When an article conflates things like this without calling it out, I become suspicious of the rest of the claims.
> 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 farming modern farming techniques to impact the soil’s ability to restore natural minerals such as magnesium. techniques to impact the soil’s ability to restore natural minerals such as magnesium. In addition, the use of phosphate-based fertilizers has resulted in the production of aqueously insoluble use of phosphate-based fertilizers has resulted in the production of aqueously insoluble magnesium phosphate complexes, for example, further depriving the soil of both components
Now I don't know what to think..
You read the article, and by the end you have actionable items, that you can execute today, literally.
Many piece published on the topic go on and on about how agricultural methods should do this and that. Sure, and in the meantime what do we do?
whoops you're right, I somehow skipped that part.
I guess it is kind of weird article with contradicting points of view and the author could have communicated that improving soil quality and pairing it with speed to consumption is the best combination.
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 content is, that's not something you can factor into your purchasing decision.
That's exactly the problem, fertilisers don't necessarily fully replenish the soil in every single micro nutrient so if you cultivate corn on the same parcel for 60 years you might very well have completely depleted the soil of some of them
You can grow very nice fruits and veggies on NPK fertilisers alone without caring for any of the other nutrients, nobody buys tomatoes because they're nutritious, we buy them because they're big and red. And that's why most taste like water and have no nutritional values today
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.
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).
It made me wonder about the rest of it.
> "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."
What is this chart and data? It's meaningless and nonsensical. And so the rest of the article is suspect when based on unverifiable nothing.
The vitamin C thing was about nutrient loss due to blanching (a processing step) I believe
Doesn't matter if you grow old variety organic seeds the slow way in small batches on virgin soil if it takes 11 months for the food to get to your mouth.
Atoms constantly react to the environment, they can bond with other atoms, form new compounds. Oxidation time varies, in the case of potassium it is very fast, the claims in the articles would stand. For vitamins, it also depends.
I got into a rabbit hole a few years back, digging into numbers from multiple academic sources on the subject. They concur that fruits and vegetables have "lost" the majority of their nutrient density. The low end figure is (rather was) 70% loss, the high end 90%.
The reasons are multiple like the article said. I recall reading a thorough and most backed paper explaining the main cause is the soil. We are over exploiting, not allowing the time needed for soils to recoup their content, in minerals in particular. We use fertilisers but these are to enable growth, not so that what end up in your dish is rich in nutrient.
We could quite easily reverse the trend, even getting back to normal levels, but that implies a massive hit in production for several years, in a row. Some would call it greed, but can we even produce for the world's population if we did that...
Atoms constantly react to the environment, they can bond with other atoms, form new compounds. Oxidation time varies, in the case of potassium it is very fast, the claims in the articles would stand.
Potassium, calcium, and magnesium are always fully oxidized in foods. These elements are very reactive with water and oxygen; on Earth they are not naturally found in less oxidized forms.