The Need for Metrics and Data Systems for Measuring Full Nourishment

Because we have no good way to measure whether a person is fully nourished or not, we measure inputs instead, or we measure a few of the nutrient outcomes (e.g. iron levels in the blood; or NPK levels in soil).  So it is critical to find new ways to cheaply and rapidly measure nutrient absorption and retention in foods, supplements, and full spectrum nourishment in humans and land.  Wouldn’t it be useful, for example, to be able to compare the nutrient density in an orange from California with one from Chile? Or to be able to check the claims of different supplements against what they actually deliver to the body?

Such tests—especially if they are inexpensive and capable of being used by producers and consumers—would create the outcome-based measurements to enable effective consumer demand for full nourishment foods and supplements that work. It would likely stimulate development of new products, new service delivery techniques, and efficient commercial transactions along standardized measures.  Even in early versions, such tests would help in field trials of advanced multi-nutrient supplement products in targeted populations. [link to field trials]  Such trials, appropriately documented, will develop evidence of the impact of full nourishment, as well as test a variety of delivery models for reaching underserved low-income populations.

In addition, standards by which to collect and manage large amounts of data on nutritional and wellness outcomes are essential for rapidly seeing what works—in healthy land management strategies, in nutrient-rich farming practices, in wellness strategies for people. This means innovation to develop new, cheap, and widely available devices, as well as consensus on the metrics to used, are important.

Fortunately, underlying trends in information and telecommunication systems can facilitate building an information infrastructure to undergird the nutrient economy. Data-mining of large data sets is becoming inexpensive and offers new ways of detecting and documenting important connections. And mobile devices are increasingly sophisticated, so that they can empower front-line health workers (and soon, patients themselves) and front-line producers such as farmers with guidance, data, and even immediate diagnostics from mobile sensors that measure soil conditions or a woman’s anemia. When a mobile device can also measure wide-spectrum nutrient content in food or in a person, and simultaneously share or record that data, it will be a different world—and that time might not be far away.

An important consideration is to make available to citizens all information generated by the nutritional measurement systems about themselves and systemic information which is relevant to them.  A personal electronic wellness record including health and nutritional status and interventions is an example of the first, as is access to relevant information about wellness issues.  Public access to results from clinics, hospitals, food processing and inspections, practitioner ratings and the like are examples of the second.  These allow the public to hold government and the private sector accountable.  And in the nutrient economy context, the same assessment applies to wellness of land and farms as it does to individual human beings.

We invite partners to help develop the tools, the metrics, and the data systems needed to support the Nutrient Economy.