The Seventh International Symposium on Chiral Symmetry in Hadrons and Nuclei

In this talk, I discuss the generation of carbon as a function of the parameters of QCD+QED. First, in the framework of chiral effective field theory, the quark mass dependence of the nuclear forces and the constraints on possible quark mass variations from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis are discussed. Second, using nuclear lattice simulations, I investigate the fine-tuning of the fundamental parameters of QED+QCD that is consistent with the bounds on carbon production through the triple-alpha process in stars.