Well, this is amusing. But, after looking at some numbers on food production, it may simply be that CO2 is helping us grow more food. And what happens when a well fed population has more food? It eats it of course. The caveat is that correlation is not always causation, the Green Revolution (the agricultural one, not the crazy one) and Norman Borlaug had a lot to do with this too.
Source: FAO agriculture report and Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
From ScienceNordic: New theory: CO2 makes you fat
Danish researchers have announced a rather wild hypothesis: Perhaps we are getting fatter and fatter because of the increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
I had to laugh at this “fact” sidebar in the article:
Researchers are wondering whether CO2 affects embryos in the womb, so the embryos develop a tendency towards obesity.
This is one of the hypotheses that will be tested if the researchers can raise funding for large-scale trials with rats.
Gosh, giant CO2 fattened people and fat rats. These might do well with the smaller climate optmized green cat-like overlords from our other crazy story this week.
Other excerpts (tinfoil hats optional):
…
CO2 makes us eat more
This discovery made it possible to develop a precise hypothesis for how CO2 makes us fatter: We breathe more CO2, which makes our blood more acidic; this affects our brain, so we want to eat more.
In 2011, together with researchers Anders Mikael Sjödin and Arne Astrup from the University of Copenhagen, Hersoug started to test the hypothesis on humans.
At the university’s Department of Human Nutrition, they placed six young men in special climate rooms, where some of them were exposed to increased amounts of CO2. After seven hours, the men were allowed to eat as much as they liked.
This little pilot study showed that the men with the greater amount of CO2 in their blood ate six percent more food than the men who had been in climate rooms with a normal amount of CO2.
“We could also see that the extra amount of CO2 caused the men’s heartbeat to rise, and this gives us an indication that CO2 affects the brain’s nerve cells – orexins in the hypothalamus – which among other functions control our appetite and the composition of our nutrient intake,” says Hersoug.
“A very small change in the activity of these nerve cells will presumably have great importance for our development of obesity or for maintaining our weight.”
Does CO2 give men beer guts?
If the researchers’ hypothesis is correct, it raises many questions.
CO2 is found in the bubbles in fizzy drinks and beer – does that have any importance for obesity?
“Of course I have considered whether CO2 has very local impacts, which could explain how beer guts develop,” says the researcher.
…
Exercise and vegetables can limit the ‘CO2 effect’
But Hersoug says the hypothesis gives us no excuse for dropping diets and exercise – on the contrary.
“We know already that a sedentary lifestyle is a risk factor for many diseases,” he says. “According to our theory, this may be because of the higher acidity in the blood arising from a sedentary lifestyle indoors in a CO2 concentration that is higher than it is outdoors.”
On the other hand, he says, “If you’re out running, you get your blood circulating and you can pump much of the CO2 out of your body, so our hypothesis is really further evidence that exercise is healthy. And exercise may be even more necessary in the future, when we can expect even higher CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.”
Hersoug adds that fruit and vegetables also reduce the blood’s pH value, so the CO2 theory is also an argument for eating more healthily.
…
Oh noes! Blood acidification – the next CO2 scourge! Breath deeply, it worked in The Andromeda Strain. Do not panic.
Read the whole thing here while you munch on a bag of buttered popcorn.
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Oh, the legendary corpulent submarine corps.
Large amounts of H2O plus C6H12O6 or C2H5OH and CO2, definitely, probably, maybe, a cause for obesity. Especially when consumed in large amounts daily.
Can we have a moratorium on bio/medico/nutrition grads until they take statistics courses for grown-ups. It seems that most of the problem the AGW crowd has had is screwing up statistical studies. We may not know if it will be hotter or colder in the next 100 years but we sure can tell when the statistics supporting it is a load of crap. These 6 subjects (along with a few dozen more to join them) should have had their food intake individually measured daily over a period of a few weeks before going to the CO2 rooms). Off the top of my head I’d say a 6% variance among 6 people is rather a small one. The larger sample would also have determined if the numbers were significant (for example, say 75% of the CO2 crowd ate more and 80% or so of the ambient bunch ate the same as before and less than the other group).
The exercise raises blood CO2 levels so high you have to pant to get rid of it versus the CO2 you breathe, at several orders of magnitude less, affects you so severely you have to eat more paradox definitely deserves examination – I think they’re onto something here and more funding should provide an answer !
These people have become totally STUPID – if the CO2 we breathe in was at concentrations capable of affecting us more than the existing concentration in our blood (a waste from metabolic processes) our gas exchange mechanism in our lungs would be compromised, we would all be permanently gasping for breath BECAUSE our bodies rely on CO2 concentrations to provide the involuntary breathing reflex – not lack of oxygen but too high CO2 levels in our blood controls this.
Note it is only CO2 (outside of such things as tear gas etc) – the by product of metabolism – that produces this response – we do not really notice CO until we die.
Huh, and here I always thought eating too much relative to personal activity level was the reason people got fat.
Excellent advice about tinfoil hats in the form of a jolly little ditty. Here
http://www.eclectech.co.uk/mindcontrol.php
Kindest Regards
Did they research how all that extra CO2 makes it into the womb? Osmosis?
Here’s a test of hypothesis:
Because professional horticulturalists enhance the carbon dioxide concentration in their greenhouses to about 1000ppm, people who work in greenhouses should be significantly fatter than people who work in similar environments (like factories) without carbon dioxide enhancement.
Wanna bet?
Chance to vote on an ABC Australia Drum poll on the latest CSIRO CO2 figures
http://www.abc.net.au/news/thedrum/polls/
Here is an even better heading:
Food Fest: CO2 contributes to over population
If there is extra food then there will be more poor people who won’t starve to death, which will contribute to over population.
Offering logical counter arguments to something this inane is a complete waste of time, but as they say in “The Godfather” or maybe GF II, “Every time i think I’m going to get out, they drag me back in”. One would assume that anyone with intelligence greater than a turnip would have noticed that almost all of the increase in atmospheric CO2 is supposedly the product of burning fossil fuels to create various forms of energy. Almost all of that energy is used in ways which significantly reduce the amount of metabolic energy humans need to expend to accomplish the necessary tasks of daily life. That is usually considered to be a good thing. Thanks to current abundant supplies of energy we can live our lives with much lower levels of physical effort than our less gifted ancestors. But even if we could magically produce that energy from zero CO2 sources, the effect on the number of ax handles across the collective human ass would be negligible.
If you really want to stay thin, go back to walking to every place to which you want to travel. If you want information, hike yourself to a library and drag a bunch of heavy reference tomes off the shelves instead of doing a search engine inquiry on the internet. Make all of your choices in life based on similar logic and you’ll never have a problem with obesity. Of course your affect on the climate will be many orders of magnitude less than that of that apocryphal butterfly whose flapping wings upset so many climate models. I strongly suspect that you would have exactly no success in recruiting other humans to join you in an impossible attempt to expand that influence.
Guess this explains my club soda gut!
Sorry to disappoint the fluffy readers here (yours truly incl.), but the high-CO2 rooms were at 8000ppm. I’m guessing that beer, popcorn, and computer usage are more significant factors than 380ppm.
For reference, the OSHA (i.e., workplace) permissable exposure limit is 5000ppm and the level immediately dangerous to life or health (IDLH) is 50,000ppm. No wonder the subjects’ hearts were beating a bit faster.
For your further amusement, here’s the conflict of interest statement from the article:
“Professor Arne Astrup is salaried author for Ude & Hjemme; salaried associate editor of American Journal of Clinical Nutrition; advisor or member of advisory boards for a number of food and pharmaceutical producers and so on: Communications and Scientific Advisory Board of The Global Dairy Platform, Kraft Health & Wellness Advisory Council, Glenview, Il, USA; Scientific Board member, Beer Knowledge Institute (Amsterdam); Novo, NeuroSearch, Basic Research, Pathway Genomics Corporation, La Jolla, CA, USA; and Jennie Craig, Carlsbad, CA, USA; and recipient of honoraria as speaker for a wide range of Danish and international concerns. Ownership, in accordance with the Danish University regulations, of inventions and patents where Arne Astrup is co-inventor. Arne Astrup has, from the university, been granted shares in Mobile Fitness A/S. LG Hersoug and A Sjödin declare no conflict of interest.”
geez… I thought it was the fluffy pretzels that go with the beer…
I think my son is getting taller because of increasing temperature. He is now levelling out (although these last few months he has been the tallest EVAH!). Given the flattening out of temperatures, that seems to match.
I am now hoping he does not start getting smaller ….
TG McCoy (Douglas DC) says:
March 13, 2012 at 10:39 am
Love that “If I weighed 200 lbs. I would rip your throat out.” look on the cat…
Yes there is something definitely leonine in the cat’s expression, in a pissed-off sort of way.
So it’s good to know that cakes, biscuits, jams, beer, fried food, pizzas, prepared meals with added salt and sugars, sitting down all day at work, sitting down to and from work, sitting in front of the TV and affluence are nothing to do with obesity.
Out of interest I came across the following info on biscuits:
Over 491 billion Oreo cookies have been sold since they were first introduced
Nabisco turns out 320 million pounds of snack foods annually.
It costs $72,000 if you want facts and figures on biscuits in 80 countries from Algeria to Vietnam. It’s only $900 dollars if you want just one country. http://www.euromonitor.com/biscuits
This all seems a bit similar to warm air makes it snow.
The cat is a skeptic.
Totally off topic, but as someone mentioned cat facial expressions….
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthpicturegalleries/8973023/Review-of-the-year-2011-animals-feeding-and-fighting.html?image=1
As office buildings often run at 5000 ppm CO2, submarines at 8000 ppm, and rock concerts can reach 12,000 ppm CO2, it’s clear that a tiny rise in CO2 will make people eat more. It’s simple cause and effect.
After a day working in 5000 ppm CO2 people go home and eat because of the CO2 . . . or was it the work they did . . . so . . . they eat dinner because lunch was so 6–7 hours ago.
Yep, it must be the CO2.
Actually, it is the C6H12O6 + CO2 that makes you fatter.
^ CO2 = more plants = bigger cows = more cheeseburgers = bigger humans.
We needed a research study to proof this?
If this was real climate science they would have scaled the food per capita CO2 graph so the two slopes were identical.
Let’s look at the long term trends. I’ll take it from my birth year of 1974.
CO2: 328-398 ppm (Mauna Loa)
Temps: have risen ~0.5C
My weight: has gone from less than a kilo to 100 kgs. So let’s say a 100 kilo rise.
So going by the long term trend the correlation is 14 ppm / 0.1C / 20 kgs. If we extrapolate this out to 2050 we find that I will be 200 kgs!!!!
It’s worse than I thought!
Holy crap. I hope I didn’t help pay for this.
Jason says: ^ CO2 = more plants = bigger cows = more cheeseburgers = bigger humans.
bigger humans = bigger SUVs = even MORE CO2
I plotted my age against CO2…. that’s a positive correlation as well. Funding please.