Why Food Nourished More Before

Good morning!

… and an early happy Easter!

While you're planning your Easter brunch, here's something to think about: the carrots in your spring salad are nutritionally different from the carrots your grandmother served at her Easter table in 1950. This week, we're covering soil depletion, why it happens, what it means for the food on your plate, and what's being done about it. Let's dive in.

Key Takeaways

• The US allows food additives unless proven harmful, while Europe requires companies to prove additives are safe before approval.

• The US "generally recognized as safe" system lets companies self-certify ingredient safety without FDA oversight, while Europe requires independent government review before any additive reaches the market.

• These regulatory differences explain why identical products contain different ingredients across borders.

CORE

What Happened To Food?

There's a study from 2004 that barely made headlines, but it should have. Researchers took decades of USDA data, hundreds of thousands of measurements across 43 common vegetables, and compared the nutritional content of the exact same crops in 1950 versus 1999. 

They found that something changed with our food. Vegetables declined. Not in how they looked, or how they tasted, or even in how much we grew. In their actual chemical composition. Protein, calcium, iron, riboflavin, vitamin C, all down in numbers. Some by 6%, some by nearly 40%.

This isn't a story about pesticides or organic farming or GMOs. This is about a choice we made at a biological level, breed for more food, and what we gave up without realizing it. And the reason why comes down to something most of us never think about: what's happening in the soil, underground, where all of this actually starts.

The Trade-Off

Over the past 70 years, plant breeders accomplished something remarkable. They created crop varieties that produce more food per acre, resist pests, and adapt to different climates. Modern wheat yields two times what it did in 1950. Corn yields have quadrupled. Famine, which killed millions throughout human history, is now largely a problem of distribution rather than supply. This is one of agriculture's greatest achievements.

But when you breed a tomato plant to produce more tomatoes, the plant still pulls calcium, magnesium, and iron from the soil at roughly the same rate, now splitting those nutrients across more crop. Bigger harvests, lower concentration per tomato.

"Efforts to breed new varieties of crops that provide greater yield, pest resistance and climate adaptability have allowed crops to grow bigger and more rapidly," explained lead researcher Donald Davis, "but their ability to manufacture or uptake nutrients has not kept pace with their rapid growth".

This is called the dilution effect.

Soil Depletion

The second contributor has to do with what's happening underground. Soil isn't just dirt holding plants upright, it's a living system. Billions of microorganisms break down organic matter and cycle nutrients to plant roots. Healthy soil is teeming with biological activity.

Though decades of industrial farming that revolves around repeated tilling, monoculture cropping, and synthetic fertilizers replacing organic matter have degraded that system. Soil organic matter has declined by roughly 50% in American cropland since intensive agriculture became standard. The soil still grows plants, but it has less to offer them.

So you have dilution from breeding working alongside depletion from farming practices, both pushing nutrient density downward.

The Reversal

The dilution effect could theoretically be reversed, plant breeders could start tracking nutrient density alongside yield, and breed for both. But that would require a systemic shift across the entire industry. Soil depletion, on the other hand, can be reversed by individual farms right now, and some already are.

In 2022, researchers compared regenerative farms with conventional farms across the United States. The regenerative farms, using no-till, cover crops, and crop rotation, had roughly double the soil organic matter of conventional farms.

More importantly, the crops were measurably more nutrient-dense. Cabbage from a regenerative California farm had 46% more vitamin K, 31% more vitamin E, 60% more vitamin B3, 41% more calcium, and 50% more zinc and magnesium compared to cabbage from a conventional field. Same variety. The difference was the soil it grew in.

TRACE MINERAL SUPPORT

Today, an estimated 92% of Americans are deficient in at least one micronutrient.

OmniBlue brings it back to the source, broad-spectrum liquid minerals, straight from the ocean, to fill what modern food no longer can. Enjoy the 70+ minerals in OmniBlue Original!

ENDNOTE

Final Thoughts

Hungry for more newsletters? Whether you missed a week, or you’re interested in reading more about health and nutrition, check out our 8% page where you can find all our previous editions, all in one place!

Until next week!

Adrian Macdonald | Team Dietitian | The 8% Newsletter Author