so we're all agreed on this one then....
KILL AMERICANS and save the world.
Fatties are 'destroying the world'
A famous mad professor who has previously called for Britons to starve their children into dwarfism so as to ease strains on the planetary ecosystem has reiterated his arguments, this time insisting that the amount of surplus flab carried by the human race will soon be equivalent to having another half-a-billion people on Earth …
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 18:35 GMT ZenCoder
Re: KILL AMERICANS and save the world.
Good luck with that, if American's are 6% but account for 34% of the biomass then the rest of the world has an average weight of an obese large breed house cat.
6% account for 34% means 94% account for 66%. (34/6)/(66/94) ~= 8. The average adult in the USA weight about 200 lbs. An chubby main coon (large house cat) weighs 25 pounds.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 14:58 GMT Tom 38
Re: Statistics
This is like 'Poverty in the UK', which is defined as a certain percentage of the median income. One result of this is that there will always be some people in the UK defined as being 'in poverty', presumably because they don't have a flat screen TV.
It also means that if the high end income distribution changes, the median income drops, the 'poverty line' is hence lower, and a certain number of people are 'lifted out of poverty', without increasing how much money they receive or what that money buys them.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 13:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
Does it help?
If pervasive dieting "eases strains on the planetary ecosystem" then it's because of our finite resources. Finite resources mean our population can't grow indefinitely, and pervasive dieting would still not allow us to do so: it would only increase the number of people we can cram in here, and this guy seems to think we should try to cram in as many as we can.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 13:50 GMT Vladimir Plouzhnikov
Lunatics
Somebody should buy an island in some not very hospitable waters and deport all these nutcases and their families there, so that they could demonstrate on their own example how healthy and wonderful will the lifestyle they advocate be.
Added benefit - one can make a new reality TV show. Instead of eviction there will be extinction, though.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 15:45 GMT JetSetJim
Re: How much?
It's actually "34% of the world's biomass mass due to obesity". Which means, for N America, with it's population of ~529 million accounting for 34% of the worlds obesity biomass of 3.5M tons, that they're all 2.25kg "overweight". Hardly something to write such drivel of a publication about...
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 14:00 GMT Vladimir Plouzhnikov
They couldn't keep their mouth shut
Here is how it was supposed to be announced:
QUOTE:
18/9/2012 T.V. Flash on all Dial-A-Program Services
This is an announcement from Genetic Control:
"It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot restriction on
Humanoid height."
Extract from conversation of Joe Ordinary in Local Puborama
"I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the
Properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold.
It's said now that people will be shorter in height,
They can fit twice as many in the same building site.
(they say it's alright),
Beginning with the tenants of the town of Harlow,
In the interest of humanity, they've been told they must go,
Told they must go-go-go-go."
UNQUOTE:
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Wednesday 20th June 2012 12:43 GMT Intractable Potsherd
Re: They couldn't keep their mouth shut
I wonder how many people are completely baffled by this strand!* (I was immediately reminded of "Get Them Out by Friday" as soon as I read the headline!)
* It's a song on one of Genesis' early albums, "Foxtrot". Lyrics by Peter Gabriel, music by the whole team.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 14:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
If you are so fat you have to drive everywhere, that's bad. If you are so fat that you can't leave your house without taking the door-frames out, then you will not be using fuel for transport, and that's good.
But seriously- I think much could be done to save on food wastage, rather than the food that is actually consumed. I remember an interview with the tennis player Martina Navratilova in which she said she has only eaten half of every meal served to her in a restaurant since she moved to the States- the rest she would take home and eat later. That struck me, because as a professional athlete, one would expect her to be expending more energy than most of her adopted compatriots.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 14:22 GMT wowfood
Darwin awards
They blame you for being killed on the roads, they blame you for getting fat, and they will blame you when the planet fries.
Well, considering the fact I'm a pedestrian, I've seen how stupid some people are, they'll walk out on a busy road without even looking, assuming that the car will stop.
It generally is your fault if you get fat, anyone who goes "oh its too hard to diet" is just lazy. I'm fat, I got that way by eating KFC every other day while at uni, and now i'm working on losing it. I don't blame KFC, its not their fault I love their chicken. It's mine.
And yes it will be my fault the planet fries... once my moon laser is complete.
The only thing I remotely agree on is the thing about cars. I don't think we shoudl get rid of them, but I do wish the government would put in more incentives for using biofuels or electric cars for use around town. The amount of parents driving SUVs to school is annoying as hell.
They could probably do with lowering the price of train fair too.
And one great idea I had long ago. Rent-a-car. Not the classic type but in big cities etc. You sign up to some rent-a-car service somewhere in the nation where you get an electric car for home. You want to go to london? Call the rent-a-car and book it through them, get the train to london, hop off, and in the car park would be a rent-a-car waiting for you, electric of course.
It'd be like that bike thing they're doing in london, only with electric cars.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 14:51 GMT NomNomNom
Re: Darwin awards
"It generally is your fault if you get fat, anyone who goes "oh its too hard to diet" is just lazy. I'm fat, I got that way by eating KFC every other day while at uni, and now i'm working on losing it. I don't blame KFC, its not their fault I love their chicken. It's mine."
As a former fat man I find your self-hating attitude both depressing and offensive. Why can't you be jolly and full of life like the vast majority of fat people out there? Don't you see that by NOT blaming KFC you are saying all other fat people are to blame for being fat in general? You shouldn't stereotype like that, even indirectly. Oh and for what it's worth I only became bitter and resentful *after* I lost weight.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 14:25 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
A long term breeding program ?
Instead of starving children into being short we could just breed for thinner
If perhaps the typical slightly rotund programmer could be paired with an over skinny super-model the average size of the offspring could be reduced gradually.
I commend this idea to the house.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 14:49 GMT James Hughes 1
Odd
Seem fairly obvious to me that fat people eat more than thin people (presumably that why in the vast majority of cases they are fat). Therefore a fat person uses more of the Earth's resources than a thin person. They also need more energy to move themselves about (in a car for example).
KILL THEM. KILL THEM ALL. KILL THEM ALL NOW!
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 15:11 GMT NomNomNom
Re: Odd
There's no actual scientific proof that enhanced calorie intake leads to weight gain. The idea is based on speculative biology and computer models. Lots of people wrongly think that because fat people eat a lot it must be eating a lot that causes fatness, but correlation doesn't equal causation. There is good evidence that eating more is actually an effect of being fat, not a cause.
There are many better alternative theories of obesity that the mainstream "scientists" won't tell you about. Leading alternatives include the viral and genetic theories of obesity.
The fact is the scientists just don't know. The government and medical community push the calorie theory of obesity anyway for control over populations food intake and for a piece of the lucrative diet industry. It's often remarked that the country is just 5 square meals away from anarchy. He who controls those meals controls the country. Follow the money.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 15:43 GMT James Hughes 1
Re: Odd
Blimey. I'd like to believe you, but I eat too much and put on weight. I accept that fat people eat more because they need more food to stop themselves feeling hungry, and simply to drive a larger body. And I accept that some people may be genetically disposed to fatness. And also that people are doing a lot less exercise than they should. But to claim that enhanced calorie intake doesn't make you fat seem, well, wrong, and googling the same also seem to go against what you claim. Can you provide any evidence that eating lots of food DOESNT make you fat? "Supersize me" seems to prove the opposite.
Notwithstanding the above, more fat people means more food is required (you admit that). How they got fat, whether through genetics, eating too much or lack of exercise is irrelevant. So we should still
KILL THEM ALL.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 16:58 GMT Danny 5
Re: Odd
i was agreeing with you, right up untill you went off on a tangent.
But granted, i don't eat all that much and am quite overweight, a friend of mine eats at least twice as much and isn't nearly as tall as i, yet he's skinny.
Might have something to do with him running around all day and me having a desk job and being lazy in general though.
But i'll definately grant you that calory intake doesn't directly account for obesity, lack of exercise is far, far worse
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 23:20 GMT Dave 126
"theories of obesity that the mainstream "scientists" won't tell you about"
> "theories of obesity that the mainstream "scientists" won't tell you about"
Hell, you sound like you're trying to sell something to Homer Simpson. : D
Shit, scientists will tell you things all the time, if you only seek it out. Try Scientific American, or New Scientist or whatever- they're not Nature, but they're a start. Any scientist will tell you that weight gain is complicated- if they don't, they are a snake oil vendor. Things known to help are:
-high intensity exercise for short periods (rather than flumping around the park for an hour, which will only kill your knees)
-not eating carbs in the evening (steak and chocolate is fine, though),
-eat a fatty breakfast (tells your body to expect fat that day, and it adapts)
-fidgeting (though I don't know if you can learn to fidget)
-Eat all your daily meals within a single eight hour period
-drink coffee
And after all that, yeah, some probably will be genetic. But try the above first. Or take up smoking, whatever.
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Monday 25th June 2012 17:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "theories of obesity that the mainstream "scientists" won't tell you about"
Personally, I got fat by eating cheap foods with trans fats in them and lost most of the weight by cutting out trans fats. Sometime last year I noticed I was gaining again, dieted for a few weeks, then when my weight was down I looked through the fridge for things that had expired while I couldn't eat them and noticed that I'd been eating a different brand of low fat spread than usual. Guess what? Yup, contained trans fats.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 14:56 GMT Stevie
Bah!
Notwithstanding the fact that the author does not take into account the extra cost of cooling larger people nor does he do the essential extra-cost-to-cool vs savings-on-heating-during-winter calculation, I have to say I find the whole thesis of these justly ridiculed "professors" to be stoutist in the extreme.
Stoutism is an explicit theme in all their work on this subject, and one wonders how they can get funding. Any discussion of lightness-challenged people should steer clear of avowedly stoutist doctrine, and the taxpayers should not have to fund such offensive research.
The only way forward in the debate on weight is to police the language of that debate vigorously to remove all occurences of such stoutist slurs as "*bese", "*verweight", "f*t" and the like (I appologise to everyone for even obliquely making reference to the stoutist's hate thesaurus to make my point).
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 15:00 GMT NomNomNom
Re: Bah!
"Notwithstanding the fact that the author does not take into account the extra cost of cooling larger people"
Ice would work and is very cheap as the only ingredients are water and frost.
Do you have a degree? I gently suggest you don't criticize professors if you don't. your choice though!
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 17:08 GMT Stevie
Re: Bah!
"Do you have a degree?"
Yes thank you, your concern on my behalf is groundless.
I shall think of you and these idiot professors as I run my AC at full blast to cool empty rooms at a cost to me of pennies a week, all my lights blazing away because I can't be arsed to switch them off and my car ticking over in the driveway in case I want to drive somewhere this week and my swimming pool sucking more juice in a day than the average UK primary school is budgeted for all week even though no-one will be going near it until late July.
FYI: Your capitalizatorizer seems to have cut out there. You need to keep pedalling until you've finished typing.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 14:56 GMT NomNomNom
"A famous mad professor who has previously called for Britons to starve their children into dwarfism so as to ease strains on the planetary ecosystem has reiterated his arguments, this time insisting that the amount of surplus flab carried by the human race will soon be equivalent to having another half-a-billion people on Earth."
A real mad professor wouldn't just make arguments, but would find a way to fulfil his idea of utopia. Perhaps by buying a small tropical island where he could conduct research away from the prying eyes of the world and develop an army of (small) mutants that will replace humans as the dominant species on Earth. Or maybe he could construct a giant magnet that would shrink humans. If he was really clever he could shrink everything else at the same time that way no-one would realize until it was too late.
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Wednesday 20th June 2012 03:03 GMT M Gale
Re: Well, that's fabulous
I find it amusing that someone from the colonies can refer to any Imperial measurement as "hilarious". You guys seem to use even less Metric than we do, and even then your units are all buggered up.
Really, US gallons? What's with that asides some kind of 200 year old sulk? Measuring things in pounds but then saying that stones are "leftover units"? Saying all of that without a hint of irony too?
Now that's hilarious.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 19:10 GMT RonWheeler
Too many people
Half a billion isn't even that significant any more. I'd rather see the planet eventually have one billion people who can live really quite profligate (read 'full') lives than 7 billion and rising living like impoverished resource stared street-rats. Stopping people from breeding like rats and doubling the world's population every 40 years takes some doing though - people are selfish and stupid.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 19:23 GMT DF118
<blockquote>As for the idea that cycling is dangerous, this really doesn't hold water. You have to cycle more than 20 million miles in the UK, spending hundreds of years in the saddle, before it's likely that you'll be killed. There's a lot of foolish fear of motor vehicles among UK cyclists or potential UK cyclists, but it's largely unjustified.</blockquote>
Hear hear - the idea that cycling is inherently dangerous is one that many people in Britain (on both sides of the cyclists v drivers debate) need to get out of their minds. It's doing nobody any favours.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 19:32 GMT Escape Velocity
Governments and "scientists" really do suck.
Over-eating isn't near as much of a problem as poorly-eating. Thanks to the government mandates, just about every manufactured food in the U.S. contains high fructose corn syrup. Everything from sweets to hamburgers at McDonalds have HFCS.
This ubiquitous sweetener has caused so much human damage, U.S. private health insurance doesn't even want to predict Diabetes any more and stopped paying for insulin resist tests (which will indeed tell you if you are on the way to pre-diabetes, as it did for me). Now the insurance companies just wait for the Diabetes to onset and relegate to the least expensive, least effective treatments.
And here's the icing on their cake: lots of people want to start charging "fatties" more for health insurance. It's absurd... first they make a bunch of people fat by taking away healthy choices, then they start charging them for it.
Granted we can all *choose what we eat, but the choices in the U.S. are severely limited for the time and talent constrained. This restricted choice of healthy food is the fault of government in the U.S., not the fatties.
For most humans, eating a normal quantity of junky foods *today will get you fat... over the decades really fat.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 19:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
It strikes me as a self-limiting problem. Sooner or later a civilisation large enough to matter will pick a fight with another large civilisation and reduce the active biomass by a few million people. Or fail taking their technological advances with them (hello Babylonians? Mayans? Romans?)
So who's first? India v Pakistan? China vs USA? China, Russia and USA in Friday night gangbang special? Or the whole of Western Europe against each other, again, for the third time in a century?
Place your bets...
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 20:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Don't do much=get heavy=don't do much.
Cycling a walking are useful for weight-control but once someone is well on the way to chinduality they are unlikely to embrace either pursuit.
While hitch-hiking I often noticed the people who could really do with a bit of exercise were the same ones welded to their motors,
chicken and egg (on the face normally).
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 20:23 GMT Pirate Dave
"and public activities would replace sedentary solitary indoor pastimes"
Yeah... that's why I went into the IT field - so I could hang out on deserted street corners with my neighbors where we daydream about how much better life would be if we had a Big Mac and a chocolate shake to quiet the grumblings in our empty stomachs. Because I LOVE being social and being locked in a cold server room surrounded by computers all day is just torture. No, I'd much rather spend my evenings loafing around out in the streets than sitting in my house browsing Internet pr0n.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 22:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
One minor point
Generally excellent article except for this bit.
"You have to cycle more than 20 million miles in the UK, spending hundreds of years in the saddle, before it's likely that you'll be killed. "
It depends. If you're just a dude riding a bike, then yeah, you're right.
If on the other hand, you're a lycra wearing 'Cyclist(tm)' then I'm afraid your chances of being killed are 100%. Until there's a vaccine for uncool self righteousness, It's the only humane thing to do.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 22:58 GMT AdamWill
silly
"The prof evidently doesn't know or care that without motor vehicles the government would not be able to afford any roads for cyclists and pedestrians to use"
Yes, Lewis, as is clearly demonstrated by the fact that prior to motor vehicles, roads didn't exist!
Not really defending the paper in question, which is clearly twaddle of the highest order ('biomass due to obesity', I ask you), but you don't have to ruin a perfectly good critical analysis of it by getting in gratuitous political shots at the end.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 23:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
hmm..
this article seems to have a real chip on its shoulder. it is one of the most single-sided articles i've seen on reg in a long time. surely the author can appreciate that the human race is - even in net terms - overweight, and that certain areas of the planet contain humans that are consuming and carrying well more than their fair share of solid-state energy. we continue the current trends at our literal peril, and that's without even considering concepts like sustainability, with which our current trends are utterly incompatible.
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Wednesday 20th June 2012 07:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Get it straight.
@ xyz and others
Do you ever hear me bitchin about the fucked up Brittish?
No.
Instead you hear me say the fucked up UK government, the fucked up UN, the fucked up NATO, the fucked up US Government. Our country is under a fucking coup for fuck sake.
I love the Brittish, I hate their fucking government.
The logic you state is similar to blaming Indian Farmers for Monsanto's crimes. It's monsanto, not the fucking farmer! What next nuke India?
Instead of KILLING people, we need to fucking ARREST OUR PSYCHOPATHIC LEADERS.
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Friday 22nd June 2012 09:47 GMT Reventropy
Director, Reventropy Associates
Professor Roberts and his associates are correct based on my 37 years of research on how increasing height and body weight are harmful to our health, longevity and survival as a race. My findings are documented in 40 peer-reviewed papers and seven books. See Human Body Size and the Laws of Scaling: Physiological, Performance, Growth, Longevity, and Ecological Ramifications, Nova Science Publishers, NY, 2007. The increase in human size has a major impact on our food, water and energy needs. It also consumes more natural resources and promotes water, land and air pollution.
A recent paper, A New Study Of Sardinian Men Finds Height Is A Factor In Longevity" was published last month in the journal, Biodemography and Social Biology. The findings in this paper support 12 longevity and 20 mortality studies that previously found that increased height and weight promote chronic disease and reduce longevity.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
