Fight Global Warming. Lose Weight

[BPSCG]

Obesity contributes to global warming, too.

Obese and overweight people require more fuel to transport them and the food they eat, and the problem will worsen as the population literally swells in size, a team at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine says.

(...snip...)

At least 400 million adults worldwide are obese. The World Health Organization (WHO) projects by 2015, 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese.

(...snip...)

The researchers found that obese people require 1,680 daily calories to sustain normal energy and another 1,280 calories to maintain daily activities, 18 percent more than someone with a stable BMI.

Because thinner people eat less and are more likely to walk than rely on cars, a slimmer population would lower demand for fuel for transportation and for agriculture, Edwards said.

This is also important because 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions stem from agriculture, he added.

The next step is quantifying how much a heavier population is contributing to climate change, higher fuel prices and food shortages, he added.

"Promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food," Edwards and Roberts wrote.

Link

I did some quick math. Per above, obese people need 2,960 calories per day; people with stable BMI need only 2,508 (2,960 = 2,508 + 18%). Therefore, each obese person needs 452 extra calories per day. Four hundred million obese people therefore gobble down an extra 180,800,000,000 (180.8 billion) calories per day.

My lunch routinely includes a microwave meal (spaghetti today) that typically runs about 300 calories. So it would take 602,666,666 of those micro-meals to get those 180.8 billion calories.

Those micro-meals typically weigh about ten ounces. So that's 6,026,666,660 extra ounces of food = 376,666,666 pounds = 188,333 extra tons of food every day for guys and gals with the XXXL pants.

Next time you see Al Gore or Rob Reiner on TV complaining about global warming, tell them to put down the cheeseburger.

 

[mrbaracuda]

Woah, woah. Easy.

/me starts loosing weight to support zee world vee shall zoon conquer yet again!

Eh, I mean. Nevermind!

 

[TX50]

Bring back food rationing!

 

[casebro]

So 10% of the population could eat 1.8% less of the worlds food, thereby lessening the CO2 output by what ummm...1/2%? Which will have approximately NO benefit as far as global warming goes.

Call me back when you have a diet plan that works, I can't wait for the climate to moderate from it's current nice, to it's diet-controlled nice...

 

[1337m4n]

No.

I don't care if the entire world is destroyed. I am not giving up my grandma's strawberry pies. You wouldn't either if you'd ever tasted them.