For Mark Poli, leading Healthy Truth is personal.
A former collegiate athlete driven by “no pain, no gain,” injuries forced him to slow down and rethink the connection between body, mind, and lifestyle. He realized that sustaining elite performance over time required a more integrative approach to mindset, nutrition, movement, and recovery.
His goal became to stay strong and perform at his best for years, not just today. That idea of performance longevity is at the heart of Healthy Truth. That shift also reshaped how he ate - choosing nutrient-dense foods that fuel vitality. His mission now is simple: make real, functional food accessible because he’s lived the difference.
We sat down with Mark, Healthy Truth's CEO, to talk about his journey and how Healthy Truth is bringing organic, real food to more people.
Q: We know you’ve lived a life rooted in high performance, nutrition, fitness, and wellness but where did that journey start?
Mark Poli: I grew up in a very active, sports-oriented household. Both of my siblings were professional athletes. As the youngest, I was either: in the backseat, tagging along to their hockey or soccer games or was being used as a practice dummy. Otherwise, we were outside playing and laughing. Movement was a big part of our life.
I played many sports, but baseball was my best. I captained my high-school team and went on to attend a Division 1 school with dreams to play professionally some day.
From a young age, sports taught me that if I put in the effort, I got results. Ironically, I learned much more from my failures, hardships and setbacks than I ever did from my successes. But I’m grateful to have been forced to learn young that failure or loss is where we have our greatest opportunities to learn and grow.
Around the time I got to high school, my brother had just become a professional athlete, and first exposed me to training. He started taking me to the gym, and by 14 years old, I was training alongside college and professional athletes. That exposure was huge – but at that time I knew just one speed and had not learned the importance of prioritizing my recovery outside of the gym or playing fields.
A Transformed Approach to Holistic Health
Q: When did your ideas for the future start to change direction?
Mark Poli: Prior to my sophomore year in college, I ended up suffering a severe injury in a car accident. That injury led to the end of my baseball career but was a major part of the growing pains catalyst and initiator of my future transformations and development.
After my accident, I was stationary from a torn labrum in my hip. I tried physical therapy for a year, to get through my season, but in the summer I had surgery.
That recovery process forced me to take a step back. I couldn’t just go into the gym and go hard anymore. It pushed me to approach moving my body in a much different way. After surgery, I had to focus on rehab starting from the ground up.
Q: What did you start to discover about movement once performance wasn’t the main focus anymore?
Mark Poli: I was always passionate about play, competition and athletic performance but this recovery process made me aware of my body in a new way. After losing my physicality, I began exploring the recovery side of wellness. Movement became a tool for active recovery, not just performance.
I started seeing how movement also helped my mental health. Movement helped me feel better: physically, mentally and emotionally. A more interconnected version of myself that valued movement, nutrition, and wellness as a whole.
Q: What kind of movement did you get into after that?
Mark Poli: I started finding other functional movement protocols and programs. The first was a group called Gold Medal Bodies. They had an online functional fitness training program based on bodyweight and fundamental strength. Coming off an injury, it was super accessible to me.
I began moving in ways I never had before and expanding my movement vocabulary. That sparked something. I had been exposed to elite performance and training systems my whole life, but was missing a lot in the way I was moving before. There was a huge gap between how I wanted to feel and how I was training.
That’s when I found Ido Portal’s work. His philosophy really resonated with me and incorporated elements from martial arts, gymnastics, and dance. I started training with Ido as a mentor, learning to move in more diverse, expressive ways. And I trained harder than I ever had in my life, even more than I did for baseball.
Movement, Breathwork, Mindset
Q: What came next in your evolution?
Mark Poli: I was planning my next move career-wise, considering training under another coach I’d met while traveling. But I suffered my next severe injury, a low spine disc herniation. It was brutal, I lost feeling in my leg and I couldn’t sleep for weeks.
The doctor said it was one of the worst cases he’d seen and that I’d need surgery if I ever wanted to move properly again.
I felt really alone at the time, but I had a lot of tools, so I just started rebuilding again, deepening my understanding of the physiology and neurology of movement.
Once I was back on my feet, I started adding in movement practices progressively over time, like Tai Chi. Through this, I met a teacher who connected me to someone who had a background in functional neurology and Chinese medicine.
That was a turning point. I ended up taking several courses in functional neurology traveling to Arizona and California to train with different educators. I started to understand the full picture of how vision, breath, movement, even thoughts, sound and environment can influence healing. I learned scar tissue manipulation, manual therapy, performance neurology.
Surfing also became a big part of life for me. Being in the water helped me connect with nature in a primitive and incredibly powerful way. I always say, it resets my nervous system in a way nothing else can. It wasn’t just a sport but a way for me to learn to become a better person.
Food was always relevant in the recovery process. I had already been exposed to nutrition through sport, but now I was connecting it to something deeper. I became interested in regenerative farming. I started understanding that real health starts with the soil. That our food system is just as connected to our wellness as movement or mindset.
Food as Medicine: Healthy Truth Evolution
Q: Where did Healthy Truth come in?
Mark Poli: Healthy Truth actually started for me back in college. My first job was packing products into pouches in a small kitchen. There was no warehouse, no team, just a few of us in one room. Later, I helped with some of the brand’s early marketing and sales outreach.
But the real turning point came years later, after the back injury and after I’d been working at a functional neurology clinic and other wellness startups. I was helping patients recover from concussions and chronic illness, and at the same time I was trying to figure out what came next for me.
That’s when Healthy Truth came back into the picture. Our families were aligned in wanting to bring clean, real food to our community and contribute to fixing a food system that often works against people’s health.
My sister Nicole and I joined the business, first starting out small and hands-on. We wore every hat from production, packaging, sourcing to customer service. It forced us to learn the business from the inside out. It was intense, but it grounded us in the reality of what it takes to build something that lasts.
Nicole and I have since then stepped into bigger roles and have been rebuilding Healthy Truth with intention. Now we’ve brought in people who share the vision. The product line is evolving. It feels like the company reflects everything we’ve lived and the belief that food is one of the most powerful tools for transformation.
Q: How has your philosophy on food evolved through all of this?
Mark Poli: In high school, food was just protein shakes, clean carbs, whatever helped me perform. Then during injury recovery, I started to see it differently.
I learned that food can reduce inflammation. It can support the nervous system. It can help you sleep, heal, and recover. I became obsessed with that. I started studying clinical research, ingredients, dosages, and synergy.
But it wasn’t just the nutrition science, it was also experiencing how food made me feel. And how it made other people feel.
Q: How do you see Healthy Truth’s role in the broader wellness conversation?
Mark Poli: We’re here to support people on their wellness journey, wherever they are - whether they’re trying to improve performance, recover from burnout, or just feel better day to day. And we’re doing it with products that are rooted in real food.
We’re also about education. We want people to understand what they’re putting into their bodies, and why it matters. We want to empower people with food, along with practices, habits, and perspectives that support long-term wellness.
We are here to keep it real. The little things you do daily will count and add up over time.
Q: What do you hope people take from your story?
Mark Poli: I always say I’m super fortunate to feel that I f’d up a lot really early on. I failed and felt the pain in those failures. That forced me to look in the mirror early on. The hip surgery ended my baseball career, but it pushed me into movement. The back injury pushed me into functional neurology. It was all connected. Each time I had to recreate my vision for myself, and each time it got clearer.
I hope people can feel comfort in knowing that change is possible. Healing is possible. Whether you’re an athlete, a parent, someone in pain, someone burned out, your body wants to get better. You just need the right inputs. Sometimes it’s just one practice that reminds you you can change. That’s all it takes to start a full transformation.
