
The great nutrient collapse - bitwave
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511
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Dowwie
This _is_ a good article:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15253127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15253127)

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barrkel
Well, I missed this, and now that it's marked dupe, I'm sure even more people
will miss it.

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maxerickson
There will undoubtedly be more opportunities.

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crazygringo
This is a fascinating article in terms of the effect of CO2 on plants... but I
have a tremendously hard time believing it's affected diets in the first
world.

The level of carbs and nutrients in your diet would seem to determined by your
dietary choices by an overwhelmingly larger degree. Are you eating french
fries or kale?

Does it really matter if my zucchini is slightly less nutritious when I could
just eat broccoli rabe instead? Or that my green beans have a trace of carbs
when I'm eating a potato on the side? In supermarkets today we've never had
greater choice or variety, especially in winter, at least if you're willing to
pay for it -- but even in terms of paying for it, food today is the cheapest
it's ever been.

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rfugger
I'd be interested in knowing how much the decrease in food nutrients can be
offset by taking supplements.

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korethr
Per the article, increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere are causing plants to
produce more sugars in favor of the (micro)nutrients they'd otherwise have,
causing a relative drop in those nutrients. Okay. That makes sense. However,
plants being living organisms, they can be rather complex things, and the
change in CO2 concentration is not the only changed input to our food supply.
There's has been selective breeding and other bio-engineering to select for
traits like hardiness to pests, crop yield, appearance, etcetera. There's been
changes to how crops are fertilized and harvested. I don't think it's
unreasonable to think that any one of these could have interacted with the CO2
concentrations or any other factor to play with nutrient levels, or could be
completely overshadowing CO2's effects.

I think this research is a good first step. What I think would be good to
study next is to try to find how the CO2 levels can interact with other
factors like the ones I listed above, as well as other ones agriculture
researchers likely know about that I don't. Perhaps nothing will come of it.
Perhaps something cool would come of it. Wouldn't it be awesome if researchers
discovered a way to bioengineer food plants, such that by pulling extra CO2
out of the atmosphere, they grow in an extra-nutritious manner?

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netsharc
The article mentions goldenrod, a wildflower that humans don't cultivate. The
effects are also apparent in them.

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asimpletune
To the all people who are dismissing the important of the issues being
presented in this article, I'd like to invite you to reconsider. I'm reading
two main critiques here:

First, that breeding is more important than CO2. That's easy to address as it
was discussed in the article. Researchers compared a weed that has had no
human cultivation and also compared the genetics of samples from the 1850s,
only to find that their protein concentration has declined by 33% since the
industrial revolution. Additionally, the main scientist in the article
published a meta study that had enough data to account for noise and it
isolated CO2 as having an impact on our nutritional density.

Second, another prominent critique I'm reading here is that the conclusions
are not important because other factors have so much more importance. I think
this criticism is misguided and it's treating the problem as if this were big
O or something. Like, "sure, this may be happening but then people could just
eat spinach instead of broccoli, problem solved." There's so much that's wrong
with this I don't even know where to start, actually.

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lostmsu
TL;DR; increased amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reduces amount of nutrients
in most plants.

"... calcium, potassium, zinc and iron ... drop by 8 percent ..."

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
This article seems like much Ado about nothing. My guess is that human
selective breeding of plants has far more impact than the effect the article
discusses.

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barrkel
How would selective breeding affect the relative concentration / dilution of
nutrients due to increased CO2?

It seems to be that the CO2 issue directly affects the inputs, making one
input far more abundant than it used to be. To the degree that plants were
constrained by CO2 as input, it logically leads to dilution of nutrients -
unless you specifically bred plants that grew slower and produced lower
yields, which seems unlikely.

(The actual mechanism, around plant's self-regulating water management
affecting how much it retains vs needs to take in via the ground, is unlikely
to be bred for one way or another.)

