We are eating more calories than any generation before us — and we are more nutritionally depleted than any generation before us. That is not a coincidence.
I want to start with a number.
In 1948, a rutabaga contained 36 milligrams of calcium.
By 1997, that same rutabaga contained 16 milligrams.
That is a 56% decline in a single nutrient in a single vegetable over five decades.
The same pattern shows up across nearly every vegetable and fruit analyzed over the same period — iron down 37%, Vitamin A down 21%, Vitamin C down 30%, magnesium down significantly, zinc declining, chromium nearly disappearing from the foods that once contained it reliably.
We did not change the food.
We changed the ground it grows in.
And that change — quiet, cumulative, almost entirely invisible to the average consumer — is one of the most significant and least discussed drivers of the chronic disease epidemic affecting women in midlife and beyond.
Including the insulin resistance that sits at the root of so much of what I address with the women I walk alongside.
This month I want to take you somewhere most wellness content never goes.
Not into your plate.
Into the ground beneath it.
🌱 What Soil Actually Is — and What We Did to It
Healthy soil is not dirt.
It is one of the most complex living ecosystems on the planet.
A single teaspoon of healthy, biodiverse soil contains more microorganisms than there are people on Earth — bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, and thousands of other species working in intricate relationship with each other and with plant roots to break down organic matter, cycle nutrients, build soil structure, and make minerals available to growing plants.
This underground ecosystem — the soil microbiome — is the foundation of the entire food chain.
And in the last century of industrial agriculture, we have devastated it.
Here is what happened:
Synthetic fertilizers replaced biological nutrient cycling. Traditional farming built soil fertility through composting, crop rotation, cover crops, and the integration of animals whose manure fed the soil microbiome. Industrial agriculture replaced this with synthetic nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium fertilizers — NPK — that fed crops directly while bypassing the biological processes that make the full spectrum of minerals and micronutrients available.
Plants grew larger and faster. Yields increased dramatically.
But the minerals that the soil microbiome would have made available — the magnesium, the zinc, the chromium, the selenium, the iron, the calcium — were not being replaced.
The soil was being mined.
Monoculture eliminated diversity. Traditional polyculture — growing multiple crops together — supported a diverse soil microbiome that could cycle a broad range of nutrients. Industrial monoculture — growing the same crop on the same land year after year — depleted the specific organisms and nutrients that crop required while eliminating the biodiversity that would have naturally restored balance.
Tillage destroyed soil structure. The mechanical turning of soil disrupts the fungal networks — mycorrhizal fungi — that are the primary conduit through which plants access minerals and water from the broader soil ecosystem. These networks, built over years, are destroyed in hours by a plow.
Pesticides decimated the soil microbiome. The same chemicals applied to crops to kill harmful insects and fungi do not stay on the surface. They move into the soil and kill the soil microorganisms that are the foundation of nutrient cycling.
The result — across decades, across the majority of commercial agricultural land in the United States — is soil that is biologically depleted, structurally compromised, and nutritionally exhausted.
And the food grown in that soil reflects it.
🔬 The Minerals That Matter Most for Your Metabolism
This is not an abstract nutritional concern.
The minerals most dramatically depleted from our food supply are the exact minerals most critical for metabolic function — and for the insulin sensitivity that determines whether your cells can access fuel, regulate weight, and sustain the energy that makes life feel worth living.
Magnesium — involved in over 300 enzymatic reactions, including every step of glucose metabolism and insulin signaling. Insulin receptors require magnesium to function. When magnesium is insufficient, insulin resistance worsens regardless of other interventions. Magnesium content in vegetables has declined by 20-30% in the last half century. Deficiency is now estimated to affect the majority of American adults — not because we are not eating, but because the food we are eating no longer contains what it once did.
Chromium — a trace mineral that directly enhances insulin's action at the cellular receptor level. Without adequate chromium, insulin becomes significantly less effective at moving glucose into cells. Chromium has nearly disappeared from many commercial food sources due to soil depletion and food processing that strips what little remains. It was once abundant in whole grains, vegetables, and meats grown on mineral-rich soil.
Zinc — essential for insulin storage and secretion in the pancreatic beta cells. Zinc deficiency impairs the pancreas's ability to produce insulin effectively and impairs the immune function that protects against the inflammation driving insulin resistance. Zinc in agricultural soils has declined markedly with industrial farming practices.
Selenium — a critical antioxidant mineral that protects the pancreatic beta cells from oxidative damage, supports thyroid function, and modulates the inflammatory processes that drive insulin resistance. Soil selenium content varies enormously by region and has declined significantly in heavily farmed areas.
Iron — essential for mitochondrial energy production and oxygen delivery to cells. Iron-deficiency anemia — even subclinical iron depletion — significantly worsens the fatigue that women with insulin resistance already experience. Iron in vegetables has declined dramatically in the last century.
This is not a list of supplements to take.
It is an explanation of why so many women are doing everything right nutritionally — eating vegetables, eating whole foods, taking a multivitamin — and still experiencing the fatigue, the blood sugar instability, the metabolic dysfunction that these depleted minerals underlie.
The food has changed.
And our bodies are paying the price.
🌍 Your Gut Microbiome and the Soil Microbiome
Here is the connection that I find most striking — and that the research is only beginning to fully illuminate:
Your gut microbiome and the soil microbiome are in the same crisis.
The organisms that build healthy soil and the organisms that build a healthy human gut are not the same — but they are deeply related. They share evolutionary history. They respond to the same inputs and the same threats. They are both devastated by the same industrial chemicals.
And when we eat food grown in biologically depleted soil, we consume fewer of the diverse microbial signals, the diverse plant compounds, the diverse minerals that once fed and shaped our gut microbiome across thousands of years of coevolution with the land.
The diversity of the human gut microbiome has declined dramatically in industrialized populations over the last century.
The diversity of agricultural soil has declined in parallel.
These are not separate crises.
They are the same crisis — experienced in the soil and in the body simultaneously.
And the downstream consequences — the insulin resistance, the inflammation, the immune dysregulation, the chronic disease that has become so normalized we have stopped recognizing it as abnormal — follow directly.
💛 A Pattern Worth Seeing
I want to name something clearly, because it is a pattern I have been tracing across this entire year of writing:
The forces that devastated our soil are the same forces that shaped our dietary guidelines, funded the research that exonerated sugar, and produced the ultra-processed food that now constitutes the majority of the American diet.
Industrial agriculture. Industrial food processing. Policy shaped by corporate interest rather than public health.
This is not conspiracy.
This is documented history — the same pattern we traced in the Easter candy post, in the sugar research funding story, in the Ancel Keys narrative.
Industry shaped what we eat.
Industry shaped the ground it grows in.
Industry shaped the research that told us it was safe.
Industry shaped the research that told us it was safe.
And women — doing their best with the information they were given, eating the vegetables they were told to eat, taking the multivitamins that were formulated from a food supply that no longer contained what the label promised — have been left holding the consequences.
You deserved to know this.
You deserve to know it now.
✨ Rooted Reset Practice This Week
This week is about awareness and one meaningful shift:
✔ Visit a local farmers market this week if you can access one. Food grown in living, biodiverse soil by small farmers using regenerative or organic practices genuinely contains more nutrients than its industrial counterpart. The research supports this clearly.
✔ Choose organic for the foods you eat most frequently — particularly the Dirty Dozen (the Environmental Working Group publishes this list annually and it is worth knowing).
✔ Prioritize mineral-rich whole foods this week: pumpkin seeds for magnesium and zinc, Brazil nuts for selenium, dark leafy greens for iron and magnesium, grass-fed meat for chromium and zinc.
✔ Consider a soil-grown, food-based mineral supplement if your diet is heavily reliant on conventionally grown produce — not as a replacement for food, but as an honest acknowledgment of what our food supply no longer reliably provides.
✔ Think about the soil when you eat a vegetable this week. Where did it come from? What was the ground it grew in? These are not paranoid questions. They are the right ones.
💬 Does This Shift Something?
Has anyone ever explained your nutritional depletion this way — not as a personal failing but as a systemic one?
Did anything in this post give you language for something you have been experiencing but couldn't name?
Reply and tell me. This series is the most important thing I have written — and your response to it matters deeply to me.
🌿 Want Support?
If you are beginning to see that the metabolic challenges you have been navigating are not personal failures but systemic ones — and you are ready to work with that understanding rather than against yourself —
I would love to walk alongside you.
💬 Join our free Natural GLP-1 Support Facebook Group — a community of women who are done accepting less than the full picture.
📥 Or reach out directly — let's talk about what root-cause support looks like for you.
Rooting for you — always,
Rachel xo
Rachel xo
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