When do food and science overlap? When we talk about food, it is not really the agriculture or ingredients of it; that is a separate thing entirely. And when we refer to science, we aren’t necessarily talking about cooking. Food science is the overlap of production, performance, and marketing to solve real-world problems when producing food. Switch Bakery, the gluten-free bakery my wife and I own, wouldn’t exist without food science and we pride ourselves on creating food that meets people with a wide variety of health concerns and considerations. So how can we tell when science is helping to make food better for us? The answer lies in the motivation and implementation that underlies the science. 

At Switch Bakery, we start from the idea that food should make you feel better after you eat it. This may seem like a glib statement, but we are all familiar with eating something that is supposed to be good for you, only to feel awful later. One of our more popular bakery stickers reads, “We love your guts.” There are plenty of gluten-free products and bakeries out there, but we are starting from a fundamentally different place than most places or products on the market. For example, we don’t use many of the ingredients that are common in our category because they can compromise your gut health, which the world is learning is key to all health. We avoid things like soy, corn, seed oils, and many commercial gums and additives and are always looking for ways to become less “processed.” 

The bakery was born out of our experience trying to navigate, manage, and heal the damage caused by Crohn’s disease, which I was diagnosed with over a decade ago. One of the things I discovered is that autoimmune disorders (like Crohn’s disease and IBD, Celiac, Hashimoto’s, and Rheumatoid Arthritis) are particularly sensitive to the gut-compromising and inflammatory nature of some of the proteins in wheat and other grains (such as rye, barley, spelt, and Einkorn). Even grains that don’t contain gluten, like corn, oats, and millet, have proteins that may trigger similar responses in many people with inflammatory or autoimmune conditions.

You are starting to see the difference in motivation and implementation of what we do versus gluten-free bread at the grocery store. Still, there is a lot of underlying science that makes our bread delicious and healthier than a lot of other options. Going back to the food science model I described above—production, performance, and marketing—let’s take a look at how this affects the things you have to sift through at grocery stores and restaurants (even hospitals, as you’ll find out) just to eat everyday. 

Our bread relies on a blend of flours—grains (like rice and sorghum), starches, and xantham gum (a byproduct of a fermentation process)—to achieve something that traditional bread accomplishes with flour, water, yeast, and salt. When carefully balanced, we can achieve a very satisfying gluten-free loaf, focaccia, cake, pies, and a variety of other foods. Fermented foods, such as cheese, beer, and yogurt rely on microorganisms give them their characteristics, and production methods, like cave aging, choosing particular strains of bacteria, and cooking methods produce the wide variety of these foods we enjoy. These are examples of a more “traditional” technological approach to food science (and processed food), but in the modern industrial food world, science is used to make food last longer on a shelf and have more flavor, all in the effort to get your dollars. 

In large commercial bread production, you will find things like chemical dough conditioners, fillers, and artificially genetically engineered ingredients that may not need to be declared on the ingredient label. Large producers try to entice people with the idea of “real bread” by making gluten-free breads with wheat that has been taken apart, gluten removed, and then put back together. Keeping up with product development while just trying to get food to feed your family is exhausting.

I was at Stanford for an abdominal surgery related to complications from my Crohn’s disease. Every morning when I ordered breakfast, the delivery would arrive with several bottles of Ensure — meal replacement shakes — often given to older and sick people who have trouble getting enough protein vital for the healing process. I’ve had over two dozensurgeries and recovery is a real challenge when you lose a significant amount of fitness in just a week in a bed. The problem with Ensure lies in the production. The company, Abbott Laboratories, is looking at liquid protein delivery without considering the overall health impact of the product. This is part and parcel for the $80 billion company that has faced lawsuits over contaminated baby formula, price gouging on prescription drugs, and misleading marketing practices. Here is a look at some of the ingredients Abbott uses to make Ensure.

Corn Syrup & Sugar: Two of the first three ingredients on the nutrition label. The health issues associated with high sugar intake include gut dysbiosis and diabetes.

Canola & Corn Oil: Highly processed oils that require deodorization, bleaching, and often include preservatives that don’t require labeling. Additionally, these oils in mass production are often genetically modified to optimize harvesting and pest control. Finally, they are in a category known as polyunsaturated fats (PUFA) which are high in Omega-6, easily oxidized and unstable, and are considered inflammatory.

Caseinate & Soy: The protein in this high protein drink comes from two of the most common allergens, dairy and soy derived from chemical refinement. The calcium caseinate and soy protein isolate are two of the lowest-quality and cheapest sources of protein. Not exactly what you want to give to grandma, or eat when you’re recovering.

Finally, there are ingredients that aren’t food at all, including cellulose (from wood pulp or cotton), carrageenan (shown to create digestive issues and cause gut damage), and Red #3, a known carcinogen, which the FDA recently banned. This is not the kind of nutrition I want to give my aging parents, or take when I’m recovering from major surgery. When I refused the 3 bottles of Ensure every day in the hospital, I was told that if I didn’t take them, they would just throw them away. Great!

Unfortunately, I discovered this wasn’t the only potential danger on the food menu. An operator in the kitchen taking orders helped me go through just about everything on the menu where even plain chicken and beef broths and dairy products all had industrial gums in them. I ended up with only a few suitable choices I could eat every day. 

I define food science for performance as processes and ingredients added to food to achieve a particular outcome. You can see this in the Ensure example above, where the cellulose and gums are used to create a mouthfeel that reminds you of a milkshake (as does the sweetness). The same goes for the typically healthy broths offered at the hospital that use gums to make them slightly thicker and theoretically more palatable. I’m not sure who’s asking for thicker-feeling chicken broth, but it makes me more skeptical about the product overall, what kinds of shortcuts are being taken to produce more broth faster, and can I trust the nutrition information on the label at all?

The key tenet of the specialty and diet-specific food products, a bursting $300 billion market, is performance. I have specific goals for our gluten-free bread (besides being delicious): provide similar nutrition to whole wheat bread and ensure that the nutrients present can be easily used by your body when breaking it down. One of the ways we accomplish this is by adding prebiotic fiber from chicory root and a marine algae that mineralizes the dough, making it easier to digest while also keeping it softer for longer. This adds up to a performance win for your body and the pleasure you’re looking for when eating something like focaccia bread. Every product out there, from instant smoothie packets to plant-based meat and protein bars, combines ingredients with the process of refining and combining them to sell you something.

As an endurance athlete, I have tried a million things to fuel long runs and rides. I’m also looking for things that give me the biggest bang with the least amount of digestive impact, to make living with Crohn’s disease easier. One of the most exciting areas of food science has been on creating products to make being on a ketogenic diet easier and more successful. I have been cycling in and out of a ketogenic diet for ten years, when even nutritionists and doctors thought fasting (and particularly exercising while fasting) was dangerous. I was able to kick my extraordinarily high inflammation levels (that persisted even on powerful medications) to normal levels and induce deep remission of my Crohn’s disease using a combination of fasting, low carb, consistent exercise, and taking ketones. Ketones are generated by the body during periods of fasting as a fuel alternative to carbohydrates for the muscles and brain. With a well-formulated ketogenic diet, your body can come to prefer ketones as fuel, bringing with it reduced inflammation, a higher degree of burning fat for fuel, and creating a more energetic and clear state of mind. By taking ketones in the form of a powder added to water or as their own drink, you can induce many of the benefits without the rigorous nature of the diet. Ketones were initially developed to help control seizures in children, and I was formulating my own powders and experimenting with what felt like “free” energy that was created from the vast fat stores in our body without the burden (and often discomfort) from eating and digesting thousands of calories of food. Today, there are a number of great products and the impact of ketones on health is being studied for everything from diabetes to Alzheimer’s.

I don’t just buy ketones. In training for marathons and riding my single speed bike from San Francisco to Los Angeles and everywhere in between, I’ve tried everything from the sweet and gooey gels to the hundreds of protein bars on the market. The more sophisticated the science and the more processed the food becomes, the more difficult it is to tell what is actually good for you and what might be lurking in there that is not so healthy. One of our favorite snacks at the kitchen, the Honey Stinger Nut and Seed Bar, is a good mix of protein and antioxidants in a delicious treat. A peanut nougat-like center is at the core of this protein bar and it is rolled in a honey-caramel seed blend. This is not low-carb, with 16g of sugar, but it is balanced out by 14g of protein, some healthy fats, and antioxidants. It’s delicious, non-GMO,and gluten-free. There are over 30 ingredients, and I know what they all are and why they are there, which is better than many products that are marketing their performance and health benefits with weird, unpronounceable ingredients and suspicious claims.

You don't need me to tell you about the million ways everything in our lives is marketed to us, but there are few places more opaque and important than the marketing of food. When I give talks about the Autoimmune Diet Protocol and my experience with Crohn's and inflammation, one of the most common questions at the end is, "how do I shop for eating this way?" It's a common trope of health professionals telling patients or clients to shop the outside of a grocery store, where the whole foods are, and minimize the amount of things you put in your cart from the middle aisles. That's like 90% of the whole store we're supposed to be wary of! Reading labels is easy to remember when you're looking at chips, crackers, sauces, and pre-packaged food in the freezer section, but in the last five years, questionable and downright dangerous ingredients for our guts have found their way into everything. Even most heavy cream, traditionally one ingredient, has gums in it. On-the-go food marketed at health-conscious people is the most difficult area. We read things like "protein-rich", "low-carb", or "plant-based" and think that they must be ok, but sometimes there is too much chemistry required to meet their claims and we don't even know what we're putting in our bodies.

A perfect example of this marketing sleight of hand can be found in a new "perfect" protein bar that launched with endorsements from prominent health experts. The David bar promises an impressive 28g of protein for just 150 calories with zero sugar, achieved through what they call their "Fat System" using something called EPG (modified plant fat). While marketed as a natural plant-based innovation, EPG is actually created using propylene oxide, a petroleum-derived ingredient and probable carcinogen. The company avoided the FDA's strict food additive approval process by pursuing GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status, a common industry shortcut. I was served an ad in one of my running email newsletters for David protein bars and the EPG sent up my food science fuckery antennae. I ended up doing days of research, sifting through the manufacturing history and FDA documents to find out the real deal with this ingredient and then wrote a 1400 word post about it, which you can read here. Products marketed as healthy solutions using the power of health influencers who boast big credentials may be the most dangerous, hiding potentially harmful ingredients behind scientific-sounding names and clever marketing. When something sounds too perfect, especially in the processed food world, it probably is.

I've spent over a decade trying to figure out how to fuel an active lifestyle while managing Crohn's disease. Along the way, I've learned that food science isn't inherently good or bad—but a tool that can help us create real solutions for people with health challenges. At our bakery, we're aiming to prove that you can use science to make genuinely nourishing alternatives to make it easier to fuel busy lives and allow everyone to eat together, without resorting to questionable ingredients and industrial shortcuts.

The explosion of specialty diet and sports nutrition content and products shows how many of us are looking for better options that don’t require going back to school to understand. But better isn’t always what we’re being sold. We need to be thoughtful about ingredients and honest about what we’re putting in our bodies, and it would be nice if more products popped up that follow that approach too. The best innovations in food might be the ones that help us get back to eating real food—just made in a way that works for more people.