Chagit
Looking for a healthy turbo boost?
Give Chagit a shot and harness the power of the world’s most powerful antioxidant, the Chaga Mushroom!
To find out more behind how Chagit got its start and what’s in store for the future, Josh interviews Chagit co-founders, Prema and Tulsy Ball
More about the episode…
Josh sits down with Chagit founder Prema and Tulsy Ball….Chagit is an energy/nutrition shot created from the world’s most powerful antioxidant, the chaga mushroom. When Tulsy and Prem first caught wind of the healing powers of the chaga mushroom they were originally encouraged to create a television show around it and the culture that follows. Having traveled all over the world, worked for various networks, and countless shows, they soon found themselves in Alaska. After being introduced to the mushroom taking it for couple months (by using it to make a tea) the effects were so positive that they decided to abandoned their original idea and pursue turning their chaga show into a chaga product! Now their aiming to revolutionize the typical diet by spreading the glory of this wondrous healing shroom.
Have an opinion? We want to hear it! Join the conversation and leave a comment, check out show notes, and get all the links mentioned in this episode below
Links/resources:
- Check out Chagit’s website
- Grab a case of Chagit and give your health a serious upgrade!
- More about the benefits of Chaga Mushrooms
Show Notes
- What is Chagit all about?
- Tulsy: I would say that our business is a completely unique and innovative way of taking the world’s most powerful antioxidant and making products that are directly bio-available for human consumption. It is a way to take the chaga mushroom which has been used by the native inuit of alaska and siberia for thousands of years to survive the wintertime…we design a process to maximize the benefits from that mushroom…”
- How did you discover the Chaga mushroom?
- Prema: My brother, Tulsy and I, we produced television for a long time. We had shows that we did for Discovery Channel, History Channel, Nat Geo… We were up in Alaska and a friend of our Larry Dean Smith told us about this mushroom that people up there in Alaska were harvesting and selling overseas more a lot of money for the health benefits of it and he thought it would be a great idea for a show… In the time we were doing that and developing it as a show we started using it ourselves making a tea out of it… the effects that the tea had on our health was immediately apparent to us…we decided to scrap the show and make a product instead…”
- What’s the process of taking it from the 6 hour process of making a tea to a quit easy shot?
- Tulsy: “It took us a lot longer to get done than the original 6 hours. We relied heavily in our initial research upon what the Russians had done. Russian scientists had started looking into chaga and doing research with it in the 1950s where they used it for their space program and sports program… They did over 350 studies and initially we did a deep dive into that Russian research and got them translated… We worked with a friend of ours, Damian Watkins who has a PHD in biochemistry from UCLA. We challenged damian to come up with the best process for extracting everything from the mushroom and we worked with him at his lab… as it is the process right now takes about two and a half weeks…”
- What about the Chaga mushroom is so beneficial?
- Tulsy: “It is the world’s most powerful antioxidant… there are 215 different compounds in it, 14 of them are found nowhere else in nature, and it’s not any one single thing it’s the combination of all of those things that are so good for you… What Chaga does is, like I said there are 215 different things in there, each on of those individually has a purpose for your body, the combination of all of them works like a mechanic…”
- What sort of benefits did you notice when you began to take Chaga?
- Prema: “For myself, I started losing weight, my metabolism started speeding up again. I had always got myself in great shape but, by the time I hit 40, doing 16 to 18 hours on set or in the editing room my body starts to not be as functional as it used to be. I immediately started feeling my energy that I used to have when I was younger, my back pain started to go away. Everything just started to functioning a lot better…”
- Tulsy: “For me it was a little more specific. I was dealing with some medical issues at the time, I’m a couple years older than Prema. I was having some liver problems, my liver was operating at less than 50% capacity and there was a chance that by the time I was 50 I would be on a transplant list… within a couple of months when I started to use the mushroom that I went back to my doctor for a physical and that physical had revealed that my liver had gone back to acting at full capacity…”
- What was the process like to developing the chaga mushroom into a shot?
- Prema: “It’s been three years worth of road bumps. Our process is pretty unique, I don’t think it’s been attempted, certainly not with this raw material. Because of that, we went through a lot of hurtles with the FDA and the California Department of Public Health just in verifying that our process was safe and what we were doing was ok…It took us about over two and a half years to get passed that…”
- Tulsy: “I think the greatest difficulty and hurdle that we reached was that we don’t add any preservatives to our product… The idea was try and heal the damage done by all the chemicals and the preservatives we put in our bodies…we wanted to eliminate the dangers of those chemicals and putting those preservatives in there seemed completely contradictory to our purpose…”
- For someone who’s never even considered, how should people approach using Chagit?
- Prema: “For someone who’s never considered it the very simplest thing we could say is take one a day. Going back to the old “apple away keeps the doctor away,” that’s the idea with us… The shot was designed around being the optimum amount for a person around 150 lbs…”
- Does mixing it in your coffee or smoothy alter the effects?
Tulsy: “No I do it all the time, actually… I pour one or two shots into my camelbak or water reservoir so can keep getting a little bit all the way through and those walls that you seem to hit you just don’t hit… I put it in my water, I put it in my ice coffee… the flavor actually mixes well with other flavors…”
- Have you had any mentors with building Chagit?
- Prema: “I would say in regards to building the business, that was an effort of trial and error. We have educated ourselves and run a successful business before so we had that going for us…We had some people who had been inspirational along the way. The first of those is Larry who introduced it to us. He’s one of those men who has an incredible reservoir of faith, in the planet, and in humanity… “
- What has been one of the hardest parts about starting and building Chagit?
- Tulsy: “There’s two things, the process of getting through the trials of the CDPH and the FDA has definitely been our greatest difficulty. There’s no question that going through that process had me wanting to pull my hair out…”
- Prema: “We wanted to make sure our product was done the right way, was handled the right way from the beginning to the end so, unlike a lot of companies that we talked to since we decided to go fully vertical and we maintain everything in house… We take it from our harvest network in Alaska and we do everything under one roof…Most people would have gone the far easier route with an OEM partner that has an approved facility…”
- Where do you see Chaga headed into the future?
- Tulsy: “ Worldwide. In the next year our focus is on market penetration throughout the united states, education about the mushroom, being able to get into the markets where the people don’t necessarily consider themselves a target for fitness or wellness but, are fighting diseases that are crippling them and us being able to educate them that is by nutrition and eating right…”
What do you think of Chagit? Leave a comment below to let us know!