
Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food (2013) - primroot
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-the-nutrition-out-of-our-food.html
======
Elrac
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.

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.

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.

The author feeds our fears but not our appetite for real, credible
information.

~~~
addicted44
It's not feeding any fears.

It's telling us the simple fact that our food consists of plants and trees
selected for taste and appearance. This article specifically is discussing how
this has led to diminishing nutrition in those plants.

This is not controversial. A different article could have talked about the
same issue but presented a different effect which is that nearly the entire
banana crop in the world is at risk of being wiped out because we've pretty
much eliminated any variety in order to get the sweetest and best looking
bananas.

~~~
CountSessine
_This is not controversial_

Maybe it should be - because it certainly is disputed by scientists. Not NY
Times-bestselling "scientists", but certainly peer-reviewed scientists.

The intuitive connection between the claim that grocery market food has been
selected for "taste and appearance" and the claim that this has led to
"diminishing nutrition" is most certainly controversial.

~~~
noondip
Can you cite any peer-reviewed publications disputing the decline of nutrients
found in food? I found this evidence to the contrary, for example:

    
    
        Historical food composition data and the growing of
        archived seeds suggest that the average content of
        some nutrients in many foods has decreased over the
        last century.
    
        Although the changes are small in comparison with
        other factors affecting nutritional status, we might
        benefit if agriculture were to place greater focus on
        nutrient content, rather than just yield.
    

[http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...](http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8837520&fileId=S1446545000000841)

------
mrxd
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?

> The more palatable our fruits and vegetables became, however, the less
> advantageous they were for our health.

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.

------
manachar
"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

~~~
harshreality
I mostly agree, except...

> 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.

This is a stretch. Those people who were lucky enough not to die of
communicable diseases or predators just happened to be the ones genetically
superior in the sense that they didn't suffer as much from degenerative
diseases? I doubt it.

The lifestyle (plenty of exercise, and not eating too much, or too much
processed/extracted foods like sugar and hydrogenated oils in everything)
theory is much stronger.

I don't doubt, though, that some nutrients have been bred out of crops
inadvertently while domesticating them (making them easier to grow, breeding
variants that produce more food, making the color or taste more appealing).
And some less common varieties of crops are probably closer to the pre-
domesticated varieties and are therefore healthier.

~~~
ZeroFries
You misunderstood him. You can't die from alzheimer's at 80 if you died from
malaria at 72, is what he's saying.

~~~
Retric
Assuming early death was fairly random then the number of people living to 70+
may have been much smaller, but the survivors would probably not differ
significantly from the overall population. However, I don't think we can find
a lot of actual evidence to support one interpretation over another.

PS: It should be noted that due to low human birth rates disease and
accidental death really can't kill over that high a % of the population each
year. 90% survival change per year = 28% of people reaching 12 years old which
is far from sustainable. 95% survival chance = 54% live to 12 which is at the
edge of sustainable. ~.95 ^ 75 = 2% which would suggest 2+% of the population
should hit 75 assuming a steady rate of accidental / disease related deaths.
(Which is unlikely)

Granted, real world death rates do increase after puberty, but even still a
significant portion of preindustrial society was likely over 70. Barring a
strong exponential population growth rate.

------
hinkley
There are groups working to fix this.

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.

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?"

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.

You just have to know where to look and who to cheerlead for.

------
technotony
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).

~~~
gburt
How reliable/discrete is this process? Can I select particular nutrients and
decide I want a plant to have them? Can you tell us more/provide some
interesting references?

~~~
technotony
We can put new pathways into plants. Currently our tech allows up to ten
genes. Most nutrients could be boosted with 1-2 additional genes (typically
over expressing genes the plant already has or adding similar genes from other
plants, eg Golden Rice add's beta carotene genes from daffodil), so today we
could boost 4-6 nutrients. Over time we'll be able to add more and it will get
easier (Eg through synthetic chromosomes). This explanation of how they made
golden rice is probably helpful:
[http://www.goldenrice.org/Content2-How/how1_sci.php](http://www.goldenrice.org/Content2-How/how1_sci.php)

It's not as simple as just putting the first genes into the plant, there is an
optimization process needed. The regulatory costs however are at least 10-20
times greater than the development costs.

------
sp332
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.

~~~
noondip
That's not true for all plants. For example, cooking can boost the absorption
of the phytonutrient beta-carotene in carrots. Artichokes, beets, and onions
can also be boiled without losing antioxidants. Microwaved green beans are
actually more nutritious than raw green beans.

Source:
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1750-3841.2009....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1750-3841.2009.01091.x/full)

~~~
sp332
Carotenoids I knew, but I thought they were the exception.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytochemical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytochemical)
"The main cause of phytochemical loss from cooking is thermal decomposition."

------
mschuster91
Another thing that has impacted average human life time is _peace_. We have
enjoyed 60 years without war on the European main continent, with no
destruction or contamination of food sources.

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).

Now that we can control most of these factors, it's natural that life
expectancy rises.

~~~
nradov
What do you consider to be the European main continent? There were significant
wars not long ago in former Yugoslavia. There's a war going on in Ukraine
right now.

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mfoy_
Could someone please remove the anchor to the comments section?

~~~
dang
At your service, and have a (2013) as well.

Btw: would it work to just strip query strings and URL anchors out of NYT
URLs? It would be nice if it did, but I don't want to break any stories.

~~~
tedunangst
Afaik, nothing after .html affects the content. It's just for tracking, but it
leads to a dozen variants for the same page.

~~~
dang
Maybe we'll take a random sample of recent NYT posts to HN and see if that's
true of them.

------
bitwize
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.

------
jcl
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."

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?

------
polskibus
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!

~~~
noondip
A simple test for the quality of produce can be done with a refractometer, or
a so-called Brix meter.

------
Nux
Every bloody vegetable and fruit in the supermarket is selected for appearance
and sweetness. The bigger and sweeter, the better.

We'll end up eating sugar on a piece of cardboard, because that's where
nutritional values are going.

It's really hard to eat properly, I don't see how it can be done without
growing your own.

~~~
bkmartin
And do you have any research to back up your claim that those vegetables and
fruits are less nutritious than ugly ones? That the amount of nutrients
differs in a statistically significant way to produce negative health
outcomes? Saying it doesn't make it a fact, we need good research to get to
that. And, from what I can see, the research just isn't there. If people were
just plain better at eating less processed sugars and better at eating more
whole foods like fruits, vegetables, and even meats there would be greater
improvements in health. What good are the super nutritious vegetables if no
one eats them?

~~~
amalag
It is common sense that plants are bred for their ability to sell, not
nutritional value. If a commercial grower had to choose between a fruit with a
long shelf life and a nutritious one, which one will he pick?

~~~
evgen
False dichotomy. There are many variables at play and nutrition is not
necessarily the loser on any particular selection choice.

