241. The Future of Nutrition: Making Supplements More Convenient, Effective & Enjoyable

September 8, 2026

Don Dillon endured roughly four years of unexplained seizures and immune collapse during his Navy years, and decades later he built a supplement bar designed to survive the very manufacturing process that destroys most nutrients before they ever reach your mouth.

Dillon is the founder and CEO of Sound Foods, and he joins Dr. Fix to unpack the real reason most people quit their supplement routine within 90 days. It’s not a lack of discipline. Pills are unpleasant, powders are a hassle, and the “convenient” alternatives on shelves rely on heat and sugar that wreck the nutrients they’re supposed to deliver. So what happens when a bar can hold its shape without any of that?

Sound Foods uses an ultrasonic manufacturing process that binds ingredients cold and skips the sugar syrups and gums that give most protein bars their gummy, overly sweet texture. The result tastes closer to a crumbly cookie, and it opens the door to putting real, functional doses of nutrients like creatine or nootropics into something people will actually want to eat.

The bigger idea here is where this technology could go. Dillon describes a future where your blood work or wearable data could inform a bar built specifically for your body. If a supplement finally tasted good and worked with your biology instead of against it, would you still need the pill bottle at all?

The two also get into Dillon’s own health detective work, including a stubborn 2 a.m. wake-up habit he’s still trying to solve, and why chasing symptoms with quick fixes rarely gets you closer to what’s actually going on underneath.

Quotes

“The challenge is what is nutritious is not convenient. What is convenient is not nutritious.” (08:15 | Don Dillon)
“What I needed is something that was convenient and that I could work or do whatever if I’m traveling, what have you. It just didn’t exist.” (08:23 | Don Dillon)
“Eighty percent of people who start a supplement program fall off within ninety days. ‘Cause it just is not pleasant. Nobody likes to swallow a bunch of pills or mix up powders. It’s not pleasant, it’s not convenient.” (10:24 | Don Dillon)
“If you don’t eat it, it ain’t nutrition.” (11:53 | Don Dillon)
“I like to say I don’t have a headache because I don’t have enough Tylenol in my diet. That’s not why.” (28:43 | Don Dillon)

Connect with Don Dillon:

Sound Foods Website

Connect with Don on LinkedIn

Don Dillon is the founder and chief executive officer of Sound Foods, a food technology company redefining the intersection of nutrition, supplements, and snacking. At Sound, Dillon draws on a broad range of professional and life experiences to advance a radically new food production technology designed to democratize access to advanced nutrition for consumers, manufacturers, and the U.S. military.

Dillon’s drive to create a new category of food is deeply personal. While serving in the U.S. Navy, he developed a medical condition that led him to explore what would later become known as the biohacker lifestyle. He started biohacking with food and later with supplements, but not for performance optimization, but to regain normal function and quality of life.

As his supplement regimen grew, Dillon became increasingly aware of the complexity and inconvenience of the biohacker approach, particularly its incompatibility with everyday eating habits. This realization sparked a search for a technology that could fundamentally change how people snack, eat, and consume supplements. Through industry connections, he discovered and acquired a proprietary ultrasonic cold-forming process capable of shaping ingredients into a bar or similar form in a fraction of a second. The process enables the inclusion of heat-sensitive and encapsulated bioactive ingredients in the forming process, something traditional food manufacturing cannot achieve.

An entrepreneur at heart, Dillon immediately recognized the potential of this technology to deliver supplement-grade nutrition in an enjoyable, familiar food format bringing simplicity, accessibility, and even joy to advanced nutrition and human optimization.

Prior to founding Sound Foods, Dillon demonstrated the same entrepreneurial drive as the founder and president of Voloren, a construction company focused on modernizing large government buildings through comprehensive energy retrofitting, a role he has held since April 2016.

Earlier in his career, Dillon spent more than a decade gaining exposure to a wide range of public-and private-sector business initiatives through roles at Ackman-Ziff Real Estate Group and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). He holds a bachelor’s degree from Indiana University and a master’s degree in finance and investment from New York University

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