The most important things to look for when buying bone broth
It’s no secret that I believe bone broth is one of the most valuable, nutrient-dense tools to have in your healing pantry.
It isn’t always convenient to make my homemade bone broth—especially over the summer while my family was in the middle of a kitchen remodel, which is why I was so grateful to have FOND Bone Broth stocked in my personal pantry.
With so many products on the market, it can be hard to know which one will not only taste great but also hit all the marks of integrity that make a bone broth truly worth consuming.
FOND Bone Broths hit all the marks…from the sourcing of ingredients from regenerative farming operations to the cooking and production process, even my homemade broths have a hard time stacking up against FOND.
Watch the video to learn exactly what to look for when sourcing a quality bone broth. Plus, you’ll pick up some new, interesting ways to incorporate bone broth into your cooking.
Click here and Use code WAHLS for 20% off of your first order of FOND or 10% off your first subscription.
Transcript:
Dr. Terry Wahls:
Hello, Wahls Warriors. It’s Dr. Wahls. I am very excited to be here today. I’m with Alysa Seeland, who is the CEO and founder of FOND Bone Broth, which is just incredibly delicious. She is the mom of five energetic boys. She is a Lymes disease warrior, survivor, and now thriver in discovering bone broth, and the healing power of bone broth is a key part of her healing journey. We are thrilled that you also discovered us as well, because we are very, very fond of bone broth. That was a key part of my healing journey, is a key part of my everyday routine. It is just a fabulous nurturing practice. While it’s wonderful to make your own bone broth, and I do, there are also plenty of times when my life is too busy and I’m really thrilled to have a wonderful off the shelf bone broth, and FOND Bone Broth is just that.
I also want to make sure you all know that FOND Bone Broth is a Wahls protocol seminar sponsor. I really value these sponsorships. It makes it easier for us to bring this message to all of you, and our sponsors are people whose products I believe in and use are part of my everyday life. I love chatting with the sponsors and letting you know more about them and their products, and why I am so enthusiastic about incorporating them as part of your daily routines as well. Again, thank you for joining me, and Alysa, let’s get started.
Alysa Seeland:
Yeah, it’s so good to be here.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
Your founding story is also very cool, that you had your health challenges, that you were able to address as you figured out diet and lifestyle.
Alysa Seeland:
Yeah. I mean, really similar to you in a lot of ways, right, Dr. Wahls. Had chronic health issues, was told I would never have kids, finally got pregnant, and during my first pregnancy I was told by my midwife I wouldn’t keep my baby to term, and no mother should ever have to hear that, but I did. Definitely a warrior, right? Persevered, had a beautiful baby boy, and then five months later was saying goodbye to him and my husband for emergency surgery. It was really a wake up call for me of, no one ever wants to go through this. I was 23 at the time and just shocked that I was having my second emergency surgery. I’d had one when I was younger, and when I woke up during my post-op, the doctor was telling me, “Hey, in three to six months, we should really have a follow up procedure. Your gallbladder looks like it needs to come out as well.”
I just thought this cannot be the trajectory of my life. There was something inherently wrong with me just giving in to and signing up for that surgery. I’m happy to say, nine years later I still have my gallbladder intact. But, the point is, after the surgery I knew something needed to change, and so I started to do copious amounts of research and found that bone broth spanned cultures and centuries, but was missing from the modern diet. I went on a five week bone broth diet. I created many of the flavors that we sell today for different reasons. Dealing with inflammation, so I combined turmeric and cracked pepper in the most easily absorbed vehicle I could find, bone broth, and put a little bit of MCT oil in there and addressed my inflammation. Then, wanted extra immunity post-surgery, so I combined shiitake mushrooms with some sage and created our flavor youth tonic.
It was a very organic process of self healing, and I made, I mean, just slavishly almost, right, over that bone broth pot, 20 hour cook, flavoring it, but I felt better than I felt in my entire life. When you have an experience like that, you share it. I was telling everyone, “You have to drink bone broth, you have to have,” and they were looking at me like, you were crazy. I mean, this was in 2013 before most popular bone broths that we see today are on shelves. They were just like, “There’s no way I’m spending 24 hours cooking a pot. Even when I do, it smells like my whole house.” It was hard for them to source, it didn’t taste good.
I just thought, “Wow, I’ve experienced firsthand that this is a healing product, and we need to get it to the masses. How do we do that?” I didn’t have the experience they had. Mine was delicious. Mine had variety. I was doing all sorts of fun combinations to even level up the bone broth benefits. I was sourcing from pasture raised farmers down at our local farmer’s market and grass fed, grass finished beef bones. I just thought this product needs to be in everyone’s hands. Everyone, regardless of where they are, needs access to the healing power of bone broth. FOND began, and I will never forget my first farmer’s market. It was probably a hundred degrees in Texas, and I’m giving broth shots to people, like, “You have to try this.”
I mean, I was shocked, their delight. People continue today to be delightfully surprised by how good FOND tastes, and a lot of it’s just in our, our methodology and trusting the brewing process that’s literally been around for centuries, not messing with that. But then, combining it with a little modern mixology so that we have additional benefits, but also it’s fun and easy to drink. That’s the thing. There’s some people who are resilient enough to drink it every day, even if they don’t like it, but for most of us, we want that delight piece as well.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
It’s lovely. It is wonderful. Bone broth is just so, well, delicious, and it is so healing. It helps address a lot of leaky gut. If you have an autoimmune issue, it begins with leakiness of the gut, which then leads to food sensitivities, activated inflammation, and begins that autoimmune process. This really is a vital, vital, vital part of everyone’s healing journey. What makes your broth unique and special, you say different? You want to tell us your story?
Alysa Seeland:
Yeah. The FOND differences really in our quality without compromise. We have grown intentionally over the past seven years to where we are available in over 2000 stores nationwide, but that growth was done responsibly. We want to leave the world better than we found it. A lot of it’s in our sourcing. We use pasture-raised chicken, we use grass fed, grass finished beef that are participating in a regenerative process, which means they’re adding to the soil right through fertilization.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
Let’s stop for a moment. Not everyone will understand the regenerative process, so don’t gloss over that too quickly.
Alysa Seeland:
Yeah.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
Can you expand that a little bit for our listeners?
Alysa Seeland:
Absolutely. Regenerative farming is, if you think of your traditional farming as taking what you need to grow this crop from the land, so you’re taking nutrients, and you’re not putting them back in. In a lot of traditional crop farming, they actually have to pump ammonium into the soil so that nitrogen is present. Whereas, in a regenerative organic farming practice, you would handle that in different ways. You would be grazing your cattle to fertilized. You would be having the chickens to spread out the cattle fertilization. You would be rotating crops in such a way that, maybe you’re putting alfalfa in that field the next year to replenish the nitrogen naturally in the soil.
It’s this beautiful, it’s farming that takes in the entire ecosystem and looks to make the soil contribution better. Instead of slowly or quickly eroding the nutrients, the soil, and contributing to the carbon emission issue, regenerative farming is actually sequestering those carbons. We’re contributing to soil additions to the land and to the nutrient density of food. It’s a really cool, it’s kind of a name for what farmers who have always done farming the right way, can now talk about what they’ve been doing.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
Yeah.
Alysa Seeland:
Not pillaging and plundering, contributing, right, is the way that I’m farming contributing to the health of the land long term.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
That would be how my farmer grandfather would’ve farmed with crop rotation and relying on manure from the cattle, the hogs, which was gold for the soil.
Alysa Seeland:
Yeah.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
I’m very excited that regenerative farming is part of the FOND family process. What are some of your favorite ways that you’re using FOND in your kitchen, and how some of your tribe is using FOND?
Alysa Seeland:
Another differentiator to your previous question that also answers this one, what makes us different is FOND is flavored with fresh botanicals and herbs, like fresh turmeric, fresh ginger, fresh sage, fresh thyme. It makes it not only delicious to consume as a coffee or tea replacement, but also in your cooking. A lot of people, if you’re avoiding grains, you wouldn’t do this, but a lot of people start out with bone broth rice. If bone broth seems intimidating, they start out with replacing anything they would use water in their cooking with bone broth, which is a great way to start. For me, I always start out my day with the bone broth latte. I warm up bone broth, I have a little bit of coconut milk, and I’m, just like you said, addressing that leaky gut, making sure my gut is replenished with that collagen and that gelatin first thing in the morning before I have anything else.
Then we’ll do anything from bone broth marinara sauce, so I use bone broth in my pasta sauce for my kiddos. We serve it over broccoli. We use it in soups and sauces. It’s summertime and we’re using it in different marinades, and so I use it really in everything in my kitchen. But for me, it’s a lifeline as well, as I’m sure it is for many of the Wahls Warriors. I’m drinking it in the morning, I’m drinking it in the afternoon, and I’m drinking it in the evening as a night cap.
As Americans, we can kind of think, well, 24 ounces in the morning is what I should do, and that’s fine. It also can be five ounces in the morning, five ounces in the afternoon, five ounces before bed, just to continue to give your body what it needs. I love the idea of, I used it recently that bone broth is kind of like the brick and mortar to give your body what it needs to replenish and heal. There’s nothing secret or snake oil about it. It’s just giving your body the building blocks that it needs to do its job. A printer can’t print without paper, your body can’t heal without essential amino acids and protein and collagen and gelatin.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
Collagen is really an essential building block to all of our connective tissues in our body. In our skin, in our gut, our muscles, our bones, all of the effective tissues in our organs. As we age or mature, we’re less effective at maintaining and repairing that collagen. Particularly in today’s society, we’re not having as much bone broth and collagen.
Alysa Seeland:
Yeah.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
People aren’t having organ meats, we’re just having muscle meats, so that leads to an imbalance of our amino acids, and it leads to less and less collagen. Which, if you just want to be vain, the quality of your skin will diminish.
Alysa Seeland:
Yeah.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
You’re going to get more wrinkles. You’re going to age more rapidly.
Alysa Seeland:
Yeah.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
We spend a lot of money, all of us, to look younger. I get these fancy salves and creams and all this crazy stuff, but we often forget that the basic way to look young is to eat well and to have a lot of collagens. Bone broth is a delicious and a very tasty way to do that. I know a lot of people have bone broth powders.
Alysa Seeland:
Yes.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
Collagen powders. Do you want to have some comments about that?
Alysa Seeland:
I do. That process of drying out the bone broth is called denaturing, and you can do it quickly, you can do it slowly. There are ways to denature a bone broth to where it preserves more of the nutrients, but certainly any time you’re going from a liquid to a powder, to a liquid again, there’s nutrient loss. Any change of state, we know that happens. I also do think about the histamine levels. FOND Bone Broth, another thing we do that’s different is we test for heavy metals. As someone who is a Lyme disease warrior and now in remission, I cannot have heavy metals as frequently as I’m drinking the bone broth. There’s no way. We test for heavy metals, we test for histamines, we test for oxalates. There’s only one of our flavors that would be, arguably, maybe you would not want to drink that one if you were dealing with histamines. The others are very safe.
I worry about histamines when you are, it’s just a question. When you are dehydrating a product, and then who knows how long it’s in that state, and then you’re rehydrating again, a lot of bone broth companies, too, now are doing a combination. They’re using a bone broth concentrate that’s been cooked down almost like a demi glaze, they’re rehydrating it and then they’re adding a powder in, that’s a lot of tampering with a product that has changed a lot of states. There are concerns about the nutrient density. Also, especially with histamines in collagen, and just I have some concerns.
I’m not going to say that if you have powdered bone breath, you’re not getting any benefits, but I think it’s truer to say that the closer you can stay to the natural state of anything, our bone broth goes from brew to seal in one process. That is it. It has one step, and then it’s good on your shelves for two years. You’re warming it up for the second time. That’s it.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
That [inaudible 00:15:44] a lot.
Alysa Seeland:
That’s how you make it at home. Right? You would brew it, bottle it or freeze it, and then warm it up for a second time. Let’s also talk about lead contamination. Where is this powdered bone broth being sourced from? Is it being sourced from overseas? There’s a lot of toxicity issues with foods that are heavily processed. There is no powdered bone broth company that I have come across that has tested for lead, cadmium, arsenic. There’s not one.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
Yeah.
Alysa Seeland:
It’s important, really, to think about getting as close you can, and as a food manufacturer, we’re always, how can we stay as close to how you make it at home? How can we really preserve the integrity of that process and still make it convenient for you? For us, that was the pressurized process.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
This part of the conversation I’ve had with the public, they want to ask me about these powdered greens, powdered supplements. I can say, “Well, I’m very confident about the ingredients, green leafy vegetables, berries, I have great confidence. But once we begin processing them, I no longer know what all happens to that food and how it changes the nutritional value of that food.” I certainly agree with you that some powdered products might be okay, but we just don’t know. I have a lot more confidence in FOND Bone Broth because we know more about the ingredients, we know more about the processing, and I’ve had it, it’s delicious.
Alysa Seeland:
Thank you.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
We used it two days ago to make this really wonderful collared greens. We cooked the collared greens with some pork fat and ham in the broth. The greens were delicious. I added a little natto at the end, it was just wonderful. It was just on low for several hours in that broth, and the broth becomes even more delicious with all of the collard greens.
Alysa Seeland:
Yeah.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
It is just so wonderful to have broth that is rich in collagen. If you get canned Campbell soup, which perhaps was originally quite wonderful.
Alysa Seeland:
Yeah.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
Now the modern version of canned soups don’t have that rich collagen flavor that you get out of either making your own bone broth or having a product like FOND.
Alysa Seeland:
Yeah. When we were starting out, we had a retailer mentor, and the buyer just said, “Why on earth would you make this? You can buy ingredients to make it.” I was like, “No, no, no, that’s the whole point.” They were like, “Why would you put chicken feet in there? Don’t tell people, you’re putting chicken feed in there.” I was like, “No, our customer will know it’s important that we are using the joints.” There’s been a lot of education. FOND being successful has been really exciting for me on, I know customers want more nutrient dense products, I know they want products that are made well, but the retailers aren’t always convinced of it.:
For us to be successful on shelf, when people support us, they’re also supporting a larger movement of real food, real good regenerative farming, and then finally, food as medicine. I mean, I know how important that was in your story and it certainly is in mine. Making that available to the masses who don’t maybe have time. I mean, FOND is ideal for two parents who are working who have kids, or people who are on the go and they just, they want to live that healthy lifestyle, but there’s no way that they have the time to prepare it. We want these things readily available.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
Yeah. I mean, I think more people are beginning to know that you want to get chicken feet, you want to be sure to have them in your soup because, oh my God, it is so much taster when you’ve added chicken feet, or when you’ve added the hoof to get that collagen into the broth. Just like people are beginning to figure out that in fact liver prepared correctly actually is quite delicious.
Alysa Seeland:
Yes, it tastes great.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
The key is to figure out how to prepare that correctly. Now, how do people find FOND? Where would they find it?
Alysa Seeland:
As we’re located in Texas, we’re in HEBs, we’re also in Sprouts Farmers Market nationwide. We just got into Natural Grocer, so people will be able to see us popping up in their local Natural Grocer. But, we’re also available on Amazon and through our own B2C, so online fondbonebroth.com. We’ve got, I would say at any given retailer about seven flavors, but we have 12 flavors available online. Just great variety, good selection. If you’re dealing with certain ingredient sensitivities, we certainly have an option for you.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
Okay, now I understand we have an affiliate code for the Wahls Warriors. You want to tell us about that?
Alysa Seeland:
Yeah. The affiliate code is Wahls. It’s just capital W-A-H-L-S, and it is good for 20% off of your first order of FOND or 10% off your first subscription. That subscription already has a nice discount on there, so it’s 10% in addition. That’s something that we’re doing exclusively for Wahls Warriors as just a thank you for trying.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
Okay, so this sounds pretty cool. You could sign up for a subscription. I’m here in Iowa, and so if we have folks here in the Midwest, so it gets shipped and you can ship anywhere in the continental US?
Alysa Seeland:
That’s correct.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
Do you ship to, we also have folks in Canada and Mexico, do you ship there? Or it gets more complicated internationally?
Alysa Seeland:
Yes, not yet, but hopefully. There’s a huge demand in Canada for bone broth, so hopefully soon friends, but not yet. Just the continental US right now.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
Okay, and so we’re not shipping to Alaska or Hawaii yet, because that would be more complex. Correct?
Alysa Seeland:
That’s correct.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
All right. Well, everyone, thank you for tuning in and listening. What I want to invite you to do is to tell us what is the key thing that you learned as we were chatting about bone broth. Please put that down in the comments, and also go to my website, terrywahls.com. If you’ve not already signed up for my newsletter, please do so, that way you can get the latest news and tips from me and my research updates. Now, Alysa, this is wonderful. To all of you who are watching, forgive me if I was drooling, because I get so excited about bone broth I sometimes begin to salivate and begin drooling just because bone broth was such an essential part of my healing journey as well.
Alysa Seeland:
Thank you, Dr. Wahls. It’s been awesome to be on and to connect with all of you Wahls Warriors, and to join you in this healing process as we fight for food as medicine and enjoy the benefits, so thank you.
Dr. Terry Wahls:
Thank you.
* These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
About FOND Broths:
Fond means foundation or base in French, and we hope that FOND is the foundation of your culinary and nutritional lives. After a health crisis, our founder set out to make a healing product that made high-quality bone broth delicious and accessible for all. With regenerative bones, organic herbs and veggies, and gorgeous glass jars, with FOND you can truly see and taste the difference. We infuse every flavor with synergistic botanicals that level up the benefits and the flavor (seriously, you have to try it to believe it!). We lab test every flavor for heavy metals, histamine, amino acids, collagen, and more. Experience these little jars of healing for yourself today.
Shop here and use code WAHLS to save!
* These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
