Why Does God Allow Famines?
There are 800 million malnourished people and at the same time there are 1.2 billion over nourished people.
So for every 2 under nourished people there are 3 over nourished people. Now according to the latest figures I could find the AVERAGE daily intake for someone living in the USA is 3,754.
Note that these are averages and if you consider that (the US count of 78 million) clinically obese people will consume much more than this then it would not be too out of the park to suggest that very fat people will consume 5 or 6 THOUSAND calories a day. Remember something as common as a Big Mac has 560 calories and a large triple thick shake has 1,110. It doesn’t take long to get those calories sky high.
Conversely, someone in the Congo has about 1,606 calories. Again this is an average so there will be millions who don’t get anywhere near that much and are in fact starving to death.
So lets take our conservative figures for average US food intake and round them up slightly to 4000 per day.
Three over nourished people consume 3 x 4000 = 12,000 Calories
The WHO and many other health organization recommend a reasonable daily intake will be about 2000 calories. So simple put 3 fat people are eating enough to adequately feed themselves and three other people as well. However, their excess would however feed 4 or 5 people in the Congo, or CER or Somalia or many other countries where hunger is a problem.
To put it bluntly… The excess food consumed by the 78 million obese people in the USA alone would feed more than a hundred million people in other countries. When you add in the millions of people in Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and all the other countries where obesity exists in any form, then you can see that many of those millions of people for whom being hungry is the norm could be feed from the excesses of even more millions of people for whom gluttony and greed are the norm.
The CDC reports that the annual cost of obesity in the US reached $146 billion in 2008 meaning that costs for each person who is obese was $1429 more than those of normal weight. Latest figures suggest that this cost has passed $190 billion. If you consider that there it can cost as little as 22 cents to feed a child in Africa and not a lot more to feed an adult – then that $146 billion buys Over 400 Billion meals. That’s 2 meals a day for each person who is hungry.
Yes… The amount the USA spends in one year on healthcare for obese people can feed the rest of the worlds starving men women and children. And that’s before you include how much the rest of the world spends on treating health problems directly caused by obesity.
The conclusion we must come to here is that:
There is more than enough food to feed everyone in the world to a very high standard of nutrition.
So why are people still starving?…