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Fat People Cause Global Warming, Higher Food Prices
Stating the obvious: "Two scientists write that obese people are disproportionately responsible for high food prices and greenhouse gas emissions because they consume 18% more food energy due to their greater body mass -- and require increased quantities of fuel to transport themselves and the food they eat. 'Promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food,' write the authors, Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts of the evocatively named London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine."
Weighing more makes us harder for the aliens to suck out of our cars, the reserves mean we'll last longer in the coming famine years, and if any skinny little vegans give us any lip, all we gotta do is sit on 'em to quash the noise...
Seriously, extreme obesity is a darwin rule in action, usually - nobody wants to breed with us, and heart disease/stroke usually kill us "early" - rather like gay marriage, if you don't like 'em, don't join 'em, otherwise, back off: It's hard enough living in a world that wasn't built for us without having some smug, self-righteous ass-hat making comments because, while normal, we don't fit average... only made the worse when it's people who want their particular outside-of-average needs respected who fail the tolerance test...
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
How'd you get to reply so fast?
Although it was quite funny, it's a straw man and the study itself has some serious flaws. Some people really do have serious glandular problems or diseases causing obesity. My cousin was a beautiful young woman until she developed lupus... she went from somewhere around 120 pounds to, well, I'm not going to speculate. I'm not sure what exactly caused the obesity, it could have been anything from hormonal changes to medications she had to take, but I know her house isn't exactly filled with twinkies. I feel terrible walking around with her in public. Not because I'm embarrassed to be with an obese woman, but because I get so upset at the looks people give us. People look at her like she just killed and ate their favorite pet, then they look at me with a slightly different look of disgust.
In addition, I feel that while this may be accurate, we'd be pushing the environmentalism too far to cite it as a reason for people to lose weight. Even if it would save some energy, fuel, and materials, all of the savings are overshadowed by the significant social and medical advantages. If we could waste just a little more food and fuel to ensure a longer life expectancy, we would.
Of course, this study isn't really very good. While the global demand for food would likely drop, you'd have a significant jump in energy and oil prices. All of the formerly obese Americans, spending hundreds less on food every month, would be ready to hit the beaches, ski slopes, etc. with their extra money and less embarrassing bodies.
Finally, BMI is a shoddy system that I'm sick of seeing. BMI was developed at a time when leeching was an accepted medical practice, and hasn't changed significantly since then. BMI can not differentiate between lean mass and lard. This means that a society of body builders would have the same average BMI as a society of, well, lazy Americans.
Getting back to serious topics, it's very important to note that global food shortages (and corresponding rises in prices) are not caused by increased demand. They're caused by reduced supply, which has been, in part, caused by food aid programs. When people become dependent on food aid programs, a small series of events can raise food prices enough that food aid programs can't afford to send food. You can imagine how well this works out for impoverished areas that have lost their indigenous food production capability.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
That and they increase the price of porn due to lower supply of hot gals to enlist in the industry.
Way I see it, things even out pretty nicely: Fat people are disproportionately unlikely to get laid, and therefore don't contribute to overpopulation.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Does this mean I'm finally in a class that the government is going to throw money at?
Oh, and I plan to live 20% fewer years than average, so it's really a 2% gain for the planet.
-Peter
No, I didn't read the article. But if that applies to taller people too, I'm happy for being just 1.66m (5'5" for americans) tall!
So say we all
Seems logical that obese people are disproportionately using up some resources. In the same way that professional racers are disproportionately using up carbon based fuels. I have seen really fat person it, and as a fatty myself, some scare me. But back to the story, seems like a logical corolation to me, very few obese people are fat and not eating much food.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Corn? Yes, Corn!
Michael Pollan will convince you, that this is no accident. You are eating nothing but corn - with a four-carbon configuration that is destroying your healt and nutrition, as it wrecks ecosystems in its cultivation.
Thanks, Cargill! Thanks, Mosanto! If Chevron-Texaco is Emperor Palpatine, these two are Darth Vader and Tarkin.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Why does everyone always pick on the fat kid?
I'm not all pro-obesity or anything, but it's just silly to think that ALL obese people eat more than ALL average-weight people.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
There will always be skinny guys who like to fuck fat chicks, fat guys who are rich enough that skinny girls will fuck them, and fat guys who eventually give up on their dreams of banging supermodels and settle for a fat chick.
I am a fat man. I weight 370 pounds. (However, I am 6" 6' tall, but I'm still fat.) Now, this article does state that there are other factors. It names the skinny guy with the high metabolism on the 100 mile bike ride, but there is one factor (among many) that it doesn't consider. I live in a small apartment and drive a Honda Civic that gets 25MPG or better, even around town. (It gets 33 - 35MPG on the highway. All these fuel consumption figures are real measured figures that I've taken.) Lets look at my overall carbon output compared to the little 90 pound skinny woman driving her Chevy Suburban aggressively on her way home to her massive suburban McMansion, while talking on her cell phone no less. What's her carbon impact versus mine? How much more oil does it take to propel her massive SUV, especially when she's stomping on the gas with that big V8, then it does to propel my little 4 cylinder Civic? How much more oil does it take to heat and cool her massive house than my little apartment? I'd bet that we come out about the same, or that she might even end up producing more carbon than I do. There are so many factors that this article doesn't consider. All it really seems to do is give people an escape goat for global warming. Yes its all OK now, we can blame it on the fat people!
Well, first, global warming was a scientific exploration of the relationship between climate and weather via the development of some butt ugly FORTRAN code. Then, it was something everyone had to be aware, then it became an orthodoxy. Now all of a sudden, fat people are worse because of global warming, and of course, its only a matter of time until movie makers, lawyers, or any other profession is under assault in some way, because of global warming. Just imagine how many union jobs, hanging on because cost was the driver, will be packed up and shipped to a non-CO2 country, because all of a sudden, its not just about cost, its about saving the planet...
This is my sig.
> I've uploaded a PDF of the email I received:
> http://billsey-christian.net/tmp/Bakken.pdf
>
Wow, guess mother earth must have cut them a deal.
But consider the Beverly Hill Billies, all it took for them was a single bullet.
The point should be clear. The cost of producing a barrel of oil is a man made amount. Much like the cost of producing any product. Thats is why technology created in the US often goes into production in another country with cheaper labor.
On a more interesting note, it turns out the the price of High Fructose Corn Syrup is going up and as it does food producers are looking for sweetener alternatives to use. Hinze for example is working on producing a sweeter tomato (without genetic engineering but by natural means) to replace the HFCS in ketchup
Here's the thing:
HFCS has been proven to raise triglycerides by as much as 1/3. I myself have lost 30 lbs by nothing more than removing it from my diet. So its really not good for the human body.
The reasons food manufactures use it, besides it having been a cheap sweetener is that it suppresses the sensors that tell you, you are full, causing you to eat more which the food manufactures like, as they sell more food that way.
The reason HFCS is going up in price is because corn is becoming very popular in the production of alternative fuels. This of course includes HFCS.
Oddly enough this fuel interest in corn is causing less corn to be used in feeding 3 world countries. Contributing to world hungar.
But overall it seems its better to use less pollutant fuels and for people to eat better by not eating HFCS contaminated foods.
Also as the price of petroleum based fuel goes up, the more financially likely that alternative fuels will be used more. And as the use of such alternative fuels increases the cost or price of it will likely go down due mass large scale production.
And to think, there was a time when the US government paid farmers to NOT grow crops in order to keep a cost to produce and sale price in check.
Just think, all those farmers that went out of business could go back in and grow corn.
As a final note: potash stocks (companies that mine it see: POT on the stock exchange) - are good investments
Thanks. That makes me feel a lot better.
Regards,
Fat people
"It's a glandular problem!" Yeah, sure
But as a "large" person, bite my flabby ass.
not speaking for every fatass. But since I started working nights 10 years ago i've gained 150lbs.
Funny thing is I'm still as active and eat basically the same amount that I always have.
I've been big since puberty set in.
In HS i was 5'9" and weighed 240lbs. As i was playing football at the time I don't think it was a lack of exercise. I don't know what my calorie intake was at the time but it couldn't have been that much since we weren't very well off but my dad made enough to keep us off welfare. Never any huge amount of junk food or fatty food. Mostly carbs though. beans, rice, pasta and chicken.
In my 20's i reached my present height of 6ft. I was working construction and living in Brooklyn. I ate and drank pretty much whatever I wanted then but never got above 190.
FF to my 40's and 10 years of night work, sleep apnea and other nonsense I weigh 340. I eat maybe 2 times a day. I don't really eat sweets. My diet is mostly the same it was when I was a kid though I drink a lot more.
spent about 3 months writing down my food intake for the doctor I'm working with.
He didn't see anything abnormal. I average about 1900 calories a day.
I should be losing weight but I'm not. Possibilities include sleep deprivation, thyroid problem or diabetes (which i still test negative for even though both parents have adult onset)
Sure there are people that don't control what they eat, don't exercise and are seriously fat in the way you describe.
But I think there a lot of folks that due to different circumstances just can't maintain weight the way you or other people think they should.
FWIW, my family of 6 has a food budget of 540 a month not including 160 budgeted for eating out. this is pretty low for our area. most people i know that make the same amount of money as i do spend twice as much with less people in the house.
I don't have any figures about the amount of fuel we use. We have to have a minivan for all of us to go somewhere in one vehicle. And my personal vehicle is no gas miser. But I may only drive it 3000 miles a year. The minivan we've averaged about 9000mi/year since we bought it.
Until hydrogen powered cars become more widespread though we won't be buying any new vehicles.
I'm not wild about hybrids because i don't think batteries are any better for the environment than burning fuel.
Converting Gas engines to run hydrogen I think is the best bet.
I don't think our transportation impact is that great since we aren't running kids back and forth to activities every night and we have always made an effort to consolidate trips.
and last but not least. I view people that hold stock with BMI calculations with the same derision as those that in the past believed in phrenology.
Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, and Charo, twice...
Ah the new religion,
Now combining the sudo sceince of global warming with a little good old fashion scapegoating.
Speaking as a 5'8" guy weighing in at around 135 pounds, this sounds alful facist to me. Nobody would call me fat but replace global warmin with economic struggles and fat people with jew and our intelectual elite sound pretty much like Hitler did in the the late 1920s.
Can we get back to real science before we completely destroy the world pretty please?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The obese only consume more until they are in their mid 50's. After their deaths the thin and healthy live longer lives but and consume more than fat people over their lifespan.
I used to condemn fat people for their over use of pretty much everything. Now I relish crowds of fat people, especially people my age, as I know their early deaths will result in fewer people fighting for scarce resources in the future!
Eat up!
(Ok, I know it may be possible that what we are really talking about here is utilization rates of resources, and not total usage per person, but this is just a Slashdot post, give me a break!)
Fat people are, however, much easier to control. No fat guy ever started, and won, a revolution. They are far too slow and lazy -- too slow to dodge a bullet and too large a target. And, talking of targets, they are also a great target market, you can sell them all sorts of things that people of normal mass will never need.
Fat people are patriots. Fat people won't ever be terrorists.
I kid, I kid...well, sort of... there is some truth there...
And another thing, the price of clothes and many other things is disproportionate. "S" costs the same as "XXL" -- and that's just a tax on the rest of us.
Stop providing medicine, let supply and demand, starvation cycles, plagues, etc. all have their effects and you'll quickly take care of the over burdening issues. A generation or two and we'll be back to levels the planet can support far better.
Addressing obese people will maybe effect, what, 20% of consumption?
The global human population was 2 billion a century ago. It passed 6,666,666,666 a week or so ago. Cutting down 20% of consumption is going to buy what, a decade? If we're lucky.
We can keep chasing cutesy ideas like blaming fat people, blaming the 15% who use 85%, blaming biofuels and all the rest of it. It doesn't change the fact that no amount of efficiency increases can keep pace with the crazy level at which humanity's going around breeding and its ability to ensure large numbers make it to a breeding age.
All we're achieving is saving 5 million people from suffering this generation so they can have 20 million kids that suffer next generation. Tragic as it is, which is better to let suffer? The five or the twenty?
We've really got three choices in the scheme of things:
Stop distorting natural die off cycles.
Readjust our birthrate to match the reality we live under.
Keep trying to make things more and more efficient, lamenting how awful things are that [group X] isn't playing fair, until we physically can't keep up and the die offs happen anyway.
They're not pleasant solutions but they're also the only realistic ones when no amount of efficiency increases can keep pace with a population that doubles every two or three generations.
How do you get from:
Fat People Contribute More Human-Made CO2 Emissions Than Skinny People
to
Fat People Cause Global Warming
???
So Calista Flockhart was in fact just caring for the environment? Who knew.
Full Tilt
As you may have noticed, I can't detect spelling errors very well, my apologies.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Yeah, but think about all the resources they're not:
- Not buying new clothing every year to stay in fashion?
- Not hotrodding on a Jet Ski at the lake?
- Taking up and paying for two seats on the plane but only getting one skimpy rubbery meal?
- Keeping the heat at 60 in the winter?
- Not burning fuel to go to the movies because HBO is so much more comfortable?
- Not flying in grapes from Chile to feed a winter-time vegetarian ethos when fried wheat do just fine?
Hey, I'm not advocating it, but let's have a full accounting here. Oh, right, that's really hard and there's less opportunity to be priggish. Sort of like me not reading TFA.My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
A skinny person with a really high metabolism
There's current thinking that different varieties of gut bacteria play a huge role here. Apparently some types can metabolize more types of food than others. The trick is the higher caloric content generated doesn't properly feed back into the hunger satiety mechanism, so the average person with highly efficient bacteria will tend to gain weight.
So, either fill up skinny people with more efficient bacteria and figure out how to deal with the hunger problem, or fill up fat people with the less efficient bacteria, but have to produce more food. Hey, there's a novel approach for anti-global-warming funding!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
... made a troll scientific report and people actually dignify it by responding as if it would deserve the publicity.
"How to spot and deal a troll" should be a first grade class.
It's funny because there is some truth in it - regarding the root cause behind *all* of the environmental issues facing humans. IMO, a comment by "Walter" @ the LA Times page said it pretty succinctly:
Cute notion but as off the mark as every other cause...the only issue that is never seriously addressed is the only issue that really needs to be; this planet is severely over-populated. Every 'serious global problem' is simply a result of this fundamental fact. Good luck reconciling ever increasing population with rapidly dwindling resources. Be fruitful, dummy...multiply.
Posted by: Walter | May 17, 2008 at 10:06 AM
Disclaimer: I'm not "Walter", and I don't even play him on teh internets.
It gets said even better in Ishmael, a novel by Daniel Quinn. Great book.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
Why we we have to hate. Its time to leave fat people alone. They are not the evil spawn of Satan. Go find some other class of people to hate like say Preppies.
Rob Miracle http://www.robmiracle.com
"Its all a bunch of tree hugging hippie crap."
So someone sweating on a bike uses less food energy than a couch potato? Bad science methinks.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7335188.stm
"Householders chuck out 6.7m tonnes of unwanted food every year at a cost to us of £8bn. That's the equivalent of chucking out one bag of food for every three that we buy."
this is just plain wrong, it's usually WHAT they eat not how much, and it's also about exercise. all this proves is that some people will find a way to link anything to global warming in order to try get grant money.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
..so let's kill of a few billions instead of bickering over some grams. That'll save the earth instead, but only if we go about it in a "green" way.
..oh wait, it's already happening. Nothing to see here then, carry on.
My proposal is "death by resource starvation".
Sounds like a Bush campaign.
... what about all the trim, muscular, athletic people? Think about it. If some guy runs, bikes, or goes to the gym a hour per day and lifts weights, isn't he eating more food, burning a lot more calories, and exhaling a lot more CO2 than a lazy s.o.b. sitting on his couch in a semi-vegetative state?
When you see a really obese person, don't think of them as 'fat'. Think of them as mobile carbon sequestration units.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
All those Doritos and Coke over keyboard in parents' basement really add up to the average ./-er's waistline.
are vegan females.
Males don't deserve to live because any self respecting teenage male can consume his weight in food every day. Meat eating teenage males eat 100% more food than vegan females. With the miracles of modern science, the vegan females don't even need males for reproduction.
The study assumes that all people are equally worthy of consuming food. The retards who did the study for instance, clearly are of very little benefit to society; and yet they are eating at least as much food as people who do good in this world.
It is also interesting that the study completely ignores flatulence. While some might guess that we of the wider persuasion give off more green house gasses, my experience suggests that the skinny little imps with high metabolisms are far more guilty in this regard.
Poverty is one of the major contributers to global warming, as well as obesity.
Poor people:
Cannot afford to maintain their vehicles as often as they should, said vehicles therefore put out more pollutants and consume more gas.
Tend to get whatever the cheapest food on the market is. Have you ever read the nutritional data on most prepared foods, meal kits, or staples such as ramen noodles? These food "products" are incredibly high in starches, high fructose corn syrup (believed by many to be linked to both obesity and diabetes), fats, and salt.
Can't afford to buy Dom Perignon like so many rich skinny people would like them to, opting instead for the cheapest possible booze, such as beer, which comes with a massive caloric load.
And of course, the poorer families are, the more often parents hold two or more jobs, which of course leads again to commuting in inefficient cars with higher pollutant outputs, AND additional stress which also causes them to put on more weight.
Methinks those scientists ought to go outside into the real world for a change, instead of commiting hate crimes.
Yes, I said hate crimes. Just as you cannot change your sexual preferences or color to suit others, you cannot change your endocrine systems to do so either (there are actual medical conditions which can lead to obesity, so you can't just chalk it up to greed being the chief cause).
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Sorry but I can't seem to get excited about this scoop. It borders on pettiness. Who's next? ugly people, deformed, sick, weird, nerds?
I don't question the report or it's accuracy. It's probably right. I just did't expect it to make the news at Slashdot. Especially here.
BTW I am about normal weight for my age and size.
Fat People Cause Global Warming, Higher Food Prices
If you're going to go that route, how about contributing to
Saying "Cause" gives everyone the impression that it's the sole (or leading) factor, which is just stupid.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I would like to know how much energy they wasted on this non-sense research, instead of doing something productive, or at least save that energy for the sake of the planet!
Maybe we should prohibit fireworks, car races, energy-expensive events...
Besides we consume more, i don't think walking my way to ork would produce 18% more emannations. And in the case they somehow manage to do it, 18% from zero is... still zero.
xK.
Their study had to be that of super morbidly obese people. Quite possibly the by people who can't even fit into cars and/or live with a relative or they'd otherwise die of starvation after a few months. I am one of those Jared story people. No, I didn't start eating Subway. I just stared getting away from soda, fast food, etc. and started making my own stuff or choose tea/water over soda. Oh and we can't forget about good ole exercise. ANYWAY, in the last few years I have lost 120LBS and in about 20-30 more LBS I'll be at my height weight ratio of 150-160LBS. Now for my point: At 300LBS I was still getting the same gas mileage in my truck(use the trip meter for tanks of gas to track usage). My trip meter always reads around 290-310mi per tank. Even at 180LBS I am still getting those same readings. My food bill has not changed. Infact it has gone down quite a bit because I am not buying 2-liter sodas at 1.80$, I am getting 1/Gal water jugs for 59 and since there are about 4-liters/Gal, they last twice as long. I wont keep on about how BS this research is. I challenge any of you HUSKY fellows to loose some weight and call BS on this article. I did and I call BS!
"That's right...I said it."
We can use this information to quarantine fat people and force them to starve themselves. For everyone's good.
My response to fat jokes? "They see me rollin', they hatin'."
Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the juice.
It's truly frightening that you could write five paragraphs and still overlook the reason for the recent food shortages.
1. don't ask people if they're fat
2. if you're fat, don't tell anybody
3. ?
4. Solution!
Fatties are likely helping to keep global warming and food prices DOWN.. No energy to breed.
The planets population has ballooned from 1 billion a couple of hundred years ago, to 2 billion 70 years ago. From then it's jumped to 3 billion in the 60's, 4 billion in '74, 5 billion in '88, and 6 billion in 2000.
It's expected to reach 9 billion by 2050; so in the next 40 years we need to find more space to grow crops/cattle to feed 50% more people than we do now.
All this while populations take up more space with housing, and land mass decreases as tides rise. Hopefully everyone here likes fish?
About time things were made a bit tougher for people wanting to start families? With the number of badly treat kids in the world, we could do with a few less anyway. Being an unmarried male not interested in having kids, I get a bit sick of funding people going on maternity leave, or paying tax towards benefits for people to bring up their tribes of offspring.
Can we not stop picking on fatties, and instead direct scorn to those proud they've figured out intercourse?
In most cases, obesity results from emotional distress. People who are poorly adjusted sometimes turn to food as a coping mechanism. Almost all obese people use food to meet their emotional needs in this way.
If we want to end obesity, we need to educate parents about the link between associating food with nurturing behavior and obesity. This way people will learn to cope with their stress in healthier ways, such as feigning illness, attempting suicide or picking fights to get attention.
because most fat people live in ammerica we should wipe that country off the map.
I burn around 25% more than the average person my size and weight due to exercise (averaging 2600 calories/day). Should I stop exercising to save the world? Maybe I should switch to a sedentary lifestyle and the ensuing shortened lifespan to help rid the world of pesky humans faster. The authors of this study are trying to sensationalize this, when they really should have just pointed out the issues with a poor BMI and the associated higher medical costs.
I don't know who invented BMI but math wasn't his best subject. Humans are three dimensional so there should be a power of three in the BMI equation somewhere. There isn't, what we have is a quadric curve where the middle bit happens to fit middle size people.
If you go outside the "medium" range it all falls apart, tall people come out as obese and short people come out as underweight.
We need to scrap it an try again.
No sig today...
I am not the sort who is anywhere near overweight, but "news" like this makes me so fucking angry it's not even funny. As if obese people wasting more energy is a world-endagering crisis. Seriously, fuck people like this who try to pin the world's problems on bullshit like this.
Industrialization and capitalism in general are horrific, world-destroying facets of our world. Remove all overweight people from the planet, and we're still a fucked up society doomed to no end.
Have I had my break tonight? I think not.
The majority of Chinese and Indians got along fine without cars or cell phones or electricity or enough food to be above the starvation level for thousands of years. Now they're all changing their ways and creating enormous demand for energy and food.
If the Chinese, Indians, and other countries such as the African nations would just accept their place as starving, poor nations, then food prices would plummet and we wouldn't have to worry about their lax environmental standards enabling them to produce with so many emissions.
Their increased body mass will make them less efficient to transport, and their increased affluence will allow them the opportunity to travel in other ways, further worsening global warming.
I'm a lot more worried about 2 billion+ poor people getting cars, iPods and a sense that they shouldn't have to starve than I am 3 million people eating one more Big Mac a day.
Some kind of normalization of wealth and living standards has to happen eventually if our planet is going to support so many.
I just knew that it couldn't be the commodities markets. Unless they're all run by...fat people! NOOooooo!
What?
I agree! "These people" really are a problem because they just don't understand things as well as you do.
I believe that when you say they are in the same category as the are disabled, what you really mean is that they are inferior to you and not worth consideration as full-fledged human beings.
It's a shame that they can't use their intellect to understand their place in this complex system of a world we live in.
Maybe I'm reading too much into what you wrote and if so I appologize, but I suspect you are one scarey dude with a serious God complex.
But, I look forward to reading your manifesto.
let me guess, you were the fat kid at school who got picked on and now you have a real complex? go ahead and deny it, it just makes me right.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Mulder: His jigging is almost hypnotic...
Scully: Yeah... it's like a lava lamp...
So, it's the fraction of the developed world's population that uses 18% more resources and not the developed world's 320% relative per-capita consumption that's the problem?
I'm a 300lb dude who rides a bike to work. I live in a metro area where 110lb women and 150lb guys drive their finely toned asses in two hours from their West Virginia, 5kW-power-use-when-no-one's-home McMansions in their big SUVs. I call bullshit.
I'm not interested in arguing whether or not fat people eat more, because no one bothers to look at the real facts about obesity anyway. Let's just assume I consume 18% more food resources than someone whose body fits the societal ideal.
That means I consume 377% of the food resources as someone in, say Kenya, as opposed to the thin, virtuous person's 320%.
I also consume 5% of the gasoline and a tiny fraction of the natural gas (small house) that my skinny, far-flung "suburb" counterparts use, but that wouldn't possibly factor in. Of course it doesn't factor in because the "obese" are always lying when they say they ride a bike or walk to work. That couldn't possibly be true. They're too disgusting for that to be true.
Hell, I'm a fattie... so I *produce* copious amounts of natural gas, don't I?
*fart*
Whoops. Excuse me. I should bottle that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9Zt8mn14hY
You should just ignore him - he's obviously nekulturny.
And how much were these two geniuses paid to come up with this worthless tidbit?
As a fat American who lives in Britain, I can tell you they are utterly obsessed with this non-problem. Obesity is the bugbear du jour in the UK; it fills the media daily.
Britain throws away one million, count 'em, 1,000,000, uneaten pots of yoghurt per DAY -- fact from the BBC. Plastic pots that won't biodegrade. What does THAT cost in global warming?
I piss off bigots.
"I try to promote bike riding, and green house issues. But what can I say to an obese person, who can't face their own petty problems let alone the worlds and couldn't ride a bike if they wanted to"
Soo.. what do you say to a fat guy that has been riding a bike to work every day for the past eight years?
Asshole.
By this logic we should irradicate the great whales, or any large size fauna for their impact on the environment. Nature will select large individuals in the coming ice age that cuts in CO2 emissions will bring. It would be wise to keep them around.
an ill wind that blows no good
No. It's far more sensible for Bush to ask Saudi Arabia to increase production. That has a possibility of working. Going on TV and saying "STOP BEING FAT" (even from the President of the United States), almost certainly will not work.
Hopefully this will change soon (or may be changing as we debate this), but the primary treatment for most autoimmune conditions such as lupus erythematosus, is steroid immune suppression.
My mother in her time, and my sister in hers were both ordinary, slim women until the lupus tore through their kidneys, causing all sorts of problems. But it was the prednisone treatment that overinflated these people nearly beyond their own skins.
My wife developed a raging case of sarcoidosis, whose treatment was also prednisone. She also ballooned up, despite being very disciplined in her eating. Relevant to the point of eating: While on steroid treatment, my wife stopped at a grocery store EVERY SINGLE TIME she came home from work. That's 100.0000 percent, an absolutely perfect score of food shopping. Eventually she was able to titrate down to zero steroids and remains (fortunately) in remission.
To anyone considering steroids 'voluntarily': Go for it. Then watch your body and your heart explode prematurely, and get nailed by the cancer that is likely to result from suppressed immune activity. It's a really interesting, slow, painful, degrading way to go.
If the Earth had more CO2, crops would grow faster.
If the temperature was a few degrees warmer, there would be massive increase in crop lands in Canada, and Russia.
More fat people would increase food production.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
If scientists are going to start blaming a group of people over global warming, here's my satirial chance.
1) Obese people consume 18% more food energy, which means that they consume 18% more Cows then the rest of the population.
2) Cows are a powerful source of Greenhouse gas. Google "Cow Emissions" to be enlightened.
3) In 2008, there are roughtly 96.7 million cows in the US alone, since Fat people consume 18% more than average, assuming that half of these said cows are eaten (48.35 million), Fat people alone will eat roughtly 8.703 million more cows per year then the average people.
4) A Cow roughtly produces 25 to 130 gallons of methane a day, which comes out to 9,125 to 47,450 gallons of methane per year. Since fat people consume 8.7 million cows per year, Fat people alone save the planet from roughly 79 to 412 billion gallons of methane per year.
5) Vegetarians do not eat cows, therefore they do not do their part in reducing greenhouse emitting cow gas. In fact, Vegetarians eat plants. plants not only produce oxygen, but also absorb Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
6) luckily, Fat people pick up the slack for the vegetarians by eating the Vegetarians' share of cows.
So in conclusion, Fat people are saving the environment by eating cows where Vegetarians are destroying the environment by eating plants.
Isn't science funny!
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
You make my point for me.
I made a comment about why I was too weak and certain of failure to make climate related comments to fat people. ( and that George Bush was too).
And sure enough I am seen as scary dude with a God Complex.
Apologies for pointing out what I see as very serious issue affecting the future of the whole planet. Why don't I just shut up and wait for the problems to solve themselves.
For an annecdotal study, simply visit a non-upper class mall in your neighborhood and sit in the food court for 30min. Grotesquely obese will rapidly become average, shifting your bell curve a good 50+ lbs to the right, and skinny becoming the left-side outliers.
I'm sure that if you removed the (qualified) medical reasons, the generally husky/bigger, but not fat, people, merely the margin of error would change. Americans are overweight with many just plain old FAT!
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
Cow Farts
Now its people? I thought we already had consensus of this science
That is so much BS and purely designed to cause more Prejudice against overweight people. I have seen skinny people eat far more than an overweight people.
I have been overweight most of my life and my uncle who was only 6 years older than me was skinny. While growing up he always ate three times what I did.
Yes some overweight people do over eat but most due to environmental factors or genetics just tend to process & store food more efficiently than skinny people do.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Cue xkcd reference: - Give me the Nobel. - Do some research first. - Sudo give me the Nobel. - Ok.
More seriously: I believe that obese people differ from trimmer people (generally) in being less active physically. Whether someone is trim and skinny or trim and large, the difference in my experience is that obese people just don't need to move around as much.
:-)
:-)
Slim people seem to tend to impatience and vibrate a lot...
Count me in as a skinny overeater. I was 45 before achieving the goal of my lifetime: Finally achieving 200 lb. This after an adult lifetime of eating as much as I could. (Favorite pastime: 14 inch pizza, 20 minutes.) I'm 51 now and still answer to the name "zoidberg": I'll eat just about anything, and often provide the "no leftovers today" service whenever asked.
It's also the case that I am constantly in motion, cannot stay off my bike, and am also a prodigious generator of infrared energy..
Tall people cause global warming and higher food prices.
Highly physically fit people cause global warming and higher food prices.
Healthy people who move around cause global warming and higher food prices.
People who aren't starving at the edge of metabolic functioning cause global warming and higher food prices.
Men (who are larger than women...) cause global warming and higher food prices.
Yes. People who eat more food than other people who don't eat as much as them...eat more food than other people who don't eat as much as them. Yes, they are a larger part of the demand set...than people who are a smaller part of the demand set.
I'm glad that this study has been released right now so as to get this jackass notion fixed in people's minds right now, so that we don't have to waste time considering it in the future with any seriousness at all.
Why?
Because if humanity EVER gets to the point where the food consumption habits ALONE of a portion of the population actually substantially impact the global environment and/or global economics to a serious degree (which, still, right now, it's not) then we have much bigger problems than "some fat people need to eat less". The problems are more like "serious percentages of the human race are starving to death because the food DOESN'T EXIST to feed them"...which is absolutely not the problem right now, and hopefully will NEVER be a problem. Right now, food problems are a simple matter of price, NOT actual global availability.
Ugh, and duh.
Given enough hydrogen, just about anything is possible.
Something I recall... I think it was a news show... Poor quality sleep correlated with increased incidence of weight-related problems, such as diabetes.
I know that if I don't exercise properly in a given week, my sleep cycle suffers. This is so important that as I get older, I've taken to running steps at a local dam during winter. (Spring, summer and fall are easy: bike riding).
They're called myspace and facebook. ;-)
It is not enough that fat people get discriminated against in every aspect of life, but now they are being blamed for global warming and food prices.
Some people are fat not because they eat too much food, but because they have a slow metabolism that doesn't burn as much food as a skinny person with a fast metabolism. There are a lot of "Jughead Jones" people out there that are skinny as a rail, but eat more food than obese people are accused of eating, but burn it off really fast.
Meanwhile a 275 pound person with a slow metabolism eats salads and lower portions of food, and also exercises but cannot seem to burn off enough fat not to be obese anymore. Their bodies think that they are starving, so it slows down metabolism even more as part of a survival mechanism.
Sure ignore the obvious that the price of oil and gas are causing more people to burn more fuel and also raise up the price of food that is transported using oil and gas, as a cause for global warming and high food prices. When people panic like the oil and gas might run out soon due to higher prices, they end up using it more in a panic mode. Truckers are starting to go on strike in protest of high gas prices, but no, blame the fat people for higher food prices, not the people in SUVs burning gas and oil, and not OPEC and oil companies for raising oil and gas prices, and the higher oil and gas prices causing higher food prices as the cost to transport than food is passed on to consumers.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Theoretically he has more control over his own population than he does over Saudi Arabia, and there are more effective policy instruments than going on TV and saying things.
But what to use depends on the goal. Are you trying to make people happy today - by reducing the price of petrol or eating another fatty food item ; or are you trying to make the people happy in the future - by avoiding catastrophic climate change or morbid obesity.
My point is that the two issues are very much the same. The short term gratification verses long term gratification.
People that have trouble solving a problem which only involves themselves and has a time constant of only a few months, are unlikely to be able to help solve a problem that involves the entire planet and has time constants of decades.
This chap was on BBC radio Five Live yesterday. When challenged he backed away from all the 'shock' headlines of the story, all in all, he did not sell his case well and made a weak story even weaker.
Skinny people waste tons of electricity by running on treadmills. Also, think of all that energy that is wasted producing their bottled water.
So I guess, judging by this article, that we've eliminated all the industrial sources of waste heat and CO2, and we're all driving electric cars? What a bunch of HORSE SHIT.
What about those of us who are just lazy?
There are two ways to be thin: you can starve yourself, or you can get occasional exercise. The latter is better for you. The former is better for The Environment (all else being equal).
The healthy kind of thin people often eat just as much as fat people. We just get more exercise. Or maybe we have tapeworms. But we're right there with the big guys, eating 4000 Calories a day to sustain our high metabolisms.
Of course, fat people (and the starving thin) are more likely to drive places (very bad for everyone), whereas healthy thin people are more likely to walk or bike. Oh, wait, this is the US, where thin people drive to the frackin' gym!!
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
OK, so we fat people eat more than normal. Fine. What about all those skinny people decked out in gold head to toe? Wanna discuss the amount or resources and land raping required to satisfy the world's gold hunger? Hummers use far more fuel REGARDLESS of how fat the person inside is. What about jet travel? All those skinny jet setters burning up our precious resources... To say it's only obese people is a joke. Try it's ALL of the resources that are consumed by our modern society, not just the food. Hell, how much extra energy goes into producing high quality veal, caviar, champagne, DIAMONDS ffs, and other luxury goods. Why not look at that. Poor and fat is most likely a far LESS of an impact that rich, gaudy and skinny.
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
BMI does not take in to account a person's build, age, or even sex. According to the BMI quacks, a man and woman of the same height should be the same weight. That's not juts quackery, that's quackery that kills people. I have known people with a BMI that would come out as grossly obese, but had - measured - less than 5% body fat, because of a massively muscular build. The reason more Americans are overweight is because the definition of overweight keeps changing, more than anything else.
I can't help but wonder if the "London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine," or at least these two quacks, are funded by pharmaceutical companies that are heavily in to the weight loss drug market.
Soylent Green.
It's the only way to deal with the explosive population growth of overweight people.
A few other things in the U.S. could also be the cause of so much obesity. Take for instance MSG. Although it's said to be harmless, look outside the U.S. for studies on it's effects. Now go look in your cabinets for foods that contain it. Nearly all chips, any pre-prepared food mixes, nearly 50% of fast food, as well as restaurant chain food contain it. With that much of it, not just the occasional bit in, it's bound to have some adverse effects on our metabolism, as well as cause more food addiction. Look at how little many other countries use MSG(Mono Sodium Glutamate.) Another thing would be to look Corn Sugar usage. The use of real sugars, not processed modified corn sugars, are more easily digested and metabolized in the body, but we have corn subsidies to fill, so we all get Corn Sugar in everything that used to have sugar. Try to find anything but natural Maple syrup that uses Cane Sugar instead of Corn Sugar. I doubt you can. I cut out soda completely, and steer clear of Corn Sugar completely. I avoid MSG and pre-prepared foods that use it, and do my research before eating anywhere because you'd be surprised at MSG usage. Since then, and with a moderate workout plan, I've lost over 15% body fat and increased my muscle mass tremendously.
Some people have higher metabolisms and eat much much more than an "average" person and weigh less. A 'rail-thin' friend of mine keeps a later file filled with chips and cookies next to his recliner and does nothing in the way of external fitness activities and works a desk job by day. My brother on the other hand was in law enforcement and ate moderately but ran 5 plus miles a day and alternated heavy aerobics for 2 hours on even days with weight training on odd days and could barely meet department regulations for acceptable weight. (Mind you he ran rings around the other folks in his department in the other fitness tests). His doctor said he had low thyroid function but he wasn't 'sick' so no medications were needed. Some people have such 'unfortunately efficient in this era of plenty' (TM) metabolisms they can eat next to nothing and maintain an obese mass. And stress causes weight gain in some people. Stop stressing the overweight people... you are only making the problem worse!!!!
Damn skinny researchers.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
cos they like getting fucked in the ass. fucking faggots personal pleasure is costing society. stop faggots from being faggots today. they're a burden on society.
I'm 5ft 5in 130lb There are far more of you 6ft 5 170+ "average" monsters destroying the ecosphere than there are FAT folks doing it and trust me, those of use down here in the land off the lost have been noticing it for decades. I can live for a month on what one of you "normal" people use in 2 weeks.
The fat people that eat more than athletes also gradually take on more and more weight. Athletes wouldn't make it on the same diet, they'd probably get tired and chubby and unable to exercise intensely.
My girlfriend has been vegan for years and we jog three times a week, and still she's somewhat overweight. Life is sometimes just unfair. Still, I'm talking way less than American standards here. :-)
Take off every 'ZIG' !!
Body mass index is a load of crap.
I am very slightly under 6 feet, weigh 250 lbs, and have a percent body fat of 25% (done by a person with a Masters in kinesiology using the pinch test). Yes too high, and I am working on it but what it means is that if I had 0% (absolutely unattainable) body fat I would weigh 188 lbs. With 10% body fat, which is that of a very athletic person, I would weigh 207 lbs.
Now looking at BMI: It says at my current height and weight (25% body fat) I am way over obese (BMI 34). BMI says that if had 10% body fat I would be considered significantly overweight still (BMI 28... at 10% body fat!??). According to BMI doctrin, if I had 0% body fat (188 lbs), I would still be considered overweight with a BMI of 26). If I were to be in a healthy midrange for BMI (21), I would have to have a body fat percentage of... well I would have to be 155 lbs... more than 30 lbs less than I would be if I had 0% body fat. Which is impossible.
Bottom line, BMI is a crock of shit. Use percent body fat. It is a much more realistic way to measure how much you should weigh.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
so it's unhealthy (like smoking) and it's bad for the environment (like CO2 emmissions). It only seems logical to handle it in the same way - a Fat Tax!
I consume between 4000 and 6000 calories per day, depending on the length of my training ride that day. On a 200 mile distance training ride, I can eat up to 8000 calories.
I eat at least a full pound of pasta every day, sometimes two. If I go out to eat with the team after a long training ride, we'll each order a couple of full-sized salads and at least two entrées.
The last time the 6 of us went out after a long day the bill was $500. Hah..
(Of course I didn't read it)
I call the same on tall people!
The topic here is fat people, not vegans. Looks like all the fat slashdotters felt this story touch a nerve. Are you so ashamed at yourselves that you have to bring down someone else? Fat and pathetic really
Link to the actual letter, please.
I saw only one quote in that article, and that is: "Promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food," which only talks about food prices.
Until I see the letter and where they link the price of food to global warming, I won't believe the letter's authors wrote anything like it. Nor should anyone else believe that they did.
It really depends on just how many calories go in vs how many are expended. New England Journal of Medicine had a study about 15 years ago, looking at exercise and eating habits of thin, and obese people. Obese people tended to underestimate the amount of food they ate by 50% !!, and overestimated the amount of exercise by 2x. Thin people had about the opposite experience.
Low fat food may be more of a culprit, since many of the stomach and intestinal hormones (CCK, somatostatin, GIP) are triggered/released by fat, which then produce the "full" sensation. Look at the French - tons of fatty food, and they are skinny with much less heart disease. Yeah - they eat less (feeling full?) and walk more. Portion sizes in America are ridiculous.
There's nothing magic about food - if you eat too much, it gets converted to fat. And please, no vegan rants - England looked at a random sampling of 1000 people who reached the age of 100, and only 4 were vegetarians, all the rest ate meat routinely. It's not eating meat that can cause heart disease, but the lack of fruits and veggies. Yes I agree Americans could stand to eat less meat, but mostly just need to eat less.
..........FULL STOP.
How much do you weigh?
1) Under 100
2) 100-150
3) 150-200
4) 200-250
5) 250-300
6) I ate Cowboy Neal.
OK, how many more resources does a new child take? It's far better to be fat and not have any more children.
We really ought to be focusing on the impact of reproducing. I mean, think of the, uh, children. The other children, I mean.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
we need more biofuel to decrease our dependence on middle east oil
It's all about calories in vs out and with an athlete, there's a lot of out. They have to eat tons, or they will simply be unable to perform. As an example I knew a guy who was a competitive cyclist. Thus he'd regularly do things like a 100 mile bike ride on a day, just for fun. Seriously hardcore. Needless to say he was in top shape. Man could he put away the food though. One day a group of us went to Chipolte. Now I'm a big guy, over weight, and exercise a moderate amount (I bike to work). So I eat a good deal. However one of their burritos is enough for me. That's a TON of food and when I put one away, I'm good. This guy? Ate TWO of them, and was snacking on chips. The reason is that he was just so super active his body needed a tremendous amount of calories to maintain itself. On that particular day he'd just finished a 60 mile ride before coming to lunch.
If you want people to eat less, they are going to need to be not only skinny but fairly sedentary. If you are very light and non-active, your base metabolic rate (the amount of calories you need just to stay alive) will be very low, and the amount of calories you need over that to maintain your weight won't be much. However, I'm not sure you'll be all that healthy.
However if you are highly active and in good shape, well you are going to burn a lot of calories. Your BMR will go up, so even just living will require more calories, and the amount you need to maintain body weight will go way up.
Smokers and obese people are sick more often, use more sick days, and spend more health care dollars. So they tend to be less productive at work. The non-smokers and thin people wind up subsidizing their health costs, and pull their slack at work.
So, yes it does affect us.
I am all for personal responsibility, but I should not have to pay for others poor choices. If you wish to smoke, or get fat, then it's fine by me - go smoke your brains out, but I shouldn't have to smell your stank air, nor subsidize your health costs.
As far as the SUVs go - I concur. I live in Los Angeles, and see probably 30-40% of the vehicles on the highway are SUVs and pick ups with just one person in it, commuting to work in stop/go traffic. If this were Montana, then I wouldn't mind, but L.A. doesn't get a lot of snow if I recall.
..........FULL STOP.
I chose to weigh 260 and only have two children. The skinny couple next door has 8 kids.
The planet loves me.
It has nothing to do with girth and body fat, and everything to do with actual dietary consumption and metabolism. A high energy person with a higher metabolism will eat a whole lot more food than one with a lower metabolism. Just because a person is overweight doesn't necessarily mean that the person eats more than one meal a day...they simply tend to store fat more efficiently than someone who burns through it inefficiently.
You also have to take into account the effects of the actual diet...if a person is overweight from a diet of mostly bread products, vs. a person overweight from eating a lot of pizza, bacon, etc., the latter person's diet would contribute greater to global warming as a result of the length of the food chain and resulting pollution it takes to produce meat vs. wheat products, etc. And a skinny person with a high metabolism, they'd be the absolute worst of all. They'd eat and eat, and wastefully lose their calories instead of carrying them around and prolonging the next meal.
Atheletes require more food than the average person due to the high levels of activity and training, they have to travel regularly for competitions and training, and are a bigger drain on the health care system due to sports related injuries.
And I don't just mean professional atheletes, but all levels, including college, high-school, little league, etc.
Is engaging in atheletics a more justifiable waste of resources than overeating?
The BMI data is taken from actuarial tables - i.e. insurance tables of peoples health, longevity,etc.
What the numbers showed, was that people who had a BMI between 18-25 tended to live the longest.
Doesn't mention fat anywhere - just weight. So having that super slim, but very muscular body may still put you in the category of not tending to live the longest. So having a short,very lean , but muscular frame may put you over the norm for people. So on average you may not live as long. Maybe the heart doesn't like to pump blood thru all that muscle mass, etc. Having lots of muscle doesn't mean that you are healthier. - it may actually be worse.
..........FULL STOP.
In Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dillema" he points out that beef takes 100 calories of fuel (vegetables, other power) to produce 1 calorie of edible meat.
We could quibble with the exact details, but the line of thinking in the article would inevitably lead not only to who eats how much, but how much fuel the food required for production.
In fact, if we're for reducing carbon through food, we should probably start with the "carbon footprint" of our own diet, rather than how much the average person weighs.
We are obese on BEEF, a major contributor to global warming through deforestation and their methane emissions. Our burger way of life is going to kill us all, one way or the other. But you'll never, ever, get Americans to change unless there is absolutely no choice.
fat WALLET people cause global warming, higher food prices.
AND some of those fat wallet people causes fat people too. Dont blame one of the victims, go right to the source of the problem.
I say much respect to you. I read your other post "First world, not the fatties" and agree with your points.
I think you should take pride in being not representative of "fat guys" or are you arguing that all fat people are as conscienscious as you ?
timothy is an even bigger troll than kdawson.
Yup, I have to keep my carbon footprint big to fend off the coming ice age, and need a layer of fat in case it comes anyway.
Captive fish will eat themselves to death if you keep giving them food, they too have evolved to eat when they can (when food is available). But fish can't understand that, they're slaves to their appetite. Humans can.
Of course, eating healthy is hard when you have to go past so many bad choices to get to the right one... if you're eating more because you require more energy to carry an extra 50 or so pounds What!? Fatties don't eat because they need energy to carry their own fat. Quite the opposite!
They are fat because they eat more energy than they need.
You can't take the sky from me...
oh so over the last 15 years populations have increased and you claim demand isnt rising?
more poor people are getting more money and thus eating more pricy food such as meats, and perhaps more breads.
And then there are the dickheads who promote ethanol and grow lots of corn (not the same corn you eat) to make fuel, which
costs more in water+ferts+oil than what it actually makes, its a negative sum result, its stupid. You environmentalists are utter
failures in maths.
Now lots of countries are stopping exports of foods because they want to secure internal supplies. Add in a few natural disasters like
cyclones in burma, and earthquakes in china, and new volcanos, and you start getting more mass crop failures, and surges in demand.
If possible more people should grow local coop grows. Instead of fancy gardens or roof tops with concrete floors.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
is a fat ass who needs a more proportionate BMI. I'm sure there are a lot of them here... Let me get out of the way before you crush me with your stupid mod points fattie.
Let's see...
W = Fd
W = 3,000 lbs * 3,000 mi
W = 9,000,000 mi*lbs
9 000 000 mile pounds = 6.44284689 × 10^10 joules or 64,428 megajoules.
When burnt, diesel typically releases about 40.9 megajoules (MJ) per litre, whereas gasoline releases 34.8 MJ/L (you didn't specify what your truck consumes). Let's go with the higher density fuel:
64,428 MJ / 40.9 MJ/L = 1575 litres or 416 gallons of diesel
If on the way back you burned just as much fuel, you had an open parachute attached to your truck. If on the way there you didn't burn this fuel, you have a perpetual motion machine on your hands.
And when there's one left, and then what?
Luau hawaiian style Hmmmm barbeque super-fat chick
Hmm..last I checked...for health insurance, they ask if you smoke....and you pay higher premiums. And what about the 'sin' taxes on smokes and booze? Aren't they there to help offest the costs associated with their use?
Also...just to throw this in. Since they have banned smoking in so many places...and smoking has gone down...have you noticed that drop in your premiums yet? No? Me neither.....kinda like how the insurance rates dropped with seat belt laws, and helmet laws on motorcycles....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
In that blog post, I suggested some follow-up research:
I guess it takes a while to get the grants...
I'm a vegan for over five years and did my last blood exam last month. My iron and calcium levels are fine. But being a vegan requires you to have deep nutrician knowledge because you need to be aware of the nutrients of each food, how they chemically react, how much your body needs and plan your meals over that and avoid/eat some kind of food/beverages.
People don't receive that kind of education on high-school or can learn over-night so I don't advice anyone to become vegan without having deep nutrician knowledge.
About the main topic it's much more efficient taking your food directly from vegetables than feeding some animal with vegetables to later eat some of its meat. Of course the vegetables used on those cases may differ but you can compare the amount of water/land/pollution needed to produce both.
I'm tired of bondage-and-discipline style dieting and exercise. Its a lot of work for a tiny payoff. D&E is like a job that pays 50-cents-an-hour. Why don't they spend more on research to safely dampen our hunger system??? Science created the problem, so THEY should fix it. Don't make us huff and puff and eat grass like a goddam Neanderthal.
Table-ized A.I.
I call BS. This is just another blame article out to gather points. According to "popular" opinion" EVERYTHING causes global warming and it's "Going to Kill Us All" unless you happen to live in one of the increasing numerous areas where we're still freezing our butts off. As for being fat - it's none of anyone elses damned business what or how much I eat as long as I'm paying market price for it. I pay for my own health insurance too so take your "You're stealing from less privileged neighbor" mantra and shove it.
I'm not convinced that portion size is even close the the whole story. I can gorge myself and lose weight, as long as it is all meat and fat. As soon as you throw a little sugar in (which means any carb including bread) I balloon up almost immediately. I can starve myself with tiny portions, and if there is any significant amount of sugar in my diet, I will be fat.
I know you didn't talk about exercise, but that is the other myth that tends to go with "eat less = skinny". For me, I simply will not lose fat from exercise, no matter how much I get. I build muscle like there is no tomorrow, but don't lose any fat. What this means for me is that if I eat small portions, and exercise a lot, I become MORE obese. The only way that I can get myself out of the "obese" range is by eating all protean and fat, while getting little to no exercise. If I go with a carnivorous diet, I will lose the fat, but if I exercise, my muscle mass puts be right back into the "obese" range.
The biggest problem is that weight has become a religion. It is absurd to think that someone whose ancestors have been eating beef for the last 5000 years would have the same nutritional requirements as someone whose ancestors has been picking fresh fruit from trees for the last 5000 years. Until we can get past the "fat people are evil" mentality, and accept that different people have different nutrition/exercise needs, we won't get anywhere with the problem.
Fat people also die sooner because of all those health related activities. What do you think damages the environment more carrying around a few extra pounds in a car or driving a car around for an extra 20 years?
I bet they forgot to study earlier morbidity and its effects when they went about blaming global warming on fat people. And honestly WTF!?
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
I notice that all of your meals have eggs, meat and/or cheese. Those came from some animals. What do you want to bet those animals were raised on corn products?
I'm arguing that fat vs. non-fat is not the issue; that is, first of all, you can be skinny and be a resource glutton or be fat and be very conscientious of your impact on the world's resources, or anywhere in between.
You can even be fat and a *food* glutton, or at least an 18% extra consumer of food calories and still do better than breaking even in terms of actual energy consumption.
In fact, check this out:
Let's say 2000 Calories daily is a "base" for an active male. Maybe it's more or less, but it's coming in in the ballpark of the amount that males in the USA are fortunate enough to eat.
18% extra is an additional 360 Calories per day. As a power consumption (Calories/24 hours), that's about 17W.
So if you, on average, unnecessarily leave a 100W light bulb on somewhere for 4 hours a day... or 4 lightbulbs for an hour... whatever, you've done as much damage to the global energy budget as a fattie has.
Basically, my argument comes down to this: even if fat people do actually consume 18% more Calories on average (which I'm not sure I believe, by the way. A lot of fat girls are fat because they screwed up their metabolism with dieting), whether or not you leave your computer on 24/7 and the type of insulation you have in your house is going to swamp what you eat.
Fat people are just an easy scapegoat because we're allowed to hate them.
"Fat People Cause Global Warming, Higher Food Prices"
Yep, it is the fat people, not the fact that we are turning food into fuel (ethanol) or that the cost of oil is skyrocketing (double whammy of promoting ethanol use and increasing harvesting and transportation costs of food).
Read about it here:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1717572,00.html
Believe it or not what is termed as "economic progress" (industrialization) is a greater cause than the fatties.
For the same reason that the law says that if a building/firms accepts random public, cannot refuse anybody due to law, gender, handicap, or whatever discriminatory reason. The law now also says that in building where random public comes, you cannot smoke. Mind you in many countries this only applies to government building, and in some this applies to also shop/cinema/restaurants(*) and the likes where public people can comes. Smoking people endanger non-smoker with their smoking (however minimal this danger is), whereas non-smoking don't endanger smoker. Thus the law deemed the right of the non-smoker to be safe trump the right of smoker to poison themselves and the right of smoker to try to get lung and throat cancer.
(*) exception in many country : if the restaurants/bar is catering ONLY to smoker and advertise that o the front. Except some fumoire and tabacoe special shop, most other type of shop would find it suicidal to cater ONLY to smoker.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
All those activities are not dailies, but once in a while. Most obese people will consume more energy on a daily basis. Your jetski hotriding whatever will be a one our fling consuming what, a few dozen liter gas ? Comapre this to all the eventually gas cumulated over 1 week/month/year for more food, or since walking is so inconvenient , going by car to the shop.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
In related news, researchers have concluded that 14.4 percent of CO2 emissions contributing to global warming are being disproportionately generated by people like Jack Thompson.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Question: how is having "too much" muscle a problem? I mean, charts be damned, as a skinny guy that can't put on any kind of weight, I'd kill to have your "problem".
And yes, I completely agree about different people having different dietary needs. A North American diet makes me slow and sluggish, a South-East European diet makes me feel awesome. Friends who's families came from different parts of the world are completely different. I have no idea why this surprises some people.
Smokers are sick more than obese people. I'm fatter than my obese brother. But my brother is "obese" due to his muscle mass being high, he's joining the aussie army as an officer next month. As far as productivity goes, I can work over 12 hours a day for 13 days straight. I only get a cold once a season.
I spend NZ$24 on medicine a year. That's about the same as a week's worth of electricity in winter. Mainly because my medicine is subsidised to cost just $3 per type per prescription. It saves the hospital the cost of a month in hospital every year, so I guess they make up on the cost of near free to use medicine.
SUVs in cities are stupid, unless you like unsafe cars.
As far as global warming goes, my country will have longer summers when I'm retired and might have a little less rain in a few eastern areas. Perhaps we'll pipe water long distance?
And as far as paying for poor choices made by other people, that's why NZ isn't fighting in Iraq. It's why the next government is trying to do pretty much the same as the current administration and really mean there is no difference between the major parties.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Its not my weight that causes global warming. It may be responsible for a proportionately greater carbon footprint, but we all know that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
I myself have been known to produce huge amounts of methane on some days.
How can you people tolerate this junk on /. ? seriously... what the hell is this bullshit so called "news" they post here? Did Rupert Murdock buy /. and I missed it? I think I'm gonna be sick... too much propaganda... must... puke... now...
You are what you eat. I realize there are cases where various ailments cause one to be obese, but in my experience you literally are what you eat. Some of my best friends are overweight & it's not because they have an ailment. It's because they want another hot dog or cheeseburger an hour after their biggie fast food meal.
According to my company representative the main reason our insurance rates go up every year are due to complications from obesity. Not smoking. They expect 75% of Americans to be overweight by year's end.
The truth of the matter is that it's hard to find food that isn't crap. I was once overweight & when I decided to change my lifestyle I didn't know what the hell I was going to eat. For many Americans if you cut out fast/fried food you're lost.
Wait, are you suggesting that a North American diet doesn't make North Americans slow and sluggish? Because, as someone who lives surrounded by the fuckers (I are American), I beg to differ.
Have you ever been to a North American mall?
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Bring on the 100 million beef cows that live in the USA and Canada and I'll eat them doing my part to cause global warming!
Isn't it interesting that the "Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice Reaches 'Unprecedented' Levels"?
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3066
Very interesting indeed. Maybe we need to have another 100 million cows to reverse this Southern Hemisphere Global Cooling!
If you're thinking of the heavily processed I-can't-pronounce-half-of-the-ingredients fast/frozen food then, well, yeah... To be honest I don't even consider that to be food (I can't eat it, it makes me sick - though I remember enjoying it as a child). (I are American) Also a lolcat, apparently. I like that.
Frankly, I think the whole notion of "smoker vs non-smoker", "smoking section", "No Smoking" and recently the emergence of "Breathe Easy Zones" at a university in town (and many others around the country) fuel rebellion on the part of smokers.
1. There is too much emphasis on the habit of smoking, while the person and their freedoms go ignored, even abused.
2. Second hand smoke is annoying, even as a smoker I am bothered by it, but it is a well-funded and erroneous myth that it is responsible for some "45,000" deaths a year. That's ridiculous--no one's death certificate lists "Second-hand smoke" as the cause. The numbers were obtained by masquerading heart attack sufferers as "victims of second-hand smoke." So the worker-safety issue is a fallacy.
3. Smoking is a small pleasure that 1/4 of American men (not sure about women's numbers) enjoy. It is easily attackable politically and with fines and in this Tolerance 2.0 politically correct attitude of the US appalls me someone that smokes tobacco is not accepted as a person and a human being.
4. People have been steadily increasing in rates of asthma, though the rates of smoking have declined. In my lifetime I have never smoked inside a building besides a bar or a private residence (and this is very rare). Some bars are even smoke free, depending on your state. The point of #4 is that there are myriad other factors contributing to asthma, exacerbations, COPD, and other respiratory diseases. My estimate is diesel exhaust, relaxing air quality standards, and other pollution that you cannot see.
So please, for the sake of humanity, leave the smokers alone. People pick on us because it's so easy to visualize and yes, it can be annoying. But there are dozens of other invisible contaminants that are lowering your sperm count, hurting your lungs, causing your DNA to mutate, poisoning you slowly (mercury, bisphenol-A, PCBs, dioxin, particle pollution, blah blah blah).
I urge you to check out the book Dissecting an anti-smokers' mind to confirm some of my points above.
A whopping 120 characters to take your mind off topic. Tested in MS Word.
That's right: ban it. Maybe it's time for government intervention. I am slightly overweight myself and I hate it. Flabby fat is so unattractive and also bad for your heart, causes diabetes etc. I have no idea how to go about losing weight, but I have at least started doing something about it: 1) NO bread, very little pasta and NO French fries. 2) I bicycle to work every day excerpt if it's much too cold or if there there is a heavy rain. That's a start, but not nearly enough. The next step, I think, is to learn about how to live a healthy life. If you live in the west, have a car and a comfortable life, you are liable to become fat, complacent and lazy, and it's time to break that habit.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
Thing is though, probably nobody can claim to have ancestors who ate almost all meat for the last 5000 years. Sure there were highs and lows in the history of human nutrition, but up until the turn of the last century, meat was the exception. If everyone eats cow all day, and without modern and intense farming, you're going to run out of cow pretty fast.
Carbohydrates always have been the basis of nutrition for humans.
The number of fat people is increasing every day. Once we reach a majority, we are coming to take your pizza.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
It really depends on just how many calories go in vs how many are expended.
That's absolutely right, but there is some variation in how much food different people need, which is affected by both genetics and the environment. I'm towards the low end (about 19) of the healthy BMI range, but don't seem to have very high calorie requirements either. I recently decided to cut out most animal products for environmental reasons (ie sustainability, global warming and pollution generally), so looked at my nutritional intake to make sure I was getting enough protein. I found that my calorie intake is supposedly below the minimum amount needed for my height and weight (whether or not I include meat and animal products), but it seems to be the right amount for me, ie I'm not getting thinner or fatter.
England looked at a random sampling of 1000 people who reached the age of 100, and only 4 were vegetarians, all the rest ate meat routinely. It's not eating meat that can cause heart disease, but the lack of fruits and veggies.
From a health perspective, it's obvious we evolved as omnivores. For the above comment to be meaningful, however, you would have to compare 4/1000 with the number of vegetarians in the representative population (i.e. people born 100 years ago in England, or the UK if that's what you really mean). Moreover, despite being omnivorous, it's unlikely there were copious amounts of animal fat in our early diets; modern farm-produced meat is quite different to what we would have been eating thousands of years ago. More importantly, all that's necessary for evolutionary survival is to live long enough for your offspring to reach maturity, so there's no reason to expect our natural diet is necessarily optimal for health or longevity, just for reproduction and survival to age 40 or so. At any rate, statistical analyses have shown that vegetarians do live longer, but the causality is unclear. It may be that vegetarianism and higher longevity are both caused by being more health-conscious, for example.
#1 - BMI is complete and utter bullshit, as you've discovered. Go with the highly technical "do I look fat in the mirror" test. Or get your body fat measured.
#2 - If you think you might be obese, you probably are. Barring anorexia, if you're not, then you will at least get in better shape.
#3 - It sounds like you're suggesting that if you put on more muscle, you're more obese than if you don't put any on. If I'm reading your comments correctly, then it's pretty obvious you don't have any idea what you're talking about.
I assure you that you're making yourself worse off by not exercising, no matter what your BMI says.
if your BMI is 29 without muscle, but 31 with muscle, it doesn't matter because your body fat mass is the same. Hell, your body fat percentage is higher without muscle.
Jesus Christ, go to a freaking doctor already. Every time I read your comment, I am awestruck by one more ridiculous assertion. Your post just seems to be along the lines of: I look bigger when I put on muscle. Therefore I don't work out because bigger = less healthy. Stop hating fat people, guys. We're all different, and maybe in some ethnicities, being obese is the most healthy way to be. Here, I'll quote you for you: And until ridiculously unhealthy people are all healthy, I will continue to show concern for my fellow man, and strive to improve humanity by pushing them to improve their health and the well-being of this world.
Disclaimer: some of what I said here could be self-loathing, since I used to be fat and am still working on getting in terrific shape.
what i have noticed is the difference in lifestyles. over there, far more people ride bike, walk or use public transit (still plenty of walking) to reach their destinations. i also think that there is almost a stigma attached to purchasing prepared items, excepting bread, jams, etc. grocery stores there aren't bursting with pilsbury, chef boyardee, sara lee, etc.
my first german professor pointed out something key in the distinction between the us and much of europe: here, people eat to live, there, people live to eat. how often do we read about a ground-breaking american chef? we don't take food seriously (as a nation). most people don't know how good brie is, too many people have never had home-made bread or pasta, and the majority of soup is canned - all bad signs.
Yeah, you ate a lot of corn there. The point is that most of the animals we eat, eat corn.
It's Stone Age animist thinking to believe that, when you eat an animal that ate corn, you thereby eat corn yourself.Take it a stage further! You ate the cow; the cow ate corn; the corn was fertilised with manure. Ergo, you ate manure.
Except, of course, that you obviously didn't. The "transitive" argument works when calculating the energy cost of food, but not when thinking of its ingedients.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
You miss understand my point. The word "obese" is in quotes because I am quoting others by using it. I would never suggest that having more muscle is bad. My point is that studies that use the term "obese" almost always use BMI, and it is a worthless measurement. If you reread my post understanding that my example is showing why the word "obese" is pointless in this context, you will probably find that you disagree less.
Seriously, visit the Midwest some time.
Lolcat is a quintessentially American dialect, no?
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
After taking my own advice and re-reading my previous post, I have to say that it does sound like I am complaining about too much muscle. That was poor writing on my part. I also noticed that I did not put quotes around the word 'obese' when I typed 'MORE'. As I said, my point wasn't that having muscle is bad. It was that the word 'obese' has become meaningless when used by the health industry, as you can easily be fatter and less 'obese' at the same time. (I got the quotes around it this time)
Fat people are disproportionately responsible for helping to turn the U.S. into an even bigger laughingstock than it already is. The rest of the world is having a field day with us because somehow you fatties have gotten it into your heads that dual-boxing Slashdot and WoW while you cram 5 cans of Dew and and an entire frozen pizza down your gullet is an acceptable way to spend your evenings.
"blah blah glandular problem blah blah" - yeah I know, whatever. Some people are born 10ft from the finish line and some 10 miles, but everyone is expected to cross it. Suck it up and stop being so god damned fat.
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS AHEAD
;)
OK, fine. But in that case, grammar/punctuation point: The use of quotes around "obese" in this case would be "required" even if you weren't quoting others--when using a word as a term, you should put quotation marks around it (or italicize it, in some sources).
I put quotes around "required" because I know Slashdotters like to argue against formal rules of spelling.
This is actually a prime example of why knowledge of punctuation rules is essential: Because Belial6 did not know the rules of punctuation, Belial6 failed to correctly convey the intended message.
And yes, I do find I disagree less. I'm raging less at your comments now
In any case, get the heck off Slashdot and go running! I should be doing the same.
I just made a 6-week move to another town with only books, a laptop for work, exercise clothes, and work clothes; this minimizes distractions. I really shouldn't be on Slashdot right now. I should be running!
Do you know how much is spent each year treating smoking related conditions? I don't pay my taxes so you can abuse your body and then expect the government to pay for your medical expenses because you cant afford them.
As you said, how bout some personal accountability?
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
You're doing the wrong kind of exercise. I was getting stupidly fat last year and I changed my eating habits and started an exercise regime under the supervision of a nurse and a trainer.
I don't eat sugar anyway, and I'm allergic to dairy, so I had a head start. Turning down the carbohydrate intake and filling up on fruit and vegetables to stave off hunger did it for me.
As for the exercise, you need muscle-building exercise in addition to other types. Muscle burns fat, even when you're sitting idle.
If you eat protein and take water soon after exercise, it builds up muscle without your body trying to make emergency fat reserves.
I was hugely skeptical of all this stuff until last year. I've never been very impressed by "sports science" and those who practice it until now. If you ignore the rubbish you see on TV and see someone who knows what they're talking about, you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Lay off the meat fat, saturated fat and hydrogenated vegetable oil. You're not doing your heart and arteries any good whatever your weight.
Stick Men
In any case, get the heck off Slashdot and go running! I should be doing the same. It's 2am! That's often called "probable cause".
In any case, try to rage less, it's bad for your health.
Obesity 'may be largely genetic'
I take from this that certain genes give you the predisposition to obesity if there are lots of calories around.
Here's an interesting link: Obesity 'may be largely genetic'. Here it claims that your environment doesn't make much difference to your weight and it is mostly genetic. As your metabolism uses such a large fraction of your energy intake, it is clear that changes in this will affect your weight the most.
"War on Obeses declared"
Dubya quoted as saying: 'There will be no cheese burger left behind !'
Do we have any numbers to back that up or did we just replace the blacks/mexicans/whatever subgroup with a new one? One that's more politically correct because it's not discriminating by race or origin, but by weight.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Be fair now, the overweight people are actual doing the underweight people a service. Overweight people are removing mass from the Earth, and hence the gravital pull becomes less. That of course means that everything becomes lighter (less energy needed to move stuff about!), and when the underweight people fall down they don't shatter into tiny pieces. Global warming is just an added benefit to save on fuel to heat stuff during winter. You should thank these heroic overweight people for their hard work.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
You aren't obese through body weight, anyone who thinks that is an ignorant jackass. You are obese through outward appearance. Most bodybuilders fall into the obese category, but have almost no body fat. Muscle weighs a lot more than fat, and obese refers to people who have an excess of body FAT, not muscle.
Summary for those not reading the article: "We blame the Americans, again."
Note: and for the many, many comments talking about how everyone in America is fat and people in the rest of the world aren't - that would be because in just about every category, Americans live in better circumstances and more ease than anyone else on the planet. Of course, now that your standards of living are (finally) reaching that of the US, you're all starting to have problems with obesity too.
By the way, obese people burn more energy, sure, but they also pay more for food, clothing, and increased wear-and-tear on everything they own. So they pay for it. The minute resources become so rare that the cost to being obese will be prohibitive, obesity will go away...Adam Smith wins again.
-Styopa
This is completely in line with what Alex Jones says about how the-powers-that-be want to make -us- , the people the enemy. We are the enemy. We are the terrorists. WE must be regulated.
Actually, since fat people die earlier than others; in general, they use less total resources for a lifetime. There was an article here not too long ago, extoling the values of bad habits, like smoking, drinking, etc, because they cause you to die early and be less of a burden on society to take care of the elderly. Geriatric care (especially ahzheimers for long-lived skinny people) is going to be the biggest drain on earth' resources soon. Sure it may cost 50,000 to care for a fat person's ailments, but they don't last long. It costs much more over time
to take care of an old skinny person who won't die, and just loose their brains. Think of all the resources used by doctors, nurses, hospitals, etc, just to service old skinny people just sitting drooling in chairs,
So..... eat, drink,smoke, and be merry, die young, and save society alot of money.
Still, I wish I was skinny now. :-) zentara
That man who says we should all drive hybrids while at the same time puts out more than all of us while flying those private jets half way around the world for so called Global Warming conventions. He has a bigger house that 90% of the rest of America thus using more energy to heat and cool it, and now hes overweight.
The rest of America needs to drive hybrids and live in a two room hole in the wall and be super thin just to make up for Al Gore's waste...
That is assuming of course that climate change is man made and that the climate doesn't change on its own over time naturally due to natural reasons...
--- When you start with the conclusion that you want, then throw out any facts that don't agree, is it true?
> Even if you cover up the entire Texas state with solar cell it won't make enough hydrogen to replace gas in USA.
I know this is Slashdot, but you could try to make your crap a little less obvious.
The area of the state of Texas is 696,241 km^2, or 696 x 10^9 m^2. Solar irradiation at ground level perpendicular to the Sun is around 1000 W on a clear day, so the state of Texas would be irradiated with around 696 x 10^12 W or 696 TW if it were at the equator. Make that 500 TW at the latitude of Texas in round figures. The energy consumption of the entire human race currently runs at around 18 TW, so the state of Texas is receiving from the Sun at peak around 27 times the power needs of all of humanity.
Solar cells are already into two figure efficiency, but a mere 3.7% efficiency would be enough for Texas to deliver all of mankind's power needs.
21st Century Renaissance Man
I can think of one thing that causes global warming, you sons of bitches, and THAT'S YOU GUYS FLAPPING YOUR PIE HOLES AND EXHALING!!! Do us all a favor and kill yourselves in the name of reducing greenhouse gases which is clearly what you are full of.
These guys are skipping a step. After tobacco, it was alcohol they were supposed to take on next, and eating habits only after that.
It (the alcohol issue) is already starting to become visible (or audible) too, over here in Europe. Arguments usually sound like "the cost to society of liver and pancreas disorders at later age" and "it's time for zero tolerance on drunk driving, with all those little kids that get killed by them."
BTW, you're 200% right about the owner's choice issue. Bars here where I live are forced to install a smoke-free zone of at least half the total area of the premises, with the necessary means (ventilation, walls) to prevent smoke from drifting over from the used part of the bar.
That's right, the USED part: at the place I regularly visit after work, the non-smoking zone is larger than the smoking zone (for practical reasons, something to do with where the smoke is and where the bathrooms are located), it's just as close to the entrance and to the bar as the rest, AND it has better furniture, yet it tends to remain all but empty until the smoking zone is getting overcrowded.
In the same country, at the same time, restaurants are forbidden to have such a zone, with a ridiculous exception: if there is one it has to be strictly a smoking zone, they're not allowed to serve any food there. Instead of allowing them the choice or evening the rules out between bars and restaurants, if someone is caught smoking in a restaurant, the owner is fined (that's right: the owner, not the smoker!)
Result: a severe drop in revenue for the average restaurant since the measure went into effect, which (the drop) the government is at the same time denying it exists and trying to convince everyone it isn't related to the smoking ban, but to the rising cost of food, and everything else they can think of.
To add insult to injury, despite the fact that everyone knows you can't smoke at a restaurant, the owners have to install mandatory non-smoking signs. Enter a place with lovely decoration, and see it ruined by a bunch of ugly traffic signs.
Restaurant owners often out the same complaint: restaurant visits are less frequent, but especially SHORTER than before the ban. They sell far less desserts and after-meal drinks, people leave after the main course instead and go somewhere where they're allowed to smoke. Actually, I have to plead guilty here too: I often eat out, but I haven't had a dessert, a coffee or a pousse-café at a restaurant since the day the ban went into effect.
umm. by those same arguments: rich people cause global warming.
Or pie-eating contest.
I suggest we look into the real production of Soylent Green as an alternate food source. I would further suggest that the first two components of a trial batch of SG be Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts. This would assist in the food shortage problem and also getting rid of the greenhouse gases (read methane from crap) these two are responsible for.
This "study" appears to be nothing more than junk science (aka Bush science).
I may be well over my ideal BMI, but I only drive about five miles to work, thin people I know in my department commute as much as forty-fifty miles one way, who is producing more greenhouse gases? Me driving five miles in my 30 MPG Toyota, or my co-worker driving fifty in his 12 MPG Ford Expedition?
My electrical usage at home is only about 70% of my "normal" sized neighbor. Since most power in this area comes from coal fired plants, again who is contributing more to global warming. It sure isn't me, the fat guy.
This study is extremely flawed and worthless, the two idiots that created it need to be sanctioned for doing "bad" science.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Maybe it's just deja-vu, but I could swear you posted this exact same post in another article months back.
Plus the french don't eat tons of fatty food, they eat hardly anything at all. Maybe a slice of toast for breakfast, salad for lunch and a small meal for tea.
Here are the key issues to argue against:
;) that non-smokers have to absorb. (sure, same argument for alcoholics and fatties, but arguing that is just a diversion from the point)
-imposing smoke on a non-smoker is not a reversible argument; you may like coming home in the same smell category as a cat's asshole, a furry tongue, loss of taste and smell, and an ever-shortening life span, but I don't.
-smokers do place a much higher burden on public health costs (in countries modern enough to have them
-modern cigs are nothing more than a highly cultivated and refined designer drug that smokers are *addicted* to; the only difference between cigarettes and heroine or cocaine is that it is a legal drug that it is socially acceptable to be addicted to
-modern society is forced to regulate the unintelligent, inconsiderate and unhealthy in cases where people are not willing to regulate themselves. Many laws exist to regulate public behavior, especially when this behavior affects the health or pocketbooks of others. Bike helmets, seatbelts, child safety seats, gun laws, public shagging (sad, but true), public drinking...all these laws are there for a reason: to manage the stupid, selfish, 'I am an island' behavior of self-destructive impulse-driven dickheads.
There are many more valid arguments for smokers to avoid, but what it comes down to is that smoking is a vile, unhealthy habit that the addicts have no qualms about inflicting upon others. Guys begging on the street for quarters so they can get their next crack fix are less offensive than riding in an elevator with stinky and his phlegmy cough...never mind having to walk through his cloud of toxic shit whenever I walk out of a building.
When smoking bans were introduced for bars and restaurants, a small minority of owners pissed and whined about them and made the same sort of selfish arguments as these. Then the ban came, and these business improved on average 30-40% across the board (even for the dumb-fuck owners who opposed it). Why? Obviously because the minority where no longer able to force their shitty habit onto the rest of us, and we were finally able to go out and taste our food and not come home smelling like the floor of a taxi.
Stop avoiding the arguments. Comparing smoking to segregation laws or telling non-smokers 'suck on it...I have rights to' proves just how asinine and weak your logic is.
How fat people are doesnt' really matter at 3 billion population.
And at 11 billion, it is probably going to be a self correcting problem.
OTH, the majority of fat people tend to be that way because they eat very inexpensive food like chips, noodles, flour stuff.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"Two scientists write that obese people are disproportionately responsible for high food prices and greenhouse gas emissions because they consume 18% more food energy."
And anybody having a kid consumes 100% more energy.
Two kids: 200%.
These so-called scientists are idiots. 18% is nothing compared to six kids and they know it.
I'll grant the fact that at face value this seems to be true....BUT IT ISN'T!!
No factors other than food consumption and fuel are touched upon. What about the fact that fat people may only go out 1/4 as many times a week as an average sized person?
So then if the average sized person is driving 10 miles a day, 4 days a week to go to the gym, and the fat person only leaves 1 day a week for 5 miles to go to Burger King, that would mean that the skinny person has used more fuel than the fat person by 8 times (per week)! Of course there are hundreds of other examples just like that however I just wanted to open the door to make you think about this kind of garbage study.
Give me a break!!! P.S. I am a twiggy skinny bastage so I'm not just making excuses
It's not just heart disease, cancer and many other physical ailments: Obesity tied to risk of psychiatric disorders
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I am going to demand from my airline that they introduce a total allowance for the weight of luggage and passenger. I don't find it fair that I should have to restrict myself to some 20 kgs of luggage when others easily have 20 kgs of excess weight around the waist!
And please, no vegan rants - England looked at a random sampling of 1000 people who reached the age of 100, and only 4 were vegetarians, all the rest ate meat routinely.
To be fair, such a statistic tells us very little about the relative health benefits of those eating habits. A more appropriate statistic would quote the percentage of meat-eaters who make it to 100 versus the percentage of vegetarians who make it to 100. There are of course confounding factors - vegetarians might be more health-conscious in general - but at least we'd actually be measuring the same variable in two separate groups, rather than simply counting the number of vegetarians per 1000 people of a certain age.
Did you see the pool? They flipped the bitch!
Is there any carbon dioxide in methane gas?.....just a thought
What a bunch of crap. I am really getting sick and tired of all the politically motivated global warming hysteria. Warming and Cooling has to do with the Sun and its cycles... 3 years from now when the icecaps are expanding again, and the Chesapeake bay is freezing over.. I wonder if they will take Gore's Nobel prize away from him.. after all, he will probably have been responsible for killing more people from starvation (caused by turning food into fuel) and mis-directed energy resources than many of the other socialist despots (Hitler, Mao, Stalin, etc.. )we have seen in the last century. CO2 feeds plants.. not the weather!
If you're (very) drunk in an English pub (that you're not a frequent visitor to) you probably won't get served as you've "had enough".
:)
Yet a "fattie" can go to their local supermarket and buy as much lard based products as they like.
Clearly the UK government are missing a chance to "harmonise" consumption laws
Why yes, I have been drinking the Devils Advocaat this evening...
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
"Fat people are to blame for global warming" Next weeks "Fat people killed in USA by crazy global warming people" The week after "Cows are to blame for global warming" The week after that "Cows killed by crazy global warming people" The week after that "Food shortage ,"Fat people and cows not the issue with global warming"Al Gore "
Trying to pretend they're comparable is insane. What next, "balancing" the rights of people who like to shoot others and people who don't like to be shot?
Much as your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, your right to smoke ends where my lungs begin. If you don't like that, figure out how to make smokeless cigarettes.
Either BMI is nonsense, or being a little overweight isn't all that unhealthy. Probably both.
The problem is MSG in our food. The "fast food" industry has been using it for 50 years. McDonalds, and all the other large corps that pop-and-go your meals in a bag. I prefer food the old-fashion way, killing, preparing, and eating my own. If you grow your own garden, make sure you use organic seeds, and not anything that is GMO.
http://www.goaskalice.columbia.edu/2208.html
Tell that to the doctors and health insurance companies. If, you read farther up the thread, you will see that I just wrote my comment poorly. My point was that the definition of "obese" that the government/medical industry and insurance companies use is stupid.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
All those replies about food additives and how it's not fat peoples fault are obviously coming from fat people. It's not the governments job to monitor every thing that someone puts in their mouth, everything in moderation. The labels are on food for a reason and if you don't known what's good for you and what isn't then perhaps you should try some drain-o, it's really nice on fries.
FAT PEOPLE FUCK OFF!
"-1, Troll"? Seriously? You fat fucks need to lighten up, and I don't just mean dietarily.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Bloat on bloaters! I remember the fat lady in Oakland, Caifornia who sued the airline because they wanted her to pay for two seats.
People in the USA are the fattest on the planet by far as we are the nation that consumes the most energy capital. High food and gas prices will help us in the long run --portions will become smaller and that's a good thing. Notice the French, mostly they are slim and their food comes in small portions and is generally of higher quality than ours.
High gas prices will put us on bikes and walking to and from public transportation. If we had any that even rivaled most third world countries..not to digress but maybe people will demand more pubc transpo and that's also a good thing all the way around except for the car, and oil companies.
Ever been to an all-you-can eat buffet in Vegas and checked out the girth of the people?
Compare that to an all-you-can-eat buffet in Beijing and the difference is huge.
A pal of mine once said that we should be genetically engineered to be 3 feet tall and therefore would cut our resource consumption in half.
Good idea? Any bio firms listening?
So I don't think that we do a good service to smokers by allowing them to freely exercize their addiction in public. Especially if its something that threatens the health of other people. Second hand smoke is annoying, even as a smoker I am bothered by it, but it is a well-funded and erroneous myth that it is responsible for some "45,000" deaths a year. That's ridiculous--no one's death certificate lists "Second-hand smoke" as the cause. The numbers were obtained by masquerading heart attack sufferers as "victims of second-hand smoke." So the worker-safety issue is a fallacy. Again, its nice that you feel that way, but epidemiological research thinks you are full of shit. Google scholar: urinary cotinine + (whatever smoking associated disease you like - asthma is easy because it has a shorter lag.) However, in my purely anecdotal experience: as soon as I graduated medical school and stopped waiting tables to get by, my use of albuterol MDIs fell from 1 a month, to 3 a year.
Like it or not, you do hurt others with your addiction. If you want help stopping I would be happy to, but if you want enabling, you are not going to get it.
Fat people are the cause of global warming? My ass. Give us a break. How stupid is stupid. One person with a hummer cause hundreds of times more damage. The fact the the price of food and other things are going up, has more to do with the policies of the lunatics GWB and his brother Jeb and the dem gov of Florida and the people that support them than anything else. Yeah, fat people are the reason why food prices are going up. I guess the are asses in Britain too. Big ones from what it smells like.
Great! Blame all the fat people! This is the most ridiculous thing Ive ever heard in my entire life.
Its definitely not skinny super-moms that shuttle their 4 kids around all day to various extracurricular activities in their Chevy Suburbans and rappers in their H3s and such.
All that extra packaging that goes into 100 calorie packs surely isnt a big deal.
Now fat people cant walk, are they immobile?, NO!!! There are plenty of thin people that eat like hogs but nooooo theyre not to blame.
Scientists need to stop pointing the finger to other people and do a case study on actually stopping global warming or better yet, go cure cancer, not this nonsense. Sheesh!
There, I said it. I'm not even sorry. There is way too much "tolerance" these days for stuff that people are responsible for.
I'm all for having an open mind and being tolerant and nice to everyone for everything they had no say in - their gender, race, skin-hair-eye-colour, whatever.
I'm sick and tired of this whole "tolerance" bullshit when it comes to stuff that people choose - smoking, drinking, religion or being fat. And yes, it's a choice unless you're in the 0.1% where it's a medical condition (I'm willing to argue on religion, though. Some evidence says it's a mental condition with a genetic pre-disposition part).
People choose to be fat. Not necessarily consciously, as in "hey, let's get fat", of course. And tolerance towards obesity has a major impact. If every fat child were ridiculed and laughed at, there would be less of them. It's not the only factor, not by far, but hey, let's give the fat bastards some incentives to work on themselves!
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
-modern society is forced to regulate the unintelligent, inconsiderate and unhealthy in cases where people are not willing to regulate themselves. Many laws exist to regulate public behavior, especially when this behavior affects the health or pocketbooks of others. Bike helmets, seatbelts, child safety seats, gun laws, public shagging (sad, but true), public drinking...all these laws are there for a reason: to manage the stupid, selfish, 'I am an island' behavior of self-destructive impulse-driven dickheads.
Without knowing what proportion of people born in 1908 are/were vegetarian late in life, that "only" is a bit premature.
(Are we going to have a Guitar Hero health scare when we find only 1 in 1,000 octegenarians play Guitar Hero - clearly if you want to live to be 80, don't play it!)
Chances are you live in America and our food portions are ridiculous (every time I eat at Chilis/Outback/National Chain Here) I go away with TWO days of leftovers. If you are having problems not going to fatty national chain restaurants (I'll admit I do), try not eating that entire Bloomin' Onion in one sitting. EVERY restaurant has healthy choices, it's just up to YOU to make a smart decision. Eat the bad stuff if you want, just don't eat it all in one sitting...and take a walk for cryin' out loud. Your level 42 Blood Elf Warlock will still be there when you get back.
One last tip that will help you (it helped me immensely): stop drinking sodas IMMEDIATELY and drink water instead and you'll start losing weight without even exercising.
... but obese people are costing to society, not only in the ways indicated by the article, but also health care (via increase in insurance premiums if you are unlucky to live in the US, or by increase in overall taxation if you live in a place with a socialized health care system).
Fatties are a burden to society, to pretend otherwise is most disingenuous, if taxation is one of the weapons to combat this, I see no rational argument against it.
As for personal responsibility, p-h-u-l-e-a-s-e... obese people is precisely what they lack, they are not responsible towards themselves (they are pretty much killing themselves) so there is no much responsibility to be expected from them frankly unless they are educated or made to pay for the privilege of making all of us poorer.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
A non smoker does not affect other people for not smoking.
A smoker does affect others around him.
In a civilized society activities that harm third parties are curtailed in some form.
Smokers got away with murder only because the companies killing them have a lot of political cloud.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Hi squiggie :-)
Also wheat, caused by:
You step into a maize.
(i) inventory
Inventory: One fat person
"Feed the fat person to the grue-weevil. [Enter]"
I used to be like that, plenty of excuses for doing nothing.
Until my dad died of a fulminating heart attack.
Now I run 10km every weekend (and other distances during the week) and am training for a half marathon.
The day I ended with the excuses I became more creative about ways to lose the flab.
15 miles is nothing for any seasoned cyclist. If you would embrace it you would find that after 6 months it would take you a short time (and is not like you need to do it every day, you could do it twice during the working week and then put two more sessions Saturday and Sunday. That is plenty of exercise to be in good shape).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There is a point when too much muscle is bad for you, specially for your heart.
Also your bones may struggle (they don't really care if the extra weight is fat or muscle).
So although BMI may be bullshit in the sense of declaring you obese, it is still a good indicator in regards to where you weight is going, and a high BMI could still indicate issues, since too much muscle is also unnatural.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
http://data1.blog.de/blog/m/mechafanboy/img/euro_vs_america.jpg
I have this as one of my wallpapers on one desktop (KDE, so I have multiple desktops, natch :-).
I believe it gets the point across.
this, this, this - not a pretty sight.
So the people who claim that they're fat because they have a "slower metabolism" should obviously just eat less. Problem solved.
Whether someone has a "faster" or "slower" metabolism isn't the issue - it's about energy intake vs. energy output. Fat people, by and large, need to eat less. It's not like everyone has a "right" to eat as much as they want and not get fat ...
So, if you find your scale is saying "one at a time, please!" - reduce your caloric intake, increase your energy output, and you'll lose weight. Too many fat people claim that their metabolism somehow violates the laws of thermodynamics, that no matter how little they eat, they still gain weight.
You are what you eat. Extend this. A chicken is what it eats. You are becoming what the chicken ate, by eating the chicken.
Enlightenment is the elimination of that which is unnecessary.
Insightful? Delusional.
Exercise does not cause obesity.
Obese is not just weight. It's a ratio measurement.
Starving gets you no where. Your body is designed for starvation. And cuts back fat expenditure greatly during times of famine (by lowering your metabolism). So then you eat... with this low metabolism... and BAM, your calories do NOT get burned, but stored.
You're your own Oroboros.
Balance is required.
Enlightenment is the elimination of that which is unnecessary.
BMI is far from the best gauge for fat levels. I have a BMI of about 40, but my fat percentage is only about 20. Admittedly, that still places me 12-15 percent above what it should be for really healthy individuals, but there's a large margin between my fat percentage and your average 6 foot tall 300 pound individuals.
Unless you work out, BMI is fairly accurate to be honest
"You are what you eat" is not meant to be taken so literally. No one here has pointed to any study implicating corn-fed (vs. any other grain) chicken in any kind of nutritional or health problem.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If only ... despite my love for chocolate, I'm still white!
Have you ever tried HFCS? It is the most amazing thing ever! I love it.
Why should a business be accessible to people who don't want to go there? WTF? Maybe I should just not register it as a business and do everything under the table so people like you won't get up in my face. You are just out to ruin everyone's fun.
SO... we're not closed systems? Cancer isn't caused by nutritional deficencies? And speghetti monsters rule the universe!
Enlightenment is the elimination of that which is unnecessary.
Cancer certainly can be caused by nutritional deficiencies, along with many other things. But I doubt very much that you can show me a scientifically rigorous study linking corn-fed chicken to ANY disorder.
And that's not even getting into whether corn is any better or worse than any other grain, which was my original point.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
He/she was saying that global warming is not even confirmed to be a problem. Reading comprehension, try that before trying your $3 words. The double standard you bring up by saying that his/her argument is a straw man then saying "Or is knowledge for the sake of knowledge only a good thing when OMNIpotusCOM (1230884) * tells us that it is?" makes you look a little special.