FoA 286: Nutrient Density and the Future of Quality-Driven Food Systems with Dan Kittredge

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bionutrient Food Association: <a href= "https://bionutrient.org/">https://bionutrient.org/</a></span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bionutrient Institute: <a href= "https://www.bionutrientinstitute.org/">https://www.bionutrientinstitute.org/</a> </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bionutrient meter: <a href= "https://bionutrient.org/bionutrientmeter">https://bionutrient.org/bionutrientmeter</a> </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Over the past few years, the term “nutrient density” has been popping up more and more. There are a lot of claims being made about farming practices like regenerative agriculture producing more nutritious food or more nutrient dense food. But is this true? I mean, if you increase the amount of one nutrient are you really making it more nutrient dense or are you maybe just doing so at the expense of other nutrients? And if there are more of any given nutrient in a product, does that make it necessarily healthier? </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The truth is we don’t really know. There is no agreed upon standard for nutrient density. And many people and companies are not letting that stop them latching onto the term and running with it for their own marketing purposes. You’ve heard evidence of that right here on previous episodes of this show. Also, without collecting a large amount of data on the various compounds in agricultural products, we can’t really even say if it matters.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our guest today is making progress in defining nutrient density with data and has created an open-source consumer-priced handheld bionutrient meter that can provide a real time percentile of nutrient compound levels in eight different crops so far. He has a vision of someday using nutrient density as an important data point to optimize our food system in a variety of ways. But first we need the data to define what the nutrient profile should look like in each crop and the instrumentation