Out of Control

The term “globesity” was invented at least seven years ago, but it hasn’t yet become a household word. When the World Health Organization (WHO) coined the word—a combination of “global” and “obesity”—the problem it described was not just missing from the English lexicon, but also largely absent from news headlines. The intervening years have brought a sea change in culture and consciousness, and this year “globesity” is poised for a breakthrough.

WHO defines “globesity” as “the global epidemic of overweight and obesity.” That’s a mouthful, but if a word was needed to describe it, one would imagine the more obvious word combination, “obesidemic,” or the traditional word for a global epidemic—a pandemic—would have been put into service, but these, too, have been little-used so far. It’s not surprising, then, that the new meaning increasingly ascribed to the term “globesity” is a mash-up of an even bigger policy conundrum: catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, a.k.a. the global warming crisis, combined with the worldwide obesity epidemic.

Of course, in this context, “globesity” is a more than just the newest attempt to sum up the world’s problems in a single word, it signifies an approach to policymaking and publicity for a range of advocacy groups. In an Associated Press report last year, public health officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Public Health Association said their agencies will promote the “co-benefits” burning fat instead of fossil fuels, while another official called this the “greatest public health opportunity that we've had in a century.”

There is certainly an element in the combining of obesity and climate change into a single mega-problem that can seem a little crudely opportunistic. For instance, when the animal rights group PETA adds the slogan “Meat: #1 Cause of Global Warming” to their campaign for vegetarianism, or advertise (as they do on their website) that “eating meat and dairy products makes you fat,” it should be pretty clear that those claims, however true, have little bearing on the group’s core philosophy. Similarly, these issues are now counted among the top justifications for “smart growth” and New Urbanist development, even though high-density urban development had its vocal advocates long before the threat of rising obesity rates and greenhouse gas emissions were on the public radar.

Still, there are meaningful parallels between the two issues. First, there’s the obvious fact that we accomplish many tasks by fossil-fuel power that once required personal exertion. Daily caloric intake per person in this country decreased during the first half of the 20th century in general, and on through the 1960s in certain demographic groups, such as working men, whose jobs became less labor-intensive during the same period. That historical trivia helps to illustrate that, although a superficial analysis might conclude that obesity is a problem of overconsumption, that’s not necessarily true. Both food calories and carbon dioxide emissions only become problematic when they are out of balance (in the first case, with respect to exercise; in the second, in relation to carbon dioxide uptake by oceans, plants, and other carbon sinks).

Both issues also deal not just with the quantity, but the quality of energy. In the United States today, the lowest-income groups still have the highest rates of obesity and overweight, although the gap in obesity prevalence is narrower than it once was. Studies show that the most energy-dense, nutrient-poor “junk” foods are not only cheaper than their more nutritious calorie-equivalents by an order of magnitude, but also the most resistant to inflation in the last few years, a period when some food prices have increased by as much as 20 percent. At the same time, the fuels that much of the world’s poorest people depend on, wood and coal, could be described as the “junk foods” of fuel energy. These fuels are relatively cheap and convenient, but have potentially serious side-effects, like particulate pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation.

The parallels between cutting carbon and cutting calories end when you focus on the individual. The critical difference between the two at a personal level is that (though many dieters have no doubt wished otherwise) you can’t get someone to lose weight for you. In the effort to curb elevated atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, the opposite is true. Whether the cheapest and most effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are to be found in your backyard, or halfway around the world makes no practical difference. In fact, any benefit from a local project that that is expensive or inefficient can be limited or nonexistent.

Given current trends, it is easy to imagine a scenario where we in the Western hemisphere consume durable goods produced by carbon-emitting industries in the global East and enjoy the benefits of carbon sequestration in the global South and call the whole arrangement “carbon-neutral.” The fact that greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced through bargaining between individuals, industries and nations is both a blessing and a curse. Those bargains allow us to make quick progress, but as always, the advantages of political power are omnipresent in negotiations.

If some concept of “globesity” becomes part of the mainstream dialog on obesity and climate change, hopefully the socioeconomic, personal and practical differences in the two issues will still be recognized.

Otherwise, we’ll be lucky if the “globesity” concept, like fad diets before it, falls out of fashion before it does any real harm. By conflating a personal issue like obesity and the inherently global issue of atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions into one monster problem, “globesity,” we invite the worst policy approaches to both issues—individual mandates for carbon emission reductions and society-wide prescriptions for weight loss.