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Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (2011)

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (2011)

#211

Post by jgust »

bttrfl wrote: post #174
Cytobit wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anybody have a good suggestion for figuring out which produce is seasonal? Do you just buy stuff grown in/around your home country? It seems like I can usually buy any vegetable I want, regardless of the time of year, so I have no sense of when anything is in season.

The easiest way is to avoid supermarkets. I have a small market nearby where I buy, once a week, directly from small local farmers. You can learn the calendar there quickly.

Another bonus is that I bet you can ask the people working the market and they'd be more than happy to explain what is in season and when!

Re: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (2011)

#212

Post by JumpCrisscross »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #210
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're asking for (additional??) studies to show something you've stated without evidence I believe we have evidence for factory-farmed meat being less nutritionally dense than pasture-raised meat. But the reason isn’t the factory farming per se . It’s the correlates to factory farming. So OP’s example is true. Just not for the reason hypothesised.

Where's that evidence.

See [1] for eggs. Relatively simple Google Scholar search if one is curious.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21673178/

Re: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (2011)

#213

Post by yourapostasy »

gerardnll wrote: post #35
punnerud wrote: post #5

Blueberries that taste the same but are transparent in the middle. Tomatoes that tase water. Cucumber that look great and almost tasteless. You don't know what you are missing if you have never tasted the "real" deal.

It's saddening how fruits have lost its flavour. I'm thrilled to eat fruits/vegetables every time I go back to my grandfather town. I don't know what it is... mass production? Tomatoes bought in the city do not even taste good in season (like now). We now have bigger and tasteless fruits. Why? I want to enjoy eating, I don't care if it's 25% smaller. Now they try to fool us with more colourful pulp or exterior... but…

> I don't know what it is... mass production?

It is the structural incentives of the modern food retailing industry [1]. Buyers (in aggregate, both corporate and end-buyers) do not care about taste as a primary purchasing decision point. It comes in around 4-6th in importance. Your and my preferences are seen as a rounding error of the market segments. Be really, really wealthy enough to source from your own farms and ranches next to where you live, or have lots of disposable time to raise your own food, or (like many here I suspect) pick your battles and cobble together a solution between a little raise your own, a little CSA, a little pick your own, a little farmer's markets, a little from co-ops, etc., which again, exacts a price of your disposable time, a luxury working poor do not possess.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/07/9313480...

Re: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (2011)

#214

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #212
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's that evidence.

See [1] for eggs. Relatively simple Google Scholar search if one is curious. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21673178/

One quite literally can conclude nothing useful from that. They got the same feeding, it says so in sentence 3. It shows the testing laboratories were a great variation in the outcome, not the chickens. The free range had a bit more fat - is that good or bad? "Vitamin A and E levels were not affected..."

So what point were you trying to make by posting this?

I'm getting fed up with the quality of posts here, you can't base your reality around what feels nice, give us data or stop making baseless claims.

Re: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (2011)

#215

Post by g8oz »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #148

This kind of tripe is why nutrition epidemiology is basically the laughing stock of modern science. First of all, the article is almost 10 years old and references data from 1999 at the latest. But most importantly, it uses common nutrition weasel words like "healthy" and "good for you", which are not supported (in fact, CAN'T be supported) by the study. It is a huge leap to go from "there's less Vitamin C in this su…

From the article: "They studied U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritional data from both 1950 and 1999 for 43 different vegetables and fruits, finding “reliable declines” in the amount of protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin (vitamin B2) and vitamin C over the past half century."

Is that something worth dismissing out of hand?

Re: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (2011)

#216

Post by pvaldes »

Cytobit wrote: post #155
bttrfl wrote: post #135

There's no scientific basis for my choice, but I have almost entirely stopped eating seasonal produce out of a season. I eat tomatoes in the summer and early autumn and then I patiently wait months to eat them again. When the winter comes I switch to vegetables that I haven't eaten at all or in limited amount for past half a year - beetroot, cabbage, carrot and more. I also eat all kinds of quality fermented, process…

Does anybody have a good suggestion for figuring out which produce is seasonal? Do you just buy stuff grown in/around your home country? It seems like I can usually buy any vegetable I want, regardless of the time of year, so I have no sense of when anything is in season.

Is a too generic question that could fill a book. Most people just ask to somebody. Libraries and grandmas can definitely save the day in this sense.

Re: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (2011)

#217

Post by pvaldes »

durnygbur wrote: post #83

The large retail chains in Europe sell what I call porn-fruits and porn-vegetables. Especially places like EDEKA, REWE, Kaufland in Germany. Strawberries, berries, raspberries, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, salads, apples, pears, eggplants, etc. - shiny (do they wax them?), large, unified size, saturated color. Barely any taste, all watery. Grown in perfectly artificial industrial greenhouses. Not a trace of soil on…

> shiny (do they wax them?)

sometimes, yes.

Re: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (2011)

#218

Post by pvaldes »

camhart wrote: post #7
MattGaiser wrote: post #2

Well, who here buys their vegetables based on nutrition? Who even knows how nutritious their particular vegetables are (probably not if you have a lab)? Companies optimize for what customers will pay for, and everything else falls by the wayside.

Strawberries in the USA are huge. Sometimes they remind me of an Apple. Go to Denmark--they're small but packed full of flavor. I would much rather have the smaller ones. I wonder if the large, crisp, apple-esc strawberries really sell better. They're certainly bigger.

> Strawberries in the USA are huge

Plant hormones added

Re: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (2011)

#219

Post by notJim »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #190
TaupeRanger wrote: post #148

This kind of tripe is why nutrition epidemiology is basically the laughing stock of modern science. First of all, the article is almost 10 years old and references data from 1999 at the latest. But most importantly, it uses common nutrition weasel words like "healthy" and "good for you", which are not supported (in fact, CAN'T be supported) by the study. It is a huge leap to go from "there's less Vitamin C in this su…

I'd worry less about the lower vitamin C and more about the lower secondary metabolites that likely come with that. Anyone that has ever eaten a garden grown anything can tell you that there is a lot missing in store produce. These secondary metabolites are likely the missing link in my opinion. We aren't malnourished (with respect to most vitamins and minerals) in the western world but we do likely have drastically…

> Anyone that has ever eaten a garden grown anything > can tell you that there is a lot missing in store produce

I also enjoy gardening, but from a scientific perspective, I cannot support a statement like this. There is enormous room for bias in assessment of produce grown yourself, because of the physical and emotional investment made in said produce.

Re: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (2011)

#220

Post by newen »

notJim wrote: post #219
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd worry less about the lower vitamin C and more about the lower secondary metabolites that likely come with that. Anyone that has ever eaten a garden grown anything can tell you that there is a lot missing in store produce. These secondary metabolites are likely the missing link in my opinion. We aren't malnourished (with respect to most vitamins and minerals) in the western world but we do likely have drastically…

> Anyone that has ever eaten a garden grown anything > can tell you that there is a lot missing in store produce I also enjoy gardening, but from a scientific perspective, I cannot support a statement like this. There is enormous room for bias in assessment of produce grown yourself, because of the physical and emotional investment made in said produce.

You don’t need a study published in a peer reviewed journal to know that vegetables bought in typical US grocery stores taste much worse than home grown ones.
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