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Fat people increase global warming!?!?
June 18, 2009
Please do not kill the messenger. This news comes from CNN.
I was surfing a few stories and as I was looking in their archives, I found this piece of news that is sure to be explosive and cause a lot of debate for those who are hearing about this for the first time.
I don’t know if you watched in April the debates on CNN over airline companies who want to charge double-fares to overweight and obese passengers because they aren’t able to fully fit in one seat and often leave the people sitting next them unpleasantly smushed. The CNN Twitter pages and the Facebook boards were red hot with people debating each side of the story.
If you didn’t catch that debate and if you missed CNN proclamation that “Thinner is better to curb global warming, study says” then you’ll surely have something to talk about at the water cooler.
It seems that this big news comes from the U.K. where researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published a shocking study. You see, because of food production and transportation factors, a country that has more fat people contributes more harmful gases to the planet than a population of thin people.
It’s true that thanks to supersize meals, processed foods, frozen dinners, fast foods, junk foods and severe lack of exercise people around the world are getting fatter and fatter, but given that Americans are the most obese people on the planet and Brits are the fattest in Europe, would this mean that these two countries lead the way in negatively impacting the planet because their citizens have been unsuccessfully fighting the battle of the bulges?
CNN reports there are more than 1 billion adults on the planet who are overweight and 300 million of those are considered to be obese (according to the Mayo clinic the U.S. has 33.3 per cent obese people). Perhaps these growing numbers prompted this study, given that “population with 40 per cent obese people requires 19 per cent more food energy for its total energy expenditure than the population with 3.5 per cent obese people, the study showed”.
So would the logical conclusion from this study mean that being thinner is not only good for your health, it’s also good for the planet?
You can read the full CNN story here: Thinner is better to curb global warming, study says
Photo by permanently scatterbrained
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June 25th, 2009 at 10:41
maybe I start the discussion with the wrong comment, but if you reduce everything to transportation costs, you can find nearly everything increases global warming. I found the title of this post interesting but thought that it would have a little more substance.
June 25th, 2009 at 18:31
I’ve lost count of how many times we have been warned that the outside world merely reflects our inner state. Now science supports this basic observation of religious leaders throughout time.
We’ve made the world in our image. No wonder we live in a polluted, sick and dysfunctional world since we’ve done the same to our bodies.