Nourishment v Nutrition

Nourishment v Nutrition

I want to eat food that nourishes me, not that just provides energy for physical movement and activity and I certainly don’t want food that creates excessive inflammation in my body. Food is one of the most intimate ways that we interact with the outside world, so I want it to be an enjoyable experience, but also one that is good for my body and soul.  What happens out in the paddock with the food’s production is as much a factor of ensuring this, as what I do in the kitchen.

Inflammation in the Body

Any of you interested in health may know that disease can be the product of inflammation expressed in different ways in the body.  Short lived inflammation can be healing, such as swelling and redness associated with a cut or minor infection. When the inflammation becomes chronic is when it is deemed a problem, albeit it is still just the body’s adaptation and attempt to heal.

Chronic inflammation in the body can result from many things, including mental stress and pressures, lack of sleep, toxins in the body, poor diet and more.  The act of eating a meal can create an inflammatory response by the body, but it is here that the response of the body can vary significantly depending on the food, as reported in a study by Southern Cross University (Arya, F, 2010).

The Science

The study looked at inflammatory markers in the blood of people in the hours following meals of either Kangaroo meat (used as an example of free range game meat) and Wagyu beef from that fed in a feedlot (characteristic of a modern domesticated production system) – eaten as meals with baked potato and green peas.  The study reported an inflammatory response in the body of participants following the grain fed wagyu meal as determined by a number of inflammatory markers in the blood, 1 and 2 hours after the meals.  The study concluded that the metabolic related inflammation reaction to Wagyu was indicative of a low grade, systemic immune reaction when compared to the kangaroo meat.1 The mind boggles as to the effect on one’s body over time if this reaction were repeated at each mealtime.

What is it about these meats that resulted in the different responses in the bodies of the study participants?  I spoke with the wonderful Fred Provenza, Professor Emeritus of Animal Behaviour and Management at Utah State University some year’s back who explained what might be the link and it is back in the paddock where the difference may arise.

What Animals Eat Matters

Let’s look at the diets of farm animals. The constituents of pastures that are typically considered with animal health (and food and human health for that matter) are the primary components of feedstuffs – namely energy, protein, minerals, vitamins and water.  These are most certainly important and definitely related to growth and weight gain of the animal, but perhaps not wholly responsible for overall animal health, immunity, fertility and more.

Plant Secondary Compounds

To have optimal animal health, we must look further, to the secondary components of pasture plants or animal feedstuffs.  These are equally as important but often overlooked.  These secondary compounds or phytochemicals are things like phenolics, terpenes, alkaloids and tannins. They can exist in varying levels in plants depending on species, season, region, time of day and the resources available to the plant.  They can be anything from nutritious to toxic – and this can vary depending on the quantities and combinations in which they are consumed. Animals have learned over time (and generations) to manage intake of these for best health via clever feedback loops.

These phytochemicals (primary and secondary compounds together), are responsible for flavour of plants, as well as for the satiety that they provide.  They allow animals to self-medicate – to alleviate bloat, enhance protein utilisation and immune responses, and increase resistance to gastrointestinal nematodes and to improve reproductive efficiency.

A pasture with a diversity of plants provides choice and ability to choose for the animals, which is critical for animals to meet their needs for nutrients and to self-medicate.  Animals given access to a diverse range of plant species will predominantly graze a handful of plants but then choose to graze small amounts of lots of other plants as they seek an array of these health-giving phytochemicals.

Incredibly, animals receive feedback from their organs and systems that help them to become adapted to the plants of their area – complex systems involving hormones, neurotransmitters and more.  Animals learn to associate flavours of foods with the consequences they feel following consumption.  The way the body sends messages back to the palate to alter liking for the flavour or food type is a function of need.  Amazingly, organs of animals will vary in their form and the way that they function as they adapt to different feedtypes!  And all of that actually begins to develop in utero and early in life, which is what prompted this writing as I watched a young milk-dependent lamb experiment with chewing on a stalk of grass.  When fed on monoculture pastures or a small selection of feedstuffs in a feedlot environment, the animal’s ability to select for specific health giving phytochemicals is restricted or all but absent.

If these feedback systems are present in animals, with the secondary compounds providing health giving properties, why would it be any different for us?

Consider meat from a free range animal, compared to a plant based meat alternative, the primary nutritional information of energy, protein, minerals and vitamins may read exactly the same on the label, but if one were to do an analysis of the secondary compounds in the meat, the complexity of the free range animal’s meat would not be recognizable as the same product as the other, let alone a lab grown meat.

Grass Fed versus Grain Fed

This is what I believe is being reflected in the responses of the people consuming the kangaroo meat versus the wagyu feedlot beef.  This myriad of secondary compounds consumed by the kangaroo, not even available for choice by the wagyu animal in the feedlot may well in turn be reflected in the quality of their bodily makeup and how our bodies then respond to the consumption of that meat.

The conclusions Professor Provenza reaches regarding how we as a species have dulled or eliminated our ability to adjust diets to meet our true nutritional needs is concerning. If we still possessed the intuition to know what foods will heal us, we may be far better off. We end up reaching for research for guidance rather than the guidance of our bodies. Of course, as humans we have been at the mercy of food companies who research and understand such feedback loops, creating foods with flavours and associated ‘energy hit’ rewards and other tricks that play on and commandeer the feedback systems of our bodies.  I noticed at the bottom of the study that, not surprisingly, ‘no grant funding was received for this research’.

Have we tested for the complexity of such compounds in our beef and lamb? No, we haven’t, but I know, see and experience the diversity the sheep and cattle graze on as I ride around the paddocks, and I taste the complex flavours of the meat, and I eat and enjoy the sweetness of the fat and have every confidence of its value in nourishing.

There are still foods produced by people who have not forgotten quality and nourishment at the expense of throughput of kilograms and we try our best to be this. We go out of our way to choose these foods for us whenever we can. If you’d like to choose it too, you can do so with one of our beef or lamb hampers, which you can see here.

Good health,

Kirrily

 

  1. Arya F, Egger S, Colquhoun D, Sullivan D, Pal S, Egger G. Differences in postprandial inflammatory responses to a ‘modern’ v. traditional meat meal: a preliminary study. British Journal of Nutrition. 2010;104(5):724-728. doi:10.1017/S0007114510001042