From the source:
"The high rate of magnesium deficiency now postulated [5,6,7,8] can be attributed in part to a steady decline in general magnesium content in cultivated fruits and vegetables, a reflection of the observed depletion of magnesium in soil over the past 100 years [11,12,13]. A report to Congress was already sounding the alarm as far back as the 1930s, pointing out the paucity of magnesium, and other minerals, in certain produce [14]."
"Three kinds of evidence point toward declines of some nutrients in fruits and vegetables available in the United States and the United Kingdom: 1) early studies of fertilization found inverse relationships between crop yield and mineral concentrations—the widely cited “dilution effect”; 2) three recent studies of historical food composition data found apparent median declines of 5% to 40% or more in some minerals in groups of vegetables and perhaps fruits; one study also evaluated vitamins and protein with similar results; and 3) recent side-by-side plantings of low- and high-yield cultivars of broccoli and grains found consistently negative correlations between yield and concentrations of minerals and protein, a newly recognized genetic dilution effect. "
I wonder if there's a relationship to the obesity epidemic, especially since it's not just humans that are getting larger but also lab animals, pets, and wild animals living close to humans [1]. What if we're compelled to eat more calories when we're not getting enough nutrients in our diets? This would impact any animals consuming lower quality fruits and vegetables.
Completely unscientific - but when you see programs on TV about people that eat a lot, the food tends to be highly processed and low in nutrients, I've been wondering the same thing.
> the food tends to be highly processed and low in nutrients
This type of food is - coincidentally - always extremely high in calories.
But the relationship is orthogonal. You can make processed non-nutritious food that is low in calories, and you can make healthy food that is high in calories. The former happens rarely.
this is wat I eat, high calory, cheap, and very nutritious:
breakfast:
6 raw eggs
lemon juice (1 lemon, squeezed)
378 calories in total, of which 227 are fat and 144 protein. just enough sugar to help you digest it without bloat. awesome anabolic effects from the eggs.
lunch:
6 raw eggs
200ml whole unhomogenised milk (raw if possible)
similar effect but even more anabolic
dinner:
200-300g of fresh steak (beef) cooked blue. can be replaced with lamb or other nutritious meats, but certainly not chicken breast which has nearly no nutritional value whatsoever compared to something like sardines
I'm always quite scared of salmonella, so I tend to overcook everything with eggs in it, be it pudding or some pasta sauce -- mostly scared for my 3 year old daughter, I've lived on a subsistence farm and used A LOT of raw eggs and never got any issues.
I wish there was a salmonella vaccine for humans and be done with it, because raw-ish eggs can be quite delicious.
1) Doesn’t say it has no effect, it has “clinically insignificant especially when compared to saturated fat”. Not the same as no effect.
2) “ However, in the minds of the public, cholesterol in the diet, specifically from eggs, continues to be viewed with suspicion and that view is still reflected in the advice of some professionals.”
Professionals are still telling people to reduce cholesterol intake when your blood results show high cholesterol. How many people do you think spend every waking hour scouring for new health articles?
This is also just one study, maybe let’s not invalidate the many years of people reducing cholesterol intake to reduce cholesterol so quickly?
I’ve been saying this since my nutrition lecture said it in 2003, and he’d been saying it for at least two decayed before that.
If you don’t get enough chromium and molybdenum your body can’t properly regular blood glucose control via insulin sensitivity, protein, carbohydrate, and lipid metabolism.
Like that could be contributor, but also don't forget how many calories some refined and processed foods can have also while either being sweet or fatty/savory.
Anecdotally, this has been my personal experience. I have gone through phases of my life where I ate a lot of junk food. I would feel constantly hungry during those phases, until I ate something nutritious, green and easily-digestible, like steamed broccoli or green peas.
This doesn’t make any scientific sense. Study after study has shown that protein and complex carbs are what reduces feelings of hunger, not vegetables.
This makes sense when you consider most green vegetables like broccoli are 90% water. A meat like chicken, after cooking is only about 60% water.
So if you eat 400g of broccoli vs 400g of chicken, the one that will make you feel more full is obviously the protein.
What’s more likely, is due to marketing we’ve associated anything that is green in color with being “real, nutritious food” and have convinced ourselves that is what makes us feel full.
It’s like people who claim they “feel better” after eating a salad. The average iceberg lettuce has near zero nutritional value and is 96%+ water.
The only way you’d feel better after eating one is if you were dehydrated.
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*edit - people seem to be misunderstanding. I'm not saying fast food is healthy. I'm simply refuting the idea that green vegetables are the key to feeling full. If you wanted to feel satiated, green vegetables would be one of the most inefficient ways to do so--due to their 90%+ water content.
I did clearly state that it was an anecdote, with a sample size of one, myself.
Also I think you're being extremely reductionist here. I'm not claiming that I never felt the sensation of fullness in my stomach. Of course I did. Maybe I should rephrase, that I constantly felt like I was craving food even though my stomach was full.
Moreover, to suggest that our brains somehow only understand macronutrients when it comes to regulating our sense of hunger, is ridiculous. You really think that people feeling better after eating broccoli is because they have been brainwashed by the marketing of the vegetable-industrial complex? is it really that outlandish to hypothesize that eating nutritious food makes you feel better?
Of course it would be fallacious to generalize my experience to other people, if only because I myself hardly understand what was going on. But it would be equally fallacious, not to mention arrogant, to dismiss that such an effect might exist, on the grounds that we did some controlled studies and found that hungry people feel more satisfied after eating something substatial.
There's more to it -- there's a considerable delay between your stomach being full to your brain telling you you're full.
I can eat one pound of icecream in one go before I feel that I'm done, or 1/3 of that, tell myself I can eat the rest in 15 minutes IF I still feel the need to at that future time, and I usually don't -- sort of like the reverse of telling myself I'll only work 5 minutes on that boring task I don't want to, but usually I work through it all.
My unscientific point being, there's no way the brain can tell I've eaten 1/3 meat and 2/3 salad vs 3/3 meat in the span of 15 minutes; sure, it will digest the salad much faster, but by that time I'm already doing other things that don't involve me stuffing my face with food; I've found that with food, if you can resist the urge to eat more for 15 minutes, and don't have snacks just laying around you, you actually solved 90% of your overeating problem. SO in my experience, eating broccoli/salad, or just drinking water, absolutely do work to make you full/less hungry, for a short while at least, but that short duration should not be underestimated, because a lot of times is all that is required for one to stick to a caloric limit.
> there's no way the brain can tell I've eaten 1/3 meat and 2/3 salad vs 3/3 meat in the span of 15 minutes
Again, I think this is trusting too much in "today's science". Who's to say that your body/brain can't detect whether a food is nutritious? For all we know, some trace nutrients are subconsciously detectable in taste and smell, even if heuristically.
I'm not saying that is what happens, but I don't think we know nearly enough to dismiss such a possibility.
Yes, proteins and carbs reduce feelings of hunger. But nutrient deficiencies cause food cravings. That's why people who eat high-calorie meals with few vitamins and minerals tend to overeat, they satiate their hunger but the cravings remain.
If that were true, you could solve your cravings by taking a simple multivitamin. Which just isn’t the case unless you’re critically deficient in something (which, most 1st world people aren’t). Eating fast food 3 meals a day but taking a multivitamin will change nothing about your feelings of hunger.
What’s more likely, is fast food doesn’t make you feel full because its low in protein (the most expensive ingredient typically, so fast food skimps on it) and high in simple carbs.
But since when are multivitamins the same as the real thing? Study after study show that multivitamins don’t do much if anything so your idea here is flawed.
Also in my experience, proteins & fat reduce the feelings of hunger, not carbs.
If I eat at breakfast in the morning 140 g turkey breast + 70 g cashew nuts + 3 sweet potatoes + 1 bell pepper, then I feel perfectly satiated and I feel no hunger until late in the evening, when I have next meal. Deleting either the turkey breast or the cashew nuts from that breakfast menu, makes me hungry much earlier.
On the other hand, if I eat just bread, I have to eat a very large quantity, e.g. 1 kilogram, until I feel satiated due to the full stomach, and then after a few hours I feel hungry again.
There are many kinds of food, like bread, vanilla or cocoa cream and many others, which I like very much, but which do not satiate me unless eaten in huge quantities, so I have given up on eating those kinds of food, because it is much easier to not eat them at all than to stop after eating just a small quantity.
> most green vegetables like broccoli are 90% water.
That's super misleading. The nutrition facts for broccoli here [1] gives 89% water but actually over 1/3rd of broccoli by mass is carbs, fats, proteins or fibers. And comparing raw broccoli to cooked chicken is deceptive - cooking broccoli obviously gets rid of a lot of it's water depending on how you cook. Moreover, comparing gram-to-gram, I'm sure broccoli is less filling, but a lot of people care more about calorie-to-calorie.
Raw chicken with skin on is 66% water, so I wouldn't call it super misleading. I simply mentioned "cooked" because almost nobody eats chicken raw. Lots of people eat raw broccoli.
Boiling or steaming broccoli does basically nothing to its water content. Baking it may reduce by 10%. So still 20% more water than the protein.
Anyways, the water point was brought up to give something intuitive to grasp on to.
As said, the main reason eating one chicken breast makes you feel more full than multiple servings of broccoli, is the 55g of protein.
So adding broccoli to your fast food won't suddenly make you feel full. Dumping the fast food altogether and eating a chicken breast instead might.
I was saying that "90% water" stat is super misleading because it makes it sound like <10% is anything of value, but that's off by a factor of 3. Baking absolutely makes a bigger than 10% water loss by mass in broccoli, and that would of course double the non-water fraction even if it were only 10%.
But the point is, it doesn't matter how much water there is. No one is wondering whether they'll feel more full on 100g of chicken or 100g of broccoli. Anyone trying to control weight would ask about 100 calories of broccoli versus 100g of chicken. I don't know what the answer there is, but they're probably comparable. A head of broccoli is just 205 calories but still contains 17g protein and 16g of fiber. Equivalent calorie chicken breast would be like 40g protein and no fiber. Both are healthy food choices unless you deep fry them or something. You're making lots of fast-and-loose comparisons here that are simply misleading. (Why is the comparison broccoli + fast food versus just chicken? Why do you suddenly switch to talking about iceberg lettuce? Why pretend that broccoli isn't a healthy food that is substantially more satiating than fast food - as is chicken?)
>> So if you eat 400g of broccoli vs 400g of chicken, the one that will make you feel more full is obviously the protein.
The idea under discussion is that the thing that will make you feel more full is the food that has what you're deficient in. That makes sense, and evolution tends to do things that make sense.
Phytochemicals found in some veggies and spices increase immune and other functions. Even if it's 90% water, there are still many functional compounds that aren't found in meat.
Mushrooms are a fascinating bunch to look at regarding this. There are many chemicals in them that are being studied around the immune system, anti-tumor properties, and health in general.
The human body is complex and ultimately poorly understood. These studies typically focus on short-term hunger cues which aren't necessarily indicative of why someone can happily eat 1 meal a day and someone else feels compelled to eat mcdonalds 3x per day.
Anecdotally, If I have a deficiency I'll keep snacking/eating until I've found something that satisfies the deficiency or I'm completely full. Eating to fullness 3x per day or more is a great way to gain a ton of weight.
Volume is important for feeling full. For sure protein really helps, that's well-studied. But low-calorie-density high-nutrient density foods (like veggies) can really hit the spot and help satiety. And yes, people do get a lot of water from veggie intake, actually!
Fiber is certainly important, but try eating a diet of only broccoli one day vs a diet of only chicken the next.
You’ll likely feel normal on the chicken day. On the broccoli day you’ll feel like you’re fasting (because on a calorie basis, you literally will be unless you eat 5-7X as much broccoli as you do chicken).
Pretty widely known effect of sugars on the body. The more simple, processed carbs you eat, the more hunger you feel. Easy enough to test out: stop all simple carbs for 2-4 weeks, observe the results. If you're deep into carbs or junk food, there will be withdrawal symptoms from the sugar addiction. After a month, you'll notice you don't crave any sugars, and you'll feel significantly less hungry on a regular basis.
Sibling poster is unnecessarily certain. Craving and satiety is not going to be well covered by macronutrient RDAs. There are interactions in the small intestine related to digesting plant fiber that produce serotonin, for example. I could find details on request.
Interesting. I recently started using Magnesium Glycinate as a supplement and I feel it truly changed my life, not exaggerating. I’ve suffered from chronic general anxiety for most of my teens and adult life. Magnesium has completely cleared this up, things I thought were just part of my personality (being anxious and other associated things) were actually due to a chronic magnesium deficiency. I just have to make sure I get a decent amount of calcium in my diet (via canned mackerel mostly) to avoid muscle twitches from the magnesium.
I’ve recently switched to magnesium L-Threonate which has shown to be far more effective at being absorbed by the brain and I’ve found myself far less anxious in social situations.
I found that mag l-threonate helps me fall asleep after an anxious afternoon/night but I'm groggy in the morning. Also, I've read anecdotal reports that after a couple of weeks of regular use, the effect flattens out (sorry, too lazy to search for those reports) and one has to take a break for the effect to return. Have you noticed anything along those lines?
For me, the effect is less (or possibly just less noticable) after a few weeks. But some coffee or tea gets me going pretty quickly and the effects wear off.
I've always been a slow morning person, so 30-60 minutes to start feeling normal is on par for me, so it doesn't really affect my timetable, but you may have a different schedule in mind.
My morning bowel movements when I take magnesium l-threonate are amazing, however, which used to slow me down even more on a typical morning.
The RDA on Magnesium is almost never there on multivitamin formulas and so should be added separatedly, I can't really feel that (significantly) it helps for anxiety or jittery though, same goes for theanine, in fact theanine makes my jittery/anxiety worse. Best for jittery/anxiety is taurine, at around 2 grams per each 100mg of caffeine, YMMV.
I've noted overall anxiety got noteacible better when I added DHEA, I'd guess due to changes in the cortisol to DHEA ratio.
It recommends 400-420mg/d for adult males, 310-320 for women (matches the # on my MVM container)
(I found this quickly by starting at the MedlinePlus front page, recommended to me by an Info specialist at a major medical center. Well laid-out readable access to a lot of vetted info from the U.S. National Library of Medicine.)
Thanks for the taurine tip. I've always enjoyed the red bull sensation more than coffee. Never thought taurine would be neuro-active enough, but I'm revisiting that idea.
Theanine is great with caffeine also. I just spoon it in 200-400mg into my coffee.
I've had anxiety problems most of my life, and when a death in the family shook everything it got really, really bad.
I tried everything I could think of except prescription meds (maybe should have, but I didn't like the side effects or addictive potential) and one day while lurking I read a random comment on HN about magnesium.
I decided, Why not, its cheap, and it has had a truly profound effect on my life, among the generally healthy choices I started to make. It took a little time, but it worked a LOT and the muscle spasms and cramps subsided too!
I can't believe sometimes how different my life has become.
What type of muscle spasms were you having? My spouse has high anxiety, some depression, and a persistent issue of localized muscle spasms or twitches in her arm when their anxiety is extra high.
It was a twitching of muscles in my upper arm such as triceps usually, sometimes forearms, sometimes calf muscles and facial muscles around the eyes. It didn't cause pain but it was annoying and a little troubling. The light twitching would just go on an on for hours, every 5-15 seconds seemingly unending. I recall my cat batting at the back of my arm while sitting on my back balcony one morning. I think it was wiggling a loose thread on my shirt.
It didn't really seem to follow any logic, except I noticed alcohol made them worse. Alcohol also caused an increase in anxiety in the following days. I also experienced symptoms of depression. It was a very dark time.
There was definitely more going on than just magnesium but it wasn't until I tried the magnesium that I had any breakthrough.
Good luck. Another poster in these comments mentioned that you can get non-prescription testing for magnesium and other markers from Walk-In Labs ( https://www.walkinlab.com/ ) if you want to go that route. I also know there are doctors out there that will work with this kind of medicine, but I don't know too much about that. Magnesium is pretty safe, but I understand there is some possibility for problems with taking too much.
I genuinely wish you the greatest success, I'm confident that with careful, thoughtful effort along with your loving support, your spouse can start to feel better.
Maybe consider meditation too? Box breathing[0][1] is an often recommended technique for this sort of thing.
Dr. Andrew Huberman[3] recommends a breathing technique, I cant remember what he calls it, but is easily performed to counteract sympathetic nervous stress:
Breath in sharply through the nose, quickly to about half capacity Once, brief pause, followed by a second sharp inhalation through the nose to mostly full capacity, brief pause, and then release the total breath through the mouth.
He suggests doing this 2 or 3 times to engage the parasympathetic nervous response.
You could also try quinine. I recently discovered that drinking a glass or two of bitter lemon, bitter orange or tonic water a day helps with my muscle tremors.
Magnesium doesn't help much.
Side effect is the high sugar intake, which concerns me somewhat. I can't stand most artificial sweeteners, so drinking light products is no alternative.
Ok, your comment is shocking to me: I've been having annoying muscle twitches lately (probably from drinking lots of coffee), and one thing I found online was that magnesium supplements could help. I eventually ended up trying it, but the twitches just keep getting worse and worse; I didn't realize until now the magnesium is probably what is worsening things. Could anyone ELI5 what' the relationship between calcium, magnesium and muscle twitches?
Your body has to move calcium ions in and out of (striated) muscles to trigger contractions. This is done through "calcium channels". Mg2+ is an antagonist to the activation of calcium channels.
You need enough calcium to achieve a strong reliable contraction, and enough magnesium to keep the channels "closed" when they should be closed (among very many other physiological uses).
In short, you need a balance of calcium and magnesium for reliable muscle function. A gross excess or lack of either is bad.
Wow, I started magnesium recently because of migraines. I’ve been twitching occasionally and I’ve been wondering why. Might just need more calcium. Thanks for sharing.
Because Magnesium and Calcium are both divalent the primary mechanisms of absorption tend to compete if you take them both together. You'll get higher bio-availability if you separate them in time (e.g. one with breakfast, the other with dinner).
Thanks for the suggestion. I think my problem is I'm just not getting enough calcium now that I'm getting a lot more magnesium. My legs and arms occasionally have been twitching and I've been having terrible sleep starts, since I started taking magnesium.
Just a warning to anyone on anti-seizure or mood stabilizing meds. Theanine can seriously fuck you up because it alters glutamate channels that your medication may also be altering.
Not everyone can afford a good doctor, so experimenting on their own might be the only way to fix something. People have been hacking their CPAP machines for awhile even though it could kill them.
I, too, wish to chime in here. I've seen people that are absolute wrecks unless they're on theanine, either alone or as an adjunct therapy. I suspect a surprisingly large number of people just have entirely screwed up glutamate/glutamine cycles, and theanine is an amino analogue of them (makes more sense when you realize the name is l-gamma-glutamylthelyamide).
I too take magnesium in an attempt to stop muscle twitches (fasciculations). This was recommended to me by a neurologist after a couple of tests. My fasciculations started during a period of serious stress and anxiety (of the "I think I'm dying"-variety). They've never really fully gone away. Some nights I can't sleep because some muscle is randomly twitching all night. Magnesium helps, but so does staying away from caffeine and making sure to keep hydrated.
Damn this hits close to home. I've been convinced I have some debilitating neurological condition even since I saw my finger twitches a little with my arm stretched out. On top of that I've been having really bad sleep starts. Talked with neurologist and doctor who didn't seem worried at all.
Around this time I had a few migraines and was recommend to take magnesium. Not sure if that's what caused the sleep starts but I also noticed my leg started to occasionally twitch inwards when I'm sitting. The sleep starts have kept me up for hours at night. Going to try and add more calcium in my diet to see if that helps the problem.
It is commonplace for people to eat magnesium supplements before taking certain central stimulants to decrease yaw clenching and gurning, not sure if it helps or not, but it is a thing.
I was under the impression that cramps are from an imbalance of potassium, calcium and magnesium. Supplementing the one you are lacking generally resolves the problem, but its hard to know for an individual without trial and error unless you are 100% sure of your diet.
I mentioned in passing to a nurse at my gym that I get calf cramps from running. She told me to get a supplement from Amazon called Calm. It eliminated the cramps, and after an especially rough squat workout I used to get cramps, it also took care of that. Although you need to be very careful with the dosage, it is basically a laxative.
Just like if you take some extra Zinc (30mg-50mg picolinate) for a variety of reasons - you have to take a bit of copper with it, or eventually your copper supplies will be drained and start causing issues.
I’m not 100% sure if it was zinc but I supplemented zinc for like a week then had the worst constipation of my entire life. Like, wife had to run to the pharmacy to resolve it while I cried in agony sort of bad. So yeah, be careful with how you supplement!
The glycinate is a well absorbed form of magnesium. Threonate is also well absorbed and is able to pass the blood-brain barrier.
Malate and citrate are pretty absorbable too, but I (am not who you were responding to but) use Magnesium bis-glycinate (TRAACS) form. It works well enough.
Keep in mind I am not a doctor or biologist, but many common forms of magnesium, commonly in multivitamins, are absorbed (slowly) via metal channels which require calcium to be taken as well or else the absorption slows and stops. As a result, it will pass through your GI instead of being absorbed into your body.
Not really sure, I heard that magnesium citrate can have laxative effects. I used to use cal-mag which helped anxiety but it never really “clicked” in my head that it was helping, I used it for muscle cramps.
If you live in the country you can fix that. Raising chooks is easy.
I raise my own sheep for food, heavily under-stocked so they can pick and choose what they want to eat (makes the meat taste much better than when they are forced to eat bitter stuff they don't want). I don't eat lamb, I let them mature to 2-3 years old first to develop a stronger taste which I prefer, but not so old that they get tough. Beef tastes bland to me now (unless it is charred and/or served with horseradish).
Soil tests show my soil is high in magnesium, low in phosphorus/sulfur, and normal for calcium/potassium, pH is low and I probably need to apply ag lime (nothing has been applied for at least 9 years).
When my grandparents told me that chicken tastes less good nowadays I thought they were just old and had lost their sense of taste. Actually they were right though.
Everything tastes less good nowadays. When I was a kid, we used to eat tomatoes like apples, just biting into them, maybe with some salt. Nowadays supermarket tomatoes taste like water.
Anecdotally (though studies like [1] seem to confirm this), I've found that tomatoes are quite sensitive to transportation and storage. To me, garden tomatoes taste fantastic; the ones at the local farmers' market taste pretty good too; supermarket tomatoes are only good for making tomato sauce. I wonder whether the tomatoes you ate as a kid had been transported over long distances.
Also anecdotally, I haven't found any other fruit or vegetable that exhibits such a drastic contrast. Maybe persimmons, but I haven't had that many supermarket persimmons. For most fruits and veggies, I've found the supermarket ones tend to taste roughly the same as garden grown ones. Indeed, sometimes I prefer the supermarket version, e.g. for apples.
The varieties you see in a supermarket are optimized for industrial farming and yes, transportation is one of the things they optimize for. The tomato specifically, though, lost most of it's flavor purely for aesthetic reasons [1]. Consumers have an image of the perfectly round red tomato so all the farmers optimized for it, losing at least one critical gene that contributed significantly to flavor and sugar production.
Those varieties have mostly out competed everything else in farmers markets and supermarkets but if you buy seeds online from specialized stores and grow them yourself, you can unlock an entire universe of flavor. Personally, I've never found a supermarket fruit or vegetable that tastes as good as the ones I have grown or eaten in countries with less industrialized farming, with the exception of designer varieties like cotton candy grapes, cosmic crisp apples, or sumo mandarins (though their quality is rapidly falling as they go from coddled breeding labs to industrial scale). I don't think I've had a "proper" strawberry, blueberry, or raspberry since I moved to the United States.
Depends where you live, but heirloom tomatoes and such are very popular at farmers markets up here, and available at the better stores. (example image from a quick google: https://i1.wp.com/www.seedtopantry.com/wp-content/uploads/20... ) Berry season up here is awesome too even in the major markets, because there's such a glut of berries that won't transport out of the region.
I suspect this will be more of a trend across the US. Every time I visit back home in KS I see more people at the farmer's market there, more stuff in the supermarkets that's trying to regain some farm to table authenticity.
As long as you're grocery shopping in the United States, it doesn't really matter. I've spent most of my life in suburban and exurban California with several years each in New York, Miami, and Seattle so I'm no stranger to farmers markets and co-ops. The difference between homegrown and farmers market is much greater than the difference between farmers market and supermarket.
If I had to quantify it, I'd wager that fruits and vegetables from farmers markets are from 10% to 20% better than what you'd find in a supermarket. Co-ops can be as much as 10-50% better but growing it yourself with proper varieties is easily 200-300% better, especially here in California. Tomatoes with so much flavor that you can taste them through a tablespoon of ranch dressing (not that you'd ever need anything more than a splash of olive oil and a dash of salt with home grown vegetables).
I've also come across an article in a Swiss newspaper according to which supermarkets prefer tomatoes varieties that have a "consistent" taste all year round – and because you obviously don't get extraordinarily tasting tomatoes in winter, this then means mediocre-tasting tomatoes all year round instead.
(So are they afraid that if they start selling truly delicious tomatoes in summer, they will no longer be able to sell mediocre tomatoes in winter?)
Engineered genetic mutation that grants supermarket tomatoes mechanical properties of a tennis ball and making them always red (instead of normal green to red transition) is also responsible for the lack of normal tomatoe flavor.
Tomatoes are particularly egregious. There are still tomatoes that taste good, but you won't find them in most grocery stores. Scientists are working on some genetic engineering to make a tomato that's mechanically strong enough to withstand commercial growing and shipping, but still tastes good. In the meantime, you have to search for real tomatoes at specialty grocery stores and farmers' markets.
I've found good quality tomatoes are widely available in standard grocery stores (they all seem to have the same kinds - I'm guessing they have the sam suppliers). Not as good as you get in France or Italy, but significantly better than you get in supermarkets. If you are stuck with supermarket tomatoes then the premium, small/cherry ones are usually the best and well worth the extra money.
Yes, I used to love tomatoes from the local greenhouse. The sorts we get now just taste and smell fresh cut grass. For the farmers it's about what species of tomatoes grows the fastest and largest, with least work. However this is usually the least interestingly tastewise.
The tasty plants still exist, you just have to find the right sorts. They won't be found in your local grocery though.
Growing my own tomatoes this year has made grocery store made those grocery tomatoes seem like fake tomatoes that have no flavor. The small cherry ones in the plastic boxes are at least sweeter a lot of the time.
People I know who grew up in Asia remark consistently that the chicken here in the US is larger, softer, and tasteless. They are used to smaller chickens and toothier meat with a stronger taste.
It is probably breeding practices here, to promote attributes other than taste.
Chickens have been bred in the US to maximize yield to feed ratios and breast size. This news article has a figure from a paper from the University of Alberta showing chickens breeds from different decades as well as their size given the same amount of feed: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/chickens-are-4-times-...
I love magnesium pills! I take two in the morning. It relieves brain fog, reduces lower back pain and makes you shit. (Those three are totally related, btw)
Fertilizer 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).
> 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.
Agricultural 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.
That's because wheat, corn, and soybeans are staples, while vegetables are luxury food items, especially fresh ones. At no point in history, regular people in agricultural societies ate as much vegetables as we do right now. The diets has always been based in overwhelming majorities on grains, roots and beans, and in places with lactose tolerance, also on dairy.
A single bell pepper today costs something between $1 and $2 where I am. Imagine the government subsidizes bell peppers so that they cost $.50. As a single bell pepper has less than 50 calories, you couldn't base your diet on it, you would still need some more calorie-rich food to actually give you required energy. Since vegetables (except root vegetables) are not calorie-dense, you'd need to eat seeds (e.g. grains) or oils anyway.
That's why, if your goal is to enable the nation to feed itself, you should rather subsidize the staples, not luxury consumption.
Corn and soy are not staples for humans, they're staples for industry. What doesn't get exported is used for livestock feed, ethanol, and filler for unhealthy foods. It makes a very small sector of our economy rich, it destroys huge swaths of our nation's ecology, and that result damages the health of animals (including us).
Feeding the nation isn't hard. We could feed this nation five times over with the amount of food we produce. The problem is, we'd probably shrivel up and die, because wheat, corn and soy aren't enough to keep a population healthy. We could actually produce more nutrition and calories with a fraction of the land just by switching from corn to oats. But then you'd be producing less, and hence selling less. That's not as profitable!
And vegetables are luxuries in the same sense that "nutrition" is a luxury. Just because humanity has historically had a shit diet (since the adoption of agriculture) doesn't mean it's a great idea to stop eating vegetables, or produce less of them. We get plenty of calories already - too many in fact. And most of the ones we do get are more harmful than good.
It would be better to get people to eat more of those low-calorie vegetables as it would help stem the American obesity crisis. And as we've seen in this report, vegetables already contain fewer nutrients than they did before - a reason to consume more of them, not less!
Rich nations don't have problems supplying calories. In fact they have the opposite problem, people eat too many calories. There is an obesity crisis underway.
A 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.
I 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.
When 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.
Terrible 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.
Sadly 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.
This 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?
Frankly, 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.
Diet 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.
Another 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.
This 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.
Come 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.
I'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).
Sounds 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."
Yeah, 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.
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
I wonder if that's specific to the US and other western nations.
One thing I've noticed is that vegetables are rather tasteless in the US. Vegetables in Asia are packed with flavor, and maybe they are also packed with nutrients as well?
The easiest of those references to link to is https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1... :
"Three kinds of evidence point toward declines of some nutrients in fruits and vegetables available in the United States and the United Kingdom: 1) early studies of fertilization found inverse relationships between crop yield and mineral concentrations—the widely cited “dilution effect”; 2) three recent studies of historical food composition data found apparent median declines of 5% to 40% or more in some minerals in groups of vegetables and perhaps fruits; one study also evaluated vitamins and protein with similar results; and 3) recent side-by-side plantings of low- and high-yield cultivars of broccoli and grains found consistently negative correlations between yield and concentrations of minerals and protein, a newly recognized genetic dilution effect. "