(WS) Weight of the world
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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You've downloaded More or Less, an oasis of common sense in the desert of innumeracy. In this week's episode, we're taking on the weight of the world and judging a welterweight boxing match. Hello, welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. For the next ten minutes, we'll be picking apart the numbers in the news. I'm Angela Saini, standing in for regular presenter Tim Harford. This week we enter the ring for a statistical boxing match. But first, and this is a delicate question, would the entire human population mind just coming over here for a moment? OK, we're just going to measure your weight. Could you get onto these scales for me? Yeah, just there. Oh, looks like we're heavier than ever.
According to a study published this week in the journal Biomed Central Public Health, it's not only because there are more of us. Global adult human biomass, our combined weight, now stands at around 287 million metric tonnes. And 15 million tonnes of that... is excess being carried by the overweight. The problem for all of us is that, like every creature in the animal kingdom, the heavier we are, the more energy we need. Leading the league table of heaviest nations is the US. The authors argue that if every country had the same body mass index distribution as there, the weight of the world would increase by 58 million tonnes, the equivalent of nearly a billion averagely sized adults. So, are they right?
Could the rest of the world go down the same road as the US? It's a theory that's certainly got lots of headlines around the world. Well, according to Nick Massey-Taylor, a professor of human population biology and health at Cambridge University, the US is not necessarily a good model for where we're heading.
This is the most unlikely scenario, because it's surely most untrue that populations will in fact be going like that. If they take the much more reasonable scenario, having got the weights of each population, let's then assume an increase in, for example, 2 kg per decade, which is a reasonable amount to have from some of our international studies. Extrapolate from that onwards, that would actually give us a much better scenario about what might happen. But to impose, if you like, a BMI dispute in America on the rest of the world is in many ways quite stupid.
So why have they cherry-picked the worst-case scenario? David Prieto-Marino is a lecturer in the Department of Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and one of the scientists who wrote this paper.
We don't want to say that necessarily will happen like that. We just want to raise awareness that if this happens, then we will be in such a situation. If you look at the statistics from WHO, their BMI estimations, it seems to be going up in most of the countries. So that's an indication that we might be heading in that direction. However, whether we get there or not will depend on the policies implemented.
Are you sure you're not scaremongering here by telling everybody that we're tipping the scales too much?
No, we didn't want to scare anyone. We were just saying, this is the data, and these are possible scenarios.
Although you did pick out the worst-case scenario in picking out the U.S., didn't you?
We did pick out the worst and the best. We also put Japan in there, and we said how better things would go if we were like Japan.
But as somebody who's read the report fully, yes, Japan is there, but in the conclusion, it's just the U.S. ?
because in the conclusions we want to focus on the public health problem, and that would be a worst-case scenario, rather than in the best-case scenario.
That was David Prietau-Marino from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
How much does the global adult human population weigh in total?
Now, from overweight to welterweight, June 9th saw a bout in Las Vegas between Filipino Manny Pacquiao, widely regarded as one of the best boxers in the world, and American Timothy Bradley.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–4:06
2
How much does the global adult human population weigh in total?
4:06–6:09
3
What did the Biomed Central study claim about excess weight and the US scenario?
6:09–8:44
4
Could the rest of the world follow the US BMI distribution and gain nearly a billion people’s worth of weight?
8:44–9:49