Environmental impacts of food consumption and nutrition: where are we and what is next?

Purpose

This article introduces the special issue “LCA of nutrition and food consumption” and 14 papers selected from the Ninth LCA Food Conference in San Francisco in October 2014.

Literature overview

The scientific literature in the field of food LCA has increased more than ten times during the last 15 years. Nutrition has a high contribution to the total environmental impacts of consumption. Agricultural production often dominates the impacts, but its importance depends on the type of product, its production mode, transport, and processing. Local or domestic products reduce transports, but this advantage can be lost if the impacts of the raw material production are substantially increased. Diets containing less meat tend to be more environmentally friendly. Several studies concluded that respecting the dietary recommendations for a healthy diet would reduce the overall environmental impacts in the developed countries, although this is not a universal conclusion.

Contribution of this special issue

Eight papers analyze the environmental impacts of catering and in-house food consumption and impacts on sectoral and national levels; four papers presents tools and methods to better assess the impacts of nutrition and to implement the results in practical decision-making. Finally, two contributions analyze the impacts of food waste and reduction options.

Challenges for the environmental assessment of nutrition

(i) Comprehensive assessment. Most studies only analyze climate impacts, although data, methods, and tools are readily available for a more comprehensive analysis. (ii) Assessment of sustainability. The social dimension remains the weakest pillar. (iii) Data availability is still an obstacle, but significant progress has been made in recent years. (iv) Lack of harmonization of methodologies makes comparisons among studies difficult. (v) Land use. Enhanced consideration of land use impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services is required in LCA. (vi) Defining the functional unit including nutritional aspects, food security, and health needs further work. (vii) Consumer behavior. Its impacts are still little assessed. (viii) Communication of the environmental impact assessment results to stakeholders including policy-makers and consumers needs additional efforts.

Research needs and outlook

(i) Development of holistic approaches for the assessment of sustainable food systems, (ii) assessment of land use related impacts and inclusion of ecosystem services, (iii) exploration of LCA results for policy support and decision-making, (iv) investigation of food consumption patterns in developing and emerging countries, and (v) harmonization of databases.

     

Effect of LY53857, a selective 5HT2 receptor antagonist, on 5HT-induced increases in cutaneous vascular permeability in rats

Both serotonin and histamine increased cutaneous vascular permeability in rats; however, serotonin was approximately 100-fold more potent than histamine. LY53857 (0.1 and 1.0 mg/kg, i.p.), a selective 5HT2 receptor antagonist, blocked serotonin- but not histamine-induced increases in cutaneous vascular permeability. the alpha 1 receptor antagonist, prazosin, did not significantly affect increases in vascular permeability produced by serotonin. These data extend previous studies with LY53857 by further documenting its selectivity as a 5HT2 receptor antagonist. In addition, these results with a selective 5HT2 receptor antagonist provide evidence that 5HT2 receptor activation may be the predominant mechanism associated with vascular permeability changes induced by serotonin.     

Cocaine: its use in otolaryngology

A review of 120 patients who had a discharge diagnosis of intermediate coronary syndrome showed 12 patients with documented transient ST elevation during spontaneous rest pain consistent with Prinzmetal''s angina. Coronary arteriography showed severe proximal occlusive coronary atherosclerosis in nine of the patients, and normal or minimal disease in the other three patients. In two of these three, there was documented coronary arterial spasm with reproduction of symptoms during arteriography. Although a shorter history of chest pain, presence of an old myocardial infarction and a positive finding on electrocardiogram treadmill test tended to predict the patients with severe occlusive coronary artery disease, these methods were inadequate to select candidates for arteriography. All patients responded well to nitroglycerine while in the hospital. Five of the nine patients with coronary artery disease had coronary bypass operations, with two excellent, two fair and one poor result. One of the three patients with normal findings on coronary arteriograms died with refractory ventricular arrhythmia six months after study. The other two have had good-to-moderate relief of symptoms on long-acting vasodilators and propranolol. Current concepts of the syndrome of Prinzmetal''s angina and ST elevation are reviewed. It appears that this syndrome has a wide spectrum of clinical presentations and coronary arteriographic anatomies.     

Learning visuomotor transformations for gaze-control and grasping

For reaching to and grasping of an object, visual information about the object must be transformed into motor or postural commands for the arm and hand. In this paper, we present a robot model for visually guided reaching and grasping. The model mimics two alternative processing pathways for grasping, which are also likely to coexist in the human brain. The first pathway directly uses the retinal activation to encode the target position. In the second pathway, a saccade controller makes the eyes (cameras) focus on the target, and the gaze direction is used instead as positional input. For both pathways, an arm controller transforms information on the target’s position and orientation into an arm posture suitable for grasping. For the training of the saccade controller, we suggest a novel staged learning method which does not require a teacher that provides the necessary motor commands. The arm controller uses unsupervised learning: it is based on a density model of the sensor and the motor data. Using this density, a mapping is achieved by completing a partially given sensorimotor pattern. The controller can cope with the ambiguity in having a set of redundant arm postures for a given target. The combined model of saccade and arm controller was able to fixate and grasp an elongated object with arbitrary orientation and at arbitrary position on a table in 94% of trials.     

Increased Sporulation of Vesicular-Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi by Manipulation of Nutrient Regimens

Adjustment of pot culture nutrient solutions increased root colonization and sporulation of vesicular-arbuscular mycorrhizal (VAM) fungi. Paspalum notatum Flugge and VAM fungi were grown in a sandy soil low in N and available P. Hoagland nutrient solution without P enhanced sporulation in soil and root colonization of Acaulospora longula, Scutellospora heterogama, Gigaspora margarita, and a wide range of other VAM fungi over levels produced by a tap water control or nutrient solutions containing P. However, Glomus intraradices produced significantly more spores in plant roots in the tap water control treatment. The effect of the nutrient solutions was not due solely to N nutrition, because the addition of NH₄NO₃ decreased both colonization and sporulation by G. margarita relative to levels produced by Hoagland solution without P.     

Developmental instability and inbreeding in natural bird populations exposed to different levels of habitat disturbance

As habitat disturbance and inbreeding increasingly stress natural populations, ecologists are in urgent need of simple estimators to measure their impact. It has been argued that developmental instability (DI) could be such a measure. Observed associations between DI and environmental or genetic stress, however, are largely inconsistent. We here test whether an interaction between habitat disturbance and inbreeding could, at least partly, explain these discordant patterns. We therefore studied individual estimates of fluctuating asymmetry (FA) and of inbreeding in three populations of the critically endangered Taita thrush that are differentially exposed to habitat disturbance following severe forest fragmentation. As predicted, the relationship between DI and inbreeding was pronounced under high levels of disturbance, but weak or nonexistent under less disturbed conditions. Examining this relationship with mean d², an allelic distance estimator assumed to reflect ancestral inbreeding, did not reveal any significant trend, hence suggesting that inbreeding effects in the Taita thrush are fairly recent.     

Human Intellectual Disability Genes Form Conserved Functional Modules in Drosophila

Intellectual Disability (ID) disorders, defined by an IQ below 70, are genetically and phenotypically highly heterogeneous. Identification of common molecular pathways underlying these disorders is crucial for understanding the molecular basis of cognition and for the development of therapeutic intervention strategies. To systematically establish their functional connectivity, we used transgenic RNAi to target 270 ID gene orthologs in the Drosophila eye. Assessment of neuronal function in behavioral and electrophysiological assays and multiparametric morphological analysis identified phenotypes associated with knockdown of 180 ID gene orthologs. Most of these genotype-phenotype associations were novel. For example, we uncovered 16 genes that are required for basal neurotransmission and have not previously been implicated in this process in any system or organism. ID gene orthologs with morphological eye phenotypes, in contrast to genes without phenotypes, are relatively highly expressed in the human nervous system and are enriched for neuronal functions, suggesting that eye phenotyping can distinguish different classes of ID genes. Indeed, grouping genes by Drosophila phenotype uncovered 26 connected functional modules. Novel links between ID genes successfully predicted that MYCN, PIGV and UPF3B regulate synapse development. Drosophila phenotype groups show, in addition to ID, significant phenotypic similarity also in humans, indicating that functional modules are conserved. The combined data indicate that ID disorders, despite their extreme genetic diversity, are caused by disruption of a limited number of highly connected functional modules.     

In reply to hertwich & pease, Int. J. LCA 3 (4) 180 — 181, “ISO 14042 restricts use and development of impact assessment”

Life Cycle Impact Assessment describes indicators and does not predict actual impacts. The value of an LCA is its comprehensive review of all stages of a product’s life cycle and its synoptic view of all relevant environmental issues. The current version of the 14042 draft describes the uniqueness of Life Cycle Impact Assessment approach which is distinct from other assessment techniques. The wording was designed to help users of the standard understand how and why LCIA is distinct from other assessment methods. In closing, we would like to highlight our opinion that the present document on the level of a DIS is sound, stable and practical within the ISO 14040 series of standards. We do not agree withHertwich & Pease that the present document prevents the use of LCIA. It makes a choice regarding the exclusion of weighting across categories in order to prevent misuse in deriving inappropriate claims. And for characterisation it has achieved a well founded synthesis. In addition, we strongly believe that this standard will stimulate the international scientific discussion of LCA and will substantially contribute to enhanced and more valuable applications of LCA in the future.