely trash these days?
What do you think?
Yeah, it's interesting that you ask that way.
So I would say for sure,
I think what a documentary like that begins to bring out
is the fact that we're learning more and more
about the quality of our food
and this relationship to our diet.
So there've been a lot of studies that have been done
showing the impact on red meat, on processed meats,
and so on, on our overall health.
And increasingly as a counterweight to that,
the impact of plant-based or even plant-forward diets
and how they can really empower health in new ways.
And so I think the science is becoming more
and more prominent.
And then to the latter part of your question,
are we eating our way to extinction and so on.
I think it's interesting.
We like to think of it as,
and one of the ways that we say it is,
we have gotten from our food system
exactly what we've asked for of it
over the last 100, 150 years,
which is cheap calories, mass produced, at scale,
and delivered over distance.
And where convenience and cost
are the drivers of innovation.
So you look back 150 years from food safety
to nearly a hundred years ago,
people coming out of World War II
and sort of the rising middle class
and working moms and the need for convenience.
And then sort of as we moved into convenience foods
and then really looked at taste,
convenience as being drivers,
and then value engineering the heck out of them,
we've gotten exactly what we've asked for.
So I think part of what this movement represents
is a pivot into optimizing for something different,
which is human health.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.