Fat? Or big brained?

Obesity causes global warming? Yes, the food police are here.

Dr. Richard N. Bergman, a diabetes and obesity researcher said, “If you think of three thin people in a room, they use a certain amount of energy. If one of them is obese, it’s the same as having four people.
That means that the extra person in the room translates to a requirement for more energy to make more food and transport to the food. It creates more trash and other consequences, according to Dr. Bergman. Many of the most obese countries, the U.S., Kuwait and Egypt, rely on cars to move around. But bigger isn't necessarily fatter or more obese.

Heh? Egypt has an obesity problem?

But obesity is now a growing problem in China.

A recent report from America's Johns Hopkins University claimed that, overall, 20 percent of China's children were now overweight and up to a third of Chinese boys were, compared to a Peking University report from 2004 that said the overall figure was less than two percent.

But all that abundant food does more than make kids fat: It makes them grow taller.

A reader writes,

Starting at 19, I spent two years (1985-86) in Hong Kong. I am an average-sized American (6’0”), but whenever I got on the subway car (which was always filled to capacity with standing riders) I could see to the end of the car unobstructed. I was always head and shoulders taller than everyone else. The Hong Kong Chinese always said that Westerners were larger and taller because they had more meat and dairy in their diet than average Chinese.
When I went back ten years later, after the generation that had fed on McDonald’s had grown up, I could no longer see to the end of the subway car. The native Chinese obstructing my view were all teenagers or in their 20s. I hadn’t gotten any shorter in the meantime. Maybe there was something to what the Chinese were telling me.

Once, an Indian-American friend of mine made this observation to me: “Our parents [immigrants to America] come up to our waistlines

But of course, there is another small point to this increase in nutrition: the brain also grows.

So taller kids do better in school, probably because their brains are larger.