By Dr. Brian Cornblatt
Over the past 50 years there has been a paradigm shift in dietary preferences. The proverbial meat and potatoes —once the staple of most dinners—are increasingly replaced with salads and other botanicals.
In fact, plant-based foods and beverages have captured dietary market shares at a remarkable pace during the past 40 years or so. Supermarket aisles are bursting with “natural” foods while produce bins offer organically grown fruits and vegetables.
But there are concerns about the safety of conventionally-grown produce, which can be reservoirs of pesticide residues. At the same time, questions arise about the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables grown in depleted soils – questions which will become ever more urgent due to extreme weather resulting from climate change.
Degraded Soil for agriculture
Since the 1950s, American agriculture has been amplified by “artificial fertility”: the addition of massive amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to spur plant growth. That’s a contrast to the past, when farmers (especially in the Midwest) enjoyed such a wealth of rich topsoil that fertilization wasn’t really necessary.
Unfortunately, widespread indifference by farmers to soil management (through crop rotation and other practices) has left vast swaths of the Midwest vulnerable, especially when the region has become more susceptible to periods of drought. As a result, millions of tons of topsoil have been blown away in dust storms.
Healthy soil isn’t just dirt, though. Healthy soil stores moisture and provides an ecosystem for earthworms, which aerate the soil. Aerated soil, moreover, has a greater ability to absorb rainfall, thereby reducing the terrible erosion seen in the Dust Bowl disaster.
Healthy soil also stores carbon, which—besides mitigating global warming—promotes the growth of crops which are much more resilient to extreme weather. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for people emphasizing plant-based diets, healthy soils are richer in such trace elements as copper, zinc, manganese, iron, molybdenum and boron.
Plants depend on the availability of trace elements to synthesize the compounds they need to thrive; but also to fend off attacks from insects and fungi. In some cases, like the selenium found in Brazil nuts, the elements themselves provide a health benefit to people. Healthy soils all contain a bounty of micronutrients, which ensure that the fruits and vegetables grown in those soils will support the wellness sought by more and more consumers.
Concerns about botanical foods
The driver in this shift away from “meat and potatoes” has been an aspiration to wellness. But that same approach has led to some concerns about plant-based diets, arising from soil-quality issues and the resulting need to artificially compensate for soil deficiencies.
For example, fruits and vegetables stressed by heat, drought, and a lack of trace elements may be spurred to grow faster through heavier fertilizer applications. But the consumer doesn’t have any way of knowing if the brightly colored produce in their supermarkets offer all the phytonutrients they’re presumed to contain.
Additionally, climate extremes leave crops ever-more vulnerable to weeds, insects and fungi. When growers apply systemic herbicides and fungicides (which are absorbed through the roots), they may be helping the plants survive; but they are degrading the soil (by degrading the ecosystems for the roots). Additionally, they are adding residues of unwelcome chemicals whose presence defeats the primary purpose of switching to healthier food: the aspiration to wellness.
Food quality
I raise this point because of a distressing anomaly I encountered about a decade ago. I had traveled to California to participate in a fundraiser for a colorectal cancer foundation. It was there that I learned firsthand about a disturbing increase in colorectal-cancer diagnoses among young adults.
The most unexpected aspect of their dietary profiles was that all of the cancer victims self-identified as vegetarians! Isn’t a diet packed with phytonutrients supposed to support our natural defenses against cancer cells? Even stranger, none of those victims—ranging in age from their late-20s to early-30s—had any family histories of cancer.
I learned that although the victims were vegetarians, the fruits and vegetables they were consuming were not organic. So, it occurred to me that their botanical foods must be loaded with pesticide residues while possibly lacking in the phytonutrients that should help them offset the biochemical damage from such chemicals.
As someone with friends and family members who have been stricken with colorectal cancer, it was maddening to imagine that the young vegetarians were compromising their immune systems by eating what they wrongly believed to be healthier diets—afflicted in the prime of their lives with a potentially lethal illness.
The answer may be that they represent the first wave of young Americans who have totally forsaken meat and dairy—with the result that they are also the first wave of young Americans consuming unprecedented amounts of herbicides and fungicides—all of which interfere with cellular functions.
That trend wasn’t factored into the EPA risk assessments designed to predict cancer incidence from the ingestion of food-use chemicals registered by the agency. Thirty years ago, vegetarians themselves were outliers – but now, the implication is that unless vegetarians are consuming organic fruits and vegetables, they are exposing themselves to unquantified risks.
A safer approach
It would be a tragedy if people were forced to give up on the benefits of phytonutrients to reduce their cancer risk, but we do need to find ways to consume a phyto-nutritious diet regimen while minimizing our exposure to the chemical risks of conventional produce.
My decades-long focus on nutrient research has led me to BioHarvest Sciences, where I now serve as Chief Medical Officer. The company’s scientists have created a groundbreaking supplement, called VINIA. It contains red-grape powder from cells—not the fruit—which generate their phytonutrients in pristine media contained in bioreactors.
BioHarvest’s scientists have developed a patented botanical synthesis platform technology that can harness and even magnify the active and beneficial ingredients in fruits and plants.
This platform can produce the plant cells that deliver beneficial phytonutrients at industrial scale, minus the need for soil, herbicides and insecticides, and without genetic modification. The web page for VINIA, https://vinia.com/, explains why this nutraceutical is an ideal addition to the diets of vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike.
BioHarvest is developing the next generation of science-based, clinical-trial tested and validated health-promoting solutions.
We believe it represents the future of plant based proactive health promotion.
Dr. Brian Cornblatt
Chief Medical Officer, BioHarvest Sciences
Some relevant articles on this topic:
Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? – Scientific American
Dirty Dozen list: Which fruits and vegetables could contain pesticides | CNN
