The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Tue, 13 May 2025
Giving spotlight to a game-changing snack company that’s literally saving our livers one chip at a time (while tasting incredible) — Ancient Crunch. Founder Steven Rofrano started his journey with a simple question: why are we still putting seed oils in everything? This led to Steven challenging himself to create chips that actually nourish, rather than destroy cellular health. Remember: Americans used to spend 30% of their income on food in the 1950s. Today, it’s just 11%. We’ve sacrificed quality for quantity, and our health is paying the price. MASA CHIPS - GET 20% OFF YOUR FIRST ORDER: https://bit.ly/40LVY4y Join the Ultimate Human VIP community and gain exclusive access to Gary Brecka's proven wellness protocols today!: https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg Connect with Steven Rofrano: Instagram: https://bit.ly/435ybxf TikTok: https://bit.ly/4j0p9WP X.com: https://bit.ly/3GSTZmS LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/454xu8v Thank you to our partners: H2TABS - USE CODE “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4hMNdgg BODYHEALTH - USE CODE “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV BAJA GOLD - USE CODE "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa EIGHT SLEEP - SAVE $350 ON THE POD 4 ULTRA WITH CODE “GARY”: https://bit.ly/3WkLd6E COLD LIFE - THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: https://bit.ly/4eULUKp WHOOP - GET 1 FREE MONTH WHEN YOU JOIN!: https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW VANDY - USE CODE “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/49Qr7WE AION - USE CODE “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD HAPBEE - FEEL BETTER & PERFORM AT YOUR BEST: https://bit.ly/4a6glfo CARAWAY - USE CODE “ULTIMATE” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3Q1VmkC HEALF - GET 10% OFF YOUR ORDER: https://bit.ly/41HJg6S BIOPTIMIZERS - USE CODE “ULTIMATE” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4inFfd7 RHO NUTRITION - USE CODE “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: https://bit.ly/44fFza0 GENETIC TEST: https://bit.ly/3Yg1Uk9 Watch the “Ultimate Human Podcast” every Tuesday & Thursday at 9AM EST: YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8 Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3RQftU0 Connect with Gary Brecka: Instagram: https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs TikTok: https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo X.com: https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf Facebook: https://bit.ly/464VA1H LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/4hH7Ri2 Website: https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU Merch: https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1 Newsletter: https://bit.ly/47ejrws Ask Gary: https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:20 Steven Rofrano’s Story and Journey to Masa Chips 08:23 Why Remove Seed Oils in Our Diet? 19:27 Non-Organic & GMO-Foods Toxicity 20:34 Founding of Ancient Crunch (Masa Chips) 28:08 Nutrient Density in Foods 32:41 From 30% to 11% Household Budget for Food 35:02 Masa Chips Production vs. Big Snack Industry 39:28 Avoidance of Using Artificial Additives & Preservatives 49:20 Where is Ancient Crunch Going? 52:53 Sourcing of Raw Ingredients 57:07 Final Question: What does it mean to you to be an “Ultimate Human?” The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka Podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice, and no doctor/patient relationship is formed. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast is at the user’s own risk. The Content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their health care professionals for any such conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Steven Rofrano and what inspired the creation of Masa Chips?
You know, with one of the best products that I have in my kitchen, one of the best products on the market, and this is never a podcast about products and services, as you guys know, but in this particular case, I wanted to go deep down the rabbit hole of food safety on the backs of the Baja movement and what we can do and add to our kitchen to maybe replace some of the toxic compounds that our families and our kids are eating.
Great ways to add snacks to your daily routines. And you know I have an episode called What's in Gary's Kitchen, and I do lateral shifts where we take all kinds of different foods that you love to eat and swap them for things that are more nutrient-dense that feed your cellular biology. And so if you're into that, today's podcast is going to be a must-watch.
So welcome to the podcast, Stephen Raffrano. Thank you. Great to be here. So what's your role with Masa? And then I want to take a step back, and I really want my audience to kind of get to know you and know a little bit about your story and what actually brought you here.
I'm the CEO and co-founder of Ancient Crunch. We make Masa chips, which are tallow-fried tortilla chips, and also Vandy crisps, which are tallow-fried potato chips. And I started this with a friend about... Almost three years ago at this point, two and a half years ago, one of my friends was eating a bunch of Tostitos one morning. I think this is after. This is college? This is after college.
This is like a New Year's trip. Actually in Fort Lauderdale. Okay. Not too far from here. Yeah. I was just in Fort Lauderdale this morning. Basically New Year's two years ago plus a month. My friend eating Tostitos and this is after the whole seed oil summer. I like to call it 2021 when seed oils really became mainstream.
Yes. Yeah. When the news about them. Yeah, when the news about them.
Right, right, right.
They've been out there for a long time, but like people started exposing the toxicity.
The term seed oil is like people started talking about it then. Yeah. Yeah. And so I was just kind of going on a rant to my friend about why are you putting this in your body? Seed oils are poisonous. This is toxic. What are you doing? And he's like, I'm just trying to eat. Like, I'm hungover. I'm just trying to eat my breakfast.
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Chapter 2: Why are seed oils considered toxic and why should we remove them from our diet?
And so, yeah, healthy is nice, but they want to eat what tastes good and other sort of things. So you expect the same people that have made fun of me for eating beef liver.
I kind of envision you out there in your backyard with the fryer and being like, hey, anybody want to invest? This is my startup company.
Not yet. That would come later.
Your seed round starting right out there in the backyard with your Uncle Joe.
I have my PowerPoint, my business plan.
Yeah, business plan. No, guys, really, this is going to be a big thing. Who wants to get in now before we launch it?
I didn't even know any of that yet because, again, I had just found out five minutes prior that they didn't taste beefy. So it was like news to me. So yeah, I fed this to my family members who ate them and were like, wait, this is actually pretty good. Because I have a lot of, you know, these are people who if I fed them liver, they would freak out.
They would not want any part of what would normally be considered health foods. And so the fact that they liked them, that set a light bulb off in my head because most health foods... as at least people think of them, taste bad. It's kale smoothie, it's chia seed pudding, it's like, eh, gross. And on the contrary, most things that taste good are considered unhealthy.
McDonald's, fast food, chips, candy, whatever. So the fact that you have something here that's healthy enough for me, the health freak at this time, and also delicious enough for the people that don't care about health at all, that's a pretty novel thing. And that was the idea that I was like, wait, this could actually go somewhere. This is actually impactful.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Ancient Crunch face in producing chips with healthy ingredients?
And so that guy invented this process that allowed them to turn cottonseed oil into a solid. And now all of a sudden, people, because it was consistent with American culture, hey, we can eat this, it looks like lard, it looks like tallow, it's a solid thing, I can scoop it out, that's familiar to me. And so they began selling that, and it was obviously so cheap, right?
Because you're taking this waste product, it's basically free. Or you'd even pay to get rid of it in some cases. So you have this thing that's basically free, and now you're selling it to compete with something that actually costs money, whether it's lard or tallow or something. So you can undercut everyone else on price.
And a lot of their marketing at the time was touting this whole futurist, modernist idea of developed technology. It's sort of that dirty animal fat with those smelly farmers who have pig poop on their boots. Eat this thing made by science in a lab with guys in white coats. And that sort of idea, which is kind of the opposite today, most people think, if it's made in a lab, I don't want it.
Back then, it really resonated with the American culture, who was like this forward-looking, like, scientific, like, we want this kind of technology in our lives. So that's kind of how it got started, and then that was a very, very big success for them, obviously because the inputs are so cheap, and ultimately led to them starting to sell liquid seed oils, starting in the 50s and beyond.
So anyway, all of that's to say that this entire category of products was invented. There was a point in time in history when people did not eat this at all. That's not true about corn. That's not true about wheat.
Well, at least in recent memory, people have been eating all these things, you know, butter, they've been eating, they've been drinking water, for example, eating sugar for at least hundreds of years, if not thousands. Cedar oils. were not eaten in any form or fashion, like these types of oils, the industrial processed ones, prior to, say, the early 1900s.
So I think understanding that history makes it a lot easier to understand why we shouldn't really be eating them. Because anyone who understands this idea of how we're evolved, right? We talk about we're evolved to get sunlight.
You talk about how we're not supposed to be wearing sunglasses outside because we want to get the sunlight in our eyes, and that helps us make the melanin that we need to protect our skin. All these things, like live how we're evolved, Same thing with food. No one has evolved to eat seed oils. It's not possible that anyone's evolved to eat seed oils.
So it's kind of like this shocking, and the last piece I'll say about this that I've been talking for a minute is that it went from zero, literally zero, to 25 to 30% of the average American's calories. a quarter of their calories.
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Chapter 4: How do Masa Chips compare to big snack industry products in production and ingredient quality?
I've not confirmed this, but I'd be interested to hear your take.
Um, there's a common thing on the internet about how the founding fathers, after they signed the declaration of independence, like rented out some bar in Philadelphia and just like drink obscene quantities of alcohol, even for like the most, you know, alcoholic of modern, you know, say frat bros or whoever, just like handles of whiskey per person, like this kind of thing.
Um, and I, I can't help but wonder, and I know people used to drink a lot more in the past, actually. Like you, if you go to the cafes and bars in Europe, you have these big giant shelves of liquors and stuff. No one's drinking that anymore. And people talk about how Gen Z doesn't drink that much, yada, yada, yada.
I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that we literally can't process alcohol in the way that our ancestors did because our livers are so... tied up with, I'm sure, you know, seed oils, but I'm sure other things too, but predominantly seed oils.
And that's another thing, you know, we talk about the toxic burden in a lot of these snacks. It's not just the seed oils. I mean, what originally drew me to ancient grain, you know, a friend of mine told me about you named Ben Greenfield and who I'm a huge, huge fan of. And, um,
he brought my attention to you guys and I started looking at your ingredients, you know, non-GMO corn, organic grass-fed beef tallow, sea salt, you know, spices I could recognize. I think in your traditional ones, that's all you got in there is the grass-fed beef tallow and sea salt. Grass-fed tallow, organic corn, and then the salt or organic or better spices.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's the organic and the non-GMOs is another one because that industry as a whole, in my opinion, is one of the most toxic industries food sources, you know, sources that supplies our food system. And what happens is as a base ingredient, it makes its way everywhere.
It's like, you know, seed oils are kind of like the root and they go into this trunk and they just branch out into all these different, you know, if you pick up a salad dressing on the...
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Chapter 5: What makes beef tallow an ideal frying fat compared to coconut or avocado oil?
Because I'm always fascinated by people that, and I'm making an assumption about you, so tell me if I'm wrong, but who don't have any specific expertise in a certain market. I assume you didn't have any.
Absolutely. I have zero experience.
professional experience in food or right anything and and um you know but i also find and i say this all the time on my podcast you know some of the most passionate driven purposeful entrepreneurs i've ever had on this podcast including yourself um they solve some kind of problem in their life and and they're actually solving a big problem for other people i mean you're solving a massive problem and that is is there an antidote to you know our current incredibly unhealthy
snacking habits without just killing your snacking habit, but replacing it. You know, I call this lateral shift. And the answer is clearly yes. I mean, so it's a massive problem. And so talk a little bit about this transition from backyard turkey fryer to when it became a real thing.
Just a point about the massive problem, just for some context. Frito-Lay North America, which sells Doritos, Tostitos, Lays, etc. People buy in North America, people buy $30 billion worth of that a year. Wow. Yeah. So when we say massive problem, this particular, like food in general is big. Snack foods is huge. Food is even bigger.
But like just this one tiny little industry, tortilla and potato chips, basically. Wow. And that's just Frito-Lay.
I found fascinating that I heard you on another podcast talking about this. And one of the things you said, it was just a podcast. It wasn't video. Yeah. One of the things you were talking about is how the manufacturer actually manufactures possibly for multiple brands, maybe 10, maybe dozens of brands.
And so you're essentially getting the same source, different labels, but you're essentially getting the same ingredient.
Right, exactly.
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Chapter 6: How did Steven and team transition from backyard prototypes to a commercial food business?
I've, I've fried some coconut before it comes out greasy, shiny, you know, it gets on your fingers. Like, I don't know. I don't like that. So tallow is the ideal frying fat. We couldn't get someone to make it for us. Then we were like, okay, crap. So we're going to have to go make it ourselves. That was the next fundamental realization. And so we thought about like, how are we going to do this?
We're going to rent a commercial kitchen because you have to have, you know, a food safe place to make your products. Um, we ended up finding one not too far from, um, As I said, my parents' house, which is where the prototype was made. So this is where I grew up. So I know the area well. We found a kitchen. We had to go buy a fryer. We had to get people.
We had to buy a machine to get the pouches. We had to do all that stuff. And we were like, as we were planning this out, we quickly realized... this is going to cost a lot of money. This is going to cost a lot of money.
I assume you weren't just independently wealthy on your own.
No.
Okay.
No, still not. Okay.
Such is the life of an entrepreneur, brother. Yes.
So we realized it was going to cost a lot of money. And so we were trying to like figure out how this is going to work. I looked at the price on the shelf of like Doritos and I'm like, This doesn't even make sense. Not even about the ingredient quality, because, of course, tal is way more expensive than seed oils. Organic corn is way more expensive. The salt is way more expensive.
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Chapter 7: Why are Masa Chips priced higher than conventional chips and how does industry scale affect costs?
So like, for example, if I'm on the shelf at Publix or a similar, I'm not naming Publix specifically, but that kind of store, if I'm on a shelf, Publix might take 35 to 45% of the sticker price for their margin. For Frito-Lay, they might take 25%. Because Frito-Lay has this massive volume, they negotiate this better deal, yada, yada, yada.
So, so many structural reasons why, oh, and the last thing, and Frito-Lay's bottom barrel ingredients are not only cheap inherently, they're even cheaper because the government subsidized them. Right, yeah. A.K.A. your tax dollars. Yeah, yeah. A.K.A. the listeners' tax dollars subsidized this. Right. So there's a lot of reasons why it's cheap.
And so thinking about this, it's like, obviously, we're going to have to make this more expensive in order to survive, in particular, to survive without accepting a ton of outside investor money, which we didn't really want to do because we intend to control and own the business for a long time.
So we realized that the products are going to have to be expensive, which I think all things considered, for me personally, if I'm not eating monster chips, I'm just not going to eat them. They're more filling. I would probably, people- They are actually more filling.
So are the Vandy chips, by the way. Oh, yeah. Like, you really can't overeat them, which, you know, one of the things I talk about a lot on the podcast is nutrient density. And, you know, I mean- Chips and snacks really shouldn't be the main source of our meal.
That shouldn't be the main thing.
It's an accessory. Yeah, it's an accessory. And nutrient density is what our GLP-1 responds to. Now we have all of these ozempic, guacove, you know, Manjaro, essentially trying to mimic what we already make in our gut. And we make more GLP-1 in response to nutrient density.
If you actually look at side-by-side trials with, and Mark Hyman talks about this all the time, side-by-side trials of highly processed diets versus deeply nutritious or whole food diets that have nutrient-dense foods,
you'll find that even when they gave the exact same amount of calories, highly processed calories versus nutrient-dense calories, the highly processed group got hungrier more frequently and hungrier faster. And so the important point about that is that when you eat satiating nutrient-dense foods, you have less of a tendency to overeat. It's really hard to overeat ribeye.
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Chapter 8: What role does nutrient density play in snacking and satiety according to Gary Brecka?
In a single meal? Wow. And their kids and their children in one meal. Wow. Eating several hundred more calories until they were full. And like you said before, who knows? I'm sure they're getting more hungry faster than the kids that ate the saturated fat. And so there's an added layer. And Michael Eads talks about the whole metabolic reason for this. There's FADH and NADH ratios involved.
It's all very complex. I think you'd really like it. I'll send this to you afterward.
Yeah, send it to me.
I would really love it. Yeah, it's a very interesting framework of our cells telling us when to stop eating based on caloric density. Yeah, satiation, nutrient density, caloric density. Totally agree. That's it. You will eat more calories when you're eating seed oils. And obviously people count calories. I'm not a big calorie counting fan myself. But I think it's somewhat helpful for some people.
But yeah, people eat more calories when they're eating seed oils as their fat instead of tallow. So there's, yeah. And then the other thing about cost, which I think is very interesting, is something about expectations, right? So in the 1950s, 30% of our household budget went to food. Yeah, that's... Yeah, like a third of people's income. That's a sizable amount of money.
Sizable amount of money, right? Nowadays, it's 11%. Wow, so it's a third. A third of what it was in the 50s. And 100 years before that, it was like your entire life was a farmer because 97% of people are farmers. So you worked to eat. Yeah, you worked to eat. So it was like 100% of your income, basically, or your time or whatever, equivalent.
So over the past 200 years, we've progressively gone from our entire lives were dedicated to food to now 10% of our income is due to food and we complain about it. Obviously, financial circumstances are what they are. However, people's diets, like the quality of the food that your dollar purchases has suffered because of this.
And so if we're thinking, if you're of the mindset, we're like, okay, food actually affects health. If you understand, oh, I'm going to be, I'm going to save money on food now and I'm going to be sick later and that's going to cost even more money. In addition to the suffering, like what about suffering?
Like money is one thing, but like being physically healthy and vibrant is worth more than money in my opinion. Um, so if you add up all these factors, we, we actually are spending, I think way too little money on food collectively.
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