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Asked by anon-190583 to Maia, Lyndsay, Liam, Dionne, Brendan on 5 Nov 2018.
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Dionne Turnbull answered on 5 Nov 2018:
Great question! Mufasa from the Lion King knew the answer to this one, the ‘circle of life’! We shouldn’t ever run out of nutrients, because nature recycles them – it’s called the nutrient cycle. A good example of this is a compost bin – you throw bits of plants and waste food in there, the insects, worms, bacteria etc. break it down and turn it into nutrient-rich soil. You can then use this soil to grow healthy new plants.
The really important thing is to make sure that nature can complete its cycle – that means making sure all of our waste (plant, animal, water, sewage) is processed in the best possible way to get the nutrients back to the environment.
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Maia Elliott answered on 6 Nov 2018: last edited 6 Nov 2018 1:57 pm
Hi Abbie! I think Dionne has answered your question perfectly for the bigger picture, but I just wanted to add that we are seeing a big loss of natural nutrients in our food!
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A lot of the food we are eating doesn’t contain as many nutrients as it did 10, 20 or 50 years ago. Intensive farming (growing loads of food really quickly) is one of the causes of this. It leads to poor quality soil that doesn’t contain all the nutrients that a plant needs in order to provide nutritious food for us to eat. (Luckily there are ways to prevent the soil from running out of nutrients!)
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Another reason our diet is less nutritious is because a lot of nutrients are lost when we process food in factories. You can start out with a very nutritious food (for example, wheat) and end up with a food product that doesn’t have a lot of nutritional value, like white bread. Nowadays we eat a lot of this highly-processed foods like crisps, cakes, white bread, microwave meals, canned soup, etc. so many people end up not getting enough nutrients!
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To answer your question: if we can’t get the nutrients we need from our food we will get nutritional deficiencies (where you get sick from not having enough of a specific nutrient in your body). Everyone would have to start taking vitamin supplements to avoid getting ill. -
Brendan Marrinan answered on 12 Nov 2018:
Wow, good answers from Dionne and Maia. I’ll try my best to give you an answer Abbie.
Nutrients come from all sorts of places and it depends on what needs those nutrients. As Dionne points out a lot of the nutrients we need come from organic material (plants, animals, etc.) but the nutrients required to grow plants and that animals need come from the earth through rocks and soils. Salt is an essential nutrient for humans and this is a rock called sodium chloride.
Plants need a variety of nutrients but mainly nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous (NPK), but you also get a lot of organisms that live off very different nutrients and have different ways of extracting the nutrients required to grow.
So, if by some catastrophe we run out of the nutrients we need to survive there will still be nutrients suitable for other organisms to grow…….and we can try and eat them.
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