This item, much touted on new bulletins throughout today, is bullshit, pure and simple:-
Obesity aggravates world food crisis - 16 May 2008
Policies designed to reduce levels of obesity would also help to ease global food shortages, experts have claimed.
Dr Phil Edwards and Dr Ian Roberts say that obese people are contributing to the world food crisis because of the amount of food they eat.
Writing in the medical journal The Lancet, the experts from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine suggest that obese populations typically consume 18 per cent more calories than average, increasing demand for food and leading to rising food prices.
While someone with a stable body mass index (BMI) of 24.5 may consume around 2,500 calories of food per day, a person with a stable BMI of 29 would need 2,960 calories per day in order to maintain their basal metabolic rate and have enough energy for daily living activities. (Rubbish! People the world over get by on far less without harm.)
Dr Edwards and Dr Roberts claim that promoting healthy urban transport policies such as walking and cycling routes would help to reduce the excess food demands placed by obese members of society, as people’s reliance on cars is contributing to the problem.
‘Increased car use also contributes to rising food prices by promoting obesity, which increases the global demand for food,’ they wrote.
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Note:- Edwards and Miller are based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (so how does that qualify them to write this trash?). Edwards, in particular, has a history of writing contentious articles (better known by the technical term - complete bollocks), of quite remarkable puerility - he’s appeared in The Guardian’s Comment is Free online section occasionally, usually getting a well-deserved kicking for his pains.
I don’t think I have ever read such egregious, and dangerous, nonsense - this isn’t research, it’s just opinion, and ill thought out opinion, at that.
I am technically obese - my BMI is 30 - yet for the most part I have one meal a day and, even with the odd snack, consume less than 1,000 kcals on an average day. This is not supposition - I’ve checked.
Yes, there are many fat people who have no more ambition than to make their next pig-out grosser than the last, but they are, I believe, very much in the minority. True, on TV recently we have been treated to the grotesque sight of human blimps who have eaten themselves into the record books and, soon, an early grave, but these people are grossly abnormal. Many fat people deeply resent being fat, and crap like this does nothing for their often fragile self-esteem. Despite what professional fatties like Dawn French say, fat is NOT sexy, and no-one in their right mind wants to be fat.
America, if the media are to be believed, is dominated by fat buggers who are too stupid to know when to stop eating - but how can those of us who don’t actually live there know for sure just how widespread the problem is? Personally, I’m pretty damn sure it’s a serious problem, but I refuse to believe that fat people are responsible for rising food prices and increasing shortages - that is complete, and unprovable, bollocks.
What does contribute, very largely to these problems, in developed nations, is the hugely excessive purchasing of food, with the result that a vast amount is thrown away uneaten, because too much has been cooked, or too much has been bought and it passes beyond its idiotic use-by date before it can be eaten, and thrown away whether or not it has actually gone off.
A couple of days ago I had a bacon sandwich - my meal for the day - using the second half of a pack I had opened a week previously. The instructions say it should be thrown away 3 days after opening, but why? It was perfectly fine, and conspicuously failed to kill me or make me even slightly ill. If meat has gone off, there’s no mistaking the smell - if it smells good, providing it’s been tightly wrapped and not contaminated, then it is good. Far too much food is wasted through slavish adherence to dates which are purely notional at best, and a bad joke at worst - I mean, a use-by date on vinegar? Give me a break - tightly stoppered the stuff will last a year or two, likewise for soy sauce. Even bottled beer comes with a use-by date, but bottle beer - and I don’t mean Pasteurised beer, which is an abomination - is quite capable of being kept for several, even many, years, just like wine, which isn’t dated (I have a bottle of 12-year-old sherry to hand, which has no use-by date, and quite right too). 20-odd years ago, cleaning out the shed, I found several flagons of stout I’d made at least a decade previously and, apart from having thrown a heavy sediment, it was fine
Cheese, too, has a use-by date set far too early - hard cheeses will keep for months wrapped in foil in the fridge, though why anyone would want to keep cheese I don’t know - it’s for eating, not hanging on to. Soft cheeses, because of their higher moisture content, won’t keep as long, but they’ll still keep beyond their date, and cheese has a very good indication that it’s reached the end of its life - it goes mouldy - but then you just trim off the mould and eat the stuff. After all, some people go to great lengths to make mouldy cheese (what else is it you think makes blue cheese blue?).
Anyway, to get back to the body fascism, there are many reasons why people are fat - over-eating is just one of them. For the first two decades of my life I was extremely underweight - at 14 I was 3 stone. What pumped up my weight wasn’t food, or sloth, it was prescription drugs (OK - a fondness for beer didn’t help, but that exacerbated the problem, it didn’t cause it). I take a lot of drugs - 16 right now, more if I have a crisis - and many of them cause constipation (the longer for food remains in your alimentary tract, the more is extracted from it in terms of both calories and fluid); others cause fluid retention and yet others - steroids and anti-depressants, for example - quite simply cause weight gain. My intake of the latter is very low - it’s for pain control, not depression - but my steroid intake is substantial. I also have an illness - ME - that is known to cause weight gain. That, for the information of those trouble-making fuckwits Dr Phil Edwards and Dr Ian Roberts, is why I, and very many other people are fat, and remain so, no matter how little we eat.
When the first fat person is beaten up, or murdered, thanks to you, doctors, for allegedly eating the world into oblivion, I shall make it my business to ensure that the responsibility lands exactly where it belongs - on your undoubtedly pointy heads.
I have fibromyalgia, a close cousin to CFS/ME. I am also fat. A lot of things made me fat. I look like my paternal grandmother. I have obstructive sleep apnea, which I think makes you put on weight. I have osteoarthritis in my knees. I can’t go out walking. No way do I take in the number of calories they say I would need for my weight.
Doctors have known for years that if you lower food intake, it will reset your body. If you have ever dieted, you have reset your body to maintain your weight with less calories. I was a nurse, and I watched on of my patients continue to gain weight even as the dietitians kept cutting her calories.
What is causing the food crisis is not what we eat, or even throw away in developed nations. It is the agricultural policies of the US, and the restructuring conditions of the IMF. We open up poor countries to our commodities, and put their farmers out of business. And then their corrupt leaders steal what the people need.
You rant like I do. You might be interested in one of my blogs, The View from the Bottom of the Shaft.
Perhaps later I will look at your archives. Meanwhile, I’m blogrolling you.
Thanks for that.
I don’t think, though, that consumers can entirely abrogate their responsibility for the food crisis. True, every field given over to mange tout in Kenya, for British supermarkets, is one field less that could be growing crops for local consumption, but the bottom line is that no-one actually NEEDS mange tout, and that IS down to the consumer - if we didn’t buy them, they wouldn’t be imported/grown.
And food waste really is a colossal problem, not least in the US where the average outsize portion would probably feed two people elsewhere in the world - a 20oz steak, which no normal person needs, would provide protein for four Sudanese, for example. And what’s not eaten goes to landfill or incinerators.
I’ll pick this one up later - it’s time for my daily calorie-fest! 540, it says on the pack - that’s about 800 so far.
OK - I’m back. True, it’s the following day, but that still counts as later. I wanted to address the question of food waste at home. I live alone, and though I take great care to buy only what I need, there is still more waste than I’m happy with. Bread, for example, often winds up in the bin whether I buy it or make my own, simply because a loaf will go mouldy before I can finish it, so may 25% of it is wasted, and there are other, much smaller examples, so if I have waste, how much more will a family of three or four have, even without conspicuous consumption? And conspicuous consumption, in the UK, is rife. I see the same people every week, with trolleys stacked so high with groceries that, unless they have a family of 10, they couldn’t ever get through it all. They MAY have a family of 10, of course, but over-buying is rather more likely.
The UK supports a thriving population of Freegans, too - people who get their food raiding the dumpsters at the rear of supermarkets, and rescuing food that has been thrown out because it’s getting close to its sell-by date or, in the case of fruit and veg, is slightly damaged. Why this produce isn’t given away to the needy I have no idea, but the waste generated is massive, and Freegans barely make a dent in it.
Something else contributing to wastage is poor quality. Because, although I love cooking, it’s difficult for me, I get through a lot of ready-meals, usually from Sainsbury’s. Quality control, wherever these things are made, is a major problem though, and all too often they are utterly crap. I have two in the fridge right now - a Cumberland Pie and Steak & Dumplings. I’ve already eaten their fellows, bought at the same time, and they were rubbish - so do I eat those I have left, which are likely to be just as bad, or do I dump them and get something out of the freezer that I cooked?
Or do I just cobble something up from scratch? A can of Baxter’s Tomato and Butter Bean soup, for example, with some cooked and flaked cod added to it, along with the cooking juices and butter (frozen cod portions, baked in foil with butter), and/or some smoked haddock, makes a passable fish soup for very little effort and less cost. I don’t know what I’ll have yet, but I do know I’ve wandered away from the subject, this thing is getting way too long, and I need to get out and do a bit of shopping.
Just one more instant recipe, though - a packet of Ainsley Harriott’s Shropshire Pea cup-soup, made as directed, then added to a can of Harry Ramsden’s mushy peas, stirred well and heated through, makes a pretty good bowl of thick pea soup.
Mange tout. Had to google that one. We call them snap peas here in the US. One of the themes recently here in Seattle is “eat locally”, that is eat what is produced nearby. This is good advice. One of the worrying things about the globalization of food is that rich countries can contract with poor countries to produce things such as snap peas, that take the land out of production for the local population. The unwisdom of this was brought home during the Irish Potato Famine of 1846-51, during which time much of the food produced was under contract to be shipped to England. Thus the Irish saw ships of wheat, cattle, and pigs leave port even as they starved. But then I am a student of the Famine as my family came to the States as a result of it.