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The world is getting fatter and apart from the usual reasons for being worried about this—vast increases in diabetes and cardiovascular diseases—Edwards and Roberts have given us a new one.1 They have calculated the energy costs of food production and transportation arising in two hypothetical populations, in which one has a 3.5% prevalence of obesity (reflecting UK in 1970) and the other of 40% (UK in 2010). The authors claim an increase in greenhouse gas emissions of between 0.4 and 1.0 Giga tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents that was readily translated for environmentally naïve readers by The Sun—‘FATTIES CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING’ as a front page headline. It would be tempting to suggest that air companies should levy an additional carbon tax on obese passengers but the underlying message is the need to reduce the population distribution of energy consumption downwards—something for which we all need to take responsibility—rather than target those at the top end of the distribution. Powles provides a commentary that highlights the need for considering what we eat as an integral part of policy on climate change but notes the reluctance of affluent Western politicians and the public to consider a halving of their meat consumption in order to move towards ‘contraction and convergence’ policies for global control of green house gas emissions.2

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