This post will be a bit longer than usual because it contains numerous citations and an important disclaimer, so please bear with us as we discuss the idea that food today is less nutritious than it was in prior generations.
Let’s begin with the disclaimer – we love farmers, and this article should not be taken any other way. We live in Wisconsin, “The Dairy State,” have friends and family who are farmers, and are proud that the farmers of the United States largely still feed the world.
Back to the topic of food and how it seems to be less nutritious than in the past. Is there any scientific evidence of this? It turns out, there is – lots of it. In December 2004 researchers at the University of Texas at Austin published an article in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition (link below) that documented the decline of 13 key nutrients in 43 different crops, ranging from 6 to 38 percent, between 1950 and 1999. Similar research in the journal Foods (link below) found that some vegetables lost between 30% and 50% of their iron content between 1980 and 2010. Another study from 2010 in Scientific Reports (link below) found that the protein content of wheat decreased by 23% from 1955 to 2016, along with notable reductions in manganese, iron, zinc, and magnesium. Such findings led National Geographic (link below) to state “As you gaze across the rows of brightly coloured fruits and vegetables in the produce section of the grocery store, you may not be aware that the quantity of nutrients in these crops has been declining over the past 70 years.” Thus, we may safely conclude that food today is indeed less nutritious than in our grandparents’ time.
By now you are probably wondering if anybody has identified the root cause of this problem. According to Researcher Donald R. Davis of the University of Texas at Austin, the problem is modern farming practices that are designed to increase crop yields. “By learning to grow plants bigger and faster, the plants aren’t able to keep up with absorption of the nutrients from the soil or able to synthesize nutrients internally,” explains Davis in the same National Geographic article referenced above. Why would farmers do this, you may be wondering? Davis concludes with the comment “Unfortunately, farmers get paid for the weight of their crops, so that incentivizes them to do things that aren’t good for the nutrient content.”
But what if you’re a carnivore and don’t really like vegetables all that much? Are you safe? Nope! Our food animals are now eating less nutritious crops which, as you’d expect, has a ripple effect on their nutrient content too. This is compounded when we consider that the same economic pressures are put on farmers who raise meat animals. According to the United States Cooperative Extension System (link below) the average “fryer” chicken is harvested at seven weeks old – seven weeks! The fried chicken you had for dinner last night hatched from an egg less than two months before. Conversely, prior to World War II, the Plymouth Rock breed of chicken was used almost exclusively for chicken meat in America and was typically harvested at 20 weeks of age – three times as long as today. David R. Montgomery, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and co-author of What Your Food Ate states nutrient decline “is going to leave our bodies with fewer of the components they need to mount defenses against chronic diseases—it’s going to undercut the value of food as preventive medicine.”
Thanks for sticking with us through this long post. In future articles we will discuss supplements, supported by proper nutrition, can help mitigate the dietary challenges we face today. Stay tuned!
Sources:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15637215/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8750575/
The Atomic Cheesehead 
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