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Comment by addicted44 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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...

"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.

>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.

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