The biggest problem right now is that the majority of our diet in America, and increasingly around the world, is ultraprocessed industrial food that is grown in ways that destroy the environment, the climate, and our health. It’s a pattern that’s leading to catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet.

Six out of ten Americans have a chronic illness—heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, you name it—related to our ultraprocessed diet. About 88 percent of us are metabolically unhealthy, meaning nearly nine out of ten of us are somewhere on the diabetic spectrum. The economic burden of that is staggering: One out of every five dollars in our entire economy goes toward health care. And 80 percent of that is spent treating chronic disease that’s almost entirely triggered by food.

Our industrial food system is also at the root of many social and health inequities. It disproportionately targets poor and minority communities, strapping them with countless consequences, from widespread chronic health problems to threatening future economic competitiveness. (For example: Diets based in processed foods hinder children’s ability to focus, learn, and perform academically.)

The ecological consequences are catastrophic. We’ve depleted our fresh water resources, damaged our aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and wiped out species of pollinators, livestock, and edible plants in favor of growing massive swaths of corn, wheat, and soy. Our food system, end to end, is the number one cause of climate change, driving about 50 percent of all climate consequences; that includes the effects of deforestation, factory farming and animal agriculture, soil loss, transportation, storage, refrigeration, food waste, and more.

We estimate that there are at least 25,000 plant compounds in our food. Conventional databases track only about 150. Many more are just being discovered and cataloged. In fact, the Rockefeller Foundation is funding a Periodic Table of Food initiative that hopes to lead to a greater understanding of how these other compounds, called phytochemicals, work in our bodies and how to help the most beneficial ones become more widespread in our foods and in our diet.

Phytochemicals all have different properties, and different ones will affect different systems of the body in different ways. Let me describe one example.

Polyphenols and the gut microbiome: One of the bacteria in your gut microbiome, Akkermansia muciniphila, provides a mucus coating on the lining of your gut that helps protect you from food, particles, and bacteria that might otherwise enter your bloodstream and create inflammation for your body. It’s one natural line of protection against diabetes, obesity, autoimmune diseases, cancer, and heart disease. Many people have low Akkermansia, including those who have taken several courses of antibiotics. And it turns out that out if you have particularly low Akkermansia and you get cancer, you are significantly less likely respond to one of our most powerful treatments for cancer: immune checkpoint inhibitors. But the consumption of certain plant polyphenols, including those from cranberries and Concord grapes, has been shown to get Akkermansia to grow in the gut. One study in mice showed that introducing Akkermansia to the gut directly improved responses to immune checkpoint inhibitors.

That’s just one example of how a particular microbe in your gut responds to specific phytochemicals, and how that microbe can then grow and help you address chronic illness, even in how we treat cancer. Other phytochemicals affect other systems of the body. I could give you similar explanations of how some other compound affects your detox system, or how another affects your hormones, or countless other relationships between plants and our bodies. If we dismiss phytochemicals as unimportant because they’re not central vitamins and minerals, we’ll be ignoring compounds that potentially have powerful benefits for our health.

The idea of eating your meat as medicine is clearly provocative and controversial, but the idea arose from my understanding of the difference between feedlot meat and regeneratively grown or wild meat.

Most of the research that’s been done on meat has been on feedlot-raised, factory-farmed meat. This meat is produced by packing animals into tight spaces and feeding them mostly corn and soy. These conditions are widely accepted as not good for animals or the planet, and it’s been found that this meat is largely inflammatory in the human body, contributing to many kinds of chronic inflammatory diseases, including cardiovascular disease and cancer.

What’s coming up in the research more and more is that things look different with grass-fed animals or wild animals. These animals are raised foraging on hundreds of plants that all have different nutrients and compounds. Those compounds get taken up into the blood and meat of these animals. And it turns out that in addition to overall better protein and fat profiles in wild and regenerative meat, there are also all these additional phytochemicals, antioxidants, and nutrients.

Two pieces of steak could have the same gram-for-gram breakdown of protein, fat, and carbohydrates, and still these differently raised meats could have wildly different effects on the body depending on the quality and the composition of that meat.

Yes. We see similar patterns in dairy as we do with meat. Most of the dairy we eat today comes from Holstein cows bred to produce lots of milk that is rich in A1 casein, a milk protein that tends to cause inflammation and digestive issues in many people. We also pump those cows with hormones to keep them producing milk, which can have hormonal effects in the people drinking that milk. Even organic milk may be an issue for some people if it comes from one of these Holstein cows.

I prefer milk from sheep and goats, which are more often raised on grass. Sheep’s and goat’s milks are also a better fit for those who are lactose intolerant.