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“Addictions can be very, very bad but addiction itself is not bad.
It’s a case of what you’re addicted to.
You better live each day like it’s your last, ‘cos one day you’re going to be right”.
Ray Charles.
Link tip a friend
- Roger Chao looking in good health but privately thinking: "This stuff better work ....".
The journey for FIRST – how it became fuel for our missions.
Polar pioneer Ernest Shackleton and Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi were not men who could ever be accused of sugar coating the truth, especially when it came to truth in advertising.
* Advertisement placed by ES for men to join his 1914 Antarctic expedition: "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success."
* Plain speaking by GG to men wishing to join the 1859 Second Italian War of Independence: “I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor food - only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death”.
This type of blunt language tends to weed out the vacillators ………
Anyone joining Shackleton or Garibaldi was clearly in for a tough time ahead and that’s how it usually is on expeditions; the word is seldom used in conjunction with other words like “Caribbean island vacation”.
Expeditions usually involve significant effort, discomfort and suffering – of course there are plenty of rewards too but they’re often hard to recognise at the time! This is the environment that we designed FIRST for environments where no compromise can be made and only tested and proven nutrition will allow success.
The thinking was simple:
“If it works in these extreme conditions, it will work anywhere”.
It’s possible to look at our product and think that it’s just some coloured powder in a sachet but that’s like saying a climbing rope is a piece of glorified nylon string or a paraglider is a semi-inflatable plastic bag.
(All photos of the Australian Greenland Expedition were taken by Rob Rigato and with thanks for their use here Rob).
When we initially came up with the concept of FIRST, we wanted to look at expedition nutrition though a new prism and see whether we could answer these questions:
* Could we design, develop and then test a single powdered total nutrition source that would entirely replace traditional food?
* Would the food we created provide all the calories needed for extended high level physical output – up to 8000 Calories per day and would it work for weeks on end with no other source of nutrition?
* And by using this food, could we become much more efficient by eliminating the time spent cooking, the significant weight of stove fuel and it would also gives us extra time spent sleeping, thus recovering?
Long story short – the answer was yes.
Development
The environments we designed FIRST for were specifically picked for their extremely testing nature. There are virtually no arduous tests for human beings greater than polar expeditions and long distance, multi week, winter mountain expeditions.
If someone is extremely active in cold temperatures, their nutritional requirements change. In addition to the basic nutrition needs of around 2000 Calories per day, there will be an additional 3000 Calories required to compensate for the increased activity and a further Calories needed per day due to cold temperatures. That creates a total of 5000+ Calories per day intake requirement at near or sub-zero temperatures when someone is physically active.
This is why we chose these environments to test our product; no other physical goal provides equal challenge to the athlete as the combination of altitude, cold, exertion, elevation change and dehydration.
To combat these challenges, years of research led us to create a unique system of powdered food designed to deliver a full nutritional complement of essential vitamins, minerals and macronutrients - what is now known as FIRST.
Testing grounds:
The Southwest National Park in Tasmania encompasses over 600,000 hectares of wild and inspiring country; it receives 140 inches or 4 metres of rain per year and is a place where you’d fully expect at any minute to see Jurassic Park type dinosaurs; the forest is thick enough to limit travel to less than one kilometre per day and the rugged glaciated geology ensures steep climbs and descents.
In contrast, the Greenland icecap is a vast body of ice covering 1,710,000 square k’s, it’s almost 2,400 k’s long, 1,100 k’s wide and is the home of one of the great polar journeys - the classic 4+ week long east to west crossing. Temperatures in summer can be expected down to -40 degrees Celsius excluding wind-chill. On top of that, at any time expeditions can be struck by horrific 250 kph katabatic winds called Pitteraks, which drive explorers into their tents for many days – if of course the tent survives.
Expedition 1: We used our product every day for, every meal on the first ever traverse winter of South West Tasmania’s Eastern and Western Arthurs ranges and ascent of Federation Peak; the whole trip taking in excess of 3 weeks.
Expedition 2: And then an up-supported coast to coast crossing of Greenland, east to west which took 35 days.
What this expedition testing proved:
That consumption of FIRST for every meal, of every day contains the total energy and total nutritional food requirements to enable peak performance while undertaking arguably the most arduous of outdoor activity possible, namely polar man-hauling.
Not only did FIRST deliver the entire calorie and energy requirements to meet the demands from the first day to the last but both muscle and body fat were built up consistently throughout the trips which is in total contrast to the loss of both (up to 30%) which is normally encountered on such expeditions while consuming traditional foods.
Here were just some of the results from the Greenland expedition –
The crossing of the Greenland icecap takes four weeks or 28 days and if we had taken typical outdoors food:
Traditional food per person per day = 2 kgs
2 kgs X 28 days = 56 kgs
Stove, pots, cooking implements = 3 kgs
Stove fuel = 0.5 litres per day times 28 days = 13 kgs
Total weight = 74 kgs
With FIRST as the sole food source:
The crossing of the Greenland icecap still takes four weeks i.e. 4 weeks or 28 days.
FIRST food per person per day = 1 kg
1kgs X 28 days = 28 kgs
Stove, single pot, = 1.5 kgs
Stove fuel = 0.1 litres per day X 28 days = 2.8 kgs
Total weight = 32 kgs
By using FIRST, a weight reduction of 42% was achieved.
* As a result of the weight saving of over 40 kgs, there was additionally a massive saving in energy expenditure and this is especially important as the aim is to keep energy consumption to a minimum at the start of an expedition; therefore every kg saved is vital.
* In addition to weight and size reductions, the extra benefits included an 85% cut in preparation time and cleaning up time which meant more time sleeping therefore recovering or travelling therefore decreasing the number of days needed to be spent on the trip.
We recognise that consuming only FIRST every day for weeks on end are extreme examples of the product’s capabilities and only consuming it for every meal for every day will seldom be replicated by most people but that was not the point of us doing this testing.
The point was to prove to ourselves that the R+D with nutritionists, the lead-up field testing before these 2 expeditions, the batch sampling and more, had all led to a product that really works – genuinely fuel for the mission.
These are some images of FIRST being consumed on the Greenland expedition and don’t be concerned that the product in the photo below appears to be a weird green colour and thus looks pretty unpalatable; rest assured we’ve worked on the colours and spent a lot of time making sure the flavours are great too.
