The falling nutritional value of crops | Hacker News Reader

The falling nutritional value of crops

jeroenvanbaar.substack.com

If you repeatedly harvest crops from soil without working on building it, this is what happens. Each crop progressively removes some nutrients from the soil with the result that the soil nutrients, and nutrients in the derived food gradually decay. Most petroleum/chemically derived fertilizers do not replace such. It is a known phenomena organic farming circles. Organizations like Rodale institute are working to correct this my improving soil health - but in general we’re been on a long program of “withdrawing money from the bank account without paying in”.

> [I]n general we’re been on a long program of “withdrawing money from the bank account without paying in”.

Yes, in general indeed. Essentially every major sustainability problem on the planet is caused by people refusing to acknowledge that there are no free lunches, and no free loans either.

Won't matter once the world gets warmer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem will get these frozen black soil zones. If Ukraine joins the EU the whole of Europe will lose their farming competition and nobody will be able to grow against Ukraine.

> Won't matter once the world gets warmer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem will get these frozen black soil zones. If Ukraine joins the EU the whole of Europe will lose their farming competition and nobody will be able to grow against Ukraine.

That's a strange argument to make. Once these fertile soils become usable it is preferrable to have these resources inside the EU, not outside of it. And if you're worried about competition in the agricultural sector inside the of EU, then you could as well be concerned about a few other countries in the EU right now.

For the sake of the EU yes. For the sake of farmers in the EU no. They're lobbying against it.

You mean the competition will finally be motivated to invest in research and improve what they have now

No, you can't beat Ukraine. It's impossible. Subsidies are the only competition they'll get and that costs the country more than it helps.

The map shows much of it is in Russia. Can't it produce more cheaply using the large surface available when the world gets warmer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem?useskin=vector#/medi...

(and wouldn't that be an incentive for Russia and Canada to have the world warm up?

Russia and Canada will gain more human habitable land from global warming.

So why did you say 'No, you can't beat Ukraine'?

When clearly at least one other country has even more black soil?

Which country? The depth of black soil in other places is incomparable with Ukraine's. It's like comparing the marianas trench to the Caribbean. The total landmass might be lower but the total volume in Ukraine is leagues larger.

>Chernozem layer thickness may vary widely, from several centimetres up to 1.5 metres (60 inches) in Ukraine

> The depth of black soil in other places is incomparable with Ukraine's.

How do you know it's incomparable?

That statement would still hold for other countries with layer thicknesses in the 1m to 1.5m range. Which seems entirely comparable considering the area covered is multiple times greater.

speculative question, how much weight do you think this carries in the EU zeal to get Ukraine in as a member

A lot.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/15/ukraine-memb... https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/ukraine-says-pol... It will probably destroy all non Ukrainian farms for grain and might even do it for specialty foods because it's hard to complete with (guessing) 40% black soil verus 1% or less. They can grow for a very long time with no need for crop rotation or fertilization.

Interesting, many thanks.

As a Hacker News thread goes longer, the probability of someone bringing up Ukraine approaches 1. Anyway, the map on Wikipedia seems to belie this notion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem#/media/File:Chernoze...

Ukraine is going to be a massive minefield for decades by the looks of it.

They're working hard on solutions. AI powered drone discovery is one such method. I'm sure you've seen the vids of Ukrainian farmers making their tractors remote control, to run rollers in front to find mines.

And then what? Let them go boom? I'd doubt that most of the released chemicals by modern mine explosions do any good for nutritional value, or soil chemistry in general. Rather the opposite. AFAIK there are no 'Eco-Blasts' on the 'market'.

Shit thats a good point. I guess the AT ones are easy enough to disable if you can find them via AI drone. The smaller nastier ones are harder to find but have less chemicals in them.

what is nutritious to a human and to a plant is obviously fundamentally different

So drawing a straight line between soil nutrients and food nutrients is simplistic

No, that's understanding you don't replace a complex system with 1000 variables with a solution of 10 variables.

Soil are complete ecosystems. Plants are complex organisms.

You can dumb it down a lot and get very good result for some time, but eventually what made it anti-fragile, à la nassim taleb, will run out. And your alternative is not anti-fragile.

> 10 variables.

That’s generous. Someone’s in the holiday spirit.

I think the point is that nutrients like trace minerals have to come from somewhere. And if they are lacking in the soil, they will be lacking in the plant.

Molecules that would be synthesized by the plant from trace compounds or pathways that require trace compounds would be lacking in the plant if it's lacking in the soil.

So if the soil is lacking in those trace compounds, there will be a gap in the output nutrients when we consume the plant or vegetable as food. This goes up the chain and is a reason why grass fed livestock is higher in Omega 3 fatty acids due to the differences in the feedstock.

Same as how farmed salmon don't have orange flesh because they do not consume the same food sources as wild salmon. So their flesh lacks the molecular compounds that result in the natural pigmentation that results from consuming organisms that consume krill.

Commercial fertilizers replenish the compounds that are required for the rapid cellular growth of the plant, but do not sufficiently replenish the trace compounds that would be in the soil from natural cycles of growth, decay, and recovery. There is also the factor of biodiversity as different plants, animals, and fungi will enrich the soil composition in different ways through their natural lifecycle which does not occur in monoculture industrial farming.

(Not critiquing modern monoculture industrial farming as its efficiency has allowed for huge growth in the human population, but it's clear why it would result in less nutrients in the output over time as the soil itself becomes depleted)

Sure, lack of nutrients will stunt the plant in some way, and will reduce the production of some plant compounds. But the original comment's logic is just too simplistic. You can't then safely jump to the conclusion that the lack of nutritional value in plants is primarily due to the reduction in these plant compounds

The main drivers could very easily be due to a variety of other factors. Like the sibling comment says, it could for instance be changes in agricultural practices (like the plants growing faster) b/c farmers naturally optimize for volume and not nutritional value per-kg or per-calorie

There are just a million other variables at play - and the nutrients in the soil aren't intrinsically the limiting factor for the nutritional of plants - b/c what's nutritional is fundamentally different

> Most petroleum/chemically derived fertilizers do not replace such

Those fertilizers are also responsible for saving the lives of millions of people.

Perhaps we should go back to nightsoil instead.

Two things can be true.

> If you repeatedly harvest crops from soil without working on building it, this is what happens.

Per the article, that doesn't appear to be a critical factor.

> The problem is that while dwarf varieties and increased CO₂ levels allowed wheat and rice to grow larger, the amount of nutrients they sucked up out of the soil stayed roughly the same.

Sounds like you can grow/gather the same size apple faster, leaving less time to soak nutrients.

This is not recent news to some of us.

The theoretical model put forth is this: the nutrition in fruits and seeds comes from the plant, not the ground. It’s substantially what’s been saved up all season. So when a smaller plant has bigger fruit, it doesn’t have the reserves you’d expect for such a volume of produce. Hence nutritionally anemic food.

Add to this fruits and veg selected for shipping stability. Longer times to rot, and thicker skins that don’t bruise when loaded into crates. That shitty bland tomato you bought probably wasn’t even ripe when it was picked. It ripened in transit, possibly by being exposed to chemicals that boost ripening. Underripe fruits were picked before they were ready.

> It ripened in transit,

Don't get me started on tomatoes. We have ourselves to blame for pivoting the supply to tomato varieties with no flavor. [0]

> But as growers bred tomatoes to meet those priorities, flavour gradually diminished. “Every time they bred it and tasted it, they thought, ‘that doesn’t taste so bad,'” says Tieman. “But after doing it over and over, the flavour has changed.”

[0]https://chatelaine.com/food/trends/tomatoes-taste-florida-re...

I/we use tomatoes because the sad fate of the tomato is the best rallying cry we have.

I don’t even like tomatoes, but they piss a lot of people off.

I heard an NPR interview a few years ago where a farmer was trying to do for peaches what we have done for apples - make a palette of flavors instead of the 2 we get. Those are selected for shipping as well. They are only really flavorful just before they spoil, or when baked.

Tomatoes are very easy to grow in a garden and besides are more like a herb because they have basically no nutritional value at 15 calories a piece.

The core problem seems like you can't see the nutritional value in the grocery store. So you can't prefer more nutritional produce so there is no incentive for the industry to cultivate more nutritional crops.

Imagine if every farm needed to test their produce for nutritional value and have nutrition labels at the store. I'm sure things would change.

It's probably both - right?

Because there's more CO₂ each individual plant will grow larger and draw up proportionally fewer nutrients. At the same time, we are also able to rotate crops more often, so whatever replenishes nutrients in soil is probably now "covering" a larger numbers of growth cycles.

Of course industrial agriculture routinely applies micronutrients, so no, they are not withdrawing without paying in.

Odd that you would be well informed about organic farming circles but blissfully unaware of the routine practice used by the majority of the agricultural industry.

Industrial agriculture adding fertilizer to soil is simply feeding the plant. There is no attempt to actually recover a deficit taken from the soil directly. Instead the farmer calculates the seasonal fertilizer needs of growing their crop(s).

If the intention was long term sustainability, focus should be on feeding the soil, not the crop.

Over time, agricultural soil begins to resemble hydroponic growth medium. It’s not soil, it’s just something to hold roots and deliver water and fertizers.

Which means it definitely doesn’t have much nitrifying bacteria and absolutely doesn’t have any fungi transporting minerals from deeper underground or by organically weathering sand particles.

Yes.

I keep sharing Gabe Brown's three-part video series titled Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem, now and then, here on HN, whenever such threads come up.

Some really solid practical and pragmatic stuff there, on regenerative agriculture, which, as I understand it [1], goes beyond organic farming, and is related to many of the issues talked about in this thread.

[1] I had done organic gardening successfully, for a few years, some time earlier, so I have at least some practice and experience (and also a lot of reading and thinking about what I read) as the basis for my opinions of his work and those of others I mention, such as Elaine Ingham (a video by her is below too).

One of her most astonishing finds / claims is that (IIRC, I saw the video a few years ago), almost all soils anywhere on earth have more than enough nutrients for plants for many many years.

She said the real issue and limitation is the lack of soil organic content and soil structure and mycorrhiza ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza), without which even applying tons of nutrients is useless.

And, Gabe has a big farm, a few thousand acres (so not small scale) in North Dakota, USA, with field crops, green manure, livestock on pasture / prairie, etc. And is making profits from his farming operations, sustainably, even regeneratively, without government subsidies, and more than his conventionally-farming neighbors, some of whose soils are getting worse, while his get better over time, by objective measures (checked by external govt. agencies) that he mentions.

Here is Part 1.

Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem

https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A?si=bTLRoacXTGiAP-Qr

And here is the video by Elaine Ingham, The Roots of your Profits, in which she talks about the points I mentioned above, and some more relevant ones:

The Roots of your Profits

https://youtu.be/x2H60ritjag?si=MskMBEIgTUStrWsX

Here is an earlier comment subthread by me, on an earlier HN thread on the same general topic, as I said I've done, above. It mentions Gabe, Elaine, and a few others, including Geoff Lawton, permaculture pioneer, who are doing good work in this area, with a few more details:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24827234

Pretty simple:

Human waste never makes it back into the ecosystem

So we only extract minerals, consume them, then bury them (landfill) or put them into the ocean (wastewater)

Modern humans halt the natural cycle of life in every region we inhabit

Many treatment plants are producing a fertilizer product now.

Which is great and isn’t necessarily new but it’s too little too late

We have to actually restructure society to get to any kind of widespread health

I love change in general, but when I hear talk about architecting society I get mental images of mass graves. I just made a post advocating climate engineering in addition to net neutral carbon, but the potential unintended consequences of planet scale climate fiddling scare me far less than trying to plan societal changes that will counter human nature even just a bit.

True, but that doesn't get back the farms in the same quantity that nutrients left. some farms near the city get more than they need while others get very little. Most fruit in the stores (US at least) is grown in Chili - they have a great climate for this (there is lots of reason to debate this that would take books to get into, so for now lets accept this simplistic statement), but how much sewage from the US goes back to that area? Cattle produce a lot of manure, some farms sell that to local farms and it goes back to the soil (dairy farms typically do this - often they own the fields the cow feed comes from), but other cattle end up on giant feedlots where there are not enough farms around to take the generated manure and so the local fields end up over fertilized while more distance farms don't.

Note that this waste is a bio hazard. So the obvious, just send the waste back to the fields in the empty truck cannot work. Once a tank has been used for waste you cannot use it for food again. Thus you end up with twice the trucks gong back and forth if you try this - and this in turn presents more CO2.

Not being able to return sewage to where food is grown is a consequence of shipping food long distances. This also causes more CO2 emissions. I think we need to grow food more close to our population centres.

We can't while supporting the current population. Food takes a lot of land and effcient high production needs each region to specialize. Disasters like drought require long distance transport to handle

I think we could with solar panels, LEDs, hydroponics and sewage reclamation. It wouldn't take so much land if all this was in tall buildings or multiple levels underground. Any methane involved could be put into biofuels for vehicles or lighting/temperature control of the hydroponics.

This reminds me of the _Les Miserables_'s lengthy digression on sewers, which begins thusly:

Paris casts twenty-five millions yearly into the water. And this without metaphor. How, and in what manner? Day and night. With what object? With no object. With what intention? With no intention. Why? For no reason. By means of what organ? By means of its intestine. What is its intestine? The sewer.

Twenty-five millions is the most moderate approximative figure which the valuations of special science have set upon it.

Science, after having long groped about, now knows that the most fecundating and the most efficacious of fertilizers is human manure. The Chinese, let us confess it to our shame, knew it before us. Not a Chinese peasant—it is Eckberg who says this,—goes to town without bringing back with him, at the two extremities of his bamboo pole, two full buckets of what we designate as filth. Thanks to human dung, the earth in China is still as young as in the days of Abraham. Chinese wheat yields a hundred fold of the seed. There is no guano comparable in fertility with the detritus of a capital. A great city is the most mighty of dung-makers. Certain success would attend the experiment of employing the city to manure the plain. If our gold is manure, our manure, on the other hand, is gold.

What is done with this golden manure? It is swept into the abyss.

Ascientific Nonsense. Trace elements or the lack of them are detectable via drill core samples, drone footage and satellite footage. And in the harvest itself.

And they are routinely re-added while working on the fields. All it would have taken is a visit to a online fertilizer storefront for farmers.

The problem is the rising efficiency of photosynthesis with higher carbondioxid in the air. Means, faster growth, more sugar, less everything else.

In addition I want to express my deep disgust to the "blood and soil" nazi ideology most back to natural farming people push as soon as you drill down on the consequences.

Calm down

Why? It's like advocating for a society wide genocide with nice fluffy words. Isil propaganda starts like this too:"let's just go back to nature, let's just go back to the golden years, the good old days". This stuff has killed and kills every time it becomes policy. As we speak Sri Lanka starves,the ashes of the starved, they are on grand parents hands.

You're invoking Nazis and Isil in a discussion about farming. You've lost the plot.

Needs a lot more arguments to tie that to a rising iron deficiency, or any rising deficiency.

There have been many changes in the consumption pattern in the last century.

Many fruits & vegetables where not available year round, so even if they have less mirconutrients, orange, bananas, strawberries, etc. used to not be consumed as much as now.

There's also been a huge drop in the consumption of organ meats, which contain much more vitamin and minerals then most vegetables (with the exception of vitamin c).

I'm also curious what widespread deficiencies there are.

Exactly. Does it really matter if fresh pineapples or mangoes have half as many of certain vitamins, if we're eating 30x as many of them than were available 40 years ago, when we were lucky to eat them more than once a year?

And it's also certainly not like the ways in which we used to can and/or boil vegetables was great at preserving vitamins either.

We currently have unprecedented variety of produce. Even if one item is lower in a vitamin that it didn't have much of to begin with, now you get to eat something else that naturally has tons more.

Yes, it matters. Is it unsurmountable? No, that's different.

Around 2009, I found a bottle of “grandma’s original molasses” from the mid-90s which the nutritional facts claiming had 30% DV of iron. I compared it against a new bottle at the time, which listed 10% DV.

Today, a new same jars have iron listed as 2%

The actual paper:

Historical changes in the mineral content of fruit and vegetables in the UK from 1940 to 2019: a concern for human nutrition and agriculture

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/09637486.2021.1...

I'm not sure the article supports what the headline says.

There are not half as many carbs in wheat and potatoes as there were. I don't understand nutritional value to mean 'amount of trace vitamins', and neither does wikipedia. Is this a fair definition

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritional_value

there are seven major classes of nutrients in food: carbohydrates, fats, fiber, minerals, proteins, vitamins, and water

Oh, oh, which ones are macro and which micro?

Oh, I get it! That must mean the macros are more important.

That’s why you’ll die without adequate carbohydrate intake, but you don’t really need any, say, vitamin a, right? Right?

Nobody is sustaining their iron copper and magnesium through carrots. Not eating carrots won't kill anyone. None of your points matter unless you're a vegan that only eats carrots.

I only made one point: it is silly to pretend that macro nutrients are somehow more important than the micronutrients, when, in fact, you can do without one of the macronutrients entirely and without any ill effect whatsoever but there are many micronutrients that you will die or suffer life-threatening disease without an adequate supply of.

You may not like that fact, but it is a fact and your straw man about vegans eating carrots that you hallucinated into my post doesn’t change that.

It would be, if it had a bearing on reality. Your fantastical scenario is only relevant for sailors before they ate limes.

Your scenario is the one with no bearing in reality. In the western world, we do not suffer from a lack of calories from macro-nutrient deficiency. There are, however, people who suffer from micro-nutrient deficiency along with a mountain of research that micro-nutrient supplementation is inferior to consuming adequate micro-nutrients in diet. Research about declining micro-nutrient levels in staple crops is both important and more applicable to daily life than whatever non-sense you are imagining with vegans and carrots.

The first sentence lists it as including

> carbohydrates, fat, protein, minerals, and vitamins

So, it seems accurate to include minerals, which are essential for health

But when you say something has half the nutritional value it had, then shouldn't there be less of everything, not just the smallest group?

If there was a 10% increase in one area and an 80% decrease in two others I would still be okay saying half as much. And then there is some wiggle room in how you weight the categories.

(But that's not what's going on here)

Imagine reducing the fiber, sugar, water, minerals, and "everything" else in some apple slices by half. You haven't made it less nutrient-dense; you've eliminated everything that makes it up; i.e., you've just made it smaller.

The researchers aren't arguing that we eat less. They've defined some things as important "nutrients" in some sense and noted that the relative (not absolute) concentrations of those have decreased.

Whether that matters for a particular application is up for debate. Certainly macronutrients matter. It's really not hard to understand what they mean though.

For the average person, this pushes the incorrect narrative that somehow our food is becoming drastically less useful. The primary use of these crops has always been the carbohydrate content, followed by micronutrients; all this really says is that we should still have a diverse intake of food to reach RDA’s of said micros.

That may well be true, but that disagreement at least bothers to engage with what the authors were obviously saying, whereas the former posts were an exercise in pedantry. It's actually a point worth bringing up, which is commendable.

Secondarily, I disagree with you a bit I think:

(1) Wheat is an important iron source. Lack of vitamins minerals in modern rice definitely killed a bunch of poor east-Asians who couldn't or didn't know they should supplement their diet more heavily with non-rice foods.

(2) Even if the focus on cereal grains were the main point, an obvious side-suggestion is that cereal grains would not be the only afflicted crop. At a minimum, that would need more study. Some of that study has been done though, and potassium and iron (among others) have significantly declined in other common vegetable crops this century.

(3) A diverse intake of food absolutely does not suffice to reach RDA's of said micros. Just to leave things brief in the context of short interweb comments, (a) how would you hit an RDA of calcium in a day's worth of calories and without additional supplements, (b) is that diet "diverse", and (c) does that plan leave enough budget in your available calories for the other micros you'd like to target? Calcium isn't the only micro which is hard to satisfy with a generic "diverse" or "raw" or "natural" or whatever diet, and in 2000 calories (less as you age or if you're smaller) it's very, very difficult to hit all your micros with any combination of commonly available foods, especially if your strategy isn't to explicitly make sure you hit those RDAs.

As a counterpoint, that's kinda my personal definition. I don't think of calories, carbs, fats when I think about "nutritional value."

A related phrase is "empty calories," which I define as foods with no vitamins or minerals, but plenty of carbs.

I don't think it means you're wrong, you're just ignoring a common use.

Exactly, this is just clickbait. Certain minerals may have become less prevalent, but that's not at all the same as a reduction in 'nutritional content'.

The minerals are the nutritional content, so yes, that’s exactly what it means.

Nobody eats carrots for sodium and copper. That's like saying you only use your computer for the floppy disk.

And what would you have done in say 1993 with a computer without floppy disk?

That's ludicrous.

The "nutritional content" is the part of the food that your body can make use of.

Mostly carbs, proteins, etc.

The trace minerals are essential, but hardly central.

Even if the definition of 'nutrition' is just those trace minerals (because somehow all the carbs, proteins, and everything else are 'free'), the article grossly exaggerates.

And given the whole shtick of this blog is 'using science to make sense of society', it's a poor show.

Carbs and proteins are macronutrients. Minerals are micronutrients. Both are central parts of nutrition.

If there are less minerals than there are more substitutes. Which are also nutrition content with some value.

Therefore we can say that nutrition value increased as well!

They're talking about "the amount of sodium (Na), iron (Fe), copper (Cu), and magnesium (Mg) found in [crops] ha[ving] significantly declined." The significant ones are iron and magnesium.

"Almost half (48%) of the US population consumed less than the required amount of magnesium from food in 2005-2006" [1]. Iron deficiency is less prevalent, peaking among pregnant women around 25% [2]. I couldn't find data from 1940 for either. My iron is indirectly tested for (hemoglobin), but I couldn't find any recent bloodwork for magnesium.

Agree, broadly, that the article is a nothingburger. The real story might be the lack of testing for magnesium deficiency.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22364157/

[2] https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/micronutrient-inadequacies/o...

Fortunately these are really easy to supplement/fortify back into foods. Plus it's not like meat has any less of them these days, so it'll mostly affect vegans.

A steak has 58mg of Magnesium.

The rda for a male is 400+mg.

Unless you’re eating tons of pumpkin seeds everyday, everyone is missing the mark.

And magnesium deficiency is implicated in depression, anxiety, etc.

This might make a good case for supplementing/fortifying magnesium into foods broadly, like we did with iodine in salt.

In a previous similar discussion on HN a few years ago, someone made the same point- and lots of people said that supplementing magnesium permanently changed their mental state for the better. So I started supplementing with magnesium-threonate, and it low-key changed my life. Less anxiety and depression, and I swear that my long distance vision sharpened up a bit. Anyways, seeing as reading the HN comments changed my life for the better a little bit, I always try to give back and tell people my experience with supplementing magnesium

Did you choose a particular brand? I don't trust the supplement industry!

If New Chapter makes what you’re looking for, they’re one of the more reputable brands.

I do not recall “carbs” ever being used to mean “nutritional value”. In fact it’s almost always the opposite, with “empty carbs” (i.e. foods that contain carbs and almost no other vitamins, etc.) being the primary target of campaigns telling people to avoid them. If anything, carb-heavy foods would benefit from having lower carbs, since it would increase the relative amounts of actually healthy stuff in them.

Focusing on carbs leads to situations where people may be overweight, but also malnourished, which is increasingly common in poor areas.

Would straw or rock have excellent nutritional value, then?

If you can't get anything out of it then it doesn't have nutritional value.

In other words, when we say "nutritional value", what we mean is carbohydrates.

This is something that everyone understands when we're talking about bears, but somehow forgets when we're talking about people. Those "empty" carbs are 99% of the reason you eat anything. "Nutritional value" and "energy content" are the same thing.

If you’re not trolling, I think you need to learn more about the difference between carbs, other nutrients, and indigestible material. “Carbs” does not mean “anything you can digest” (which seems to be how you’re using it).

For all animals, of course ensuring that you have enough energy to function is a primary concern, but health studies in modern contexts always assumes that the supply of carbs is a solved problem (modern foods generally have far more carbs than most people need), but at the expense of reducing other nutrients.

No, that's stronger than I'd say and I suspect than you think? For example, I think almost anyone would say the nutritional value of 100 calories of whole wheat flour is greater than 100 calories of enriched white flour, is greater than 100 calories of plain white flour.

Sure, but the differences there are very small compared to the nutritional value of the 100 calories of white flour.

Note also that 100 calories of whole wheat flour is more flour than 100 calories of white flour, which will matter to people who need to eat, but gets glossed over as you do the calorie-for-calorie comparison.

They have to be qualified as “empty carbs” because fiber is a complex carbohydrate and that’s pretty crucial to gut microbiome health and blood sugar regulation.

Afaik empty carbs moreso refers to starch or sugar containing foods that otherwise bring little to the table in terms of vitamins, minerals, etc. Especialy high glycemic index food items.

The presence of fiber alone doesn’t necessarily offer these kinds of health benefits. It largely has to do with the structure of the fiber and if it’s affecting the speed of digestion of the food. A smoothie is far less healthy than the unprocessed fruit (assuming nothing else is added to the smoothie) simply because the act of blending the fruit liberates the sugars from inside the cells, allowing faster absorption (and resulting in insulin spikes/crashes).

Any fiber is still better than none, but it’s not just a matter of amounts.

This is in itself misleading. Carbs are the fundamental nutrient required for energy production (specifically for glycogen). So much so that without them the body undergoes glycogenesis. Carbohydrates might be “empty” in that they aren’t filling / are higher calorie per gram, but they are no less a nutrient.

Within a general nutrition context, yes of course carbs are essential, however in a modern context the supply of carbs is so abundant that the conversation mostly revolves around the over abundance of them, while other nutrients are neglected. This and many other studies are highlighting this problem, where people crops have been optimized for size, yield, and fast growth (which almost always results in empty carbs being produced quickly), at the expense of all the other nutrients being reduced.

I didn't say carbs meant nutritional value. However when a product containing mostly carbs is said to have half the nutritional value it used to hand, one might reasonably assume that the components of its nutritional makeup had reduced in proportion. The headline is clickbait. What they meant was that some of the micronutrients were there in a lower proportion. That is a very different story

Yes, the Substack author and this post have greatly exaggerated the article. The actual data is that some fruits and vegetables have 50% less Sodium, Iron, and Copper in them than before. (Also a 10% decrease in Magnesium). That's interesting but a far cry from "nutritional value has dropped by 50%".

The drop in sodium is funny because if anything that's a good thing as most people eat way too much of it, and it's super easy to supplement on the rare occasion it proves necessary. (Every one of us has a shaker of 100% bioavailable sodium sitting on our table.)

I agree. Their one relevant chart has seven items, probably cherry-picked to suppprt their narrative. One is sodium (Na), which is overabundant in modern diets.

> One is sodium (Na), which is overabundant in modern diets.

Sodium consumption per capita has remained rock-steady in the face of an intense demonization campaign. It doesn't really go up (as you might expect, if people develop food to satisfy cravings for it) or down (as you might expect if people pay attention to public messaging).

(See e.g. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7042a4.htm :

> Mean usual energy intake–adjusted sodium intake among U.S. adults aged ≥19 years was lowest (3,333 mg/day) during 2003–2004, and was 3,464 mg/day during 2015–2016. )

This tends to suggest that it is not in fact overabundant in modern diets.

Was just going to say, the correct title might be “the micronutrient variety has reduced”, but that is misleading on its own. Unless the crops are becoming impossible to digest / akin to cardboard, nutrition is just changing.

Micronutrients are still important but there are relatively abundant sources still available, for example in leafy greens.

The article is talking about micronutrients, minerals.

Per wikipedia: >Nutritional value or nutritive value as part of food quality is the measure of a well-balanced ratio of the essential nutrients carbohydrates, fat, protein, minerals, and vitamins in items of food or diet concerning the nutrient requirements of their consumer.

My takeaway from this is that this issue is not something that can be efficiently solved at the agricultural level if the root cause truly is the increased yields of modern farming.

Is there an issue with taking a daily multivitamin that I am not aware of?

A few years ago, I learned as much as I could about vitamins and how to buy them.

Multivitamin pills are the worst bang for the buck. Amounts of actual vitamins are very small. It's better to buy mono-vitamin pills.

Many of the vitamins have no strong evidence of usefulness. I keep buying Omega-3, D3+K2, Magnesium and B, specially B1 but there are good compounds.

Magnesium is ridiculously difficult to source in good quantities, the labels are consistently misleading, bordering the scam. Happens with all, but Mg is the worst offender.

>Magnesium is ridiculously difficult to source in good quantities, the labels are consistently misleading, bordering the scam. Happens with all, but Mg is the worst offender.

Any recommendations for vendors/brands?

I live in Spain and bought everything through Amazon.es. I guess the products are also available in the rest of Europe. Most of the links give me 404 now. Still working:

https://www.amazon.es/Omega-3-Aceite-Pescado-Salvaje-concent...

https://www.amazon.es/Complejo-Vitamina-Cápsulas-Vitaminas-M...

I bought B1 much cheaper in powder, but no idea where... some site for bodybuilders's supplements. That Aavalabs complex is also good. Magnesium is from the same brand as Omega-3, Zenement. The D3+K2 is from GloryFeel.

I also read into vitamins and minerals (while trying to ignore all the snake oil), and I agree with you!

I tried a lot and the ones I keep buying are the same you do - Magnesium, Omega-3, D3+K2 and a B complex. These are not only the ones that most people are likely to be deficient in, these were also the ones that I subjectively felt had a positive effect on me, and either low or deficient levels were confirmed by blood tests. I feel a lot better, too! :)

Regarding the magnesium: I did not know that. How do you make sure the brand and/or it's magnesium is of good quality?

It's curious you say this, I wasn't totally sure, but I sometimes felt like there was a difference in quality, even between the same brand or product of the same form of Magnesium.

Regarding the magnesium: I did not know that. How do you make sure the brand and/or it's magnesium is of good quality?

The ultimate quality is impossible for me to judge. I just believe them at face value. The problem is that there are different kind of Mg (citrate, carbonate, oxyde) and different ways to write the quantities in the label. It's been a long time since I read it.

One common trick is saying that there is one gram per serving. But in the fine print they say that a serving is not one pill, but two pills. Or three or four.

Another trick was playing with total vs. elemental Mg weight.

As a mostly-vegetarian, I've settled on roughly the same, though I typically buy D3 without K2 and eat nattō a few times a week.

Based on a quick scan, this seems like weak tea to me. The article is based on a small sample of repeated measurements across three periods and multiple variables. The significance levels are small and the changes vary over time. For example, in the 90s it seems many variables increased quite a bit only to fall later. It seems to me to be quite possible that we’re seeing “significant” results simply due to random variation. I suspect this is a publish or perish exercise.

Extremely misleading headline.

The underlying study doesn't support this claim in the slightest.

An accurate claim: some crops contain a few nutrients in smaller quantities than they contained in the 1960s. Primarily sodium and iron.

This is absolutely not a crisis, especially in the developed world.

Green revolution pumped volume of crops, mineral density remained the same in soil.

Somewhat expect just the affect is unknown.

> Green revolution pumped volume of crops, mineral density remained the same in soil.

Most minerals are in plants because plants need them for their own needs. So it doesn't automatically follow at all.

Copper is probably the only mineral where your simplistic model applies.

Most of the best work in this field has been summarized by John Kempf on his podcast and book.

Nutrient density is driven by two related systems - the photosynthetic efficiency (amount of sunlight converted into sugars) which can range from 10% up to 30% + and the soil microbiology. As photosynthesis improves more sugars are exuded into the soil - often to select for microbes that perform certain function- such as making magnesium or phosphorus into a plant available form. This begins a flywheel in the soil. As microbes in a healthy soil die, larger proteins and amino acids are consumed by plants roots. Now plants have to spend less energy building these larger compounds and they become more efficient at producing the proteins and amino acids that make food healthy.

IMHO - after 10 years of farming vegetables - this can all be jumpstarted by testing plant leaves for nutrients via plant sap analysis and then providing folier sprays that help improve photosynthesis and address protein synthesis pathways.

On the consumer side…we aren’t that far off from a device that can scan a fruit and have your phone tell you how nutrient dense it is. Bio-nutrient food association and the gathering of open ag technology have been working on this for some time.

>When comparing the same quantities of the same foods over time, they found that the amount of sodium (Na), iron (Fe), copper (Cu), and magnesium (Mg) found in them had significantly declined between the first and the last time point.

Doesn't seem concerning at all. If you're a man you probably have too much iron.

On the other hand, for women it seems concerning:

> As one example, the World Health Organization estimates that 42% of children under 5 years of age and 40% of pregnant women worldwide suffer from anemia due to a lack of iron, folate and/or vitamins B12 and A. A primary cause of this problem (although there are others) is the lack of these minerals in people’s diet. Remember that iron (Fe) was one of the minerals whose presence in fruits and vegetables was found to drop by 50% between 1940 and 2019 in the first study I mentioned.

Cooking on cast iron can help reduce this problem though right?

Not enough to fix the issue.

> Cooking on cast iron can help reduce this problem though right?

Probably [1]. That said, most Americans get enough iron.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8266402/

Easiest solution, if someones eats meat, is to eat a bit of organ meat regulary. Women need more iron in general due to their cycle. In general Iron from plants is also absorbed less.

That's a good point, but it doesn't seem to be affected by the us crops as much as other factors. Low iron is probably from low meat intake, Indian politicians had to fight strict vegetarians over giving developing children a SINGLE egg a day to eat over all vegetables.

If you were sustaining yourself from vegetables even if they had 1950s and before iron, I doubt it would positively affect anemia.

And, at least according to the doctors, many of us have too much sodium.

Copper deficiency is extremely rare, and it's mostly due to a rare disease rather than a dietary deficiency.

The salt thing is overblown. There are more people salt deficient than that get too much salt, at least if you look at the average person that tries to be healthy.

I have helped two different girlfriends with almost lifelong migraines basically completely get rid of them by upping their salt intake.

It's not on purpose. Farming is incentivized to increment yield without regarding micro-nutrients. A simple fix could be a label indicating if the product is below, at, or above average for its micro-nutrients.

But we can't even have simple labels warning for high sugar, saturated fats, and sodium. SMH

Of course compared to 70 years ago the average city dweller probably has more than 2x access to fresh fruit and veggies, so the trace mineral intake is probably higher for at least some folk.

Poisons relentlessly sprayed on the fields, destroying the life that extracts these nutrients from the soil and allows the plants to use them...and we're surprised to find the plants have less of these nutrients.

We're a complex system of interactions, and our approach of killing life we don't like hurts us more than we'll ever know.

It's not that, it's just the fact that plants produce more from same area, leaving less vitamins and minerals per kg of produce.

Oh, so you think poisons killing the bacterial life that turns rocks into readily available plant nutrients have no impact?

Scientists were aware of this way back in the 1970s:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00652...

My father gathers his own seeds from his favorite examples, or ofshoots of plants when appropriate.

His tomatoes, dill, pomegranates, lemons, oranges, grapefruit and grapes are better than you can buy in any store, no matter how organic, special, artisan you try to get. There is definitely something to quality soil, and no chemicals rushing the process.

Can you explain how they are better? Just curious what aspects you would determine that from, since I assume you’re not referring to nutrient content which would be pretty tough to judge.

They are so much better tasting, and so much obviously fuller in color, that only an academic would look at them or taste them and say that he's not sure if there's more nutrients in them.

Four apples a day keeps the doctor away.

I was inclined to dismiss the claims of CO2 on crops. This kind of language sounds to me as kids spouting agendas they don’t even really understand… People too easily scream “climate change” every time there is a severe storm.

That said, I found CO2 levels seem to have changed by 25-30% from 1960. And a small multiples of the current concentration, humans tend to feel effects.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1091926/atmospheric-conc...

Maybe there is something to this?

Much higher CO2 doesn't mean an actual higher temperature as evidenced in reality.

Commercial hydroponic greenhouses frequently add CO2 to the grow room to increase yield: https://dutchgreenhouses.com/en/climate/co2-enrichment If high CO2 levels reduce the mineral content of vegetables, then everything coming out of the Netherlands has been the nutritional equivalent of wax fruit for quite some time now.

Somewhat awkwardly, the CO2 produced by the Climeworks DAC plant was initially sold to such a greenhouse, which was used to boost plant growth and then immediately exhausted to the atmosphere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climeworks#Projects Carbon captured... but not quite sequestered.

This is my personal (unproven) theory about the obesity epidemic. People eat more than ever but are still hungry for more. It's because our food is less nutritional. Although we're getting adequate calories - we're not getting enough nutrients, and our bodies are telling us to eat more.

That’s not at all how satiety works. People over eat for all kinds of reasons and there is a lot of low volume and highly calorically dense food available now. You feel full a little while after you’ve hit a certain level of physical fullness in your stomach.

Very few people in the west have meaningful micro nutrient deficiencies.

Or do we not have micro nutrient deficiencies because we overeat in order to hit those needs?

Obviously there's flaws in my silly theory. I'm not a biologist or chemist, just something I think correlates in an interesting way.

The why doesn’t really matter, we don’t have a hunger regulation mechanism that relates to micro nutrients.

> This led the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025 to recommend that you get 85% of your daily calories from vegetables, fruits, grains, dairy, and protein—in that order.

It's absolutely astonishing to me that after the absolutely catastrophic response to the pandemic by 3-letter agencies like the CDC, WHO, and FDA, people still believe their advice when it comes to nutrition. The output of those agencies is just a toxic mishmash of various special interests, it has no relationship to reality. These are the same people who, 20 years ago, promoted the "Food Pyramid" with massive servings of carbs as the base.

That is from the USDA, which in addition to not being a 3-letter agency wasn't involved in any of the pandemic response you were unhappy with.

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