Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food (2013)

nytimes.com

93 pointsprimroot53 comments

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.

And the linked-to comment section is full of FUD as well, in case you were looking for an after-meal fear digestive.

Agreed. My skepty-sense goes off the moment I hear the word "superfood". Steven Novella on the idea:

First, the idea of “superfood” itself is not valid. There is no magical combination of nutrients that make a food into a “superfood” where it will start to have fabulous benefits. Food is just food. It also doesn’t really matter how you get your nutrients, as long as you get enough in reasonable proportions. The best way to accomplish this is to eat a variety of foods and make sure you get enough fruits and vegetables. This includes avoiding an excess of certain kinds of food and an excess of overall calories.

There is no “zone,” however, where proportion of nutrients turns food into anything other than food, that will boost your immune system (which itself is a problematic idea) or shift your metabolism into some sort of optimal state. There is no science behind any of these ideas, but they do sound satisfying to the scientifically illiterate. In short – there is no such thing as a “superfood.”

From http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/human-breast-mi...

While I agree to some extent that "food is food" I don't think that's the start and end of it.

Fruits tend to have a lot of water in them. Imagine a fruit that has somehow magically had all its cell have 50% more water in them. It'd be 50% bigger than before. And it would sell for 50% more than before. But would it have 50% more nutrition in it? Hard to say, but it feels like no. There'd be more of some stuff sure, like more cell walls to hold all that extra water. But more of the stuff you want? I don't know.

I think this is a legitimate concern to have in the whole "superfood" or modern food nutrition debate. Farmers like increasing yield, and there are probably ways to increase yield without increasing nutrition. It's like the old cram an extra 100lbs on every cow in water with salt trick that ranchers used to and perhaps still use.

I'm not suggesting that the whole idea of a superfood is real or valid. But there probably are foods which are better for you by virtue of the fact that the agricultural machine hasn't highly optimized them for whatever yet. I am skeptical of the claim 100x, but I might readily believe 2x or 3x.

Would it sell for 50% more? I strongly suspect that an apple with 50% more water would be less tasty and would not sell as well.

The most expensive apples in my grocery store are correlated with their availability and popularity when it comes to taste.

Oh, of course. And I agree. But this isn't a step-change that's happening, it's a slow increase in yields or whatever. It's not as though one year they made a tomato that was 50% bigger and firmer and tasted terrible but shipped and looked amazing and everyone switched over to it en-masse. It's 1-2% a year, year after year, in a slow way so that it's very hard to notice.

Not that anyone's trying to hide it either, it's just that the interests of the farmers and the people in the supply chain and the grocery store are different in some ways and probably opposed a few to those of the people eating the food.

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.

>It's telling us the simple fact that our food consists of plants and trees selected for taste and appearance

It's telling us a lot more than that.

Further this is an "Opinion" piece, in the opinion section of a newspaper. Opinion sections are not held to any standard of truth, and pretty much anything goes, even when factual claims are made. No information in this article can be trusted as reliable, because of that.

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.

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...

> 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.

First, this has already happened once.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease

Second, this is an argument against monoculture, not selective breeding. If I have 5 types of selectively bred bananas, I have fixed the monoculture problem but not your claimed selective breeding problems.

"Nutrition" implies a health outcome; it is not enough to count the nutrients in a food and then declare it less nutritious. The claim in the article is that food which is the result of agriculture is less nutritious, which means that we have a worse health outcome from eating it than food we ate before agriculture. I think that is controversial, and it was not backed up.

Tons of real credible information in peer-reviewed publications if you care to look. Plenty of in vivo studies as well. Presumably you know how much of any anthocyanin is needed to catalyze a putative reaction in the body? No, you don't. On the article itself I won't comment.

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.

"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.

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.

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

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.

> The modern sedentary lifestyle with enormous quantities of extra calories at our fingertips is quite a recent invention of humanity.

Some people have concluded otherwise. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/debunking-t...

Also we can blame caloric intake, but we should also look at the nutritional quality of the sources of calories and whatever other elements might negatively affect the capacity to become satiated.

Living in a tropical country (Panama) I'm always bemused at people's conception of apples as a staple of a healthy diet, when at the same time we can easily find Bromelia Pinguin growing wild in the driest regions of the country, a fruit containing at least 10 times as much vitamin C.

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.

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).

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?

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

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.

Do you know any rice cultivars, to which Golden Rice genes have been added without a decrease in yields in regions where Vit. A deficiency is currently a problem (e.g. the Philippines)?

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.

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....

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

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.

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.

Could someone please remove the anchor to the comments section?

Clean link for the interim until a mod fixes it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-th...

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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!

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

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.

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?

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?

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

To further emphasis your point, it's not like growers have magical tomato plants that don't make ugly tomatoes. They get loads of ugly tomatoes, which then get sent to be turned into canned tomatoes, or jarred tomato sauce, or V8, or any number of other pre-processed applications. But selling directly to the consumer yields the highest price per unit, so of course that's where the best stock goes.

I'm skeptical of your claim that consumption of meats in any amount could lead to improvement in health. Could you share any resources which support this theory?

Well here is a rather balanced look at some of the research. You can do more checking if you want... and this comes from a "liberal" publication that one would expect to be all about ridding the world of red meat consumption.. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/03/eat-burger-wo...

I would also have you check out Health Care Triage... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIPl5xPYJJU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhEwfaFLrd0

Interesting, thank you for sharing. However neither of those references support the claim any meat consumption is beneficial or healthy.

May I recommend checking out the work by Dr. Michael Greger on http://nutritionfacts.org? Unlike Health Care Triage, each video on his channel is cited to published and peer reviewed research, opposed to just nice-sounding rhetoric.

Here's something about benefits of liver consumption (which is meat):

> It is important to remember the other end of the nutritional spectrum: those women whose diets may be lacking in nutrients. Doyle and colleagues reported that among women on low incomes low birth weight was significantly associated with poor intakes of thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, zinc and iron, all of which (together with other nutrients such as folate and vitamin B- 12) liver provides in generous amounts at low cost. Fetal nutritional insufficiency, low birth weight, and the associated risk of defects is thus likely to be a far greater problem on a population basis than the risk of defect associated with vitamin A toxicity.

> Most women do not need to take vitamin A supplements either before or during pregnancy, and those who do should be under medical supervision. There is justifiable concern about the excessive concentrations of vitamin A in liver, but it is equally important to remember that liver is a source of many nutrients and a desirable adjunct to the diets of many women, particularly those on low incomes. [1]

As for Mr Greger, I've checked out his work following your recommendation. His section about antioxidants doesn't instill confidence. The claims about wonder properties of antioxidants (preventing cancer being the primary one) are oft-repeated across the site, but this optimism should be more reserved:

> Randomized, placebo-controlled trials—which, when performed well, provide the strongest evidence—offer little support that taking vitamin C, vitamin E, beta-carotene, or other single antioxidants provides substantial protection against heart disease, cancer, or other chronic conditions. The results of the largest such trials have been mostly negative. [2]

The videos on Mr Greger site quote only one paper about the preventive effects of antioxidants. The other studies which don't support this premise are omitted.

Since antioxidant industry is significant ($65 billion in 2012 in the US alone [3]), this is not only a nice-sounding rhetoric, but a clever marketing as well.

At first I thought such sloppy reporting was only limited to one topic on this site. But there might be more. For example, the link between milk and autism [4] is also not as clear as it's being made on the website:

> In autism spectrum disorders, many parents resort to alternative treatments and these are generally perceived as risk free. Among these, the most commonly used is the gluten-free, casein-free diet. The objective of this work was to conduct a systematic review of studies published from 1970 to date related to the gluten-free, casein-free diet in autism spectrum disorder patients. Few studies can be regarded as providing sound scientific evidence since they were blinded randomized controlled trials, and even these were based on small sample sizes, reducing their validity. We observed that the evidence on this topic is currently limited and weak. We recommend that it should be only used after the diagnosis of an intolerance or allergy to foods containing the allergens excluded in gluten-free, casein-free diets. Future research should be based on this type of design, but with larger sample sizes. [5]

I wouldn't take everything on this site for granted.

1 - Nelson, Michael. "Vitamin A, liver consumption, and risk of birth defects." BMJ 301, no. 6762 (1990): 1176-1176.

2 - http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/antioxidants/

3 - http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/personal-care-surge...

4 - http://nutritionfacts.org/video/cows-milk-casomorphin-and-au...

5 - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24789114

That liver article is really a stretch. The two studies I've found which reference it simply say consumption of liver or vitamin A supplements should be limited to avoid excess exposure to retinol, although may be used as a last resort for nutrition in poor populations, and is also not teratogenic in pregnant women. Not very appealing reasons to take up meat-eating, in my opinion.

I think your assessment of Dr. Greger's position on antioxidants is flawed. One of his oldest videos (published 7 years ago) reaches the same conclusion as your Harvard article:

> The studies so far are inconclusive, but generally don’t provide strong evidence that antioxidant supplements have a substantial impact on disease.

> At the same time, abundant evidence suggests that eating whole fruits, vegetables, and whole grains—all rich in networks of antioxidants and their helper molecules—provides protection against many of these scourges of aging.

http://nutritionfacts.org/video/antioxidant-vitamin-suppleme...

> With two notable exceptions we should try to get nutrients from produce, not pills.

In fact, he even comments on his own video:

> I’m afraid many millions of Americans have been bamboozled by the multi-billion dollar supplement industry. I’ll be posting more videos on this–stay tuned!

To affiliate him with the industry he so vehemently protests is a tragic misunderstanding. He is quite outspoken about corporate influence and lobbying, if you care to explore more of his ad-free web site.

Finally, your cited study on gluten-free, casein-free diets is several years newer than his video, which I believe is an unfair comparison.

If I recall correctly you were looking for references supporting the claim that "any meat consumption is beneficial or healthy". I provided you with so. I didn't realize the goalposts moved in the meantime to "appealing reasons to take up meat-eating".

> One of his oldest videos (published 7 years ago) reaches the same conclusion as your Harvard article

I haven't seen that particular video, so it seems there are good bits on that website. My point on not taking everything for granted still stands.

> He is quite outspoken about corporate influence and lobbying, if you care to explore more of his ad-free web site.

I did and I found his thoughts about corporate patents [1] interesting. And I wouldn't call it "ad-free" when it tries to sell me books and DVDs.

> Finally, your cited study on gluten-free, casein-free diets is several years newer than his video, which I believe is an unfair comparison.

And I believe it is a fair one, for two reasons. First, while this particular video might be several years older than the study I cited, Mr Greger publishes new videos every week. He can publish a new one about recent studies. In fact, that's one of the mission of his non-profit. To provide "free updates on the latest in nutrition research via bite-sized videos". Second, this excuse might be ok if it was a paper book, but we're talking about a website which can be easily modified. Also, YouTube videos offer annotation feature for situations just like those.

If anything, it's unfair to those who are unaware of the latest research - which is the target audience of that website.

1 - http://nutritionfacts.org/2015/09/08/plants-as-intellectual-...

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

This attitude is worse than useless, it is actually damaging!!! There is a quite large subset of the population that, once having accepted that belief, will throw their hands in the air and go straight for the frozen dinners.

Cooking simple foods from scratch will take you a long way, even if all/most of the ingredients came from Walmart. Just like walking 15 minutes, twice per day will take you a long way if you do not have time to engage in a more formal training routine. You won't be as healthy as you can be, but at least you'll be ahead of the pack.

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

I wish! I can't get a good tomato to save my life. They're all flavorless piles of very firm mush. For a couple of weeks a year I can buy heirloom tomatoes which actually taste like something and look like a tomato. But other than that, it's boring and disgusting greenhouse tomatoes that ship great and taste terrible.

Correct. They're bred for shipping and storage, not for taste.

> The bigger and sweeter, the better.

This isn't true, at least for some geographies. Ability to ship without bruising or spoilage is the dominant factor that drives breeding, and usually results in smaller and less sweet varieties. I can't remember where I read this, but I'm in the US and can cite as evidence any supermarket aisle in semi-arid Denver during the cold months, when things have to be shipped in from Cali or wherever. Small, hard and flavorless seems to be the norm.

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