How climate change could make our food less nutritious | Kristie Ebi

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Rising carbon levels in the atmosphere can make plants grow faster, but there's another hidden consequence: they rob plants of the nutrients and vitamins we need to survive. In a talk about global food security, epidemiologist Kristie Ebi explores the potentially massive health consequences of this growing nutrition crisis — and explores the steps we can take to ensure all people have access to safe, healthy food.

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55 Comments on How climate change could make our food less nutritious | Kristie Ebi

    • @someone The treatment of GM technologies in general is extremely unfair, but to the best of my knowledge the assimilation rate for vitamin A precursors engineered to be produced in the golden rice was lower than anticipated in nutritional trials anyway.

      A similar story is the one where wheat was engineered to include aphid-repelling allomones, it worked at a small scale in the laboratory but didn’t at field-scale because the aphids ignore it when it is abundant.

      On the bright side, there was that research group that made a GM Arabidopsis that turns purple when it grows on top of a landmine, so there’s some potential use for clearing up war zones with that.

    • @someone IDK about starving, but it’d prevent the health problems from vitamin A deficiency. I think night blindness is one of the problems.

  1. Hate to break it to this presenter , our food has become less nutritious due to over cultivation and gmo crops .

    Ted talks unfortunately has lost some objectivity .

    What a shame .

  2. I think a study should be done to see if food has different amounts of nutrients with seeds from the same plant and in a greenhouse where they can control the levels of CO2.

    • @Dan Cattell Art It dosent, why do you think the color of the product changes over time as its exposed to oxygen. In the grocery store you can even noticeably differentiate the two by the marks on the organic product. If they had wax or pesticides they wouldn’t show any signs of spoil. You can even test it yourself in all honeslty. Buy an organic apple and a non organic apple then see which one spoils first.

    • @Dan Cattell Art Farmers care about shelf life and how much money they make from sales instead of the safety and health of their consumers

    • Giovanni Ferraro it’s been proven time and time again that organic produce are covered in feces are WAY less healthy and nutritious. Not only that, people will choose the commercially grown produce over organic 9/10. In fact there is an entire episode of Penn & Teller “Bullshit” where the entire Organic Produce racket is exposed. NOBODY chose the organic produce in a blind taste and visual test. Not one person picked the organic. Organic equals E.Coli to the educated. You fn dolt.

  3. She doesn’t look healthy. Maybe some garden fresh ORGANIC food would help. Oh wait, home gardens and self reliance is increasingly ILLEGAL! AGENDA 21 SMART CITIES and DEPOPULATION is the plan! Total dependence on the government. Madatory vaccines and soylent green chips if you are good and keep your social credit score up. Free thinking will not be tolerated in the track, trace, and surveillance future.

  4. Watermelon…..Green on the outside and red on the inside. AGENDA 21. Georgia Guidestones- keep population to under 500 million.

  5. Starts with Food Pyramid = immediate thumbs down. The Food Pyramid is the product of the USDA, whose purpose is to promote the consumption of American agriculture. Guess what America grows really well? Corn & wheat! So they are promoted as the basis for a “balanced” diet; to drive demand in the American cash crops. It never had anything whatsoever to do with healthy eating.

    • That’s happening slowly over time in several countries in Asia. The only real problems from air pollution are places like Beijing, China and New Delhi, India with high levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution. These fine particles pose a threat to human health because they are small enough to enter the body by penetrating the lungs.

  6. Haha where do you find these idiots? 🙂 Make up a problem then “find” the solution. The way people have been controlled by their rulers since beginning of time.
    Lower nutrition has to do with GMO and farming methods where the soil is destroyed. Always what happens when humans try to “fix” nature.
    It just grows more with more CO2. Noone can do antyhing amout climate change. It has been chaning since the birth of the earth. What we can do though is to remove industrial farming and give it back to the people locally. More natural meat and veggies. No GMO:s or “beyond” meat and all that crap that no humans or animals ever evolved on.

  7. these comments are hilarious – gmo`s are bad, organic is the solution to everything, climate change is a fraud…jfc, this is a science channel!

  8. Putin’s alt-right trolls have been working overtime targeting science channels lately. It’s a waste of time. Anyone capable of understanding what is being said won’t be put off by the comments of low-life knuckle-draggers.

  9. I have not watched this video but let me just say from the title (because I have to go to work): Food is already less nutritious than in years past!! Why? Because we don’t let the land rest and let the soil re-gather nutrients once it’s been sucked out by previous crops. This use to be common practice and for good reason.

    There’s a lot of reasons our food is already massively low on Nutrients and not one of them have to do with climate change but rather common negligence in order to turn more profit. Now its convenient to bring up the lack of nutrients and use it as a spin for climate change.

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