Scapegoating of obese people has reached a new low. No less a figure than the head of the  United Nations  Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) accuses heavy people of wasting resources that could have fed the world's poor,

by their overeating. 

Separately, two researchers, writing in the British medical journal The Lancet, imply that obesity is a cause of global warming. Not only is it safe to point a moralistic finger at obese people, it may even have become a duty.

These are ridiculous and irresponsible claims, notwithstanding that they have a smidgen of truth, as is often the case in the world's eternal search for scapegoats.

"No one understands how the excess consumption by the world's obese costs $20-billion annually, to which must be added indirect costs of $100-billion resulting from premature death and related diseases," Jacques Diouf, the UNFAO's director-general, told a food-security summit meeting in

Rome.

"Compared with the normal weight population, the obese population consumes 18% more food energy," write Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in The Lancet, adding that transporting all that extra food requires extra fuel.

They also argue that if urban centres stressed cycling and walking rather than driving, fat people would exercise more, thus lowering the demand for food and fossil fuel.

This fat-disappearance theory is utopian and childish.

Obese people may well eat more, on average, than others, but they could not have caused the spike in food prices - the doubling of the cost of rice, corn and wheat, the world's three main grains, in the past year. There is no evidence that obese people are eating twice as much as they did last year.

Rather, there are cyclical and structural factors behind the price rises, according to the Asian Development Bank. Random droughts, flooding, pest infestation and cold weather have all hit the harvests of grain-producing countries. Export bans in some rice-exporting countries have raised prices by lowering world supply.

Agriculture has become more energy-intensive, and energy prices themselves have spiked. Around 100 million tonnes of food grains are being diverted to use for biofuels each year. As India and China grow more prosperous, their populations' appetites grow. And the list goes on.

All people put a demand on the world's resources, but to single out the obese for a disproportionate share of the blame will only expose them to more scorn and to puerile moral judgments, neither of which will help obese people shed pounds.

Source: The Globe and Mail