One of the problems I've noticed about trying to include healthier foods in the diet is that the alternatives can end up being environmentally harmful when production is scaled up. An example is almond milk as a dairy alternative. Almond milk is nutritious, an excellent source of vitamin E, and it is easy to make a milk out of it. In fact, people made almond milk back in medieval times. But almond trees need a lot of water. A lot.
In a warming world with changing rainfall patterns, food supplies are already threatened. We need to be developing climate-tolerant agriculture. In the article "Carob: A Sustainable Opportunity for Metabolic Health," Gioxari and colleagues introduce carob pods as a climate-resistant source of sweeteners, and possibly other food products. Historically, carob has been part of the traditional Mediterranean diet. But apparently, its current main worldwide use is as animal feed. I remember carob, though, as an alternative to chocolate, and also as a sweetener in "health foods" in the United States going back to the 1970s. I remember it as sweet but not too sweet.
Key points include:
- Because carob is a fruit, in addition to sugars (mostly sucrose), carob is high in fibers and antioxidant polyphenols. It is a bean-like fruit, but still a fruit! Insoluble fiber can make up 40% of the carob pod.
- The seeds in the pods are very high in protein, but they are so far not used much for human food production. Flour made from the seed germ is gluten-free, so it can be used for gluten-free baking. It also has mono-unsaturated fatty acids, which are considered to be "heart healthy."
- Carob trees are likely to be resilient to warming temperatures. They require warm temperatures (16 to 36 °C) for more than half of the hours per year. This describes regions in the US as well as Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions that are already being challenged by warming temperatures.
- Carob trees are resistant to drought and salinity. This is attractive because in regions, such as the coastal Southern and Mid-Atlantic region of the US, where sea levels are rising while the land is sinking, agriculture is threatened by increasing salt in the water.