Posted on 07/30/2022 5:20:07 AM PDT by FarCenter
In the U.S., people eat more protein than they need to. And though it might not be bad for human health, this excess does pose a problem for the country’s waterways. The nation’s wastewater is laden with the leftovers from protein digestion: nitrogen compounds that can feed toxic algal blooms and pollute the air and drinking water. This source of nitrogen pollution even rivals that from fertilizers washed off of fields growing food crops, new research suggests.
When we overconsume protein—whether it comes from lentils, supplements or steak—our body breaks the excess down into urea, a nitrogen-containing compound that exits the body via urine and ultimately ends up in sewage. Maya Almaraz, a biogeochemist at the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues wanted to see how much of this nitrogen is being flushed into the U.S. sewage system because of a protein-heavy diet. The researchers combined population data and previous work on how much excess protein the average American eats and found that the majority of nitrogen pollution present in wastewater—some 67 to 100 percent—is a by-product of what people consume. “We think a lot about sewage nitrogen. We know that’s an issue,” Almaraz says. “But I didn’t know how much of that is actually affected by the choices we’re making way upstream—when we go the grocery store, when we cook a meal and what we end up putting in our bodies.”
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Their new study, published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, broke down protein requirements by age (adults 50 to 70 years old need the most) for the current U.S. population and projected future populations out to 2055. By midcentury, the country’s population is expected to be larger overall and to have a greater percentage of older people. The researchers calculated the amount of nitrogen that would enter the environment if people ate today’s average American diet and if they instead reduced their protein intake to only what is nutritionally needed. This shift in diet alone could reduce the amount of nitrogen reaching aquatic ecosystems by 12 percent today and by nearly 30 percent in the future, according to the study’s results. Such a change could also help reduce damaging nitrogen pollution while wastewater infrastructure catches up.
Right on time. Insects are the next food source!
Here we go again! I thought Kaiser Klaus and Yuval Noah Harari had this all planned.. “You will eat ze bugs!”
More leftist control propaganda.
Looks like they’ve pivoted from farting cows destroying the atmosphere to meat-eating humans destroying the waterways with their pee.
Get a life!
The left has gone buggy a long time ago. They and their WEF can go piss up a rope.
Amen. What a load of bilge water.
“Ain’t nobody got time fo that!”
Well, fear of carbon hasn’t worked completely to control people yet, so I guess they’re going to the next element in the periodic table. If that doesn’t work either, they’ll have to try to demonize oxygen.
The end game is the same for the eco fascists; kill the humans. Never the eco fascists, of course; just the great unwashed. At the core of it, the eco fascists hate humanity.
But that's just more protein. Peepocalypse not solved!
The translation here is you must go on a vegan diet to save the planet, but if you must, we will sell you bugs to eat on the side
Liberalism is a terrible, terrible, debilitating mental disease.
We see classic examples of of it, such as this one, every single day.
There is no co-existing with these morons.
They need to be in mental institutions.
Right now, we have the inmates running the asylum.
Where is Vlad Tepes when he’s really needed?
Talk about stark-raving lunacy, this article is a prime example, right up their with the supposed danger to human and planetary survival of cow farts.
Here we go. Climate alarmism is failing so the next boogie man is nitrogen. I hate these people.
Oh well, too bad so sad. We will continue to eat protein regardless of what the “consequences” are. Man has been eating protein for 1000’s of years and the world has survived just fine and will continue to do so for millions more years. Eating bugs is for lossers and the extremely poor- there is no need for a civilized population to resort to primitive eating habits because some socialist/communist moron discovers proteins in the waterways and thinks the world is gonna collapse as a result.
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