At the grocery stores, I’ve gotten used to seeing Jumbo apples, bananas, eggs, etc. - that screams something artificial to me. This may have something to do with the human association of better with bigger (or does it ?). The other day, it got me thinking if nutritionally the bigger apple has more “stuff” than the smaller one. So here are my specific questions :
1> Apples : if I take two apples (say red-delicious if you want to get real specific) and one is a small apple and the other is a jumbo apple twice the weight of the small apple. Does the twice the weight apple have twice the nutrition in it ? i.e. the total amount of carbs/fiber/… in the large apple is double that in the small apple ? (or does large normally means more water / diluted nutrients )
2> Eggs : Same question for eggs. Does the extra large egg has nutrition content in proportion to its weight compared with a normal egg from the same species ?
For macronutrients, there’s almost certainly going to be a correlation between size and the quantity. An egg is basically made of protein. If you have an egg with double the volume, it’s going to have (roughly) double the protein. An apple is probably most carbs and fiber. How exactly those will compare to one another will depend on which one dominated the process of growing bigger apples, but you’ll definitely end up with more of both.
How well that will track with the micronutrients, however, is hard to say. I’d venture to guess that it requires better nutrition for the chicken or the apple tree to produce a larger product, but that’s nutrition for the chicken/apple tree, not for you. If it’s a micronutrient for both humans and chickens/trees, then most likely it will be more plentiful in the produce. If it’s something that the human body ignores or which is adverse to human physiology, but good for producing large produce, well…then no change or things will be worse.
But all of this presupposes that more nutrition = more nutritious, which is sort of like assuming that more medicine = more healthy or more seasoning = more delicious. There’s a “right” point and as you get further away from that point on either side, things go progressively worse.
If you’re trying to get double the apple for the same price as before, you’re not actually gaining anything if the smaller apple is all you need (unless you can split the apple and only eat half, where you would have eaten one smaller apple). You might as well buy pants twice your size, if available at the same price as pants which fit.
Since eggs from a particular species largely have the same composition, a larger egg is likely going to have more nutrition simply by having more of everything. There could be exceptions to that, for example, if an egg is larger due to a doubled yolk but contains the same amount of albumen as a regular sized egg the nutrient profile will be different than an egg that is simply proportionally bigger in all respects.
With plants, though, there is an additional factor. Many fruits and tubers have a concentrated layer of nutrients just under the skin. This can even be visible as a sort of ring - in this image that layer is labeled as the “primary cortex”, and it’s even easier to see in these potatoes. Because the nutrient composition of the various layers of such plant organs varies, as the fruit/tuber grows larger in volume the cortex layer, while it, too, enlarges, does not do so with the same proportions. If you’re seeking the nutritional elements in the cortex then you’ll maximize your intake by eating two small items rather than one large item of the same weight/volume.
In other cases, the enlargement of a fruit results in an enlargement of interior voids. This is probably most noticeable in strawberries, where the larger ones tend to be hollow and the small ones solid all the way through. It can also occur in melons like honeydew, cantaloupe, and their cousins. In such cases the volume may be greater but the actual mass of edible food may be the same or at any rate not as much larger as you initially think.
So… somewhat more complicated than it initially appears.
