Why do fruits and vegetables have more vitamins than other foods?
In: 20
Because they’re unprocessed
Food like bread, pasta, pastries etc have a lot of processed sugar and fat which make them taste delicious. This fat and sugar has been taken from other fruit and vegetables (and also dairy) and distilled down to just the tasty part rather than the healthy part.
Not to be too flippant, but the reason why fruits and vegetables have so many vitamins is because fruits and vegetables have so many vitamins. Let me explain… evolutionarily speaking, these are things the body needs but can’t produce. Many are things our distant ancestors could produce, but can’t anymore. The reason is that they are plentiful in the easier-to-get food and can be absorbed from them, so losing that ability is not something that would cause you to not be able to survive to childbearing age or raise children. There are other genetic issues people can have that cause the body to not be able to produce certain things, but because our common foods can’t supply them either (or our bodies can’t absorb them through the gut), they are considered genetic diseases instead of the missing things just being labeled “vitamins”.
So the reason these foods have so many chemicals we consider “vitamins” is that they were plentiful and thus our bodies didn’t have evolutionary pressure to keep making it ourselves.
Eons of selective breeding to over generalize.
Very little of what you eat is in any way natural.
Yes it is that simple the source plants from which we bred these fruits and vegetables into existence came from have no where near the nutritional content of their modern descendants.
Let’s take the banana for example: a wild banana is a strachy, small little fruit with quite a few large pits in them. They were selected for smoother flesh, tastier and smaller seeds over 10,000 years and the result is a plant which is wildly different in taste, texture, appearance and nutritional value than it’s ancestor.
A wild peach is thought to be a small dense bitter little fruit about the size of a cherry.
A wild watermelon – is bitter but we bred it to extend the placenta. Yes the red part is pure placenta for a plant. Older cultivars had swirls of white and the rest was placenta.
We concentrated what was already there and made it better with thousands of years of effort all over the globe.
Why doesn’t wheat, grains and meat have such changes?
We bred them all to do something else or the limits of what an animal can be bred into based on it’s genetic code. They eat these things like us so why would they need to produce it?
Some crops we split into two like corn.
Some crops like the potato are simply food stores for the plant to trigger regrowth rather than the reproductive part of the plant.
Plants need their fruits to be eaten, so that the seeds get spread. So it’s in the plant’s interest to produce desirable fruits.
I’m not so sure your premise is entirely correct. For example eggs are extremely high in many vitamins, as are shellfish, organ meats, etc. The bioavailability for your body to use them also matters:
https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/are_you_absorbing_the_nutrients_you_eat
Also, it’s worth noting many fruits and vegetables in an average grocery store aren’t actually as nutritious as they would be under better conditions. A carrot doesn’t automatically have X amount of Vitamin A that a website says it does. When you eat produce that tastes like cardboard from the store, this is why. Its literally lacking the nutrients that make it taste good. Not many people have tasted well-raised fresh produce anymore so I don’t think they realize.
In order for a vegetable to meet its nutritional potential, it has to be grown in soil that has not been depleted of certain minerals AND has the appropriate bacteria and fungi to work in concert with the plant to grow. Plants cannot just eat dirt. The bacteria and fungi do this for them.
Large-scale agriculture generally doesn’t meet these requirements (in the US) due to heavy pesticide, herbicide, and fungicide use and heavy tilling. Ok I’ll cut myself off here.
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