Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
298 Dan Kittredge – Local, regenerative and organic have no connection to nutrient density, soil health does
A long-overdue check-in interview with Dan Kittredge, founder of the Bionutrient Food Association. We discuss their involvement in the revolutionary beef study, all the research they have been doing and where they have been showing absolutely no connection between the labels, local, organic, regenerative, farmer's market, etc., and nutrient density.
What has been shown is a correlation between soil health and nutrient density. All the claims about regenerative agriculture that leads to more nutrient-dense food, they are only true if it leads to healthier soil, and in some or many cases, it actually doesn’t. It all starts with the soil. Plus, very interestingly, the potential of nutrient density: most of the crops they researched scored very very poor compared to what they could have scored. The pessimist would say: look at the empty crops we are eating depleted of nutrients, the realist would say look at the amazing potential. Crops could be (on certain aspects) 10x or 20x more nutrient dense. Let’s get to work!
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A long overdue check-in interview with Ted Kittredge, the founder of the Bionutrient Food Association, where we discussed their involvement in the revolutionary beef study and all the other research they've been doing and where they've been showing that there's absolutely no connection between popular or starting to become popular labels like local, organic, regenerative, farmer's market, etc. Etc. And nutrient density. What has shown correlation is soil health and nutrient density. Let that sink in for a bit. All those claims you see out there, all those messages regen ag by definition leads to more nutrient density, food, et cetera. Yes, but only if it leads to healthier soil first, and in some, or actually many, cases it actually doesn't. It doesn't lead to healthier soil, which means it doesn't lead to more nutrients in your food. It all starts with the soil, plus some very interesting insights in the potential of nutrient density. Most of the crops they researched until now and by now they're quite a few scored very, very poor. Actually, the majority scored very poor compared to what they could have scored. The pessimist would say look at the empty crops we've been eating depleted of nutrients. But the realist would say would say look at the empty crops we've been eating depleted of nutrients. But the realists would say look at the amazing potential Crops could be, on certain aspects, 10x or 20x more nutrient dense. So let's get to work. This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast investing as if the planet mattered, where we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems, while making an appropriate and fair return. Why my focus on soil and regeneration? Because so many of the pressing issues we face today have their roots in how we treat our land and our sea, grow our food, what we eat, wear and consume, and it's time that we, as investors big and small and consumers, start paying much more attention to the dirt slash, soil underneath our feet. To make it easy for fans to support our work, we launched our membership community and so many of you have joined us as a member. Thank you. If our work created value for you and if you have the means and only if you have the means consider joining us. Find out more on gumroadcom slash investing in RegenEgg that is, gumroadcom slash investing in RegenEgg or find the link. Welcome to another episode today with friend of the show, but it's been way too long, actually three years, more than three years. It was the beginning of 2021 and we're recording this in April 24 and it will be out soon as well. With Dan Kittredge, so the founder of the Bionutrient Food Association.
Speaker 1:You've been here, I think, twice before, mentioned many times. I was checking my notes. Anytime we discuss a nutrient density, nutrient quality measurements, meters and all of that, your name and the episodes come up and you're organizing something extremely cool in, actually exactly a month from now the state of nutrient density 16 weeks online, so anybody can participate, and so we're going to unpack that. And, of course, we're going to discuss the state of nutrient density 16 weeks online, so anybody can participate. Um, and so we're going to unpack that and, of course, we're going to discuss the state of nutrient density. So welcome back then.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me back, coon, really happy to be here, and it's not been that long since we saw each other. That's why, probably, I'm confused, because we saw each other in italy actually about a year and a half ago or something. So we, we hang out a bit, which was, which was great, and so I mean, we hang out a bit, which was great, and so I mean, the worst question to ask is describe the state of et cetera, et cetera, since 2021, because that will be way too long. So let's start with why? Because you have been doing in-person conferences and online conferences, if I'm not mistaken, also last year. Why another one? What was the reason to put in a lot of work? Because it's 16 speakers, it's every week, it's every week. It's a hell of a job.
Speaker 2:Why did you commit yourself to another one of these? Well, in fact, because I feel like it's been too long since we have had one. We started the organization in 2010, and I think it was in 2011,. We had our first conference, which was in person, and did them every year through just before the COVID epidemic. And then in 2021, we did an online conference. That was very successful. I think it was people from 46 countries and 48 states or something like that. It was a wonderful global community.
Speaker 2:We tried going back to doing in-person in 2022, but I remember effectively the movement had.
Speaker 2:We used to be a local, regional, northeast US organization and sort of.
Speaker 2:It's been spreading and spreading and now it's much more of a global organization, and so we tried to put together a, an event in one spot, and most people were like I want to go, but I'm not going to fly all the way across the world and it's going to end up costing me two thousand dollars.
Speaker 2:So, and we've been spending a lot of time and almost all of our money and effort in the last couple of years really trying to define nutrient density in a crop, and so the conferences and the education and the communication with the movement has really been put on the back burner and we made a strategic decision at the board level and the organization in January to say let's really get back to our roots, because you can't doing science in a silo, you know, without keeping the community engaged is really, you know, defeating the point. It's really got to be, it's got to be much more connected. So really excited to have our next soil nutrition conference online starting in May and, yeah, like you said, going for the next, going for 16 weeks and bringing together a lot of the leaders that are stepping up. It's really wonderful now that we've got a word and something of a burgeoning movement and companies and organizations and networks and researchers and a lot of people taking ownership around the space and really, you know, it's no longer just the BFA which is, I would say, success.
Speaker 1:And what can people expect from the conference? And what can people expect from the conference. What are you specifically trying to cover, let's say, in this edition, apart from, like, you want to paint a picture of the state? But what are specific ones that I really want to double click on this year as a theme or as a specific topic?
Speaker 2:Well, there are a number, like I said, of individual companies and organizations and researchers and certification agencies, et cetera, that are taking serious steps to move this conversation forward, and a lot of that people I think most people don't know anything about those things. They don't know anything about those things. They don't know about these certification standards that are coming up. They don't know about where these labs are established that can give companies the ability to make claims on PAC. They don't know what the systemic research framework is going on with big global entities. There's just a lot of action in the space and um as well. We'll have a decent amount of growers, um, producers, cutting edge insights, um. I mean, I can.
Speaker 1:I can spend 20 minutes talking about who each of the speakers are and what the exciting topics are, if you want, or no, no, I mean I'll put, of course, the link there, but, for instance, something that wasn't there a few years ago, maybe that's a good, like the last time you organized, like something that didn't I'm not saying didn't even exist, but definitely wasn't, let's say, in your ecosystem, in your realm.
Speaker 2:What are some examples?
Speaker 1:Yeah, some examples of people or even organizations or things. Okay, that's new and we really want this to be on stage and put a spotlight on it, because I know those things. I mean you, in this case, know these people, but our audience, our community and maybe the people, the different people on stage, don't even know from each other that you're working, that they're working on this.
Speaker 2:Well, audacious is an example that I think you had, eric Smith, on your podcast. Yes, and you know the BFA was critically involved in getting that company established and getting their lab built and, you know, I think, inspiring the company to be founded in the first place. And, and they're, they're, you know we have, we have a really close partnership with them now with the beef project and the logistics of digesting the data. And you know what people can do companies. You know, between now and when we define nutrient density, there's a big space in the middle, which is I want to verify that my beef has a better omega six, omega three ratio. Well, how do you do that? There's a, there's a company that. There's a. There's a way you can do that.
Speaker 2:And you know, between now and when, we have a certification label. Well, what's um, the non-gmo project, doing with their one health standard where they're looking at a suite of different um management practices? And you know we were just talking about the ultra-processed food which I call at a call, I like to say it's not, it's junk, it's not food.
Speaker 1:actually, I think the brazilian research is a shout out to chris, who's going to be on in the future, but I think they call it food-like substance, which is an edible food-like substance, processed product. Edible food-like substance.
Speaker 2:I would call it processed product or junk, but anyways, we can have our semantic conversations If you haven't read the book.
Speaker 1:Anyone go and read the book? Ultra Processed People.
Speaker 2:It's highly recommended, yeah, but I mean so. Okay, so there's a. You know, the Non-GMO project has got a certification label, which is very well known, and they've been spending years thinking about a. Not a negative definition, like it doesn't have GMOs, but a positive definition, like it is well-grown with integrity with respect to the environment. It is not processed in a certain, to a certain level. It's processed, maybe in ways that indigenous cultures would understand. There's no, um, uh, synthetic materials added, uh, you know what? What's what's coming up on the? You know the frame of. Is there a label you can start to look for in the supermarket shelf? Or what's PTFI doing with their global collaboration with the American Heart Association and Rockefeller and you know, and research universities around the planet?
Speaker 1:What is PTFI for anybody?
Speaker 2:not Periodic Table of Food Initiative, you know, which is a very well-funded, very serious many-year global endeavor to characterize dark matter in food. Before there was the Human Genome Project, which was a massive global endeavor, and the National Microbiome Initiative, which is a massive endeavor. Now there is a big, massive endeavor coming together like that. There's this guy you know, ken Hamilton, who's a agronomist from Utah, who's been doing brilliant research in fermenting foods you know, like for animals. So you take your hay and you basically turn it into sauerkraut and your cows grow way faster and add pounds per day and faster growth to slaughter and less disease, but also amazing omega-6, omega-3 ratios. But you can do that also for pork and chicken.
Speaker 2:So anybody who's ever had an organic pig or organic pork or organic chicken. Usually your omega-6, omega-3 ratios are 15 to 1 or 30 to 1, which is really bad. According to the American Heart Association and all the science we've got Like, anything more than 4 to 1 is considered to be bad. And all grain-fed chicken, organic or not, all grain-fed pork, whether it was out pasturing or not, actually has nutrient levels in it that are quite negative. And so what are some ways you're that?
Speaker 1:subtle um carefulness, quite okay, let's not say bad, quite negative yeah but it's. It's interesting to see, like the grain piece here the grain, how we feed them, even if it's organic, non-organic, of course there are, but that in itself leads to pasture even if they're running around.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, so there's some brilliant work that's been done. There's agronomists you got people from from germany and from england and um and some research. I'm imagining, yeah, research from australia, um, doing side-by-side trials with beef. That'll verify and overlay beautifully, because it's being done with stefan's lab in utah. I they're doing side-by-side trials with beef and we're doing this sort of global survey. So how does that all piece together?
Speaker 2:I'm really excited about all of the you know, the allies that are carrying pieces of this broader puzzle that we as an organization can't carry all together, but providing an opportunity for that to be shared.
Speaker 2:And so the model this year is the speaker presents for an hour and then the other speakers get to ask that speaker questions for half an hour. So we get the sort of the panel back and forth experience and then the attendees get to ask questions for half an hour. So really trying to move it from like a one person presenting and everybody sitting and listening to you know, one person presenting to the other, sort of quote, unquote, leaders, sort of the curated community that we've brought together and having them get to know each other and listen to each other and ask each other questions and then having the global attendees also have space to engage. You know, and John Kemp will be on, and and um, uh, uh, David Knauss, and you know, I mean it's just uh. Who were the? Who were the equanimists that are doing the cutting edge work with with, uh, you know, foliars and Stefan is also as well.
Speaker 1:Stefan will be on. Tina Owens, eric will be there. Smith.
Speaker 2:Lodacious. We don't have the complete list up on the website yet, but that'll be there shortly, perhaps by the time this is released.
Speaker 1:Amazing and so why do you think? Apart from that, it's way too late, it should have been earlier. And also, I'm asking this question like the investor always asks this question, the investor in me. And the investor like why, now, what's the why is there momentum now? What do you? What do you see? Because you've been in this for quite a while I don't want to say a long time, but you've been trying to define.
Speaker 2:Almost 20 years. You've been in this 20 years, and so what do you?
Speaker 1:feel like the last few years. It feels, at least to me, a lot more momentum, and I'm trying to figure out why. For all the obvious reasons that we needed, etc. But what do you feel? Why is there momentum now and all these global pieces that are starting to move and puzzle and like fall in place?
Speaker 2:Well, I think I mean there's a time and place for all things and you know, as the climate irregularities and the human health, you know, issues and everything else become more and more pronounced, that certainly is helping to drive it, I feel like you know at least I obviously come from my own personal perspective. I can't see the rest of the world, but from my perspective, the fact that we have been doubling down on the science and proving categorically I mean we just got our first paper published in nature science communications, so that's a reasonably legitimate journal um, you know, showing that handheld, consumer priced flash of light ray guns basically can be used to test nutrient levels. A, that nutrient levels are dramatic, like 4x, 8x, 20x, 40x. B, and those nutrient levels variations connect to soil health. C, the fact that we've done the science, the fact that we've proved it categorically, like, like it was kind of an idea, I mean.
Speaker 2:I remember. I remember 10, 15 years ago the question was is organic better? And, you know, is local better? And these are sort of very reductionist, mechanistic definitions. And I think we've. I mean I don't want to sort of toot our own horn too much, but I think the work we've been doing to sort of tease this out scientifically and have it not just be a, a um, you know, an argument you have over over dinner or whatever, and you can each take your positions and and find your you know your blog posts and yeah, yeah, okay, I'm on this team, on that team, like okay, actually now we have a foundation of of really solid science that that verifies these theses.
Speaker 2:Maybe that's helping maybe that's something that helps.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that helps. Yeah, yeah, of course. And do you see a lot more scientists getting into? Because I think that was one of the issues or the challenges until now like very few on, like the soil sign piece, where we're then looking at the quality of the nutrients, even like the, the disconnectment in those, the different parts of science was was enormous. Now it seems like you mentioned amount of researchers in in these 14 minutes of recording. I don't think they were there, or maybe they were very isolated a couple of years ago. Do you see it? They weren't there.
Speaker 2:They weren't. That's what that's. What's happened in the past three or four years is, I mean, I don't know of anybody else around the world that was talking about these things. I mean, I think I'm fairly well connected, so it's just one of those things where, if an idea has merit, you know, thoughtful people listen to it and contemplate it, they begin to see the broader implications and then they begin to move their lives towards this exciting opportunity. And everybody wants to do something that's meaningful, right? I mean, a lot of people want to have some purpose in their life and if they see a space where they can do something that can be part of a deep solution set, it takes time to to to raise the money and develop the relationships and establish the institution and build the logistics. So life takes time, um, but yeah, it does.
Speaker 1:It does feel like we're beginning to get something resembling a global movement and yeah, and I think the whole piece to, to looking at the outcome is such a fundamental, like it's organic, better, and it's a set of practices, and it even different, like it's different in certain countries, um, and so now, like, when you say we published this paper, I will link it below as well. Um, I always point below, but it doesn't mean we're not recording for the video at all. I'll put it in the show notes. People, sorry, um, yeah, yeah, like, what was that focused on? And and can you, can you describe it a bit more? For for the science geeks in the audience, um, the first paper we published.
Speaker 2:Yeah, uh, can I spend a second absolutely talking about, please, the project any?
Speaker 2:any direction you can want to take we don't have a script, okay, yeah, well, so you know, going back to the beginning of this organization in 2010, you know our mission was to increase still is increasing quality in the food supply, and by quality we're talking about flavor, aroma, nutritive value, which we think connects to human health and soil health and system function and farm viability, et cetera. So we spent our first number of years giving courses, conferences, presentations, et cetera, et cetera, lectures, and as that spread through word of mouth across the US and then into other countries and other continents, we were seeing these principles of working with nature Like. I mean, the foundational concept here is that nature figured this thing out. And you know, I happen to be living I mean not living, but at the moment in a sort of an Amish-type community here in Tennessee, and so I have to change my words. I have to say God. In some places you say science, in some places you say nature, in some places you say God. But as far as I'm concerned, they're all basically the same thing. There is an order to the universe that is that is, and the more you are in harmony with it, the more you manage your ecosystems in harmony with it, the more beneficial symbiotic, you know, octuple bottom line outcomes occur, and so so, as it began to occur that we would, you know, seeing these kinds of results globally, you know, the concept was if we can, through thoughtful, you know, interactions with the lands as producers, not only sequester carbon and improve ecosystem function, but improve farm viability and increase shelf life and flavor and aroma and, we presume, human health, then this could be a space around which a very empowering symbiosis could occur. We could bring together the environmental activists and the people concerned about human health and underprivileged environments and communities and farm viability, and people that have issues with pharmaceutical industry or agribusiness, people concerned about consciousness. We think there's a high ground, you know, where this work actually could be very powerfully symbiotic to a broad global movement.
Speaker 2:And so the question became how would one take this to the next level? If these principles seem to work, how would you bring it to scale? And the idea was that, effectively, money is a very powerful force in the world and economic incentive drives a lot of action whereby we could really drive systemic benefit without having to go through lots of bureaucracy or legislation or things like that. We could really be just driven by that visceral economic drive, which does seem to be a powerful force. So the question was how would you do that? And our thought was by giving the purchaser of food the ability to determine the relative quality of the food they're looking at. So if you got three bags of carrots on the shelf, if you knew that one was 80 out of 100 by a comprehensive, honest score and one was 40 out of 100 and one was 20 out of 100, you'd likely buy the 80.
Speaker 1:And if you did that, then luckily, even if it was slightly more expensive, probably for most people or for a good chunk of people, even if but regardless, just being able to know.
Speaker 2:Just being able to know would be helpful.
Speaker 1:Might be cheaper actually.
Speaker 2:And I would tell you, as a farmer who started doing all this because I'm a farmer and I found out oh my God, I can make a living working less hard, a good living, working less hard because I'm working with nature my experience has been like your cost of production decreases, so you don't actually need to charge a premium if you're working with nature, because nature does most of the work. That's how indigenous cultures were able to live peacefully without a lot of work, you know, with lots of music and dancing and lovemaking and things. It seems like it was because they were working in harmony with nature. And we've got this much more colonized, mechanistic paradigm which involves a lot of effort and destruction. So I digress to some degree, but the concept was if we can create this economic incentive that could drive the systemic benefit. So how would you create that economic incentive?
Speaker 2:Um, there's some science involved. Um, you have to define what 80 and 40 and 20 out of 100 are and you have to develop a capacity to assess that that cannot be perverted and you need to verify empirically that those variations are significant and that those variations connect to soil health. So there's a bunch of steps in that process which we initiated in 2016 conceptually, and we identified three specific questions that we needed to answer, all in the affirmative, if this were to be a viable strategy. One was do nutrients vary dramatically in food? Our hypothesis was yes, but a lot of the researchers we were talking to were saying it's maybe 2%, 5%, but it's probably nominal.
Speaker 1:Probably because they didn't know or we never studied that or it was just not important. I mean, it seems like an important question in general. Does the nutrient variety?
Speaker 2:I continue to be flabbergasted by the fact that there's no comprehensive data set that overlays all these things. I mean, if you look deeply into literature, you'll see this person, this researcher found this level of whatever protein and chickpeas, and this researcher found that level, and there's always the. Anybody who wants to be a doubting thomas will say well, this was done in the 1980s, this was done in 1960s and this person used this method in that lab and this, but still there is.
Speaker 1:I was still surprised with when we had david and um, david montgomery and bigly like the amount of research going back 100 plus years around the original, the foundation of the organic movement. Like there is a lot in pieces but there was quite a lot without, and yet there's still this constant conversation of um. Does quality actually make like if most scientists keep saying it's only two or five percent difference? Well, there is actually deep down, but there is research that that shows significant differences. It's interesting how there's just never been really an issue, or never even a question, that this is an important topic. Maybe that you found massive varieties, not just 2.5%, but like 2.5, 20x.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, and you can look at Lady Eve Balfour and what she was doing in England, which Anne and David talked about, and there have been pieces here and pieces there and at Western Price and I mean there's lots of literature out there, but as far as, like you know, somebody driving this conversation and not it's like a dog with a bone, like we're going to figure this out as a movement and and put these pieces together, because if it's a biological system, there's many factors and so you can look at this piece and you can look at that piece and you can look at that piece, but until you can actually look at them all in relations to each other, you can't begin to make that whole, that whole, that whole claim.
Speaker 1:Um, so, yeah, I mean, that was the first question. When you look into the variety, yeah, the pieces are there, um.
Speaker 2:So the first question was how big is variation? What is the scale? And the second question was you know what are the causal factors? What connects to that? If variation is significant, does it connect to soil type and variety, like many of the you know the sort of land-grant researchers were saying, or does it connect more to soil health, as was what we were proposing based on our experiences working with farmers all over the place who were using the same soil, the same varieties, but having better results? And then and then the third question is is it plausible to create handheld meters that non-invasively, you know, with a flash of light, can assess nutrient levels in real time? Because that would give us the capacity to ensure that any science we come up with could be kept honest in the market over time. So if we can develop a framework where we don't have bureaucracies, we don't have binaries.
Speaker 2:You know my background personally, growing up on an organic farm and having my parents work for an organic farming organization and develop some of the first organic standards in the country, and you know, in the US what would that be? Almost 40 years ago now. I think 30, 38 years ago was when they first wrote their first standards. I've watched that organic standard get watered down and, you know, bastardized, perverted, whatever the polite words are not polite words you want to use, for it are. You know, a lot of people buy organic and sure toxins weren't applied Doesn't mean toxins aren't present and doesn't mean the crops more nutritious. But there was an ethos back then which was like we're trying to grow better food and, as a grassroots movement, started a certification label, but then countervailing forces effectively took it over, at least here in the US. And so can we develop a framework where, if we can verify that variation, um, the capacity to assess it, cannot be perverted over time?
Speaker 1:so that's a long yeah, no no an overview of the rationale behind what we did and on that last point of the meter, because I bought the first one and it's actually somewhere here in this house. Um, where are we with the meter? Because, because I remember seeing you on stage, virtually because I saw you, I think I saw a YouTube video presenting at Acres or some grass exchange, something somewhere with the idea of the meter and I think it has captivated a lot of people, like, can you, even as a consumer, as a citizen, in any supermarket, any place, just scan and know, of course there's a whole world behind there that you just scan and know, of course there's a whole world behind there that you just described, that needs to happen first, or needs to happen simultaneously, to be able to say this is an 80 or an 18 and and all of that. But yeah, like just from the the practical, um hardware side of things, where, where are you with the meter, or with meters, what's the? The latest on on that?
Speaker 2:do you mind if I answer that question at the end of this absolutely review of where we've, where we've been and where we're at, um, because I think that'll have the most context. Um, so, like I said, in 2016, we just we just we devised this, this, this strategy of discernment and, like, if this is a plausible strategy, these three things would have to be answered in the affirmative. So, you know, in 2017, we engineered the first generation meter. That was a consumer-priced handheld, you know, flasher light meter. We had, we had, we built a meter. We were like okay, and and that was a big deal. It was like wow, we actually have a thing, it's not just a concept anymore.
Speaker 2:And then in 2018, we built our first lab and we started testing our first couple of crops. That year was just carrots and spinach and we had people send in samples from across that year it was only the US from farms and farmers, markets and grocery stores and CSA bags. We were not doing a side by side randomized, randomized replicated trial. Like grow this variety in the soil and this same variety in the same soil, just with one thing tweaked. Sort of the normal way agronomic science is done is side-by-side trials, you know, randomized, replicated. Just change one factor and see what's different. That was not our question. Our question was how big is the variation? Variation? So we wanted samples sent in from everywhere and um, so we did that with carrots and spinach that year and we found, you know, very, very significant variations 2x, 5x, 10x, 20x, 40x, depending on which, the nutrient, which nutrients it. Okay, it sure looks like something big is going on here. That was 2018.
Speaker 2:2019, we set up our second lab at Chico State in California and we went up to six crops that year and we had people send in not only the crops but also the soil they grew in, along with answering a big, long series of questions about the management practices what was the variety? When did you plant? How did you prepare the soil? Did you cover crop? You know what was your fertility program, et cetera. So we had management environmental conditions data overlaid against soil data overlaid against nutrient level data, to answer that question and to begin to build out this data set. And you know, every time any piece of soil came in or any crop came in, we flushed the lead at it, first with a meter and then we ran it through the lab so we could overlay the spectral signature against the nutrient level or the organic matter or whatever. It was facts.
Speaker 2:And then in 2020, we set up our third lab in France and we got up to about 25 crops that year. I think it was a couple hundred farms. 25 crops that year um, I think it was a couple hundred farms, um, and by the end of the 2020 data year, we had enough information to, in 2021, effectively answer our three questions in the affirmative. Um, across the board, 25 different crops roots, leaves, fruits and grains. Variation and nutrient levels was somewhere between 2x and 10x.
Speaker 2:On the minerals, so, like this carrot has as much phosphorus as those eight carrots, this carrot has as much sulfur as those four carrots. That would be an 8x or a 4x variation. Like, you have to literally eat eight of these carrots to get as much phosphorus as if you get one of those carrots. And with polyphenols, antioxidants, 20x 40x. So you have to eat 40 of these carrots to get as many antioxidants as if you ate one of those carrots. So that's the range we found and pretty similar across the board, regardless of what the crops were. We looked at organic, certified organic, no-till, regenerative, biodynamic, local. No connection, no connection. I know people were waiting for.
Speaker 1:Like what's he going to say? No connection whatsoever. Okay.
Speaker 2:So local, even on the freshness, interesting.
Speaker 2:Farmer's market, grocery store, farm stand, garden. No connection. Wow, right, uh. Northeast us, western us, south, central, midwest. No connection. Varieties napoli, bolero, you know? Nantes no connection. Sorry, just what crop is that? That would be carrots, but regardless of the crop, like we have, we can see. I mean, nantes is a variety of carrot.
Speaker 2:Some people had an overall nutrient levels which was remarkably low, in the bottom 20th percentile. Some had the top 20th percentile. So some certified organic was in the bottom 20th percentile, some was in the top 20th percentile. Some local was in the bottom 20th percentile. Some was in the top 20th percentile, some local was in the bottom 20th percentile, some was in the top 20th percentile, some garden. It didn't really matter which of these identifying factors that people are attached to. I'm regenerative, I'm no-till, I use cover crops. I'm certified organic, I'm local, I'm farmer's market, I'm the Northeast, I'm the Southwest.
Speaker 2:None of those identifying factors correlated in any meaningful way with nutrient levels. The only thing that we found that correlated with nutrient levels was soil life, level of soil life. So in that first iteration you know, ending in their 2020 the metric, the mode we used to discern that, was respiration. So it was not a nuanced microbial assessment. It's just simply level of carbon dioxide being emitted by the soil, the amount of microbes in their breathing and so. But actually anybody who knows anything about all this says, like, actually that makes sense. Level of life in the soil is like that. Would that would make sense, that that would correlate, and actually it would make sense that some organic farms, based on their management practices, would have low levels of life in the soil and some would have high, and some people with backyard gardens would have low levels of life in the soil and some would have high levels of life in the soil and some would have high. Right, it actually technically like you can plant the seed in poor soil and it won't grow that well, and you can plant the seed in good soil and it will grow more well. That all kind of makes sense. But it's very difficult for people who are attached to regenerative or are attached to local or attached to cover crops, because it's not what. What do they say? That's not the cow, it's the how. It's really, it's about the level of life in the soil that connects to that.
Speaker 2:So, at any rate, we released a meter, a second generation meter, in 2021. I think just three or 400 were sent out around the world that had some basic calibrations associated with it. So I think for carrots it was polyphenols and so if you flash light at carrots it'll tell you this carrot, the level of polyphenols in this carrot are in the 65th percentile of the range we found. Or if it was zucchini, it was maybe antioxidants, and if you flash light at the zucchini it was in the 35th percentile of what the variation was we found. Or if it was zucchini, it was maybe antioxidants, and if you flushed a lot of the zucchini, this is in the 35th percentile of what the variation was we found. So we built a meter that is at a consumer price point, that is non-invasive, that can give you honest scientific results on nutrient levels and crops.
Speaker 2:But polyphenols is not nutrient density. Antioxidants is not nutrient density. Yeah, anti antioxidants is not nutrient density. So I mean we effectively we showed variation is massive. It does seem to connect to soil health, ecosystem function and not to um label or individual practice or other identifying factor. There is a massive continuum and one very you know well very strong potent fact is, on average I would say, 85 percent of the sample is below the 50th percentile of what's possible. So, in general I mean a general fact is that about um, regardless of the of the nutrient, regardless of the crop, about 85 percent of the sample is below the 50th percentile as possible so it's not not a normal distribution whatsoever.
Speaker 2:No, no, they're bell curves. Yeah, they're bell curves, but the peak is around the 25th percentile and the top 20th like between 80 and 100, is maybe 2% of the sample size. So remarkably poor is the nature of the supply chain. The vast majority of the samples are relatively quite low in relation to what they could be. Because we did this survey, because we asked people to send in samples from all over the country, all over multiple countries, different soils, different varieties, different management practices. We had some people who were doing a really good job sending crops, but a lot of people who thought they were doing a good job actually were showing up well below what was possible.
Speaker 2:And I mean, when I give my courses, I like to start with the fact that the only reason I've come to this point of these realizations is because I started off realizing I was a bad farmer.
Speaker 2:Like you have have to be humble to start with, to be willing to learn. And if you think that you're God's greatest gift because you're using cover crops or because you're using foliar sprays, then you're probably not going to be willing to learn. But if you're, if this is what science is for, you know data effects, if you're open, if you're open-minded and you've and you're willing to like, okay, this is an honest, honest process. Then then, um, you know, okay, maybe I have things to learn here, and so, um, I I've been having this, this experience recently where, you know, a lot of people in the regenerative world are wanting to make claims about the nutritional level of their crops based on the fact that they're using regenerative practices, and um, and you've been showing that that's not necessarily connected and they call us up and say hey, can we use your, your data to make claims about our us being better?
Speaker 2:I'm like, well, before you bother, like doing any, like working with our labs or sending in any samples, let me tell you what we're likely to find, so you don't spend a bunch of money and then find things you don't want to find and I show them.
Speaker 2:I show them the reports, I show them the graphs, I show them what we found. I'm like this is what we found. So, with that being understood, do you still want to work with us to spend thousands of dollars to test your crops because you think you're going to be able to show you're better, or are you willing to, you know, engage a conversation which may show that there's a significant opportunity for improvement in what you're doing? I think you know there's this big conversation going on around the movements and the regenerative community at least, about um certification versus regeneration, and, and just because you engage a series of practices does not mean you've regenerated the ecosystem, and so I would say regenerated ecosystems correlate brilliantly with nutrient density, but regenerative certifications do not, and that applies to local and organic and a bunch of this other stuff as well.
Speaker 2:So it really is soil health, that's their soil diversity and health health into soil level of life, soil health, whatever soil health is, which we don't actually have a good definition for. That's your next job. No, no, no, no. The first job is still to define nutrient density. All we've done so far is define nutrient variation, and this drives to the question of the meter. And so if we've shown that variation exists in this massive and it connects to soil health, like we thought it did, and meters can be built to test it, now the question is what is nutrient density? Because you can't build a meter to test nutrient density until you've defined it.
Speaker 2:And so that's what we've been working on since 2021 with the beef project, and here in 2024. This is, this is april um, I think we will have all of the data from this global project completed, completely like in our database, by a month and a month and a half from now, and now we can actually begin to hand that data over to the scientists to say, okay, now can you give us at least a red, yellow, green about what nutrient density is in beef? So, and then, once we've got that, once we've got biochemical markers which correlate with this complex holistic definition of nutrient density, then we can hand those biochemical markers over to people who want to engineer meters, and and they can build nutrient density meters.
Speaker 1:So that's are you saying you can't?
Speaker 2:build a meter to test nutrient density. Until you define it, won't be building the next one.
Speaker 1:Are you saying you won't be building version three?
Speaker 2:um, I'm totally open to it, but I think from an honest standpoint, as a non-profit educational organization run by, effectively, farmers.
Speaker 2:Um, you're not a hardware we may not be the most well positioned in the world to build a piece of kit. I mean, in my vision, endgame looks like one of the cameras in your smartphone, whether it's an Apple smartphone or a Samsung smartphone or a Google smartphone. One of the cameras in your phone is a bio-nutrient meter, and I don't think we'll ever be able to compete with apple, and I don't particularly have a desire to. If apple and samsung and google are competing to have the best spectrometers in their phones and those spectrometers are calibrated to our definition of nutrient density, we win. I don't need to, you know, you don't need to make it and and on the side, like the beef study you mentioned a couple of times.
Speaker 1:I don't need to do that, no. And and on the beef side, like the beef study you mentioned a couple of times, I don't think it started yet then, or maybe it just did, but let's um dive a bit deeper into that. It's such a hot topic, um in general beef and, uh, we had stefan on here a while back, I'm gonna say a year plus ago. I can find it, but it was right in the middle still, and I think now you're planning to um to publish and to have more like this year, early next year. So it's coming to I'm not saying an end, but it's coming to a different phase. What? What is the beef study? Just for people to to understand what it actually entails.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we hadn't even designed it when we last talked, so that was yeah. So once we showed that, like I said, variation exists, soil, health, meat is going to be built, then the foundational question is answered in the affirmative through this nutrient density strategy. And we had to answer that question first before we really dove into the complete process. You know, spend $3 million to see if it's possible before you spend $50 million to get the job done, kind of a thing. And so the beef study. We, you know, we just we said okay, no one's ever defined nutrient density before. This is a really complex project. We don't really know how to do it. We think we've got some ideas.
Speaker 2:Let's start with a crop that you know has some meaningful effect. Um, so cucumbers are nice, but beef there's. There's basically more land in the world used to produce beef than any other crop. A, so if you're worried about the ecological implications of agriculture, you know, and economic incentives to shift how that crop is managed, then you'd want to work with one that's got major global impact. And B, there's more money used to purchase beef than any other crop right, Sugar, rice, milk, whatever Like there's. So it's the largest global ecological and economic footprint of any crop. So that's why we started with it, Not because it was the easiest thing, but because it had the biggest bang for your buck impact.
Speaker 1:That's why I do wheat second. Basically, that's the yeah we just we, just we.
Speaker 2:Basically that's the yeah, we, just we, just we just coming up next. That's exactly together. It's very interesting. Yeah, that's exactly why weed is our next project. Yes, I see, I see a trend and and there's also a bunch of really good uh companies, you know, in many cases smaller, you know family operations, but some a little bit bigger, doing a good job with beef, wanting to differentiate themselves. So we already have a naturally established set of allies in the corporate space, albeit not all large, who are, you know, we think, doing a good job and would want to be part of this process.
Speaker 2:So anyway, the design was, you know, is we want to look at many hundreds of different nutrients in the meat. So, whereas we were initially looking at just a couple of compounds and a couple of elements in our first three or four years of work, in this case we're looking at hundreds, and that's where we brought Stefan in, because he was at the cutting edge of that research. We're looking at elements, we're looking at enzymes, we're looking at vitamins, we're looking at amino acids and proteins and fatty acids and lipids and polyphenols and terpenoids. We really want to sort of look at a bunch of different nutrients. So that's one piece. The second piece is the microbiome. So we want to understand many hundreds of different species and multiple kingdoms, archaea and bacteria and levels. And then we're looking so the farmers Of the soil or the gut the gut In this case it would be the animal, the animal microbiome, which we understand correlates with the health of an animal. Right, we understand about and stress hormones and you can see the overall well-being and animal welfare and all that kind of stuff. You can, really you can look at that, you can have overlaying context.
Speaker 2:So our thought was you know, we don't know what nutrient density is. So let's look deeply in the biochemistry and the nutrient levels, let's look deeply in the microbiome, let's look deeply in the management practices, let's look deeply in the forage and let's look deeply in the soil and then let's feed that to humans and see what effects we get in humans. So the farmers send in three stakes. So we're doing triplicate samples and each one looking at hundreds of minerals and nutrients. Then they send in the fecal material. So we're looking at hundreds of species in the fecal material. Then we're sending in the forage. So we assess the forage and look deeply in whether it's a total mixed ration of corn and things, or it's their fodder, whether it's a monoculture or polyculture. Then they send in the soil that fodder grew in. Then they answer a bunch of questions about how those animals were raised, what the variety was, what the age was, the logistics of whether they were living in a feedlot or they were moving every day or just in one pasture, for three months in the same pasture, and then a subset of that gets fed to humans.
Speaker 2:And this is a separate but completely related project Stefan's been doing with some USDA money to feed this grass-fed beef to humans, feed this corn-fed beef to humans, feed this corn fed beef to humans, feed this fake meat to humans. So we've got some I think it's some possible burger in there as well and then look at the inflammation markers in the blood and the urine an hour after eating it, three hours after eating it, five hours after eating it, et cetera. So the idea is nutrient density is the point where all these things connect right. We don't know what it is. So we're going to, you know, look deeply at nature and see if we can find patterns.
Speaker 2:And if we can find a pattern, then we'll say that's what it is. Because we, who are we to say we know what it is Like, let's let nature be our guide and let the scientific method be our process. So we're at the point now where we're establishing the Bionutrient Definition Standards Board, bdsb, and bringing in microbiologists and giving them the microbiome data and saying look at this microbiome data and you tell us which animals you think were most well and least well. And we give the biochemists you know the biochemistry data and say you tell us which stakes you think were best and worst. And we give the human nutritionists the human data and say which responses were most beneficial, least beneficial. And then you give the agronomists the management data and the soil scientists the soil data. And the idea is bring in those who have specialized insight in each of these realms, ask them independently to score these samples 1 to 100, and then put them all together and see if there's a pattern.
Speaker 1:If there is a pattern and what do you see until now?
Speaker 2:do you see patterns? Is this too early? We haven't done it. We're about a month. We're about a month out from having all that raw data to then hand to these people to have them go through this process, and so this is the design and we're almost done, I mean we've. It's been a really long and expensive and harrowing process and any early indications, anything I asked you before as well.
Speaker 1:A few months ago and you said I think you said diversity is key. You were very diplomatic, but any early flavors samples?
Speaker 2:Yes, there are a number of very I mean, it's all obvious? The answer is obviously is what we thought it it would be from what we can tell so far? Obviously we can't say it yet because we're not done, but if you use the omega-6, omega-3 ratio, which is something that a lot of people are aware of as a preliminary factor, but still people are surprised, Like I say, Bleu Blanc has been measuring that in France for 30 years and published on it for so many.
Speaker 1:I've heard for sure, I think, at John Kemp for once, and with you as well. Like, people are like oh really, and there's a certificate that measures outcome and they look at the three to six ratio and you can say quite a lot not everything, but you can say quite a few things about animal protein and people are completely shocked that there's a body of science, mostly in French, unfortunately, but for 30 plus years, like from breast milk to this to that, like it's not, it's not pregnant women, old people babies, COVID, everything.
Speaker 2:Like what, what, what, yeah, what Pierre has done there is, I mean completely epic and, like you said, because it's not in the English literature no one knows about it.
Speaker 1:Anyway, they do amazing. I mean completely epic and, like you said, because it's not in the English literature, no one knows about it and it stays in France. Anyway, they do amazing. One Health Conference as well. They're an amazing One Health Conference. I don't think not this year, I haven't seen it yet, but anyway. So, going back to a few small snippets you can share, it's obvious.
Speaker 2:You say, if you look at omega-3,6, some people have been aware of at least more than a lot of the other stuff if you use omega-3-6 ratio as a a presumptive conclusion, if you think, if we say that is a thing we think will likely correlate with our conclusions, um, the answer is the greater. The diversity of the species of plants the cow has access to connects directly to the health of the meat. Polyculture pastures are going to cause a better health outcome in the animal, better health outcome in the human, than monoculture pastures, which are going to produce better health outcomes than grains and and just for reference omega-3 six.
Speaker 2:Why is that?
Speaker 1:important because we mentioned it before on the organic egg and grain fat and pigs. Um, but for people in the back of the room that haven't been paying attention, what is? Why is omega-3 and six? Oh, for people that this is completely new. They think I've heard omega-3, I think, but what is omega-6?
Speaker 2:Right, exactly. So you know there's basic levels and ratios of critical nutrients that correlate with overall health and well-being, and it's the. You know your cell walls are all made out of lipids, fats, and so you know if you need a certain ratio of these different fats for your body to function well, and when that ratio gets out of line, you begin to be dysfunctional. I'm not the best scientist to explain it in detail, but that's, for a layperson, effectively what it comes down to, and this is why seed oils are bad for you, you know, like cottonseed oil and corn oil, and soybean oil and canola oil, and we don't get a much three, which means it's completely out of balance, which means you have high levels of inflammation, which means you have the baseline to succumb to chronic disease, and basically all chronic disease whether that be cancer or diabetes or heart disease or osteoporosis or all those things at their foundation have inflammation and inflammation.
Speaker 2:you know, when you have healthy omega-6 omega-3 ratios, your inflammation is dramatically reduced. When you have too much omega-6, you get higher inflammation, which is basically your body saying I'm trying to process a bunch of things out of my system that I shouldn't have.
Speaker 1:I'm basically building myself poorly and I think Stefan, pierre showed as well Pierre, we love Blancur is that grain fat, soy fat protein, animal protein, that balance is completely out of balance. Way too much omega-6, very low omega-3. And they showed with grass fat et cetera, that the omega-3, 6 ratio was much better. And you're now saying that's a good, it's an indication. It's not. Of course this means health and this means science, et cetera. Sorry, I cut you off. Actually, on Stefan, you were going to say something omega-3 and 6.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, Keep going. I mean what Stefan says. You know, if you look, would you rather like imagine? I mean look. Would you rather like imagine? I mean not, you don't imagine you're a cannibal, but like think about, think about a, a human who is an athlete, and think about a human who's been eating um pizza and beer for two years. Like, if you think about a cow, that's an athlete, that's out running around, that's healthy, that's jumping, it's bounding and things like that, like it's it's meat is, is is healthier for you than a cow that's been eating pizza and beer for a year, which is corn fed right, like the inflammation markers in the meat, the stress hormones in the meat, these things, it's all. I'm not sure I'm conveying it most eloquently right now. The effective point is um, you can see the physiological effects. Um, you can. It's it's. It beautifully connects to animal health, animal welfare and the biomechanical system function. Um, and it's it's. It's replicated across the kingdoms.
Speaker 1:So and and. Have you been attacked a lot or got a lot of criticism for picking beef as a subject? You say the biggest environmental outcome or the biggest land use is is on that, but like it's a very sensitive topic the whole meat discussion in general there are a lot of people saying we should eat drastically less, or even like the world would be better without cows. Um, like what has the last years? Um, have you changed any opinions? Have you changed any beliefs, let's say, around animal protein, while diving so deep into beef pasture and all of that?
Speaker 2:um, I can't say if we've changed many opinions. I think to a large degree we've been focusing on getting the research done and and we haven't been doing much.
Speaker 1:Communications many for you yourself, like internally for for dan kittredge, have you changed like over this research project? Until now it's not done, etc. But have you? Has your mind shifted has any, in this super sensitive topic of animal protein?
Speaker 2:and rightfully so, if you look at the circumstances of most of the meat produced in the world well, what I've one thing I do is I don't eat chicken and pork anymore and I only eat fish from the ocean. I certainly wouldn't eat eight, wouldn't eat farm-raised fish. Um, but uh, interesting, we're gonna do a series.
Speaker 1:It might be, and it's not out yet, but when you? We're gonna do a series on regenerative aquaculture, so we're going to explore the fish farming world and the non-fish farming world into depth. So just a hint that that will come at some point to a podcast player near you anyway, so that's interesting. So you stopped pork and chicken. Are you eating eggs still?
Speaker 2:uh, I am eating eggs. I do eat eggs still, I had that's what I had for breakfast today was two eggs While we were recording.
Speaker 1:People didn't hear it. I haven't been able to quit that diet.
Speaker 2:They're chickens that are on pasture. But to your point, yes, they are chickens eating grain.
Speaker 1:And fermented grain as we know now. That would be better now.
Speaker 2:Well, so sprouted, you want to sprout it for a while. You want to sprout it for a while, and I mean these grains. You know the grains all have this eight to one, ten to one, fifteen to one, omega-6, omega-3 ratio in them. So, or 30 to one or more. So you want to. It's the. You know omega-6s are much more stable and so nature will store oils in a stable fashion in seeds in omega-6 form, and then when the grain sprouts, it begins to use that oil and starts to grow and, depending on which grain it is and what the numbers were to start with at day five or at day eight, the omega-6, omega-3 ratio shifts from eight to one to one to one. And so you feed that sprouted grain, which is now a sprout, to a chicken or to a pig, or you even ferment that and again, you get much better weight gain, healthier animals.
Speaker 2:You know better epigenetic effects in the animals, profoundly better nutrient effects in the meat and the eggs. The meat and the eggs and yeah, I mean with eggs you can. I mean, if you shift the chicken's diet in a week, you'll get much better ratios in the eggs With a chicken if it takes eight weeks or 12 weeks to raise a chicken, you know, and it's the meat you have to start at birth. So that's eight weeks. You can transform the diet. If it's a pig, and that's just weeks, you can transform the diet.
Speaker 2:It's massively fast, all this can be done rapidly and the fact is you make better money doing the right thing. Whole grain sprouted costs way less than the amount of grain it takes to then grain crushed and mixed and gone rancid. It actually is better economics for the farmer. It actually is better economics for the farmer. It actually is better welfare for the animal, is better nutrition for the human and it's worse business for agribusiness, right? I mean there's economic incentives that have caused us to shift.
Speaker 2:I mean, 100 years ago, chickens were not eating corn and soy. 100 years ago, chickens were not eating corn and soy. 100 years ago, pigs were not eating corn and soy. 100 years ago, cows were not eating corn. This is not like the way animals have always eaten and there is a reason that people, when they eat meat, have negative health outcomes in many cases. But it's not the meat, it's how it's produced. And your soy burger has got all those high levels of omega-6s in it, right, and your vegetable oils have horrible levels of omega-6s in them. So from a human health, nutritional standpoint, you know there's a lot to say here, and I mean I didn't even talk about whether there should be cows on the planet. I mean, what was the Serengeti full of. You know what was the American West? Full of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but then people argue that we have so many. I mean, those numbers are interesting in general, but there is this yeah, but now we put them inside, we have more animals now than we had before. I don't think the numbers should back that up, but there's a very interesting discussion ever just to because I want to be conscious of your time as well and ask a few more questions on the wheat project. So next up is wheat. Um, you haven't, yeah. I mean what, what um should we be eating wheat in general? I think is the first question like why? Why wheat, apart from the huge footprint, because that that's undeniable well, because there's a massive variation in wheat in nutrient levels.
Speaker 1:We conquered weed, or weed conquered us.
Speaker 2:But yeah, the fact is we eat a lot of grain. You know, whether you're in a in a wheat-based diet or a rice-based diet, I mean grains are a significant portion of the diet of industrialized, civilized quote-unquote. You know people can't see my air quotes in the video because there's no video in the audio, because you're not getting it. But you know, since we started quote unquote agriculture, which is when we stopped doing, you know, systemic, brilliant, indigenous permaculture grains have taken on a much larger portion of our diets because they're stable and they can be stored and you can, you know, have cities and have armies and things when you are eating grains. So we have a lot of grains in our diet and and there's a lot of of you know difficulty that people have digesting grains. In some cases they can't. They can't eat wheat, et cetera. But if you feed them an old chlorazone wheat or a, you know I mean a lot of, a lot of that.
Speaker 2:A lot of the gluten intolerance seems to have started when we hybridized wheat. And you know, humans were eating wheat for a long time and not experiencing gluten intolerance, but they were also eating sourdough bread. So they were lacto-fermenting. And anybody who's from India, who knows anything at all, knows, you don't just cook the rice, you sprout the rice first, you release the phytase inhibitors. There's all this wisdom, not just about how the food is grown but then how it's produced. So we were talking about the ultra-processed food. Like this is the Western price work and you know all that kind of thing where, where traditional cultures that seem to have healthy physiological development, they lacto-fermented their food, they lacto-fermented their meat, they lacto-fermented their milk, they lacto-fermented their grain, they lacto-fermented their, their um, their vegetables. They pre-digested with microbes their, their food, which is, you know, as I said, one of the presentations that we're going to have for the conference is how you can pre-digest the food for your animals, whether they're cows or chickens or pigs, to get that similar beneficial effect.
Speaker 2:So, but from a foundational standpoint, there are many different varieties of wheat and they're grown in many different ways, and so begin to tease out what would be the you know, more optimal biochemical matrix in your grain you're working with, and then how to produce it. You know, I think is a piece of this process. What's exciting about taking on wheat and then other subsequent crops is now that we've got this relationship with the Dacias and we've spent three years figuring out how to do nutrient density research. We hopefully can do it in six months instead of three years and for a quarter million instead of a million. So now that we've figured out how to define nutrient density, we think we can really speed up the process and do it much more inexpensively, so that it becomes plausible in a couple of years to have 10 or 20 crops defined, so that it becomes plausible to engineer the meters that can be used to bring that insight to the market. So it's a multi-year, you know systemic process, but I feel like we're making pretty good headway.
Speaker 1:Um, and do you think it'll be. No, it's. It's impossible to like. The wheat part is so interesting now because it's so interesting.
Speaker 1:If we should be eating that at all, I am definitely, but we're. It's such a big part of our culture. It seems even bigger than than animal protein, and but it's not, so it's not such a touchy subject until you, um, it's very interesting what role it plays breaking bad, like breaking bread together, or um, the rice piece in many cultures, or like it's such a big thing, um, and it's, it's very interesting and it's such a big hectare it's like acreage globally, like the impact in terms of it's just, is it white flour?
Speaker 2:is it? Is it whole flour, right? Is it? I mean white rice or brown rice, is it? You know? Are you? Are you sprouting? Are you sprouting the wheat before you grind it and then lacto-ferment it into sourdough bread? Or are you taking white flour and then putting these totally unnatural expanding agents into it and causing it you go from flour to bread in 15 minutes, literally the whole thing. They mix it with water, they put this compound in. It gets really big, they flash, cook it and it's like white bread is just an atrocious substance. It's not really bread, right? Technically it's not legally bread, because it wasn't. It didn't raise with yeast, it wasn't raised with it didn't expand with it, didn't ferment. There was no. I mean, yeah, this whole thing of what we call food and the ultra-processed product, it really in many cases is just not food. I call it junk, let's call it junk. Let's not beat around the bush here.
Speaker 1:Let's not be nice.
Speaker 2:You know, I'm very curious who's that guy you're talking about? Yeah, Eddie.
Speaker 1:I'm going to give Eddie a shout out here. Eddie Abue. Find him on Instagram. He eddie. I'm gonna give eddie a shout out here. Eddie abu. Find him on instagram.
Speaker 2:Um, he's definitely not going around the bush about ultra-precious is that pc?
Speaker 1:no, he's, he's. This is not something you I mean and he just reads out ingredients of, uh, for sure, he was new to me. I saw henry the movie introduced me to him, uh, to the wonderful world of eddie and um, real food, and, of course, not everything he says is true and I'll start writing emails, people, please. Um, but he's hitting a nerve with with people and just very simply showing ingredients and showing what kind of crap is in there, and you shouldn't be putting this in your body. This is not food, and and so the message is children's bodies yeah, and children's bodies and in general.
Speaker 1:And he's an ex-bodybuilder, he has been on the, I think, the steroids and and all of that and knows what, what how important the body is and and he's having a very successful instagram channel at the moment. This might be over when, when this goes out, I don't think so because he's hitting a nerve and he's being kicked out of supermarkets for reading out ingredients.
Speaker 1:So definitely go and check Eddie out, but also go and check Dan out. I'm super interested in what's going to come out, of course, of the beef piece, but definitely also the wheat piece and the conference that's coming up. So make sure you follow that if you're interested in that topic. Otherwise you wouldn't be here one hour and five minutes after we started recording. So I'm imagining you're interested. Go and sign up and follow some of the amazing speakers that Dan has put together. So I want to thank you so much for the work you do, coming back here after three years, which is way too long and, of course, for putting together an amazing conference that anybody can follow from anywhere.
Speaker 2:And thank you for all the amazing work you've been doing. Kuhn, it's really wonderful to have known you from right when you got started and to see all the really amazingly positive effect you've been having. It's been a lot of fun, great.
Speaker 1:Appreciation and respect. Thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. For the show notes and links we discussed in this episode, check out our website investinginregenerativeagriculturecom. Forward slash posts. If you liked this episode, why not share it with a friend or give us a rating on Apple Podcasts? That really helps. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you.
