Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Is Agribusiness Making Food Less Nutritious?
Growing evidence indicates that today's fruits, vegetables, meat and dairy
products  have less vitamins and nutrients than in the past.
By Cheryl Long and Lynn Keiley
http://www.motherearthnews.com/index.php?page=article&id=2132

American agribusiness is producing more food than ever before, but the
evidence is building that the vitamins and minerals in that food are
declining. For example, take the two eggs shown at right. The one with the
bright orange yolk is from a free-range chicken raised by Mother Earth News
managing editor Nancy Smith, while the pale one is a supermarket egg from a
hen raised indoors on a “factory farm.” Eggs from free-range hens
contain up to 30 percent more vitamin E, 50 percent more folic acid and 30
percent more vitamin B-12 than factory eggs. And the bright orange color of
the yolk shows higher levels of antioxidant carotenes. (Many factory-farm
eggs are so pale that  producers feed the hens expensive marigold flowers
to make the yolks brighter in color.)

Once upon a time, most of us ate eggs from free-range chickens kept by
small, local producers. But today, agri-culture has become dominated by
agri-business. Most of our food now comes from large-scale producers who
rely on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and animal drugs, and inhumane
confinement animal production. In agribusiness, the main emphasis is on
getting the highest possible yields and profits; nutrient content (and
flavor) are, at best, second thoughts.

This shift in production methods is clearly giving us less nutritious eggs
and meat. Beef from cattle raised in feedlots on growth hormones and
high-grain diets has lower levels of vitamins E, A, D and betacarotene, and
twice as much fat, as grass-fed beef. Health writer Jo Robinson has done
groundbreaking work on this subject, collecting the evidence on her Web
site, www.eatwild.com, and in her book Pasture Perfect.

Similar nutrient declines can be documented in milk, butter and cheese. As
one researcher writing in the Journal of Dairy Research explained, “It
follows that continuing breeding and management systems that focus solely
on increasing milk yield will result in a steady dilution of vitamins and
antioxidants.” (Today’s “super-cows” are bred and fed to produce 20
times more milk than a cow needs to sustain a healthy calf.)

How much, and why, the nutrients in vegetables and fruits may be declining
is less clear. Comparisons of 2004 data from the USDA’s National Nutrient
Database, with numbers from 1975, show declines in nutrients in a number of
foods (see “Signs of Nutrient Decline”) as well as some increases. When
reports of apparent downward trends in nutrient content in vegetables and
fruits appeared in 1999, we wrote to then-U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Dan
Glickman for an explanation: “Is the drop linked to preventable factors,
such as American agriculture’s dependence on acidic nitrogen fertilizers
and the effects of acid rain? Will you ask your top scientists to give us
some direct answers?”

Writing on Glickman’s behalf, Phyllis E. Johnson, director of the
USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Md., confirmed the
findings. “It is true that in many (but not all) cases, the apparent
nutrient content of these vegetables decreased,” Johnson said. She went
on to list variables that might be related to the apparent decline, but she
offered no indication that anyone at the USDA would be studying the issue
further.

Recently, we contacted Johnson again, to find out whether there had been
any new developments on the matter. Her office referred us back to the 1999
letter and told us Johnson had no additional comment on the subject.
What the Experts Say

Many things can impact the nutrient content of a vegetable or fruit.
Variety type, soil quality, fertilizers, crop rotations, maturity at
harvest time and the distance from farm to table all play a role in
determining the vitamins and minerals in our food. We asked sustainable
agriculture expert Charles Benbrook, Ph.D., if reliance on chemical
fertilizers and emphasis on high yields might reduce the nutrients in
fruits and vegetables. Benbrook has been studying the pros and cons of
conventional and organic agriculture for more than 15 years. He explained
factors that make organic foods rich in nutrients:

Fertilizers. Non-organic farmers use highly soluble nitrogen fertilizers,
and keeping this nutrient in their soils is difficult. To be sure they get
high yields, they often apply more nitrogen than the crops actually need.

This dependence upon chemical nitrogen fertilizers means we’re getting
less for our money, says Benbrook. Numerous studies have demonstrated that
high levels of nitrogen stimulate quick growth and increase crop yields
because the fruits and vegetables take up more water. In effect, this means
consumers pay more for produce diluted with water. “High nitrogen levels
make plants grow fast and bulk up with carbohydrates and water. While the
fruits these plants produce may be big, they suffer in nutritional
quality,” Benbrook says, “whereas organic production systems [which use
slow-release forms of nitrogen] produce foods that usually yield denser
concentrations of nutrients and deliver consumers a better nutritional
bargain per calorie consumed.”

Benbrook says the USDA has a tacit policy to avoid discussions of
differences in food quality and safety that may be a function of how food
is grown and processed. “The Department made a political decision when
they finalized the national organic rule; they declared that ‘organic’
food was not nutritionally superior or safer than conventional food, even
though there is solid evidence suggesting otherwise.” This would
certainly explain the response we got from Johnson’s office.

What it all comes down to, Benbrook says, is that you can’t buy soil
quality in a bag any more than you can buy good nutrition in a pill.
Organic farmers work to support the complex natural relationships between
crop roots, soil microbes and minerals, but “scientists only understand a
few of those relationships. Unless we understand much more fully what the
critical balances are, it’s very difficult to import them to the farm in
a bag or a bottle.”

Vitamin C. High nitrogen levels reduce the concentrations of vitamin C in
crops such as lettuce, beets, endive, kale and Brussels sprouts. Similar
effects have been detected on fruits such as apples, oranges, lemons and
cantaloupe. Swiss studies have shown similar impacts on potatoes and
tomatoes, as well as citrus fruits — which are major sources of this
important vitamin.

Harvesting and storage. The fact that the average supermarket apple travels
1,500 miles from farm to table only adds to the problem. “Most fruits
reach best eating quality and peak nutrition when fully ripened on the tree
or plant,” explains Julio Loaiza, Ph.D., a research scientist at Texas
A&M University’s Vegetable and Fruit Improvement Center. “However,
fully ripened fruit may not withstand the harsh handling typically involved
for travel to distant markets, which leads to a compromise in optimum
maturity and nutritional quality.”

Breeding for high yields. Plant breeders could maintain and even increase
the nutrient content of most crops, if they were asked to do so. But this
goal usually takes a back seat to economic issues: “Large-scale growers
want size and fast growth so they can harvest early. These factors feed
into sacrifices in nutritional quality,” Benbrook says.


Why Buy Organic

What we need is a more holistic approach to our food systems. We need to be
sure that high yields and maximum profits for producers don’t come with
hidden price tags to consumers in terms of nutritional decline or
environmental damage. This approach isn’t anything new to organic farmers
— they’ve been working their farms as holistic systems all along, and
the result is a production system that is better for us, domestic animals
and the environment. The growing evidence that organic foods are more
nutritious is summarized in “Why Organic Food is the Winner.”

Certified organic growers are not allowed to use chemical nitrogen
fertilizers, ever. Instead they build soil fertility using cover crops,
compost and slow-release natural fertilizers. Because they aren’t grown
with chemical nitrogen, organic fruits and vegetables tend to be smaller,
and yields  seem lower compared to non-organic crops. But as mentioned
above, studies have shown that organic crops often contain less water, so
in terms of actual nutrient value (and flavor) per bite of food, organic
often is a better buy than non-organic produce.

The higher dry matter/lower water content of organic produce also impacts
the levels of health-promoting antioxidants such as polyphenols and
flavonoids. In a review of the scientific literature, Benbrook discovered
that smaller fruits had up to five times more of these antioxidants per
unit of calories.

There’s more research that must be done before we can know to what extent
the overall quality of our food is declining, and whether the rapidly
expanding organic industry will be able to consistently produce more
nutritious food than chemical-based agribusiness.

But Benbrook says the public health implications are considerable: “When
you think about the diseases and long-term health problems that are caused
by poor nutrition — heart disease, diabetes, cancer — the value to
society of producing more nutritious crops is enormous.”

Indeed, a 1992 USDA report estimated the following potential health
benefits if everyone in the United States could be convinced to eat a diet
containing the recommended daily amounts of primary nutrients shown in the
table:

• 20 percent reduction in cancer

• 25 percent reduction in heart and vascular conditions

• 50 percent reduction in arthritis

• 20 percent reduction in respiratory and infectious diseases

• 50 percent reduction in infant and maternal deaths

So, it seems to us that the government should be doing more to monitor the
nutrient content of our food, especially organic and pasture-based
products. Currently, the USDA’s National Nutrient Database, which is
widely used as the “official” source for nutrient levels, includes more
than 6,600 food products, including meat; fresh, frozen and canned produce;
and processed foods. They even include candy bars, gumdrops, TV dinners and
hundreds of fast food items in the database. But the agency has not
included a single organic item, nor any entries for products from
pasture-based meat or dairy systems. If they use our tax dollars to report
the nutrients in candy bars, isn’t it time they started including data on
these healthier “alternatives,” too?

If you agree that the government needs to do more to enhance the quality of
our food supply, write your congressional representatives and let them
know. After all, as one USDA secretary whispered while giving us the
mandated brush off, “It’s up to the public. If they really want to
know, they have to press Congress to appropriate the funds.” You also can
send a message every time you shop for your groceries: When you choose
organic or grass-fed products, you are helping support farmers and ranchers
who are offering high-quality foods from sustainable production systems.