Too+Many+Calories

Our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors ate a wide variety of wild plants, tubors, seeds and animals depending on what they could find. When these wild food sources dwindled, they needed to find a new food sources.
 * The Paleo Problem**

**The Neo Solution** They settled down and began farming. They mainly grew one or two different cereal crops from wild seed in their area: barley & wheat in Mesopotamia, rice in Asia & corn & potatoes in South America. These crops weren't too difficult to grow, gave them lots of calories from carbohydrates, could be stored and could be fed to their animals.

**MP4U**

As hunter gatherers, we are adapted to crave and search for calories. Now our recent ability to grow high calorie crops and raise high fat meats presents us with a real problem: easy access to more calories than we need and no easy way to control intake resulting in obesity. Ironically, obesity and hunger often go hand in hand, as many find it easier and cheaper to fill up on high calorie, low nutrition foods.



Begin your research here:
 * Obesity has quadrupled worldwide since 1980
 * Beating obesity
 * Food Research & Action Center facts on hunger and obesity in the U.S.
 * How many calories do we need?
 * Food energy
 * Food Calorie Counter - use this site to calculate how many calories in common food
 * ==World Hunger & Obesity counter==
 * ===We grow over 1 billion tons of sugar in the world today, and the number is increasing. [|Thailand is the world's second largest exporter of sugar from sugar cane. Sugar is good business.] But is it good for us?===

Innovations:
 * ==9 technologies to help address hunger and obesity==
 * ===Sugar Taxes might be needed===
 * [|Taking back control over our diet by growing some of our own healthy food]