Carbon Pollution Is Making Food Less Nutritious, Risking the Health of Billions (detroitnews.com) 36
A new meta-analysis found nutrients in food decreased over the last 40 years, reports the Washington Post. "Many of humanity's most important crops — including wheat, potatoes, beans — contain fewer vitamins and minerals than they did a generation ago."
"The invisible culprit behind this damaging phenomenon? Carbon dioxide pollution." Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, have produced potent changes in the way plants grow — from increasing their sugar content to depleting essential nutrients like zinc... "The diets we eat today have less nutritional density than what our grandparents ate, even if we eat exactly the same thing," said Kristie Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington's Center for Health and the Global Environment.
People in wealthy countries with strong health care systems will have many tools to cope with the change, experts said. But for the world's poorest and most vulnerable, the consequences could be devastating. One study concluded that by the middle of the century the phenomenon could put more than a billion additional women and children at risk of iron-deficiency anemia — a condition that can cause pregnancy complications, developmental problems and even death. Meanwhile, some 2 billion people across the globe who already suffer from some form of nutrient shortage could see their health problems grow even worse. "The scale of the problem is huge," Ebi said.
Plants depend on carbon dioxide to perform photosynthesis — but that doesn't mean they grow better when there's more carbon in the air, scientists say. A sweeping survey of changes among 32 compounds in 43 crops found that nearly every plant that humans eat is harmed by rising CO2 levels... On average, they found, nutrients have already decreased by an average 3.2 percent across all plants since the late 1980s, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader GameboyRMH for sharing the news.
"The invisible culprit behind this damaging phenomenon? Carbon dioxide pollution." Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, have produced potent changes in the way plants grow — from increasing their sugar content to depleting essential nutrients like zinc... "The diets we eat today have less nutritional density than what our grandparents ate, even if we eat exactly the same thing," said Kristie Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington's Center for Health and the Global Environment.
People in wealthy countries with strong health care systems will have many tools to cope with the change, experts said. But for the world's poorest and most vulnerable, the consequences could be devastating. One study concluded that by the middle of the century the phenomenon could put more than a billion additional women and children at risk of iron-deficiency anemia — a condition that can cause pregnancy complications, developmental problems and even death. Meanwhile, some 2 billion people across the globe who already suffer from some form of nutrient shortage could see their health problems grow even worse. "The scale of the problem is huge," Ebi said.
Plants depend on carbon dioxide to perform photosynthesis — but that doesn't mean they grow better when there's more carbon in the air, scientists say. A sweeping survey of changes among 32 compounds in 43 crops found that nearly every plant that humans eat is harmed by rising CO2 levels... On average, they found, nutrients have already decreased by an average 3.2 percent across all plants since the late 1980s, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader GameboyRMH for sharing the news.
This is why (Score:2, Funny)
Re: This is why (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: This is why (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Preparation techiques are the key
Now it's twice less Nutritious (DUPE). (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
This is a double-dupe, I remember this article from back in December.
https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
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Re: Actually, Bayer(Monsanto) is to blame (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There are nutrients and nutrients. Clover definitely captures nitrogen and puts that into the soil. However, for example, zinc, which likely comes from the rocks which form the soil will not be replaced.
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Indeed I call bullshit on TFA
which you didn't read.
Re: (Score:2)
Unless the headline and quote massively mislead about the article, which becomes a “this site isn’t reliable” problem, there’s no need to-it’s *obviously* bullshit.
Plants require CO2 to perform photosynthesis, but higher or lower CO2 in the ranges over the last 10000 years have no meaningful way to change “the nutrients” in plants grown for food: that all comes from the soil.
Might someone say that changed weather patterns have altered soil composition because X, the
The 250 year race to harvest faster (Score:2)
The plants are less nutritious because farmers, governments. and corporation have spent the last 250 years finding ways to speed up pant growth , reduce time to harvest, reduce the effects of pests, and reduce the number of varieties of food grown.
Check the organic versus not organic spinach leaf thickness (or lettuce) at the store next time you shop.
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There are several threads leading to the same result, and they aren't separate, the reinforce.
It's not monoculture per se that reduces crop nutritional value, it's the varieties chosen. And grocery stores like merchandise to have a long shelf life, so they prefer to purchase varieties that have such..and such varieties tend to be less nutritious.
Also, people object to many strong tastes. So varieties with strong tastes (except sugar) tend to be replaced by varieties without that taste. Unfortunately, som
Nope. (Score:4, Informative)
It's not a recent finding:
The CO2 enrichment usually produced a decrease in nutrient concentrations, which was already detectable at the booting stage and was further enhanced until plant maturity. - A paper from over 30 years ago [sciencedirect.com].
What about changes due to modern farming practices (Score:2)
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Did they adjust for the way crops are being grown now? Intense fertilizer usage - much of which is produced from oil, and is likely to have far fewer of the micro nutrients.
What’s worse is picking the crops far far before their time and using extended shipping and storage times to ripen them and even gasses to quickly ripen them if needed. It makes things not only taste bad, but they are significantly lower in nutrients.
"Risking health of billions" an overstatement (Score:4, Insightful)
The fine headline is leaping to quite a conclusion.
I was able to try reading the actual paper this time. It's a bit dense for me but whatever. It's a meta-analysis. The authors didn't actually grow any plants but consolidated results from many other papers. So far, so good. This is a normal research process.
From the quoted summary, it finds a 3.2% decrease in minerals in major crop plants. That seems a small effect to me, likely overwhelmed by other factors. For example, if you were living on 1500 calories a day 30 years ago and now get 2000, I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're likely to be healthier even if each individual bean is less nutritious.
There's also a lot of other things going on. I couldn't follow their methodology well enough but I wonder about confounding factors. For example, were they comparing the same strains of crops? Seed companies come out with new varieties all the time and it wouldn't surprise me if that has a much larger effect on nutrition than CO2.
In summary: interesting research. I'll take their word they found a real effect. I'm not at all alarmed because I expect there are much larger changes at play.
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Yeah, right (Score:1)
Plants evolved to grow in an atmosphere with around 6,000 ppm of CO2, or close to twenty times what we have today. They have been literally starving for tens of millions of years and complex plant life dies when CO2 gets below about 150ppm. Greenhouses pump CO2 in to increase growth the same way we give sick people oxygen.
Plants didn't evolve to be eaten, so I guess it's possible that somehow plants become more nutritious when starved, but it seems unlikely. Particularly when we've trashed thousands of year
Re: Yeah, right (Score:1)
Wait, I'm confused, I thought CO2 was bad (a so-called 'Greenhouse Gas'), are you really saying we need MORE CO2 for plants?
Please expand on your answer, thank you.
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Yes. Life came close to dying out entirely in the last Ice Age because CO2 dropped to around 180ppm and plant life started dying off.
If we return to preindustraial CO2 levels then we get maybe two more Ice Ages before all life dies out from lack of CO2.
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Do you know what didn't evolve to thrive with 20x the CO2?
It's humans.
I'll vote to keep the climate tolerable for humans. Plants seem to be doing ok. And as you've just mentioned, they've had tens of millions of years to evolve and adapt to the current environment.
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The CO2 concentration hasn't been above 1k ppm for 200 million years, dear.
No plants that evolved to grow in a 6k ppm environment survive.
Try again.
Maybe we could first focus on... (Score:2)
Maybe we could first focus on getting everyone access to clean, safe, drinking water?
Just a thought.
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Confounding Factors in Play (Score:2)
I’ve only just skimmed the paper, but I think the authors are missing a HUGE confounding variable: the plants of today are not the same plants of yesterday. Commercial food operations have selectively bred crops for traits like colors that consumers prefer, the ability to survive mechanical harvesting and long-distance shipping, drought, disease and insect resistance, reduced time from planting to harvest, and profitability. Neither nutritional value nor flavor is prized.
If you need to see this in act
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You've also got to compare not only the specific strains of plants being grown, but also how they're being grown. Very different farming practices today than even 40 years ago, but 100 years ago they had even odder ones. It wasn't uncommon to burn petroleum fuel in early tractors and have the exhaust go into the soil, under the understanding that it would add carbon back into the ground. And they still have a lot of the same ag practices and strains as the 1800s, then, too.
Thank heavens (Score:2)
Thank heavens, it's global warming and carbon increases of less than 0.02% causing a decrease in other, largely unrelated nutrient levels in foods, because it makes plants grow faster.
I thought for sure it was due to the aggressive industrial farming practices employed globally, including:
* literally "salting the earth" (many pesticides and herbicides are salt based) and making once productive regions inhospitable to growth
* excessive use of pesticides/herbicides which deplete soil microbiome
* soil leeching
You sure? (Score:1)
Monocultural big ag DGAF (Score:2)