Question: Could someone explain whether it is known that higher Brix fruits/vegetables have higher mineral and protein contents, or is it only known that they have higher sugar/flavor components?

 

Answer: I've been asked this many times and the short answer is that I'm unaware of any charts or tables that bluntly state something along the lines of "6 Brix tomatoes have 49mg of this, 75mg of that, and 100mg of the other."

 

 

Perhaps the Japanese buyers that paid to have them shipped to Tokyo (at about $1 per berry) were wasting their money. They could have saved on the airfreight charges by buying the light-weight watery berries so commonly grown (and that have to have enormous amounts of chemical pest protection).

 

No, I can't provide a table that says a 30 brix pineapple has so many ounces of minerals, but I can tell you that I, you, or anyone else can pick up two different fruits and tell the higher brix pineapple by it's heft. Rightly or wrongly, I've always assumed that extra heft might be minerals at 165 pcf instead of water at 62 pcf.

 

Sorry, but I can't provide a table that proves high brix forage has a certain mineral poundage per ton, but I can tell you that animals fed on high brix fields won't be pushing fences over to get at the mineral box a neighbor had to install because his grass was such lousy low brix his animals were suffering.

 

I can only add that Dr. Albrecht found animals in highly-mineralized pastures had dramatically stronger and heavier bones than those grazing in low quality (low brix) fields. Rightly or wrongly, I consider any vegetation that allows better bone mineralization probably has more minerals (by far). If you read the Brix Site and Weston Prices's work, you should be aware that if kids don't get adequate minerals they will have to have their wisdom teeth pulled and wear braces. That's because their mineral-starved dental arch doesn't round out and provide space for the 32 teeth nature bequeathed us. You can look in the little one's mouths and see braces coming years in advance.

 

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t currently have what you've asked for. I'll surely post such data as soon as it becomes publicly available. Actually, I suspect such data may be collected unofficially by those folks operating food laboratories. If that's true, we'll have a real breakthrough if one ever goes public.

 

 

Question: For a lot of fruit, sunlight, temperature and length of time before picking seems to affect the amount of sugars dramatically. Do we know that levels of minerals and proteins are associated with sugar levels, or is this just assumed?

 

Answer: Remember, Brix is not sugar. However, sugar is one component of brix. Reams found the brix of properly grown crops tends to be 50% sugar/50% minerals, whereas most Departments of Agriculture find brix in NPK commercial crops to be 75% sugar/25% minerals. As I've explained before, sugar is the fundamental building block that the plant combines with soil minerals to make aminoacids, proteins, hormones, and other life goodies.

 

However, nothing I could possibly say here can have 1% of the dramatic effect that biting down into a high brix fruit can do. There is a difference between perception & belief on the one hand and true knowledge on the other. Tasting high brix produce triggers a billion year old response in a person: they instantly *know* the item is good for them. And what is good for them is the minerals they have not ordinarily been getting.

 

As someone who recently bought a refractometer and started home testing said, "What an eye opener!" Indeed, looking through a screen and first getting that visual validation is a true eye opener.

 

No, there is no chart showing minerals vis-a-vis a certain brix level. For that matter, there is no chart showing mineral levels in *any* produce. You have to test them one at a time. The famous USDA "nutrient chart" is simply a big collage of averages and means exactly nothing unless they one day decide to add the brix number of the items they are testing.

 

Again, I have no chart that shows brix level "X" translates to "x" amount of minerals. I guess feed labs may have some data along this line.

 

Sorry. I wish what you're seeking existed. The old Firman Bear report can't help even though it showed that mineral levels of produce could vary a thousand times depending on the soil quality they were grown in. That's because it appears Dr. Bear didn't have a refractometer---darn.

 

Maybe some other government researcher will get a big grant from Ortho or DuPont that allows him to run the tests that show high brix produce (which doesn't need chemical protection) is more highly mineralized than the low-brix watery stuff Ortho/DuPont's insect & disease prevention chemicals allows to grow to maturity.

 

But I'm not holding my breath waiting for them to come through.

 

Question: You addressed this "fuzzy" factor, which I have come to understand to be an important aspect of the refractometer reading. Why is it that a refractometer is not engineered in such a way as to produce an "unified" numerical reading?

 

Answer: Actually, there are instruments that do as you suggest. The digital electronic models (at $500+) appear to do this automatically. Certainly most $5000-$8000 laboratory refractometers can be set up to deliver razor-sharp demarcation lines. However, I far prefer the simple hundred dollar-range optical instruments, as the degree of fuzziness imparts so much more data into the equation. It's as if the fuzzy line tells you that an item of a certain basic brix quality is at either the high or low end of that range.

 

Question: As things stand at this point, we get a dual reading: one numerical and the other visual, this last one requiring being expressed as "clear", "fuzzy", "very fuzzy, sharp," etc. , all of them not satisfactory in communicating.

 

Answer: In reality you get a single reading which is at the center of any fuzziness. Perhaps the photograph will help you understand. It is of a very nice "fuzzy" reading on a piece of fruit. That fuzzy implies a noticeably superior taste when compared to a fruit that gives an equal---but very sharp---19 brix reading.

 

 

I apologize for the lack of clarity. Almost all instruments are fitted with a focusing ring that brings the view into very clear focus.

 

 

 

 

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Cheers

 

WIEL