The Bioavailability of Nutrients in Animal Foods Only Way to Address Deficiencies World-Wide

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With the backing of the world’s largest governments and visionary billionaires, international organizations striving to address malnutrition worldwide are failing. In low and middle-income countries, the risk of being deficient in one of six crucial micronutrients is still 2 in 3

Even at home, high-income countries average 1 in 3 citizens deficient in zinc, folate, vitamin A, iron, vitamin B12, and calcium, often within the populations most vulnerable to forms of malnutrition including children 2–4 years, adolescents, non-pregnant and non-lactating women of reproductive age, and pregnant women. In high-income countries this is also paired with a tremendous over-consumption of calories.

Seeking to quantify the best ways of addressing these worldwide, cross-cultural deficiencies, a team of researchers from GAIN: the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, set out to build an aggregated global food composition database, and then rank order the foods based on the quantity of these essential micronutrients, and their bioavailability in the body.

The findings were published in early March in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition. What they found was that nearly all of the richest sources of these six critical micronutrients were animal sourced, and that the bioavailability of the nutrients was also highest in animal sources.

Most foods contain 70,000 component molecules nestled within a structural food matrix, all of which alter the effects of consuming a particular nutrient. One critical compound tracked in the database was phytate, which blocks calcium absorption and is found a lot in grains, vegetables, and other plant-based foods.

PICTURED: A chart of calorie-per-calorie comparisons for density of micronutrients versus AR, or average daily energy requirements. At the top liver needed just 11 calories of the average daily energy requirements to deliver one-third of the recommended intakes of iron, folate, zinc, vitamins A and B12, and calcium.

Not all created equal

“Foods with very high aggregate micronutrient density… include organs (liver, spleen, kidney, and heart from beef, goat, lamb, chicken, and pork), small dried fish, dark leafy green vegetables, bivalves (clams, mussels, and oysters), crustaceans, goat, beef, eggs, milk, canned fish with bones, lamb/mutton, and cheese,” the study finds. “Foods with a high aggregate micronutrient density include goat milk and pork”.

Even among animal foods however, there was also wide inequality in the density of micronutrients. The above chart was particularly striking, and demonstrates that in order to acquire one-third of all these 6 important micronutrients, one could eat 11 calories of beef liver—not even a fork-sized bite—or 1,100 calories of chicken.

Also striking is how low nuts, seeds, pulses, quinoa, and some fruit were, which often come highly recommended in whole-food or plant-based modern diets. The reason for this can be deduced from another chart—the aggregate scores from their dataset of surveyed countries—which shows the bioavailability of nuts, seeds, pulses, and quinoa were not only high in mineral-blocking phytate, but they were among the lowest bioavailable foods for iron and zinc.

Still, the researchers were attempting to quantify metrics that could be used to build better nutrition policy and interpret their findings also in the context of lacto-ovo vegetarians and vegans, as well as for people in low and middle-income countries who may not be able to afford ruminant meat, organ meat, or seafood.

Sustainability question

Over the last few years, a closer examination into the true effects of animal-sourced foods on global climate change has many scientists changing their position, including one of the panelists of the original IPCC, who admits that ruminant-methane production can’t be counted next to other anthropogenic sources of CO2 emissions like transport, production, and energy generation.

Ty Beal from the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis and co-author of the nutrition study, also co-authored a review published around the same time entitled: “An argument against drastic limitation of livestock in the food system”.

Beal et al. quite succinctly explain why it’s understood to be no longer necessary at all to limit animal agriculture to limit greenhouse gas emissions, and that most environmental harm done from the large-scale application of animal husbandry is because of poor husbandry practices, not because the animals themselves are somehow naturally damaging to the world. Earth has always hosted mass herds of ruminant grazers, and they have a natural place in the ecosystem.

When well-managed, livestock farming contributes to ecosystem management and soil health, while delivering high-quality foodstuffs through the upcycling of resources that are otherwise non-suitable for food production, making use of marginal land and inedible materials (forage, by-products, etc.), integrating livestock and crop farming where possible has the potential to benefit plant food production through enhanced nutrient recycling, while minimizing external input needs such as fertilizers and pesticides.

Moreover, the impacts on land use, water wastage, and greenhouse gas emissions are highly contextual, and their estimation is often erroneous due to a reductionist use of metrics.

The authors note that bizarrely, the discussion over the degree to which animal-sourced foods are included in a world food system has become an ideological, and not an intellectual, battleground, with many large corporate interests becoming involved in the conversation through large financing inputs, particularly into institutions like Lancet which suggest limiting global meat consumption heavily. WaL

Continue exploring this topic — Agriculture — Oxford IPCC Panelist Admits Cow Methane is Not Honestly Accounted For

Continue exploring this topic — Red Meat —New Meta-Analysis Shows “No Health Benefit” To Reducing Red Meat Consumption

Continue exploring this topic — Malnutrition — How to Protect Yourself from Choline Deficiency

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