How many times have you heard that a healthy and balanced diet doesn’t require any nutritional supplement? A lot, surely. And the surprising thing is that this notion is almost always uttered by health professionals. However, this is no longer the case. These days it is very difficult for a supposedly healthy and balanced diet to provide you with all the micronutrients in the optimum quantities and qualities.

And this is, in part, because the nutrients in food deteriorate over time. Do you know how many of today’s apples you would need to eat to get the same as an apple from 1914 in terms of vitamins, minerals and fiber? More than 20! (extrapolating data from the United States Department of Agriculture).

The cause: intensive crops, several crops in one season, greenhouses, fertilizers, insecticides, preservatives, etc. Cultivated soils have exhausted their capacity for supplying minerals to plants. Today’s fruit and vegetables have to be attractive so that they look shiny in the supermarket, but they’re not what they seem. How many times have we picked up an unbeatable piece of fruit, only to find that it doesn’t taste like anything?!

Continuing with the data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (the same thing has happened to Europe’s soil), there are foods whose vitamin and mineral levels have dropped by 81% in the last 30 years.

This is the main argument of the flourishing functional food and nutritional supplement industry. We have no doubt that gradually both functional food and nutritional supplementationwill end up being fully incorporated into our lives.