Food as Medicine, with Trifecta's Greg Connolly

Announcer:

Hi, Thorne Podcast listeners! This year, we’re celebrating our fifth season. As we prepare new and exciting conversations on the latest topics in healthy aging, sports performance, and the future of wellness, we’d like to hear your thoughts about the show and any ideas you’d like to see explored on future episodes. You can fill out a short survey by visiting thorne.health/pod. As a thank you for your feedback, you’ll be entered into a drawing for a $50 Visa gift card. We’ll select two winners each week until the survey ends. Got to Thorne.health/pod for your chance to win and to get your voice heard. That’s T-H-O-R-N-E dot health slash pod.

Dr. Robert Rountree (INTRO):

This is The Thorne Podcast, the show that navigates the complex world of wellness and explores the latest science behind diet, supplements, and lifestyle approaches to good health. I'm Dr. Robert Rountree, Chief Medical Advisor at Thorne and functional medicine doctor.

As a reminder, the recommendations made in this podcast are the recommendations of the individuals who express them and not the recommendations of Thorne. The statements in this podcast have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Any products mentioned are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

--

Hi, everyone, and welcome to The Thorne Podcast. Joining me this week is Greg Connolly; he is the founder and CEO of Trifecta, a subscription-based meal delivery service with the mission of transforming people's health through fully cooked and personalized meals delivered by Trifecta. Greg, welcome to the show. How about you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. Where are you? And how did you get there? And how did you develop this company?

Greg Connolly:

Yep, absolutely. Thanks for having me on the show. Trifecta at this point is 8 years old, so a little over 8 years old. I got into this business largely because I was building software companies, and after having sold one in 2010, I really wanted to start a mission-driven business. And my wife happens to be an MD, and she and I were just talking about some of the bigger problems in the world.

One of the next big ones up on the list was chronic disease. It's now the No. 1 killer in 198 countries worldwide. It's a cause of more than 70 percent of our health-care costs in the United States. So I think there's a lot of political debate around the rising cost of health-care and how we can solve that problem. And it is the leading killer in the United States as well. So over 300,000 people in the U.S. will die this year because of chronic disease caused by diet. Countless more will have, what we all learned from COVID, which is as I'm sure you know well, comorbidities that cause them to have worse outcomes with other problems that they have.

So that was really the thesis behind Trifecta, is rethink the food supply chain. If you go to a grocery store, you're tempted by the doughnut aisle, just as much as you are by the chicken and broccoli you might see on the shelves. And with Trifecta, we exclusively sell healthy food, so it allows us to simplify the cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, planning, all of the challenges that go into eating healthy for Americans. Because, as I'm sure you guys have discussed on the show before, eating healthy is not just about education, etc. It's a logistical challenge. It's one of the more difficult things to do in the United States, and that's a big part of the focus of the business, is to make it as easy as possible for people. So yeah, that's the backstory. And eight years in, we've sold almost half a billion dollars’ worth of food.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Whoa.

Greg Connolly:

We ship to all 50 states, and we're one of the largest players in the industry.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Wow. Well, here's a question to start with. Why do people eat such crappy food? [Laughs]

Greg Connolly:

Nice.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

What are the reasons? Is it unawareness? Is it availability? Is it food deserts? Obviously, you're trying to address that very issue. Why don't people eat healthier?

Greg Connolly:

I think it's a great question and something we've obviously pondered for a long time. I think there's several reasons. One is, as I'm sure you know, is education. I think there are a huge number of Americans that don't realize that that Starbucks Frappuccino they're drinking first thing in the morning is 600 calories.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

And all sugar.

Greg Connolly:

And all sugar. I joke that Starbucks is the largest milkshake vendor in the world. So I think a big part of it is education, what goes into actually eating healthy. I think in economies like this one, a big part of it is also stress. People oftentimes reward themselves at the end of the day or end of a hard shift, etc., with food. And that can be going to In-N-Out or Five Guys or having some dessert or whatever in particular it is.

I think a big part of it is the convenience of healthy eating as well. Prior to launching Trifecta, I was someone who had gained a lot of weight. And I lost a lot of weight by meal prepping. And good God, was it a miserable experience! Prior to the meal delivery services hitting the scene in 2011 was when the first one hit the market. You're going to a grocery store, you're buying chicken and broccoli probably, maybe some rice if you're feeling creative. And by Wednesday or Thursday, you're choking it down. It's a miserable experience.

And it's hard for people to consistently, inexpensively systematize their diet. And that's when you see people have profound results, is when they get a system in place so that eating healthy is the easiest option available to them. So as I mentioned earlier, that was really the thesis behind Trifecta is we're the easy button on the Internet. You just go to the website, buy meal prep, and it gets shipped directly to your house, fully cooked. You don't have to think about the macros and calories and following a particular diet type like keto or Mediterranean or anything else. We do all the thinking, cooking, cleaning, planning, shipping, all of that for people, so that all they have to do is put the food in their mouth after they've reheated it for a couple minutes. And they can get in the best shape of their life, no matter their age, their health-care condition, etc.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

So I'm hearing that you see three big obstacles for people doing a better job with their diet. The No. 1 is just the lack of information about what's good for you. And people are bombarded with all kinds of nutrition advice, so that's one problem.

Another one is the work that it takes to prepare meals. And I know for us, my wife and I are super busy, and then it comes 8 o’clock at night and then we go, "What's for dinner? Oh, I thought you had planned it." Right? "I thought... Wait a minute, what were you thinking we were going to have for dinner?" "No, I thought you were planning it." So you get tired and you don't want to do the effort. So it's really easy to go pick up some fast food.

And then, No. 3 is the long-term planning is like, OK, not just planning for the evening, not on the spot and going, "What are we going to eat now?" But "What are we going to do this whole week?" We have that discussion on Sunday, "Well, what are we going to do all week?" And I just think, "Oh my God, I've already got a headache. I've got to think Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I've got this whole week I've got to plan out." So that's like triple the effort. And you're saying that you can do all that for people.

Greg Connolly:

Absolutely.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

You're going to do the heavy lifting.

Greg Connolly:

Yeah. The analogy I give people is you've got to think of your body as like a house or a project. You would never build a house without a blueprint. You would never go into it without a plan, a strategy, all the materials you need, etc. And we really try and provide that blueprint for people so that they can get the information that they need. 

Evidence-based nutrition, I think that's part of… You mentioned getting bombarded by nutrition information. I think that's one of the big challenges, is you've got all this conflicting information coming at you. You've got MDs and PhDs and RDs telling you to eat nothing but meat. You've got other ones telling you to eat nothing but veggies.

And in reality, for most people, it's not that you're eating nothing but meat or nothing but veggies that leads to these better health outcomes. It's that they've stopped eating so much processed food. They're now eating whole foods consistently, and that's why we don't prescribe to any particular diet dogma. You can get healthy eating keto, you can get healthy eating paleo, Mediterranean, vegan. There's lots of different options out there, and we give people lots of options to choose from. 

People ask us, "What's the best diet out there?" And we tell them, "The one that they're going to stick to." [Laughs]

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Uh-huh. Yeah.

Greg Connolly:

It's not a particular diet dogma. It's about eating the right amount of calories, the right amount of macros, whole foods, etc. And we give them lots of options to choose from so they can follow whatever particular program or plan that they've decided to follow.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Just a wild guess, what percentage of people in this country would you say build their diet mostly around processed food?

Greg Connolly:

An enormous percent.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

An enormous percent.

Greg Connolly:

I don't think they're... Over 70 percent.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

70 percent? Wow.

Greg Connolly:

I don't think they're planning. I think it's exactly what you said earlier with you and your wife. The convenience of processed food is unbelievable. It's in vending machines, it's in Office Max, it's in every store everywhere. And it's highly convenient to say, "Oh, I'm just going to grab a bag of chips or order something via takeout" or whatever the situation is. There are lots of ways to get processed food very easily.

So I think the convenience of processed food plays a huge factor in how often people eat it. I think it's not that they're planning their diet around processed food, it's that they're not planning their diet, and therefore they eat whatever is most convenient, which makes psychological sense. Humans evolutionarily are lazy. We want to eat the berries or whatever is right in front of us type thing.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Yep, yep.

Greg Connolly:

And we end up grabbing what's convenient. I'm the CEO and founder of a giant meal prep company, and I'll still be tempted by, if I'm at a restaurant and they've got a burger and fries, I could be going, "Wow, that sure looks good."

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Yeah. "Yum."

Greg Connolly:

Every time you look at a menu, you're sitting there fighting that battle in your head for 30 seconds before you decide to get a chicken and salad or a burger and fries. That's the interesting question to me, is why when people know they should eat the chicken and broccoli, do they still choose the burger and fries off of the menu?

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Well, there was an article in The New York Times recently that was talking about the chemistry of French fries and how the big food companies have got it figured out so that those French fries, when they hit your mouth, especially from let's just say a big company that starts with an M, that they've figured out that the minute that fry hits your tongue, it starts to melt and release all these flavors. So they've got this food chemistry thing figured out to make it actually addictive.

Greg Connolly:

Yep. And for me, French fries are definitely my Achilles heel.

I'm not a sweet-sugar person. I'm a savory person. I'll take a burger and fries over anything else any day. And yeah, I think you're right. There is an incredible combination people get with a French fry that it's salty, it's savory, it's high in fat, obviously it's high in carbs. It's an absolutely delicious food, but it's about one of the worst things you could conceivably put in your body from a diet standpoint. 

So we preach 80/20 rule ourselves. We say, "Hey, if you're eating healthy food at least 80 percent of the time, knock yourself out and get those French fries on a Saturday night" type thing.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Go ahead and do it.

Greg Connolly:

Yep. As long as the majority of your diet is consistently healthy, you can get away with having some fun meals that are a little bit off the beaten path when it comes to healthy food.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

So here's a question for you about how you prepare your meals, which is that there's been a discussion in the school systems for years about, “How do we get kids to eat more vegetables for lunch?” And the pushback is always, "Well, the kids won't eat it. If you serve the chicken and broccoli, the kids won't eat it. If we serve a burger and fries, then at least we know they'll eat something."

So the argument gets back to taste preference. How do you deal with taste preference? So it's one thing to say, "We've got healthy food. It's not processed, and that's what you should eat." If you want return business, which I assume you have it because your business is very successful. So how do you get return business? How do you deal with the flavor issue and making it compelling, whether it's keto or Mediterranean or whatever? You've got to cater to a lot of people's tastes.

Greg Connolly:

Yep, absolutely. It's one of the big challenges we face. You're really looking to hit the Venn intersection of perfect macros, a particular diet type that the person is following, and then taste. And without taste, you're absolutely right, people will not eat it. If you want my opinion, since this is a podcast on how we solve it.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

You can say anything you want.

Greg Connolly:

Yep. And how we solve it at a society level, I'm going through this with my son right now where we've completely bypassed kids' menus. Every restaurant we go to essentially worldwide, I was amazed even in Mexico or Costa Rica or French Polynesia or Europe, they've got a kid's menu that largely consists of hamburger and fries, spaghetti, pizza, chicken nuggets, and usually one additional wild card depending on where you are. But for the most part, it's that, those four horsemen of the apocalypse.

And you end up with really picky kids because you've fed them French fries and pizza for their childhood. That's largely what happened to me. My parents were both electrical engineers, amazing, hardworking people. But just like you mentioned with you and your wife, they'd get off work and pick us up from sports practice and boom, it's 7:00 p.m., so we'd hit Taco Bell or Carl's Jr, or whatever it is. That's the food I grew up on, and that's the food I crave because of it.

So I think the long-term solution with our kids is to skip the kids' menu and start feeding them healthy food right out of the gates. My son eats broccoli and all kinds of stuff. It's one of his favorite foods, and it's because that's what he grew up with. That's all he's consistently known since he was born. And I think that's probably the long-term solution.

And then, yeah, to answer your question about schools and what we do, I think you have to make it taste good. So use things that taste good like fat-free cheeses or the popular trendy thing in social media right now is using things like fat-free cottage cheese or fat-free Greek yogurt to make cream sauces. So we do that on what we call our Clean Meal Plan, which is essentially the Mediterranean Diet. We loop in these incredible sauces and cheese and various other things, but we do it with fat-free options so that people are eating... Fat-free mozzarella is pretty much pure protein. It has better macros than a protein shake. It's incredible.

So it's not about making it a bad experience. I think you can eat incredibly healthy, tasty food that happens to still have good macros and calories and is made out of whole foods. And it doesn't necessarily have to include dairy. We've got lots of options that don't, but there are ways to make it appealing for kids by making it taste good. You just have to work a little bit harder. And I think most food companies could accomplish that if they put in the effort and didn't take the easy route, which was making the cheapest French fry they possibly could.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

“They possibly could.” And then, I guess the next phase of that is talking to the airline companies, the caterers for the airlines and say, "OK, guys. You've got to ramp up your game." 

And to that end, I guess I'm wondering, do you have a test kitchen or do you have a bunch of chefs where you have a little team meeting every day and you go, "OK, guys, here's a flavor idea. What can you do for me?"

Greg Connolly:

We absolutely do, and we used to go through a process where we would… Our R&D kitchen is actually nine stories below me in this building that I'm in, it's underground, and we have kitchens all over the United States now that actually do the cooking of the food at large scale. But initially, we used to ideate on recipes based on what was hot in the market that we could see at restaurants and other things, and then put them out in the market and see how they did, see what the customer feedback was. Now we actually reverse engineer the process, where we look at our influencers on social media and see which one of their recipes are going viral. And then we... Of course, they're healthy recipe influencers, the ones that we partner with.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Yeah, hopefully.

Greg Connolly:

Yeah. Then we reverse engineer that recipe and turn it into an actual meal that we can produce at scale, and then sell that in the market. And it allows us to get a lot of market feedback on what people want prior to us actually producing it. It's a pretty incredible process, and we're really excited about a lot of the recipes we have coming up. Even next month we've got, I think, 19 new recipes that are going to hit in October, and they're incredible. What we've learned is Americans want comfort food like fried chicken sandwiches and other things, but they want them in a healthy way. And that's absolutely possible. If you take a chicken breast and bread it with egg whites and a little bit of Panko, especially if you do healthy Panko, you can get a fried chicken sandwich with a keto bun that tastes incredible, but has incredible macros and calories. We're looking for high protein, low calorie. That's what the market seems to really want. That combination of four words, high protein, low calorie is what everybody's after, no matter what particular diet that they're following.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Wasn't it Swanson that first introduced the TV dinners, I don't know, that must've been 50 years ago?

Greg Connolly:

Oh, a long, long time ago. And yeah, I would say that is... You watch a lot of the reviews on YouTube, that's a very different thing than I think what you get from meal delivery companies today. We're going to incredible lengths, logistics-wise, in the supply chain to deliver food fresh. That is fresh, fully cooked, vacuum sealed. I've got vacuum sealing machines that do something called vacuum skin pack, and they're half a million dollars each and the size of your living room. We're employing high tech to get people fresh food delivered directly to their door as best as possible.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

So anybody that thinks, "This is just a new variation on Swanson" is going to have a big surprise when they get that first box.

Greg Connolly:

Big, big surprise. Yeah. It's a wildly different thing and it's constantly going through innovation. It's 2023. You've got to think the first company started doing this in 2011. It's not that long ago that fresh meal delivery started. As Jeff Bezos loves to say, "We're still in Day 1 of the internet." There's a lot of innovation coming, and we're just excited to continue to improve the process and the recipes.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Well, one thing I've got to say, having eaten in some huge restaurants in China and Beijing, these restaurants that are like three stories of tables, and I was always marveling at the logistics involved. How do you serve a thousand people at once? So I've got to hand it to you, the logistics of doing this in 50 states, that's got to be a challenge.

Greg Connolly:

Oh, absolutely. Our COO, John Kuehn, has his work cut out for him definitely. But it's about systematizing the supply chain quite a bit. So we're buying proteins, meat, on the commodities futures market in advance so that we can keep prices down. We're doing a lot of, I think, really clever things to optimize the supply chain as best as possible. Because what the customer wants is to click a button on the internet and have a box of healthy food show up at their doorstep. It doesn't matter if they're in Boulder, Colorado; Manhattan; Los Angeles; Miami; even Maui. It's a major convenience that just didn't exist 10 years ago that we can deliver a box anywhere in the United States at that level of speed with fully cooked food. It's a lot of planning, a lot of supply chain logistics, and a lot of chefs cooking over grills to make that much food that quickly every week.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Amazing. So you actually have kitchens all over the country?

Greg Connolly:

Yep. We do, yeah.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Well, otherwise I'm thinking if it goes from Davis, California, to Miami, Florida, it might not be quite as fresh. So you have at least fulfillment centers that are really nearby for most parts of the country.

Greg Connolly:

Yes. That's one of the ways we keep costs down, because you got to imagine, yes, we were shipping from, let's say, California to Miami. There's no way we're going to get it there in 48 hours without using two-day air. So we have to have production kitchens on the East Coast; in the South, we have a big one in Texas; on the West Coast, etc. So we can hit all of the zones through UPS and FedEx in one to two-day ground. Because we put ice packs in the box. It's a temperature-controlled box, but it's got to get there in 24 to 48 hours. It's got to be fast.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Well, I have to say, I'm amazed that you can pull this off.

Greg Connolly:

I appreciate it.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

So what I think we're going to do is take a break. And then, when we come back, we're going to go into some more specific questions that our listeners have asked and we'll have some fun with that.

Greg Connolly:

Sounds great.

– AD BREAK –

Dr. Robert Rountree:

With so many nutritional supplement brands to choose from, it's a challenge to find one to trust. When you choose Thorne, you're not just getting another brand. You're choosing science-backed solutions for your health, each one carefully formulated and manufactured under the highest quality standards in Thorne's own state-of-the-art facilities in the USA. When you choose Thorne, you get the purest, most absorbable nutrients formulated by Thorne, made by Thorne, made for you. Your health is your choice. Discover the choice already made by millions of customers worldwide at Thorne.com. That's T-H-O-R-N-E dot com.

–

And we're back. So now it's time to answer some questions from our community. The first question that comes in this week is from a listener who asks, "I hear a lot about the Mediterranean Diet, often on this podcast. How does that align with the concept you’ve talked about, ‘food is medicine’? Does Trifecta follow that concept, the ‘food is medicine’ concept?”

Greg Connolly:

Yep, absolutely. That is the main purpose of the company, is to provide people with food that results in better health outcomes for them. So the Mediterranean Diet has been around for a long time. It's obviously very popular because of the Blue Zones concept, a lot of centenarians in the Mediterranean, people living to over a hundred years old. Very popular diet in the healthcare world, and it's absolutely one that we recommend. What we call our Clean Meal Plan is largely the Mediterranean Diet. Our Paleo Meal Plan also has a lot of similarities with it as well. But it's based on lean meats, veggies, healthy fats like olive oil and nuts and stuff, so a very healthy diet that we highly recommend. And I think it aligns very strongly with the “food is medicine” concept as long as you do it properly, and that means eating whole foods, watching your calories. 

You can eat too much of anything. You can eat too much chicken, even. It's absolutely possible. So watching the quantities of what you eat along with whatever particular diet program you're following is how you end up with the “food is medicine” concept that leads to better health outcomes.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

I imagine you guys get a lot of olive oil. You probably go through pretty large quantities.

Greg Connolly:

Well, candidly, because of its heat point, we predominantly use avocado oil.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Oh! 

Greg Connolly:

It’s what we use.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

It's an up-and-coming one.

Greg Connolly:

Yeah. Avocado oil is very popular. And yeah, there's obviously a big raging debate around seed oils right now. But avocado oil is one of the most popular and easiest for us to cook with, and it's now widely available in the market. Even in grocery stores, you can usually find it.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

So next question, "I've always been turned off by the cost of meal services. I do a discounted trial, it's great. But then, I cancel because it's going to get too expensive. So why should a person stick with this one past the trial phase?"

Greg Connolly:

I think it all comes down to your goals. If you are a person that is eating a meal delivery service in order to have better health outcomes, going back to the “food is medicine” concept, or maybe you want to get a six pack, maybe you want to be in the best shape of your life. We've got 75-year olds with six packs, and it's because of their diet. It's not because they're running a hundred miles every week, it's because of what they're eating. And it doesn't matter your age, ethnicity, etc., your diet is going to be the core input to your health outcome.

Most meal delivery services these days have meals ranging $14 to $16 per meal. And I think what most consumers don't think about is all the time and money that goes into their normal diet anyway. You're going to the grocery store, driving there, waiting in line. If you're doing meal prep – let's say you go to Costco on Sunday – it's going to be a five-hour Sunday to do your Crockpot or bake or whatever in particular you're doing to prep the food yourself. So you may save a dollar or two per meal, but you're going to spend six, seven hours a week at least preparing that food. So unless you're making $2 per hour, it probably makes more sense for somebody to do a meal delivery service.

Above and beyond that, you're probably going to miss a few meals during the week from your grocery shopping, and you're going to end up doing something like DoorDash. While DoorDash is highly convenient, you're going to pay more than $20 per person for every single meal you buy because of the fees, the delivery, the tip, the tax. All of that is going to be very expensive if you order something through one of those delivery apps.

So ultimately, when you do a side-by-side comparison of a meal delivery service like Trifecta and doing it yourself, most comparisons we've done for people end up being they save money even when they're paying full price with a meal delivery service. 

And on top of that, they have wildly better health outcomes and transform their body because they've systematized their diet. That is the thing that most Americans cannot seem to get, is you are not going to get into the best shape of your life unless you systematize your diet. You have to build it into a habit with a plan. And that's very, very hard to do when you're winging it on your own week over week. Most people convince themselves again and again they're going to do it, but if you look in the mirror and you're not happy with what you see, you should probably consider changing your plan.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

So I hear two take-home messages. One is that time is money, right?

Greg Connolly:

Yep.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Time is money. And then, the kind of corollary of that is do it yourself, DIY, is an illusion, right? That the idea that you're going to save money by doing your own shopping, etc., seems like a good idea. But when it comes to implementation, if you actually add up what's involved, considering that time is money, it's costing you more to do it yourself. And that's just the nature of our society.

Greg Connolly:

Yep. And people take personal responsibility for the waste as well, but they don't think about the dollars behind it. Those veggies you threw away that were in the drawer of death in your refrigerator because you didn't get to them in time.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

The wilted broccoli.

Greg Connolly:

Yeah, the wilted broccoli, because you did order that DoorDash, that's wasted money. You just threw money away. That meat you didn't cook in time that you ended up throwing away because it expired, all of that is waste. And you don't have that with a vacuum-sealed meal delivery service. The meals last for 10 days in the fridge or three months in the freezer. It eliminates a huge percentage of the waste you get from grocery shopping.

So people just haven't done the comparison, they haven't done the math; and therefore, they get fooled into thinking that they're doing it for cheaper, and they get fooled into thinking that they're doing a good job of following their diet. And they fool themselves again and again and again oftentimes for their entire lives. And that's just a critical fallacy in society that we're trying to help people uncover and solve by outsourcing a big part of their nutrition.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

The other thing I'd throw in is that when people tell me, "Hey, what you're recommending is expensive," I would say, "When's the last time you replaced a part on your car?"

Greg Connolly:

Yep.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

You paid for it yourself, like, oh, you had to get a new bumper for your car. That was $5,000 for that new bumper.

Greg Connolly:

Right.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

So sometimes people spend more on their car than their body. So that brings us to a really important question is do doctors actually prescribe food to people who are sick?

Greg Connolly:

They're starting to. So this is one of the exciting things that's begun happening. You saw the big White House conference actually under both of the last administrations, under Trump and under Biden, you saw them really pushing to help integrate food into medicine. There are a lot of very direct studies like readmissions rates into hospitals. If you provide four weeks' worth of meal delivery after somebody's checked out of a hospital, the hospital's readmission rate drops by 25 percent. That's billions of dollars every year in health-care costs saved. That's just one of many examples.

And I think, being married to a physician, I'm sure you've experienced this yourself as well, physicians didn't really have the ability to prescribe food very effectively in the past. My wife used to give people flyers as they would leave the ER. That was what Kaiser recommended they do, saying, "Hey, you have type 2 diabetes, what's next?" And it would recommend the Mediterranean Diet or paleo or different diets they could follow. But then, the patient is going out into a world controlled by McDonald's and Coca-Cola and all these mega-billion dollar brands that are going to put burgers and fries and soda right in front of their face at all times. So she'd see them six months later and they had gained 20 more pounds and their diabetes was even worse.

Now, physicians have the ability to prescribe what's essentially an outpatient nutrition solution like Trifecta. Your physician can say, "Hey, here's a discount code for you to try Trifecta. And they're going to ship all of the food you need to eat to your house.” So it is unbelievable how much nutrition can transform your health, and it all comes down to them systematizing it.

So I'm obviously, as you can tell, very passionate about this topic. But it is one of the coolest things we're seeing now is politics, the hospital system, insurance companies, everybody is leaning into the “food is medicine” concept because they know they cannot sustain these health-care costs much longer. The insurance companies are going to get crippled by the rising costs of chronic disease caused by diet in the United States and worldwide, candidly.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

So hopefully, the day is coming when I can write a prescription for my diabetic patient to get Trifecta specifically, and their insurance company will say, "OK. We'll pay for that because it's cheaper than paying for insulin."

Greg Connolly:

Yes. That is what we've started doing with some of these captive insurance groups. What a captive is, to explain to your audience is, say you have an employer that has 5,000 employees. Instead of using a large insurance company, they'll fund their own insurance program. So they'll take the premiums the employees are paying, put them in a bucket, a bank account, and use that to fund any claims. Well, when we get the anonymized data from their captive, their employees, their patients, it's often multi-millions of dollars cheaper for them to feed everybody in their captive Trifecta than it is for them to keep paying for their prescriptions and their medical visits.

And they give us their data anonymized, we run it through our data science team, and we give them the analysis back and say, "You could save $8.6 million a year and have healthy employees if you just paid the cost of feeding them." And most of them fall out of their chairs. And that's one of the ways we've started to get these insurance captives to shift to a food as medicine policy. Instead of prescribing insulin, they're prescribing the Mediterranean Diet.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Yeah. That's seriously cool. So that kind of leads into what I think is going to be our last question, which is, "How personalized is the Trifecta personalized meal delivery?" Everybody's not going to be eating the same thing. Some people don't do well with beans. "No black bean cakes and broccoli for me." So how much can you personalize it? It sounds like it's highly personalizable.

Greg Connolly:

Absolutely. So you can pick which individual meals you're getting. So if there's a particular ingredient that say you don't like, like broccoli or mushrooms or chicken or something, you can just pick meals that don't have it. On top of that, if you want to really control, most of our meal plans are in general ranges, 400-500 calories per meal, 35-40 grams of protein, etc. And those are really one-size-fits-all. Those are for people that want to push the easy button on the Internet and get a meal plan that’s going to get them into great shape delivered to your door.

If you want to control down to the gram, we can actually offer that to you as well. We have a line on our website called Meal Prep, where you can order protein, veggies, carbs, etc., by weight. And that's one of the coolest things that we offer, is you could order 3 pounds of chicken, 2 pounds of bison, 4 pounds of white rice, and 4 pounds of broccoli. And you can mix and match meals in whatever combination you want by ordering the components by weight. So that's one of the unique things that we do. And all of that food is grilled and sous vide’d to perfection, and you can order it by weight just like you would do in the grocery store.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

I don't think anybody else is offering this, are they?

Greg Connolly:

Not that we know of. It's pretty innovative, and it gives people, some people, especially bodybuilders, CrossFitters, strong men, people that are really competitive in whatever particular sport that they play, oftentimes they want to control things down to the calorie and down to the gram. And we give them that absolute total control so they can customize their meals 100 percent.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Great. Well, this all sounds pretty appealing and makes me very hungry.

Greg Connolly:

I know. We're perfect timing coming up on lunch here.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Yeah. All right, folks. That's all the time we have this week. Greg Connolly, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. If people want to find out about Trifecta or they want to follow you in particular, they want to know what you're thinking and what you're up to, how do people check in?

Greg Connolly:

Easiest way is on social media. Our handles are all @Trifecta on Instagram or any other platform. And mine is my name, @GregConnolly_ on Instagram, if they want to follow along. We've got thousands of blog posts. I do tons of podcasts like this. So just Google "Greg Connolly, Trifecta." We're No. 1 on Google for a whole bunch of different things. And really, the goal is to help America get into the best shape of their lives. And we think that's possible with solutions like Trifecta. So I really appreciate you guys having me on the show. I think it was a great convo, and hopefully we've educated some people on how they can take control of their diet and transform their life.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

And just to be clear, your website itself is trifectanutrition.com, correct?

Greg Connolly:

Correct. You could just Google “Trifecta” and it will still come up No. 1, but yes.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

It'll come up, it'll pop up?

Greg Connolly:

Yeah. The URL is trifectanutrition.com. Yep.

Dr. Robert Rountree:

Terrific. Excellent. Well, as always, thank you everyone for listening. Be sure to tell your friends about our show, and watch your podcast feed to find out when the next episode is coming out. Until next time.

– 

Thanks for listening to The Thorne Podcast. Make sure to never miss an episode by subscribing to the show on your podcast app of choice. If you've got a health or wellness question you'd like answered, simply follow our Instagram and shoot a message to @ThorneHealth. You can also learn more about the topics we discussed by visiting Thorne.com and checking out the latest news, videos, and stories on Thorne's Take 5 Daily blog. Once again, thanks for tuning in, and don't forget to join us next time for another episode of The Thorne Podcast.

–

Announcer:

Thanks again for listening to The Thorne Podcast. If you’d like to share your thoughts on this episode or ideas for future episodes, visit Thorne.health/pod to fill out a quick survey. We’re entering each respondent into a drawing for a $50 Visa gift card. Winners will be notified by email. Again, you can find the survey at T-H-O-R-N-E dot health slash pod. We can’t wait to hear from you!