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Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

I think it's great that we have people researching this. However, what worries me are not the results but how we are going to deal with them. As a species we have to cope with the fact that the climate is changing, we won't reverse that so easily. This is a fact. I'd rather talk about how to overcome the obstacles exposed by this study not only the mere fact that our food is changing "for the worse". Finally, I believe for many parts of the world I suppose it isn't as bad as portrait to have a higher carbohydrate share in their meals.

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>Finally, I believe for many parts of the world I suppose it isn't as bad as portrait to have a higher carbohydrate share in their meals.

Actually this is a big problem eg in South Africa, which has very high obesity rates. For most poor people a meal is refined maize porridge, often with a coco-cola, or bread and a coke. It’s imperative that people get access to cheap, quality protein, it could be something like lentils, beans ...

I would expect any effect of atmospheric CO2 concentration on a person's carbohydrate intake to be totally dominated by food preference / availability / choice and by selective breeding of plants used for food.

That's my main gripe with the article, too. It's really interesting biologically, but it doesn't really talk about the effect size. The influence of selective breeding is even mentioned in the article, but without explaining the relative influences.

> The data we have, which look at how plants would respond to the kind of CO2 concentrations we may see in our lifetimes, show these important minerals drop by 8 percent, on average. The same conditions have been shown to drive down the protein content of C3 crops, in some cases significantly, with wheat and rice dropping 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively.

I had the same gripe. 6%-8% change doesn't quite seem insignificant, but this is under CO2 concentrations that "we may see in our lifetime". So how much more CO2 were these plants exposed to than the controls, and how strong is that "may"?

For the rich, the ~10% difference in nutrients is trivial to compensate. As long as they will care to do so.

What will happen to poorer people and how the society is going to deal with it though?

As far as I understand the article it states that the share of carbs is increasing. That food is lacking other nutrients seems to man made as well but the underlying reason is not climate change but agricultural methods that have changed

It's worth noting that there's an opposite force in play - as poor countries get richer (or, for the first world, got richer a century or two ago) the typical worker's meal goes from almost entirely staple crops (wheat, corn, rice, etc) to having these crops as a side dish to a relatively protein-heavy animal product (meat, eggs, dairy).

If you e.g. potatoes+bread based diet with meat once a week transforms into meat at every meal, then the total diet has more protein even if the potatoes and wheat don't have as much protein as they used to.

That much meat and dairy doesn't scale. Certainly you might see how this might be of great concern to vegetarians?

> That much meat and dairy doesn't scale.

I don't believe that — there's plenty of land unsuitable for farming but suitable for grazing, and that's where meat shines.

> Certainly you might see how this might be of great concern to vegetarians?

Yes, I do. I wonder if this might convince some of them to return to a more natural human diet. We are, after all, omnivores.

GMO, would people like it or not, will be a solution.

Stuff like Soylent might also be a solution. I've heard people say that the lack of taste in food might make their meal much less appreciable, but let's be honest, if it's a matter or health, enjoying a meal might become a luxury.

FWIW, I consider the present state of such powders to be highly deficient, but I do believe that in time and in theory they could serve as a permanent replacement for food. At minimum, the current deficiencies have to do with phytonutrients and various fibers.

Yeah, and by the year 2000, we'll all be eating meals in capsule form. Oh wait, what's this? It's your 1950's techno-utopia calling. It said it's never coming. Something, something, more like mad max.

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