The following is a transcription of a radio interview between ProFiber Founder Dr. Harris Silverman and “My Future Business Show” host Rick Nuske. Here is audio link: audio.youtube
[Rick] Hi and welcome to the “My Future Business Show.” As you know my name is Rick Nuske, I’m the host and I always say that I have the best role in the world. Now I’ll tell you why that is, because I get to spend some time with some incredibly talented individuals and my next guest today is no different. His name’s Harris Silverman. Welcome to the show Harris, how are you?
[Harris] Yes! Wonderful.
[r] I’m looking at your wonderful smiley face on your website and we’ll go into detail about what it is we’re going to be sharing with the My Future Business audience in a moment. What has been happening in your neck of the woods?
[h] Oh I don’t think a great deal. We have beautiful weather here in Florida, fantastic actually. It’s quite remarkable, I feel bad for my relatives who live a little further north.
[r] Oh yes, they’re going through some blizzard environment at the moment I think?
[h] Yeah it’s pretty nasty up there, but certainly good for business down here.
[r] Oh yeah, why is that?
[h] Well they want to come down here and of course it’s just a transient thing.
[r] Oh I love it when I hear about entrepreneurs and business owners having the ability to be transient with their lifestyle to suit their chosen weather patterns. It’s remarkable, and I guess that’s a really good point to lead into what we’re talking about today on the show, which is a product called ProFiber. Could you tell us a little bit about what that’s about and how your business came to be what it is today?
[h] Well like almost everyone, after a certain age you begin to store energy in your gut, and I work out — I do Pilates and we do stretching and a little bit of yoga and then I have a full weight gym in my house as well and I do like lifting weights — but despite all my efforts to maintain a healthy lifestyle there I was, like everyone else getting a little bit…. I wasn’t liking what I was seeing. So I hired a workout guy to kind of spur me up a little bit and the first thing he did was he said well… you certainly do look like you’re in good shape. Turn sideways and look at the mirror and I did and I said “oh my god” yeah I didn’t like what I saw.
[r] Bit of a different story?
[h] Yes, so me being a doctor, that caused me to go to the computer and start doing lots and lots of research on why people tend to gain weight — especially as they get older. And, you know gaining weight and weight loss theories are…. you could fill a library with those books. Everywhere, everybody has this particular issue, so I wanted to have a solution that would work for me actually. As time went on my friends kept bugging me and I started making it [ProFiber] for them as well. But my research told me that losing weight is a very simple proposition. It takes X amount of calories energy to run your body every day, and if you take in excessive amounts of calories your body will store that as energy. Where is it stored? Well, it just so happens as we get older it gets stored in the gut, and that results in the weight gain. Not to mention there’s other lots of many other implications.
So I decided to create something that would address the weight issue primarily and then it evolved from there. But, basically people eat too much because in many cases, they’re just hungry. What causes us to be hungry? Well in many cases you eat by the clock. Some people just have breakfast, they have lunch, they have dinner, and they just eat by the clock. But in many cases they eat too much because they’re hungry.
So one of the things that I studied and looked up was: what makes you hungry? Well, to a great extent if you have sugar — rice krispies, any type of sugar, even a banana — that is a very, very fast absorbing form of sugar or simple carbohydrate. When that gets ingested, your blood sugar goes up. What happens then is that your body makes insulin. Insulin clears the blood of excessive calories, especially sugar, and that excessive amount of energy is stored as fat or glycogen in the liver. So one of the key elements was: let’s create something that has a glycemic index of zero, which means if you’re a pre-diabetic (which many people are as they approach 60) their blood sugar starts to creep up. Fasting blood sugar creeps up until it reaches a threshold of let’s say… a hundred. A hundred you’re pre-diabetic, once you go to 120/130 fasting blood sugar, you’re a diabetic. What does that mean? It means you have created a very, very significant cardiovascular risk going forward. And we all know how a cardiovascular risk is gonna end.
If you want to live a nice, healthy life maybe you should try to reduce your cardiovascular risk and one of the ways is to control your consumption of simple and even complex carbohydrates, so I created a drink… it’s a powder actually, simple powder. All the ingredients are all-natural, all the ingredients ordered online. I mixed them together and over the course of several years came up with this mixture that actually worked so well. I mean I went from — just myself as an example — I went from 212, and I’d probably been that way for a long time, and now I’m 180.
[r] Now that’s amazing
[h] And that that’s a fair amount of weight loss. But the most important thing of all when you’re talking about any of this weight loss stuff, which there’s a million theories out there -
[r] Haha yeah -
[h] You have to create in your life a habit. And my habit, which I’ve offered to all my friends and my customers is: start the day with a very, very healthy meal that will fill you up well. What fills you up? Well first off you need a source of energy, because you’re gonna have to run your body on something. You don’t want to run it on sugar or simple carbohydrates, we’ve already said that. That will stoke an insulin response, you want to run it on something else. Well you have limited choices. One is amino acids. And I like to work out, and so I like to have a bolus of amino acids in the form of whey isolates after a workout. And whey isolate is 94%bio-available. It’s absorbed beautifully fast. And then I wanted to have a slow form of energy in the form of casein, which is also its kind of a milk product… it’s a protein. But it’s very slowly digested, so you have two sources of energy there. Then the other thing I wanted to add was another source of energy that would carry you even further into the day, and that’s oil — mono-saturated oil. What is a good source of mono-saturated oils?
[r] Chia seeds
[h] Yes, chia seeds, flax seeds, sunflower seeds… four or five different seeds and those are the main ones. But what you have to do in the process is you have to you have to break the seed up, because the protein is in the seed, as well as the oil being locked up in the kernel. You’ve got to break it and that makes it bioavailable. So now you have a source of long-acting energy because you know fats are very dense with energy, but at the same time when you take a simple seed and you break it up using a coffee grinder — whatever you want to use — you have preserved the husk. That is a terrific form of soluble fiber. Soluble fiber is the best form of fiber for you to ingest on a daily basis. Most Americans don’t get nearly enough soluble fiber; but if you mix the protein powder and the soluble fiber from the seeds you have a really good source of energy and once again you have the glycemic index of zero. When you add water to this simple powder — what does soluble fiber do, what’s special about it? At forms a gel, right? And if you were to take my breakfast drink for example, and your mother calls you, and you have a long conversation with her after you’ve shaken it up…you come back it’s not coming out of the shaker bottle. It’s a gel.
[r] Yeah it gets quite thick. That’s fantastic
[h] That is how it works. You’re ingesting a fluid, it turns into a gel, and it really fills you up and provides you with lots and lots of energy of the best sort.
[r] It’s funny, when I have chia seeds in smoothies I find that because of what you’ve talked about with the kernel, I find that the chia seeds oftentimes clump up and they actually expand and part of your process is to actually crack those husks, is that right? You’ve got a crack the husk otherwise you’re you’re not going to get the protein in the oil it’s something I’ve learned today
[h] But if you were a bird and eating chia seeds, she would be… um you know… propagating the chia all over the place because it’s gonna come out the other end. Yes, it’s indigestible, unless you crack it up in a coffee grinder or whatever you want to use. It is a very good source of soluble fiber in addition to the oils.
[r] It’s amazing I am I’m sitting here thinking to myself I have a couple of questions, and the first one being that: given what we know about diet — poor diet mostly — are you seeing a shift towards better sources of energy like ProFiber across society? What’s happening in terms of how societies are looking to change their dietary intake?
[h] Oh I think it’s happening as we speak. Especially in the Millennials, they seem to be very tuned into eating better or all this organic organic, organic, organic. This drink is basically organic, because I can buy the raw ingredients that way, but when you buy something organic it increases the cost and I’m trying to create a product that is so inexpensive that you will be inclined to use it every single day, and you’ve got to use it! You can’t expect to have any results unless you commit yourself — hopefully forever — but if not, at least for months and months use. This is because if you expect to lose weight the best way to lose it is lose a quarter pound a week. That’s more than enough. You’re now in a deficit, you’re going to lose weight, you’re gonna like what you see, you’re gonna be motivated by the change in your body, and also you’re not going to sacrifice any energy at all. In order to get the morning started, I decided to add something else to the mix over time. That product was matcha tea.
[r] Matcha tea?
[h] Matcha tea. It’s ceremonial tea. It’s a green — dense green powder and it has so many antioxidants and other health benefits. It’s just a wonderful thing. It doesn’t taste very good, it tastes very earthy. But I’m just using the powder and I’m putting it as part of my mixture, and what it does is it also gives you some mental clarity because it does have some caffeine — it’s like a coffee substitute — and I still have coffee in the morning. Coffee is a ritual for me. I have a cup of coffee, I read the paper or whatever… though I know Millennials don’t read the paper anymore.
[r] They have the news feed…
[h] Yes haha, but it’s just habit. Habit is the key. You’ve got to make it a habit.
[r] You talk about habit, and I’d like to explore that a little bit more if we might in terms of you your dietary intake. It’s one thing with ProFiber, but is there a need to balance all the other aspects, or are there other things you do in your day to make the results even better for you?
[h] Oh absolutely, by itself it’s not going to do very much because your whole idea is during a 24-hour period to reduce your caloric intake. And the whole idea of this is: if you’re having lunch with a friend, or a social event or to talk businesses — if you’re hungry when you go into the restaurant you’re gonna order something that you don’t need. People become crazy when they’re hungry. [For instance when they say] “I want a 12 sub”
[r] I get ‘hangry’ I’ll often say.
[h] No, no! [With ProFiber] you’re not hungry! This powder, this concoction has rendered you just not hungry at one o’clock or two o’clock; which is the case when you order the sandwich, you’ll just order a 6 inch. You’ll have a very small amount of food because you’re just not hungry. And actually that carries through for the rest of the day. But you have to commit yourself to limiting carbohydrates to some extent. I mean this is not a big secret anymore, the carbohydrates are the backbone of weight gain. And also, you want to avoid becoming a diabetic or pre-diabetic because this increases your cardiovascular risk
[r] And that’s absolutely pertinent isn’t it, especially if you want to live a long healthy life you have children you might have a business that you’re running, so it’s vitally important.
[h] And you know exercise is wonderful it makes you feel good, it gives you stamina, gives you staying power, and makes you look good. If you’re like me you like to lift weights. But in the terms of controlling your weight, you cannot exercise yourself into a weight loss situation. You’ve simply got to control your caloric intake and bodybuilders know that — serious bodybuilders — know that. But you can’t just say I’m gonna get on the treadmill, I’m going to work out for 30 minutes, and then I’m gonna go out and have an all-american breakfast. You just negated all your exercise.
[r] It defeats the purpose doesn’t it?
[h] Absolutely! Another kind of interesting aspect that came up during my research is that for the average person, the immune system as we get older (your immune system is in your gut -that’s where foreign bodies are) if you have a leaky gut syndrome (it’s called leaky gut syndrome), then antigens (that’s some of the elements in your food, for example: wheat, which I think should be outlawed) but, if the wheat protein passes through (I’m picking on wheat now) but if this protein passes through the gut wall, it can initiate an immune response and there’s research that’s just starting to come out and it’s very suspicious that there is a cross-reactivity between the immune system getting stimulated by the leaky gut and certain neurological diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. It’s not a direct correlation, there’s many more factors involved with that, it’s not as simple as that, but there is a competition there. So one of the things that I found is called resistant starch — it’s a white starch material, in this case made from raw potatoes and you can buy it anywhere. When you eat resistant starch, it doesn’t get absorbed by the small intestines at all. That’s why it’s resistant to absorption. But it goes into the colon. What’s in the colon? Your microbiome! Boy did they [the microbiotic bacteria] love that! When I first started adding it I didn’t know the proportions, so I just guessed, and all my friends (including myself) said they can’t go to meetings anymore and so finally I had to reduce it, reduce it, reduce it until we have the right effect.
[r] But not the other outcome
[h] Right, not the other outcome. And I think that for people approaching 60, having this
healthy drink to start the day — and I also put desiccated vegetables because they’re antioxidants and makes the flavor better — it just works. And it works well, but only for those people who have a commitment. You know if there’s no commitment, there’s no results.
[r] There’s a bit of a process, and bit of a behavioral change overall here, isn’t there?
Well I mean you can’t you can’t have success in terms of controlling your diet and your physique unless you have a long-term perspective. If you just want to be healthy, and you want to look good, you gotta work at it, and it has to be part of a daily routine. Just like — I don’t know if you work out — I work out almost every day, and it’s part of my life. I like to work out.
[r] And so it’s a wonderful, wonderful sounding product and you know I think anybody who’s listening to the “My Future Business Show” today you’ll be thinking to yourself ‘well maybe that’s me. Maybe I need to look at other ways to improve my dietary intake.’ So if people are looking for your product where are they going to go? Just profiberfood.com. I’ll be making the links back to Harris’s website. Harris it’s been an absolute treat spending some time with you on the My Future Business Show today.
[h] Well you’re a wonderful host and I have enjoyed it.
[r] Thanks for joining us today
You can learn more about ProFiber at profiberfood.com/nutrition
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