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Old December 19th, 2004, 08:16 AM
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1203100522.htm

Source: University Of Texas At Austin

Date: 2004-12-03

Study Suggests Nutrient Decline In Garden Crops Over Past 50 Years

AUSTIN, Texas A recent study of 43 garden crops led by a University of
Texas at Austin biochemist suggests that their nutrient value has
declined in recent decades while farmers have been planting crops
designed to improve other traits.

The study was designed to investigate the effects of modern
agricultural methods on the nutrient content of foods. The researchers
chose garden crops, mostly vegetables, but also melons and
strawberries, for which nutritional data were available from both 1950
and 1999 and compared them both individually and as a group.

The study, based on U.S. Department of Agriculture data, will appear in
the December issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.
Its lead author is Dr. Donald Davis of the university's Biochemical
Institute in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. His
coauthors are Drs. Melvin Epp and Hugh Riordan of the
Bio-Communications Research Institute in Wichita, Kan., where Davis is
a research consultant.

According to Davis, establishing meaningful changes in nutrient content
over a 50-year time interval was a significant challenge. The
researchers had to compensate for variations in moisture content that
affect nutrient measurements, and could not rule out the possibility
that changes in analytical techniques may have affected results for
some nutrients.

"It is much more reliable to look at average changes in the group
rather than in individual foods, due to uncertainties in the 1950 and
1999 values," Davis said. "Considered as a group, we found that six out
of 13 nutrients showed apparently reliable declines between 1950 and
1999."

These nutrients included protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin
and ascorbic acid. The declines, which ranged from 6 percent for
protein to 38 percent for riboflavin, raise significant questions about
how modern agriculture practices are affecting food crops.

"We conclude that the most likely explanation was changes in cultivated
varieties used today compared to 50 years ago," Davis said. "During
those 50 years, there have been intensive efforts to breed new
varieties that have greater yield, or resistance to pests, or
adaptability to different climates. But the dominant effort is for
higher yields. Emerging evidence suggests that when you select for
yield, crops grow bigger and faster, but they don't necessarily have
the ability to make or uptake nutrients at the same, faster rate."

According to Davis, these results suggest a need for research into
other important nutrients and foods that provide significant dietary
calories, such as grains, legumes, meat, milk and eggs.

"Perhaps more worrisome would be declines in nutrients we could not
study because they were not reported in 1950 -- magnesium, zinc,
vitamin B-6, vitamin E and dietary fiber, not to mention
phytochemicals," Davis said. "I hope our paper will encourage
additional studies in which old and new crop varieties are studied
side-by-side and measured by modern methods."


Editor's Note: The original news release can be found here.


------------------------------------------------------------------------
This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University Of
Texas At Austin.


Can't find it? Try searching ScienceDaily or the entire web with:
Search Web sciencedaily.com

 




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