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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."
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
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.
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
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)
"In conclusion, we should not be trying to eliminate obesity. Rather, we should establish "fat farms" where we can increase their numbers for our future needs."
Welcome to America. What would you like to eat?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
unlikely, due to their shape skinny people stack better therefore we can farm them at a higher density and store them better. our vegan buddies will also tire faster and become easy pickings since they avoid high energy foods.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It's truly frightening that you could write five paragraphs and still overlook the reason for the recent food shortages.
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.
The world *was* built for you, it's your culture of no exercise and bad diet that's to blame. Leave the United States and discover that almost everywhere else you go you will *never* see anybody as fat as they are in the United States, and what few fat people you find are more of the pleasantly plump variety, rather than the extremely obese.
;) Something about having to commute almost two miles to work by bicycle every day, I suspect.
Solution? Home-cooking and exercise. Having lived in Germany for two years and Japan for six, I now find that when I go home I can see the drastic difference between the two, both in portions and quality. Not to mention that the diets and lifestyles of both countries will naturally cause you to lose weight, because they're simply healthier. I lost 20 pounds coming to Japan alone (and no, I actually *do* like the food here).
When you cook at home, you know what's going into the food, and you're only going to cook for yourself. Make the effort to go out and ride a bicycle for thirty minutes every other day (no coasting!) and you'll see a definite change over, say, a month.
Stop blaming everybody for discriminating against you and take control of your own life. Heaven forbid people should encourage you to improve your health, attractiveness, and lengthen your lifespan using exactly that body which god gave you, and without prescribing to some stupid standard of beauty. Do it for yourself and your family at the very least. No pills, just self-control and common sense. Even if your best still comes in at plump, good for you.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
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
I'm not saying it's good or bad - just a fact.
antipaucity
I think his point about smoking was that a building owner cannot decide whether or not to cater to smokers. Why can't the business owner decide if they want to allow smoking and then if smoking bothers you don't go there. Instead it has to be banned and taxed. A business owner should be allowed to have a business that caters to smokers. For the record I do not smoke. I used to though.
All points of time and space are connected.
Its also a worker safety issue. We don't allow employers to have other toxic substances wafting through workplaces, why should we allow that with tobacco smoke? Just because its customer generated?
BMI is a silly measurement for health. A few years ago, I ran a marathon at a BMI of 24. That is just shy of being classified as obese. At the time, you would have been hard pressed to find excess fat on me. I'm one of those "heavily muscled" people that fall under the disclaimer that BMI does not work for eveyone.
On the flip side, BMI IS an excellent predicter of marathon times. (and I've never been anything other than a ploddingly slow runner)
Because historically, allowing employers to say such things have led to what amounts to slavery. "If you don't do 16-hour days using machines with no safety devices whatsoever, and be on-call for the reminding 8 hours, and if I happen to find you attractive bend over whenever I want it, you're not qualified to work for me." It was the standard during early phases of Industrial Revolution, and a natural result of a vast oversupply of labor. It was only stopped once the unions got all employees to bargain collectively, since together their power equals that of all employers; individually, any employee is vastly inferior to any employer.
The sad truth is that in an industrialized world, the natural cost of labor approaches zero: the more you automate, the less people are actually needed for production. Since allowing the market forces free reign here would thus lead to an unlivable society for a majority of its members, laws are required to artificially limit the bargaining power of the employer.
As for your strawman about a chimney sweeper suffering from vertigo, if his vertigo doesn't prevent him from sweeping the chimney, what do you care ? And if it does, well, not doing his job is a valid reason to fire him, is it not ?
I've said this before and I'm saying it again: no matter what businessmen might think, society does not exist to help them make profit. It exists to help and protect its members. And that means putting clear limits for the businesses to operate within, so they can't prey on people.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Because occupying land for business use is a privilege, not a right.
You want the cops to come and remove someone from your establishment who you don't want there, you want the government to enforce your control over that little patch of real estate? Part of the deal is that the government gets to set some restrictions on your business.
For the same reason you can't tell a factory worker, "you want to work here, you tolerate the risk of getting your arm ripped off by our unsafe machinery."
Chimney sweeps climb to significant heights. It is the nature of their jobs, if they can't tolerate heights they can't do the job, and there's no reasonable accommodation that could change that.
A waiter delivers food. There is nothing in the nature of a waiter's job that requires him or her to smoke. It's no more permissible to say "only smokers can be waiters here" than "only atheists can be waiters here" or "only members of the Green Party can be waiters here" or "only people who let me have sex with them can be waiters here".
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood