Hi everybody this is Monica Reinagal and you're listening to the

nutrition divas quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous

several of you asked me to comment on the feeling fabulous.

Several of you asked me to comment on the article titled Breeding the Nutrition out of Our Food,

which appeared recently in the New York Times.

The author, Joe Robinson, observes that humans naturally prefer fruits and

vegetables with more sugar and starch and that the varieties we've

cultivated over the millennia reflect those tastes.

But, she points out, these tastier varieties

tend to be lower in phytonutrients,

which often impart a bitter taste to food. She suggests that eating your veggies isn't going to keep you healthy if you're eating modern cultivars.

This anxiety that fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be is not new and I've addressed it in a previous podcast

But a high-profile article like this is sure to breathe new life into this issue

While Robinson has gathered some really interesting data, some of her reasoning doesn't seem completely logical to me

and I don't agree with all of her conclusions. For example, she points out that today's apples contain less than half the phytonutrients found in wild crab

apples from which modern apples descended. But is this really a fair comparison?

Have you ever tried to eat a crab apple?

At least one that hadn't been cooked in sugar syrup first?

They're barely edible.

How many crab apples do you think your kids are going to eat?

I would argue that the cultivation of the modern apple, palatable, portable, and ubiquitous

has probably vastly increased the average humans intake of

...