Dead zones are a result of farm runoffs. The majority of river pollution comes from agriculture; it's the runoff from farms, whether soot, fertilizer, or animal waste.

We need fertilizer to grow anything, whether it's food that directly feeds people or food fed to livestock, and then people eat livestock. For plants to grow successfully, farmers choose to fertilize their crops, whether through organic compost, chemical fertilizer, or animal waste. They fertilize these crops, and that's what helps them grow. It's usually a nitrogen source and phosphorus and a couple of other things that really help plants grow. Farmers liberally fertilize their fields. So the plants take up a lot of this nitrogen from the fertilizer. Some fertilizer is either off-gas into nitrous oxide or washed away into streams and rivers.

However, when the nutrients runoff into streams and rivers, they will also help algae grow. The algae consume these nutrients and multiply into large algae blooms requiring more oxygen. Thus robbing the water of oxygen and creating what is called hypoxia. The lack of oxygen in the water actually can kill fish. This is the reason we find dead fish in rivers.

Take the Gulf of Mexico as an example. All the farms' runoff gets into the Mississippi River and then empties out into the Gulf of Mexico. Every year there's this huge dead zone in the ocean where marine life can't swim in without having problems with breathing.

So basically, when you grow food to feed an animal and then consume the animal, you're losing many efficiencies. There's a huge energy conversion loss in that extra step compared to just growing food directly for human consumption. For example, take a cow for every 100 grams of protein that you grow, whether it's corn or soy, or sorghum, and you feed that protein to that cow you only get about four grams of protein back out. That's like a huge waste of resources, and you have to fertilize that cattle feed. You know you have to fertilize those crops. Over half the corn we grow Is to feed livestock. So that's a huge amount of fertilizer to get a minimal amount of nutrients back out.

So if you want to reduce your nutrient footprint, you're better off going to plant-based foods to feed people directly.

Listen to the full interview on The Environmental Impact of Food Choices: plantbaseddfwpodcast.com/112.

Related videos:
Dead zones: https://youtu.be/H5SaskJ7m10
Overfishing: https://youtu.be/6NW7uOFGbqg
Deforestation: https://youtu.be/cFyOxJ_DK1E

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Thanks for watching the video: Dead Zones & Nutrients | Environmental Impact of Food Choices | Lifestyle Medicine Podcast Ep.112