Whether domesticated plant foods are better than wild ones depends on your reasons for eating. If your singular goal is to consume the most nutrient dense, medicinally active foods possible, then you should eat the roots, stems, leaves and fruit of wild plants. If, on the other hand, your singular goal is to satisfy your sweet tooth, then domesticated plant foods - particularly cultivated fruits - will suit you better. I'm admittedly setting up something of a false dichotomy here; we can eat for nourishment sometimes and eat for sweet tastes at other times, using a mix of wild and cultivated plants.
In general, plants have been bred to remove their bitterness and increase their sweetness. The compounds that make plants bitter often have either nutritional or medicinal value, so removing the bitterness diminishes the value of eating plants. Lettuce is a prime example; the wild ancestor of today's cultivated lettuces is prickly lettuce, a wild plant with a quite bitter taste that most people find unpalatable but is, in fact, both nutritious and very medicinal. Through decades of breeding, we've turned prickly lettuce into iceberg and other lettuces, which are mild of flavor, are largely devoid of nutrition and have zero medicinal value. They're basically crunchy water.
In my personal experience, fruits that have been bred for sweetness cause me to eat too much, leading to blood sugar issues, tooth enamel damage and sometimes reinforcing a sugar or carb addiction more generally. I don't have this problem when eating wild fruits, like wild blueberries or strawberries, because these fruits have plenty of plant secondary compounds that trigger the 'enough' sensation and prevent me from eating more than a hand full.
Topic: Is wild food actually healthier? (Read 14115 times)