It's bad enough that driving a hydrogen-powered car, which emits only water vapor as exhaust, will kill polar bears by destroying their environment. Now we know that if all two-thirds-plus Americans who have excess avoirdupois decided to lose that weight, the ice caps and glaciers would melt, sea levels would rise and humanity would face oblivion!
As it turns out, when you shed fat it is not metabolized by your body into energy, it is simply breathed out as evil CO2. And that's going to kill us all!
"There is surprising ignorance and confusion about the metabolic process of weight loss," says Professor Andrew Brown, head of the UNSW School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences.Now, lest you think I jest about global warming and weight loss, the article actually takes the point seriously.
"The correct answer is that most of the mass is breathed out as carbon dioxide. It goes into thin air," says the study's lead author, Ruben Meerman, a physicist and Australian TV science presenter.
In their paper, published in the British Medical Journal today, the authors show that losing 10 kilograms of fat requires 29 kilograms of oxygen to be inhaled and that this metabolic process produces 28 kilograms of carbon dioxide and 11 kilograms of water.
The second most frequently asked question is whether weight loss can cause global warming.Of course he does.
"This reveals troubling misconceptions about global warming which is caused by unlocking the ancient carbon atoms trapped underground in fossilised organisms. The carbon atoms human beings exhale are returning to the atmosphere after just a few months or years trapped in food that was made by a plant," says Mr Meerman, who also presents the science of climate change in high schools around Australia.
I think anyone carrying excess baggage around his/her middle should get a carbon-sink tax credit. The more pounds you are overweight, the more your credit shall be.
HT: American Digest
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