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Obesity: The True Cost of an Overweight World

Photo by Vova Krasilnikov on Pexels.com

In today’s world, it seems that everywhere we turn, on every news feed and every TV channel there are advertisements for junk food. From worldwide conglomerations to corner store candy shops, our ability to obtain sugar, fat and sodium is easier than it ever has been. Whether we go through a drive-through, find a technicolour store beckoning us in or opt for a home delivery to make us feel like kings, junk food has become the global addiction that none of us seem to be able to kick.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) reports that global obesity levels have tripled since 1975, and the majority of people in the world live in a country where more people die from being overweight than they do from being underweight. Obesity has become a global pandemic that has travelled to every continent and infected every city in the world.

The Cost of an Overweight World

With global obesity levels constantly on the rise, the effects of an overweight world can be felt far and wide.
The health effects are an obvious one, obesity has been linked to cardiovascular disease, cancer and musculoskeletal disorders. It has also been found that obesity is a risk factor for those that contract the COVID-19 Virus. The human body was not designed to carry large amounts of excess fat and obesity is a contributing factor in millions of death around the world every year.

A rise in obesity levels can also put a strain on the economy. The more unhealthy a population, the more it costs a country. Rising levels of chronic conditions requiring complex healthcare services and creating a situation in which people can not work is not conducive to making money.

Fast food outlets, often linked to being contributing factors to a rise in obesity levels, also create a significant impact on the natural environment. Increasing factors such as waste from packaging into the environment. In some areas in Australia, fast food stores have been banned in an attempt to stem the environmental impact on these areas.

What Do We Do From Here?

The good news is that the obesity epidemic is not unsolvable. We know how to prevent and how to treat obesity. Things like government policies and incentives, such as sugar taxes, to encourage people to choose healthy eating options have been found to create a positive effect in some areas. Promoting physical activity, particularly in childhood is another method that is being used to try and stem obesity levels. As lower socio-economic areas are often the worst hit by obesity, healthy eating education programs and providing easy and cheap access to healthy foods in these areas is another way to try and lower obesity levels.

Obesity is a complex problem. It has ramifications on public health, the economy and the environment and can be seen all around the world. Obesity levels may still be on the rise, fortunately though there are solutions to this problem. With a growing awareness of the dangers of obesity, countries around the globe have started to take steps to create a healthier world for us all.

For more information on the effects of obesity check out https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight

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The Drying Well

Loren Eisley was once quoted, “if there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” It is one of the few things that almost all known life needs to function, can be found on every continent and is one of the first things that scientists look for when trying to find life in outer space. Water is one of the most vital resources of our planet. And yet water scarcity in on a global rise.

The Blue Planet

Earth is the Blue Planet. Over 70% of Earth’s surface is covered with water. However,  a lot of this water is not of great use to us, the water that sustains the majority of life is fresh water, and this is much harder to find, only 3% of the world’s water is fresh and a lot of this is not accessible, locked away in glaciers and ice shelves. Now, there is no less and no more water than there ever has been on Earth, water scarcity is not a system in which there is less water but less access to useable water. Water scarcity involves changes in the distribution of water, the number of people accessing and using fresh water and pollution making fresh water sources unusable.

Quite simply the more people using a resource the less there is to share. Think of it as having a single bottle of water. If there is one person drinking from that bottle it lasts a lot longer. If there are five people the water runs out a lot faster and not everyone gets enough. The global human population has been increasing since the 1300s and has boomed within the last hundred years, however the amount of available water has not increased. So, going back to that bottle analogy you now have 7.7 billion people drinking, bathing, growing food and manufacturing goods from the water out of that one bottle.

Rubbish in the Lakes and Trash in the Sea

Pollution is only making this worse, as water pollution levels increase the amount of available fresh water decreases.  You can’t drink water sources contaminated with factory run off, garbage, sewage  and pesticides. Climate change can increase the severity of water scarcity, with changes in weather patterns changing the amount and location of rainfall on certain areas. Modern agricultural practices such as growing crops in unnatural areas, water consumption in factory production and high product consumption rates are causes of water scarcity in many regions with underground aquifers drained at a rapid rate.

Water is a vital resource for life and as water scarcity increases many experts believe that conflict over water resources will spark the wars of the future. Some companies and individual brokers are already purchasing water rights, claiming that water will become the new gold within their lifetime.

The Last Drops of Water in a Thirsty World

Water scarcity is already beginning to impact many populations, with over four billion people living in an area that experiences water scarcity at least once every month. The World Economic Forum has listed water scarcity as potentially one of the largest global risks. By 2040, one in four children are predicted to be living in an area of high water stress. These regions will include major cities such as Melbourne, Sao Paulo, Beijing, Cairo, Madrid and Miami. Cape Town has already experienced looming water scarcity, coming to the brink of running out of water in both 2017 and 2018.

There is currently enough water to support the human population, it is down to how we use this water and how we share it that will determine the level of water scarcity we face in the future.

Abraham Lincoln once said that when the well is dry we will know the worth of water, let’s try to know the worth of and protect this vital resource before we use the last drop.

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Current Affairs News virus

Vaccinations, Smallpox and COVID_19

With the outbreak of COVID_19 disease has been at the forefront of the world’s mind. Health officials warn that the spread of the disease may continue to increase and so far, there is no working vaccine to prevent the spread of the virus. What of the diseases that already exist though?

This is not the first disease that humanity has faced and the rise of vaccinations has meant that we can now prevent the spread of diseases that once brought populations to their knees.

Diseases such as polio, rubella, tetanus and diphtheria that once presented a global threat have become far less common. Perhaps most famously, the Smallpox virus that once killed millions and spread through populations all over the world was eradicated in 1980. So how what exactly are vaccines? How reliable are they? And why are there communities in the world that refuse to use them?

What is a Vaccine?

Vaccines are used to prevent diseases through injecting the body with something that looks like the disease. This allows the immune system to create antibodies without the person actually having the disease. Sort of like a practice run.  This means that if the body comes into contact with the disease it can quickly create the correct antibodies to stop the disease infecting the person.

So, Where do Vaccines Come From?

Vaccinations were first invented in the late 1700s when surgeon, Edward Jenner, observed that milkmaids who came into contact with the non-fatal cowpox were rarely effected in smallpox outbreaks. From this he discovered that being infected with the non- fatal cowpox strand prevented the maid from catching smallpox, thus creating the first vaccination. By the mid 20th century vaccination research was rapidly expanded and vaccinations for many common diseases began to be developed and distributed. Since that time vaccinations have become widespread ways to control and prevent infectious diseases.

So how reliable are they? In short, very. Nothing is ever completely foolproof but on average childhood vaccines are 85-95% effective. If the majority of a population is vaccinated there is also the aspect of herd immunity. Herd immunity makes it much harder for diseases to spread and lowers the risk of infection for those that aren’t or can’t be vaccinated. In simple terms, a vaccinated population will survive.

So, why would anyone refuse this medical miracle? Largely, this is due to misinformation.

The Anti-Vax Movement

A large aspect of the anti-vax movement is based on a report published in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield that claimed there was a link between vaccinations and autism. This report has since been debunked but the fears it created have remained and grown. This is in part because of the success of vaccines, many parents believe that the diseases vaccines protect against are not a threat because they have not seen them in their full force, while conditions such as autism are prevalent in the community. The current scientific consensus is that there is no link between vaccines and conditions such as autism and that a drop in vaccination rates is highly dangerous. It provides a situation in which diseases can rapidly spread, re-emerge and in some cases mutate to create far more dangerous strains. Recent outbreaks of the Measles in the US and Samoa have been reported to be exacerbated by anti-vax movements. The loss of herd immunity also poses a severe risk to those that can’t be vaccinated such as very young children and those undergoing some cancer treatments.

Vaccinations are possibly one of the most important medical breakthroughs. They have allowed us to eradicate and control diseases that humanity has battled throughout our history and saved countless people from suffering and death. As can be seen with COVID_19 and with recent outbreaks of Ebola, MERS and SARS one of the greatest threats to our species comes from the world of disease and vaccinations are perhaps one of the greatest weapons we have in the battle for survival on this planet.

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Foundations Built on Sand

We use it to tick away the minutes in hour glasses, curse the amount of it that we track back into our houses after a trip to the beach and post quotes featuring footprints in it to our Instagram pages in our weaker moments, sand it seems is everywhere.

Skyscrapers, Windshields and iPhones

Sand, however, may not be everywhere for long. Yes, those little grains we give very little thought to are running out. Sand is what we have built our cities out of, created our phones from and is even found in most car windscreens. Sand is the primary component in concrete, melted down the make glass and used to create silicon. Sand is, quite literally, everywhere. Sand comes second only to water when it comes to the most used natural resource in the word, with over 50 billion tonnes of the stuff used every year.

Now, the world has sand, one look at the Sahara or an image of the Kalahari from space and that is easy to see. The issue comes with the fact that not all sand is created equal. Desert sand is generally eroded by wind rather than water and as such, is the wrong shape to bind correctly when used to create substances such as concrete. Sand eroded by water and found in river beds, floodplains and beaches is what is used for construction purposes, the industry that makes up the main bulk of our sand consumption. This is the sand that is running out.

Sand Mining and Urbanisation

A large driver of this is the rate of urbanisation. As more people are moving to more cities, new buildings and roads need to be built and these are all built out of sand. The annual amount of construction sand used each year in India has tripled since 2000 and Dubai has such a demand for particular types of sand used for construction that it buys it in huge quantities from Australia. Sand is also being used to literally create more land. Countries including Nigeria, China, The US, Singapore and The UAE have all dredged ocean sand to create new land. This creates long term and often disastrous effects for the natural eco-system.

Mining sand for construction purposes is equally destructive, the churned up sediment created from river bed dredging can disrupt ecosystems and kill plant and aquatic life. Many experts believe that sand mining is a key contributing factor to the shrinking of the Mekong Delta, an area home to a diverse ecosystem, a main area of food production for Vietnam and home to over 20 million people.
To make a bad situation worse, riverbed dredging can cause increases in riverbank collapses, causing further destruction to croplands, homes and eco-systems, and sand mining had been linked to deadly bridge collapses in Portugal and Taiwan.

The Violent Underbelly of the Sand Trade

The sand trade has gotten so lucrative that criminal groups have started controlling the trade in some areas and creating a virtual slave labour in sand mines. In addition there have murders linked to the sand trade and violence in India, Gambia, Indonesia and Kenya has been reported as result of criminal groups operating in the sand trade.

Urbanisation shows little signs of slowing and construction materials are going to remain a highly sought after commodity. As a result, scientists are trying to come up with alternative materials to make concrete from, exploring options such as shredded plastic and rice husks. Methods to more efficiently recycle concrete and glass and create ways to make these products with less sand are also being explored. For now though, we have built our foundations out of sand, the problem is that only makes the ground we have built them on that much more unstable.

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We Won’t be in Kansas Anymore

Climate change. I know it is terrifying. We are all going to burn, drown, starve or get sucked up in a tornado like some twisted version of The Wizard of Oz. Politicians are denying it, teenagers are fighting to stop it, businessmen are exploiting it and new agreements are being drawn up and then being left unsigned everyday. Meanwhile Australia is on fire, the UK is flooding, tornadoes are crisscrossing the US like they’re trying to win a game of snakes and ladders and a literal plague of locusts has descended on the Horn of Africa. Welcome the new world folks.

Floods, Fires and Twisters

It can be tempting to try and bury our heads in the sand, take some retail therapy at our nearest fast fashion outlet, forget our keep cups, decide recycling is too hard and pretend this whole thing is a bad dream. But (I know there is always a but) scientists are predicting less than 12 years before climate change is irreversible and the twisters, floods, fires, plagues and general apocalyptic scenes become a compulsory, worldwide, year-round event. So pretending its all a bad dream, well it will become the sort you can’t easily wake from. Burying our heads in the sand here is not an option, and only in part because the world is rapidly running out of sand.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a panel made up of over 1300 members from around the world has forecasted a temperature rise of 2.5-10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. Previous global warming impacts the panel has forecasted due to rising temperatures such as shrinking glaciers, river ice breaking up sooner in the season and the melting of sea ice have already started to occur.

The warming of the planet is largely due to increases in greenhouse gasses from mostly human activities, these gasses trap heat in the atmosphere, creating an increase in temperature.

Global warming is one of the main drivers of climate change, climate change being a global issue and one of which the effects will be felt world-wide.
With 39% of humanity living within 100 kilometres of a coastline, countless people will be displaced, heat waves will become more common and severe, farming practices will be disrupted and animal species will begin to die out.

And Droughts Too…

 In some areas droughts and water scarcity will become more common, with Cape Town already having faced the prospect of running out of water, and other areas will become far more prone to severe flooding.

If we ignore the issue of climate change then the impacts on the economy, immigration, world aid, food, water, trade and society as we know it will be impacted far more than if we implement change to tackle this issue before the house is burned down. If you are still leaning towards pretending this isn’t happening and going out to buy that coffee in its disposable cup, know that two of the crops that will be affected by climate change and rising temperatures include coffee and cocoa. So enjoy that coffee while you still can.

Now, this may seem like a lot of doom and gloom, but the positive news is that the world is starting to realise the full extent of climate change. We have seen movements like Fridays for Future spread across the world, a reported increase in the concern and awareness of the public about climate change and changing trends, albeit it sometimes slow, in consumer habits towards more sustainable practices.

Our clock is ticking but our time is not up yet, we can all make changes to help turn this around. That twister may be on its way but we are still the ones that can change it, at the moment we are still in Kansas.

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