11/20/2016 0 Comments Where are the nutrients going?!I've stumbled upon some interesting articles recently regarding the nutrient content of our modern-day crops. It's common to use higher yield crop varieties in order to meet the growing demand from the food industry. So how does this affect the nutrients in these crops?? These high-yield garden crops grow faster and grow larger than ever before. The nutrient uptake from the soil cannot keep up with the speedy growth of the plant. Therefore, when harvesting comes around, the crop is larger but with a decreased amount of nutrients (we can call this low nutrient density). In conjunction with this, our soils are also becoming less nutrient dense as the years go on due to widespread use of chemical fertilizers and large-scale farming which is over using the land. So why do large food distributors do this?? Simply because faster, larger growing crops can make it to supermarket shelves faster which means more money in sales. This not only affects the nutrient status of our garden crops, but also our animals. From a study conducted in England, beef raised in factory farms show a 38% decrease in iron, 84% drop in copper and 4% loss of magnesium. What does the research say about the crops? A study published by the Journal of the American College of Nutrition compared 43 garden crops over a span of 50 years. They found a decrease in protein, calcium, phosphorous, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C by up to 38%. They also predicted decreases in other nutrients like magnesium, zinc, and vitamin B6; however, there was insufficient comparable data regarding those nutrients. So what can we do? When purchasing produce, look into where it came from. What were the farming practices used to raise the crops or even meat? Try buying local when you can, putting in effort to get your hands on small-scale production of a crop. Simply being more educated that things aren't only what is marketed to us. There is SO much more. I found it interesting that expert and author Jo Robinson interviewed a USDA plant breeder who has been doing said job for a decade trying to develop a new desirable variety of pears and carrots. As a result of the interview she discovered that these breeders never once measured the nutritional content of the produce. In a world where we are just trying to be as healthy as we can are limited by the options controlled by big business and companies in it only for the money. Thanks for reading! xo, Katie Citations: Davis, Donald R., Melvin D. Epp, and Hugh D. Riordan. “Changes in USDA Food Composition Data for 43 Garden Crops, 1950 to 1999.” Journal of the American College of Nutrition 23, no. 6 (December 2004): 669–82. Robinson, J. (2013, May 25). Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food. The New York Times. Retrieved November 20, 2016, from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-the-nutrition-out-of-our-food.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&
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