A great honor to be joined this morning by one of our distinguished HBCU presidents. He is Dr. Quinton Ross, a proud alumnus and now the campus CEO of Alabama State University. Brother Ross, it is an honor seriously to have you on. I've been chasing you for years. I've been ducking you for years and we finally got you on. In the midst of board meeting at that. That's right. So I appreciate you making time, especially during this hectic time. First, congratulations on all the success. As an alumnus, as someone who's served in state legislature, as someone who's been a proud benefactor of the institution, what is it like to look back over this period so far and say, what I set out to do, it appears that you've done it, you've achieved it. Even though there's more to go, there are things that you've done. What is that feeling like for you? Well, Jeff, first of all, let me thank you. It's so good to see you and I just wanna thank you for all the wonderful work and journalism and reporting that you do for HBCUs across the country. And so it's always good to be with you. And we have this ongoing joke. I had your colors on the day. But we don't have no choice. But listen, October 3rd will be four years that I've been at the institution. I stepped away and resigned from the state legislature in October of 2017. And being on this journey, it truly has been phenomenal. I tell people all the time that basically when grace and mercy, they collide, that's called favor. And favor has surely been shown on Alabama State University. We've been on a long journey. And we talk about the things that we've been able to accomplish. I walked through the door in October after school had already been started and enrollments have been declining across the country. But even with all that Alabama State University had been through, our enrollments were declining. And now we're happy to report that we have sustained and stopped the bleeding of enrollment loss and stabilized it. But also more importantly, try to clear up and frame up those areas where we have had lost retention for our students. Students have been leaving the institution by particularly our freshmen, right? We were losing like 31% of our freshmen when I walked through the door by the next semester. And so really working across campus, breaking down silos, getting everyone to work together, we have been able to improve our retention rate of our freshmen. I mean, when you talk about the retention rate in returning students, we have gone up to about 70%. We talk about that. People look at numbers and say, well, how many students do you have? But really you can have as many students as you want. But if they're not being retained, not persisting and completing, it really means nothing. We just have a revolving door. So we've been able to focus in on that and we're excited about that. I also walked in when Alabama State University was under review for SAC-CLC, the 10-year review. A lot of people didn't think we could do it, but we did it. Matter of fact, we probably were one of the first institutions that went through SAC's review virtually because of COVID. And so we're hopeful in December, it's December convening that Alabama State University will be reaffirmed for another 10 years. And that's major. And but even through that process, bringing people out the silos who probably had never been a part of the process, putting them together and understanding that it takes all of us to move the university, we were successful through that process. We have a phenomenal QEP program, our students' first year success, journey to first year success that has been implemented and we're kicking off here. We also just announced a few weeks ago, we unveiled our focus 2030, which is a new strategic plan for the institution. The institutional organization has to have a map in terms of where it wants to go. Fiscally, we came in, of course, on very shaky fiscal ground here at Alabama State University, but I'm proud to report today that we're probably in the best fiscal condition that we've been in for a long time here at Alabama State University.  And so doing that, that helped us to accomplish the goal of stability. But not only that, taking the money that was given by the legislature and making sure that we used it appropriately, we were able to secure extra funding, which is not an easy feat. You just don't get extra money. You have to work with your legislators and people, the relationships that you have to do that. And so by us being able to do that, we've been able to manage real well. Now, COVID struck and one of the first things that I did when I came in as president now was went to the HP, in the first two months, went to the HPCU Capital Refinance Program, because what I wanted to do, I didn't want to build anything. I didn't want, I wanted to get the debt that we had under control. You find that. Because we had debt that was all over the place, meaning we had bonds that the rates were varying from 6% to 7%. We had bonds that could have been called at any day for five or $10 million that the university just didn't have. So with the help of my team here and the help of the board, we were able to have about $148 million worth of our debt refinanced on campus, which was excluding the new stadium that we had built. So we still had that outstanding debt. But again, when you talk about how things happen and you look for the silver lining, silver lining in a bad situation, working through COVID and working through our federal lobbyists and working in conjunction with TMC and UNCF, we were on the front lines pushing for while they were giving deferment, but we were on the front lines pushing for that forgiveness piece. And of course, you know that 40 institutions were able to have their debt forgiven, but you had to have participated in the HBCU Capital Finance Board. Only God would have known that when we went to the HBCU in October of 2017. That made you eligible for it, right? Right, that we would have been eligible for it. But get this. We were probably one of the only institutions that refinanced debt. So what that did for us, it cleared away all hundred and, I think it was about 130, 31 or 32 million. So the only thing that we owe on this campus now is our stadium, right? So we're probably 52 and any stadium related items. So I think we're probably about 52 or 53 million, right? Which gives us a focus to say, okay, well, now let's see about refinancing our stadium. Because what we wanna do is put ourselves on level, even funding so that we can look at the growth that we'd like to see through the institution when you talk about the deferred maintenance that we have on campus, when you talk about housing that we need on campus. So now we can breathe, right? Because we have removed that debt thanks to the federal government and their work, all of our congressmen are representatives here from the state of Alabama. So we have been truly blessed. And listen, you walk into COVID, I cannot say enough about my leadership team, my students, the faculty and the staff. Because when COVID hit, no one knew what it was, what was gonna take place. But what I do know is that when we determined that it was something and one of the most difficult decisions I had to make as president was to send our students home. In the midst of, people were going home for spring break. But I can remember sitting around our conference table, and that was the last time that we sat around my leadership conference table. We met every Tuesday and making the decision. But we had healthcare professionals that were at our meeting. We had those who were dealing with the federal government and they were watching on an iPad your state by state, the number of cases that were ticking up. And so at that time, Alabama hadn't reported any cases. That was the day before. And so, and I asked the nurse, I said, well, why don't we have any case? She said, it's not, that it's not here. She said it's hadn't reported. She says it was coming. So we made the decision to send the students home. I think that was like on the 12th. But the day after Alabama reported their first case, and it was at Maxwell Air Force Base here in Montgomery, Alabama. So while it was uncomfortable for the students, it was uncomfortable for all of us, we did the best thing at the time to just get our students out of here, let them stay at home, don't return until we could get our hands around this issue. And let me get that because that's so critical in the fall of the return. You guys have successfully kind of mitigated this thing. There's not been talk about Alabama as a state as a hotspot. You guys are planning to move ahead with homecoming this fall. You've had a great amount of cases. How have you successfully been able to manage that public health? Serious, serious issues. Well, listen, and it goes back to relationships.  You know, the campus was empty. But none of us knew, you know, how we would go get a test, where to get a test.  But I looked across the street and we have a housing community over there. And I said, no, I know being a person of means and having the ability to call and find some things out, some of those individuals definitely would not be able to know where to start. So I got with Dr. Lloyd Davis who was our senior health officer here. And I just said, man, we should do something. Let's partner with the Alabama Department of Health. And so through relationships that I've had from the legislature, her relationships with the Department of Health, we said, look, we want to run a drive-up walk-up clinic, COVID-19 testing clinic for our community. So we partnered with the Montgomery Housing Authority as well as the Department of Health to do this drive-up walk-up testing clinic.  So we were gonna get that training through the Alabama Department of Health. And secondly, we wanted to be a service to the community under our banner of community diversity. So when we did that, Jared, the very first day, you know, and of course, that's when you had to have protocols, right?  But, you know, I said, hey, listen, if I have a mother of five that stays in a two-bed room and she comes up and she tests positive, right? Chances are. It's difficult for her to isolate number one in a two-bed room. You know, so what can we do to make sure that the mother can be tested and all five children can be tested? And that day, the first day, Jared, the Department of Health allowed us to remove those barriers that I would call them. And we became a testing site, not only for Alabama State University, but for the community at large. Now, we also made sure that all of our faculty, this was just a requirement that we had. All the faculty had to be tested. All of the students had to be tested and athletes. And that was even before you returned to school. Not only did we implement that, we implemented the Sentinel testing, the random testing. And so everyone embraced that process.  And because of that, we were less than 2% for the entire year, the first year of COVID. We had two student concerts on our campus, less than 2% because we had created this semi-bubble on campus. We had cut off any public events on campus or everything was just kind of limited to the students. But my health staff was phenomenal.  And because we had done so well with the testing, when the vaccine came out that January, we have been designated as a vaccination site. So we had, just imagine, we have every test that's out, every rapid test that's out. We have the relationship with the Alabama Department of Health with the PCR tests. We have the antibody tests on campus where I can check my antibodies. We have the rapid testing machines. And then we have every vaccine right here on campus. And so how did that work?  If there is a place where there is, should and could be vaccine hesitancy, particularly among black folks, is Alabama, number one. Number two, how do you navigate such a pioneering role in kind of infection mitigation and awareness and education? When there's a lot of politics around you, that's not how the rest of us feel. So how are you able to do that? Well, look, you know that we were mandated in Alabama to have masks. But you know, and I would tell my people all the time, but as for me and my house, we have been a mandated mask campus from day one. So while everyone was talking about, well, we're masks. You may, Alabama State University has been a mass mandated campus from day one and still today. And so we kept sending those messages, my office of strategic marketing and communications. We made videos. Our health center made videos to send to students, to send to parents. This is the way you wear your mask. This is how you mitigate catching the virus. We partnered with Dragonfly to get some of the top quality virtual, what was it, the temperature check machines. Yeah, with the temperature check machines, the vital statistics that we were able to get, we partnered with them with drone technology to spray our stadiums. We went to have capacity. We didn't go to full capacity. So we still function of those things. Our guide is out there online, our reopening guide. And that's what we call the reopening guide. But we always put in the fine print that it's subject to change based on the information that we had. But it just took a lot of working together. Listen, we vaccinated probably all of the judges in Montgomery. We have vaccinated in Alabama probably over 1,300 employees. We partnered with Hyundai Motor Manufacturing. We vaccinated about 1,300. Right here on this campus, we probably vaccinated more than 1,000 Montgomery public school employees. So we've been on the front line. And it's been because we've been vocal about us being safe. I think we laughed the other day. I told you that I'm the masked police, right? And that just comes from our old high school principal days. We used to tell them to pull the pants up right now. Pull your mask out. Look, I have phenomenal individuals on this campus that we have our think tank. We were meeting daily, Jared. My leadership team, it will be 20 of us on the call, meeting daily about how we will proceed. The faculty and staff adjusted. You talked about a school that had very limited presence online and had to pivot for the students to complete their semester. But we have carried that on. So now we're hybrid, asynchronous, in-person. And look, we have been working to try to get to virtual, right? But this just pushed us there. Pushes over the edge, right? Let me speak to the point about your partnerships, because I think that's critical, particularly in the political area of this. It's well known, as you mentioned, you were a former member of the state legislature. And I'm sure it's no bad thing to say you maintain relationships there. Do you think that that gave you an advantage of coming back home to serve it in a leadership capacity, particularly when everything, and it's not a secret again, all that happened prior to your arrival? I mean, there were years where it was kind of shaky. And you get there, and now it's quiet. It is quiet. Listen, I think that it does play a role. I think when you have people who control the checkbook, they're looking for someone that they could trust. And I think based on my relationships that I had in the legislature when the decision was made, when I made the decision to lead the legislature, I think that some of my colleagues could breathe kind of a sigh. Because they knew that I was the type of person that what you see is what you get. And my whole intention was to come to my alma mater and leave her better than what I found her. And so I think that kind of helped calm the waters. And not to mention, of course, a Republican-controlled legislature, but having relationships on both sides of the aisles, having a reputation to be able to work across party lines to get things done, all of that happened as well. And one of the things that we did when we first got here, we meet in Montgomery every year for a legislative session for about three months. And people come from all over the state and they have to pass by Alabama State University. But you'd be surprised that a number of my colleagues that had never been here. So we quickly, and I tell my people on campus all the time that you have to go to know, right? And so we quickly embrace the idea of inviting individuals in to see, right? A lot of times you look and you say, oh yeah, I know they're over there, but I really don't know what's going on. And so we started our legislative receptions here on campus. And now it's a situation where people call in every year to say, hey, you're all gonna have another reception. Where's my ticket, right? Right, we hosted meetings, commission meetings for different legislative committees here on campus. I open that up because I want people to see all that we have to offer here at Alabama State University. So I think that relationship is important and not only for the legislature, but for the state, the local government, for the city council, for the county commissions, because they're all are great partners for us. And so we truly believe in that, that's all a part of our community, right? State, local, state and federal. We want to have these partnerships to continue to move us to global prominence. So it has been beneficial to us. I know it's hard for you to speak for the sector at large, but do you think that that's something that more campuses or more boards in particular should look at or consider doing in leadership? Maybe it obviously is a better fit as president, but should they look at more legislative trained or legislative forged officials to serve an institution because of those relationships, because you understand the nuance of bills and you know how to monitor lawmaking and you know how to work relationships on both sides of the aisle, particularly in the South. Is that something more HPC community should look at? Well, it certainly can't hurt, Jared. I mean, it certainly can't hurt and it certainly does give an edge. You know, I take my colleague down at grandma, President Rick Gallo, right? Yeah, so I mean, it doesn't hurt to have those type of relationships. And of course those experiences that we bring to the table are something that is totally different from the average experience. And of course, my trajectory to the presidency, you know, being a peer educator, having been on K through 12, having worked in the two-year college system, you know, having been a principal, all of those things come into play. Really, when we talk about leading the university. And so I just think that in order to get the good fit, you have to make sure that you have someone who is well-rounded. I mean, no matter what sector they would come from, but just have, you know, it's like being a, they say I'm a jack-of-all-trades master of none, but you have to have a little bit of everything to kind of maneuver through the overall academic enterprise because all of it will come into play. Research is high at Alabama State. Enrollment is stable. Fundraising going up.  These things are all up.  What is your strategic plan say to you? Here's the next step for Alabama State. Well, you know, we always say at Alabama State University, we're moving 150 years forward. So we're setting the path for us being in existence. So, you know, even when I'm long gone, this question of the relevancy of HBCU, you know, hopefully we will diminish that as we go. But we really want to, you know, make our mark and you talked about research. And of course, I think all of our institutions, basically with the federal government opening up the way that they interact with our institutions, it's going to help us increase in that research area. We also want to make sure that people understand that academically, you know, we, you get a sound academic education from an HBCU. And Jared, I've told people, you know, we have taken to the HBCU designation just by the federal government, but we truly are elite institutions of higher education, right? And so we have to continue to remember that. And so, you know, moving forward, we really want to look at growing our enrollments, but growing them sensibly, growing them so that they match with the retention and the persistence and the completion that we're looking for, making sure that we're still here standing true to our mission to help those first-time students, first-generation students come and have the educational experience of a lifetime and go on to become prominent in the community. Those are the type of things that we're focusing on, you know, continue to establish our partnerships, knowing that we sit in the midst of a community, a region, and being an economic engine, but also being a source of service to the community that's around it. Those are the things that we're continuing to focus on. You know, it doesn't happen overnight. I promise you, you know, when I got here, I used analogy when I talked to all the colleges and everything, I mean, really, we're plugging the holes in a ship, right? Because there were just so many, I mean, even from the deferred maintenance, I mean, we're getting things done on this campus that have needed, I was here 30-something years ago and we just finished a major paving project on campus, right? I know that in some of the front of some of the facilities, they hadn't been paving in 30 years, but we've been able to accomplish it. We just unveiled that we're getting a brand new track for our track team now. That was this week, yep. Right, and so we just continuously, you know, are working toward making that difference, leaving our mark that will help and be to the benefit and success of our students. And don't let me leave out our alumni who have been phenomenal as well. Giving is up because, you know, and we have to be transparent, you know, listen again, we want to make sure that they understand that anything that they do for the universe is the benefit of students, not for any individual. And so that has really helped as well. So the alumni have really stepped up. Our partners are stepping up and we're always looking for partners and finding ways to help for the benefit of our students here at Alabama State University.


Thank you. Can everybody hear me with this mic? Can everybody hear me? Do you know how to increase the volume? Talk louder. Is this it? Oh, it's on there. Okay, excellent. So That's a little too loud. Okay, that's good. That's great I'm Matthew LaLonde. Just to you know clarify things. I have a PhD in organic chemistry from this university Also got my postdoc in inorganic chemistry from this university. I'm currently staff I'm responsible for training and teaching, but I am not faculty and I do not have a research group So whether or not that makes me qualify to speak on the subject of nutrition is for you to decide I Often get the question. Why should I avoid grains and legumes and I purposefully left dairy out of the equation? And whenever I ask that I'm asked that question. I will typically use these four things I'll say well, there's the immune immunogenic and allergenic Properties of proteins that are frowned in grains and legumes. There's unsustainable grain agriculture It's not clear whether or not legume agriculture is sustainable. Then there's the whole theory of food palability and reward Which is championed by us to Fonginae I hope that most of you know his work and then there's nutrient density And what I like about these four things is that when you present that to someone you have a choice You can either address it from an evolutionary angle or you can address it from a very simple Maybe biology psychology angle specifically with these two things here Actually, sorry these two things here and the reason I say that is not because I don't believe in evolution I personally am a strong believer in evolution But it's because 40% of Americans believe that evolution is false and 20% of Americans are still undecided on the issue and Officially only 40% of Americans think that evolution is true. We are ranked You know second to last Turkey is a little bit worse than we are so This is a very unfortunate reality For our community and this is why I prefer to address the issue in this manner My talk as the title implied is going to focus on nutrient density And whenever someone asks me about nutrient density, I give them this great paper by Professor Cordain and Boyd Eaton who's sitting right here Where they and this is a table that's in the paper and they analyzed a variety of food groups Based on these nutrients and then they classified them and you can tell based on their analysis Vegetables have a pretty high score Seafood lean meat and then fruits so a diet of you know vegetables seafood lean meats and fruits is going to give you everything that you need however, we have a really intelligent and I would say critical community and When I send this to people I will get one of the three Criticisms back One of them is that they say well, we don't have the software that was used to calculate this So we can't verify the scores. We don't know how they came up with this. We can't check it. Okay fair enough To the legumes are not there. There's no legumes group So how do you justify not eating the legumes and three is that the number of foods for categories fairly small? So whole milk, there's just one in lean meat. There's just four nuts and seeds There's just ten whole grains is just eight that kind of stuff So I'm like, okay, you know, I guess I guess you have a point So after I got these criticisms back said I look for something else, you know I'm pretty sure that this is good work, but I'll look for something else So I started looking for other papers and I found This work here by Junowsky and this is essentially a model that he came up with he's using model nr9 here So he essentially takes what he calls desirable macro nutrients and vitamins and minerals So protein and fiber of vitamins a c and e calcium iron magnesium and potassium and then he Counteracts that with undesirable nutrients saturated fat added sugar and sodium and he yeah, I know and And he comes up and he comes up with a score and of course the saturated fat Issue is just we should not have to address this anymore This is a summary of the great fat debate where you know a lot of great minds and the subject of nutrition came together This is what Darius Mazzafarian from this university wrote after that conference He says although the paradigm that saturated fat is a major cause of coronary heart disease has been become entrenched in the public scientific consciousness Over decades modern nutritional evidence simply does not support a major effect of saturated fat on coronary heart disease risk These scientific advances include the randomized trials of disease outcomes the prospective cohort studies of disease outcomes and Randomized trials of multiple not just single biomarkers and risk factors enough said So thank you So back to this model the person also you know uses food categories as opposed to individual foods Ranks fruits and vegetables fairly high. So here we have the caloric density and then here we have the rating And this is how it was calculated if you're interested in that exactly how we calculated this you have milk products here You have meat poultry and fish over here grains over here fats and oils and it's interesting There's not like a whole lot of difference here except for the caloric density Then you have dry beans here, but this is based off, you know, you know five nutrients I'd like like a little bit more, you know, I feel like I can't I can't give this to folks So I hit up my favorite my favorite paleo registered dietician That's Amy Kubel who's here at the conference and I said hey me. What do you use? So she points me in the direction of Nuval and This is pretty interesting. It's a ranking system goes from zero to a hundred and it gives a score to a food I think that the grocery change the chain high B uses these things So you look at the scores you're like a spinach 82 sure avocados 89 broccoli 100. Yeah, okay You know I buy that pineapple 99. Hmm sardines 88. Okay sardine lobster 36.  Well, here's how it was calculated in the numerator They have a bunch of what they feel is good stuff, which I agree for the most part iron vitamin a cd Zinc magnesium when we get three fat net fatty acids total carotenoids potassium folic calcium Total bioflavonoids which doesn't belong there in my opinion But I'll get to that and then in the denominator they have trans fat cholesterol saturated fat sodium and sugar Well, we've already addressed the saturated fat that then cholesterol really the sugar may be but sodium Yeah, maybe added sodium, but the cholesterol I mean the man that came up with the hypothesis Ansel Keys in 1953 Wrote in one of his own articles that the dietary cholesterol is not important for man would be predicted from the fact that the Biliary output of cholesterol from the human liver is from 10 to 20 times as much as the daily amount of cholesterol in any diet of natural foods Repeated carefully careful dietary surveys on large numbers of persons in whom blood cholesterol was measured Consistently failed to disclose a relationship between the cholesterol on the diet and in the serum This has been reviewed more recently to reviews by the same author Where they have shows that there is actually a group of hyper responders in that group of hyper responders both LDL and HDL increase So the LDL HDL ratio doesn't change and however the dietary cholesterol does reduce Circulating levels of small dense lipoprotein particles that are thought to be a risk factor for coronary heart disease So again, maybe we should not be thinking that this is a bad thing So I keep surfing on the new vial site and eventually I reach their board of directors Dr. David Katz David Jenkins Walter Willett and a variety of other folks who are known of proponents of plant diets Does this sound like a biased system to you sounds like it sounds like one to me So I kept searching and that's when I met Andy Andy is the aggregate nutrient density index this you will find on signs in Whole Foods grocery stores This score goes from zero to one thousand and you can tell things like kale and collards get one thousand And then if you look for meat anywhere on the list, you're gonna have to make it all the way down over here To chicken breast twenty seven really twenty seven out of a thousand ground beef twenty twenty out of a thousand Really? So I actually don't I didn't need to search very far I looked for a critique of this of this this system and Chris Masterjohn has done an excellent job of doing that So I'm just going to summarize what Chris came up with so this is Chris Masterjohn down here in the corner You could say a proponent of you know grain legume for free diets if you will and then works for the Works with the Weston a price foundation and then here we have Joel Furlman the creation of the creation The guy that created Andy who is a known proponent of plant-based diets So he excludes from his calculations preform vitamin a vitamin B5 vitamin B12 vitamin D Biotin vitamin K1 and K2 to ring an iodine He he also excludes essential minerals sodium chloride potassium sulfur phosphorus copper manganese boron molybium and chromium all essential fatty acids and essential amino acids What he includes in the score are carotines and other pigments glucose in elates which do have problems In themselves as far as biologically activities concerned fiber and the oxygen the oxygen radical absorbance capacity What we call the orac times two because he thinks it's so important most of these compounds I'll tell you honestly from a chemist standpoint. We don't even know how they work or why they're so important So at that point I got really fed up with this stuff. I said all right. I'm gonna make my own So we're gonna start We're gonna start by defining nutrient density well from a purely scientific standpoint density is a quantity of stuff divided by volume and that quantity of stuff in Order to avoid the biases that we've just seen we are going to limit to essential nutrients per serving That's it You can't go outside of that category because then you're gonna start including a bunch of stuff that's favoring this food And that food don't want it. It's essential nutrients. That's all we're gonna focus on What are your essential nutrients fatty acids the accepted ones are ALA and LA? Unfortunately, that should be DHA and AA, but that's not the case I'm not gonna get into why amino acids isolucine, lucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, b-alanine, histidine Histidine is like plus or minus. It depends Vitamins ABP which is choline B123567 which is also called biotin or vitamin H B9 which is folate B12, CDENK, and then your minerals you have calcium, chloride, chromium, cobalt, copper, iodide, iron, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, sodium, sulfur, and zinc Excellent. The problem is that you can't find data on volume of food. It's typically not measured You can find data on calories per serving Using this definition I started processing data and I found two problems one Zero calorie foods can be treated. Electrolyte enhanced water for example has some advantages can't treat it zero right because you're dividing by zero and If you think about this carefully this confuses or combines nutrient density and caloric density If you have a food that's very nutrient dense, but also calorically dense It's not going to get as good of a score as the food that has the same nutrient density with fewer calories And in my opinion those things are separate They should be considered separately if you have someone who needs to lose weight Well sure say on you know moderate to high nutrient density, but then moderate to low caloric density You've got an athlete. Hey, you know, there's only so much food you can eat So increase the caloric density of the food that you're eating those two things should be considered separately So I decided finally to use the weight per serving which always comes with the food The only problem here is that this is no longer a density.  Well, it turns out that the USDA has this huge Amount of data available with the type of nutrients that are in foods. I had two choices here I could use the access version which is the full version or I could use the excel version Which is an abbreviated version and my goal was to distribute this to anyone who wanted it and unfortunately not too many people know How to use access or have access so I decided to go with the excel version What's missing from the excel version that I wish I had a distinction between vitamin D D2 and D3 right now in the excel version they're taken together and then The individual fatty acids and the individual amino acids would have been nice because then I could have added those there So on from the wish list, what can we not have? Well, we don't have the fatty acids We don't have the amino acids, which is too bad We have almost all of the vitamins except for b7 and a variety of minerals except for chloride chromium cobalt I had died lindium nickel and sulfur of the data that was available to me from that spreadsheet That I did not use because it was not an essential nutrient Sodium and the reason I left out sodium and I would have had to leave out chloride too It's because it favors if you incorporated it favors food to have a lot of added salt You can't do that. So you have to leave it out of the equation. You got no choice left out fiber. I'm sorry food I'm you know, it's not essential. I know I'm gonna get a lot of flak for that, but it's not essential I will correct for that a little bit later on you'll see but fiber is not considered essential So I left it out then there's all of these Substances that you know would favor very specific foods and then this stuff is mostly for the caloric content So that was completely left out So now you got a spreadsheet. You've got your minerals and vitamins and choline too All of these have very very different standard deviations So you have no choice but to standardize the data So you if you look at the standard deviation for calcium It's 214 that for iron is 6 you can't compare those things and then some are in milligram Some are in my program So you need a quantity that's unit list and that's standardized So what you do is that you take the unit you subtract the the mean of the group and then you divide it by the standard Deviation and that gives you a standardized number those numbers go from negative to positive After doing that for each food And it's not that I'm favoring dairy here It's just this is the top of the of the spreadsheet for each food I just add up the score across all nutrients and that is what I call the nutrient density of that food I could have divided by a hundred but they're all they're over a hundred grams all of them So I just left it as is so that's the nutrient density score With that is couple the caloric density that you have all of these are for 100 gram samples So now we've got a little bit of data Actually, we have 7,907 entries in that spreadsheet and foods and they had to be separated into 46 different categories one line item at a time This took about three days with minimal sleep and food and I never want to go through that again So if someone wants to see a different result from this, I'm just gonna send you the spreadsheet Say you go tiger I'm not doing this anymore. I obviously do not have the time to focus on all of these things Some of the why I separated some of the things hopefully will make sense to you So cook grains for example and pseudo cereals are separated from raw grains and pseudo cereals You can't eat raw wheatberry or a raw chickpea or stuff like that Do you so you can't you have to put that in a separate section, right? In the grains section, I only kept the whole grain So I separated processed foods from whole foods only whole grains So the bread's pastes and noodles are in different section the big goods are in a different section The enriched grains are in a different section just so I'm you know I'm trying to compare things in as fair a manner as possible So these are the things that I'm going to be focused on here So in the eggs and dairy section the high scores I'm going to ignore the dried stuff and the dried stuff is because it's obviously it's concentrated, right? And it's typically not something that you eat So I'm going to focus on things like egg yolks raw and fresh you can tell that the egg yolks are pretty They're pretty nutrient dense the scores go up to 49 some of the scores can go near 100 If it's an enriched food it can go past 100 and then for the minus it'll it typically doesn't go past minus 10 And then so you see the eggs and cheese are pretty much What is most nutritious at the top of this category if you want to plot that now? What is far more useful than having a score? Let's say you've got spinach at 99 and you've got kale at 99. Well, that's great What's the difference? It's hard do they have exactly the same amount of nutrients you can't tell so you can plot this stuff And that's what I did here the numbers on the left are how many times the RDA do you have? So I took the quantities the milligrams the micrograms divided them by the RDA and That's what you see here So this red bar goes above one that means that parmesan cheese shredded at 100 gram serving has more than one times the RDA for calcium You can tell that the eggs and dairy have a pretty nice distribution of vitamins overall Even the least nutritious one of this group which is still at the top, which is the duck egg So it's still fairly nutritious. We're looking at a score of 4.73 and then here you have the caloric density So this is the nutrient density This is the caloric density and then you can see that the eggs have choline in them But the cheese doesn't have choline the cheese has a bit of fat soluble vitamins actually so that's so do the eggs And you can mix and match make things very interesting if you wanted to put this on a label You can minimize this whole thing into a spark line This these spark lines were created by Edward Tufty what I actually wanted was just a line So imagine a line tracing the contour of this thing such that you can overlay them and tell very quickly What's what and all you need is one dot telling you okay? This is 1.49 times the RDA so I know more or less what this is nutrient density caloric density good to go Bam you have that on a label you can make sure is that it's very easy You get a lot of information very quickly on the low scores and the eggs and dairy You know you can tell we're in the minuses now it goes as low as minus seven. I was surprised to find human milk However, it's difficult to compare it to other milks because most of the milks were fortified and I had to put them in a separate category There's also some some craft process dairy here things like yogurt some cottage cheese and stuff like that What does that look when it's? When it's craft well, you can tell we're already below one This food here butter has just a lot of salt and vitamin a and not much of anything else Although it does have some vitamin D and K as well The human milk has a good distribution But it's kind of low and then the best one here that I picked was that cottage cheese Which has a decent distribution but also low in some of the vitamins so this is you know very interesting Stuff to look at I Thought that the audience would be interested especially this audience in a comparison between egg yolks and egg whites I'm sorry, but for those of you eating egg white omelettes. I'll take the yolks Don't throw them away The egg yolk crushes the egg white on every category safe for sodium, I think yeah So very interesting. Let's go to herbs and spices herbs and spices are a winner The highest one dried basil is up to 76 Then you've got things like thyme and parsley and sage and spearmint you can go down the list Until you reach things like distilled vinegar vanilla table salt more vinegar more vanilla and more vanilla and then this Campbell soup Company dry taco season mix Which are not very nutritious so instead of giving you a high and low this time I'm going to give you just a sample of the data from something that's very nutritious like the basil You tell basil has a lot of vitamin K even a little bit of choline which was surprising some vitamin E a decent distribution a lot of Minerals and then you look at things like pepper interesting distribution across the board Maybe a little heavy on the mineral side of thing salt is of course just sodium if we had access to iodine Maybe you could see that in there, but it looks like there's no potassium I thought that would be potassium there, but salt doesn't have much to offer really Nuts and seeds high scores there 71 also very very nutritious You know you've got things like Brazil nuts cotton seeds sunflower Going down the mix sesame pumpkin seeds that kind of stuff at the bottom of the category You're gonna have chestnuts and more chestnuts and ginko nuts that kind of acorns that kind of stuff breadfruit seeds Here's a sampling of the data again from something very nutritious to something less nutritious Brazil nuts this is cut off the chart because I needed to see the rest of it Brazil nuts has There have 34.85 times the RDA in selenium. So when I grabbed this all I could see was a big blue bar So I had to shrink it down a little bit again decent distribution in the nuts Although like I expected a little bit more on this side of things. There is some vitamin D But I expected a bit more on this side of things and not quite so hot So mostly on the mineral side for for the nuts, but still fairly fairly nutritious in general except maybe for those for those chestnuts fruit High scores about 19 but then you're looking at dried stuff. So if you look at something not dried you have to go through this West Indian cherry here Okay, that's pretty good Then there's a lot of more dried stuff and then you get to logans and avocados You know it is a fruit dates raisins that kind of stuff oranges coconut meat is there by the way And I think I've got that graph the losers in the fruit category are apples and A lot of varieties of apples pears grab apples watermelon that kind of stuff is what's at the bottom What does this look when you graph it? Here is here's that West Indian cherry That's mostly vitamin C actually has 18.64 times the vitamin C So that's another one that I had to chop off to see what the heck was going on fairly good distribution of vitamins in the fruit Not too surprisingly not a whole lot of fat soluble vitamins That's okay. Maybe you'd get that if I put avocados on there I did put the the coconut even the coconut is mostly on the On the left side of the graph But there is a little bit of choline and a little bit of vitamin E in there But you can tell how this is fairly informative and you can see how the nutrient density goes down as it should as the scores go down Here we're going from 1687 to minus four point minus eight point point five Edible raw and unprepared vegetables. I separated the raw vegetables those that are edible Raw, so I raw potatoes are in a different category. They're not edible raw. I mean you can't eat them But it's just not great for you. So I put that in a different category So here are the edible raw vegetables at the top of the stuff. That's not dry You keep going down and you're eventually gonna get to kale all of the greens greens kale dandelion chart all that stuff Have very high positive scores if you want to go to the bottom You're gonna find onions and cucumbers and pickles and relishes and varying radishes and that kind of stuff What does that look like when it's a hey that might be a mistake? Oh, no terror terror shoots. Can you eat those raw? I don't know anyways That's what here's what it looks like when it's graph So here we have kale kale has six point eight times the RDA and vitamin K So I had to chop that one off very high So is lettuce actually fairly high in vitamin K Kale's also high in vitamin C and has a fairly good distribution Maybe a bit a little bit low on the selenium and sodium and zinc But we don't care too much about the sodium at this point. It's hard to Do not get enough sodium these days On the purple side of this thing the seaweed again has a very nice distribution across the board and fairly nutritious But then you get to things like carrots and onions and not so much the onions have a decent distribution But it's it's fairly low. So not a whole lot there What you need to look at however is the caloric density to right? So yeah, the kale is good It's at 50 the onions have a little bit less caloric density The worst case scenario is if you have something that has got really low Nutri density and really high caloric density. That's something that you want to stay away of I'm unfortunately not going to present much of those foods I did calculate all the data Segregated it and looked at it and it looks horrible as you would expect. So I'm just not going to present that In the cooked vegetables the high scores are again all of your kale beat be green spinach all of the Colored greens all that stuff lamb quarters dandelions All the grape leaves and then at the bottom you again have some onions and I think here you have like some pickled and this is like cooked and pickled some hikama Onions cabbage that kind of stuff. What does it look like actually instead of giving you a spread for this one? You can tell the scores are fairly negative I decided just to compare some some cooked and some raw stuff so that you could see how much nutrient Loss that you get from cooking so these are blanched This is blanched kale versus raw kale the red is raw kale So you can tell that across the bow or the board you have lost some nutrition here However, the cooked kale does have less caloric density Part of the nutrition loss is due to the fact that some of it really came out of the food and is lost Another part is the fact that that food is absorbing water when you blanch it and it's diluting the nutrient content Okay, so it looks a little bit worse than it actually is I Also thought that people would be interested in a comparison of sweet potatoes versus potatoes the sweet potatoes are in blue The potatoes are in red the potato has a nutrient score of minus zero point thirteen The sweet potato has a nutrient density score of minus three point zero two So the potato actually wins and it wins on the mineral side of things The sweet potato does win on vitamin a The potato does have a much greater Caloric density, however, almost more than twice of the sweet potato So, you know if you decided to eat twice as much sweet potato You'll get close to the levels of minerals like copper and iron that are in the potato Both of them are fairly nutritious. I mean if you look at that you get a pretty decent distribution of nutrients across the board here Even though the scores are negative so even if a score is negative doesn't mean the food is necessarily that bad Because not that many of them are very high and positive So now we reach cooked grains and pseudo cereals. This is all we have access to Because the rest of it is all wrong and it was put in a different category. So this is all we can look at There is no data for cooked wheat. It's not in there. So I couldn't present that Notice that we begin at the top with negative scores And I decided to not cover succotash So if a food was a combined food So for example succotash then I put that in both the grain in the legume category because it's corn and beans So the things the winners here are like things like camateff quinoa and spelt and the losers white rice at the bottom The best rice is this white rice has long grain Actually, it's the wild rice, but of the white rice. It's this one with long grain So what does that look like? So notice that we immediately start below one This blue thing here is the camate cam. It's not bad pretty abysmal in this area But not bad in this area and then this blue line here. That's the couscous fairly rich in selenium However, but a little pretty low on the rest of the scale This is cooked versus raw grains now We have teff that is cooked Camot that is cooked versus camot that is uncooked and teff is uncooked So the purple should be compared to the blue at the front and you can see the nutrient loss across the board, right? And then the green should be compared to the red and again You can see the nutrient loss across the board except for an increase in folate. It was interesting Maybe it becomes more bioavailable or what not? And that's you know one thing that you need to keep in mind is that this is not corrected for bioavailability Ideally you would want that correction in your system But I don't have those numbers So there is a substantial Nutrient loss there and there's a substantial drop in the score teff is eight point sixteen cooked teff is minus four point sixty seven Camot is five point eighty six cooked. Camot is minus four point forty two. Which one should we be considering the cooked or the raw? The cooked right you can't eat the raw stuff. You absolutely can't eat the raw stuff Same is true for legumes, but there are some legumes that are edible in their raw state So here I had to create a category for edible raw and cooked legumes and then another one for inedible raw legumes Here again, you know, we immediately start with scores. Actually, these are not negative. These are positive legumes are far more Nutritious than the grains at the top you have roasted soybeans and I'll show you they're they're fairly nutritious then you have cashews Yes, I'm sorry cashew is actually a legume not a knot then you have peanuts in a variety of other foods I think peanuts pretty much rule this whole thing at the bottom You've got things like snap peas mung beans of other types of beans that are at the bottom What does this look like when it's plotted? Like I said the the soybeans are pretty nutritious now whether or not that's bio available. No The the purple stuff is the chickpea and that is the cooked chickpea Decent distribution here the the values are reasonably high too. Then we go to kidney beans snap beans and then finally the Pinto beans that have a decent distribution, but a little bit low on the scale certainly much better than the grains however Here is cooked chickpea versus a raw chickpea and you can tell that there's a substantial loss of Nutrients as you cook the substance But again, you know that the cook material contains a little bit more water So some of it is a loss some of it's a dilution effect now we go into the meats and How much time do I've left? Excellent For those of you and I had to ask because for those of you that are pleased with the rankings You have ten seconds and no more to celebrate after go on with the talk. There's a lot of data and I'll give you a hint Bacon bacon bacon bacon and more bacon Followed by some loin however Don't celebrate too quickly At the bottom you'll have things like pickled pork hocks, you know some patties and stuff like that But you have raw bacon Well, that's interesting. What's that doing there? You see I didn't think it would be necessary to separate raw meat from cooked meat but It turns out that animal fats has an average score of minus six point eighty five, which is abysmal and The bacon grease finds itself very low on the list These are all the animal fats and this is where bacon grease is at So when you cook your bacon and you get rid of the grease you actually increase its nutrient density score I was expecting a nightshade thrown my way as soon as I said Also known as a tomato So here's some sample data for the pork We have the cured bacon here and the back you can tell that this is you know, fairly nutritious stuff It's got a decent amount of nutrients and a good distribution the same is true for all the other meats even the one that The ones that aren't that great good distribution, but this is low However, just as good as one of the low entries in the legume category for example In the poultry the winners are things like you know emu Ostrich and and all dove and all that kind of stuff and at the bottom You're gonna have some duck some mechanically deboned Chickens and some Cornish hen and other chicken boilers and stuff like that Here's what that looks like again Fairly nutritious. So either one of the best one is that is the emu one of the least nutritious here Is the duck and you can tell them the duck has got some some serious nutrient deficiencies here I'm not sure what they did to it if you look at the name. It's like duck and then yng I'm not sure what that means do I am with pecking duck. Yeah young duck. That's right pecking leg meat bone in I'm like, why is that so Poorly nutritious. I don't know but the rest of the no no actually the skin is really bad I put that in a different a separate category animal skin is not very you'll see shortly Yeah, maybe maybe it's because it's so high in fat But actually, I mean you would expect that to it would increase if you cooked it it was because it wasn't raw I didn't use any raw stuff Yeah, it was cooked So you would expect that to be to increase the nutrient density as you cooked it So I don't think that's the case beef and in the beef you've got a lot of like Steaks boneless steaks all that stuff. They call this being plate beef plate And then they give a variety of cuts all of them fairly nutritious at the bottom You have a lot of ribs beef ribs and ribeyes that aren't that great the scores don't go like notice that the the lowest score This is where the grains started at in their high score for beef just to give you an example Okay, this is what it looks like when graphed pretty sexy, right? I mean, this is this is the lowest one here Right not too bad. I mean that you're looking at stuff. That's fairly nutritious has a decent distribution They think what was that? Yes, exactly, right you you can tell why the people who have a vegetarian agenda they top they drop B12 from from their list because This beef plate that's at the top has 3.14 times the RDA. So I had to cut it off in B12 Efficient seafood oysters and clams and that kind of stuff octopus They're all at the top and then at the bottom You've got some jellyfish some dried jellyfish and a variety of other processed things that are too interesting if you If you plot that the oysters are just a powerhouse of nutrition So I had to cut that off They have 6.34 times the RDA in copper 7.15 times the RDA in zinc and 7.20 times 29 times the RDA in B12 With a decent distribution of minerals overall the fact that these are so tall make these look really small But this is pretty nutritious stuff. So is salmon. So is the tilapia, but then the jellyfish is pretty abysmal You know, it's got sodium and selenium Copper and iron and not much of anything else. It does have some coalene though, which is fairly interesting It was nice to see where coalene popped up Then we've got lamb veal and game meat. So the high scores here We've got things like game meat, caribou, deer, beaver, raccoon But then it's interesting that the game meat is also at the bottom You've got things like a boar. You've got squirrel rabbit and squirrel muskrat And then the veal and the lamb is sort of in between Notice again, you know that as you're going down you're you're at minus four here And then there's like only a few entries that are below that so this is still fairly nutritious stuff Here's a back plotted out. I took like the the elk here as one of my examples because it was cooked Notice, you know that the raw meat often finds its way at the bottom So I did my best to pick something that was cooked to graph and what I'm going to do now is I'm gonna have to separate the raw meat From the cooked meat, right?  That's good. The lamb shoulder blade and then the meat boar That's that's pretty good again good distribution and decent amount of nutrients all over all the organ meats This is one of the highest score for the natural foods 93 for veal liver So here you have liver or cod liver oil liver liver liver liver liver and more liver and then if you look at the bottom This is the I think this is the whole organ meat thing. You're gonna have things like tripe and lungs that aren't quite as As interesting so this is what it looks like when you initially plot it And that's because these things are so damn nutritious that can go up to you know 40 times or 35 times the RDA and vitamin a and then B12 and all that stuff So if you focus in on the graph, this is what you get again pretty nutritious You know the number one is right here. So you're looking at a good distribution a lot of nutrient density in here on the Low end of things for the organ meats. I had to split that one in two You've got a lot of lungs and tripe and that kind of stuff stomach This is what it looks like This is you know, some of it is fairly low But still respectable compared to to grains for example in a decent distribution not so much in this category though Plot plant fats and oils I highlighted this one because people are going to complain so this is going to increase your average score In an unnatural way, it's not going to make that big of a difference What we'll see this is all of the plant fats at the top You've got things like wheat germ hazelnut sunflower canola oil and then at the bottom You've got things like coconut oil and avocado oil mustard oil and whatnot So here's a sampling of that and you know fairly deficient on this end of things a lot of vitamin E A lot of vitamin K a little bit of choline and not much of anything else really so they that's why they get a pretty poor score So here's a sample data from animal fats and oils Also, this is plant fats and oils. Sorry. So here's a sample data from animal fats and oils So a little bit better in the distribution. I would say this is for the pork enhanced comp fat Whatever that is. Sorry.  Here's your category organ meats at the top herbs and spices nuts and seeds cacao Fish and seafood pork beef eggs dairy vegetables lamb veal poultry legumes is where this is where they show up processed meat Vegetables plant fats and oils fruit animal skin grains and pseudocereals that are cooked refined and processed fats and oils animal fats and oils grains and processed fruit The plant fats and oils without the weed germ at minus six point zero seven so they wouldn't have moved a whole lot But now if you introduce the raw grains and legumes, this is what you get They actually come on top of all the meat except for the organ meats this notion that grains and legumes are healthy for you Comes from their consideration from their analyses in the raw state in a state in which they cannot be consumed This does not belong here. This should not be considered. You cannot eat it in that state Da doesn't go here, right? So you leave that out of the process That is where this myth is coming from and it's true. They have a lot of nutrients. You can't eat it that way What's the point? You don't consider that Finally, I think some of you are going to be criticizing this and say well, you know that 100 grams It contains water it contains fiber, you know, so you're disfavoring the vegetables and the fruits That's probably they're low on the list. I'm like, okay I'm going to define something called the caloric weight and I'm going to take that 100 grams And I'm going to subtract the mass of the water and the fiber from it So foods that have a lot of water and they have a lot of fiber or both are now favored. What do you get? This is what you get. I now call this the caloric weight score Oregon meat, serpentine spices, nuts and seeds, nothing's changed. The legumes come up They have a lot of fiber then you get fish and seafood, pork, beef, cacao, lamb, poultry, plants, fats and oils all that stuff The refined grains are still way over here. Sorry Doesn't make that much of a difference except for the legumes really. If you want to see them side by side This is what they look like. This is the ranking according to nutrient density and this is using this this caloric weight score So if you guys want to take pictures of that I have to end. We are done So conclusions the available data suggests that a diet centered around meat vegetables fruits nuts and seed is very nutrient dense and can easily Provide all essential nutrients and adequate quantities. The notion that grains and legumes are nutrient dense likely originates from a lack of segregation between raw grains and legumes which are inedible Versus cooked grains and legumes. So these should not be part of the equation. Animal foods are highly ranked even though raw and cooked meat were not segregated and Essential fatty acids essential amino acids vitamin B7 some minerals and bioavailability were not taken into account So imagine that they're going to go even higher if we had all of this data Finally some acknowledgments My girlfriend for being very patient with me while I was crunching all of this data I had to cancel some arrangements gotten a lot of heat for it. She was very patient I love her Ned cock of health correlator who helped me out with some of this data is like dude You need to process it this way and all that stuff super useful Amy Kubell who pointed me in the direction of a lot of Nutrient scoring systems Chris master John and Stefan Guine who also helped me out and consulted with with some of the data processing As well as a Rob Wolf so with that I thank you for your attention So now we have a 15 minute break, but Matt LaLonde loves questions So it's up to you if you want to come and ask Hey, I'm Dave My name is David and I just wanted to raise two points. My first one is when you were talking about the Sustainability of grains and legumes. I completely agree with you that you know chemical fertilizers in the current way we do that It's bad for the environment But if we're if we're trying to feed a world of seven billion or eight billion approach on nine billion people You know cereal grains are the only way we come out exactly where you're going and the problem with that is one That no one wants to admit it's overpopulation. I'm sorry. Nothing's gonna solve What we need to do is get is get sustainable agriculture first and figure out how many people we can support I agree But so if we look at sister if we look at we can praise Joel South and all we want and I really like what he does But that relies on corn and soy It's not sustainable. I agree. You got 50 years of topsoil left. What's your solution? No, I agree I will if you look at permaculture approaches like I'd encourage you to read me of the non-extravity We don't have a lot of time next question. All right, and I raise my second point Sure. My second point is that, you know, it's really easy for you to say that You know, it's just a myth that legumes are nutrient-dense, but I feel like that's only hatchery I completely agree with you that it's better look at it raw But if I look at something like lentils, especially with correct preparations like I know Stephen who Stephen Guy and they who you referenced I did show them with correct preparation at the end and their score did increase Sorry. Well, I when I was looking at the graphs, I didn't see legumes at all You didn't highlight that but if I'm just I'm just giving you one example Not only did I show legumes while legumes and cooked legumes. It's low in stock. There's a very good thing It's not very palatable next. I just want to finish my question. Can I ask a question over here? Hi, yeah, Todd Becker. So really nice analysis. I liked it one Minor point though when you use the term Nutrient and you're referring to essential nutrient. Yes The concept of an essential nutrient is something where you absolutely need a certain minimum But the analysis doesn't say whether you actually need more than that or whether it's useful for example minerals like selenium Can be essential at a low amount, but can be toxic at a exactly and that's something that you need to consider at the end That's why I use the RDA and when you see things are like 30 times the RDA That's telling you that that foods a little too much that you should have very little of it Right, so I'm not saying that that food is like the best food that you could possibly as far as how to use the index It's mainly these are foods you should have at least a little of but not to go crazy Yeah, yeah, like and the people that advocate eating liver say just that Yes, did you say in the beginning that you were going to? Make this database yeah email me and I'll send it to you well as a graduate student I really appreciate that just you're welcome one of the people I consulted told me that what I just did was a PhD is worth of work right took six days I Second thing I noticed in your data is that foods that were low on nutrients and calories Especially in fruits veggies and seafood They tend to be cheap. That's based on my experience. I might be wrong here and foods that were Nutriently dense Nutritionally dense and calorically dense tended to be costly some of them Have you thought have you thought about factoring in cost for 100 grams into your analysis? That's great. If you could do that. I could have the data though. That's great You know that I use what I had at my disposal with this spreadsheet, but that's a great idea. I like that. Yeah, just a dish Yeah, thank you. I Had one remark also you use the USDA database on nutrients the USDA. Yeah. Yeah, you said it Yeah, so that data comes from the USDA I know I know and you said it didn't provide Information on essential fatty acids and vitamin D2 and D3. There is a more expanded database that does Yeah, but I didn't use that one because it's an access and I want to be able to give this The spreadsheet to other people most people don't have access. They have Excel so I chose to go really I used it in Excel Really the access to the full version one I don't know. I just downloaded the same with all the fatty acids D3 D2 and D3 and I'll have to look at that It's a nice way to waste three days of my life That's why I stood up. I wanted to make the people they well now They know it's also as accessible in Excel so everybody can do it. I think okay. That's good to know Question about the meat. Yeah now the meat you presented. That's all is that all grain-fed meat So there was only one entry for grass-fed meat and it was a raw cut So I was not able to cover it and compare it to any of the gifts the numbers We were better if you had actually probably and if you consider the essential fatty acids, yeah Sure So the person said for the record most lamb is grass-fed and not in general. Yes Good news folks. There are oysters on every corner in this that's been the city in this Little town and it they all taste great Small question. I Don't know if you came in for this, but would it make your table more interesting if you merged it with? The glycemic load for nutrients. Oh, you're not talking or are we talking here about 30 days? You can do that. I'll give you this the template I'll give you my facts number. Okay. Yeah, I see I see why you use the RDAs But do you have a lot of confidence when they don't consider like the butt different bite of a case or it's you know It's the it's the best I had so yes The the RDAs are are not always right like the RDA for calcium set a little bit too high because they think the calcium is gonna Solve all our osteoporosis problems and then for others. It's set low So it's really it's not that great, but you notice that a lot of the foods went above the RDA So no, but it's again. I work with what I have so I agree, but that's in the DRI That's what I have is there a way to weight the importance of certain ones that you think people generally are lacking So that's another thing like But if you start doing that then you start biasing it a little bit So what would be interesting is just listen the data is there if you know you're lacking something then go find the foods You can order them by which one has the most vitamin E Which one has the most of this fairly easily, but that would be most useful if it came with bioavailability So you a couple times said that if you had access or if you had included the essential fatty acids as well They would change you know it would make meats better But actually if you consider that the essential ones as you mentioned are linoleic and linoleic which are higher the accepted Essential ones what I mean is the the real essential ones which are DHA and arachidonic acid Yeah, the COSA hexanoic acid try saying that seven times fast and arachidonic acid So but if if you're going with the guidelines that are currently set up It would be a la and a well, yeah, which would have the unfortunate You know it gives soybean oil and yes Yes, really high thing and that's not what I'm thinking about And it's kind of as a secondary to that things like that and also maybe potentially selenium that are potentially When they become too nutrient dense or problematic. Yes. Yeah, we just talked about that like you know If Brazil nuts give you 30 times the RD and selenium don't have a lot of them on a daily basis I'm not saying that you have to eat all the time at the top of the food chain It's just like try going from moderate to high and and using that to guide your your proportions In the realm of foods that you eat which food surprised you the most fruit In fact the reason why I went to this model where I took out the water And I I took out the fiber or I counted for watering fibers because I was like how can fruit be so low And I just started putting more fruit in my diet. I'm like, are you kidding me? Yeah Well, I don't know. I'm just seem to be doing well with more food, but I was really surprised. Yeah, that's a good question Hey, Matt, just over here. It's all sugar. Yeah bless you Matt just to be clear you were you were working with what you had and not we still have some other intuitive or yeah So for example, you know, it's weird that a wild boar is is not stacking up against an industrial pig, right? You remind me of something too There is data missing in the spreadsheet when you open up there are places where there's absolutely no data And I had to treat that as zero. So, you know, that data needs to be as awesome folks furiously scribbling down this Like this is gonna be their dietary guideline from now on that wasn't exactly your point This is just one exactly and if you look at the animal the organ meets in oils cod No, sorry in the animal fats fish oil had zero across the line. It had nothing on it I'm like really, you know, not even a little vitamin E is a stabilizer So there was something wrong there with that. Sorry for taking up so much time


Good morning afternoon. I just want to start off by thanking the organizers for inviting me here today My name is Stephanie Morris and I'm a program director at the National Human Genome Research Institute Within the National Institutes of Health. I'm here representing the ENCO program team at NHGRI Where today I'll provide a brief overview of ENCO, the encyclopedia of DNA elements I'll tell you a bit about how it started the goals where it's been and where it is now So this program has been in place for over the last 17 years It was initiated after completion of the human genome project in 2003 There are two overarching goals The first of which is the cataloging of all of the functional elements and the human genome and the genome of model organisms So this includes mouse worm and fly When we say functional elements, what we mean are protein coding and non-coding regulatory elements That is genes and regulatory regions The second goal is to make this catalog and other resources generated by the program really available to the research community To enable enhanced understanding of gene expression and how it is regulated and also to enhance understanding about the genetic basis of disease So these goals came about because at the time of the completion of the human genome project It was known that non-coding DNA was important for genome function It was shown to be important for disease and gene regulation Many of these elements regulate gene expression and are only active in specific cells and tissues Also, the majority of common disease associations lie outside of protein coding regions This leads to a need to understand how these elements function to interpret the role of genetic variants So we have an understanding of the genetic code This project ENCODE aimed to learn and understand and regulatory code So what I have here is a slide that's really emphasizing the second ENCODE goal Of the program which is to serve as a community resource And the ways in which we're doing this is by putting an emphasis on rapid pre-publication Data release so all data producers available for unrestricted use by the research community immediately upon release External users can freely download analyze and publish results based on ENCODE data We have a dedicated portal where these data can be accessed And what we do is request that data be cited promotion of open access sharing of data Software tools and data analysis pipelines is also An important component of this being a community resource So to maximize this all data are shared in databases without controlled access Human biological samples are consented for unrestricted data sharing Um through the process of creating the catalog and the analysis of data generated consortium Investigators have developed common data reporting formats data standards And analytical tools that can be adopted and used by the broader research community An important important analysis that the consortium also continues to share the information through publications And this is resulting from the data produced and analyses And this is leading to independent publications So much of this is actually documented on the various websites from consortium members as well as ENCODE portal And this is information about these generated data analyses and tools So I want to get a little bit into the ENCODE timeline And wanted to mention that really there are three components to this project And that is data generation analysis and the development of this data repository As started with at the start of this talk ENCODE was started in 2003 and it started as a pilot with the focus on mapping 1% of the human genome And this was 2003 to 2007 This resulted in a second phase where this second phase transitioned into full scale data production It also was an introduction to the development of a data coordinating center responsible for tracking, storing and displaying these data And the data analysis center that's responsible for integrative analyses We also saw the introduction in phase two of mod ENCODE and mouse ENCODE So this is looking at the genomes of model organisms in this case flyworm and mouse We see as we move into phase three more of a focus on human and mouse projects And we see the funding of the first round of computational analysis projects Where these projects were being tasked with computational analysis methods To applying these to the data being generated by the consortium We also see during the first three phases of ENCODE that there have been four rounds of technology development Awards that were funded We see a lot of these activities continue in other NHGRI programs and efforts Such as the technology development program and do investigative initiative projects funded outside of ENCODE So examples of technology development Can be seen for chromatin accessibility Which went from DNA seek to fair seek and now we're seeing a lot of attack seek We've also seen changes in chromatin IP technologies So right now we're currently in the fourth phase of this program which started in 2017 Where activities and data production and computational analyses continue and we started a new component And functional characterization of ENCODE predicted candidate functional elements So just a little bit about how this fourth phase is organized There are 24 awards that are spread across five components And so we actually have eight centers focused on functional element mapping And these centers employ high throughput and some lower throughput genome wide experimental assays That are being used to map biochemical genomic features associated with functional elements You see that these funded centers are Where they can conducting experiments on common sets of biological samples And in this phase the focus is on mouse and human genomes with an expansion in the types of biological samples Including the potential to add those associated with human disease We also have eight functional element characterization centers Where they are developing and applying generalizable approaches to characterize the role of candidate functional elements in specific biological contexts So are the learning best approaches that will enable better understanding of the ENCODE catalog They are also reserving part of their experimental capacity to test a common set of elements And that allows for a comparison across Approaches so we'll see things like various reporter assays and genome editing within these centers We also have our computational analysis projects and in this round there are six of them Where they are developing and applying these new computational methods to ENCODE data to improve and interpret the catalogs of candidate functional elements And then we have the combined efforts of the data coordinating center And the data analysis center in the ENCODE data coordination and analysis center Where we have again the DCC is collecting housing and organizing and sharing ENCODE metadata and data through the ENCODE portal And then we have the DAC that provides computational expertise and performs integrative analysis of ENCODE data And is able to present enable and enable search of the registry of candidates to regulatory elements by a screen So an important to also point out is that the DCC and DAC are Actually taking in community data and they're able to handle that and enable sharing with the the public So for example, we have hosting of data from other programs such as genomics of gene regulation mod ENCODE and modern So this is a map of the current awardees just to give you a sense of where all of these Projects and centers are doing their research. They are located across the u.s. And some of them have Foreign institutions involved with their awards Also want to point out that we have projects that participate as affiliate members of the consortium Where they have opportunities to participate in the analysis working group as well as other working groups and in consortium activities So moving a little bit into the ENCODE assays with a focus on generation and analyses So ENCODE has produced and continues to produce data from a broad range of high and lower throughput Biochemical assays and methods I want to point out here with the red asterix. These are active ENCODE assays or methods But picture here are a variety of methods and approaches that have been used over the past 17 years The main approach being taken by ENCODE is that different biochemical features and combination of these features are associated with specific Genomic functions. So these can be mapped using a variety of genomic assays The mapping allows for the influence of the location of different elements like promoters enhancers and genes So we see here that we have approaches for looking at long-range interactions between chromatin regions So for example, high C and chia pet assays that are looking at chromatin accessibility As well as approaches for assaying his some modifications and transcription factor binding We have to use of computational predictions of genes and their relationship to regulatory elements And then we also have approaches like RNA seek and clip seek that are being used to look at transcription and the binding of proteins to RNA So for ENCODE all of this is being brought together and the encyclopedia which includes raw and processed data From all of the different assays and elements being called from the integrated data So these raw data are processed through uniform processing pipelines and called elements make up this registry of candidate regulatory elements So the ENCODE portal allows you to search the metadata for ENCODE experiments and provides access to over 16 000 data sets So this includes data from all three phases and the current phase of the program As well as data from other programs We also have this tool screen as mentioned and you'll hear more about the portal and screen and other talks throughout this meeting But for screen and it lets you search genomic regions and tells you what annotations are found from thousands of experiments Performed through the ENCODE program and also provides tools for visualization So there are a couple of really important points about ENCODE's approach to these assays that are important to point out There's a strong emphasis on rigor and reproducibility as well as transparency So under rigor and reproducibility, I want to point out There's a strong focus on the use of standardized protocols for assay experiments and data analyses The use of validated reagents and the validation of reagents As well as having quality metrics in place for the various data types to enhance rigor and enable reproducibility And then as mentioned, there are uniform data processing Pipelines and this is really especially important when the same data types are coming from different groups And then last but not least Some importance to structuring of data and metadata that enable the use of these data and downstream computational analyses So by structuring these data and metadata enable search and retrieval You can find out more about this on the portal under materials and methods So we have this last section here about ENCODE use cases and really this is just about how ENCODE is being used by the community And one thing to point out is really One way that the community can use this information is not only to report the ENCODE portal, but also through publications So what I want to point out here is that most recently the ENCODE phase three Um consortium members published a collection of papers and this was actually in the july 3th issue of nature This features 14 publications in nature and other major journals This is a way to share what the program has been generating and also provide information for others to use in their research studies These papers actually contribute to over 500 ENCODE consortium publications produced to date This particular package features a main paper that highlights the expansion of ENCODE's experimental catalog so this is used to identify cis regulatory elements and The creation of a comprehensive registry of these elements as mentioned during phase three recent introduction of screen And this is again a user friendly way to navigate the extensive catalog So you can see a paper about that as well The consortium also published a perspective of ENCODE Where authors took a closer look at the history of the project and its growth during The third phase of the program and really that opportunity to reflect on its impact in future directions We also find within this package additional publications that span various topics of human and mouse gene expression regulation Every genetics disease and software tools So this is really to point out that there's a lot of ENCODE data being shared by the portal And with the broader community through publications and that ENCODE data are widely used So we know this through the number of community papers that are using ENCODE data The table here on the left hand side is a papers published over time We have a southern point of august 2018 But as you just saw we have several papers coming out And I'm sure we'll have updates soon about papers being generated by the community So so far NSGI has identified more than 2200 community publications And this is shown by this red orange curve And these are from groups without ENCODE funding but who use ENCODE data for their published work ENCODE consortium members have produced more than 500 publications And that's going actually close to a thousand that's shown by this white curve And this is since the program started Further to this ENCODE has been used across a number of human disease categories Attesting to the translational value of the resource So I'll briefly mention here how the community is using ENCODE and this really falls into four different categories This includes technical products that may have various applications to your projects And this is these are products that have been Generated by ENCODE and are being used by other programs like gene code That's a resource that is focused on annotating genes in the mouse and the human genome We also have various approaches so protocols that are being used for carrying out assays and analyses In various methods used for analyses We also have Use cases that fall in the category of methods development and validation So these are experimental and computational New experimental methods being developed by members of the consortium and the broader community for generating data Similar to ENCODE and new computational methods for analyzing data types used by ENCODE and others And then we have this last category here Related to disease association and gene regulation studies So ENCODE is providing information on genes and regulatory elements that can be overly or used in conjunction with other studies To identify causal variants or enable you to learn more about the mechanism of your target gene adventures So basically what we're seeing is that this scientific community continues to utilize ENCODE data in new and innovative ways To better understand the human genome in its role in health and disease So i'll stop there And sort of end by thinking the ENCODE consortium and the NHGRI ENCODE team Really the consortium and NHGRI engage in a variety of outreach To the community at scientific meetings workshops and user meetings like this I do want to point out if you want to learn more and you can go to the portal Here's the link here ENCODE project.org Or you can go to ENCODE site on genome.gov And then there are opportunities to follow and learn more about ENCODE resources and happenings to facebook and twitter And with that i'll thank you for your time and ask if there are any questions