What is the difference between nutritive and nutritious?

lena Aren't they basically the same adjective, what exactly is the difference between the two?

nutritive - relating to nutrition;

nutritious - nourishing.

What is the nutritive value of cornflakes? (Nutritive collocates with elements, value, content)
http://fraze.it/n_search.jsp?q=nutritive&l=0

Cornflakes is a more nutritious breakfast than strawberry pop-up tarts. (Nutritious collocates with the food items.)

Definitions from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nutritive :

1. of or relating to nutrition
2. nourishing

Definition (2) is the essentially the same as "nutritious", as far as I know, though "nutritive" sounds more technical or academic.

Definition (1) does not

This is a bit surprising (thought "nutritious" would be a lot more common, relatively):

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nutritive%2C+nutritious&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3

Perha

GPYThis is a bit surprising (thought "nutritious" would be a lot more common, relatively):

Yes, it's the frequency in Google books, which includes a lot of technical treatises.
If you check "fraze.it", (common use sources), there are 1328 examples for nutritious, and 64 for nutritive.
If you go to the American Corpus, (general use), there are 1291 exa