Advertisement
Opinion

The Aggie food moon shot

Texas A&M scientists are trying to change our relationship with food

I didn’t get it right away. I had been talking to some Aggies, including Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp, who were citing studies about health care costs and the nutritional value of the food Americans eat. They seemed excited about a new institute that has something to do with agriculture. I’m not a foodie, and nutritional guidelines seem so malleable I generally tune them out. Plus, it was hardly surprising that a school whose “A” used to stand for agriculture would be ramping up an ag program. I didn’t see the news.

But then Patrick Stover, the director of the program, said something about changing the purpose of food.

That’s right. Changing the purpose of food.

Advertisement

For the past dozen millennia or so, ever since humans developed agriculture, the purpose of food systems was to limit hunger, Stover explained. Well, yes, I thought. That seems obvious. A bit like saying the purpose of roads is transportation. If it were otherwise, that would be news. But the just-launched Institute for Advancing Health through Agriculture (IHA) aims to change that. Stover and his team want to change humanity’s relationship to food.

Opinion

Get smart opinions on the topics North Texans care about.

Or with:

That’s when I realized the Aggies are making a moon shot.

What we’ve all come to realize in recent years, even those of us who don’t count calories, is that, for most of the developed world, the presence of food is almost as much a threat to our health as its absence.

Advertisement

Nearly half of all U.S. adults have some type of cardiovascular disease, according to the American Heart Association. Nothing, not even COVID-19, kills more Americans. More than 70% of American adults are overweight or obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 34 million Americans have diabetes. Six in 10 have some kind of chronic health condition. And diet-related cardiometabolic diseases cost the U.S. $50.4 billion annually.

Stover’s team is saying it’s time for humanity to take the next evolutionary step, creating food systems that don’t just keep us fed, but that help keep us healthy, and by extension, keep health care costs down.

“Now, agriculture is expected to support human health, to lower rates of chronic disease, to do it in a way that’s environmentally sensitive, to do it in a way that supports profitability for producers so we don’t keep losing precious land,” Stover said.

Advertisement

That’s not to say that hunger is no longer a problem. According to an IHA fact sheet, 1 in 8 Americans faced food insecurity before the pandemic. Now, high rates of unemployment driven by the coronavirus are expected to leave another 18 million U.S. children food insecure. So humanity’s new relationship with food is not less than filling stomachs, but it should be more.

Stover is a big get. He came to College Station from Cornell University in 2018. He’s a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Since 2015, he has been co-editor of the Annual Review of Nutrition, which, if you’re unfamiliar because you, like me, prefer to read literally anything else, is a premier peer-reviewed journal in its field.

Stover told me that IHA will be a “transformative type of institute” because it will be the first research establishment to combine the latest advances in agriculture, nutrition and behavioral health. Those disciplines have largely operated independently of one another, Stover explained. The way they will work at IHA is less siloed. They even get catchy, updated names.

Precision nutrition

Not just nutrition, IHA will promote “precision nutrition” which takes into account differences in various populations and how their bodies process food differently. Katherine Hancock, communications director for Texas A&M AgriLife, explained that nutrition is a relatively young field, compared to chemistry, biology or other sciences. As the discipline evolves, it’s becoming more nuanced. That’s why, Hancock noted, nutritional guidelines seem so fluid.

Those of us who are old enough to remember the four basic food groups realized long ago that meat and bread aren’t necessary for every meal. And as much as we all want Buddy the Elf to be right, his four food groups (candy, candy canes, candy corn and syrup) aren’t healthy either. In 1992, the USDA changed its guidelines from a square to a pyramid, which later became “My Pyramid” in 2005, and “My Plate” in 2011.

Stover was more direct. He pointed out “flip-flops” in nutritional guidance in the past have undermined confidence in those recommendations. Hence, people like me who tune them out.

“Eggs are good for you today. They’re bad for you tomorrow. They’re good for you the next day.” he said. “What we need to do to really engender public trust is to have very strong science that people actually believe in what the researchers are telling them.”

Hancock said precision nutrition is “the study of nutrition based on individual differences in responding to diets and their impact on health because of genetics, epigenetics, age, sex, disease status, sleep patterns and other factors.” Rather than a food pyramid for all eaters, the output here is more likely to be an algorithm or some wearable tech that adjusts dietary recommendations based on those complex factors.

Advertisement

On Monday, the institute will announce that it’s hiring Regan Bailey, a nutritional epidemiologist and professor at Purdue University, to lead this part of the IHA.

“We’ve generalized recommendations,” Stover said. “We need science to stop the controversy that confuses the public.”

Healthy living

Of course, there’s a big difference between knowing which food is healthy and choosing to eat it. The second IHA pillar is related to behavioral and community health. To lead the charge, Stover has recruited his former Cornell colleague Rebecca Seguin-Fowler. Her third of the institute will be based in Plano, where she will investigate programs that remove barriers to healthy food. Her work may include cooking classes, community-supported agriculture programs, or produce prescriptions, which are referrals by health care providers to organizations that can provide fresh produce with no added fats, sugars or salt.

Advertisement

Eager for a North Texas angle and a photo someplace like a community garden, I asked if I could visit the Healthy Living hub. But the entire IHA initiative is so new that there is hardly anything on the ground, or in it, to visit.

Responsive agriculture

The final hub involves farming and ranching techniques that promote greater health and sustainability. This is where the institute intersects with Stover’s background.

In the 1990s, Stover contributed to breakthrough research that connected folate deficiencies in pregnant women to birth defects, specifically spina bifida. Scientists discovered that increased levels of folic acid in the diets of expectant moms reduced spina bifida-affected births. Following that discovery, the FDA adopted a policy of folic acid-fortified foods which likely saved the country billions in health care costs and, more important, contributed to thousands of healthy babies.

Advertisement

Stover said that diet-related chronic disease costs the U.S. between $1 trillion and $4 trillion per year, depending on how it’s estimated.

His relationship to better agriculture goes back even further than his professional career.

“I grew up in a family of eight kids. We grew all our own food,” he said.

Stover, 57, grew up on five acres in Pennsylvania. His father, a World War II veteran, had a printing business. During the war, Stover told me, his mother planted a victory garden, like many of her neighbors. Victory gardens were a social campaign to support the war effort by reducing the pressure on domestic food supply. People were encouraged to grow as much of their own food as possible. When the war ended, Stover said, his parents kept the garden going.

Advertisement

“I’m very much interested in not taking a pharmaceutical approach to a problem that’s really rooted in agriculture,” he said. “We need a diversified agriculture system. We need production agriculture to meet the needs of everyone. But we need more local agriculture to create resiliency and give local connections. We have that in Texas. We have vertical agriculture, indoor agriculture, community gardens. It’s all important.”

Proof in the pudding

It was John Sharp who first alerted me to the food system moon shot in College Station. The TAMU chancellor, former Texas comptroller, legislator and railroad commissioner had a more political angle on the work facing IHA. He said the confusion over dietary guidelines in the past was not just because nutrition is a young science. Some of the studies that advanced new guidelines were funded by industry actors, he said. By contrast, IHA relies entirely on government funding: $21 million per year from the USDA and another $9 million per year from the Texas Legislature for the next biennium.

“It’s government money or it’s nothing,” Sharp said. “Completely unbiased.”

Advertisement

With Texas A&M’s connections to ag extension services and other resources throughout the state, Stover said it’s the perfect fit for this kind of initiative.

“Very few institutions in the world could do this,” he said. “We have the capacity. We’re one of the largest universities. We’re one of the most comprehensive agriculture programs. So we have the expertise across the entire agriculture value chain.”

For a non-Aggie perspective, I called Paul M. Coates, an adjunct professor at Indiana University School of Public Health and president of the American Society for Nutrition. He said it’s not an exaggeration to call IHA a moon shot.

“It’s as ambitious as can be,” he said.

Advertisement

Coates pointed out the federal government has recently launched its own precision nutrition research program. He called the two initiatives “concordant” and said their greatest value is in interdisciplinary cooperation.

“What I’ve seen happening since Dr. Stover got to Texas A&M is a coordination of thinking and resources at a pretty high level,” Coates said. “This is a big-ticket item. Things are really crystallizing in ways they haven’t before.”

So will Texas A&M change the way the human race relates to food?

“If it works, yes,” Coates said. “The proof will be in the pudding.”

Advertisement

Or, perhaps, in the responsibly sourced, precisely nutritious tapioca.

Ryan Sanders is an editorial writer and a member of The Dallas Morning News editorial board.