The Innovation Fund is a four-week crowdfunding competition that gives VFA Fellows the opportunity to launch their business ideas and projects. Nine Fellow-led teams are off to the races sharing their new ventures with the world and hustling to raise as much money as possible on Indiegogo between now and March 16th.
2013 Fellow Astrid Schanz-Garbassi has teamed up with Hilary Cunningham and Nick Jasset to create Phi Bar, an energy bar designed to help you rethink the way you eat, and refuel during less active parts of your day. Read more about their project below and visit their Indiegogo page if you’d like to support them!
By Astrid Schanz-Garbassi
As Venture for America Fellows, we’re encouraged to challenge paradigms. Our very entrance into the program is such an acknowledgment; we value critical thinking in the face of tradition. One paradigm that’s always stuck out to me as ripe for improvement is the way we (Americans) learn, transmit, and interpret health and nutritional wisdom. How did we decide that low-fat diets are healthy? That “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”? That it was sensible to eat muffins for breakfast but not chocolate cake? That it was reasonable to eat 6-11 servings of grains each day? The more I read about these questions, the more I realized the scientific community wasn’t providing the answers. Our parents, the media and the USDA seemed to be the main sources of information, and two of those three were being largely influenced by massive corporations and lobbyists with vetted interests in getting more of a certain food—wheat, corn, soy—on our tables. (Depending on who your parents are, perhaps three of three…)
I began to search for actual scientific validation behind mainstream nutritional dogma. It turns out there’s shockingly little. Our obsession with cholesterol and our conviction that it caused heart disease was actually not well-founded, and has been debunked time and time again, my favorite compilation is this excellent history of cholesterol research. The notion that dietary fat makes us fat has come into question multiple times over the course of the past couple of years, with physicians, nutritionists and investigative journalists all raising excellent critical points. Even the ubiquitously accepted idea of calories in calories out has compelling arguments against it.
I won’t explore the myriad arguments for these points here; Dr. Peter Attia, Gary Taubes, and Dr. Paul Jaminet have already made eloquent and exhaustive cases for these ideas.
After reading the logical and impossible-to-ignore attacks on the fallacies of the modern diet recommended by the USDA, I was infuriated that this dietary advice was creeping into the everyday food choices that were available to me. Most often, I was cornered into making these choices when I was on the go, unable to cook, and had to reach for something convenient: an energy bar.
Most energy bars are made with a nutritional profile in line with the “low-fat” label that is now so closely linked with health, or with a profile well-suited for pre or post exercise consumption. Consequently, these bars are packed with protein, glycogen-building carbohydrates, and sugars.
But as it turns out, I am not often spending the majority of my day summiting peaks—I’m actually sitting. In an office, on public transportation, or at social events. As it turns out, staying fit during less active times requires a drastically different dietetic paradigm—one that involves higher fat foods.
It turns out I wasn’t alone—which is how Phi was born. A nutritional science graduate student, a health nut, and a frustrated office dweller came together to create an energy bar with a macronutrient profile that rejects “conventional” dietary wisdom and embraces that nutrition is situational.
We cut out the sugar, brought protein to liver-safe levels, and swapped the high-carb content for healthy fats from nuts. Better yet, we do this without the use of scary sounding chemicals – in fact, our bars are compatible with vegan and paleo diets.
This bar feels like a first step towards beginning a conversation about reevaluating the way we think about what we eat, when we eat it, and why. Lets not let shoddy science, powerful corporate lobbies, and a fractured American food culture define the next generation of eating. We hope that you’ll join the conversation: check out our Indiegogo campaign to learn more about what we’re building at Phi Bar.