A Mathematical Challenge to Obesity

My contention that the US can be viewed as an excess nation can be clearly borne out by the fact that 1 in 3 americans are obese. The primary reason why this has happened is due to the changes since 1970s when "there was a change in national agricultural policy. Instead of the government paying farmers not to engage in full production, as was the practice, they were encouraged to grow as much food as they could. At the same time, technological changes and the “green revolution” made our farms much more productive. The price of food plummeted, while the number of calories available to the average American grew by about 1,000 a day."(A Mathematical Challenge to Obesity)

To address this issue Carson C. Chow suggests that, "One of the things the numbers have shown us is that weight change, up or down, takes a very, very long time. All diets work. But the reaction time is really slow: on the order of a year.People don’t wait long enough to see what they are going to stabilize at. So if you drop weight and return to your old eating habits, the time it takes to crawl back to your old weight is something like three years. To help people understand this better, we’ve posted an interactive version of our model at bwsimulator.niddk.nih.gov. People can plug in their information and learn how much they’ll need to reduce their intake and increase their activity to lose. It will also give them a rough sense of how much time it will take to reach the goal. Applied mathematics in action!"

So maybe this will be an opportunity to slice away the excess!

 

Lawns in America

According to Kevin S. Baldwin, lawns in America, "collectively comprise the largest irrigated crop in the U.S., covering about 163,800 square kilometers, plus  or minus 35,850 square kilometers; Milesi et al. 2005), an area larger than Ohio. Another estimate puts lawn area at more than twice that of cotton (Steinberg 2006)."

Now if that isn't one can only wonder what it is?

His point about the use of technology is right on point. An additional annoyance of the lawns in the US is the lawn mowers which are enough to spoil your spring time reverie.

Proper use of Paper Towels!

According to Joe Smith, who in this TED talk here argues that, 571 million pounds of paper towels can be saved if only Americans use a simple logic of 'shaking their hands 12 times' after washing their hands and 'folding the paper towel' once to dry their hands. That would be out of the 13 billion pounds of paper towels consumed every year in the US.

This aspect makes me wonder about the obsession with cleanliness which had gone to such an extent that ordinary mud in the earth is referred as 'dirt'.

Some more food for thought!

Sleeping Pills and Packaging

Talking about excess when it comes to medicines Americans have filled 60 million prescriptions for sleeping pills which has now been found to have a correlation to cancer and other mortality causing effects (correlation is not causation!). Additionally, I just brought some allergy medicines which was a packet of 14 pills in a large package (see image above). I would guess that the packaging here might take the cake when it comes to excess amount of use of plastic, aluminum wrap and paper in putting together just 14 pills when in fact they could have used a small glass pill box (I am assuming that glass making is less polluting and toxic and recyclable, and need to check my science on that!) to sell the same medicine.

This brings to my mind the regulations in UK on Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive which require for packaging to be minimized and limited to a certain ratio of the product being sold. For all the cost-benefit analysis done, the short sightedness of capitalism means that we are creating toxic waste which is going to ruin our lives, for which capitalism will find the cure in a pill!

Not much hope here!

Excess Litigation!

I think that the US leads as a nation of excessive litigation  on all issues. It would be fun to count the number of lawyers, per capita, courts, laws, prisoners, issue areas which are regulated, etc. to expose the mess that the US has landed itself with the plethora of laws.

Maybe its time to scale back some of the excess!