Vegetables are half as nutritious as they were in the 1960s | Hacker News Reader

Vegetables are half as nutritious as they were in the 1960s

telegraph.co.uk

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Headline:

"Vegetables half as nutritious as they were in the 1960s"

Body:

"The study found that many crops had lost 20pc to 50pc of several key nutrients."

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So, vegetables are possibly 80% as nutritious as they were in the 60's if these key nutrients capture the complete nutritional value of vegetables, which they don't. Regardless, that's some pretty sloppy linkbait garbage.

What makes you think your maths of computing nutrition is as simple as picking 20% rather than the 50% of key nutrients as the multiplier ?

Article is pure bullshit (i.e. doesn't care about truth, just wants to sell you something). You can point any competent AI at it and see how selective it is being (or just know it is BS by being informed, e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915751...). That this gets upvoted on HN is concerning and suggests a serious bot problem, this trash should never persist on the front page.

The study in question was by "Deep Science Ventures" - a venture capital firm specializing in bio-technologies.

People have been trying to spin stories about soil degradation since... ironically, the 1960s.

While these might be true, the actual answers are usually much more mundane:

- We choose fruits and vegetables increasingly for their taste

- The rise of hydroponics and salad vegetables in general

- Quicker harvests with less time to absorb nutrients

Our diets are much more diverse and fortified compared to the pre-war period - nutritional deficits are not nearly the concern they used to be.

If you grow your own veggies at home and compare them to store veggies you will know not all tomatoes are created equal.

One looks like it has been injected by syringe with water, and has almost no taste, which of course makes sense because its is water and not much more. THe breeding has produced a fruit that is just a skin holding water.

> THe breeding has produced a fruit that is just a skin holding water.

i'd blush but im not a tomato :P

> - We choose fruits and vegetables increasingly for their taste

People choose from what they have to choose from. And even then, taste seems to be competing with other factors.

Pre Honeycrisp, peoples' choice of apples wasn't great. And among that disappointing selection, the flavorless, mushy, dismally awful stand out - Red Delicious - sold well.

The concerns about meaningful decline are also essentially fake / bullshit https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915751....

EDIT: Also being worried about nutrient deficiency on a modern balanced Western diet is also basically deranged and wildly out of touch with the evidence. There are some interesting exceptions for women and iron, to some degree vitamin C (easily solved), and then some serious B12 issues in vegans, but, otherwise, vitamin deficiency is basically a non-problem in the developed world.

They can prevent deficiency of b12 in vegan diet quiet easily but they avoid it. For example they don't add B12 to tufo and TVP which are consumed in vegan diets quite a bit but they add them to cereals.

https://archive.li/CCky5

Sigh, more sensationalist, low-quality coverage, and, as always, proper scientific studies refute these claims: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915751....

Also Deep Science Ventures / Hollow Harvests is a biased startup that simply cannot be seen to be objective on these matters.

Given now bad things are, for those who don't eat too much meat, if you don't correctly supplement every single essential nutrient, and even many conditionally essential ones, you could be in a sea of trouble. Even then they won't get you sufficient phytonutrients. To make things worse, food is packaged in harmful plastics, and contains toxic pesticides, also PFAS containing pesticides.

There is more of a new vitamin in veggies and fruit and that is vitamin S; S for sugar. I noticed lately that little grape tomatoes taste more like grape than tomato! Other offenders are corn and green peas; corn that is so sweet that it doesn't taste like corn. Oranges that are too sweet. Grape fruits that have lost tartness. Even lemon is sweeter. I read that even soya bean has changed to be sweeter and it has less protein. Probably it is the same for most pulses; they have modified them to cook faster so they have more starch and less protein.

Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect: https://m.xkcd.com/2241/

Yup for sure. Celery too. I recall some pleasant bitterness in cooked celery when I was a kid; no longer.

What kind of trash celery are you buying? Celery is a staple in soups for that exact flavor. The leaves and seeds have even more of it, and celery salt is a very common "secret" ingredient.

From supermarkets. They cut the leaves out too to prevent access to any possible flavor.

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