Better that it goes to our waste than our waist, you could say
Americans may well be the most wasteful people in history. Just finding ways to dump, bury, disintegrate or recycle all the stuff we go through and toss out is a major industry. But we are wasteful in at least one way that, if not exactly virtuous, is something we should probably be thankful for, and that is in the matter of food.
According to a report by the Department of Agriculture, roughly 40 percent of all the food produced in the U.S. gets thrown away. On the one hand, in a world where a billion people have insufficient food, that is truly shameful. On the other hand, the USDA calculates that each of us discards an average 1,400 calories per day in the process.
If you want a nightmare scenario, imagine what we would look like if we instead consumed all those leftovers and scraps and so forth. The diabetes rate alone would probably be around 85 percent.
It’s not such a small world after all
Despite the fact that tens of millions of people are chronically undernourished and lack secure, reliable access to food around the globe, the human race is steadily growing fatter. According to newly released World Health Organization numbers, so many people worldwide now carry too much excess weight that they’ve coined the word “globesity” just to label it. In fact, one in every three adults on earth is now overweight and one in every 10 is obese, an amazing stat given the vast legions of the underfed. WHO reckons that there will be some 2.3 billion overweight humans walking the planet in 2015, a number you also get by adding the combined populations of the US, Europe, and China.
Of course, if global warming causes the Pacific to rise enough, we’ll be number one
So, which is the fattest nation, per capita, in the whole wide world? Somewhat surprisingly, the United States only ranks third on the list, with 66.7 percent of us overweight or obese. Germany, land of fatty sausages and rich strudels? Nein; it’s on our heels in fourth place at 66.5 percent. Then comes, rather inexplicably, Egypt, at 66 percent. So who took the top two spots?
Two island nations in the South Pacific whose explosive post-World War II obesity epidemic was posted about here some time ago: American Samoa, at an appalling 93.5 percent, and Kiribati, at 81.5 percent. The cause is absolutely no mystery: a culture yanked from an environment of physical labor in pursuit of food which was mostly fish and fruit and vegetables, to one of processed, fat-and-calorie-laden Western food products, with no physical effort required. So much for the “island paradise” concept.
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
From the RSS feed of CalorieLab News (REF3076322B7)
The huge amount of calories we don’t consume, and the fattest nations on earth