health

“My
painful
heavy
legs are
healed!”

Cheryl, Housekeeper

Food Loss

Israeli study shows global food
waste would be less with plants.

A

Heal leg symptoms like:

- Restless Legs

- Swelling

- Ulcers

- Bulging Veins

- Discoloration

- Itching

This minimally invasive, out-patient procedure can
heal your legs before they get worse. Treatment is
covered by most insurances, including Medicare.

Free Leg Exams

To book, call before Thursday, June 7th

24 8-266-8 822

w w w.a l lu revei ncente r.com

Beverly Hills/ Birmingham
32804 Pierce St.
Beverly Hills, MI 48025

50

May 31 • 2018

jn

:HVW%ORRPÀHOG
6900 Orchard Lake Road, Ste 215
:HVW%ORRPÀHOG0,

bout a third of the food pro-
duced for human consump-
tion is estimated to be lost
or wasted globally. But the biggest
waste, which is not included in that
estimate, may be through dietary
choices that result in the squander-
ing of environmental resources.
In a study published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences (PNAS), researchers at
the Weizmann Institute of Science
in Rehovot, Israel, and their col-
leagues have now found a novel way
to define and quantify this second
type of wastage. The scientists have
called it “opportunity food loss,” a
term inspired by the “opportunity
cost” concept in economics, which
refers to the cost of choosing a
particular alternative over better
options.
Opportunity food loss stems from
using agricultural land to produce
animal-based food instead of nutri-
tionally comparable plant-based
alternatives. The researchers report
that in the United States alone,
avoiding opportunity food loss —
that is, replacing all animal-based
items with edible crops for human
consumption — would add enough
food to feed 350 million additional
people, or more than the total U.S.
population, with the same land
resources.
“Our analysis has shown that
favoring a plant-based diet can
potentially yield more food than
eliminating all the convention-
ally defined causes of food loss,”
says lead author Dr. Alon Shepon,
who works in the lab of Prof. Ron
Milo in the Department of Plant
and Environmental Sciences. The
Weizmann researchers collabo-
rated with Prof. Gidon Eshel of Bard

College in New York and Dr. Elad
Noor of ETZ Zürich, Switzerland.
The scientists compared the
resources needed to produce five
major categories of animal-based
food — beef, pork, dairy, poultry and
eggs — with the resources required
to grow edible crops of similar
nutritional value in terms of protein,
calories and micronutrients. They
found that plant-based replace-
ments could produce 2- to 20-fold
more protein per acre.
The most dramatic results were
obtained for beef. The researchers
compared it with a mix of crops —
soya, potatoes, cane sugar, peanuts,
and garlic — that deliver a similar
nutritional profile when taken
together in the right proportions.
The land area that could produce
100 grams of protein from these
crops would yield only 4 grams of
edible protein from beef. In other
words, using agricultural land for
producing beef instead of replace-
ment crops results in an opportunity
food loss of 96 grams — that is, a
loss of 96 percent — per unit of land.
This means that the potential gain
from diverting agricultural land
from beef to plant-based foods for
human consumption would be enor-
mous.
The estimated losses from fail-
ing to replace other animal-based
foods with nutritionally similar
plant-based crops were also huge:
90 percent for pork, 75 percent for
dairy, 50 percent for poultry, and 40
percent for eggs — higher than all
conventional food losses combined.
“Opportunity food loss must be
taken into account if we want to
make dietary choices enhancing
global food security,” Milo says. •