Promiscuous Eating Habits Needn’t Have a Wasteful Ending in Life!

Indeed, that waste might just sustainably improve the health of your microbiome, targeting specific diseases, and keep you healthy, youthful and fit later in life. Responsible eating, regular exercise, getting sufficient sleep and avoidance of excessive stress will also help.

Dr Andrew Siegel – defined promiscuous eating as the “wanton, reckless, unselective, casual and indiscriminate consumption of foods without regard to the potential consequences of this indiscretion” – identified as the unhealthy relationship with food and a lack of commitment to a healthy balanced food intake.

UNITED NATIONS IN FOOD WASTE

The United Nations claims that 30% of food produced globally is wasted. This waste is having a significant impact on our planet’s health – particularly in terms of carbon emissions, water withdrawals, and land use. A potential 70% rise in food demand by 2050, based on present trajectories, fresh water and biodiversity loss will deplete by 70% if we continue to do nothing – so that is not an option, and we all have a role to play.

A recent article in the Visual Capitalist listed how different food items contribute to this environmental impact, ranking foods based on their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and water withdrawals.

In terms of food items collectively they produce just over 25% of all GHG’S!

Citrus as an example, while appearing at the bottom of the list – (beef was in first place with the largest carbon footprint) – still produces huge amounts of bio-waste – and given it also has a promiscuous past- (roughly speaking any two citruses can get fruity and hybridize, and potentially produce new varieties), how we manage that waste better matters, and the waste from the other food items on the list, be they animal or plant.

WASTE STREAMS A PRECIOUS COMMODITY!

These waste streams tend to be an aggregated resource that lies in specific locations where processing takes place around the planet. These items and their by-products are used in many of our largest trillion$ industries - Food and Agriculture, Pharma/Consumer Health and Personal Care, Tech Bio and Tech Med and have the potential to generate immense value, if the right science, technology and logistics are in place, that can efficiently collect, extract and return these products back into the value chain, improving human, animal, and planetary health.

FOODS ABOUT NUTRITON AND WELL-BEING - OUR MICROBIOME TELLS US SO!

Leveraging AI and data analytics enables companies to create new compounds/bio-actives and ingredients at the Intersection of food nutrition, biotech, and health, irrespective of location and reducing carbon footprints and based on developments and research within the microbiome and supporting data around efficacy, safety, and commercial viability from clinical development projects.

Recognizing standard drug development principles and global drug or biologic development?requirements. Understanding what normal flora is, what the?confounders are, and what are clinically meaningful endpoints are important steps in developing a successful clinical development program for products affecting the microbiome whether for human animal or plant. Indeed, mechanistic, and therapeutic discoveries in animals will benefit not only those species but also humans.

FERMENTING A FUTURE - FOR A HEALTHIER LIFE

De-risking and scaling production via fermentation/bioprocessing facilities, strategically placed in key locations globally where waste aggregates, is one obvious way.

So, while certain people may want drugs to “live forever,” for now most from a supplement perspective would rather products that add “life to years and not years to live” – as I heard two grandees of the C suite discuss recently.

NEXT GENERATIONS - AND NEW FOOD SYSTEMS

It is also creating the next generation of foods, and a new food system, and doing things in a climate smart way, utilizing analytics and insights that are data driven to systematically provide incremental value to all the operating companies sustainably.

GAINING INSIGHTS INTO WHAT OUR CUSTOMERS WANT

Ensuring customer experience achieves success, with a combination of technology and data science powered by machine learning, programmatic consulting, and research based CX insights and education, to ensure we stay on this less wasteful path in the future!

PLANT, ANIMAL OR HUMAN - FOOD AND ITS WASTE GENERATING NEW OPPORTUNTIES THROUGHOUT THE VALUE CHAIN!

Furthermore, if I look at citrus again, its waste has the potential ability to not only help reduce beef methane emissions by significant percentages up to 30% - by improving the quality of their feed. Citrus waste is more beneficial to farmers/manufacturers because the residue is also neutralized of its volatile oils and acidity, this also makes it suitable for vermiculture and production of high nutrient fertilizer, and thereby enabling plants to grow better and function as carbon sinks. A clean extraction process can upcycle 100% more of the bio-waste than conventional water extraction, generating polyphenols and /fiber-rich prebiotics and probiotics, that for instance can improve gut health and the microbiome, but also provide alternative proteins, vitamins minerals and nutrients. In terms of human longevity certain polyphenols and prebiotics developed from waste streams may let us live a healthier life in our later years by combatting senescent cells or creating the next alluring ingredient in skincare.

THE RIGHT PARTNERSHIPS

This will happen by forging partnerships at the intersection of food, health, and medicine, and significantly in this century ensuring that supply chains are more resilient post Covid and have better traceability.

MULTI- ENTERPRISE SUPPLY CHAIN NETWORKS KEY

Today’s marketplace is as we saw during Covid increasingly volatile and unpredictable, relying on their external, packaging partners to market more cost effectively. These supply chain communities were shackled by the limitations of ERPs and hindered by obsolete single-enterprise strategies. However multi-enterprise supply chain business network platforms exist to illuminate your supplier system from “farm to fork" or Pharma, enabling new and established businesses to work faster and smarter with your contract manufacturers, packers, value-added 3PLs and raw and packaging suppliers, where some very sustainable ones are emerging.

TRUST YOUR GUT INSTINCT TOWARDS A HEALTHIER AND LONGER LIFE

Building trust with the right decisions makers is all important - our customers, consumers, and patients, facilitating sustainable improvements in everyday life and health and enabling all of us to contribute to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and to live healthier and more fulfilling sustainable lives , we are after all what we eat, let's just not waste it!