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I'd worry less about the lower vitamin C and more about the lower secondary metabolites that likely come with that. Anyone that has ever eaten a garden grown anything can tell you that there is a lot missing in store produce. These secondary metabolites are likely the missing link in my opinion. We aren't malnourished (with respect to most vitamins and minerals) in the western world but we do likely have drastically less of all the terpenoid, phenol, and alkaloid compounds that make vegetables "healthy", to use a word you hate. To add insult to injury, vegetables and fruits low in secondary metabolites taste worse to us, so we eat even less of them than we should.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_metabolite#Plant_sec...

> Anyone that has ever eaten a garden grown anything > can tell you that there is a lot missing in store produce

I also enjoy gardening, but from a scientific perspective, I cannot support a statement like this. There is enormous room for bias in assessment of produce grown yourself, because of the physical and emotional investment made in said produce.

You don’t need a study published in a peer reviewed journal to know that vegetables bought in typical US grocery stores taste much worse than home grown ones.

I do need that. I’ve had plenty of home grown produce that I doubt could be distinguished from store bought in a blind taste test.

Depends on your skills as a gardener and your grocery store, I suppose. Some of my tomatoes were better than the best grocery store tomatoes and some were worse. In any case, the claim was not about flavor, but about nutrition profile, and a lot being "missing" from grocery store produce.

Watch food scientist Harold McGee[0][1] and see if you’re as impressed as I was, and that there’s potentially something in the GP claim.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_McGee

[1] https://youtu.be/lQvfKNMybWY?t=1230

Old data doesn’t make it invalid. I think it’s pretty reasonable to assume soil with more nutrients in it results in food with more nutrients in it (at least within a reasonable set of values). I think it’s also worth checking that food that is modified for growth and resistance factors is still as “nutritious” as before. Do you have any references to your claim that organic food does/does not change health outcomes?

Its crazy because fruit and veg are so heterogeneous. If you look at apples there are dozens of different varieties, different sizes and different orchards but all one set of nutritional information. I'm pretty sure many modern varieties have more in common with candy than the small, sour apples of 50 years ago.

To be fair, I would imagine, each apple on the tree has a slightly different nutritional make up then every other apple on the tree. Plants don't spread nutrients evenly throughout themselves. They push more nutrients to areas with more light or the areas that grow better.

I've always assumed nutritional guides on fruits are more like averages or something. There's no way each individual piece of fruit is exactly the same. Plants just don't grow that way.

From the article: "They studied U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritional data from both 1950 and 1999 for 43 different vegetables and fruits, finding “reliable declines” in the amount of protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin (vitamin B2) and vitamin C over the past half century."

Is that something worth dismissing out of hand?

The point is (and it's a good one), does it matter?

A good example are the statin drugs. Drug companies did a lot of marketing around "well, our drug lowers LDL by 10% more than our competitor", which could be very well be true, but again, does that matter?

Unless you run studies that measure an outcome that matters, it's all conjecture. Vitamin C levels might be declining, but we don't have a issue with scurvy in developed nations, the impact of any decline might be insignificant.

>It's the same with grass fed beef and all the other "organic" stuff - they are never actually connected to better health outcomes...

I'm not sure that would even be possible considering how much time and effort a study like that would require. But you might be able to hypothesize that eating a clean/chemically free (ex: Round Up/Glyphosate) food item would be better for you.

Comparing a factory farm pig that was fed GMO Soy it's entire life and raised in conditions that encourage disease/sickness to a pig raised in a clean/organic pasture with no exposure to synthetics/chemicals, I would imagine there is a noticeable difference in health.

Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that someone consuming this animal would benefit more than someone consuming the factory farmed pig?

> Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that someone consuming this animal would benefit more than someone consuming the factory farmed pig?

No. This is the naturalistic fallacy [1] in new clothes.

We need the additional studies showing how stress and poor diet makes most factory-farmed meat less nutritionally dense than the pasture-raised stuff. Though even then, it isn’t anything inherent to the production method causing the variance.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

> We need the additional studies showing how stress and poor diet makes most factory-farmed meat less nutritionally dense than the pasture-raised stuff

you're presuming the conclusion. You're asking for (additional??) studies to show something you've stated without evidence. Unless I'm misunderstanding you.

> You're asking for (additional??) studies to show something you've stated without evidence

I believe we have evidence for factory-farmed meat being less nutritionally dense than pasture-raised meat. But the reason isn’t the factory farming per se. It’s the correlates to factory farming.

So OP’s example is true. Just not for the reason hypothesised.

Where's that evidence.

See [1] for eggs. Relatively simple Google Scholar search if one is curious.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21673178/

One quite literally can conclude nothing useful from that. They got the same feeding, it says so in sentence 3. It shows the testing laboratories were a great variation in the outcome, not the chickens. The free range had a bit more fat - is that good or bad? "Vitamin A and E levels were not affected..."

So what point were you trying to make by posting this?

I'm getting fed up with the quality of posts here, you can't base your reality around what feels nice, give us data or stop making baseless claims.

> The free range had a bit more fat - is that good or bad?

It’s a controlled study isolating the effect of letting the chickens run around. Lower fat ceteris paribus and higher fatty acid is generally considered good, and no, I’m not going to link to every paper that makes that point.

If you let diet vary then yes, you get more pronounced results [2].

> give us data or stop making baseless claims

This is a forum. Not your personal research service. These materials are a simple search away and you are refuting with zero evidence.

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1475-2891-9-10

> isolating the effect of letting the chickens run around

true but irrelevant. What you said earlier was about 'pasture raised'...

> factory-farmed meat being less nutritionally dense than pasture-raised meat

but they got the same nutrition because they were fed the same factory diet, free-range or not. So totally irrelevant.

> and you are refuting with zero evidence

No, you are claiming with zero evidence. I am asking for evidence, and then point out your one piece of subsequently cited 'evidence' wasn't.

Your next cite is pretty ambiguous too - you previously: "and poor diet makes most factory-farmed meat less nutritionally dense than the pasture-raised", your cited study:

> It is also noted that grain-fed beef consumers may achieve similar intakes of both n-3 and CLA through the consumption of higher fat grain-fed portions

So in that respect the same.

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutathione for example says "Systemic bioavailability of orally consumed glutathione is poor because..." so that don't help, and I can't see any evidence for or against that glutathione (or the other antioxidant) survives cooking.

Your posting unsubstantiated stuff is no more than an extension of ant-vaxxer's thinking, "this is fluffy and nice so it must be right".

Reality matters. What you want to believe doesn't.

Sure there is a huge leap, but there’s enough research on organic food being beneficial to both growing and eating. Researchers have been blackmailed into presenting their studies as irrelevant. One recent issue came up in the Netherlands where a researcher was only allowed to say that “research has not shown clear benefits regarding organic food” by authoritive organisation NTO at risk of declaring their work “useless”. (It’s Dutch, I couldn’t provide translate link because of cookie wall) https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/onderzoeker-na-...

The article is pop sci, and thus not a representative of "nutrition epidemiology".

> It is a huge leap to go from "there's less Vitamin C in this supermarket carrot" to "you will get fewer diseases and/or live longer or better if you eat carrots from soil 100 years ago".

If only there was some kind of study linking vitamin [1] and protein intake [2] to health [3]...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin#Deficient_intake

[2] https://www.nutrition.org.uk/nutritionscience/nutrients-food...

[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/high-intake-of-vit...

Yes there are known essential vitamins, minerals, and amino and fatty acids. That does not mean that current produce doesn’t provide enough of them. It’s possible that is true, but also possible that it is not.

Your last link just shows a correlation, not any kind of causation. It is suggestive, and somebody should do the actual research which might tell us whether it is causative. But they won’t, because it would cost too much and nobody could profit monetarily from the results.

Nutritional science is in a pretty sad state right now. It’s cheap and easy to find correlation between things, but expensive and time consuming to actually test interventions to see whether they work.