Nutrition and Agriculture Overview

Malnutrition

• Malnutrition is characterized by not getting enough to eat, chronic hunger, and poor nutrition.
• It is not the result of a healthy diet and is not a lack of motivation to eat.

Overnutrition

• Overnutrition occurs when food energy intake surpasses energy use, leading to excess body fat.
• This also results in lower life expectancy and increased susceptibility to diseases.
• It leads to lower productivity and overall quality of life.

Agriculture Types

• Industrialized Agriculture: This method aims to increase crop yield per unit of land. It heavily relies on large equipment, significant financial investment, fossil fuels, water, fertilizers, and pesticides to produce single crops (monocultures).

• Traditional Agriculture: This method isn't specifically described in the provided text.

Genetic Engineering

• Genetic engineering alters an organism's genetic material.
• It can add, delete, or change segments of DNA to create desirable traits or remove undesirable ones.
• Genetic engineering can be used to create new crop varieties through gene splicing to accelerate selective breeding.

Food Production Energy

• Industrialized food production requires large inputs of energy for machinery, irrigation, synthetic pesticides, fertilizers, and transport.

Environmental Effects of Food Production

• Food production negatively impacts biodiversity by increasing food waste, degrading grasslands, forests, and wetlands, and replacing wild crop strains with monocultures.
• Killing wild predators for livestock protection is also a harmful impact.

Soil Degradation

• Salinization is a soil degradation process where irrigation water in dry climates gradually accumulates salts in the topsoil.

Irrigation

• Excessive irrigation can lead to groundwater depletion, waterlogging, and depletion of plant nutrients in the topsoil.

GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms)

• GMOs are genetically engineered foods.
• Critics fear unknown long term consequences for human health and ecosystems from the widespread use of genetically modified organisms.
• GMOs can lead to unintended ecological and genetic effects.
• Genes from GM crops may spread to non-modified species, leading to the reduction in biodiversity.

Water Resource Issues

• Poor water management leads to falling water tables, shrinking rivers, and disappearing wetlands.

Freshwater Uses

• The three major global uses of freshwater are manufacturing, irrigation, and drinking/domestic use.