From article “Side note on frozen produce: The post above is about fresh produce only. A potentially appealing alternative may be buying frozen produce, which on average has equal or higher nutritional content than fresh. This is because frozen produce is picked at peak ripeness then frozen shortly after, locking in most of the nutrients at the expense of appearance/texture/flavor.”
Presumably, cooking/heat causes (or accelerates) some chemical reactions (like with enzymes) which turns those nutrients into something else, or the heat destroys the more complicated molecules, or allows the water to leech away dissolved stuff.
Freezing generally means lowered rate of chemical reactions, water no longer flows, etc. So it makes logical sense that freezing keeps the nutrients intact.
> That means it had been a year since the apples he bought were actually picked
I've been saying for a while that instead of focusing on "best by" dates, food suppliers should be forced to put on the harvest or manufactured date.
"Fresh" Apples being sold after a year is nothing compared to how old some of the food you by in the freezer, or boxed section.
Manufacturers and store owners are the ones that benefit the most from keeping food on the shelves longer.
> If you walk into a booth and that vendor is selling over 5 types of produce, there's no way they all ripened at the same time. They may not even all be grown by them.
I noticed this also when i was buying a "farmers box" that promised to deliver fresh produce from a local farm. Upon closer inspection almost all of the organic farmers market type produce delivery services buy from other suppliers and sell as if they grew them themselves.
Frozen vegetables are often blanched and flash frozen at the peak of freshness. In many cases they are “fresher” than what you find in the produce section
Rory Sutherland makes this point, that because some products are cheaper to manufacture and keep in stock (like frozen veggies), they're perceived to be less healthy than "fresh".
If you want a real 'farmers box', look into Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). I've never seen those programs not be local seasonally-appropriate food. The change in produce over the year is part if the fun.
I wouldn't expect a logistics company to actually own farms. They are promising to buy some standard of produce (organic , local, fresh, whatever they promised...) and get it to me.
> vendor is selling over 5 types of produce, there's no way they all ripened at the same time. They may not even all be grown by them.
I’d like to know how authors make this conclusion. For my weak but real experience in the field:
1. Plants don’t fruits everything at once. Some pumpkins fruits spans during months
2. Wise farmers grow several time separated batches, precisely to space the harvests. Especially useful for not-fruits plants like leek and salads
3. Plant several species that don’t grow at the same time. Fresh tomatoes 8 month a year is real
4. Outdoor growing is not a lab and there’s chance a side of you field receive more/less sun, wind, moisture… so won’t grow at the same rate. Some farmers don’t harvest all at the same time but just what’s ripe at the time.
5. Probably even easier in a greenhouse, the most environment you control, the most precise can be the harvest date/range of your controlled batches.
This article could use an awful lot more links to the cited research. Reading this as a skeptic, I don't know whether the claims are accurate or not, but the fact that (nearly) none of his claims are supported by citations to authoritative sources is not promising.
Literally the author states it's unverifiable data:
The chart has unverified information "The average mineral content of calcium, magnesium, and iron in cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach has dropped 80-90%
between 1914 and 2018 30,34,35,36,371. Asterisks indicate numbers could not be independently verified."
> If you walk into a booth and that vendor is selling over 5 types of produce, there's no way they all ripened at the same time. They may not even all be grown by them. Once, he actually saw a vendor at Boston farmers’ market selling carrots from Target! He could tell from the packaging because he used to work for them.
I don't think this is true. In California and New York City, vendors at farmers markets can only sell what they grew themselves, unless they get an exemption for a specific product and prominently label the product as grown by a third party, specifying the third party (usually things like cranberries grown by one vendor in the fall). Very occasionally you'll see foods like apples in plastic bags with supermarket labeling, but that's because the farmer packages and sells the produce directly to the supermarket.
My wife ran a farmer's market for years, it can definitely be true.
Vendors tried to sneak stuff in constantly, and unless you have a market manager who really cares and is constantly vigilant, vendors will resell stuff they have bought in bulk and are reselling at a markup.
Not all vendors of course, but like anything else there's always a handful of bad actors.
Yeah I have seen a farm do this! They bought from other local farms at least, not Target. But the claim "vendors at farmers markets can only sell what they grew themselves" is only true to the extent that there is enforcement and sufficient oversight to find violators.
My one addition to this is that I wonder if this is part of the obesity crisis.
If food is less nutritious, then logically we should eat more of it to get the nutrition we need.
Excess calorie consumption could at least partially be a byproduct of our biological drive to acquire the lacking raw vitamins and minerals we need from the foods that we eat.
This is undoubtedly exacerbated by eating processed foods, sure, but I'm willing to bet this lack of a fundamentally nutritious foodscape almost certainly contributes to the Pavlovian habit of overeating and resultant societal obesity.
I've had the same thought and wonder if this is the likely long-term ticking time-bomb for GLP-1 agonists. Hunger is a check-engine light. Turning it off is a bad idea without a clear understanding of what is triggering it.
If your body is malnourished in a fundamental way, turning off the nutrient-seeking system is going to lead to a wide spectrum of pathological deficiencies over time.
I've been growing most of my own produce for several years and I make sure all trace elements are present and available. It's a ton of work and makes no financial sense (it's not really cheaper when all is said and done) but at age 53 I feel a lot better than I did at age 38.
I wish I could share this more widely but I think a lot of the worlds problems might be from lack of trace elements. Just a theory but eating produce picked the same day with proper mineral balances as a regular diet is astounding.
The older I get the more I appreciate how important good nutrition is for basically everything in your life. I started focusing on it more for climbing where I kept getting injured, injury used to set limit for me, now I hardly ever get injured or it's far more subtle and manageable. I feel way stronger and happier, and noticed other parts of me generally feeling healthier. I've been climbing for a very long time so even though this is anecdotal, it's a very clear relationship to me, and this is supported by some of the leading climbers in the world who really get into the science of it.
It's hard to sell most people on this because nutrition is historically such a terrible science, but the western diet over the past 50 years has gradually set the bar so low, that it's incredibly easy to make substantial improvements for little effort by focusing on the basics of simply getting back onto natural foods for the core part of your diet. The bioscience of nutrition is complex, and the statistics of nutrition is fraught with misinterpretation and flat out bullshit, but it's bizarrely simple when you figure out the actual changes to make... meat, veg, eggs, dairy, all the things that have been villainized by the food industry. That people still think eating egg yolks is bad for you just reflects how poor public education is on this stuff, and how damaging all of the ancient missinformed and massively outdated WHO recommendations have been to public health.
One theory I have (no idea just a theory) is that obesity and overeating are partially the result of missing nutrients.
Something close to 50% of Americans are deficient in Magnesium for instance. But there are a lot of trace minerals and nutrients and they interact to some extent.
Is it possible people are trying to get enough of "something" when they overeat and this leads to consuming too many calories? Maybe it's not a self control issue so much as you have to eat a lot of Domino's pizza to get what your body is lacking?
I'm sure there is some contribution of nutrient deficiency to obesity, nutrition is too complex to assume otherwise. However I'm not convinced it's the main driver, although the change in diet required to control intake usually improves nutrition as a side effect.
To be more concrete, the single correct part about "calories" is that the quantity matters, but the only practical road to keeping that under control is being naturally satiated, which is entirely about what you eat, everything else is a side effect of what. I know there are more complications when we are talking about people who grew up on very bad diets and have been obese all their entire lives - there's the psychological aspect and what the gut is used to that can take a long time to change - but putting that aside, the simplified extremes are:
1. You eat predominantly processed food based on carbs and sugar all day (90% of the isles in supermarkets, that also happen to be nutritionally empty but that's a another topic). You will always be hungry, because your body has been exposed to so much sugar that it never gets close to entering ketosis during the day, so as soon as you run out you immediately feel hungry. The only way to prevent overeating is pure will power, which is not sustainable for anyone, and extremely unpleasant.
2. You eat predominantly natural food, it has far higher fat and protein content, far less sugar, far less carbs. We are talking red meat, eggs, fish, milk, veg, nuts (lots of good fat). It's really hard to even intentionally over eat on these natural foods, and to eat too frequently, because it's so high in fat and protein and so low on carbs (relatively, it doesn't mean you can't have bread in your sandwich). Your body very easily enters ketosis between meals so you don't tend to get hungry easily outside of excessive exercise.
I'm a human being, I don't adhere to #2 strictly, but I try to make that my core diet, and the effects are really obvious. On the days I have some naughty cake or croissant or whatever, I notice how much hungrier I am all day, I just accept that, it's ok, I don't do it every day. Trying to control that hunger is futile and I get a taste of what it's like for all those poor obese people who unfortunately don't know this is the reason, I don't blame them, they are a product of their environment (food industry) and a lack of education.
One thing I have learned gardening is the importance of microflora. Which we also have in our guts.
Another theory I have (again, no idea if it's true) is that when people consume carbohydrates as the bulk of their diet for length of time the gut microflora changes to species that prefer those. And they signal to the person "hey, you need some dinner rolls right now!".
> when people consume carbohydrates as the bulk of their diet for length of time the gut microflora changes to species that prefer those
This is fairly well supported by studies, it even affects oral health. Although the idea of "good" vs "bad" bacteria is more to do with displacing bacteria that processes food into undesirable compounds with something more inert, e.g in the mouth the bacteria that causes tooth decay processes sugar into acid, but in some people this is naturally displaced by another bacteria that when dominant will produce a compound that kills the acid producing bacteria while producing no acid or enamel eroding compounds itself - maybe the natural dominance of that bacteria is affected by absence of excessive sugar intake over ones lifetime, or maybe it's just luck, or a bit of both... but much like gut bacteria, to actively change the dominant bacteria seems to either require a persistent and gradual change in diet, or a shorter and much harsher measure to eliminate the existing population.
I don't know about the specifics of the article I see a lot of "well, he doesn't cite sources!" type of comments and this may well be, however, in the general or the abstract this article hits on a number of important points. It's not just missing minerals, phytonutrients in particular often degrade rapidly. Mineral depleted soils are a real phenomenon and a tomato isn't necessarily fungible.
It's become a pet topic of mine and there is a lot more I could say about this (I have a bunch of theories) but will cut it short for now with this: I feel very healthy and I feel very happy. I wish others could experience the same type of things and I'd like to optimize it further.
How do you ensure the trace elements are present and available? I assume there's some testing you can do for both the soil and the produce, but how do you fix any deficiencies that you discover?
I keep the pH within ranges that plants can uptake nutrients and apply both mineral and trace mineral supplements in sufficient quantities. Azomite for instance which I apply to working compost and calcium magnesium supplements. Additionally I apply other supplements like organic acids (fulvic and humic acid) which aid in the transport.
I also remove all minerals from irrigation water with RO and use an engineered growing medium rather than growing in native soil. But it's organic (and alive with microbes), not hydroponic or anything like that.
A lot of people who eat this produce and don't take any supplements are healthy and doing fine. If the nutrient levels have really fallen so much, then, how come malnutrition isn't an epidemic?
* The article is making claims about a 100 year timespan and I doubt we have comparable data on nutrient deficiencies which is that old
* Daily calorie intake has probably doubled in that time period, so in theory you'd hope daily intake of all essential nutrients would double as well, but here we are with almost half of women and children having iron deficiency, with widespread deficiency in vitamins D and B12, half of the population not getting the recommended calcium intake etc.
So I think as an example to start throwing some numbers out there. About 40% of Americans don't get the recommended amount of calcium. First chart in the article shows calcium in vegetables at retail declining by 90% in the last century.
I think we have evidence establishing that nutrient deficiency leads to cravings - maybe declining nutrient density is a factor encouraging overeating and obesity?
Half of the western world is obese, eating double what you actually need in term of calories probably make up for a lot of deficiencies in micro nutrients
Malnutrition isn't as visible as obesity though, you can be a fat fuck and still malnourished in some aspects, but if you're already fighting high blood pressure and diabetes these issues are way down your list of problems. It can be very subtle like micro gut health, teeth health, long term bone health, children not growing as tall as they could, &c.
Maybe people are "fine" and surviving but not flourishing. For example, if you are deficient in magnesium, you could have reduced energy levels, poor sleep, anxiety, depression, heart issues, etc. If you have reduced calcium, you develop osteoporosis down the line.
Maybe there are other health effects like people subconsciously eating more because the body is craving certain micronutrients, leading to getting fat from too many macronutrients.
We could do randomized controlled studies, where we first have a phase where everybody just eats what they eats, we record caloric intake and nutrition profiles of the food they eat. To be sure that price is not a factor we pay for all the food.
Then in phase 2 we split into a control group that still buys from any store, a second group that only has access to foods with high nutrition content, and a third group that only has access to foods with low nutrition content. The same types of food should be offered just high and low nutrition options (e.g. zuchinnis, brocolli, tomatoes, apples, ...)
We then check if there's any significant effect on caloric intake (given a certain time for them to adjust).
You could create several cohort with different co-controlled fixes for each: more calories, more protein, more fiber, more nutrients.
Then evaluate the percentage of successfully treated patients in each cohort.
It's of course a difficult study, since someone with a bad diet will lack practically everything, so more things will work than not. I'd also be curious to see how you would design a real food diet high in micronutrients without accidentally adding a bunch of fiber in the process
I thought it was a little weird that they start off talking about "calcium, magnesium, and iron" and then immediately switch to talking about how vitamin C degrades over time in produce. OK sure, vitamin C can enhance iron absorption, but it doesn't do that for calcium or magnesium and, being atomic elements, they assuredly do not disappear from food in storage.
When an article conflates things like this without calling it out, I become suspicious of the rest of the claims.
The article doesn't say those minerals degrade, however it also fails to reiterate the linked paper's reason:
> The high rate of magnesium deficiency now postulated [5–8] can be attributed in part to a steady decline in general magnesium content in cultivated fruits and vegetables, a reflection of the observed depletion of magnesium in soil over the past 100 years
> Increasing demand for food has caused modern farming modern farming techniques to impact the soil’s ability to restore natural minerals such as magnesium. techniques to impact the soil’s ability to restore natural minerals such as magnesium. In addition, the use of phosphate-based fertilizers has resulted in the production of aqueously insoluble use of phosphate-based fertilizers has resulted in the production of aqueously insoluble magnesium phosphate complexes, for example, further depriving the soil of both components
It does mention those reasons and others, however all those reasons directly contradict the article's next point "If all you care about is nutrient content, SPEED is the only factor that matters". Seems like all these other factors should matter too! Surely not every farm is equal in these respects...
> Seems like all these other factors should matter too!
The way I read it was that there are some minerals that are no longer there to begin with because they're simply not in the soil. For nutrients (like vitamin C) created as part of the growing process, speed is the only factor that matters.
So yes, it does matter but unless you have a way of knowing which farm(s) the produce came from and what their soil mineral content is, that's not something you can factor into your purchasing decision.
> The way I read it was that there are some minerals that are no longer there to begin with because they're simply not in the soil. For nutrients (like vitamin C) created as part of the growing process, speed is the only factor that matters.
That's exactly the problem, fertilisers don't necessarily fully replenish the soil in every single micro nutrient so if you cultivate corn on the same parcel for 60 years you might very well have completely depleted the soil of some of them
You can grow very nice fruits and veggies on NPK fertilisers alone without caring for any of the other nutrients, nobody buys tomatoes because they're nutritious, we buy them because they're big and red. And that's why most taste like water and have no nutritional values today
I guess it is kind of weird article with contradicting points of view and the author could have communicated that improving soil quality and pairing it with speed to consumption is the best combination.
One of my unorthodox views is that the popular blue light obsession is exacerbated by magnesium deficiency, given how hard it is to get enough in our diets.
Yes, blue light disrupts melatonin and makes it harder to get to bed. But magnesium disrupts sleep quality and deregulates melatonin production in the first place and makes one particularly sensitive to blue light.
Melatonin production is influenced at least also by: Zinc, iron, calcium, copper, P5P (active B6), and tryptophan. Selenium, iodine, and manganese are involved in indirect ways. Many people are deficient in most, or all of those.
To be fair, some of these, like iodine and selenium, have always been problematic in some regions, like Switzerland (lots of goiters). But I find it less than ideal that only some minerals are fortified in bread and milk etc, because their deficiency is very obvious. While all the other minerals are not fortified because their deficiencies are less obvious or less well understood.
A healthy human body contains quite a few minerals in greater abundance than iodine: copper, bromine, strontium, rubidium, gallium, silicon, zinc, iron, and the electrolytes. Some of them don’t even have lab tests (not that blood tests work well for minerals, which is another issue - blood is short term transport for most minerals, not storage).
Magnesium is also a mineral that is under supplied by multivitamins due to the bulk required. This is why I take a magnesium supplement on top of a multivitamin. Given the state of vegetables today it seems wise and I feel much better with it.
I had a similar reaction to the discussion of farmer's markets. Technically yes, I've been to markets where it's obvious some vendors are not selling local produce but in the vast majority of the markets around me it's equally obvious that they are (I actually think most of them have rules that the produce has to originate within a certain radius). And selling "5 different types of produce" all grown locally at the same time is hardly difficult to do. Different produce does in fact ripen around the same time.
It's an odd article all around. Look at the first graph. It's an average mineral content of calcium, magnesium, and iron in 4 different vegetables, but only represented by a single line. Why isn't it broken out for each category (ex. iron in tomatoes over time)?
The first graph is also 5 data points connected by a line and separated by decades and most likely differing methodlogies. And this footnote
> "The chart has unverified information "The average mineral content of calcium, magnesium, and iron in cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach has dropped 80-90%
between 1914 and 2018 30,34,35,36,371. Asterisks indicate numbers could not be independently verified."
What is this chart and data? It's meaningless and nonsensical. And so the rest of the article is suspect when based on unverifiable nothing.
You’re sort of mixing ideas I believe. The nutrient density (minerals etc) is declining because of the soil quality it is grown in, not because it is sitting on shelf.
The vitamin C thing was about nutrient loss due to blanching (a processing step) I believe
The article is mixing ideas, is the point. If soil quality matters, that seems to contradict the article's claim that speed is the only thing that matters.
The article is from the comsumer's perspective. For me, someone who doing my daily / weekly shopping, time-from-harvest is the only factor I can use in a purchasing decision. I can't rely on branding, source, grower etc as all that is a crap-shoot. Even if one grower has nutritious tomatoes this year, next year they might use a different field leading to worse nutrition.
They're saying how fast the food goes from farm to table is what matters.
Doesn't matter if you grow old variety organic seeds the slow way in small batches on virgin soil if it takes 11 months for the food to get to your mouth.
Not contradicting your view that the article isn't very diligent, but have you heard of oxidation?
Atoms constantly react to the environment, they can bond with other atoms, form new compounds. Oxidation time varies, in the case of potassium it is very fast, the claims in the articles would stand. For vitamins, it also depends.
I got into a rabbit hole a few years back, digging into numbers from multiple academic sources on the subject. They concur that fruits and vegetables have "lost" the majority of their nutrient density. The low end figure is (rather was) 70% loss, the high end 90%.
The reasons are multiple like the article said. I recall reading a thorough and most backed paper explaining the main cause is the soil. We are over exploiting, not allowing the time needed for soils to recoup their content, in minerals in particular. We use fertilisers but these are to enable growth, not so that what end up in your dish is rich in nutrient.
We could quite easily reverse the trend, even getting back to normal levels, but that implies a massive hit in production for several years, in a row. Some would call it greed, but can we even produce for the world's population if we did that...
Not contradicting your view that the article isn't very diligent, but have you heard of oxidation?
Atoms constantly react to the environment, they can bond with other atoms, form new compounds. Oxidation time varies, in the case of potassium it is very fast, the claims in the articles would stand.
Potassium, calcium, and magnesium are always fully oxidized in foods. These elements are very reactive with water and oxygen; on Earth they are not naturally found in less oxidized forms.
Vitamin C sufficiency is very important to humanity, and freshly picked produce very expensive. Vitamin C seems to be largely unique among nutrients in how fragile it is, being destroyed with any significant storage or cooking.
Supplementation with ascorbic acid in shelf-stable tablet form seems like a reasonable compromise.
An alternative to tablets is pure powder of ascorbic acid, which can be mixed in drinks or food, and which is also cheaper, while containing no excipients.
While one can get enough vitamin C from one red bell pepper per day or from one or two kiwi fruits, depending on size, where I live, in Europe, the equivalent amount of pure powder of ascorbic acid is more than ten times cheaper. It also does not need frequent shopping.
Vitamin C is also one of the most abundant vitamins. there's a ton of vegetables and fruit that are very high in vit C (you can check my nutrient finder: https://kale.world/c ) . Rather than jumping straight to supplements, I prefer eating leafy greens. they're loaded with so much stuff: antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, fiber, etc. and, i've read so many times that often supplements don't provide the same benefits as the original foods.
Growing pest-free greens for 365 day availability (daily nutrition) is _incredibly hard_. It requires suburban housing, heated greenhouses, water and pesticide management, succession planting, fertilizer management, daily attention, etc, etc, etc. Not one person in a thousand achieves it. Buying produce at the supermarket for several dollars a day is dramatically easier, even if a high fraction of the vitamin C has decayed. Supplements are something on the order of 1-10 cents a day.
Well, as an experienced gardener I can tell you that growing perfect broccoli and cualiflower is very challenging, growing leafy greens is not.
if you have a desent sized garden and are constantly growing stuff in it, you will almost always have greens one way or another. all those failed broccoli result in a consolation prize: the leafy greens that come with the plant. and when they do go to seed, the plant gets super huge delivering pound after pound of leafy greens. similar things happen to lettuce and many other greens. and if you take the time to identify all the weeds growing, you'll notice that many of them are edible and can be added to the garden salad. the beets whose heads never developed properly, still have lots of green growth on top. and those french sorrel plants, once properly rooted will be hard to get rid of and you'll have pounds of leafy greens. Just keep growing and you'll see.
I've experienced this myself. Most of the year, i have waaayy too many leafy greens (much of it from failed brassicas, various weeds - which by the way are very nutritious) than i know what to do with and harvest at least 1/2 lb per day.
This article seems to lack common sense. Yes, the amount of Vitamin C will reduce the longer you store a vegetable or fruit in a fridge, but the amount of calcium and iron does not change. Nor does the the density of other minerals.
Why is the author nominating Walmart as the winner based just on their speed to market? What about the other factors like soil degradation etc., which reflect the amount of iron and other minerals?
Deep in the text they mention that a study looked at nutrient contents and Walmart was the best:
“I learned this from talking to Brent Overcash, co-founder of a startup called TeakOrigin, which specialized in testing nutrient content in groceries from retail grocery stores. For years, every week, his team would walk into grocery stores, buy thousands of produce items the way normal consumers would, and bring them back to the lab to assess nutrient content.“
It’s unfortunate that the company (teakorigin) raised so much capital ($5mil?) without publishing a peer reviewed paper, scientific report or data set available for download by the public.
It is an interesting research idea, but there are major methodological challenges that would be better be addressed by a scientific inquiry than an entrepreneurial startup-y approach. For example, time of year, sampling, seasonality, handling, selection, etc.
My guess is that this is a retailer-oriented venture in search of a host, but the margins on this stuff are razor thin and grocers are more interested in optimizing the reduction of shrink.
Why would Target or Whole Foods buy into an app that tells shoppers to throw away more produce that looks and tastes totally fine or buy it across the street?
"It's a well-documented phenomenon that nutrient levels in produce have been declining for decades. ... There are several reasons for this, but most of them are due to modern agricultural practices. These reasons include: ... higher CO2 levels in atmosphere diluting nutrient content in plants, ... "
The author then links to an X post with a chart that shows relative carbon and nitrient levels and that says that "exposure to high levels of CO2 reduces the nutritional value of plants". It's not clear to me from the chart that spinach raised in high CO2 levels would contain less nutrients per kilogram than regular spinach. The chart only show proportions of the nutrients to carbon. Does the amount of carbon per kilogram of edible spinach stay the same or go down as CO2 increases? It's not clear.
The amount of carbon per kilogram of spinach is determined by its content of water.
This is unlikely to change much.
More CO2 that is captured is likely to stimulate the synthesis of more cellulose, i.e. of more cell walls, so the plants should grow faster, possibly also bigger.
Even when grown in soil with the same amount of minerals, the plants that grow faster and/or bigger may be more depleted in anything else besides carbohydrates.
Many negative comments here, but the notion that food might be less nutritious is certainly interesting and worth exploring, even if this article isn’t the end all be all. As mentioned in there, apples are sold up to a year old, and I know the same is done with potatoes. We have global issues with soil quality and depth, produce is selected for transport instead of taste (which is why grocery store tomatoes are gross but garden tomatoes are amazing) and other practices like breeding chicken that grow twice as fast as they used to.
This article smells like a fine bullshit. It's based on one diagram and a meta-analysis of papers.
However, the diagram has these nice annotation: "Asterisks indicate numbers could not be independently verified". And there are asterisks on all the historic data except for 1948.
The only reliable reference is from "35. Firman, B. Ash and Mineral Cation Content of Vegetables. Soil Sci. Soc. Am. Proc. 1948,13, 380–384."
A human needs only around 50 chemical substances to stay alive in good health, which are composed of around 20 chemical elements.
These approximately 50 include a little more than 10 amino-acids for providing both the essential amino-acids and the additional bound ammonia that is needed, 2 or 3 amino-acid derivatives, vitamin C, around 7 or 8 essential fatty acids and liposoluble vitamins, 8 B-complex vitamins, water, salt and about a dozen minerals.
Besides these, there are a few additional chemical elements that might be needed, but if they are needed they are needed in quantities so small in comparison with their normal abundance as impurities in food that there have never been observed any cases where any harm could be attributed to their absence (e.g. silicon and bromine).
There are also various substances from plants that may be beneficial for health, but which are not known to be strictly necessary for anything.
I tried this, and I have never had such flavorful lettuce! I'd been a little worried: Hydroponics has a reputation for (maybe?) producing flavorless vegetables. And certainly, I did have trouble growing some things. But those things I succeeded with (mostly lettuce), actually had tremendous flavor!
Hydroponics, being mostly based on water and sunlight, are unlikely to boost the nutrient profile as much as healthy soil, depending on what feed you add to the water.
if you're concerned about getting enough micronutrients, I did create a tool that helps me discover the foods that are highest in any particular vitamin or mineral or combination thereof and normalizes the data to 200 calorie servings for ease of comparison. it uses a weighted formula that you define with sliders on the left: https://kale.world/c
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