034: Tekla Back – KEHO for life

Tekla Back Tekla is a nutrition nerd hungry for positive change! She is building KEHO a real food savory snack business, that is keto and vegan to make positive change easy. She has been featured in Forbes in 'food hacks that don't compromise nutrition' plus KEHO has been selected as 'editors' favorite weekly plant-based snacks' by The Beet., called by Rachel Ray 'standout savory snacks you need in your pantry' and scored the highest in The Trendhunters review of savory snacks. Tekla has a 20 year career in Food & Beverage, starting in grocery stores as a consultant with McKinsey & Co. followed by a senior executive role at PepsiCo, America's largest Food & Beverage company and the second largest in the world. Much of her work at PepsiCo focused on making the products better-for-you or good-for-you. She is an ex-champion calorie counter, who got passionate about nutrition and weight loss through coxing varsity and national level lightweight crews. She thought she knew it all! Until she was introduced to keto by fellow physicists whose facts checked out. She got obsessed. However as a non-cooking non-meat-eater she found it hard. So she created KEHO to make plant-powered and keto eating easy! Shhhhh, she is on a secret mission to (ob)literate obesity by spicing up life. Tekla has a doctorate in Physics from Oxford and an AAS in Fashion Design from FIT. She is originally from Finland, grew up in the UK and has made New York her home. Tekla Back describes herself as a reluctant entrepreneur, nutrition nerd hungry for positive change who is an ex-champion calorie counter. As a pescatarian she didn’t want meat based, dairy based snacks and she couldn’t find suitable snacks. This lead her to make a snack which she could trust was plant based, no sugar and high in healthy fats. Now she manufactures the four savoury flavoured KEHO bars which her secret mission is to (ob)literate obesity by spicing up life. Tekla's Top Tips Swap out rice, pasta for a salad. Stop or limit processed sugar. Focus on the food composition and nutrient density. Resources Mentioned The Case Against Sugar - Gary Taubes https://amzn.to/3tYEs9E The Big Fat Surprise - Nina Teicholz https://amzn.to/3k9t4Ts Nutrition Coalition Real Meal Revolution seed cracker recipe Quotes by Tekla Back “The science, I was literally won over by the science.” “I call myself a champion Calorie Calorie counter, probably I can still tell you the calorific content of every single food. So it was a slow, fact based journey for me.” “ I kind of call myself a reluctant entrepreneur.” “I was really struggling to eat and particularly to snack because if you've gone full on keto, it's really hard to get snacks that are either not refrigerated, like cheese sticks or beef jerky which are not meat based.” “I was obviously of the mind that everything in moderation. As someone who's been pretty good at moderation all their lives, i