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Obesity could affect the world food crisis

Obese people are contributing to the world food crisis because of the amount they eat, experts claim.

Researchers calculated that obese populations consume 18% more calories than average, boosting the global demand for food and pushing up prices.

Car use by overweight people also had knock-on effects on oil supplies and the cost of food production. Food prices are soaring around the world, placing staple products beyond the reach of poorer communities and leading to social unrest.

Last month several people were reported killed as food riots erupted in Haiti, where the price of rice, beans and fruit has soared by more than 50% in the space of a year.

Trouble has also flared in Mexico, Bangladesh, Egypt, Senegal, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Mauritania and Yemen. Increasing oil prices and the use of land for growing biofuels instead of edible crops are said to be two major factors driving up the cost of food.

But according to two experts from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, obesity is also to blame. Dr Phil Edwards and Dr Ian Roberts compared the calorie consumption of individuals with a normal and obese body mass index (BMI), a measurement that relates height and weight and is used to define obesity.

They estimated that populations with an average BMI in the healthy range of 24.5 consumed a total of 2,500 calories per person per day. But an obese population with an average BMI of 29 required 2,960 calories per person per day - an extra 18% of food energy.

The scientists wrote in The Lancet medical journal: "Additionally, more transportation fuel energy will be used to transport the increased mass of the obese population, which will increase even further if, as is likely, the overweight people in response to their increased body mass choose to walk less and drive more."

Nearly a quarter of adults in the UK are now classified as obese, twice as many as there were in the 1980s.

By 2010 about 6.6 million men and 6 million women in England are predicted to be obese.