The Most Important Question #57: Make Food Great (Nutritious) Again
In Episode 57, Quinn & Brian discuss: Why more food ≠ more nutrition. Our excellent guests are Professors Kristie Ebi and Irakli Loladze.
Dr. Ebi is the Rohm & Haas Endowed Professorship in Public Health Sciences at the University of Washington, where she has been conducting research and practice on the health risks of climate variability and change for over twenty years. She focuses on understanding sources of vulnerability, estimating current and future health risks of climate change, and designing adaptation policies and measures to reduce the risks of climate change in multi-stressor environments.
Dr. Loladze is a professor of health sciences at the Bryan Medical Center at Bryan College, where he applies mathematical, computational, and statistical methods to life sciences – which is to say, he’s a math biologist.
Dr. Ebi recently testified in front of Congress – specifically, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology – in the first of a series of hearings on climate science and why it matters (a series of conversations we’re pretty surprised and excited are actually happening at all, if you need any more evidence that your vote matters). She was speaking about the health implications, which Dr. Loladze has also spent much of his life studying. In fact, he linked rising CO2 levels to the quality of human nutrition and obesity, revealing that some of the advancements that allow us to grow more food also reduce the nutritional quality of those foods.
But you want to know what’s really screwed up about the whole situation? These two don’t have any funding for this potentially world-saving research.
Trump’s Book Club: Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance by Dennis Overbye: https://www.amazon.com/registry/wishlist/3R5XF4WMZE0TV/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_ep_ws_2Gr8Ab6RS5WF3
Links:
Irakli Loladze on Twitter: https://twitter.com/loladze
Kristie Ebi on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kristie_ebi
“The great nutrient collapse”: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511
“Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels this century will alter the protein, micronutrients, and vitamin content of rice grains with potential health consequences for the poorest rice-dependent countries”: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5966189/
“Hidden shift of the ionome of plants exposed to elevated CO2 depletes minerals at the base of human nutrition”: https://lens.elifesciences.org/02245/
“Plague of plenty”: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17623715-200-plague-of-plenty/
“Net Farm Income Projected to Drop to 12-Year Low”: https://www.fb.org/market-intel/net-farm-income-projected-to-drop-to-12-year-low
“Why Is the Cold Weather So Extreme if the Earth Is Warming?”: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/climate/winter-cold-weather.html
The Tantrum That Saved the World: Carbon Neutral Kids' Book: http://michaelmann.net/content/tantrum-saved-world-carbon-neutral-kids-book
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