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Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

nationalgeographic.com

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

#101

Post by giantg2 »

amelius wrote: post #70
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.

It was always the case that smaller vegetables are stronger in taste. I'm guessing that the larger ones took up more water, which diluted the taste, but without a difference of total nutrients.

I believe this could be true. We see that lead is also diluted by increased size.

https://www.soils.org/news/science-news/lead-contamination-g...

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

#102

Post by giantg2 »

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…

Welcome have some types of produce that is stored for long periods of time and lose nutrients during storage. For example, apples that you buy in the store tend to me more than a year old.

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

#103

Post by seunosewa »

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.…

Do you really think that farmers in developing countries have it easier than those in developed countries? That they can more easily afford the cost of environmental regulation?

The carbon footprint of the average American or Canadian is about 14 tones per year. For India, Indonesia, and Brazil it's about 2 tons per year. Thus it is fair to expect developed countries to do more to tackle climate change.

Having said that, industrial agriculture done right is better for the environment because it's more efficient. The amount of land needed to feed an average person is minimised, thus there's less pressure to convert forests, grasslands and peat bogs to farmland.

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

#104

Post by refurb »

pessimizer wrote: post #91
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 prob…

"and not for the authors' speculations about causes"

I'm sorry? You're taking NatGeo's word over the people who did the research because, "the authors were just speculating?"

That's not how research works. That's not how any of this works.

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

#106

Post by hansel_der »

l33t2328 wrote: post #74
mdp2021 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> taking vitamin pills Except that it is not the same, it's not a solution...

In what sense is it not the same?

in the sense that the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts.

it will not be whole again if you just consume the broken down parts.

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

#107

Post by gruez »

davebranton wrote: post #82
bjcy wrote: post #69

When gluten-free diets began to become popular, I had a similar question as to why a food that had been a staple of multiple civilisations for hundreds of years had suddenly become "bad for you". Dan Barber has a book on this called The Third Plate , which served as a great introduction for me on nutrition, but from a culinary perspective. He's also one of the chefs profiled in the first season of Netflix's Chef's Ta…

The answer to this question is that we don't make bread like we used to. There's a wonderful documentary on Netflix about this, called "Cooked" (the episode entitled "Air" is about bread). Short answer: bread used to be fermented, and consisted of three ingredients. Today's regular supermarket bread is bad for you, unless you take the time to go to your local bakery and buy their sourdough. My wife couldn't eat bread…

>Short answer: bread used to be fermented, and consisted of three ingredients. Today's regular supermarket bread is bad for you, unless you take the time to go to your local bakery and buy their sourdough

Can you outline how the additional ingredients in "Today's regular supermarket bread" make them "bad for you"?

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

#108

Post by PretzelPirate »

giantg2 wrote: post #100
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.

> I think a lot of this pressure is from there being too many people.

Would this still be a problem if we didn’t use most of our agricultural land to grow crops to feed to the animals we eat? It’s very inefficient to feed plants to cows and then eat the cow.

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

#110

Post by antris »

giantg2 wrote: post #100
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.

This is an ecofascist adjacent argument, and is not based on reality. Not much land is needed to feed people, most of it is being used to produce meat and dairy, which is a waste.

https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets

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