by Kaid Benfield, via NRDC’s Switchboard
The headline in Tuesday’s USA Today was shocking: “Obesity could affect 42% of Americans by 2030.” That is nearly triple the rate experienced just three decades ago, according to an article written by Nanci Hellmich. At current rates, eleven percent of Americans could be “severely obese, roughly 100 or more pounds over a healthy weight.”
The findings come from a Duke University study presented at a meeting hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and to be published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
The consequences for our health (and, for that matter, our economy) are quite serious. Earlier this year I recently reported data on Type 2 diabetes, for example, which is obesity-related and has been rising at the same rate as body weight in the US for the last few decades. Diabetes is the leading cause of nontraumatic amputations, eye disease, and kidney disease, and is a major factor in the development of cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death in diabetes patients.
My fear is that we pay insufficient attention to this disturbing trend because, like global warming, it has become more pronounced gradually and tends not to have sudden and dramatic consequences. We get used to it. But, unlike global warming, the environmental factors associated with the rise in obesity have not attracted the attention of the environmental community to any great degree.
As Dick Jackson — one of the country’s top environmental health experts — has been telling us for years, this needs to change. There are all sorts of causes of the obesity epidemic, including of course poor nutrition. But the downturn in physical activity because of the way we have designed our cities and suburbs — for driving more than walking — is also a significant factor. There are studies showing that transit use is associated with reduced body weight, as is is the presence of shops and services within walking distance of the home.
And now there’s more. Nate Berg, writing for The Atlantic Cities, reported yesterday that a new study of automobile commuters has found that, the longer the commute, the more likely one is to have reduced fitness, increased weight, high cholesterol, and elevated blood pressure:
“The activity of driving to work should be better thought of as inactivity, and all that time sitting on your butt is slowly eating away at your cardiovascular health – and probably adding to your waistline. Those who have farther to travel tend to see worse results according to the study, which will be published in the June issue of American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
“The study tracked 4,297 people who lived and worked in 11 counties in the Dallas-Fort Worth or Austin, Texas, metropolitan areas, and compared their commuting distances with various medical health indicators, including cardiorespiratory fitness, body mass index, and metabolic risk variables like waist circumference. The longer the commute, the greater the likelihood these health indicators measure up on the fat and sick side of the scale. The researchers also found that people who drove longer distances reported doing less physical activity overall.”
Berg reports further that these associations were found even when the researchers controlled for individual characteristics such as personal physical activity habits and level of fitness.
Obesity, heart disease and diabetes are health problems, to be sure. But they are environmental problems as well. We know how to locate and design our communities so that we don’t need to drive so much and have more opportunities for walking in our daily routines. The basic principles of smart growth point us in the right direction. What we need to understand better is that following these principles — which, incidentally, the market supports — is important not just to reduce emissions and conserve land. It can also save lives.
Kaid Benfield is Director of Sustainable Communities at NRDC. He writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog’s home page. This piece was originally published at NRDC’s Switchboard and was re-printed with permission.
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Humans are essentially mobile ecosystems that have evolved to dynamically live in much larger ecosystem systems; and apparently the biological dynamics are part of the array of key factors, like food, water, protection from the elements, social interaction, etc., crucial to the health of these mobile ecosystems.
The health of both civilizations and the people that form them, all of which are natural systems within natural systems; it seems that the focus must be on intense integration within nature capital where human capital is the most important component; where capital like money is the abstraction for the currency of ecosystem services and resources providing for life.
In short, a certain amount of self-propulsion is necessary for health and yes we can use our machines for propulsion when necessary, but good health requires physical activity for regulation and normalization of ongoing processes that have evolved to provide for and feed off of human mobility.
Fasting from time to time is good, too. It appears to protect against metabolic diseases and possibly cancer and dementia. Physical activity and lessened energy intake are the simple paths to somatic well-being-but that would threaten massive financial interests, so it will be denied and resisted, the unvaring Rightwing anti-human project.
You can add this to the list..
Clearing the Smoke: The Science of Cannabis
Clearing the Smoke, reveals how cannabis acts on the brain and in the body to treat nausea, pain, epilepsy and potentially even cancer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8aTbnO9I-TU
This has an easy fix, the fist bit requires that you decide to get up off your lazy backside and do some exercise and at the same time stop eating huge portions of garbage.
Next you should get aquatinted with say http://www.beachbody.com and do a suitable workout program such as Tony Horton’s P90X or Charlene Jonson’s Turbo Jam and get on with it.
These programs work enough said, the rest is up to you after all it’s your life and your health, take care of it and you will live longer, happier, healthier lives or don’t and be a statistic your choice make the right one.
The next thing i’m going to buy for my working place, is a computer desk where i can stand at. I do sports and eat healthy (most of the times) but i sit way to much.
This article parallels the notion I have come to that the planet is also accumulating calories we should be converting to the renewable energy we need.
Wikipedia defines obesity as, “a medical condition in which excess body fat has accumulated to the extent that it may have an adverse effect on health, leading to reduced life expectancy and/or increased health problems.”
It is a term no less applicable to Gaia, than to you or I.
The planet’s calorie load is mainly being taken up by the oceans with the consequence sea levels are rising, icecaps are melting, phytoplankton are declining and global weather patterns are being disrupted.
In humans obesity is mainly the result of eating too much for the amount of energy burned; therefore the response can either be eating less or burning more.
Unfortunately, on a planetary basis, there is no choice as to the number of calories the sun lavishes on us.
Each year that number is 129 trillion billion (or10 to the 23rd power) calories or 11,000 times the total primary energy consumed by mankind over the same period.
About 30 percent of the sun’s power is immediately radiated back into space while a very small fraction, 1/10th of 1 percent is converted to coal, crude oil and other organic forms that store energy for more than 100 years. Two percent is converted to wind that would be enough to provide the power the world needs were it constantly available and about 23 percent of the Sun’s power evaporates water, acting as the planet’s radiator. The balance is absorbed by the atmosphere, land and seas; mostly the latter that has accumulated about 90 percent of the excess heat attributable to global warming.
The only viable option to address this problem is to convert as much as we can of this heat to the renewable energy the world needs.
This is the essence of the global warming mitigation method that adapts the thermodynamic reality to a solution to the cause and effect of climate change.
It uses ocean thermal energy conversion to convert ocean heat to power in the process limiting thermal expansion. It desalinates sea water and moves this to productive terrestrial use, primarily by irrigating the earth’s driest regions, the hot deserts. It converts part of the ocean’s liquid volume to its gaseous components, hydrogen and oxygen and then recombines these on land to produce water and energy and, captures some of the melting land based ice before it can enter the oceans to swell their volume. With the consequence atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, are drawn down by sequestration in the vegetation grown in the irrigated deserts and by ocean water absorption because cooler water can dissolve more of the gas than warm water.