[www.cornucopia.org]

A top quality tomato will yield over 430 times as much iron as the typical commercial tomato. Here is a small snippet from my file on Soil Fertility, which goes as a reminder for all of those depending on Nutrient Tables based on Analysis of typical Agro-Chemical Commercial Produceā€¦

In 'Thorsons Complete Guide To Vitamins And Minerals' (Mervyn, 89), variations in mineral contents of various plant foods are given, as reproduced in the table below. The values for commercial produce are reported to fall about midway (if you are lucky!) between the maximum and minimum given values. While the nutrient content varies at most between different food groups, by a typical factor of between 10s and 100s, differences in soil culture may account for nutrient variations as high as 2000 times in the same food. The soil and methods of cultivation are therefore the major factor in determining the nutritional values of plant foods.

Note: to convert p.p.m. (parts per million) to grams per 100 grams, divide figures below by 10,000

Food Boron
(p.p.m.) Manganese
(p.p.m.) Iron
(p.p.m.) Copper
(p.p.m.) Cobalt
(p.p.m.)

Snap Beans 10-70 2-60 10-227 3.0-69 0.00-0.26
Cabbage 7-42 2-13 20-94 0.4-48 0.00-0.15
Lettuce 6-37 1-169 9-516 3.0-60 0.00-0.19
Tomatoes 5-36 1-68 1-1938 0.0-53 0.00-0.63
Spinach 12-88 1-117 19-1584 0.5-32 0.20-0.25

The above variations have important repercussions for those eating plant based diets. Taking the most extreme example of iron levels in tomatoes, a top quality tomato will yield up to 193.8mg/100g as iron, so that a 100g serving will provide 10 times (i.e. >1000%) or more of the RDA value. However the typical commercial tomato provides only 0.450mg/100g (USDA figures), and therefore only about 4.5% of the male RDA. Thus a person eating the best quality tomatoes might do exceptionally well nutritionally, while one eating typical commercial produce will suffer nutritional deficiency. Therefore, when eating such deficient commercial produce, which are effectively little better than bags of weakly flavoured water, one must apparently "balance" the diet by utilizing richer food sources of the limiting nutrients, i.e. greens, sprouts, or indeed the cooked legumes or animal corpse and bird mense diets of popular vegetarian and meat eating dietary cultures. A farmers economic incentive is to grow for maximum profit by obtaining the greatest yield of produce for market from the least expensive chemical input. In practice this means growing produce with the highest content of water, with the lowest input of fertilizers. Such a farmer would not attempt to adjust and monitor the many factors essential in producing the most nutritious food - the modern culture puppet has no concept, let alone experience, of quality food, health or nutrition, so no such market forces arises to create the demand.

The above analysis also undermines the dieticians dependence on nutrient tables based on analysis of typical agro-chemical commercial produce, which are evidently of very very low quality. Application of those data to people eating higher quality home produce, or selected organic foods, contains great potential for extreme inaccuracy. Look at the case of iron above, the dieticians are blaming the vegetarian diet for causing iron deficiency, and telling us to eat meat, so are the 'paleo' diet crowd, some of them are even eating raw animal organs. This may well prevent deficiency, but even 100g of liver contains only 12.5mg of iron (Mervyn, ibid.) - that's nothing compared to a carefully cultured vegetable (see above). So they are telling us to eat animal products, all because they do not really understand food quality, and they get the R.Ds and Ph.Ds, and probably the cancer and heart disease because of vegetable ignorance. The nutritional value of raw plant foods is grossly underestimated, but we simply need to look at the might of any gorilla or elephant to understand that potential.

Peace and Love..........John

Bump...

I was just cleaning up my file on Tomatoes to send to a student who was refrigerating her Tomatoes and noticed this Post, which made me think of some of the people who claimed that they didn't do very well eating fruits and vegetables.