Land Food Life
Calling all farmers, ranchers, and conscious eaters! Welcome to the LAND, FOOD, LIFE Podcast, where host Kara Kroeger takes you on a transformative journey designed to enhance the quality of life for all beings, YES, THAT INCLUDES YOU! Immerse yourself in the world of regenerative agriculture, nutrition, holistic healthcare, and advocacy for food and healthcare justice. Discover invaluable insights on how together we can heal the land, our ecosystems, and uplift our physical, mental, financial, creative, and spiritual health and well-being. Connect with the life giving soil beneath your feet, understand the origins and medicinal value (or lack thereof) of your food, and embrace the interconnectedness of all that surrounds you. Get ready, because this podcast is specifically crafted to change your outlook and sow the seeds of positive transformation within you and beyond. So listen up and together we will co-create a thriving planet!
Land Food Life
Decoding Nutritional Dark Matter: Understanding How Agricultural Growing Practices Influence Nutrient Density with Dr. Stephan van Vliet
Explore the nexus of agriculture and human nutrition as we learn about cutting-edge research focused on understanding how agricultural growing practices and biodiversity shape the nutrient density of the food on our plates and our well-being. In this episode, nutrition researcher Dr. Stefan Van Vliet from Utah State University enlightens us about his collaborations with farmers, ecologists, and agricultural and nutritional scientists to study the critical linkages at this nexus.
Our dialogue traverses the influence of our diets on health metrics, highlighting the stark differences between whole foods and their ultra-processed counterparts. Learn about the transformative power of a diverse array of whole foods as we dissect research findings that reveal rapid health benefits.
Equipped with the insights of my guest, we probe deeper into the complexities of phytonutrients, protein metabolism, and the innovative research connecting what's on our plate to the earth beneath our feet. We unravel the mysteries of metabolomics, a cutting-edge tool that's unlocking the understanding of the nutritional potential of our food, and discuss the concept of 'nutritional dark matter' that may hold the key to further health advancements. Whether you're a seasoned health enthusiast or just starting to question where your meals come from, this episode promises to feed your curiosity and fuel your motivation for creating a healthier tomorrow.
Show Notes:
https://stephanvanvliet.com/
https://caas.usu.edu/directory/vanvliet-stephan
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=L5KcySQAAAAJ&hl=en
Stephan van Vliet (@vanvlietphd) / X
Welcome to the Land Food Life Podcast. I'm your host, cara Kroger. In each episode, I'm dedicated to enlightening you with invaluable insights on how we can heal the land, our ecosystems and improve our overall health and well-being. My goal is to raise your awareness about caring for nature as a whole and the life-giving breathing soil beneath your feet, help you understand the origins and medicinal value of your food and embrace the interconnectedness of everything that surrounds you. With 25 years of combined experience studying and coaching in regenerative agriculture, natural medicine, nutrition, cooking, mindfulness and cultivating abundance, I am thrilled to share the life-changing tools I've learned. By implementing these practices, you'll experience a regulated nervous system, a nourished body, ready to pursue your dreams with energy and vigor, the ability to collaborate with nature and a renewed sense of hope and purpose.
Speaker 1:I am so grateful to have you here today. If you like what you hear, please rate, review and help me spread this information to as many people as possible. Let's get started. Hello everybody, welcome to the Land Food Life podcast. I am very excited to be joined by Stefan Van Vliet, a researcher from Utah State University, and we are going to be talking about nutrition and agriculture today. So welcome, stefan. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Kara. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. Well, I just want to jump right in. And you know, in your lab you are routinely collaborating with farmers and ecologists and agricultural scientists and you're studying the critical linkages between sustainable agriculture and food nutrient density and human health. And so, before we start delving into some of that beautiful research that you're doing and learning the ins and outs of why that's important, I want to ask a question about the future. So, ultimately, I'm wondering what a somewhat romantic yet realistic future of nutrition research looks like for you, and how would you like to see that affect the average eater in the future?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the romantic version of our research would be that, you know, we keep continue to increase sort of the interest in regenerative agriculture, sustainable agriculture and its impacts on food nutrient density, and that this becomes more and more widely recognized, that the way that we grow our food or the way we raise our animals directly affects ourselves. And I think that realization is maybe not amongst everyone. I mean, it lives in this circle, this community of regenerative agriculture, but certainly not widely known, I believe or even when I interact with some of my nutrition colleagues at more traditional nutritional conferences. So not so much food or farming conferences, but more nutritional conferences. This idea that a blueberry that is grown in a multi-cropping system is different than a blueberry grown in a monoculture system, I think it is less recognized at the moment. So I think that is what a more romantic future will look like.
Speaker 2:I think a more realistic one is that the increments are going to be, the changes are going to be take longer than we think they do. So I think that's the realistic part, because it is, of course, like moving a mountain and we'll be realigning incentives right. If regenerative agriculture became the most profitable thing, everyone would do it, but at the moment. I think we're not quite there yet, but the silver lining is that it's definitely a growing interest and a growing movement and there's a growing realization that we need to cut back on our external inputs. With rising fossil fuel prices, that the cost of soil erosion and land degradation will ultimately cause us to make a shift.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. And so how do you think that would affect the consumer, the end user of the product, the eaters out there, you know? How would you like to see that impact them from a metabolic perspective?
Speaker 2:Well, I hope it makes them healthier and it makes the food taste better. I believe, because a lot of the things that we're studying these phytochemicals in the context of a blueberry, things like polyphenols, flavono and things such as that these are also what give the blueberry flavor, and I think everyone knows it's like when we pick a fresh strawberry, when it's in season, it has this incredible deep flavor, right, and this is these phytochemicals that you're tasting. So it should make our food taste better and it should also make it healthier for us to consume. So hopefully that is what also gets the consumer on board, and when and if using more agroecological or regenerative methods become the norm, then I think we can also see that price point will start to come down and it becomes more affordable, because that's obviously currently an issue, right? Is that? Typically anything that's regenerative or organic? There's some regenerative certification now and I'm sure it will grow further, but, yeah, it is more expensive at the moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, it very much is. So getting the cost down for the end for the consumer is huge in terms of making it a wider spread availability for everyone. So, yeah, it's very easy to wind up in an echo chamber. In the world of regenerative agriculture, we are at a lot of conferences where we are constantly talking with people about it and it's easy to lose sight of the fact that it's a small group of people. But you're right, it is growing and I always get emails or text messages from friends who are talking about something that they're seeing on the news about regenerative agriculture, sending me articles and so, while it is just a small contingency of farmers who are producing regeneratively or in a more holistic way, ultimately it is a growing contingency, but it is it's slow moving.
Speaker 1:It is slow moving and there's a lot of work to be done and I think that's where your research really can be helpful, because you are working very hard to not only do nutrition research right, where you're looking at the actual nutrient density of foods, but you're looking how it's getting there.
Speaker 1:How is that food becoming a more nutrient dense food by way of its growing practices? So tell us a little bit about you know. I know that you're currently working on several very large scale projects that are profiling the nutrient content in things like beef and bison, milk, blueberries and almonds, and you're looking at these foods that were grown and produced using various production methods. So can you explain to our listeners why this research is groundbreaking and specifically for eaters, ie consumers, because I think that a lot of times nutrition research is in a silo and a lot of consumers become very confused by research and research is always skewed, especially in the realm of nutrition, to kind of move consumers in a certain direction. So how do you feel like this research that you're doing? Can you explain a little bit about it and you know, share how it can be helpful in the long run to people who eat?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no for sure. I think one of the things that we found to be missing in the literature at the moment is linking production practices to food nutritional composition. Right, because oftentimes we link certain foods to health outcomes, associate, let's say, red meat with cardiovascular disease or heart disease, but then what is not taken into account currently is how was that meat raised? And another bigger picture question is in what dietary context was it consumed? But how the meat is raised or that blueberry was grown is currently not being taken into account, and we know from the research that we do that beef isn't beef isn't beef and a blueberry isn't a blueberry isn't a blueberry. Let's take the example of beef. What we're finding is and we've done a big profiling study with the Bionutrition Institute where we looked at grass-fed and grain-fed beef from commercial operations sourcing from all across North America and what we find is that there's this great variation in beef nutritional quality, specifically in regards to the omega-3 fatty acids. I mean, what we're typically finding is that animals that were out on biodiverse pastures. They contain more omega-3s, they contain more of these antioxidant components that are being transferred from the forages. How that impacts our health there have been a few studies done on that and it does seem that, for instance, if you eat grass-fed beef, that you can raise the blood omega-3 levels in your body, which should be protective of heart disease over time. So I think the piece of quality of our food, in sort of classic nutrition research, is not being considered enough in my opinion at the moment, and this is a gap that we hope to fill.
Speaker 2:So we do indeed a lot of profiling studies where we oftentimes compare different farming practices and we use the term agroecology as sort of a scientific term, which is the sort of wedding of agriculture and ecology. So it's sort of nature-based approaches to farming, trying to mimic how nature grows plants or animals and see if we can at least closely align to that which is a little bit different from the monocultures that we use now, whether it being animals or plants. Right, this is you go out and you look at the land, you don't see a monoculture really in nature. If you see a monoculture, it's usually man-made. There's also not just one herbivore jumping around, right, it's a whole host of herbivores.
Speaker 2:But we have simplified alpha-dipese systems to monoculture systems and while this is very efficient and maybe economically to an extent also efficient, you could argue that the true cost is not embedded in those and you pay for it elsewhere. But okay, what we're finding is that, if we compare that to more of this, yeah, regenerative system and and regenerative term is used very loosely it's basically anything that's not a monoculture and the implementation could be multi-cropping system, integrated crop, livestock system, agroforestry, rotation, grazing animals on biodiverse pasture. It's a whole host of collective things. But what we're seeing is is that, typically, if you implement such steps that you are able to increase the health of the animal and the plant and health and nutrient density at least from our work I've convinced myself that those are two peas in a pot, because a healthier animal is a more nutritious animal and a healthier plant is also a more nutritious plant.
Speaker 1:Absolutely yeah. So you know, for instance just to give the listeners some examples when you have a biodiverse pasture, you're going to have more tannins, particularly in the foods that are being consumed by that animal, and so a tannin is a phytonutrient, and when the animal eats that tannin, it takes on more of that into its body, and then when we eat that, we wind up having some of those protective effects inside of our body. And as time has gone on, many of the pastures that our livestock are being raised in are less and less diverse, and so this movement in regenerative agriculture to increase biodiversity is huge, and you know that's reflected in the human gut as well. Well, in human nutrition as well. Right, like, if we eat 30 different foods per week, we are going to be consuming, you know, a wide array of nutrients, whereas if we're eating five foods per week, we're only going to be getting so many.
Speaker 1:So, yes, I think it's really, really interesting. So, just to delve a little bit deeper, can you tell us some of the factors that you are researching? I know that y'all have done soil samples, you're doing forage samples, you've taken meat samples from over 200 farms. Is that right, like? What is the scale and what all are you looking at and how are you able to look at that data in, you know, in a broad perspective as well as some singular perspectives.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, we've taken data from lots of different farmers, also different livestock species. If we combine the bites of them beef potato we'll probably get close to that number. I also look at chicken as well. And yeah, what we're?
Speaker 2:Indeed we're trying to find linkages between soil health, which would be markers of soil organic matter, soil nutritional composition, right and iron, zinc and other minerals within the soil. Of course, the organic matter, the total exchange capacity, which is the ability of the soil organic matter, the total exchange capacity, which is the ability of the soil and the plant to exchange nutrients. Because that's obviously going to be key because while the plant produces nutrients from air and sunlight as well, it also has to get various macro and micro molecules from the soil to grow. So if it's better able to do that, because the soil is healthier and it has more life within the soil, this translates into more life into the plant. So, by that token, we indeed carefully take plant samples as well, that we study and then we overlay that with what we see in the meat. So there's this transfer of metabolites or compounds from the soil to the plant and from the plant to the animal. And if we see like, for instance, your example of tannins. If we see more tannins in the plant, this is directly reflected in the tannins within the blood and also, subsequently, the meat of the animal. Indeed, I like your example. If an animal out on pasture has sort of access to a buffet of 50 different plants, it is better able to nourish itself than when it's provided with a, let's say, a standardized ration of three different plants. Right, it's able to get a wider variety of these compounds in, able to nourish yourself better, both medicinally and prophylactically, so preemptively to ward off disease. What is really interesting is that animals, for instance, have parasite. They select certain plants which they might otherwise not select, so they were able to make themselves healthier and, as a result, also this translates into having more of these compounds in the meat. So it's really this overlay between can we define this relationship between soil health, plant diversity and animal health.
Speaker 2:What we're seeing sort of on a broad scale level is is that, yes, if you have more soil, organic matter or more quote unquote life in the soil, we do see that this typically results in more biodiversity and subsequently, a healthier animal. But the thing that correlates by far the strongest what we're finding is biodiversity, so the amounts of, or I should say, plant diversity on pasture. This seems to correlate the best with meat nutrient density. And we do see that there's sort of this flattening of the curve after about 10, 12 plants or so. So it's not like maybe a hundred plants is better than 10.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure, but what we clearly find is that 10 is better than three. So, avoiding a monoculture, so it's not per se that you have to have like this incredible level of biodiversity. It just seems that if you are able to at least get away from like one or two grass species dominating your pasture to having a more, more biodiversity at about 10 or 12 plants, then you're already pretty far along and almost, I think, optimizing the nutrient density of meat. And then the other part, of course, is this but this goes without saying, is not overgrazing, because if the plant is being overgrazed you start to actually create monocultures again. So this is another key piece.
Speaker 1:Gotcha, absolutely so. Can you tell us a little bit more also about research that you're doing in humans? Are you doing any research in humans right now through understanding the effects of these types of meats on the human body?
Speaker 2:We do. We've completed two major studies and the data analysis of that is ongoing. Well, we've completed three major studies in that area. I should say One that we have clear results from, and two that were specifically focused on agriculture. So we started off with a study a few years ago where we were just interested in the basic question of comparing whole foods to ultra-processed foods, because there's a lot of concern If we look at sort of the bigger picture. Right, it's, yes, there is. Could we potentially be healthier if we had a grass-fed beef over grain-fed beef? Yes, there is. Could we potentially be healthier if we had a grass-fed beef over grain-fed beef? Yes, but is the switch coming from the standard American diet to a whole foods diet is probably going to be a lot bigger, and this is what we're finding so far. I think that's the real elephant in the room is just our poor diet quality. The average American gets about 60 to 70 percent of their calories from ultra-processed foods. So what we found in that study is that if you put people on a whole foods based diet, so basically there's increasing their fruits and vegetable intake and still consuming a good amount of meat as well, but just eating whole food as opposed to ultra processed foods. People get healthier quite rapidly. They start to lose weight.
Speaker 2:An interesting anecdote about that study is is that we started, for instance, the first few people that we put on the standard american diet. They were complaining of not being satiated, so we upped their calories a little bit as well to try to keep them at maintenance. But then if they switched over to the whole foods diet because each participant did both diets they could not meet those calories and they were complaining of being so full on this whole foods diet. And we matched them food by food. So this could be, like you know, broccoli with some actual cheese or a broccoli and cheese sauce. It could be sweet potato or some more ultra processed sweet potato fries and things such as that. So we matched them food by food. But what we found was is that people, when they switch over to a whole food diet, they A could not meet their normal caloric intake. They started to lose weight. Their triglycerides, which the fat circulating in their butt, dropped, their blood glucose dropped. So they got a whole lot healthier quickly, and this was within four weeks. And we did a follow-up study to that where we wanted to then compare well, within the whole foods.
Speaker 2:What if we source everything from regenerative agriculture versus conventional agriculture? So again, we recruited people, just average Americans. So picture, people are consuming standard American diet. Right, they're eating already ultra-processed foods. To begin with, we put them on the regenerative, organic diet and then the conventional diet, which basically meant that we sourced all the onions, all the carrots, all you name it, from regenerative agriculture or the exact same type of foods from conventional agriculture. Also, the meats came from pastured systems or feedlot systems, and the same thing we're finding.
Speaker 2:What we found there was is that you probably get 80% of the way there by just not consuming a bunch of ultra processed foods. Your health improves rapidly. I'd say it probably gets you 80% of the way there. Now, not to say that if you're eating passionate animal source foods and you're raising the omega threes in your blood, that over 30 years it may lower your risk of heart disease. But in randomized control trials that we typically do over a few months, no one's going to develop heart disease. And if I do, I got some serious explaining to do to our irb, right.
Speaker 2:But the conclusion that, or at least that our findings are making is is that in the grand scheme of things.
Speaker 2:That becomes more of a detail in ways as when you compare to our current intake of high intakes of ultra processed foods and just very low intakes of fruits and vegetables and whole foods, and eating lots of processed meats instead of more unprocessed meats and I think that's also where some of the confusion comes from always is about whether red meat is healthy or not.
Speaker 2:You see, if you consume red meat as part of a standard American diet, it's associated with metabolic health issues. If you consume it as part of a Mediterranean diet, it's actually quite healthy for you. So these are some of the bigger picture findings that we're making, and it is not to say that these nuances within grass-fed versus grain-fed beef, because we clearly see differences there. We see about a 50% difference in, if we measure several hundred compounds, we see a 50% difference within these higher amounts of mocha trees in the grass-fed beef and more of these polyphenols in the beef. So in theory it should result in beneficial health effects over a lifetime, we think, but proven is beyond reasonable doubt. It's going to be very hard.
Speaker 1:Right, right, well, and I want to make a couple of points based on what you've just said. So one is I work with clients as a nutritionist and so many of my clients. When we're going through their protocols, I create customized protocols for them based on, you know, I might do a microbiome stool analysis or, you know, food sensitivity testing, and so the protocols will be created around what the data is from those tests. And when I give them this protocol, they'll come back to me and they'll say, well, can I eat this, can I eat this? And they'll send me pictures, right, of foods that are, yes, fitting the criteria, right, that I've given them, but they are very much packaged, highly processed foods, right, and so they're just trying to replace what they know with something similar but that fits the criteria, replace what they know with something similar but that fits the criteria.
Speaker 1:And it's a constant kind of back and forth in terms of educating of like, okay, here's another option. And, yes, it is less convenient oftentimes, right, it's usually a bit of a less convenient food, but you really cannot override the benefits that come from just eating vegetables. Right, eat five to nine servings of vegetables per day. You're going to feel very different. You're going to feel very different from a satiation perspective, right, because of the fibers that are in that, and you're also going to feel, maybe more hydrated. You're probably getting more water than you'd gotten from not eating that, and so, yeah it's. There's so many aspects to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the digestion absorption is a lot more gradual. Right, the satiating effects are larger. You're probably. When you look at whole foods, they're much more biochemically complex, so you're getting probably a thousand other compounds that are beneficial for your health. One example, for instance, would be if oftentimes we eat refined foods, we have vitamins and minerals that are being fortified, right. But if it comes in a whole food, yes, those vitamins and minerals are there, but the food is so much more than that. It probably contains a thousand cofactors that play a role one way or another.
Speaker 2:We don't fully understand how it works.
Speaker 2:We just see differences, like if you get your vitamin d from an egg or a pill, you see that the digestion or an absorption of the vitamin D is a lot larger, much more than you would think is the case.
Speaker 2:From purely looking at the amount and the same thing I think happens with grass-fed beef you can see that with or pastured animals or shoots in general, you can see that even though it contains only a little bit, like maybe 30, 40 milligrams of omega-3 fatty acids, you would think that if I take it in a pill form, it much is going to happen to my blood levels, but it seems that if you take it in a food form, your blood levels can actually rise, and this is probably because there's a bunch of antioxidants in there, so it's prevented from lipid oxidation. It's digested and absorbed better. Whole foods versus a pill or a fortified ultra processed food is not the same thing at all. So when we did a study about whole foods versus ultra processed foods, we matched for protein, carbohydrates, fat, sugar. We still find very much different health effects, so it's independent of purely macro or micronutrient intake.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so do you use supplementation in your own?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so do you use supplementation in your own? No, no, unless you consider, maybe like cod liver oil or supplements, but I consider it more for food, like olive oil. So no, I don't take any supplements.
Speaker 1:Okay, you know I do use supplementation, but I always be sure to take it with food right, because the body is already in that mode of utilizing the nutrients that are coming in from a food. So making sure that it's taken at the same time, I think, is one of the better ways to allow it to be utilized more efficiently in the body. So how has there's so many directions I want to go, but I want to ask this question before we move on how has working with farmers and ranchers changed your career? Right? You started out as a business major, then you moved into kinesiology and human nutrition, and now you've progressed into your work, encompassing a huge amount of relationships and contacts with farmers and ranchers, and I'd like to know how this has changed your life, both professionally and personally.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it kind of started with lifting weights. I got a big interest in lifting weights during my college years and I caught myself not reading business or economy journals but exercise, physiology and nutrition journals instead. So I did finish business school. But then I felt like I needed to make a switch and start to study nutrition and kinesiology. So I did my master's in England in exercise and nutrition science and then I worked in or I volunteered in a lab in the Netherlands which was a muscle metabolism lab at Masters University, quite a famous lab in sort of the protein metabolism world. So I was able to kind of work myself up through that way and during my PhD, which was in kinesiology, I got a big interest in studying protein metabolism in the context of whole foods, because the prior literature was all done with protein shakes.
Speaker 2:Essentially it would be whey protein or soy protein or casein protein. But I mean, this is not how we eat our protein. We typically eat it from meat, milk, eggs and maybe beans as well. So we started studying that and we made some interesting differences. The leading thought at that time was that the amino acid composition dictates the muscle anabolic response, and this was the case in terms of protein shakes, but then when you move into whole foods that contain a whole host of other nutrients, yes, the amino acids are very important, but there's clearly other factors within that whole food source that impact muscle protein synthesis that cannot just be explained by its amino acid composition, and amino acids are the building blocks of protein.
Speaker 2:Then I got an interest well, what is the way of increasing these beneficial compounds that are clearly impacting our health and metabolism? Well, this we found, for instance, something in the way of increasing these beneficial compounds that are clearly impacting our health and metabolism. Well, we found, for instance, something in the context of eggs. Well, how can you maybe increase some of these beneficial compounds? Well, the obvious way is by what you feed the chicken right or the laying hen. So that's kind of how I gradually moved more into that work, and it was sort of this interesting moment.
Speaker 2:It was kind of already on my mind, but I got a call one day from two guys, one named fred provenza and another named scott kronberg, and they gave me a call, maybe like four years ago probably, and they were like well, we're two animal scientists and I had a long career in this, and they're interested in bashed animals for foods, but we never really got into the human nutrition side of things. And would you be interested in collaborating on that? And this is kind of how it. And after a while I found that there was actually quite a bit of interest in that. We got some funding for it and it kind of all took off from that.
Speaker 2:And then, yeah, over time you kind of build these relationships and we started with a lot of livestock products, but especially in recent times we've also been starting a lot of crops as well blueberries, oats, wheat, rice, also from the perspective of regenerative agriculture, comparing that. So this is kind of how I progressed throughout my career and it certainly as I progressed. It sounds a little cheesy, but it is true. The more I get into this, the less I realized that we don't know a darn thing about the complexity of food no-transcript.
Speaker 1:But science is, you know, catching up a little bit and bringing more to the table for us to consider, and it's really cool. I also just want to mention to listeners that have interviewed Fred Provenza, the gentleman that Stefan was just talking about, on this podcast, so you can listen to an interview with Fred as well. Fred and I and, yeah, that's actually how I learned about you, stefan is Fred shared some of your research with me and I was like, oh, so cool. I know for me, you know, as a nutritionist for many years, I enjoyed what I was doing very much, and then I kind of hit a point where I was like, okay, part of being a nutritionist is saying the same thing over and over to people throughout the day for many, many days and weeks and years in a row, and I love helping people. But, you know, you kind of get to a place where you're like, okay, I need to, I need to do something else.
Speaker 1:So I started cooking and I started training with the chef, who really focused on using uber local. I mean, he did not use anything that didn't come from 150 mile radius except for salt, and he was serious about it, like it was. It was very hardcore and I started working with him and while I always had been into, you know, farm raised foods from a nutrition perspective, like I just started learning so much more and then I started hanging out with the farmers and the ranchers and then I just realized, oh yeah, these people are really really cool and I need to spend more time with them. So it is a fun progression that I think more and more people are making, especially who are in the nutrition field moving you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree, and this is, I think, has been a sort of operating in silos, right.
Speaker 2:It's like a lot of sort of the nutritional scientists or nutritional crowd has historically not interacted, I think, with the farming community enough, and it's great to see that that's been.
Speaker 2:And it's great to see that that's been and it's also super helpful for my work as well. I mean, I'm always super excited. This is probably the most fun part of my work is get to go to farms and and learn as well, right, and oftentimes sort of you know, you see this, you experience it, and then we take it into the lab and see, okay, can we put data behind this to see if this is the case or not? And oftentimes I mean, it's not always the case, but yeah, sometimes you are kicking in an open door, right, if you could kind of seal it. Or or even then, if we have two blueberries in our lab, one is grown regeneratively. It's usually a lot smaller as well, right, and this is a whole other thing where we paid like for yield as opposed to nutrition. But yeah, I mean, taste that blueberry. Taste that blueberry, the sort of regenerative, small like cultivar.
Speaker 2:It has a much deeper flavor and then if we run this through a mass spec, then, yeah, we see, okay, this contains two times more polyphenols, so you can taste that. But obviously we also need to put data behind that as well, of course. And and yeah, you can see it too I think everyone sort of experienced that if you go to your farmer's market and you get carrots fresh, they actually taste good. Right, you want to eat them. Maybe, if you get sort of the carrots from the grocery store, it's are probably to a large part also related. So there's a lot of things that, even as a consumer, we can just observe by looking at things, by tasting things. But obviously anecdote is not enough to change policy. Right, we need to have robust data on that and certainly it's not always the case, right. But in general, what we're seeing and we've seen this now on a number of crops is that typically the pendulum swings in favor of the regenerative. It's either no difference or there's a benefit on the regenerative side is what we're typically seeing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's very interesting. So I'd like to talk a little bit about how research nutrition research has really changed over the years, because we definitely have tools at our fingertips that we didn't have in the past, and I'm particularly particularly speaking about omics technologies. So metabolomics, proteomics, genomics, right, all of these different things. Can you explain to the listener what that entails and how are you using some of those omic technologies in the research that you're doing?
Speaker 2:yeah, so basically you need. It sounds very fancy. So metabolomics is a study of metabolites, and metabolites are products of metabolism being a plant or an animal, or even the soil and many of these metabolites can serve as nutrients for us. So B vitamins are metabolites, amino acids are metabolites, phytochemicals are metabolites, and many of these metabolites can serve as nutrients to us. And what the technique metabolomics can do is it can look at a large number of these metabolites or nutrients within biological systems. So, whether it being a plant or an animal, or our own bodies as well, by taking blood samples in the context, of course, of plants and animals.
Speaker 2:We oftentimes study this in the context of food, right, but mind you, these metabolites. A plant does not produce this for us, right, it produces it for its own health. But if it's a health, that's why I certainly think that a healthier plant is a more nutritious plant as well. And it becomes nuanced with plants, because a little bit of water stress is good for a blueberry, too much water stress is not good. Decent amount of sunshine is good, too much maybe not. So these are all kind of like nuances that play a role, but typically when these are growing in sort of more biodiverse and more healthier soils, then, yeah, the blueberry plant is better able to nourish itself and get healthier blueberries.
Speaker 2:I mean, this is part common sense and part that we're seeing in our research. So, granted, is that mass spec which is what you use? So mass spectrometry what it can do is it can look at small molecule metabolites very precisely. So it's also used in drug testing for athletes, for instance. So if an athlete gets caught, tests their urine and you find testosterone derivative, right, and it's a very small amount, but you can detect it. We do the same thing with foods, essentially looking at these small molecule metabolites. So sort of these improvements in mass spec, and people have been using this since the 70s or 80s.
Speaker 2:But yeah, further improvements have led us to be able to look at a larger number of compounds over time. Whereas maybe people are looking at a handful of compounds or even one or two compounds in the 70s or 80s, we can now look at several hundreds, and I'm sure 50 years from now people can look at several thousands of that as well, right, or tens of thousands. So certainly these newer techniques have enabled us to look at a broader number, and genomics basically is the study of a larger number of genes. Proteomics is a larger number of proteins, so the omics is kind of referring to sort of this large number of compounds that you can study at once.
Speaker 1:A larger body right.
Speaker 2:Larger body yep.
Speaker 1:What I'd like to also know more about is how do you manage the complexities in this broad nature of your research? Right, you've got the soil testing, you've got the forage testing, you've got the metabolomics or the mass spectrum technology that you're using. Are you able to compare those things to one another, and will some of that data just be held for a while until it can be conglomerated in deeper ways? Where are you with that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, for sure, I mean it's certainly a lot more complex than I anticipated it would be. So, you know, starting this journey, that's for sure. Yes, I mean we'll publish it all, of course, but yeah, I mean part. Publish it all, of course, but yeah, I mean part of it is is trying to understand those relationships. I mean a lot of it would just be running for relations, right? Is this factor in the soil related to this factor in the in the plant or the or the animal?
Speaker 2:And while we are seeing on sort of a group level, if you compare grass fed and grain fed or pastured, or soils that are managed as pastures, versus adjacent soils that are managed as monoculture crop fields on a group level, you can clearly see that these fields that are managed as pastures are healthier as opposed to. This is, of course, a model. This is growing feed, props on it and then sending this to a feedlot or it's going to the commodity market, but part of it ends up in a feedlot. You see that those same adjacent fields managed as pastures are certainly healthier. It becomes tricky when you study this on the individual farm level and you try to make these correlations. Certainly, there are some correlations with plant diversity. But what we're finding now it is not as sort of black and white that, okay, more iron in the soil equals more iron in the meat or something like that.
Speaker 2:It's not that clear in the data and this is also the sort of indicates the complexity of science. Like I said, the clearest effect that we're sort of seeing is this life of biological activity within the soil and the plant diversity piece. So it's very complex. We're definitely learning a lot ourselves as well, and then this is the nature of science. I cannot stress enough how complex it is also to produce this data. It is definitely very difficult to produce it. In science in general, you have to be able to accept a lot of failure before figuring it out. This is just the nature of it, right? Because if it had been done before, if everyone was doing it or if it was very easy, everyone would be doing it. That's just the way it is. So, yeah, over time we have learned a lot as well, going for a foray into sort of this unknown territory.
Speaker 2:One, for instance, interesting thing that we learned was and this also tells you sort of how science progresses. So we looked at previous literature, for instance a lot of it had been done in dairy in the in the 2000s and in the 90s. They used a slightly different technique. So we still use high performance liquid chromatography, but the detector that we use now we use a mass detector and a tandem mass detector. What that means is that we can specifically look at the mass of compounds. But you have various compounds that are very much. They're structurally similar but they have a different mass.
Speaker 2:So let's say, if we take, for instance, the compound, benzoic acid, which is a major plant phenolic, occurs in almost all plants, but it becomes transformed in the plant but also in the animal. Now what we noticed in the previous literature, when you look at sort of spectral wavelengths or color this is how it's measured People report this compound as benzoic acid, the parent metabolite in the plant, in the animal source foods, for instance in the milk. We run this through a mass detector and find out well, there's zero benzoic acid in these samples. In fact, what we found out is that it's 2,6-dihydroxybenzoic acid, 3,4-dihydroxybenzoic acid, where this compound is slightly transformed. You cannot really pick this on a spectral wavelength, but if you can measure the mass of these compounds, which you can now, we see that this in fact is not benzoic acid, it is a metabolite of that, and trying to understand that was I know I'm getting into the weeds here, but this was very complicated because we started from sort of previous literature and found out like, oh well, with these newer techniques we know that this is not true. This compound is not there. This is reported as benzoic acid, but it's in fact it's, it's a derivative of that.
Speaker 2:But then if you start that, you are scratching your hat for a half a year and figuring out like, huh, interesting, why are these guys able to detect this? And we are not? Well, it's because we're using a slightly different technique. So it's also as the research progresses, you also find out that, not to say the previous literature was wrong. They used the techniques that they had, but then you found out that it wasn't 100 correct. So, yeah, these are some of the some of the nuances that you'd run into doing research.
Speaker 2:And then you have to go back to the drawing board and be like, okay, let's try this again. And yeah, science is, in that regard, always difficult to perform, because even if you go into the literature, you can find probably a thousand protocols on how to do it, and sometimes you do them in your lab and you're like I don't know how these guys are able to pull this off, because if I do it exactly as you say, it does doesn't work right, so there's. So this is another thing. It's sort of like in the literature. It's like give me and there is some guidance on this over time like there's an organization, the american organization of analytical chemistry, that provides some guidance on on how to analyze these things, but for these polyphenols there's absolutely no guidance on this. So it's a bit of a wild west out there and you just gotta kind of foray into the unknowns.
Speaker 2:And then, over time, we've definitely figured out that these metabolites do appear in animal sourced foods. They just don't appear in the same way as they appear in the plant, which opens up a new interesting question. Well, if we get these in sort of pre-processed versions, how does that impact us? And this is a question that we will try to explore over the next couple of years, because now, instead of our body having to transform it, we already get it in that transformed phase. And then, actually, what we learned a lot about was human breast milk data. This was actually something that we started to look at and start to understand like, hey, you know you feed someone greens and in the breast milk you see these compounds that we think come from the kale or the greens, but they're definitely different compounds. So, borrowing from that data, we were kind of able to figure that like back engineer that into meat and milk of ruminants.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very interesting. That's very interesting. So what's the most surprising thing that you learned from your research, or something that you didn't expect to learn from your research, whether that's personal or actual, you know scientific evidence Either way. I'm just curious, curious, like what has surprised you the most about the research that you've done?
Speaker 2:well, what has surprised me the most is just thinking about how complex those foods are, and I'm safe to say, is that I don't know a thing about foods, and I think what sort of what I've learned is is that I always like using sort of this saying is that if you have a little bit of knowledge about something, you feel quite confident in your position. Right, and I think I was more confident in my positions in the past. If you have a little bit of knowledge, you feel quite confident about the position. If you have a lot of knowledge, your confidence goes down in that position. Right. When you become an expert, you realize that no one's really an expert.
Speaker 2:But here's where the tricky part comes into food policy that people that maybe have a little bit of knowledge they're quite vocal or confident about their position, right, and then maybe someone who doesn't know a lot about this might mistaken that that they have the answer, whereas in fact if they had more knowledge, they would realize they don't have the answer.
Speaker 2:So this is something that has been an interesting conundrum that I that I sometimes see, and even with colleagues that I know are, like you know, maybe in other areas, like incredible experts on it, but they're maybe not as vocal as the people on social media that think they have the answer, but they don't actually, because they have such limited knowledge. But as a result, it's what people figured this out. Classic example for me would be, for instance, the idea that we can throw a few ingredients together and replicate meat, because what do we think is meat? Meat is protein, right, it is b vitamins, it is zinc and it is iron, heme, iron and this is what is what meat is. So if we match those things together, we've recreated meat yeah and it's not.
Speaker 2:It's a lot, lot more complicated than that, and if maybe someone had that knowledge, they would realize that, okay, this is not meat. This is 1% of meat. Right, there's none of those phytochemicals in it. And this is a tricky part also is that even you know, we can kind of observe in our empirically. We can observe this as well in animal health, right. If you talk to a farmer and say, well, if you have a biodiverse patch, you all manage the farm, we'll say, yeah, my animals do so much better, they look so much healthier, right.
Speaker 2:We can take that and observe that too in our research. But exactly knowing how all of these tens of thousands of plant compounds get metabolized within the animal, yeah, that part really early innings, and I think we probably mapped only a few percent of that at the moment.
Speaker 1:Well, when you look at a breakdown chart, you know, I have this one chart that breaks the polyphenols down into their various categories and it is so complex. It's just, you know, branch after branch after branch after branch, and these polyphenols play such a ginormous role in our health. It is just, they're in everything and we are consuming them nonstop. If we're eating, you know real foods and we just know so little about them, right, and we think we know a lot about food, just as you know you've been saying.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, when you start looking at those polyphenol charts and seeing all the different ones, you're like wow, there's so much more, there's so much more to know. I think that one study I read was talking about how, you know, we really only look at about like 150 compounds and plants and that's like there's 99.9% that we're still not looking at, or something like that. I don't know that I'm not being very scientific in the way that I'm stating that, but we got a bunch of nutritional dark matter out there. That's how one study referenced it this nutritional dark matter that we are still trying to understand, and I loved that concept of the way that they phrased that.
Speaker 2:So the good news about that is is that we don't fully understand how it works, but what we do see is that it works right. Like people that eat polyphenol rich foods, that eat diets that are rich in whole foods, rich in fruits and vegetables, we see that their health is improved. So even if we don't fully understand it, it doesn't mean that we cannot act now. We certainly can. I think we have a good handle on what healthy eating is. I mean, we make nutrition oftentimes super complicated, but in reality it's not that complicated If you eat a wide variety of foods. If you ask me, I think it should be an omnivorous diet, but it's still fascinating to see that people can sort of operate on this varying ratio of plant and animal source foods. But on the general population, I think including both will have significant benefits, especially if it's done in the context of a diverse whole foods diet. I mean it is really that simple. Another thing also to your point about polyphenols or phytochemicals, which are historically called plant secondary metabolites, because we thought they were waste products of plants and what we now know is that they impact metabolism. Throw them on a cancer cell line and cancer growth is reduced. Throw them on a liver cell and the liver health is improved, right. So we do know that they're impacting metabolism antioxidant, anti-inflammatory effects.
Speaker 2:And what are the diseases that we're struggling from now? Well, we're not struggling from primary nutrient deficiencies, which were deficiencies in b vitamins and which has historically been a big issue. Right, we've solved that. What we haven't solved is our metabolic disease issues and these phytochemicals. We know that they have metabolic health benefits, so a lack of that in our diet is certainly, I think, one of the reasons why we may have such large amounts of metabolic disease.
Speaker 2:The other part of this, of course, it's never one thing, it's just one of the factors, right, the other factors are our current lifestyle. Certainly, I think our ultra-processed diet is playing a major factor in it. The level of stress, the environmental toxins that we get exposed to, the lack of physical activity. Of course all these things play into that. But it's certainly part of the piece, I think, is our diet, which is low in phytochemicals as a result of high levels of ultra-processed food consumption.
Speaker 2:And we see this all the time that even processing these things the wrong way, like polyphenols, for instance, don't like a lot of heat or extrusion things the wrong way, like polyphenols, for instance, don't like a lot of heat or extrusion. Well, what do we use in ultra-processing? Heat and extrusion Quite often our processing techniques that we use. So even if you start with sort of a very healthy regenerative weed, if you even sift this so much, using too fine of a mesh, and then apply a bunch of heat to this and then another processing, you can see that you've kind of negated those benefits right, like in the classic example. Let's say, if you have regenerative wheat and then you refine the wheat, you've gotten rid of 90% of the polyphenols.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So eat lots of vegetables and eat half of them raw and half of them cooked.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and depending on the vegetable also right, like probably if you eat carrots we know that the protein bioavailability improves quite a bit if you cook it. But maybe something like, depending on you know, kale you probably want to cook, but uh, some lettuce and things such as that eat raw. So yeah, and fruits as well. Like fruit is actually probably you can cook it for culinary reasons.
Speaker 1:But if you're eating it for the health benefits.
Speaker 2:You probably the vast majority you don't want to cook, so yeah, yeah, well, and just chewing your food.
Speaker 1:I think so many people are in the habit of eating so quickly they forget to chew their food efficiently, and that in and of itself can really help you extract a lot more nutrients from your food. And we're always in a hurry, that's right, myself included. You know I do it too sometimes. So we are coming up on time here soon, but I do have one other question that I want to ask. Obviously, there's a lot of advancements in microbiome research, and do you foresee some studies in the future where you're looking at the human microbiome along with what you're already doing, because that's not something that you've included thus far? Is that right?
Speaker 2:yeah. No, we've included microbiome studies as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah in humans okay in human.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's right. So I mean, this is an interesting area of study that I think what speaking of like research that's in infancy, I think the microbiome research very much. So I think no one really knows what the hell's going on or at least you know like we have a very limited understanding of that, whereas maybe uh yeah, we see that diversity seems to be associated with health in western populations. But go outside of western populations and maybe the picture doesn't become as clear.
Speaker 1:How long?
Speaker 2:does it take to impact changed gut microbiota? The timeframe of that is also tricky to understand. I think the strongest evidence we have now is from fermented foods that can impact the microbiome. I think that's where the strongest evidence at the moment comes from. So things such as sauerkraut, yogurt and things such as that, including those, I think, are key. But speaking of a minefield, yeah, the microbiome research and we have work also did that in cows and you also see, yeah, greater alpha beta diversity in cows that are on biodiverse pastures. Does that mean does that associate with health? Well, yeah, because we argue we think they're healthier animals. But, yeah, the relationship there is, I think, even more complex.
Speaker 1:Well, very interesting. And what is a non-negotiable for your own nutrition? What do you just don't even think twice about. You're like this is what I'm doing and I'm not changing it.
Speaker 2:Well for me, yeah, eating a whole foods diet I mean. Over time I definitely started to appreciate just how good whole nutrient-dense foods can taste me. Yeah, eating a whole foods diet I mean. Over time I definitely start to appreciate just, uh, how good whole nutrient-dense foods can taste and be for you. So for me it, my personal diet is I probably eat about three to four pounds of vegetables a day and and three pieces of fruit, and, supplemented with that or with every meal, I'd say I eat, you know, some sort of animal source food as well.
Speaker 2:I'm deutsche, I like dairy, so I drink milk and then eat plenty of cheeses, eggs, pastured meats, fish yeah, that's kind of kind of my diet and uh, some sourdough, bread, potatoes and things such as that. So, uh, and especially on days that I work out, so I I mean certainly you know I'm a consumer too. So this research if you're looking at spreadsheets and then the chromatograms, for most of the day finding that these organic blueberries look more nutritious and these ultra processed foods clearly are negatively impacting your health, it's, of course it's going to impact my decisions as well on food even more so. So partly it's of interest and I always jokingly say it's going to impact my decisions as well on food even more so. So partly it's of interest and I always jokingly say it's like I kind of want to know this stuff for myself and I'm happy other people want to know it too and they can get research funding for it. But it's something that I'm personally also always super interested in and that's probably the most fun part is interacting with farmers and analyzing data.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Yeah, that's great. Well, how can people learn more about what you're doing? Where can we direct folks to find out where they can read your papers and or just learn more about what you're up to and a?
Speaker 2:PhD and then also Google Scholar profile. If you just type in Google Scholar and my name, you'll find all the papers that we published. Almost all of them are open access. I certainly believe in open access and publishing is an open access so that everyone can read them.
Speaker 1:Is there anything that you want to leave our listeners with, or any future projects that you want to inform anybody about, or you know what are your last statements for this podcast?
Speaker 2:well, my statements would be is like try to connect with farmers. I think if you have a good relationship with with farmers and your local food community, I think this will motivate you to consume healthier foods. Right, it helps if you if I know, I mean, like you know, being up in northern utah I thank god for having a modern food system so that I can eat some fruits and vegetables in the winter, but when in season, definitely try to immerse yourself in a local food community. And where do you feel like you have the most impact is in your local community, right? So if you work together locally with farmers or buy from farmers, it is rewarding. You feel like you're doing good stewardship of the land.
Speaker 2:You can see this. It's a lot less abstract than that avocado grown in South America, which, not to say that avocados aren't delicious. But my point is that if that results in land degradation, you're not going to see that, obviously, or even if it's here in the US farms. But if you see this, if you immerse yourself in local food and try to source from that, at least get some exposure to farming, some exposure to a local food culture. I think that makes you appreciate that there's people behind the product and that many of them are doing a great job. And then one thing I've also become very interested in is studying meat from wild animals as well.
Speaker 2:Deer antelope which are down south in texas, right? So these are things that we're studying whale, and because it's always very interesting to see for me is is that, in our modern farming systems, how close do we get to sort of these? Yeah, what we oftentimes consider wild foods, right, and so I think we can learn a lot, a lot, from that as well, and certainly we've impacted ecosystems to such a regard that you could argue it's really, yeah, not always really wild, but yeah, those are, you know, learning more about, especially the meat nutritional compositions of other species other than pigs, poultry and beef. Right, because if you didn't really touch upon this, but if you think about it like, we often like to critique plant agriculture for monocultures, right, but we've also very narrowed our base of animal source foods to those three, right, and we probably benefit from eating a wider variety of herbivores in our diet. We consume a lot of lamb, we don't consume a lot of duck, but these can be very goat and things such as that. These can be very goat and things such as that. These can be very efficient animals and especially if you look at different ecosystems, right, it might be better to raise a wider diversity of species as well, and then you see a complementary nature of sheep and cattle when they're grazed together, you can actually produce more food per acre.
Speaker 2:I know it's easier said than done. Of course I appreciate the practical implications of that, but there's no good ecological reason to not do it. So, as we think about like sort of these complexities and then make these broad statements of like, well, it takes X amount of acres to an X amount of water to produce a pound of beef or something like that, right, it doesn't, I think, take into account the complexities of this with wildlife integration. What if we have multiple herbivores integrated? What if we have bees and things such as that? Right, they keep producing a lot more food on acres of land.
Speaker 2:And the final piece that I wanted to highlight I was at a ranch this past week in Texas and, yes, while they are using thousands of acres to produce beef, the cattle are only on a small piece of land at any given time and the rest is used by wildlife. So you could argue well, this land is producing beef, yes, but it's also producing a lot of other. You know, you could argue well, this is using 8,000 acres for 500 cattle, but it's not because it's not. These animals are not on 8,000 acres at all times. Right, I think these complexities need to be recognized more into the literature as well, because oftentimes we come to these simplified conclusions of well, a cow uses this much? Entities whereas they're very much the same and need to be integrated, and this is what regenerative agriculture is about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, awesome. Well, I'm very interested in more wild game research and also very interested just in you know the chemical load and you know the chemical load that's you know as a huntress. Myself, growing up in Texas, hunted and got even more into it later when I started working with that local food chef, jesse Griffiths, who I also did a podcast with last month or two months ago, so you can listen to that much pesticides are in wild game meat, because I know that there's a lot like through through being fed lots of corn, through trampsing through all different kinds of fields and this and that, so it's like, yes, the nutrient density is there, but how much are we? How clean is the meat?
Speaker 2:well, we're actually that very question. I mean, we're not looking so much at like the pesticide load, but we're able to work with various hunters and we actually got a white-tailed deer that was predominantly grazing Midwest crop fields and then we got a white-tailed deer that was in much more of a biodiverse system.
Speaker 2:So this is, of course both are wild, but one is sort of our feedlot equivalent of if that makes sense, right, sort of not truly obviously but our green fat wild deer versus a biodiverse wild deer. So I'm not sure what the data will show, but my hypothesis, of course, is that maybe the omega-3 fatty acid profile of the wild deer that was on biodiverse pastures or biodiverse landscapes, wild landscapes is going to look better or more nutritious than if that wild animal was on a crop field. So that's for sure. I mean the pesticides we haven't. You know, we can only do so much, of course we haven't really fully looked at, but what the literature would suggest is that you do have sort of this because it goes through the animal right is that the content of the meat is quite low in things such as glyphosate. On the other hand, maybe more longer term chemicals such as PFAS, if the animal is grazing near a plant that produced it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there you definitely see some issues. We're going to use the about this about a potential project, since we have so much meat from across the US to maybe study. They may study PFAS in this and see, because there's certain hot spots. Definitely there's a growing body of literature that livestock that is grazing close to chemical plants do accumulate PFAS and other chemicals in their tissue and it definitely is then available in the milk.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very interesting. Well, I can't wait to see what more comes out of your lab, stefan, and I am very thankful for you taking the time to share your knowledge with the listeners today, and hopefully we will just keep moving forward and learning more and also just staying in awe of the mystery.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:That's a really beautiful thing as well, but it's fun to try to understand things so beautiful. Well, thank you so much for joining us of insight that will enhance your quality of life. If you're looking for personalized guidance on holistic health, nutrition or running a regenerative agriculture business, visit landfoodlifecom to explore my virtual and in-person coaching programs. You can also join my mailing list at landfoodlifecom to receive exclusive perks and discounts for email subscribers only. I appreciate your valuable time spent here with me, and if you're digging this content and you're finding it helpful, please share it with your friends and others in your network. You can post a screenshot of the podcast thumbnail, tag it on social media and rate the show on your preferred podcast platform. I am very much looking forward to our next chat in two weeks. Same time, same place. Bye for now.
