chris

chris.bair

About Chris

Chris Bair is a technology and computer geek. He became involved in the nutritionally complete "future foods" movement in January 2014, originally with a conventional recipe and later switching to a high fat, low carb "ketogenic" variant on October 2014. In January 2015 he created the recipe for Keto Chow and released it without restriction for anyone to use, at the same time he began mixing the recipe up for people that wanted a finished product and has seen steady growth in the business every month since.

? Flavor of the week: Get 20% off the Natural Strawberry Keto Chow 21 meal packs Mar 16-19

 

Please note: due to high demand during this sale, we are currently sold out of Natural Strawberry! We are now offering 20% off of Root Beer Keto Chow until Sunday, March 22.

March 20, you can get 20% off the 21 meal “week” size of the Natural Strawberry Keto Chow. Normally, the Natural Strawberry is $70 for 21 meals, this week it’s discounted down to $56.00 – that’s only $2.66 a meal! Check out the flavor reviews of Natural Strawberry. Natural Strawberry differs from most of the sweet flavors of Keto Chow in that we use Monk Fruit (a “natural” sweetener) to sweeten it. It’s a way for us to gauge the actual market for Keto Chow using something besides 0.08g of pure sucralose as the sweetener. It doesn’t taste exactly the same as the sucralose-sweetened Keto Chow, but it gives those that can’t have, or don’t like the idea of, sucralose an opportunity to use a convenient and customizable complete meal replacement.

We sometimes get asked: “what can I do with Keto Chow besides make shakes?” The best place to start is our Keto Chow Recipes page, here are some of the recipes that can use Natural Strawberry Keto Chow:

You should check out the reviews of Keto Chow, we also get a lot of reviews on our Facebook page and on the Keto Chow subreddit. It should be noted that we publish all of the reviews that come in – bad or good – as they are, typos intact. The only ones we remove are spam posts from people wanting you to buy pills to “enhance performance” and such or reviews that divulge personal information. These are just a few of the over 100 real reviews we received in the last week

By |2020-03-20T13:11:46-06:00March 16th, 2020|Categories: Keto Chow|Tags: , |0 Comments

Live Stream recording from Mar 10, 2020

This entry is part 8 of 37 in the series Live Streams

Every week we do a live broadcast where we answer questions, talk about fun stuff, and more! Starting in January 2020, we switched to a new platform where we can broadcast to YouTube and Facebook at the same time. It’s pretty cool, actually. You can find the stream on YouTube or Facebook

We talked about:

  • The Keto Chow flavor of the week is Tomato Basil. It’s 10% off until Monday morning.
  • Chocolate is back in stock, call off the mobs!
  • Our California meet up went really well. We met some awesome people and had some great discussions.
  • This week we are heading to Denver for Low Carb Denver – it runs March 12-15. They still have live stream access for sale if you can’t make it in person at https://lowcarbconferences.com/
  • Next week Holly and Steve of Keto Chow will be doing a road trip with small Keto meet-ups along the way. Stops will be in Idaho Falls (Mar 17), Butte (Mar 17), Billings (Mar 18), Bismarck (Mar 18), Rapid City (Mar 20), and near Mt. Rushmore (Mar 20). More details in the Keto Chow Facebook Support Group and the Keto Chow Instagram account.
  • Why don’t we have smaller packages
  • What is the shelf-life of Keto Chow? We actually had laboratory testing done, and it has a “best by” date of 2 years from manufacturing, though it can last longer depending on the application. Makes it great for the zombie apocalypse.
  • Does 1 sample pack of keto chow = 1 scoop?
  • Using different fats, heavy cream vs butter vs avocado oil
  • What do you do if you get bits of solidified fat in your shake?
By |2020-05-19T13:51:36-06:00March 11th, 2020|Categories: Keto Chow|Tags: , , , |0 Comments

Results of accelerated 2 year shelf life testing (passed)

Several months ago, the place that packages our samples (and puts a “best before” date on the packages) asked us to get them a report to corroborate the 2-year shelf life claim. So I did. The results came back today. It was conducted as an accelerated test with high humidity and temperature. They checked for changes in the water activity, moisture; total bacteria, yeast, and mold populations. They also did an organoleptic to check that the color, texture, odor, and taste were unaffected – as a powder and mixed with water.

The short version is: they agree that a claim of a 2-year shelf life is acceptable for the product.

So what does that mean for you? The date we have stamped on the packages should represent the date it should last until with no discernable change in taste – and it’ll likely be absolutely fine even MUCH longer than that. The packaging we are using has an extremely good oxygen barrier and likely lasts a REALLY long time before you’re going to see any degradation in the flavor or the protein. You will, however, see degradation in many of the vitamins once you get really far out past the “best by” date. If you intend to use Keto Chow for ALL of your meals for several weeks, I would not recommend using “expired” product. If you’re using it once or twice a day, you are unlikely to experience adverse effects or deficiencies.

Planning on stocking up on some non-perishable food? Along with many of the suggestions you’ll find in a recent blog post by Dr. Adam Nally, he says:

… this has been a wonderful and needed addition to our food storage.  Simply adding water, avocado oil, butter or cream to the KetoChow powder creates and instant, and very healthy ketogenic meal

Apparently, you should also take up bow hunting.

Discussion: The water activities of the products are so low that they do not support the growth of microorganisms. However, the products are not sterile as some bacterial populations existed, possibly spore formers. For item 1, microbiological populations hovered around detection limits (100 CFU/g) for the course of the study with 1 container having a higher load (2,800 CFU/g on day 597). For item 2, microbiological populations mostly remained below detection limits. No yeast or molds were detected in either product. Overall, the data shows that microbiological populations are extremely low, and the products do not support the growth of microorganisms. The client states that the product should be refrigerated after mixing with water. [the testing lab] agrees with this precaution since the product would be capable of supporting microbiological growth after being added to water. Interestingly, moisture levels increased somewhat in both products [over the course of the test]. Water activity values fell slightly. There were no detectable declines of organoleptic quality observed over the course of the study. [the testing lab] feels the product remained unchanged over the course of the sutyd[sic].

*Recommended Shelf Life: Based upon the analytical and organoleptic data obtained over the course of this shelf life study, it is the opinion of [the testing lab] that a shelf life of 2 years is attainable and acceptable for the product analyzed herein.

By |2020-03-10T15:03:40-06:00March 10th, 2020|Categories: Future Foods, Keto Chow, Keto While Traveling|Tags: , , , , |2 Comments

? Flavor of the week: Get 10% off the Creamy Tomato Basil Keto Chow bulk packs March 9-15

 

Until March 15 you can get 10% off the 21 meal “week” size of the Creamy Tomato Basil Keto Chow. Normally, the Creamy Tomato Basil is $75 for 21 meals, this week it’s discounted down to $67.50 – that’s only $3.21 a meal! You know you want to find some low carb bread, make a grilled cheese sandwich and dip it in some of this. Go for it! Works well with just about every fat we’ve tried including butter, beef tallow, bacon grease, duck fat, heavy cream, avocado oil, and more! 

The Tomato Basil (and the other savory flavors) are NOT the same as the sweet flavors. If all you’ve had of Keto Chow so far are the sweet flavors, you might want to grab a sample before you buy the big bag. It should also be noted that the Creamy Tomato Basil Keto Chow is dairy free, has no sweetener, and is loaded with beef bone broth protein.

We sometimes get asked: “what can I do with Keto Chow besides make soup?” The best place to start is our Keto Chow Recipes page, though you can pretty much stop at the Chaffles recipe: Miriam has been making the Tomato Basil into Chaffles and loving it. Our kids like to use the chaffles made with the Tomato Basil as pizza crusts:

Keto CHow Chaffles as pizza crusts

Here are some of the recipes that use Creamy Tomato Basil Keto Chow:

You should check out the reviews of Keto Chow, we also get a lot of reviews on our Facebook page and on the Keto Chow subreddit. It should be noted that we publish all of the reviews that come in – bad or good – as they are, typos intact. The only ones we remove are spam posts from people wanting you to buy pills to “enhance performance” and such or reviews that divulge personal information. These are just a few of the dozens of real reviews we received in the last week

By |2020-03-10T12:38:05-06:00March 9th, 2020|Categories: Keto Chow|Tags: , |0 Comments

Kinda last minute Meat-Up in Anaheim California this Thursday

Miriam and I (Chris) were headed to California this week for a (now canceled) trade show. Since it’ll cost almost as much to cancel our flights and hotel, we’ve decided to go ahead and fly to California anyway and turn it into an impromptu meet up! If you’re in the LA area, head over to this post on our Facebook page and leave a comment! We’ll be nailing down the time and place once we get enough suggestions.

By |2020-03-03T10:14:57-07:00March 3rd, 2020|Categories: On Tour, Keto Chow, Keto While Traveling|0 Comments

?Flavor of the week: Get 20% off the Root Beer Float Keto Chow bulk packs March 2-8

 

Until March 8, you can get 20% off the 21 meal “week” size of the Rootbeer Float Keto Chow. Normally, the Rootbeer Float is $66 for 21 meals, this week it’s discounted down to $52.80 – that’s only $2.51 a meal!  Check out the flavor reviews of Rootbeer Float.

We sometimes get asked: “what can I do with Keto Chow besides make shakes?” The best place to start is our Keto Chow Recipes page, here are some of the recipes that use Rootbeer Float Keto Chow:

You should check out the reviews of Keto Chow, we also get a lot of reviews on our Facebook page and on the Keto Chow subreddit. It should be noted that we publish all of the reviews that come in – bad or good – as they are, typos intact. The only ones we remove are spam posts from people wanting you to buy pills to “enhance performance” and such or reviews that divulge personal information. These are just a few of the over 100 real reviews we received in the last week

By |2020-03-02T07:57:03-07:00March 2nd, 2020|Categories: Keto Chow|Tags: , |0 Comments

Powdered Fats with Keto Chow and rounding on nutrition labels

This entry is part 66 of 131 in the series Ketogenic Diet

This is a topic I’ve looked at twice before, once with powdered cream from Hooser Hill Farms and once with powdered cream from Anthony’s. I actually was working on a completely different project yesterday and happened upon the product specifications for the specific ingredient that (I believe) is used for Anthony’s Powdered Cream. This represents FAR more accurate information than what I previously had available so I’m going to revisit my earlier post.

This is something that has been asked a lot and will continue to be asked: is there a powdered cream that can be used with Keto Chow? People would like it for the convenience factor of being able to just add water – perfect for hiking or other uses where transporting liquid isn’t an option and you don’t want to have to melt butter for your fat. The issue becomes: whenever you take a liquid and make it into a powder you’re going to be doing 3 things and typically doing a 4th thing:

  1. The volume will be larger for the same number of calories
  2. The mass or weight will be higher for the same number of calories
  3. The cost will be higher for the same number of calories
  4. The number of carbohydrates will be higher for the same number of calories

Now, if the convenience of having a “just add water” mix outweighs those factors, you have a winner. Otherwise, there is some analysis to be done. Let’s do some comparisons! When doing these comparisons I’m going to make use of the nutrition specifications I found that are FAR more accurate than what is shown on a nutrition facts panel. The panels will tell you the ROUNDED number per serving which is something like a tablespoon or an ounce – the specifications will tell you the typical values per 100g or what percent they are. The USDA common foods database also has these 100g values and are accurate to 1 decimal or better.

product cost grams calories/100g carbs/100g carbs per calorie carbs 1500 Cal $ per 1500 Cal nutrition specs
Sweet Cream Powder $14.99 454 744.3 12.8 0.017 25.796 $6.65 specs
Butter Powder $12.99 454 698.7 7.7 0.011 16.530 $6.14 specs
Liquid Heavy Cream $3.98 952 340 2.84 0.0084 12.529 $1.84 specs
Regular Butter $9.46 1816 717 0.06 0.000084 0.126 $1.09 specs

The nutrition label for all 4 of these products show 0g of carbs per serving because anything under 0.5 gets rounded down to 0 or “less than 1g” The problem with that rounding is that we’re not talking about using a 1 tablespoon (6g) serving of the powdered cream, we’re talking about potentially using 200g over a day to reach 1800 calories (300 from keto chow, 1500 from the fat) for 3 meals. “Where’s the powdered OIL?” you say. That’s another issue entirely: it’s relatively easy to find powdered MCT oil, but few other oils are powdered on anything suitable for a keto diet. Most oils are combined with maltodextrin (starch) to make them a powder, which is not suitable at ALL for a keto diet. MCT might be on maltodextrin, or they could use one of the suitable media: acacia gum, soluble corn fiber, or casein protein; the first two add total carbs as fiber. The REAL problem for MCT oil is: using powdered MCT oil for a significant percentage of your daily calories is not something I would recommend trying (it’ll jack up your HDL and triglycerides and will not be nice to your bowels).

Now: few people are using Keto Chow 3 meals a day for all their meals, and your specific calories might be higher or lower (I figured 1500 made the math easy). 1/3 of the 25.8 carbs you’d get from the powdered cream, plus the carbs from Keto Chow (depending on flavor) would have you around 9.3g of non-fiber (net) carbs in each meal. Does 9.3g for a meal fit into YOUR carb budget for the day? If you’re backpacking and otherwise exercising it might be perfect! If not… maybe not. The powdered versions are FAR more expensive, that is for sure (3.6x for the cream, 5.6x for the butter)!

So again: does the convenience of having a powdered fat outweigh the costs? That’s for YOU to decide =)

 

By |2021-04-09T10:38:42-06:00February 28th, 2020|Categories: Ketogenic Diet, Keto Chow|Tags: , , , |0 Comments

Live Stream recording from Feb 26, 2020 with Keto Konduct

This entry is part 7 of 37 in the series Live Streams

Every week we do a live broadcast where we answer questions, talk about fun stuff, and more! Starting in January 2020, we switched to a new platform where we can broadcast to YouTube and Facebook at the same time. It’s pretty cool, actually. You can find the stream on YouTube or Facebook.

This week we had our friends Sandra and Roy from KetoKonduct stop by to be guests on our stream. We talked about:

  • The Keto Chow flavor of the week is the Taco Soup Base, it is 10% off until Monday morning.
  • Get Fit February is nearly finished! Has anyone been doing the movement of the day?
  • We have Roy and Sandra here from @ketokonduct
  • Roy and Sandra talked about their story, Sandra told us some awesome stuff about body image – Roy’s just awesome =)
  • Miriam and Chris did a 72 hour fast last week and a 36 hour fast yesterday (which turned into a 40 hour fast) both went well.
  • We will be heading to Denver for Low Carb Denver March 12-15.
  • Holly and Steve will be doing a Road Trip with small Keto meet-ups along the way. Stops will be in Idaho Falls (Mar 17), Butte or Bozeman (Mar 17), Miles City (Mar 18), Bismarck (Mar 18), and near Mt. Rushmore (Mar 20). More details in the Keto Chow Facebook Support Group.

By |2020-05-19T13:51:20-06:00February 26th, 2020|Categories: Keto Chow|Tags: , , , |0 Comments

?Flavor of the week: Get 10% off the Spicy Taco Base Keto Chow bulk packs Feb 24 – Mar 1

 

Until March 1 you can get 10% off the 21 meal “week” size of the Spicy Taco Soup Base Keto Chow. Normally, the Spicy Taco Soup Base is $72 for 21 meals, this week it’s discounted down to $64.80 – that’s only $3.09 a meal! Works well with just about every fat we’ve tried including butter, beef tallow, bacon grease, duck fat, heavy cream, avocado oil, and more! By the way, we call it a “soup base” because we’re anticipating that people will want to add other ingredients: cheese, ground beef, maybe some avocados.

The Spicy Taco Soup Base (and the other savory flavors) are NOT the same as the sweet flavors. If all you’ve had of Keto Chow so far are the sweet flavors, you might want to grab a sample before you buy the big bag. It should also be noted that the Spicy Taco Base Keto Chow is dairy free, has no sweetener, and is loaded with beef bone broth protein.

We sometimes get asked: “what can I do with Keto Chow besides make soup?” The best place to start is our Keto Chow Recipes page. Here are some of the recipes that use Spicy Taco Soup Base Keto Chow:

You should check out the reviews of Keto Chow, we also get a lot of reviews on our Facebook page and on the Keto Chow subreddit. It should be noted that we publish all of the reviews that come in – bad or good – as they are, typos intact. The only ones we remove are spam posts from people wanting you to buy pills to “enhance performance” and such or reviews that divulge personal information. These are just a few of the dozens of real reviews we received in the last week

By |2020-02-24T05:23:55-07:00February 24th, 2020|Categories: Keto Chow|Tags: , |0 Comments

Pardon our dust – we’re doing a massive update to the shopping cart!

The shopping cart has been having problems of late, you’ll select a flavor, try to add it to the cart, and you get an error. It sucks.

The problem is with the “theme” we are using for the cart – but the developer (who has been very nice and eager to be paid to fix problems) has suddenly decided that: nope, not his problem. So… today I’m switching themes.

That means that a lot of the store is going to be pretty janky for a few hours (or days) as I get all the functionality moved into the new theme. The result should be a lot cleaner and also will be more betterer for mobile users (which account for around 75% of the visitors to the site).

So – if the site looks weird and stuff isn’t where you think it should be: just wait for a bit, I should have it sorted out soon.

In the mean-time, did you know I added zip-up hoodies to the “shirts and gear” page? they’re REALLY nice, bought one myself and Keto Chow made a whole $0.07 on the transaction.

By |2020-02-22T08:17:47-07:00February 22nd, 2020|Categories: Uncategorized|Tags: , , , , |0 Comments