Does there always have to be an opposing reaction?

 I was at a Wellness Conference and Expo this weekend in Chicago.  Teraswhey had a booth there.  So did many other vendors for things like vitamins, nutritional supplements, aromatherapy products, infrared saunas, practioners of various kinds, all alternatives to our mainstream medical system.  A medical system run amuck, everyone agrees. But since no one agrees what should be in its place, we continue to press on with total dysfunction.

At a conference for supplement industry leaders a few years ago, old lion’s of the industry were calling for greater self-regulation of the industry.  They acknowledged the disservice that middle of the night ads for miracle cures was doing for the industry and called for industry leaders to self police.  What wasn’t clear at the time was what self-policing would actually look like or how it would happen.  Would the Presidents of pharmaceutical grade vitamin companies call up the Presidents of mediocre quality miracle vitamin companies and tell them to clean up their act or get out?  Would that call actually change anything?  And if it didn’t, what recourse would the legitimate company have?

Miracle cures and the people who sell them that have been around since the beginning of time. Here we are, two years after the call for self-regulation and it is nowhere in sight.  The same infomercials run in the middle of the night, the industry still proffers strange products with weird claims and sketchy science behind them.  Things like whole body vibrators, miracle bands, and portable saunas that are essentially microwave ovens for people. How can we tell what is going to work and what isn't?

Maybe both the problem and the answer to it were at the show. One path would be to bring more stringent regulation to the entire industry.  Forcing supplements to undergo the same testing that pharmaceutical products go through would certainly kill the industry.  It would be an equal and opposite reaction to infomercials at 3 AM. 

There was an alternative path at the show.  People bought samples of our product, took them home to try them, and surfed the internet to read up on them and see what other people are saying about them on the internet - a kind of crowd QA.  As a result of their research, the last day of the show I had people returning to buy large quantities of product from me. I sold out by noon.

I used to think that consumer’s couldn’t be educated enough to judge the medical efficacy of medicinal products; now I think that there are so many readily available resources that it is possible for people to research products and make choices based on their research.  Maybe instead of regulation, we should spend the enforcement funds providing basic medical education to consumers so they can make good choices about products like supplements and wellness devices.

Not as full of drama as an opposing reaction of comparable force, but an effective path forward all the same.

Dear Jerry

Dear Jerry,

This summer I took your writing workshop at The Clearing.  I’ve since realized that many of the writing exercises you did with us were powerfully designed to shut down the left side of our brains to allow the creativity of the right side emerge.  It was so simple, so fast, an amazing experience.

You mentioned in the class that you just published a book called Cranberry Red.  It’s taken me a while, but the memory of your description of the book came popping up lately as my own work continues to uncover more examples of how our modern food and agriculture is failing us.

In Cranberry Red, you tell the story of a University Extension employee who loses his job and takes one with a private company that is working on a nutrition-enhanced cranberry.  All is well until evidence of harmful side effects starts to surface.  Should he expose his employer, lose his job again, and lose the opportunity to influence the company?

I bet you won’t take offense if I say that you are anything but a radical guy.  You too were on the Faculty of UW Extension for many years.  This book, however, tells the story in your warm and folksy and entertaining way, of what we’ve done and are doing to farmers and food.  Modern agriculture: hubris at the expense of nature. 

What I like best about your book is that it makes the economic and health tragedy that is emerging out of our food system into a personal story.  Food and health are personal.  I see this all of the time.  Our industrial food system keeps trying to make food into a widget, but people and the earth keep resisting.  No we haven’t figured out how to take the vagaries of weather out of supply.  No we haven’t successfully convinced consumers that buying food from a big food company like Kraft is safer than buying it from a local farmer. People want a personal relationship with their food and the people who make it.  People are also starting to think that maybe surrendering their physical health to “experts”, whose solution no matter what the problem is appears to be pills, may not be the best idea.  Nor is believing that humans can engineer foods that are better for us than natural foods. 

I created teraswhey to cause extraordinary change, not of the engineered kind, but of the natural kind, the kind where the food that can heal us comes in its natural form, from farmers we know and cheese makers who respect their craft. Teraswhey is a sort of antidote to Cranberry Red.  

Thank you for giving voice to something many of us have been experiencing for a long time!

Tera

Dear Sara

Dear Sara,

I started thinking about gluten again after you and I had a really wonderful dinner made by your husband, Jason, the chef at The Tavern restaurant in Garrison, NY.  Aromatic blood sausage made from scratch; we discovered it’s good for both of us because we’re iron deficient. I’ve been endeavoring to wean myself of iron pills; your acupuncturist told you to eat black foods.  Nutrition by color, it’s like painting a diet.  Then we start talking about your husband’s travails, trying to cook from local ingredients and keep the menu items affordable.  Is it off-putting to call blood sausage blood sausage?  Maybe aromatic loaf would be better?

Our conversation then turned to baking.  Jason uses flour milled by the baker at Wild Hive Bakery, which tends toward old grain varieties.  Apparently the old grains perform differently from commodity grains and Jason has a hard time finding people who can work with them successfully.  The Wild Hive guys say the same thing. 

Apparently we’ve intentionally hybridized wheat in a way that has increased the proportion of gluten in the grain.  We did this intentionally because gluten is where the protein lives in grains.  Bread, pizza dough, and bagels all perform better with high gluten flours.  Gluten also shows up in surprising places - on its own is also used to make imitation meat, fish, and as a stabilizer in foods like ketchup and ice cream.  All of this means we’re eating not just more carbohydrates than before but also that there is more gluten in our carbohydrates than ever before.  Could it be that the higher incidences of gluten intolerances is a result of overconsumption of gluten?

 

Or is it because of changes in processing?  In the old days, people often stored grains whole and milled them as they used them.  This left the bran intact, encircling the starch and the germ inside.  Once grains are milled, the oils in the germ can become rancid.  Commodity flours are milled in huge quantities that are stored as flour.  This means that they are far more likely to have rancidity problems.  Bakers who mill their own flour right before they make bread like the guys at Wild Hive in NY and Cress Spring in WI tell me they have customers that seek them out because they can tolerate their breads even though they are typically “gluten intolerant”.  Of course, true celiacs like my friend Linda cannot eat anyone’s gluten. 

It’s a hard road to eating gluten free in the US where so much of our food is processed and contains gluten – soups, soy sauce, candy, cold cuts, low and no fat engineered foods that do more harm than the fat would have.  I always thought it was odd that people would ask me whether my whey protein products had gluten in them – whey is a dairy product afterall so of course there is none in teraswhey.  Now that I understand how ubiquitous it is as a food processing agent, it makes more sense that people ask.

I’m glad that chef’s like Jason are experimenting with old grain varieties and teaching people to cook with them.  Lets hope that the increased attention doesn’t cause Big Ag and Big Food to start hybridizing the old grains to make them “better”.

Any chance Kamut is black? Oh, and tell Jason that I think it’s fine to call it blood sausage. 

Tera

PS Linda

PS Linda,

As if bariatric surgery wasn’t reason enough for a personal connection to our company, you went on to be diagnosed with Celiac disease.  Celiacs like you are allergic to gluten.  Gluten is in just about all prepared foods and pretty much all foods in the carbohydrate group.  Because of your Celiac disease, you have small intestines that can’t digest gluten.  When you eat foods with gluten in them, your intestines are unable to break down the gluten and an autoimmune response is triggered that causes the villi in the small intestine to be damaged.  This causes malabsorption of critical nutrients by your body.

In the past, people thought that Celiacs would always present as malnourished – underweight and with a range of health issues associated with malnourishment -  and someone like you would never have been diagnosed.  Evidence is now surfacing that obese people may have a higher than average rate of celiac disease.  The mechanism is not well understood, but it appears to be related to how the body responds to malnourishment.  For survival of the species, our brains and bodies adjust to chronic changes in diet.  In the absence of nutrients, the brain causes the body to crave carbohydrates, which the body then stores as fat for use later.  The problem Celiacs have is there is no real starvation driving this and there is no time in the future when their bodies will absorb more nutrients, so they continue to crave food and gain weight, in some cases a lot of it. 

So there you were, Linda, in a high stress profession eating as a stress response and a biological response, and gaining weight because, paradoxically, your body wasn’t getting enough nutrients.  All the while you were fighting for the legal rights for women in particular, you were feeling the negative body image, discrimination, and physical effects of obesity.  It makes me wonder just how many people I know with weight problems are actually Celiacs, and how their lives would be different if they knew and were using teraswhey.

Gastric bypass surgery doesn’t cure Celiac disease; only a completely gluten free diet can relieve its symptoms.   Because gluten is almost ubiquitous in our modern diet of manufactured foods, eradicating it from our diets is very difficult.  And the incidence of Celiac disease seems to be increasing.  Much research still needs to be done to determine whether there is in fact an increased rate of incidence or just more diagnosis.  Some practitioners I know are beginning to think it could be exacerbated by the increased presence of not just manufactured foods but also ubiquitous biologically engineered foods like corn that are either in everything or fed to everything. When these things end up ubiquitously in our diets, our guts have to deal with more and more substances that they don’t recognize as food.  Eating.  It used to be something easy and nourishing and joyous.  Now somehow what we’ve done to our farms and our food and ourselves has made it complicated. 

Linda, every day you get to deal with the puzzle of how to get enough protein without eating any gluten. Whey protein is not only a source of a lot of the protein you need, it is also the most bioavailable and most readily absorbed protein for your body.  This means teraswhey is great for bariatric surgery patients and for Celiacs, in short, a simple food that’s perfect for you.  Maybe the universe wanted you to be part of teraswhey because you were going to need it as a foundation of your diet for the rest of your life, and because it would give you a way to share your story with the thousands of people who have been on the same health journey you have.

We get to change the world, one shake at a time.  I can’t thank you enough for sharing this journey with me.

With love,

Tera

Dear Linda

I may have been able to start my business without you, but I know I wouldn’t have been able to keep sane if you and the whey cool girls weren’t such an important part of what we are doing.  Thanks to you we actually have women investing in teraswhey!  I am convinced that part of how we are going to make the world more sustainable is by having more women investing in other women–owned businesses.  Someday we will all have time to look back and reflect, and understand why I say this.

I remember when I first met you.  You knew about whey protein already but what made you so passionate about this business was its local roots.  These high value whey’s could only come from this location in southern Wisconsin – we had the small family farms, clean water, and specialty cheese makers making specialty cheeses with specialty whey by-products.  As the company progressed, you realized that you had personal health reasons to be passionate about it.

While we were still building the plant, you shared with me your intention to do bariatric surgery.  Many years in a high stress profession, you thought, had led you to gain over 100 lbs since you began practicing law.  Still young, you had already had two hip surgeries.  Diets, meditation, and exercise never worked, and you were concerned about having a future of more health issues.  So you decided to do the surgery.  One of the first things that happened was you saw a nutritionist who talked to you about how to eat before and after the surgery.  You were going to need 80g of protein per day, something that is very difficult without a high quality protein supplement.  By then you were a part owner of the most natural whey protein brand in the country.  Now that you’ve had the surgery, teraswhey is a part of your daily diet.  You tell me you feel bereft of energy when you don’t have it.  I’ve had bariatric surgery nutritionists compliment us on the quality of our protein for their patients, and the privilege of talking to other bariatric surgery recovery patients who, like you, now have teraswhey as a fixture in their daily lives.

There are no accidents in this world.  You were meant to be a part of teraswhey even though neither of us really knew why at the time you invested.  It’s one of my greatest rewards to know that the company I created is making such a positive difference each day in the lives of real people like you who go out and make more positive change happen in this world.  We get to be the pebble that causes the ripple that changes the world…

With love and admiration,

Tera

We're a Real Company Now

It was Expo West last week, the biggest tradeshow of the industry.  In the past I would have been terrible at savoring the moment; now that I’m more present in my life I’m getting better at this.

It was one of the first times I felt like the thing that started as an idea in my head has grown to be a real company.  Last year I was there by myself.  Four days of crushingly busy booth traffic and meetings before and after.  I could barely stand up by the time the show was done.  Product flew into the hands of random people; I managed to talk to very few store buyers.  But we were there and people were seeing us for the first time.

This time we had three people at the show from the company.  Amazing.  I could go to the bathroom, walk the show, talk to industry colleagues.  And people were coming up to us who were already customers.  Store buyers saying their customers love our product and want more sku’s.  People loving the branding, packaging, website.  I even met the guy who founded Clif Bar. Wow. It felt like a long way from an idea in my head.

The best thing about this show for me was the stories, most of which, not surprisingly I guess, came from women.   Two women from a rural area in CA described how they started selling teraswhey in their little community’s health club.  At first people either wanted the cheap stuff or didn’t know what whey protein was.  Gradually, even the guys who were used to the cheap stuff have started to convert to our organic. Apparently they think it works better and want to be a part of shifting away from a global food system.  The women smiled and said it felt like teraswhey was changing their entire community.

Another woman came up and said she was a devoted customer and loved what we are doing.  She was my age.  She started talking about how important she thinks it is that I am doing this, that is, that a woman created this company and the brand not a man.  Like me, she is of a generation of women who had to work hard to prove that we could do anything a man could do in the business world and elsewhere.  We are the generation that paved the way for the younger women following us.  I have two daughters and because women like us have done what we have, my daughters know that they can do anything they want to do in this world.

The show had a poignant moment too.  I woke up to a worried call from home the day the Tsunami was due to hit the California coast.  It reminded me of being on a trade show floor in London on 9/11 and getting a call to tell me my kid’s Dad’s house had a fire the night before and while they were fine, the house was not habitable until it was fixed.  Then the planes hit the towers and I was stuck in London for almost a week, no longer able to even call my kids.  Now my kids are grown, two living in California.  I hung up from the call from my boyfriend at home and got on the phone to talk to each of my kids.  The Tsunami warning turned out to be a non-event, and I felt really grateful for having a person in my life at home who was concerned enough to call me that morning.

Dear Brett

Dear Brett,

I went to high school and college from 1976 – 82.  I was a figure skater and for a bunch of reasons knew a lot of people who worked in the fashion industry in New York.  I grew up around gay people and had many as friends.

I remember hearing a few years after I graduated from College, after the birth of my first child, that one of my friends in high school had died of Aids.  He contracted it from a blood transfusion.  Then I heard that another friend from College had also died.  He was a brilliant man who spoke three languages, majored in biochemistry and was on his way to a top medical school.  He had come out as a gay man while we were in College. 

Then the trickle became a flood. I remember taking my kids to the beach house of a woman who was a friend and mentor to me.  She was one of the first women executives in the NY fashion industry.  She had a wall with snapshots on it at her house of all of her friends when they came to visit at her house.  She had started calling it her wall of the dead because so many of the pictures were of people who had died from complications resulting from Aids. The nature of the tragedy changed with the advent of a new generation of drugs.  People stopped dying and I stopped hearing about the tragedy.  I thought it was “under control”. 

What I didn’t realize until I met you was that the tragedy hadn’t gone away, but morphed into a hidden battle with chronic illness and slow physical deterioration.  You told me that living on anti retrovirals was like living on perpetual chemotherapy.  People struggled to eat, maintain weight, energy, they got sick, depressed, isolated, lonely.  They lost the ability to keep a job. They became poor, disabled, went on public assistance.  They needed help from people like you just to make it through the day.

It may not have to be this way.  This past spring an Epidemiologist from Albert Einstein hospital in New York came up to me at my booth at a tradeshow.  He said he had found my whey protein at whole foods in the city and started using it with some of the aids patients in their clinic.  They were doing better.  It helped them tolerate the drugs better, helped them retain body mass, seemed less prone to secondary infections. 

So I got onto PubMed and found that there is a body of research emerging that is documenting the benefits of whey protein for HIV positive patients.  The mechanism appears to related to whey’s ability to increase glutathione levels in HIV positive individuals.  HIV positive people tend to be glutathione deficient, which leaves their bodies without the major antioxidant they need to combat oxidative stress.  Both the disease and the meds HIV positive individuals take to combat the disease cause oxidative stress on their bodies, which means they need more not less glutathione.  There may be other elements of whey that are beneficial, including lactoferrin and immunoglobulins, but more research is needed to document this.

Could it be that HIV positive patients could use lower doses of their medications if they made whey protein a consistent part of their diet?  Could it help them better tolerate their meds, live more active lives, maybe even stay employed longer? 

The way the system works right now, indigent HIV positive patients have their medications covered by Medicare or Medicaid, but not things like whey protein.  Good quality whey protein is cost prohibitive.  The irony is that the lifetime cost of treating these people to society could be less if they had a way to get whey protein into their treatment regimes.

I so much admire the work you do, Brett, to help people with HIV and Aids cope with the litany of problems they face in their lives.  We seem to live in a world that demonizes the people around us who are most vulnerable and one of its effects is to perpetuate a disease abatement industry that costs ever more even as it steals people’s dignity from them.  People like you help them cope, but imagine actually being able to change their lives for the better at the cellular level. However improbable it seems at the moment, you and I get to always believe that it is possible that one day all of your patients can get access to teraswhey. 

With love always,

Tera

It's All About the Pie or Tera's View from Madison

I live in Madison, WI.  For the past week people I know around the country has been asking me whether these protests are as real as they appear on TV.  They ask me what I think about them; what would be ‘tera’s way’ of solving this.   Would I raise taxes on everyone? Cut spending?  Cut salaries?  Aren’t we just squeezing one side of the balloon only to have it pop out somewhere else? Isn’t this all just inevitable?

I think that all of this -the labor protests and the tea party counter protests and the anti-intellectual animosity, and the anti-science belief system, and the increasingly bellicose values system -  are just symptoms of a much, much bigger economic problem that we’ve been denying for years: our country’s economic competitiveness is eroding at an accelerated pace.   If we use the typical pie analogy, we live in a country where the pie is no longer getting appreciably bigger every year.  In fact, we’ve come out of a period where the pie actually shrank quite considerably and at the slow rates of growth we are going to be lucky to produce in the future, the pie may take years to get back to where it was, never mind get bigger.

So what happened when the pie was getting bigger?  It used to be that people in the highest income brackets could look forward to their wealth increasing every year at an accelerated pace.  Thanks to financial engineering, they could actually troll for investment deals that yielded 50% annual return.  They came to expect at least 30%.  Meanwhile the investor class in places in Asia were still entrepreneurs who were thrilled to see a 5% return and would work their hands to the bone to see these businesses succeed.  There were still entrepreneurial people like that in the US, but they had a hard time justifying the risk when they could work for someone else and make decent money and they had a hard time finding people to invest in their businesses.  The companies that started tended to be those with low upfront investment and high potential for leverage. Even the poor did better as a rising tide did in fact raise all boats.  Governments had increasing tax revenues without increasing tax rates and everyone seemed somewhat happy.

Then came the great unraveling.  Suddenly investor returns dropped for everyone.  The banks were in trouble.  The institutions that guaranteed the banks were in trouble.  The stock market – where most of the middle class had their 401k’s – fell.  The layoffs began.  The pay freezes and pay cuts began.  Meanwhile our population got older, used more expensive medical care.  The pie shrank.

What is happening in Madison is a fight for the crumbs that are left as we race to the bottom.  We won’t hit the bottom overnight, but it will happen, because we are spending all of our energy fighting over our shares of a shrinking pie instead of grappling with the things that are causing the pie to shrink in the first place. 

We cannot do things the same way we’ve always done them when the rest of the world is doing them cheaper and better than we are.  We have to be innovative and create opportunities in emerging economic sectors, things like green energy and biotechnology.  So how have we done at this?  Our manufacturers of solar panels are moving to China.  The largest wind turbine companies in the world are not in the US.  China is pushing capital into the sector with the goal of becoming the global leader in a decade; we can’t even manage to create a predictable enough incentive system to encourage investment in the sector.  In biotechnology, places like Korea have made advances in biomedical research that cause our ethical stomachs to roil.  But instead of advancing our ability to drive the ethics of how the technologies are developing by being the technical leaders in the field, we refuse to allow the research here and surrender both the economic promise and ethical leadership to countries we already know we don’t feel comfortable with.  China and India will soon become the largest consumer markets in the world, the largest manufacturers.  When that happens, they will own us.  And you think the pie is shrinking now…

Meanwhile our leaders punish the most vulnerable among us.  Medicare and Medicaid benefits are set to be cut.  Already doctors are refusing to see more Medicare and Medicaid patients, so the most vulnerable among us are going with no medical care.  Our global competitors, not just in Europe but also the so-called developing world, have governments that cover basic care for all of their citizens.  The result is that US companies are less competitive because they have to cover expenses that governments cover elsewhere.  Why business leaders are so resistant to government-funded health care is beyond me. 

And why the rich are so angry is also beyond me.  The Gini coefficient in the US, which measures the distribution of income across income groups, shows that incomes in the US are more unequal and skewed toward the wealthiest among us than at any time in our entire history.  We look like a South American dictatorship. Private sector ideology about the role of government is as much at fault as government’s failures to do what’s right.

No one seems to be doing anything to help grow the pie.  In its zeal to fix the financial crisis, the SEC has imposed the same regulations on small community banks as it did on the big banks.  The only problem is that most of the lending that creates jobs in the US comes from smaller banks and they didn’t cause the problem in the first place.  Small banks are now disappearing at an alarming rate because they can’t recapitalize fast enough, taking their small business lending with them. 

Even the SBA, supposed to be an institution that supports entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, now has such onerous clauses buried in the unlimited personal guarantees they require of entrepreneurs that no one in their right mind would sign up for them.  Banks that have survived have added the same language.  Basically, the only way an entrepreneur can get a lender is to sign up for unlimited personal guarantees that now continue even if the entrepreneur no longer runs or even works in the company.  The bank can change the amount, term, interest rate of the loans without even consulting the guarantor as long as there is someone in the company that is authorized to sign for the company. 

Finally, investors are still more interested in chasing 50% returns even if they come from overseas rather than investing in companies that will create the jobs of the future at home. With all of this going on, what entrepreneur in their right mind would start a business in the US? The best and the brightest graduating from places like MIT are voting with their feet and moving overseas. 

It didn’t used to be this way and it doesn’t have to be this way now.

So what would I do in Madison?  It’s actually quite simple: equitably share the pain and address the real problem.  As long as the pie is shrinking, government will have to shrink with it.  We have to cut spending and raise taxes.  And if we want to stop this death march, we need to use every means at our disposal to create a climate that encourages innovation and entrepreneurship. 

We need to grow the pie again.

Dear Dode

Dear Dode,

I often do think of you.  You are my ex husband’s mother, one of the most truly generous, profoundly happy, and most courageous people I’ve ever met.  I’ve been truly blessed to have you in my life and in the lives of my children as a role model and grandma.

Last year (I think it was last year, time has blended into oblivion over the past few years) my kids told me you were having trouble swallowing.  You had half of your neck removed when you were a young, poor, single mom with thyroid cancer.  In those days they removed your entire thyroid and half your neck, then bombarded you with radiation.  You just wanted to live long enough to see your kids graduate from high school.  In fact you’ve lived long enough to see many of your grandchildren graduate from high school.  True to form, you refused to have the tests for throat cancer done because you didn’t want to have to survive the treatments.  Once is enough.  So you’ve stopped eating solid food unless you can, started living on a liquid diet, and lost a lot of weight.

When my kids told me about you, we agreed that you had to have teraswhey.  I hear you like it, and even saw me last week on the Dairy Heiresses show that featured me among other women leaders in the dairy industry in Wisconsin.  I hear you have stopped losing weight and that the predictions of imminent serious problems have not materialized.  You have a boyfriend and still inspire everyone who meets you.

All the evidence says that it is your completely infectious positive attitude and joy in the face of all of life’s adversities that is keeping you with us.  I like to think that teraswhey is playing a small part as well.  All of that protein, in a highly bioavailable liquid form, is feeding your muscles and bones, so while you can’t always eat solid food, you are feeding your cells in a really positive way.  Cancer, aging, malnutrition, wasting have been associated with glutathione deficiencies that can be addressed by eating whey protein. Your body is busy converting cysteine to glutathione, and the glutathione is using a process known as conjugation to detoxify your body. Research has shown that the lactoferrin that is in whey can inhibit esophagus, lung, bladder, and tongue cancer in rats; it has not been tested in humans.

I’ve written this before in a letter to my Mom, but I’ll say it again to you. I wish there was a way for all of the women like you who face similar struggles in their later years to make teraswhey® part of their lives.  It says on my can that I created teraswhey® to cause extraordinary change.  That change happens one person, one shake at a time, and it starts with the people we love.

With love from your ex-daughter-in-law,

Tera

Dear Mom

Dear Mom,

It probably won’t surprise you that when I created teraswhey®, I wasn’t thinking of you specifically.  You were my mother at a distance, a person suffering from the isolation, economic deprivation, and health effects of decades of alcoholism and mental illness.  Now you are a functional, old, poor, beautiful, smart, and diabetic Mom, and one of a huge number of older people who are working hard to live out your years independently and with dignity in a country with a broken healthcare system, frayed social safety net, and a food system that’s making us all sick.

You and thousands of older women like you are struggling to live on social security checks that are $750 per month.  You qualify for $17/month in food stamps. After you pay your rent, you don’t have a lot of money left for food.  So you buy things that are cheap, most of which contain sugar and starches and carbohydrates and high fructose corn syrup that exacerbate your blood sugar problems.  You feel full until your blood sugar level collapses, and then you feel faint.  Your health care covers insulin testing supplies, but you can’t get in to see a doctor to help you figure out how much insulin you should be taking because physicians in the area cannot afford to take on new Medicare patients.  So you guess.

Many of the women who live in your building drink Ensure or Boost for a meal.  Its cheap, even recommended as a meal replacement by doctors and pharmacists.  The only problem is it contains several variations of sugar and high fructose corn syrup:  high carbs and low protein, exactly the opposite of what a diabetic should be eating.  I’ve always suspected that you drank alcohol because it was a way to self medicate your manic depressive mental states.  Now that your liver function has been damaged over the years, your body suffers from even more oxidative damage than most because it can’t efficiently detoxify.  So you suffer from a poor diet, diabetes, mental illness, and the inability to get adequate medical care.

You started using teraswhey® because I am your daughter and I gave it to you and told you it was good for you.  You like to look at my cans in your kitchen.  What you still don’t fully grasp is that my products have the power to not just feed you but also transform your life.  We talk about how the high protein, low carb, low glycemic index whey protein I give you has no fillers, additives, hormones, melamine, whatsoever.  Your eyes glaze over when I tell you that whey protein is one of the best dietary sources of cysteine and other precursors that your body converts to glutathione. Low levels of glutathione and high levels of oxidative stress have been associated with bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, liver disorders.  Sound familiar? As a diabetic, eating a high quality, high protein whey protein shake with low carbs and low glycemic index in the morning helps you regulate your blood sugar. With more work on your diet to take out sugar, I bet you would have a shot at getting off your insulin shots entirely, or at least maintain the low dosage you are currently taking. Your shakes are also feeding your body’s muscles and helping maintain and even build bone density.  All of these things are working to improve your underlying physical and mental health, which is now your only line of defense in the absence of access to adequate medical care. 

I wish there was a way for all of the women who face similar struggles in their later years to make teraswhey® part of their lives.  It says on my can that I created teraswhey® to cause extraordinary change.  That change happens one person, one shake at a time, and it starts with the people we love.

With love from your daughter,

Tera

Why I started teraswhey

teraswhey has always been a personal thing for me.  When my kids grew up and took flight to other parts of the country, I did the only sensible thing and started a company.  Now teraswhey is another teenager for me, and it too has grown and changed and become more and more independent from me.  I remember when it was a dream in my head; now I've got a management team and 25 people in the company and teraswhey cans on the shelves all over the country.  

I feel that empty nest gaping hole creeping into my life again. I stop to reflect. Why did I start teraswhey?  Over the next few weeks I'll be writing letters to the people around me and posting them, because I find that is the best way to capture why I did this.  These are the personal stories at the root of all of this. It is my hope that they will inspire others to create extraordinary change.  We live in a world that needs it.

A teraplace

I spent this past weekend at The Clearing in Door County, WI. The Clearing is a teraplace for me – one of those places that is beautiful and earthy and authentic and thoughtful.  A place to linger and draw strength from.

I was in a writer’s workshop.  Our instructor was Jerry Apps, a prolific writer who became even more prolific after he retired from the University of Wisconsin.  He writes historical books with titles like The Barns of Wisconsin, and fiction, historical or otherwise, with titles like Cranberry Red.  Jerry is one of those wise people with a gift for making everyone feel acknowledged in his class.  Many of the people in the class were also retired or retiring, and intend to write about their lives.  They told stories of romantic trysts 50 years prior, the Normandie landing, going to the barn to milk cows because the cow's udders kept them warmer than they were in the house.

Jerry and his class got me thinking about how this generation of retirees is changing how we all see retirement.  Gone are the days (we hope) when people retire to a rocking chair at 65.  Jerry has probably written at least 10 books since he retired.  Jimmy Carter is still tromping around the world for his Carter Foundation overseeing elections or building Habitat for Humanity houses.  My own grandfather lived to be 100 and was still doing sales calls for his former business when he was 75.

The one thing that could in fact make this generation the last to live longer than its predecessor, despite all of the medical advances, is, paradoxically, nutrition.  Until now, we were living longer because we had better nutrition.  But theirs is the last generation to grow up on pre-industrialized, pre-chemical laden food. My generation had cheetos and twinkies from the get-go, which means that not only is my generation more likely to be obese, it is also more likely to face health problems that result from obesity and the chemical adulteration that has accumulated in our bodies.

One of the things I’m most proud of in creating teraswhey is that I am contributing, in my small way, to making a better option available to us as we age.  Pub Med is constantly publishing the results of new scientific research that is showing a myriad of benefits for older people of drinking whey protein.  We all know that whey protein helps muscle protein synthesis.  This is as important for the elderly as it is for athletes because as our bodies age, they begin to breakdown muscle protein faster than they synthesize it.  (It’s why grandma shrank as she got older).  Whey protein also helps enhance the body’s immune system.  In trials with the elderly with broken hips, whey protein after the surgery helped increase their IGF-1 levels in 1 week.  Had they used whey protein before hand, the bone deterioration could have been markedly different.

Sometimes we just need people like Jerry to remind us what is possible, and products like teraswhey to help us make it real.

What We Eat and How We Feel

I remember when the Internet first started, people were speculating that things like trade shows would go away completely.  Who needs to be in one place physically when you could do it virtually?  I do think that the role of trade shows is different these days, but I learn things there that I would never have known otherwise.  Here’s a smattering of what I learned at the Natural Products Expo this week.

Teraswhey is going to be featured in an upcoming book written by a psychiatrist who is using nutrition as part of how he treats his mentally ill patients.  When you think about it, that he anticipates that his book will be controversial in the psychiatric community says a lot about the dysfunction of our medical system.  Imagine someone who is bipolar who doesn’t work on regulating his or her blood sugar, for example.  He likes our whey specifically because it has the clean functionality he is looking for.  He uses it in a protein diet he recommends as part of a treatment regimen for treating depression.

An epidemiologist working with an HIV positive patient population told me that the side effects of the drugs and secondary illnesses experienced by his patients cause their absorption of protein to be severely limited.  It may take a patient consuming 120g of protein a day for their bodies to absorb half of that.  Since they are also likely to have stomach problems, the only way they can get enough protein is by supplementing with highly bio-available whey protein.  He likes teraswhey for his population because we have a range of flavors and our products aren’t chalky and taste great.

This is the year of the gluten-free cracker.  Lots of new brands and products were there.  I think it’s interesting that so many people are finding that they can’t digest gluten these days.  I also think it is interesting that people ask me whether my whey is gluten free.  I suppose its possible that people might add wheat gluten to a whey protein powder, but this is really more an issue that people have no idea where whey comes from.  I gather the average consumer doesn’t know that hamburger doesn’t come from anything other than a supermarket either so maybe this isn’t so odd.

All of this makes it clear to me that even the scientific world is starting to embrace the notion that what we eat really does impact how we feel.  That is a huge step forward.

The Future of Food isn't What it Seems

Another wrinkle in the global intrigue of potash.  It turns out that a single marketing organization called Canpotex markets 100% of the potash produced in Saskatchewan.  It’s made up of 3 of the largest producers of potash  - the Potash corp., Mosaic (i.e. Cargill), and Agrium.  That makes Canpotex the OPEC of Potash.  When food prices rose in 2007 and 2008, prompting mass protests in the developing world and a recurrence of talk of a Malthusian dilemma, Canpotex resisted production increases and allowed the world price of potash to go from $200 per ton to $1000/ton.  In 2009, farmers across the world cut back on their use of potash to save money, depleting their soil in the process.  The price of Potash fell to $350/ton.  This year it is rising again as farmers cannot continue to mine their soil indefinitely.

Free markets can be volatile, but they clear quickly and don’t produce huge boom and bust cycles.  However, where market consolidation creates pricing power in the hands of a few players, it magnifies volatility.  This has happened in all our global food commodity markets.   Worse in the case of Potash, market consolidation and power led to the mining of one of humanity’s most valuable long term assets: soil. 

In most cartels, there is an incentive for a member of a cartel like Canpotex to cheat.  When prices get high enough, one of the players can sell for a little less and lure customers away from the other members.  Or, one can increase production and sell more than their quota.  It turns out that one of the companies bidding to buy the Potash Corp, BHP, has already indicated its intention to leave the cartel. China’s Sinochem Corp. is also working on acquiring sufficient ownership to block a change in ownership if it means it will go to BHP Billiton, an Anglo-Australian mining company. This has prompted the Canadian government to indicate that it could block the transaction, saying that the cartel has provided beneficial royalties and jobs for Canadians. 

So here we have a situation where government, the one stakeholder that is usually viewed as intervening in cases of extraordinary market power, is actively supporting it.  All of which means that it may actually be the case that farmers and people around the world would be better off if The Potash Group was purchased by an Australian Company or a Chinese company instead of being a public Canadian company.

How many times these days are we faced with choices that are nothing more than the lesser of two evils?  This is what happens when we view the world within the box of how it currently exists.  The only way we can extract ourselves from this prisoner’s dilemma approach to economic activity in general and our food system in particular is innovation, disruptive innovation that creates meaningful and viable alternatives to a status quo that’s locked up by a few enormously powerful stakeholders.

Seaweed.  The solution to the potash dilemma is actually not more potash, or changing who owns the companies or how it is marketed, it’s seaweed. 

The Flush - It's All About The Grass

“The Flush”.  If you are not in the dairy industry, it’s a phrase that conjures up the face of an embarrassed young girl.  For me, hopelessly engrossed in a new business that’s rooted in traditional dairy, its living proof that our cows and goats do in fact eat grass.

In early June and September our plant is full.  Totally full.  That means we have lines of trucks waiting to unload, staff that hover over our processing facility making constant adjustments to maximize our throughput, a drier that’s running 24/7, and people who have worked 7 days a week for several weeks.  In February, we were nowhere close to full.  Wiser people who have been around a while said, just wait until June.  I thought that meant we would see a bit more whey from each of our plants.  I had no idea how much more whey we could get…

And it’s not just more whey, it’s different whey.  Some of our cheese plants only make certain types of cheese in the spring.  That’s because their cows and goats and sheep are eating loads of fresh grass in the spring, and fresh grass has different components in it than mature grass or late season grass.  To a cheese maker, different components mean different flavors in their cheese.  Old time cheese makers tell me that the differences can be so pronounced that they change their starter cultures in the spring to enhance the natural flavors and ward off the bitterness that can occur in cheese made from spring milk. 

This is in stark contrast to confinement systems where cows are fed the same rations day in and day out all year.  No variation in feed means no variation in production volume, less variation in flavor, and no need to change cultures or make a different kind of cheese.  Great if what you want to do is produce the same cheese day in and day out; not good if you want distinctive flavors, believe that cows should be allowed to exercise their natural behavior and graze, and are interested in having dairy products with all of their constituent health benefits.

This is all possible because the amazing stomachs of cows change when they graze.  Their guts become huge as the villai expand to break down the grass, so much so that they can look a bit like a cow in one of those 18th century Dutch paintings with tiny legs and a huge girth.  When their guts digest the grass, they extract nutrients, which end up as biochemical components in the milk and the products made from the milk.  The most commonly understood difference between grass fed milk and silage fed milk is the CLA level.  CLAs are a fatty acid that has been shown to have health benefits for people.  Less well understood are a huge range of trace vitamins and minerals that come from the soil, feed the grass, and are consumed by grazing animals.  I just read an amazing book called, “ Soil, Grass, Cancer” that was written in the 1950’s by a French Veterinarian.  In it he discussed the scientific evidence that existed at the time of how depleted soil produced depleted grass which grazing animals then converted into nutrient deficient tissue and milk that was in turn eaten by humans.  The author then went on to cite studies that linked a nutrient deficient diet to cancer.  Not calorie deficient but nutrient deficient in trace minerals like copper.

What I found most concerning about that book was it was written in the 1950’s in France, a time that predates a lot of the worst modern agricultural practices and place that has banned GMOs and still practices relatively traditional farming and values its local and regional food culture.  If the data from the 1950’s showed enough soil nutrient depletion to cause problems for both grazing animals and humans, imagine what we are exposing ourselves to when we eat food produced on severely depleted soils in an industrial food system.

For good reason, people often ask me if our whey is grass fed.  Then they ask if we’ve tested for CLA’s.  What I tell people is that the CLA’s, as fatty acids, follow the cheese not the whey.  Which means that testing our whey for CLA’s will not help us understand whether our cows eat grass.  Beyond there, the component differences are small, but as the book convincingly demonstrates, even small differences in trace elements can make a huge difference.  In our goat whey, for example, the ratio of alpha to beta lactalbumen changes throughout the lactation.  I bet if we tested our cow whey across the season, we would find similar but less consistent variations.  Goats are milked seasonally in this part of the country so they are all hitting their lactation at a similar time and are therefore all in the same stage of their lactation together.  Cows have a longer lactation and milk all year round, so they don’t tend to be as close in their lactation stages unless it is a seasonal dairy.

So it turns out that, even in this world of high tech scientific analysis, the best way for us to tell that our whey comes from animals on pasture is still The Flush: the fact that we have them in Spring and in Fall, the fact that our components vary from month to month, and the fact that we have trucks lined up in June and not in February.  That and driving through the countryside tonight and watching cows literally lope down a grassy field just for the fun of it on an early fall evening.

Brian's Ride with Teraswhey

The most amazing thing about doing what I do is the people I get to work with.  Here's a note from Brian who will be fueled by teraswhey on his ride across the US.  WOW!!!

Tomorrow we embark on a ride across the US.  Leaving from our home town of Santa Barbara, we will travel through the southern part of the US, with a final destination of Charleston, SC.  Passing through 11 states in 3,240 miles, we will ride for 35 days, taking a day off at the Grand Canyon, Taos, Branson and Nashville.  My wife and I will be "powered" by Tera along the way, and while I will likely post on my blog about nutrition over the weeks ahead, I thought I would share a little bit about our planning in this area.  A quick note - we are a married couple, who grow some of their own produce, and by most of the remainder of our fruits, vegetables, meat, pork, chicken and fish from locally sourced providers of organic product wherever possible.  We generally seek out food that is minimally processed, trucked, and not modified by some chemical or external means.  Food is fuel, and we try and make good decisions that support our bodies and our local communities, since we are fortunate enough to live in a place where we can make good choice three times per day.

For anyone who has embarked on even a single day century, and rode again the next day, you are aware that you will likely burn more calories than you can consume on the bike, and while off you are still in a deficit.  Taking into consideration other factors like hydration, the need to rest, and the absence in many parts of the country of locally sourced, organic ingredients, it becomes clear that long distance stage riders must have a plan.  Ours is quite simple.  Whenever possible we eat "real food" like baked sweet or russet potatoes, rice, fruit and occasionally sandwiches while on the bike.  We will, of course, have to supplement our endurance fueling with commercially prepared bars, but this is more of a back up to our core food, and chosen carefully amongst the vast array of products out there.  We drink a combination of water and sports drink to stay hydrated and balanced in our electrolytes, and we pull it all together with our after bike routine.  While showering and stretching, we make rice in a small rice cooker, and mix up a Tera's Whey protein drink.  The two make for a very good combination of clean protein and carbohydrates, and the key is to start taking these in within the first 30 minutes off the bike.  With this meal, we can then generally rest before seeking out dinner, preferably with the products of local farms, dairies, and restaurants that focus on healthy, organic food.  On particularly hot or long days, we may start off with a "liquid breakfast" of Tera's Whey as well, and find the product is well tolerated at either end of our long rides.

Tera's Whey is a particularly significant part of our nutrition strategy.  I stopped eating milk, cheese, and cream about ten years ago, and found that my health and energy were greatly improved.  My nutritional advisor felt what I needed to do was avoid casein.  It wasn't that I suffered from lactose intolerance, it was more a matter of my being constantly congested while consuming these products.  When I first started to prepare for the trip, I experimented with soy, rice, and other protein powers, avoiding whey based products.  These didn't work for me; either because of the nutritional component or the inability to be drunk as a standalone product without requiring juice or milk.  In consultation with sport nutritionists and the advisor who had first steered me away from dairy, we determined that it would be wise to test a variety of whey protein based powders.  The criteria was casein free and organically produced products.  This quickly narrowed down the choices, and I settled on Tera's product line as providing the maximum benefit, and suffer little lymphatic system congestion utilizing this very clean and minimally processed protein source.  I sincerely believe that my ability to tolerate and metabolize the product well is based on how it is made - the quality of the underlying organic ingredients, and the minimal processing that occurs at their factory.  Even the flavorings (where you can truly get in trouble with other "recovery" products) are organic and taste fresh and unadulterated.

Those who want to follow along with us can do so at crosscountrybybike.com.  We will try and post ride statistics everyday at about 3 pm or so (while shaking up a Tera's Organic Whey Protein Drink - Bourbon Vanilla being our flavor of choice), and then follow up with an account of the day and some photos later that evening.

Best wishes from the road,

Brian

Tomorrow we embark on a ride across the US.  Leaving from our home town of Santa Barbara, we will travel through the southern part of the US, with a final destination of Charleston, SC.  Passing through 11 states in 3,240 miles, we will ride for 35 days, taking a day off at the Grand Canyon, Taos, Branson and Nashville.  My wife and I will be "powered" by Tera along the way, and while I will likely post on my blog about nutrition over the weeks ahead, I thought I would share a little bit about our planning in this area.  A quick note - we are a married couple, who grow some of their own produce, and by most of the remainder of our fruits, vegetables, meat, pork, chicken and fish from locally sourced providers of organic product wherever possible.  We generally seek out food that is minimally processed, trucked, and not modified by some chemical or external means.  Food is fuel, and we try and make good decisions that support our bodies and our local communities, since we are fortunate enough to live in a place where we can make good choice three times per day.

For anyone who has embarked on even a single day century, and rode again the next day, you are aware that you will likely burn more calories than you can consume on the bike, and while off you are still in a deficit.  Taking into consideration other factors like hydration, the need to rest, and the absence in many parts of the country of locally sourced, organic ingredients, it becomes clear that long distance stage riders must have a plan.  Ours is quite simple.  Whenever possible we eat "real food" like baked sweet or russet potatoes, rice, fruit and occasionally sandwiches while on the bike.  We will, of course, have to supplement our endurance fueling with commercially prepared bars, but this is more of a back up to our core food, and chosen carefully amongst the vast array of products out there.  We drink a combination of water and sports drink to stay hydrated and balanced in our electrolytes, and we pull it all together with our after bike routine.  While showering and stretching, we make rice in a small rice cooker, and mix up a Tera's Whey protein drink.  The two make for a very good combination of clean protein and carbohydrates, and the key is to start taking these in within the first 30 minutes off the bike.  With this meal, we can then generally rest before seeking out dinner, preferably with the products of local farms, dairies, and restaurants that focus on healthy, organic food.  On particularly hot or long days, we may start off with a "liquid breakfast" of Tera's Whey as well, and find the product is well tolerated at either end of our long rides.

Tera's Whey is a particularly significant part of our nutrition strategy.  I stopped eating milk, cheese, and cream about ten years ago, and found that my health and energy were greatly improved.  My nutritional advisor felt what I needed to do was avoid casein.  It wasn't that I suffered from lactose intolerance, it was more a matter of my being constantly congested while consuming these products.  When I first started to prepare for the trip, I experimented with soy, rice, and other protein powers, avoiding whey based products.  These didn't work for me; either because of the nutritional component or the inability to be drunk as a standalone product without requiring juice or milk.  In consultation with sport nutritionists and the advisor who had first steered me away from dairy, we determined that it would be wise to test a variety of whey protein based powders.  The criteria was casein free and organically produced products.  This quickly narrowed down the choices, and I settled on Tera's product line as providing the maximum benefit, and suffer little lymphatic system congestion utilizing this very clean and minimally processed protein source.  I sincerely believe that my ability to tolerate and metabolize the product well is based on how it is made - the quality of the underlying organic ingredients, and the minimal processing that occurs at their factory.  Even the flavorings (where you can truly get in trouble with other "recovery" products) are organic and taste fresh and unadulterated.

Those who want to follow along with us can do so at crosscountrybybike.com.  We will try and post ride statistics everyday at about 3 pm or so (while shaking up a Tera's Organic Whey Protein Drink - Bourbon Vanilla being our flavor of choice), and then follow up with an account of the day and some photos later that evening.

Best wishes from the road,

Brian

Marking Time

There’s nothing like research to stretch things out.  I am a big fan of making fact based decisions, but it seems like right now we are faced with so many significant changes at once that the scientific method is failing to keep up.

Researchers from the University of Cincinnati Medical School published findings last week in the on line Journal of Pediatrics that confirmed that girls are now developing breasts and hitting puberty as young as age seven.  While confirming something that many of us had suspected for a long time after watching our own kids, their friends, nieces and classmates, the study could not present any conclusive explanation of what could be causing this shift.

The study compared 1200 girls age six to eight in New York, Ohio, and California.  It compared the age when the girls showed early signs of puberty against the results of a similar study from 13 years ago.  At 8 years old 18.3% of white girls showed signs of developing breasts, 43% black, and 37% Latina.  In all categories the ages of the girls were statistically significantly younger than they were just 13 years ago. No explanation of the divergence among the races was offered.

The researchers posed two areas for further research.  The first is that the data showed a statistically significant correlation between obesity and early puberty.  In the study, the girls who reached puberty at a young age were also more likely to be obese.  The disturbing thing about this is that these young girls will be at a higher risk of many health problems for the rest of their lives due to their early obesity. Unfortunately, however, correlation doesn’t prove causality.  Is it the obesity that causes the early puberty or is there something out there that is a precursor to one or both?

The second was environmental toxins.  Over 100 chemicals were found in the girls.  The study author, Dr. Frank Biro of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, postulates that pollutants that mimic the female hormone estrogen might also be contributing to early puberty.  “Whether {they be in} food that they’ve eaten, or products that are used for personal care products, as well as products that could be used at their homes”.  Note that the Dr. didn’t call out something like proximity to a nuclear waste site or early exposure to radiation; he called out things that we all have in our lives every day.  Could it be that the food we eat and the personal care products we use are causing early puberty?

What pollutants mimic estrogen?  Carbon chorines used in pesticides, phthalates used in the plastics industry to soften pvc, dioxin that is a byproduct of paper processing, and herbicides. These are all chemicals that can interact with the same receptor molecules inside the body that estrogen can.  The theory is that we may be overdosing living things with excesses of hormone-like signals.  Pesticides and herbicides are certainly used in food production in the US, and we use them on our lawns and in our homes.  Our food comes wrapped in plastic, we use bleached white paper products.  The potential list of everyday contaminants goes on.

So what are we to do?  I heard a doctor interviewed on a cable news channel after the release of the Presidents report of the state of our health that discussed the mounting evidence that organophosphates were associated with ADD in kids.  Imagine thinking your were doing the right thing getting your kids to eat more vegetables, only to find out that the veggies you gave them were making them sick.  This doctor advised people to “eat local food, not something from Mexico”.  What is it about local that means it hasn’t been exposed to chemicals?  We use more chemicals in food production in the US than Mexico does.  Where I live in the Midwest, our local farm production is some of the most chemical intensive in the world. 

As un-cool as it sounds, eating organic food is still important.  Local and organic is the best, but it’s dangerous to confuse local with chemical free.  In the world of Venn diagrams, they are two different circles that overlap but they are not identical.  I also think its interesting that the study authors didn’t attempt to explain the significantly higher rates of early puberty among African American and Latina girls.  It may not be an accident that these demographic groups are more likely to be poor, eat a less healthy diet, be obese, and live in cities, than white children.

Conclusive research moves slowly at best, and may never happen because of the difficulties inherent in conducting scientific research on this kind of long-term effect of multiple factors.  In the meantime, maybe a bit of common sense would work better?  Something is going on that is making animals lower in the food chain multi sexual, sterile [frogs for ex.]; something is here that’s driving down male sperm counts globally; something is making young girls pubescent when they used to be playing with dolls.  Maybe we don’t have time for definitive research?  Maybe we get to work on getting chemicals out of our food now, not decades from now when the research is more definitive.

Thanks Ken!

It seems like every year I’m getting on an airplane out of Madison with a slug of sinuous, gaunt, and ecstatic people who just finished the Wisconsin Ironman.  They sort of limp onto the plane and grimace while they carefully lower their sore bodies into the seats. 

I can’t even imagine attempting to do an Ironman…  Mini-tri’s are daunting enough for me.  People apparently love coming to ours because they can have great ethnic food, run through the University and state capital, and cycle through through rolling farmland on some of the best cycling routes in the country.

I’ve always struggled to figure out how teraswhey can participate in the event.  Booths there are very expensive for a small company like ours and the big athletic nutritional brands take up most of the space. While lots of ironman participants have whey protein in their training regimes, these folks also need lots of carbs, so terawhey is only the right product for recovery for them. They are also heavy users of what I call engineered protein products, because what they do to their bodies involves a level of punishment that stretches them beyond the normal limits of human activity.  That means they don’t tend to care much about unpronounceable additives in their protein powders.

So how does an organic, natural, not engineered product without a big marketing budget participate in the ironman?  This year my marketing genius friend Ken who owns Fromagination finally figured it out: Fromagination will be handing out pouches of teraswhey in their store, which is right by the finish line, most likely to the family members who are in town to support their loved ones who are busy doing the impossible.  We use the raw whey from a number of the cheeses they carry in the store, which is why we are there.  Ken and I are betting that lot of the people here to support their athletes or watch the race care about their own health and are looking for a whey product that is more natural and made for them.

Thanks Ken!

Getting Out of the Potash Corner

It’s a funny thing about being a manufacturer of a nutritional product like teraswhey, I get to care where my ingredients come from.  And since whey comes from milk, things that impact raising cows or goats are things that I care about.  This is why I care about Potash.  Without it, we can’t grow the forages (including grasses) and crops that feed livestock.

Since my last potash posting, I’ve done more research on alternatives to potash as a source of potassium in soil.  The Rodale website has information on it for helping diagnose nutritional deficiencies in soil.  In the case of potassium deficiency, it recommends adding composted manure, wood ashes, greensand, or seaweed.  I have yet to figure out what greensand is, but otherwise the list was a bit reassuring for small-scale agriculture.  We can compost manure and find sources of wood ash – may include burning your garden in the fall as part of a soil improvement effort, for example.

What about large-scale production alternatives?  Seaweed could be promising, so I used the global trade database Alibaba to search for seaweed fertilizer companies.  Wow.  More bad news for us.  There were 8 companies listed there, none of which are in the US.  3 were Chinese, 3 Indian, 1 Pilipino, and 1 Peruvian. 

Next I dug around more and discovered that the American agricultural giant Cargill owns 60% of Mosaic, a US company headquartered in Minnesota and traded on the NY stock exchange.  Mosaic has 3 potash mines in Saskatchewan and one in the US.  All of their planned supply expansion is in Canada.  They plan to take their production from 8.6MT to 15MT.  US Potash consumption in 2010 is estimated to be 4.1 MT.; Mosaic’s US production is 1.5MT.

So, does it feel better to know that our alternative for large-scale supply is controlled by Cargill?  Yes, it’s certainly better than no alternative.  And yet, this has its own ramifications – large-scale agriculture in the US is increasingly controlled by a handful of very, very large companies, Monsanto, Cargill being the leaders.  The smaller scale alternatives are all overseas in places like China and India.  This feels a bit like alternative energy projects.  The largest manufacturer of wind turbines is now located in India.  China is on track to develop its alternative energy technologies and use far faster than we are in the US.

What has happened to the US being the worldwide leader in innovation? If we ever want to have middle class jobs again, we need to start creating innovative young companies that produce alternative technologies to those that are controlled by global giants.  Here in the Great Lakes, maybe that could be freshwater seaweed fertilizer?

Oh, and check out this recipe for making your own seaweed fertilizer:

http://www.ehow.com/how_5362326_make-own-organic-seaweed-fertilizer.html

Can Berries be Sexy?

I often tell people that great design is one of those things that people know when they see but find difficult to explain in words.  That’s because, like great art, great design is appropriate and compelling and stimulating in ways that do not reside in rational thought.

When we were first talking about packaging for teraswhey, I had an image in my head of what I wanted.  It was inspired by a product I bought in London that was a series of cubes in a sleeve, each cube being a type of chocolate from another part of the world.  One side of the cube was white and had a picture of the particular single cacao bean on it.  It was so simply dramatic and seemed to align with the products I was making – clean, naturally formulated, few ingredients.

So we decided to include among a wide range of design approaches one that was white with nothing but a glamour shot of the relevant fruit or flavor on the front.  It was a radically different approach to packaging a protein product.  The industry has made whey protein, something that has been consumed as a medicinal food for centuries, into a scientifically re-engineered agglomeration, and as a result, the packaging has to list a plethora of data and claims and certifications about contents and manufacturing processes.  Alternatively, the body building community creates brands whose fundamental personality is physical power and narcissism:  pictures of guys with six packs and women with biceps and bulging veins in their arms.  My packaging designer, a person who I’ve worked with forever and trust implicitly, kept telling me that fruit pictures was a risky approach; my sales experts kept asking for more copy.  And what was this poem thing? It didn’t even line up…

In the end I decided to stick to my vision and my impossible to explain gut and create packaging that was beautiful and emotionally compelling in its simplicity.  The reception in the market has been phenomenal; everyone loves it and can’t explain why, which was my goal.

When I do events, 95% of men who buy something choose a berry over chocolate and vanilla.  95% of women do the opposite.  I told this to a male medical doctor and he laughed, lined up my berry canisters, and told me that when men look at my berry packaging, the primitive part of their brains are thinking its time to eat, hunt, or have sex.

Who knew berries were so sexy???