Nutrient levels in retail grocery stores

> vendor is selling over 5 types of produce, there's no way they all ripened at the same time. They may not even all be grown by them.

I’d like to know how authors make this conclusion. For my weak but real experience in the field:

1. Plants don’t fruits everything at once. Some pumpkins fruits spans during months

2. Wise farmers grow several time separated batches, precisely to space the harvests. Especially useful for not-fruits plants like leek and salads

3. Plant several species that don’t grow at the same time. Fresh tomatoes 8 month a year is real

4. Outdoor growing is not a lab and there’s chance a side of you field receive more/less sun, wind, moisture… so won’t grow at the same rate. Some farmers don’t harvest all at the same time but just what’s ripe at the time.

5. Probably even easier in a greenhouse, the most environment you control, the most precise can be the harvest date/range of your controlled batches.

Do we know this is not a problem?

Maybe there are other health effects like people subconsciously eating more because the body is craving certain micronutrients, leading to getting fat from too many macronutrients.

A few remarks...

* The general population does have a bunch of nutrient deficiencies in their diet - https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/7-common-nutrient-defic... as an introduction to the problem

* The article is making claims about a 100 year timespan and I doubt we have comparable data on nutrient deficiencies which is that old

* Daily calorie intake has probably doubled in that time period, so in theory you'd hope daily intake of all essential nutrients would double as well, but here we are with almost half of women and children having iron deficiency, with widespread deficiency in vitamins D and B12, half of the population not getting the recommended calcium intake etc.

So I think as an example to start throwing some numbers out there. About 40% of Americans don't get the recommended amount of calcium. First chart in the article shows calcium in vegetables at retail declining by 90% in the last century.

I think we have evidence establishing that nutrient deficiency leads to cravings - maybe declining nutrient density is a factor encouraging overeating and obesity?

Pretty interesting topic

Not really.

You could create several cohort with different co-controlled fixes for each: more calories, more protein, more fiber, more nutrients.

Then evaluate the percentage of successfully treated patients in each cohort.

It's of course a difficult study, since someone with a bad diet will lack practically everything, so more things will work than not. I'd also be curious to see how you would design a real food diet high in micronutrients without accidentally adding a bunch of fiber in the process

We could do randomized controlled studies, where we first have a phase where everybody just eats what they eats, we record caloric intake and nutrition profiles of the food they eat. To be sure that price is not a factor we pay for all the food.

Then in phase 2 we split into a control group that still buys from any store, a second group that only has access to foods with high nutrition content, and a third group that only has access to foods with low nutrition content. The same types of food should be offered just high and low nutrition options (e.g. zuchinnis, brocolli, tomatoes, apples, ...)

We then check if there's any significant effect on caloric intake (given a certain time for them to adjust).