The article informs us that anthocyanins are good against cancer and a slew of other illnesses. However, what little research about the antioxidant properties of anthocyanins exists is based on in vitro studies, and it's well known that anthocyanins are at least for the most part unlikely to survive being digested.<p>The article informs us that "one species of apple has a staggering 100 times more phytonutrients than [Golden Delicious]." There are thousands of different phytonutrients, and no edible plant has no phytonutrients, so exactly what is this figure telling us? 100 times more of a certain nutrient? 100 times more different varieties? 100 times more by total weight? I guess we need to buy the author's upcoming book to find out, if at all.<p>This doesn't look like any kind of evidence-based complaint about the deficiencies of modern food; it looks like the kind of pseudoscience used to promote unnecessary supplements and overpriced organic food. And feel-good books about medicating yourself by a judicious choice of the "right" foods.<p>The author feeds our fears but not our appetite for real, credible information.
The nutritional value of plants in their raw state is less interesting than what people actually eat. The original plants require a lot more processing and cooking to turn them into food, which destroys many of the nutrients. For example, crabapples are very sour and have to be boiled to make something edible, blue corn must be ground into flour and cooked. Is that better or worse than eating raw Gala apples or raw or steamed sweet corn?<p>> The more palatable our fruits and vegetables became, however, the less advantageous they were for our health.<p>We don't know that. It's possible that breeding more edible plants reduced the need for nutrient-destroying processing, so the net effect was better, not worse nutrition.
"Were the people who foraged for these wild foods healthier than we are today? They did not live nearly as long as we do, but growing evidence suggests that they were much less likely to die from degenerative diseases, even the minority who lived 70 years and more. The primary cause of death for most adults, according to anthropologists, was injury and infections."<p>There are two ways to interpret this "growing evidence". One approach, favored by this author, is to say their old wild diet was healthier and therefor those eating in such a fashion were less likely to get degenerative diseases.<p>The other approach is to say they died too young from injury, starvation, or infections. Had they lived longer they too might have contracted more of our degenerative diseases.<p>I strongly suspect lifestyle may have played more of a role than diet alone. The modern sedentary lifestyle with enormous quantities of extra calories at our fingertips is quite a recent invention of humanity.<p>Getting more nutrients back into our food is good. So too would be to increase the variety of foods we eat (monoculture seems to not be healthy for the environment or our bodies). But I suspect the biggest gains in well-being will come from rethinking how we apportion our days and incorporate more physical activity and leisure time into them.
There are groups working to fix this.<p>Around the world there are several breeding programs that are doing genetic and trait testing of wild varieties of our food plants and trying to use selective breeding plus dna testing to breed traits back into our proverbially cross-eyed knock-kneed commercial seeds, not unlike how the man who 'saved' the Irish Wolfhound crossbred mastiffs and Danes to strengthen the inbred bloodline.<p>I know there's a group working with carrots, and another one that's looking at wild rice to breed a more nutrient dense and drought tolerant rice strain, to answer questions like "could we have gotten vitamin A into rice without using transgenic techniques ('golden rice') to do so?"<p>There are also groups trying to breed biennial and perennial grains, to improve net yields (food minus fuel and labor inputs) and reduce topsoil degradation.<p>You just have to know where to look and who to cheerlead for.
Golden Rice is an excellent case study for one solution to this problem. If the public were more accepting of GMO's we could take the existing best crop lines (bred for looks and supply chain) and insert additional nutrients. My companies technology (www.taxa.com) could easily do this if the regulatory and public acceptance issues weren't so big that we are focusing on non-food applications (glowing plants, blue roses etc).
If phytonutrients are so good, why does the article repeatedly recommend cooking the plants? The fastest way to degrade those chemicals is to expose them to heat.
Another thing that has impacted average human life time is <i>peace</i>. We have enjoyed 60 years without war on the European main continent, with no destruction or contamination of food sources.<p>Go back in history and all you'll find is death everywhere. Epidemics (pest, cholera), decades-long wars with despicable tactics as "scorched/salted earth", natural disasters without a way for people to defend themselves (earthquakes, floods, volcano eruptions).<p>Now that we can control most of these factors, it's natural that life expectancy rises.
I was expecting him to quote the old saw about how a hundred years ago a single bowl of spinach could supply you with ALL the micronutrients you needed, while 20 years ago it took a hundred bowls to have the same nutritive value and today spinach is virtually nutrient free. Naturopaths like to toss that one about, and it comes from extraordinary rendition of various flawed data sets.
I can't help be reminded of Jack LaLanne's two rules of nutrition: "If man made it, don't eat it", and "If it tastes good, spit it out."<p>Of course, he was not exactly a scientist, but he's right that our sense of taste is no longer a good measure of the value of food in the modern world. It seems likely that the way we will overcome this is through education -- but wouldn't it be great if there were some way to fix our sense of taste, so that valuable phytochemicals tasted sweet, or that lead tasted bitter?
What we need is a method and implementation of testing selected piece of fruit and vegetable for actual and not averaged from ages ago nutrient content. I hope that one day it will be possible!
Every bloody vegetable and fruit in the supermarket is selected for appearance and sweetness. The bigger and sweeter, the better.<p>We'll end up eating sugar on a piece of cardboard, because that's where nutritional values are going.<p>It's really hard to eat properly, I don't see how it can be done without growing your own.