British Report Claims Obesity a Burden on Environmental Sustainability

A recent report by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) has claimed that rising obesity rates “could have
the same implications for world food energy demands as an extra half billion
people living on earth.” Sarah Walpole, “The weight of nations: an estimation
of adult human biomass,” BMC Public Health, June 2012. After analyzing data
from the United Nations and World Health Organization on body mass index
(BMI) and height distribution to estimate the average adult body mass, the
study’s authors calculated total biomass per continent and country “as the
product of population size and average body mass.” Based on these results,
the researchers concluded that “[i]f all countries had the BMI distribution of
the USA, the increase in human biomass of 58 million tons would be equivalent in mass to an extra 958 million people of average body mass, and have
energy requirements equivalent to that of 473 million adults.”

“Everyone accepts that population growth threatens global environmental
sustainability—our study shows that population fatness is also a major threat,”
one of the study’s authors said in a June 18, 2012, LSHTM press release.
“Unless we tackle both population and fatness our chances are slim.”