Category Archives: Ecology

Unpleasant Food Facts

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Allergies: The most common food allergies are milk, eggs, seafood, wheat, nuts, seeds, chocolate, oranges, tomatoes.

Carcinogens: a musty mold called aflatoxin found on corn, nuts, sorghum

Chemicals:

  • In 1986 there were some 60,000 chemicals in common commercial use in the USA.
  • American industry produced 96 billion pounds of hazardous chemical waste per year; much of which is disposed of in unsafe ways and some of which ends up in our water cycle.

Migraines: For some people food can be a trigger: MSG, sodium nitrate, red wine, old cheese, avocados, ripe bananas, curried meat.

Plaque: Saliva contains streptococci bacteria that use sugar to wrap themselves in a sticky protective wall or plaque. They produce acid that eats enamel.

Quality of Food:

  • Broccoli loses 1/3 of its vitamin C within 2 days of picking
  • canned juice loses 70% of its Vitamin C if it is stored in a hot space

Bottled Water

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70% of the bottled water sampled by researchers in Montreal showed high levels of heterotrophic bacteria. This calls into question the benefits of switching to bottled water in cities with clean tap water.

The researchers randomly purchased several brands of bottled water from a local marketplace and subjected them to microbiological analysis. They discovered more than 70 percent of famous brands tested did not meet the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) specifications of 500 cfu/mL, and in some cases the water was 100 times richer in bacteria than recommended.

The average microbial count for different tap water samples was 170 cfu/mL.

The bacteria are unlikely to cause disease although they could potentially affect people whose systems are already vulnerable.

“Bottled water is not expected to be free from microorganisms but the cfu observed in this study is surprisingly very high. Therefore, it is strongly recommended to establish a limit for the heterotrophic bacteria count as well as to identify the nature of microorganisms present in the bottled water,” says Azam.

Global Vegetation

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Anyone who loves to eat has to worry about the state of farm products and that means they need to be concerned about climate change because recent studies suggest that where plants grow is shifting, as they seek cooler or wetter conditions.

A new study from a University of California, Berkeley  ecologist working with researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service found that over the past century, vegetation has gradually moved toward the poles and up mountain slopes, to areas with cooler temperatures,  and towards the equator, where rainfall is greater.

Meanwhile depending on whether or not we can control greenhouse gas emissions, between 1/10 and 1/2 of the Earth will continue to see climate-related vegetation shifts.

The results are based on an overview of hundreds of field studies and a spatial analysis of what we have witnessed over the past century and can expect over the next 100 years.

The researchers found 15 cases where there was a complete biome shift since the 18th century meaning that an entire suite of plants moved. In each case the researchers were able to attribute the shift to changes in temperature and precipitation.

The researchers calculated that over the 20th century,  mean temperatures  increased over 76%  of the earth’s landmasses, with the greatest warming in the subarctic. The big biome shifts occurred where either temperature or precipitation changed by one-half to two standard deviations from 20th century mean values.

What Does That Mean?

Examples of biome shifts that actually occurred were

  • woodlands giving way to grasslands in the African Sahel, and
  • shrublands encroaching onto tundra in the Arctic.

As trees and shrubs in the Sahel died off, there was less and less wood for housing and cooking.  The damage to Arctic tundra reduced habitat for caribou and other wildlife.  Globally, we are seeing the disruption of many ecosystems which affects everything from the habitats of endangered species to human water supplies. In all, at least 1 billion people live in areas that are could be affected by vegetation shifts. That’s 1 in 7 people who may find that food, water, or other plant based supplies are hard to come by if we don’t act.