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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."
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..."
"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...
And full disclosure--I'm about 50 pounds overweight. I've been working on this for a number of reasons--health, comfort, and the ability to bike to work instead of having to drive my car (those fill ups at the gas tank are starting to hurt.)
Not quite.
Muscle uses a lot of energy. People with a muscular build NEED a lot more food than fat people, because fat doesn't consume energy, muscles do.
Add to this the fact that muscular people probably got that muscle through regular exercise, which burns lots of energy too.
Obesity is very often a case of bad diet (eating the wrong stuff) and non-balanced lifestyle (no exercise to match the food), and not simply eating too much. Athletes eat FAR more than your average fatty.
Basically correct, but you left another relevant fact out: food prices are also going up due to increased energy costs. As for the decreased supply due to drought, flood, and other environment issues, that's not entirely correct. Rice, wheat, corn, and other staple crops were produced at record levels over the last year. Enough rice (or was it wheat, I don't remember) was produced in the most recent season to proved each living human about 700lbs. (I really wish I could find the article for proper citation.) No food shortage at all when looking a the global scale, but there is a shortage of political will to properly distribute the food in many nations where starvation is rampant.
I hope this comment is well received... I could have moderated instead!
Persecutors will be violated!
That would depend on your definition of "diet". If you eat less energy than you expend you will obviously lose weight, and that's what "diet and exercise" is all about.
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.
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.
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.
Although Americans are generally the largest population of morbidly-obese, the rate of obesity and overweight is about the same almost everywhere in the world.
:) with Argentina close to US. 1.6 BILLION is fat! 30% of Chinese are FAT!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bmi30chart.png
But % of overweight people, US doesn't lead anymore,
http://www.epidemiologic.org/2007/02/most-overweight-countries-in-world.html
Kuwait wins
Just because someone doesn't look like a fat hippo, as some people in US do, doesn't mean they are lean or healthy. BMI of 27 is NOT that difficult to hide, but it is quite unhealthy regardless.
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.
BMI is not a good predictor of individual health. There are too many reasons why an individual can have high BMI but healthy, or low BMI but not healthy. But since the probability of those, though many, reasons are not high, the average of it over a population is a good predictor of collective health. You might be yourselves an athletics that makes good reason for your own high BMI. If 70% of your whole population has that, it is not very likely that all of them have the same good excuse. Much more likely they are high BMI because they eat too much energy and expend too little.