> Could you provide some evidence to support your assertion that highly enriched foods are degrading health?
Getting nutrients from whole foods is generally superior, for absorption and balance and avoiding overdosing, than getting it from supplements, whether taken directly or via enrichment.
That said, getting a nutrient any way is better than running a deficiency. For most of agricultural human history, in most societies, most of the population was nutritionally sufficient [1]. That changed with enrichment. It’s healthier to eat whole over enriched food; it’s better to have enriched food versus a vitamin decency.
It’s ahistoric to claim we’re unhealthier today than we’ve been over most of human history. But we can do better. In that way, Roman pipes brought clean water to its populations in a way that made them healthier than people had been in cities to date. But it also gave them lead poisoning, which while better than cholera, is worse than no lead.
> that changed with agriculture some 480 generations ago; enrichment is merely the solution
Whoops, typo—I meant nutritionally deficient.
Hunter-gatherers had a varied but volatile diet. Agriculture solved the volatility at the expense of variety. Most agricultural humans across history were nutritionally deficient.
Enrichment (a/k/a fortification) started to solve for the lack of variety, though it’s been historically stymied by our lack of understanding what e.g. vitamins are; modern farming, biology and logistics enable us to actually solve for the problems agriculture introduced to society for the first time.
Getting nutrients from whole foods is generally superior, for absorption and balance and avoiding overdosing, than getting it from supplements, whether taken directly or via enrichment.
That said, getting a nutrient any way is better than running a deficiency. For most of agricultural human history, in most societies, most of the population was nutritionally sufficient [1]. That changed with enrichment. It’s healthier to eat whole over enriched food; it’s better to have enriched food versus a vitamin decency.
It’s ahistoric to claim we’re unhealthier today than we’ve been over most of human history. But we can do better. In that way, Roman pipes brought clean water to its populations in a way that made them healthier than people had been in cities to date. But it also gave them lead poisoning, which while better than cholera, is worse than no lead.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9460423/