Nutrient Dense Food

This appeared in the January 2, 202 edition of The Fish Wrap

How do you get the most bang for your food buck? What makes a high value food? Food gives us nutrients which we use for fuel  and the building blocks for growth and repair. Whole foods have more nutrients than processed food. So one way to think about bang for your buck is nutrient density.

Processing food strips it of nutrients. This means that you have to eat a lot more bulk to get the fuel and building blocks your body needs. Have you ever eaten a super-sized fast food meal until you were full and found yourself hungry a few hours later and found your energy level dipping into sleepiness? You filled up on empty bulk and now your cells are starving for fuel. When you eat whole, nutrient dense foods, you are satiated and you stay satiated for longer. Your energy levels stay even and your body has the building blocks it needs for growth and repair.

Dan Kittredge of the Bionutrient Food Association has a mission to raise the nutrient density of our food supply. He, along with many other collaborators, has created a spectrometer that will measure the nutrient density of food. In the near future, this instrument will just be another lense on your smartphone that you will use to make decisions while shopping. The device is ready and now they are building the dataset. To learn more, go to bionutrient.org.

At Regenerative Live Farm, we embrace practices that increase the nutrient density of food. It all starts with the soil. Our passion is for increasing the health of the life-giving soil. Every decision we make, from no-till to composting is based on how it will affect the soil. The produce and eggs that are grown and raised on that soil have higher nutrient density.