8 ms·

Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food (2013)

93 points by primroot 11y ago

technotony 11y ago
Golden Rice is an excellent case study for one solution to this problem. If the public were more accepting of GMO's we could take the existing best crop lines (bred for looks and supply chain) and insert additional nutrients. My companies technology (www.taxa.com) could easily do this if the regulatory and public acceptance issues weren't so big that we are focusing on non-food applications (glowing plants, blue roses etc).
- gburt 11y ago
  How reliable/discrete is this process? Can I select particular nutrients and decide I want a plant to have them? Can you tell us more/provide some interesting references?
  - technotony 11y ago
    We can put new pathways into plants. Currently our tech allows up to ten genes. Most nutrients could be boosted with 1-2 additional genes (typically over expressing genes the plant already has or adding similar genes from other plants, eg Golden Rice add's beta carotene genes from daffodil), so today we could boost 4-6 nutrients. Over time we'll be able to add more and it will get easier (Eg through synthetic chromosomes). This explanation of how they made golden rice is probably helpful: http://www.goldenrice.org/Content2-How/how1_sci.php http://www.goldenrice.org/Content2-How/how1_sci.php It's not as simple as just putting the first genes into the plant, there is an optimization process needed. The regulatory costs however are at least 10-20 times greater than the development costs.
- primroot 11y ago
  Do you know any rice cultivars, to which Golden Rice genes have been added without a decrease in yields in regions where Vit. A deficiency is currently a problem (e.g. the Philippines)?
mfoy_ 11y ago
Could someone please remove the anchor to the comments section?
- fein 11y ago
  Clean link for the interim until a mod fixes it: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-the-nutrition-out-of-our-food.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-th...
- dang 11y ago
  At your service, and have a (2013) as well. Btw: would it work to just strip query strings and URL anchors out of NYT URLs? It would be nice if it did, but I don't want to break any stories.
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    Afaik, nothing after .html affects the content. It's just for tracking, but it leads to a dozen variants for the same page.
    - dang 11y ago
      Maybe we'll take a random sample of recent NYT posts to HN and see if that's true of them.
Nux 11y ago
Every bloody vegetable and fruit in the supermarket is selected for appearance and sweetness. The bigger and sweeter, the better. We'll end up eating sugar on a piece of cardboard, because that's where nutritional values are going. It's really hard to eat properly, I don't see how it can be done without growing your own.
- bkmartin 11y ago
  And do you have any research to back up your claim that those vegetables and fruits are less nutritious than ugly ones? That the amount of nutrients differs in a statistically significant way to produce negative health outcomes? Saying it doesn't make it a fact, we need good research to get to that. And, from what I can see, the research just isn't there. If people were just plain better at eating less processed sugars and better at eating more whole foods like fruits, vegetables, and even meats there would be greater improvements in health. What good are the super nutritious vegetables if no one eats them?
  - amalag 11y ago
    It is common sense that plants are bred for their ability to sell, not nutritional value. If a commercial grower had to choose between a fruit with a long shelf life and a nutritious one, which one will he pick?
    - evgen 11y ago
      False dichotomy. There are many variables at play and nutrition is not necessarily the loser on any particular selection choice.
  - jdmichal 11y ago
    To further emphasis your point, it's not like growers have magical tomato plants that don't make ugly tomatoes. They get loads of ugly tomatoes, which then get sent to be turned into canned tomatoes, or jarred tomato sauce, or V8, or any number of other pre-processed applications. But selling directly to the consumer yields the highest price per unit, so of course that's where the best stock goes.
sp332 11y ago
If phytonutrients are so good, why does the article repeatedly recommend cooking the plants? The fastest way to degrade those chemicals is to expose them to heat.
- noondip 11y ago
  That's not true for all plants. For example, cooking can boost the absorption of the phytonutrient beta-carotene in carrots. Artichokes, beets, and onions can also be boiled without losing antioxidants. Microwaved green beans are actually more nutritious than raw green beans. Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1750-3841.2009.01091.x/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1750-3841.2009....
  - sp332 11y ago
    Carotenoids I knew, but I thought they were the exception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytochemical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytochemical "The main cause of phytochemical loss from cooking is thermal decomposition."
manachar 11y ago
"Were the people who foraged for these wild foods healthier than we are today? They did not live nearly as long as we do, but growing evidence suggests that they were much less likely to die from degenerative diseases, even the minority who lived 70 years and more. The primary cause of death for most adults, according to anthropologists, was injury and infections." There are two ways to interpret this "growing evidence". One approach, favored by this author, is to say their old wild diet was healthier and therefor those eating in such a fashion were less likely to get degenerative diseases. The other approach is to say they died too young from injury, starvation, or infections. Had they lived longer they too might have contracted more of our degenerative diseases. I strongly suspect lifestyle may have played more of a role than diet alone. The modern sedentary lifestyle with enormous quantities of extra calories at our fingertips is quite a recent invention of humanity. Getting more nutrients back into our food is good. So too would be to increase the variety of foods we eat (monoculture seems to not be healthy for the environment or our bodies). But I suspect the biggest gains in well-being will come from rethinking how we apportion our days and incorporate more physical activity and leisure time into them.
- harshreality 11y ago
  I mostly agree, except... > The other approach is to say they died too young from injury, starvation, or infections. Had they lived longer they too might have contracted more of our degenerative diseases. This is a stretch. Those people who were lucky enough not to die of communicable diseases or predators just happened to be the ones genetically superior in the sense that they didn't suffer as much from degenerative diseases? I doubt it. The lifestyle (plenty of exercise, and not eating too much, or too much processed/extracted foods like sugar and hydrogenated oils in everything) theory is much stronger. I don't doubt, though, that some nutrients have been bred out of crops inadvertently while domesticating them (making them easier to grow, breeding variants that produce more food, making the color or taste more appealing). And some less common varieties of crops are probably closer to the pre-domesticated varieties and are therefore healthier.
  - ZeroFries 11y ago
    You misunderstood him. You can't die from alzheimer's at 80 if you died from malaria at 72, is what he's saying.
Elrac 11y ago
The article informs us that anthocyanins are good against cancer and a slew of other illnesses. However, what little research about the antioxidant properties of anthocyanins exists is based on in vitro studies, and it's well known that anthocyanins are at least for the most part unlikely to survive being digested. The article informs us that "one species of apple has a staggering 100 times more phytonutrients than [Golden Delicious]." There are thousands of different phytonutrients, and no edible plant has no phytonutrients, so exactly what is this figure telling us? 100 times more of a certain nutrient? 100 times more different varieties? 100 times more by total weight? I guess we need to buy the author's upcoming book to find out, if at all. This doesn't look like any kind of evidence-based complaint about the deficiencies of modern food; it looks like the kind of pseudoscience used to promote unnecessary supplements and overpriced organic food. And feel-good books about medicating yourself by a judicious choice of the "right" foods. The author feeds our fears but not our appetite for real, credible information.
- mfoy_ 11y ago
  And the linked-to comment section is full of FUD as well, in case you were looking for an after-meal fear digestive.
- scott_s 11y ago
  Agreed. My skepty-sense goes off the moment I hear the word "superfood". Steven Novella on the idea: First, the idea of “superfood” itself is not valid. There is no magical combination of nutrients that make a food into a “superfood” where it will start to have fabulous benefits. Food is just food. It also doesn’t really matter how you get your nutrients, as long as you get enough in reasonable proportions. The best way to accomplish this is to eat a variety of foods and make sure you get enough fruits and vegetables. This includes avoiding an excess of certain kinds of food and an excess of overall calories. There is no “zone,” however, where proportion of nutrients turns food into anything other than food, that will boost your immune system (which itself is a problematic idea) or shift your metabolism into some sort of optimal state. There is no science behind any of these ideas, but they do sound satisfying to the scientifically illiterate. In short – there is no such thing as a “superfood.” From http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/human-breast-milk-the-new-superfood http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/human-breast-mi...
mrxd 11y ago
The nutritional value of plants in their raw state is less interesting than what people actually eat. The original plants require a lot more processing and cooking to turn them into food, which destroys many of the nutrients. For example, crabapples are very sour and have to be boiled to make something edible, blue corn must be ground into flour and cooked. Is that better or worse than eating raw Gala apples or raw or steamed sweet corn? > The more palatable our fruits and vegetables became, however, the less advantageous they were for our health. We don't know that. It's possible that breeding more edible plants reduced the need for nutrient-destroying processing, so the net effect was better, not worse nutrition.
hinkley 11y ago
There are groups working to fix this. Around the world there are several breeding programs that are doing genetic and trait testing of wild varieties of our food plants and trying to use selective breeding plus dna testing to breed traits back into our proverbially cross-eyed knock-kneed commercial seeds, not unlike how the man who 'saved' the Irish Wolfhound crossbred mastiffs and Danes to strengthen the inbred bloodline. I know there's a group working with carrots, and another one that's looking at wild rice to breed a more nutrient dense and drought tolerant rice strain, to answer questions like "could we have gotten vitamin A into rice without using transgenic techniques ('golden rice') to do so?" There are also groups trying to breed biennial and perennial grains, to improve net yields (food minus fuel and labor inputs) and reduce topsoil degradation. You just have to know where to look and who to cheerlead for.
polskibus 11y ago
What we need is a method and implementation of testing selected piece of fruit and vegetable for actual and not averaged from ages ago nutrient content. I hope that one day it will be possible!
- noondip 11y ago
  A simple test for the quality of produce can be done with a refractometer, or a so-called Brix meter.
mschuster91 11y ago
Another thing that has impacted average human life time is peace. We have enjoyed 60 years without war on the European main continent, with no destruction or contamination of food sources. Go back in history and all you'll find is death everywhere. Epidemics (pest, cholera), decades-long wars with despicable tactics as "scorched/salted earth", natural disasters without a way for people to defend themselves (earthquakes, floods, volcano eruptions). Now that we can control most of these factors, it's natural that life expectancy rises.
- nradov 11y ago
  What do you consider to be the European main continent? There were significant wars not long ago in former Yugoslavia. There's a war going on in Ukraine right now.
bitwize 11y ago
I was expecting him to quote the old saw about how a hundred years ago a single bowl of spinach could supply you with ALL the micronutrients you needed, while 20 years ago it took a hundred bowls to have the same nutritive value and today spinach is virtually nutrient free. Naturopaths like to toss that one about, and it comes from extraordinary rendition of various flawed data sets.
jcl 11y ago
I can't help be reminded of Jack LaLanne's two rules of nutrition: "If man made it, don't eat it", and "If it tastes good, spit it out." Of course, he was not exactly a scientist, but he's right that our sense of taste is no longer a good measure of the value of food in the modern world. It seems likely that the way we will overcome this is through education -- but wouldn't it be great if there were some way to fix our sense of taste, so that valuable phytochemicals tasted sweet, or that lead tasted bitter?

93 points by primroot 11y ago

Golden Rice is an excellent case study for one solution to this problem. If the public were more accepting of GMO's we could take the existing best crop lines (bred for looks and supply chain) and insert additional nutrients. My companies technology (www.taxa.com) could easily do this if the regulatory and public acceptance issues weren't so big that we are focusing on non-food applications (glowing plants, blue roses etc).

gburt 11y ago
How reliable/discrete is this process? Can I select particular nutrients and decide I want a plant to have them? Can you tell us more/provide some interesting references?
- technotony 11y ago
  We can put new pathways into plants. Currently our tech allows up to ten genes. Most nutrients could be boosted with 1-2 additional genes (typically over expressing genes the plant already has or adding similar genes from other plants, eg Golden Rice add's beta carotene genes from daffodil), so today we could boost 4-6 nutrients. Over time we'll be able to add more and it will get easier (Eg through synthetic chromosomes). This explanation of how they made golden rice is probably helpful: http://www.goldenrice.org/Content2-How/how1_sci.php http://www.goldenrice.org/Content2-How/how1_sci.php It's not as simple as just putting the first genes into the plant, there is an optimization process needed. The regulatory costs however are at least 10-20 times greater than the development costs.
primroot 11y ago
Do you know any rice cultivars, to which Golden Rice genes have been added without a decrease in yields in regions where Vit. A deficiency is currently a problem (e.g. the Philippines)?

mfoy_ 11y ago

Could someone please remove the anchor to the comments section?

fein 11y ago
Clean link for the interim until a mod fixes it: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-the-nutrition-out-of-our-food.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-th...
dang 11y ago
At your service, and have a (2013) as well. Btw: would it work to just strip query strings and URL anchors out of NYT URLs? It would be nice if it did, but I don't want to break any stories.
- tedunangst 11y ago
  Afaik, nothing after .html affects the content. It's just for tracking, but it leads to a dozen variants for the same page.
  - dang 11y ago
    Maybe we'll take a random sample of recent NYT posts to HN and see if that's true of them.

Nux 11y ago

Every bloody vegetable and fruit in the supermarket is selected for appearance and sweetness. The bigger and sweeter, the better. We'll end up eating sugar on a piece of cardboard, because that's where nutritional values are going. It's really hard to eat properly, I don't see how it can be done without growing your own.

bkmartin 11y ago
And do you have any research to back up your claim that those vegetables and fruits are less nutritious than ugly ones? That the amount of nutrients differs in a statistically significant way to produce negative health outcomes? Saying it doesn't make it a fact, we need good research to get to that. And, from what I can see, the research just isn't there. If people were just plain better at eating less processed sugars and better at eating more whole foods like fruits, vegetables, and even meats there would be greater improvements in health. What good are the super nutritious vegetables if no one eats them?
- amalag 11y ago
  It is common sense that plants are bred for their ability to sell, not nutritional value. If a commercial grower had to choose between a fruit with a long shelf life and a nutritious one, which one will he pick?
  - evgen 11y ago
    False dichotomy. There are many variables at play and nutrition is not necessarily the loser on any particular selection choice.
- jdmichal 11y ago
  To further emphasis your point, it's not like growers have magical tomato plants that don't make ugly tomatoes. They get loads of ugly tomatoes, which then get sent to be turned into canned tomatoes, or jarred tomato sauce, or V8, or any number of other pre-processed applications. But selling directly to the consumer yields the highest price per unit, so of course that's where the best stock goes.

sp332 11y ago

If phytonutrients are so good, why does the article repeatedly recommend cooking the plants? The fastest way to degrade those chemicals is to expose them to heat.

noondip 11y ago
That's not true for all plants. For example, cooking can boost the absorption of the phytonutrient beta-carotene in carrots. Artichokes, beets, and onions can also be boiled without losing antioxidants. Microwaved green beans are actually more nutritious than raw green beans. Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1750-3841.2009.01091.x/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1750-3841.2009....
- sp332 11y ago
  Carotenoids I knew, but I thought they were the exception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytochemical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytochemical "The main cause of phytochemical loss from cooking is thermal decomposition."

manachar 11y ago

"Were the people who foraged for these wild foods healthier than we are today? They did not live nearly as long as we do, but growing evidence suggests that they were much less likely to die from degenerative diseases, even the minority who lived 70 years and more. The primary cause of death for most adults, according to anthropologists, was injury and infections." There are two ways to interpret this "growing evidence". One approach, favored by this author, is to say their old wild diet was healthier and therefor those eating in such a fashion were less likely to get degenerative diseases. The other approach is to say they died too young from injury, starvation, or infections. Had they lived longer they too might have contracted more of our degenerative diseases. I strongly suspect lifestyle may have played more of a role than diet alone. The modern sedentary lifestyle with enormous quantities of extra calories at our fingertips is quite a recent invention of humanity. Getting more nutrients back into our food is good. So too would be to increase the variety of foods we eat (monoculture seems to not be healthy for the environment or our bodies). But I suspect the biggest gains in well-being will come from rethinking how we apportion our days and incorporate more physical activity and leisure time into them.

harshreality 11y ago
I mostly agree, except... > The other approach is to say they died too young from injury, starvation, or infections. Had they lived longer they too might have contracted more of our degenerative diseases. This is a stretch. Those people who were lucky enough not to die of communicable diseases or predators just happened to be the ones genetically superior in the sense that they didn't suffer as much from degenerative diseases? I doubt it. The lifestyle (plenty of exercise, and not eating too much, or too much processed/extracted foods like sugar and hydrogenated oils in everything) theory is much stronger. I don't doubt, though, that some nutrients have been bred out of crops inadvertently while domesticating them (making them easier to grow, breeding variants that produce more food, making the color or taste more appealing). And some less common varieties of crops are probably closer to the pre-domesticated varieties and are therefore healthier.
- ZeroFries 11y ago
  You misunderstood him. You can't die from alzheimer's at 80 if you died from malaria at 72, is what he's saying.

Elrac 11y ago

The article informs us that anthocyanins are good against cancer and a slew of other illnesses. However, what little research about the antioxidant properties of anthocyanins exists is based on in vitro studies, and it's well known that anthocyanins are at least for the most part unlikely to survive being digested. The article informs us that "one species of apple has a staggering 100 times more phytonutrients than [Golden Delicious]." There are thousands of different phytonutrients, and no edible plant has no phytonutrients, so exactly what is this figure telling us? 100 times more of a certain nutrient? 100 times more different varieties? 100 times more by total weight? I guess we need to buy the author's upcoming book to find out, if at all. This doesn't look like any kind of evidence-based complaint about the deficiencies of modern food; it looks like the kind of pseudoscience used to promote unnecessary supplements and overpriced organic food. And feel-good books about medicating yourself by a judicious choice of the "right" foods. The author feeds our fears but not our appetite for real, credible information.

mfoy_ 11y ago
And the linked-to comment section is full of FUD as well, in case you were looking for an after-meal fear digestive.
scott_s 11y ago
Agreed. My skepty-sense goes off the moment I hear the word "superfood". Steven Novella on the idea: First, the idea of “superfood” itself is not valid. There is no magical combination of nutrients that make a food into a “superfood” where it will start to have fabulous benefits. Food is just food. It also doesn’t really matter how you get your nutrients, as long as you get enough in reasonable proportions. The best way to accomplish this is to eat a variety of foods and make sure you get enough fruits and vegetables. This includes avoiding an excess of certain kinds of food and an excess of overall calories. There is no “zone,” however, where proportion of nutrients turns food into anything other than food, that will boost your immune system (which itself is a problematic idea) or shift your metabolism into some sort of optimal state. There is no science behind any of these ideas, but they do sound satisfying to the scientifically illiterate. In short – there is no such thing as a “superfood.” From http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/human-breast-milk-the-new-superfood http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/human-breast-mi...

mrxd 11y ago

The nutritional value of plants in their raw state is less interesting than what people actually eat. The original plants require a lot more processing and cooking to turn them into food, which destroys many of the nutrients. For example, crabapples are very sour and have to be boiled to make something edible, blue corn must be ground into flour and cooked. Is that better or worse than eating raw Gala apples or raw or steamed sweet corn? > The more palatable our fruits and vegetables became, however, the less advantageous they were for our health. We don't know that. It's possible that breeding more edible plants reduced the need for nutrient-destroying processing, so the net effect was better, not worse nutrition.

hinkley 11y ago

There are groups working to fix this. Around the world there are several breeding programs that are doing genetic and trait testing of wild varieties of our food plants and trying to use selective breeding plus dna testing to breed traits back into our proverbially cross-eyed knock-kneed commercial seeds, not unlike how the man who 'saved' the Irish Wolfhound crossbred mastiffs and Danes to strengthen the inbred bloodline. I know there's a group working with carrots, and another one that's looking at wild rice to breed a more nutrient dense and drought tolerant rice strain, to answer questions like "could we have gotten vitamin A into rice without using transgenic techniques ('golden rice') to do so?" There are also groups trying to breed biennial and perennial grains, to improve net yields (food minus fuel and labor inputs) and reduce topsoil degradation. You just have to know where to look and who to cheerlead for.

polskibus 11y ago

What we need is a method and implementation of testing selected piece of fruit and vegetable for actual and not averaged from ages ago nutrient content. I hope that one day it will be possible!

noondip 11y ago
A simple test for the quality of produce can be done with a refractometer, or a so-called Brix meter.

mschuster91 11y ago

Another thing that has impacted average human life time is peace. We have enjoyed 60 years without war on the European main continent, with no destruction or contamination of food sources. Go back in history and all you'll find is death everywhere. Epidemics (pest, cholera), decades-long wars with despicable tactics as "scorched/salted earth", natural disasters without a way for people to defend themselves (earthquakes, floods, volcano eruptions). Now that we can control most of these factors, it's natural that life expectancy rises.

nradov 11y ago
What do you consider to be the European main continent? There were significant wars not long ago in former Yugoslavia. There's a war going on in Ukraine right now.

bitwize 11y ago

I was expecting him to quote the old saw about how a hundred years ago a single bowl of spinach could supply you with ALL the micronutrients you needed, while 20 years ago it took a hundred bowls to have the same nutritive value and today spinach is virtually nutrient free. Naturopaths like to toss that one about, and it comes from extraordinary rendition of various flawed data sets.

jcl 11y ago

I can't help be reminded of Jack LaLanne's two rules of nutrition: "If man made it, don't eat it", and "If it tastes good, spit it out." Of course, he was not exactly a scientist, but he's right that our sense of taste is no longer a good measure of the value of food in the modern world. It seems likely that the way we will overcome this is through education -- but wouldn't it be great if there were some way to fix our sense of taste, so that valuable phytochemicals tasted sweet, or that lead tasted bitter?