Your package labels all say, “not a good source of…,” and then proceed with a huge list of things. Then, it lists vitamins and minerals, and gives you 2% of your daily value. 3 meals per day and you get 6% of your daily iron content.
Also… Your fruits and vegetables have 1/4 the nutritional value they did when your grandparents were alive. AND your soil nutrient levels are at an all-time-low.
Your vegetables couldn’t even get the nutrients they needed if you wanted them to.
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/five-reasons-why-soil-health-declining-worldwide
The nutritional value of top soil is declining worldwide. And it generally likes to stay homogenous. So, if your neighbor isn’t taking care of his soil, yours is losing nutrients too.
Also, plant some trees. They take nutrients from the surrounding areas and bring them into your land. There’s an entire fungal network that grows underground, and stretches between the roots of trees. It carries nutrients from one tree to another. Meaning, what your neighbor does affects you.
If he’s growing acres upon acres of industrial food, your own nutrients are depleted.
To answer your rhetorical question, no. Virtually nobody in the US has the slightest inkling of where their food comes from, what’s in it, or what should be in it. Nor do they have any specific strategy for choosing meals that have half a chance of resulting in any particular health outcome.
Almost nobody here knows how to decipher a nutrition label. I would be shocked if 10% of Americans could explain the concept of dietary fiber. We have massive systemic hurdles to overcome in this arena, I have no hope whatsoever that soil health will enter the public consciousness without some type of massive societal upheaval
I’m in a city and people are “protein maxing” and “fiber maxing” so yes people know about fiber. Unfortunately the micronutrients are missing because instead of eating stuff like beans and whole grains that have good amounts of both, the are eating highly processed foods without other nutrients because they have lower calories, and lower carbs, and lower everything else.