US loaded with weighty problems

If you think that Panama has some “weighty” problems, they are small scale compared to the US and UK.

A study to calculate the impact on the environment of growing waistlines has estimated that the adult human population weighs in at 287 million tons, 15 million of which is due to the overweight and 3.5 million due to obesity reports The Week.

Scientists from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) said tackling population weight is crucial for food security and ecological sustainability.

The study will be unveiled this week at the largest-ever United Nations conference, Rio+20, where 194 nations are working towards a series of new international agreements on sustainable development.

Professor Ian Roberts, who led the research, said: "Everyone accepts that population growth threatens global environmental sustainability. Our study shows population fatness is also a major threat. Unless we tackle both population and fatness our chances are slim."

The United Nations predicts that by 2050 there could be a further 2.3 billion people on the planet and that the ecological implications of the rising population numbers will be exacerbated by increases in average body mass, the Daily Mail reports.

While the average body mass globally was 62kg, North Americans weigh in at 80.7kg. Despite only making up five per cent of the world's population, the United States accounts for almost a third of the world's weight due to obesity. In contrast Asia has 61 per cent of the world's population but only 13 per cent of the world's weight due to obesity.

The United Kingdom is getting fatter: the British adult population is 13.8kg fatter than the rest of the world, with an average adult body mass of 75.8kg. Britain is responsible for 3 per cent of the excess flab despite only having 1 per cent of the world's people.

The argument is simple. More body mass takes more energy to maintain and move; therefore as someone's weight goes up, so do the calories they need to exist. This means increases in population counts don't tell the whole story when it comes to demand for resources, according to the authors.

"Although the largest increase in population numbers is expected in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, our results suggest that population increases in the US will carry more weight than would be implied by numbers alone," researchers said. ·