More pretty pictures on declining nutrition in our food, courtesy of the USDA database between 1963 + 2000:
Collard greens took a big hit. You'd have to eat 5 times the collards to get the same magnesium as in 1963, and again it is even worse now (these statistics came from the year 2000).
How long have you been treating the soil w/compost and worm castings? It can take multiple years, and even the compost is sometimes deficient in certain nutrients. It's also a good idea to supplement with some sort of minerals from the sea, as you know you won't be missing out on anything if you do, mineral-wise at least. Kelp makes a great fertilizer too.
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Rhubarb did real well, it has been growing in this location for several years.
Interesting. Personally I'm more of a crop rotation kind of guy (well, I was...now I mostly grow weeds), but I know there's a school of thought which says soil eventually adapts to a specific plant if it is grown in the same place year after year. And that does make sense when you consider that in the wild most plants do stay in e same soil year after year, even the annuals frequently crop up in the same place. It's not far fetched to imagine that when that happens the plants get into a symbiotic relationship with specific soil organisms.
How long have you been treating the soil w/compost and worm castings? It can take multiple years, and even the compost is sometimes deficient in certain nutrients. It's also a good idea to supplement with some sort of minerals from the sea, as you know you won't be missing out on anything if you do, mineral-wise at least. Kelp makes a great fertilizer too.
Interesting. Personally I'm more of a crop rotation kind of guy (well, I was...now I mostly grow weeds), but I know there's a school of thought which says soil eventually adapts to a specific plant if it is grown in the same place year after year. And that does make sense when you consider that in the wild most plants do stay in e same soil year after year, even the annuals frequently crop up in the same place. It's not far fetched to imagine that when that happens the plants get into a symbiotic relationship with specific soil organisms.
Good point. I've been supplementing my soil with million-year-old seashells.
Rhubarb is a perennial in the PNW. the crowns I've been growing have been around since I was a child. Much to my chagrin, the dogs dig them up in the fall. I replant them with compost and worm castings. Perhaps the dogs are the better gardeners?
Really good book called 'Teaming With Microbes', written by a couple gardeners in Alaska. Outstanding electron microscope plates throughout the book. Ever see a fungus eat a nematode? Carnivorous bastards!!! Who knew?
__________________ I'd rather meander for the prevention than race for the cure.
Lime is one of the more important minerals to supplement with, because it normally won't be present in sufficiently high amounts in plain compost.
You might enjoy the book, Weeds - Guardians of the Soil, which you can read online. Actually the entire website has lots of great information and the small farms library has dozens of valuable books. I've read quite a few of them.
Another factor causing produce to be deficient in minerals is the high yields being used today - more plants in the same space leads to each of them having less nutrients due to competition and stress caused by lack space. In addition, however, high-yield plants also seem to pick up less nutrients in the soil wether they are overcrowded or not; somehow the genetic manipulation that allows you to cram more plants in the same space leads to them picking up less nutrients even if plenty are available. Probably this is because one of the things that makes a high-yield cultivar have a high yield is because they require less nutrients. Maybe you could only grow 100 normal broccoli plants in your garden before, but you can grow 120 high-yield broccoli hybrids. That may be because they each use 1/5 less nutrients from the soil, freeing up those nutrients for the extra 20 plants. The result would be that the high-yield broccoli only has 80% of the nutrients of the normal broccoli!
So the question is...why would you choose to eat plants engineered to have less nutrients?????
One study on fourteen different cultivars of wheat showed that the zinc, iron, and selenium concentrations in wheat decreased as the yield increased, and also decreased based on when the cultivar was released - ie, the oldest varieties tended to have the greatest concentration of nutrients, whereas the newest varieties tended to have the least concentration of nutrients.
Another study showed that the levels of calcium and magnesium in broccoli heads had a negative correlation to the density + weight of the heads - in other words, the more the heads weighed, the less nutrients they had gram for gram. As the broccoli in the experiments was grown with the same number of plants per acre for all varieties, it is logical that the broccoli with higher head weight came from high-yield varieties.
This paper [Under "Green Revolution varieties of wheat, page 4 to page 5] discusses a study where it was shown that there was a correlation between yield and nutrient density of wheat. The yield of the cultivars increased by roughly 1% every year, with a corresponding decrease in the concentration of iron, zinc, and phosphorous of about .3% every year. It doesn't sound like much, but from 1950 to 1992 - the time the study was conducted - the wheat lost 5 ppm iron and zinc. Assuming that a similar or greater decrease in nutrients occurs in all high-yield produce, which it seems to, that could add up fast.
Most produce on the market has been selectively breed for higher yields for decades. Your best bet is to look for heirloom varieties whenever possible, and even better incorporate as many wild greens in your diet as you can - food as nature intended, never touched by man and his destructive practices.
10 or 11 yrs ago I met a chiropractor who specialized in nutrition. He told me to take an occasional copper supplement because the soil was depleted in copper.
The soil is depleted in just about every nutrient, but supplementation is much less effective them getting your nutrients from real food, and lots of synthetic nutrients are harmful.
Most people are deficient in zinc, so you might want to be wary about those copper supplements because too much copper aggravates zinc deficiency dramatically. That's the other problem with supplements - most use isolated nutrients, but nutrients are synergistic so you can't supplement with just one nutrient if you want good results, you need to supplement with half a dozen or more. We don't even know all of the cofactors for most nutrients today, so there's no way they could be in a nutritional supplement unless it's a wholefood supplement. Isolated, synthetic nutrients are a waste of time, money, and potentially quite harmful.
Grow your own food in fertile soil or get it from someone who does, and eat all the wild food you can. Most supplements are a waste of time but there are some very good wholefood supplements I recommend, mainly spirulina, broken-cell-wall chlorella, AFA, and the various seaweeds. Growing your own wheatgrass and other microgreens to juice, in conjunction with the above guidelines, will ensure you get a wide array of trace minerals that would otherwise be missing from your diet, as well as very potent phytonutrients.
The soil is depleted of nutrients because the only nutrients put back into the soil are phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium. (PNK)
Farmers don't add magnesium, or copper, or selenium, or any of the other 57 essential minerals, all of which work in unison. That is why vegetables of today look good, but are nearly depleted of minerals.
The only real solution is to either grow your own veggies in soil that has either wood ashes or volcanic ash, or supplementing with all 60 essential minerals in colloidal form.
On a final note, chemicals such as roundup have sterilized the soil, basically killing it.
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Let Food Be Your Medicine And Medicine Be Your Food.(Hippocrates)
Add good fats to the diet. Dietary fats are needed for the conversion of carotene to vitamin A, for mineral absorption and for a host of other processes. People who possess enough will power to remain fat-free for any length of time develop a variety of health problems including low energy, difficulty in concentration, depression, weight gain and mineral deficiencies.
And keep your cholesterol from oxidizing with the aid of anti-oxidants in your diet. Cholesterol is a precursor to vitamin D, a very important fat-soluble vitamin needed for healthy bones and nervous system, proper growth, mineral metabolism, muscle tone, insulin production, reproduction and immune system function.
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- Jim
"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving." - Albert Einstein
Dietary fat is very important to good health - lots of misconceptions about fat + cholesterol. Mainstream medicine seems to get everything wrong about health and give you recommendations that are actually harmful. almost makes you wonder...
Here's a study that shows that the mineral content of fruits, vegetables and grains in Finland has decreased from the 1970s to mid-2000.
"In most cases trace elements contents are now lower than before...We found that trace element density in vegetable foods has decreased over the past three decades. Per capita daily intakes of mineral elements in the 2000s were lower than in the 1970s, although the consumption of fruits and vegetables has increased since 1970s." [my emphasis]
So people aren't just getting less nutrients from the same amount of vegetables, they're eating more vegetables but still getting less nutrients.
This study looked at the nutrient values for 43 different crops from the USDA database from 1950 to 1999; they found a statistically significant decrease in protein, calcium, phosphorous, iron, riboflavin and ascorbic acid, ranging from a 6% to 38%.
This one's interesting; it looked at the iron, zinc, copper and magnesium content of wheat in the UK and found that the decrease in those nutrients seems to be related to the introduction of high-yield varieties.
"The concentrations of zinc, iron, copper and magnesium remained stable between 1845 and the mid 1960s, but since then have decreased significantly, which coincided with the introduction of semi-dwarf, high-yielding cultivars"
This part might be what you were looking for before, Arrowwind: "Similarly decreasing trends were observed in different treatments receiving no fertilizers, inorganic fertilizers or organic manure. Multiple regression analysis showed that both increasing yield and harvest index were highly significant factors that explained the downward trend in grain mineral concentration." [my emphasis]
Now, it doesn't say that the soils were well nourished and it didn't use heirloom varieties, just new high-yield cultivars vs normal varieties, but even when treated with organic manure there was a significant difference in nutrient levels.
A study on the macronutrient content of corn over the last 80 years showed that as the yield increased, the protein and oil content has decreased while the starch levels have increased. That's not good.
I've been trying to find a way to copy the graphs from the study, but it won't let me. Click on the link and scroll down to the top of page 4; the graphs show the decline over time of overall protein and fat levels as well as the decrease in the essential amino acids lysine, tryptophan, and methionine.
Also look at graph A on page 5, which shows that the level of protein decreases as the plant density (more plants grown in the same space) increases. High plant density also causes an increase in starch content.
The graphs on page 6 show that the newer the corn variety, the less oil it has. It appears we are breeding corn to have higher and higher starch levels at the expense of protein and fat, which of course is harmful to our health.
This is another graph that shows the average changes in protein, oil, and starch content. The big vertical lines show the complete range of change based on growing conditions [environment and density] and the horizontal line in the midle shows the average change:
A British study showed that there were "statistically significant reductions in the levels of Ca, Mg, Cu and Na in vegetables and Mg, Fe, Cu and K in fruit" in the 20 fruits and 20 vegetables studied, over 50 years. This was based on the data gathered from the UK Government’s Composition of Foods tables. Although you can't see it in the abstract, the study showed that the average copper levels decreased by 80%.
Last edited by Living Food; 12-30-2012 at 03:08 PM.
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