With rates of smoking, heart disease and high blood pressure through the roof, many Oklahomans haven’t made a commitment to change their lifestyles, much less thought of stepping into a nutritional supplement store.

David Kinsel wants to change that. In 2010, he brought the Complete Nutrition franchise to Oklahoma with stores in Norman and Edmond. He says pending results from those stores, he’d like to add two more in the metro this year.

“Doing the research, Oklahoma City didn’t seem like it had a nutrition store like Complete Nutrition,” he says. “It’s more based on personal relations and customized products. It seemed like a city that would benefit from us being there. “It is a younger city, still growing, and it didn’t seem like it was hit as hard by the recession.”

Kinsel’s research has seemed to pay off. The new locations now bring his total to six. He says look for stores near Penn Square Mall and Yukon to be next.

He started working for Complete Nutrition while attending college in Nebraska. It was a good job at the time, but the finance grad didn’t think much about it until he lost an internship and looked around to see what pieces of his future were left.

“I did my research and moved to Lubbock to start my first store,” he says.

Kinsel went head-to-head with supplementation giant General Nutrition Centers when he started, and does so in every market he enters.

GNC has long franchised in Oklahoma with 39 in-state stores currently listed on its website.

above Janet Thompson, manager of Complete Nutrition in Edmond

But Kinsel, now 26, says while Complete Nutrition goes head-to-head with GNC on product, the franchise wins in the way it interacts with clients.

“We have one-on-one complete consultations,” he says. “We are there with you from the first day. It’s not ‘buy a product and we’ll see you later.’ All of our guys are committed to working out, and they live the lifestyle.”

Chad Richardson is one of those guys. He is Kinsel’s district manager now, but the ex-Marine still remembers walking into that first Lubbock store just to see what was going on.

“I was an avid supplement user already, and I was excited to see a new place in town,” he says. “From that day forward, I probably shopped with David for a year and a half.”

That included when Richardson was deployed to Iraq. Kinsel shipped everything overseas that Richardson needed to maintain his lifestyle.

“It’s all about customer service,” Richardson says. “We have professionals that work within our stores – usually college graduates in nutrition or coaches or personal trainers. You don’t have some meatheaded college student behind the counter.”

Kinsel counts high schoolers to those in their 50s as his core demographic; Complete Nutrition carries products designed to help build muscle for younger clients, or products designed to replace things like testosterone for aging men.

“It’s really hard to find the right supplements for people. It’s not like trying on jeans. With supplements, they all look the same, but you don’t have the luxury of trying them out,” Kinsel says. “You really need someone in the store to ask so you’re not buying a different product every month.”

The Complete Nutrition franchise is expected to nearly double this year, according to Kinsel, with another 50 stores under contract to open nationwide.