We have surely passed a milestone. From USAToday:
World now has more fat people than hungry ones.
The world now has more overweight people than hungry ones and governments should design economic strategies to influence national diets, a conference of international experts have heard.
The transition from a starving world to an obese one had happened with dramatic speed, US professor Barry Popkin told the annual conference of the International Association of Agricultural Economists on Monday.
"The reality is that globally far more obesity than undernutrition exists," Popkin said, adding that while hunger was slowly declining, obesity was rapidly spreading.
There are more than a billion overweight people in the world and 800 million who are undernourished, he said at the Gold Coast convention centre near Brisbane. The world population is estimated at about 6.5 billion.
On my list of global threats, this one is weighted pretty light. My wife has me on the weight-watchers diet right now, so I speak as an expert. About being heavy that is. I've been hungry before, but never really starving. But I do suspect that it is easier to lose weight when there is plenty of food available than to gain weight when you have nothing to eat. So I count this as progress.
And I say: be afraid. Be very afraid. Any day now it will be illegal to rip open a bag of pork rinds within thirty feet of a doorway, and some New England town that went 80% for Howard Dean will fine somebody because the fat molecules from his grilled baby-back ribs tempted a neighbor to head for Famous Daves.
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