 But sellers of supplements like to argue that we have to take vitamin pills because the nutrient content of our crops has declined over the last 50 years due to soil depletion. Is that true? The nutrient content of our food is in decline. Fact or fiction, it's a fact, but by how much, though? On average over the last 50 years, have the nutrients declined just a little, 1 to 20% to 20% to 40%, or have we lost half the nutrition? Do we have to eat like twice as many carrots these days as we would have in the 1950s to get the same amount of nutrition? Or is it even worse, and the majority of the nutrients have disappeared? We've only lost about 15% on average across 43 different crops. So instead of eating 6 florets of broccoli, eat 7.