  It is conjectured that flavor mixing furnishes a universal mechanism for the
spontaneous breaking of supersymmetry. The conjecture is proved explicitly for
the mixing of two Wess--Zumino $\mathcal{N}=1$ supermultiplets and arguments
for its general validity are given. The mechanism relies on the fact that,
despite mixing treats fermions and bosons symmetrically, both the fermionic and
the bosonic zero point energies are shifted by a positive amount and this kind
of shift does not respect supersymmetry.
