Mark Cox

Now an energetic 37-year-old with bright eyes and radiant skin, he acknowledges he didn’t always care about wellness. He was not raised in a pickling family: He grew up eating processed commercial foods, and then waited tables at steakhouse and seafood chains. “I was five pant sizes bigger, suffered from attention deficit disorder, and didn’t have any energy,” he says. In 2006, through the studies of a turn-of-the-century researcher named Weston A. Price, Cox and Henson discovered that wellness begins with a healthy gut. Cox believes that today’s overprocessed food system takes out important bacteria our bodies need. “I immediately woke up and began my own preventative maintenance, and lacto-fermentation was the missing link in my life.”