Adam Torres and Irina Swan discuss Healthiest Chef.
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Show Notes:
How can you stay fit and healthy in a sustainable manner? In this episode, Adam Torres and Irina Swan, Co Founder at Healthiest Chef, explore Irina’s journey as an entrepreneur and Healthiest Chef.
About Irina Swan
Irina Swan is an early-stage startup leader with expertise in product development, strategy, go-to-market execution, operations, and business development. With over a decade of startup experience, she has launched multiple products that achieved billion-dollar valuations, generated over $15 million in revenue, and reached more than 2 million users worldwide.
Her background in finance and business enables her to prioritize product backlogs by linking features to key metrics, increasing project survival rates in early stages. She has successfully initiated more than 10 projects in high-ambiguity environments, demonstrating a strong ability to define clear requirements.
Irina has developed a diverse range of products, including mobile and social apps, an engage-and-earn platform, a play-and-earn game, AI-driven assistants for health, nutrition, and digital reputation, as well as NFT Marketplace APIs.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right, today I have Irina Schwan on the line, and she is the co founder over at Healthiest Chef.
Irina, welcome to the show. Thank you, Adam. And I really love the name Mission Matters, and I feel privileged to be here. All right. Well, I feel privileged that I got to eat your food. I was just talking when we were doing the, for everybody listening, when we were doing the warmup, I was looking at this and I’m like, wait a minute, I know her.
And then I saw the name and then I was like, oh, I still remember the food. It was so good. So we met, correct me if I’m wrong, we met last year and HealthSpan Summit. And you know what’s funny about that too? Guess who I just interviewed not even an hour ago, Elias Arjan, who was the, Oh, wow. founder of Healthspan Summit.
That’s hilarious. That’s the universe. Just bringing everybody together. I can’t even make that up. And that’s hilarious. But I, I did have the opportunity for everybody listening to eat this delicious food and I got to see the plans and everything else that was going on. And I guess just to get us kicked off before we get into Healthiest Chef, I want to know, how did you get into this space in general?
Like, how did you learn your craft? I will, I have finance background and I’m an entrepreneur since I was 21 or 20. I worked in tech for a decade, worked for big companies, but my passion was always wellness because when you work in tech, you don’t really see the impact. It’s all numbers and people earning money, losing money.
I worked in crypto for some time and it didn’t make any sense. So for me, wellness is my pain, my personal pain, and it’s my life’s mission. And it all started to unveil when I moved to the U. S. Because I faced various health issues and you, I think you probably know it. Number one killer in the U. S.
is heart disease and number one cause of it is nutrition. So basically, I got very sick and it was so bad that I wanted to leave back and go back to my home country. And this is when I met my co founder. I think you met her as well, Natalie. And she was working for athletes and celebrities at the time.
She was doing prepping for them. And she created a menu for me where she eliminated the food and the best part, she taught me how to do it in two, three hours. Like for the whole week, I had all those amazing meals and I healed myself. And as a product person, as entrepreneur, I was like, okay, what if everybody can have this food available?
And I just looking back, I understand that as a busy professional, like my choices were very limited, processed meals, Uber eats. You know, delivery services. I don’t I don’t think we have to go into details. Everybody knows like how bad it is. And I think like our concepts of food are very perverted. And I think as entrepreneurs would go after some mission, some idea.
And I think this is a very big problem because yes, we need to eat food that reenergizes us. So food is fuel, right? So fatty, crappy food packed with sugars and chemicals is not capable to fuel success to fuel our big dreams. I think we need food for the champions. Ooh, I like that food for the champions.
I’m in. So let’s go further into that. How can busy professionals kind of keep this on top of mind and not because there’s going to be some people listening to this episode and they’re like, I know that all makes sense, but how, how do I do it? So tell me more. So I think we can, when we need to talk about nutrition, we need to look at data and studies.
And I know there’s a lot of debates about nutrition but again, there’s blue zones. I don’t know if any of the guests mentioned blue zones before, but that’s probably a big one. Their founder is on our program too, in Healthiest Chefs. Basically they started Habitat Centenarians for like 50 years and they found certain traits.
It is nutrition. It’s other pillars to such a socializing and moving a lot in a very aerobic manner. And there are quite a few interesting findings out there. Of course, they were eating whole food. So only whole foods, no processed food. And interestingly, those areas were in a very modest location.
So Costa Rica, right? So like my myth about nutrition longevity was that, Oh, it’s only for the rich people. In reality it’s vice versa, right? So those people that were eating very modestly and thus they develop all those. Healthy habits. Another big study was between studies by Harvard. Professor Christopher Gardner.
He’s the head of nutrition at Stanford was the one that was leading this investigation. They were comparing like different diets and some diets. actually lengthens the telomeres, the very biomarkers of aging. So and we have Brian Johnson, too. One of the most tidy humans on earth right now. And we can see what he eats.
And I think it’s just like, I like to simplify things, right? I would say Number one thing to understand is that it’s all about diversity. So you need to be eating diversity of food. So it’s not about just one superfood or eating pineapples all day. It’s about healing to the diversity. It’s number one, very easy.
So. Then the next rule is whole foods, right? And then organic, preferably regeneratively organic. We can talk about a little bit more. And we place a lot of focus on detox right now because we live in a very toxic environment. So glucose rich foods help with natural detoxification. So we do have Like, we need to understand we’re an organism and we actually have everything to be successful and healthy.
So first we need to realize it’s not like one big bat, one superfood or one, one change that you make. No, it’s like 1 percent better attitudes, like in business, like in sports, no unicorns here. And it takes. It’s time to build traction of the nutrition will longevity. So two, three years, and you can actually see the results.
And I think mindfulness probably the same timeline but our body regulates itself. So all you need to do is to eat well, sleep well. And if you have a great lifestyle, you don’t need supplements. I just had my results returned. I’m 30 years younger than my biological age. And I don’t take any supplements.
I do don’t do anything crazy. I don’t do any crazy exercises all day long. It’s just very balanced lifestyle, and it doesn’t require spending a lot of money. So, and I think that’s one of the reasons when we were thinking about the product, we’re thinking, okay, we can do a meal delivery, right? People will be paying all this money and they’ll be eating this amazing food, but we want to help anyone like people like me, busy professionals.
So I think it’s important. We developed a product where people actually spend less money. They’re spending 125 per week per person, and they’re eating the best longevity food on the planet. So they’re actually saying that they’re saving like 40, 000 a year on food because they’re It doesn’t even include the medical bills and concierge services.
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that makes so much sense. And how are you? So how are you doing this? Give us some of the, like, let’s, let’s add, this is a good transition, actually. Let’s talk a little bit more about Healthiest Chef and how you’re accomplishing this, how you’re helping to realize this mission.
It’s funny you mentioned taste in the beginning, and I think taste is a very important factor because if you’re not looking forward to the meals, and that was my trouble when I had to go on those elimination diets. It kind of takes the pleasure out of life. And I don’t know if you’ve heard of vagus nerve.
So basically there is a nerve that goes directly from the gut to the brain. And whatever microbiome feels, we feel it. So for example, if our microbiome isn’t happy, We feel unhappy or we feel anxiety. Like I was very anxious when I was having got issues and that was because of that connection actually.
So , can we link it back to the question? Because I think it started like yeah, no, no. So how are you accomplishing this? Yeah. With healthy. So the taste is very important, because if your microbiome is happy, you feel happy, and it needs to be tasty.
That’s number one. And we actually recently have a chef, a famous French chef, he came to have a private master class with us, and he was crying when he was trying the soup. It was really interesting to see that. So taste number one. Second, honestly, like anywhere, it’s discipline. But it actually saves time and money down the line.
So basically, you allocate two, three hours to make the meals for the week. We have all the instructions, we have links to the groceries. The groceries get delivered to your door from Whole Foods. It’s very, very easy. In those two, three hours with all the equipment, like, say, food processor or blender, if you make the food, and you just repeat it every week, and get younger.
I love it. I love this idea. it makes so much sense and it’s you know what I like about this is that you even have the, so maybe go into the program just a little bit. So you said you could get it, all the ingredients are there for you. All of it. It’s definitely a masterclass. I’ve been on the website by the way, healthiestchef.
com. So for everybody that’s watching or listening to this you can definitely go check it out. And I’m looking at some of the some of the program highlights that you have on there. Whether it’s overnight oats or tofu scramble or dragon power smoothie or citrusy fennel chowder. I mean, I’m getting hungry just reading this actually.
I think I think you tried the chowder and the brat and we’re actually also going to have beans choconuts coming up. So we’re always updating. So we’re updating you with new weeks, with new recipes and so far we didn’t even have, because we have like a seven day return policy. Like if somebody doesn’t like the food, they can like just request their money back.
And we never had it so far. Wow. Wow. Yeah. That’s amazing. Well, Irina, this has been a lot of fun having you on the show today and learning more about Healthiest Chef. If somebody is listening or watching this and they want to connect with you and your team, Irina what’s the best way for them to do that?
How do they connect? So I think I will leave a link to our free master class. So we’re going to have two coming out. One on environmental toxins with environmental toxicity doctor. Another one will be a master class again, free on nutritional fundamentals with head of nutrition from Stanford. So I will link, I will leave a link.
And if you have any questions, you can just text me maybe on Instagram arena swan, and I’ll be happy to help. Fantastic. And Freddy, listening to this, just so you know we’ll definitely leave the, leave everything in the show notes so you can connect with Irina. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Irina, I look so much for joining us and we look forward to watching the continued growth and success of a healthiest chef and to taste some more of your food to coming up soon.
So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you guys. Agreed.