Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

This happened due to extermination of soil life through modern farming practices of heavy tilling, fertilizing and monoculture crops. Dead soil is more susceptible to erosion and requires ever increasing amounts of synthetic fertilizer to grow anything. More soil has been lost from the US than the amount of food that has been produced. Soil fertility can be returned to historical levels by changing farming practices to make living soil. The benefits of treating the soil as a living organism include increased fertility, water infiltration, moisture retention, and nutrient availability as well as decreasing or eliminating synthetic fertilizer requirements.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theweek.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;554677&#x2F;america-running-soil" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theweek.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;554677&#x2F;america-running-soil</a><p>This is a long video but it has completely changed my home gardening practices. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A</a>

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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC6163803&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC6163803&#x2F;</a><p>From my link:<p>&gt;It is important to note that the USDA mineral content of vegetables and fruits has not been updated since 2000, and perhaps even longer, given that the data for 1992 was not able to be definitively confirmed for this review.<p>I’d like to see if it’s improved recently. Healthy foods and organics are more readily available now.

I’ve been living in Ukraine for the past few months, trying to figure out why the food here, especially the vegetables, simply taste <i>so good</i>. The very same dishes (e.g. steak and veggies) from popular mid-range restaurants are far more enjoyable to me over here in Kiev than I ever ate in Canada. When I went back to Canada for a brief visit, my body was craving Ukrainian food. Now this study on vegetable mineral content may explain why. I’m very keen to see a comparison study on Eastern European agriculture and produce versus North American. Ukraine was once the “breadbasket” of the Soviet Union, so there must be an explanation. Ukrainians who migrate to other countries are often said to complain about a loss in food taste - previously I assumed that was just some form of homesickness, but this study lends some potential scientific ground to their complaints.

Growing food has turned into an engineering problem where people think you solve it by investing the least possible resources into it. Whatever the consumer will buy and you can produce as cheaply as possible wins the day. Our tasteless vegetables are like cheap Bose (no highs, no lows, must be Bose) speakers or pressed paper furniture at Walmart. On the surface they look like a vegetable should look, but the taste, what’s inside, is completely deficient.

Has it really? I thought it would be useful to share a paper from the opposing viewpoint, which argues the opposite of the conclusions you might first arrive at from looking at this chart...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S0889157516302113#tbl0005" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S088915751...</a> (Mineral nutrient composition of vegetables, fruits and grains: The context of reports of apparent historical declines, published in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis March 2017).<p>As a non-expert I have no opinion as to which viewpoint is correct. However, as usual the issue is more complex than that...

Something that has puzzled me recently: how is anyone supposed to get the daily recommended amount of potassium? If you look at foods like bananas that are supposed to be good sources of it, you still need to eat something like eleven bananas a day to get enough (according to US recommended daily intakes, anyway). At least with the minerals mentioned in this posting, you can fall back on supplements if you need to...but if you try to buy potassium supplements, the max dosage you can get over the counter is 99mg, which is only about 3% of the daily recommended intake. WTF?

These are normalized mass rates, ie grams per gram of plant mass. However, the mass yield per acre of cabbage has radically increased over that time period. Is it possible that a cabbage plant is capable of absorbing an absolute amount of minerals, and this is simply being diluted by ever-larger cabbages?

Soil depletion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;soil-depletion-an...</a><p>I have a friend who refers to vitamins as &quot;expensive pee&quot;. He means taking vitamin pills when you eat a good diet containing fruits and veg is unnecessary because your body will excrete out the excess. I like to point out to him that fruits and veg are not what they used to be.

I don&#x27;t think this is new or that unexpected, but it should be talked about. We use to breed plants based on both taste and size, taste being altered significantly by mineral contents. Currently, we mostly only breed plants based on weight, taste doesn&#x27;t factor into it, and increasing sugars and starches increases weight far better than any mineral count. Heirloom plants are generally considered luxury products and since they don&#x27;t have as large of yields, aren&#x27;t a good competition against commercial plants, despite the fact that most people agree heirloom plants taste better and usually have higher mineral counts.<p>Now I don&#x27;t know how much the the growing medium effects this, our topsoil is getting thinner and is fed primarily on &#x27;purified&#x27; artificial fertilizers, and heirloom plants are far more likely to be home garden or &#x27;organically&#x27; grown, but im willing to bet plant genetics play a much bigger role in mineral contents than anyone wants to admit. It would be another hit to the idea that current farming practices are sustainable long term and nobody wants to admit that.

This isn&#x27;t necessarily a bad thing. High iron consumption appears to be at the nexus of a vast array of diseases from colon cancer to Alzheimer&#x27;s. As for Calcium there&#x27;s really no evidence of it strengthening bones. And high consumption is probably causally increases CVD mortality.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nautil.us&#x2F;issue&#x2F;67&#x2F;reboot&#x2F;iron-is-the-new-cholesterol" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nautil.us&#x2F;issue&#x2F;67&#x2F;reboot&#x2F;iron-is-the-new-cholesterol</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bmj.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;351&#x2F;bmj.h4580" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bmj.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;351&#x2F;bmj.h4580</a> [3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3336363&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3336363&#x2F;</a>

Another reason to roll out Enhanced Olivine Weathering, get some minerals back into the dirt.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.innovationconcepts.eu&#x2F;res&#x2F;literatuurSchuiling&#x2F;olivineagainstclimatechange23.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.innovationconcepts.eu&#x2F;res&#x2F;literatuurSchuiling&#x2F;oli...</a>

Derek from Vertasium on YouTbe has a nice explanation. Even showing how the nutrient levels in weed specimens are also falling. The weeds were collected by researchers over the last 100 or more years. The weeds were vital because it showed it wasn&#x27;t limited to farming practices it&#x27;s all plants.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Yl_K2Ata6XY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Yl_K2Ata6XY</a>

Wait until everyone learns about bioavailability of nutrients with respect to type of food -- ie. Animal-based nutrition is more bioavailable than plant-based nutrients. [1]<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academic.oup.com&#x2F;ajcn&#x2F;article&#x2F;78&#x2F;3&#x2F;633S&#x2F;4690005#109811045" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academic.oup.com&#x2F;ajcn&#x2F;article&#x2F;78&#x2F;3&#x2F;633S&#x2F;4690005#1098...</a>

In India, Subhash Palekar is a name you often hear these days. He was awarded fourth highest civilian award the Padma Shri in 2016. He is a proponent of Zero Budget Natural Farming- (which some agri bodies have claimed does not work as the claims would indicate).<p>A few links, if interested. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Subhash_Palekar" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Subhash_Palekar</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Masanobu_Fukuoka" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Masanobu_Fukuoka</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palekarzerobudgetspiritualfarming.org&#x2F;home.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palekarzerobudgetspiritualfarming.org&#x2F;home.aspx</a>

I want to see the study. If we are saying that average mineral content of calcium, magnesium, and iron in cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach has dropped 80–90% between 1914 and 2018, where were the subject vegetables taken from? Are we needing to look at farming methods, large agriculture process such as early harvest, soil depletion, delivery method, sun exposure, etc?<p>And, if we are looking at findings from the USDA, Agricultural Research Service and USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, they really need to update their research. As stated by the study&#x27;s author, &quot; the USDA mineral content of vegetables and fruits has not been updated since 2000&quot;

Article seems suspicious. How were these measured 100 years ago? Same techniques as today? Can we verify the 100 year old data?

In many countries in Eastern Europe the soil is poor in iodine, which historically meant a lot of thyroid problems. Good news is that governments mostly solved the issue by requiring table salt to contain iodine. In some countries you can still buy table salt that doesn&#x27;t contain iodine (&quot;Himalayan&quot; and so on) but people still use the mandated kind indirectly by buying bread and cheeses made with iodine.<p>My point is the same can be done with magnesium and other minerals, which can solve the public health aspect while the soil is restored.

Isn&#x27;t a big part of the problem that for nearly all of duration of life, all animals had their own excretion patterns? If a monkey eats a banana, and 2 days later excretes nutrients in forms it cannot use... then typically the distance between plant and and dropping is not <i>that</i> far. Plants also spread throughout the landscape.<p>Birds may perform a larger diffusion work part of the time (random droppings while flying), yet a large part of the time it would eat some fruits from one type of tree, then fly to another type of tree, and leave droppings that represent a mixture of the nutrients the different types of trees had access to, but for a large part what came from trees returns to trees even if it&#x27;s different types of trees. So by producing one type of fruit the tree can trade it&#x27;s nutrients through birds-as-traders with other trees. Humans ban birds from trees because we want to keep the fruits to ourselves.<p>Perhaps we are simply wasting too much of our faeces into rivers and the sea? and generally disturbing the natural transport patterns (hidden labour) performed by different types of animals.<p>Migratory birds might trade nutrients over huge distances, which may sound ridiculous since they can&#x27;t hold their droppings that long, but their bodies in general also contain nutrients, and the bird could die at either end of the migratory path.

Our increase in food production comes at the expense of fertilisers, pesticides, soil depletion and water poisoning. We are feeding the world alright, but on empty calories.<p>Was Malthus right after all?

This is a side issue in the paper linked. The paper itself cites a more useful-seeming source: &quot;Declining Fruit and Vegetable Nutrient Composition: What Is the Evidence?&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.ashs.org&#x2F;hortsci&#x2F;view&#x2F;journals&#x2F;hortsci&#x2F;44&#x2F;1&#x2F;article-p15.xml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.ashs.org&#x2F;hortsci&#x2F;view&#x2F;journals&#x2F;hortsci&#x2F;44&#x2F;1...</a><p>Freely available too, nice one.

The graph of male testosterone levels looks very similar to this one. I&#x27;m not suggesting there&#x27;s necessarily a correlation between the two, but modern life is taking its toll on our health.<p>Life expectancy may be longer in present times, but quality of life is in some ways lower (a notable exception to that is the status of even relatively minor infections, which were frequently fatal in pre-modern life).

I grew up on a farm in Norway. I love how people who have never even driven a tractor suddenly know how to save the planet because they have a garden. Oh please.<p>It&#x27;s really simple: we consume more resources than the planet can reasonably sustain. And because we do not intend to stop procreating and consuming we&#x27;re fucked. (No, really, we are)

Isn’t this at least easy to fix? Required amounts of dietary minerals are minuscule: 50 mg iron, 15 mg zinc and less than 2 mg of the other transition metals and P. Presumably fertilizer could include trace amounts of these elements without substantial cost increases? (Ca&#x2F;K&#x2F;Mg are already in fertilizer.)

When crops are removed from the land, more complex fertilizers must be used to replace the minerals. A good example is sulfur. The sulfur removed had been replenished by acid rain. Once scrubbers were applied to remove sulfur from coal plant emissions, farmers needed to monitor and replenish sulfur levels by sulfur fertilizer.<p>&quot;Seeking high yields, the reduction of acid rain and the need for sulfur&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.farmprogress.com&#x2F;management&#x2F;seeking-high-yields-reduction-acid-rain-and-need-sulfur" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.farmprogress.com&#x2F;management&#x2F;seeking-high-yields-...</a><p>The bottom line is that agriculture is mining, and any elements that are removed in crops must be replaced. Adequate sulfur levels are particularly important to cruciferous vegetables.

The is the flip side of the green revolution, which basically bred plants to grow big and fast if you dump a lot of fertilizer made from fossil fuels on them. More carbs and less of everything else. I know people love Norman Borlaug but not everything is as nice as you’d like it to be.

It&#x27;d be cool to see a comparison of common top-grade &quot;organic produce&quot; compared with produce from a farmers market and that grown from someone&#x27;s own backyard. Granted, with a measure of time from harvest to measurement of mineral content.

Would it be wise for most people to take a daily multivitamin or supplement? I believe we only need trace amounts of these vitamins and minerals, so even with a 90% decline in mineral levels, it sounds like most people are still getting plenty of minerals.<p>&gt; 60% of adults do not achieve the average dietary intake (ADI) and 45% of Americans are magnesium deficient.<p>I&#x27;m always a bit skeptical of claims like this, and those percentages are huge. I&#x27;m wondering why I&#x27;ve never heard about it before (although I&#x27;m very ignorant about a lot of things.) Are there any government efforts to make magnesium supplements widely available, or some other way to solve this problem?

I worked on a bio-intensive organic farm in Washington State via <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wwoofinternational.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wwoofinternational.org&#x2F;</a>. This was one of the articles that got passed around:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;templates&#x2F;story&#x2F;story.php?storyId=129629752" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;templates&#x2F;story&#x2F;story.php?storyId=129629...</a><p>Volunteering there was the first time I realized strawberries were red all the way through and incredibly dense with flavor, since they were allowed to ripen naturally and benefit from richly amended soil full of microbes.

Almost impossible to eat healthy these days. Even if you think you’re eating healthy you might not be. We aren’t getting as many probiotics, minerals, and vitamins from fruits and vegetables. This is terribly unfortunate. We need to find a way to use land more effectively and give our soil and plants enough time to establish themselves so the nutrition content is sufficient and normalized.<p>A solution might be less land for herding cattle and more land for planting vegetables and fruits that might take more time to cultivate.

Does anyone know how much we can absorb? Like if we can only take in 1 out of the 50, then I don&#x27;t care if its down to 10. Anyone know the science on mineral absorption?

Here is a good resource on growing your own food with maximum nutrition.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;janabogs.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;janabogs.com&#x2F;</a>

Old news?<p>Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? - Because of soil depletion, crops grown decades ago were much richer in vitamins and minerals than the varieties most of us get today<p>April 27, 2011<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;soil-depletion-an...</a>

This is a good reason to eat organic food.<p>The overall strength of evidence is good or moderate that, for many parameters, organic produce is superior to conventional produce.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tandfonline.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1080&#x2F;16546628.2017.1287333" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tandfonline.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1080&#x2F;16546628.2017.1...</a>

Fascinating discussion, just noticed the article is about magnesium deficiency.<p>Magnesium pills! I love those things. The only supplement I take, because it gives such a direct brain-fog lifting effect and makes me poo good. Real good. A must before international travel.

Original article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC6163803&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC6163803&#x2F;</a>

Probably cause there&#x27;s a TON OF PEOPLE LIVING AND REPRODUCING. You can talk about soil depletion all you want, but you&#x27;re ignoring the true problem.

calcium and magnesium? that sounds familiar...the two main minerals that water softeners remove. could this be related to water filtration&#x2F;softening that farmers may be using? (I don&#x27;t know if they actually use filtration or not). I imagine they&#x27;d want to use softeners, as it would increase the lifespan of irrigation equipment.

If you understand French, you can take a look at Claude and Lydia Bourguignon’s work about soil health.

Makes sense: we&#x27;re getting like 5x the yields per area of land. Something has to give.

Perhaps a silly question but doesn&#x27;t a plant require all these minerals to grow?

New health campaign message: remember to eat your 50 portions of fruit and veg a day.

FYI: The iron within meat is much more bioavailable to your body

Well there are some that say that minerals on vegetables are not bio-available for the human digestive system, so in the end doesn&#x27;t make a lot of difference.

Very interesting.

Can we not have LinkedIn links on HN

weak soil makes weak food makes weak humans

Read The Omnivore&#x27;s Dilemma. Do it now.

My chiropractor warned me about this. He said everyone is deficient in vitamins and minerals because of our food. He suggested an extreme pill popping routine, which was difficult to do. Does anyone agree with this approach? I was taking so many vitamins it made me feel sick. I can&#x27;t remember the name of the routine, but I researched it online. I think it was used to treat schizophrenia.

As I said in a previous thread:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20799295" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20799295</a><p>---<p>*-4 points by patientplatypus 18 days ago | parent | favorite | on: The Next Recession Will Be About Sovereign Debt<p>The next recession will be caused by poor crop yields due to environmental destruction. It will also cause famines and wars globally.<p>---<p>We have maybe one or two years left, up to five maybe if we&#x27;re lucky, until the entire social system collapses. It will be dark and sad and scary.<p>I&#x27;m sorry you guys.