Food is at the heart of both our greatest health challenges and our most promising solutions, Dr. Amy Godfrey told the audience at last week’s Regenerative Food Systems Investment (RFSI) Europe event in Brussels.
The challenges grow more painfully obvious every year—a point Dr. Godfrey, an analyst at VC firm The First Thirty—underscored with a list of sobering statistics. Among adults over the age of 18, 50% have at least one chronic disease. Around 70% of worldwide deaths are caused by chronic diseases that are largely preventable. Meanwhile, the costs associated with these diseases are in the trillions each year.
“The worldwide increase in life expectancy should be an opportunity for us to live longer, more fulfilling lives, but the reality is, we are medicated and sick for a large portion of those latter years,” she said.
The good news is that the link between soil health and human health is becoming more obvious, too, presenting an opportunity for regenerative agriculture and food systems that prioritize more than simply high yields.
The prize of such a transition would be substantial, she said. “Better health, higher economic growth and less pressure on our health services,” to name just a few benefits.
Nutritional quality ‘a byproduct’ of environment
“Nutrition is microbially mediated through the health of the soil, into the plant and into the food that we consume,” Edacious CEO and cofounder Eric Smith, who was onstage with Dr. Godfrey.
Edacious has developed software to map the nutritional density of whole foods from meat and milk to fresh produce, and during the RFSI panel, Smith said the company is “beginning to see strong, systematic evidence that shows how that nutrition is actually mediated into the plant and thereby into our bodies.”
Anecdotally, he added, we all have lived experiences of this connection between soil health and nutrition: “When we taste good food, we can sense that something good happened in how it was produced. Nutritional quality of food is a byproduct of the environmental condition [in which it] is produced.”
You are what you don’t eat
Planetary Alliance cofounder and registered nutritionist Ali Morpeth, who was also on the panel, said getting healthy, regeneratively grown food to everyone is more than just an accessibility challenge. It’s critical that we also consider diet quality.
“We have very high incidence of obesity, but at the same time we have extremely high levels of malnutrition, and sometimes those cases of malnutrition are going undiagnosed because they’re happening in populations living with obesity.”
“A diet that is low in whole grains, for example, is directly responsible for 3 million deaths every year,” said Morpeth. “A diet that is low in fruit is responsible for 2 million deaths every year,” she added.
In other words, it’s not just about what we eat too much of, it’s also about what we eat too little of.
Growing for taste
There are plenty of links along the food supply chain that bear some responsibility in this transition to better farming and therefore better health, suggested panelists.
“When it comes to consumers, I don’t think we’ve got a job to be done there,” said Morpeth. “When we go out and we talk to people about their preferences for a healthy diet, almost everybody wants to eat a healthy diet.”
“The difficulty that we have is the accessibility, the affordability of [regenerative] foods, and the prolific marketing and promotion of low-quality, ultra-processed foods, which are dominating our supermarkets.”
So while there’s plenty of work to be done still around educating consumers, there’s also a great need to restructure our food environments and make healthy food available to everyone, she added. This is more a lift for food corporates and retailers that control which foods the average consumer sees day in, day out.
Smith called “ultra-processed foods,” or UPFs, into question: “We have to get out of that diet,” he said, flatly, adding that we also must address the issue of chemicals impacting food safety.
Finally, he said, there’s making sure that food is nutrient dense because “all of our dietary systems and recommendations are actually built on minimum daily intakes, not optimization and what is healthy living.”
How can we optimize for healthy living? Grow for taste, said Smith.
“The way we’ve designed [the food system] is optimizing for yields and carbohydrates and calories; what we’ve sacrificed is actually taste, and taste is directly correlated to nutrition,” said Smith. “If we actually want to get people eating those fruits and vegetables again, if we want to get people eating the right fats that are related to healthy ecosystems, we need to make food taste good again, and we need to make people excited about eating that food.
“I think the real shift culturally in this is getting people connected back to the land, getting people excited about the food,”
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Author Jennifer Marston
