[Ashartus]

Originally Posted by Azure

There are a ton of taste enhancers out there. Go look them up.

It's happening to crops in the United States, too. In 2004, Donald Davis, PhD, a former researcher with the Biochemical Institute at the University of Texas, Austin, led a team that analyzed 43 fruits and vegetables from 1950 to 1999 and reported reductions in vitamins, minerals, and protein. Using USDA data, he found that broccoli, for example, had 130 mg of calcium in 1950. Today, that number is only 48 mg. What's going on? Davis believes it's due to the farming industry's desire to grow bigger vegetables faster. The very things that speed growth — selective breeding and synthetic fertilizers — decrease produce's ability to synthesize nutrients or absorb them from the soil.

A different story is playing out with organic produce. "By avoiding synthetic fertilizers, organic farmers put more stress on plants, and when plants experience stress, they protect themselves by producing phytochemicals," explains Alyson Mitchell, PhD, a professor of nutrition science at the University of California, Davis. Her 10-year study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry showed that organic tomatoes can have as much as 30 percent more phytochemicals than conventional ones.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37396355/

30% more phytochemicals is not always a good thing - some of those phytochemicals are the pesticides plants produce to defend themselves and can be toxic to humans, which do tend to be in higher concentrations in some organic produce (30% more nutrients, on the other hand, is probably good). I'm also pretty skeptical of any chemical analyses conducted before around 1980 - they tend to show much higher concentrations than what modern analyses show in my experience, due to things like cross-contamination from laboratory equipment and less sophisticated laboratory equipment, so the change in calcium concentrations could be at least partly due to measurement error. That's not to say there hasn't been a change - growing bigger vegetables faster could have some effects on mineral uptake etc. - but if they can't grow plants with 1950's levels of calcium that leads me to believe the 1950's levels weren't real.