Our little blue-green marble ... straining under the masses.
Eat a salad, save the planet?
That appears to be the case. Biologists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (odd combo … ) have determined that all of humanity weighs 287 million tons. For some reason, the biologists didn’t include children in their calculation, so this number is actually larger.
And of the 287 million tons adult earthlings weigh, it turns out 15 million tons of this is extra fat. North America is the most overweight (big surprise); we have 6 percent of the global population but account for 7.4 percent of human “biomass.” In fact, a full third of ALL global obesity resides in North America. If our “fatness” was spread across the entire global population, it would be the equivalent of an extra 473 million humans of average weight.
Geez!
Putting the numbers another way, the average North American weighs 178 pounds while the global average is 137 pounds and Asians average just 127 pounds. How does us being overweight affect global warming? Actually more than you might think.
Our fat cells need to be fed with processed foods and large servings of meat mostly. Production of these food resources uses more energy than that salad I mentioned at the start. On top of that, heavier people require more energy to move around. Trains, planes, and automobiles expend more energy moving heavier loads and, yes, a car full of overweight individuals burns more gas than a car full of people with normal BMIs. (Here’s a collection of my “This is Why You’re Fat” posts.)
So on top of all the other reasons why we should lose weight, let’s add global warming to the list. You’ll look better, you’ll feel better, and you’ll save the planet.
Pass me a carrot please …
Cheers,
Lisa
Related post: “More Than Half of Europeans Are Overweight”
photo credit: DonkeyHotey
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I read these statistics last week, and I couldn’t believe it! If only these stats were enough to motivate people to lose all that extra weight. I had never thought of obesity affecting global warming either, but that’s such a good point!
The majority of the article quantifies the aggregate mass of human beings and does nothing to support the link between low mass and greenness. I don’t know of any science to support the claim, “[...] our fat cells need to be fed with processed foods and large servings of meat mostly.” The science behind diets like Pritkin, the Paleo Diet, Atkins, and the Smarter Science of Slim say that it’s the presence of starches and sugars — primarily from plants — that are the root cause of fat.
If any are motivated by a “lean=green” message, power to them. As a practical matter, I don’t think that a change in the BMI will have a huge impact on gasoline consumption. Many people already carry a significant amount of dead weight in their cars and/or travel with under-inflated tires remedying those conditions that would have an immediate impact. Car-pooling and using human-powered transportation would have a far greater impact on carbon footprint.
There could also be some negative impacts from this kind of message. A young girl suffering from bulimia might use, “At least I’m more green than you” as a justification for her behavior. We already have enough of a “lean police” mentality in our society; I don’t think that kind of attitude needs to be encouraged.
Learning to become more lean may save the person, but I don’t think it’ll save the planet. ;-(
Phil, you took all the fun out of that post! Yes, cleaning out our cars would actually be a great and easy first step for a lot of people and it’s an excellent point that it would probably help (at least a little). I just thought the perspective of looking at obesity as a green problem as well was interesting. Remember most of the corn crop (I want to say 80%?) is grown for livestock, not for humans and the practices of Big Agra are appalling bad. As for triggering someone into an eating disorder that seems a bit far fetched, but hey I suppose it’s possible. Basically if someone is looking to trigger into an eating disorder they’ll find something to support their endeavors, the idea of being green seems a bit less likely than say viewing models in magazines …