In this episode, we discuss:
- The problem with the reductionist approach to nutrition
- The importance of animal foods in nutrient density
- Which nutrients we should be concerned about
- The suitability of dairy foods
- Critiques of the NOVA food processing classification system
- The fake meat failure
- The role of food fortification
- Reception and obstacles of The Nourishment Table
- How to practically apply The Nourishment Table in your everyday life
Show notes:
Chris Kresser: Hey, everybody, Chris Kresser here. Welcome to another episode of Revolution Health Radio. If you followed my work for any length of time, you’ll know I’ve been a vocal critic of the US dietary guidelines and the food rating scales that have gone into those guidelines. They are reductionist, they focus too much on the quantity of isolated nutrients, and not enough on the overall quality of the diet. This leads to some absurd ratings like candy being more healthful than red meat or eggs because of the cholesterol and saturated fat content of those foods.
Back in February of this year, I saw a paper published by Frederic Leroy and Ty Beal, who’s been on the show a couple of times. I’ve been aware of both of their work for some time and they published an alternative framework called the Nourishment Table that basically has two primary factors for determining dietary adequacy – one is nutrient density, and one is food processing. As you’ll see in this conversation, that simple framework is a powerful way of getting us to where we want to be in terms of the foods that we should be consuming. I invited Frederic to be on the show. I’d been aware of his work, like I said, for many years, but we’d never connected personally [and] it was a real pleasure to meet him and discuss the Nourishment Table. He’s very active in this space. He has a PhD in Applied Biological Science, and he is a professor in food science and biotechnology. He’s the president of the Educational Board [of the Bio-engineering Department at Vrije Universiteit Brussel] and teaches [the classes] ‘Nutrition’, ‘Sustainable Agrifood Systems’, ‘Food Chemistry’, and ‘Food Technology’. I know of his work because he’s been a huge advocate for regenerative agriculture and the important role that animal foods play in the human diet.
We cover a wide range of topics in this conversation. We talk about the need for the Nourishment Table as a new framework for assessing adequate nutrition. We talk about nutrient density, the animal-to-plant ratio, [and] the role of food processing, both the pros and cons. Processing isn’t always bad – we have fermentation [and] sprouting, [which] actually increases nutrient value, versus the type of processing that we see in foods that are in a bag or a box. We talk about some policy issues and the challenges of changing the dietary guidelines, and some practical tips for how to eat more nourishing food. I really enjoyed this conversation. I think you will too. Let’s dive in.
Chris Kresser: Frederic, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you after all this time.
Frederic Leroy: Well, thank you so much for having me, Chris. I’ve been following you [for] a long time, and it’s nice to have this conversation.
Chris Kresser: So, I just want to dive right into the Nourishment Table. This is something I was so excited about when I saw it published, because as you know, I’ve been a vocal critic of the typical nutrient scales that have been used in studies like EAT-Lancet and many others that often lead to these ridiculous findings where candy is ranked as more healthful than red meat or [eggs], which I think most people with common sense would disagree with. But I think many people don’t realize that these are the scales that have been informing dietary guidelines and nutrition research for many years. So, why don’t we just start with what led to the development of the Nourishment Table for you? What problems did you and your co-author set out to solve? And why did you feel this was just so important right now?
Frederic Leroy: Well, exactly this. I think the fact that a lot of the policies we’re seeing in the nutrition space are based on very reductionist approaches to food. You know very well, and I guess most of your listeners will also know, that we’re facing a huge public health crisis, with part of the global population overeating [and] another part undereating. We have about, what is it? One up to 2 billion people, I think either overweight or obese, and then have almost a billion that is chronically underfed. Combine that also with the micronutrient deficiencies and the fact that we don’t see improvement, right? So part of that is economic, but I think part of it is also the fact that the policies are not based on the best possible scenarios. And so we wanted to do something about it, and I kind of brought a team together with different people with different expertise.
And so we combined all sorts of different disciplines to look at this problem. And the intention was to brush away all the conventional elements of the guidelines that we think are not good enough because they’re based on low certainty evidence, and because they’re maybe too narrow or too specific and just maintain the common sense framework that would be more productive. And also emphasize flexibility, because I think a lot of what we’re seeing is very patronizing. It’s very much steering us towards specific models that have been designed in by specific people in specific regions, and especially Lancet, is coming up with a planetary health model that they wish to impose on the entire global population. So we wanted to emphasize flexibility and just kind of find the boundaries in which you can build and construct proper human diets.
Chris Kresser: That’s one of the things I love most about the Nourishment Table is the simplicity and the elegance of the framework. You have basically two components, nutrient density and the amount of food processing. Why did you choose those two as the most critical components of the scale?
Frederic Leroy: For a number of reasons. The first one is of course, that both are very hot topics in the current nutrition debate. So there’s a lot of talk on processing and ultra processing. The NOVA scheme is often mentioned. So that’s one of the very topical conversations. And the other one is the nutrient density axis we’re incorporating in the model. And that is largely correlating with the animal plant ratio, just for the simple fact that animals are at a higher trophic level. So they tend to be more nutrient, animal foods tend to be more nutrient dense. Now, that’s not a perfect correlation. Of course, you have plant foods that are also nutrient dense and you have animal foods or especially processed variants that are not so nutrient dense. But it tends to match that animal plant ratio to a certain degree and that’s another big debate right now. So it’s the combination of both. Also, if you think of it, it’s the, those two elements of the human diet are probably the two factors that mostly contributed to our evolutionary divergence from other primates. It’s the fact that we started to eat higher up the food chain and more nutrient dense foods combined with the technology that we’ve been developing since a few million, millions of years,
Chris Kresser: Right. Cooking and fermentation.
Frederic Leroy: Right. Yes, yes, yes,
Chris Kresser: Yes. So I’ve had Ty Beal, who I know you know and respect, on the show a couple of times, and we talked about his nutrient density scales from his studies that actually took bioavailability into account, which had not been previously done. And I’ve shared the scale with organ meats often coming out on top quite far above even muscle meats in terms of nutrient density in animal foods, and then shellfish scoring really highly as well. But what I love about this, I think both of these factors too, and you kind of alluded to it before, is when you think about it from a behavioral perspective, these are two variables that people can pretty easily modulate in their diet. How processed is the food? Well, that’s fairly straightforward.
Is it something that’s in a bag or a box and has an ingredient list that’s two miles long and full of things, words that you can’t pronounce? Then that’s probably very highly processed. If it looks like it came out of the ground with minimal intervention, pretty low process. So it’s fairly easy to, without any scientific training or background or any understanding of the more complex nuances to change your, what you’re doing there, right? And then you can also, I think once you understand some basic principles, which we’re going to talk about, fairly easily modulate your nutrient density just by choosing, as you mentioned, more animal foods in your diet, at least for certain nutrients. We know that leafy green vegetables, for example, kale, some of the brassicas, etc., score pretty highly on the nutrient density scale for certain nutrients that aren’t found in plant foods. But in general, as you said, if you increase the proportion of calories that you’re getting from animal foods, you will typically improve your nutrient density. So I love the simplicity there. Let’s talk a little bit about the flip side of that. This nutritionism and this kind of myopic focus on isolated nutrients or single environmental or metrics. How has that led us down the wrong path?
Nutritionism: The Problem of The Reductionist Approach
Frederic Leroy: Well, I think Scrinis has written about this extensively, [and] made some great arguments. And nutritionism will typically overlook diversity and that means inter-individual diversity. So people have different needs to begin with, not everybody’s the same. So metabolic needs can vary quite a bit between different people. And nutritionism tends to ignore that by standardizing the portions and the proportions of the various nutrients. And by doing so, it kind of negates the tremendous potential we have for self-selecting proper foods. That’s sometimes underestimating. It’s amazing how much accuracy there is in the way we can navigate that diversity of foods and find the proper foods as long as those foods are wholesome. As long as we don’t get tricked into the ultra processed diets.
And then also it kind of ignores the synergies and the food matrix and the plethora of compounds we don’t even begin understanding what they actually mean for our health. So there’s a lot of, think of plant, secondary components in plants have all sorts of effects, and we can hardly understand what they’re doing because the complexity is so enormous. And if you throw out all that complexity, well, you end up with the Kellogg cornflakes approach. You just have your macronutrients and you fortify with the micronutrients, and then you just assume that this is going to be a proper diet. Well, it doesn’t seem to work quite well. So I think it’s a major problem. It’s pervasive. It’s pervasive in policy. It’s even pervasive in the environmental domain where, when people develop environmental metrics, they kind of just bring in nutrition by using very reductionist approaches to what, calories or maybe protein in the best case, but very, very narrow views on what the true complexity of food means for human beings.
Chris Kresser: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. And I think it also distorts the nutritional research paradigm and the kind of studies that are published. I mean, how many studies have we seen about how eating dark chocolate will increase your lifespan or decrease your lifespan or eating blueberries will increase your lifespan. Again, I think most people with common sense understand that just eating blueberries is not going to increase their lifespan by 12 percent or 15 percent or whatever. But that’s the absurdity of what happens when you have this kind of reductionist approach that focuses on single nutrients. Let’s get back to talking about nutrient density. Your February 2025 paper in Animal Frontier suggested that nutrient density improves once animal source calories reach between 25 and 33 percent of the diet, I believe was the threshold. How did you arrive at that threshold? And what kind of variability do we see across cultures and different ages? Is there a sex difference between men and women? What’s the variability there?
The Importance of Animal Foods in Nutrient Density
Frederic Leroy: Yeah, so the value is we kind of bumped onto that value from a number of angles. So, it’s kind of a convergence of different lines of thought. You mentioned Ty Beal. So Ty is one of the co-authors of the paper. And so Ty has looked at the EAT-Lancet report specifically and so they found out that the EAT-Lancet report brings in about 14 percent of the calories from animal source foods and that creates deficiencies in certain micronutrients if you don’t fortify. Of course, I mean, you could always supplement or fortify, but if you don’t, then you have those inherent deficiencies which have to do with the bioavailability as well. That was overlooked by the EAT-Lancet authors to a large degree. And they then calculated what you would need to have to cover those nutritional needs, at least of the priority nutrients.
Because the priority nutrients would be covered by about 28 percent, if I remember well, of animal source foods in the calorie budget. Then you would actually have to double the amount. And then there’s also another study from GAIN, Stella Nordhagen was the first author, and so that’s, GAIN is the Global Alliance For Improved Nutrition, and Ty is part of that same organization.
Chris Kresser: Ty is, yeah, right.
Federic Leroy: So what they did is looking at national diets and they’ve plotted them versus the animal-plant ratios as well. And then you see that for all those diets worldwide, that once you go below that threshold of about 30 percent, then you see all sorts of micronutrient deficiencies pop up again. So there’s this angle, and then there’s another, more evolutionary perspective. And so we have Neil Mann as another co-author, and Neil is emeritus professor from Australia, and he’s an evolutionary nutritionist to a certain degree at least. And Neil has worked with people like Lauren Cordain, and they have looked at evolutionary diets or ancestral diets to be more specific, because they mostly looked at modern hunter-gatherers. And in the modern hunter-gatherers spectrum, you see that there is a very wide variability in the percentage of animal foods on that same caloric intake. And it ranges somewhere between 25, 30 percent and almost completely animal based, so about, let’s say up to 95 percent. And that is of course, in the modern hunter-gatherer based on modern hunter-gatherer data, then of course, you have also the ice age stage where people are probably towards the upper end in the warmer climate zones, they are more or less around 50 percent. Some go a bit below that, but it seems to be an ancestral spectrum that is kind of matching our evolutionary requirements, and it doesn’t drop below a certain percentage of animal foods.
Now that is of course in an ancestral context where you didn’t have the fortification, you didn’t have the supplementation. It was virtually impossible to go down that spectrum further. We can do so today. It’s at least technically feasible, but it wasn’t from an evolutionary perspective. So it’s more, it’s interestingly more or less the same percentage. So I don’t want to set this number in stone either. It’s not exactly 25 percent or 30 percent, and it depends a lot on the quality of the foods, obviously. Interestingly enough, the current intake of animal foods in the American diet is about 30 percent, right? And still we have deficiencies, and that’s of course because the plant part of it is based on starches and sugars and oils. So you, of course, if you’re going to reduce your intake, you would have to take care of that, the plants you’re bringing in are sufficiently nutrient dense.
Chris Kresser: I wonder if part of it too is the quality or the type of meats consumed. For example, on the nutrient scale in Ty’s paper, chicken, which is a very popular meat in the United States because of all of the hate on red meat that persisted for so many years, is one of the least nutrient-dense meats that you can eat, compared to red meat, and especially compared to organ meats, which have completely fallen out of favor in the American diet. Do you think that has something to do with it? That our ancestors, even not too far back in the US, perhaps my grandparents were eating nose-to-tail. They were eating organ meats, they were eating more gelatinous cuts of meat high in glycine. They were consuming primarily beef and other ruminant animals. Chicken was something that people had on Sunday dinner, right? Because, you kill a cow, you can feed your family for a long time. You kill a chicken, you can maybe feed your family for one meal. Most people haven’t actually eaten a truly pasture-raised chicken. They’re scrawny and small, there’s not a lot of meat there. So do you think that has something to do with it? And maybe we could use this as a segue to talking about the role of organ meats and shellfish and foods like that in terms of their impact on nutrient density?
Frederic Leroy: Yeah, definitely. There’s a very big difference between eating deep-fried chicken nuggets and the ancestral types of meat and organ meats, yes. It was very clearly part of the dietary intake. It must have been extremely important to have. So people were not wasting it. It was good nutrition, it was valued, it was part of, I’m talking from a European perspective which I’m most familiar with, but organ meats were very much part of, and are still very much part of the gastronomic legacy, the culinary legacies we’re having in traditional recipes. More in some regions than others, but still, they’re so nutrient-dense that they can make a big difference even with small amounts.
Chris Kresser: Yeah. Yeah, that’s absolutely apparent when you look at those scales and this is not to criticize the nutrient density of muscle meats and red meat, but like liver, for example, is several times more nutrient-dense according to the scale. Beef liver is several times more nutrient-dense than beef muscle meat. And I think people often don’t understand the magnitude of the difference there. I think, and if I recall off the top of my head, on Ty’s scale, you had to eat only 11 calories of liver to get one third of the sufficiency of all of the nutrients that were studied in that scale. And then red meat is somewhere, a few hundred calories or something like that. So it’s a meaningful difference. And my audience has heard me talk about this ad nauseum, so we don’t need to belabor the point, but what are some other nutrients of concern that you start to see inadequate intake of when animal protein drops below that threshold?
Nutrients of Concern
Frederic Leroy: Well, actually there are quite a number of them. And again, it will depend on how much you’re building quality in the plant side of the diet. But typically you have the ones like, iron and zinc and B12 and vitamin A and choline as well is, is very much underestimated. What is it in the States? It’s about 80 to 90 percent of people that are consuming below the recommendations, and we don’t even know what the proper recommendations are supposed to be because deficiency is very hard to diagnose, right? It’s the clinical deficiencies is, it’s a minority of people. It’s a very low percentage. But the impact of choline deficiency is maybe very much underestimated. It’s a very important nutrient for brain health, especially at a young age or during pregnancy. So the impact of that, we don’t even know what that means, but that’s one of them. And then, but you also see it-
Chris Kresser: EPA and DHA, the long chain Omega-3 fats.
Frederic Leroy: Yeah, and then there’s a lot of stuff in there that again, they may not be essential nutrients in the classical sense of the word, but they contribute to health as well. Things like creatine or carnitine or carnosine, they also are part of the larger picture. And again, if you’re very reductionist, you just don’t take those into account. But they do have their function.
Chris Kresser: Yeah, I like that there are now some studies coming out that are looking at, for example, the differences in nutrient content of pasture raised meat versus conventional meat. If you look at some of the essential nutrients, there’s not much of a difference. But if you look at, if you expand the range of nutrients that you’re looking at to include some of the ones that you mentioned, and then some of the lesser known nutrients, there’s quite a big difference there. And to your point, we don’t even fully understand the impact of that yet. We’re just beginning to be able to measure all of those nutrients and then determine what their impact is.
Frederic Leroy: And there’s something, I’m sorry to interrupt you. But there’s something else that is also fascinating me, and that’s the difference between, you mentioned chicken before, but you have this pasture-raised chicken and you have industrial chicken, and if you eat a small piece of pasture-raised chicken, it may be a perception that, and I don’t have full, scientific proof behind it, but my impression is that the satiety value of that meat may also be higher than of the industrial variant, just maybe because of all the phytochemicals that are inside and the way that signals something within the body. So that’s another area that we have hardly explored. Fred Provenza talks about this a bit in his work, and Stephan Van Vliet as well. So those things are also fascinating. So what would be the difference between a complex matrix like a traditionally-raised animal versus an industrial animal that has just, where the focus is really on hypertrophy and muscle rather than the actual composition of the tissue?
Chris Kresser: Yeah, that’s an excellent question. And Stephan Van Vliet has been on the show as well, and we talked about the phytonutrient content of pasture-raised meat and some of the recent research he’s doing there, which is really fascinating. On that note, plant-based diet advocates and even just the sort of more conventional way of looking at diet, talks a lot about the importance of things like fiber that you of course get more of from plant foods than animal foods and phytochemicals, phytonutrients, and then concepts like glycemic load. What, in your, as you put together this framework, how did you think about those variables? And since you did not include them, I’m assuming there is a, I mean, they’re included indirectly in the sense that you eat less processed food. But you didn’t choose to include them as sort of direct variables that people are manipulating. So what was your thought process there, and how important do you think those factors are for the average person to think about?
Frederic Leroy: Well, it’s, you automatically land on that composition of foods, on that composition of diets, if you take into account the principles of the table. So if you exclude the ultra-processed foods, as you say, you end up with the moderately-processed or minimally-processed foods. And then, and you also kind of, if you put the focus on the more nutrient-dense plants, you will end up with higher proportions of certain micronutrients that are more difficult to source from animal foods. Magnesium and potassium and folic acid, maybe if you don’t have your occasional liver on your plate. So you end up in that space and fiber will be part of it. So there’s a big difference, I think if you focus on wholesome foods and the fiber intake you will have from those foods versus the ultra-processed foods where you have, in many cases, artificially-added fiber, just again, because it scores well on all the algorithms and nutrient scores and you name it. But in that case, I think fiber is often to be seen as a proxy for wholesome foods rather than as the thing to focus on. So when they’re constructing these dietary scores and making those dietary evaluations and they put such an emphasis on fiber, well, that’s, fiber is a good thing, but it’s also a powerful proxy for wholesome foods unless that fiber is artificially added to the composition, and then it doesn’t mean much. So that’s why we didn’t include fiber as a focus point, because it depends on which type of fiber we’re talking about. And there’s so many different molecular structures behind fiber with their own different functionalities. So it can, even from a biochemical perspective, it’s difficult to group it into one, in one single family.
Dairy Foods Suitability
Chris Kresser: Yeah, that makes sense. And again, it goes back to the simplicity, the value simplicity there when you just focus on these two variables that not everything naturally falls into place and you reduce confusion, probably improve compliance and that’s important with something like this. What about dairy? So it seems challenging in some ways because we know that it’s a nutrient dense food, especially full fat dairy, and I’ve written a lot about the fact that there’s really no evidence to support non-fat and low fat dairy recommendations. There was just a new paper published on this recently, I’m not sure if you saw it, corroborating that. But it’s a great source of calcium, certain fatty acids that are hard to get elsewhere, it’s a nourishing food. And yet we also know that lactose intolerance is very common worldwide, particularly in Asia and west Africa, parts of Africa. So how do we think about dairy from the perspective of this scale and nutrient sufficiency, like particularly calcium?
Frederic Leroy: Certainly, if you tolerate dairy, then it’s a very nourishing food. The full fat version obviously is even better because the fat fraction as such contains interesting compounds. Things like vitamin K2 and then even such, the fatty acids inside also have their own biological functions. So full fat dairy is extremely nourishing. You of course need to tolerate it. People have sometimes lactose intolerance. And that’s a lot of people, that’s the majority on the planet. But however, you can also develop dairy products when you deplete the lactose. Like if you take the aged cheeses for instance, the fermentation actually depleted the lactose. And even people with lactose intolerance, they can tolerate small portions. Now of course, there are other things playing as well. It’s not only the lactose. It could be other kind of reactions, and it may not be suitable for everyone, but people that have no issue with dairy, I think it’s a great option. Especially the yogurts and very nice foods, and convenience foods.
Chris Kresser: It reflects, that reflects my view as well. And it’s interesting even that there’s some studies suggesting that if you consume yogurt or kefir, you can actually reduce lactose intolerance over time.
Frederic Leroy: Yeah. That’s an official claim in the European Union if I’m not mistaken. So the lactase from the bacteria that is brought in helps digestion of lactose.
Critiquing the NOVA Food Processing Classification System
Chris Kresser: Right, and there may even be some horizontal gene transfer, that helps kind of train your gut microflora on how to digest lactose over time. So very, very interesting. Okay. So let’s move on to food processing. This portion of the scale, since we’ve just largely been talking about nutrient density, starting with the NOVA system, which is the system that we hear a lot about as a means of measuring the degree of food processing, but you’ve criticized it as being too blunt, maybe kind of a sledgehammer where we need a more precise tool. So what are the problems with NOVA? What are the biggest blind spots? And how does Nourishment Table improve on that?
Frederic Leroy: Well, to be fair, I’m not the most harsh critic out there. I’m actually quite favorable in a way that NOVA has opened up the discussion and has been very productive. And it’s not a perfect system, that’s the problem. But it’s very hard to come up with a perfect system anyway. Whenever we as humans try to put things in boxes, we always kind of have things that fall in between or in the gray zones. So we don’t cover foods to perfection with the NOVA system. However, what I think is often misunderstood is that NOVA is not a system that is against processing. Well, on the contrary, it actually makes the point that processing is useful, but there are certain types of processing that are harmful. And in its definition, if you look at the broader definition, you see that it’s not just a matter of intensity of processing only. It also has this qualitative definition where they say, it’s those kind of branded products that are designed to be addictive. They are pushed by big multinationals. They are generally deconstructed food ingredients that are put together once more in a concoction that is then colored and flavored and emulsified. And that actually makes quite a bit of sense. And I think the problem with NOVA is when you try to apply it, and that’s maybe where you picked up my criticism, when you try to apply it to single foods, because you will always have that difficulty, how many ingredients would you tolerate, right? Is it five, six? How many can we accept? Are they all problematic to begin with? I think you have to take NOVA to the dietary pattern level, and that’s what we do in the paper as well. We don’t judge foods on their NOVA classification as such. What we do is, advising people, advise people to steer away from diets that are dominated by NOVA. Because then I think it becomes much more robust and you get rid of all those intricate differences and little complexities. And you just have the common sense approach that you just try to stay away from the hyper engineered foods that are addictive and create problems.
And whether you do that through NOVA or any other qualification is besides the point, I think. It’s the common sense part that is most valuable here. And there are certain criteria that we need to fulfill, and NOVA kind of does that. But this maybe, maybe we need to have a deeper discussion or at the academic level to solve all those things. But at the more superficial level when it comes to explaining people what to eat or not to eat, I think it’s good enough,
Chris Kresser: Right. Yeah, I agree with that. And then of course, there’s also the fact that certain forms of processing, which I think most people wouldn’t even think of as processing in the sense that we talk about in NOVA, but fermentation, sprouting, nixtamalization, of corn particularly, or masa, these actually increase nutrient bioavailability typically and are going to maybe even make the foods have a higher ranking on the Nourishment Table score.
Frederic Leroy: Yeah, and that’s especially valid in the lower animal percentage part of the table. So if you go all the way to the left side of that table, you end up in that space that is less robust. Actually, we have, if you look at the table we constructed, you have the upper layer and that’s the ultra processed diet, and then we put like a red color, something you don’t enter. You stay away from ultra processed diets. And then the left side is more orange, right? We’re not saying you cannot go there. If you’re a vegetarian or even if you’re vegan, there are solutions. It’s just that it’s more tricky because you’re moving out of that biological robust spectrum that we have encoded in our physiology, and you are entering a more experimental zone. It is feasible, but you need to be careful. And if you’re going to enter it, then processing is a good thing because processing will help you detoxify certain toxic components you’ll find in plants. That’s what we’ve been doing since always. It will help you increase the digestibility of plant foods. It will also, kind of help you to improve bioavailability of certain micronutrients. So processing as such is something that is especially valuable for plant foods even more than for animal foods. I mean, it also helps you to digest meat. And if you eat raw meat, it’s kind of, it’s not kind of the optimal way to eat it. But it’s not even enjoyable, I think, except for carpaccio. People actually roast meat or heat it or whatever. But for plants, it holds particular potential because it always has been essential for humans.
There’s something called the, it’s called McHenry’s Megadontia Ratio or something like that. And that has been used to look at how much an animal can cope with unprocessed plant materials, right? And we see that for humans, that ratio has moved along the spectrum quite a bit starting from homohabilis all the way to Sapiens. And it shows that we, based on that ratio, it shows that we actually, again, depend on animal foods because we wouldn’t make it with only plants. And homosapiens was only able to go beyond that limit or that boundary by processing. And that’s, especially during the Mesolithic when the, during the broad spectrum revolution, humans started to, so when the climate changed again and the megafauna died out, humans started to use the diversity of plants that appeared with the new climate, under the new climatic conditions, and started to process to find all sorts of different ways to process those foods as a kind of warmup for the neolithic and experiment with different processing techniques. So it always has been there, and it has been extremely useful in the past, and it remains so today,
Chris Kresser: I find it fascinating that human beings figured this out. It goes back to what you were saying before, is how little we in the modern world trust our own intuitive sense and our own cravings and just our response to food. But these cultures figured out without the benefit of modern science, that just eating legumes, for example, that are cooked without any processing beforehand is not a good idea. And so you look at traditional cultures, they always soak and sometimes even sprout legumes before they consume them. And the same thing with grains, everyone from like oatmeal and the Scottish highlands traditionally was soaked and prepared with some kind of acid medium. You see this all over the world. And yet today that has largely been lost, like in the modern world. So much of the grain that’s consumed is not, first of all, it’s not even whole grain to begin with anymore and it’s certainly not fermented or sprouted, when it’s consumed in processed flour form in most cases. But at least in health food stores, you can see this trend starting to reverse a little bit. You can go into Whole Foods and buy almonds that are sprouted almonds, for example. You can buy sprouted quinoa and things like this. So it seems like at least in a subset of the population, there’s some increased awareness of the importance of that, which is good. Let’s talk about fake meat and where fake meat fails on the Nourishment Table scale. Is it primarily nutrient density or is it processing, or is it both in the case of these products?
The Fake Meat Failure
Frederic Leroy: Yeah, I think we need the distinction between what they call cultured meat or lab meat and plant-based imitation meat, right? Those are two very different things. The plant-based imitation foods are in many cases, if not most cases, ultra processed foods, right? So they are highly processed. You see it also with non meats, other animal foods. You have, for instance, imitation eggs or imitation shrimp or anything you want. They have a plant-based imitation dairy, of course, very often as well. So many of those are indeed ultra processed. And, if you look at the composition of, so I think it depends a bit also if you should talk about dairy imitations or meat imitations, they’re not processed to the same degrees. But the meat imitations are usually a protein isolate with refined fat or oil, and then a lot of emulsifiers and things to structure and texturize it, colorants and flavors. Because if you start from a protein isolate, it is rather impalatable, right? It’s something, it’s not something that is nice to eat. So you need a lot of tricks from the toolbox of food engineers to be able to make it look and taste like meat. And so that implies that, again, the entire focus here is usually on the protein. And some of them may have added micronutrients, but it’s very narrowly seen as a protein replacer. And by doing so, you kind of ignore all the other nutrients that you will have in meat. So it’s reducing it to a more narrow nutritional spectrum. And then the cosmetic interventions you need to make it look like meat, they come with all those ingredients.
Now, is that problematic? Well, we don’t really know for sure, but there’s a lot of, there are a lot of indications nowadays that especially emulsifiers and those kind of components are potentially having impact on the gut microbiome and start to emulsify in places where you actually don’t want them to emulsify. And they may, they may have their impact over longer timescales and through mechanisms that are not so easy to pick up based on diagnosis, because they’re more at the chronic level. So it’s something that is, I wouldn’t recommend it. I’d also think it’s a very impoverished way to look at diets. If you don’t want to eat meat, fair enough. I mean, there are solutions to avoid meat. You can be lacto-ova vegetarian, or you can even be vegan and come up with whole foods solutions. It’s basing your whole dietary philosophy on a limitation of a food you actually don’t want to eat. I don’t find that a good foundation for dietary scenarios and the dietary future of our species.
The Role of Food Fortification
Chris Kresser: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting just from a purely economic standpoint, you look at the trajectory of these companies over time and also their share of shelf space, and you can see that it’s a failing enterprise at this point. And people have not bought into it. It’s the truth of the matter. So, I think our basic human sensibilities prevailed in this case, fortunately. So let’s talk a little bit about fortification. So, in a perfect world, we would all be eating a nutrient-dense diet. We would have no need for fortification. What is your stance on fortification? Is there any role for fortification in the modern world, in the modern diet? And if so, what might that be?
Frederic Leroy: Well, I think there is, and again, it’s one of those conversations where you often have a black and white discussion where you shouldn’t have one. Some cases are so acute that fortification is really needed just to deal with existing human misery. So it’s a very powerful tool. It becomes more of a problem when it’s becoming a paradigm, right? And so you mentioned before nixtamalization and Mark Schatzker in one of his books, I don’t remember which, I think it is one of his latest books, The End of Craving, I think it’s in this one, he comes up with this interesting comparison between the United States and the north of Italy. So both regions in the early 20th century were hit by pellagra, a niacin deficiency. And that’s because they were based (inaudible 45:38) southern states in the US were very much, the diets were very much based on corn, because that was the cheaper option. And in Italy you had polenta, which is again, a corn derived product, and very little other, I mean, very little otherwise nutritious foods, because they were just not affordable. And then so what Schatzker is saying is that in the, so when Goldberger, Joseph Goldberger, made the link between pellagra and the diet, because before that, before there was an infection, it was an infectious disease, he made a link with the diet and actually opened the way towards the discovery letter of niacin. Because of that discovery, the US government at some point in time, I think it was during the 1940s, started to fortify certain staples like flour and so on, with niacin among other nutrients, including also iron and a couple of others. And then they managed to solve the problem.
And so the fortification was extremely useful and helpful in eradicating pellagra, which was a devastating disease, and it’s a horrible disease. But Italy had another trajectory. So what happened in Italy is that the population also solved pellagra, but not through fortification. But because the people started to eat more rabbits, which were easy to keep, and they brought in a lot of nutrients, and I think they also. So there’s also a point being made about wine consumption, because the unfiltered wine of that time was still containing yeast, there was a push to have more bread consumption rather than corn, and that solved the crisis as well. So what Schatzker then concludes from that contrast is that in the United States, a paradigm was installed where fortification became the fixing of the problem. So you fix the problem through fortification. And you maintain the idea that food is problematic. So it’s something you need to fix by filling in the holes and you fortify.
What should we really be eating? Chris Kresser and Dr. Frederic Leroy break down the Nourishment Table, a simple but powerful framework based on nutrient density and food processing. #RHR #Nutrition #ChrisKresser
Frederic Leroy: And that idea, that concept, that paradigm eventually ends up with ultra processed foods, because that’s how you look at it. That’s what, again, Kellog’s cornflakes is doing. It’s a very poor basis for nutrition. But then you fortify it, you solve the problem by fortification. The Italian philosophy is that food is actually the solution because you just have to bring in the foods that are doing the proper job. So on the longer term, you may create those different perspectives on what diet actually means for people. And that’s easily said, of course. And it maybe has that kind of foodie overtone and connotation. But I think there’s some truth in it. So you cannot just install a new food culture and fix everything overnight. But what the Nourishment Table is trying to do is exactly that. It’s trying to put the focus on those nourishing foods that are maybe affordable and not too expensive. And you can come up with certain lists of such products and help you stay away and get you out of that left orange zone that is less robust. It’s a bit what the Italians have been doing in the early 20th century.
Reception and Obstacles of The Nourishment Table
Chris Kresser: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense to me. And again, I appreciate the nuance. We can’t just wave a magic wand and ensure that everybody is eating a nutrient dense diet, because of course, there are economic and geopolitical considerations and people who are living well below the poverty line in various parts of the world just don’t have access to the amount of nutrient dense calories that they need. So that does make sense to me. I’m curious now, just shifting gears a little bit, like how the Nourishment Table has been received in the academic community and what you think the biggest obstacles are to shifting the conversation more in that direction from the current paradigm that we seem to be stuck in. It just seems to me that we just continually get more and more of the same misguided scales, the dietary guidelines were just recently reevaluated. We had a big opportunity there for a shift. There were a lot of people advocating for that shift, but business as usual seems to just continue. So what do you think the major obstacles are there? And then again, what have you seen so far since you published the Nourishment Table?
Frederic Leroy: Yeah. Well, it’s a very young publication. So the impact is minimal. It’s also not a, we can’t say it’s a leading scientific journal in the top tier of the journals. So that also prevents or limits its exposure. But it’s just difficult to enter the dominant discourse within academia when we talk about nutrition. So those, that space is taken up by the leading paradigm, right? And that still is the one that is referring to healthy diets and unhealthy diets essentially mean, whole grains and low fat or, or if there’s fat, that must be from plant oils. And stay away from red meat and substitute all your protein, and try to get it based on beans. And so those very rigid ideas, and then, I’m not saying they’re all necessarily problematic, but they’re certainly not valid for everyone. And it’s just not working. And that’s the main reason why we also started this exercise. So what we’re seeing is now that we’re having these dietary guidelines that are basically just having the same stories, and just ramping it up essentially, starting in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and since we haven’t seen any improvement. Year by year metabolic syndrome and diabetes, they just increase. So even the guidelines will be okay, there’s something wrong in the policy, it’s not working. And at some point you just would have, it’s just not sustainable anymore because the public health costs will be so massive that it will just not be, it would be, it won’t be able anymore just to neglect it. You see the first cracks in the system, right? You mentioned the pushback against, within the United States. So the cracks are appearing, and I think it is about, we’re about to reach the moment I think where new models will start to take over, and it will probably work through more bottom up systems. And you see that already appearing where communities that are adopting specific diets and then they talk to each other and people are getting healthier. And in many cases, if you look at those communities, whether they’re low carb or ancestral health or whole food, or any of those movements, they’re essentially very compatible with the Nourishment Table. So the Nourishment Table is not revolutionary. It’s actually the advice that my grandparents would’ve given me if I would just asked them what to eat. It’s not rocket science. The revolutionary side of it, I think, is just that it tries to break with the current, consensus paradigm, indeed.
Chris Kresser: Yeah, my very non-scientific, far less informed way of a version of the Nourishment Table many years ago, advice that I used to give to my patients and in my blog posts was eat real food. And then, eat real food, including animals was, I added that on because you could of course, eat just plants, and be eating real food. But eat real food, including animals. That was my lay person, my clinician’s version of the Nourishment Table. And if we could maybe summarize the conversation here in a practical way for people, like if someone’s listening to this and they’re thinking about how they’re going to plan their meals for the week, what would you say as just the shorthand version when they’re at the grocery store, when they’re thinking about meal planning, what’s the most practical way of applying this?
How to Practically Apply The Nourishment Table
Frederic Leroy: Yeah. Well, it’s, so the problem is with the real food kind of statement is actually quite good. I can, we just cannot use that in the academic literature because that wouldn’t be acceptable. What does real mean? Real as a construct, it’s not an easy word. But people do know what it means. Pragmatically people will understand what it means. So I think at a practical level, you can just use that, real food. And it implies that you go for those foods that are known to be nutritious and nourishing, right? And that’s why we insist on nourishment and not on healthiness, because healthiness has been co-opted. It doesn’t mean anything. You can go to a person and ask, are you healthy? How do you even begin to answer that? What it usually means is that you don’t have a metabolic condition that you’re aware of. But since that, what is it, around 90 percent of the people with prediabetes don’t even know they have prediabetes. What does that even mean? And nourishment on the other hand, is something that is more real, more tangible. It means that you feel satiety. It means that you have these connotations of commonality as well. It’s more than biological satisfaction. It’s richer. It’s the deeper satiety level that you kind of obtain through nourishment. And then you obtain that with certain foods, and people will quickly find out what it means if they stay away from those branded boxes with lots of ingredients and focus on the primary products that you get in the supermarket. And fair enough, some cooking skills may be needed. But you can also, you don’t have to be a chef, right?
Frederic Leroy: And it’s not that you need to have an ocean of time to prepare all those meals. There are solutions to use simple foods. You can think of, if you go in the supermarket, don’t buy the fruity yogurt with added starches and lots of sugar. Just buy the plain yogurt. If you want, you can add a drop of honey if it’s too sour. Just go down that direction and very quickly, I think people will, and that’s documented by so many case studies. People rediscover what it means to be nourished. It’s a much more positive angle than the negative angle of healthy diets, healthy in a way. What the word means nowadays is almost coming from a negative point of view. It’s not the disease that’s healthy. Embrace foods and include processed foods, like (inaudible 57:21) beans or whole grain bread that is not the industrial type of bread. Have a piece of meat, have a piece of fish, have an omelet. Now an omelet is very easy to make, and it’s very nourishing. Full fat dairy.
Chris Kresser: Yeah, I mean, I think you don’t need to be incredibly rigid about this. I’ve talked about the 80/20 rule or the 90/10 rule, or your exact proportion may vary depending on your health status and your goals. But if you aim for meeting these principles 80 to 90 percent of the time, you’re probably going to get the majority of the benefit. Whereas if you aim for it a hundred percent of the time, and that’s not stressful, and it doesn’t uproot your life in any way, that’s fine. But if it means you’re not going out to dinner with friends because you absolutely never want to have any seed oil at all, there’s a social cost to that, right? And we know that socializing is a very, it contributes to our wellbeing in a lot of ways. And so if you cut that out of your life completely in the name of being healthy, or even well-nourished, then there’s no right or wrong here, but you have to consider the impact of that on our overall health. That’s something I’ve usually, I’ve tried to talk to my patients about, because I have some highly motivated folks in my audience who want to do the best for their health. But it’s good to broaden the conversation that there’s more to health than food too, That’s a whole other topic.
Frederic Leroy: And there’s a whole field of research that is looking into the effects of eating together and we’ve kind of lost that a lot. The eating behavior is pretty much now families come home and they eat at different times in the evening, and the one just drops something in the microwave and someone else, so this disconnect is actually very harmful for our, for the entire nourishment potential. Because if you eat together, you also take into account, you kind of behave differently, you eat differently, you eat in a different manner that is usually beneficial. And it’s very often underestimated. And that only happens if you see food just as nutrients. The nutritionism perspective just tells you basically food, that’s an accumulation of nutrients. But it’s so much more than that. And you cannot just neglect it. It comes with a price. Now that said, of course, and we do know that some people have metabolic conditions and they have to narrow down that flexibility. And that’s unfortunate. Some people will react badly to certain plants or some people will react badly to certain degrees of carbohydrates. That also plays of course. I mean we, I’m not saying that we can have maximum flexibility for everyone. That would be ideal. But for many people, obsessing over food choices, I think one of the key messages would also be, relax a bit, right? Don’t see it as a religion.
Chris Kresser: Yes, I agree. So last question for you, hopefully it’s a fun one. If you’re looking ahead five years and I were to give you a blank check and fund any research question that you wanted to answer, what would that be?
Frederic Leroy: I think we need to know more about the mechanisms behind the overeating phenomena. So why are we overeating, why is that happening? It has to do, I think, with the fact that you get through ultra processed foods, you get fake information because you have kind of fake foods bringing you fake information and then there’s just mismatch with what the body expects. And then the apostat that is normally very tightly regulating almost to perfection what we eat. The accuracy has been calculated. It’s less than a percent. It’s amazing how precise the body actually can balance calories in calories out just because of the hormones and the signals. And something is going on there, and we don’t, we just don’t know enough about it. So I think a priority should be finding out the exact mechanism behind the distortion of our epistatic control, which would then be the basis for a proper evaluation of ultra processed foods in the NOVA system. What is actually driving that? We need more sophistication in that analysis and that will require expensive research, I think. Kevin Hall was going down that way, but I’ve seen that he unfortunately had run into trouble. So but that, I think, would be a very interesting avenue for further research.
Chris Kresser: I agree. [It] would be incredible to have that result. And we will work on the blank check for you to see what we can do. Frederic, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you. I know my audience is really going to appreciate this. Where can people follow you and learn more about your work? I follow you on X, that’s how I get most of my updates from you. But what are the best ways for people to do that?
Frederic Leroy: I think mostly on X, unless of course they have access to scientific publications, but that’s not to be taken for granted. But on X, you can find me. I do have profiles on other social media platforms, but I don’t use them very often. So if you want to have the latest things, it’s on X. I also have a website called ALEPH 2020 where I’m trying to collect information and the latest, so it’s an evolving website. It’s a source of information on specific topics of animal-sourced foods. But it goes also beyond that and it talks about sustainability and nutrition and ethics. So that’s a place where you can also find evolving thoughts. And that’s, I think, [the easiest] places to follow what I’m doing.
Chris Kresser: Well, thank you again, and thanks everyone for listening. We’ll see you next time.
