Nutritional Quality of Foods

[256bits]

TL;DR Summary

In the last sixty years, there has been an alarming decline in food quality and a decrease in a wide variety of nutritionally essential minerals and nutraceutical compounds in imperative fruits, vegetables, and food crops.

An Alarming Decline in the Nutritional Quality of Foods: The Biggest Challenge for Future Generations’ Health​

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10969708/

Abstract​

In the last sixty years, there has been an alarming decline in food quality and a decrease in a wide variety of nutritionally essential minerals and nutraceutical compounds in imperative fruits, vegetables, and food crops. The potential causes behind the decline in the nutritional quality of foods have been identified worldwide as chaotic mineral nutrient application, the preference for less nutritious cultivars/crops, the use of high-yielding varieties, and agronomic issues associated with a shift from natural farming to chemical farming. Likewise, the rise in atmospheric or synthetically elevated carbon dioxide could contribute to the extensive reductions in the nutritional quality of fruits, vegetables, and food crops

 

[sbrothy]

TL;DR Summary: In the last sixty years, there has been an alarming decline in food quality and a decrease in a wide variety of nutritionally essential minerals and nutraceutical compounds in imperative fruits, vegetables, and food crops.

Scary stuff. Eating insects looks more and more realistic. That you can copyright seeds, in effect forcing farmers to buy your (gene-modified?) product has always puzzled me.

In the Courts: Monsanto v. Bowman: Supreme Court upholds patent holders’ rights

Expanded Intellectual Property Protections for Crop Seeds Increase Innovation and Market Power for Companies

 

[DaveC426913]

What do vitamins and nutrients have to do with food?

Don't we already get them in bottles from the drug store?

 

[Laroxe]

Really the amounts of various micronutrients in food has always been dependent on soil quality, its true that frequent use in agriculture can deplete certain minerals but to be honest this isn't a major problem and its easily corrected. In land used exclusively in agriculture there are age old ways in which the soil has been allowed to re-establish the levels of micronutrients and the type and frequency of soil enrichment can be important. Various types of natural fertilisers and soil improvers contain significant amounts of micronutrient sources to replace what is removed. It's difficult to know what the effects of the observed changes might be and It's worth remembering that our bodies are generally pretty good at adapting to these things and controlling intake. There is a similar issue in that in some areas there may be far too much of certain minerals, while it's easy to measure these minerals our interest should be on the effects, and in areas that have access to a reasonably mixed diet, I expect it would be unusual to see much evidence of deficiency states.

I think the comments about genetically modified crops are interesting, we have over the centuries selectively modified plants to increase their nutritional value and remove various toxins. More recently, certain important food crops were subject to genetic modification to increase the content of vitamin A for which there was considerable evidence of deficiency causing harm. This "Golden Rice" was subject to a campaign of misinformation to try and prevent its marketing, there are now however a range of new products becoming available.

 

[gleem]

What do vitamins and nutrients have to do with food?

Don't we already get them in bottles from the drug store?

Store bought supplements usually have synthetic (man-made) vitamins. The problem is that they may not behave the same biologically compared to natural vitamins and their sources. Examples: synthetic Vitamin E is only 50% absorbed compared to natural Vit E, Niacinamide substituting for Niacin (B3) does not decrease LDL like Niacin and Synthetic Folic acid interferes with the absorption of natural folate.

The issue with minerals is a problem with bioavailability compared to natural sources e.g., Calcium, zinc, magnesium, and selenium. Also certain mineral pairs complete for absorption (ideally should not be taken together) as calcium and magnesium or zinc and copper.

 

[russ_watters]

Scary stuff. Eating insects looks more and more realistic. That you can copyright seeds, in effect forcing farmers to buy your (gene-modified?) product has always puzzled me.

In the Courts: Monsanto v. Bowman: Supreme Court upholds patent holders’ rights

He was basically stealing the IP. That's the opposite of forcing him to buy their seeds.

Farmers use/buy GMO seeds because they are better than the alternative, not because they are forced to (except insofar as they can't steal them).

 

[BillTre]

He was basically stealing the IP. That's the opposite of forcing him to buy their seeds.

Farmers use/buy GMO seeds because they are better than the alternative, not because they are forced to (except insofar as they can't steal them).

Not so simple all the time.

Farmers with fields neighboring to GMO crops have been sued because the GMO pollen fertilized the neighbor's non-GMO crop so that it carried recombinant genes.
This is not the farmers fault. Blame could be more convincingly put on the recombinant crop owner for letting their imperialistic pollen spread to neighboring fields.

Trying to control the behavior of animals with mere laws seems fruitless to me.
How about outlawing invasive plants and animals. That'll fix things.

 

[jim mcnamara]

https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/pvpa does mostly do what the name says. It requires evidence of {new plant, seed, or, rhizome, tuber} breeding.

 

[jim mcnamara]

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articl...igh-yielding fruits,soil dilution factors [8].

This helps to understand why nutrient depletion affects many foods

 

[Laroxe]

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10969708/#:~:text=Important commercial high-yielding fruits,soil dilution factors [8].

This helps to understand why nutrient depletion affects many foods

I still refuse to be "alarmed". Since the dawn of agriculture it was quickly realised that repeated growing of the same crops on land depleted the soil, so techniques like rotating crops and leaving ground fallow have been used for centuries. People have also experimented with all sorts of soil dressings well before they had any idea what they were trying to replace and soils from different areas have their own issues that effect the plants that grow on them. So gardeners often alter the Ph of their soils and people in inland areas often suffered thyroid problems through lack of iodine in the soil, there are huge variations in soil quality regardless of farming. Its even fashionable to suggest that CO2, one of the most important fertilisers, responsible for an overall greening of the planet of around 14%, increasing crop yields and improving drought resistance. The reality is that we are able to produce more food of better quality on less land, there is less hunger and greater food security that there has ever been and this includes greater choice. As plants vary in the micronutrients they contain, that's important, and plants, like humans have all sorts of adaptive mechanisms to maintain their physiological needs.

Its true that we can measure the amounts of the micronutrients in a plant and unsurprisingly if they grow vigorously the concentration of certain elements might drop, I just don't find this a very convincing argument of harm. Its suggested that there is evidence of widespread malnutrition in poorer areas of the world, this might be true, after all there is far less overt starvation and most of the evidence of malnutrition is either based on serum levels, this is the one that sounds the most scientific. Indeed, it might be if we actually had a clear idea of what the optimum levels should be, in fact the only evidence that's reliable is when we see evidence of deficiency states. These are not that common and tend to occur in specific localised areas, the causes are generally well known and for most we are fully aware of how they could or should be managed.

This all just seems like another chapter of the book of scary stories, it could have been printed centuries ago, it's not really scary, but it does serve to meet the needs of people who like to feel guilty, if people were in any way bothered they could easily do something about it. Most deficiency states in the west are the direct result of human stupidity and the various fad diets, beliefs about various toxins and detoxification, naturalistic fantasies and genetic manipulation are spreading across the world.

 

[russ_watters]

Not so simple all the time.

Farmers with fields neighboring to GMO crops have been sued because the GMO pollen fertilized the neighbor's non-GMO crop so that it carried recombinant genes.

I've heard that before but as far as I'm aware that's just a popular conspiracy theory myth and has never actually happened. Got any sources?

What I'm seeing is one farmer claimed cross-pollenation but was probably lying:

https://geneticliteracyproject.org/...ers-for-accidentally-planting-patented-seeds/

Anti-GMO activists regularly claim that Monsanto sues farmers who have accidently reused seeds or found their farms inadvertently “contaminated” by GE seeds. That’s not true. Monsanto does sue farmers who use its seeds without licensing agreements. Arguably, the most famous of these cases was against Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, whose story was the focus of the conspiracy-theory-laden documentary “David versus Monsanto”. Schmeiser discovered that his field had been contaminated with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola seeds when the land segments surrounding utility poles was sprayed with Roundup. He then admittedly used the seeds from areas where he sprayed with Roundup to replant the following year’s crops.

Schmeiser’s legal team for the federal court case argued that by releasing the gene into the environment in an uncontrolled manner, Monsanto had lost or waived their rights to an exclusive patent. The judge’s decision concluded that Schmeiser’s arguments defy all evidence. , Witnesses testified that Monsanto removed “plants from fields of other farmers who complained of undesired spread of Roundup Ready canola to their fields.” The judge also found that the level of contamination that had been detected in Schmeiser’s fields through various tests could not be attributed to birds/bees/wind alone.

 

[BillTre]

@russ_watters maybe your issue is on the legal side. This seems to be the basis of the myth argument in an article about legalities that complaining about not wanting to talk about the legalities (written by an industry product developer).

However, I am more interested in the biological issues of uncontrolled spreading.

never actually happened

That's not what I got from your article.
It seemed to me to mostly be an article about legalities while complaining about not wanting to talk about the legalities.
Nothing I read there seemed to rule that out the inadvertent contamination spreading from the neighboring fields.

In fact,

Monsanto has a written policy on its website against inadvertent contamination and the court documents recorded Monsanto’s position on the argument. Monsanto and the organic growers agreed that “trace amounts” meant approximately 1% contamination.

This implies that contamination at lower levels is not ruled out, but no further explanation is provided there.

The article discussed two different cases not just one.
I thought the first guy's actions were biologically clever, but of questionable legality.
Noticing the resistant plants, and replanting is just genetics.

Guess you didn't look too far looking for examples:
https://theecologist.org/2016/jan/19/feral-roundup-ready-gm-alfalfa-goes-wild-us-west
This was my second hit on a simple search.

Another thing the article made a big claim about was that the same rules should exist for living things because if they didn't there would be all kinds of problems with other easily copied things. This seems pretty bogus to me. It is not a good comparison because those other things don't reproduce themselves. They have to copied by people. Living things just live their lives and reproduce by themselves. If they are not well enough controlled by their "owners" then they should not (in my view) be patentable.

 

[russ_watters]

Guess you didn't look too far looking for examples:
https://theecologist.org/2016/jan/19/feral-roundup-ready-gm-alfalfa-goes-wild-us-west
This was my second hit on a simple search.

That article does not describe a lawsuit, so it does not satisfy my request/substantiate your claim.

However, I am more interested in the biological issues of uncontrolled spreading.

That's fine, but your claim was about lawsuits, and that's what I objected to. I remain open to being shown there are some I'm not aware of.

The article discussed two different cases not just one.

The second one wasn't about accidental usage of "contaminated" seeds, so is irrelevant to your claim(and not for nothing, but the USSC decided unanimously in favor of Monsanto in the second case).

 

[BillTre]

Primarily my claim was about the stupidity of trying to control nature with laws.

 

[russ_watters]

Primarily my claim was about the stupidity of trying to control nature with laws.

[separate post]
I am more interested in the biological issues of uncontrolled spreading.

No, it really wasn't:

Farmers with fields neighboring to GMO crops have been sued...

I wasn't an English major, but this claim is very clearly about lawsuits. If you're saying you want to retract that and are really more interested in "the biological issues of uncontrolled spreading" or "trying to control nature with laws" (whatever that even means), I'm ok with that.

[edit]
E.G., if you want to say "seeds shouldn't be patentable" or "offspring of GM seeds shouldn't be protected by patents", that's fine, but that isn't what happened in the lawsuit you claimed, it just would have been an alternative way out of it. The ruling was that the usage was not accidental, it was on purpose; He stole the IP on purpose, he didn't trip over it and then get abused by an Evil Corporation for an honest mistake/circumstance out of his control.

 

[BillTre]

No, it really wasn't:

Well, OK then.

 

[Laroxe]

I must admit I find this whole issue very confusing, the reality is that most food crops are effectively engineered by selective breeding over time. These have been engineered to be resistant to certain herbicides to increase yields, and in an effort to maintain the profits of the supplier, have been modified to produce sterile seeds. So personally I'm not convinced of any harm from eating the foods, and it looks as if these crops will be able to compete with others in terms of "fitness", even if there was limited cross contamination they would disappear quite quickly.

Some of the other concerns don't really make much sense to me. There is a concern that these crops will increase glyphosate resistance, while its quite possible the use of a particular herbicide will increase resistance, this is how the natural world works, the chemical acts as the selective force, this would apply to anything. The ways in which nature responds to chemical control has been a problem in agriculture well before we started genetic control. It's claimed that it would result in a loss of biodiversity, well that's its job, to kill weeds and the potential effects on soil organisms would in fact effect the quality of the crops which would be undesirable. I suspect the issue has little if anything to do with the biological consequences and reflect the companies desire to control the seed market. In fact, even the resistance to GM crops serves the commercial interests of the producers as any evidence of cross contamination can lead to whole shipments of grain being rejected.

I suspect that these and similar innovations will all be short term, nature will do whatever it wants, and company profits play little role in this. It's becoming a common strategy for some companies to continue to control how a product is used after it is bought, they attempt to maintain ownership, some tech companies have been doing it for years while evading responsibility for problems. I suspect that some of the changes seen in the USA will see these controls and resulting conflicts becoming far more common in many areas.