Eat well for the sake of your body AND the planet

A growing number of consumers are paying attention to how their decisions about food affect the planet's wellbeing.

Eating well isn’t about choosing what’s good for your body alone; it’s also about choosing what’s good for the planet. These two concepts have been separate for a long time, but are quickly becoming intertwined as more consumers realize the necessity of taking the environment into consideration when making decisions about food.

“It’s all connected,” says American dietician Kate Geagan, author of Go Green, Get Lean. “You can’t tackle hunger and obesity and the paradox of the obesity crisis among hungry children without tying it to food waste, the farm bill and how the food system has been set up in this country.”

Indeed, pressure is on for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to include environmental considerations in its new dietary guidelines that will be released by the end of this year. The USDA’s advisory panel recommended that the guidelines “factor in whether or not a food is good for the planet when deciding whether it’s healthy” (The Guardian). This advice has created uproar within the food industry, which says that the USDA would be stepping beyond its rightful jurisdiction with such recommendations.

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Here’s How Climate Change Will Make Food Less Nutritious

A new study suggests that having more CO2 in the atmosphere will cause levels of zinc and iron in important staple crops to drop.

There are two things you want to get from a harvest. First there’s yield, the amount of grains, beans, or fruit you pull from the fields—and that’s where the focus is placed much of the time, both from the farmer’s perspective and in terms of plant breeding and global development conversations. The other, which isn’t so apparent on the farm, is nutrition. A study published this week in Nature suggests that as CO2 levels in the atmosphere increase in the coming decades, yields may increase. But even as farmers have more wheat, rice, and beans to harvest and eat, the nutrition levels in those staple crops—namely, zinc and iron—are going to drop.

Just last year, the world crossed the dubious threshold of 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. By using CO2 jets placed around test plots, the study created growing conditions that approximate a future in which those levels creep upward of 500 parts per million. The grains and legumes grown in this environment had anywhere between 5 and 10 percent less iron, zinc, and protein too. The increase in nutritional deficiencies these drops could cause “represents the most significant health threat ever shown to be associated with climate change,” according to a Harvard press release.

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