SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH – December 4, 2017 – As the nation prepares for the holiday season, with holiday treats, eggnog, hot cocoa, and more; inventor and entrepreneur Chris Bair decided to perform a nutrition experiment on himself by consuming a meal replacement shake he invented for 4 weeks without any other food and publishing the results. He explains: “Well, I have a lot of people that are skeptical. They think you have to chew, or you’ll die. You have to eat 200 grams of carbohydrates a day, or you’ll die. You can’t have saturated fat or cholesterol, or you’ll die. I wanted to get some nice data to prove a point – and hey, I didn’t die!”
3 years ago, Bair was technically “Obese” by C.D.C. definition and had “Metabolic Syndrome”. He decided to begin a ketogenic diet – which turns conventional wisdom on its head. Instead of whole grains, pasta, and fruit; you primarily eat healthy fats like avocados, coconut oil, butter, and olive oil with generous amounts of cheese, fatty meats, and green vegetables. “People get pretty excited when they hear that butter, bacon, eggs, and sausage are suggested foods on the keto diet. It’s a bit like ‘Atkins’ – but with science!” Bair says. The “ketogenic” diet, also known simply as “keto”, is gaining in popularity and making news with popular figures like Kim Kardashian, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Halle Berry, and with a recent feature on “Good Morning America.” Within a year of starting the ketogenic diet Bair was, as he puts it, “77% the man I used to be.” Bair emphasizes that the keto way of eating isn’t something temporary you do for a while and then stop: “you can’t expect to go back to eating what made you get fat and have it not make you fat again. To be effective it has to become your lifestyle, likely permanently. You decide not to eat potatoes, rice or bread; but the foods you can eat are fantastic! One of my favorites is a pizza where the crust is made from cheese, almond flour, eggs, and cream cheese with all the toppings you’d expect.”
One of the issues people trying a ketogenic diet face is figuring out how to manage the quick on-the-go meals and limit carbohydrates while getting all the nutrients necessary. Situations like: breakfast on the run, lunch during a meeting, or dinner after a long shift. Soon after starting his own keto journey, Bair invented a recipe for a product to help users get complete keto nutrition easily. He says: “It’s named ‘Keto Chow’ – it’s a bit of a play on words from a TV show where there’s a product called ‘Bachelor Chow’ – a complete staple food you can eat for any and all meals, that’s Keto Chow and it tastes fantastic!” That original recipe is still available on Bair’s website: old.ketochow.xyz and many thousands of people use it to make their own Keto Chow at home. Not everyone wanted to buy all the powdered ingredients and mix it themselves so Bair started selling it pre-packaged, ready to mix with water and heavy cream or avocado oil. All of the mixing and packaging is currently done in a GMP certified and FDA inspected facility in Orem, Utah and is shipped out of the Keto Chow warehouse in South Jordan, Utah.
As a product that’s designed to be complete nutrition for the Keto diet, Bair recently decided to do an experiment where was going to live solely on his invention for 4 weeks while getting weekly blood tests to monitor his health. “Well it’s one thing to say a product is nutritionally complete, it’s another thing entirely to have enough confidence in your own product to live off it exclusively. There are a lot of ‘meal replacement’ shakes being marketed for Keto, but most are a 200 calorie ‘snack’ that, frankly, doesn’t measure up to the nutrition of simply eating a handful of string cheese sticks” Bair exclaims. To keep the data clean, Bair didn’t even chew sugar-free gum or drink diet soda during the 4 week experiment: “I hadn’t chewed any food or anything else for almost a month, that first family meal after the experiment ended was kinda weird actually – I kept getting keto lasagna stuck in my teeth which I wasn’t used to feeling anymore!”
On his blog, Bair chronicled the experience with regular updates, complete blood test results, and his daily food log. He explained the reasoning: “I wanted it to all be open and accessible to everyone to see – if you want to see what consuming only Keto Chow with loads of saturated fat did to my insulin levels, my glucose, my LDL cholesterol, my iron? It’s all there.” Along with the favorable blood test results, Bair reports that during the course of the 4-week experiment, he lost slightly more than 14 lbs. Bair asked world-renowned “Bio-Hacker” Dave Feldman for his take on the results of the experiment, Feldman said: “Chris has pretty good labs overall. Great general metrics found in his CMP and CBC, low inflammation and generally good lipids. Naturally, I focused quite a bit on the lipids. So I was particularly fascinated at how consistent all of his numbers were with regard to LDL, HDL, and triglycerides […] All in all, this turned out to be an excellent experiment-within-the-experiment.”
Along with people wanting to try simplifying meals on a keto diet, Bair also thinks his product has applications for weight loss clinics wanting something to help their patients, along with the potential for use in scientific research: “It tastes like melted ice cream so getting people to drink it isn’t a problem and it’s easy to prepare, the bigger problem will be the meals that are not Keto Chow, frankly. The applications for research are pretty exciting: to do true science you need it to have a control group and clinicians that don’t know which group is getting the ‘intervention’. This is actually possible with Keto Chow!”
Bair was quick to point out that most people using Keto Chow do not have it for all their meals like he did: “Even I don’t typically do it for all 3, usually I do breakfast and lunch as Keto Chow and fantastic keto food for dinner with my family. It’s not here to replace your bacon or prime rib, it’s for your ‘oh no, I forgot breakfast’ or ‘how can I stay keto while traveling?’ meals.”
About Keto Chow
Keto Chow started in January 2015. The founder, Chris Bair, is a computer system engineer that stumbled into the world of health and nutrition seeking to improve his own health – after finding that path, he’s determined to help others succeed in Keto as easily as possible. Keto Chow LLC operates out of a warehouse in South Jordan, Utah with around 10 part-time employees that help ship out orders to customers around the world. The mix for Keto Chow comes in two sizes: a single meal sample and a larger 21 meal bag. It is currently available in 8 flavors: Chocolate, Vanilla, Salted Caramel, Chocolate Peanut Butter, Cookies & Cream, Strawberry, Mocha, and Banana with other new flavors coming in 2018. Preparation is simple with heavy cream and/or avocado oil and water allowing users to make a complete keto meal in a matter of seconds that can be stored for several days until needed. More information about Keto Chow, along with details from Bair’s experiment, can be found on the website https://old.ketochow.xyz/experiment-results/. You can also connect with Keto Chow on social media via @ketochow.
