Berries – Portfolio of Pigments
Jaakko Halmetoja — Nutrition Expert, Co-Author @ Biohacker's Handbook, Product Development Manager @ Foodin
Jaakko Halmetoja is a nutrition expert, author and professional speaker. Jaakko has managed multiple special caféterias in Tampere and works as a product developer for food growth companies. Halmetoja has been popularizing health benefits and unique uses of e.g. chaga mushroom, chocolate, wild foods, various berries and medicinal herbs. Halmetoja maintains a non-profit website loydalahde.com, a database for finding local springs around Finland and hosts weekly talk show – InspiRadio Podcast. He has also written a book on chaga mushroom as well as co-authored the Biohacker’s Handbook. Halmetoja is a popular lecturer with over 500 public lectures and performances.
Jaakko Halmetoja explores how domestication has diminished the nutrient
Ask what type of plant varieties you are eating. Is the plant strong and wild, or domesticated and weak? You are made from those characteristics. Remember, you are not just what you eat, but what you actually absorb.
Summary
- Wild plants, like bilberries, have higher nutrient density than domesticated varieties, which have been bred for carbohydrates rather than minerals and phytonutrients.
- Plant pigments serve as indicators of beneficial chemistry and medicinal alkaloids that are often lost during the domestication of common fruits and vegetables.
- Bioavailability of plant nutrients is improved by consuming fat-soluble pigments with oils and breaking down cell walls through blending, juicing, or fermentation.
- Pigmented compounds act as prebiotics that feed the gut microbiome, and maintaining a diverse diet of colorful plants is essential for supporting a healthy bacterial environment.
- To achieve therapeutic effects like cognitive enhancement, it is necessary to consume significant quantities of berries, such as 200 grams of bilberries daily, to reach effective nutrient levels.
Article
Berries As A Portfolio Of Pigments
Wild Varieties, Bioavailability, And Gut Health At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, nutrition expert and author Jaakko Halmetoja made a case for seeing berries not as quaint health foods, but as dense biological systems carrying pigments, fibers, and defensive chemistry that modern diets too often lack. In his presentation, **“Berries – Portfolio of Pigments,”** delivered on Friday, 13 October 2017 in Helsinki, Finland, Halmetoja argued that the story of nutrition had been flattened by domestication, industrial farming, and an obsession with sweetness.
His thesis was both simple and unsettling: much of modern agriculture had been designed to cultivate carbohydrates, not complexity.
“We have been farming carbohydrates for a long time now, instead of minerals and phytonutrients,” Halmetoja said. “We need to emphasize what we actually mean when we talk about nutrition because we are not eating terms, we are eating chemistry.”
The Great Nutritional Trade-Off
Halmetoja’s talk turned on a stark comparison between wild and domesticated plants. Over thousands of years, he said, cultivation had selected for softness, sweetness, size, and shelf appeal, often at the expense of bitter compounds, alkaloids, and pigments that once helped plants survive and, in turn, helped humans thrive.
Wild varieties, he suggested, still carried the signatures of struggle. They had not been bred for comfort. They had been shaped by weather, predators, poor soils, and ecological competition. That hardship produced chemistry.
“Wild varieties produce complex chemistry to survive, giving them more vitality,” he said. “When we domesticate plants, we often breed out the bitter compounds and color pigments that provide the insurance our biology has evolved to rely on for health.”
The bilberry stood at the center of this argument. Unlike the more commonly cultivated blueberry, whose anthocyanins are concentrated mainly in the skin, the bilberry is pigmented throughout. For Halmetoja, this was not merely a visual curiosity. It was a sign of deeper nutrient density, a clue that color could act as a shorthand for medicinal potential.
Pigments As Biological Signals
Halmetoja framed pigments as more than decoration. They were indicators of phytochemical richness, visible evidence of compounds such as anthocyanins and carotenoids that support multiple systems in the body. In this account, color became a nutritional map.
The deeper point was that many people treated produce categories as nutritionally interchangeable. A berry was a berry. An apple was an apple. A carrot was a carrot. Halmetoja rejected that flattening logic. Variety mattered. Origin mattered. Whether a plant had been bred for resilience or sugar mattered.
He urged the audience to ask a more precise question of every ingredient: what kind is it, and what has been lost in making it more marketable?
Feeding The Gut By Feeding Color
One of the most compelling parts of the presentation connected plant pigments to gut health. Halmetoja argued that these compounds, often bound to plant fibers, acted as prebiotics, nourishing beneficial gut bacteria and helping support microbial diversity.
“Color pigments work as prebiotics, providing food for the good bacteria inside of you,” he said. “By eating a diverse array of colorful plants, you create a better environment for life to explore and thrive within your own biology.”
This emphasis placed berries within a larger ecological view of health. The body, in Halmetoja’s formulation, was not a closed machine but a habitat. Food did not simply deliver calories or isolated nutrients. It shaped conditions. It altered which microbes could survive, multiply, and influence immunity, mood, metabolism, and cognition.
His language repeatedly returned to diversity. A narrow diet, especially one built on heavily processed and low-complexity foods, reduced the richness of life within. A varied diet full of pigmented plants did the opposite. It cultivated resilience from the inside out.
Absorption, Not Just Intake
If the first half of Halmetoja’s talk was about what modern diets were missing, the second half was about why even good diets often failed to deliver their full potential. The problem, he said, was bioavailability.
“You are not what you eat, but what you actually absorb,” he told the audience.
Many beneficial plant compounds are difficult to access because they are locked behind tough cell walls or because they dissolve better in fat than in water. That means berries and greens may be healthful in theory while offering less in practice if they are consumed without attention to preparation.
Halmetoja recommended strategies that could increase the body’s access to these nutrients: blending, juicing, chewing thoroughly, and especially fermentation. He also stressed the importance of pairing colorful plant foods with oils or fats to improve uptake of fat-soluble pigments.
In practical terms, this was a call to move beyond simplistic dietary virtue. Eating salad was not enough. Eating berries was not enough. The question was whether the body could actually liberate and absorb the compounds they contained.
The Therapeutic Threshold
Halmetoja also challenged the casual use of healthy foods in token amounts. One handful of berries, he argued, might satisfy a cultural image of clean eating without reaching a level that could produce measurable effects.
“We can be doing the right things, but not in amounts that give a therapeutic effect,” he said. “To truly see results from berries and phytonutrients, we must ensure we are consuming them in high enough concentrations to impact our systems.”
He pointed to research suggesting that meaningful benefits, including stimulation of brain-derived neurotrophic factor and support for connective tissue and skin elasticity, may require around 200 grams of berries a day, particularly in the case of bilberries. Most people, he suggested, were eating far less.
It was a familiar problem in nutrition, but one Halmetoja rendered with unusual clarity: many people had adopted the language of health without reaching the dosage of health.
Beyond Berries, Toward A More Diverse Chemistry
Though berries anchored the presentation, Halmetoja widened his lens to include other deeply pigmented foods. Sea buckthorn, he noted, stood out for the breadth of its chemistry. Spices such as turmeric were described as underused reservoirs of concentrated plant compounds. Raw cacao, particularly unfermented cacao beans, was presented as another potent source of polyphenols and catechins.
These were not side notes. They reinforced his central message that the most powerful foods often announced themselves in color, bitterness, and intensity, qualities modern palates and food systems frequently sanded down.
His appeal was not to fetishize any single superfood, but to restore diversity and concentration to the diet.
A More Nuanced Definition Of Nutrition
By the end of the session, Halmetoja had shifted the conversation away from calorie counting and generic food labels toward something more textured and more ecological. Nutrition, in his view, was not a matter of broad categories but of chemistry, vitality, and interaction.
“Think about food in more nuances: Are you actually feeding life, or are you acting against life?” he asked. “Increasing the diversity of what you eat from every kingdom of life allows your internal ecosystem to become more robust and cultured.”
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, Jaakko Halmetoja’s presentation did not merely celebrate berries. It used them as a lens through which to examine a wider loss in modern eating: the erosion of bitterness, pigment, resilience, and biological depth. His argument was that color was not cosmetic. It was a signpost. And in a food culture trained to prefer sweetness and sameness, it may also have been a warning.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki