9 ms·

This kind of tripe is why nutrition epidemiology is basically the laughing stock of modern science. First of all, the article is almost 10 years old and referen

This kind of tripe is why nutrition epidemiology is basically the laughing stock of modern science. First of all, the article is almost 10 years old and references data from 1999 at the latest. But most importantly, it uses common nutrition weasel words like "healthy" and "good for you", which are not supported (in fact, CAN'T be supported) by the study. It is a huge leap to go from "there's less Vitamin C in this supermarket carrot" to "you will get fewer diseases and/or live longer or better if you eat carrots from soil 100 years ago". The former is a claim about vitamin content. Easy to measure and write a paper about. It is another thing entirely, and totally outside the scope of a paper about mineral/vitamin content, to claim that eating modern carrots actually results in worse health. That claim is (fortunately for "nutritionists" and "functional nutrition" people) never actually backed up by any science whatsoever. It's the same with grass fed beef and all the other "organic" stuff - they are never actually connected to better health outcomes and they never live up to the wild claims made by journalists and bloggers.

montjoy 6y ago
Old data doesn’t make it invalid. I think it’s pretty reasonable to assume soil with more nutrients in it results in food with more nutrients in it (at least within a reasonable set of values). I think it’s also worth checking that food that is modified for growth and resistance factors is still as “nutritious” as before. Do you have any references to your claim that organic food does/does not change health outcomes?
rbecker 6y ago
> It is a huge leap to go from "there's less Vitamin C in this supermarket carrot" to "you will get fewer diseases and/or live longer or better if you eat carrots from soil 100 years ago". If only there was some kind of study linking vitamin [1] and protein intake [2] to health [3]... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin#Deficient_intake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin#Deficient_intake [2] https://www.nutrition.org.uk/nutritionscience/nutrients-food-and-ingredients/protein.html https://www.nutrition.org.uk/nutritionscience/nutrients-food... [3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/high-intake-of-vitamins-a-e-and-d-linked-to-fewer-respiratory-illnesses-says-study-b1390967.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/high-intake-of-vit...
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  Yes there are known essential vitamins, minerals, and amino and fatty acids. That does not mean that current produce doesn’t provide enough of them. It’s possible that is true, but also possible that it is not. Your last link just shows a correlation, not any kind of causation. It is suggestive, and somebody should do the actual research which might tell us whether it is causative. But they won’t, because it would cost too much and nobody could profit monetarily from the results. Nutritional science is in a pretty sad state right now. It’s cheap and easy to find correlation between things, but expensive and time consuming to actually test interventions to see whether they work.
x87678r 6y ago
Its crazy because fruit and veg are so heterogeneous. If you look at apples there are dozens of different varieties, different sizes and different orchards but all one set of nutritional information. I'm pretty sure many modern varieties have more in common with candy than the small, sour apples of 50 years ago.
- grawprog 6y ago
  To be fair, I would imagine, each apple on the tree has a slightly different nutritional make up then every other apple on the tree. Plants don't spread nutrients evenly throughout themselves. They push more nutrients to areas with more light or the areas that grow better. I've always assumed nutritional guides on fruits are more like averages or something. There's no way each individual piece of fruit is exactly the same. Plants just don't grow that way.
JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
I'd worry less about the lower vitamin C and more about the lower secondary metabolites that likely come with that. Anyone that has ever eaten a garden grown anything can tell you that there is a lot missing in store produce. These secondary metabolites are likely the missing link in my opinion. We aren't malnourished (with respect to most vitamins and minerals) in the western world but we do likely have drastically less of all the terpenoid, phenol, and alkaloid compounds that make vegetables "healthy", to use a word you hate. To add insult to injury, vegetables and fruits low in secondary metabolites taste worse to us, so we eat even less of them than we should. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_metabolite#Plant_secondary_metabolites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_metabolite#Plant_sec...
- notJim 6y ago
  > Anyone that has ever eaten a garden grown anything > can tell you that there is a lot missing in store produce I also enjoy gardening, but from a scientific perspective, I cannot support a statement like this. There is enormous room for bias in assessment of produce grown yourself, because of the physical and emotional investment made in said produce.
  - newen 6y ago
    You don’t need a study published in a peer reviewed journal to know that vegetables bought in typical US grocery stores taste much worse than home grown ones.
    - alach11 6y ago
      I do need that. I’ve had plenty of home grown produce that I doubt could be distinguished from store bought in a blind taste test.
    - notJim 6y ago
      Depends on your skills as a gardener and your grocery store, I suppose. Some of my tomatoes were better than the best grocery store tomatoes and some were worse. In any case, the claim was not about flavor, but about nutrition profile, and a lot being "missing" from grocery store produce.
SubiculumCode 6y ago
The article is pop sci, and thus not a representative of "nutrition epidemiology".
hourislate 6y ago
>It's the same with grass fed beef and all the other "organic" stuff - they are never actually connected to better health outcomes... I'm not sure that would even be possible considering how much time and effort a study like that would require. But you might be able to hypothesize that eating a clean/chemically free (ex: Round Up/Glyphosate) food item would be better for you. Comparing a factory farm pig that was fed GMO Soy it's entire life and raised in conditions that encourage disease/sickness to a pig raised in a clean/organic pasture with no exposure to synthetics/chemicals, I would imagine there is a noticeable difference in health. Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that someone consuming this animal would benefit more than someone consuming the factory farmed pig?
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that someone consuming this animal would benefit more than someone consuming the factory farmed pig? No. This is the naturalistic fallacy [1] in new clothes. We need the additional studies showing how stress and poor diet makes most factory-farmed meat less nutritionally dense than the pasture-raised stuff. Though even then, it isn’t anything inherent to the production method causing the variance. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    > We need the additional studies showing how stress and poor diet makes most factory-farmed meat less nutritionally dense than the pasture-raised stuff you're presuming the conclusion. You're asking for (additional??) studies to show something you've stated without evidence. Unless I'm misunderstanding you.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > You're asking for (additional??) studies to show something you've stated without evidence I believe we have evidence for factory-farmed meat being less nutritionally dense than pasture-raised meat. But the reason isn’t the factory farming per se. It’s the correlates to factory farming. So OP’s example is true. Just not for the reason hypothesised.
g8oz 6y ago
From the article: "They studied U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritional data from both 1950 and 1999 for 43 different vegetables and fruits, finding “reliable declines” in the amount of protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin (vitamin B2) and vitamin C over the past half century." Is that something worth dismissing out of hand?
- refurb 6y ago
  The point is (and it's a good one), does it matter? A good example are the statin drugs. Drug companies did a lot of marketing around "well, our drug lowers LDL by 10% more than our competitor", which could be very well be true, but again, does that matter? Unless you run studies that measure an outcome that matters, it's all conjecture. Vitamin C levels might be declining, but we don't have a issue with scurvy in developed nations, the impact of any decline might be insignificant.
highmastdon 6y ago
Sure there is a huge leap, but there’s enough research on organic food being beneficial to both growing and eating. Researchers have been blackmailed into presenting their studies as irrelevant. One recent issue came up in the Netherlands where a researcher was only allowed to say that “research has not shown clear benefits regarding organic food” by authoritive organisation NTO at risk of declaring their work “useless”. (It’s Dutch, I couldn’t provide translate link because of cookie wall) https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/onderzoeker-na-chantage-paste-ik-conclusie-over-biologisch-voedsel-aan~b1010520/ https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/onderzoeker-na-...

montjoy 6y ago

Old data doesn’t make it invalid. I think it’s pretty reasonable to assume soil with more nutrients in it results in food with more nutrients in it (at least within a reasonable set of values). I think it’s also worth checking that food that is modified for growth and resistance factors is still as “nutritious” as before. Do you have any references to your claim that organic food does/does not change health outcomes?

rbecker 6y ago

> It is a huge leap to go from "there's less Vitamin C in this supermarket carrot" to "you will get fewer diseases and/or live longer or better if you eat carrots from soil 100 years ago". If only there was some kind of study linking vitamin [1] and protein intake [2] to health [3]... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin#Deficient_intake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin#Deficient_intake [2] https://www.nutrition.org.uk/nutritionscience/nutrients-food-and-ingredients/protein.html https://www.nutrition.org.uk/nutritionscience/nutrients-food... [3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/high-intake-of-vitamins-a-e-and-d-linked-to-fewer-respiratory-illnesses-says-study-b1390967.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/high-intake-of-vit...

amanaplanacanal 6y ago
Yes there are known essential vitamins, minerals, and amino and fatty acids. That does not mean that current produce doesn’t provide enough of them. It’s possible that is true, but also possible that it is not. Your last link just shows a correlation, not any kind of causation. It is suggestive, and somebody should do the actual research which might tell us whether it is causative. But they won’t, because it would cost too much and nobody could profit monetarily from the results. Nutritional science is in a pretty sad state right now. It’s cheap and easy to find correlation between things, but expensive and time consuming to actually test interventions to see whether they work.

x87678r 6y ago

Its crazy because fruit and veg are so heterogeneous. If you look at apples there are dozens of different varieties, different sizes and different orchards but all one set of nutritional information. I'm pretty sure many modern varieties have more in common with candy than the small, sour apples of 50 years ago.

grawprog 6y ago
To be fair, I would imagine, each apple on the tree has a slightly different nutritional make up then every other apple on the tree. Plants don't spread nutrients evenly throughout themselves. They push more nutrients to areas with more light or the areas that grow better. I've always assumed nutritional guides on fruits are more like averages or something. There's no way each individual piece of fruit is exactly the same. Plants just don't grow that way.

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago

I'd worry less about the lower vitamin C and more about the lower secondary metabolites that likely come with that. Anyone that has ever eaten a garden grown anything can tell you that there is a lot missing in store produce. These secondary metabolites are likely the missing link in my opinion. We aren't malnourished (with respect to most vitamins and minerals) in the western world but we do likely have drastically less of all the terpenoid, phenol, and alkaloid compounds that make vegetables "healthy", to use a word you hate. To add insult to injury, vegetables and fruits low in secondary metabolites taste worse to us, so we eat even less of them than we should. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_metabolite#Plant_secondary_metabolites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_metabolite#Plant_sec...

notJim 6y ago
> Anyone that has ever eaten a garden grown anything > can tell you that there is a lot missing in store produce I also enjoy gardening, but from a scientific perspective, I cannot support a statement like this. There is enormous room for bias in assessment of produce grown yourself, because of the physical and emotional investment made in said produce.
- newen 6y ago
  You don’t need a study published in a peer reviewed journal to know that vegetables bought in typical US grocery stores taste much worse than home grown ones.
  - alach11 6y ago
    I do need that. I’ve had plenty of home grown produce that I doubt could be distinguished from store bought in a blind taste test.
  - notJim 6y ago
    Depends on your skills as a gardener and your grocery store, I suppose. Some of my tomatoes were better than the best grocery store tomatoes and some were worse. In any case, the claim was not about flavor, but about nutrition profile, and a lot being "missing" from grocery store produce.

SubiculumCode 6y ago

The article is pop sci, and thus not a representative of "nutrition epidemiology".

hourislate 6y ago

>It's the same with grass fed beef and all the other "organic" stuff - they are never actually connected to better health outcomes... I'm not sure that would even be possible considering how much time and effort a study like that would require. But you might be able to hypothesize that eating a clean/chemically free (ex: Round Up/Glyphosate) food item would be better for you. Comparing a factory farm pig that was fed GMO Soy it's entire life and raised in conditions that encourage disease/sickness to a pig raised in a clean/organic pasture with no exposure to synthetics/chemicals, I would imagine there is a noticeable difference in health. Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that someone consuming this animal would benefit more than someone consuming the factory farmed pig?

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that someone consuming this animal would benefit more than someone consuming the factory farmed pig? No. This is the naturalistic fallacy [1] in new clothes. We need the additional studies showing how stress and poor diet makes most factory-farmed meat less nutritionally dense than the pasture-raised stuff. Though even then, it isn’t anything inherent to the production method causing the variance. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  > We need the additional studies showing how stress and poor diet makes most factory-farmed meat less nutritionally dense than the pasture-raised stuff you're presuming the conclusion. You're asking for (additional??) studies to show something you've stated without evidence. Unless I'm misunderstanding you.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > You're asking for (additional??) studies to show something you've stated without evidence I believe we have evidence for factory-farmed meat being less nutritionally dense than pasture-raised meat. But the reason isn’t the factory farming per se. It’s the correlates to factory farming. So OP’s example is true. Just not for the reason hypothesised.

g8oz 6y ago

From the article: "They studied U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritional data from both 1950 and 1999 for 43 different vegetables and fruits, finding “reliable declines” in the amount of protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin (vitamin B2) and vitamin C over the past half century." Is that something worth dismissing out of hand?

refurb 6y ago
The point is (and it's a good one), does it matter? A good example are the statin drugs. Drug companies did a lot of marketing around "well, our drug lowers LDL by 10% more than our competitor", which could be very well be true, but again, does that matter? Unless you run studies that measure an outcome that matters, it's all conjecture. Vitamin C levels might be declining, but we don't have a issue with scurvy in developed nations, the impact of any decline might be insignificant.

highmastdon 6y ago

Sure there is a huge leap, but there’s enough research on organic food being beneficial to both growing and eating. Researchers have been blackmailed into presenting their studies as irrelevant. One recent issue came up in the Netherlands where a researcher was only allowed to say that “research has not shown clear benefits regarding organic food” by authoritive organisation NTO at risk of declaring their work “useless”. (It’s Dutch, I couldn’t provide translate link because of cookie wall) https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/onderzoeker-na-chantage-paste-ik-conclusie-over-biologisch-voedsel-aan~b1010520/ https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/onderzoeker-na-...