14 DAY TRIAL // According to the findings of a recent investigation, it might be only a matter of time until certain foods that people happen to be big fans of cease to be as nutritious as they currently are.
What this means is that farmers will no longer have as much fun growing them as they currently do, and that the people on whose plates these foods will end up will have trouble finding them satisfying.
As detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature, certain grains and legumes might become less nutritious in the years to come, as a result of increased carbon dioxide pollution for which human society is to blame.
Thus, evidence indicates that, when exposed to elevated levels of said greenhouse gas, foods such as wheat, rice, field peas, and soybeans tend to lose their nutritional value.
Looking to pin down the potential impact of carbon dioxide emissions on said foods and, consequently, on global food security, researchers carried out a series of experiments, Science News informs.
What these experiments boiled down to was using a system called the Free Air Concentration Enrichment (FACE, for short) to expose certain plants to various environmental concentrations of carbon dioxide.
The specialists who carried out this investigation made sure that the plants they got to toy with all received the same amount of sunlight and water on a daily basis, were grown in the same soil, and were exposed to be same temperatures.
By ensuring that these growing conditions were the same for all the plants, the researchers were able to determine changes in nutritional value resulting from exposure to various concentrations of carbon dioxide alone.
These experiments showed that, when having too much carbon dioxide around, wheat, rice, field peas, and soybeans all contain less iron and zinc than they normally would. “Zinc and iron deficiency is a big global health problem already for at least 2 billion people,” specialist Andrew Leakey wishes to stress.
Besides, the outcome of this investigation indicates that, as levels of carbon dioxide pollution continue to increase in the years to come, wheat and rice are bound to experience a drop in their protein content.
To put things into perspective, it must be said that, for the time being, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are now revolving around about 400 parts per million. However, studies have shown that, under a business-as-usual-scenario, they could easily reach 550 parts per million by the year 2050.