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Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#101

Post by everybodyknows »

NickM wrote: post #55

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...…

You'll find higher doses of potassium in "electrolyte replacement" drink powders.

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#102

Post by oh_sigh »

mshroyer wrote: post #21
wil421 wrote: post #2

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…

> Healthy foods and organics are more readily available now. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that "organic" foods are more nutritious than conventionally farmed foods: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19640946

why would one expect thst? How would the method you choose to keep insects and other pests off of your produce affect the contents of the produce?

I can understand organic food having less "inorganic" pesticide in it, but I don't see why the other contents of the product itself would differ.

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#103

Post by fragmede »

jjoonathan wrote: post #50
all_usernames wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ten thousand years of agriculture is an assumption?

People have put up with a lot of shit -- literal and metaphorical -- over the last ten thousand years. I don't understand the assumption that it simply must be better than anything chemistry has to offer, and I find the aversion to measurement and control inherently suspicious.

No one is saying don't measure things. Fertilizer doesn't come from mysticism and homepathy but from science - make a guess (hypothesis) and test to see if it works. The issue is that we've focused on volume of output from a field, rather than mineral content of vegetables, which is far harder to measure.

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#104

Post by tastyfreeze »

dv_dt wrote: post #96
tastyfreeze wrote: post #82

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…

Healthier soil may also capture carbon. There are many reasons to look at optimization of farming and food production for a whole range of concerns beyond profits. The question is how to broadly incentivize and fund those concerns - reinvigorating agricultural dept programs with a wider focus at a federal and state level is one way to do that; others would likely come up under a Green New Deal type framework too. htt…

Aside from a few farmers that are motivated by ideology, profit is the only motivation that will change practices.

I have recently been researching biochar(biologically charged charcoal). Use of biochar is a form of carbon sequestration that reduces nutrient leaching and provides immense surface area for bacterial and fungal life to thrive in soil.

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#105

Post by oh_sigh »

simonsarris wrote: post #43
opportune wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If organic food actually had a noticeably higher mineral count than nonorganic, I would start eating it. But I don’t see why organic food would actually have more minerals. Organic doesn’t mean healthier it just means that it uses different kinds of pesticides, to my knowledge

Adjacent: Butter/milk from grass-fed cows has a noticeably better amino acid profile https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10531600/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7905466/

This makes sense, because grass and the alternatives(probably corn/oat meal) don't have the same nutritional profile. A more apt comparison might be whether cows which get sprayed with a manufactured anti-fly compound have a different nutritional profile than cows that are sprayed with, say, lavendar oil to keep the flies away.

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#106

Post by oh_sigh »

jjoonathan wrote: post #39
spenczar5 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you prefer that? I don’t particularly care either way, so blanket-preferring man-made chemical fertilizers strikes me as odd.

Preferring measurability strikes you as odd?

You can't miss what you can't measure.

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#108

Post by dwg »

Has it really? I thought it would be useful to share a paper from the opposing viewpoint, which argues the opposite of the conclusions you might first arrive at from looking at this chart...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915751... (Mineral nutrient composition of vegetables, fruits and grains: The context of reports of apparent historical declines, published in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis March 2017).

As a non-expert I have no opinion as to which viewpoint is correct. However, as usual the issue is more complex than that...

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#109

Post by fbonetti »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #6

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.

This is not a bad thing. Food is so abundant that globally, more people are obese than underweight. This is pretty remarkable considering that for all of human history, up until recently, periods of mass starvation was the norm.

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#110

Post by jonplackett »

jjoonathan wrote: post #23
pasabagi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably, using natural fertilizers would make a difference, as you'd expect a wider range of minerals than in straight haber-process fertilizer. I don't know if natural fertilizers are always a requirement for organic food, though.

If this is actually a problem, I'd much rather someone figure out which minerals need to go into the fertilizer mix (plus some downstream monitoring) than to assume that putting poop on the vegetables makes them wholesome.

What, just because you're grossed out by poo?
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