How tinkering around with simple food led to the birth of ReNature and revolutio

Posted by renature on December 23rd, 2013

November 22, 1963: It was a day when Dr Myron Winitz was probably pleased as punch. Time magazine, in its latest issue had described his invention, Formula 9, as a panacea for “wiping out malnutrition” from the planet. A bit over the top, he thought; but he certainly wasn’t complaining about being the envy of his colleagues at NASA. An endorsement by Time magazine certainly would have been a show-stopper moment in his career. Except, that on that very fateful day, history and the cover story were being rewritten on a boulevard in Dallas with three bullets – the assassination of then US President John F Kennedy.

While the news about the presidential assassination swept everything else under the proverbial carpet, in no way could it detract from the significance of Winitz’s achievement. Till the creation of Formula 9, liquid nutrition diet had only been tested on hospital patients. For the first time, Winitz tested a health drink on healthy adult males, and the results, to put it mildly, were astounding. He demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt the beneficial effects of a beverage-only diet in space - chubby individuals got leaner, skinny ones gained weight, blood cholesterol profiles improved and faecal output was lowered.

Overshadowed by what was arguably the news of the century, Winitz tried his luck again with NASA in 1965, touting the benefits of a liquid diet in space. Unfortunately for him, manned space flights had given a thumbs-down to liquid diet in favour of solid food. The report on Formula 9 was consigned to the archives.

Several years later and several thousand miles away, in the mid 1970s, in San Jose, California, Robert “Bob” Fritz was challenging the concepts of canine and human athletic nutrition. Till then, existing health supplements for both canines and human athletes had steroid components in them – a source of discomfiture for Fritz, who was training as an Olympic lifter.

Convinced there had to be a better way to formulate health supplements, he toyed with natural foods, extracting their key ingredients after educating himself through a host of seminars and scientific research papers. To validate his formulations, Fritz tested them on his pet dogs, who showed a marked improvement in overall health and physical appearance. At that time Fritz was unaware that his research was on a convergence course with what Dr Myron Winitz had done during the early years of NASA’s space research programme.

Joining NASA’s space shuttle programme as a contractor in 1980, Fritz was surprised to see the results of his experiments validated by the research done by Winitz almost two decades back. “That really fired me up,” said Fritz. The deeper he delved into Winitz’s research on Formula 9, the more commonalities he discovered with his own research and experiments. Formula 9 got a new lease of life.