Nutritional Value of our Vegetables - Part 2
I have heard it stated you should shop the outside aisles of the grocery store, I believe you should shop the outside of the city !
It truly is all in the dirt. As factory farming and industrial production has become the norm and small farmers have been pushed further and further away from the mainstream we are experiencing more and more nutritional gaps in our food. Our “healthy fruits and vegetables” are now less nutritional dense.
The simple and best fix, grow your own food. We realize this is out of reach for most Americans, time simply does not provide us that luxury. The next best option, drive out of the city to a farm and eat seasonally and buy off the farm. Ask questions about composting and adding back to the soil, ask about crop rotation to give the soil a rest, ask about allow a field to lay fallow for a year or two to regenerate itself.
Leave the urban environment of Charlotte, North Carolina as an example and drive to Lancaster, South Carolina or outside of Waxhaw or past Ft. Mill or on the other side of Huntersville.
an excerpt from Scientific American
“It would be overkill to say that the carrot you eat today has very little nutrition in it—especially compared to some of the other less healthy foods you likely also eat—but it is true that fruits and vegetables grown decades ago were much richer in vitamins and minerals than the varieties most of us get today. The main culprit in this disturbing nutritional trend is soil depletion: Modern intensive agricultural methods have stripped increasing amounts of nutrients from the soil in which the food we eat grows. Sadly, each successive generation of fast-growing, pest-resistant carrot is truly less good for you than the one before.
A landmark study on the topic by Donald Davis and his team of researchers from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry was published in December 2004 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. They studied U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritional data from both 1950 and 1999 for 43 different vegetables and fruits, finding “reliable declines” in the amount of protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin (vitamin B2) and vitamin C over the past half century. Davis and his colleagues chalk up this declining nutritional content to the preponderance of agricultural practices designed to improve traits (size, growth rate, pest resistance) other than nutrition.
“Efforts to breed new varieties of crops that provide greater yield, pest resistance and climate adaptability have allowed crops to grow bigger and more rapidly,” reported Davis, “but their ability to manufacture or uptake nutrients has not kept pace with their rapid growth.” There have likely been declines in other nutrients, too, he said, such as magnesium, zinc and vitamins B-6 and E, but they were not studied in 1950 and more research is needed to find out how much less we are getting of these key vitamins and minerals.
The Organic Consumers Association cites several other studies with similar findings: A Kushi Institute analysis of nutrient data from 1975 to 1997 found that average calcium levels in 12 fresh vegetables dropped 27 percent; iron levels 37 percent; vitamin A levels 21 percent, and vitamin C levels 30 percent. A similar study of British nutrient data from 1930 to 1980, published in the British Food Journal,found that in 20 vegetables the average calcium content had declined 19 percent; iron 22 percent; and potassium 14 percent. Yet another study concluded that one would have to eat eight oranges today to derive the same amount of Vitamin A as our grandparents would have gotten from one.”