Measuring the Invisible: Decoding Nutrient Density and the Nutrimeter with Chris Macquet

SHOW NOTES

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• 𝗡𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗡𝗫 – device to measure nutrient density in produce.
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00:05 – Introduction to nutrient density and spectroscopy.

04:27 – Chris Macquet’s mission: Saving the nation from bad food.

05:29 – Defining nutrient density and soil preparation.

08:55 – How to perform a nutrient “spot-check” for your household.

12:54 – Digression: The fascinating and difficult world of truffle growing.

17:31 – The evolution of measurement: From Brix meters to Nutrimeter NX.

26:26 – Comparison: Nutrimeter vs. the Bionutrient Meter.

38:08 – Case Study: The nutrient density of free-range eggs.

46:52 – The “Find Good Food” platform and future mobile updates.

Measuring the Invisible: Decoding Nutrient Density and the Nutrimeter with Chris Macquet

Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:00)

Hello and welcome to Unstress Health. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich.

Well, as we navigate our way up and down the aisles of our vegetable and fruit and vegetable shop where we are buying produce and we are hoping that the food we buy is nutrient dense. And if you’re a regular listener of this podcast, you will know that nutrient density is the key. Well, wouldn’t it be nice if we had something in our hand that could measure

the nutrient density of a food. Well, this is an issue that has been challenging many people in the world of technology and food science. And my guest today has come a long way in addressing that challenge. My guest is Chris Macquet. And Chris is a specialist, an IT specialist in supply chain and natural resource sector. 

So he has been working using spectroscopy, which is the use of light and energy to measure the composition of a product or in this case, food and soil. Because the soil in which our food is grown is also very important. And not all apples are the same and not all vegetables are the same, even if they may look the same to us as uninitiated shoppers. So Chris has developed something called Neutrometer version 10 or X.

This is the 10th iteration of it. And it’s a device which allows you to measure nutrient density. And I believe this is where we are heading into the future of personal empowerment. So I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Chris Macquet.

Chris Macquet (04:08)

Thank you.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (04:11)

Chris, you’ve said as your mission, as though this wasn’t a pretty big mission, saving the nation from bad food. What do you mean by that? And how did nutrient density become the central lens through which you viewed human health?

Chris Macquet (04:27)

Right. That saying comes from Charlie Massey, who said, what we need are self-organizing, self-sustaining, grassroots food movements, if we want to save this nation from good food. Now, that was back in 2017, and since then, we’ve been working to put together the right tools and the system to enable that to happen.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (04:54)

Well, now the issue of nutrient, firstly, Charlie has been a very honored guest on this program a couple of times. And I consider him to be, you know, a legend really, ⁓ in his book, the call of the Reed warbler and his five cycles of that. He talks about an argue and the fifth cycle being the human social cycle is obviously a big one, but he also talks about soil mineral quality. Can you explain nutrient density? that why it matters so profoundly. What do we miss when we ignore it? Well, first of all, mean by nutrient density.

Chris Macquet (05:29)

First of all, one has to get nutrient density into the soil, right? And you do that through a variety of processes. Our region farmers, we went that way in 2001 and we focused on enriching the soil with worm juice, with mulch, compost, etc., etc. 

No chemicals at all. From that, you’ll get, obviously, that’s the first ingredient to food nutrient density, is having a good soil that’s appropriate to the plant providing the plant with the nutrients it needs and then of course picking the produce at the top of its ripeness curve and then eating it fresh is when it’s at highest nutrient density. Now what nutrient density is the level of dissolved solids within the liquid or the sap or whatever you’re eating that comprise and we use the

National Health and Medical Research Council and Fizance data on providing a balance of all the nutrient densities across the 51 essential nutrients. And with computers, that’s pretty fast and easy, but it’s a bit tedious in many ways. We have a spot check program now running in Find Good Food, which enables you and all your household to check their nutrient intakes on whatever period you like a week a month. It’s just a spot check when circumstances change within the household, kids growing up, you know, that sort of thing. 

Any change you want to adjust your nutrients to do that, nutrient intake to do, be balanced. Where you’re short in terms of essential nutrients, we provide a guide to where you can find them in natural foods, in herbs, through Find Good Food.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (07:19)

I mean, I mean the 51 nutrients, central nutrients is a, is an excellent, ⁓ starting point to explain nutrient dense foods because so often, and this is, don’t want to disparage dieticians too much here, but their focus is very much on the three macro nutrients and calories. You know, are you having enough carbohydrates as though that was an essential nutrient? Are you having fats? There’s certainly essential fatty acids.

And are you having enough protein and particularly the eight or nine essential amino acids? They’re the macro nutrients, but there’s a hell of a lot more there when you, when you factor in 51.

Chris Macquet (08:01)

Well, again, we work mainly with nutritionists that they love what we’re Dietitians tend to favor their favorite diet, dietary regime. So they’re not that analytical. It all depends what they know and treating your health. yeah, nutritionists love what we’re doing. 

You know, these are who’s economy in the name of the crowd and in in Queensland who provide all the nutrient assessments to dietitians, least nutritionists and so forth. But yeah, we’re pretty closely allied with the way they do things there.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (08:39)

I know we’re going to be talking about the neutral meter, is a wonderful new tool that you’ve developed, but you mentioned doing a periodically doing a spot check on your nutrient intake. Can you just elaborate on that a bit?

Chris Macquet (08:55)

Right. It’s basically an app or a module within find good food, because we found the continuous process of capturing information, bit too tedious, too analytical. And even I, who’s an analyst, miss one thing and you, and it’s pointers. So basically the idea really is to capture over a period, could be three days, could be a week, whatever period you like. What is in fact you, the household or you or, and or the household can be eating. And you basically pick up all those food tables from.

The problem, the Byzantium databases, there’s 8,000 food items there. And that then gives you all 51 essential nutrients. Then, yeah, then you actually have look at the graphs, the charts, see where you’re lacking in the earlier system, which was a standalone system by itself. If you went below certain levels, it would send you an automatic alert to saying, Hey, you need more vitamin C or F, whatever it is. And you’d attend to it. this case, you really have to.

Look at the charts periodically once every couple of years and see if your nutrient intake is in fact the balance for yourself ⁓ and your household.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (10:05)

Cause I mean, talked about Charlie Massey. I’m getting a bit of an echo there, but we talked about Charlie Massey and I know he talks about the five cycles, the sun, the solar cycle, the water of the soil, mineral cycle, biodiversity and the psychos and the human social cycle. And it really is the soil mineral cycle that determines

nutrient density to a large degree. When we get tables like that, that are kind of on an app, depends a lot on the soil in which those foods have been grown. mean, apples, you may not want to compare apples with oranges, but even within apples and apples, all apples aren’t the same.

Chris Macquet (10:49)

Absolutely. Absolutely. Look, I’m not the real farmer in the family. My wife and my son are the real farmers. He’s a horticulturist agronomist. So I’ll let all the issues about how to grow things to them. But the one thing I do know how to grow is the truffles. That is quite a unique process, quite different to any other essential nutrients we’ve brought to the plants. But basically, we did use a scanner from

The Netherlands called Agrocares, which actually measured carbon content and could actually advise farmers on what is best grown in that plot of land or what you need to do to optimize your production of potatoes. That is quite a laborious process as well. It’s actually very difficult to get exact metrics from soil like you can from the produce.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (11:43)

I mean, you’ve mentioned their truffles, which has certainly whetted my appetite. this relationship of a fungi, which is essentially what truffle is. And more specifically the micro risal fungi that goes through the soil is so central in providing that soil mineral balance.

Chris Macquet (12:06)

Absolutely. There’s so many elements to this, the one golden rule is that whatever tree you’re planting in your soil, you’ve got to make sure that the tree, that the soil itself lacks the essential nutrients required by the tree. Because the work of the truffle is to convert nutrients in the soil into the nutrients the tree needs. Okay. Now we’ve got a French background. We understand all that. ⁓ The harder the truffle has to work, the bigger it grows.

And that’s the reason why you look for soil that relax what the tree needs or if you got the soil ready, what tree do you actually best plot that requires nutrients that the soil lacks? Yeah.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (12:54)

mean, you’ve, you’ve now we digress a little bit here because you’ve captured my imagination here with the growing of truffles cause they are so valuable or so expensive anyways. What makes them so difficult? Is it difficult to grow or is it challenging? What’s the challenge?

Chris Macquet (13:11)

Well, there’s three things, there’s obviously clean air, clean rain and clean soil. Okay? you find truffles growing between certain latitudes at certain heights. So temperature is important in the sense that you must have a really cold snap during winter. So the tree itself shuts down and when the tree shuts down the truffle stops growing because the tree is no longer functioning, it’s not doing any work and that’s when the truffle matures or ripens.

And that’s when it admits the smell which the dogs pick up or the pigs. used to use pigs up in Trenton, as well as dogs. yeah, so that’s really when they mature is when the trees are shut down for a week or so, then the truffles will start dying because they’re not doing their work and not feeding the tree. And that is called the maturing process. That’s when we can smell the truffles.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (14:06)

And how long does it take to grow a truffle that’s commercially usable?

Chris Macquet (14:11)

Well, it’s again, varying on the tree and the soil. Anything from 18 months to 12 years is what Rick would say. So people have harvested in 18 months and some have waited 12 years to harvest. So it’s all to do with getting the right conditions, clean air, clean rain, and hopefully the soil is clean. One of the biggest mistakes that especially the Australian Truffle Grows Association, were

Dr Ron Ehrlich (14:33)

Sorry.

Chris Macquet (14:41)

found the members of that was they were dumping too much lime on the soil to try and raise the pH, which is very good for mushrooms and tuples and so forth. So you want to have pH between 7.6 and 8, but don’t, you’ve got to raise it slowly. Otherwise you kill everything that’s in the soil. If you like, dump 30 tons, some are even recommending 60 tons of lime to get the pH right up straight away. But you’re killing everything else, you know, so.

That is one of the other secrets which we found hard to convey to others. The issue at the time, back then, ⁓ was only 3 % of truth array were financially viable. So when people came to ask us for advice, we said, look, you do have to stand that the fastest way to lose a million dollars is to try growing truffles. Very good.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (15:32)

What’s the tree, the best tree that it should grow on?

Chris Macquet (15:35)

Tens of the temperatures. We are growing up in Fenton, we’re growing in Odio and English Oak. English Oak was the main one. In the warmer climates, the Hazelnut is a procured one.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (15:47)

Right now we talked, it’s interesting because I remember also Charlie Massey saying in a healthy soil, in a teaspoon of healthy soil, there are a billion microbes and mind boggling in a healthy teaspoon of soil and in a healthy cubic meter of soil, there’s 27,000 kilometers of micro risal fungi. 

So that’s the foundation, but what you’re doing with nutri, nutrimet meter, is measuring the nutrient density of the food. Now what’s been wrong before we go into the nutrimeter, what’s been wrong with the existing measurement tools and what, you know, what, what, what, what have they used in the past?

Chris Macquet (16:28)

Well, soil tests have always been sort of more chemical tests rather than ⁓ sensory tests like near-infrared rays or spectrometers. And chemical tests really are the best, it’s all the best way to do it locally. They could have done it with the agro-care scanner, but we have to pre-calibrate it every square, every hectare with the labs in Europe and that would have cost us 30,000 per hectare and there’s quite a few hectares to cover. So we thought, no, that’s not on. We didn’t pursue that particular venture. We really focused on the produce and on human health.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (17:11)

Well, great, because I think people are, well, some people may be interested. A lot of people are interested in the soil. I think a lot more people are interested in the food that they’re actually putting in their mouth. Tell us a little bit about the nutrimeter. How, what does it change in the food system? What is it? What does it measure? How does it measure?

Chris Macquet (17:31)

Well, first of all, you’ve heard of the bricks meter.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (17:35)

Well, I have, but let’s remind our listener about the BRICS.

Chris Macquet (17:40)

Now that’s called a refractometer because what it does, it refracts through light the density of the liquid that’s on its palate. So the higher the density, the higher the degree of refraction. So with measuring fresh produce, we measure between zero and 32 degrees of refraction. So that’s the normal BRX meter. You can get more advanced ones for measuring honey, egg yolk, which measure between 50 and 80 or 90 degrees of refraction.

So it all depends on use. It measures also Pacific gravity. It measures what was very popular in the States, the home brewing and all that. So it all started with an optical device called a fractometer, which has been regarded for the last 200 years as the best objective measure of nutrient density, because it was an absolutely accurate, pure measure of physical density of the produce. So,

Yeah, I don’t know how long you’re gonna talk about this, but…

Dr Ron Ehrlich (18:40)

Well, well, well, I know, no, no, but I’m just trying to get my own head around. Yeah. ⁓ and, that is measuring the physical density of the food of the Jews. I I have one.

Chris Macquet (18:52)

Juice or sap of the food you have to extract that first to put on the pellets I’ve got one here I think

Dr Ron Ehrlich (19:01)

Don’t don’t don’t start demonstrating because that that’s, but that that is what has to happen. You take some food, you liquidize it, and then you run the fractometer, which measures the physical density of that liquid. And that is relative to the nutrient density. Yes. Okay. Interesting. Yes. If you cheat on that, could, could you cheat on that? Could you

You know, mean, that assumes vitamins and minerals and that, but we could just have fiber, couldn’t we?

Chris Macquet (19:32)

Yeah, it could be, but certainly, I mean, that measure of it is 80 years ago, there’s a chap called Dr. Kerry Reams in America, sat down with teams all over America with different climatic conditions, soil conditions, and they came up with a rating chart. So depending on the rating of, tomato, if it’s less than four, it’s rated as poor. 

If it’s less than six, it’s rated as average. it’s less than eight, it’s rated as good uh less than 12 no once it reaches 12 then it’s rated as as excellent so that’s essentially the difference so if you want accurate measurements of nutrient intake uh the average used by ISANs who stands Australia New Zealand is six which is the average um fixed measure uh if you’re buying tomatoes at measure three which was the case since 2010 to 2023 then you’d have to halve your nutrient intake. 

Again, pie tans agree to this. So if you’re growing excellent, tasty tomatoes and highly delicious, nutritious tater tomatoes, they measure 12, you can double the nutrient intake per 100 gram, whatever weight measure you want to use. So it has a direct bearing on the value of the food intake that you’re taking. Not only is it more delicious, it’s much more nutritious in that sense.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (20:57)

It’s interesting that we, well, that is the bricks measurement. was, know I about 10 or more years ago, there was a product on the market that was just being launched called Sceo, S-C-I-O. What was it using? What was the technology that it was using to measure? What was it measuring?

Chris Macquet (21:17)

Yeah, we bought half a dozen actually of those. They’re quite expensive. There are a number of limitations. First of all, they kept all the data. We wanted to use it in helping farmers get better prices from consumers or to help consumers find better product. They put it out there as a spectrometer, but it wasn’t a true spectrometer. It was actually measuring lights. The company that made it, Computer Physics from Israel,

Dr Ron Ehrlich (21:21)

Yes, I will.

Chris Macquet (21:47)

was an optical specialist. So they’re actually using a light refraction rather than true spectrometer. Their methodology was quite scientific, but they were limited only to 13 different fruits. Whereas with our new Neutrometer, the 10th version called NX, we can measure up to 450 varieties of produce because there’s a big difference between the red apple and the green apple and so on. So each one has its own standards of measurement.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (22:19)

Well, now this is a tantalizing segue into explaining what sets Neutrometer NX apart. What is the technology and you’ve explained the difference between 13 fruits and 450 or something. Right. That’s significant. yes. Yeah. That’s significant. But tell us about the technology, how that differs from the fractometer or is it different from the spectrometer or what are we light refractory? What’s the difference?

Chris Macquet (22:47)

Yeah, the spectrometers is, I think I might’ve told you that when the bio nutrient food association, the US were considering trying to measure soil qualities with a reflectology, a photosynthesis up device. I said, don’t do that. That measuring soil quality is the most difficult of all of the three measures. You really want, and so they invited me over there and I was able to demonstrate, I think it was 2017, demonstrated to the SIA that convinced them it was far easier to measure produce quality than soil quality with a spectrometer. 

The SIO, as I said, is not actually, well, I won’t go into all the technical problems with it, but it was expensive to operate. had to create a spectral profile across all the light ranges, shoot it up into the cloud where it was matched against pre-calibrated from Brics profiles, and then would come back and tell you whether it was average, good, or excellent.

The net, new to me, our new to me, a new to X, we use a near infrared ray spectrometry, ⁓ with, ⁓ light intensity at the higher ranges. Well, I can’t give you all our secrets, but what it was, what it was is that we had to find a way of making a principle, keep it simple, stupid of being able to get an accurate measure relative to bricks because it bricks was our, phytarea of measurement and back in 23 we discovered that we had a really good correlation between our NDR, nutrient density index and BRICS and that we were given enough benchmarking tests, lot of data collection, we all come up with correlation figures that will give any NDR on any variety to a BRICS value which would then open up many doors in the use of how it’s used for measuring you tune intake for example by 5 volts.

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Dr Ron Ehrlich (24:51)

You’ve mentioned bio nutrient.org or the food association. And I know that Dan Ketterich is, their CEO. And I was going to have him on the podcast, but he just, maybe he knew you were coming Chris, but without being too, without being too adversarial, can you share with us what you do? What, what your thinking is about how the bio nutrient measured diverges from the neutral meter.

Chris Macquet (26:26)

Yeah, well, Ron, it’s a bit of a sensitive issue. I’ve got to be very careful what I say. Okay. Our business model is delivering value to clients, to farmers, to consumers. That’s quite different to dams.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (26:32)

I said without being adversive.

What is their business model?

Chris Macquet (26:44)

Well, for the last year, eight years, he’s relying on donations. Okay. All research ongoing and ongoing research. So I’m not being in retort, I’m just talking the facts, right? Okay. Um, and now, well, look, we’ve got a lot of friends and farmers in the U S and they’ve lost eight years. They’ve been paying the donations, waiting for this bio nutrient meter to come out and so forth.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (26:57)

Yes, no, no, that’s all.

Chris Macquet (27:13)

Unfortunately, the chief scientist is an expert in photosynthesis in reflectology rather than spectrometry and he keeps pulling it in a different direction. I feel sorry for him. You know, I’ve done my piece back in eight years ago now, nine years ago now, and you know, I can’t keep helping them. So I thought, well, let me find something that’s going to be a lot cheaper, much easier, much quicker to use than

Either the SIO or the, we call it SIO, S-C-I-O. Yep. Or the bi-nutrient mitmeter as well. We had bought one back in 2017, couldn’t find much use for it. So we just stuck to the evolving. The term nutrimeter came when we were advertising it. We believe the first in the world to advertise BRICS values and BRICS ratings in our fresh produce and organic shop in Trenton in 2010. Consumers came in and said, what’s BRICS?

And I tried to explain it was the guy who came up with the right graduations on a professor from Germany. And they said, no, you can’t call it bricks because there’s a coffee shop that’s just opened down the road called bricks. Oh, okay. I accept that. So what do you think? asked them, what do think I should call it? Well, call it a nutrimeter because that’s what it does. It measures new intensity. 

So since 2010, we’ve gone through 10 evolutions, you know, from U2 meter one was just for food, two was doing a combination of things, sorry, I gonna say, I mean, fresh produce specifically, it was measuring water, was measuring specific gravity, more advanced solutions could measure higher densities like honey and egg yolk, and then digital, digital Brics meters came onto the market, where they’re more accurate, down to 0.1 of a degree of refraction.

And those have been going on and then we did some work on trying to make the SIO more useful around 2018, sorry, 2018. And that’s one of the versions on our journey of 10 different ones. So, yeah, so NX stands for the 10th evolution of different Newton meters. And yeah, and so what we’re doing now is trying to position it that is so useful. So it’s very useful to farmers and very useful to consumers. 

So we have slightly different, more advanced readings with light shields to protect any light refraction from the device. That may get in there for the farmers. It’s a longer scan, it takes 12 seconds, but it’s more scientifically accurate and that’s what the farmers want. Consumers want something that’s very fast, you know, they can move down the aisle. So we’ve got automatic scanning.

They can do ⁓ 45 seconds per scan, which tells them ⁓ the nutrient density index, which is purely for comparison purposes, which is the most highly nutrient-dense. It also tells them what the sugar content index is as well. And I think that’s pretty relevant today. Give a… You’re aware of that, Ron.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (30:27)

Yes

Absolutely. Low blood sugar is a goal for anybody in life. But if you’ve got a disease, every disease is worse with elevated blood sugar level, including mental health.

Chris Macquet (30:41)

Now, what happened in 23 when we’re prototyping the NX, we suddenly discovered that the average nutrient density of tomatoes from the supermarket had risen from 3.5 to suddenly 8 to 9. Now, we’ve been warned by American food scientists that are about to genetic modify to raise the nutrient density levels on all fish projects. 

And today, that’s what we got. You know, we’ve actually got our government departments and the various food associations saying the future food is genetic modification. But all they’ve been doing and ⁓ Australians food scientists are confirming that all they’ve done is increase the sugar levels, leaving the other nutrients pretty flat, you know, down there. And so what you’re getting is basically the ill effects of genetic modification and an overload of sugars, which we don’t think is good know, a lot people would then contest it, that’s fair enough.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (31:45)

I don’t think, well, I think they may contest it as a, as an impediment to a business model, but they certainly won’t contest it in terms of an impediment to better health and higher sugar levels will guarantee more pharmaceutical sales.

Chris Macquet (31:56)

And we’re running

Yes, no good. We’re on the same side. We believe only in the truth. Yes. We’re not interested in the money. We’re doing this for the future of our children.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (32:10)

But Chris, I’m, just, this is a moment for pause because what you’re saying is these they’ve worked their way around the bricks as a measurement by including more sugar in it. And it comes up as a greater nutrient density. my God. I was getting really excited about measuring nutrient density.

Chris Macquet (32:31)

The original Brix meter is not able to differentiate between the amount of sugar and the overall nutrient density. So those are all gone up. What we do is saying, yes, that’s a sugar level. And if that’s the level of sugar in there, maybe it’s potentially modified. If the level of sugar is down here, then you know, it may be a natural product.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (32:53)

Right. And is the Sceo is the Sceo and the bio, what is the bio nutrient device that they use? I don’t even know what it’s called.

Chris Macquet (33:02)

Yeah, I’ve studied the components that go into it and it’s not too dissimilar to ours. We actually use the same spectra heads, we call them, for detecting in-surf.

What, what, what concerned me was Dan trying to redefine what nutrient density was by including, ⁓ phytochemicals as he said. Now, when we look similar, said, look, phytochemicals are essential for the plot. It’s for the health of the plot. They’re not essential to humans, according to our national health medical research council, according to Farzans, et cetera, et cetera.

So we said, no, come on, no, we can’t go around redefining nutrient density to suit whatever, you know, he’s down to probably saying it’s going to take another eight years of research. And, you know, that’s the donations model. You know, people want answers now. They don’t want to wait another eight years. So I must say there is a difference of opinion between the food scientists in America that we got the whole world is becoming.

two sides, we call them the woke and the awake. Now the work organization said totally ignore phytonutrients, phytochemicals, phytonutrients, et cetera, et cetera. They’re not essential to humans. Now the awake side, chapstuck Mark Adams from Brighton and natural news, whatever it is, he’s a food scientist. Okay. 

And he want to see his equipment that he’s got to analyze everything. He’s saying that phytochemicals and phytonutrients are essential to human health. So I’m having to change my tune and see, okay, maybe there’s something in this which Dan is on about. But in the meantime, people want solutions now.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (34:55)

Yeah. I think it is an interesting one. I know I wouldn’t dismiss phytonutrients. I’m reminded by a professor, Fred Provenza, who we did a podcast with from Utah university and wrote that wonderful book, nourishment, where he looked at the wisdom that animals have in selecting varying grasses, various, various grains that they’re presented with. And they will always go with the more nutrient dense.

And he said to me, Ron, the, for example, the humble strawberry, the humble strawberry has 5,000 components to it. We know what 10 or 15 of them do, but we’re not going to suggest that the other four and a half thousand or whatever are not of some value. 

And I think he, I think he’s alluding to the fact that phytonutrients, there’s something about whole foods that probably is a value, but coming back to  the MIT, the, the, ⁓ a neutral meter in X. ⁓ it measures. So, and I think you said, or working your way down the aisle, ⁓ you need the consumer in four to five seconds. It wasn’t 45 seconds, four to five to be able to assess the nutrient. I’m trying to visualize me as I often do, cause I do all the food shopping.

Chris Macquet (36:10)

It’s a totally self-contained item, no connection to the internet. does all its algorithm calculations internally. It consists of a motherboard, which has all the software on it. We have a display and we have a spectro reader and obviously a battery to power them all up. And all the calculations are done there. And that’s from purely observing nutrient density over the last 20 years and understanding how best to measure it. 

Yeah, so I can show you what one looks like. It’s very small. So, how about that? That looks with the camera. Oh, there. Yeah, yeah, it’s that big. It’s basically 90 millimeters by wide, 25 millimeters by 17 millimeters deep. So, it’s very small and it has a button and it has a little display on it so that when you push the button, it does start reading and it remains on auto.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (37:04)

HANDHILL

Chris Macquet (37:24)

And you go carry on just reading automatically until you finish those read apples. Then when switch to the next read apples, you can switch it on or off or you can just carry on reading. But you can just switch on and off whenever you want to. So it’s all.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (37:36)

It’s amazing. And I can only imagine for farmers. mean, this would be a whole education process. Of course, what a pity. And we’re not there yet, but hopefully we will be where farmers are enumerated for nutrient density rather than volume.

Chris Macquet (37:50)

That’s correct and other and that’s

Dr Ron Ehrlich (37:52)

That was the other, the other observation that Fred Prevenza made. And that was that animals actually eat less stock, less feed. If they’re allowed to select nutrient dense foods and we would probably eat less ourselves as well.

Chris Macquet (38:08)

Yeah, Ron, now, last time we were running pre-range eggs, right? And they’re getting half their feed from the soil. Because the soil was nutrient-intensive, was full of worms, grubs, insects, the birds would come and look for them and leave their droppings. They following the cattle around the paddock. Every few weeks we’d move them with the cattle. And as a result, they were able to get half their feed from the soil and half from grain. 

Now, that’s…pretty good because the nutrient density of our egg whites with a normal refractometer was between 60 and 20 degrees of refraction. Now every other at that time free range egg that we measured was between eight and 10. So we were double the nutrient values. Now the people who really loved them were the chefs because of two things. They love to cook with good food. It makes their life easier. They reach their standards faster. It was consistently good.

The customers love delicious food. And when we sold the farm, was the first time I’d been publicly sworn at and told it out the shop because we were stopping producing such wonderful eggs because this guy, his whole breakfast was not reliant on our eggs. Yeah. So that was what your professor said earlier is exactly true. We were getting 20 better prices wholesale. Then you could buy free range eggs for retail.

And that’s… that was a good number.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (39:40)

And now I’m still trying to picture myself in, the shop where I do all my food shopping, working my way down the up and down the aisle. So I’ve gone through fruit and vegetables, which are easy to access. You’ve raised the issue of eggs. Well, I kind of, can you point this through an egg shell and get a reading? Surely not. That’s a question. That’s question.

Chris Macquet (39:52)

YesTechnically, at this point, we haven’t tried. We don’t think we can. Okay. But the is a more advanced form of a spectrometry called Raman, which actually does vibrational analysis. It actually caused vibrations within the product. So it can analyze molecular structure. Now we believe that technology will be able to egg qualities. It’s able to detect for sure whether it’s genetically modified, whether it’s got chems like glyphosate in it. That, that technology.

It’s normally in a big lab environment, but there is a small device that’s being prototype environment overseas in the Netherlands, which has got potential of being a handheld device. So people can be able to, but it will be more expensive obviously than this one.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (40:51)

But you could, but you would bring home two lots of eggs, open them up. Do you have to cook them or can you just point that at the.

Chris Macquet (40:58)

No, that, you just point and scan

Dr Ron Ehrlich (41:04)

No, no, but I mean with your neutral meter, you would bring home the eggs of two different groups. Just as a sale. I’m getting now ready to decide in future, which egg manufacturers should I go with? Okay. I’m going to buy a half a dozen of this and a half a dozen of that. And I crack open both eggs into a cup. Do I point the neutral meter at those eggs or do I have to cook them?

Chris Macquet (41:27)

Theoretically, yes, you built a total difference, but we haven’t done it yet.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (41:32)

What about meat? What about meat?

Chris Macquet (41:34)

Messiah could detect the meat and fat ratios, but not the kind of grading that butchers are familiar with. That’s quite a different thing. But back then about 10 years ago, there was a Czechoslovakian scientist who admitted to probe. In fact, he was a doctor. He admitted a probe that went into the flesh and could actually work out the nutrient values of that meat. So it was a kind of electric electronic kind of device, I guess, that was like a probe like we have if you want to measure soil temperatures or moisture contents. 

That’s what it proved. I don’t know what’s happened to that since, but that is the kind of requirement you’d need back then to tell you about the meat’s quality and the way that we are familiar with grading it. But the size could measure, tell you how much meat there was and meat and fat ratios, depends what you’re looking for, but it couldn’t tell you the quality of that meat.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (42:34)

The nutrition, the nutrimeter, is it just for fruit and vegetables?

Chris Macquet (42:38)

At the moment, Yes, we can’t make any statement on anything else, not even eggs. These are things we must think we want to perfect it for fruit and vegetables first, cover that 450, 450 varieties and then look at other stuff later. Yeah. Yeah. So

Dr Ron Ehrlich (43:00)

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the, the whole concept of really, talk about nutrient density as a kind of a throwaway line, although, although growing it in healthier soil gives you a better chance. There’s no question about that. You mentioned three things that were mentioning or that were measurable soil quality, food quality. What’s the third thing?

Chris Macquet (43:23)

Okay. First thing, soil quality and it must be appropriate to the plant. Okay. It’s got to the nutrients that the plant needs. Okay. Not just any quality. It’s got to be very specific to the plant. Okay. The second thing is the ripeness curve. Now most, what we call industrial farm produce is picked too early to travel the mini food miles to the market and storage and all that. If you pick it at the right time of its ripeness curve, the content will be higher, which is natural preservative or the fructose content, the natural preservative and

Dr Ron Ehrlich (43:34)

Rod, Rod, I-

Chris Macquet (43:53)

If you eat it ripe, sorry, it fresh. Because the moment you pick it, it starts deteriorating. mean, truffles is a really good example. If you don’t eat it in 10 days, you lose it. know, it’s exuding all its essences at the rate of 8 % per day. So in 10 days it’s gone. You’ve got to eat it fresh. Well, you can’t keep it the fridge at 4 degrees or… The French had the technique of blast freezing it down to minus 40.

Immediately we were managed to get to that kind of thing not down to minus 32 The other interesting thing we do troubles were the only ones who made a real truck all in Australia Because any shit will tell you that 99.9 percent of trouble is fake. Yes, free

Dr Ron Ehrlich (44:38)

Yes, that’s such a shame because I do love the smell of it and you know, if I do use it, I know that I’m cheating myself here, but you know, it’s a little small indulgence. mean, the, this is an exciting area. Are you, you optimistic? must be optimistic Chris about the, future. If you’re working on things like this, this is empowering consumers to make informed decisions.

Chris Macquet (45:01)

Absolutely. It is exciting. And I’ve been in technology 50 years. New technology always brings new opportunities. And it’s question of understanding what are those opportunities and what technology do we have that can provide some answers now. In the future, you know, it’s going to improve all the time. 

You know, the ability to glyphosate, to detect whether it’s genetically modified. That’s, that’s, you know, definitively possible with the new Raman spectroscopy device, a miniaturized one which is being developed in the Netherlands at the moment.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (45:36)

Well, I mean, when I heard about what you were doing, I was very excited to hear about it. it’s, and I was very familiar with the Sceo, not very familiar, but I had been, I was an early adopter or try. think I got one of their first, they sort of sent them out a bit to say, Hey, this is the first version and give it a try and all that. Well, when I looked at the cost of it, I think it’s now retailing for about four and a half thousand dollars. Yes. And then I was intrigued.

Chris Macquet (46:01)

the

Dr Ron Ehrlich (46:11)

Okay. Okay. And then I, okay. Then I looked at, then I was intrigued by the bio nutrient thing, but then I looked at yours and yours, uh, the neutral meter is certainly a lot more affordable. think around 400 or something dollars, but it did, but it is a very interesting concept of putting empowering people with knowledge about what nutrient density actually means and actually empowering farmers. 

Hopefully we can reward farmers accordingly. thank you so much for all the work that you are doing. We’ll have links to your website and people can find out more information about it and we’ll probably get you back on as this technology.

Chris Macquet (46:52)

The next subject is fine good food because that’s where it all comes together. That’s how I can talk about it very briefly. actually started developing fine good food in 2015 to label on good food. Yeah. Okay. And before COVID hit us, we had 103 provodors, provodors of farmers, market gardeners, producers, and those who support local produce produce. We had 106

Dr Ron Ehrlich (46:57)

Yes, I can

Find good food.

Chris Macquet (47:22)

103,000 all listed categorized and mapped throughout Australia. But it was a chicken and egg situation. know, the farmers want all the consumers up first and the consumers want all the farmers up first. Now, that was difficult. Okay. And then COVID came along and stopped the whole project. Now with the NX, we can empower both consumers and farmers to start talking to each other and pay that extra. 

We know that people appear to pay more for nutrient values, are twice that of of what else you can buy in the supermarkets. might be, you know, delicious, nutritious produce is always going to be better, providing it’s not genetic modify, you know, that’s all.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (48:01)

Well, that is, ⁓ that is thank you. Thank you for stopping me there right there, because that’s an even better message to leave our, our listener with. that is that resource, which will connect them with farmers, literally producing or provodors producing fine, good food. That’s, that’s, that’s terrific.

Chris Macquet (48:20)

We’re having to, we develop fine grain food on a web-based platforms. We’re not going to have to upgrade to mobile platforms. We have to port across all our software. I simply don’t have time at the moment, but we have to do that because 90 % of the transactions are going to be on mobiles. So the old product, the website, I’ll show you what it used to do. It was very good on mobiles. You know, you could be traveling on the road, pre-select within 20 kilometers, looking for pre-range eggs of a certain value, and as you’re traveling, the ones that qualified or were selected came into view and popped up so you could phone ahead, make contacts and so forth. Very powerful.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (49:04)

Wow. Well, so that is on your website, but you don’t have an app to develop. Is that app based now or just through.

Chris Macquet (49:11)

But no, all it is is just an information site. This is what it used to be. And there are a lot of mobile apps in there, but they’re bit chunky compared to mobile based platforms. Yeah, so that’s that’s what it does. That’s where we’re heading. And that’s the reason why you should buy an NX today, because it’s going to be used in Find Good Food if you want to buy good, healthy, delicious, nutritious produce.

If farmers want to get better prices like we did, then you know, this is the way to communicate your BRICS value or your NDI value is so much you can get better prices for it and consumers are paid to pay for it. Certainly chef style. know that. Okay. Sorry. I could talk all day about it, but you can see I’m very passionate and

Dr Ron Ehrlich (49:53)

Terrific. Thank you.

I love the passion. love the passion. And you’re in very good company here, not just with me, but I hope my listeners as well. Thanks so much. Well, nutrient density. mean, one day I do believe that we will have the full spectrum of being able to point our device into any food, not just vegetables, but into meat and into eggs and what you name it. And we’ll be able to assess what nutrient density actually means. But the nutrimeter is the beginning or not just the beginning.

10th iteration of this challenge, and you can go onto the website. We’ll have links to that. I mean, as I said in the program, Scewo, I didn’t pay this then, but Scewo is now about four and a half thousand dollars, and the Neutrometer is around 400. So it is more accessible, and it does give you some insight into the nutrient density. Look, I’d also encourage you to leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Always appreciated.

always pushes the podcast up the rankings. And I believe we are covering some really important things that don’t often get discussed in mainstream media. I’d also encourage you to join the unstressed health community until next time. This is Dr. Ron Erlich. Be well.

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Disclaimer

This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health, and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences, and conclusions.

This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health, and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences, and conclusions.

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