Welcome to the Spark Bites Blog

It’s my first blog in a long, long time and I haven’t read many to keep up with what’s the standard convention these days, so forgive me if I wander or if it gets a little dry.

It’s also a really challenging time b/c, of course, of the Corona virus. I’m currently a home with my wife and kids while we wait out the lock-downs. There’s ever been a better time to start this which I have to admit I’ve been putting off for quite a while.

I am looking forward to writing here, and I appreciate your interest, b/c I have a lot to say about Spark Bites (love them!) and I tend to go long when I have a lot to say. I end up being like my dad, very light on the small talk but a bit heavy handed when the issue is nutrition & well-being. Hey – sometimes you just have to get into the weeds to say what you want to say.

In many ways Spark Bites are a tribute to my dad; he passed away in 2011. He was a pathologist– a very heady day job—and loved research, medicine and metabolism. I never met a man who worked harder or longer hours to pursue his passion. Day and night. Before and after work. Blocks of hours at a time. I miss him, of course, but he left me with a lot to think about, including a huge amount of respect for the process of pursuing a truth.

You see although he was a pathologist by day, the mission he pursued before and after “work” was to find the perfect balance of vitamins and minerals in a homemade blended formula to support optimal cellular metabolism. He created his own multivitamin “mix” and worked to improve it every day that I knew him. Seriously, every day. To him there was a final formula waiting to be discovered. It was, or perhaps is, the perfect supplement for cells to run smoothly and keep a level of homeostasis. We had wonderfully long talks about health and the body. We’d talk for hours at a time. But they weren’t lively debates full of disagreement and challenges. We agreed a lot: it’s all about providing the body with a balance of nutrients. Where we differed was the source. I default to foods, whether fresh or minimally processed. He included foods in his quiver, but more frequently resorted to synthetic or natural isolates. He crushed a lot of tablets and emptied many capsules when updating his mix.

My logic goes like this: We ought to be able to get what we need to thrive from foraging, cultivating or hunting living organisms around us. Vitamins and minerals synthesized in labs in super concentrated levels that defy how they appear in nature are too much, too intense for the body to handle. My dad spent a lot of time looking for relationships between the vitamins and minerals. He developed many rules and grouped them as catalysts, buffers and antagonists relative to one another. It was a lot to follow. I opted to keep it simple with what tastes good, hits the tummy without turning it upside down, and does more good than harm.

Alright, thank you for reading this far. I fear I’ve gone on long enough. More very soon…

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