Performance Cooking with Trifecta's Chef Mario

Intro:

This is the Thorne Podcast – Performance Edition. The show that navigates the complex world of sports science, and explores the latest research in diet, nutritional supplements, and the human body. I’m Joel Totoro, director of sports science at Thorne. As a reminder, 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.

Joel:

Welcome to the Thorne Podcast, Performance Edition. Excited today to have a long-term friend of mine and one of the great people in the industry, performance chef at Trifecta, Mario Limaduran. He's been a long-time colleague, long-time contributor. He's got a joint degree in bachelor's of science in culinary nutrition from Johnson & Wales, which is also one of the premier culinary institutes in America. It's right in my backyard in Providence, so I'm especially fond of it. But he's worked kind of all over performance in starting collegiately with wrestlers at Cornell. He's worked with athletes across all major sports, Olympics, really like I could do about 10 minutes on your intro, but I'm going to keep it short and let you talk a little bit about yourself. But what really focused on it is Mario's got a great perspective on there's, you know, foundational nutrition, there's food first, and then there's cooking for wellness and cooking for performance, and we're gonna kind of dive into a little bit of what's the same and what's different. So, it should be a really packed episode, and Mario, we're really, really excited to have you.

Mario Limaduran:

Joel, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. This is super exciting. I was thinking about this a few days ago and it's kind of like a full circle moment. You know, we started back in Exos 2000, what was it? 17, 18? Maybe even a little bit earlier than that. But, we're back here, different times in our life, but still within the industry. So thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah, and I'm excited. We're launching a partnership together between Thorne and Trifecta. We've been friends for a long time in friendly companies, but in this industry, it's always great to find people who are kind of doing things for the same reason you are. And that's exactly kind of what you're doing things on the Trifecta side. And we're really excited to have you as kind of just knowing what I know about you. It just makes the partnership easier because I know everything I'm thinking you're thinking. So really excited to have you. You've had kind of a unique journey in the culinary world and unique for sure in the nutrition world. Can you talk a little bit about your journey and kind of how you got to where you are now?

Mario Limaduran:

As you mentioned, I got a bachelor's degree from Johnson & Wales University. I got my associate's degree from the North Miami campus and I got my bachelor's degree from the Denver campus and COVID closed both of them. But at the time they offer a culinary nutrition degree, and you could focus one of two routes. You could go either the clinical route or the sports route. And I grew up playing soccer or futbol. I grew up running track. I also played tennis. So I was a very active kid. And sports were sort of always that secret dream of mine. I always wanted to end up in playing some sort of professional sport, but life had different plans for me. Every time I was getting good at something, or at one sport, I either got injured or got injured. Then just focused on the books on the school side. My mom was very, she put a lot of emphasis on education, which essentially is how I ended up here. So I'm very grateful for that. And so after I got my bachelor's degree in culinary nutrition, I got an internship and a one year sort of work job out of college at Cornell University. It was sort of an opportunity that came up while I was taking a class called Performance Cuisine. One of my chef mentors that I adore, and I thank for coaching me and bringing me to this point, his name is Chef Sacks. And he's been a mentor since you know day zero. So Chef's Sachs offered the opportunity and I was the only one that raised his hand and the rest was history. So I went to Cornell and cooked for the Cornell wrestling team and that's how I got introduced to weight sports. And it's not something that young Mario would have ever thought that he was going to become a leader in, but because I started my journey with Cornell and with wrestling, that led me to being able to get to this position today and let me explain it a little bit more. So after that, I went to Exos. where we met. I was there for two years. I worked with combine athletes, with hockey athletes, with collegiate, high school, you know, we get, we used to get everyone and anyone under the sun in any sport at Exos and so that was a great exposure. And then I decided to go back to the restaurant industry and went to a two-star Michelin restaurant called Providence in LA to further my culinary skill set. It was 10 months of absolute grind and then Clint had left Cornell. He became the head of nutrition at the UFC and they were looking for a performance chef but Trifecta and the UFC were just about to sign a partnership and so the way the partnership worked is that Trifecta was going to provide the chef to go and travel and cook for the for UFC athletes throughout the world. So Clint put in a good word in for me with Greg Connolly, who is the founder and CEO of Trifecta. He gave me a call, made an offer, couldn't refuse, and I've been with Trifecta for the last five years. And the first two years were focused on building the culinary nutrition program for the UFC and with the UFC, so I worked with Clint Charles Stoll, who's the other dietician at the Performance Institute, and built that together. And after that partnership ended, the last... three years I've been focused on the commercial aspect of food. It's the same sort of focus on performance, Trifecta essentially is a massive restaurant, right? But I believe that we have the, I don't wanna call it clean because I don't like that word by the most wholesome product in the market because the way we source our ingredients, the quality of the ingredients, the focus on the macronutrients, the focus on how we build the recipes. is essentially how I would focus on building a recipe or working with a dietitian in the UFC or in any other aspect. So that's been the journey. And that's how I've gotten to Trifecta. And it's the same application, but now I'm using that same knowledge to be able to create meals, to apply, and be able to help people fuel their goals.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah, I think that's great and it kind of surprisingly echoes my journey. So I'm kind of right there with you where you start with the foundations and then you have this opportunity you're not expecting and you're like, wait, I don't know what I'm doing. But I know I've got the skills and then you have mentors like Clint Wattenberg, as you mentioned, and that start challenging you. You're like, well, yeah, no, I have the skills to do this. I just I'm looking at the same skill a different way and then continue to grow in athletics. What's kind of your performance philosophy and how does that differ from just... cooking at Providence for just make it taste good, right? How do you change that and make it taste good but work within the body?

Mario Limaduran:

Yeah, so I truly believe that health and flavor, like nutrition, flavorful food, and nutritious food, they go hand in hand. That's like my philosophy. And the general rhetoric, the general dogma, the popular dogma or rhetoric is that in order to lose weight, gain weight, or maybe not so much with maintain weight, but if you're going on a diet, means that you're restricting yourself from all the things that you like from flavor, and that's not the case. So as Chef Mario, my philosophy is that you can have this, you can eat what you like in order to reach your health goals, and it's a lot simpler than what most people think about. That's what really bugs me, and that's like what I'm, as Chef Mario, very passionate to teach and what I've been trying to teach, but it's been interesting to like, I know it, but teaching it is a completely different thing, so I'm in the process of trying to figure out how to simplify what I know so that the general population can understand it. So in a very simple term, my performance philosophy is that both health and nutrition go hand in hand along with flavor. And one is not independent of the other. And I'm super passionate about that.

Joel Totoro:

The educated consumer makes the best choices for themselves. And I always say, everyone has to be the CEO of their own health. So taking the food side into it and understanding like, you know, I'm a dietitian and came up in the world and yeah, the phrase diet has diet is literally just defined as like the food you take in But it has this kind of negative Stigma, but one of the things I've always said is like it's easy to eat healthfully when it tastes good, right? A lot of it is people's just fear and understanding how to get there so really love the mission you're on there to kind of just allow people or just empower people to make those decisions for themselves and you know be able to kind of go off the cuff and create things on their own and see what magic happens. You've worked both in the performance world and in the restaurant world, and I came up through my family in the culinary world. Can you talk a little bit about like, there's a red thread there of teamwork and kind of working together to, I would say, the nutrition and the health and wellness. We're a service industry as well, right? We're trying to create an outcome for the individual we're interacting with. Can you talk about some of the learnings about teamwork that you've either taken from the restaurant world to the performance world, vice versa, or just kind of commonalities? Because I think that's It's hard for anyone to exist in a vacuum.

Mario Limaduran:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, from, you know, we're still dealing with food. So essentially working in restaurants, whether it was, you know, Mexican restaurant was the first restaurant I worked at in Miami or there's a restaurant in Denver and Linger, it's called Linger, or at the two-star restaurant Providence. It's the same skill set, but you kind of do it better and better and better and better. And, you know, at a two-star Michelin level, you have to execute everything well. Your knife cuts, your... your sauces, your plating, your everything needs to be top-notch. And, you know, the, I would say that the progression and evolution and improvement of my own skill set within the food has allowed me to sort of get clear on how to apply it on the sort of health and wellness and regular aspect side of things. Because cooking is something that we all do, is something that we all have to do in order to live right as part of life, but it it's ironically one of the things that people don't know about It's one of the basic skill sets that every human should know um, so you know I’ve been cooking for I think it's 14 years now and only now do I feel like I’m in a decent point in my life like okay. I can call myself a chef and like I I know what i'm talking about um, so it's been a journey and In Gordon Ramsey talk I saw a video clip way early in my career where he said that cooking was kind of like being a doctor. You don't become a chef in five, six, seven years. It takes years and years and years, like 10, 15, maybe 22, to actually own that. And so the application of the culinary world, sort of that's been Chef Mario on the culinary side, right? But on the health and wellness side, I've grown at the same time, just because when I was in culinary school, like, in culinary nutrition and taking all these nutrition classes like nutrition was really confusing like I was I was way too worried about am I fasting am I not fasting is paleo better as keto is like and Ultimately what I'm getting at is The basics like you just said a little bit ago remain the same right and so if I have my basics in Cooking very well. I know I'm gonna be able to make a killer salmon if I know that I need to I know what my caloric intake is and how to translate that into macronutrients so that I can lose the weight that I want to lose or build the muscle that I want to build or maintain the health that I, or optimize the health that I have right now, then with that basic knowledge, everything else becomes so much more easier. And I see over and over again how people just get over complicated and lost in all these diets and whether... You have to drink celery juice in the morning to be healthy. Like, I think like you guys may have seen that may see that a lot also and in the supplement world because the supplement world is mixed in with so much Nonsense so much bro-science, right? And I think Thorne does such a great job at teaching people Okay, like if you're not sleeping well, this magnesium is great for you. By the way, it's absolutely amazing. I've been sleeping so much better Thank you so much but It's again going back to the basics and educating oneself and in this case myself in order to hit the basics and in turn hit those goals. Does that make sense?

Joel Totoro:

Yeah, no, and it's very similar to how I kind of talk about it too. For years, people were like, can I get a diet plan? And I'm like, you kind of have to earn that, right? If you're not taking care of the foundationals or foundations and you don't know, here's the little tweaks I could do. I'm empowered. I have the knowledge to be like, okay, I want to go, I need to add more protein. What does protein even look like within my calories or whatnot? Just really understanding the relationship between food and wellness. And I totally agree with what you said. It takes you know, years to have your own philosophy. You've had the skills and the technical knowledge, but I would say until you've been asked the right questions and have an answer that you know why you do everything you do, that's when you become, okay, this is my philosophy. I'm an expert in my culinary view or I'm an expert in my nutrition view. So I love that. And you're, you know, it's, I think already obvious listening you've got a growth mindset and you're always trying to improve yourself and I think that's the mark of you know, it's the more you know, the more you don't know, right? so kind of love watching your journey and kind of just all the different stimulus you change and put on yourself to to perfect that philosophy, but I Think one of the things I think you and I it's we talk about all the time But maybe new to some people is the idea of nutrient density Which I think kind of gets down to what you you we've both been kind of getting to Can you talk a little bit about like what that means to you and how you can kind of

take a meal you may be preparing in a traditional way and kind of upgrade it and just make it a little bit more or in line with what your health goals may be. So you don't have to just chug a celery juice in the morning for fiber or whatnot.

Mario Limaduran:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And this is a topic that we've been exploring at Trifecta for a while. We've been trying, it's been like a passion, a project of ours to explore what the nutrient density of our meals are and like send over our meals to. Of course, they're all nutritionally analyzed. I'm not saying that they're not, but send them to a lab to look at the nutrition density in a more wholesome way. But it's something that we haven't been able to get to. to that specific project because of time and whatnot. But the word nutrient density essentially means how, in my mind at least, I translated to how much nutrition are you getting on any specific given meal? How many micronutrients and what's the quality of the fuel that you're putting into your body? Because yeah, granted, what I dislike about the if it fits your macros philosophy is that they don't account for nutrient density, right? Because if it fits your macros were to be the guiding light to everything, we could essentially have a diet filled with pizza and still or McDonald's and still sort of lose weight. You know, that's why Subway had that one that one marketing campaign where this man lost a bunch of weight. only eating Subway. If it fits your macro, sure, like if you're in a caloric deficit is going you're going to lose the weight but nutrient density is what's the quality of the food, what's the quality of the fuel that you're putting to your body. It's essentially saying do you want to put regular gas into your car or premium gas into your car. And so to me like the way to get more of a easy nutrient dense meal and I do this all the time. This is how I stay healthy. Is I go to Costco and I buy the frozen cooked vegetables. It's called Pura Vida I believe the brand and then the other one is just like the stir fry vegetables and there's a Normandy vegetable. I go home and I cook either brown rice which is it's got more nutrients compared to brown rice. Not saying that one is better than the other but it's got a little more fiber so. there's more of a micronutrient value there. And then I rotate between brown rice, sweet potatoes, white rice, sometimes black beans, and I rotate through chicken, beef, and salmon. And so with that, I know that I'm getting a myriad of different nutrients from different foods. And the whole eat the rainbow sort of thing, I do follow that and I mix vegetables as much as possible because different colors have different nutrients. So... That, in my mind, is how you can get something from just eating broccoli, white rice, and chicken every single day for the rest of your life to sort of changing things to have more nutrition but at the same time so that one doesn't get bored with their diet intake from a day to day.

Joel Totoro:

I think one of the things you touched on is one of the things I think people limit themselves is that they don't realize like there's no necessary rules in the culinary. And some of the best dishes are, you know, whoops, right? That worked in the right way. So exactly like you said, having like, okay, I can do this and I change the sauce, I change the spice, I change the protein. And that's one of the things actually I've used Trifecta with athletes is getting them to start thinking out of the box. So when they are using that as that, you know, kind of convenience version of doing everything we wanna do around food. Okay, so look at that. Look, these two things go together. These three things go together. Oh. this sauce on this protein. Like, you know what I mean? Just put that into your repertoire and you're like, all right, Mario is approving this combination of foods. This is a combination that goes together, but how else can I tweak this? Or how do I make this my own or remake this or whatever? So that's one of the stronger reasons. I mean, obviously, like you mentioned in the supplement world and the nutrition world, there's a bunch of options. And then once you start looking, there's only a couple of really great ones, right? So. You know, being, have the trust to know like, all right, the Marios of the world have done the work for me. I don't have to count the macros on this. I don't have to count. I know this is a nutrient in its meal, but now I know these are nutrient-dead ingredients that work together. So using it to be, to really empower people to make choices. Cause I mean, we've all worked with athletes. They're like, well, yeah, I do frozen chicken, broccoli and rice. We're like, well, you have to enjoy, like food is soulful. You have to enjoy it too, right? A big concern of mine is always people missing the joy about food and getting way too caught up on specific things. So I know I'm speaking your language there.

Mario Limaduran:

Absolutely, you know and I would say again going back to the very early first topic that we're talking about, you know like there's this negative connotation to dieting and like People truly believe that you need to suffer in order to lose the weight or you need to be in this Insane caloric deficit or just eat very plain food and that's not the case. I think Part of sustaining a diet long term is eating what you can eat for the longest period of time, right? And a clear example is I've lost 10 pounds since January 1^st which is great. I went through a like a weight gain phase where I wanted to put as much muscle as possible and with that came fat and so I was not comfortable with the amount of fat that my body had so January 1st to May 1st I went on this very strict sort of like okay I'm going to track my macronutrients very religiously but essentially I never told myself that I could not have one thing. If I wanted to have an Oreo I would have an Oreo. I actually I'm going through this phase where I love fried chicken sandwiches. Don't ask why. And actually Sacramento, where I'm located, has so many good fried chicken sandwiches. So randomly, on a random Saturday, I love to go and get a chicken sandwich, a fried chicken sandwich. And does that meet my caloric deficit for the week? It doesn't. But at the same time satisfies the flavor and the experience and the joy that I want to have. so that I can stick to my goal long term. And it's been super successful, and I've been really enjoying this entire process. I haven't been suffering, and that's available for everyone to do, right? And at the same time, one, food is not going to completely destroy all the progress that I've been doing over the three months. And I don't think we, as humans, we rationalize nutrition way too much, and we don't realize how our bodies are so resilient. and how like nutrition is not black and white because we eat food and I think it's, correct me if I'm wrong, I think it's like 40 to 60% goes to just digesting the food and then the rest can be utilized differently and it all varies per body, right? So I don't think we as humans understand how resilient and how smart the human body is when it comes to nutrition. And I truly have seen, even in myself, that I overanalyze things. Like I like what really focus on eating one thing for way too long, but in order to have success I found that eating what I like in a ration way is the key to success.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head like, yeah, the body's a survival machine. And it does a lot of things that we can't even override if we wanted to, right? But I think what people forget is that it's an average over time. Like it's not one day doesn't ruin you, you know, or one, you know, I grabbed an Oreo. Like what works for you in that moment, without causing as much minimal damage or stress on your body around food, what works for you is what works for you. And that's the right answer for you, right? So I think that's kind of the way we go about it. And we'll talk a little bit at the end so people can read it, where they can follow you and get a lot of the information that you're putting out. I'm going to go one more question and then we'll take a break. This may be a loaded question. I know my answer to it, but the idea of supplementation within a meal plan, from a chef's point of view. For me, we always say supplements are exactly that. They supplement a diet, food first. Can you talk a little bit about how you see diet and supplements and just what your philosophy around them is?

Mario Limaduran:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think we've talked a lot about what Trifecta does without really mentioning it. And the whole flavorful aspect, the whole macronutrient aspect, the whole nutrient-dense aspect of things, that's what Trifecta is. We do offer the ready-to-eat meals that have everything already done for you so that you can just reheat the meal and eat it and sort of have nutrition in check and in automatic so you don't have to worry about it. That is if you have if you want to have your meal plans already done But we also have the sort of bulk aspect of things the proteins carbs and vegetables that we sell so that one can portion as they see fit and much like that aspect of the equation of like having that Sort of taken care for you. I do believe that Once you hit everything that we just talked about supplements Are an aid to help you get to your goals. They are the one percent, right? That they help you get to that 100 performance or your goals and whatnot. I mentioned that I wasn't sleeping well and I actually saw I've become a very big formula one fan and Daniel Riccardo is one of your guys's uh, Partners, I believe I don't know if he is still is but was at the time. Um, And he mentioned that he didn't sleep that He didn't sleep too well, but he started taking magnesium by by-cylinate? By by bicycling. I can't pronounce it. I'm sorry. I wasn't getting a lot of rem sleep and he mentioned that he wasn't either but that was the magnesium he would and I ordered it  I cannot tell you what a big change in what a big supplement that was to my sleep routine, right? Of course, like the green, the, the, the blue light and all these things also came into play, but I went from having 30 minutes of REM sleep per night without the magnesium to having two hours of REM sleep. And that is a huge difference on how I feel in my energy in the morning. So it's sort of plugging and playing where things are not necessarily working because my body for whatever reason, I can't give you a scientific fact, but for whatever reason, my body wasn't performing in that aspect. And so that's how I see food and supplements, right? I'm just plugging in supplements where I see that my nutrition is not necessarily, for whatever reason, for whatever is happening in my body, wherever my nutrition is not really hitting those spots. So that's my philosophy in it. I'm not... I'm not relying 1000% on supplements to help me get to my goals. It's all diet, it's all sleep, it's all exercise that's going to help me get there and supplements are just sort of like inching away to help me get to 100%.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah, that's very much how I look at them too. It's just another tool in the belt, right? Like I know, you know, looking at my diet, like there's times when I only tend towards a certain color of vegetables. So I'm missing some nutrients, right? So you can look at what within your diet or like, you know, I've worked with an athlete that's going vegan. Okay, cool. Here's some nutrients that are lacking in those food sources, right? So are you either missing something in your diet because of your choices or restrictions, but more so where I kind of play with supplementations exactly like what you're talking about. What's my kind of pain point or what do I have a goal? What am I asking my body to do above normal? What are the nutrients that uses? Because at some point, there's only so much food you can eat in a day. And magnesium is a perfect example. It's kind of dropped in our, like it's based on soil quality, whatever. The last hundred years, it's been dropping in our food supply. So even if you're eating the same amount of food, it's just tough to get enough, right? And it's, I mean, you're talking to the right guy. It's my favorite nutrient, which is, it's hard to pick one, but magnesium I can talk about for hours, but. That's a perfect example like that, or vitamin D, which just aren't strong in the diet. So kind of really love the kind of service and everything that trifecta is behind it and knowing that it's not just they're not just saying it they have the excerpts behind it you know which is you and the team that you work with so we're gonna take a quick break and then get into some questions from the listeners and we'll wrap this up...

Joel Ad Read:

Tired of bloating, gas, and other digestive discomfort? Help keep your gut happy and healthy with premium probiotics, digestive enzymes, and other innovative solutions by Thorne to support optimal gut health. One example is Thorne's Floorman Prime Probiotic. This shelf stable and stomach acid resistant probiotic blend offers everyday GI and weight management support. To take control of the health of your gut, visit thorne.com to explore probiotics, digestive enzymes, and other ways to support a happy and healthy gut That's T-H-O-R-N-E.com.

Joel Totoro:

All right, and we're back. So I got a couple questions that kind of come in are things we hear all the time. And I think the one, we talked a little bit about in our previous conversations, but I think a lot of people have the fear of cooking or trying something new. Do you have any kind of recommendations or tips on someone who's just getting started out?

Mario Limaduran:

Yeah, so. That's a great question and it's a very simple answer and it's an answer that not a lot of people are going to like. And that is that in order to learn how to cook better, you need to go out and invest in learning how to cook better. Just like it's a skill, right? Identify the foods that you like the most, that you like the most right now. Is it rice? Is it sweet potato? Is it quinoa? Is it whatever the case may be? Is it chicken? Is it steak? Is it salmon? Is it a combination of those? Do you like broccoli? Do you like green beans? Do you like bell peppers? And once you identify those, learn how to cook those insanely well. You know, don't overcook your fish. Don't cook it more than 145 degrees Fahrenheit. Don't overcook your chicken. Don't cook it at more than 165 degrees Fahrenheit. But don't undercook it because if not you may get sick. Learn how to cook rice properly. We'll learn how to... Use the air fryer and make sweet potato fries. Learn how to make mashed potato. Learn how to blanch vegetables so that you have bright green vegetables every single time. Or roast your vegetables so that you have a nice little roasted vegetable with a little crunch. Whatever works for you, identify that and double down on it. And if you wanna learn more about how to cook basic things, make sure you follow me on Instagram, because that's what I teach.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah, and we'll drop that handle at the end there. No, I think you're right. It is like anything. People just assume like, oh, I'll follow this recipe and it'll be perfect. There's so much foundationals you need to need. We talked about nutrient density. What's kind of the favorite way you've added nutrients to a dish or kind of, I don't want to say sneak vegetables into something, but just do the way you've kind of like, oh, no, I can use these and make this way more nutrient dense. What's kind of your favorite example of that?

Mario Limaduran:

Okay, so I'm gonna give you guys Chef Mario's secret, secret sauce for that matter. And this is what's gotten me very far in life in how I've been able to create a lot of flavor and how to hide a lot of flavor so that people enjoy a meal. And that is by making your sauces flavorful and nutritious by hiding the vegetables in them. And when you think of sauces, you can think of sauces in one of three ways. A fat forward sauce a carb forward sauce or a calorie neutral sauce That's how I have it organized in my brain and a fat forward sauce can be something like a romesco that is almond based and romesco has is typically It's cooked with toasted bread, but in order to make it more nutrient dense People use almonds. I typically make my romesco almond based and so the romesco also has Tomatoes and roasted bell peppers, but if you want to hide a little more nutrition you can roast carrots You can roast any sort of like red or orange vegetable and just hide it in there. Do you want to make a pet a pesto sauce? But you don't want to eat your spinach. Why don't you just hide the pest of the spinach into the pesto? you want to make a teriyaki sauce. Why don't you maybe put a little nutritional yeast in the teriyaki sauce, even though it's not going to be the what the definition of teriyaki sauce is. You can also go ahead and do that. So it's thinking, okay, you know, I have my carbohydrates. I have my protein. I have my vegetables, but I don't have any fat. Let's look at a sauce that is going to have a lot of flavor and it doesn't have to be complicated. It can be like three or four roasted vegetables, a little bit of oil, some garlic, salt, pepper, and you're good to go, you know, and it's figuring out what you like and what you like the most. And this is the secret that I use with the UFC. Essentially, this is the secret that we do here at Trifecta. And that's the secret that I apply in my life to make my dishes really flavorful. So that is the secret sauce on how to hide nutrition.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah, and I can speak to personal experience when we were both at Exos together. You know, we had access to the food Mario was creating and, you know, I can't tell you how many times I'm like, dude, what is this? And like wasn't even caring about the nutrition side. I was like, this tastes amazing. And he's like, actually, it's got this, this, this in it. And I will say like that kind of idea and that concept and buying an immersion blender are the single things that have set my game up for sure. You've traveled the world. What's your favorite culinary city and what's your last meal dish?

Mario Limaduran:

Oh, so it's ironic because I haven't traveled to Japan, but I'm a huge, huge fan of the Japanese culture in general. Providence is an American Japanese based restaurant, seafood based restaurant. A lot of the ingredients that Chef Michael, the owner and chef of Providence does is based on like a combination of Japanese ingredients. And just learning about that and tasting all the flavors is just, it's fascinating to, it was fascinating to like discover and there's so much complexity to the flavors. It's absolutely delicious. So I'm planning to go to Japan on like a two week long trip next year. So if we talk in two years, I'll tell, I'll say Japan, but to answer your question more directly, it's, it's. I would say ramen would be my last meal if I was ever to be in that position. Like a really flavorful broth ramen with a lot of just like braised meats and pork belly and oof I think I'm gonna have that for lunch. That's what I would have. As far as my favorite cuisine in the world, I mean I don't think I can point out one. I'm not one to say favorite. I don't have a favorite of really anything. But I do sort of like the Asian flavors a lot, the complexity of them. But same time, like if you go to Argentina, their meats are delicious. If you go to New Zealand and Australia, like their coffee's absolutely ridiculous. If you go to India, the curries, if you go here in the United States, the barbecues from Kansas to Texas, like it's just, there's so much complexity to it. It's difficult to say like one thing is my favorite. So I enjoy the cultures within the cultures and I enjoy the food for what. for what it is at that time of that period. Like you said earlier, we're not in a vacuum, you know? Humans are more complex than that, yeah.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah, that was kind of an unfair question. There's plenty of places to follow you, but other than that, what are some kind of recommended resources you have for people who are trying to kind of understand culinary, or step their game up a little bit?

Mario Limaduran:

Yep. Yeah, I have two really good books for everyone. One is called The Flavor Bible. It's been an absolute Bible to me to better understand flavor. Actually, I'm going to say three books. Then it's Spice. It's a book that was just really released and it shows how different spices combine with different spices and how they interact and how you can combine and make different spice blends which is incredible. That's a new book that was just given to me a couple months ago and I absolutely love it. And if you really want to learn how to cook better, Fat Heat Salt Acid is the book, I forget the name of the author, she's just incredible. But that's been probably one of the best reads that I've had in the last 13 years since graduating college. And it's been one of the books that's helped me improve my cooking a lot. a lot more than what I thought it would. Any other, I haven't had any other resource or any other book that's helped me progress my own cooking as a chef, much like that book has. So those three resources is something I would definitely tap into, and they're not overwhelming, they're not too culinary, because I can suggest to others, the food and science of cooking. Food and science. On Food and Cooking The Science and Lore of the Kitchen and Kenji J's Lopez the The Food Lab which are two varied science-driven food science driven books If you want to geek out definitely go into those two But if not the first three and the main one, Heat Fat Salt Acid is the one that I would definitely go ahead and buy.

Joel Totoro:

I think that's a great mix of resources there. I know my entire life I've always been scared of baking because you can't really improvise. Until I realized my nerd brain had clicked and I was like, oh, you can do this by weight and it's a chemistry experiment. I was like, oh, okay, now I'm not as scared of it, right? But yeah, I think it's finding that thing and for some people it is. If I know the science behind this.

Mario Limaduran:

That's a science, man. That's a science.

Joel Totoro:

than I'm in or if some people are like, oh, these two things go together. So I love it. It's just like, you know, everything works differently for different people. So that was a very well-rounded set of resources there. And I've got some homework to do now too. But Mario, it's been an amazing conversation and you know, I could talk to you for hours, but can you tell us a little bit, our audience, where they can keep up with you and then a little bit more about where they can find out about Trifecta.

Mario Limaduran:

Yeah, so we talked a lot about convenience, we talked a lot about nutrient density, we talked a lot about goals and performance and health and wellness. To wrap things up, Trifecta is one of the leading meal delivery companies in the United States. So if you're looking for a convenient way, convenience equals compliance, like Joel said Trifecta is a great resource to help you get to your health goals. It's ready to eat meals that you can just reheat in the air fryer, in the stove, up in the microwave, in the oven, and you can take them anywhere. They're TSA compliant and you can make sure that you stick to your health goals. We have the option of ready to eat meals or if you want to meal prep yourself, we sell our proteins, carbohydrates, and vegetables in bulk so that you can meal prep and portion yourself. So if you guys want to check that out, go to trifectannutrition.com forward slash thorne and use the code thorne40 so you guys can get a 40% off discount on your first order. We have different meal plans that fit different dietary requirements and dietary, I'll say that one more time. We have different meal plans that had to fit different dietary requirements. So if you have something that you can't eat, we have all, we have multiple meal plans that can fit your personal needs. And then you can follow us on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, at trifecta. And personally, you can follow Chef Mario on TikTok, Instagram, and on Twitter, @ChefMario._, or on YouTube, at ChroniclesOfACook, where I teach a lot of the things that we've been talking about, a lot of the how to cook, the basic things, so that you can become a better cook. So those are the resources I would tell you to go ahead and tap into.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah, and I can say I personally, Mario’s taught me a few tips, just following his socials. So there's some really great stuff in there and I'll definitely step your game up. But that's all the time we have. Thanks everyone for listening and we'll see you next time.