A few months ago I was in the gym near to my former workplace discussing articles with a friend. Glancing around he suggested that I do “The Problem With…Obesity”, so I thought about it for a bit. It became clear that there was indeed an environmental aspect to the increasing average weight of people, not just in western industrial society, but also in societies hitherto healthy and to which excess weight would be seen as a disease. The reason for this latter phenomenon : the high-fat, high-sugar, addictive Western diet creeping into Oriental lifestyles.

The nature of the environmental aspect was not cut-and-dried – there were major issues with the size of vehicles increasing to accommodate larger backsides, the same with aircraft having to make seats larger and, of course, the increased consumption of environmentally damaging rich foods, and the flipside lack of exercise that comes from increased motorised vehicle travel.

But then we simultaneously agreed that overweight, and particularly obese, people die younger. The figures are not clear, and they relate not just to the extra strain on the body, and the increased likelihood of a variety of preventable diseases (expecially Type 2 Diabetes), but also the related unhealthy lifestyle that overweight people tend to lead. Compare this with numerous studies on vegetarians who are shown to have an overall lower incidence of most cancers, but which could be partly related to the extra care that most vegetarians tend to take over their lives in general.

What this all comes down to is that although overweight people may have more environmentally damaging lives, in the long run this may be cancelled out by their decreased lifespan.

I find this extremely sad.

Having just returned from a holiday which included its share of ice cream and other treats, but also a great deal of walking, swimming and carrying great loads of luggage from one place to another, I was struck by the increase in just one year of the number of overweight children. Children who seemed to be throughly enjoying the outside, but whose lives would otherwise be spent ensconced in a sitting room staring at a computer or TV, eating high-fat, high-sugar foods, and whose parents don’t seem to care (and by the look of most of them, even about their own health) that their children are being set up for a more difficult and shorter life.

And in the vast majority of cases there is absolutely no excuse for it. As the father of two young girls, I know how easy, enjoyable, and cheap, it is to give my children healthy lives. I also know that I can hold up a mirror to the way most humans treat themselves, and their children, and see it reflecting the way they treat the planet – do they really care so little?

Keith Farnish
www.theearthblog.org
www.reduce3.com
And proud member of The Sietch