Gut Reaction
Manette Jen McDermott creates foods designed as medicine for the body.
What’s happening in your gut? Manette Jen McDermott believes the answer plays a major role in health. “As Hippocrates said long ago, the gut is the foundation of our health and the beginning of all disease,” she says.
In November 2022, McDermott and her business partner, Bill McCalpin (pictured above), opened muun chi (pronounced MOON CHEE), their fermenting kitchen and storefront in Redondo Beach. The name combines chi, the Chinese life force energy, and the moon, representing nature.
“When you’re in line with nature, your chi is in balance,” McDermott says. “The body was designed to keep you well. And when it doesn’t recognize real food, it starts to inflame and we start to have health issues.”
Before establishing the company, McDermott was a self-described sugar addict who kept licorice twists in her purse so she’d always have something sweet within reach. Her daughter enlisted McDermott to join her in a two-week sugar fast, and something unexpected happened.
Before the sugar fast, McDermott suffered from stabbing sciatic pain. She couldn’t drive for more than 15 minutes without pulling over in agony. But by the time the two weeks without sugar had elapsed, her pain had disappeared.
Determined to eliminate refined sugar from her diet, McDermott searched for satisfying snacks free of refined sugars and artificial sweeteners. When she couldn’t find any, she started making her own using such ingredients as banana and orange peels that juice stores would otherwise have discarded. She also earned certification as a health and wellness coach from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, where she learned more about the gut’s role in health.
To help her mother, who was struggling with constipation, McDermott created a dairy-free kefir—a fermented food containing live bacteria and yeast, and a beet kvass—a fermented tonic containing gut health-promoting bacteria. Between orders from friends and family and sales at the Redondo Beach farmers market and elsewhere, McDermott and McCalpin saw demand for their products grow. At the urging of McDermott’s mother, they formed muun chi in 2019.
Muun chi offers probiotic and prebiotic foods designed to balance the digestive system’s microbiome—the trillions of microorganisms living there. All products are free of dairy, gluten, refined sugars, grains, dyes and processed or artificial ingredients, which McDermott and McCalpin believe can cause inflammation.
In addition to the kefir and kvass, muun chi produces more than 30 other products, including cacao and vanilla hemp mylks, a variety of chia puddings, and protein fiber bites designed to replace sugary energy bars. The store uses glass packaging so customers can return the jars to be reused repeatedly. The light-filled shop, designed to look like an outdoor patio, also hosts informational presentations by local physicians and dieticians.
McDermott says muun chi is committed to educating young people about the importance of the microbiome and has met with students in the biotech program at Mira Costa High School and exhibited at the TEDx Changemaker event there in October. She has also met with environmental studies students at Leuzinger High School, which receives donated compost from muun chi.
McDermott and McCalpin believe real food from nature has functional benefits, but not to the exclusion of traditional Western medicine. They note, “We are grateful for access to the wonders of modern medicine combined with healthy lifestyle options. We acknowledge we are not medical doctors.”
“Instead of seeing food as an addiction, we’re looking at how foods benefit our bodies,” McDermott says. “There are thousands of different plants on Earth, and each has a functional benefit. Our mission is to create a supportive community that educates people about their choices.”
