Such a condition can be particularly damaging if it occurs in growing children.
At the same time that they are losing nutrients, other vegetables and fruits are also suffering a drastic decline in the number of varieties available to consumers. Just as the number of tomato varieties is sharply limited in the supermarket, so are those of potatoes and apples. As investigative journalist Brewster Kneen noted in his landmark book, From Land to Mouth: Understanding the Food System:
Even though there are 2,000 species of potato in the genus solanum, all the potatoes grown in the United States, and most of those grown commercially everywhere else, belong to one species, solanum tuberosum. Twelve varieties of this one species constitute 85 percent of the U.S. potato harvest, but the one variety favored by most processors, the Russet Burbank, is by far the dominant variety. By 1982, 40 percent of the potatoes planted in the United States were Russet Burbanks.21
To witness the poverty of choice among apples, just walk into the corner supermarket and look on the shelves. Most chain stores have only three varieties on display: red delicious, golden delicious, and Granny Smith. Sometimes a Canadian store will also feature MacIntosh. Looking at such a display, it is useful to keep in mind that at the turn of the last century “there were more than 7,000 apple varieties grown in the United States. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, over 85 percent of these varieties, more than 6,000, had become extinct.”22
By the year 2000, 73 percent of all the lettuce grown in the U.S. was one variety: iceberg.23
ACROSS-THE-BOARD DEGENERATION
Examples of the rapid decline in nutrients in our foods are not limited to vegetables and fruits. A general, across-the-board degeneration affects nearly everything we eat.
For instance, according to the USDA tables, chicken–which many of us eat in an attempt to avoid steroid-rich red meats–is in deep trouble. Skinless, roasted white chicken meat has lost 51.6 percent of its vitamin A since 1963. Dark meat has lost 52 percent. White meat has also lost 39.9 percent of its potassium, while dark meat has lost 25.2 percent.
And what has chicken gained? Light meat, 32.6 percent fat, and 20.3 percent sodium; dark meat, 54.4 percent fat and 8.1 percent sodium. Let’s hear it for fat and salt.
Dairy products are no better. According to the USDA, creamed cottage cheese–eaten by millions of dieting men and women precisely because it is seen as a low-fat source of calcium and phosphorus to maintain strong bones and teeth–has in fact gained 7.3 percent fat since 1963, while losing 36.1 percent of its calcium, 13.1 percent of its phosphorus, and—incidentally—fully 53.3 percent of its iron. And what has it gained, besides fat? Hey, you guessed it: 76.85 percent in sodium.
We are also seeing increases in carbohydrates, which include sugars and starches. Good old healthy broccoli, for example, while losing 45 percent of its vitamin C, has seen its carbohydrate content jump upward by 13.8 percent since 1963.
As for bread, traditional mainstay of the Western diet, the highly processed nature of the typical soft, all-but-crustless, bleached-flour white supermarket loaf makes it hard to evaluate. In the process of manufacture, the nutritionally best parts of the original wheat grain are sifted, milled, or chemically bleached out of the flour to make it as perfectly white as possible. The purpose here is purely cosmetic, designed to accommodate the widespread–and completely irrational– public prejudice that white bread is somehow “better.” Then a small portion of these nutrients is put back in to “enrich” (the pure irony of the industry’s euphemism here is almost comic) what would otherwise be a loaf of nothing. So-called “enriched” white bread thus actually does contain some nutrients. But compared to loaves made by more traditional baking methods, the supermarket product is rather pathetic.
This was demonstrated as long ago as the 1970s, when the consumer-oriented Harrowsmith magazine conducted a comparison analysis of three loaves of bread: a) a mass-market “enriched” white loaf of Weston’s bread, taken from the supermarket shelf; b) a white loaf made by a local, small-town bakery; c) a home-baked loaf that used the “Cornell bread” recipe developed by nutritionist Dr. Clive MacKay. The results of an independent laboratory analysis:
The Weston loaf proved highest in fat and chloride (calculated as salt) and lowest in protein and phosphorus, as well as in the B vitamins (niacin, thiamine, riboflavin and B12). The homemade loaf was highest in protein, iron, calcium, phosphorus and the B vitamins niacin, riboflavin and B12. It was lowest in chloride and, surprisingly, in fiber. The bake shop loaf was highest in fiber, in vitamin B6 and folic acid, and lowest in both fat and calcium.” 24
Even those who represent the manufacturers of the spongy white “tissue bread” sold in supermarkets admit its inferiority. The managing director of the Baking Council of Canada, the lobbying and public relations arm of the baking industry, told Harrowsmith’s reporters he “does not eat Weston or any other mass-produced bread himself... he shops instead at a small specialty bakery ... adding that large industrial bakers could not match its quality.”25
Then there is that traditional favorite, the hot dog, so closely identified with warm summer days and baseball, with Fourth of July and Canada Day picnics, as to be a virtual North American icon. No diehard fan’s day at the diamond could be complete, sitting out in the bleachers, without a cold beer and a couple of hot dogs for lunch.
Except that the dog, in terms of food value, is almost worthless— especially the prized all-beef frankfurter, for which people are ironically willing to pay a premium, thinking they’re getting something more for their money.
The average hot dog is actually 58 percent water, 20 percent fat, 3 percent ash and 6 percent sugar. Less than 13 percent of each sausage is made up of actual protein, and even this is of poor quality, consisting for the most part of scrapings from animals’ bones after the main cuts of meat have already been taken in the packing plants.26
An eight-year study by the non profit Protegez-vous (protect yourself ) magazine in Canada’s Quebec Province found that most hot dogs–including all-beef, as well as blended chicken and turkey, and blended beef and pork hot dogs–contained “the minimum required by law of protein, too much sodium and too much fat” and that they were of generally “bad quality.”27 Only vegetarian hot dogs contained a reasonable amount of food value.
As for “all-beef ” hot dogs, which many buyers seek on the mistaken assumption that they contain more protein and less “fatty” meats like pork, the magazine concluded: “The all-beef hot dogs were the worst of our study: Not only are they among the most costly, but their saturated fat and sodium content is much too high. Avoid them.”28 The study authors advised readers that veggie dogs have “almost double the protein, a third less fat and sodium, and hardly any saturated fats compared to meat hot dogs.”29
PILL POPPING TO THE RESCUE?
The above examples, taken chiefly from the produce, meat, and dairy sections, don’t even touch on the subject of the highly processed foods that make up most of the other products found in the cans, heat-sealed tinfoil or plastic envelopes, and cardboard boxes that line an increasing percentage of supermarket aisles (see the following chapter). But the drop in nutrients in these areas alone has been so drastic, and so constant, that many nutritionists are now saying that in order to be assured of a healthy “diet” all people must routinely take daily dietary supplements—in the form of multivitamin pills.
“Absolutely,” biochemical nutritionist Dr. Aileen Burford Mason told Globe and Mail reporter Picard. “When I hear people say, ‘you can get all the nutrients you need from food,’ I ask them: where is there a shred of evidence that is true? They are in denial.”30 Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the Harvard University School of Public Health, agreed, calling a daily multivitamin