In a previous post, I pointed out similarities between the obesity epidemic and our addiction to oil. As we burn more oil, our air becomes less healthy. We cannot produce enough ourselves and have to buy it from countries that are not our friends. That, in turn, leads to uncomfortable consequences in foreign policy. The situation has lately become worse worldwide as developing nations try to catch up with our standard of living.
In this post, I want to concentrate more on the personal health side of the analogy. People become overweight by consuming more energy (calories) than they use for their daily activities. This weight puts stress on their joints and other body systems. It becomes more difficult to keep active. Less physical activity means burning even fewer calories and so gaining more weight. It's a vicious cycle.
If I drive where I used to walk, I not only use fewer calories but more oil. Likewise if I take an elevator or escalator where I used to take the stairs. As I expend less of my own body's energy, it gets heavier if I don't reduce what I eat.
But if I get to the place where it takes too much effort to go much of anywhere or do much of anything--if I spend more time just sitting because it hurts to do much more--I'm more likely to eat just to stave off boredom.
What kind of food can I eat without preparing a meal? I can toss something in the microwave. I don't know how to compare how much energy it takes to use the freezer and microwave for it with using the stove or oven to fix something comparable from scratch, but I suspect there's a net increase based on what it takes to get that prepared meal to your freezer.
First of all, the factory that manufactures the meal surely does not have people with knives and cutting boards preparing the ingredients. Making, say, stir fry on an industrial scale calls for fairly large machines to do any of the steps people would do in their own houses: cutting the ingredients, adding them to the wok, stir frying them, putting rice and water in a separate pot, and then serving up portions of an appropriate size.
Not only must machines do the work of people in a factory, but other machines must prepare various aspects of the packaging. Finished and packaged meals must be stored in a freezer at the factory. The factory then ships them to a warehouse, and the warehouse to the factory.
Freezers at the warehouse, at least two trucks, and the back room at the grocery store keep the meals frozen until they are ready to be placed on the sales floor. All those machines, trucks, and freezers use a tremendous amount of energy. I haven't even begun to describe the energy costs of manufacturing and shipping all of that packaging from raw materials to the landfill.
Obese people did not become obese over night. Our nation did not get into its dangerous addiction to oil over night, either. As I have tried to show, these two problems are not separate from each other.
Fortunately, whatever we do for our personal health will probably help the nation's energy imbalance. Take a look at other articles I have written, following the links to the left of this post.
We may think that one person can't do very much about large problems. But in fact, one individual making healthier choices, multiplied by tens of millions of other individuals making similar choices, can have a profound impact. That, after all, is how we got to where we are in the first place.
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