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Can it be solved by simply adding more magnesium to the fertilizer?
by xyzzyz 5y ago
Can it be solved by simply adding more magnesium to the fertilizer?
- DistressedDrone 5y agoI suspect it can be solved in many different ways, but when you sell food by the pound, it's much more advantageous to distribute your limited quantity of nutrients in as much produce as possible. This seems really, really hard to regulate.
- xyzzyz 5y agoFrankly, it seems to me like it's rather relatively simple thing to regulate. We already mandate things like adding vitamins to milk or flour. Extending this to vegetables really doesn't seem like big problem: farmers would just have to buy magnesium-enriched fertilizer.
- alisonkisk 5y agoWhy pour it in your diet when you can put it in a pill to eat directly along with 30 other vitamins?
- xyzzyz 5y agoThen the issue is to remember to take the pill. Much easier to forget than to forget to eat.
- cutemonster 5y agoAlso, can be hard to reach out to everyone and let them know that they need these pills. Many might not know what "magnesium" is? It's simpler to add iodine to salt -- and maybe magnesium to the soil
- thaumasiotes 5y agoAnother issue is that the effect of a nutrient can sometimes differ based on what it is consumed alongside. Pills are not necessarily as effective as supplemented food.
- slipframe 5y agoBecause anybody with sense prefers eating food to popping pills.
- krastanov 5y agoCome on, this is a bit too aggressive of a statement. On the other hand, there is some anecdotal evidence that nutrients in pills are not absorbed by our gut as well as more "naturally" delivered nutrients.
- slipframe 5y ago"Why do we need to drink water anyway? Why can't we all get our fluids from an IV?"
- zepto 5y agoWhy stop there? If you are getting fluids via IV, may as well add in nutrients.
- bbarnett 5y agoThis sounds grand, but I Googled, and couldn't find a provider/source, where do you buy?
- kortex 5y agoI'm down. Add a glucostat for optimal blood sugar level too. Just get a waterproof Ergodox, wrap around 8k monitor, and a sensory dep tank (with optional high-tech minimal techno piped in). I call it The Precog. It'll be a hit in SV.
- dghughes 5y agoI wouldnt say anecdotal nutrient bioavailavilty is quite well-known and studied.
- Smaug123 5y agoThis is an instance of the orthogonality thesis, by the way. Your assertion is that "increased ability to think" should cause "increased desire to eat Traditional Food (tm)", which is no more true than the assertion "increased ability to think causes increased desire to consume Renaissance art". Desires are, by and large, orthogonal to the generalised ability to achieve desires (the ability which you label "sense"). Some desires are not orthogonal - the desire to survive and be healthy, for example, which is instrumental in achieving many other desires - but to argue your assertion on those grounds, you must prove that Traditional Food is sufficiently dramatically better for achieving some instrumental goal.
- justinator 5y agoVitamin absorption via pills doesn't seem to work very well.
- toomim 5y agoThis. It's actually very hard to get enough Mg from pills. Your body needs a lot.
- bumby 5y agoDiet is quite more complicated that just taking a multivitamin, unfortunately. Some nutrients compete for absorption (Zn and Ca, for example) and shouldn’t be taken together. There’s also debate about the need for phytonutrients that also come along with plants. The data is mixed enough that the US Preventative Services Task Force isn’t yet willing to endorse supplements as a means of reducing cardiovascular or cancer risk. My personal opinion is that the human body may be too complex to say we fully understand a seemingly straightforward solution like just taking a multivitamin. We evolved over an awfully long time before industrialized agriculture and supplements. I’m not trying to demonize them because they have solved the number 1 concern humans had for the last 10,000 years of not getting enough calories, but I think it’s wise to temper the hubris of thinking we understand the human body well enough to expect a simple fix from a pill.
- spfzero 5y agoFor all of the things we know are present in food and necessary for nutrition, I suspect there are still a lot we don't know of. Biodynamic farmed food seems like the best bet if you have access to it. At least you're avoiding the worst of the mega-farming shortcuts.
- ullevaal 5y agoWhen reading comments like this, which are good-natured, and a natural response, do you ever think “wouldn’t be great if we as humans had more trust built into our systems, and people actually making a best-effort attempt at honouring that trust”? Instead of everything being a scam until proven otherwise, and even then the scam is probably just one level deeper in what triggered the interest in that product in the first place.
- ullevaal 5y agoThis comment was triggered by the essay “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams” by Jia Tolentino in the book Trick Mirror, the essay also being available in audio form online. So the scam here was to get you to google that book, I wonder if my scam will convert anyone?
- gotoeleven 5y agoSadly human nature is what it is. It seems like it would take a long time for evolution to make humans not naturally lazy, greedy, jealous and xenophobic. It's also not clear that, even in a world where resources are abundant, there would be any evolutionary pressure to not be this way.
- Nasrudith 5y agoTerrible as it sounds trust is in computer terms a gaping security vulnerability. If anothet clever actor can take advantage of it they can gain all sorts of things at cost to you. Distrust is like an immune system - it has costs and can occasionally hurt you but it developed and is ubiquitous for a reason.
- adrianN 5y agoRelated to your question, I found the ideas in this long and winding essay to be quite interesting: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...
- dr_dshiv 5y agoWhy regulate when you can market? If I knew that a brand of zucchini had high mineral content and flavor, I'd buy it at a premium
- tbihl 5y agoSounds like a good way to have every milk container say "rBST free, from cows raised without hormones!" Which could also be stated "farmed in accordance with California law."
- dr_dshiv 5y agoYeah, in this case, I'd rather have the former... Since I'd assume the latter? Maybe that's me. And, to be clear— I don't want to be dismissive of the importance of govt regulation! It's just that working out the marketing opportunities can happen much faster than effective regulation.
- rdedev 5y agoVeritasium did a video on this topic of vegetables becoming less nutritious https://youtu.be/Yl_K2Ata6XY https://youtu.be/Yl_K2Ata6XY He argues that the increased CO2 in the atmosphere is making the plants grow faster. This is making the plants produce more carbs wet to other nutrients, making the plant less nutritious compared to the past
- throwawaaarrgh 5y agoFertilizer is actually the problem. The soil is losing magnesium because we don't practice crop rotation anymore, so we load up the soil with fertilizer, 90% of which runs off into our watersheds, wreaking havoc. It can be solved by using less efficient / more complex farming practices which aren't amenable to mass production of monocultures. But that makes a lot less money, so it will never happen. A different solution would be to pass legislation specifically to protect the nutritional value of our food. But that would just prompt the ag sector to pump the soil full of so much crap to meet the law's requirements that it'll speed up the collapse of ecological systems (in addition to possibly poisoning us).
- Moru 5y agoA couple of years ago where was a very long draught in northern europe. The only fields that weren't burned brown was the new ecological farms that reinvented farming the old way. Their soil is kept alive deeper into the ground and can hold water much longer. So while their neighbours had to buy feed for their cows, the eco farmers could keep using their grass for feeding.
- xyzzyz 5y ago> It can be solved by using less efficient / more complex farming practices which aren't amenable to mass production of monocultures. But that makes a lot less money, so it will never happen. “Makes less money” is certainly one point of view. Another is “makes the food too expensive to afford for many, and shifts more land usage to farming, to make up for the reduced productivity per acre”. It is not even clear that it would reduce the profits of food producers: it depends on the shapes on supply curves. If every food producer is forced to produce food using expensive methods, and people are forced to buy food anyway (as they ultimately must eat), it is very well possible that the profits could actually increase: if demand for food is inelastic, people will just pay higher prices to get the same amount of food, which would only increase the total profits of agricultural industry.
- kaitai 5y agoAgricultural policy in the US shapes a lot of this, though, via subsidies. The financial system also shapes this through its lending policies. The implements of industrialized farming are what the ag lending sector is designed around; try to step out of that mainstream and you will have trouble accessing capital. Wheat, corn, and soybeans are heavily subsidized by the US gov't and vegetables are not at all. Every little tiny program to subsidize vegetable growers is picked at every year (happening right now in my state legislature) -- it's always a fight to preserve. The agricultural lending system in the US is fascinating. Look up Farm Credit Administration. We have a weird and unique system of paragovernmental financial institutions in the US that do farm lending, and even though it's not technically government-backed lending, everyone sees it as such, and so there are some interesting distortions in the market (compared to a more "free-market" system). It does seem quite centered around US gov't subsidies and farm/ag policies.