Climate change does not care if you think it’s real. It’s going to reshape the world you live in regardless, and as I’ve reported before, it already is, fueling stronger, more erratic weather and even altering bird migration patterns. Now, as reported by The Washington Post, it’s making the food on your plate less nutritious.

It’s not as dramatic an effect as a hurricane or sea level rise that worsens flooding. It’s a slow, steady erosion of the stuff that makes your food worth eating. The Post’s report, which is based on research published in Global Change Biology, says that scientists have found that rising carbon dioxide levels are reducing nutrients in crops like wheat, rice, and beans.

Since the late 1980s, essential elements like protein, iron, and zinc have dropped by about 3.2 percent across dozens of staple crops. Sounds small, but when billions of people already live on the edge of malnutrition, a few percentage points can throw entire populations into crisis, as the dietary staples they rely on for nutrition are inherently less nutritious, and are becoming increasingly less so as the effects of climate change ramp up.

Plants Are Bigger Now, But That’s Not Necessarily a Good Thing

Plants use CO2 to grow, so more carbon in the atmosphere makes them bigger and faster-growing. Sounds great, but that growth comes with cash: the nutrients don’t increase alongside plant growth. Iron and zinc are absorbed from the soil, and they are effectively being diluted as plants bulk up on sugars that feed on carbon.

Growing crops is more efficient than ever, but the crops themselves are less useful to us. They’ll fill your bellies and taste more or less the same, sure, but they won’t give you the things you need to become and remain healthy.

This means that in our near future, hundreds of millions of people could face worsening deficiencies in zinc and iron, with rates of anemia climbing, especially among women and children. In wealthier countries like the United States, this could all be offset with supplements or shifts in diet toward foods that provide the necessary nutrients, though none of that would be necessary if we just tackled the issue of climate change and ensured it didn’t zap our crops of the nutrients we need.

The people living in poorer regions of the world, who rely on these crops as their precious sources of vital nutrients, won’t have access to a multibillion-dollar supplement industry.