Environmental experts have warned that obesity is not only damaging the nation’s health but is also threatening the environment. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have said that the more we are eating, the greater the impact on the changing climate - and in the West, food consumption has escalated hugely over the past 20 years. Not only is a lot of energy being expended to meet growing demand for food, but as we get fatter we are choosing cars over public transport or walking.
20% of all greenhouse gases have been blamed on the methane emitted by cows and as demand for meat grows, so does the gas. Increasing consumption of meat has lead to an increase not only in associated environmental damage - from the emissions given out when transporting the livestock and then the meat, to the landfill sites filled with packaging - but the corn grown to feed the animals also consumes a massive amount of water.
The team calculated that current levels of obesity compared to 40 years ago have meant each year, an extra 60 mega-tonnes of greenhouse gases are released . Besides the costs stemming from the production of food, the team also examined how much greater the environmental cost of transporting a heavier U.K population was. They discovered that altogether, between 0.4 and 1.0 giga-tonnes more greenhouse gases were released for every 1 billion of the population.