Studies show that hectic consumption patterns should worry us more than overpopulation

Jun 19, 2012 09:30 GMT  ·  By

Recently, researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine decided to pull together all available resources and calculate the body mass index of the entire world's population.

Their results are staggering: at the present moment, given the amount of excess body weight, our planet is short of 300 million individuals who would be needed to balance things out.

Apparently, rising consumption patterns in the food industries, particularly in the case of developed countries, is much more damaging to our natural world than simply having more people around would be, simply because this social phenomena involves using and abusing the available resources.

Therefore, unless humans learn to only take what they need from the environment, concepts such as sustainable development are prone to remain a utopia.