The next time you watch your belly increasing in size, please also think that you’ll need more resources to keep it, and hence more carbon dioxide will be emitted for you. A new UN and WHA (World Health Organization) study published in BMC Public Health says that if we are to survive by 2050, then we’ll have to lose some weight.
The total mass of adults worldwide is about 287 million tons. This estimate took into account numbers like population size, the body mass index and height. The data used had been collected in 2005. Nowadays we may weigh even more than that.
Out of these almost 300 million tons of people, 15 million were due to overweight people of which only 1/3 was located in North America, despite the fact that the continent only accounts for 6 percent of the global population. On the other hand, Asia accounts for 61 percent of the global population but they aren’t as heavy, as only 13% of them are obese, versus 36 percent in the U.S.
All in all, a huge amount of energy would be needed to support all of us if we weighed as much as the Americans, at least 481 percent more energy – would be a lot of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted and a lot of energy wasted.
[via sciencemag]
