Obesity Has Officially Passed Starvation as the World’s Dominant Disease
August 28, 2006 by Liz Lewis
Filed under Event, Food and Drink, Media, Prevention, Your Body, Your Mind
I’m not sure whether this is happy news or sad news. I have never been uncomfortably fat or uncomfortably hungry, so I’m not able to say which is worse, but good or bad this BBC report announces a true paradigm shift in the way our world’s problems work: fat people now outnumber starving people on this planet.
US professor Barry Popkin said all countries – both rich and poor – had failed to address the obesity boom.
He told the International Association of Agricultural Economists the number of overweight people had topped 1bn, compared with 800m undernourished.
Speaking at an Australian conference, he said changing diets and people doing less physical exercise was the cause.
Professor Popkin, from the University of North Carolina, said that the change had happened quickly as obesity was rapidly spreading, while hunger was slowly declining among the world’s 6.5bn population.
I guess I’ll go ahead and say this is good better news and here’s why…
If you don’t have enough food and can’t get any more, then you die. This result is a product of your environment. However, if you have too much food and it makes you fat, then it is within your own control to curb that behavoir and live a healthier lifestyle. The latter seems like a much more hopeful scenario to me.
We’ve figured out how to make enough food to make us (as a planet) more likely to be fat than to starve. Now we just have to exercise a little self control.
Piece of, er, cake, right?
Read the full artcile after the jump. via Interiority (pops)
Sweet. You have the favicon.ico goin on.
Also sweet that we’re all fatasses… right? right??
I think that maybe we should rig up a thing like the Kitty Exercise Video in all restaurants – if you run for thirty minutes then a burger shoots out at you. I already play this game, but without the wheel… and they usually just hand me a bag through my window, rather than shooting it into my car.