Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

nationalgeographic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 173 posts

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#91

Post by pessimizer »

refurb wrote: post #14

National Geographic has really gone to crap. ”One of the largest scientific studies to draw attention to this issue was published in the December 2004 issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.” And what did that paper conclude? “Conclusion: We suggest that any real declines are generally most easily explained by changes in cultivated varieties between 1950 and 1999, in which there may be trade-offs b…

That was the first study mentioned, solely for the purpose of confirming nutrition loss and not for the authors' speculations about causes. The next study was the Australian one cited to confirm protein loss.

If you want to know where they drew the statements about causes from, you might check the next three studies which, like the first two, are directly cited and linked within the text of the article.

But that probably wouldn't make a good comment, though.

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#92

Post by iggldiggl »

saiya-jin wrote: post #71
dustymcp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My anecdote from my garden is that my smaller cucumbers have way more taste, my smaller red bellpebbers are way more pebbery, potatoes have a richer taste, if this is just freshnes i dont know, but there for sure is a huge difference.

I don't think that's you. When I come home and eat stuff from my parents garden, the differences in some cases are massive. Carrots for example taste 10x more intense, even one that was taken from soil weeks ago. And I am comparing to bio carrots we buy in Switzerland, so can't go much higher than that when shopping (apart from farmers markets maybe but that depends what kind of farm). Maybe its about transport and p…

As you mention Switzerland, this newspaper article might be interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20190601232951/https://www.tages...

I.e. apart from the general trade-off problem between maximum yield and maximum taste, things are also exacerbated by the big supermarket chains demanding varieties that are delivering a "consistent taste year-round". As even the best tomatoes are only mediocre-tasting during winter, that apparently means standardising on mediocre-tasting tomatoes all year round, instead of mediocre tomatoes during winter and tasty tomatoes in the summer.

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#93

Post by pessimizer »

alecco wrote: post #90
pessimizer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure farming is as efficient as it is now because farmers listened to technicians who weren't working in the fields all day, and were helped to break out of local maxima. Also - you don't think farmers' kids go to college and end up studying and writing about regenerative agriculture? Are you yourself a farmer's kid who went to college and became a techie?

This is a simplistic analysis. Farmers have to time things around season, weather events, water availability (e.g. almost dry wells), floods, and many other variables changing all the time. For example, after heavy rains machines can't get into the field because they get stuck. And if you plant right before rains then when the mud dries it becomes too hard for seedlings to break it. Making all this work is very hard.…

Are you replying the the right comment? I offered no analysis. I'm just not into Lysenkoism or generalized anti-intellectualism on principle. I don't think it is productive to attack the people making an argument instead of the argument itself, especially when you make the most negative assumptions about who they are.

I'm sure that there is merit in what you say and that you probably have experience. My only experience in farming was directly in the fields, none in any sort of decision-making.

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#94

Post by stinos »

pessimizer wrote: post #89
somenameforme wrote: post #57

This is the conclusion of the paper [1] that this article is based upon: "We suggest that any real declines are generally most easily explained by changes in cultivated varieties between 1950 and 1999, in which there may be trade-offs between yield and nutrient content." What National Geographic says scientists say, "Scientists say that the root of the problem lies in modern agricultural processes that increase crop…

There are at least four other papers directly referenced and linked in the article. You picked the first one.

Modern HN in a nutshell. Oh, wait.

All kidding aside: please people read the full article, there's enough in there to at least partially support the claim quoted by the OP. Just not in that first paper.

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#95

Post by hansel_der »

fsflover wrote: post #86
lebski88 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grow a large amount of fruit and vegetables. There isn't really a best seed. There are simply tradeoffs. That probably sounds familiar :-) Disease resistance, water tolerance, soil conditions, climate, daylight, tolerance to heat and cold, pest resistance, taste, yield, time to grow, harvest period, storage period. There are usually an incredible number of varieties for any given plant. It takes quite a few years t…

> There isn't really a best seed. There are simply tradeoffs. (Probably a naive question, but I know very little about the topic, sorry) Why not to make GMO crops without tradeoffs?

probably because "GMO crops without tradeoffs" are a contradiction

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#96

Post by matthewmacleod »

somenameforme wrote: post #57

This is the conclusion of the paper [1] that this article is based upon: "We suggest that any real declines are generally most easily explained by changes in cultivated varieties between 1950 and 1999, in which there may be trade-offs between yield and nutrient content." What National Geographic says scientists say, "Scientists say that the root of the problem lies in modern agricultural processes that increase crop…

This isn’t an article that is “based on a paper”, and instead sources from multiple.

It’s really frustrating that this sort of lazy and dismissive middlebrow comment that misrepresents the article ends up stuck to the top.

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#97

Post by unglaublich »

Intensive agriculture has been focusing too much on short-term yields, and too little on long-term soil performance.

Plants need nutrients which they normally retrieve from the soil. Natural soil is rich in organic matter and minerals, a product of microorganisms consuming biomass and excrement. Note that it forms a cycle! Nutritious soil -> Growth -> Death -> Decomposition -> Soil enhancement. Plants are just the visible part of the cycle. The other part consists of microorganisms.

The use of pesticides, monocultures, and an absence of organic waste material and natural decomposition, effectively kills the microorganisms in the soil. This is what intensive agriculture does. Now, the soil is devoid of nutrients that plants need to grow. So farmers have to use fertilizer to substitute the required organic building blocks.

The problem with this, is that fertilizer just provides the most common organic building blocks. This is enough to grow, but not in the most healthy and fruitful way possible. It's comparable to humans living on a diet of water and rice. They'll survive, but their health will suffer from a lack of nutrients.

Now that intensive agriculture has literally killed the soil, there is no easy way back, and we are dependent on fertilizer to produce food of inferior quality.

Luckily, alternative ways of agriculture are picking up popularity. See for example, biodynamic farming: https://www.biodynamics.com/

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#98

Post by dr_dshiv »

orlp wrote: post #79
saiya-jin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's you. When I come home and eat stuff from my parents garden, the differences in some cases are massive. Carrots for example taste 10x more intense, even one that was taken from soil weeks ago. And I am comparing to bio carrots we buy in Switzerland, so can't go much higher than that when shopping (apart from farmers markets maybe but that depends what kind of farm). Maybe its about transport and p…

Commercial mass-produced tomatoes, bananas and other climacteric fruit are picked heavily unripe, shipped in this more durable state, and in the destination country are rapidly artificially ripened in ethylene gas chambers. The same commercial mass-produced fruits and vegetables also have been cultivated for decades for resistance against disease, size, and shelf life. Taste is often only secondary to those. On one h…

Random: ethylene is psychoactive. Haven’t tried it. But, some evidence that it was the abiogenic gas at the temple of Apollo at Delphi:

Foster, J., & Lehoux, D. (2007). The Delphic oracle and the ethylene-intoxication hypothesis. Clinical Toxicology, 45(1), 85-89.

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#99

Post by wcoenen »

lil_dispaches wrote: post #56
gregwebs wrote: post #17

This article mentions that regenerative agriculture as the solution. There is a lot of concern now about the potential for a global food shortage at the end of this year because of rising fertilizer prices (leading to less planting). Regenerative agriculture can help solve this as well by focusing on restoring the biome of the soil, thereby harnessing nitrogen from the air and minerals from the soil.

Why are fertilizer prices rising? Could it be that fertilizer is the same stuff as gunpowder?

Because of high natural gas prices.

The production of fertilizers such as ammonium nitrate and urea require ammonia. Ammonia is synthesized on large scales with the Haber-Bosch process. This process requires hydrogen, which is obtained by steam reforming of methane in natural gas.

When natural gas prices exploded in Europe, many fertilizer factories had to stop production:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-15/soaring-e...

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#100

Post by giantg2 »

unglaublich wrote: post #97

Intensive agriculture has been focusing too much on short-term yields, and too little on long-term soil performance. Plants need nutrients which they normally retrieve from the soil. Natural soil is rich in organic matter and minerals, a product of microorganisms consuming biomass and excrement. Note that it forms a cycle! Nutritious soil -> Growth -> Death -> Decomposition -> Soil enhancement. Plants are just the vi…

"Intensive agriculture has been focusing too much on short-term yields, and too little on long-term soil performance."

I think a lot of this pressure is from there being too many people. I have seen the estimates of how many people earth can support, yet I have never seen numbers for how many people the earth can sustainably support, especially in our modern lifestyle of excess.

Post reply on HN