The Need for Change

For a long time, Jeff Zucal was like so many people.

Focused on his career and his family, Jeff didn’t have much time to think about his health or his diet. He ate the typical things most Americans eat while steering clear of high-fat foods, as was recommended by many health professionals for decades. And yet, also like many Americans, despite this he found himself gaining more and more weight as time went on and his perspective on food remained the same. Eventually, Jeff’s problems progressed until he weighed in at 350 pounds and received diagnoses for type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, and epilepsy – all in a six month period.

What Jeff wasn’t able to see for years was that the advice he had been following for his whole life failed to account for something entirely out of Jeff’s control: his hormones.

This is why when Jeff underwent a gastric bypass to help reduce his weight, Jeff’s surgeon made sure he understood the reality of his situation. The surgery represented a helpful head start to his attempts to build a healthier life, but Jeff’s hormones remained the same. If he did not take advantage of the weight loss surgery and change the way he looked at food, Jeff’s surgeon said he could gain back all the weight (and all of the health problems with it) in five years.

The surgery set Jeff on a new path. A shift began in Jeff that was more thoroughly life-changing than simply reducing his weight, and that shift was centered around his understanding of the hormonal impacts of carbohydrates and insulin.

An Old Paradigm Leads to a New Perspective

One of the most significant side effects of a low-fat diet championed by many for decades was that when fat intake dropped, carbohydrate intake increased. The increase in carbohydrate consumption has resulted in a dramatic increase in chronic disease.

No part of our food has a greater effect on our hormones than carbohydrates. The presence of carbs/sugars initiates the production and release of insulin, and greater levels of carbs lead to greater levels of insulin. While insulin is an important part of the human body’s essential functions, too much insulin contributes to a wide range of serious health issues from weight gain to brain function and many problems in between. High-carb diets have even been shown to contribute to cancer growth, as the number of insulin receptors on cancerous cells are several times higher than what is present on healthy cells.

The positive effect of the low-fat trend was that it taught many people for the first time the importance of paying attention to the food they eat. The downside was that the focus was on the wrong thing. One of the most detrimental side effects of the low fat diet is that the perceived silver bullet turned out to be more like blinders. With so much focus on avoiding fats, many people intent on losing weight or improving other aspects of their health barely considered the nutritional impact of a food item outside of its fat content. So, when nutritional science began to recognize the significant role carbohydrates play in the production of the hormone insulin, along with the resulting detrimental effects of increased insulin on a variety of serious chronic illnesses, a new way of looking at food became necessary.

Enter the ketogenic lifestyle.

Keto: More Than a Diet

When Jeff Zucal began to change the way he viewed and consumed food, he came to realize that carbohydrates – not fats – were his biggest obstacle to a healthier life. The gastric bypass may have allowed Jeff to start the marathon of weight loss at a quick pace, but it was the ketogenic lifestyle (referred to by its shorthand, keto) that gave him the tools to power through, lose the weight and keep it off – all while drastically improving his other serious diagnosis from type 2 diabetes to epilepsy. However, despite the clear success he experienced thanks to the keto lifestyle, Jeff recognized a serious problem that kept many people from beginning or maintaining the dietary changes: it takes a lot of time to meal plan and shop for the right ingredients and the right meals that fit in with the low-carb lifestyle.

Unlike the low-fat diet and countless other diets floating around today, keto is built upon the latest developments in nutritional science. Unfortunately, grocery stores are still catching up to the science, so the majority of products found on the shelves are not keto-friendly, and even those that are can be difficult to find.

So, in 2017 Jeff and his business partner Matthew Hayden set out to fix that problem by founding PangeaKeto.

Changing the Landscape

PangeaKeto is the first and only store of its kind in the U.S. When a customer walks into a PangeaKeto locations, they will never have to worry about checking labels – because co-founders Jeff and Matt have done the homework for their customers. Every product sold in the store or made in the bistro is crafted for the purpose of providing high-quality food with little to no carbohydrates attached. Beyond that, most of the 80+ proprietary in-house products and bistro menu are gluten free.

And, if that isn’t enough on its own, PangeaKeto’s standards for taste remain incredibly high – something often overlooked in the creation of healthy, low-carb and gluten-free foods. Chef-crafted with ingredients from around the world, PangeaKeto elevates the taste of their products to a whole new level.

Jeff and Matt have made a healthy lifestyle accessible to their customers. Even the name, PangeaKeto, stands as a testament to the quality and clean sourcing of the food in their proprietary products. The founders believe in only using ingredients that could have been on the earth before landmasses began to separate, long before society began to develop. This philosophy inspired the first part of name, PangeaKeto, as a reference to the ancient supercontinent (Pangea).

Keto, the second part of the name which serves as a shorthand for the ketogenic diet, is not simply following the latest findings of nutritional science, it is on the forefront of new developments. The low-carb keto lifestyle is changing the lives of people with serious, chronic illnesses such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, Crohn’s disease, celiac disease, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and autism, and PangeaKeto is bringing those changes within reach for people who don’t have the time to read every label in the grocery store. Jeff and Matt have made sure they will remain on the front lines of nutritional and medical science by adding numerous experts from both both fields to their team of highly-qualified investors.

The Business of Changing Lives

Despite significant success in their first three years in business, Jeff and Matt are not ready to stop doing everything they can to expand the reach of the healthy keto lifestyle. Online sales have risen steadily since the store opened, not just increasing shipping to private consumers across the country but also to multiple professional sports teams looking for healthy and nutrient-packed fuel for their players on the field. But after noticing how many of their regular costumers drive several hours to shop in the store located in Hartville, Ohio, the co-founders have decided it is time to expand the PangeaKeto footprint.

In 2020, PangeaKeto officially became a franchise company. Jeff and Matt know that the fastest way to make their life-changing products available to more people is to bring in motivated entrepreneurs who want to see their community transformed. The PangeaKeto grocery store and bistro represent a business that is both meaningful and unique – a combination that is sure to be valuable to the members of any community.

With this considerable step taken, the co-founders of PangeaKeto hope to see the nutritional and medical benefits of the keto lifestyle reach exercise enthusiasts, people with chronic illnesses, and everyone in between who just wants to feel confident in the food they eat.

For more information on PangeaKeto, watch the video below or visit PangeaKeto.com