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Comment by hshehehjdjdjd | Hacker News Reader

Losses of ten percent on these nutrients do not seem like that big of a deal. Worst case we can enrich. Climate change is an enormous problem. But the nutrient levels in rice are an invisibly small speck on the face of that problem.

Don’t get me wrong. This is interesting, and the research is important. But this comment is for people like me who sometimes feel the news is about to make them hyperventilate. You can skip that for this one.

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Ten percent is a big deal if you're already malnourished, as 11% of the world currently is[1].

I don't disagree about enrichment, but this is a pretty big problem in terms of eliminating poverty and minimizing (or improving) subsistence farming.

[1]: http://www.fao.org/state-of-food-security-nutrition/en/

10% is a very big deal. We talk about trying to 'eat healthy', but what happens when all your food is becoming less healthy? This is a tragedy of a worldwide commons. Because it's not just rice, extrapolating from it, this is something that affects all plants globally. And it isn't just humans that are affected: this affects the animals that eat plants. What happens to environmentally stressed endangered species who now get less nutrient value from what they eat? This isn't an isolated study: people have been looking at this (albeit with little funding) for 20 years.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016953470...

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrie...

Rice is a staple for more than half the human population in the world, and hence anything that affects its nutrition profile is bound to have a huge effect on several countries, their policies on healthcare, hunger alleviation and poverty alleviation. Enriching rice may not be easy to do at this scale across many countries.

The Wikipedia article on rice [1] says:

"Rice is the staple food of over half the world's population. It is the predominant dietary energy source for 17 countries in Asia and the Pacific, 9 countries in North and South America and 8 countries in Africa."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice

I think the impact is greatest on those who rely on rice as the majority of their sustenance and can not afford to purchase enriched goods or supplements.

How do you enrich rice?

Not only can you do it, it's Federally mandated in the U. S.: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/7/1431c

As to how, my understanding is that it's just coated with nutrients; easy peasy.

Thanks

A lot of people wash rice before cooking it which also washes the enrichment off it.

Through genetic engineering. For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice

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