The food we grow at Deck Family Farm is raised using regenerative agriculture practices. This means we aim to improve the health of the environment in which we farm. This is important for the planet, for our animals
and for the quality of food we sell.
I heard a great discussion about our American food system and health problems recently, which focused in part on the soil in which we grow our food. Dr. Casey Means, the author of the book Good Energy about metabolic health, appeared on the Huberman Lab podcast in May 2024.
Dr. Means describes why we are having so many health problems in America by pointing out that the conventionally raised food we eat, whether highly processed or not, has many fewer nutrients than we need. She said this causes people to overeat because the cells in the digestive system are not finding the nutrients they require. In order to find them, we are driven to eat more and more.
One of the reasons, she says, is that industrial agriculture has depleted the nutrients in our soil making the food it produces less nutritious. She points out that we can change this for ourselves and our families: We all have the power to make changes in our shopping, which you may already be doing by shopping at our Full Farm CSA.
In regenerative agriculture, you can imagine that the soil is the main client of the farm. Since everything we raise, whether animal or vegetable, lives in or on the soil, we take care of that soil carefully. Rotational grazing, cover cropping, animal integration, and composting, among other practices, keep the soil and waterways healthy. In turn, the soil and water help us raise foods naturally, so Deck Family Farm doesn't need to use vaccines, antibiotics, or synthetic fertilizers.
Dr. Means also points out that our digestive system procures and breaks down all the food we eat in a lifetime (which averages 70 metric tons) into the molecular building blocks for our bodies. So, since we are what we eat, higher quality is better. She used an effective metaphor: “Babies are 3-D printed from food inside a woman’s body!”
Means has an interesting background. Her career as an Ear, Nose and Throat surgeon led her to research the root cause for the diseases she was seeing, such as chronic sinusitis. She found that the reason people had impacted infections of their sinus cavities was because their cells were under nourished and therefore not able to perform basic functions. This caused them to set off an emergency immune response. She was inspired to stop treating the symptoms and begin working on the solutions for those ENT diseases and so many more and has become an advocate for changing the American diet.
“Metabolism is the foundation of all health. It is the core, foundational pathway that drives all other aspects of health. It’s also the core, foundational pathway that’s truly getting crushed in the modern American world and underlying nine out the 10 leading causes of death in the United States today,” she said.
Below is an excerpt from the Huberman Lab Podcast, May 6, 2024, where they directly discuss soil health and food nutrition. It is a deep and useful conversation, covering topics very prominent in today’s society. The following quote has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Dr. Casey Means:
"This ultra processed food environment that's cropped up for the past 50 years is an experiment that has failed. It has failed. You know, close to 45 percent of kids are overweight or obese now. It’s not working…
…Just telling people to eat less calories but eat whatever you want just doesn’t work. We have to inspire the body to not want to eat excess calories which we do by stimulating satiety hormones, helping the microbiome support that process and then change our reward circuitry which is done with the most nutrient rich food we can possibly get.
And that’s why I mention the soil because our food is drastically depleted of nutrients. When we look at that 70 metric tons of food we are eating during a lifetime, it’s just fascinating. That's the information for our body about what it's going to be built from, how it's going to function. Well right now, 60 to 75 percent [of what we eat] is ultraprocessed so we have slashed the value (because the ultra processing just slashes the nutrients) of that 70 metric tons and then we have crappy soil because of our industrial agriculture system which means the food has in some cases 70% less of key micronutrients in it. So of that 70 metric tons [that we eat in a lifetime] what’s actually useful for our body becomes so much smaller. So what we want to do is expand the value of that substrate we are putting in the body and that means real food, unprocessed, from good soil, meet the needs of the cells, naturally don’t be hungry, maintain a healthy weight."