Nutrient-dense food, it’s a big topic in regenerative agriculture. It’s just one of the many goals of improved soil health and it’s so very important to our own, human health. But how do we quantify it? What new research techniques are uncovering these connections and how can we identify practices and systems that will improve nutrient-dense food? Our guest today is trying to discover just that, Dr. Stephan van Vliet is a nutrition scientist and metabolomics expert in the Stedman Nutrition and Metabolism Center at Duke University School of Medicine. Dr. van Vliet earned his PhD in Kinesiology and Community Health as an ESPEN Fellow from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and received post-doctoral training in the Center for Human Nutrition at Washington University in St Louis School of Medicine.

Dr. van Vliet’s research is performed at the nexus of agricultural and human health. He routinely collaborates with farmers, ecologists, and agricultural scientists to study critical linkages between agricultural production methods, the nutrient density of food, and human health. Dr. van Vliet uses high-throughput metabolomics techniques to study the presence of bioactive compounds in the whole food matrix and their impacts on human metabolic health.

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