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If you wanted to replicate the vitamin A content of an orange grown in 1940s America, one would have to eat eight oranges grown today, and there’s every reason to believe that this would be the same for vitamin C and other nutrients.
This was reported recently in Scientific American, which was answering user-submitted questions about the alleged decline in nutrient content in American produce.
A 2004 study by University of Texas Austin’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry found that 43 different varieties of fruits and vegetables were deficient in certain nutrients by looking at data from the USDA. Davis et al. reliably found declines in protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, vitamin B2 and vitamin C, in food grown in 1999 compared to those grown in the 1950s.
Scientific American looked at other studies with similar results. While not all the declines were as dramatic as the eight-to-one orange ratio, there could be as much as 37% less iron in our vegetables, 30% less vitamin C, and 27% less calcium. These three nutrients, in which millions of Americans are deficient, are some of the most critical for maintaining a high-level of overall health.
With Americans being told, wrongly, to eat cereals and lean meat for iron, this fall in iron content is likely exacerbating an already serious problem of iron deficiency in the nation and the world.
The cause of this? Eroding topsoil and degraded soil quality are the primary cause of loss of nutrition in fruits and vegetables. By farming the same soils every year for more than a century, American fields are not given the adequate amount of time to replenish the mineral content needed to sustain healthy produce. For reference, 3 inches of topsoil require 1,000 years to build, but only a few modern farming seasons to destroy.
Furthermore, plants bred, either through selective breeding as has been done for thousands of years, or through genetic modification, have evolved to grow fast and large, forsaking other genetic equipment for absorbing nutrition. Research in aquatic insects has shown that environmental stressors in one individual cause epigenetic changes, through DNA methylation, to adapt the species to better survive the same stress, and which can be found in the next four generations of offspring.
Transgenerational epigenetic changes have been identified as even more sensitive and pronounced in plants, meaning that farming plants in degraded soil environments with limited nutrients are causing inter-generational stresses that change the makeup of the fruits, vegetables, and grains which humans are farming, to plants that have more limited nutrient quantities.
The Organic Consumer’s Association have changed their position over the 21st century as evidence that a regenerative agricultural model is superior for soil replenishment than that of an organic model. Regenerative practices, such as farming over top ground cover crops, and pasturing grazing animals in fields post harvest, through the next season, and into the next, can actually rebuild soil depth, nutrient quality, and biodiversity.
This could be a solution to falling nutrient levels in food, but it needs to be implemented sooner rather than later.
