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What about nutritional value? From various reports lately, I don't have links handy but I've seen them shared here on HN, it is generally accepted that the nut
by yumraj 4y ago
What about nutritional value?
From various reports lately, I don't have links handy but I've seen them shared here on HN, it is generally accepted that the nutritional value of the food is declining. This has been primarily attributed, from what I remember, to the condition of the soil. So, if we start producing everything in a greenhouse, won't that impact nutritional value as well.
- cjsawyer 4y agoIn the extreme case, this is something we’ll need to figure out for space exploration too. Hopefully people are working on it!
- jay_kyburz 4y agoIt's not just space, global warming could lead to a complete ecosystem collapse (think Mars). We may need to move everything into climate controlled environments.
- zemvpferreira 4y agoAs far as I remember from the last discussion on the matter the effect is overblown. Nutrient decline for modern techniques and soils is around 7% from baseline.
- beambot 4y agoIs that 7% one-time or 7% compounding? The latter has a pretty deleterious effect over time...
- zemvpferreira 4y agoOne-time, or rather total decrease over time. I'll see if I can dig up a source. EDIT - old but seems like a decent review: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an... To recap, there are declines up to 30% in certain nutrients for certain vegetables. This seems to be mostly down to farmers choosing varietals that grow faster and handle transport better over time. Personally it's still my opinion that this is no big deal. Even if, say, oranges are lower-quality than a century ago, they are now cheap, easy to obtain and available year-round. You might have to eat four oranges instead of one for whatever nutrient allotment you desire but...that's a heck of a lot easier than it was for our grandparents. As long as people aren't eating mainly combinations of flour and oil, they'll be fine.
- Retric 4y agoEating more food eventually means obesity issues. I don’t think we are at the point where it’s either nutritional deficiency or obesity, but that seems like the ultimate risk here.
- zemvpferreira 4y agoMy man, no one is becoming fat because they eat too many oranges for the vitamin C.
- Retric 4y agoYet, give it 100 years and see what’s going on.
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- somenameforme 4y agoI'd strongly argue against that. A lot of people somewhat mindlessly consumer fruit and fruit juice 'because it's good for you' which is a reasonable proxy for high levels of things like Vitamin C. And fruit is in general very good for you, but of course it's also quite high in calories. A single navel orange has upwards of 70 calories [1]. So 2 oranges ~= 1 can of Coke. And fruit juice is even worse. A plain cup of orange juice has 112 calories. If somebody buys some form of it that's been sweetened or otherwise mixed, you can easily end up with your OJ having more calories than a Coke. People can easily speed their way to obesity by eating things that they think (and are) 'good for them' without really appreciating how many calories they're consuming. Similar to how things like vegans can easily end up consuming way too many calories when doing things like using peanuts as a protein source. An 80kg man needs around 64 grams of protein a day. 64 grams of protein from peanuts (to take things to an extreme) would be more than 1400 calories. And that's from raw unseasoned peanuts, which have the best nutrition:calorie ratio. [1] - https://www.verywellfit.com/oranges-nutrition-facts-calories-and-health-benefits-4119322 https://www.verywellfit.com/oranges-nutrition-facts-calories...
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- asfasdf111 4y agowas the baseline also under monoculture?
- zemvpferreira 4y agoIf I remember correctly, yes. The comparison was made between normally grown vegetables from the 60s and now.
- lambertsimnel 4y agoI've heard it's highly dependent on the nutrient BBC Radio investigated it in 2019: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz3ry https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz3ry The next year they did the same for soil degradation, and found it a similarly complex topic: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08dx986 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08dx986 Both are <10 minute MP3 downloads
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- hans1729 4y agoHealthy soil can be cultivated at scale, so if quality is the top priority that's not an issue. At least two major factors are at play: - soil usually doesn't get time to recover and gets fertilized every year, nutrition can't build back up because of worsening chemical conditions due to monoculture and salts -> simply less nutrients are available to the plants with each cycle - plants get bred to maximize yields, leading to first and foremost bigger plants, other factors (like nutritional value) are not priority #1 See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an....
- ABCLAW 4y ago>Healthy soil can be cultivated at scale, so if quality is the top priority that's not an issue. The larger issue is that consumers have no way of assessing the nutritional value of the items they're purchasing at the point of purchase. Cost is mediated on the basis of weight, which results in water-rich, nutrient poor, taste-poor produce. Saline injection into meat is another similar issue. How do we make growing nutritional food profitable? Foods that can be sold on the basis of nutrient specific benefits, like Golden Rice or Vitamn D enriched milk can be marketed and sold on that basis, but comparing two beefsteak tomatoes grown in differing soils is not possible at present at the point of sale. Typical food certification strategies, such as Organic, DOP, AOC, and other regional growth indicators don't seem to fit the bill. It's also unclear whether or not there is a market for inspections on the basis of nutritional value - from an organizational standpoint, it shouldn't be too difficult to have an inspector randomly audit crops and send samples to a lab to be HPLC or Mass Spec'd, but whether or not another certification mark changes buying patterns is unclear.
- DeWilde 4y agoNutritional decline of actual fruit and vegetables or the nutritional decline of food as is consumed by humans? I don't think we are seeing the former while the later is how you use the former for the production of actual food that is consumed. Converting fruits into smoothies makes them retain mostly only sugar, while vegetables (and fruits) under thermal treatment loose a lot of nutrients like fiber and vitamins.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago> Converting fruits into smoothies makes them retain mostly only sugar. Wait. So where does the potassium go in my banana when I blend it up?!
- candiddevmike 4y agoThe blender chops up potassium atoms into sucrose molecules via Nutri Bullet fission
- cogman10 4y agoThat's why the blender motor gets hot when you run it. It's fissioning.
- WithinReason 4y agoI always learn so much on HN!
- creaturemachine 4y agoIf it's fissioning then why do I have to plug in my blender? There's something they're not telling us.
- cogman10 4y agoMostly for 5g signals.
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- scythe 4y agoIt's never seemed to me that this whole "worse soil -> less nutrients" postulate makes sense on its face. There are, roughly, four categories of nutrients: - organic macronutrients, which we'd definitely notice if they weren't there - organic micronutrients, which are generally carbon compounds, but carbon doesn't come from soil, it comes from the air - electrolytes, which do come from soil, but are always replenished with fertilizer, because plants need them too - inorganic micronutrients, essentially transition metals plus selenium and iodine, which are present in utterly tiny quantities in food (you need about half a milligram of selenium per day), and could certainly be replaced by fertilizer if we even tried, or easily supplemented. Speculation: manure could work well. - (extra) that wacky little devil cobalamin, which is both organic and a transition metal (cobalt), but doesn't come from plants anyway Now, I could certainly see some kinds of farming techniques impacting the nutritional quality of plants. If you can increase the water content of your broccoli ceteris paribus, you sell more broccoli but the concentration of vitamin C goes down. I could also see impacts on the physical properties (compaction, grinding) of soil leading to worse long-term crop yields. But in order to convince me that soil changes are going to impact the vitamin C content of orange juice, when the constituents of vitamin C come entirely from water and air, you need pretty strong evidence.
- gtvwill 4y agoFairly easy answer to this. If I took a orange tree and only fed it water and air. Would it produce oranges with vitamin c? The answer. No. Because the plant requires far more than just water and air in order to run all the other systems within itself to make that vitamin c production happen. If you take away certain elements in your soil, your going to affect aspects of that plants health that in turn affect its production capacity. If you provide most nutrients for a plant sure it will produce fruit. Will that fruit be as good as fruit from a plant with all the nutrients? No, no it will not.
- glitchc 4y agoHow do we square declining nutritional value with people living longer __and__ spending more years in a healthy state?
- ummonk 4y agoAntibiotics, vaccines, improved cancer treatment, and smoking bans have all done wonders. Declining nutritional and increasing caloric value is probably one of many contributors to rising diabetes rates though.
- SiempreViernes 4y agoNo great mystery, less nutritional value per unit produce just means you have to eat more produce, it doesn't force you to be malnourished.
- glitchc 4y agoMore doesn’t account for nutritional deficiency. If zinc is missing in a foodstuff, it requires supplementing with other foodstuffs, not eating more of the same foodstuffs.
- somenameforme 4y agoThe biggest factor is likely just reduced infant mortality. Today when we say today that somebody has a life expectancy of e.g. 80 years, then it does mean you can expect people to start dropping of various causes around that age, give or take a bit because infant mortality is approaching zero. In the past infant mortality was extremely high, with frail infants invariably ending up as dead infants. And so in the past if you looked at somebody who was 15 years old, it's very likely that he'd live to roughly the same age as somebody today. It's not like he'd just start dropping around age 40. It was more a mix of people living to 5 years old and people living to 80 years old. Take the founding fathers as a random example: ========== John Adams - 91 Benjamin Franklin - 84 Alexander Hamilton - 49 (killed in a duel) John Jay - 84 Thomas Jefferson - 83 James Madison - 85 George Washington - 67 (speculation he may have been killed by a common medical practice of the time - bloodletting) ========== Interestingly enough this goes all the way back to Ancient Greek times where you may be surprised upon some brief research to see how long any Greek you know of likely lived to, in spite of having effectively zero medical knowledge and hygienic practices such as shared butt sponges (in lieu of toilet paper) at the various public toilets. The reason I more contemporary samples is because one can reasonably argue a survivorship bias in the Ancient Greeks. Would you know of Philosophartes today if he had died when he was 40? Probably, but I can't prove that. The founding fathers though were all relatively young when their names were inscribed into history.
- snarfy 4y agoIt's the extra CO2 in the air that makes the nutritional value decline. Plants grow larger with more CO2, but the nutritional content stays the same.
- algoatecorn 4y ago>This has been primarily attributed, from what I remember, to the condition of the soil Perhaps not https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/articles/fact-or-fake-news-our-food-becoming-less-nutritious https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/articles/fact-or-fake-news-our-... Besides, the measured reduction in nutritional content is a fraction compared to our yield increases over the years. If you: live in a developed country have a reasonable income live near a supermarket and eat a varied diet, then you most likely do not have any nutrient deficiencies
- mlindner 4y ago"nutritional value" isn't a scientific term so you're going to have to define what you mean by that. Crops have been in fact getting more and more energy dense over time.
- ummonk 4y agoDensity of various micronutrients per lb. They aren’t talking about macronutrients like calorie content.
- refurb 4y agoNutritional drops have been minimal (see other comment references 7%) and considering most Americans don’t even get the minimal servicing of fruits and vegetables I’d worry about that first.
- acchow 4y agoAnd with nutritional value, the taste. I was astonished when I first visited California how full of flavor the vegetables are. Just a whole different level.