Providing Affordable Food as Medicine At Scale with Pierre Weil

Hi friends, this is John. I'm passionate about developing regenerative agriculture systems that improve soil health, produce crops that are completely resistant to diseases and insects, and produce food of such an exceptional quality that we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. I've been fortunate to meet many people with incredible knowledge and information about soil and plant systems. However, much of this knowledge and information is scattered all over the place. I founded Advancing eco Agriculture in 2006 to bring this knowledge together in a more coherent fashion and incorporate it into products and growing systems that growers can easily put into practice. It's my personal mission to have these regenerative agriculture systems become the mainstream globally, the status quo against which all other growing systems are compared. To achieve this goal, I want to share the knowledge that we have learned in the last decade and make it available to everyone. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or topics that you would like for me to discuss, please connect on social media or email me johngenerativeagriculturepodcast.com Be sure to sign up for our email list@regenerativeagriculturepodcast.com Hope you enjoy and thank you for listening. Our community impact spot for this episode is no Till on the Plains, a nonprofit organization that provides education, networking and inspiration for growers with a focus on soil health. Their annual Winter conference is in Wichita, Kansas in January where I will be presenting a workshop on regenerative agricultural systems. Here's Steve Swoffer describing the event.

Founded in 1992, no Till on the Plains is a non profit educational organization that provides information to farmers about adopting systems based production methods. Our goal is to educate and demonstrate to producers the principles of soil health that create successful economic, environmental and integrated crop and livestock production systems. Each year, no Till on the Plains hosts summer and fall field days, local bus tours and observations at demonstration plots across the Great Plains. These events showcase how individual farmers have tailored the application of soil health principles to the conditions on their farms. The culmination of the year is the annual Notel on the Plains winter conference in 2020. The two day soil health conference is being held in Wichita, Kansas January 28th and 29th. Registration for the conference will open August 15th, 2019. See more information at www.not.

I hope you look into the work that no Till on the Plains is doing and can attend their Winter Conference. I look forward to seeing you there.

Hi friends, welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. I am very honored and excited to introduce you to Pierre Vaile, who is a French agronomist who created a Feed Company in 1992 in French Brittan with the intention of producing health oriented animal nutrition. And from the work that Pierre has done with growers throughout France. He then went on to co found a nonprofit association called Blue Blanc Cour which connects all of the actors involved in the food chain to help producers and consumers connect the dots between food and reducing disease and the quality of the production in the field. I've been really intrigued by the opportunities you have found to document the medicinal impact or the health impact of the quality that food produces. We speak a lot in the area of regenerative agriculture about how we can produce healthier, higher quality food for consumers. But I think one of the challenges is that there historically hasn't been very much research to make that claim. There are often missing dots in the research chain. So we may be able to identify that we can produce fruits and berries with a higher nutrient content, a higher phytoalaxin content that we believe has a impact. And then in some cases there is research that describes how some foods can have a nutritional value and medicinal value.

Such as blueberries and raspberries and so forth.

But there often isn't research that connects the dots from the way the food was grown to the health impacts that it can have on people. And I think this is something that you have done. Can you tell us a little bit about the research that you've done and what you learned?

Okay, thank you. Thank you for inviting me to talk about this. Maybe I can tell some things that connect your interest for a new agriculture, regenerative agriculture, and what we've done on human health. We did six clinical trials with human people and some were healthy volunteers, some were diabetic people, obese volunteers, etc. But the common point that in all the cases we had two groups, control group and the experimental group, and the people of each group ate exactly the same thing. Sometimes it's during two months, sometimes it's during four months, sometimes they are healthy, sometimes not. But in all the cases they eat the same quantity of product. It's only the way the products are produced, the producer's behavior and not the consumer's behavior. That is the fact that we try to measure. So we did the proof of concept because it's bigger than the lipid nutrition or omega 3, omega 6 nutrition. But omega 3, omega 6 nutrition is very interesting proof of concept. On one hand, Omega 6 and Omega 3 drives all the inflammatory process. It's quite easy to measure in the blood, in the red blood cells, and also Some parameters of inflammation. We feed animals, cows, hens, pigs, etc. In a conventional way, which means basically based on corn and soybean, or we fed animals the same animals to produce the same eggs, milk, et cetera, but in a different way. With first a of product of forages or seeds. And in these forages of seeds, we want them to reach an optimal ratio for omega 6 on omega 3, which means more grass for ruminant, more flax for monogastric animals, etc. And various protein seeds. And after only two weeks we can measure a change in the serum of the volunteers. They eat the same thing. But animals were fed differently and we found a very significant difference. Which means, for instance, this ratio omega 6 and omega 3, which is supposed to be healthy at a level of 5 and to be pro inflammatory at a level of 10. It was 15 in the control group and only 5 in the experimental group. And the only things that changed was the composition of the diet of the animals. So this was the proof of concept. And there is a link between the way you feed the animals, the way you produce the food, and the human health after. There is, I think, a lot of things still to do in other fields that inflammation and lipid nutrition, other things like antioxidant, etc. For fruits, for legumes, for grain. A lot of things still to do. But we did the basic proof of concept with this clinical trial that were published from 2002. The first one in analysis of nutrition and metabolism. And the last one, the last trial, just a few words about it. I love the design of the trial. It's in the big hospital of the city near us in Brittany. It's pregnant women in two groups. So we'll have like again, BLE Blanca diet of animals or not. And we check the impact on the composition of the milk of the breast milk of the mothers, but also the impact on the immunity of the children. So I have no results now, no data, but it was designed to prove that food chain, the term chain is absolutely important if feeding animals, if choosing the foragers, can have an impact not only on the quality of the breast milk, but also on the immunity of the baby. It will be something tremendous, fantastic to prove our responsibility at all the steps of the food chain. But it's also to prove that the farmer is the number one actor of human health.

The research you're conducting is exciting and I'm looking forward to those results because I think you are correct in that farmers, growers, particularly of the food products that we consume Directly, such as fruits and vegetables and animal products. They can have a bigger impact on our health than doctors and hospitals can, because they have the capacity to prevent us from becoming ill. And I just wanted to clarify. You spoke about reducing inflammation. And inflammation is at the foundation of many of our degenerative illnesses that we have today that are just exploding within the population. So how much did you see inflammation decrease when you fed livestock a different diet and then people consumed those animal products?

First of all, inflammation is a absolutely natural process. The genes of inflammation, the genes provoke inflammation. One of the big difference between men and the big apes, our ancestors, something like that. But it's really a difference because inflammation is a way of fighting against aggression, all kind of aggression. But too much inflammation is not good. Because too much inflammation, our body is attacking its own cells. So inflammation is. It's like oxidation, oxidation, you need oxidation to live, to have energy, etc. But too much peroxidation, that's good because you have too much free radicals. Free radicals, it's a kind of weapon to fight against the aggressors. But too much free radicals will damage your body. And oxidation plus inflammation are naturally processed. But the balance between too much and not enough is very, very important. Must be. We adapted ourselves to our environment for a long, long time, since maybe less than one century. We completely changed the ratio between pro inflammatory process and anti inflammatory process. And also the ratio between pro oxidation and antioxidation process. That's very important to understand that for me, food is not a medicine. Food will prevent, will avoid any trouble in this inflammation and peroxidation process. And inflammation and oxidation are probably the mother diseases, all the what we call civilization diseases, which means diabetes, obesity, cancer, even depression. And these new neurodegenerative diseases, the scientists call them low grade inflammation diseases, low grade inflammation disease, which means we live to have a good balance between pro inflammation omega 6. Absolutely. Pro inflammation omega 6 is mainly in seeds like corn, soybean, sunflower, etc. Or anti inflammation molecules like omega 3 that comes from grass, from alfalfa, from clover, and also from flax, which is a very original seed. All the seeds are rich in Omega 6, only flax is rich in Omega 3. Once you understand, we cannot synthesize ourselves Omega 6 and Omega 3, we must find it in our plate and mainly in animal products, fish and terrestrial animals. So the balance between, for instance, grass and corn is also a balance between Omega 6 and Omega 3. And it's also a balance between pro inflammatory and anti inflammatory inflammatory processes. So we prevent, we don't heal. I think maybe we need chemical drugs to. When I'm sick, I can take for a few days aspirin, something like that. But aspirin and most of the called blockbuster drugs are anti inflammatory drugs. So if we can prevent in the fields will not need to buy and eat so much anti inflammatory drugs.

If we can prevent the inflammation from occurring in the beginning from the foods that we eat, that certainly seems to be the way the system would be designed to work. We don't become ill because we have an aspirin deficiency, but because of the food choices that we make or because of other factors in the environment.

Yeah. There is an American.