Fruits and vegetables 50% less nutritious than in the 1960s, new study finds

Make sure you drink your ovaltine.

Fruits and vegetables are only half as nutritious as they were 60 years ago, a new study reveals.

U.S. produce harvested today is lacking essential nutrients, including vitamin C, calcium and iron, due to drastic declines in soil quality, researchers at U.K.-based Deep Science Ventures have found.

Consumers must eat twice as much fruit and vegetables just to get the same level of minerals – like copper, magnesium or potassium – as in the 1960s. Bread, cereals, apples, peas and carrots have also lost between 20 and 50% of several essential nutrients.

“For sixty years we have measured food security in calories…and we have done remarkably well with these measures,” wrote Will Summers, one of the authors of the damning report.

“But we quietly emptied what was inside our food.”

Since the Green Revolution of the 1960s, agricultural systems have successfully increased global food supplies and grain yields.

But the movement has neglected nutritional quality, causing “hidden hunger” – micronutrient deficiencies despite adequate calorie consumption – in 2 billion people worldwide, researchers say.

With the rise of ultra-processed foods masking a decline in essential nutrients over the past 60 years, per capita calorie intake has increased worldwide – but this has led to what researchers call a “triple burden”, where obesity coexists with hidden hunger.

Researchers were able to show a systematic decline of 20 to 50 percent in mineral and protein density in many key foods using historical food datasets and long-term crop archives, including wheat samples spanning 160 years.

These micronutrient deficiencies lead to lost productivity and healthcare burdens of up to 3% of countries’ GDP each year – while increasing the risks of chronic diseases, poor maternal health and child development, the study found.

And increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, widespread land degradation and yield-driven agricultural policies threaten to worsen the nutrition crisis in the decades to come.

To resolve the crisis, the researchers suggest reframing the food security discourse around nutritional security and creating national nutrient monitoring networks. They also propose developing agricultural practices such as improving soil organic matter to improve the profitability of farms and the quality of harvests.