We know you eat clean. As endurance athletes, we have strong opinions about the macro breakdown of our breakfast and can enjoy debating kale's benefits as much as we like eating it.

For general health, whole foods are the best way to maintain and sustain. But for athletes fueling for performance, the goal is building an aerobic engine that can handle high-volume suffering.

"Natural" and "unprocessed" are two ideals that we like to hold separately.  When it comes to mitochondrial function —the literal power plants inside your cells—relying on turmeric root or a cup of green tea is like trying to get peak performance out of a Formula 1 car with diesel. It might run, but it’s not going to win.

Here is some hard science on why we prefer high-purity molecular extracts of (-)-Epicatechin and Quercetin, to supplement every Freak Shake Product, and why your "whole plant" strategy may be leaving performance on the table.

1. Energy & Resilience

Rather than throwing a witch's brew of ingredients into a blender and hoping for the best, we target two high purity bio-nutrients extracted from edible plants: Epicatechin and Quercetin. They target complimentary phases of endurance: The Push and The Recovery.

• The Engine Builder ((-)-Epicatechin): Daily consumption of effective doses of (-)-epicatechin works directly on your cellular mechanics. It starts by increasing the energy-producing enzymes in mitochondria. Mitochondria literally grow larger and divide, creating more energy capacity & efficiency, particularly in aerobic heartrate zones. This also translates to to paying a smaller relative recovery toll for your effort.

• The Fire Extinguisher (Quercetin): Proper progressive training is designed to stress us and generate a manageable amount inflammation. It's the cost of doing business because that inflammation response triggers beneficial adaptations that build strength, endurance & vascularity during our recovery period. Research led by David Nieman at the University of West Virginia reviewed a range of endurance events and found that Quercetin was the only plant-polyphenol that consistently reduced post-event inflammation and soreness.

By combining them, we help support an engine that burns cleaner and rebuilds faster.

2. The Dosage Problem: Why You Can't Just "Drink More Tea"

You might ask, "Why can't I just get these performance effects from whole foods?"

The answer is volume. To get the biological effects demonstrated at an effective dose in research, we require supplementation. 

• The Concentration Gap: Our delivery systems (pills/mixes) allow us to provide 10 to 50 times the amount of Epicatechin or Quercetin than you could ever get from green tea or turmeric for example. To match the dosing in one serving of Freak Shake products, you would have to consume unreasonable amounts whole plants, powdered or encapsulated extracts.

• The "Browning" Effect: Nature degrades quickly. The starting material for our (-)-epicatechin is green tea leaves, but the moment those leaves are cut and aged, they "brown," causing Epicatechin levels to fall precipitously. If you are brewing standard tea leaves, the potency is already largely gone.

• Our Process: We don't wait. Extraction starts immediately after harvest using natural solvents like water, ethanol, and acetic acid (vinegar). The result is a fine powder that is 90-98% pure, isolating the molecules we are targeting for endurance, while removing the leaf matter that's less consequential.

3. Safety: High Performance, Low Risk

Resilience is our north star, not recklessness. It's true that high purity extracts are processed, but they are natural occurring molecules which are already present in a healthy diet. These are not synthetic or banned substances designed to cheat nature's toolkit.

• Food Derived: The bionutrients we use are already found in foods humans have consumed for millennia—tea, cocoa, cherries, onions and hundreds of other edible plants & fruits in our diet—meaning they are recognized as safe by global food regulatory agencies.

• Clean Metabolism: Toxicology studies show that even at levels 10 times higher than our formulation, these compounds are safely broken down and eliminated through the intestinal tract. No strain on the liver or kidneys, and they don't hang around in our system for long. Epicatechin enters our blood as quickly as 30 minutes after ingestion, peaking in 2 hours. 

Contributed by Dr David Stuart, Freak Shake's Nutrition & Quality Advisor. He has a PhD in Plant Biochemistry, was the Founding Director of the Hershey Center for Health & Nutrition and is the retired CEO of Food & Nutrient Impact.