So I am currently reading In Defense Of Food, its an interesting, if depressing, read but most of it was not too surprising to me. One part was however really shocked me, in one section the author talks about what he callz “Nutritional inflation” (I’ve no idea if he coined the term himself).
He quotes some USDA figures (and some from the UK, he doesn’t say which agency) that the amount of various nutrients in agricultural plants (that is in the plants themselves, not the food produced from them) has fallen quite drastically since the 1950s. Vitamin-C by 20%, Riboflavin by 38%, for example. He doesn’t say exactly where these figures come from (e.g. which plants ? is that an average over several species, or just the “worse case” ?), or which report from the USDA he is quoting.
What do the assembled dopers make of this idea ? I’m surprised it is not more widely know, if an apple I am eating today has 20% less vitamin-C than one fifty years ago, that’s a big deal.