91–100 of 315 posts
Something that has puzzled me recently: how is anyone supposed to get the daily recommended amount of potassium? If you look at foods like bananas that are supposed to be good sources of it, you still need to eat something like eleven bananas a day to get enough (according to US recommended daily intakes, anyway). At least with the minerals mentioned in this posting, you can fall back on supplements if you need to...…
Growing food has turned into an engineering problem where people think you solve it by investing the least possible resources into it. Whatever the consumer will buy and you can produce as cheaply as possible wins the day. Our tasteless vegetables are like cheap Bose (no highs, no lows, must be Bose) speakers or pressed paper furniture at Walmart. On the surface they look like a vegetable should look, but the taste,…
> Growing food has turned into an engineering problem where people think you solve it by investing the least possible resources into it. Our economic system optimizes for exactly this.
Was Malthus right after all?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
not sure why this would get downvoted
It's not very helpful. Why do we need to read it? Why now? How is it related to this topic? Those answers may be obvious to someone who's already read the book. To people not familiar with the book it's a cryptic imperative.
The Omnivore's Dilemma zeros in on the diminishing quality of vegetables due to some (not all) modern farming practices. I realize not everyone agrees with Michael Pollan's viewpoints, but I believe the book forces the reader to confront the food they are consuming, the system that helps deliver it to their table, and the impact on the environment and the food itself.
This happened due to extermination of soil life through modern farming practices of heavy tilling, fertilizing and monoculture crops. Dead soil is more susceptible to erosion and requires ever increasing amounts of synthetic fertilizer to grow anything. More soil has been lost from the US than the amount of food that has been produced. Soil fertility can be returned to historical levels by changing farming practices…
https://e360.yale.edu/features/soil_as_carbon_storehouse_new...
The link got that actual paper is much better than a sentence or two on LinkedIn. The paper’s title isn’t as catchy to put in nicely. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/ From my link: >It is important to note that the USDA mineral content of vegetables and fruits has not been updated since 2000, and perhaps even longer, given that the data for 1992 was not able to be definitively confirmed for this…
I used to run an organic farm experimenting with hydroponics and I did a ton of research on this. What I found, organic does not mean healthier. In fact, a larger percentage of food related illnesses are reported for organic foods than foods without the organic label, which itself is controversial and misleading. This is largely due to the types of fertilizer used. Animal waste is used to fertilize organic foods. Yes…
My own foray into hydroponics has been lack luster. Lettuce didn’t taste as good and it’s much more maintenance. I can setup water timers and fertilize every x weeks in my garden. You have to constantly check hydro and put chemicals in it very often. Too labor intensive.
Something that has puzzled me recently: how is anyone supposed to get the daily recommended amount of potassium? If you look at foods like bananas that are supposed to be good sources of it, you still need to eat something like eleven bananas a day to get enough (according to US recommended daily intakes, anyway). At least with the minerals mentioned in this posting, you can fall back on supplements if you need to...…
I was once on a low potassium diet and had to avoid half the of foods I normally ate. You are likely getting enough potassium in your diet without needing any effort.
The link got that actual paper is much better than a sentence or two on LinkedIn. The paper’s title isn’t as catchy to put in nicely. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/ From my link: >It is important to note that the USDA mineral content of vegetables and fruits has not been updated since 2000, and perhaps even longer, given that the data for 1992 was not able to be definitively confirmed for this…
Why not just add minerals to our fertilizers? Organics is such a regression after the green revolution (which has saved billions of lives).
Apparently Finland made it mandatory, and it worked.
The link got that actual paper is much better than a sentence or two on LinkedIn. The paper’s title isn’t as catchy to put in nicely. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/ From my link: >It is important to note that the USDA mineral content of vegetables and fruits has not been updated since 2000, and perhaps even longer, given that the data for 1992 was not able to be definitively confirmed for this…
The eye-catching graph reproduced on the LinkedIn post is Figure 2 in this paper you linked, "Challenges in the Diagnosis of Magnesium Status." It is labeled as "The average mineral content of calcium, magnesium, and iron in cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach." Note that 3 of the 7 data points -- including the two highest points -- are marked with asterisks as "numbers could not be independently verified." Excluding the asterisked points, there is one measurement in 1948 at around 200 mg and then 3 measurements in 2000, 2004, and 2018 all of which look similarly low -- I eyeball them as around 25 mg.
The oldest non-asterisked value is from 1948, cited as
Firman Bear. Ash and Mineral Cation Content of Vegetables. Soil Sci. Soc. Am. Proc. 1948;13:380–384.
The actual paper is here:
https://dl.sciencesocieties.org/publications/sssaj/abstracts...
Sadly, it appears to be in a journal old/obscure enough that sci-hub does not properly retrieve the full text of the article.
The results appear to be from a report commonly cited as the "Bear Report," numbers reproduced here:
https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/phosphorus.php
https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/ash.php
(See also https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/ for a top level overview of the report.)
What is the value plotted in Figure 2? It does not correspond to the sum of iron, calcium, and magnesium across any of {cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, spinach}. Taking a guess, it looks closest to the highest reported value for spinach in magnesium (203.9 mg in the Bear report). Note however that the lowest value for magnesium in spinach in the Bear report is 46.9 mg. Whatever is being plotted here, it's also not an average.
Now take a look at the citation for the modern numbers in spinach:
https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/11457?fgcd=&manu=&fo...
It reports an average of 79 mg of magnesium, 99 mg of calcium, and 2.71 mg of iron. There is no single nutrient number or sum of numbers that makes sense as the value plotted in Figure 2 of "Challenges in the Diagnosis of Magnesium Status." Figure 2 shows a number that I eyeball as around 25 mg for the modern (2000 and later) measurements.
The eye-catching claim of "estimates that the mineral content of vegetables has declined by as much as 80–90% in the last 100 years", buttressed by Figure 2 and apparently valid citations, seems to fall apart once you actually look at the citations.
Why would authors put so much effort into making such a confused, thinly supported claim?
2 out of 3 authors, including the first author, are employees of the Balchem Corporation. Their paper helpfully suggests that low serum magnesium levels "could warrant a medication change or dietary recommendations to increase intake of raw vegetables with higher magnesium content and reducing soda and processed food consumption with low or no magnesium and/or recommending magnesium supplements." (My emphasis.)
Balchem Corporation sells supplements to supply magnesium, calcium, and iron:
https://www.balchem.com/our-products/
What about the third author, Robert P. Doyle? He is an apparently legitimate professor at Syracuse University. Here's his faculty page:
http://thecollege.syr.edu/people/faculty/pages/chem/Doyle-Ro...
He links to this full list of his publications from his faculty page:
http://thecollege.syr.edu/people/faculty/pages/chem/Doyle-Ro...
This paper, "Challenges in the Diagnosis of Magnesium Status," is not listed among them. In fact, scanning over the titles of his listed papers, I don't see anything mentioning magnesium, nutrition, or soil in his publication history. Did the Balchem authors get some preliminary involvement from an actual professor and then add his name to the paper to confer legitimacy? Did the professor consider the final result so low-quality that he didn't want it listed even in his "full" publication list?
This paper has many problems that you can see just by trying to reconcile its Figure 2 with its corresponding citations, and other circumstantially suspicious factors. I would not put much stock in it.