https://phys.org/news/2024-11-sugar-great-planet-health.html
"Sugar addiction is on the rise. Globally, sugar intake has quadrupled over the
last 60 years, and it now makes up around 8% of all our calories.
This sounds like sugar's keeping us fed, but added sugars are actually empty
calories—they are bereft of any nutrients like vitamins or fibers. The result
is massive health costs, with sugars linked to obesity around the world. Some
estimates suggest that half the global population could be obese by 2035.
A limited 20% reduction in sugar is estimated to save US$10.3 billion (£8.1
billion) of health costs in the US alone. Yet, sugar's impacts go far beyond
just health and money.
There are also many environmental problems from growing the sugar, like habitat
and biodiversity loss and water pollution from fertilizers and mills. But
overall, sugar hasn't received a lot of attention from the scientific community
despite being the largest cultivated crop by mass on the planet.
In a recent article, we evaluated sugar's environmental impacts and explored
avenues for reducing sugar in the diet to recommended levels either through
reducing production or using the saved sugar in environmentally beneficial
ways.
By phasing out sugar, we could spare land that could be rewilded and stock up
on carbon. This is especially important in biodiverse tropical regions where
sugar production is concentrated, such as Brazil and India. But a different,
more politically palatable option might be redirecting sugar away from diets to
other environmentally-beneficial uses such as bioplastics or biofuels.
Our study shows that the biggest opportunity is using sugar to feed microbes
that make protein. Using saved sugar for this microbial protein could produce
enough plant-based, protein-rich food products to regularly feed 521 million
people. And if this replaced animal protein, it could also have huge emissions
and water benefits.
We estimate that if this protein replaced chicken, it could reduce emissions by
almost 250 million tons, and we'd see even bigger savings by replacing beef
(for reference, the UK's national fossil fuel emissions are around 300 million
tons). Given sugar has a far lower climate impact than meat, this makes a lot
of sense.
Another alternative is to use the redirected sugar to produce bioplastics,
which would replace around 20% of the total market for polyethylene, one of the
most common forms of plastic and used to produce anything from packaging to
pipes. Or to produce biofuels, producing around 198 million barrels of ethanol
for transportation.
Brazil already produces around 85% of the world's ethanol and they produce it
from sugar, but instead of having to grow more sugar for ethanol, we could
redirect the sugar from diets instead. This estimation is based on a world
where we reduce dietary sugar to the maximum in dietary recommendations (5% of
daily calories). The benefits would be even larger if we reduced sugar
consumption even further."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
