Could it be that eating fresh fruits and vegies isn't as healthy as we think?

I haven't read all the articles pointed to in this little news story, but I've heard anecdotes for years that modern vegies and fruits just don't taste the same. I've experienced that myself with grocery store produce -- I remember when once Red Delicious apples actually had flavor, for instance, and Beefsteak tomatoes from my uncle's garden were the tastiest ones around. I prefer the vegetables grown locally (I live in a fairly rural area with lots of farming around) to most of the stuff imported that the stores sell.

If this story has some facts in it, is our best solution to eat local? Grow our own? Stick to organic brands? Or is the whole thing just a bunch of alarmist hooey, an attack on science's involvement with food, or even a marketing ploy?

What are your thoughts and experiences with your favorite produce?

Interesting. I have long had concerns about eating store-bought produce. In some cases, any nutritional benefit could be outweighed when you look at the cumulative effect of certain pesticides, which I don’t trust no matter what the FDA says. And when they pick fruits and veggies so early because they have to ship them around the country (or world) I can’t imagine they have the same burst of nutrients as they would if they were picked ripe and eaten right away. I think local growers and farmers markets are a pretty good bet if you can manage it (and homegrown is even better). But it’s hard for many of us to get by without at least supplementing from the grocery store.

Isn't that why frozen and canned fruits and veggies are actually healthier, since they're able to lock in the nutrients at the height of their ripeness?

I believe that you are correct Brooke, but in season I believe that local grown produce will still be the best.

I've heard that, too, Brooke. I wonder if there are any articles with comparison information?

I buy local at our farmer's market in all seasons for which that is possible, and use the winter to have a little fun with exotic stuff. Local is more important to me than organic, but both is cool when possible. I'd love to see more community gardens and affordable farm shares...I've been having this weird urge to go back to school for an urban planning degree to work on greenspaces in cities.


I definitely agree that the heirloom varieties found at the farmstands run rings around just about everything in the grocery store. Why buy Red Delicious when Pink Lady apples are in season? And I always thought tomatoes were watery and boring (and frightening, but that's another story) until I met the orange and yellow and purple and stripey ones that appear in the summer.

Sarah, I live near a university that has a huge agricultural college, and they are talking about turning over some area to a community garden (I'm hoping it's in one of the huge greenhouses) for students and their families (my husband is a grad student). We have a tiny area here and garden only in containers. I grow some herbs and cherry tomatoes occasionally -- I can never get enough tomatoes ripe at one time to really cook with them.

Because of the area where we are, even some of the grocery stores carry locally grown stuff, so I just pay attention to varieties (had my first Pink Ladies this fall -- yum!)

We have our own garden in the back yard, so we grow what we like the most and use the Farmers Market to supplement. It works pretty well.

sigh. It's just not like when I was growing up! *grin*

I too try to buy local and in season, and organic for the items that I know are most absorbent of the pesticides.

Kate -- I have no idea, but I was terrified of tomatoes from the age of 3-30. Like, if you chased me with a tomato, I would run. I sat on a ketchup packet around the age of 20, and did the finest Eew-Get-It-Off-Me-Dance ever seen in these parts.
My root may in fact have been Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but I'm not sure.

Sarah, you report a reaction to tomatoes that equals my reaction to cock roaches. :)

Both of which make more sense.

The funny thing for me was how easily I dropped it, after so many years. Barbara Kingsolver wrote so convincingly about the appeal of tomatoes - and the ones at the farmer's market were so dang pretty - that before I was finished with her book I was ready to give them a try.

That's a GREAT story, Sarah! Phobia cures via literature!

The falling levels of nutrition and taste in supermarket vegetables are precisely why I have been growing more and more of my own, and buying from smaller local farms when I can't grow my own.

My mother, who still mostly buys from supermarkets, loves to come to my house to eat or get care packages because she says the food reminds her of the way things tasted when she was a kid. But there's no question its more work this way, both the grow your own part and the buy local part.

Last month for example, I went to get some meat from a local farm and the farmer called me and asked me to stop at Tractor Supply on my way over to pick up some stuff and bring it with me. When I got there there was a kurfuffle going on in the barn, so I ended up sitting in the kitchen knitting and reading for about an hour until somebody could get time to come sit down with me and then we unloaded the Tractor Supply stuff from my car and got some meat packaged up and worked out that the difference between the cost of the supplies and the meat...

Well in the end I came home with twenty pounds of meat for the freezer but I wouldn't exactly call it convenient!

Oh yes, that buzzword born in the 50's (at least according to all those History Channel episodes of American Eats) -- convenience!

But it is a ruling factor. Cooking food from raw ingredients is a lot of work. A good bit of that work is not really pleasant. It can be exhausting if you have to do it three times a day, or if you spend days prepping food for the freezer so you don't have to cook all the time. Technology brought us convenience, and we had to make little sacrifices along the way.

Not that "in the old days" food was always healthy and wonderful -- sometimes you ate the not-so-good foods because they were all you had, or they were the cheapest.

And when it gets to growing your own food -- what do you do when the insects eat your crops, or the deer? I love cheese, but I don't want to make it myself.

Food can get very complicated, I think.

Food is complicated. But since its necessary to have it in order to stay alive, I think its a thing that's worth fussing over.

Usually. But sometimes I'm bored with having to eat, and I'll just have cereal.

Jackie -- yep! a bowl, a box, some milk -- I'm good.

And I used to have an unhealthy relationship with Poptarts.

Yeah, I remember when I used to eat Poptarts. Have you ever tried them buttered? Mmmm...

I try not to think about them anymore. They are emergency car food now, to be eaten when nothing else is available.

Bun, I agree that it is important and worth fussing over. My problem is my relationship with food is far more complicated than just getting nutrition or the sensual experience. I have so many emotions tied in with food that nothing I eat can go unexamined. It's irritating, especially now that I'm aware of the issues and watch what I'm doing, but sometimes the whole act of choosing something to eat gets so overwrought that my ability to make a good choice is impaired.

Toss in the idea that my vegies may not really be good for me, and I can almost feel the neuroses swarming :)

Vegies might not be as good as they used to be, but they're still better for you than packaged food, processed food, and Poptarts.
Tang will never replace orange juice.

Veggies may not be as good for you as they were fifty years ago, or even as good for you as they should be, but they're still better for you than just about anything else you could choose.

The thing that was hardest for me, and still is sometimes, is to get rid of all the noise about what I "should" be doing and just experience my food. My body actually knows what it wants if I can shut off the blah blah blah in my head long enough to pay attention.

Edit: Holy Cross Post, Batgirl!

As a woman, I find myself constantly considering everything I decide to eat, and if the enjoyment balances out the calories. Is that cookie worth the 200 calories? Will it sustain me, and not leave me wanting to eat more?

Does anyone else do this?

Did it for years, but it was not a positive thing for me so I gave it up.

In some ways, it's good, because it keeps me from eating things I don't actually LIKE. Such as grocery store sheet cake, and cheap ice cream full of weird sounding gums. Guar gum? Bleah.

If you're going to eat candy, don't eat the crappy candy (yes, Hershey's, I'm talking to YOU!).

I totally agree with the philosophy don't waste calories on stuff you don't like. Just, when I stopped being rebellious and eating stuff because I wasn't "supposed" to, and focused instead on eating what I actually like, turns out I actually like the stuff that is good for me.

Actually, I think guar gum isn't a bad thing, if I remember correctly. It holds the ingredients together.

I used to eat a ton of chicken, and no cheese. Because chicken was good, and cheese was bad, right? Well years ago I read this book, Eat 4 Your Blood Type, and read that B people (like moi) shouldn't eat chicken and should eat cheese. I ran out and bought some cheese, and oh my, my body was saying yes yes yes, finally! And I realized I hadn't been liking chicken for a long time.

I don't follow that diet religiously, but it did make me very aware that my body knows what it needs. The book's premise is that blood types developed at different stages of our evolution, so O is the original caveman, grunt grunt, meat; A is when agrarian culture began; B is from the steppes when the cultivation of farm animals began, etc. It was interesting.

That IS interesting, Lori. Have you read any of the articles out lately about Neandertals, and modern Caucasians are differentiated from them by our ability to digest milk? It sounds like a similar idea to the blood type thing.

I hadn't heard that, Jackie, yeah I find this kind of stuff fascinating.

Guar gum is a thickener derived from seaweed, some people tolerate it fine, some people have bad reactions to it. I am one of the people who have bad reactions to it.

I agree with the idea that different people have different nutritional needs and the best thing to do is to eat in the way that satisfies you. One size definitely does not fit all.

However the Eat Right for Your Type thing completely lost me when it produced this notion that different blood types evolved at different periods in human history. Because that has some really fairly gigantic logical and factual problems. Doesn't invalidate the idea that people should eat in the way that suits their bodies, but did make me throw the book across the room.

Oh, Bun, I hear you, and I'm working on it very hard. My big problem is that my body and I are so out of touch with each other that I no longer always get the right signals. I've had low blood sugar for many years. My body signals for hunger and thirst sometimes do not work correctly (I've been known to NOT eat until I fainted, not because I was starving or dieting or anything, but because I never noticed being hungry). When I DO get hungry, it tends to come on all at once, an intense, painful hunger, and I turn into a BITCH ON WHEELS, emotionally unstable, sometimes even violent. And, even if I don't eat, that will cycle through in about 15-30 minutes and I won't be hungry again.

Like I said, it's an economy sized issue :) from a long, long history. One snowy night by the fire, I will bore you with it ;)

Jackie, that gives me an excuse to call my lactose-intolerant boyfriend a new name when we’re having a fight! :)

Oh? Care to enlighten me, Bun? The way it was presented was of course as historical and biological fact which made alot of sense. Not that I believe everything I read, so didn't take it as fact. More as a Huh, that's interesting kind of thing.

I'll look forward to that snowy night by the fire sometime Sherri. Believe me I know where you are coming from. I am climbing some of the slopes of that same mountain.

Oh just saw what you said, Sherri. I tend to ignore those signals which is pretty stupid. Sometimes I realize late in the evening that I haven't eaten or drunk anything the whole day. Well, duh, no wonder I'm so tired! I find that when I do catch the signals and follow up on them, the signals become far stronger again.

Yeah, sometimes I just get headachy and cranky, instead of feeling hungry, like I should be.

And then the problem is I am so hungry I just want something completely hassle-free, and go for a not-so-healthy choice. Like popcorn or chips. Or something to microwave immediately. Fortunately, the microwave stuff I do buy is better than most.

I have no microwave. Just a toaster. So, much toast in my world, and much jam.

Bread and Jam for Francis!

Sure Lori. There are several enormous problems with the idea that blood types evolved at different points in human history and are markers of adaptations to different diets.

The first gigantic problem is that evolution generally takes a long damn time. Unless blood types are the result of a sudden beneficial mutation or a really strong environmental pressure then there just hasn't been enough time since the development of agriculture for us to have evolved anything in response to that.

The second gigantic problem is that all apes and many other primates have blood types. Chimps have type A and O. Gorillas have type B. Baboons have type A B and O. So that would suggest that humans inherited the trait of having different blood types from an ancestor that we shared with other primates rather than evolved them after we differentiated.

Third, I think its a radical oversimplification to suggest that you can choose any one trait, blood type, or eye color or toe length or whatever, divide people into groups by that one trait and make predictions about the groups. It just doesn't work that way, physiology is way more complicated than that.

You only have to look around to see short people who have tall kids, or people with a strawberry allergy who have kids who can eat strawberries all day long, deaf people with hearing kids, hearing people with deaf kids. People just aren't simple enough that you can pigeonhole them based on any one thing like blood type.

Fourth if blood type was a marker for or ocurred in combination with adaptations to different diets then you would expect for example Eskimos who eat a very high fat, meat based diet to be almost all type O. This is not the case. The distribution of blood type among Eskimos is pretty similar to the distribution of blood types among Irish people.

Bun - are the blood types of the chimps, gorillas, baboons, similar to our? ie is an A type the same across the board.

Pretty interesting!

And oh yes I agree about making predictions from one thing.

When you spoke about eye color, it reminded me of a Phil Donahue show I saw over 20 years ago. He divided his audience up by eye color - light vs. brown. And then proceeded to cite all this research that proves if you have light eyes you are more intelligent. It was amazing to see how the groups reacted as the research piled up. The brown-eyed's body language changed into obvious lower status bearing, and became extremely quiet. While the light-colored people were standing up straight, very chatty and laughing, with many and I mean MANY cheerfully admitting they've often felt that light-colored eye people were indeed superior. Of course at the end of the show, the research was revealed as nonsense. Then we got to witness the reactions of the 2 groups. Absolutely fascinating.

Similar but not the same. Blood types are complicated even before you get into cross species blood types. There's ABO, there's Rh positive and negative, and there are actually twenty plus other factors too.

I love Phil D. He was so good at doing those kind of social experiments on his audience.

Being diabetic for over 20 years now I've learned a coupla things:
1) If you crave something it means your body is trying to tell you something. It's not always 'eat this and it's good for you', but that something is amiss/happening that you need to pay attention to. When I'm stressed or my blood sugar is high, I crave sweets/pastries like you wouldn't believe. It's because the sugar, i.e. glucose, isn't getting into my cells & they are 'starving'. But, when I crave things like ginger, cinnamon, almonds it usually means there is something in them that my body needs. Kinda like when you're pregnant.

2) Eating things that are more close to their natural state gives you so much more energy & vitality than processed & chemical-laden foods. High Fructose Corn Syrup is a classic point. (Has anyone seen those stupid ads asking 'what's wrong with it?' ugh, pisses me off) It's made from corn, and I do great with fresh corn if I don't go overboard (blood sugar again). I even do okay with unrefined sugars like honey or that brown crystal sugar (within reason), but HFCS sends me through the roof. I think a huge part of this is because of the refinement & chemical processes that they undergo. When it comes to highly processed foods like frozen tv dinners or fast-food like McD's, I have to take at least twice the insulin for an equal amount of similar fresh food.

And, my last point (really, it is relevant to this thread) about eating fresh produce as opposed to canned, or even frozen, is that they have more vitality to them and your body absorbs the vitamins better. I have to be really aware of how foods affect my body, and I've seen this time & again. Interestingly, this summer we ate all fresh local produce from a farmer's co-op near town, and not only did it taste fabulous compared to grocery produce, but my health was much better from it. I could feel the difference in the two, which I hadn't expected.

Kay, that was my buck-twenty-five on this subject. ;)

Sherrie, good point there -- what I've read about the HFCS is that is IS "just like sugar" on a macro nutrient level, but on a micro nutrient level it is not -- it is quickly absorbed by the brain, but tends to produce a quick high followed by a quick drop. Glucose is what the brain runs on, so something that isn't QUITE glucose but gets taken up by the same receptors can be a problem.

I reduced my intake of HFCS about a year and a half ago, and I noticed the difference in about 3 weeks. I have a sugar addiction problem (well, that's what I call it because I constantly crave carbs and sugars. I've been cautioned about diabetes for years, but as yet, it hasn't developed and I hope to head it off) and now I watch for things with HFCS in them. I find I don't eat so much of anything sweet if it's made with honey or plain sugar.

I hhhhaaaaaate!!!!!!! those HFCS ads. I will run screaming across the room to get to the remote to change the channel.

To jump back to vegetables, for a minute---canned vegetables may be canned just hours after being harvested, but the canning process necessarily subjects them to high heat. (That's why they're all overcooked before you even think about heating them up.) Many vitamins are destroyed by high heat, so canned veggies, besides tasting like overdone hell, often don't have the vitamins you think they do.

True, Ruth. I grew up on canned foods -- both store bought and the stuff in Mason jars -- and now rarely use canned foods. I don't know what happens with frozen, though.

And to think canning started with champagne bottles.

Those HFCS ads drive me nuts too. Heck, if it's in something like soda or a popsicle, I don't care. You know those things are sugar-laden and really bad for you. However, it really ticks me off to find it in things that shouldn't even be sweet, like whole wheat bread.

Good to know, Ruth. Do you know anything about frozen ones?

Sometimes I notice my hunger through being fuzzy brained and out of focus, rather than any signs coming from my stomach. It always takes me a while to go, "Oh yeah, that's hunger, not something else."