 Welcome to Ancestral Health Today, evolutionary insights into modern health. Welcome to this episode of Ancestral Health Today. We have Dr. Sarah Ballantine, PhD scientist and the founder of NutriVore.com. Dr. Ballantine creates educational resources to help people improve their day-to-day diet and lifestyle choices. Empowered and informed by the most current evidence-based scientific research. Dr. Sarah Ballantine began her career as a science communicator and health educator when she launched her original website in 2011. Since then, Dr. Sarah has continued to follow the science, diving deep into immune health, metabolic health, microbiome health, and nutritional sciences. Dr. Sarah seeks to create a positive and inclusive approach to dietary guidance based in science and void dogma, using nutrient density and sufficiency as its basic principles. She goes by nourishment, not judgment. Today we had a lovely conversation about everything NutriVore, how the concept originated, what it is, and what it isn't. And I am delighted to present to you Dr. Ballantine. Welcome to the podcast. Oh, thank you so much for having me. Yes, absolutely. So let's start diving right in and talk about the work that you have been doing. You are an amazing scientist that's very well known, that's very thorough, and that people really respect. So I'm really, really excited to get to hear about your latest body of work. Let's start with a question. What is NutriVore? So NutriVore is a not terribly original play on words, right? A carnivore eats meat, an herbivore eats plants, and a NutriVore eats nutrients. But really I would describe it as a dietary philosophy where the goal is to get all of the nutrients we need from the foods we eat. And that is the beginning, middle, and end of what NutriVore is. My challenge then is to teach you how, right, what nutrients do in the body, what foods contain them, and what amounts, how to combine different foods. You're getting the full spectrum of nutrients you need. And one of the things that's been really both eye-opening and liberating in creating those like nutritional sciences for the general public resources, as I have built up, you know, NutriVore and all of the different resources that have gone along with it so far, is realizing that there are potentially infinite ways to combine foods to meet your nutritional needs. And it, to me, then creates a permissive dietary structure rather than a restrictive one. And I think restrictive diets have really run their course. They've really hit the limits of what they can do. And in fact, they are now being, they're now more like trade-off diets, right? So I'm going to trade something like my gut microbiome health for weight loss. Whereas NutriVore, as a permissive dietary structure, it really embraces whole foods and a very diverse diet. It's very plant-forward, but there's no food that's off limits. So it automatically really encourages balance as well as a healthier mindset when it comes to food and kind of getting away from dogmatic approaches to diet and getting away from restrictive mindsets, which I think have come to the point where the restrictions are so severe in a lot of popular diets right now that we're just digging ourselves into an even deeper nutrient deficiency hole. Yeah, absolutely. So what is the science behind NutriVore and how does that science relate to nutrient density? Yeah, so I think that the science is the field of nutritional sciences, right? The entire field of nutritional sciences is what underlies all of the resources that I'm creating and very much looking at scientific consensus rather than making conclusions based on a handful of studies. I'm looking at where the preponderance of evidence is. So I use a lot of systematic reviews and meta-analyses to inform my work now. So those are studies that pool together data from sometimes five, sometimes 100 different either perspective epidemiological studies or randomized control clinical trials depending on what they're looking at or sometimes one systematic review will include analyses from both. So these are studies that are designed to understand where the majority of the evidence is because in science it's not often clear cut, right? We are complicated biological organisms and so often there might be like one or two studies that disagree with the other eight or 10. What meta-analyses do is they look at the quality of the studies, how they're controlled, what the statistical power is and then try to understand where the truth is. So those are the types of studies that I look at and then that's always reinforced with mechanistic studies, which would be in veto and in vitro work. Those aren't studies that measure whether or not something happens. Those are studies that measure how it happens. So they support the epidemiology. And so it's really looking at this vast collection of studies that look at how nutrient shortfalls in the diet increase risk for both chronic and infectious and acute disease. Every thing that could possibly go wrong with our health is linked with our nutrient status in one or multiple ways. And you can then look at the how, right? So what is the role of that nutrient in that biological system that not having enough of that nutrient is stressing the system in such a way that makes it more vulnerable to something going wrong? So it is really the entire field of nutritional sciences that is the supportive scientific basis for NutriVor. Because I think the logic is sort of irrefutably logical, right? Like, we have a requirement for nutrients, let's get it from food. I mean, that is the entire actual action of NutriVor. So just understanding what those nutrients do, how they relate to health and symptomology, and then what foods have them in sufficient quantities so that we can get as much as we need from foods. Like that is the entire scientific foundation for NutriVor. Yeah, that's amazing. How did you come to conceptualize all of these connections, linking nutrients to conditions, and how is that going to play out in the future of this framework? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So I don't think there was one Eureka moment for me. There wasn't one like Epiphany where I was like, oh, it's all about the nutrients. I think this was a slow gradual realization. So I have been a nutrient nerd for my entire history in the wellness community. As I was entering the wellness community, it was the exact same time as Dr. Terry Wall's TEDxIowaCity talk was going viral, where that was all about the nutrient requirements of mitochondria. And so my earliest work was looking at the nutrient requirements of the immune system and how the immune system requires a huge amount of nutrients in order to regulate itself properly. And then as I progressed more into gut health research and understanding the gut microbiome, that again had a really strong link with the nutrient density of our diet. So our gut bacteria are also very sensitive to the nutritional resources that we provide them. And so as I have expanded my knowledge, I've become more and more of a nutrient nerd at every single step of the way. And at the same time in interfacing with the community and seeing the rise of ever more restrictive diets, the gaining popularity, I've had more and more conversations with people who have tried to diet based on some kind of promise of some kind of miraculous health impact and then found themselves with even worse health linked to nutrient deficiencies. And so I think I've seen this from like both sides of the coin, like one is just the compelling science of why nutrients are important and why nutrient dense foods are important to incorporate into our diets because those are the foods that expedite the goal of getting all the nutrients our bodies need. While seeing that the diets that are gaining a popularity are the diets that are cutting out more and more food. So they're cutting out all sources of important nutrients and they're magnifying a problem that already exists. The problem is that nearly everyone has multiple nutrient shortfalls and this increases risk for health problems. And so when we follow fad diets, we're basically going from the frying pan into the fire in terms of those nutrient shortfalls. We're expanding them instead of shrinking them and that is then increasing risk for even more health problems or in some cases, right, nutrient shortfalls can actually drive disease activity. So it's actually worsening health outcomes over a short period of time for some people. And so I really recognize there was a need to create a resource to address this problem. And as I was doing this research and feeling inspired to expand my own diet, seeing that there were foods that I was avoiding that were not foods I could rationalize avoiding as I learned more and more about nutrients and the gut microbiome and that interface, I started to realize how much of what I had learned about nutrition was restriction focused and it wasn't about what foods do I eat that improve my health. It was about what foods do I avoid and a diet isn't healthy based on what you don't eat. It's what you do eat that matters. So all of that kind of culminated in for me starting to conceptualize Nutri4 about five years ago, starting some of the early research and some of the early foundational resources like the Nutri4 score, which is a measurement of nutrient density. So all of those things came out of, you know, seeing this problem in the wellness community of we're not getting enough nutrients and that it doesn't lead to wellness. Yeah, I completely agree. I think you know, I'm an autoimmune protocol certified coach and one of the things that I discuss in my discovery meetings with clients is that we're not going to work on being on a restrictive diet to fear food and stay there forever. But if we're going to go that route, it means that we're going to work really hard on addressing the issues that are causing the problems that you can ultimately expand what you're doing because understanding the microbiome and understanding immunity, you know that those restrictions lead to even having to go further down the road of restrictions because you're just resorting to just, you know, a very small group of foods. Absolutely. Yeah, so that's really how I drive the work that I do as well. But you were very well known or you are very well known. So how did you start making that transition from AIP to Nutri4? And, you know, how did those fears and potentially development of eating disorders, you know, play into the work that you're doing now? Yeah, so I think, I mean, the work that I'm doing now is the very natural progression of the work that I did in the autamine protocol because one of my first contributions to the autamine protocol was bringing in that nutrient density focus. And when I started conceptualizing Nutri4, it was within the context of creating a tool for autamine protocol followers to be able to make sure that they're getting the full range of nutrients that they need. And it actually informed modifications to the reintroduction orders that I released several years, four or five years ago now because that was looking at the gut microbiome and nutrient density and reevaluating like, these foods are actually really important. We need to try them as soon as possible. And so all of that work was happening at the same time as I was realizing that I had hit a very comfortable place in my own autamine protocol journey, and I was not challenging foods anymore. I wasn't trying foods anymore. And, you know, doing this research, looking at the incredible health benefits of, for example, pulsed legumes like chickpeas and lentils and split peas and not knowing if they worked for me or not. And so I was really faced with like challenging my own food fears and working to get over them. And so the first few foods that I tried went really well. I felt better when I reintroduced lentils. They became a regular part of my diet. And that gave me a lot of confidence to start expanding. And I started expanding then into foods that I was fairly certain did not work for me. And what I found was I was really in my head. So trying tomatoes from my garden and just, is that joint pain? Is my stomach upset? Is my skin acting up? I realized that the stress response of having developed a restrictive mindset around those foods was causing me to be sort of paranoid a little bit and was causing the symptoms that I was like trying to figure out if they were a reaction to the food. They weren't a reaction to the food. They were a reaction to my stress over eating a tomato, which, you know, the vast majority of literature shows that tomatoes are anti-inflammatories. So I knew that science and yet I had a lot of what I realized was sort of like disordered eating patterns that were learned through the autonomy protocol. And I think when you discover that foods trigger symptoms, that fear is earned. But what I've discovered over the last few years is that the only food for me that really doesn't work is gluten. And I was avoiding many, many more foods than just gluten out of fear that it might trigger symptoms and sort of like trying the food and then being so in my head about whether or not am I tired? Like is my stomach upset? Is this a symptom? And when I was finally able to let go of that fear, I was able to recognize that, no, these foods are absolutely working for me. And actually I feel better with a more diverse diet and being able to mix up the different foods that I am eating. So I think that addressing my own food fears is what led me to decide to build NutriVor as a general health approach and really focus in on the research that is looking at overall health outcomes. So things like all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease risk, type 2 diabetes risk, cancer risk, Alzheimer's or dementia risk. These like really big long-term health outcomes and conditions that are typically risk increases pretty dramatically with aging. And take myself out of this really like narrow view of like what is the immune system doing? Because immune system of course is contributing to the pathogenesis of all of these conditions. So being able to like just take a step back and go, I need to build NutriVor as a general health approach. It needs to be permissive and it cannot engage with food fear. Like I'm learning for myself as I face my fears, how much of a disservice they have done for me in my own health journey, in my own relationship with food, in my relationship with my body, in my own sense of body positivity. Like all of that's been colored by these food fears. And so NutriVor needs to be a permissive approach where we focus on those foods that are really health promoting and no food needs to be off the table. And that's what has really led me to dig into the science in a very different way, right? A very different way than I engaged with it 12 years ago when I was first starting to understand how nutrients impacted immune function and instead look much bigger picture. And I think what's so powerful about approaching, I won't call NutriVor a diet, a dietary philosophy this way, is that it reveals how much health benefit we can get from very small changes. And it really shows that it doesn't need to be all or nothing. And I think diet culture has taught us, like if you're not perfect, it doesn't, like you eat one thing off plan, all of your progress is gone, right? It's perfect or bust. And what the science really shows is that if you go from eating no vegetables to one serving a day, there's a huge beneficial health impact. Bigger in magnitude than going from four to five servings per day, right? That first baby step is so important. And if that's all you can handle right now, that has tremendous benefits to long-term health outcomes. And it allows, I think, healthy eating to be affordable, accessible. It's not intimidating. And I think the like all or nothing mentality that is so prevalent in diet culture is a barrier to entry for a lot of people. And YouTube just kind of strips that away and just says, hey, look, here's the scientific evidence showing that just that, one serving of fruit or one serving of vegetables, one serving of seafood per week, and look at the health benefit that you can have. It takes something that seems like an insurmountable to-do list for diet and turns it into, oh, I got that. Oh, I can do that. And I think taking that approach also takes the stress out of food. And I think that is one of the things that the wellness community needs right now, because right now all diets are so, everyone's so wound because it has that like perfect robust mentality. Yeah. And I don't think people realize how real the stress response is from a biochemical perspective and how many symptoms can be derived from a stress response. I don't think that, yeah, go ahead. All of the symptoms of a food intolerance. The overlap is exact. The Venn diagram of that is a circle. So that's what I realized as I was challenging foods. I was like, oh, everything I think is a food reaction is just a stress response because I need to let go of my fear. Yeah, absolutely. So let's switch a little bit to how that applies to the realities of how busy our lives are. And the presence of so much food, that's really convenient, but it's really often low in nutrients. How does a NutriVor approach help to navigate our very real, very void food landscape? So I would say there are like the three main action steps of NutriVor. So the first is to eat mostly whole foods. So ideally 80% of our calories or more would come from whole and minimally processed foods. So that would include things like frozen foods, right? Canned vegetables or canned fish would be included in that. So foods that undergo a little bit of processing but still have the majority of their nutrients intact. Those are the foods that ideally would make up about 80% of our calories. The other 20% can come from ultra processed foods without having a negative health impact. And that is well supported by a number of large systematic studies. So that gives us permission to figure out like how does that 20% a stretch a budget or make it really easy for me to get dinner on the table at the right time, especially on like soccer practice night when everything's so busy. It gives us permission to incorporate cultural traditional foods. Foods we just really love that are quality of life foods, foods that supply joy, even if they don't supply a lot of nutrition. And that is the breakdown between like whole and ultra processed foods. You can actually shift that blurry line if you think about nutrient dense and nutrient underwhelming foods, right? So the more really nutrient dense foods you're eating, so things like fish and shellfish, vegetables, fruit, pulse legumes, nuts and seeds, organ meat, right? The more of those foods we're eating, the more room there is for, we'll call them empty calories because that's a phrase that everyone's familiar with, but like foods that don't offer a lot of nutritional aids. So depending on exactly how many of these like super nutrient dense foods you're choosing, you can actually meet your nutritional needs with as little as like 30 to 40% of your total caloric intake. So that leaves a lot of room for nutritionally underwhelming foods while still meeting your body's nutritional needs. So that means there's even more flexibility to go, okay, well, rice is not a super nutrient dense food, but it's a really important food for me to cook my, you know, my family's recipes or it's a really important budget stretching food. So I can incorporate this as part of that, you know, 40 to 50% of foods that aren't, you know, super nutrient dense and it's not an ultra processed food. So there's this other way of kind of dividing the line, right? So we can say 80, 20 when it comes to whole foods versus ultra processed foods, but we can say 50, 50 or 40, 60 when it comes to really nutrient dense foods and everything else. So that's like one, right? That's one action step. The second one is just dietary diversity. Eat as many different foods as possible. And this has been studying a lot of different ways, but studies show that it matters more how many different foods you're eating than what those foods actually are. And that, it makes sense when you think of it in terms of nutrient variety. So the more different foods you're eating, the more likely you are to be getting a wider variety of nutrients and you're less likely to have nutrient shortfalls. And especially when you think of foods like vitamin C versus polyphenols that have a lot of similar activity, right? They're both really important water soluble antioxidants in the body. So the more different foods we're eating, the more likely it is that even if we're not quite meeting our nutrient needs for a nutrient, we are making up with another nutrient that can perform kind of the same job in our biology. So the system that needs those antioxidants, for example, is not stressed. So just eating as many different foods as possible that refers to the whole food ingredients, not pizza and cake and cookies and crackers and bread that are all made with the same five ingredients, right? And then the third action is to be plant forward. So I recommend three quarters of our plates be covered in a diversity of plant foods and one quarter be animal foods that tends to lead to a really good balance in macronutrients as well as the right balance in nutrients that are predominantly found in animal foods versus nutrients that are predominantly found in plant foods. So when we take those as like our three main action steps, there's lots of ways we can refine neutrophore from there. But when we take that as our sort of three main action steps, it makes reaching that goal of getting all the nutrients we need. Really customizable and really flexible, right? So now whatever your individual challenges are, whether it's access to food, you know that canned green beans are actually slightly more nutrient dense than fresh. Frozen vegetables are typically more nutrient dense than fresh. It kind of gives you sort of permission to choose the cheaper, more accessible option. So it helps also make healthy eating affordable and it also I think sets the bar at something really attainable. So if you just think about those as like broad dietary patterns and we get away from thinking of like yes food lists and no food lists and this like really rigid mindset in terms of food choices, I think it actually helps healthy eating fit even easier into our overall diets because also it means you don't need to be perfect. If you really want that pizza or Oreo cookies or whatever it is and the rest of your diet is very nutrient dense, there's no harm to our health from incorporating some ultra processed foods just because that's what we want. And so it actually helps us I think achieve more balance in our approach, which means that healthy eating is more sustainable over the long term because it's not a like restrict binge cycle. Yeah, so two follow up questions to that. One is the paleo and the ancestral health dietary approach has been largely geared towards one types of food and you mentioned that this gives you the permission to go into more of your own ancestral foods. So my question in that regard is what are the differences in there? In terms of the nutrient density of what has been portrayed and what may fit to a closer timeline in the ancestry of people? And two is how does this ratio fit into people who are dealing with significant chronic conditions let's say or even someone who is not metabolically healthy and we know that within that framework a lot can be addressed with food choices. So if you can answer those two. Yeah, so I think to address the idea of ancestral eating first, clearly our modern food supply is very different than what our Paleolithic ancestors would have hunted or gathered. But also, you know, we can see for example, evidence of oat consumption going back at least 40,000 years. Lagoons have been part of the ancestral diet for upwards of 200,000 years in certain regions of the world. And so I think there's certain interpretations of the ancestral diet that don't actually reflect the paleo anthropological record. And so there's interpretations of what a ancestral dietary pattern looks like within the modern food supply that are, again, a restrictive mindset. They are creating arbitrary boundaries around foods that are not supported by the scientific evidence and don't continue to follow the scientific evidence as new studies are performed. And I think one of the things that does us a disservice is this idea that foods nowadays are empty shells nutritionally compared to what they were before agriculture. There are certain phytonutrients that are like way increased in the wild versions of foods like wild berries or wild alliums, wild mushrooms, right? We'll have enrichment of certain nutrients, especially phytonutrients. Wild mushrooms can have more of the amino acid or goethionine. But the amount that our body needs is extremely attainable from the versions of those foods you're going to get at the grocery store. And we don't even need to make all of the foods we eat those whole foods in order to get what our body needs in order to be healthy. So I think the ancestral approach, right? It is a whole foods diet, but I think it is more restrictive than what I can support with the current scientific literature. And so I think what NutriVord does is it honors, right, many of these foods that have been staple foods in the human diet for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. While also recognizing that our modern food supply is abundant in nutrients. It's a complete myth that fruits and vegetables have less nutrients now than they did in the 1950s. That's actually not supported in the scientific literature. So we get to recognize that our modern food supply does have enough nutrients if we know how to choose foods from it. Obviously, it's very nutrient void if 70% of our calories are coming from ultra processed foods as the standard American diet now does. So I think it honors the modern food supply while also recognizing that you don't need to eat this perfect whole foods diet in order to get all of the nutrients that you need. In terms of people with chronic illness, a lot of chronic illnesses are associated with nutrient deficiencies that are big enough that it's really hard to bring levels up without supplementation or without addressing issues like digestion, right. So if you're talking about somebody with ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease, it's really hard to overcome nutrient insufficiencies and deficiencies because absorption of those nutrients is much lower compared to somebody without those conditions. So in the case of chronic illness, there's always some tweaking that can happen and that's going to be individualized and it's going to be something that people work on with an AIP certified coach or a retrospective dietitian or a nutritionist or a doctor. And so I think that the great thing about NutriVor is it still respects individual intolerances, allergies, sensitivities. Because there's no list of yes foods and no foods, it is a diet modifier. It is a way of understanding foods that you can apply to your preferred diet. If you love the paleo diet, you can apply NutriVor principles atop of the paleo diet. It gives you an additional knowledge base and an additional lens through which to view foods and help inform food choices within that dietary template. If you want to follow the Ottoman protocol, NutriVor is a fantastic set of tools for making sure that you don't have nutrient shortfalls in the elimination phase while also guiding decisions through reintroductions and into the maintenance phase. So NutriVor is not, it's not against other dietary templates that might be used therapeutically for chronic illness. Instead, it actually helps us get more therapeutic power of these other diets because it helps us to avoid nutrient shortfalls. So that's wonderfully said. And I was going to ask you if there was one myth that you want it dispelled from that transition. I think this really answered that question in a great way. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, so I know that you've been doing an amazing job with the NutriVor website. I had a chance to look through it. I was literally floored because there is so much great information. But before we go there, a little tangent, a little bird told me that you love to forage, which I do as well. Oh, fantastic. Yes, can we get a little bit into what got you into foraging? So I used to forage as a kid. So we grew up super poor, like very poor. So as a four-year-old, I was sent out alone with my two-year-old brother into, we lived in a townhomes. So we were sent out into the green spaces between the townhomes to pick beletus mushrooms. So I don't know, like I don't remember a time before I knew what beletus mushrooms were and how to forage them. We lived, there was salal berries, huckleberries, wild blackberries, where I grew up, and we would go for walks with empty buckets and just go pick berries. I knew what wild ramps were as a very little kid, wild garlic I knew. We used to go, we used to plan camping trips over the summer to great places to pick chanterelle mushrooms. We didn't, where I grew up, there weren't a lot of puffballs, but when we found puffballs, my mom would get so excited. It was like Christmas. Yes, absolutely. And so foraging was like part of my childhood, like we would go to the park to pick dandelion greens to have greens for dinner. And then we also grew a lot of food. And we would, I grew up near the Pacific Ocean. So we would also go down to the water and pick mussels if there was no red tide, or if sometimes there was one beach that had oysters, although there usually wasn't a ton of them. So it was just something that was part of my childhood due to the combination of poverty, but also having a family that was full of amateur naturalists and just nature nerds in general. And then it's something that, like as I went to college and went into grad school and moved away from home and got married and had kids. It was something that wasn't really part of my life until I got my dog three and a half years ago right before the pandemic. And we started doing off leash hiking in the woods pretty much by the time she was like six or seven months old. She was very easy to train dog off leash. So that is something I'm very grateful for. And then I realized that we have chanterelle mushrooms and then I started learning more of the mushrooms. You'd find other people picking mushrooms and you say, oh, what are you picking? Oh, bicolor bleed. I don't know that one. Show me. Show me how to tell it from the beletus sonesis, which will make you throw up for four hours. I would like to know the difference. I just this year have finally found chicken of the woods and it's like super exciting. So now I'm like learning what to forage in my, my like local area now living 3,000 miles away from my family. So learning about, you know, pokeberry and all of the different right acorns that are here and how to process those. My favorite is to pick mushrooms because we have oyster mushrooms and chicken of the woods and chanterelles. Those bicolor bleeds are probably my favorite and puffballs here. There's, I'm sure there's a couple of others that I know, but the oyster mushrooms and the bicolor bleeds. The hen of the woods is one of my favorites. I haven't found hen of the woods here. And I also, we don't have birch. So I haven't found chaga, but you don't have to go too far north to in order to find chaga. Well, I have found lion's mane though. And that's a very exciting day when it's like low enough that you can reach it because most of the time when you find lion's mane, it's 30 feet up and you just look at it longingly. But yeah, it's been a wonderful. So I would call myself an opportunistic forger. I don't usually like plan a trip around foraging, but I just go for a hike in the woods every morning with my dog. And when I see something that I know is edible that I am excited about, then I pick it. So I always have, I have like a hiking backpack that I bring every single day. I mean, it's got like the leash and the dog poop bags and all that stuff in it, water and a layer, but it also always has like a pocket knife and a mushroom bag. And like though in my foraging supplies, just just in case. Yeah. A telescoping pole so you can get something from, you know, high up. Yeah. It's a great one to have. That is not something in my eye. But I don't know why I haven't put a hiking pole in my backpack. We have coyotes in the woods here. I mean, I think coyotes are now just everywhere. And every once in a while, they decided that my dog is breakfast and they follow us in the woods. And we had them sneak up behind us on the trail a few months ago now, like 15 feet behind us. Like it was, it was scary. And I have a whistle and I have bear spray as well in my backpack for the coyotes. And for like a week afterwards, I carried a hiking pole, sort of as an additional, just something to swing around at the coyotes because they were definitely out and about for that week. But yeah, that is a great idea. I'm just going to strap that onto my backpack and that will become a normal part of the extra gear that I carry around every morning, just in case. Yeah. It's really helpful. And I'll also send you a big chunk of chaga that I have. Yes. So I just get so excited when other people forage as well because it's such a big passion. And I mean, talking about nutrient density is just, it doesn't get better than that. Yeah. And flavor, like it's just even like oyster mushrooms you can get at the store, but they are nothing compared to the oyster mushrooms that you can pick on the woods in the morning. Yeah, absolutely. And people don't realize how easy it is to grow them in their gardens as well. Or even if you don't have an actual garden, just to grow them in your yard is also super easy. I tried inoculating cardboard with some that I picked last fall. And unfortunately forgot about it. And it was so tragic. Because I was like, well, I would have eaten them then. And it ended up not working out. But it has been on my to-do list ever since. And I still haven't managed to, every time I've picked them, I've been like, oh, we're just going to eat these ones. I think as much as I have a huge vegetable garden, I think that work of just inoculating sawdust your cardboard from wild mushrooms, that has just been like one more step that my brain can handle at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. Wine caps are really easy. So that's one to start with. Yeah. I've heard you can get. So I've never found wine caps in the woods here. I know what they look like. I don't know if they grow locally. But I've heard, I mean, it's also, the spore is pretty affordable to purchase. I've heard. Yes. Yes, it is. So we went on a wild tangent. But I am sure that, you know, people who appreciate nutrient density will appreciate the conversation because it's really, it's really fun and you're, you know, fulfilling two goals at once. You're getting your food. You're, and you're also, you know, enjoying the time that you're doing it. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. All right. So let's take advantage of the fact that we have a video podcast and take a tour of the. This website because I think that once people realize how amazing it is, they're going to be going there for a lot of information. I'm so excited. All right. So I will share my screen. So for anyone who's just listening to the audio, I will try to be as descriptive as possible of what the NutriPur website looks like. But this is the homepage. It's just nutrivor.com. You can Google it. Google understands what Nutrivor is now. And on the homepage, there are these icons that will link to different sections of the site. So I think of the resources that I'm creating is filling certain types of goals. So one is just understanding what nutrients do in the body and why they're important and how much of them we need. The other one is understanding what foods contain those nutrients. What are the best sources of those nutrients? And then what foods are the most nutrient dense? And then also supplying recipes and practical tools for being able to enjoy these foods because when we enjoy healthy foods, we eat more of them. So the first section that I want to show you is called NutriVor 101. And this is just the introduction to the dietary philosophy. It talks about the prevalence of nutrient deficiencies and insufficiencies. It talks about why it's preferable to get nutrients from foods compared to supplements and common nutrient shortfalls in popular diets. It also links to the basic understandings of understanding nutrients, the NutriVor score, which is a measurement of nutrient density, as well as linking to all of the different food families, which we divide much more granularly than how, say, like the USDA would divide food groups. So we're really looking at much more related foods nutritionally. So I look at about 50 different food families compared to four or five food groups. So NutriVor 101 is just the place to kind of start and learn about NutriVor. And it's a great home base to be able to navigate the site. The NutriVor score explains everything that goes into this calculation. It is a measurement of nutrient density that incorporates 33 nutrients into the calculation. And this page basically explains the methodology, the history of nutrient profiling. One of the things that happened when I was first developing NutriVor is my initial intent was to choose a nutrient profiling method that was already out there, that already existed. And I discovered pretty quickly that I didn't like any of them, that they all had some kind of like, it was great, it was great, it was great. And then why did you make that choice? So I ended up developing my own. It's based on the NutriVor rich food index algorithmically, but it uses a much wider collection of nutrients. So that is what is explained on the page. It's called the NutriVor score. And then the NutriVor score search is where you can search the entire database of about 8,000 foods. It's also a very smart search so you can search for a food and it will give you like every food that has that in the description, but also if you misspell something, it will understand that you misspelled it and it will rank the results by NutriVor score. So you can see the most nutrient dense options of whatever that food is and know that there's like multiple different variations typically within this database. So for carrots, you're going to have fresh carrots, boiled carrots with salt, boiled carrots without salt, canned carrots, carrot baby food. You're just going to have many different options to look at, but you can search the NutriVor score database for free. And then under nutrients, this is our like nutritional sciences education. I've lost track of how many articles there are under this. They're divided by a nutrient type, so carbohydrates, proteins and amino acids, lipids and fatty acids, vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients. And then each one of these categories has an individual article for each nutrient. So let's say you're very interested in folate. So you can click on the article for folate and learn all about it, learn, for example, like why it's important in pregnancy. You can learn about the difference between folate and folic acid. You can learn about why it's important in cardiovascular disease and cancer and neurodegenerative disease and a little bit about folate metabolism disorders, what folate deficiency looks like. And then every single one of these articles lists the best food sources which have 50% or more of the daily value per serving and good food sources which have between 10 and 50% of the daily value per serving of those foods. And then you can link directly to each one of these food articles and understand a little bit of the history of the food, what nutrients it contains, and then we have tables of the nutrients as well as visual representations of the nutrients they contain. So these graphs here show visually the vitamin and mineral content in relationship to the daily value present in one serving of this is the pomegranate page. There's lots of really beautiful graphic summaries of the information and then there's also the understanding of the health benefits of the nutrients for which this food has the most of, right? So pomegranates are really good sources of copper, of polyphenols, and of fiber. So a little bit of explanation of why those nutrients are important and then you can link back to the nutrient articles from there. You can also just jump straight to foods either in the nutrient facts section or in the foundational foods. So nutrient facts are just organized by nutrient density, so by nutrient per score and under foundational foods they're organized by food family. And here's where you learn about the 12 foundational food groups on YouTube. So these are the food families that have something unique to offer us nutritionally. So they're the foods that expedite that goal of getting all of the nutrients that we need. So from here we can, for example, learn more about root vegetables. We have all of the reasons why root vegetables are good, examples of root vegetables, and then all of the foods that are root vegetables listed underneath. And then we can go and learn more about that food's specific nutrients. So the last two main sections of the site, one is recipes. We are adding, by the way, I think typically like four to eight new articles to the site every single week. So if something's not here when you're looking, come back because it will be potentially here before you know it. Or join my Patreon and put in your specific request for something to come to the site. So there's a lot of recipes and the recipes also have nutrients for us. You can see the nutrient density whole recipe. And there's also a section on daily values, which goes through all of the nutrient requirements for all of the essential nutrients by age group and biological sex, as well as for pregnant and lactating females so that you can understand how much of these nutrients you need. And then link back to the nutrients, understand more, link to the foods that have them, understand more, then link to a recipe that cooks that food so that you can enjoy it. So it's all interconnected. And there's many more like corners of this website that are planned for the future. So we're hoping to, in the next few months, have sections on chronic conditions and how those link to diseases and then you can link to, chronic conditions have those linked to nutrients and then which foods have those nutrients. So that gives us like yet another way to link all of this information between our health as well as the practical part of following the diet. At the top in the menus, there's learn, which is basically start here, practice, which is very practical focused resources, master, which is for the super nutrients who want to dig into it very deeply. And join is the most important tab for me to point out because this is where you can get five free guides when you sign up for my newsletter. And this is where you can link to me across social media as well as find links to my Patreon. Wonderful. And as if this isn't already robust enough, I am still looking forward to the chronic conditions link because I think that's going to be super, super important for people to navigate their nutritional needs within a chronic condition and going back to being able to have as much freedom to choose as possible and make that in a way that is nutrient dense. So that will be amazing. One thing that I wanted to touch up, I know that we're coming up on time, but I wanted to really address the needs of our growing generations and the younger populations, right? Because they are experiencing disease at a younger and younger age. And I wanted you to help parents, again, navigate the reality of how busy our lives are and how much falls under the responsibility of the nuclear family to care for kids, but also understanding how important it is for kids to have that foundation and nutritional base early on in order to minimize risk in the future. So if you can speak to that. Yeah, I mean, what I would ideally like to see is nutritional sciences being taught in schools in a way that gives people the type of foundation they need when they graduate school, same as you understand your times tables or basic grammar, having a basic understanding of nutritional sciences mostly to help people identify misinformation online. Like I think this would be huge for just being able to be like a centering influence for people making nutrition decisions. In the absence of that, that is what I'm creating with NutriVor, is that nutritional sciences education. I have a book coming out in May called NutriVor, which is a great intro to all of these different concepts and really highlights specific connections between nutrients and chronic conditions and symptoms. So it really brings this whole thing into a very personal light. And there's lots of information in there relevant to every stage of life. So a great place to start for parents to understand nutrients to be able to teach their kids. The number one thing that I would recommend as a mother of two teenage daughters is to take a step back from labeling foods as healthy and unhealthy. That is how they are taught. My plate right now in school is these foods are healthy and these foods are unhealthy. There's a lot of psychology research that shows that when you restrict foods, when you make foods called something bad, it actually increases obsession with those foods. It increases the desire for those foods. It makes them the forbidden pleasure and it can actually drive disordered eating patterns. And so I think one of the best things that we can do as we are educating our children about what foods are foods that supply our body with nutrients is to talk about foods, right? I have one TikTok follower suggest between fuel and fun. Fuel foods supply nutrients and fun foods supply joy. And to not say that one is better than the other, but that we actually need both and we need them in the right proportions, right? We need a lot more fuel foods than fun foods. And I think if we can take that, I think that approach is really hard for us as adults who have so much diet culture judgments of foods ingrained, but at the same time, I think it's a major part of looking at our own biases and the misinformation that we have been following for so long to help teach our kids a more balanced approach to adopting a healthy diet so that they don't fall for the same things that we have as they grow and start to make their own food decisions. And I think that too when kids are taught to or they are facilitated in eating nutrient dense foods that those foods also become the fun foods because I grew up eating these things and if you put a plate of liver and mushrooms in front of me, to me that's a lot of fun. I am enjoying eating the heck out of that. So it makes a huge difference how you grow up eating in terms of what you choose and enjoy as an adult. Great. So anything else that we have in cover that you would like to say? Just come check out NutriVor.com. My book, NutriVor, again, is coming in May. It's available for pre-order now. And please come follow me across social media. I am at Dr. Sarah Ballantine just about everywhere. You might be spending time online. Wonderful. Wonderful. And we'll make sure that those are also on the show notes so everybody can find you. And thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to share your ideas, your knowledge, your scientific rigor with our public, with our audience. And we're looking forward to, you know, leading people to your website and making sure that if everybody doesn't know that they get to know the work that you're doing because it is truly amazing. Thank you so much. And thanks again for having me today. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Ancestral Health Today. We hope you enjoyed our discussion on how evolutionary insights can inform modern health practices. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast to catch future episodes.