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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

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

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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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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?

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

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.

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