How Brad Gruno Ended in the Chips

Brad Gruno used to eat steak. “I was living the fast life, the American corporate diet,” says Gruno, 52, a former president of a multimillion-dollar, Atlanta-based fiber-optic cable company. But with skyrocketing cholesterol and the accumulated stress of losing his company following the 2001 dot-com crash, he knew his lifestyle needed a radical makeover. “Forty pounds overweight, depressed, I had just lost all this money—what am I going to do?”

In 2006, Gruno moved back to his hometown in Bucks County, Pa., and became a devout raw foodie. He began whipping up homemade chips in his kitchen: a thin layer of ground-up vegetables—including kale, flax, buckwheat, and spices—prepared in a food dehydrator. In three months, he’d shed the weight. “I was glowing,” he says.