This week’s question is Do You Have Enough Nutrients?
This is an odd question until you look at the data.
Multiple environmental crises are reducing food nutrients
Increases in CO2 are changing plant biology to reduce nutrient levels in plants. This reduction is ongoing and substantial. The nutrients of most concern/notice so far seem to be proteins, iron, zinc, and calcium, but the degree of chemistry change occuring will likely have effects on many of the nutrients we get from plants. This is because chemical reactions can be impacted by the relative amounts of available reactants, and we are still increasing the amounts of available CO2.
Plastics, at micro and nano scales, are everywhere, and we are eating them and drinking them every day. Plastics leech chemicals into our bodies (such as PFAS, dioxins, PAHs, and endocrine disruptors) that are harmful in a wide variety of ways. Plastic particles also do physical damage in our bodies by cutting and tearing. Not surprisingly, plastics also directly change plants by causing RNA transcription reprogramming and protein production changes. These changes reduce plant nutrients.
Supplements only go so far
In The Martian, Mark Watney survives on potatoes and supplements, but few of us have access to NASA-produced quality goods. Supplements in the U.S. are unregulated. Even if they actually have in them what they purport to contain, it’s often in quantities greater than what you need or can metabolize, and it’s sometimes in a form that you can’t metabolize at all. One doctor memorably told me they’re an expensive way to produce colored urine.
Standard medical advice is that you can get all the nutrition that you need in most cases from a healthy diet. But this assumes that nutrition is a fixed quantity in food, and that is no longer the case.
What’s being done so far
There are manufacturers and scientists experimenting with crop biofortification and genetic engineering; other groups are working on cataloging and supporting expanded genetic diversity of food plants. Generally, neither type of activity is something an individual can undertake. These efforts require a lot of resources and time to accomplish, and they only apply to a limited number of plants species.
On an individual level, there are some demonstratable positive impacts of an organic (i.e. pesticide-free) diet. Access to such a diet is very much a function of where you live and how much money or time you have.
And those are the only things being done about this problem that I know of.
So what do we do?