How in the world did I get here? (The story of R&B Foods Nexgen™ brand)

It all started when I noticed my mother's left foot was puffy and I wondered what it meant. It ended with her walking into a major metropolitan hospital and almost dying from the surgery. She had emergency bypass surgery and spent four weeks in the ICU, for a total of five weeks in the hospital. She died multiple times during the surgery, and as the medical machine that is a major hospital spun out of control, she suffered from multiple medical mistakes that left her weak, unable to speak, difficulty breathing, and emotional distress for the entire family.

We brought my mother home and it was clear that she was dying. Not only that, but my father and I were both severely taxed by this ordeal and our health was in rapid decline. Our entire family was in disarray. In order to compensate and try to save us, I did the only thing I could - I started to buy medical books and read. The more I read, the more I had a hard time understanding how this all happened. Then I started reading medical scientific papers instead of medical texts. Now I was learning. There were huge discrepancies between the books used to teach medical doctors and the scientific reports that taught the reality of how things worked. Not only did the medical establishment disregard the scientific papers, but they also pointed to these papers with ridicule. Being trained in the scientific method, I knew that what was being published in the scientific papers was the conservative findings of science, and the real cutting edge stuff was to be found elsewhere. That was when I found the wild and wooly world of alternative health.

I bought hundreds of alternative health books and read all of them - thank God for Amazon.com. I decided what I wanted to believe and what I didn't believe. I experimented on myself. I offered what worked on myself to my parents, and the results were miraculous. My mother went from being wheelchair-bound to walking in 3 days using alternative health methods. My father and I both started to return to our formal selves. My decades long fight with IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) was gone within a couple of months.

Eventually, we reached a plateau where our health was improved but not getting any better - that was not good enough, and I started to reach out even more. I went with my mother to the "Mind, Body, Spirit Expo" at the Valley Forge Convention Center in King of Prussia, PA. While there, I met and spoke to George Stella (George later had his own Food Network TV show and books.) He told me that Doctor Atkins was speaking at the conference and he very emotionally told me what the Atkins diet had done to save his life. Well, George is a very impressive person, and I was already skeptical about anything that the American Medical Association said. They really said bad things about Doctor Atkins. I was curious to learn more, but we were both tired and went home. A couple of months later, while on vacation in Florida, I dropped in to a bookstore and bought the Atkins book. I couldn't put it down. Then my father read it, and we both read parts of it to my mother. While on vacation, I got the phone number for Doctor Atkins and make an appointment for the three of us at his office in New York City.

Unfortunately, Doctor Atkins passed away a couple of weeks before our appointment, but we met with Doctor Keith Berkowitz (now of the Center for Balanced Health and my business partner) and started the Atkins life style. What a breath of fresh air! Our health started to climb again. The only problem with a low carb diet is that it is very boring. My family is Italian-American, and life without bread or pasta was hard to imagine. My mother was suffering the most from pasta withdrawl, and she asked me to do something. I love to cook and I am good at it. I am not a professional chef like George, but I understood how to cook Italian, Chinese, some Japanese, Korean, French and (of course) American cuisine. I promised my mother I would invent pasta that she could eat on the Atkins diet. That might seem like an outlandish promise, but not to me. I wanted to do this for my mother, and I had a long history of inventing the impossible - in general, if it doesn't exist and I want it, I invent it. That is what happened here. I invented a zero carb, very low-calorie pasta and made gnocchis. It tasted good. In fact, no one could tell the difference between real gnocchis and my zero-carb gnocchis. Well, Christmas was coming, and being Italian-American, I found the idea of Christmas without Italian Christmas Cookies hard to bear. So I invented a low-carb bake mix using almond flour (other people also used almond flour for baking). I made cookies, cakes, pancakes, waffles, and other baked treats. I also invented a zero-carb chocolate mousse, and a rich chocolate ice cream. Later, I got rid of the almond flour and changed the formula to one that only used dietary fibers. This new mix was the first of its type in the world. One of the experts with 30 years experience in the field said that he never saw anything like it before. The funny thing is that not only did it work better than almond flour, have zero carbs and calories, but it was more versatile. I could now make anything that I could make from wheat flour, but in a low-carb, wheat, and soy-free form. Then I started buying books on dietary fiber, and it became clear that this just might be something very, very important from a health perspective, even beyond being low-carb.

Somewhere between inventing this stuff and having tried low-carb products from all of the other companies - which I didn't like - I thought maybe I should start a company. I wrote a letter to Dr. Keith Berkowitz, inviting him to start a company with me (I still have a copy of the letter; Keith has the original). After a lot of false starts, we ended up with R & B Foods. R & B opened its internet store in early March 2007, under the NexGen™ brand. Men's Health Magazine mentioned us in an article that same month, Jimmy Moore, author of "Livin' La Vida Low-Carb", wrote a wonderful article about us on his website, and sales started with a bang.

As they say in Hollywood, that is how I got where I am.

Pete Radatti
March 30, 2007

www.nexgenfoods.com