10 Facts About Chlorella

Chlorella is a genus of about thirteen species of single-celled green algae belonging to the division Chlorophyta.

When first harvested, Chlorella was suggested as an inexpensive protein supplement to the human diet.

Chlorella seemed like a viable option because of the technological advances in agriculture at the time and the widespread acclaim it got from experts and scientists who studied it.

Since the growing world food problem of the 1940s was solved by better crop efficiency and other advances in traditional agriculture, Chlorella has not seen the kind of public and scientific interest that it had in the 1940s.

Chlorella has only a niche market for companies promoting it as a dietary supplement.

Experimental research was carried out in laboratories, rather than in the field, andscientists discovered that Chlorella would be much more difficult to produce than previously thought.

Also, for the Chlorella to be as productive as the world would require, it would have to be grown in carbonated water, which would have added millions to the production cost.

Costs have remained high, and Chlorella has for the most part been sold as a health food, for cosmetics, or as animal feed.

Chlorella, too, was found by scientists in the 1960s to be impossible for humans and other animals to digest in its natural state due to the tough cell walls encapsulating the nutrients, which presented further problems for its use in American food production.

In 1965, the Russian CELSS experiment BIOS-3 determined that 8 m of exposed Chlorella could remove carbon dioxide and replace oxygen within the sealed environment for a single human.