10 ms·

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.

• 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.
              • nitrogen 7y ago
                Could also be in the sense of "control theory", where a feedback loop like measure->analyze->predict->change->repeat is applied.
          • fragmede 7y ago
            No one is saying don't measure things. Fertilizer doesn't come from mysticism and homepathy but from science - make a guess (hypothesis) and test to see if it works. The issue is that we've focused on volume of output from a field, rather than mineral content of vegetables, which is far harder to measure.
      • pasabagi 7y ago
        For what it's worth, I totally agree. Without artificial fertilizer, half the world would starve. I don't think that kind of process makes sense within the context of capitalism, though. One obvious driver in the downward nutritional trend is the fact that faster-growing, larger, longer-lasting vegetables are better products, even if they taste worse and do less for the body. The problem with products is they're optimized for sale, not for use. Adding in extra nutrients is unlikely to improve the product, since it would increase costs.
        • primroot 7y ago
          > faster-growing, larger, longer-lasting vegetables are better product Whatever product fits into the economies of scale, and selective commoditization solely for the sake of profit concentration not nutrition or environment. But back to the idea of measuring everything. These are the counterpoints I can think about regarding measuring and controling: * Measuring and controlling cost resources, some less, some more. E.g. It is easier to measure yields than to measure nutrition. * There is imperfect knowledge on how to respond (control) after a given measurement, or even what measurements are important. E.g. Premature optimization, Goodhart's law, lack of certainty regarding nutrition. * There are conflicting interests on what the result of controlling should be. E.g. more profits or more nutrition? * Under appropriate circumstances systems can respond to variability or keep functioning without human control or input. This is resilience. E.g. Pollinating insects, edible weeds.
      • jonplackett 7y ago
        What, just because you're grossed out by poo?
  • 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.