3. Food production is a social cost
We all want to feel the taste, aroma and texture and enjoy our meals.
We all have to get nutrition from food to sustain our lives.
We also have to take functional ingredients from our diet to prevent illness and repair the modulation of the body’s physiology.
Everyone wants to enjoy eating, grow with food, and stay healthy with food.
Food is the most valuable thing in our lives, and food is our life itself.
Poor food quality and nutritional value lead to higher medical costs. Like health care, food is one of the social costs. There is a trade-off between food functionality and medical costs. The three functions of food (nutrition, sensation, and accommodation function) are the source of human life and are greatly related to productivity. Poor dietary function impedes human production activities and increases medical costs.
Environmental conservation, soil functionality improvement, and water resource security are prerequisites for food security.In addition improving food quality is an important factor in controlling social costs and developing and maintaining society.
What is a high quality produce?
Mere freshness is meaningless.Freshness and functionality are two different things.
As mentioned above, we should require food to be functional, nutritious and fresh.
It is necessary to redefine the functionality of agricultural land and crops and their value.
Food safety is an important theme. However, with existing traceability, it is difficult to ensure safety and it does not seem to work well. The reason is that traceability does not provide valuable information. The functionality required by food security is valuable information that is a different dimension than mere safety.
Turning to Japan, while the need for safe and secure foodstuffs is increasing, functionality is not attracting attention. Vegetable and fruit production has decreased, and the variety of ingredients has decreased. There is also data that the nutritional value of vegetables has dropped by half compared to vegetables 50 years ago as a result of continued breeding and cultivation with an emphasis on taste. This cannot reduce medical expenses.
In recent years, we have seen many patients with obesity-related dyslipidemia due to lifestyle-related disorders such as modern eating habits, overeating, and lack of exercise. Obesity has increased significantly not only in adults but also in children, reaching approximately 2.3 billion people worldwide, including overweight, accounting for 30% of the total population. In particular, the number of obese people in China has increased remarkably, finally surpassing the number of obese people in the United States. And India is also following China.
Obesity is the basis of hypertension, abnormal sugar metabolism, dyslipidemia, hyperuricemia, etc., and causes heart disease and arteriosclerosis, which greatly increases medical expenses. It has long been said that daily exercise requires digestion of fat and improved diet to reduce this obesity.
However, obesity only increases and does not seem to decrease.
Why?
Obesity refers to "a condition in which adipose tissue is excessively accumulated".
To reduce obesity, we need a lifestyle that incorporates continuous exercise and a diet that promotes normal metabolism.
We also need to think deeply about "a diet that promotes normal metabolism."
As you know, our body undergoes various metabolisms every day.
We get the substances needed for metabolism by diet.
We need many substances such as Three major nutrients (carbohydrates, lipids, proteins) that are energy sources, Minerals (iron, zinc, copper, chromium, molybdenum, manganese, selenium, iodine, etc.) that become constituents of the human body and regulate biological functions, Vitamins that regulate metabolic responses in metabolism.
But this is not enough. We cannot even metabolize satisfactorily with our own strength and function.
Dietary fiber, which is an energy source for intestinal bacteria, and phytochemicals, which have a physical condition-regulating function, play important roles here.
We use the metabolism of microorganisms and the functionality of plants to live.
However, in recent years, the spread of unfunctional foods has led our society to suffer from not only obesity but also many diseases caused by poor diet.
Recent studies have shown that deterioration of the intestinal environment causes many symptoms.
The current situation is that the health solution of food is not being utilized at all.
Increasing medical costs are a fatal problem in society.
We must not only eliminate malnutrition in the world through food production, but also reduce the social cost of medical expenses. We need to pursue the functionality of agricultural products.
We redefine quality by "freshness retention" and spread awareness of the functionality required for food in pursuit of food functionality, and we will introduce a Safety Chain system using blockchain in order to guarantee them.
The AgriCloud Project drives the transition from traceability, which only traces quality, to "SafetyChain", which guarantees quality and functionality.
