Green Revolution has boosted US crop yields, but nutrients decline : study

Data collected by the U.S. government show that the nutritional content of America's vegetables and fruits has declined during the past 50 years, in some cases dramatically.

Donald Davis, a biochemist at the University of Texas, said that of 13 major nutrients in fruits and vegetables tracked by the Agriculture Department from 1950 to 1999, six showed noticeable declines - protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and vitamin C. The declines ranged from 6 percent for protein, 15 percent for iron, 20 percent for vitamin C, and 38 percent for riboflavin.

"It's an amazing thing," said Davis, adding that the decline in nutrient content has not been widely noticed. He said an agriculture scientist appears to have been the first to pick up the disappearance of nutrients in 1981 in a paper comparing the data on nutrients on garden crops grown in the United States with those grown in England.

Davis, who discussed his findings at an early-2006 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, suspects the trend in agriculture toward encouraging crops that grow the fastest and biggest is a reason for the decline. The past five decades have been marked by the "Green Revolution," which has seen a marked increase in U.S. production and yields as farmers have turned to the fastest-growing and greatest-producing plants.

The trade off is that the faster-growing plants aren't able to acquire the nutrients that their slower-growing cousins can, either by synthesis or from the soil. He said there also are differences in the amounts of nutrients lost in differing varieties of wheat and broccoli.

Davis said he doesn't want his study to encourage people to stop eating vegetables on the grounds they lack nutrients. "That's completely wrong," he said, contending his study shows that people need to eat more vegetables and fruits, not less. "Vegetables are extraordinarily rich in nutrients and beneficial phyto-chemicals. They are still there, and vegetables and fruits are our best sources for these."

Seattle Post-Intelligence