Increased CO2 enhances the nutritional quality of food crops

A recently published scaremongering study claims that increasing CO2 levels will decrease the nutritional quality of food crops. However, the vast majority of the scientific literature finds the opposite, that increased CO2 improves the nutritional quality of crops. A new paper by SPPI and CO2 Science reviews the scientific literature on the health-promoting effects of elevated CO2 on common food plants and concludes, "it is becoming ever more evident that the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content is not only increasing the productivity of earth's common food plants, it is significantly increasing the quantity and potency of the many health-promoting substances found in their tissues, which are the ultimate sources of sustenance for essentially all animals and humans."





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[Illustrations, footnotes and references available in PDF version]

Excerpts:

How will the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content alter the amounts of various health-promoting substances found in the plants that we commonly eat? Studies of the effects of atmospheric CO2 enrichment on the quality of the different plants that comprise our diets have typically lagged far behind studies designed to assess the effects of elevated CO2 on the quantity of plant production. Some noteworthy exceptions were the early studies of Barbale (1970) and Madsen (1971, 1975), who discovered that increasing the air's CO2 content produced a modest increase in the vitamin C concentration of tomatoes, while Kimball and Mitchell (1981) demonstrated that enriching the air with CO2 also stimulated the tomato plant's production of vitamin A. Then, a few years later, Tajiri (1985) found that a mere one-hour-per-day doubling of the air's CO2 concentration actually doubled the vitamin C contents of bean sprouts, and that it did so over a period of only seven days.

The direct effects of atmospheric CO2 enrichment on the health-promoting properties of soybean seeds are likely universally beneficial and a boon to the entire human race, especially in light of the fact that Bernacchi et al. (2005) characterize the soybean as "the world's most important seed legume.”

Atmospheric CO2 enrichment can enhance the health-promoting quality of broccoli because of induced glucosinolate content changes

In conclusion, it is becoming ever more evident that the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content is not only increasing the productivity of earth's common food plants, it is significantly increasing the quantity and potency of the many health-promoting substances found in their tissues, which are the ultimate sources of sustenance for essentially all animals and humans. Thus, as these foods make their way onto our dinner tables, they improve our health and help us better contend with the multitude of diseases and other maladies that regularly afflict us. In fact, it is possible, if not likely, that the lengthening of human life-span that has occurred over the past half-century or more - as described by Horiuchi (2000) and Tuljapurkar et al. (2000)9 - may in some significant part be due to the concomitant CO2-induced increases in the concentrations of the many health-promoting substances found in the various plant-derived foods that we eat.