13 million tons of walking explosive

December 15 2007   William   writes:

It is estimated that 64% of the US, or 129.6 million people are overweight3. How much unused energy is this?

The Reserve:

An overweight person is defined as having a Body Mass Index (BMI) greater than 25. A crude estimate for this is if someones BMI is 25 they are 25 lb overweight. 129.6 million people have at least 25 lb each or 3.24 billion lbs total of unnecessary fat in the US alone. Every gram of fat4  contains 9 Calories and 453.6 grams are in every pound5. Therefor there are 13.23 trillion calories of energy reserves walking around this country.

13.23 trillion Calories =

  • 420 million gallons of gasoline
  • 314 million gallons of diesel fuel
  • 15.4 billion kilowatt hours of electricity
  • 13.2 million tons of explosives
  • 1.538649e-8 zettawatthour?

This rough calucation does not include the inefficiencies of converting the food to fat and the wasted energy spent carrying this extra weight. With these additional variables included it would not be surprising if the amount of wasted energy of obesity was 5 times the values listed above.

References:

  1. A person has traditionally been considered to be obese if they are more than 20 percent over their ideal weight. Medical Dictionary
  2. This was a result of many long meetings with nutrition experts who concluded that 2000 calories was the average amount needed by American adults. Columbia University
  3. An estimated 129.6 million Americans, or 64 percent, are overweight or obese. about.com
  4. One gram of fat on the other hand, releases 9 kilocalorie. hypertextbook.com
  5. 1 pound = 453.592 37 gram. onlineconversion.com

Categories: Energy

One Response to “13 million tons of walking explosive”

  1. MK on 27 Dec 2007 at 11:48 am #

    This waste of energy pales when compared to the wastes in our transportation sector.

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