Image by Rakib Al Hasan from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The pagan witchdoctors are out in force —
This time an invisible spooky force called carbon dioxide is stealing away nutrients from food, at least that’s how the Washington Post propaganda team words it. It’s a “surging” culprit causing anemia in pregnant women which can lead to complications and “even death”. Stop the car! Is there no evil this molecule can not do?
This is pure climate-scare porn — carbon dioxide makes plants grow faster, and so it has this “awful” effect where crops bulk up more quickly, and without extra fertilizer, the mineral content and protein levels will be slightly diluted by the extra carbohydrate. And when I say slight, I mean barely measurably — in the last 37 years the levels of zinc in an undisclosed amount of chickpeas has fallen from 22% of our RDA to only 20%!
Let’s be clear: no one in the rich world eats chickpeas to get iron, protein and zinc, not if they can eat steak instead. All these nutrients are far higher in meat, and they are more absorbable too.
So this article is mostly at the concern-troll level. They pretend to care for the poor of Africa, but use their suffering to sell carbon reduction policies. It’s true the world’s poor rely on paltry rice and chickpeas for basic nutrition, but if we want to help them, the answer is to lift them out of poverty and give them a steak, not to change the global climate, cars, and electricity generation in order to get more zinc in their peas.
Weight for weight, beef contains three times the protein, four times the zinc, and twice the iron that chickpeas do. The minerals in beef are easier to absorb and also come with B12, B6, selenium, B3, B5, Vitamin A, E, and D.
At the very least, in the short term, it would be kind of us to help the poor get better fertilizer and richer soils. NPK fertilizer is essential (and that’s a challenge), but the soils are steadily depleted of iron, magnesium, boron, calcium, vanadium, iodine and twenty other trace minerals.
The invisible force making food less nutritious
By Naema Ahmed and Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post
Chickpeas and rice are not the only foods steadily growing less nutritious. 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. Experts fear the degradation of Earth’s food supply will cause an epidemic of hidden hunger, in which even people who consume enough calories won’t get the nutrients they need to thrive.
More spooky associations:
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.
Nutrient decline in the last 30 years could just as easily be soil depletion from constant cropping with no replacement of trace minerals. Can poor farmers get seaweed spray in Chad? Can they afford blood and bone fertilizer?
Ultimately, Myers said, the best way to protect human health is for people to stop releasing so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which not only depletes the nutritional value of crops but leads to escalating heat waves, intensifying floods and lengthening droughts that hurt food production around the globe.
How many windmills in Dubbo does it take to stop one case of anemia in Nigeria? Sadly, the answer is infinity-and-another-ARC-Grant.
The diet witchdoctors have done this all before back in 2014. Back then, the fear campaign was about rice losing some iron, and the answer I calculated to compensate for the tiny decline was for the world’s poor to eat one extra chickpea.
REFERENCES
Protein — 7.02g, Zinc — 0.72mg, Iron — 1.04mg
Protein — 21.6g, Zinc — 3.43mg, Iron — 2.29mg