 Thank you. Can everybody hear me with this mic? Can everybody hear me? Do you know how to increase the volume? Talk louder. Is this it? Oh, it's on there. Okay, excellent. So That's a little too loud. Okay, that's good. That's great I'm Matthew LaLonde. Just to you know clarify things. I have a PhD in organic chemistry from this university Also got my postdoc in inorganic chemistry from this university. I'm currently staff I'm responsible for training and teaching, but I am not faculty and I do not have a research group So whether or not that makes me qualify to speak on the subject of nutrition is for you to decide I Often get the question. Why should I avoid grains and legumes and I purposefully left dairy out of the equation? And whenever I ask that I'm asked that question. I will typically use these four things I'll say well, there's the immune immunogenic and allergenic Properties of proteins that are frowned in grains and legumes. There's unsustainable grain agriculture It's not clear whether or not legume agriculture is sustainable. Then there's the whole theory of food palability and reward Which is championed by us to Fonginae I hope that most of you know his work and then there's nutrient density And what I like about these four things is that when you present that to someone you have a choice You can either address it from an evolutionary angle or you can address it from a very simple Maybe biology psychology angle specifically with these two things here Actually, sorry these two things here and the reason I say that is not because I don't believe in evolution I personally am a strong believer in evolution But it's because 40% of Americans believe that evolution is false and 20% of Americans are still undecided on the issue and Officially only 40% of Americans think that evolution is true. We are ranked You know second to last Turkey is a little bit worse than we are so This is a very unfortunate reality For our community and this is why I prefer to address the issue in this manner My talk as the title implied is going to focus on nutrient density And whenever someone asks me about nutrient density, I give them this great paper by Professor Cordain and Boyd Eaton who's sitting right here Where they and this is a table that's in the paper and they analyzed a variety of food groups Based on these nutrients and then they classified them and you can tell based on their analysis Vegetables have a pretty high score Seafood lean meat and then fruits so a diet of you know vegetables seafood lean meats and fruits is going to give you everything that you need however, we have a really intelligent and I would say critical community and When I send this to people I will get one of the three Criticisms back One of them is that they say well, we don't have the software that was used to calculate this So we can't verify the scores. We don't know how they came up with this. We can't check it. Okay fair enough To the legumes are not there. There's no legumes group So how do you justify not eating the legumes and three is that the number of foods for categories fairly small? So whole milk, there's just one in lean meat. There's just four nuts and seeds There's just ten whole grains is just eight that kind of stuff So I'm like, okay, you know, I guess I guess you have a point So after I got these criticisms back said I look for something else, you know I'm pretty sure that this is good work, but I'll look for something else So I started looking for other papers and I found This work here by Junowsky and this is essentially a model that he came up with he's using model nr9 here So he essentially takes what he calls desirable macro nutrients and vitamins and minerals So protein and fiber of vitamins a c and e calcium iron magnesium and potassium and then he Counteracts that with undesirable nutrients saturated fat added sugar and sodium and he yeah, I know and And he comes up and he comes up with a score and of course the saturated fat Issue is just we should not have to address this anymore This is a summary of the great fat debate where you know a lot of great minds and the subject of nutrition came together This is what Darius Mazzafarian from this university wrote after that conference He says although the paradigm that saturated fat is a major cause of coronary heart disease has been become entrenched in the public scientific consciousness Over decades modern nutritional evidence simply does not support a major effect of saturated fat on coronary heart disease risk These scientific advances include the randomized trials of disease outcomes the prospective cohort studies of disease outcomes and Randomized trials of multiple not just single biomarkers and risk factors enough said So thank you So back to this model the person also you know uses food categories as opposed to individual foods Ranks fruits and vegetables fairly high. So here we have the caloric density and then here we have the rating And this is how it was calculated if you're interested in that exactly how we calculated this you have milk products here You have meat poultry and fish over here grains over here fats and oils and it's interesting There's not like a whole lot of difference here except for the caloric density Then you have dry beans here, but this is based off, you know, you know five nutrients I'd like like a little bit more, you know, I feel like I can't I can't give this to folks So I hit up my favorite my favorite paleo registered dietician That's Amy Kubel who's here at the conference and I said hey me. What do you use? So she points me in the direction of Nuval and This is pretty interesting. It's a ranking system goes from zero to a hundred and it gives a score to a food I think that the grocery change the chain high B uses these things So you look at the scores you're like a spinach 82 sure avocados 89 broccoli 100. Yeah, okay You know I buy that pineapple 99. Hmm sardines 88. Okay sardine lobster 36. Oh, well, that's a head scratcher And then and then you keep going down the list and you get the chicken breast 39 shrimp 75 ham 27 port baby back ribs 24 and and all the meat gets a rotten score and you start asking yourself How was this calculated? Well, here's how it was calculated in the numerator They have a bunch of what they feel is good stuff, which I agree for the most part iron vitamin a cd Zinc magnesium when we get three fat net fatty acids total carotenoids potassium folic calcium Total bioflavonoids which doesn't belong there in my opinion But I'll get to that and then in the denominator they have trans fat cholesterol saturated fat sodium and sugar Well, we've already addressed the saturated fat that then cholesterol really the sugar may be but sodium Yeah, maybe added sodium, but the cholesterol I mean the man that came up with the hypothesis Ansel Keys in 1953 Wrote in one of his own articles that the dietary cholesterol is not important for man would be predicted from the fact that the Biliary output of cholesterol from the human liver is from 10 to 20 times as much as the daily amount of cholesterol in any diet of natural foods Repeated carefully careful dietary surveys on large numbers of persons in whom blood cholesterol was measured Consistently failed to disclose a relationship between the cholesterol on the diet and in the serum This has been reviewed more recently to reviews by the same author Where they have shows that there is actually a group of hyper responders in that group of hyper responders both LDL and HDL increase So the LDL HDL ratio doesn't change and however the dietary cholesterol does reduce Circulating levels of small dense lipoprotein particles that are thought to be a risk factor for coronary heart disease So again, maybe we should not be thinking that this is a bad thing So I keep surfing on the new vial site and eventually I reach their board of directors Dr. David Katz David Jenkins Walter Willett and a variety of other folks who are known of proponents of plant diets Does this sound like a biased system to you sounds like it sounds like one to me So I kept searching and that's when I met Andy Andy is the aggregate nutrient density index this you will find on signs in Whole Foods grocery stores This score goes from zero to one thousand and you can tell things like kale and collards get one thousand And then if you look for meat anywhere on the list, you're gonna have to make it all the way down over here To chicken breast twenty seven really twenty seven out of a thousand ground beef twenty twenty out of a thousand Really? So I actually don't I didn't need to search very far I looked for a critique of this of this this system and Chris Masterjohn has done an excellent job of doing that So I'm just going to summarize what Chris came up with so this is Chris Masterjohn down here in the corner You could say a proponent of you know grain legume for free diets if you will and then works for the Works with the Weston a price foundation and then here we have Joel Furlman the creation of the creation The guy that created Andy who is a known proponent of plant-based diets So he excludes from his calculations preform vitamin a vitamin B5 vitamin B12 vitamin D Biotin vitamin K1 and K2 to ring an iodine He he also excludes essential minerals sodium chloride potassium sulfur phosphorus copper manganese boron molybium and chromium all essential fatty acids and essential amino acids What he includes in the score are carotines and other pigments glucose in elates which do have problems In themselves as far as biologically activities concerned fiber and the oxygen the oxygen radical absorbance capacity What we call the orac times two because he thinks it's so important most of these compounds I'll tell you honestly from a chemist standpoint. We don't even know how they work or why they're so important So at that point I got really fed up with this stuff. I said all right. I'm gonna make my own So we're gonna start We're gonna start by defining nutrient density well from a purely scientific standpoint density is a quantity of stuff divided by volume and that quantity of stuff in Order to avoid the biases that we've just seen we are going to limit to essential nutrients per serving That's it You can't go outside of that category because then you're gonna start including a bunch of stuff that's favoring this food And that food don't want it. It's essential nutrients. That's all we're gonna focus on What are your essential nutrients fatty acids the accepted ones are ALA and LA? Unfortunately, that should be DHA and AA, but that's not the case I'm not gonna get into why amino acids isolucine, lucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, b-alanine, histidine Histidine is like plus or minus. It depends Vitamins ABP which is choline B123567 which is also called biotin or vitamin H B9 which is folate B12, CDENK, and then your minerals you have calcium, chloride, chromium, cobalt, copper, iodide, iron, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, sodium, sulfur, and zinc Excellent. The problem is that you can't find data on volume of food. It's typically not measured You can find data on calories per serving Using this definition I started processing data and I found two problems one Zero calorie foods can be treated. Electrolyte enhanced water for example has some advantages can't treat it zero right because you're dividing by zero and If you think about this carefully this confuses or combines nutrient density and caloric density If you have a food that's very nutrient dense, but also calorically dense It's not going to get as good of a score as the food that has the same nutrient density with fewer calories And in my opinion those things are separate They should be considered separately if you have someone who needs to lose weight Well sure say on you know moderate to high nutrient density, but then moderate to low caloric density You've got an athlete. Hey, you know, there's only so much food you can eat So increase the caloric density of the food that you're eating those two things should be considered separately So I decided finally to use the weight per serving which always comes with the food The only problem here is that this is no longer a density. We're still going to call it a density But it's actually a concentration a concentration scientifically speaking So now where do we get the data? Well, it turns out that the USDA has this huge Amount of data available with the type of nutrients that are in foods. I had two choices here I could use the access version which is the full version or I could use the excel version Which is an abbreviated version and my goal was to distribute this to anyone who wanted it and unfortunately not too many people know How to use access or have access so I decided to go with the excel version What's missing from the excel version that I wish I had a distinction between vitamin D D2 and D3 right now in the excel version they're taken together and then The individual fatty acids and the individual amino acids would have been nice because then I could have added those there So on from the wish list, what can we not have? Well, we don't have the fatty acids We don't have the amino acids, which is too bad We have almost all of the vitamins except for b7 and a variety of minerals except for chloride chromium cobalt I had died lindium nickel and sulfur of the data that was available to me from that spreadsheet That I did not use because it was not an essential nutrient Sodium and the reason I left out sodium and I would have had to leave out chloride too It's because it favors if you incorporated it favors food to have a lot of added salt You can't do that. So you have to leave it out of the equation. You got no choice left out fiber. I'm sorry food I'm you know, it's not essential. I know I'm gonna get a lot of flak for that, but it's not essential I will correct for that a little bit later on you'll see but fiber is not considered essential So I left it out then there's all of these Substances that you know would favor very specific foods and then this stuff is mostly for the caloric content So that was completely left out So now you got a spreadsheet. You've got your minerals and vitamins and choline too All of these have very very different standard deviations So you have no choice but to standardize the data So you if you look at the standard deviation for calcium It's 214 that for iron is 6 you can't compare those things and then some are in milligram Some are in my program So you need a quantity that's unit list and that's standardized So what you do is that you take the unit you subtract the the mean of the group and then you divide it by the standard Deviation and that gives you a standardized number those numbers go from negative to positive After doing that for each food And it's not that I'm favoring dairy here It's just this is the top of the of the spreadsheet for each food I just add up the score across all nutrients and that is what I call the nutrient density of that food I could have divided by a hundred but they're all they're over a hundred grams all of them So I just left it as is so that's the nutrient density score With that is couple the caloric density that you have all of these are for 100 gram samples So now we've got a little bit of data Actually, we have 7,907 entries in that spreadsheet and foods and they had to be separated into 46 different categories one line item at a time This took about three days with minimal sleep and food and I never want to go through that again So if someone wants to see a different result from this, I'm just gonna send you the spreadsheet Say you go tiger I'm not doing this anymore. I obviously do not have the time to focus on all of these things Some of the why I separated some of the things hopefully will make sense to you So cook grains for example and pseudo cereals are separated from raw grains and pseudo cereals You can't eat raw wheatberry or a raw chickpea or stuff like that Do you so you can't you have to put that in a separate section, right? In the grains section, I only kept the whole grain So I separated processed foods from whole foods only whole grains So the bread's pastes and noodles are in different section the big goods are in a different section The enriched grains are in a different section just so I'm you know I'm trying to compare things in as fair a manner as possible So these are the things that I'm going to be focused on here So in the eggs and dairy section the high scores I'm going to ignore the dried stuff and the dried stuff is because it's obviously it's concentrated, right? And it's typically not something that you eat So I'm going to focus on things like egg yolks raw and fresh you can tell that the egg yolks are pretty They're pretty nutrient dense the scores go up to 49 some of the scores can go near 100 If it's an enriched food it can go past 100 and then for the minus it'll it typically doesn't go past minus 10 And then so you see the eggs and cheese are pretty much What is most nutritious at the top of this category if you want to plot that now? What is far more useful than having a score? Let's say you've got spinach at 99 and you've got kale at 99. Well, that's great What's the difference? It's hard do they have exactly the same amount of nutrients you can't tell so you can plot this stuff And that's what I did here the numbers on the left are how many times the RDA do you have? So I took the quantities the milligrams the micrograms divided them by the RDA and That's what you see here So this red bar goes above one that means that parmesan cheese shredded at 100 gram serving has more than one times the RDA for calcium You can tell that the eggs and dairy have a pretty nice distribution of vitamins overall Even the least nutritious one of this group which is still at the top, which is the duck egg So it's still fairly nutritious. We're looking at a score of 4.73 and then here you have the caloric density So this is the nutrient density This is the caloric density and then you can see that the eggs have choline in them But the cheese doesn't have choline the cheese has a bit of fat soluble vitamins actually so that's so do the eggs And you can mix and match make things very interesting if you wanted to put this on a label You can minimize this whole thing into a spark line This these spark lines were created by Edward Tufty what I actually wanted was just a line So imagine a line tracing the contour of this thing such that you can overlay them and tell very quickly What's what and all you need is one dot telling you okay? This is 1.49 times the RDA so I know more or less what this is nutrient density caloric density good to go Bam you have that on a label you can make sure is that it's very easy You get a lot of information very quickly on the low scores and the eggs and dairy You know you can tell we're in the minuses now it goes as low as minus seven. I was surprised to find human milk However, it's difficult to compare it to other milks because most of the milks were fortified and I had to put them in a separate category There's also some some craft process dairy here things like yogurt some cottage cheese and stuff like that What does that look when it's? When it's craft well, you can tell we're already below one This food here butter has just a lot of salt and vitamin a and not much of anything else Although it does have some vitamin D and K as well The human milk has a good distribution But it's kind of low and then the best one here that I picked was that cottage cheese Which has a decent distribution but also low in some of the vitamins so this is you know very interesting Stuff to look at I Thought that the audience would be interested especially this audience in a comparison between egg yolks and egg whites I'm sorry, but for those of you eating egg white omelettes. I'll take the yolks Don't throw them away The egg yolk crushes the egg white on every category safe for sodium, I think yeah So very interesting. Let's go to herbs and spices herbs and spices are a winner The highest one dried basil is up to 76 Then you've got things like thyme and parsley and sage and spearmint you can go down the list Until you reach things like distilled vinegar vanilla table salt more vinegar more vanilla and more vanilla and then this Campbell soup Company dry taco season mix Which are not very nutritious so instead of giving you a high and low this time I'm going to give you just a sample of the data from something that's very nutritious like the basil You tell basil has a lot of vitamin K even a little bit of choline which was surprising some vitamin E a decent distribution a lot of Minerals and then you look at things like pepper interesting distribution across the board Maybe a little heavy on the mineral side of thing salt is of course just sodium if we had access to iodine Maybe you could see that in there, but it looks like there's no potassium I thought that would be potassium there, but salt doesn't have much to offer really Nuts and seeds high scores there 71 also very very nutritious You know you've got things like Brazil nuts cotton seeds sunflower Going down the mix sesame pumpkin seeds that kind of stuff at the bottom of the category You're gonna have chestnuts and more chestnuts and ginko nuts that kind of acorns that kind of stuff breadfruit seeds Here's a sampling of the data again from something very nutritious to something less nutritious Brazil nuts this is cut off the chart because I needed to see the rest of it Brazil nuts has There have 34.85 times the RDA in selenium. So when I grabbed this all I could see was a big blue bar So I had to shrink it down a little bit again decent distribution in the nuts Although like I expected a little bit more on this side of things. There is some vitamin D But I expected a bit more on this side of things and not quite so hot So mostly on the mineral side for for the nuts, but still fairly fairly nutritious in general except maybe for those for those chestnuts fruit High scores about 19 but then you're looking at dried stuff. So if you look at something not dried you have to go through this West Indian cherry here Okay, that's pretty good Then there's a lot of more dried stuff and then you get to logans and avocados You know it is a fruit dates raisins that kind of stuff oranges coconut meat is there by the way And I think I've got that graph the losers in the fruit category are apples and A lot of varieties of apples pears grab apples watermelon that kind of stuff is what's at the bottom What does this look when you graph it? Here is here's that West Indian cherry That's mostly vitamin C actually has 18.64 times the vitamin C So that's another one that I had to chop off to see what the heck was going on fairly good distribution of vitamins in the fruit Not too surprisingly not a whole lot of fat soluble vitamins That's okay. Maybe you'd get that if I put avocados on there I did put the the coconut even the coconut is mostly on the On the left side of the graph But there is a little bit of choline and a little bit of vitamin E in there But you can tell how this is fairly informative and you can see how the nutrient density goes down as it should as the scores go down Here we're going from 1687 to minus four point minus eight point point five Edible raw and unprepared vegetables. I separated the raw vegetables those that are edible Raw, so I raw potatoes are in a different category. They're not edible raw. I mean you can't eat them But it's just not great for you. So I put that in a different category So here are the edible raw vegetables at the top of the stuff. That's not dry You keep going down and you're eventually gonna get to kale all of the greens greens kale dandelion chart all that stuff Have very high positive scores if you want to go to the bottom You're gonna find onions and cucumbers and pickles and relishes and varying radishes and that kind of stuff What does that look like when it's a hey that might be a mistake? Oh, no terror terror shoots. Can you eat those raw? I don't know anyways That's what here's what it looks like when it's graph So here we have kale kale has six point eight times the RDA and vitamin K So I had to chop that one off very high So is lettuce actually fairly high in vitamin K Kale's also high in vitamin C and has a fairly good distribution Maybe a bit a little bit low on the selenium and sodium and zinc But we don't care too much about the sodium at this point. It's hard to Do not get enough sodium these days On the purple side of this thing the seaweed again has a very nice distribution across the board and fairly nutritious But then you get to things like carrots and onions and not so much the onions have a decent distribution But it's it's fairly low. So not a whole lot there What you need to look at however is the caloric density to right? So yeah, the kale is good It's at 50 the onions have a little bit less caloric density The worst case scenario is if you have something that has got really low Nutri density and really high caloric density. That's something that you want to stay away of I'm unfortunately not going to present much of those foods I did calculate all the data Segregated it and looked at it and it looks horrible as you would expect. So I'm just not going to present that In the cooked vegetables the high scores are again all of your kale beat be green spinach all of the Colored greens all that stuff lamb quarters dandelions All the grape leaves and then at the bottom you again have some onions and I think here you have like some pickled and this is like cooked and pickled some hikama Onions cabbage that kind of stuff. What does it look like actually instead of giving you a spread for this one? You can tell the scores are fairly negative I decided just to compare some some cooked and some raw stuff so that you could see how much nutrient Loss that you get from cooking so these are blanched This is blanched kale versus raw kale the red is raw kale So you can tell that across the bow or the board you have lost some nutrition here However, the cooked kale does have less caloric density Part of the nutrition loss is due to the fact that some of it really came out of the food and is lost Another part is the fact that that food is absorbing water when you blanch it and it's diluting the nutrient content Okay, so it looks a little bit worse than it actually is I Also thought that people would be interested in a comparison of sweet potatoes versus potatoes the sweet potatoes are in blue The potatoes are in red the potato has a nutrient score of minus zero point thirteen The sweet potato has a nutrient density score of minus three point zero two So the potato actually wins and it wins on the mineral side of things The sweet potato does win on vitamin a The potato does have a much greater Caloric density, however, almost more than twice of the sweet potato So, you know if you decided to eat twice as much sweet potato You'll get close to the levels of minerals like copper and iron that are in the potato Both of them are fairly nutritious. I mean if you look at that you get a pretty decent distribution of nutrients across the board here Even though the scores are negative so even if a score is negative doesn't mean the food is necessarily that bad Because not that many of them are very high and positive So now we reach cooked grains and pseudo cereals. This is all we have access to Because the rest of it is all wrong and it was put in a different category. So this is all we can look at There is no data for cooked wheat. It's not in there. So I couldn't present that Notice that we begin at the top with negative scores And I decided to not cover succotash So if a food was a combined food So for example succotash then I put that in both the grain in the legume category because it's corn and beans So the things the winners here are like things like camateff quinoa and spelt and the losers white rice at the bottom The best rice is this white rice has long grain Actually, it's the wild rice, but of the white rice. It's this one with long grain So what does that look like? So notice that we immediately start below one This blue thing here is the camate cam. It's not bad pretty abysmal in this area But not bad in this area and then this blue line here. That's the couscous fairly rich in selenium However, but a little pretty low on the rest of the scale This is cooked versus raw grains now We have teff that is cooked Camot that is cooked versus camot that is uncooked and teff is uncooked So the purple should be compared to the blue at the front and you can see the nutrient loss across the board, right? And then the green should be compared to the red and again You can see the nutrient loss across the board except for an increase in folate. It was interesting Maybe it becomes more bioavailable or what not? And that's you know one thing that you need to keep in mind is that this is not corrected for bioavailability Ideally you would want that correction in your system But I don't have those numbers So there is a substantial Nutrient loss there and there's a substantial drop in the score teff is eight point sixteen cooked teff is minus four point sixty seven Camot is five point eighty six cooked. Camot is minus four point forty two. Which one should we be considering the cooked or the raw? The cooked right you can't eat the raw stuff. You absolutely can't eat the raw stuff Same is true for legumes, but there are some legumes that are edible in their raw state So here I had to create a category for edible raw and cooked legumes and then another one for inedible raw legumes Here again, you know, we immediately start with scores. Actually, these are not negative. These are positive legumes are far more Nutritious than the grains at the top you have roasted soybeans and I'll show you they're they're fairly nutritious then you have cashews Yes, I'm sorry cashew is actually a legume not a knot then you have peanuts in a variety of other foods I think peanuts pretty much rule this whole thing at the bottom You've got things like snap peas mung beans of other types of beans that are at the bottom What does this look like when it's plotted? Like I said the the soybeans are pretty nutritious now whether or not that's bio available. No The the purple stuff is the chickpea and that is the cooked chickpea Decent distribution here the the values are reasonably high too. Then we go to kidney beans snap beans and then finally the Pinto beans that have a decent distribution, but a little bit low on the scale certainly much better than the grains however Here is cooked chickpea versus a raw chickpea and you can tell that there's a substantial loss of Nutrients as you cook the substance But again, you know that the cook material contains a little bit more water So some of it is a loss some of it's a dilution effect now we go into the meats and How much time do I've left? Excellent For those of you and I had to ask because for those of you that are pleased with the rankings You have ten seconds and no more to celebrate after go on with the talk. There's a lot of data and I'll give you a hint Bacon bacon bacon bacon and more bacon Followed by some loin however Don't celebrate too quickly At the bottom you'll have things like pickled pork hocks, you know some patties and stuff like that But you have raw bacon Well, that's interesting. What's that doing there? You see I didn't think it would be necessary to separate raw meat from cooked meat but It turns out that animal fats has an average score of minus six point eighty five, which is abysmal and The bacon grease finds itself very low on the list These are all the animal fats and this is where bacon grease is at So when you cook your bacon and you get rid of the grease you actually increase its nutrient density score I was expecting a nightshade thrown my way as soon as I said Also known as a tomato So here's some sample data for the pork We have the cured bacon here and the back you can tell that this is you know, fairly nutritious stuff It's got a decent amount of nutrients and a good distribution the same is true for all the other meats even the one that The ones that aren't that great good distribution, but this is low However, just as good as one of the low entries in the legume category for example In the poultry the winners are things like you know emu Ostrich and and all dove and all that kind of stuff and at the bottom You're gonna have some duck some mechanically deboned Chickens and some Cornish hen and other chicken boilers and stuff like that Here's what that looks like again Fairly nutritious. So either one of the best one is that is the emu one of the least nutritious here Is the duck and you can tell them the duck has got some some serious nutrient deficiencies here I'm not sure what they did to it if you look at the name. It's like duck and then yng I'm not sure what that means do I am with pecking duck. Yeah young duck. That's right pecking leg meat bone in I'm like, why is that so Poorly nutritious. I don't know but the rest of the no no actually the skin is really bad I put that in a different a separate category animal skin is not very you'll see shortly Yeah, maybe maybe it's because it's so high in fat But actually, I mean you would expect that to it would increase if you cooked it it was because it wasn't raw I didn't use any raw stuff Yeah, it was cooked So you would expect that to be to increase the nutrient density as you cooked it So I don't think that's the case beef and in the beef you've got a lot of like Steaks boneless steaks all that stuff. They call this being plate beef plate And then they give a variety of cuts all of them fairly nutritious at the bottom You have a lot of ribs beef ribs and ribeyes that aren't that great the scores don't go like notice that the the lowest score This is where the grains started at in their high score for beef just to give you an example Okay, this is what it looks like when graphed pretty sexy, right? I mean, this is this is the lowest one here Right not too bad. I mean that you're looking at stuff. That's fairly nutritious has a decent distribution They think what was that? Yes, exactly, right you you can tell why the people who have a vegetarian agenda they top they drop B12 from from their list because This beef plate that's at the top has 3.14 times the RDA. So I had to cut it off in B12 Efficient seafood oysters and clams and that kind of stuff octopus They're all at the top and then at the bottom You've got some jellyfish some dried jellyfish and a variety of other processed things that are too interesting if you If you plot that the oysters are just a powerhouse of nutrition So I had to cut that off They have 6.34 times the RDA in copper 7.15 times the RDA in zinc and 7.20 times 29 times the RDA in B12 With a decent distribution of minerals overall the fact that these are so tall make these look really small But this is pretty nutritious stuff. So is salmon. So is the tilapia, but then the jellyfish is pretty abysmal You know, it's got sodium and selenium Copper and iron and not much of anything else. It does have some coalene though, which is fairly interesting It was nice to see where coalene popped up Then we've got lamb veal and game meat. So the high scores here We've got things like game meat, caribou, deer, beaver, raccoon But then it's interesting that the game meat is also at the bottom You've got things like a boar. You've got squirrel rabbit and squirrel muskrat And then the veal and the lamb is sort of in between Notice again, you know that as you're going down you're you're at minus four here And then there's like only a few entries that are below that so this is still fairly nutritious stuff Here's a back plotted out. I took like the the elk here as one of my examples because it was cooked Notice, you know that the raw meat often finds its way at the bottom So I did my best to pick something that was cooked to graph and what I'm going to do now is I'm gonna have to separate the raw meat From the cooked meat, right? I have no choice because it's obviously a confounder So the elk isn't all that great, but it's still decent And then you have things like veal breasts. That's good. The lamb shoulder blade and then the meat boar That's that's pretty good again good distribution and decent amount of nutrients all over all the organ meats This is one of the highest score for the natural foods 93 for veal liver So here you have liver or cod liver oil liver liver liver liver liver and more liver and then if you look at the bottom This is the I think this is the whole organ meat thing. You're gonna have things like tripe and lungs that aren't quite as As interesting so this is what it looks like when you initially plot it And that's because these things are so damn nutritious that can go up to you know 40 times or 35 times the RDA and vitamin a and then B12 and all that stuff So if you focus in on the graph, this is what you get again pretty nutritious You know the number one is right here. So you're looking at a good distribution a lot of nutrient density in here on the Low end of things for the organ meats. I had to split that one in two You've got a lot of lungs and tripe and that kind of stuff stomach This is what it looks like This is you know, some of it is fairly low But still respectable compared to to grains for example in a decent distribution not so much in this category though Plot plant fats and oils I highlighted this one because people are going to complain so this is going to increase your average score In an unnatural way, it's not going to make that big of a difference What we'll see this is all of the plant fats at the top You've got things like wheat germ hazelnut sunflower canola oil and then at the bottom You've got things like coconut oil and avocado oil mustard oil and whatnot So here's a sampling of that and you know fairly deficient on this end of things a lot of vitamin E A lot of vitamin K a little bit of choline and not much of anything else really so they that's why they get a pretty poor score So here's a sample data from animal fats and oils Also, this is plant fats and oils. Sorry. So here's a sample data from animal fats and oils So a little bit better in the distribution. I would say this is for the pork enhanced comp fat Whatever that is. Sorry. This is the back fat Duck fat and then animal fat and all that stuff pretty good distribution So now you take these things you grab an average score for each category And again, I tried to be fair and remove all the refined stuff from the categories and this is what you get Here's your average nutrient density score. Here's your category organ meats at the top herbs and spices nuts and seeds cacao Fish and seafood pork beef eggs dairy vegetables lamb veal poultry legumes is where this is where they show up processed meat Vegetables plant fats and oils fruit animal skin grains and pseudocereals that are cooked refined and processed fats and oils animal fats and oils grains and processed fruit The plant fats and oils without the weed germ at minus six point zero seven so they wouldn't have moved a whole lot But now if you introduce the raw grains and legumes, this is what you get They actually come on top of all the meat except for the organ meats this notion that grains and legumes are healthy for you Comes from their consideration from their analyses in the raw state in a state in which they cannot be consumed This does not belong here. This should not be considered. You cannot eat it in that state Da doesn't go here, right? So you leave that out of the process That is where this myth is coming from and it's true. They have a lot of nutrients. You can't eat it that way What's the point? You don't consider that Finally, I think some of you are going to be criticizing this and say well, you know that 100 grams It contains water it contains fiber, you know, so you're disfavoring the vegetables and the fruits That's probably they're low on the list. I'm like, okay I'm going to define something called the caloric weight and I'm going to take that 100 grams And I'm going to subtract the mass of the water and the fiber from it So foods that have a lot of water and they have a lot of fiber or both are now favored. What do you get? This is what you get. I now call this the caloric weight score Oregon meat, serpentine spices, nuts and seeds, nothing's changed. The legumes come up They have a lot of fiber then you get fish and seafood, pork, beef, cacao, lamb, poultry, plants, fats and oils all that stuff The refined grains are still way over here. Sorry Doesn't make that much of a difference except for the legumes really. If you want to see them side by side This is what they look like. This is the ranking according to nutrient density and this is using this this caloric weight score So if you guys want to take pictures of that I have to end. We are done So conclusions the available data suggests that a diet centered around meat vegetables fruits nuts and seed is very nutrient dense and can easily Provide all essential nutrients and adequate quantities. The notion that grains and legumes are nutrient dense likely originates from a lack of segregation between raw grains and legumes which are inedible Versus cooked grains and legumes. So these should not be part of the equation. Animal foods are highly ranked even though raw and cooked meat were not segregated and Essential fatty acids essential amino acids vitamin B7 some minerals and bioavailability were not taken into account So imagine that they're going to go even higher if we had all of this data Finally some acknowledgments My girlfriend for being very patient with me while I was crunching all of this data I had to cancel some arrangements gotten a lot of heat for it. She was very patient I love her Ned cock of health correlator who helped me out with some of this data is like dude You need to process it this way and all that stuff super useful Amy Kubell who pointed me in the direction of a lot of Nutrient scoring systems Chris master John and Stefan Guine who also helped me out and consulted with with some of the data processing As well as a Rob Wolf so with that I thank you for your attention So now we have a 15 minute break, but Matt LaLonde loves questions So it's up to you if you want to come and ask Hey, I'm Dave My name is David and I just wanted to raise two points. My first one is when you were talking about the Sustainability of grains and legumes. I completely agree with you that you know chemical fertilizers in the current way we do that It's bad for the environment But if we're if we're trying to feed a world of seven billion or eight billion approach on nine billion people You know cereal grains are the only way we come out exactly where you're going and the problem with that is one That no one wants to admit it's overpopulation. I'm sorry. Nothing's gonna solve What we need to do is get is get sustainable agriculture first and figure out how many people we can support I agree But so if we look at sister if we look at we can praise Joel South and all we want and I really like what he does But that relies on corn and soy It's not sustainable. I agree. You got 50 years of topsoil left. What's your solution? No, I agree I will if you look at permaculture approaches like I'd encourage you to read me of the non-extravity We don't have a lot of time next question. All right, and I raise my second point Sure. My second point is that, you know, it's really easy for you to say that You know, it's just a myth that legumes are nutrient-dense, but I feel like that's only hatchery I completely agree with you that it's better look at it raw But if I look at something like lentils, especially with correct preparations like I know Stephen who Stephen Guy and they who you referenced I did show them with correct preparation at the end and their score did increase Sorry. Well, I when I was looking at the graphs, I didn't see legumes at all You didn't highlight that but if I'm just I'm just giving you one example Not only did I show legumes while legumes and cooked legumes. It's low in stock. There's a very good thing It's not very palatable next. I just want to finish my question. Can I ask a question over here? Hi, yeah, Todd Becker. So really nice analysis. I liked it one Minor point though when you use the term Nutrient and you're referring to essential nutrient. Yes The concept of an essential nutrient is something where you absolutely need a certain minimum But the analysis doesn't say whether you actually need more than that or whether it's useful for example minerals like selenium Can be essential at a low amount, but can be toxic at a exactly and that's something that you need to consider at the end That's why I use the RDA and when you see things are like 30 times the RDA That's telling you that that foods a little too much that you should have very little of it Right, so I'm not saying that that food is like the best food that you could possibly as far as how to use the index It's mainly these are foods you should have at least a little of but not to go crazy Yeah, yeah, like and the people that advocate eating liver say just that Yes, did you say in the beginning that you were going to? Make this database yeah email me and I'll send it to you well as a graduate student I really appreciate that just you're welcome one of the people I consulted told me that what I just did was a PhD is worth of work right took six days I Second thing I noticed in your data is that foods that were low on nutrients and calories Especially in fruits veggies and seafood They tend to be cheap. That's based on my experience. I might be wrong here and foods that were Nutriently dense Nutritionally dense and calorically dense tended to be costly some of them Have you thought have you thought about factoring in cost for 100 grams into your analysis? That's great. If you could do that. I could have the data though. That's great You know that I use what I had at my disposal with this spreadsheet, but that's a great idea. I like that. Yeah, just a dish Yeah, thank you. I Had one remark also you use the USDA database on nutrients the USDA. Yeah. Yeah, you said it Yeah, so that data comes from the USDA I know I know and you said it didn't provide Information on essential fatty acids and vitamin D2 and D3. There is a more expanded database that does Yeah, but I didn't use that one because it's an access and I want to be able to give this The spreadsheet to other people most people don't have access. They have Excel so I chose to go really I used it in Excel Really the access to the full version one I don't know. I just downloaded the same with all the fatty acids D3 D2 and D3 and I'll have to look at that It's a nice way to waste three days of my life That's why I stood up. I wanted to make the people they well now They know it's also as accessible in Excel so everybody can do it. I think okay. That's good to know Question about the meat. Yeah now the meat you presented. That's all is that all grain-fed meat So there was only one entry for grass-fed meat and it was a raw cut So I was not able to cover it and compare it to any of the gifts the numbers We were better if you had actually probably and if you consider the essential fatty acids, yeah Sure So the person said for the record most lamb is grass-fed and not in general. Yes Good news folks. There are oysters on every corner in this that's been the city in this Little town and it they all taste great Small question. I Don't know if you came in for this, but would it make your table more interesting if you merged it with? The glycemic load for nutrients. Oh, you're not talking or are we talking here about 30 days? You can do that. I'll give you this the template I'll give you my facts number. Okay. Yeah, I see I see why you use the RDAs But do you have a lot of confidence when they don't consider like the butt different bite of a case or it's you know It's the it's the best I had so yes The the RDAs are are not always right like the RDA for calcium set a little bit too high because they think the calcium is gonna Solve all our osteoporosis problems and then for others. It's set low So it's really it's not that great, but you notice that a lot of the foods went above the RDA So no, but it's again. I work with what I have so I agree, but that's in the DRI That's what I have is there a way to weight the importance of certain ones that you think people generally are lacking So that's another thing like But if you start doing that then you start biasing it a little bit So what would be interesting is just listen the data is there if you know you're lacking something then go find the foods You can order them by which one has the most vitamin E Which one has the most of this fairly easily, but that would be most useful if it came with bioavailability So you a couple times said that if you had access or if you had included the essential fatty acids as well They would change you know it would make meats better But actually if you consider that the essential ones as you mentioned are linoleic and linoleic which are higher the accepted Essential ones what I mean is the the real essential ones which are DHA and arachidonic acid Yeah, the COSA hexanoic acid try saying that seven times fast and arachidonic acid So but if if you're going with the guidelines that are currently set up It would be a la and a well, yeah, which would have the unfortunate You know it gives soybean oil and yes Yes, really high thing and that's not what I'm thinking about And it's kind of as a secondary to that things like that and also maybe potentially selenium that are potentially When they become too nutrient dense or problematic. Yes. Yeah, we just talked about that like you know If Brazil nuts give you 30 times the RD and selenium don't have a lot of them on a daily basis I'm not saying that you have to eat all the time at the top of the food chain It's just like try going from moderate to high and and using that to guide your your proportions In the realm of foods that you eat which food surprised you the most fruit In fact the reason why I went to this model where I took out the water And I I took out the fiber or I counted for watering fibers because I was like how can fruit be so low And I just started putting more fruit in my diet. I'm like, are you kidding me? Yeah Well, I don't know. I'm just seem to be doing well with more food, but I was really surprised. Yeah, that's a good question Hey, Matt, just over here. It's all sugar. Yeah bless you Matt just to be clear you were you were working with what you had and not we still have some other intuitive or yeah So for example, you know, it's weird that a wild boar is is not stacking up against an industrial pig, right? You remind me of something too There is data missing in the spreadsheet when you open up there are places where there's absolutely no data And I had to treat that as zero. So, you know, that data needs to be as awesome folks furiously scribbling down this Like this is gonna be their dietary guideline from now on that wasn't exactly your point This is just one exactly and if you look at the animal the organ meets in oils cod No, sorry in the animal fats fish oil had zero across the line. It had nothing on it I'm like really, you know, not even a little vitamin E is a stabilizer So there was something wrong there with that. Sorry for taking up so much time