HOW DOES REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE AFFECT THE NUTRITIONAL VALUE OF OUR FOODS?
Regeneratively grown meat mimics the natural ratios of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids. Meanwhile, plants grown in healthy soils contain more phytochemicals, which relieve inflammation in the body.
A conversation with Dr. David R. Montgomery, of the University of Washington, co-author with Anne Biklé of “What Your Food Ate”
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HART HAGAN: What are some of the nutrients that are missing in our food? If we go to the grocery and get conventionally grown vegetables and fruits, what are some of the nutrients that are low in our diet that could be better if we ate plants that are grown in healthy soil and animals that eat healthy plants?
DAVID MONTGOMERY: One of those near the top of the list for folks who consume meat and dairy products, if you look at the the average Western diet today, there's about a 10 to 1, or 20 to 1 ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in conventionally raised food.
That's a big imbalance. If you look at wild game for example it's close to one to one. That’s the ancestral human diet. When we first started eating meat, some thousands of years ago you're eating meat that had a roughly 1 to 1 balance of omega-6 to omega-3. If you look at regeneratively raised beef and pork, we can get that ratio down to about 1 to 1, just like wild game, but 2-1, 3-1, 4-1 are common ratios.
And then there are the studies from the dietary fields that would recommend a ratio of 2-1 as healthy for people. So it's not like we have to have a perfect balance between Omega-6 and Omega-3, but getting 20 times the Omega 6s to Omega 3s, that's imbalanced.
And why is our diet so rich now? Well, processed food is a big piece of that because a lot of seed oils are used in processed food production and seeds are rich in Omega-6’s.
EXCESSIVE SEED OILS ARE CONNECTED WITH CHRONIC DISEASE
And then a lot of our conventional beef and dairy is fed seed-derived feeds, which means they're awash in omega-6 as well. This issue is also at the heart of many of the feedlot diseases that one sees plaguing our confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). These diseases don't tend to affect as many animals that are pasture-raised.
So, the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is a big deal. There's also been a number of studies that have looked at the decline in mineral abundance, and particularly mineral micronutrients, like copper and zinc. Some of the major elements have declined as well, since the second world war, when people started measuring these things.
There are a number of explanations that have been offered to explain what has contributed to the declining mineral content of foods. Crop breeding has certainly been one of them, where we've bred crops for high yield.
If a wheat plant, for example, takes up the same amount of iron from the soil because the roots are just like they used to be but they're putting twice as many seeds out, well, then they're spreading that iron through twice as many seeds. Each seed gets half the iron so that translates directly into a reduction in our diet. If we eat the same amount of wheat, we're getting half the iron.
Some of those studies are fairly controversial in terms of their net effects and I reviewed a lot of them for “What Your Food Ate.” What we concluded was that there doesn't seem to be consistently huge evidence for big differences in the macronutrients--the things we need to grow and survive that we build our bodies out of.
But there have been big losses in the things that help provide functionality to our health, the health of our bodies through mineral micronutrients and vitamins.
WHAT ARE PHYTOCHEMICALS?
And phytochemicals are the other thing that conventional food production has definitely reduced in our crops, things like beta carotene and the lycopene in tomatoes and things that relate to antioxidant, anti-inflammatory activity.
There's people in the medical profession who have theories about how that can add up over a lifetime to essentially blossom into chronic diseases, because we've deprived our bodies of many of the compounds that we need to maintain our health rather than to build our bodies and maintain our survival.
WHAT IS A NUTRIENT?
When we look at nutrition and what's been changed over the last 80 years, the first question to ask is what do you mean by a nutrient?
Is it the stuff we need to grow and survive or does it also account for all kinds of non-caloric compounds that don't contribute to the energetics of running our bodies, but are more like the oil for a car that you really need to keep the engine running.
People also need oil. You run a combustion engine long enough without adding oil, and you're going to get in trouble. And you can think of the phytochemicals and mineral micronutrients and similar compounds for the human body that help take out the trash, help the maintenance on a cellular level in our bodies and keep us functioning as well as we can for as long as we can.