LyfeFuel Founder : Chris Manderino
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Meet Chris Manderino, LyfeFuel’s Co-Founder
Steve Washuta: Welcome to Trulyfit, the podcast where we interview experts in fitness and health to expand our wisdom and wealth. I’m your host, Steve Washuta, co-founder of Trulyfit and author of Fitness Business 101. Today’s guest is Chris Manderino, a former NFL fullback. He’s now the founder of LyfeFuel, a plant-based whole food supplement company: no soy, no dairy, vegan-friendly, made with real, ethically sourced, sustainable, non-GMO ingredients, and 100% plant based. We talk about some of the LyfeFuel products, but we also cover Chris’s NFL career and what he learned working alongside bariatric physicians. We also get into what he’s learned from a business standpoint, lessons that apply to anyone thinking about starting a supplement company, or any company. It was a great conversation that ranged from science to business to football. Chris, welcome to the Trulyfit Podcast. Give my listeners a little background on who you are, and what you do day to day in the health and fitness industry.
Chris Manderino: Steve, great to be here, and excited to be a guest on the podcast. My name is Chris Manderino, and I’m the co-founder at LyfeFuel. LyfeFuel is a complete nutrition company rooted in plant-based whole foods. My previous experience was as a professional NFL athlete. After that, I had firsthand experience on the medical side of nutrition, working in bariatrics, which is weight loss surgery and medical weight management. Before taking the entrepreneurial route, I combined that experience as a professional athlete with the business and medical side of nutrition. That combination is what led to what we’ve done at LyfeFuel.
From Bariatric Medicine to Founding LyfeFuel
Steve Washuta: What did you learn in bariatrics that helped you? Was it starting your career, or making decisions for your company?
Chris Manderino: A ton. Bariatrics is a pretty unique patient population, but obesity is a growing epidemic in the Western world. The people coming in for weight loss surgery, depending on the type, are often at their last resort. They’ve tried a bunch of different diets and just couldn’t get any of them to work. Bariatric surgery altered the anatomy to control and restrict the amount of food someone could eat. That was the catalyst to reverse chronic illness and get the weight off. But here’s what I learned: regardless of whether patients lost weight, the ones who took their nutrition seriously had far better outcomes. Getting adequate protein and micronutrients made the difference. The weight they lost was more fat-focused rather than lean muscle wasting. Patients who didn’t take their nutrition seriously looked sickly, even after losing weight. They had hair loss, sagging skin, and a look in their eyes and face that showed they were undernourished. When you change the anatomy and restrict eating that much, it becomes far more difficult to get all the nourishment you need from food alone. Supplementing their diet with the right targeted nutrients was key to their success. That’s when I saw a much broader problem existing in American society. We’re not getting the same nutrition from food that we once were.
The Nutritional Triage Theory of Aging
It’s not necessarily nutritional deficiency, though that does affect certain subsets of the population; it’s nutritional insufficiency. It’s a silent thing where your body pulls key nutrients from wherever it can just to survive. Bruce Ames has an interesting theory about this, called the nutritional triage theory of aging, which holds that when you’re depleted or insufficient in essential vitamins and minerals, you’re sacrificing long-term health for short-term survival.
Why Protein Alone Doesn’t Guarantee Longevity
Steve Washuta: They talk a lot about that in the recent studies. People always argue about how much protein you should eat, and what percentage of your diet should be protein. Now, a lot of the focus is on longevity studies. It’s not just about building muscle and looking better. As far as longevity goes, a diet that’s extremely rich in protein isn’t always the best thing for you.
Chris Manderino: There’s a balance to everything, and it really comes down to your goals. If you’re a bodybuilder trying to compete at a high level, your protein needs are going to be very different than the average person’s. Depending on your physical fitness and what you’re optimizing for, those protein intakes vary. But the role of protein in the diet is paramount. It’s the structural building block of lean muscle, and it drives satiety. When you build your meal around protein, without over-consuming it, you stay full longer, which helps you avoid reaching for less desirable foods out of cravings. Protein is essential, but we probably overestimate how much we need. That’s especially true if we’re living a sedentary lifestyle rather than a physically active one.
How Much Protein Do You Actually Need?
Steve Washuta: In the social media age, most people take their advice from people who don’t live similar lives to them. There’s a guy on all sorts of illicit drugs who weighs 280 pounds at 7% body fat. He’s telling you he’s eating 290 grams of protein a day. That doesn’t mean the 170-pound accountant sitting at his desk also needs to eat 280 grams of protein. He might only work out three times a week.
Chris Manderino: Exactly, and that’s going to put undue stress on essential organs like the kidneys. They have to break down and process all that protein. At the end of the day, it comes down to what you can actually absorb and utilize. It’s not just the absolute number of grams, it’s the quality of that protein, and that goes for any nutrient. There are different ways to measure protein quality and digestibility. The gold standard for a long time was the PDCAAS score, which has since evolved into the DIAAS score. That’s a marker of how well these proteins are absorbed, digested, and utilized. There’s also the leucine threshold: how much leucine you need per meal to maintain muscle protein synthesis, rather than tip into muscle protein breakdown. That comes back to the amino acid breakdown of the food and the digestibility of the protein types involved.
Plant-Based vs. Animal Protein: What the Research Shows
Steve Washuta: There’s a lot of argument now about the biological value of certain proteins and how they’re digested. There was a documentary out recently promoting more vegan-based dietary habits. It argued the old process used to assess this was kind of antiquated. Now that researchers can look more closely at digestion in the duodenum, that’s beyond my scope, they found something surprising. We were actually digesting vegan proteins to the same extent, biological-value-wise, as some other proteins we didn’t think were comparable.
Chris Manderino: Yeah, and there are more studies coming out. That’s especially true now that alternative, plant-based proteins are more actively sought out by consumers. There’s more funding and research going into the biological value of plant versus animal proteins. A lot of it looks at pea and rice protein versus whey, and the impact on muscle building over a trial duration. Some of those studies show there’s not a primary difference between the two. Even with plant-based diets exclusively, the knock against plant protein has always been that it’s an incomplete source. But that view assumes somebody eats a single food all day. You’re getting protein from a myriad of sources, and your body knows what to do with all of them. You just don’t see protein deficiency exist anymore; it’s very rare.
Steve Washuta: That’s a great argument. It’s like saying water doesn’t have all the nutrients you need, so why drink it? That’s a false comparison, because you’re not doing this in a vacuum. I’m not only allowed to have a vegan protein shake; I can also eat other things throughout the day. People who make that argument compare one food to one food. They’re not looking at the full spectrum of what you’d eat across a whole day.
Bio-Individuality: Why One Diet Doesn’t Fit All
Chris Manderino: You look at something like the Krebs cycle or any metabolic process, and it’s incredibly complex. Trying to distill it down into a singular, simplistic claim is naive. Just consider all the chemical and enzymatic processes happening every time you consume something. The body is working its magic to figure out how to utilize all of that. It’s working to serve you in the best possible way.
Steve Washuta: Not to mention, we’re also biodiverse. If I’m an Alaskan Inuit whose family has eaten mostly meat and fish for six generations, and I haven’t had many vegetables, it might be harder for me to process plant foods. That’s because my gut biome has developed, epigenetically, to digest a different kind of diet. Someone who grew up somewhere with more access to fruits and vegetation might have a very different gut biome.
Chris Manderino: Absolutely, and that’s the whole concept of bio-individuality. Looking at any single diet in a vacuum and presenting it as the optimal diet for everyone is foolish. You have to experiment and understand your own needs and goals: socioeconomics, genetics, gut microbiome, ancestry, taste preferences. Also consider the enjoyability and social aspect of the food you’re eating. All of that gets overlooked when people argue dietary theory in the abstract, like vegan versus keto. Those debates are interesting from a study standpoint. But they don’t always transfer to the individual. That’s where you have to fine-tune things and figure out what your body uniquely needs.
Beyond Surgery: Why Nutrient Quality Matters Most
Steve Washuta: To put a bow on that, we had a physician on the show. He was dual board-certified in interventional radiology and obesity medicine. He found a way to use interventional radiology through bariatrics to essentially cauterize the hunger nerve. That’s a great start, but afterward, patients still need the right nutrients. It’s not just about helping people eat less on the front end. They still need to know what to eat, and they need to eat the right things so their body functions correctly. That’s a whole different side of medicine that usually doesn’t get addressed. We do the first intervention and then leave the patient to figure out the rest on their own. A lot of times that doesn’t happen, which is why so many of these surgeries fail to hold their results long-term.
Why Food Quality Beats Counting Macros
Chris Manderino: We often overlook the quality of food and get too consumed by macronutrients, calories, and other tangents. If we got back to eating a more ancestral diet, in an ideal world we’d grow and raise our own food. We’d know exactly the inputs and outputs. We’re obviously not going to spray that with pesticides and chemicals. Unfortunately, that’s not the food system we have today. You really have to be an advocate for your own health, and seek out food sources that align with what you’re trying to achieve. If you focus on the quality aspect, asking questions of your farmer or grocer about where the food comes from, you’ll get closer to the outcome you’re seeking. But if you’re just fixated on calories in, calories out, or hitting macro targets, you’re overlooking a much more important criterion. That’s the nutrient density of the food, and what’s not in it. What was it fed, how was it raised? The body has an amazing ability, when fed with proper, high-quality, nutrient-dense fuel, to partition that and satisfy you. If you ate 1,000 calories of sweet potatoes versus 1,000 calories of Doritos, you’d struggle to finish the sweet potatoes. But you might blow through the Doritos and want another 1,000 or 2,000 calories after. The qualitative and nutrient aspects of food really do matter.
Bars vs. Powders: The Product Development Tradeoffs
Steve Washuta: Let’s step away from the science and into marketing and development. I’m assuming you can correct me if I’m wrong, but having bars seems like a nightmare compared to powder. Powder is relatively easy: it’s a powder, most of them taste good once they’re flavored, chocolate fudge, double chocolate, vanilla. I’ve had powders from all over, and most taste fine, especially once you understand the texture. Protein bars are different. Taste profiles and textures vary a lot, and more often than not they’re not very good. They’re harder to make well, and on top of that, you need individual packaging. Why did you decide to go that route? What are the differences between making a bar and a powder?
Chris Manderino: Starting a bar line wasn’t an easy decision. I’m glad it’s not our core focus, because of exactly the constraints you mentioned. Margins on bars are quite small, so you have to sell a ton of them to make it a viable business. For us, it’s really a complementary product, another way for people to get the essential nutrients they need in a convenient, on-the-go format. Making a shake takes maybe one to two minutes, which sounds fast, but a bar is even more portable. You can travel with it and still get that full spectrum of vitamins and minerals. Getting an instant response and showcasing the brand also mattered. The way we developed the bars, 100% real food based, means every single micronutrient is something you could grow in your own backyard. That’s the direction we’re going with the reformulation of our hero product, the Essentials shake. Being 100% real food nutrition is our core value proposition. There’s less than 1% of supplement companies doing that comprehensively. That kind of innovation didn’t exist when we first started, so the bars were an easier route to prove it out.
Why LyfeFuel Bars Have a Shorter Shelf Life
We use a superfood and high fiber in the bars to do what a bar should do: curb hunger between meals. It’s not meant to replace a meal, but when you’re in a pinch and need something to satiate you, it’s a great option. That’s as long as it’s not loaded with a bunch of junk, which candidly a lot of bars are. They’re basically candy bars in disguise. We did some special things to get ours to taste great, which was challenging. They also have a shorter shelf life than our powders. That’s something we’re still figuring out as a newer product: trying to ramp up sales velocity without running into wasted inventory. It’s more challenging than the powder side, because going out of stock on a bar has a real financial impact. But that’s nowhere near as much as going out of stock on our core products, which are the powder formulations.
Bringing LyfeFuel Bars to Retail
Steve Washuta: I’m not sure if you’re in stores; you can tell me after this. But when I’m inside a store, whether it’s a Target or a GNC, my eyes are drawn to the protein bars, which are usually at mid-shelf level. The powders are on the top shelf, and most people aren’t going to those stores looking for powder anyway. I’ve never even looked there, because when I buy powder, I buy it online. I buy it from a brand I already know and trust. Bars are different, because I want to try something novel here and there. I go to the store, and maybe this is anecdotal, but I assume it works because they sell bars individually in stores, not just in boxes. So people can grab one they’ve never tried, check the ingredients, and buy it on the spot. So I do think there’s a branding advantage to having a bar.
The Case for a LyfeFuel Retail Presence
Chris Manderino: Absolutely, and at some point we’ll look at exploring retail further. That’s really the key to growth. If you’re trying to start a bar company without a retail presence, it’s almost impossible. The online space is tough, and standing out on shelf is challenging too. But that’s often where the first experience happens: somebody grabs a bar or two, likes it, and comes back. Right now retail isn’t something we’ve pursued; we actually pulled out of it early in our customer lifecycle. We’ll revisit it with the right organic retailers, stage by stage. Pop-up displays and point-of-purchase placement near checkout are definitely a huge opportunity. There might also be a different way to think about retail, like integrating with boutique fitness studios, which we’ve done a bit of, to hone in on that direct target demographic. Recurring purchases would then come online, since right now we only sell full boxes online. Breaking those down into individual units wouldn’t make economic sense once you factor in shipping costs alone.
Chris Manderino’s Advice for Aspiring Supplement Founders
Steve Washuta: Staying on that topic, convince a listener who wants to start a supplement company either to do it, or not to.
Chris Manderino: It depends. Really think about the unique problem you’re trying to solve, and the value proposition of the product you want to bring to market. In the supplement industry, there’s a ton of white-label, private-label, nice-to-meet-you products out there. Even in the protein space, I never wanted to start just another protein powder. To me that’s a waste of money for consumers and a waste of time from a business standpoint, you’re taking a commodity, throwing it in a bag, and marketing it. What we’ve done instead is look at nutrition more comprehensively. When you bite into an apple, you’re not just getting a single nutrient, you’re getting a whole host of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients from that apple itself. We wanted to build a line of convenient, functional foods people could integrate into their daily routine. There’s plenty of opportunity in the space, but you have to dig deeper to find a niche others aren’t paying attention to. Then you build a hero product around it. I don’t think consumers are looking for a company selling 200-plus different SKUs the way the legacy supplement brands do. That’s a reductionist approach to nutrition rather than a holistic one.
Why LyfeFuel Skips the Private-Label Playbook
You can get a lot more value from a complete nutrition source, like what we’ve built at LyfeFuel. It uses high-level science to pinpoint the specific levels of key vitamins and minerals that are largely missing from the modern diet. There’s also a therapeutic layer focused on things like longevity. But private-label supplements? I definitely don’t recommend that route unless you have a boatload of money to spend on marketing. Otherwise you’re just forcing yourself into existence without the resources to back it up.
What Chris Manderino Learned as an NFL Fullback
Steve Washuta: We might have buried the lede a little. Let’s go back to what you did before this company. You were a collegiate football player and then went to the NFL as a fullback, correct?
Chris Manderino: That’s correct, yeah.
Steve Washuta: I imagine at that point in your life you were eating anything and everything to keep on weight and muscle. You don’t look like you’re 250 pounds now, which you’d probably have to be as a fullback. Here’s a hypothetical. If you were working with a collegiate team and had to audit what they were doing nutrition-wise, how do you think you could help them? I know there’s a huge difference between what a fullback, a cornerback, and an offensive guard should eat. But broadly, what nutrients and dietary habits are they missing?
Auditing a Collegiate Team’s Nutrition Program
Chris Manderino: That’s a great question. I’d like to think it’s evolved since I played, but at the time there wasn’t a lot of guidance. Maybe a dietitian would help you create a meal plan if you sought one out, or if you needed to gain or lose weight, you could get some assistance. But it was fairly surface level: macros, calories, eat these types of things. At the collegiate and certainly the professional level now, I think it would be valuable to combine in-depth diagnostic testing with a tailored nutritional game plan for each athlete. That means taking into account their micronutrient status and whether they’re depleted in essential vitamins and minerals, then making sure they get adequate amounts predominantly through diet. That plan should focus on foods that fill their specific nutrient gaps and complement their training load and physical goals around strength and body mass. It should be tracked over time, the same way you’d track increases in a squat or bench. From my experience, nutrition is still kind of secondary to everything else an athlete is doing, so I’d want to see that switch made. Coaches and athletes themselves need to understand that nutrition can be a real competitive advantage, if you take it seriously.
Nutrition as a Lagging Indicator for Athletes
Based on my experience, a lot of guys are still eating fast food and performing at a high level. But you have to ask: what if you were more dialed in? Would you recover faster? You don’t really know until you get into what an individual athlete is doing daily. You also need buy-in from the coaching staff and the players themselves. At the professional level, you see it more. Guys who go on to have 20-year careers are dialed in with their nutrition as a matter of fact. That often gets overlooked at the collegiate age, because you can get away with more when you’re younger.
Steve Washuta: I think the key isn’t just age, it’s that you’re only in college for three or four years. A lot of these nutritional effects are what economics would call lagging indicators. They’re things you do now that don’t have a visible negative effect today, but that doesn’t mean they won’t down the road. Guys like Marshawn Lynch have talked publicly about eating bags of Skittles before a game. I think DK Metcalf still does something similar. Fine, you’re young and in the prime of your life. But that doesn’t mean it’ll help you when you’re 34, or that it’ll help you still be a professional athlete at 34. People expect an instantaneous benefit from nutrition, the way they’d expect from caffeine. When they don’t feel it, they give up. But energy and vitamins aren’t synonyms the way calories and energy are in nutrition. These are lagging benefits: sometimes you have to stay the course to see them.
Building Lifelong Habits in the Locker Room
Chris Manderino: Absolutely, and I’d say it goes beyond the game itself. You’re eating a certain way while you’re in the sport, trying to pack on muscle, but the habits you develop during those collegiate and high school years carry forward throughout life. I have a lot of guys I played with who still eat like we’re training twice a day and hammering weights, because that was our full-time job. It’s tough to break habits you’ve held for that long, even once you seek out better information about what you should be doing for longevity. If you can build good habits earlier on, they carry forward long after you’re done playing. They help you maintain, or get back to, a normal body weight, while mitigating the inflammatory nature of some of those old habits. It’s important to think about this from a long-term longevity perspective, rather than just the short shelf life of being an athlete.
Steve Washuta: Staying on training: I’ve talked to collegiate fullbacks, and high-level athletes in other sports generally, who say they now hate lifting. It was a punishment for them. Waking up at 5 a.m., getting pushed to your limits, sometimes literally lifting until you’re sick, builds a negative association with training. Do you feel that? Have you found a more well-rounded approach now, doing mobility work and stretching? Or is it still just the traditional lifting you’d assume a fullback would do?
Rethinking Training After the NFL
Chris Manderino: It’s definitely evolved in phases. I’m 41 now, so I’m not training at the level I was in the NFL. There was a chapter after I stopped playing where I was still doing a lot of similar weight-based workouts. I got into CrossFit for a while and really enjoyed the competitive outlet it gave me post-career. But that started to take a toll on my body and beat me down. My mobility suffered, and all the injuries I’d carried from football became a lot more painful. I realized CrossFit was no longer the best modality for me day to day. I had to figure out how to adapt. Even today, I think having a program and a plan is fundamental if you want to keep making progress. It doesn’t need to mean squatting 400-plus pounds on a Monday morning. There’s a lot more focused effort now on flexibility and mobility. The time I spend training is far more efficient, maybe an hour or so a day. It’s important to my daily routine because it keeps stress under control. It’s a mental outlet that serves me in a lot of ways beyond the physical. It’s a good balance to everything I experience as an entrepreneur, the ups and downs. It gives me time to keep working on my health and stay in tune with my body, because I’m not training to hit linebackers in the mouth twice a day anymore.
Learning to Listen to Your Body
Steve Washuta: I agree, it’s great to have a plan. It’s also great to deviate from it if you’re not feeling great. You go in, do your dynamic warmup, and realize your shoulder’s cranky and most of the plan involves pushing exercises. So instead you go on a two-mile jog and call it quits, then reassess tomorrow. Not everyone can do that, especially if they come from a background like yours, where things were more structured and you were used to just pushing through. My coach wouldn’t allow me to deviate: we had a three o’clock practice, I had to run the Oklahoma drill, so I ran the Oklahoma drill. It’s good that you’re able to step back now. You understand you don’t have to train that way anymore.
Chris Manderino: It’s not easy, because there’s still that voice in your head saying you’ve got to finish what’s on the paper. But not listening to my body has definitely gotten me hurt. The setback from an injury puts you back an extra week or several, sometimes worse. Having gone through that enough times, now I listen to the other side. If I’m not feeling it, there’s no harm in taking a step back and focusing on mobility instead, unless I’m training for something specific. The time you lose to an injury is way worse. It outweighs the small gains you’d get from squeezing out an extra rep or two.
Avoiding Overtraining and Injury in Modern Sports
Steve Washuta: There’s a misguided notion in sports now that there’s no line of diminishing returns. It’s as if you can just keep working at strength indefinitely. Not only is the risk of injury greater, and we have seen more injuries than ever. We’re also supposed to have more orthopedists and more people who understand kinesiology, nutrition, and the body than ever before. Why are we seeing more injuries? Because people are pushing their bodies to such extremes. You look at some NFL wide receivers and think: of course you have a hamstring injury, look at your legs. You’re too built up for what your position actually requires. I think there will eventually be more of a Tom Brady-style approach: prioritizing career longevity, dialing in diet, and not pushing to the absolute limit all the time. That shift tends to come from people who, down the road, get asked to audit a program and figure out what’s being done wrong. These programs have been run the same way since 1985: same squat racks, same goals, not much has changed. I hope that develops over the years, both for players’ long-term health, so they’re not crippled by 50. I also hope it develops for performance, because I think performance will actually improve as a result.
Balancing Strength With Mobility and Flexibility
Chris Manderino: Agreed, 100%. Similar to how nutrition is often an afterthought, mobility and flexibility have also been treated that way on the strength and conditioning side. Make sure the weight room session is heavy, and if there’s time to stretch, that’s a bonus. But it really comes down to force production in athletics, which requires strength. It also requires the mobility and flexibility to let a muscle explode through its full range of motion. If you’re just super buff and muscular without that mobility, the application of that muscle is reduced. So you need a balance between the two. I think that shift trickles down from what guys like Brady have shown at the NFL level. It eventually makes its way into the college ranks too.
Chris Manderino on What Sets LyfeFuel Apart
Steve Washuta: Like we talked about with individuality and biodiversity in food, the same idea applies here. A crude football analogy: a cornerback needs different things than an offensive guard. The guard can spend way more time bench pressing, because that’s how he dominates. But a quarterback spending all his time benching instead of working on footwork isn’t optimizing for his actual position. It comes down to what your specific goal is. Something that works for one person doesn’t mean it fits someone else’s goals or body type. Let’s go back to your supplements. What do you feel LyfeFuel has that competitor brands don’t? Is it particular nutrients, the amounts, or how they work together?
Why LyfeFuel Includes D3 and K2
Chris Manderino: Our hero product is the Essentials nutrition shake, which falls into the foundational meal-replacement category. What we did differently is look closely at which key vitamins and minerals are largely lacking in modern diets. We also looked at the science-backed levels needed for a functional baseline. Take vitamin D3 plus K2: most products in our category either skip D3 and K2 entirely, or use inferior sources. That’s critical, because K2 helps ensure calcium gets out of the arteries and into the bones where it belongs. D3 works more like a hormone in the body than a typical vitamin, involved in a huge range of processes. Leaving D3 and K2 out of a “complete” nutritional formulation means you’re overlooking the science. Products your listeners might know, like AG1 or Ka’Chava or Huel, have a comparable vitamin and mineral mix to ours. But they have no protein and no D3/K2; you’d have to take those separately. A lot of meal-replacement shakes check the box on nutrient count, say 21 different micronutrients at 10-20% of the daily value across the board. But they don’t look at which ones you’re likely already getting enough of through diet, and which ones are more at risk given the changing nutrient density of the soil food is grown in.
The Science Behind LyfeFuel’s Nutrient Synergy
All three of those things, D3, K2, and calcium, are nutrients we include that others don’t. They need to work synergistically. One of our closest competitors has 600 milligrams of calcium in their product, alongside a lot of things that look great on paper. But without enough of the right cofactors, too much calcium can actually block the absorption of other key vitamins and minerals. It’s not that more of everything is better, even though “more is better” is the usual American mentality. When it comes to nutrition, more targeted is what you need, that’s where our formulations stand out. We also avoid simple carbohydrates and unnecessary fillers, since carbs aren’t an essential nutrient. Instead, we focus on nutrient density. Our updated formulation leans further into being 100% real whole foods, similar to what we’ve already done with the bars. It will be one of the only products I’m aware of that hits therapeutic levels of these essential vitamins and minerals while sourcing them exclusively from real whole foods. That increases absorption and bioavailability, and is more in line with what our bodies actually crave. Compare that to synthetic vitamins and minerals, which are chemically created, sometimes starting from sources like petroleum and coal tar that would surprise a lot of consumers.
What Consumers Will Start Asking About Supplements
People taking a proactive approach to health are starting to ask these questions about supplements the same way they now ask about food. Where does it come from, how is it grown, what’s in it, am I avoiding seed oils? I think the next big question is going to be about supplements specifically. Where do these ingredients come from, and what’s the difference between synthetic B12 and methylated B12? Some thought leaders are already starting to push that conversation forward. That’s where we’re headed as a company, bringing that transparency to consumers who want the best for their bodies.
Why Trainers Are Talking About Nutrition
Steve Washuta: It sounds like you’re hitting every angle. You’re not just handing out 10% of every vitamin because that doesn’t make sense, you’re looking at what people are actually deficient in, dosing higher where needed and lower where it’s not. You’re also avoiding excess of nutrients that compete for the same uptake channels, like too much calcium blocking magnesium absorption. And you’re avoiding synthetic chemicals made in labs where the QA process is a black box. I think people are going to keep paying for supplements on a recurring basis for the rest of their lives. So getting this right matters.
Chris Manderino: We see that with our customer base constantly. People are becoming avid label readers who understand the distinction, like why we use methylated B12 instead of cyanocobalamin. That more informed population is finding its way to LyfeFuel. The mass market often doesn’t yet understand the value of those intricacies. It’s all about what you actually absorb at the cellular level. Seeking out higher-quality nutrient sources has a major impact over the long term. Vitamins don’t equate to energy directly. But when you improve the metabolic process and give your cells the nutrients they need as a foundation, your energy naturally improves without depending on caffeine. When you’re robbing the mitochondria of the core nutrients they need, they can’t function properly. So the real payoff is increased energy from fixing those underlying processes.
Steve Washuta: I think the word is spreading in my community too, the fitness and personal training side. There’s a fine line for personal trainers around what they can and can’t tell clients about diet. It’s not illegal, though it could be in certain states. But it’s frowned upon by a lot of certifying bodies, even though virtually everyone does it anyway.
Where Fitness Coaching and Nutrition Advice Overlap
Chris Manderino: It’s kind of silly, because people are actively seeking out your guidance and expertise. As a trainer, if you have this knowledge, you should at least be able to be a sounding board for your clients. That helps them make more informed choices. The bigger problem with the healthcare system is that it’s disconnected from diet entirely, it has almost nothing to do with it. So when people come to a personal trainer or a local gym owner, they’re often looking for that additional advice. Most people don’t have anywhere else to turn. Where you have to tread carefully is making a specific medical recommendation. You don’t know the exact nuances of someone’s situation without proper diagnostics.
Steve Washuta: True, but I consider this a “wicked problem,” the kind with no universal answer. It depends entirely on the person. There’s a lot of context I’d need to share for someone to really understand my reasoning. But if a client trusts me and my information, I should be allowed to share my thoughts. That’s the same way I’d tell a friend what I honestly think if they asked whether they should get married. We should have the leeway to speak up, because we care about our clients’ long-term health and wellness.
The Rise of Active Vitamins and Consumer Awareness
One thing that’s really taken off in our community is awareness around the active form of vitamins. Nobody was talking about that even three years ago. People didn’t know the difference; you just went and bought a multivitamin. Now people are checking the label to see whether it’s the active or non-active version. They’re tossing the ones that aren’t. There’s a groundswell of people in my community talking about this, which in turn helps people in your community too. It’s really the same community, people who care about health and wellness for the general public.
Chris Manderino: Absolutely, and we were positioned around that idea early. It took a while, though, for it to reach the general consumer discourse. Now you’re seeing the health IQ of the average person continuing to climb. More people are seeking us out because of that. We’ve learned a ton in our nine years in business. I’ve also spent almost three years now working on a new formulation to integrate more of this thinking, which is difficult to do through real food sources but not impossible. I’m excited to finally launch it later this year. I’ve also built a database, a spreadsheet of every vitamin, mineral, and nutrient across all of our direct competitors and where each one is sourced from. I can say with confidence that our new formulation will be the cleanest, most complete solution to daily nutrition on the market.
Steve Washuta: Should you release that document?
Chris Manderino: I’d be happy to. We’ve got nothing to hide, and it’s all public information anyway, just supplement facts panels. It’s more about digging in and being knowledgeable about the sources, and understanding how combining these elements achieves a specific result.
Timing, Luck, and Building a Brand That Lasts
Steve Washuta: It’s interesting how a little bit of this always comes down to luck, or timing. If you were promoting organic bananas in 1988, hardly anyone would be listening. Maybe a niche audience in a place like Santa Barbara, but not in Nebraska or Texas. You have to come around at the right time. Now you have a lot of people talking about this, figures like Gary Brecka. Some of them are charlatans, and some genuinely know what they’re talking about. Everyone’s discussing active vitamins now, and why it’s worth paying more for the better version of a supplement. Sometimes that’s just a matter of luck, of whatever happens to be resonating in the current culture.
Chris Manderino: It’s less about coming around at exactly the right time. It’s more about staying around long enough for that time to arrive. Look at the Stanley water bottle: that company had been around forever, and then, for whatever reason, it went viral and the business skyrocketed. When you have sound business principles and a genuine long-term horizon, it puts you in a position to get luckier over time. There’s more opportunity as the broader narrative evolves.
Steve Washuta: I forget the exact saying, but luck is really just people doing good work for a long period of time until they get their shot. It’s not luck so much as the inevitability of eventually getting found out, in a good way. Chris, this was great information. Let my listeners know where they can find more about you and LyfeFuel.
Where to Find Chris Manderino and LyfeFuel
Chris Manderino: The best place is our website, lyfefuel.com. We’ve also got an Instagram, though I’m personally not a very active social media user. I’m more focused on the business and on living life outside of digital means. All of our information lives on the website, including a transformation program, a holistic approach to wellness beyond just the physical products. It’s for anybody looking to move away from the standard American diet, learn more about the core pillars of wellness, and get started with the physical products too. That’s really the best place for people to start their journey with us.
Steve Washuta: My guest today has been Chris Manderino of LyfeFuel. Thank you so much for joining the Trulyfit Podcast.
Chris Manderino: Steve, thanks so much. Hope your listeners enjoyed the show.
Steve Washuta: Thanks for joining us on the Trulyfit podcast. Please subscribe, rate, and review on your listening platform. Feel free to email us, we’d love to hear from you.
Thanks again!
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If you want to see how another guest turned a bariatric surgery background into practical nutrition tracking advice, check out this blog: Glucose Monitoring, Bariatric Surgery, & Nutrition Tracking.
