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Nutrient deficiencies in rice grown under higher carbon dioxide
- aldoushuxley001 7y agoThis article is pretty bunk and politically/ideologically motivated.
- jacobolus 7y agoHere’s the study, http://doi.org/10.1029/2019GH000188 http://doi.org/10.1029/2019GH000188 which builds on https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaq1012 https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaq1012 What part did you think was “bunk”? It seems fairly predictable/uncontroversial that substantially changing the composition of the air plants are grown in would affect their growth. These studies are part of an effort to figure out precisely what changes result from expected current/near-future changes in the atmosphere and what potential impact those changes might have on the global food supply and health. It is important to know about these effects so that we can try to mitigate the harms involved, e.g. by switching to new crops or crop strains, adopting alternative agricultural methods, supplementing at-risk diets with other foods, etc., instead of just letting millions of people suffer dangerous nutrient deficiencies.
- nkurz 7y agoOn a quick read of the paper (thanks for the link) I was bothered that I found no mention of the fact that the per-acre yield also goes up with increased CO2. Each grain of rice (likely) has slightly less nutrients, but more grains of rice are produced in a given field. From other articles I found, it looks like the yield is expected to increase by about 13%. Omitting any mention of this feels like a political decision. It's also worth noting that the paper doesn't really try to prove that nutrition levels will drop, but instead concentrates on showing that if nutrition levels in rice drop that more people may experience deficiencies. In particular, it cites a paper that actually did the experiment, and found no decrease in nutrients other than Nitrogen: http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fcr.2004.01.004 http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fcr.2004.01.004. This experiment implies that it's at least possible to grow rice under high CO2 levels without experiencing the drop. I also thought the mitigation section was odd. It points out that only a few countries currently fortify rice with Vitamin B. It notes that fortification is inexpensive and effective, although it would require a major effort to begin doing so in other countries. The paper also shows that nutrient deficiency is already a large problem, and that increase caused by a decrease in foliate levels in rice would only be 1.5%. Maybe a better conclusion would be that these countries should really be fortifying their rice? I didn't think it was a bad paper, and it wasn't "bunk". I agree that knowing what sort of changes to expect from an increased CO2 level is a good thing. But it did seem like it might be pushing an agenda more than just trying to lay out the scientific conclusions.
- chrisco255 7y agoIt's especially weird since crop yields are up like 30-40% since 1988. Not that rice is especially nutritious in the first place. It's basically a bunch of carbs with miniscule levels of vitamins.
- sedachv 7y agoYou need read up on agriculture basics before posting junk comments. > From other articles I found, it looks like the yield is expected to increase by about 13%. Omitting any mention of this feels like a political decision. That is because CO2 enrichment as a way to increase yields is decades old common knowledge and a widespread practice in greenhouses. Just because you did not know that, does not mean there is a conspiracy here. > It's also worth noting that the paper doesn't really try to prove that nutrition levels will drop Because nutrient density decrease is something that has already happened: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511 https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrie...
- esyir 7y agoThe issue here is the notoriously shit science media with no room for nuance. This one goes in along with "SCIENTISTS CURE CANCER" in which you get potentially interesting findings that get blown horribly out of proportion by whatever rag that decides to post it, often with a political spin to boot.
- kaitai 7y agoWhile... blunt... your comment is exactly right. I don't mention the definition of degree of polynomial when I write an algebraic geometry paper. The knowledge that CO2 increases yields is universal among scientists reading this paper.
- nkurz 7y agoPerhaps obviously, I disagree. It's not that every paper has to mention everything that's obvious, but my point was that the choice of how to frame the problem can be a political decision. There was no attempt to explain why micronutrient per serving of rice was the right metric, and I think using it can be misleading if the amount of rice grown changes for the same reason that the nutrients are dropping. And while "everyone knows" that yields will increase, there is disagreement on whether the increase in yield is dependent or independent of the change in nutritional value. By the way, I liked your comment elsewhere in this thread about eating plain rice. But rather than lamenting that all the references are behind paywalls, I personally think it's better just to give the DOI's and a link to http://sci-hub.tw http://sci-hub.tw. Or even better yet, just link to the papers, profits of publishers be damned. The world is better off when more people read the actual science.
- aaron695 7y agoOP did say article not study. The bunk bit is micronutrient deficiency is only amongst the real poor, less than $2 per day. Not the rich (US/Europe) or middle class or US/European poor. And it's happening TODAY, they way forward to the problem, which ALREADY exists is to fix it by getting a variety of foods to the real poor. Rice alone is always not enough, this is a today issue. A - Stop pushing today's issues until 2050 to push CO2 agendas. B - The real poor need cheap energy today, they die without it. It's not just a discussion point by the ultra rich on a Bulletin Board. C - Other plants with the required micronutrients will become cheaper/increased yields with the increased CO2. So stop making up possible issues when it's a today issues.
- youareostriches 7y ago>B - The real poor need cheap energy today, they die without it. It's not just a discussion point by the ultra rich on a Bulletin Board. Fossil fuels need to stop being used altogether, and as quickly as possible. This means that it’s up to the wealthy nations who currently use the most CO2 per capita (https://www-cdn.oxfam.org/s3fs-public/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf https://www-cdn.oxfam.org/s3fs-public/file_attachments/mb-ex...) to drastically reduce their share. And guess what happens if the price of fossil fuels doesn’t match the ecological impact and their use is not drastically scaled down? It’s precisely the poorest of the world who will suffer the greatest consequences of global warming.
- chrisco255 7y agoMate, you want to see the poor suffer...then immediately ban all use of fossil fuels. THAT will cause suffering of levels unseen in modern times.
- youareostriches 7y agoIt’s not that simple. You don’t get to keep your wasteful jet-setting, SUV-driving, car-culture-oriented consumer lifestyle on the basis that any wholesale transition would harm poorer people—-on the contrary, it is the obligation of wealthy countries to radically curtail their own use of fossil fuels in order to allow poorer countries to continue basic necessities such as heating and nitrogen-fixed fertilizers from natural gas. The wealthy countries have the economic means to rapidly transition their economies away from fossil fuels. This technology must then be exported to poorer countries on a free or subsidized basis.
- esyir 7y agoMy god, that paper is absolutely terrible. The science one, while not without issues, is much much better. The title also sucks less.
- ggm 7y ago<citation required>
- vichu 7y agoThis is why I'm a proponent of genetically modified organisms in agriculture. The world needs to be fed and needs to be fed properly, and it is pure privilege to deny use of tools in our toolbox that abet solutions to global hunger. I won't deny the issues around the corporatization of farmland, vendor/seed lock-in and IP issues, and the litany of other issues around its use - but damn is it a viable solution for vitamin deficiency and a way forward through changing environments.
- manicdee 7y ago“Full speed ahead and damn the licensing issues!”
- epistasis 7y agoSide note to your main point: the IP issues around GMOs are little different than the IP issues around other types of agritech, so I don't think it's a huge concern. Governments and non profits are free to make GMOs that are available to all without IP issues, too, as has been done with golden rice.
- sambull 7y agogolden rice isn't free if you want to make money off of it (more than $10k it seems). And none has ever been grown for consumption it seems.
- saalweachter 7y agoOn the plus side of golden rice taking so long to amount to anything, any patents from back in 2000 when the non-commercial licensing thing dates from have almost certainly expired; it should be unencumbered by now.
- gnu8 7y agoI'm exasperated by the holdup on golden rice. I'd buy a sack of it and put it in the ground myself if it were on the market.
- 7y ago
- el_don_almighty 7y agoShould be an easy fix, easily accomplished well before 2050
- crygin 7y agoSimply purchase your single-generation seed from Monsanto at exploitative prices, and you can continue to subsist without major nutritional deficiencies.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoWell, you could just never release it, making it basically illiquid. Venezuela and Zimbabwe of recent come to mind...
- phkahler 7y agoMaybe it's because the plants grow faster with the same fertilizer, and there's not much of value in the soil any more.
- 08-15 7y agoOr the plants grow faster and contain exactly the same "nutrients" "diluted" in more starch. (The scare quotes are there because large parts of the world need those so-called empty calories even more than the vitamins.) The article talks about concentrations, not total amounts, after all.
- abootstrapper 7y agoPast time for a tax on carbon.
- oneepic 7y agoRisk of what? Just say it in the headline.
- jacobra2 7y agoThis is the same study that the publishing scientist quit the USDA in protest over. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/05/ziska-usda-climate-agriculture-trump-1445271 https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/05/ziska-usda-climate...
- ptah 7y agothat is outrageous. it looks like the trump administration's paranoia about politics in science is taking a toll
- ShlomoS 7y agoWhy is it outrageous? He was limited to talking about his research in his official capacity, and he wanted to talk about a bunch of stuff completely outside of his research. Just because you do research on the effects of CO2 on rice nutrient content, doesn't mean you can use your government position to talk about predicting future weather, drought conditions, heat, etc.
- sambull 7y agoWe have to accept we at this point are unable to address reality. There is a side not acting in good faith, and it is at a time where pressure will rapidly ramp up from that very reality, what will be blamed will be witchcraft, the others and everything else. But addressing reality would destroy their identity.
- jcampbell1 7y agoThe paper feels full of lies by omission to leave out the caloric yield increase and only discuss the vitamin density side. This is likely a case where vitamin production per acre are unchanged in a elevated CO2 enviroment, and calories per acre increase by 20%.
- cwingrav 7y agoThat's the point of much of this research. The elevated levels of CO2 enable the plants to grow faster, but absorbing the same nutrition, and then we absorb the same amount of calories, with a lower nutrition level, so we become malnourished.
- radford-neal 7y agoThe increased yield should lower the price. Poor people might then have enough surplus income to buy more nutritious foods. (And perhaps less rice - which may be what's called a "Giffen good".)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- peterwwillis 7y agoNot necessarily. For one, increased yield doesn't always result in lower prices, because the free market generally isn't that free (most of our agriculture is heavily subsidized by the government). Another problem is that access to nutritious food is extremely limited for poor people, for a variety of reasons. Overhead and supply chain economics influence whether local businesses can survive. Marketing/advertising and industry pressure on politics increases the likelihood that cheap, non-nutritious, shelf-stable foods will be more prevalent in stores. And then there's the general self-medicating-through-salt-sugar-and-fat cyclical effect, and overall lack of education on healthy eating and cooking. Even when you can find it and afford it, poor people have less free time to cook. Rice is a food that is shelf-stable, cheap, and (when enriched) provides a bare minimum of nutrition. Reducing the already-bare-minimum nutritional level, or increasing the heavy metals already found in many varieties, will have a significant effect on already vulnerable populations.
- lazyjones 7y agoWell, today it was easy to spot the daily anti-car and climate panic articles. This is not why I read HN...
- b_tterc_p 7y agoAt what point does the rice just die from too much heat?
- sedachv 7y agoEnzymes involved in photosynthesis break down with heat starting at around 20 degrees Celsius, and by 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) break down almost completely. Plants can use their stores of carbohydrates when photosynthesis is not possible. Given a long enough heat wave, plants will use up their stores of sugar and die, even if they have enough water available. Even if they do not die outright, the yield of crops will be reduced to a fraction of what it should be (autophagy when they should be growing). Rice is very water intensive, and droughts are likely going to be a much bigger problem for rice crops before prolonged heat waves become normal. https://sciencing.com/effect-temperature-rate-photosynthesis-19595.html https://sciencing.com/effect-temperature-rate-photosynthesis...
- silveroriole 7y agoHow can that be right? 20c is on the low end of room temperature. So a plant is actually bad at photosynthesising when it’s warm and there’s the most sunlight? Why? Wouldn’t this mean greenhouses are BAD for plants?
- krageon 7y agohttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC396144/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC396144/ Is the closest thing to a real source I could find at short notice. I found this surprising as well, I guess it merits some more casual research!
- adrianN 7y agoPlants evaporate a lot of water, so their leaves are likely a bit cooler than ambient temperatures.
- dTal 7y agoYeah, I don't believe this at all. In Florida for instance the daily high never really goes below 20C all year, and the name literally means "flowery". 40C I might believe, but 20? No way.
- sedachv 7y agoI previously made the observation that global warming induced nutrient density loss correlates with the mammal obesity trend: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18949373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18949373 Everyone here commenting about the great news about how yields have increased is totally wrong. Droughts, prolonged heat waves, and flooding will wipe out whatever small percentage in yields from higher atmospheric CO2 have/will result. Not to mention the health effects: people that are paradoxically at the same time obese and malnourished.
- hyperpallium 7y agoOne solution is slow-growing plants - domesticated plants are bred for yield.
- nosianu 7y ago> people that are paradoxically at the same time obese and malnourished I don't see the paradox? "Energy" and "nutrients" both are in food but they are not the same (okay, unless somebody wants to start arguing about word definitions in which case I refer them here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-definitions https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-... -- you guys know exactly what I mean). If your body wants (certain) nutrients but they are always accompanied by way too much energy that ends up being stored as fat than you end up hungry as well as fat. No paradox. Also using "energy" and "nutrients" like I just did: https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fs176 https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fs176 Many discussions about obesity are accompanied by comments "they just need to eat less because calories in > calories out - it's just physics" ignore that energy is just one of many aspects of why we eat.
- raverbashing 7y agoAn important thread that is related: https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1018674273496518656 https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/101867427349651865... Context starts here: https://twitter.com/davidorlo/status/1018616684603691013 https://twitter.com/davidorlo/status/1018616684603691013 (it's what the 1st tweet links to)
- 0-_-0 7y agoThank you, that first link explained it really well! Also, I just found out you get about 8-9x the nutrients from cooked veg vs raw.
- graeme 7y agoThis has been downvoted, but it appears to be highly relevant. It is a tweet thread from a crop scientist (scroll down, there are many tweets, not just the one linked). The gist is that in the co2 studies, fertilizer etc to plants are not increased. Analogous to keeping human food constant even if a body is growing faster. She says this makes sense for the experiments: it lets us isolate effects of components on plants. But in real life farmers add more fertilizer if plants grow faster. This appears to directly address the linked study and warrants consideration and a reply.
- kaitai 7y agoYeah, I think it's an interesting read although I disagree with some of her remarks. She's right that in the past we just threw fertilizer at plants (more is better until you burn the ground), and she's right that increasingly US farmers for instance are practicing targeted fertilization and maybe can make up for some of this. She doesn't seem to be taking into account the situations in the poorest parts of the world, where this is not being done -- and where rice is a far more important staple than in the US. She says, "Folks who are getting all their nutrients from plants generally eat at least some concentrated forms of plants, especially concentrated plant proteins: tempeh, seitan, nut milks & butters, etc." Um, I was literally talking on Thursday with a woman who was describing her childhood and the comfort she takes in a big warm bowl of rice, which was a majority of her meals growing up because she could cook it in the rice cooker without her parents' help while they were at work. My spouse also grew up eating big bowls of plain rice, although he did get to put soy sauce/ketchup/sriracha on top. They sure as (&^ were not eating seitan and tempeh on top. I can walk down to the Whole Foods 10 blocks away and buy some, uh, spirulina and salmon and whatever the cool kids are eating these days... chia? or is that passe? but that's not the situation for subsistence farmers or the vast swathes of people in cities living on the above-referenced bowls of imported rice. And these vast swathes of people often don't have great healthcare access, either, and so are more vulnerable to some of the cascading problems that result. Last, I don't know how much she knows about nutrition. I'm glad she pays attention to iron content in the tweet series... but that's not the sum of micronutrients. The roles of vitamin D, chromium, biotin, and thiamine in development of type 2 diabetes are discussed here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3313629/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3313629/ Micronutrient deficiency and obesity has been in the nutrition literature since at least 2009 at this point. I could link you to 10 more peer-reviewed articles but they're all behind a paywall :( Here at least is an editorial from 2010 with some review of articles recent at the time, and in particular some remarks about micronutrients and "clinically relevant weight loss" in Asians and perhaps others. Anyhow, thanks for defending the tweet thread :) It was interesting!
- gholap 7y ago"Is Our Food Becoming Less Nutritious?: Veritasium"[1] is a good short video that puts this into context. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl_K2Ata6XY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl_K2Ata6XY