20 Nutrition Facts That Should Be Common Sense (But Aren't)

Common sense should not be taken for granted when people are discussing nutrition.
Many myths and misconceptions are being spread — even by so-called experts.
Here are 20 nutrition facts that should be common sense — but aren't.
1. Artificial Trans Fats Are Unsuitable for Human Consumption
Trans fats are unhealthy.
Their production involves high pressure, heat, and hydrogen gas in the presence of a metal catalyst.
This process makes liquid vegetable oils solid at room temperature.
Of course, trans fats are more than just unappetizing. Studies show that they are unhealthy and linked to a drastic increase in heart disease risk (1, 2).
Luckily, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has banned trans fats as of June 18, 2018, though products manufactured before this date can still be distributed until 2020 and in some cases 2021 (3).
Plus, foods with less than 0.5 grams of trans fats per serving may be labeled as having 0 grams (4).
2. You Don't Need to Eat Every 2–3 Hours
Some people believe that having smaller, more frequent meals may help them lose weight.
However, some studies suggest that meal size and frequency have no effect on fat burning or body weight (5, 6).
Eating every 2–3 hours is inconvenient and completely unnecessary for the majority of people. Simply eat when you're hungry and be sure to choose healthy and nutritious foods.
3. Take News Headlines With a Grain of Salt
The mainstream media is one of the reasons behind many circulating nutrition myths and confusions.
It seems as if a new study makes headlines every week — often contradicting research that came out just a few months earlier.
These stories often get a lot of attention, but when you look past the headlines and read the studies involved, you may find that they're often taken out of context.
In many cases, other higher-quality studies directly contradict the media frenzy — but these rarely get mentioned.
4. Meat Doesn’t Rot in Your Colon
t's entirely false that meat rots in your colon.
Your body is well equipped to digest and absorb all the important nutrients found in meat.
The protein gets broken down in your stomach by stomach acids. Then, powerful digestive enzymes break down the rest in your small intestine.
Most of the fats, proteins, and nutrients are then absorbed by your body. While small amounts of protein and fat may escape digestion in healthy people, there is not much left to rot in your colon.
5. Eggs Are One of the Healthiest Foods You Can Eat
Eggs have been unfairly demonized because their yolks are high in cholesterol.
However, studies show that cholesterol from eggs doesn't raise blood cholesterol in the majority of people (7).
New studies that include hundreds of thousands of people show that eggs have no effect on heart disease in otherwise healthy individuals (8).
The truth is, eggs are one of the healthiest and most nutritious foods you can eat.
6. Sugary Drinks Are the Most Fattening Product in the Modern Diet
Excess added sugar can be detrimental to health — and getting it in liquid form is even worse.
The problem with liquid sugar is that your brain doesn't compensate for the calories by eating less of other foods (9).
In other words, your brain doesn't register these calories, making you eat more calories overall (10).
Of all the junk foods, sugar-sweetened beverages are likely the most fattening.
7. Low-Fat Doesn’t Mean Healthy
The low-fat diet promoted by the mainstream nutrition guidelines seems to have been a failure.
Numerous long-term studies suggest that it neither works for weight loss nor disease prevention (11, 12, 13).
What's more, the trend led to a plethora of new, processed, low-fat foods. Yet, because foods tend to taste worse without the fat, manufacturers added sugar and other additives instead.
Foods that are naturally low-fat — like fruits and vegetables — are great, but processed foods labeled "low-fat" are usually loaded with unhealthy ingredients.
8. Fruit Juice Isn’t That Different From Sugary Soft Drinks
Many people believe that fruit juices are healthy, as they come from fruit.
Though fresh fruit juice may provide some of the antioxidants found in fruit, it contains just as much sugar as sugary soft drinks like Coca-Cola (14).
As juice offers no chewing resistance and negligible amounts of fiber, it's very easy to consume a lot of sugar.
A single cup (240 ml) of orange juice contains just as much sugar as 2 whole oranges (15, 16).
If you're trying to avoid sugar for health reasons, you should avoid fruit juice as well. While fruit juice is healthier than soft drinks, its antioxidant content doesn't make up for the large amounts of sugar.
9. Feeding Your Gut Bacteria Is Critical
People are really only about 10% human — the bacteria in your intestine, known as the gut flora, outnumber your human cells 10 to 1.
In recent years, research has shown that the types and number of these bacteria can have profound implications for human health — affecting everything from body weight to brain function (17, 18).
Just like your body's cells, the bacteria need to eat — and soluble fiber is their preferred fuel source (19, 20).
This may be the most important reason to include plenty of fiber in your diet — to feed the beneficial bacteria in your intestine.
10. Cholesterol Isn’t the Enemy
What people generally refer to as "cholesterol" isn't really cholesterol.
When people talk about the so-called "bad" LDL and "good" HDL cholesterol, they're really referring to the proteins that carry cholesterol around in your blood.
LDL stands for low-density lipoprotein, whereas HDL refers to high-density lipoprotein.
The truth is, cholesterol is not the enemy. The main determinant for heart disease risk is the type of lipoproteins that carry cholesterol around — not cholesterol itself.
For most people, dietary cholesterol has little or no effect on lipoprotein levels (21).
11. Weight Loss Supplements Rarely Work
here are many different weight loss supplements on the market — and they almost never work.
They're claimed to lead to magical results but fail when put to the test in studies.
Even for the few that work — like glucomannan — the effect is too small to really make a noticeable difference.
The truth is that the best way to lose weight and keep it off is to adopt a healthy lifestyle change.
12. Health Is About More Than Your Weight
Most people focus too much on weight gain or loss. The truth is that health goes way beyond that.
Many obese people are metabolically healthy, while many normal-weight people have the same metabolic problems associated with obesity (22, 23).
Focusing just on body weight is counterproductive. It's possible to improve health without losing weight — and vice versa.
It appears that the area where fat builds up is important. The fat in your abdominal cavity (belly fat) is associated with metabolic problems, while the fat under your skin is mostly a cosmetic problem (24).
Therefore, reducing belly fat should be a priority for health improvement. The fat under your skin or the number on the scale doesn't matter as much.
13. Calories Count — But You Don't Necessarily Need to Count Them
Calories are important.
Obesity is a matter of excess stored energy, or calories, accumulating in the form of body fat.
However, this doesn't mean you need to monitor everything that enters your body and track or count calories.
Though calorie counting works for a lot of people, you can do many things to lose weight — without ever having to count a single calorie.
For example, eating more protein has been shown to lead to automatic calorie restriction and significant weight loss — without deliberately restricting calories (25, 26).
14. People With Type 2 Diabetes Shouldn’t Follow a High-Carb Diet
For decades, people have been advised to eat a low-fat diet with carbs making up 50–60% of calories.
Surprisingly, this advice was extended to include people with type 2 diabetes — who cannot tolerate a lot of easily digestible carbs, like sugar and refined starch.
People with type 2 diabetes are resistant to insulin and any carbs they eat will cause a big rise in blood sugar levels.
For this reason, they need to take blood-sugar-lowering drugs to bring their levels down.
If anyone benefits from a low-carb diet, it is people with diabetes. In one study, following a low-carb diet for only 6 months allowed 95.2% of participants to reduce or eliminate their blood sugar medication (27).
15. Neither Fat nor Carbs Make You Fat
Fat has often been blamed for obesity, as it has more calories per gram than protein and carbs.
Yet, people who eat a diet high in fat — but low in carbs — end up eating fewer calories than people on low-fat, high-carb diets (28, 29).
This has conversely led many people to blame carbs for obesity — which is incorrect as well. Plenty of populations throughout history have eaten high-carb diets but remained healthy.
As with almost everything in nutrition science, the issue depends on the context.
Both fat and carbs can be fattening — it all depends on the rest of your diet and your overall lifestyle.
16. Junk Food Can Be Addictive
In the past 100 years or so, food has changed.
People are eating more processed food than ever before, and the technologies used to engineer foods have become more elaborate.
These days, food engineers have found ways to make food so rewarding that your brain gets flooded with dopamine (30).
For this reason, some people can completely lose control over their consumption (31).
Many studies examining this phenomenon have found similarities between processed junk foods and commonly abused drugs (32).
17. Never Trust Health Claims on Packaging
People are more health conscious than ever before.
The food manufacturers are well aware of this and have found ways to market junk food to health-conscious people as well.
They do this by adding misleading labels like "whole-grain" or "low-fat."
You can find many unhealthy junk foods with these health claims, such as "whole-grain" Fruit Loops and Cocoa Puffs.
These labels are used to trick people into thinking that they're making the right choice for themselves — and their children.
If the packaging of a food tells you it's healthy, chances are it isn't.
18. Certain Vegetable Oils Should Be Avoided
Certain vegetable oils — like sunflower, soybean, and corn oil — contain large amounts of omega-6 fatty acids (33).
Studies suggest that a high intake of omega-6 fatty acids — relative to omega-3 — increases low-grade inflammation in your body (34).
Oils high in omega-6 may contribute to oxidative stress in some people, potentially contributing to heart disease (35, 36, 37).
For this reason, it may be a good health strategy to choose vegetable oils that are relatively low in omega-6 fatty acids. These include olive oil, canola oil, and high-oleic safflower oil.
This allows you to optimize your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio.
19. ‘Organic’ or ‘Gluten-Free’ Doesn’t Mean Healthy
There are many health trends in the world today.
Both organic and gluten-free food is becoming increasingly popular.
However, just because something is organic or gluten-free doesn't mean that it's healthy. You can make junk foods from organic ingredients just as well as non-organic ones.
Foods that are naturally gluten-free are fine, but gluten-free processed foods are often made with unhealthy ingredients that may even be worse than their gluten-containing counterparts.
The truth is, organic sugar is still sugar and gluten-free junk food is still junk food.
20. Don’t Blame New Health Problems on Old Foods
The obesity epidemic started around 1980 and the type 2 diabetes epidemic followed soon after.
These are two of the biggest health problems in the world — and diet has a lot to do with them.
Some scientists started blaming these epidemics on foods like red meat, eggs, and butter, but these foods have been a part of the human diet for thousands of years — whereas these health problems are relatively new.
It seems more sensible to suspect new foods to be the culprit, such as processed foods, trans fat, added sugar, refined grains, and vegetable oils.
Blaming new health problems on old foods simply doesn't make sense.
The Bottom Line
Many nutrition myths and misconceptions are easily debunked with a bit of common sense and scientific evidence.
The above list gives you some insight into common misconceptions, helping you be more informed on your way to a balanced, healthy diet.
Reposted with permission from our media associate Healthline.
Google's New Timelapse Shows 37 Years of Climate Change Anywhere on Earth, Including Your Neighborhood
Google Earth's latest feature allows you to watch the climate change in four dimensions.
The new feature, called Timelapse, is the biggest update to Google Earth since 2017. It is also, as far as its developers know, the largest video taken of Earth on Earth. The feature compiles 24 million satellite photos taken between 1984 and 2020 to show how human activity has transformed the planet over the past 37 years.
"Visual evidence can cut to the core of the debate in a way that words cannot and communicate complex issues to everyone," Google Earth Director Rebecca Moore wrote in a blog post Thursday.
Moore herself has been directly impacted by the climate crisis. She was one of many Californians evacuated because of wildfires last year. However, the new feature allows people to witness more remote changes, such as the melting of ice caps.
"With Timelapse in Google Earth, we have a clearer picture of our changing planet right at our fingertips — one that shows not just problems but also solutions, as well as mesmerizingly beautiful natural phenomena that unfold over decades," she wrote.
Some climate impacts that viewers can witness include the melting of 12 miles of Alaska's Columbia Glacier between 1984 and 2020, Fortune reported. They can also watch the disintegration of the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica. The changes are not limited to the impacts of global warming, however.
Moore said the developers had identified five themes, and Google Earth offers a guided tour for each of them. They are:
- Forest change, such as deforestation in Bolivia for soybean farming
- Urban growth, such as the quintupling of Las Vegas sprawl
- Warming temperatures, such as melting glaciers and ice sheets
- Sources of energy, such as the impacts of coal mining on Wyoming's landscape
- Fragile beauty, such as the flow of Bolivia's Mamoré River
However, the feature also allows you to see smaller-scale change. You can enter any location into the search bar, including your local neighborhood, CNN explained. The feature does not offer the detail of Street View, Gizmodo noted. It is intended to show large changes over time, rather than smaller details like the construction of a road or home.
The images for Timelapse were made possible through collaboration with NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey's Landsat satellites and the European Union's Copernicus program and Sentinel satellites. Carnegie Mellon University's CREATE Lab helped develop the technology.
To use Timelapse, you can either visit g.co/Timelapse directly or click on the Ship's Wheel icon in Google Earth, then select Timelapse. Moore said the feature would be updated annually with new images of Earth's alterations.
"We hope that this perspective of the planet will ground debates, encourage discovery and shift perspectives about some of our most pressing global issues," she wrote.
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60 Million Americans Don’t Drink Their Tap Water – Here’s Why That’s a Public Health Problem
By Asher Rosinger
Imagine seeing a news report about lead contamination in drinking water in a community that looks like yours. It might make you think twice about whether to drink your tap water or serve it to your kids – especially if you also have experienced tap water problems in the past.
In a new study, my colleagues Anisha Patel, Francesca Weaks and I estimate that approximately 61.4 million people in the U.S. did not drink their tap water as of 2017-2018. Our research, which was released in preprint format on April 8, 2021, and has not yet been peer reviewed, found that this number has grown sharply in the past several years.
Other research has shown that about 2 million Americans don't have access to clean water. Taking that into account, our findings suggest that about 59 million people have tap water access from either their municipality or private wells or cisterns, but don't drink it. While some may have contaminated water, others may be avoiding water that's actually safe.
Water insecurity is an underrecognized but growing problem in the U.S. Tap water distrust is part of the problem. And it's critical to understand what drives it, because people who don't trust their tap water shift to more expensive and often less healthy options, like bottled water or sugary drinks.
I'm a human biologist and have studied water and health for the past decade in places as diverse as Lowland Bolivia and northern Kenya. Now I run the Water, Health, and Nutrition Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University. To understand water issues, I talk to people and use large datasets to see whether a problem is unique or widespread, and stable or growing.
An Epidemic of Distrust
According to our research, there's a growing epidemic of tap water distrust and disuse in the U.S. In a 2020 study, anthropologist Sera Young and I found that tap water avoidance was declining before the Flint water crisis that began in 2014. In 2015-2016, however, it started to increase again for children.
Our new study found that in 2017-2018, the number of Americans who didn't drink tap water increased at an alarmingly high rate, particularly for Black and Hispanic adults and children. Since 2013-2014 – just before the Flint water crisis began – the prevalence of adults who do not drink their tap water has increased by 40%. Among children, not consuming tap has risen by 63%.
To calculate this change, we used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a nationally representative survey that releases data in two-year cycles. Sampling weights that use demographic characteristics ensure that the people being sampled are representative of the broader U.S. population.
Racial Disparities in Tap Water Consumption
Communities of color have long experienced environmental injustice across the U.S. Black, Hispanic and Native American residents are more likely to live in environmentally disadvantaged neighborhoods, with exposure to water that violates quality standards.
Our findings reflect these experiences. We calculated that Black and Hispanic children and adults are two to three times more likely to report not drinking their tap water than members of white households. In 2017-2018, roughly 3 out of 10 Black adults and children and nearly 4 of 10 Hispanic adults and children didn't drink their tap water. Approximately 2 of 10 Asian Americans didn't drink from their tap, while only 1 of 10 white Americans didn't drink their tap water.
When children don't drink any water on a given day, research shows that they consume twice as many calories from sugary drinks as children who drink water. Higher sugary drink consumption increases risk of cavities, obesity and cardiometabolic diseases. Drinking tap water provides fluoride, which lowers the risk of cavities. Relying on water alternatives is also much more expensive than drinking tap water.
A4: Choosing to drink fluoridated tap water over sugar-sweetened beverages to quench thirst is vital to protecting… https://t.co/3tm8wuWjeZ— Oral Health Watch (@Oral Health Watch)1600795750.0
What Erodes Trust
News reports – particularly high-visibility events like advisories to boil water – lead people to distrust their tap water even after the problem is fixed. For example, a 2019 study showed that water quality violations across the U.S. between 2006 and 2015 led to increases in bottled water purchases in affected counties as a way to avoid tap water, and purchase rates remained elevated after the violation.
The Flint water crisis drew national attention to water insecurity, even though state and federal regulators were slow to respond to residents' complaints there. Soon afterward, lead contamination was found in the water supply of Newark, New Jersey; the city is currently replacing all lead service lines under a legal settlement. Elsewhere, media outlets and advocacy groups have reported finding tap water samples contaminated with industrial chemicals, lead, arsenic and other contaminants.
Many other factors can cause people to distrust their water supply, including smell, taste and appearance, as well as lower income levels. Location is also an issue: Older U.S. cities with aging infrastructure are more prone to water shutoffs and water quality problems.
It's important not to blame people for distrusting what comes out of their tap, because those fears are rooted in history. In my view, addressing water insecurity requires a two-part strategy: ensuring that everyone has access to clean water, and increasing trust so people who have safe water will use it.
Chart: The Conversation / CC BY-ND. Source: AWWA / Morning Consult. Get the data
Building Confidence
As part of his proposed infrastructure plan, President Joe Biden is asking Congress for $111 billion to improve water delivery systems, replace lead pipelines and tackle other contaminants. The plan also proposes improvements for small water systems and underserved communities.
These are critical steps to rebuild trust. Yet, in my view, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency should also provide better public education about water quality testing and targeted interventions for vulnerable populations, such as children and underserved communities. Initiatives to simplify and improve water quality reports can help people understand what's in their water and what they can do if they think something is wrong with it.
Chart: The Conversation / CC BY-ND. Source: AWWA / Morning Consult. Get the data
Who delivers those messages is important. In areas like Flint, where former government officials have been indicted on charges including negligence and perjury in connection with the water crisis, the government's word alone won't rebuild trust. Instead, community members can fill this critical role.
Another priority is the 13%-15% of Americans who rely on private well water, which is not regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act. These households are responsible for their own water quality testing. Public funding would help them test it regularly and address any problems.
Public distrust of tap water in the U.S. reflects decades of policies that have reduced access to reliable, safe drinking water in communities of color. Fixing water lines is important, but so is giving people confidence to turn on the tap.
Asher Rosinger is an assistant professor of biobehavioral health, anthropology, and demography and director of the Water, Health, and Nutrition Laboratory at Penn State University.
Disclosure statement: Asher Rosinger receives funding from the National Science Foundation on an unrelated project. This work was supported by the Ann Atherton Hertzler Early Career Professorship funds, and the Penn State Population Research Institute (NICHD P2CHD041025). The funders had no role in the research or interpretation of results.
Reposted with permission from The Conversation.
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A new report promoting urgent climate action in Australia has stirred debate for claiming that global temperatures will rise past 1.5 degrees Celsius in the next decade.
Australia's Climate Council released the report on Thursday. The council is an independent organization of climate scientists and experts on health, renewable energy and policy who work to inform the Australian public on the climate crisis. But their latest claim is causing controversy.
"Multiple lines of evidence show that limiting global warming to 1.5°C above the preindustrial level, without significant overshoot and subsequent drawdown, is now out of reach due to past inaction," Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Prof. Christopher Field of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment wrote in the foreword. "The science is telling us that global average temperature rise will likely exceed 1.5°C during the 2030s, and that long-term stabilization at warming at or below 1.5°C will be extremely challenging."
The report is titled "Aim high, go fast: Why emissions need to plummet this decade," and as the name suggests, it is ultimately concerned with urging more robust climate action on the part of the Australian government. The report calls for the country to reduce emissions by 75 percent by 2030 and reach net zero by 2035 in order to achieve the long-term goals of the Paris agreement, which means limiting warming to well below two degrees Celsius.
"The world achieving net zero by 2050 is at least a decade too late and carries a strong risk of irreversible global climate disruption at levels inconsistent with maintaining well-functioning human societies," the authors wrote.
The report further argues that global temperatures are likely to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius in the 2030s based on existing temperature increases; locked-in warming from emissions that have already occurred; evidence from past climate changes and the percentage of the carbon budget that has already been used.
The report isn't a call to give up on the Paris agreement. It is possible that global temperatures could swell past 1.5 degrees Celsius but still be reduced by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Even if temperatures do exceed 1.5 degrees, every degree of warming that can be prevented makes a difference.
"Basically we can still hold temperature rise to well below 2C and do that without overshoot and drawdown," Will Steffen, lead report author from the Australian National University's Climate Change Institute, told Australia's ABC News. "Every tenth of a degree actually does matter — 1.8C is better than 1.9C, and is much better than 2C."
However, some outside scientists question both the accuracy and effectiveness of the report's claim. Both Adjunct Professor Bill Hare from Murdoch University and Dr. Carl-Freidrich Schleussner from Humboldt University told ABC News they have been trying to contact the Climate Council about its 1.5 overshoot claim for months. They said that it went against other major reports, including the UN Environment Program Gap Report and the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on 1.5˚C.
"The big challenge their report reinforces is the need for urgent action to get on that 1.5C pathway, [so] it's very paradoxical to me that they've chosen to attack that target," Dr. Hare told ABC News.
However, Scientist Andy Pitman from the Center of Excellence for Climate Extremes at the University of New South Wales told The Guardian that the report's assessment was correct.
"It's simply not possible to limit warming to 1.5C now," he said. "There's too much inertia in the system and even if you stopped greenhouse gas emissions today, you would still reach 1.5C [of heating]."
However, one aspect everyone agreed on involved the importance of lowering emissions as soon as possible.
"[There is] absolute fundamental agreement on the task at hand, which is to get emissions to plummet," Simon Bradshaw, report author and Climate Council head of research, told The Guardian.
French winemakers are facing devastating grape loss from the worst frost in decades, preceded by unusually warm temperatures, highlighting the dangers to the sector posed by climate change.
"An important share of the harvest has been lost. It's too early to give a percentage estimate, but in any case it's a tragedy for the winegrowers who have been hit," said Christophe Chateau, director of communications at the Bordeaux Wine Council, told CNN.
Climate change, caused by the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, has pushed winegrowing seasons earlier, putting crops at higher risk of cold — and wildfires supercharged by climate change also threaten American vignerons and farmworkers as well.
"I think it's good for people to understand that this is nature, climate change is real, and to be conscious of the effort that goes into making wine and the heartbreak that is the loss of a crop," Jeremy Seysses of Domaine Dujac in Burgundy's Côte de Nuits told Wine Enthusiast.
As reported by Wine Enthusiast:
Last week, images of candlelit French vineyards flooded social media. Across the country, winemakers installed bougies, or large wax-filled metal pots, among the vines to prevent cold air from settling in during an especially late frost.
With temperatures in early April as low as 22°F, and following an unseasonably warm March, this year's frost damage may be the worst in history for French winegrowers. Every corner of France reports considerable losses, from Champagne to Provence, and Côtes de Gascogne to Alsace. As a result, there will likely be very little French wine from the 2021 vintage reaching U.S. shores.
For a deeper dive:
CNN, Wine Enthusiast, France24, Eater
For more climate change and clean energy news, you can follow Climate Nexus on Twitter and Facebook, sign up for daily Hot News, and visit their news site, Nexus Media News.
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Climate change could make it harder to find a good cup of coffee, new research finds. A changing climate might shrink suitable areas for specialty coffee production without adaptation, making coffee taste blander and impacting the livelihoods of small farms in the Global South.
Published in Scientific Reports on Wednesday, the study focused on regions in Ethiopia, Africa's largest coffee-producing nation. Although studies have previously documented the impact of climate change on coffee production, what's less understood is how varying climates could change the flavors of specialty coffee, the researchers wrote.
The team aimed to fill this gap. Their results provide a glimpse into how future climate change could impact local regions and economies that rely on coffee cultivation, underscoring the value of local adaptation measures.
Researchers analyzed how 19 different climate factors, such as mean temperatures and rainfall levels, would affect the cultivation of five distinct specialty coffee types in the future, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) reported. Although researchers found that areas suitable for growing "average quality coffee" may actually increase over time with climate change, regions where specialty coffee is grown will shrink — a pending problem in light of the global demand for high-quality coffee.
"This is an issue not just for coffee lovers, but for local agricultural value creation," Abel Chemura, the study's lead author, told the PIK.
Coffee profiles rely on specific climate patterns for their unique flavors, levels of acidity and fragrances. But in a warmer climate, the coffee cherry — the fruit picked from a coffee plant — matures faster than the bean inside, making for a lower quality cup of coffee, the PIK reported.
For example, the sought-after Yirgacheffe variety of coffee, which is cultivated in southwestern Ethiopia, could lose more than 40 percent of its suitable growth area by the end of the century, PIK reported. This could impact small farms and threaten Ethiopia's economy, the researchers noted.
"If one or more coffee regions lose their specialty status due to climate change this has potentially grave ramifications for the smallholder farmers in the region," Christoph Gornott, co-author of the study, told the PIK. "If they were forced to switch to growing conventional, less palatable and bitter coffee types, they would all of the sudden compete with industrial production systems elsewhere that are more efficient." In a country where coffee exports account for nearly a third of all agricultural exports, "this could prove fatal," Gornott added.
Climate change impacts on coffee production are not unique to Ethiopia. In Columbia's mountainous coffee-growing regions, temperatures are warming by 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit every decade, according to Yale Environment 360. Extreme levels of precipitation, which are becoming more common, also impact production, as they spread insect and fungal diseases.
"In earlier times, the climate was perfect for coffee," one small farmer in Columbia told Yale Environment 360. "In the period of flowering, there was summer. During harvest, there was winter. But from 2008 onward, this changed and we now don't know when it will be summer, when the coffee will blossom."
But researchers say there are glimmers of hope, emphasizing the importance of local adaptation measures that are designed for particular climates and communities. For example, in regions where temperature is an important factor for specialty coffee cultivation, the researchers suggest improved agroforestry systems that could maintain canopy temperatures, a promising step toward sustaining the "availability and taste of one of the world's most beloved beverages and, more importantly, on economic opportunities in local communities of the Global South," Gornott concluded.