An apple a day keeps the doctor away! It seems easy enough, right? Every health specialist, from your health ed teacher in fourth grade to the dietician at your local gym, is probably encouraging you to eat lots of fruit and vegetables. And there’s great reasoning for this. Most fruits and vegetables are incredibly rich in vitamins and minerals and low in unhealthy fats and refined sugars. And of course – they’re natural! Fruits and vegetables grow straight from the earth, after all, don’t they?
While we wish it could be the case that simply adding more fruits and veggies to your diet can do wonders for your health, the reality is a bit more complicated. We’re not going to say don’t eat your veggies; they are good for you after all; they’re just not the magic bullet that the media often claims. Because in the age of factory farming, GMOs, and globalization that we live in, your average banana, kale leaf, or head of broccoli picked off the supermarket shelf isn’t nearly as vitamin and mineral rich as you might read in nutrition textbooks. A study from 2019 found that the levels of key minerals in commercially available fruit and vegetables had dropped drastically (for some, upwards of 50%) since the ‘classical’ nutritional science era of the 1950s.
And there are tons of reasons why this is happening. Overuse of agricultural land has meant the soil we grow fruit and vegetables on isn’t nearly as nutrient rich as it used to be. The overuse of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides has also further dampened the availability of nutrients in the soil. And in our globalized world, most fruits and vegetables aren’t sourced locally; they’re shipped from thousands of miles away. To achieve this, farmers pick the crops when they’re still underripe and not as potent with nutrients as they could be, and then transport them for weeks as they continue to lose nutritional value.
Despite what nutritional labels might make you believe, you can’t simply weigh the vitamin content of a food, as you can with minerals and proteins. Vitamins are fragile organic compounds that will deplete over time depending on how the food is stored, processed, and prepared. And although minerals don’t deplete in the same way that vitamins do, minerals from plants come directly from the soil they’re grown in. So when nutritionists say that a tomato has about 18mg of calcium and 45mg of phosphorus, you need to ask them which tomato they’re talking about. Because unless the tomatoes were picked simultaneously from the same tree, there is no way they would both have the same nutrient levels!
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy to ‘count’ vitamins and minerals as you might count calories. But while it might not be a matter of just eating an apple a day, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible! So let’s introduce you to a leading nutritionist who’s spent decades looking into how we can perfect our vitamin and mineral intake.
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