Why Supplements Are More Necessary Than Ever Before

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Can we provide the optimal level of not only the nutrients our body needs, but also the phytochemicals from diet alone? And the simple answer is no, it's impossible because our food supply has changed so much.

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Hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. It might be easy to assume that if you're eating a whole foods diet rich in plants, you're getting enough nutrients to not need supplements. And while compared to a processed diet, that may be true, the reality is that you might not be getting all the nutrition you'd expect from one carrot to the next. In today's episode, we feature four conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy on the connections between soil health, nutrient density in plants, and human health. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Michael Murray about our compromised food supply and why we need supplements. With Fred Provenza about how the microbiome of the soil is determined by plants. With Dan Kittredge about how pesticides and fertilizers also destroy the soil. And with Jeff Katcher about the value of organic foods. Let's dive in.

The question is, I think, Can we provide the optimal level of not only the nutrients our body needs, but also the phytochemicals from diet alone? And the simple answer is no, it's impossible because our food supply has changed so much and it's no longer nutrient rich, it's no longer phytochemical rich. And the type of chemicals in our phytochemicals in our food is changed and it's changed by modern farming and I'm sure you've had many experts talk about this. If we look at the flavonoids, as I said, I've loved them. If you look at the flavonoid composition of organically grown tomatoes and compare it to GMO tomatoes, it's different. The pesticides, herbicides influence the plants production of these, like you mentioned, protective compounds. So I really think that it's important to take advantage of all these superfoods that we have available to us and all these supplements that can help promote health and longevity. And if we don't, you know, yeah, we might be able to get by, but we're not going to be thriving. And I'd rather see people thriving than just getting by.

I agree. And in terms of, you know, longevity, what are the things that are the kind of have to's? I mean, there's a list a mile long, and I want to talk about your personal recommendations that you take because you, I've looked at your list and it's quite extensive. But what are sort of the have tos, the non-negotiables that are really key.

That are backed by science around what we need to take for longevity?

I think in anything you're doing in life, sports, your job, building health, you have to pay attention to the foundation. So your question is, what are the foundational supplements that promote longevity? I think you need a good high potency multiple vitamin and mineral formula because a deficiency of any single nutrient can have catastrophic pathologic effects on our health. Next, I do believe in the vitamin D3 research. I do think that it is critical that we have adequate vitamin D3 levels. So take enough vitamin D3 to get you in that ideal range of 60 to 80 nanograms per ml or micrograms per ml. Then next I think these pharmaceutical grade fish oils are a great gift because you're getting these long chain omega-3 fatty acids in a very clean form. And you have thousands of scientific studies showing the benefits of these long chain omega-3 fatty acids to our health. So taking a good high quality fish oil, getting enough of them, getting at least 1000 milligrams combined epa and dha each day, I think is a good goal. Next, I think it's important to take some sort of plant-based broad spectrum antioxidant. A good flavonoid rich extract would be a good choice. Something like a grape seed extract or a pine bark extract in the range of 150 to 300 milligrams per day. You could take one of these enhanced versions of curcumin. That would be a good choice. There's so many great broad spectrum antioxidants. You could take a green stream, just something that's rich in, in phytochemicals that can produce some, some real benefit.

I mean, it seems like the ones that you've actually listed in your personal.

List are the ones that have seemed to be the, for me, the most.

Data on, on health and Longevity, like.

Quercetin, curcumin, green tea extracts, resveratrol, which.

Very are sort of the things that.

Grape seed extract, which are the things.

That actually are based on literature the most promising.

Yeah, well, you know, quercetin is interesting because it, it activates the, the longevity gene. Everyone's trying to, like, I know NMN is a big. Yeah, yeah. But what you're doing is you're, you're filling in a bucket that has a hole in it. There's a, there's an NMN bucket and that there's a hole in it. And so we're filling that bucket up continually by taking NMN instead of fixing that hole. hole. That hole is related to an activity of an enzyme and we can help heal that bucket by taking quercetin. It activates that longevity gene and that raises the body's own NAD+ levels instead of having to take NMN.

What is that longevity gene you're talking about with quercetin? because I think that's a very important one for longevity that maybe people haven't heard of. It also assumed to be very effective.

In COVID and helping with the immune system.

It's great in allergies and gut healing. So tell us a little bit more.

About the mechanism of action, of course.

Because I think it's something people hear about but may not be aware of.

Yes, this particular gene increases the expression of the enzyme that regenerates NAD+ and NAD+ levels tend to decline as we age, and people are taking things like nicotinamide riboside or nicotinamide mononucleotide NMN to try and boost NAD+ levels. But quercetin and other flavonoids by influencing the production of a very specific enzyme can help regenerate that NAD+ and I think a more sustainable fashion. Otherwise, you're just, you're not addressing the underlying cause. Good medicine always involves trying to understand what's really going on in the cell and in the body and trying to repair it.

And so, do you remember the name of that enzyme?

It's naphthoquinone oxoreductase one.

Oh, that's a big one. That's a big one.

Well, we're going to put that in the show notes.

It's an interesting mechanism of action.

And, I think that's a very insightful point.

So, maybe even if you took NAD or NMN or NR and you have course along with it, it might help, right?

Yeah, yeah. I personally don't take NMN because I believe in the flavonoids that I'm taking.

But, you're also taking a lot of other stuff. You're taking things for detoxification and mitochondria.

Which play a big role and aging.

Things to help your metabolism. So can you talk about some of those compounds that you're taking?

Oh my God. Yeah, you know, if you're looking at wanting to live longer, you've got to have plenty of energy. So you have to ask the question.

Well.

How do I make sure my energy producing machinery is working properly? And the best way to To do that is to focus on things that help your mitochondria work better. So your mitochondria or the energy producing compartments of our cell, it needs virtually all the B vitamins, it needs coenzyme Q10, and it needs protective agents around it because basically your mitochondria are like a little mini nuclear reactor. They're producing energy. and that's what gives us life. And in that process, it's generating a lot of pro-oxidants and oxidants that can cause damage to the mitochondria as well as our cell. So there's some special compounds that protect the mitochondria. One of my favorites is called PQQ. That's short for pyroquinoline quinone. That's why we call it PQQ. I love this compound, Mark. I'm sure you've talked about it, but It's found in stardust and you could make a claim that PQQ is the spark of life spread through the universe because it's absolutely essential for life. It plays a key role in mitochondrial function. It's found in our diet in very small quantities, but they're necessary. it will someday be classified as a vitamin similar to in quantities to like folic acid. And it is available in supplement form. It's been shown to work very well with coenzyme Q10.

Yeah.

But anyway, this- Is it related to CoQ10?

It sounds like from the name of it, it may be, but is it different than CoQ10?

It is. It's a bit different. Every time an anti, we use this term antioxidant a lot, but there are as many different antioxidants as there are musical instruments. And you need that whole band playing. But every time an antioxidant performs its function, it's called a catalytic conversion. Some antioxidants are relatively cheap, like vitamin C. It can only be used four times and then it's spent. PQQ, it can survive 20,000 catalytic conversions. So it makes it very special, and that's why it's really concentrated in the mitochondria, because it's a very valuable antioxidant to protect against damage during that energy production. Glutathione is another example of a key antioxidant, but PQQ is many times more more powerful than even glutathione. And, I don't know if anyone's talked about ergothioneine.

Yeah, we do have talked about it.

I would love to hear your thoughts about it.

Yeah, ergothioneine is interesting.

Before you go on about PQQ, I.

Just want to sort of say something about it.

It's one of those compounds that activates what I call one of these longevity switches. You know, your body has these hallmarks of aging. And then, the most important one of.

These is deregulated nutrient sensing. And, I call these four longevity switches.

That regulate insulin, mTOR, sirtuins, which have to do with resveratrol and things like that, NED. But then, there's AMPK, which a lot of people are taking metformin for, but PQQ activates AMPK, which helps to really work on all the longevity pathways.

Very well said. And, you know, that leads us to berberine, too. Berberine is one of my, my standard supplements. It's a compound found in, in goldenseal, and it, it has great research showing an ability to lower cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure and lower blood glucose levels. If it was a drug, it'd be the biggest selling drug of all time. We're talking nearly We're talking nearly 30 double-blind placebo-controlled studies showing that this compound that's found in plants like Goldenseal and Barberry and Goldthread can lower cholesterol levels as well as the statin, can lower blood pressure as well as an ACE inhibitor, and can lower blood sugar levels as well as metformin.

That's impressive.

It has some other really unique effects as well, including activation of AMPK. Yes, there's a lot of compounds in nature that activate AMPK and my whole diet is full of them. You know, it's just amazing all these different compounds, they all have some common features. You know, Nrf2 activation is another key anti-aging strategy. It's a nonspecific call to arms by our cells to activate our are antioxidant mechanisms. And it explains, you know, one of the things that has happened in flavonoid research and some of the phytochemical research, they do test tube studies and to see what actions it might produce. And then, but those test tube studies show us what the concentration is that's required to produce those effects. And sometimes it's not possible to achieve that level of concentration. They get metabolized, they get inside the cell, but they're still active. So how are they working? And then that turns into a really interesting study because we see more clearly pharmacology has evolved. We've rediscovered some of these compounds that we thought were inactive because we didn't have the models to explain how they work. And what we're seeing is that many of these natural compounds activate really important cellular targets like you mentioned the four hallmarks of aging in cyclic AMP is certainly one of those key factors because it not only lowers lipid levels, improves blood sugar levels, it increases the formation of mitochondria. You increase the number of mitochondria, you increase the energy of the cell, it works better. So, It's you give that, it's like, you know, I look at it, the brain is our most metabolically active tissue. Okay. And yet many people are, they have a, their dimmer switch is turned to dim because they don't have the mitochondrial energy production needed to have that brain be bright and to function properly. And, you know, It's an epidemic of mild cognitive impairment to dementia in our elderly right now. And I think helping them have more mitochondrial numbers and better mitochondrial function is the solution. And so many of the things that we look to to improve mitochondrial function improve brain function as well. I started taking this product, Marc, it's from our friends at Natural Factors, it's called RegeneraLife. I love this product because I take a lot of pills, but this comes in a powdered form. So you got a little scoop here and you just empty that orange powder into your glass and you've got a great cocktail. It contains acetyl-L-carnitine, CoQ10, and some other key compounds for enhanced mitochondrial function. And it's just a great way to get that dimmer switch to turn up a bit.

Yeah, I put that in my smoothie every morning.

I do, actually.

It's great.

Yeah.

You know, I think it's just important to emphasize what you said earlier about.

These plant compounds that work on these.

Pathways that drugs work on. So a lot of people in the longevity field are thinking about Metformin and.

Taking this diabetes drug for longevity. And there's a large trial going on.

Now called the TAME trial, targeting aging with Metformin. which was really designed to determine whether or not this is an effective longevity intervention that can reverse biological age. But what you're saying is that there are many of these compounds like berberine and other things that actually do the.

Same or work better than these drugs.

Is that true?

Yeah, yes, absolutely. And if we look at the contrast between berberine and metformin is really interesting. Metformin, by the way, was originally isolated from a plant. So conceptually, it is a natural product and it does have some, it does have a place in medicine, but I think that berberine might be a better choice. And what's interesting about both metformin and berberine is they affect the microbiome. But if you, if you, I'm sure you've, in different ways. Yeah, exactly. I'm sure you've had people on metformin. What's their biggest complaint, Mark?

Digestive problems.

Digestive problems. Yeah.

Yes, because I don't think it's affecting the microbiome in a healthy way. Berberine has phenomenal effects on the microbiome. It's a selective antibiotic. It's a pathogen-specific, disease-causing organism-specific antibiotic, and it promotes the growth of many health-promoting bacteria. One of the key ones is called Akkermansia muciniphila. this compound or this bacteria, it works with our intestinal cells to create the mucin layer. It's given the name mucinophilia. Mucinophilia means love. It loves that mucin and it helps improve the quality and function of that mucin. When we talk about leaky gut, we're talking about the loss of that mucin and we're talking about a deficiency of acromensia mucinophilia. When we talk about diabetes, when we talk about non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, when we talk about systemic inflammation caused by a leaky gut, we're talking about decreased Akkermansia muciniphila. And BareBrain increases the counts of this health-promoting bacteria, helps reestablish that mucin layer, and is a very important remedy for leaky gut, diabetes, and inflammation, systemic inflammation, fatty liver disease, all these sequelae of what we know are the result of absorbing gut-derived toxins that create all these problems in our liver and our metabolism. So, I think the contrast between metformin and berberine on gut health is, it's night and day. One, metformin, questionable benefits, maybe some harm. bear brain looks very beneficial.

Interesting.

So maybe we're searching for love in the wrong places.

That maybe the plant kingdom actually is a source of a lot of these compounds.

And this is what I found when I wrote my book Young Forever, that.

A lot of these compounds are in.

Nature working on these pathways that we are trying to find drugs for, but.

They do it in a way that's kind of more in line with nature, less likely to have side effects and potentially even more benefit.

Yeah, and what's exciting, Mark, is the best from nature is yet to come. I've had my fingers on the pulse of research for over 40 years now, and I'm telling you, with the increase in our understanding of how natural compounds work in our body, we're going to be gaining a greater appreciation. You know, one of the biggest indicators of how far we've come in that regard is looking at curcumin. So curcumin has been the subject of over 8,000 scientific investigations. Why are researchers studying curcumin? Because they're trying to find a drug that will produce the same actions and they haven't been able to find one. It's been intense research over 20 years and most natural compounds exert what are called pleiotropic effects. This is known in with traditional drugs. If we look at inflammation, like a Celerex or an aspirin, they work on one enzyme. There are over 40 different enzymes that have been implicated in causing the Cascade of events that lead to severe inflammation. Curcumin impacts all of them. It's been shown to impact every known activator of inflammation. Well, the drugs only work on one or two and It's really quite interesting. I believe in the power of nature. We fall in love with technology, but I wrote a book called the Magic of Food and my thought was how I came up with that title was that Sir Arthur Clarke, who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, had a great quote. He said, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. and we have lost sight of where true technology lies because, you know, we're all amazed by our iPhone and our computers and all this technology, but the greatest technology in the universe is nature.

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And now let's get back to this.

Week'S episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

I thought that, you know, the microbiome of the soil was important for the plants, but the microbiome of the soil is also determined by the plants.

Yes.

And the plants, the plants in a symbiotic relationship with the soil put stuff in the soil that feeds the microbiome. And the more diversity of plants, and I'll think about these massive millions of acres of monoculture, what that does to the soil, right? You have hundreds of different species of plants on rangeland or farmland, that's putting information in the soil that feeds the silvery medicine for the microbiome of the soil. And then the microbiome in turn helps the plants by extracting compounds from the soil that it couldn't otherwise extract. So we're seeing two phenomena here. One is over the last 50 years, we've seen a dramatic reduction in mineral and nutrient content in plants, even a future broccoli today, it's not as nutritious as it was 50 years ago. Okay, we're up to 50% lower levels of minerals and also a 10 to 50% reduction in phytochemicals. And it's all because we've disrupted this natural relationship between plants and soil.

Yes. And we didn't understand, right? I mean, when people starting into all this, nobody understood. And the silos that we live in, right, that we were talking about last night. So you have these ecologists that are going down this path and learning about all these things we're talking about. You have agronomists that are thinking we need yield, yield, yield. And now those worlds are coming together. How we're starting to say, look, we did this. Nobody's to blame. It had, it was just good intentions, but we need to have a think. And then these phytochemicals going back to the soil microbiome, their health, their health promoting for all those bacteria and mycorrhizae, it's so symbiotic and so health promoting all the way across the board. And you can't extract one frame from the other. They're intimately interrelated and we're interrelated with all that, right? And we didn't we've forgotten that that's so fundamental to our health. We need to, we really need to wake up to that, right? And that appreciation of how beautiful and amazing it is for one thing, and then how important it is fundamental for our health.

Totally.

And the phytochemicals that are in these plants that have been grown in ways that feed the microbiome with soil, increase their nutrient density, that increase their phytochemical richness have profound effects for our health and they have profound effects for the animals. So I'm a doctor, you're sort of a rangeland behavioral ecologist, right? We're studying different things. Seems like how could they come ecological doctors? Yeah, but it's really, when you look at it, it's exactly what's happening in human health and animal health. So we're seeing the need for massive inputs to animals to keep them growing and healthy. beets, using supportive nutritional support, antibiotics, certain kinds of feed. And they're not that healthy. Whereas if you take a grass-fed, fully grass-fed finished animal or a wild animal, they're eating foods all the time that are treating their bodies with medicine.

That's right.

And they're less likely to get sick. They don't need as much support. and so the costs are way less to raise grass-fed regenerative beef than it is to feed a lot of animals and people think, what's more expensive? Turns out it's not more expensive. It turns out they gain weight in the right way. And what was fascinating to me reading your book was that some of these papers was that it was shocking to me that they could eat far less and gain the same weight because, and this is just asking me because we eat a nutrient complete diet, our bodies know what to do.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely the case. The whole notion of the nutritional wisdom of the body of everything from the bacteria in the soil through to the plants themselves through to the livestock and on us as well. You know, I want to go back to a point too. It's about our reliance on fossil fuels and that all these inputs that plants did naturally. Now we have to make up with, with herbicides, herbicides to, to protect plants and model cultures. Glyphosate, huh? And all the downstream effects of glyphosate. Plants, plants did that naturally. They produced their own herbicides, and we, we didn't.

And they're called phytochemicals. Right.

And they're called phytochemicals. Then insecticides to protect plants from from the insect world. Well, that's what plants did. That's also phytochemicals. That's what they also phytochemicals. Fertilizers, we've been talking about this symbiosis below ground. When we got rid of that, then we've got to do the fertilizer.

Well, there's cost to every one of those things. And then, like you said, and then a lot of plants, if you have.

The risk of plants, they put nitrogen into the soil, so you don't have to put it in. Right, absolutely. Nitrogen fixing plants. And then so we shot ourselves in the foot.

And then there's this huge cost that we've talked about.

You know, when you take in the.

So it's something that occurred to me. Sorry to trip. It just, it's something that occurred to me was just that the reason we need GMO foods is because we've depleted the plant's natural ability to protect, defend itself by the breeding we've done. That's the idea. That plants for yield and protein energy. And then go, wait a minute. These are all getting eaten and they're not striving and they're not. They're getting sick and we need. give them all these drugs, like, you know, to keep them healthy, which is kind of silly because naturally these phytochemicals are the plant's defense mechanisms. They prevent them from needing radiation. They help treat different problems that they have with their own health. They help communicate with other plants of dangers.

They have all these incredible benefits, right? Yeah, and that's the supreme irony is now we're trying to genetically engineer back into plants all the things that they originally had, you know, so it puts the emphasis as we were talking, on programs, and there are some in this country that are really trying to think about phytochemical richness and how do we get that back into the production system in really viable ways so that when you go to the grocery store and you pick up the lettuce, the kale, or the tomato or whatever it is, and you pick something that's phytochemically rich and you take a bite of that and every cell in your body saying, hey, this is wonderful rather than, you.

Know, eating broccoli on the store, even this organic broccoli from, you know, a great store. If I go and pick it in my garden and eat it, I'm like, wow, what's that? For paying an asparagus that I buy in the store. I'm paying asparagus that I go pick in my garden. I'm like, that tastes so different.

Absolutely.

It's so different.

So that's where we would encourage everyone to, you know, growing Gardens, getting yourself, getting your hands in. And I talk to a lot of people anymore who haven't done that historically, but they listen to these kind of things, and they start doing that and they you know, it's a spiritual kind of thing in the one sense that it connects you back with our being kind of, but then the rewards of eating, like you say, it's wonderful how we can pick it fresh and bring it in and you eat it and then to realize what we're talking about, some of this science that's been dug into that it actually is very, very healthy for you and all these phytochemicals that were, you know, I'll say a word, over my career, I was so involved with natural product scanning ecologists and learning all these different compounds, all of them, jillions of them. And I don't worry about that anymore, Mark, for two reasons. One, my memory doesn't hold these things.

Anymore, I'll be honest.

But two, you realize it's so complex. I mean, plants will produce tens to hundreds to even thousands of these. Strawberry will produce five thousand. so I think we can become bogged down if we try to think about, you know, well, is it to have resveratrol or does it have phenolics of this sort of one? Not to say there, but, but if you just appreciate that it's that phytochemical richness, that's really what matters. And then the miracle is at the level of the cells and organ systems in your body, your cells and body know what to do with all that. That's incredible, you know? and you're never going to study that in a reductional sense.

No, it's so complex, right?

Because you're literally eating thousands of compounds, not just protein, fat, carbs, fiber, vitamins, minerals, all these other compounds. And your body knows what to do with them. They regulate all these quirky functions. It's what I do in functional medicine. When I treat patients using food as medicine, I tell people to have green tea, which helps get rid of heavy metals, or have them have broccoli, which increases their detox capacity and glutathione for the glutathione, glutathione, and sulforaphane or whether having them eat proanthocyanidins from berries to increase their anti-inflammatory and antioxidant capacity. So, I'm thinking all the time about how do I use these, but it really never occurred to me these deep interrelations between the plants, animals, and the soil that are driving the phytochemical richness. And so, your work has really explained how that all works and why we've sort of gotten so screwed up. So, essentially we breed plants to remove these compounds and then we have to use all these agrochemical and industrial inputs to compensate for that. and two, we built an agricultural system, a legacy of the Green Revolution that ended up damaging the soil in ways that we never even understood and turned it from soil to dirt. And he wrote in a paper you recently read that the Green Revolution helped feed billions of people but had many unintended consequences, including loss of land and social changes in the culture because of how it affected the farmers and with the displacement of land and poverty for countless small farmers. And in India, you know, suicide rates are really high among farmers. even in this country, loss of biodiversity, which we're talking about, and food quality, the degradation of the land from soil erosion and a loss of minerals in the soil, adverse effects from synthetic fertilizers on soil organisms. So when you put nitrogen on the soil, it kills the bugs in there. The pollution from fertilizers, herbicides has been pesticides in the overall environment and more salt in the soil from irrigation and dependence on fossil fuels. So really create a system that has so many inputs and so many changes in destructive problems that happened to the ecosystem that we've sort of stopped living in an ecological way that's supportive and sustainable. And we're now calling regenerative, which is how do we regenerate ecosystems? How do we regenerate soil? How do we regenerate the phytochemicals in plants? How do we regenerate human health? Those are all the things that people care about. And yet we've developed the agricultural system that produces a lot of food that makes people sick and kills people. I mean, I mean, this, the one fact around COVID that's just staggering to me is that 63% of hospitalizations for COVID can be linked back to poor diet. The poor diet that caused diabetes, obesity, heart disease and so forth that led to the hospitalizations. Absolutely. That should get everybody what stopping in their tracks and going, wait a minute, if we are so susceptible to pandemic because of our diet and we've not only seen that in deaths and sickness, but also the loss of food security, nutrition security in so many communities during the pandemic, we've sort of got to get back on track here.

Yes, and as everything we're saying, it relates to all the organisms in the system, right? As you get rid of the phytochemical diversity and diversity of different plant species, that makes all the wild and domestic animals more susceptible to diseases as well. We're seeing it in a pandemic. It's become very real. for humans, but that's the same kind of thing that happens in wild and domestic animals as well.

And it's not just an animal agriculture, plant agriculture, even if you're a vegetarian or vegan, you're eating plants and if they're grown even in organic ways, they can be using killing methods in the soil, they can be doing things that actually decrease biodiversity. And it's not necessarily going to solve the problem if you're looking at large monocrops of soybeans or the new plant-based means, we've got GMO soy going in huge monocrop cultures that are destroying the ecosystem. We're pouring billions of pounds of, I don't know, billions of pounds of glyphosate that's on soil, which is destroying the cell, soil microbiome, it destroys our microbiome, and we're ending up having these food products that aren't what they were and.

Our health is really degraded as a result.

Yeah.

You know, glyphosate was originally developed as a, as an antibiotic, right? Is to kill bacteria.

So I thought, I thought it was to kill, to clean out the lead pipes. And then they put in the pipes and the, and the runoff from the pipes, they found all the, the plants died around where the runoff was out of the pipes.

Yeah, that, that's part of the history.

Of that whole thing.

That's right. Yeah. It wasn't deliberate, right? I mean, they it was a, an unintended consequence, observation, and turned it into the end of the herbicide it is today.

Yeah, it's crazy. So, so as a doctor, I understand, and as a functional medicine doctor, I understand the power of food is medicine and the power of phytochemicals and phytonutrients in plants to actually activate our health and address both the treatment and prevention of disease. That's so clear to me and. your work has really highlighted how we've lost our ability to be in right relationship with the land and with animals that will lead to more of these phytochemicals being in our diet, including not only in plants but in animals. And we'll talk about phytochemicals in meat a little bit. What really strikes me from your work is how we've really lost our natural wisdom of what to eat. And one of the studies that you wrote about in your book, Nourishment, which everybody should get a copy of, is this study that was done in the 20s by a woman, I think in Canada, who took kids from an orphanage. And I only can get this through an ethics committee today, but she took these kids from an orphanage and she fed them an array of food. She offered them these foods. so they could naturally select what their bodies wanted. And these kids would eat stuff that you wouldn't even think they would. Like, for example, a dinner might be orange juice and liver and, you know, some weird thing and brains. And so talk about the study, what was learned from it, and how as humans living in a world with a disconnection from our food supply and a disconnection from the kinds of foods that helped us maintain our nutritional wisdom, how it's led to all this chronic disease. So this study really informs a lot of the thinking about why we are also sick and overweight.

Yes. Clara Davis was the scientist who did the studies. She was in Chicago and she, I would have loved to have met Clara. I have to say she was a petite little lady and so much on the same page. But she obviously had this belief in the nutritional wisdom of the body, but wanted to study that and see what happens. So she had 15 children that were given up for adoption or put in an orphanage. And she ran the study over a six-year period. And they had 34 different foods that were offered seasonally. And some of things like you mentioned, and then they simply recorded what each child ate, meal in, meal out, day. Can you imagine that amount of data?

They just got to pick whatever they wanted.

Yeah, the kids could pick whatever they wanted. And they had pediatricians that were involved in that study and they wrote papers about it and they said they'd never seen a healthier group of kids ever in their careers. And the kids did things and this was interesting.

So there's no nutritionist telling them what to do, no dietary guidelines, getting them instructions. No nutrition facts labels with all the right stuff. The kitchen.

And Clara made it clear. She told the people who were helping on the study, you,'re not to give any indication to those children of something to eat. You put it on that, you put it in front of them. And it was interesting when they first started this study, they said the kids sampled everything. Everything went into their mouth, the napkins, the silverware, the, you know, anything that was on there. but given a little bit of time, each child would figure out what worked for its body. And I just love this because she said, no two children ever selected the same combination of foods, and no child ever selected the same foods from day to day. But they all selected diets that met their needs. And they knew when some of the kids would come in with deficiency, symptoms, they paid particular attention to what they would select, you know, and, and they would select things that they needed.

So they're vitamin A deficient. They'll go for the liver.

That's right. That's absolutely the case. If they come in with rickets, they're gonna go for vitamin B. Yeah. So they documented all of that. And it's just amazing to think. And we were talking about that. We did studies like that with livestock. with sheep and cattle, where we'd give them choices of foods or no choice at all, these rations that are fed in feedlots, these what are called total mixed rations, where they're designed for the average animal and you try to make uniform groups of animals in terms of age and sex and so forth, and then you formulate a ration, you grind it and mix it up. So one group would get that in our study, the other group was simply offered the choice of the ingredients. and it was amazing to compare what they did. And that's where, going back to the point that you made, the animals that were given a choice actually ate less food.

But gained the same weight.

But yeah, they gained weight just as readily. They finished, you know, when people talk about finishing and you slaughter them, and we did that, and you look at their carcass characteristics, they were the same, but it cost less. It was efficient, more efficient. It costs less if you're thinking in just in an economic make sense because they ate less food. Here's the other side.

So we put out a buffet for them instead of giving them a set meal. That's a set meal. Absolutely.

And then they got to pick what they actually needed for their health. And they did exactly what Claire Danes kids did, too. No two animals ever selected the same combination of foods, and they varied it from day to day to day, you know, and we understand a lot how that works. We don't need to go into those details, but it was, it's amazing. And one of the most amazing things to me so you can look at different characteristics. But one thing that nutritionists like to look at is protein to energy ratio in the diet. And that varies a lot as a function of need. And so for the total mixed ration, there's a set protein to energy ratio, right? It's set by what that ration is. And when we looked at protein to energy ratio for the individual animals given choice, they were all over the place. Some were really high, room, no, that they were, but when we averaged all those animals, they were exactly where the nutritionists had formulated the ration, but there, no, none of them were that, you know, there was no animal average animal.

They had their own intelligence.

Yes.

Even a cow.

Yeah, even a cow.

It's not to say a wild elk or buffalo.

That's right. That's right. It was still, they had not lost that day. And that's a key point because when we started our work 45 years ago, there was the notion among ruminant nutritionists that wild animals must still have this nutritional wisdom in their bodies. Otherwise, how could they be surviving? But domestic animals had lost it as a result of 10, 000 years of domestication and selection. And our work just shows in the 300 papers we published over and over again, it hasn't been lost. But it's the choices that you give them and are giving them wholesome choices that allow that wisdom. no different from a human, right? If you're raised on an ultra processed diet, then that's your choices. It's not going to work out well for you, right? But if you have all these wholesome choices and they're grown under the kind of conditions we're talking about, then that wisdom can be expressed. And the amazing thing is you don't even have to think about it. It's not so... That's right.

It's amazing. We've lost all that. And we've gotten in a world where we are over consuming, ultra processed foods in ways that make us the most obese nation in the world and are staggeringly undernourished, even though we're overfed.

Overfed and undernourished.

We have significant increase in efficiencies in this culture. Forget about phytochemicals. So I think probably 99.9% of Americans are deficient phytochemicals because I think less than 9% eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables. That is a minimum, like five cups is minimum. five servings, which is basically two and a half cups. I, I would say people should eat more like eight or nine cups of fruits and vegetables a day.

Right.

Right.

So, so we've lost that. And the, and, you know, on these, these, these compounds we're, we're not getting and we don't know we need, but we're so deficient in our diet. And the, the Cravings we have and the overeating we do often is an attempt to try to replace those nutrients that we're not getting from our food. and one of the studies by Kevin Hall and some others was fascinating to me. You talked about it, which is that when given an unlimited amount of ultra-processed food to eat or a whole food to eat, that the people who ate the whole foods felt satisfied on far less food. They ate 500 calories less a day. Now, that is a massive amount of calories. If you were 100 calories off for 20 years, you're going to gain 20 or 30 pounds. so 100 calories, let's say 3500 calories, right? Right, right, right. Which is basically a week of, of, of the calorie excess would be equivalent to a pound of weight gain a week. Yeah, excess food. So that's why we're so overweight, cuz we're looking for love in all the wrong places. You know, we're looking for nutrients in nutrient depleted food. Forget about phytochemicals. Like the whole idea of phytochemicals regulating our appetite. and our desire for food was something I just, you know, didn't fully understand until I read your book. And the thing that struck me was some of the experiments you did where you, you help explain how flavor and nutrient needs and the animals feeding behavior are all related. So they will find the foods they need and will eat enough of those to meet their needs and then they'll go eat something else. They won't eat too much or too little. They have this natural intelligence and that flavor is associated with these phytochemicals. So, most people understand when you eat like a wild strawberry, it's an explosion of flavor in your mouth even though it's the size of a pea. You eat a big fat strawberry you buy in the grocery store, it tastes like cardboard, you know, and there's no real flavor there. And Dan Barber has done a lot of work around this as a chef and created a company called Row 7 Foods where he's hybridizing plants, not GMO, but just breeding plants for flavor. He's not thinking about phytochemicals. I'm thinking as a doctor about the phytochemicals because the phytochemicals are what give the plant flavor. So that whole relationship between plants, even in humans and their dietary preferences, and plants and animals is something most people don't understand. So can you explain the way in which these flavor feedback loops help regulate animals feeding behavior and how it might inform as humans what we should be eating and how we need to reclaim and listen to our own nutritional wisdom?

That's so important. That was something that really blew my mind. I wish there's a way that we could make come alive for people there to realize that liking for flavor is being mediated by these metabolic feedbacks, hormones, neurotransmitters, peptides, all those things are those signals are coming from cells and organ systems as a function of their need. And so that's changing liking as a function of need. And when you're eating wholesome foods, then that's going to be in sync with what your body needs. that system can be hijacked.

Yeah.

We looked at a little video last night. I showed you a sheep, and one group of sheep had been when they, when they ate a really a straw, which is not, not a nutritious food at all. We, we would put either water in one group of sheep directly into their stomach or an energy, a blast of energy, and the that got the blast of energy, they love that straw, right?

That's what- you- give them a little.

Maple syrup or- yeah, that's what the food industry is doing with the refined carbohydrates. You get a flavor and you follow that with a blast of energy and you immediately form a really strong preference.

So Zoe, stop there. So basically what you're saying is you take straw, which is like eating processed food, right? Cardboard, that's no nutrient. You add sugar on it and they go, oh, sugar, that's good. I want energy. and they eat the straw even though it has no nutrition. Which is what we do as humans. We eat ultra-processed food. We eat fast food, which has no real nutritional value, but it has tons of energy. So they add sugar and all these flavorings to it in order for us to start craving it. So we associate the loose in energy with the flavor. The flavor. The flavor of the food.

But it's actually kind of mismatched. It is. And what we were showing is that it's that feedback and the way you do that, is to give the flavor of straw. So we would make maple flavored or apple flavored or whatever it is. And you've got this straw that's worthless. You have to emphasize that it's not nutritionally anything. But when you follow the ingestion of that straw with nutrients in the gut, put the nutrients directly in the gut, that's the cells work. You know, those nutrients are getting absorbed. that sells. Oh, this is great. And it's feeding back to make you say, oh, I love maple flavored straw.

Or I love. It's not even the taste because you're not, you're not letting you're not giving.

The maple flavored straw. That's right. That's the, to try to get that through. And then, and then to realize, you know, none of this is conscious. As we were talking, it's, nobody thinks about which enzymes to release to digest the food they're eating. And it's the same thing with feedbacks. It's happening automatically. Yeah. And that's where, if you're eating wholesome foods, it works. The system is as solid as it can be. But if you get on the, the ultra process, you, it gets hijacked. And the food, people in the food industry have really learned how to do that well. And then to put not, you know, not wholesome herbs and spices, let's say, as a flavoring agent, it's all these 600 million pounds a year or whatever.

Artificial flavorings.

600 million pounds of artificial flavorings are added to our food every year. That's frightening.

Yeah, it's, it's, and it's caused this.

Disconnect between our natural inclinations to eat foods that nourish us.

That's right.

With our, with our ability to sort of pick those foods and, and we tend to eat foods that are associated with these artificial flavors because they've scientifically figured out how to hijack our brain chemistry and our hormones and our metabolism.

And so we tend to crave all the wrong stuff. Rather than the phytochemicals we've been talking about, we use artificial flavoring agents. And so we're not getting, just as you were saying earlier, all those things that our bodies evolved with over the years and that regulate all these systems things inside our body.

We're not getting.

We're seeing like the really drop in nutrient levels in a lot of common foods that we eat. And what you're saying is not necessarily the lack of nutrients in the soil. Correct. But the lack of the live microbiome of the soil is needed to extract the nutrients that feed the plants.

In some cases, there are some deficiencies in the soil of minerals, but in most cases, most things are there.

And, and so that's a problem. So we don't really understand the fact that it's really the fact we've killing the soil through the application of nitrogen fertilizers and various things like glyphosate, which is a soil microbiome killer, and by tillage, which damages soil that we're actually destroying the very nutrition that we need for our own health.

Yeah, I mean, it's entirely perverse and we will go extinct if we keep it up. So, we have an opportunity, I think, to turn it around. You know, what percentage of the Earth's land mass has been desertified through the practice of agriculture through the last 10,000 years? Something like 40%.

It's a lot.

40%.

Yeah, it's a lot.

You know, we have created deserts through killing soil and turning it into dirt and turning it into dust. We can create fecundity, you know, vitality and amazing biodiversity in those, you know, currently desertified areas if we do choose to work in harmony with life. But it's incumbent on us to make those choices. And so our thought is strategically, most people are bothered with their own personal day-to-day lives much more than they are with, you know, the greater dynamics of the world. And so, you know, survival is, is, is, you know, it's real. So our thought is if we can figure out some way to align this, the interest, where your survival is correlated with the regeneration of the earth, then we actually have a reasonable chance of turning things around in short order. And so that's where it comes down to the nutrient density being a lever, is if we can help people say, choose the food that's going to make reverse your chronic illness, keep your skin looking young and supple, keep your libido up, whatever it is that you care about, Right. For your physiological form to a large degree has to do with whether what you're building your body out of is any good. And most of what we're building our bodies out of is relatively quite poor. And so we- yeah.

So it seems like you're a doctor of the ecosystem of a farm ecosystem, right? And I'm a doctor of the human ecosystem, but they're really connected. And most people don't understand how important the farm is to their own health. so can you talk about that connection?

You know, just because the label says organic or whatever on it doesn't mean that the ecosystem is functioning well where that was produced. And, you know, your tongue will tell you what your body will tell you also.

It's.

It's, you know, it's. Life. Life is the dominant reality, I would suggest. And the more we're in tune with it and aligned with it, the more we're likely to flourish. And we can't. We can't treat life like it's a factory. like it's a, you know, a, a reductionist mechanistic system. I mean, we can, but then we kill it and we're part of it. So, yeah, I don't know. I think we've.

Yeah.

Covered that.

It's. Yeah, it's a huge issue. So, say this sounds good. So people go, I want to buy nutrient dense food from the farms that practice biological agriculture, regenerative agriculture, whatever you want to call it.

Yeah.

What are the challenges to doing that today?

Well, as I said initially, the first thing is we don't have a definition. So, I mean, people can make claims and say my stuff is nutrient-dense, but then whatever, that'll be a fad for a couple of years. A bunch of people will use the label and then people will realize it's just another fad and we'll move on to the next fad. So, I mean, our thought was there's a couple of key pieces here in the strategy. One is you know, give people the ability to actually test for themselves and not have to trust a label or marketing. You know, you're not allowed to take a bite of an apple at the grocery store or at the farmer's farm stand. But, you know, we can read what stars are made up from up of, you know, light years away with this called spectroscopy, which basically is every element or compound in chemistry has a vibration in physics. you know, zinc vibrates at a certain frequency and vitamin C vibrates at a certain frequency. And so that vibration is light. So if you can take a picture of Alpha Centauri and see what it's made up of, like, we can see what percentage it is, hydrogen, helium, Etc. Why can't we take a picture of a carrot and see what it's made up of? Yeah. So that's what we did. I've got the first, our first generation little meter here. It's, you know, nothing too fancy. It's 3D printed. It's got a little chip set in the inside, and it's got some light flashings of light and readings of light right here. It's open source, it's simple, it's like an Apple II. It's not an iPhone, it's not really slick and fancy, but functionally we've got a handheld open source consumer price point spectrometer that you can use to flash a light at food and get readings off of and meaningful readings. So one thing is can we give people the ability to tell for themselves? and not have to trust some certification system or labeling system, et cetera. The second thing is, can we define the variation? Because when we give you a reading that says this carrot is in the 80th percentile or that one is in the 20th percentile, we want to have actually characterized the full variation within carrots. And then the third leg of the stool is correlating environmental conditions and management practices to nutritional variation. the last thing we want is for farmers to be told by their buyer, we don't want your stuff. We want the fact this is happening to cause the farmers to start changing their practices so that the buyers do keep purchasing it. And those who are focusing on volume, let their stuff not be bought. If there's going to be 30% food waste or 40% food waste, let the food that's wasted be the stuff that's of least nutritional value and let money drive you know, a shift. It money's driving.

Anyways, I mean, most Farmers don't know the nutrient density of their food. Right.

We don't have that vision for it.

Nobody knows. We know what nutrient is. And, and the question is, you know, what has been the drop in nutrient density in our food? I mean, is there data on our fruits and vegetables or other foods or eating grains and means and their nutritional density and content 50 or 100 years ago compared to now? Do you have any sense of the drop that's happened?

I mean, yes, the USDA has done this. You know, the British version of the USDA, the Japanese version, the German version, depending on which nutrient they're looking at and which crop they're looking at, you know, it can be tens of percent, hundreds of percent decrease. You know, are you. I mean, but the thing is, you know, how many actual nutrients matter? Is it just, is it just protein and. and calcium, or is it B12 and polyphenols? And so, what was documented 50 years ago or 100 years ago, maybe even they hadn't even identified these compounds yet, much less have assessments for them. So, I like to sort of take the conversation away from the what was food 50 years ago and what is it now? concept and say, there was a variation 50 years ago, people that were eating stuff from the farm that was grown well, had access to stuff that was much better than what might have been in the grocery store. And that's exactly the same situation now. So, like, there was no average carrot in 1950. There is no average carrot now. Every carrot stands on a Continuum. It, you know, the average on the Continuum may be lower now than it was, but they're still exceptional and pretty good. And so let's think about, like, finding, defining sourcing and incentivizing people to grow better. You know, I mean, we found variations right now in the past three years. We've studied 21 crops now, a bunch of fruits and vegetables and a couple grains, some roots and leaves. And, you know, when we were looking at things like calcium and potassium and zinc and iron, it was between 300 and 1800% was the variation. So, wow. Like this leaf of spinach, will have three times as much copper as that leaf of spinach, which would be 300%, or it would have 18 times as much iron as that leaf of spinach. And those were elements, right? And then we looked at antioxidants and polyphenols, which are supposed to be health-giving compounds, and we found the variation was more like 75,000 to 200,000%. Like literally, this leaf of spinach has as many antioxidants as a handful of kale.

It turns out, It's not different. It turns out that there's 25,000 different phytochemicals in the plant kingdom and they are probably in the more important compounds than the actual vitamins and minerals. And, yet, we haven't really been measuring them. What you're saying is there's a difference of 75,000 to 200,000% variation.

75 to 1 to 201 is what that means. So, literally, I think the biggest one we found was Antioxidant Spinach. It was 364 and a half to one. so literally like you eat this leaf of spinach on January 1st and then you eat.

So it's not 200,000%. That's a crazy number. Yeah, that's a crazy number. But yeah, that's huge. That's a 75-200 fold different. Yeah, that's incredible.

200,000% is 200. It is 200,000%. Yeah, it's 201 or 150 to 1 depending on which element, which compound is correct.

Right, you're right.

Because we studied that's insane.

To think about.

That's insane to think about.

So, so literally, quality is that different.

And it's not five or ten percent.

The very.

Wow.

That's staggering.

And so, yeah, we're missing, even if.

We'Re eating, because I'm getting all my vitamins and minerals and my nutrients from the food I'm eating. That may not be true because I'm just eating whole Foods. It may not be true. And still why people are deficient because it's how it was grown and where it was grown and what soil was growing in and how the soil was taken care of. the microbiome of the soil was and all those conditions that determine the quality of the nutrients in the plant is so, so critical. And what's so exciting to me is that you've actually sort of gone ahead with the Real Food Campaign and created an educational model and also a diagnostic model for food. It's like, it's almost like a tricorder for your vegetables, right? It's like Dr. Spock beaming over the body and see what's going on. So how does this work? Tell us about the technology and what we find and what you're finding with these spectrometers and are they available and people can use them or.

Yeah, so I think I said it sort of broadly before, but the principle is called, I mean, the science is called spectroscopy and it's a, you know, many decades old science and it's what astronomers use, you know, among many other types of scientists to identify things. And the basic principle, I mean, we were taught in school that, you know, you go to chemistry class when you're in 10th grade and you go to physics class when you're in 11th grade or whatever it is. but actually every, everything, every atom, every compound is vibrating. So copper is a vibration, zinc is a vibration, vitamin C is a vibration from a physics perspective. From a, from a chemistry perspective, it's a certain number of protons and, you know, neutrons and electrons. But either way, you can effectively see what something consists of by taking a picture of the light that vibrates that, you know, comes off of it. And so that's what we're doing is we're literally flashing a light at the carrot and taking a reading of the light that bounces back. And, you know, based on what's in there, some things get, you know, sort of don't bounce back and some things bounce back really strongly. And you can effectively measure what something is based on that signature. And there's all different kinds of spectroscopy. There's acoustic, there's UV, there's visible, there's infrared, there's all kinds of different ways of doing this. And so what we've got is a pretty simple one. Literally it's 10 LEDs flashing a light at the carrot and then taking a picture of the light that bounces back. And it's that simple. Like I said, this is an Apple II. It's like the first personal computer. You had to be able to code, do anything with it, right? like it's rudimentary, it's not market ready, it's not mass producible like slick. So we released the first version of this, I think in 2018, 2019, we started shipping. And, you know, when you flashlight at the carrot, what it gave back to you on your smartphone screen was like a little, you know, just the peaks and valleys on a graph. And so what we're releasing in June 1st is an update to it, which will now give you a red, yellow, green. So bottom 25%, middle 50%, top 25%. So that graph, which is nice but doesn't mean anything to you, is now we've gotten enough data and calibrations and algorithms and things to convert it into this isn't the bottom 25% of carrots or the bottom 25% of cucumbers. This is the middle 50% and that's the middle and top 25%. So yeah, I mean, we're making progress. and part of what we're doing is we're pretty dogmatic about the fact that we think this all belongs in the commons. We really don't want it to be controlled by a company or anything like that. So we're running three, now four labs across North America and Europe. We're doing all kinds of software build out and all kinds of other stuff.

Could it be an app that just goes on your iPhone and you take a picture with your iPhone?

Well, I'm saying take a picture, but I'm, you know, you have to be able to take a picture in the right frequency range. And so if the iPhone did build the right sensor, if Apple built the right sensor onto an iPhone, yes, it could be an app. And that is where we hope it will get.

Yeah.

But there has to be a market reason for Apple to put that sensor into their phone. So we start off with these, you know, third generation instruments.

So, can people get access to them.

Now or is it just sort of in beta?

Yeah, well, if you go to our website, you can order one. They're $377 and we'll be shipping in June with the update that gives you.

The red, yellow, green on- and what's the website?

Bionutrient.org Bionutrient.org, that's amazing. I think a lot of people are going to be interested in looking at what they're eating and seeing, gee, is this carrot or is this broccoli or is this iceberg lettuce the same as the arugula. It'd be fascinating to see. And it doesn't give you an absolute number, but it gives you a range of red, yellow, green. Right now, that's yellow and green.

It's a process. And we are really trying not to make claims that we can't back up. And so, if you read the website, there's all kinds of caveats and like, this is what it is, but this is what it's not. And, you know, but it's a process. And we think, the broader food movement and all the way from chefs and nutritionists to agronomists and growers, we think this is something that we could all come together around. We're not anti-GMO, we're not anti-this or anti-that. We're pro-quality nutrition and let's learn from each other what the best practices are and the techniques and let those who are doing a good job be acknowledged for it and supported for it.

So tremendous.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, the book I wrote recently called the Pegan Diet really had as its primary focus the idea that food is medicine and that quality matters above all else because the nutrient density and quality of the food determines the quality of your health. And, it's something that if we sort of connect the dots on it, well, wait a minute, we're not just eating for energy or fuel or calories, we're actually eating to regulate our biology with the right nutrients, including all these phytochemicals. And, it's kind of cool to think that there's A way to keep integrity in the system by at the point of purchase being able to look at your food, check it out and see whether or not it is all cracked up to me.

You can market all day long, but if people actually have these things, they can go and check and they can, and I mean, that's the idea. Not that everybody will, but the people can. And our thought is then we can work with the supply chain, the retailers, the wholesalers, whoever else. help them get these instruments and so they can make claims and market it. Not everybody else has to have a meter, but if we have a standard that anybody can engage an instrumentation set and it's all open source, it's in the commons, it's not black boxed basically. And that's the problem with Google's.

And you think that'll drive changes in the food supply chain because when consumers have the power to understand the quality of food or lack of quality, quality, they're going to drive demand for food grown in a different way, processed in a different way, distributed in a different way. Right?

That's the thesis or the hypothesis. If you've got, you know, you can choose your bunny love or your Cal Organic or your Bolthouse Farms carrots at the grocery store and one's a 20 and one's a 40, one's an 80. You're gonna choose a 20?

I don't know. I don't think so. I think the one is 20. Your product might scare a lot of people in the food industry. I think, you know, because they don't.

Want you to know, be on the cutting edge. Anybody who wants to get on the cutting edge of this can. And when the, you know, when the infrastructure is in place, the data is collected and the instruments are out there, people are going to be able to see if, you know, Stonyfield is better than Organic Valley or whatever. And so there's an opportunity here for people that want to walk the talk that have their climate claims and everything else. to get ahead of the curve, get involved in data collection, engage the process. I mean, there's all this talk about regenerative and soil carbon and climate, and all these big companies are making these pledges. The best way to build soil carbon is with healthy plants, full stop.

Let's talk about the nutritional density of the food, and then we'll get into the whole contamination chemical and risks and so forth and some of the studies on that. Because I think that there's really question of is it any better? Is it just more expensive? Okay, maybe there's a little less pesticides, but how much better is it really for you?

So in order to answer this question around nutrient density, let's turn our attention to the Vegetable Systems Trial, which is one of the newest studies at Rodale Institute. We're in our fourth year, and this study is really serving to answer the question, is organic organic food truly worth the extra premium? Is it truly more nutritious? And this is the first study of its kind in the world that is where we literally have organically grown vegetables done in a regenerative way, grown side by side with conventionally grown vegetables where we're literally applying herbicide and pesticides on certain plots. And over time, we're beginning to study the nutrient differences and the nutrient density uptake in either of those two systems. And would you believe that early data in just one or two years, we've already seen a pretty dramatic difference in nutrient density, specifically in carrots. If you look at carotenoids in carrots, we're seeing a much higher percentage of phytonutrients in the regeneratively grown carrots. And so this is a study again that we hope to do for 40 more years because you have to understand doing research in agriculture, it takes time. And very few people want to commit time and money. The average PhD student going through their research at a university, they have three years to do science. Well, can you, how do you speed up biology? We can't force nature. And so why Rodale Science is so unique is that we're committed to it, not just for years, but for decades. So if we've already found, if we're already beginning to find a stark difference in nutrient density of phytonutrients in carrots after one or two years, what are we going to see in three years, five years, 10 years. And so we're really excited about this work.

Now, can you explain why? Why would organic carrots be better than regular conventional carrots? That's the science behind why there's more phytochemicals, more vitamins, more minerals. How did that happen?

Sure. Our hypothesis on that would go back to how we treat the soil. So soil health is really going to be foundational to the plant's ability to uptake nutrients. how we manage the soil, the type of COVID crops that we put, that we use leading up to whatever cash crop is being planted, we can actually impact biology simply by what we plant in the off season as a cover crop. In addition, pesticides and herbicides are killing the microbiological life in that soil. So our, what our science is showing is that when you apply herbicides and pesticides, you're killing all the life in the soil. Any ability, there's something like 10 billion microorganisms in just one teaspoon of healthy soil. So as we begin to decimate the microbiome of that soil by what we apply to it or by how we treat it through too much tillage, by not establishing a cover crop, by not creating biodiversity in and around whatever we're growing, all those factors are what we believe are impacting the nutrient density of that food.

Yeah, and one thing people don't realize is that soil is not just a medium dirt to grow plants in, that it's actually alive, and that the life in the soil is what allows the plants to extract from the soil the nutrients that it needs to grow and flourish. That's exactly right. And certain things like glyphosate or Roundup, which is a weed killer, it's on 70% of our crops. We're going to talk a lot about that. But that actually is a mineral chelator, which means that it binds to minerals like manganese and selenium and magnesium. And it prevents these nutrients from being taken up by the plant. It also kills the mycorrhizal fungi, which are this sort of web of fungi within the soil that are critical for the overall life and health of the soil that allows so many of the nutrients to get taken up into the plants. So it's a really complex web of connections that drives these nutrient dense results in these plants. And we see this in wild plants have far more nutrients than conventional plants. For example, if you take a wild crab apple, it's got way, way more phytonutrients than a regular apple. Or if you have dandelion greens versus iceberg lettuce, or if you have, you know, a Peruvian wild potato could to a Yukon, Idaho potato or something, very, very different levels of nutrient and phytonutrients. And so organic is also providing that. And I think regenerative goes even a step further. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, there's actually something called the Shikimate pathway, which is the nutrient uptake system that is built into every plant. And the way Roundup is designed, Roundup is the chemical you just alluded to, it's ubiquitous in our food system. it literally stunts that chickamite pathway. So it literally inhibits the plant's ability to uptake nutrients. Now, how backward is that thinking that we would, that we would apply a chemical that literally inhibits the plant's ability to uptake nutrients?

And, you know, why is it so important is even, even though, even if you're eating vegetables and you're trying to eat a plant rich diet, if you're eating traditional food, you're actually getting far less nutrients than you 50 years ago, we have far less levels of magnesium, zinc, all these incredible important nutrients that we need to function as human beings. We are depleted and that's why we see massive nutritional deficiency. Yes, it's the junk food and the ultra processed food, but it's also the depletion of our soils where your broccoli and your vegetables have 50% less minerals and nutrients than they did 50 years ago. And what you're saying is our organic and regenerative organic actually help to correct that and help that build the soils, which then helps the plants grow healthy, which then creates healthy humans. So this whole healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy humans is such an important simple idea. But it's amazing how it's ignored. And our current agricultural system produces commodity crops that aren't nutrient dense. They're bred for starch, they're bred for yield, they're bred for being able to be used in industrial food products. They're not made to create healthy humans. And that is such an aha for me when you think, gee, if we can have one guiding principle in our entire federal policy and state and agricultural policies, it should be that quality is king. That the focus should be on the quality of the food and the nutrient density. And you can define quality in lots of different ways. You know, particularly it's around nutrient density, whether it's phytonutrients, nutrients or vitamins and minerals or other compounds that are really the things that give food its medicine. And then we've literally bred all the medicine out of food. We've literally, I mean, when you think of like blue corn, Native American corn, how nutrient dense it is, how low in starch and sugar it is, and how, how many phytochemicals there are in there and vitamins and minerals. And then when you take this, you know, modern corn that we're eating, it's.

It'S all bred out of there, and.

It'S, it's a great industrial product, but it's not something you'd want to be eating.

Yeah.

Can I tell you a quick story on that same line?

Yeah.

So are you familiar with the Penn State Hershey Medical Center? I think they say it's one of the largest cancer research universities or institutions in the United States. They just happen to be located about 50 miles from our headquarters.

And.

A couple of researchers inside of Penn State Hershey Medical caught wind of the study that we just embarked on. So about two years ago, they caught wind of the vegetable systems trial. At the same time, these researchers were studying in laboratories this particular amino acid called ergothioneine. Now, ergothioneine, they were finding, they were isolating ergothioneine in petri dishes in a laboratory and researching its ability to kill cancer cells. And by the way, the highest amounts of ergothioneine are found in purple potatoes. And what they were finding is that the ergothioneine was in some ways performing as effectively at killing cancer cells as chemotherapy, if not better, in petri dishes in this isolated environment. So it led them to ask the question, well, where does ergothioneine come from? And they ultimately realized, oh, it's synthesized in the soil. And what their research showed is that we have essentially farmed out, we've so degraded degraded the levels of ergothioneine in our soil since 1960 using industrial approaches to agriculture that you and I aren't getting it in our diet anymore. And so we are now, we're now doing a bolt-on study inside of the vegetable systems trial along with our partners at Penn State. And we're going to begin to do a soil to patient study looking at how we can actually impact cancer patients using food. which is so radical, but we've so depleted this one amino acid that these researchers, their hypothesis is that the reason certain cancer rates are going so high is because we literally don't have this amino acid in our diet anymore. Can you imagine if that's just one amino acid, how much more we don't know?

That's right. That's just one example of one compound in food that has profound effects. When you think of all the things that we've lost, the biodiversity of our plants. I mean, we used to eat so many different plant species. As hunter gathers, 800 different species of plants, even 100 years ago, there were hundreds and hundreds of different apple species in America. Now there's just a handful, right? And the same with all these other fruits and vegetables. And I think that we've just kind of bred into these mono systems, even, you know, our modern tomatoes or modern carrots, it's all these homogenous foods that are bred for for yield and shelf stability and storage, but have nothing to do with nutrient density. And I think that's really what Rodale's great accomplishment is, is to highlight that there is a way of farming that actually can create downstream benefits of producing more nutrient dense food that is actually scalable, that is better for farmers, it's better for the soil, it's better for even the environment and climate. So I want to talk a little bit about the idea of the problems with the chemicals in agriculture. Because in the Power of the Plate, you do talk about this. And, there's been studies that come out and say, oh, there's no difference, you know, if organic or not and pesticides, what's the big deal? But, there's been some recent studies that I've seen, and not necessarily from Rodale, but just large trials looking at organic versus non-organic dietary patterns. and seeing reductions in cancer and other chronic illnesses. And also, these are hormone disruptors or endocrine disruptors. They drive infertility and many other issues. So can you talk a little bit about the distinguishing features between organic and conventional and this pesticides and this controversy of organic not being really worth the money or not being really any different in terms of its pesticide or chemical content? I mean, the nutritional density, I think we've established, but this is the other argument against organic.

Yeah, well, I mean, we have to look at data that is kind of showing sort of a before and after before the introduction of Roundup pre-1975. You know, our chronic illness rates were sort of tracking along almost like a flat, there was really not much of a curve. And then all of a sudden, you see this dramatic inflection point around the year 1975 with the introduction of glyphosate with Roundup, that was the year it was patented. And all of a sudden we see autoimmune cancers and other chronic illnesses and diabetes and obesity just skyrocket. So it almost seems like there was like this smoking gun moment in around that, the time of the introduction of this ubiquitous chemical, as well as the sort of, I think it was right around the time Earl Butz, you know, he had these sort of his rally cry, which was to go big or go home. And so we saw this explosion industrial agriculture concurrent with this explosion in chronic illness. And so-.

I would say that there are a lot of factors going on at that time. So that correlating glyphosate with the chronic disease epidemic is interesting, but we have to be careful about drawing causative ideas from correlations. So one of the other concerns is that some people think that the idea that organic foods are going to reduce your risk of cancer or healthier for you has really been debunked. But I think the data is far from clear on that. In fact, there are mountains of evidence that show that people who do eat organic foods, one, have lower levels of pesticides and chemicals in their urine, so their bodies have less of a burden of it. And two, there was a large study of 68,000 people published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2012, 2019 that showed about a 25% reduction in people getting cancer for those who had higher levels of organic food in their diet. So I think that to think that these chemicals are not harmful when they're literally toxic in parts per billion is just kind of silly. And I think that, you know, the question really we should be asking ourselves is how do we design an agricultural system that's good for the soil, that's good for the plants, that's good for the animals that we raise, that's good for humans. It's good for the environment. It's good for climate. It's good for the farmers.

That's really what we should be asking.

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