The rising numbers of people who are overweight and obese in the UK means the nation uses 19% more food than 40 years ago, a study suggests.
That could equate to an extra 60 mega tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year, the team calculated.
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"Staying slim is good for health and for the environment.
"We need to be doing a lot more to reverse the global trend towards fatness, and recognise it as a key factor in the battle to reduce emissions and slow climate change."
It is not just a UK issue - in nearly every country in the world, the average BMI is rising.
Great. But why. They state in the article that "in the 70's, portions of vegetables were larger, and portions of meat smaller." Sounds like more vegetarian rhetoric to me. They certainly put a lot of care into their calcs on how much fat people hurt the environment, but then 1 sentence on the causes of the differences? Seems sensational.
ReplyDeleteInteresting article sure, worthwhile study maybe, written to sell advertising, definitely. Homeopathic weight loss drug ads is what comes up for me...
Can you expand on "vegetarian rhetoric?" It is intuitive to me that a diet high in veggies uses less energy to produce than one high in meat, but I will admit to not really looking into that closely.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first saw the headline and decided to click on this article, I thought it would be related to the 70s oil issues and energy use - I assumed a 70s lifestyle meant more energy conservation out of necessity. Now, I am wondering about the relationship between economic conditions and the average weight of populations. What sorts of things can you learn by looking at the weights of human populations throughout time? My hypothesis is that the socio-economic conditions that allow us suburbs, global warming, peak oil and cheap stuff from China also allowed our BMI to increase as is reported in the article. What happens next?
I agree that it is sensational (but I think all news - and anything, really, for mass consumption - is sensational). Someone doing the study has an agenda - I assumed it was either environmentalists jumping on the obesity bandwagon, or nutritionists taking advantage of the attention given to global warming.