How a Fatty Liver Diagnosis Led Vladi Del Solio to Build the Most Potent Broccoli Microgreen Supplement in America

Reflections from my conversation with Vladi Del Solio, founder of Ederra

I sit down with a lot of people in this space, but every so often a conversation reminds me why I do this. My talk with Vladi Del Solio, founder of Ederra, was one of those.

Vladi's story starts about as far from "health founder" as you can get. He was an executive at a publicly traded fintech company on Nasdaq, born in Italy, living the corporate life in the U.S. By 2023, that life caught up with him: he was diagnosed with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Not a fringe condition, either. It's affecting thousands of people right now, quietly, because of exactly the diet most of us have been sold as normal  bleached flour, canola oil, processed everything.

What struck me most was what happened next. He found a holistic doctor in Fallbrook, San Diego County, who asked him the one question conventional medicine almost never asks: what are you eating? Vladi put it bluntly during our talk, and I haven't stopped thinking about it: "If you go to a doctor and you are sick, they don't ask you what is your diet. They are not healers. They are dealers." That's not medicine. That's traffic control for symptoms.

The doctor's prescription was food: cow liver, omega-3s, better olive oil, and broccoli microgreens — specifically for the sulforaphane, an antioxidant compound that in early-stage broccoli microgreens can be 40 to 100 times more concentrated than in mature broccoli. Vladi didn't just take the advice. He quit his corporate job and became a farmer overnight, growing his own microgreens and eating a pound of them a day to heal his liver. It worked. But he also learned firsthand how impractical that regimen is for a normal life  the shelf life is only a couple of days, it's expensive, and eating a pound of anything daily is not sustainable for most people.

That gap between "this works" and "nobody can actually do this every day" is where Edera was born. Vladi teamed up with a local farmer and a scientist to create Empower Plus: broccoli microgreens and sprouts plus lion's mane mushroom, freeze-dried and packed into biophotonic glass jars that keep the ingredients stable for up to two years. No 50-ingredient proprietary blend, no fillers. Just three or four ingredients, farm to body, same week as harvest.

I want to underline something we talked about at length, because it's the whole point: this isn't just about sulforaphane in isolation. I've bought standalone sulforaphane extracts over the years, and what Vladi's product reinforced for me is that the compound works synergistically with everything else in the microgreen the glucosinolates, the vitamin C, K, and A, the fiber, the minerals, the NRF2 pathway activation that governs the body's own antioxidant and detox machinery. Strip it down to one isolated molecule and you lose the synergy. The whole plant, at that early growth stage, is doing something a supplement aisle full of extracts can't replicate.

The benefits Vladi and I went through are substantial and well-studied: liver detoxification support, reduced neuroinflammation and mitochondrial support for brain health, healthy blood vessel function and normal blood pressure through improved endothelial function, healthy blood sugar regulation, immune support, and research (from people like Dr. Rhonda Patrick) linking daily consumption to meaningfully lower rates of prostate and breast cancer. None of this is fringe. It's some of the most studied phytochemistry out there.

One thing I flagged for Vladi directly, and he was refreshingly open to hearing it: potency claims mean little without a measurement of active myrosinase, the enzyme that converts glucoraphanin into active sulforaphane. It's the difference between a product that theoretically contains the precursor and one that's verified to deliver the active compound. He took the note on the spot. That kind of openness to being challenged, on air, is rare, and it told me a lot about how he's building this company.

What I appreciated most, though, wasn't the biochemistry. It was Vladi's framing of food as a daily choice between medicine and poison, and his insistence that Edera isn't selling powder. It's selling a lifestyle, a community, a nudge toward the choices that compound over decades. He told me about the tennis player who, out of nowhere, looked him in the eye and gave him his company's tagline: "Your body is your life. Honor it." That's the whole conversation in six words.

I've said it before and I'll say it again here: nothing feels as good as feeling good. Vladi didn't die of that fatty liver diagnosis, but without the change, his body would have started leaving long before he was ready. That's the stakes for all of us, every single day, one meal at a time. You're not investing in a supplement. You're investing in the only asset you can't replace.