> If you walk into a booth and that vendor is selling over 5 types of produce, there's no way they all ripened at the same time.
This makes me think this person simply has no idea how growing food works at all.
Nutrient levels in retail grocery stores
41–50 of 104 posts
Re: Nutrient levels in retail grocery stores
#42This article could use an awful lot more links to the cited research. Reading this as a skeptic, I don't know whether the claims are accurate or not, but the fact that (nearly) none of his claims are supported by citations to authoritative sources is not promising.
Literally the author states it's unverifiable data: The chart has unverified information "The average mineral content of calcium, magnesium, and iron in cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach has dropped 80-90% between 1914 and 2018 30,34,35,36,371. Asterisks indicate numbers could not be independently verified."
If you reduce the amount of magnesium in a plant by 80%, it dies.
It could possibly vary in fruits, so the tomatoes get a pass. But leaves need a pretty constant amount.
Re: Nutrient levels in retail grocery stores
#43My one addition to this is that I wonder if this is part of the obesity crisis.
If food is less nutritious, then logically we should eat more of it to get the nutrition we need.
Excess calorie consumption could at least partially be a byproduct of our biological drive to acquire the lacking raw vitamins and minerals we need from the foods that we eat.
This is undoubtedly exacerbated by eating processed foods, sure, but I'm willing to bet this lack of a fundamentally nutritious foodscape almost certainly contributes to the Pavlovian habit of overeating and resultant societal obesity.
Re: Nutrient levels in retail grocery stores
#44Reminder to get back into hydroponics or some home scale growing of at least leafy greens.
Any tips for a beginner to get started with some easy herbs?
Re: Nutrient levels in retail grocery stores
#45Re: Nutrient levels in retail grocery stores
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article doesn't say those minerals degrade, however it also fails to reiterate the linked paper's reason: > The high rate of magnesium deficiency now postulated [5–8] can be attributed in part to a steady decline in general magnesium content in cultivated fruits and vegetables, a reflection of the observed depletion of magnesium in soil over the past 100 years > Increasing demand for food has caused modern farmin…
One of my unorthodox views is that the popular blue light obsession is exacerbated by magnesium deficiency, given how hard it is to get enough in our diets. Yes, blue light disrupts melatonin and makes it harder to get to bed. But magnesium disrupts sleep quality and deregulates melatonin production in the first place and makes one particularly sensitive to blue light.
Melatonin production is influenced at least also by: Zinc, iron, calcium, copper, P5P (active B6), and tryptophan. Selenium, iodine, and manganese are involved in indirect ways. Many people are deficient in most, or all of those.
To be fair, some of these, like iodine and selenium, have always been problematic in some regions, like Switzerland (lots of goiters). But I find it less than ideal that only some minerals are fortified in bread and milk etc, because their deficiency is very obvious. While all the other minerals are not fortified because their deficiencies are less obvious or less well understood.
A healthy human body contains quite a few minerals in greater abundance than iodine: copper, bromine, strontium, rubidium, gallium, silicon, zinc, iron, and the electrolytes. Some of them don’t even have lab tests (not that blood tests work well for minerals, which is another issue - blood is short term transport for most minerals, not storage).
Re: Nutrient levels in retail grocery stores
#47This is really important in my opinion. I've been growing most of my own produce for several years and I make sure all trace elements are present and available. It's a ton of work and makes no financial sense (it's not really cheaper when all is said and done) but at age 53 I feel a lot better than I did at age 38. I wish I could share this more widely but I think a lot of the worlds problems might be from lack of tr…
The older I get the more I appreciate how important good nutrition is for basically everything in your life. I started focusing on it more for climbing where I kept getting injured, injury used to set limit for me, now I hardly ever get injured or it's far more subtle and manageable. I feel way stronger and happier, and noticed other parts of me generally feeling healthier. I've been climbing for a very long time so even though this is anecdotal, it's a very clear relationship to me, and this is supported by some of the leading climbers in the world who really get into the science of it.
It's hard to sell most people on this because nutrition is historically such a terrible science, but the western diet over the past 50 years has gradually set the bar so low, that it's incredibly easy to make substantial improvements for little effort by focusing on the basics of simply getting back onto natural foods for the core part of your diet. The bioscience of nutrition is complex, and the statistics of nutrition is fraught with misinterpretation and flat out bullshit, but it's bizarrely simple when you figure out the actual changes to make... meat, veg, eggs, dairy, all the things that have been villainized by the food industry. That people still think eating egg yolks is bad for you just reflects how poor public education is on this stuff, and how damaging all of the ancient missinformed and massively outdated WHO recommendations have been to public health.
Re: Nutrient levels in retail grocery stores
#48This is really important in my opinion. I've been growing most of my own produce for several years and I make sure all trace elements are present and available. It's a ton of work and makes no financial sense (it's not really cheaper when all is said and done) but at age 53 I feel a lot better than I did at age 38. I wish I could share this more widely but I think a lot of the worlds problems might be from lack of tr…
How do you ensure the trace elements are present and available? I assume there's some testing you can do for both the soil and the produce, but how do you fix any deficiencies that you discover?
Re: Nutrient levels in retail grocery stores
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does mention those reasons and others, however all those reasons directly contradict the article's next point "If all you care about is nutrient content, SPEED is the only factor that matters". Seems like all these other factors should matter too! Surely not every farm is equal in these respects...
> Seems like all these other factors should matter too! The way I read it was that there are some minerals that are no longer there to begin with because they're simply not in the soil. For nutrients (like vitamin C) created as part of the growing process, speed is the only factor that matters. So yes, it does matter but unless you have a way of knowing which farm(s) the produce came from and what their soil mineral…
But you don't typically have any reliable info about how fresh produce is either?
Re: Nutrient levels in retail grocery stores
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article is mixing ideas, is the point. If soil quality matters, that seems to contradict the article's claim that speed is the only thing that matters.
The article is from the comsumer's perspective. For me, someone who doing my daily / weekly shopping, time-from-harvest is the only factor I can use in a purchasing decision. I can't rely on branding, source, grower etc as all that is a crap-shoot. Even if one grower has nutritious tomatoes this year, next year they might use a different field leading to worse nutrition.
Does your grocer label their produce with date of harvest?