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Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

743 points by hispanic 7y ago

wil421 7y ago
The link got that actual paper is much better than a sentence or two on LinkedIn. The paper’s title isn’t as catchy to put in nicely. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/ From my link: >It is important to note that the USDA mineral content of vegetables and fruits has not been updated since 2000, and perhaps even longer, given that the data for 1992 was not able to be definitively confirmed for this review. I’d like to see if it’s improved recently. Healthy foods and organics are more readily available now.
- opportune 7y ago
  If organic food actually had a noticeably higher mineral count than nonorganic, I would start eating it. But I don’t see why organic food would actually have more minerals. Organic doesn’t mean healthier it just means that it uses different kinds of pesticides, to my knowledge
  - pasabagi 7y ago
    Presumably, using natural fertilizers would make a difference, as you'd expect a wider range of minerals than in straight haber-process fertilizer. I don't know if natural fertilizers are always a requirement for organic food, though.
    - jjoonathan 7y ago
      If this is actually a problem, I'd much rather someone figure out which minerals need to go into the fertilizer mix (plus some downstream monitoring) than to assume that putting poop on the vegetables makes them wholesome.
      - spenczar5 7y ago
        Why do you prefer that? I don’t particularly care either way, so blanket-preferring man-made chemical fertilizers strikes me as odd.
        jjoonathan 7y ago
        Preferring measurability strikes you as odd?
        oh_sigh 7y ago
        You can't miss what you can't measure.
      - all_usernames 7y ago
        Ten thousand years of agriculture is an assumption?
        jjoonathan 7y ago
        People have put up with a lot of shit -- literal and metaphorical -- over the last ten thousand years. I don't understand the assumption that it simply must be better than anything chemistry has to offer, and I find the aversion to measurement and control inherently suspicious.
        phs318u 7y ago
        > I find the aversion to ... control inherently suspicious. Interesting. Could you please expand on that? Personally, I find the desire to control inherently suspicious.
        jnbiche 7y ago
        I'd assume he/she means control in the engineering sense of the word: testing and inspecting. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/control https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/control Merriam Webster says that meaning (definition 1a) of the word "control" is archaic, but I still hear it used from time to time. It's commonly used in a number of European languages.
  - LamaOfRuin 7y ago
    https://www.ams.usda.gov/publications/content/introduction-organic-practices https://www.ams.usda.gov/publications/content/introduction-o... >Soil Fertility: Crops more easily resist disease, survive drought, and tolerate insects when grown in good soil. Organic crop producers build soil quality by adding compost, animal manures, or green manures. As soil organisms break down these inputs, they convert nutrients into forms plants can absorb and create humus that sustains soil quality. Organic producers must not apply sewage sludge or biosolids to soil. Additionally, organic crop producers use cover crops to protect the soil from wind and water erosion. Soil-conserving practices include the use of cover crops, mulches, conservation tillage, contour plowing, and strip cropping.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      There is nothing about organic that means it builds soil. Conventional farmers are adapting the same practices. In many cases conventional farming with "chemicals" does better: because of roundup a cover crop can be applied much easier - you can kill it when you are done vs having to plow it up (plowing is a horrible thing to do to soil). I find it amusing they separate "sewage sludge" from manure as if they are not the same thing.
      - throwaway66920 7y ago
        They are not the same thing. Manure is animal poop. Sewage sludge is the output of our sewers. Despite our best efforts to filter this, there is a lot more than poop in there. Heavy metals, drugs, etc.
        briantakita 7y ago
        While there are many benefits to unfettered trade, a downside is lack of quality control of the inputs into the system. Garbage in, Garbage out...
  - wil421 7y ago
    I think you’re forgetting about fertilizer. You can’t spray the common green fertilizer on Organic crops. Some organic fertilizers I’ve used at my home garden: bone meal, blood meal, fish emulsion and egg shell.
  - legulere 7y ago
    Slower growth through less fertilizer (including CO2), leads to a higher mineral rate if I remember correctly
    - foofoo55 7y ago
      Minerals need to be in the ground before they can get into the plant. The depletion of soil & vegetable quality has been going on for years. This isn't the first study on the topic by a long shot. [1] [1] - https://www.vitacost.com/blog/food-nutrition/nutrition/how-is-soil-depletion-affecting-your-food.html https://www.vitacost.com/blog/food-nutrition/nutrition/how-i...
    - koolba 7y ago
      That sounds reasonable if the absorption rate is not uniform. Any source for this?
    - lightedman 7y ago
      No, bioavailability of the nutrient is the only real thing that matters when it comes to fertilizers. Most organic fertilizers are not as bioavailable as even the most basic hydroponic fertilizer.
  - all_usernames 7y ago
    Organic farming includes crop rotation, fertilizer, soil quality, and erosion control standards that would hypothetically affect mineral contents. Monoculture (conventional corn or soybean for example) uses huge amounts of synthetic fertilizer to increase yields per acre far beyond what the soil can naturally sustain. Wide swaths of American farmland has lost literally feet of topsoil over the past 50 years. The soil is largely sterile, and depleted of minerals. Monoculture also means the ecosystem that can replenish the soil is absent.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      Farming has changed since the dust bowl of the 1930s. Soil has been lost, but conservation factors have been found. Farmers are now building topsoil. We can only build top soil by about 1mm/year so it takes a long time to get any measurable change (vs the rate of loss which was much higher).
    - all_usernames 7y ago
      Can't imagine why this was downvoted.
      - colechristensen 7y ago
        Because it is inaccurate.
        phs318u 7y ago
        Please point out the inaccuracies.
    - wil421 7y ago
      Corn and soybeans are most definitely rotated. Peanuts are a common nitrogen fixer and Alfalfa is great too. >This crop rotation benefits both alfalfa and wheat/barley/corn. On the one hand, cereals tend to decrease the development of weeds, leaving the field free for the alfalfa cultivation. On the other hand, there are findings suggesting that corn following alfalfa yields approximately 10% more than corn following corn.[1] [1]https://wikifarmer.com/alfalfa-crop-rotation/ https://wikifarmer.com/alfalfa-crop-rotation/
  - simonsarris 7y ago
    Adjacent: Butter/milk from grass-fed cows has a noticeably better amino acid profile https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10531600/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10531600/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7905466/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7905466/
    - oh_sigh 7y ago
      This makes sense, because grass and the alternatives(probably corn/oat meal) don't have the same nutritional profile. A more apt comparison might be whether cows which get sprayed with a manufactured anti-fly compound have a different nutritional profile than cows that are sprayed with, say, lavendar oil to keep the flies away.
    - taurath 7y ago
      The biggest difference in food I’ve ever seen is eggs from pasture raised chickens vs farmed ones - it’s night and day.
  - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
    Organic particularly means "no roundup". Non-organic crops tend to be round-up resistant strains. If the seed engineers for said strains weren't being careful, they could have affected other aspects of the seed's physiology while selecting for round-up resistance. One concrete example is how certain modern strains of apple seeds have weaker dormancy, causing imbibing and radicand emergence to occur prematurely, usually before the apple is even eaten. Such changes are an unintended consequence of human selection for size. It's possible that the tinkering required to increase plant vigor in the presence of non-organic pesticides has a greater adverse effect on mineral content. Though there are lots of other variables to consider as well such as soils, fertilizers, storage and transportation, the positioning of plants, whether they are able to share nutrients.
  - AlanYx 7y ago
    "But I don’t see why organic food would actually have more minerals." It could be the opposite too. There's some evidence that, in some cases, purely hydroponic greenhouse-grown produce, which often qualifies and is sold as "organic", has fewer nutrients than soil-grown produce.
  - Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y ago
    It's going to be very much case-by-case. 'Organic' is a very big tent, with lots of different practices. Some is, as you say, quite conventional but with different chemical use. But organic can also incorporate other sustainable farming practices that are more likely to result in real differences.
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    I expect organic food to have a substantially lower mineral count. Organic farming uses a lot more tillage than conventional farming does.
  - porknubbins 7y ago
    Thats the legal requirement for organic but I’ve noticed it varies a lot in other aspects depending in the food. In US supermarkets standard food is generally big ag, bland, commodity level junk. I think organic has now become a byword for a subset of consumers who want to opt out of our low quality US food system and are willing to pay to do that. For example organic chicken seems to me to be often a different (smaller, better tasting) breed, free range, not water frozen, better packaged etc, not just organic, so that overall it is healthier in a variety of ways.
- mshroyer 7y ago
  > Healthy foods and organics are more readily available now. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that "organic" foods are more nutritious than conventionally farmed foods: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19640946 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19640946
  - wil421 7y ago
    I’d like to see a study where they actually take crops and determine the mineral content. The one you reference is a paper where they combed other papers until they found data they wanted. They went through 50k+ studies, found 167 they liked, and only 55 of 167 were of quality. >No evidence of a difference was detected for the remaining 8 of 11 crop nutrient categories analyzed. Not sure how to interpret this.
    - jessriedel 7y ago
      > They went through 50k+ studies, found 167 they liked, and only 55 of 167 were of quality. That is how meta analyses are meant to be performed. This is a heck of a lot better than listening to one study that you like.
  - khawkins 7y ago
    If the soil has been depleted of nutrients like magnesium, I'd bet that practices which largely shun fertilizers are going to exacerbate any problem in this regard.
  - oh_sigh 7y ago
    why would one expect thst? How would the method you choose to keep insects and other pests off of your produce affect the contents of the produce? I can understand organic food having less "inorganic" pesticide in it, but I don't see why the other contents of the product itself would differ.
- jryan49 7y ago
  Why not just add minerals to our fertilizers? Organics is such a regression after the green revolution (which has saved billions of lives).
  - bbarnett 7y ago
    https://farmingfirst.org/2011/01/selenium-fortified-fertilizers-in-finland/ https://farmingfirst.org/2011/01/selenium-fortified-fertiliz... Apparently Finland made it mandatory, and it worked.
  - aitchnyu 7y ago
    Chuckled. HN taught me that nitrogen fixing used to be a natural bottleneck to human population growth and factory-made nitrates made calories cheaper and caused a population explosion. And farming practices left the land less suitable for feeding them.
- BasDirks 7y ago
  Hoe come HN so often spends the top comment correcting Some popular outlet? Why dont we get it straight from the source?
  - Mathnerd314 7y ago
    Because submitters are lazy and HN only has two admins/moderators who can correct the link.
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  Did you miss the graph? It looks like \___. But then they have asterisks because the historical measurement methods are probably not accurate. I like one of their references, suggesting it's due to modern farming practices: https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1/article-p15.xml https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1...
- chimi 7y ago
  I used to run an organic farm experimenting with hydroponics and I did a ton of research on this. What I found, organic does not mean healthier. In fact, a larger percentage of food related illnesses are reported for organic foods than foods without the organic label, which itself is controversial and misleading. This is largely due to the types of fertilizer used. Animal waste is used to fertilize organic foods. Yes, that is a fact. Organic foods can also use BT pesticides, which are the same chemicals in GMO crops where the BT is produced inside the plant. The nutritional content also depends on many factors, including what types of fertilizers are used. Are those fertilizers available to be absorbed by the plant. It also varies by variety. Some plants, especially strawberries are better grown outside in the soil than in hydroponics. That was a rare case. I also read many studies on nutritional content of plants grown hydroponically vs organically and some studies found some varieties were more nutritional when grown organically, others when grown hydroponically. The reality is, the industry is so competitive and the studies are funded by folks with an agenda, so the data leaves me skeptical on both sides. Only 17 elements are required to grow a plant and these elements can be provided entirely through hydroponics. From my research, hydroponic vegetables, for the most part, are actually healthier for people to consume than organic vegetables according to the science, but there is a stigma that since hydroponics is produced by science and technology and the industrial farming complex that it is worse for our bodies. The research indicates though that hydroponic plants can more easily absorb nutrients, they are healthier and better able to resist fungus and insects, so not only are they more nutritious, but they don't need fungicides, pesticides or herbicides to be sprayed on them. Plus, plants can actually absorb salmonella and other bacteria into the plant from composted manure, which even when washed can still infect the human gut.
  - wil421 7y ago
    Hydroponics can’t scale like industrial farming. Our farming practices need to improve to make industrial farming sustainable. My own foray into hydroponics has been lack luster. Lettuce didn’t taste as good and it’s much more maintenance. I can setup water timers and fertilize every x weeks in my garden. You have to constantly check hydro and put chemicals in it very often. Too labor intensive.
    - 7y ago
- philipkglass 7y ago
  Thanks for linking to the original source. The original source appears quite dubious, for reasons detailed below. The eye-catching graph reproduced on the LinkedIn post is Figure 2 in this paper you linked, "Challenges in the Diagnosis of Magnesium Status." It is labeled as "The average mineral content of calcium, magnesium, and iron in cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach." Note that 3 of the 7 data points -- including the two highest points -- are marked with asterisks as "numbers could not be independently verified." Excluding the asterisked points, there is one measurement in 1948 at around 200 mg and then 3 measurements in 2000, 2004, and 2018 all of which look similarly low -- I eyeball them as around 25 mg. The oldest non-asterisked value is from 1948, cited as Firman Bear. Ash and Mineral Cation Content of Vegetables. Soil Sci. Soc. Am. Proc. 1948;13:380–384. The actual paper is here: https://dl.sciencesocieties.org/publications/sssaj/abstracts/13/C/SS01300C0380/preview https://dl.sciencesocieties.org/publications/sssaj/abstracts... Sadly, it appears to be in a journal old/obscure enough that sci-hub does not properly retrieve the full text of the article. The results appear to be from a report commonly cited as the "Bear Report," numbers reproduced here: https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/phosphorus.php https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/phosphorus.php https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/ash.php https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/ash.php (See also https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/ https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/ for a top level overview of the report.) What is the value plotted in Figure 2? It does not correspond to the sum of iron, calcium, and magnesium across any of {cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, spinach}. Taking a guess, it looks closest to the highest reported value for spinach in magnesium (203.9 mg in the Bear report). Note however that the lowest value for magnesium in spinach in the Bear report is 46.9 mg. Whatever is being plotted here, it's also not an average. Now take a look at the citation for the modern numbers in spinach: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/11457?fgcd=&manu=&format=&count=&max=25&offset=&sort=default&order=asc&qlookup=spinach&ds=&qt=&qp=&qa=&qn=&q=&ing= https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/11457?fgcd=&manu=&fo... It reports an average of 79 mg of magnesium, 99 mg of calcium, and 2.71 mg of iron. There is no single nutrient number or sum of numbers that makes sense as the value plotted in Figure 2 of "Challenges in the Diagnosis of Magnesium Status." Figure 2 shows a number that I eyeball as around 25 mg for the modern (2000 and later) measurements. The eye-catching claim of "estimates that the mineral content of vegetables has declined by as much as 80–90% in the last 100 years", buttressed by Figure 2 and apparently valid citations, seems to fall apart once you actually look at the citations. Why would authors put so much effort into making such a confused, thinly supported claim? 2 out of 3 authors, including the first author, are employees of the Balchem Corporation. Their paper helpfully suggests that low serum magnesium levels "could warrant a medication change or dietary recommendations to increase intake of raw vegetables with higher magnesium content and reducing soda and processed food consumption with low or no magnesium and/or recommending magnesium supplements." (My emphasis.) Balchem Corporation sells supplements to supply magnesium, calcium, and iron: https://www.balchem.com/our-products/ https://www.balchem.com/our-products/ What about the third author, Robert P. Doyle? He is an apparently legitimate professor at Syracuse University. Here's his faculty page: http://thecollege.syr.edu/people/faculty/pages/chem/Doyle-Robert.html http://thecollege.syr.edu/people/faculty/pages/chem/Doyle-Ro... He links to this full list of his publications from his faculty page: http://thecollege.syr.edu/people/faculty/pages/chem/Doyle-Robert.html http://thecollege.syr.edu/people/faculty/pages/chem/Doyle-Ro... This paper, "Challenges in the Diagnosis of Magnesium Status," is not listed among them. In fact, scanning over the titles of his listed papers, I don't see anything mentioning magnesium, nutrition, or soil in his publication history. Did the Balchem authors get some preliminary involvement from an actual professor and then add his name to the paper to confer legitimacy? Did the professor consider the final result so low-quality that he didn't want it listed even in his "full" publication list? This paper has many problems that you can see just by trying to reconcile its Figure 2 with its corresponding citations, and other circumstantially suspicious factors. I would not put much stock in it.
testfoobar 7y ago
Soil depletion: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an... I have a friend who refers to vitamins as "expensive pee". He means taking vitamin pills when you eat a good diet containing fruits and veg is unnecessary because your body will excrete out the excess. I like to point out to him that fruits and veg are not what they used to be.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Don't forget meat has absolutely tons of essential nutrients and vitamins, some of which can't be found in fruits and vegetables.
  - fucking_tragedy 7y ago
    I wouldn't doubt that meat suffers from similar nutrient deficiencies. After all, livestock are fed from the same supply chain.
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      Cows are still fed grass. Over 90% of their diet even in grain-finished beef is grass. Chicken and pork I can't speak to as much.
      - exhilaration 7y ago
        In American feed lots? That's not what I read in the Omnivore's Dilemma. It was the opposite actually.
        thomas11 7y ago
        In feed lots they're fed grain, but that's only the last few months of their life. That's why it's called grain-finished rather than grain-fed.
  - 7y ago
elmar 7y ago
Well there are some that say that minerals on vegetables are not bio-available for the human digestive system, so in the end doesn't make a lot of difference.
- dean177 7y ago
  This is nonsense. Perhaps you mean something like “less bio-available compared to...”
  - elmar 7y ago
    I phrased it incorrectly, you are spot on "much less bio-available when compared with animal products"
    - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
      We feed plant products to our animal products. If the plants are not nutritious, animal products become more expensive. I don't think animal products will prevent wealthier people from being priced out of their necessary nutrition.
      - jeremyw 7y ago
        It's better to think of the long-term cycle. Ruminants in regenerative management, for instance, increase the richness of the soil over time. Whereas it's very hard to do that with crops.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  > some that say who?
  - elmar 7y ago
    For example people following the Carnivore diet.
krumpet 7y ago
Read The Omnivore's Dilemma. Do it now.
- mnorton 7y ago
  not sure why this would get downvoted
  - CrazyStat 7y ago
    It's not very helpful. Why do we need to read it? Why now? How is it related to this topic? Those answers may be obvious to someone who's already read the book. To people not familiar with the book it's a cryptic imperative.
    - krumpet 7y ago
      Ahhh, fair point. The Omnivore's Dilemma zeros in on the diminishing quality of vegetables due to some (not all) modern farming practices. I realize not everyone agrees with Michael Pollan's viewpoints, but I believe the book forces the reader to confront the food they are consuming, the system that helps deliver it to their table, and the impact on the environment and the food itself.
      - CrazyStat 7y ago
        Thanks!
  - zaroth 7y ago
    Because it’s missing context for someone who doesn’t already know about the book.
  - deleted 7y ago
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JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
Growing food has turned into an engineering problem where people think you solve it by investing the least possible resources into it. Whatever the consumer will buy and you can produce as cheaply as possible wins the day. Our tasteless vegetables are like cheap Bose (no highs, no lows, must be Bose) speakers or pressed paper furniture at Walmart. On the surface they look like a vegetable should look, but the taste, what’s inside, is completely deficient.
- fucking_tragedy 7y ago
  > Growing food has turned into an engineering problem where people think you solve it by investing the least possible resources into it. Our economic system optimizes for exactly this.
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  - mikelyons 7y ago
    What if we had one world religion where everyone's goal in life was to become infinitely loving and utterly selfless? Would we grow food for eachother differently? Would we be compensated differently for doing so?
    - jniedrauer 7y ago
      You're describing humanism. We'd probably end up looking a lot like an ant colony. Unfortunately, as a non-hivemind species, it is unlikely that we will ever have that level of cohesion.
      - mikelyons 7y ago
        I'm not actually referring to humanism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE1yPCeF1Cc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE1yPCeF1Cc
nategri 7y ago
Can we not have LinkedIn links on HN
- late2part 7y ago
  Why do you not want to have LinkedIn links on HN?
  - cwkoss 7y ago
    Besides the annoying UX, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman organized several parties to introduce Jeffrey Epstein (child sex trafficker) to other rich and powerful people. The extent of his involvement with Epstein's child sex traffic ring is still under investigation.
  - nategri 7y ago
    Clicking on a LinkedIn link evokes the same "unpredictable behavior" paranoia/stress reaction as a url for a site that peddles game ROMs or guitar tabs.
    - khawkins 7y ago
      Ever since I realized they will inform users directly of who's looking at their profile my trust in the platform plummeted.
  - lucb1e 7y ago
    Not GP, but I also didn't click the link because it goes to linkedin. My motivation is that they are very similar to Facebook in tracking, walled-gardenness, and I can't imagine it being a good source for anything that is not about my personal contacts' achievements. Elsewhere in the thread I read that the linkedin post is just 2 lines and that person linked the paper instead, so I guess it might be updated by mods soon.
scythe 7y ago
Isn’t this at least easy to fix? Required amounts of dietary minerals are minuscule: 50 mg iron, 15 mg zinc and less than 2 mg of the other transition metals and P. Presumably fertilizer could include trace amounts of these elements without substantial cost increases? (Ca/K/Mg are already in fertilizer.)
- cwkoss 7y ago
  I think plants may require symbiotic microbes to efficiently process some of these dietary minerals, and modern agroindustrial farming has damaged soil biodiversity and carrying capacity.
proee 7y ago
Here is a good resource on growing your own food with maximum nutrition. http://janabogs.com/ http://janabogs.com/
- deleted 7y ago
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opwieurposiu 7y ago
Another reason to roll out Enhanced Olivine Weathering, get some minerals back into the dirt. http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/olivineagainstclimatechange23.pdf http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli...
bt848 7y ago
These are normalized mass rates, ie grams per gram of plant mass. However, the mass yield per acre of cabbage has radically increased over that time period. Is it possible that a cabbage plant is capable of absorbing an absolute amount of minerals, and this is simply being diluted by ever-larger cabbages?
- carry_bit 7y ago
  The explanation I've heard is that the total mineral content is about the same, but plants are producing more carbohydrates now due to an increase in atmospheric CO2, diluting the minerals. Consequently, if humans eat according the amount of minerals in the food, the increase in carbohydrates could also explain the increase in obesity.
  - jkeuhlen 7y ago
    I don't think the lack of minerals in food explains obesity issues. In fact, I'm pretty sure we know what causes obesity. Significantly lower levels of activity and increased sugar consumption are two of the main culprits.
    - earljwagner 7y ago
      Obesity is increasing for animals - pets and even wildlife: https://psmag.com/social-justice/just-people-getting-fatter-65342 https://psmag.com/social-justice/just-people-getting-fatter-...
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- ip26 7y ago
  Ten fold larger?
newsreview1 7y ago
I want to see the study. If we are saying that average mineral content of calcium, magnesium, and iron in cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach has dropped 80–90% between 1914 and 2018, where were the subject vegetables taken from? Are we needing to look at farming methods, large agriculture process such as early harvest, soil depletion, delivery method, sun exposure, etc? And, if we are looking at findings from the USDA, Agricultural Research Service and USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, they really need to update their research. As stated by the study's author, " the USDA mineral content of vegetables and fruits has not been updated since 2000"
abledon 7y ago
weak soil makes weak food makes weak humans
NickM 7y ago
Something that has puzzled me recently: how is anyone supposed to get the daily recommended amount of potassium? If you look at foods like bananas that are supposed to be good sources of it, you still need to eat something like eleven bananas a day to get enough (according to US recommended daily intakes, anyway). At least with the minerals mentioned in this posting, you can fall back on supplements if you need to...but if you try to buy potassium supplements, the max dosage you can get over the counter is 99mg, which is only about 3% of the daily recommended intake. WTF?
- tryitnow 7y ago
  I've wondered about this too. I have no idea why people never discusses it. I suspect it's an Illuminati secret.
- lr4444lr 7y ago
  The limited amount in multivitamin/mineral supplements is actually a legal restriction, to boot.
- rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
  I eat potassium chloride (usually sold as salt substitute for people on low sodium diets) on occasion, like when fasting or working out. It has this awful, stingy metallic taste, but I’ve noticed I tend to have less fatigue and soreness from strength training afterwards. Might be placebo but YMMV.
  - 01100011 7y ago
    I have leftover potassium bicarbonate from when I was making wine. I use it as an antacid, mixing it with water. It tastes like absolute shit, a little less so if mixed with some baking soda, and does a pretty good job of helping my heartburn.
- jws 7y ago
  the max dosage you can get over the counter is 99mg This is an FDA limit on potassium chloride supplements. Too much potassium can cause heart rhythm problems and cardiac arrest. Some organizations propose 3500 to 4500mg as a daily potassium intake, and 98% of people do not eat this much potassium, and unless you are living on beans and beats you probably aren’t. Yet there isn’t a huge “get more potassium” movement. I wonder if those targets need reassessment.
Touche 7y ago
Article seems suspicious. How were these measured 100 years ago? Same techniques as today? Can we verify the 100 year old data?
buckthundaz 7y ago
Wait until everyone learns about bioavailability of nutrients with respect to type of food -- ie. Animal-based nutrition is more bioavailable than plant-based nutrients. [1] [1] - https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/633S/4690005#109811045 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/633S/4690005#1098...
- jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
  I think it's important to consider the inputs. Carnivorism is just herbivorism with more overhead. Perhaps I do need to eat ~3 times the non-heme iron to get the same level of absorption, but plant crops usually win out over cattle when it comes to scalability. Is plant iron more bioavailable to cattle animals than humans? That might tip things slightly in favor of carnivorism, however cattle does a lot more than just convert non-heme iron to heme iron and facilitating that excess resource usage may be more trouble than the heme iron is worth.
  - deepnotderp 7y ago
    I don't see why genetic engineering like the Impossible Burger can't let us have our cake and eat it too.
  - ssijak 7y ago
    Heme iron is implicated with some cancers, main reason being bioavailability where our body cant regulate it as easy as non heme iron
- ip26 7y ago
  The iron and zinc from vegetarian diets are generally less bioavailable than from nonvegetarian diets because of reduced meat intake as well as the tendency to consume more phytic acid and other plant-based inhibitors of iron and zinc absorption. However, in Western countries with varied and abundant food supplies, it is not clear that this reduced bioavailability has any functional consequences. Although vegetarians tend to have lower iron stores than omnivores, they appear to have no greater incidence of iron deficiency anemia. -- Your Link
bwb 7y ago
Does anyone know how much we can absorb? Like if we can only take in 1 out of the 50, then I don't care if its down to 10. Anyone know the science on mineral absorption?
- jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
  Someone posted a study which specifically compared bioavailability of heme iron from animals to non-heme iron from plants: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/633S/4690005#109811045 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/633S/4690005#1098... Why would low bioavailability convince you to care less about the declining minerals? Surely declining mineral content would be exacerbated by low bioavailability? How does that make things better? An 80% loss still means you have to quintuple consumption to maintain the same level of nutrients, and your agricultural resources have to scale beyond that to account for crop losses to pests and pathogens. Meat production becomes even more expensive and unsustainable. How does low bioavailability reduce the significance of this trend?
  - bwb 7y ago
    Well, but maybe an 80% loss doesn't matter as we only absorb x mg of minerals. You know? This might not matter for humans if we don't know how much we can absorb, it might not be a percentile but rather than a cap and we pee or poop the rest out.
    - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
      I see what you're saying now, thanks for clarifying. I'm not sure how much nutrition people need in general. Perhaps we're still getting a surplus of nutrients at the current volume of food consumption, despite the loss of minerals. I am fearful of food unsecurity and malnutrition.
      - bwb 7y ago
        Ya me too on malnutrition and food desserts. Americans eat so few veggies and we are still living for a long time. And for rich Americans who match Japanese longevity, this doesn't seen to be hurting us. Like if we all had scurvy and were bleeding from the gums by age 19 I'd be worried more :) Or maybe it is what is spiking auto immune diseases or something weird.
AngryData 7y ago
I don't think this is new or that unexpected, but it should be talked about. We use to breed plants based on both taste and size, taste being altered significantly by mineral contents. Currently, we mostly only breed plants based on weight, taste doesn't factor into it, and increasing sugars and starches increases weight far better than any mineral count. Heirloom plants are generally considered luxury products and since they don't have as large of yields, aren't a good competition against commercial plants, despite the fact that most people agree heirloom plants taste better and usually have higher mineral counts. Now I don't know how much the the growing medium effects this, our topsoil is getting thinner and is fed primarily on 'purified' artificial fertilizers, and heirloom plants are far more likely to be home garden or 'organically' grown, but im willing to bet plant genetics play a much bigger role in mineral contents than anyone wants to admit. It would be another hit to the idea that current farming practices are sustainable long term and nobody wants to admit that.
- lightedman 7y ago
  "increasing sugars and starches increases weight far better than any mineral count" No, increasing bioavailable silica content (like potassium silicate addition) increases weight far more than any starch or sugar could possibly do.
- Merrill 7y ago
  Plants are also bred so that they can be picked before they are fully ripe and survive a multi-day trip to the grocery shelves of a supermarket. This may be less important for vegetables that go from field to cannery or freezers, so canned or frozen might be a better choice than fresh vegetables.
tastyfreeze 7y ago
This happened due to extermination of soil life through modern farming practices of heavy tilling, fertilizing and monoculture crops. Dead soil is more susceptible to erosion and requires ever increasing amounts of synthetic fertilizer to grow anything. More soil has been lost from the US than the amount of food that has been produced. Soil fertility can be returned to historical levels by changing farming practices to make living soil. The benefits of treating the soil as a living organism include increased fertility, water infiltration, moisture retention, and nutrient availability as well as decreasing or eliminating synthetic fertilizer requirements. https://theweek.com/articles/554677/america-running-soil https://theweek.com/articles/554677/america-running-soil This is a long video but it has completely changed my home gardening practices. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
- dv_dt 7y ago
  Healthier soil may also capture carbon. There are many reasons to look at optimization of farming and food production for a whole range of concerns beyond profits. The question is how to broadly incentivize and fund those concerns - reinvigorating agricultural dept programs with a wider focus at a federal and state level is one way to do that; others would likely come up under a Green New Deal type framework too. https://e360.yale.edu/features/soil_as_carbon_storehouse_new_weapon_in_climate_fight https://e360.yale.edu/features/soil_as_carbon_storehouse_new...
  - tastyfreeze 7y ago
    Aside from a few farmers that are motivated by ideology, profit is the only motivation that will change practices. I have recently been researching biochar(biologically charged charcoal). Use of biochar is a form of carbon sequestration that reduces nutrient leaching and provides immense surface area for bacterial and fungal life to thrive in soil.
    - samvher 7y ago
      Yeah biochar is very interesting. We definitely shouldn't massively start using it in the short term though - its effects are not so well understood. Most "knowledge" is based on terra preta, Amazonian dark soil which is hundreds of years old and man-made with charcoal, pottery shards, bones and other organic matter. There have been field trials but many of them by biochar organizations/companies who might not be completely objective and once we put it in the soil we can't really take it out anymore. I think the evidence suggests that turning waste into biochar and applying it to fields at a local scale has a lot of potential. Growing trees for the purpose of biochar might be a different story (this has many of the downsides of biofuel production).
algaeontoast 7y ago
It'd be cool to see a comparison of common top-grade "organic produce" compared with produce from a farmers market and that grown from someone's own backyard. Granted, with a measure of time from harvest to measurement of mineral content.
throwaway66920 7y ago
It’s fine, we’ll make up for it with microplastics
dcolkitt 7y ago
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. High iron consumption appears to be at the nexus of a vast array of diseases from colon cancer to Alzheimer's. As for Calcium there's really no evidence of it strengthening bones. And high consumption is probably causally increases CVD mortality. [1] http://nautil.us/issue/67/reboot/iron-is-the-new-cholesterol http://nautil.us/issue/67/reboot/iron-is-the-new-cholesterol [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h4580 https://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h4580 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3336363/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3336363/
hcarvalhoalves 7y ago
Our increase in food production comes at the expense of fertilisers, pesticides, soil depletion and water poisoning. We are feeding the world alright, but on empty calories. Was Malthus right after all?
jonplackett 7y ago
New health campaign message: remember to eat your 50 portions of fruit and veg a day.
dwg 7y ago
Has it really? I thought it would be useful to share a paper from the opposing viewpoint, which argues the opposite of the conclusions you might first arrive at from looking at this chart... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889157516302113#tbl0005 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915751... (Mineral nutrient composition of vegetables, fruits and grains: The context of reports of apparent historical declines, published in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis March 2017). As a non-expert I have no opinion as to which viewpoint is correct. However, as usual the issue is more complex than that...
Merrill 7y ago
When crops are removed from the land, more complex fertilizers must be used to replace the minerals. A good example is sulfur. The sulfur removed had been replenished by acid rain. Once scrubbers were applied to remove sulfur from coal plant emissions, farmers needed to monitor and replenish sulfur levels by sulfur fertilizer. "Seeking high yields, the reduction of acid rain and the need for sulfur" - https://www.farmprogress.com/management/seeking-high-yields-reduction-acid-rain-and-need-sulfur https://www.farmprogress.com/management/seeking-high-yields-... The bottom line is that agriculture is mining, and any elements that are removed in crops must be replaced. Adequate sulfur levels are particularly important to cruciferous vegetables.
patientplatypus 7y ago
As I said in a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20799295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20799295 --- *-4 points by patientplatypus 18 days ago | parent | favorite | on: The Next Recession Will Be About Sovereign Debt The next recession will be caused by poor crop yields due to environmental destruction. It will also cause famines and wars globally. --- We have maybe one or two years left, up to five maybe if we're lucky, until the entire social system collapses. It will be dark and sad and scary. I'm sorry you guys.
jnbiche 7y ago
The graph of male testosterone levels looks very similar to this one. I'm not suggesting there's necessarily a correlation between the two, but modern life is taking its toll on our health. Life expectancy may be longer in present times, but quality of life is in some ways lower (a notable exception to that is the status of even relatively minor infections, which were frequently fatal in pre-modern life).
legohead 7y ago
calcium and magnesium? that sounds familiar...the two main minerals that water softeners remove. could this be related to water filtration/softening that farmers may be using? (I don't know if they actually use filtration or not). I imagine they'd want to use softeners, as it would increase the lifespan of irrigation equipment.
blondie9x 7y ago
Almost impossible to eat healthy these days. Even if you think you’re eating healthy you might not be. We aren’t getting as many probiotics, minerals, and vitamins from fruits and vegetables. This is terribly unfortunate. We need to find a way to use land more effectively and give our soil and plants enough time to establish themselves so the nutrition content is sufficient and normalized. A solution might be less land for herding cattle and more land for planting vegetables and fruits that might take more time to cultivate.
viburnum 7y ago
The is the flip side of the green revolution, which basically bred plants to grow big and fast if you dump a lot of fertilizer made from fossil fuels on them. More carbs and less of everything else. I know people love Norman Borlaug but not everything is as nice as you’d like it to be.
aaron695 7y ago
No one cares the graph has no labels, or is this the state of food science.... All the minerals went down at exactly the same rates huh? FYI the * means unverified. The original article is not g eat but does bring up an interesting point on magnesium.
amelius 7y ago
Perhaps a silly question but doesn't a plant require all these minerals to grow?
mathattack 7y ago
Original article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/
Axsuul 7y ago
FYI: The iron within meat is much more bioavailable to your body
enz 7y ago
If you understand French, you can take a look at Claude and Lydia Bourguignon’s work about soil health.
colinmegill 7y ago
I worked on a bio-intensive organic farm in Washington State via https://wwoofinternational.org/ https://wwoofinternational.org/. This was one of the articles that got passed around: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129629752 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129629... Volunteering there was the first time I realized strawberries were red all the way through and incredibly dense with flavor, since they were allowed to ripen naturally and benefit from richly amended soil full of microbes.
dghughes 7y ago
Derek from Vertasium on YouTbe has a nice explanation. Even showing how the nutrient levels in weed specimens are also falling. The weeds were collected by researchers over the last 100 or more years. The weeds were vital because it showed it wasn't limited to farming practices it's all plants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl_K2Ata6XY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl_K2Ata6XY
cryptopeeper 7y ago
My chiropractor warned me about this. He said everyone is deficient in vitamins and minerals because of our food. He suggested an extreme pill popping routine, which was difficult to do. Does anyone agree with this approach? I was taking so many vitamins it made me feel sick. I can't remember the name of the routine, but I researched it online. I think it was used to treat schizophrenia.
dr_dshiv 7y ago
Fascinating discussion, just noticed the article is about magnesium deficiency. Magnesium pills! I love those things. The only supplement I take, because it gives such a direct brain-fog lifting effect and makes me poo good. Real good. A must before international travel.
- pinkfoot 7y ago
  Magnesium is also essential for peristalsis. :)
m0zg 7y ago
Makes sense: we're getting like 5x the yields per area of land. Something has to give.
igammarays 7y ago
I’ve been living in Ukraine for the past few months, trying to figure out why the food here, especially the vegetables, simply taste so good. The very same dishes (e.g. steak and veggies) from popular mid-range restaurants are far more enjoyable to me over here in Kiev than I ever ate in Canada. When I went back to Canada for a brief visit, my body was craving Ukrainian food. Now this study on vegetable mineral content may explain why. I’m very keen to see a comparison study on Eastern European agriculture and produce versus North American. Ukraine was once the “breadbasket” of the Soviet Union, so there must be an explanation. Ukrainians who migrate to other countries are often said to complain about a loss in food taste - previously I assumed that was just some form of homesickness, but this study lends some potential scientific ground to their complaints.
- krn 7y ago
  > I’ve been living in Ukraine for the past few months, trying to figure out why the food here, especially the vegetables, simply taste so good. I had exactly the same feeling when I was living in Lviv and buying vegetables from the local Farmers Market[1] to cook at home. It seems that Ukrainians are still growing vegetables like their grandparents did in the 1930s, as it's one of the poorest and most isolated regions of Europe. In my own post-soviet EU country, most people living outside the big cities still grow their own vegetables in their backyard[2], but more as a rewarding hobby. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI0VnuZObjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI0VnuZObjE [2] http://imgur.com/a/3afScVR http://imgur.com/a/3afScVR
- RowanH 7y ago
  Same when I moved back to New Zealand after years in Canada. The first trip to the fruit and vege store I went overboard...
- newsbinator 7y ago
  Same thing happened to me in the south of Bulgaria, just shopping at regular grocery stores. I couldn't figure out why the tomatoes tasted amazing. It's like I'd been eating tomato-flavored potatoes all my life until that moment, and now trying a real tomato for the first time.
- 7y ago
atulatul 7y ago
In India, Subhash Palekar is a name you often hear these days. He was awarded fourth highest civilian award the Padma Shri in 2016. He is a proponent of Zero Budget Natural Farming- (which some agri bodies have claimed does not work as the claims would indicate). A few links, if interested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhash_Palekar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhash_Palekar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka http://www.palekarzerobudgetspiritualfarming.org/home.aspx http://www.palekarzerobudgetspiritualfarming.org/home.aspx
martingoodson 7y ago
This is a good reason to eat organic food. The overall strength of evidence is good or moderate that, for many parameters, organic produce is superior to conventional produce.[1] [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16546628.2017.1287333 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16546628.2017.1...
jayalpha 7y ago
Old news? Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? - Because of soil depletion, crops grown decades ago were much richer in vitamins and minerals than the varieties most of us get today April 27, 2011 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...
dash2 7y ago
This is a side issue in the paper linked. The paper itself cites a more useful-seeming source: "Declining Fruit and Vegetable Nutrient Composition: What Is the Evidence?" https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1/article-p15.xml https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1... Freely available too, nice one.
DoctorOetker 7y ago
Isn't a big part of the problem that for nearly all of duration of life, all animals had their own excretion patterns? If a monkey eats a banana, and 2 days later excretes nutrients in forms it cannot use... then typically the distance between plant and and dropping is not that far. Plants also spread throughout the landscape. Birds may perform a larger diffusion work part of the time (random droppings while flying), yet a large part of the time it would eat some fruits from one type of tree, then fly to another type of tree, and leave droppings that represent a mixture of the nutrients the different types of trees had access to, but for a large part what came from trees returns to trees even if it's different types of trees. So by producing one type of fruit the tree can trade it's nutrients through birds-as-traders with other trees. Humans ban birds from trees because we want to keep the fruits to ourselves. Perhaps we are simply wasting too much of our faeces into rivers and the sea? and generally disturbing the natural transport patterns (hidden labour) performed by different types of animals. Migratory birds might trade nutrients over huge distances, which may sound ridiculous since they can't hold their droppings that long, but their bodies in general also contain nutrients, and the bird could die at either end of the migratory path.
nathan_f77 7y ago
Would it be wise for most people to take a daily multivitamin or supplement? I believe we only need trace amounts of these vitamins and minerals, so even with a 90% decline in mineral levels, it sounds like most people are still getting plenty of minerals. > 60% of adults do not achieve the average dietary intake (ADI) and 45% of Americans are magnesium deficient. I'm always a bit skeptical of claims like this, and those percentages are huge. I'm wondering why I've never heard about it before (although I'm very ignorant about a lot of things.) Are there any government efforts to make magnesium supplements widely available, or some other way to solve this problem?
bborud 7y ago
I grew up on a farm in Norway. I love how people who have never even driven a tractor suddenly know how to save the planet because they have a garden. Oh please. It's really simple: we consume more resources than the planet can reasonably sustain. And because we do not intend to stop procreating and consuming we're fucked. (No, really, we are)
dimitar 7y ago
In many countries in Eastern Europe the soil is poor in iodine, which historically meant a lot of thyroid problems. Good news is that governments mostly solved the issue by requiring table salt to contain iodine. In some countries you can still buy table salt that doesn't contain iodine ("Himalayan" and so on) but people still use the mandated kind indirectly by buying bread and cheeses made with iodine. My point is the same can be done with magnesium and other minerals, which can solve the public health aspect while the soil is restored.
ecoled_ame 7y ago
Probably cause there's a TON OF PEOPLE LIVING AND REPRODUCING. You can talk about soil depletion all you want, but you're ignoring the true problem.
stefek99 7y ago
Very interesting.

743 points by hispanic 7y ago

The link got that actual paper is much better than a sentence or two on LinkedIn. The paper’s title isn’t as catchy to put in nicely. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/ From my link: >It is important to note that the USDA mineral content of vegetables and fruits has not been updated since 2000, and perhaps even longer, given that the data for 1992 was not able to be definitively confirmed for this review. I’d like to see if it’s improved recently. Healthy foods and organics are more readily available now.

opportune 7y ago
If organic food actually had a noticeably higher mineral count than nonorganic, I would start eating it. But I don’t see why organic food would actually have more minerals. Organic doesn’t mean healthier it just means that it uses different kinds of pesticides, to my knowledge
- pasabagi 7y ago
  Presumably, using natural fertilizers would make a difference, as you'd expect a wider range of minerals than in straight haber-process fertilizer. I don't know if natural fertilizers are always a requirement for organic food, though.
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    If this is actually a problem, I'd much rather someone figure out which minerals need to go into the fertilizer mix (plus some downstream monitoring) than to assume that putting poop on the vegetables makes them wholesome.
    - spenczar5 7y ago
      Why do you prefer that? I don’t particularly care either way, so blanket-preferring man-made chemical fertilizers strikes me as odd.
      - jjoonathan 7y ago
        Preferring measurability strikes you as odd?
        oh_sigh 7y ago
        You can't miss what you can't measure.
    - all_usernames 7y ago
      Ten thousand years of agriculture is an assumption?
      - jjoonathan 7y ago
        People have put up with a lot of shit -- literal and metaphorical -- over the last ten thousand years. I don't understand the assumption that it simply must be better than anything chemistry has to offer, and I find the aversion to measurement and control inherently suspicious.
        phs318u 7y ago
        > I find the aversion to ... control inherently suspicious. Interesting. Could you please expand on that? Personally, I find the desire to control inherently suspicious.
        jnbiche 7y ago
        I'd assume he/she means control in the engineering sense of the word: testing and inspecting. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/control https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/control Merriam Webster says that meaning (definition 1a) of the word "control" is archaic, but I still hear it used from time to time. It's commonly used in a number of European languages.
- LamaOfRuin 7y ago
  https://www.ams.usda.gov/publications/content/introduction-organic-practices https://www.ams.usda.gov/publications/content/introduction-o... >Soil Fertility: Crops more easily resist disease, survive drought, and tolerate insects when grown in good soil. Organic crop producers build soil quality by adding compost, animal manures, or green manures. As soil organisms break down these inputs, they convert nutrients into forms plants can absorb and create humus that sustains soil quality. Organic producers must not apply sewage sludge or biosolids to soil. Additionally, organic crop producers use cover crops to protect the soil from wind and water erosion. Soil-conserving practices include the use of cover crops, mulches, conservation tillage, contour plowing, and strip cropping.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    There is nothing about organic that means it builds soil. Conventional farmers are adapting the same practices. In many cases conventional farming with "chemicals" does better: because of roundup a cover crop can be applied much easier - you can kill it when you are done vs having to plow it up (plowing is a horrible thing to do to soil). I find it amusing they separate "sewage sludge" from manure as if they are not the same thing.
    - throwaway66920 7y ago
      They are not the same thing. Manure is animal poop. Sewage sludge is the output of our sewers. Despite our best efforts to filter this, there is a lot more than poop in there. Heavy metals, drugs, etc.
      - briantakita 7y ago
        While there are many benefits to unfettered trade, a downside is lack of quality control of the inputs into the system. Garbage in, Garbage out...
- wil421 7y ago
  I think you’re forgetting about fertilizer. You can’t spray the common green fertilizer on Organic crops. Some organic fertilizers I’ve used at my home garden: bone meal, blood meal, fish emulsion and egg shell.
- legulere 7y ago
  Slower growth through less fertilizer (including CO2), leads to a higher mineral rate if I remember correctly
  - foofoo55 7y ago
    Minerals need to be in the ground before they can get into the plant. The depletion of soil & vegetable quality has been going on for years. This isn't the first study on the topic by a long shot. [1] [1] - https://www.vitacost.com/blog/food-nutrition/nutrition/how-is-soil-depletion-affecting-your-food.html https://www.vitacost.com/blog/food-nutrition/nutrition/how-i...
  - koolba 7y ago
    That sounds reasonable if the absorption rate is not uniform. Any source for this?
  - lightedman 7y ago
    No, bioavailability of the nutrient is the only real thing that matters when it comes to fertilizers. Most organic fertilizers are not as bioavailable as even the most basic hydroponic fertilizer.
- all_usernames 7y ago
  Organic farming includes crop rotation, fertilizer, soil quality, and erosion control standards that would hypothetically affect mineral contents. Monoculture (conventional corn or soybean for example) uses huge amounts of synthetic fertilizer to increase yields per acre far beyond what the soil can naturally sustain. Wide swaths of American farmland has lost literally feet of topsoil over the past 50 years. The soil is largely sterile, and depleted of minerals. Monoculture also means the ecosystem that can replenish the soil is absent.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Farming has changed since the dust bowl of the 1930s. Soil has been lost, but conservation factors have been found. Farmers are now building topsoil. We can only build top soil by about 1mm/year so it takes a long time to get any measurable change (vs the rate of loss which was much higher).
  - all_usernames 7y ago
    Can't imagine why this was downvoted.
    - colechristensen 7y ago
      Because it is inaccurate.
      - phs318u 7y ago
        Please point out the inaccuracies.
  - wil421 7y ago
    Corn and soybeans are most definitely rotated. Peanuts are a common nitrogen fixer and Alfalfa is great too. >This crop rotation benefits both alfalfa and wheat/barley/corn. On the one hand, cereals tend to decrease the development of weeds, leaving the field free for the alfalfa cultivation. On the other hand, there are findings suggesting that corn following alfalfa yields approximately 10% more than corn following corn.[1] [1]https://wikifarmer.com/alfalfa-crop-rotation/ https://wikifarmer.com/alfalfa-crop-rotation/
- simonsarris 7y ago
  Adjacent: Butter/milk from grass-fed cows has a noticeably better amino acid profile https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10531600/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10531600/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7905466/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7905466/
  - oh_sigh 7y ago
    This makes sense, because grass and the alternatives(probably corn/oat meal) don't have the same nutritional profile. A more apt comparison might be whether cows which get sprayed with a manufactured anti-fly compound have a different nutritional profile than cows that are sprayed with, say, lavendar oil to keep the flies away.
  - taurath 7y ago
    The biggest difference in food I’ve ever seen is eggs from pasture raised chickens vs farmed ones - it’s night and day.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
  Organic particularly means "no roundup". Non-organic crops tend to be round-up resistant strains. If the seed engineers for said strains weren't being careful, they could have affected other aspects of the seed's physiology while selecting for round-up resistance. One concrete example is how certain modern strains of apple seeds have weaker dormancy, causing imbibing and radicand emergence to occur prematurely, usually before the apple is even eaten. Such changes are an unintended consequence of human selection for size. It's possible that the tinkering required to increase plant vigor in the presence of non-organic pesticides has a greater adverse effect on mineral content. Though there are lots of other variables to consider as well such as soils, fertilizers, storage and transportation, the positioning of plants, whether they are able to share nutrients.
- AlanYx 7y ago
  "But I don’t see why organic food would actually have more minerals." It could be the opposite too. There's some evidence that, in some cases, purely hydroponic greenhouse-grown produce, which often qualifies and is sold as "organic", has fewer nutrients than soil-grown produce.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y ago
  It's going to be very much case-by-case. 'Organic' is a very big tent, with lots of different practices. Some is, as you say, quite conventional but with different chemical use. But organic can also incorporate other sustainable farming practices that are more likely to result in real differences.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  I expect organic food to have a substantially lower mineral count. Organic farming uses a lot more tillage than conventional farming does.
- porknubbins 7y ago
  Thats the legal requirement for organic but I’ve noticed it varies a lot in other aspects depending in the food. In US supermarkets standard food is generally big ag, bland, commodity level junk. I think organic has now become a byword for a subset of consumers who want to opt out of our low quality US food system and are willing to pay to do that. For example organic chicken seems to me to be often a different (smaller, better tasting) breed, free range, not water frozen, better packaged etc, not just organic, so that overall it is healthier in a variety of ways.
mshroyer 7y ago
> Healthy foods and organics are more readily available now. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that "organic" foods are more nutritious than conventionally farmed foods: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19640946 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19640946
- wil421 7y ago
  I’d like to see a study where they actually take crops and determine the mineral content. The one you reference is a paper where they combed other papers until they found data they wanted. They went through 50k+ studies, found 167 they liked, and only 55 of 167 were of quality. >No evidence of a difference was detected for the remaining 8 of 11 crop nutrient categories analyzed. Not sure how to interpret this.
  - jessriedel 7y ago
    > They went through 50k+ studies, found 167 they liked, and only 55 of 167 were of quality. That is how meta analyses are meant to be performed. This is a heck of a lot better than listening to one study that you like.
- khawkins 7y ago
  If the soil has been depleted of nutrients like magnesium, I'd bet that practices which largely shun fertilizers are going to exacerbate any problem in this regard.
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  why would one expect thst? How would the method you choose to keep insects and other pests off of your produce affect the contents of the produce? I can understand organic food having less "inorganic" pesticide in it, but I don't see why the other contents of the product itself would differ.
jryan49 7y ago
Why not just add minerals to our fertilizers? Organics is such a regression after the green revolution (which has saved billions of lives).
- bbarnett 7y ago
  https://farmingfirst.org/2011/01/selenium-fortified-fertilizers-in-finland/ https://farmingfirst.org/2011/01/selenium-fortified-fertiliz... Apparently Finland made it mandatory, and it worked.
- aitchnyu 7y ago
  Chuckled. HN taught me that nitrogen fixing used to be a natural bottleneck to human population growth and factory-made nitrates made calories cheaper and caused a population explosion. And farming practices left the land less suitable for feeding them.
BasDirks 7y ago
Hoe come HN so often spends the top comment correcting Some popular outlet? Why dont we get it straight from the source?
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  Because submitters are lazy and HN only has two admins/moderators who can correct the link.
Mathnerd314 7y ago
Did you miss the graph? It looks like \___. But then they have asterisks because the historical measurement methods are probably not accurate. I like one of their references, suggesting it's due to modern farming practices: https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1/article-p15.xml https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1...
chimi 7y ago
I used to run an organic farm experimenting with hydroponics and I did a ton of research on this. What I found, organic does not mean healthier. In fact, a larger percentage of food related illnesses are reported for organic foods than foods without the organic label, which itself is controversial and misleading. This is largely due to the types of fertilizer used. Animal waste is used to fertilize organic foods. Yes, that is a fact. Organic foods can also use BT pesticides, which are the same chemicals in GMO crops where the BT is produced inside the plant. The nutritional content also depends on many factors, including what types of fertilizers are used. Are those fertilizers available to be absorbed by the plant. It also varies by variety. Some plants, especially strawberries are better grown outside in the soil than in hydroponics. That was a rare case. I also read many studies on nutritional content of plants grown hydroponically vs organically and some studies found some varieties were more nutritional when grown organically, others when grown hydroponically. The reality is, the industry is so competitive and the studies are funded by folks with an agenda, so the data leaves me skeptical on both sides. Only 17 elements are required to grow a plant and these elements can be provided entirely through hydroponics. From my research, hydroponic vegetables, for the most part, are actually healthier for people to consume than organic vegetables according to the science, but there is a stigma that since hydroponics is produced by science and technology and the industrial farming complex that it is worse for our bodies. The research indicates though that hydroponic plants can more easily absorb nutrients, they are healthier and better able to resist fungus and insects, so not only are they more nutritious, but they don't need fungicides, pesticides or herbicides to be sprayed on them. Plus, plants can actually absorb salmonella and other bacteria into the plant from composted manure, which even when washed can still infect the human gut.
- wil421 7y ago
  Hydroponics can’t scale like industrial farming. Our farming practices need to improve to make industrial farming sustainable. My own foray into hydroponics has been lack luster. Lettuce didn’t taste as good and it’s much more maintenance. I can setup water timers and fertilize every x weeks in my garden. You have to constantly check hydro and put chemicals in it very often. Too labor intensive.
  - 7y ago
philipkglass 7y ago
Thanks for linking to the original source. The original source appears quite dubious, for reasons detailed below. The eye-catching graph reproduced on the LinkedIn post is Figure 2 in this paper you linked, "Challenges in the Diagnosis of Magnesium Status." It is labeled as "The average mineral content of calcium, magnesium, and iron in cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach." Note that 3 of the 7 data points -- including the two highest points -- are marked with asterisks as "numbers could not be independently verified." Excluding the asterisked points, there is one measurement in 1948 at around 200 mg and then 3 measurements in 2000, 2004, and 2018 all of which look similarly low -- I eyeball them as around 25 mg. The oldest non-asterisked value is from 1948, cited as Firman Bear. Ash and Mineral Cation Content of Vegetables. Soil Sci. Soc. Am. Proc. 1948;13:380–384. The actual paper is here: https://dl.sciencesocieties.org/publications/sssaj/abstracts/13/C/SS01300C0380/preview https://dl.sciencesocieties.org/publications/sssaj/abstracts... Sadly, it appears to be in a journal old/obscure enough that sci-hub does not properly retrieve the full text of the article. The results appear to be from a report commonly cited as the "Bear Report," numbers reproduced here: https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/phosphorus.php https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/phosphorus.php https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/ash.php https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/ash.php (See also https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/ https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/ for a top level overview of the report.) What is the value plotted in Figure 2? It does not correspond to the sum of iron, calcium, and magnesium across any of {cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, spinach}. Taking a guess, it looks closest to the highest reported value for spinach in magnesium (203.9 mg in the Bear report). Note however that the lowest value for magnesium in spinach in the Bear report is 46.9 mg. Whatever is being plotted here, it's also not an average. Now take a look at the citation for the modern numbers in spinach: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/11457?fgcd=&manu=&format=&count=&max=25&offset=&sort=default&order=asc&qlookup=spinach&ds=&qt=&qp=&qa=&qn=&q=&ing= https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/11457?fgcd=&manu=&fo... It reports an average of 79 mg of magnesium, 99 mg of calcium, and 2.71 mg of iron. There is no single nutrient number or sum of numbers that makes sense as the value plotted in Figure 2 of "Challenges in the Diagnosis of Magnesium Status." Figure 2 shows a number that I eyeball as around 25 mg for the modern (2000 and later) measurements. The eye-catching claim of "estimates that the mineral content of vegetables has declined by as much as 80–90% in the last 100 years", buttressed by Figure 2 and apparently valid citations, seems to fall apart once you actually look at the citations. Why would authors put so much effort into making such a confused, thinly supported claim? 2 out of 3 authors, including the first author, are employees of the Balchem Corporation. Their paper helpfully suggests that low serum magnesium levels "could warrant a medication change or dietary recommendations to increase intake of raw vegetables with higher magnesium content and reducing soda and processed food consumption with low or no magnesium and/or recommending magnesium supplements." (My emphasis.) Balchem Corporation sells supplements to supply magnesium, calcium, and iron: https://www.balchem.com/our-products/ https://www.balchem.com/our-products/ What about the third author, Robert P. Doyle? He is an apparently legitimate professor at Syracuse University. Here's his faculty page: http://thecollege.syr.edu/people/faculty/pages/chem/Doyle-Robert.html http://thecollege.syr.edu/people/faculty/pages/chem/Doyle-Ro... He links to this full list of his publications from his faculty page: http://thecollege.syr.edu/people/faculty/pages/chem/Doyle-Robert.html http://thecollege.syr.edu/people/faculty/pages/chem/Doyle-Ro... This paper, "Challenges in the Diagnosis of Magnesium Status," is not listed among them. In fact, scanning over the titles of his listed papers, I don't see anything mentioning magnesium, nutrition, or soil in his publication history. Did the Balchem authors get some preliminary involvement from an actual professor and then add his name to the paper to confer legitimacy? Did the professor consider the final result so low-quality that he didn't want it listed even in his "full" publication list? This paper has many problems that you can see just by trying to reconcile its Figure 2 with its corresponding citations, and other circumstantially suspicious factors. I would not put much stock in it.

testfoobar 7y ago

Soil depletion: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an... I have a friend who refers to vitamins as "expensive pee". He means taking vitamin pills when you eat a good diet containing fruits and veg is unnecessary because your body will excrete out the excess. I like to point out to him that fruits and veg are not what they used to be.

chrisco255 7y ago
Don't forget meat has absolutely tons of essential nutrients and vitamins, some of which can't be found in fruits and vegetables.
- fucking_tragedy 7y ago
  I wouldn't doubt that meat suffers from similar nutrient deficiencies. After all, livestock are fed from the same supply chain.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Cows are still fed grass. Over 90% of their diet even in grain-finished beef is grass. Chicken and pork I can't speak to as much.
    - exhilaration 7y ago
      In American feed lots? That's not what I read in the Omnivore's Dilemma. It was the opposite actually.
      - thomas11 7y ago
        In feed lots they're fed grain, but that's only the last few months of their life. That's why it's called grain-finished rather than grain-fed.
- 7y ago

elmar 7y ago

Well there are some that say that minerals on vegetables are not bio-available for the human digestive system, so in the end doesn't make a lot of difference.

dean177 7y ago
This is nonsense. Perhaps you mean something like “less bio-available compared to...”
- elmar 7y ago
  I phrased it incorrectly, you are spot on "much less bio-available when compared with animal products"
  - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
    We feed plant products to our animal products. If the plants are not nutritious, animal products become more expensive. I don't think animal products will prevent wealthier people from being priced out of their necessary nutrition.
    - jeremyw 7y ago
      It's better to think of the long-term cycle. Ruminants in regenerative management, for instance, increase the richness of the soil over time. Whereas it's very hard to do that with crops.
tempguy9999 7y ago
> some that say who?
- elmar 7y ago
  For example people following the Carnivore diet.

krumpet 7y ago

Read The Omnivore's Dilemma. Do it now.

mnorton 7y ago
not sure why this would get downvoted
- CrazyStat 7y ago
  It's not very helpful. Why do we need to read it? Why now? How is it related to this topic? Those answers may be obvious to someone who's already read the book. To people not familiar with the book it's a cryptic imperative.
  - krumpet 7y ago
    Ahhh, fair point. The Omnivore's Dilemma zeros in on the diminishing quality of vegetables due to some (not all) modern farming practices. I realize not everyone agrees with Michael Pollan's viewpoints, but I believe the book forces the reader to confront the food they are consuming, the system that helps deliver it to their table, and the impact on the environment and the food itself.
    - CrazyStat 7y ago
      Thanks!
- zaroth 7y ago
  Because it’s missing context for someone who doesn’t already know about the book.
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JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

Growing food has turned into an engineering problem where people think you solve it by investing the least possible resources into it. Whatever the consumer will buy and you can produce as cheaply as possible wins the day. Our tasteless vegetables are like cheap Bose (no highs, no lows, must be Bose) speakers or pressed paper furniture at Walmart. On the surface they look like a vegetable should look, but the taste, what’s inside, is completely deficient.

fucking_tragedy 7y ago
> Growing food has turned into an engineering problem where people think you solve it by investing the least possible resources into it. Our economic system optimizes for exactly this.
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- mikelyons 7y ago
  What if we had one world religion where everyone's goal in life was to become infinitely loving and utterly selfless? Would we grow food for eachother differently? Would we be compensated differently for doing so?
  - jniedrauer 7y ago
    You're describing humanism. We'd probably end up looking a lot like an ant colony. Unfortunately, as a non-hivemind species, it is unlikely that we will ever have that level of cohesion.
    - mikelyons 7y ago
      I'm not actually referring to humanism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE1yPCeF1Cc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE1yPCeF1Cc

nategri 7y ago

Can we not have LinkedIn links on HN

late2part 7y ago
Why do you not want to have LinkedIn links on HN?
- cwkoss 7y ago
  Besides the annoying UX, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman organized several parties to introduce Jeffrey Epstein (child sex trafficker) to other rich and powerful people. The extent of his involvement with Epstein's child sex traffic ring is still under investigation.
- nategri 7y ago
  Clicking on a LinkedIn link evokes the same "unpredictable behavior" paranoia/stress reaction as a url for a site that peddles game ROMs or guitar tabs.
  - khawkins 7y ago
    Ever since I realized they will inform users directly of who's looking at their profile my trust in the platform plummeted.
- lucb1e 7y ago
  Not GP, but I also didn't click the link because it goes to linkedin. My motivation is that they are very similar to Facebook in tracking, walled-gardenness, and I can't imagine it being a good source for anything that is not about my personal contacts' achievements. Elsewhere in the thread I read that the linkedin post is just 2 lines and that person linked the paper instead, so I guess it might be updated by mods soon.

scythe 7y ago

Isn’t this at least easy to fix? Required amounts of dietary minerals are minuscule: 50 mg iron, 15 mg zinc and less than 2 mg of the other transition metals and P. Presumably fertilizer could include trace amounts of these elements without substantial cost increases? (Ca/K/Mg are already in fertilizer.)

cwkoss 7y ago
I think plants may require symbiotic microbes to efficiently process some of these dietary minerals, and modern agroindustrial farming has damaged soil biodiversity and carrying capacity.

proee 7y ago

Here is a good resource on growing your own food with maximum nutrition. http://janabogs.com/ http://janabogs.com/

deleted 7y ago
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opwieurposiu 7y ago

Another reason to roll out Enhanced Olivine Weathering, get some minerals back into the dirt. http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/olivineagainstclimatechange23.pdf http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli...

bt848 7y ago

These are normalized mass rates, ie grams per gram of plant mass. However, the mass yield per acre of cabbage has radically increased over that time period. Is it possible that a cabbage plant is capable of absorbing an absolute amount of minerals, and this is simply being diluted by ever-larger cabbages?

carry_bit 7y ago
The explanation I've heard is that the total mineral content is about the same, but plants are producing more carbohydrates now due to an increase in atmospheric CO2, diluting the minerals. Consequently, if humans eat according the amount of minerals in the food, the increase in carbohydrates could also explain the increase in obesity.
- jkeuhlen 7y ago
  I don't think the lack of minerals in food explains obesity issues. In fact, I'm pretty sure we know what causes obesity. Significantly lower levels of activity and increased sugar consumption are two of the main culprits.
  - earljwagner 7y ago
    Obesity is increasing for animals - pets and even wildlife: https://psmag.com/social-justice/just-people-getting-fatter-65342 https://psmag.com/social-justice/just-people-getting-fatter-...
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ip26 7y ago
Ten fold larger?

newsreview1 7y ago

I want to see the study. If we are saying that average mineral content of calcium, magnesium, and iron in cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach has dropped 80–90% between 1914 and 2018, where were the subject vegetables taken from? Are we needing to look at farming methods, large agriculture process such as early harvest, soil depletion, delivery method, sun exposure, etc? And, if we are looking at findings from the USDA, Agricultural Research Service and USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, they really need to update their research. As stated by the study's author, " the USDA mineral content of vegetables and fruits has not been updated since 2000"

abledon 7y ago

weak soil makes weak food makes weak humans

NickM 7y ago

Something that has puzzled me recently: how is anyone supposed to get the daily recommended amount of potassium? If you look at foods like bananas that are supposed to be good sources of it, you still need to eat something like eleven bananas a day to get enough (according to US recommended daily intakes, anyway). At least with the minerals mentioned in this posting, you can fall back on supplements if you need to...but if you try to buy potassium supplements, the max dosage you can get over the counter is 99mg, which is only about 3% of the daily recommended intake. WTF?

tryitnow 7y ago
I've wondered about this too. I have no idea why people never discusses it. I suspect it's an Illuminati secret.
lr4444lr 7y ago
The limited amount in multivitamin/mineral supplements is actually a legal restriction, to boot.
rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
I eat potassium chloride (usually sold as salt substitute for people on low sodium diets) on occasion, like when fasting or working out. It has this awful, stingy metallic taste, but I’ve noticed I tend to have less fatigue and soreness from strength training afterwards. Might be placebo but YMMV.
- 01100011 7y ago
  I have leftover potassium bicarbonate from when I was making wine. I use it as an antacid, mixing it with water. It tastes like absolute shit, a little less so if mixed with some baking soda, and does a pretty good job of helping my heartburn.
jws 7y ago
the max dosage you can get over the counter is 99mg This is an FDA limit on potassium chloride supplements. Too much potassium can cause heart rhythm problems and cardiac arrest. Some organizations propose 3500 to 4500mg as a daily potassium intake, and 98% of people do not eat this much potassium, and unless you are living on beans and beats you probably aren’t. Yet there isn’t a huge “get more potassium” movement. I wonder if those targets need reassessment.

Touche 7y ago

Article seems suspicious. How were these measured 100 years ago? Same techniques as today? Can we verify the 100 year old data?

buckthundaz 7y ago

Wait until everyone learns about bioavailability of nutrients with respect to type of food -- ie. Animal-based nutrition is more bioavailable than plant-based nutrients. [1] [1] - https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/633S/4690005#109811045 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/633S/4690005#1098...

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
I think it's important to consider the inputs. Carnivorism is just herbivorism with more overhead. Perhaps I do need to eat ~3 times the non-heme iron to get the same level of absorption, but plant crops usually win out over cattle when it comes to scalability. Is plant iron more bioavailable to cattle animals than humans? That might tip things slightly in favor of carnivorism, however cattle does a lot more than just convert non-heme iron to heme iron and facilitating that excess resource usage may be more trouble than the heme iron is worth.
- deepnotderp 7y ago
  I don't see why genetic engineering like the Impossible Burger can't let us have our cake and eat it too.
- ssijak 7y ago
  Heme iron is implicated with some cancers, main reason being bioavailability where our body cant regulate it as easy as non heme iron
ip26 7y ago
The iron and zinc from vegetarian diets are generally less bioavailable than from nonvegetarian diets because of reduced meat intake as well as the tendency to consume more phytic acid and other plant-based inhibitors of iron and zinc absorption. However, in Western countries with varied and abundant food supplies, it is not clear that this reduced bioavailability has any functional consequences. Although vegetarians tend to have lower iron stores than omnivores, they appear to have no greater incidence of iron deficiency anemia. -- Your Link

bwb 7y ago

Does anyone know how much we can absorb? Like if we can only take in 1 out of the 50, then I don't care if its down to 10. Anyone know the science on mineral absorption?

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
Someone posted a study which specifically compared bioavailability of heme iron from animals to non-heme iron from plants: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/633S/4690005#109811045 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/633S/4690005#1098... Why would low bioavailability convince you to care less about the declining minerals? Surely declining mineral content would be exacerbated by low bioavailability? How does that make things better? An 80% loss still means you have to quintuple consumption to maintain the same level of nutrients, and your agricultural resources have to scale beyond that to account for crop losses to pests and pathogens. Meat production becomes even more expensive and unsustainable. How does low bioavailability reduce the significance of this trend?
- bwb 7y ago
  Well, but maybe an 80% loss doesn't matter as we only absorb x mg of minerals. You know? This might not matter for humans if we don't know how much we can absorb, it might not be a percentile but rather than a cap and we pee or poop the rest out.
  - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
    I see what you're saying now, thanks for clarifying. I'm not sure how much nutrition people need in general. Perhaps we're still getting a surplus of nutrients at the current volume of food consumption, despite the loss of minerals. I am fearful of food unsecurity and malnutrition.
    - bwb 7y ago
      Ya me too on malnutrition and food desserts. Americans eat so few veggies and we are still living for a long time. And for rich Americans who match Japanese longevity, this doesn't seen to be hurting us. Like if we all had scurvy and were bleeding from the gums by age 19 I'd be worried more :) Or maybe it is what is spiking auto immune diseases or something weird.

AngryData 7y ago

I don't think this is new or that unexpected, but it should be talked about. We use to breed plants based on both taste and size, taste being altered significantly by mineral contents. Currently, we mostly only breed plants based on weight, taste doesn't factor into it, and increasing sugars and starches increases weight far better than any mineral count. Heirloom plants are generally considered luxury products and since they don't have as large of yields, aren't a good competition against commercial plants, despite the fact that most people agree heirloom plants taste better and usually have higher mineral counts. Now I don't know how much the the growing medium effects this, our topsoil is getting thinner and is fed primarily on 'purified' artificial fertilizers, and heirloom plants are far more likely to be home garden or 'organically' grown, but im willing to bet plant genetics play a much bigger role in mineral contents than anyone wants to admit. It would be another hit to the idea that current farming practices are sustainable long term and nobody wants to admit that.

lightedman 7y ago
"increasing sugars and starches increases weight far better than any mineral count" No, increasing bioavailable silica content (like potassium silicate addition) increases weight far more than any starch or sugar could possibly do.
Merrill 7y ago
Plants are also bred so that they can be picked before they are fully ripe and survive a multi-day trip to the grocery shelves of a supermarket. This may be less important for vegetables that go from field to cannery or freezers, so canned or frozen might be a better choice than fresh vegetables.

tastyfreeze 7y ago

This happened due to extermination of soil life through modern farming practices of heavy tilling, fertilizing and monoculture crops. Dead soil is more susceptible to erosion and requires ever increasing amounts of synthetic fertilizer to grow anything. More soil has been lost from the US than the amount of food that has been produced. Soil fertility can be returned to historical levels by changing farming practices to make living soil. The benefits of treating the soil as a living organism include increased fertility, water infiltration, moisture retention, and nutrient availability as well as decreasing or eliminating synthetic fertilizer requirements. https://theweek.com/articles/554677/america-running-soil https://theweek.com/articles/554677/america-running-soil This is a long video but it has completely changed my home gardening practices. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A

dv_dt 7y ago
Healthier soil may also capture carbon. There are many reasons to look at optimization of farming and food production for a whole range of concerns beyond profits. The question is how to broadly incentivize and fund those concerns - reinvigorating agricultural dept programs with a wider focus at a federal and state level is one way to do that; others would likely come up under a Green New Deal type framework too. https://e360.yale.edu/features/soil_as_carbon_storehouse_new_weapon_in_climate_fight https://e360.yale.edu/features/soil_as_carbon_storehouse_new...
- tastyfreeze 7y ago
  Aside from a few farmers that are motivated by ideology, profit is the only motivation that will change practices. I have recently been researching biochar(biologically charged charcoal). Use of biochar is a form of carbon sequestration that reduces nutrient leaching and provides immense surface area for bacterial and fungal life to thrive in soil.
  - samvher 7y ago
    Yeah biochar is very interesting. We definitely shouldn't massively start using it in the short term though - its effects are not so well understood. Most "knowledge" is based on terra preta, Amazonian dark soil which is hundreds of years old and man-made with charcoal, pottery shards, bones and other organic matter. There have been field trials but many of them by biochar organizations/companies who might not be completely objective and once we put it in the soil we can't really take it out anymore. I think the evidence suggests that turning waste into biochar and applying it to fields at a local scale has a lot of potential. Growing trees for the purpose of biochar might be a different story (this has many of the downsides of biofuel production).

algaeontoast 7y ago

It'd be cool to see a comparison of common top-grade "organic produce" compared with produce from a farmers market and that grown from someone's own backyard. Granted, with a measure of time from harvest to measurement of mineral content.

throwaway66920 7y ago

It’s fine, we’ll make up for it with microplastics

dcolkitt 7y ago

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. High iron consumption appears to be at the nexus of a vast array of diseases from colon cancer to Alzheimer's. As for Calcium there's really no evidence of it strengthening bones. And high consumption is probably causally increases CVD mortality. [1] http://nautil.us/issue/67/reboot/iron-is-the-new-cholesterol http://nautil.us/issue/67/reboot/iron-is-the-new-cholesterol [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h4580 https://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h4580 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3336363/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3336363/

hcarvalhoalves 7y ago

Our increase in food production comes at the expense of fertilisers, pesticides, soil depletion and water poisoning. We are feeding the world alright, but on empty calories. Was Malthus right after all?

jonplackett 7y ago

New health campaign message: remember to eat your 50 portions of fruit and veg a day.

dwg 7y ago

Has it really? I thought it would be useful to share a paper from the opposing viewpoint, which argues the opposite of the conclusions you might first arrive at from looking at this chart... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889157516302113#tbl0005 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915751... (Mineral nutrient composition of vegetables, fruits and grains: The context of reports of apparent historical declines, published in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis March 2017). As a non-expert I have no opinion as to which viewpoint is correct. However, as usual the issue is more complex than that...

Merrill 7y ago

When crops are removed from the land, more complex fertilizers must be used to replace the minerals. A good example is sulfur. The sulfur removed had been replenished by acid rain. Once scrubbers were applied to remove sulfur from coal plant emissions, farmers needed to monitor and replenish sulfur levels by sulfur fertilizer. "Seeking high yields, the reduction of acid rain and the need for sulfur" - https://www.farmprogress.com/management/seeking-high-yields-reduction-acid-rain-and-need-sulfur https://www.farmprogress.com/management/seeking-high-yields-... The bottom line is that agriculture is mining, and any elements that are removed in crops must be replaced. Adequate sulfur levels are particularly important to cruciferous vegetables.

patientplatypus 7y ago

As I said in a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20799295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20799295 --- *-4 points by patientplatypus 18 days ago | parent | favorite | on: The Next Recession Will Be About Sovereign Debt The next recession will be caused by poor crop yields due to environmental destruction. It will also cause famines and wars globally. --- We have maybe one or two years left, up to five maybe if we're lucky, until the entire social system collapses. It will be dark and sad and scary. I'm sorry you guys.

jnbiche 7y ago

The graph of male testosterone levels looks very similar to this one. I'm not suggesting there's necessarily a correlation between the two, but modern life is taking its toll on our health. Life expectancy may be longer in present times, but quality of life is in some ways lower (a notable exception to that is the status of even relatively minor infections, which were frequently fatal in pre-modern life).

legohead 7y ago

calcium and magnesium? that sounds familiar...the two main minerals that water softeners remove. could this be related to water filtration/softening that farmers may be using? (I don't know if they actually use filtration or not). I imagine they'd want to use softeners, as it would increase the lifespan of irrigation equipment.

blondie9x 7y ago

Almost impossible to eat healthy these days. Even if you think you’re eating healthy you might not be. We aren’t getting as many probiotics, minerals, and vitamins from fruits and vegetables. This is terribly unfortunate. We need to find a way to use land more effectively and give our soil and plants enough time to establish themselves so the nutrition content is sufficient and normalized. A solution might be less land for herding cattle and more land for planting vegetables and fruits that might take more time to cultivate.

viburnum 7y ago

The is the flip side of the green revolution, which basically bred plants to grow big and fast if you dump a lot of fertilizer made from fossil fuels on them. More carbs and less of everything else. I know people love Norman Borlaug but not everything is as nice as you’d like it to be.

aaron695 7y ago

No one cares the graph has no labels, or is this the state of food science.... All the minerals went down at exactly the same rates huh? FYI the * means unverified. The original article is not g eat but does bring up an interesting point on magnesium.

amelius 7y ago

Perhaps a silly question but doesn't a plant require all these minerals to grow?

mathattack 7y ago

Original article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/

Axsuul 7y ago

FYI: The iron within meat is much more bioavailable to your body

enz 7y ago

If you understand French, you can take a look at Claude and Lydia Bourguignon’s work about soil health.

colinmegill 7y ago

I worked on a bio-intensive organic farm in Washington State via https://wwoofinternational.org/ https://wwoofinternational.org/. This was one of the articles that got passed around: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129629752 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129629... Volunteering there was the first time I realized strawberries were red all the way through and incredibly dense with flavor, since they were allowed to ripen naturally and benefit from richly amended soil full of microbes.

dghughes 7y ago

Derek from Vertasium on YouTbe has a nice explanation. Even showing how the nutrient levels in weed specimens are also falling. The weeds were collected by researchers over the last 100 or more years. The weeds were vital because it showed it wasn't limited to farming practices it's all plants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl_K2Ata6XY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl_K2Ata6XY

cryptopeeper 7y ago

My chiropractor warned me about this. He said everyone is deficient in vitamins and minerals because of our food. He suggested an extreme pill popping routine, which was difficult to do. Does anyone agree with this approach? I was taking so many vitamins it made me feel sick. I can't remember the name of the routine, but I researched it online. I think it was used to treat schizophrenia.

dr_dshiv 7y ago

Fascinating discussion, just noticed the article is about magnesium deficiency. Magnesium pills! I love those things. The only supplement I take, because it gives such a direct brain-fog lifting effect and makes me poo good. Real good. A must before international travel.

pinkfoot 7y ago
Magnesium is also essential for peristalsis. :)

m0zg 7y ago

Makes sense: we're getting like 5x the yields per area of land. Something has to give.

igammarays 7y ago

I’ve been living in Ukraine for the past few months, trying to figure out why the food here, especially the vegetables, simply taste so good. The very same dishes (e.g. steak and veggies) from popular mid-range restaurants are far more enjoyable to me over here in Kiev than I ever ate in Canada. When I went back to Canada for a brief visit, my body was craving Ukrainian food. Now this study on vegetable mineral content may explain why. I’m very keen to see a comparison study on Eastern European agriculture and produce versus North American. Ukraine was once the “breadbasket” of the Soviet Union, so there must be an explanation. Ukrainians who migrate to other countries are often said to complain about a loss in food taste - previously I assumed that was just some form of homesickness, but this study lends some potential scientific ground to their complaints.

krn 7y ago
> I’ve been living in Ukraine for the past few months, trying to figure out why the food here, especially the vegetables, simply taste so good. I had exactly the same feeling when I was living in Lviv and buying vegetables from the local Farmers Market[1] to cook at home. It seems that Ukrainians are still growing vegetables like their grandparents did in the 1930s, as it's one of the poorest and most isolated regions of Europe. In my own post-soviet EU country, most people living outside the big cities still grow their own vegetables in their backyard[2], but more as a rewarding hobby. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI0VnuZObjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI0VnuZObjE [2] http://imgur.com/a/3afScVR http://imgur.com/a/3afScVR
RowanH 7y ago
Same when I moved back to New Zealand after years in Canada. The first trip to the fruit and vege store I went overboard...
newsbinator 7y ago
Same thing happened to me in the south of Bulgaria, just shopping at regular grocery stores. I couldn't figure out why the tomatoes tasted amazing. It's like I'd been eating tomato-flavored potatoes all my life until that moment, and now trying a real tomato for the first time.
7y ago

atulatul 7y ago

In India, Subhash Palekar is a name you often hear these days. He was awarded fourth highest civilian award the Padma Shri in 2016. He is a proponent of Zero Budget Natural Farming- (which some agri bodies have claimed does not work as the claims would indicate). A few links, if interested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhash_Palekar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhash_Palekar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka http://www.palekarzerobudgetspiritualfarming.org/home.aspx http://www.palekarzerobudgetspiritualfarming.org/home.aspx

martingoodson 7y ago

This is a good reason to eat organic food. The overall strength of evidence is good or moderate that, for many parameters, organic produce is superior to conventional produce.[1] [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16546628.2017.1287333 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16546628.2017.1...

jayalpha 7y ago

Old news? Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? - Because of soil depletion, crops grown decades ago were much richer in vitamins and minerals than the varieties most of us get today April 27, 2011 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...

dash2 7y ago

This is a side issue in the paper linked. The paper itself cites a more useful-seeming source: "Declining Fruit and Vegetable Nutrient Composition: What Is the Evidence?" https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1/article-p15.xml https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1... Freely available too, nice one.

DoctorOetker 7y ago

Isn't a big part of the problem that for nearly all of duration of life, all animals had their own excretion patterns? If a monkey eats a banana, and 2 days later excretes nutrients in forms it cannot use... then typically the distance between plant and and dropping is not that far. Plants also spread throughout the landscape. Birds may perform a larger diffusion work part of the time (random droppings while flying), yet a large part of the time it would eat some fruits from one type of tree, then fly to another type of tree, and leave droppings that represent a mixture of the nutrients the different types of trees had access to, but for a large part what came from trees returns to trees even if it's different types of trees. So by producing one type of fruit the tree can trade it's nutrients through birds-as-traders with other trees. Humans ban birds from trees because we want to keep the fruits to ourselves. Perhaps we are simply wasting too much of our faeces into rivers and the sea? and generally disturbing the natural transport patterns (hidden labour) performed by different types of animals. Migratory birds might trade nutrients over huge distances, which may sound ridiculous since they can't hold their droppings that long, but their bodies in general also contain nutrients, and the bird could die at either end of the migratory path.

nathan_f77 7y ago

Would it be wise for most people to take a daily multivitamin or supplement? I believe we only need trace amounts of these vitamins and minerals, so even with a 90% decline in mineral levels, it sounds like most people are still getting plenty of minerals. > 60% of adults do not achieve the average dietary intake (ADI) and 45% of Americans are magnesium deficient. I'm always a bit skeptical of claims like this, and those percentages are huge. I'm wondering why I've never heard about it before (although I'm very ignorant about a lot of things.) Are there any government efforts to make magnesium supplements widely available, or some other way to solve this problem?

bborud 7y ago

I grew up on a farm in Norway. I love how people who have never even driven a tractor suddenly know how to save the planet because they have a garden. Oh please. It's really simple: we consume more resources than the planet can reasonably sustain. And because we do not intend to stop procreating and consuming we're fucked. (No, really, we are)

dimitar 7y ago

In many countries in Eastern Europe the soil is poor in iodine, which historically meant a lot of thyroid problems. Good news is that governments mostly solved the issue by requiring table salt to contain iodine. In some countries you can still buy table salt that doesn't contain iodine ("Himalayan" and so on) but people still use the mandated kind indirectly by buying bread and cheeses made with iodine. My point is the same can be done with magnesium and other minerals, which can solve the public health aspect while the soil is restored.

ecoled_ame 7y ago

Probably cause there's a TON OF PEOPLE LIVING AND REPRODUCING. You can talk about soil depletion all you want, but you're ignoring the true problem.

stefek99 7y ago

Very interesting.