There’s a good chance that as time goes on, the fruits and vegetables you eat daily to help keep you healthy won’t be doing as good a job. A recent study suggested that greenhouse gases will actually take away some of the nutritional value of produce as more and more of the gases are present in the environment.
Here’s how it works. As people keep using fossil fuels in everything from the way they heat and cool their house to the cars they drive, more and more carbon dioxide enters the air. As more carbon dioxide is released, the food becomes will decrease in nutritional value, according to researcher Max Taub from Southwestern University in Texas. He along with about 200 other researcher are looking at the decrease in food values due to carbon dioxide.
Right now the study is concentrating on key crops like barely, wheat, potatoes, rice and soybeans. These are crops that are grown worldwide and the lessening health benefits could have the greatest impact on poor countries that use their crops as a mainstay to their daily diets. The study is mostly looking at the protein levels in these food sources.
In a soon to be release article in Global Change Biology, Taub and his associates found the following:
• Potatoes decrease in proteins value by almost 14% when exposed to higher carbon dioxide levels.
• In barley, the protein decrease by more than 15%
• In both wheat and rice crops, the decrease was right around 10%
• The lowest most insignificant decrease was in soybean crops. The decrease in protein was only about 1.4%
“This is just one more example of the impact global changes could have on us,” Taub said.
As carbon dioxide rises, plants will take in more and more into their tissues. That excess amount then starts destroying other key nutritional elements like nitrogen.
