By Damon Burton ’26
Whenever someone wants to lose weight or improve their health, the first thing that they’re told is to focus on eating healthy, nutrient-dense whole foods, and that’s generally great advice. Processed foods tend to be packed with sugars and fats while lacking in important micronutrients, leading to a surplus of calories and weight gain along with threatening serious deficiencies in iron, vitamin c, and magnesium. These can lead to problems with sleep, bone density, and immune function. Generally, whole foods like fruits, vegetables, meat, and dairy tend to be absolutely chock-full of all the micronutrients we need.
However, over the past few decades, this has been changing. Over time, fruits have slowly been getting higher and higher in sugar while losing nutrients. According to the review of studies titled “An Alarming Decline in the Nutritional Quality of Foods”, since 1975, many fruits have lost absurd amounts of nutrients. Apples have lost over 40% of their Vitamin A, Bananas have lost 25% of their calcium, and Grapefruits have lost a whopping 85% of their iron content. But why? The two causes I will discuss in this article are the focus on greater fruit yields and the desire to make fruit taste better.
Firstly, it’s important to note that the percentage of nutrients lost in fruit from that review is for 100g of the edible portion of each fruit, not for the fruit as a whole – and fruit has just gotten bigger. Thanks to selective breeding and artificial fertilizers, fruits nowadays are absolutely monstrous compared to what they used to be. The fruits have less nutrients per gram, but are also just bigger and weigh more. Thus, while their nutritional content has undoubtedly decreased over the past few years, the difference per fruit isn’t nearly as crazy as the data suggests. However, the need to produce bigger fruits faster than ever before has undoubtedly had an impact on their nutrition.
Additionally, people generally tend to enjoy eating food that… tastes good. Companies know this, so they try to make their fruit as sweet as possible so they sell better. Thus, the sugar content of fruits has been steadily climbing over the decades. A British zoo made waves in 2014 after they stopped feeding fruit to their monkeys, as the sugar content had reached an unhealthy level.
So what should YOU do about this? Honestly… nothing. Fruits and vegetables are still healthy, and while they don’t have quite as many nutrients as they once did, that can easily be remedied by taking a daily multivitamin for as little as 15 cents a day.