16 May 2008
NewScientist.com news service


Fat is an environmental issue

Andy Coghlan

Obese people consume 18% more food energy than lean people, researchers have calculated.

"It's just due to being fatter," says Phil Edwards of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Edwards and his colleague Phil Roberts say that the way to reduce calorie demands is simple – more exercise.

The researchers calculated the hypothetical difference in food consumption between 1 billion obese and 1 billion lean people.

There were two main components: how much food people need to eat simply to keep their bodies ticking over, even if they don't do any exercise; and how much people consume in typical activities of daily living.

Increased energy
They calculated consumption for lean people with a body-mass-index (BMI) of 24.5 and compared it with the consumption for overweight people with a BMI of 29, just short of the definition of obese, which is marked by a BMI of 30 or more.

BMI is calculated by taking a person's weight in kilograms and dividing it by their height squared in metres.

The pair found that lean people consumed a total of 2500 calories per person per day on average, 18% less than the 2960 calories consumed by obese people.

Broken down into "resting" and "active" components, the data showed that obese people consumed 1680 calories per person per day just to tick over, compared with 1550 calories for leaner people.

"Larger people need more energy just to move blood round the body, maintain larger bodies and keep the heart pumping," says Edwards.

Reason to slim
They also need more energy to transport their extra bulk from A to B. So, daily consumption for routine activities, such as 30 minutes of walking and 7 hours in the office, worked out at 1280 calories for per obese person and 950 calories for each lean person.

Edwards says that the results give fatter people an extra reason to lose weight beyond simply being healthier. He points out that in the UK, for example, one quarter of adults are obese – a figure that is predicted to rise to 40% by 2010.

The calculations are only a conservative estimate of the extra burden imposed by obesity, says Edwards, as they don't include the energy consumed growing, processing and distributing the food.

Nor do the calculations take into account the extra likely consumption of meat protein by fatter people. Each kilogram of meat is estimated to require 7 kg of vegetable matter as feed.

Wasted water
Meanwhile, a report released 14 May by the Stockholm International Water Institute bemoans the amount of fresh water squandered when people throw away food.

The institute points out that in the US, as much as 30% of food is wasted, worth $48.3 billion each year.

"That's like leaving the tap running and pouring 40 trillion litres of water into the garbage can – enough water to meet the household needs of 500 million people for a year," says the report, Saving Water: From Field to Fork, jointly launched with the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Water Management Institute.

The report, which includes a section on waste related to obesity, calls for all countries to halve the amount of food they throw away by 2025.

Journal reference: The Lancet (vol 371, p 1661)


http://environment.newscientist.com...s4_head_dn13912

*sigh* Calorie in, calorie out again.... If that really worked, I'd have been at my goal weight a long time ago..

You know, I have never understood this. Last I heard, water eventually evaporated and became rain, or rejoined the aquafir. How is it squandered? It doesn't disappear,(or stay forever in the "garbage can") the earth recycles...


*twitch*

OMG!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7404268.stm

Obese blamed for the world's ills

The world's obese population is rising
Obese people are contributing to the world food crisis and climate change, experts say.

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine calculated the obese consume 18% more calories than average.

They are also responsible for using more fuel, which has an environmental impact and drives up food prices as transport and agriculture both use oil.

The result is that the poor struggle to afford food and greenhouse gas emissions rise, the Lancet reported.

It comes as the World Health Organization predicts the obese population will double by 2015 to 700m.

Transport and food policy and the importance of sustainable transport must not be overlooked

Dr Phil Edwards, report co-author

In the UK, nearly a quarter of adults are classed obese, twice as many as there were in the 1980s.

The team found that obese people require 1,680 daily calories to sustain normal energy and another 1,280 to maintain daily activities - a fifth more than normal.

The higher consumption of food has a two-fold effect, researchers said.

First of all the increasing demand for food, drives up production.

This means that agricultural processes are using more oil to meet demand, which contributes to the rising cost of fuel.

The cost of fuel is then passed on in the cost of food, making it more difficult for poorer areas to afford it.

Prices

What is more, the researchers said obese people are likely to rely on transport more and put more strain on that transport because of their mass, which again drives up prices and usage.

But the researchers said there was a solution.

Phil Edwards, who co-authored the article, said: "Urban transport policies that promote walking and cycling would reduce food prices by reducing the global demand for oil and promotion of a normal weight.

And they added: "Decreased car use would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"Transport and food policy and the importance of sustainable transport must not be overlooked."

But Dr David Haslam, of the National Obesity Forum, said it was "stretching it a bit" to blame the obese in the way.

"Really, it is discriminatory towards obese people. They are an easy target at the moment, but I think the causes of climate change and rising food prices is much more complex."

Exercise would increase caloric demands, not lower it.
I despair.

There is an interesting rebuttal of this at The Weight of Evidence blog see The Solar Powered Plate

It occured to me reading about Paleo meat eating that as horses and reindeer were their staple meat sources it's a pity that horse meat isn't generally available in the UK. They are usually grass fed.

People consume food and water. Taller people will consume, on the average, more than shorter people.

What are we going to do about the TALL PEOPLE PROBLEM?

lol - well according to an article posted recently about meat consumption in China and how increased meat consumption meant less short people - I guess we have to stop feeding tall people meat! Good for me - I'm short so I get the tall people's meat!

Once again, evidence of how fat people are ruining the world.

This article is all over the place.... what in the world is the connection between obese people, food being thrown away, and water wastage? I don't get what that has to do with the rest of the article.

Surely as an obese person who can't stop stuffing my pie hole, I throw away less food than lean people?


If any of this was valid, maybe I could muster up some guilt if food was free, but since I have to buy what I eat, if I purchase 18% more food, I'm stimulating the economy and providing jobs to the tune of 18% more than skinny folk do..... Yay me!

Hey - and wouldn't taller people eat more, to transport their lanky selves around?

Down with tall people!

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com...-for-the-earth/
Obesity Promotes Global Warming?

By John Tierney

Tags: energy, exercise, fat, global warming

As someone who commutes by bicycle into Manhattan, I would normally applaud any scientific rationale for more bike lanes. But some calculations in the new issue of the Lancet make me uncomfortable. The authors argue that policies promoting cycling and walking are good for the planet because they could reduce obesity — and obesity, the authors calculate, contributes to global warming.

Do we really need to give fat people one more reason to feel guilty?

The Lancet authors, Dr. Phil Edwards and Dr. Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, crunch the numbers and conclude:

Compared with the normal weight population, the obese population consumes 18% more food energy. Additionally, more transportation fuel energy will be used to transport the increased mass of the obese population, which will increase even further if, as is likely, the overweight people in response to their increased body mass choose to walk less and drive more.

Urban transport policies that promote walking and cycling would reduce food prices by reducing the global demand for oil, and promotion of a normal distribution of B.M.I. [Body Mass Index] would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food. Decreased car use would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thus the need for biofuels, and increased physical activity levels, would reduce injury risk and air pollution, improving population health.

Sure, exercise has lots of benefits. But would more exercise really lead to less obesity, or would the exercisers just get hungrier and eat more? Check out this article by Gina Kolata, my Times colleague and the author of “Rethinking Thin.” Or see this summary of the scientific literature by Gary Taubes, the author of “Good Calories, Bad Calories.” They both question the notion that exercise promotes long-term weight loss: Some exercisers do lose weight initially, but they tend to regain it.

And even if exercise would reduce obesity, should it be promoted by blaming global warming on what is already the most stigmatized group in Western society?

Wow. I'd love to see some of the early propaganda from Germany prior to WWII. I bet it would look astoundingly similar -- "innocent yet preparatory".


On the contrary--more use of transportation makes having it more possible as it has more business. When not enough people use an extremely expensive option such as mass transit, it ends up failing altogether.

If they want to start charging people bus fare based on bodyweight and bodywidth, that would be perfectly fair. Horrifying in several ways, but if the whole complaint is gas usage for heavier people, fair.

P.S. If you're a healthy male bodybuilder, you get penalized. If you're a 6'4 basketball player vs. a 5'1 housewife, you get penalized. But it's all for the good of society, ya know!


I am fat, but he is retarded. His political ideas are even more moronic than his dietary ideas.

Hey, you! Yeah, you with the 400# ass. You be WALKIN that 2 miles in the rain and 34 degree weather to work, cause you're a fattie! If you gotta walk everywhere, you'll become a skinny! And the world will be saved, and sunshine, and rainbows, and little rainbow unicorns!

The obese are *already* vastly less active and more inclined not to physically go to all kinds of places, from the store to the baseball game to the opera to see aunt Jane to vacation in Florida, because of their size. Deliberately doing away with mass transit for the sake of "making people walk or bike" will make fairly lean people slightly better exercised, and slightly to grossly obese people LESS exercised, probably in direct proportion to their need for movement unfortunately. This would also terribly penalize people who should NOT be walking halfway across a city rather than riding a bus -- like the elderly, and children alone, and the differently-abled, and people who need to get the doctor, and...

P.S. And I'm guessing Phil never:

Lived in a city that had NO bike lanes.
Lived in a city that had NO sidewalks.
In my city, if you want to get from one side to the other, you walk on the street and hope nobody hits you.

Big cities have those. Guess what they also have: In other cities I've lived in (big cities), you'd better look like the race of the locals--or actually be part of their gang--or you won't see the other side of that neighborhood.

Definitely we should make everybody walk everywhere. That will solve the obesity "crisis."

And while I'm at it, how the hell did obesity become a 'crisis' for anybody but the fat person? Diabetes and heart disease and cancer and schizophrenia and alzheimers, now THOSE are a 'crisis' because of the money they cost the population via government semi-socialism. But unless the government is now paying for Jenny Craig frozen dinners (not like I think that's any obesity solution), why is the "fat" part a crisis?

Oh, I just responded to the above article on a different thread.

But but but... we tall people like our meat!

http://www.reuters.com/article/news...572011320080515

"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."