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Is zerowaste at odds with nutrition? (slrpnk.net)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/zerowaste@slrpnk.net
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I always eat whatever thing in the fridge is closest to spoiled to ensure I waste nothing. And it’s a race because food is often already on the edge when I bring it home, to prevent waste and also save money (as it gets marked down because of the age).

I found out a friend does the opposite. She eats the freshest veg she has because she says vitimins deplete as the veg ages. She wants to maximise her nutrition.

Is freshness really significant for vitamins? Someone in my family does the same thing. Always eats the freshest food. And as a consequence she is frequently tossing food that lost the competition to be eaten early.

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[–] [S] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

Nutrition doesnt generally need to be minmaxed;

That may be true superficially but some ppl have an interest in minimising waste. On the one hand, we want to minimise food waste. But if that leads to consuming more food to get the needed nutrition we may still be failing to minimise waste as we try to minimise waste. So consider these two scenarios:

  1. Bob eats 1 freshly picked bell pepper. But this habit led to throwing 1 bell pepper away because he routinely eats the freshest option.
  2. Alice, who tries to minimise food waste only has near-spoiled bell peppers. So she eats 2 bell peppers as they lost nutrition.

In both cases 1 bell pepper was wasted. It’s oversimplified¹ in order to convey the problem. Alice may not be consciously choosing to eat more but when living the zerowaste lifestyle her body naturally demands bigger portions (we might hypothesize).

¹ No idea if 50% nutrition is lost in aging from freshest to near ruin. It’s arbitrary for the sake of the example..

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago*

    Note from after writing: you can probably skip to the final paragraph, I'm just bad at being succinct. Leaving the rest there for explanation and continuity

    Yeah I think the problem is that the bulk of nutrition does not degrade at all. To my understanding degradation just happens to micronutrients, and only the volatile ones which are generally vitamins. Not minerals, and the carbs and fiber of a bell pepper don't degrade at all either- carbs being the macro that bell peppers meaningfully contribute to. Your macronutrients, as the name would suggest are the vast majority of your needed intake and shouldn't degrade at all.

    So you only end up needing to eat more food to make up for degredation if you have a vitamin deficient diet as a product of waiting until things are less fresh. You only need to worry about vitamin intake if youre having problems that are likely explainable by a vitamin deficiency or have labs saying you have a deficiency and your doctor thinks you should be doing something about it (lab values can be affected by lots of things, and sometimes chasing things like vitamin levels when you don't have any specific health problems you're trying to adress causes unforseen issues. Don't fix what isnt broken, you generally only need to worry about things if theres an issue that may be caused by a deficiency, and then you test for that deficiency and you have it.)

    You do need micronutrients, but as long as youre eating a reasonably healthy varied diet you should be getting plenty, and it really should be fine to eat veggies past peak freshness even if you'd get more vitamins otherwise. If you don't have a vitamin deficiency its really not something to stress over.

    If youre going to optimize something about your health make it eating more whole foods, which would reduce any possible likelihood of vitamin deficiencies anyway.

    If your question is purely about waste rather than health, priotize avoiding macro-nutrient waste rather than micro-nutrient, as wasted macros more meaningfully guarantee you will need to eat more food to make up for lost nutrition and calories, where vitamins do not unless you're deficient and its causing problems.

    Sorry, that last paragraph probably could have been the whole answer but I'm really long-winded lol

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