For a World of Woes, We Blame Cookie Monsters

Ron Barrett

Liberals are dumb as lampposts.

Mars is undergoing similar warming trends as Earth.

Is it the fault of NASA's manmade Mars Rovers?

MORONS!

Vote Republican!

350 million gallons, which means an extra 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide.

So you get a ton of carbon dioxide out of 100 gallons?

Someone, somewhere, got paid for this?

So you get a ton of carbon dioxide out of 100 gallons?

Alkanes (single-bonded hydrocarbons) produce more than their own weight in exhaust products when burned (the extra mass coming from the oxygen consumed in combustion).

Compound	Mass in g/mol	CO2 g/mol	H2O g/mol
CH4	16	28	36
C2H6	30	56	54
C3H8	44	84	72
C4H10	58	112	90
C5H12	72	140	108
C6H14	86	168	126
C7H16	100	196	144
C8H18	114	224	162
C9H20	128	252	180
C10H22	142	280	198

Each additional carbon atom adds two hydrogen atoms as well, thus requiring an increase of 14 g/mol. The extra CO2 output is 28 g/mol, and the extra water output is 18 g/mol.

Another Gina Kolata Piña Colada, garçon...

Thanks for the chart, but the question still remains.
I think gas is about 6 pounds per gallon. 100 gallons would be around 600 pounds. Do you really get a ton of carbon dioxide out of that? It just sounds high to me.

Yep. 21.7 pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon of gasoline is what I got. Not believable to me.

I would assume that obese Americans die sooner than thin Americans and therefore ultimately use less of Mother Earth's resources.

There's some real nonsense in this article.

One problem with blaming people for being fat, obesity researchers say, is that getting thin is not like quitting smoking. People struggle to stop smoking, but many, in the end, succeed. Obesity is different. It’s not that the obese don’t care. Instead, as science has shown over and over, they have limited personal control over their weight. Genes play a significant role, the science says.

There are an awful lot of fat children of normal-weight parents out there. Genes, my eye; even if genes provide disposition, a tendency, genes are not destiny. Weight gain and retention is a matter of simple, grade-school mathematics.

For every human, there is a sustaining caloric value that will hold him or her at today's weight. You must either eat less or work (exercise) more to lose weight. If you eat more and exercise less, you will gain weight. What your metabolism influences is not whether this equation works, but what your sustaining value is. Physics is physics and chemistry is chemistry, whether it's happening in the bloodstream and GI tract of a triathlete, a starving North Korean, or one of the tragic 400-lb blivets I see waddling around here.

There are rare people that have unusual medical conditions that render them unable to control their weight, but their numbers are in the single digits per million and there are probably no more than 10,000 such persons in North America. Whereas, there are over 50 million people in North America who are physcially overweight (including me, but the physics works on me quite demonstrably).

That is not a popular message, Dr. Brownell says.

It deserves to be unpopular. It's bull puckey.

And the notion that anyone can be thin with a little effort has consequences. “Once weight is due to a personal failing, a lot of things follow,” he said. There’s the attitude that if you are fat, you deserve to be stigmatized. Maybe it will motivate you to lose weight....Dr. Brownell and his colleagues studied more than 3,000 fat people, asking them about their experiences of stigmatization and discrimination and how they responded... they ate more.

Unless someone is strapping these people down on a gurney and pouring Joe Weider's Weight Gain Formula into them, they are responsible for their own body weight. Most everyone I know who complains about his or her "metabolism" does it while wolfing down 5,000 or more calories a day.

Criminal Number 18F's wallet-size guide to dieting:

Find your sustaining value
Eat 1,000 cal/day less, on a balanced diet.
If you are very overweight and gaining (one of those 7,500 calorie cookie monsters) you may need to spend a month eating JUST your sustaining value). THEN go to -1,000.
Add a 45-minute walk to your day.
You will lose one to two pounds every week, sustainably and healthily. At first, weight will drop more dramatically, but it will stabilize at 1-2 per week.
You will get material health benefits from the first 10-15 lb you take off. It will extend your lifespan, reduce your risk of heart attack, reduce your blood pressure, lower your resting pulse, and reduce your risk of diabetes. Diabetes is not just a leading cause of death, it's THE leading cause of amputations and blindness. Wanna be blind? No? TRIM DOWN! Your family will have years more to enjoy you.

This kind of article just promotes the militant anti-intellectual attitude that I've seen among some fat people. It's typical MSM science writing, written by a reporter who does NOT understand science (Gina Kolata is a former TV bimbo -- she doesn't do "deep").

Look, some people can carry heavy weight and look good. But if you look good at 200 you'll probably look better at 150. Or less.

A few extra pounds over the BMI guidelines are one thing. "A few" is less than 20, though, and I see LOTS of people that are over 100 lbs overweight. Most of them think they're healthy. They're not, and they'll die young (and often wracked with painful, preventable diseases), leaving heartbroken families behind.

Obesity kills more people than the jihadis' wettest wet dreams. It's harder to fight, it's insidious 'cause it creeps up on you. Don't let it kill you, or someone you love.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

Add a 45-minute walk to your day.

But that's the kicker. To quote or paraphrase of one my best friends, who works on or about the George Washington Bridge and other Port Authority facilities like a monkey with its maintenance crew, "What the easiest thing for anyone to give up? Exercise!"

Doing the exercise requires the commitment of a new religious conversion.

Otherwise, by eating less calories, a body just gets a new "set point" for homeostasis, i.e. it will adjust itself to a decreased caloric intake to maintain its weight.

Without exercise, a body doesn't lose weight until it's actually starving.

Neurologist Says Rush Limbaugh Criticism of Fox Technically Inaccurate But Likely Close to Mark

CDC Investigating Salmonella Outbreak

FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.

Otherwise, by eating less calories, a body just gets a new "set point" for homeostasis, i.e. it will adjust itself to a decreased caloric intake to maintain its weight.

I disagree; you will lose weight, typical adult male with a sedentary lifestyle, on a balanced diet of 2,000 calories. I do agree you will lose weight more quickly when the exercise if factored in. However, the health benefits of the exercise may be superior to those of the weight loss. Most studies do a feeble job of establishing truly independent variables, and we know less than we think about the interplay of all of them.

Very interesting articles on health and caloric restriction in both the Times and the WSJ today. Actually there are several interesting articles on several subjects in the Times, a situation I have not noticed in a very long time. I can't remember where I got this Skeptical Inquirer article from (maybe it was in this thread, in which case I'm a schmuck for posting it again!) but it was interesting also. About a year old.

If a walk around the block takes too much time, think of all the time one loses by dying of a heart attack at 46 like one friend of mine.

I think I'm on your science pinglist. If not, please add me. Thank you kindly.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

Added. Thanks for the link. I read a number of stories somewhere recently that reduced calorie diets without exercise only results in reduced metabolic rates. The fat wants to remain as part of an inborn survival mechanism. Only physical stress, either starvation or exercise, will mobilize your fat stores.