Peanut butter can contribute to future pandemics through reforestation, a new study recently found. It has also extended such understanding to deforestation linked to the agricultural production of goods like palm oil, for one.
An INVERSE report described how vital forests are. It said their fruits and plants are feeding expansive ecosystems, successively supporting global biodiversity. Forests, as stated in the article, churn out the oxygen that fills humans' lungs, not to mention, are even good for mental wellbeing.
In recent years, many have become keenly aware of the role forests are playing in controlling animal diseases that could be transferred to humans.
This present pandemic, the COVID-19 crisis, made this point noticeable and provoked scientists to redouble initiatives to understand how disease outbreaks can link back to deforestation.
More so, researchers have also suggested forests, zoonotic diseases, and health exist in a "feedback loop" with terrible consequences.
This is the first study to investigate the cause-and-effect association between changes in forest cover and succeeding outbreaks on a worldwide scale.
Link Between Peanut Butter and Disease Outbreaks
Palm oil is present in approximately 50 percent of packaged household goods that range from peanut butter to lipstick. Now, the study authors have associated its harvesting outbreaks that could transmit to humans.
Possibly counterintuitively, the research suggests too that reforestation, or a rise in forest cover, may accelerate disease outbreaks, too.
According to Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Serge Morand, also the study's lead author, it remains unknown the exact mechanisms at play, although the study authors hypothesized that plantations, like palm oil, are developing at the expense of natural wooded sites and reforestation is primarily "monospecific forest made at the expense of grasslands."
Possible Acceleration of Disease Outbreaks from Reforestation
In the case of this particular research, the forest does not denote the idyllic, hundreds-of-years-old woodland that usually comes to mind.
Instead, "forest" is following a more particular definition which is, land that is spanning more than 0.5 hectares with trees.
As indicated in the study, "Outbreaks of vector-borne and zoonotic diseases are associated with changes in forest cover and oil palm expansion at global scale," published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science, planting an acre of monoculture crop, like orchard fruit trees, is technically regarded as forest growth, although monocultures are unsustainable and eventually decrease biodiversity.
This new research shows how this kind of commercialized reforestation, like deforestation, is a contributor to disease outbreaks.
Both land-use changes, Morand explained, are characterized by loss of biodiversity, and these simplified habitats are favoring animal reservoirs and vectors of illnesses.
Reforestation Possibly Increases Biodiversity Loss
In their study, the authors wrote reforestation can increase biodiversity loss when the expansion of forest is made at the expense of savannas, grasslands, and open-canopy woodlands.
Surprisingly, reforestation is associated most strongly with disease outbreaks in places with more grassland and less tropical climates, including the United States and Europe.
Meanwhile, deforestation, because of palm oil plantations and some types of agricultural reforestation, makes the spread of zoonotic diseases, as explained in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention site, more possible as it eliminates the natural habitats of animals which include bats that are novel diseases carriers.
Based on their study's finding, the researchers wrote, it shows that palm oil plantations may constitute a threat as well to worldwide health by favoring zoonotic and vector-borne illnesses.
Related information about the benefits of palm oil is shown on a2ZTube Nutrition's YouTube video below:
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