Conserving biodiversity is a public health investment.1
A story on NPR’s All Things Considered on May 6th, 2026 addressed the connections being explored between the nutrition of rural Nepalis and local pollinators.
To start, they tracked the diets of 776 people over the course of a year. Twice a week, researchers would visit their homes, and ask about everything people had eaten in the previous 24 hours. That allowed the researchers to figure out how much of key nutrients people were getting, and what foods those nutrients were coming from.
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The next step was tying those nutrients to pollinators. That required collecting a lot of insects. The team surveyed the farms around these villages, noting which insects visited which plants. They even looked to see how much pollen individual bugs carried on their bodies.
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With all that data, the team could start to measure the weight of the connections between each insect, each crop, and each human.1
In rural communities, pollinating bees and hoverflies are responsible for more than 20% of people’s intake of key vitamins, and more than 40% of their income, the researchers report Wednesday in Nature. Insect decline, driven by climate change and habitat loss, could result in more hardship for people, the researchers project. But they find those losses could be reversed by simple actions to support pollinators, like planting wildflowers.