Ole Humpback
Member
And no, exercise won't do it. It is not physically possible for a person over 40 to burn up as many calories/fats/etc as he can eat. your metabolism is too slow by then and your joints will no longer stand up to that much consistent strenuous activity. Been there, tried it.
Remo, you really need to come spend a day with the concrete foreman I work with. He's 63 and works 10hr days all the time forming, pouring, finishing, and setting bar. I know that when I was working with him I was burning in excess of 4000 calories a day. I know that because I was eating 4000 calories a day and still lost 40lbs that summer. The guy worked longer & harder than I did and he wasn't dead tired at the end of the day like I was.
partly due to US ethanol production
We owe a big thanks to the Iowa & the US govt for this problem. The US govt subsidized ethanol production years ago when corn prices were low because farmers in Iowa said they'd vote for a candidate that supported it. Turns out corn produced ethanol is a pipe dream to say the least. Sure, you can get ethanol from corn, but its horribly expensive to do so both in materials & time not to mention infrastructure. For every pound of ethanol you get at the end of the process, you need between 8 and 10 pounds of corn. Funny thing is that agricultural wastes (plant stalks, chaff, grasses) & algae's are far more energy bearing than the corn grain. They also happen to be easier to grow and far more economical than corn.
If we were to make syngas by gasification (which is a product of a catalytic reaction between vaporous hydrocabon gases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gasification ) we'd be swiming in gasoline from algae or ag wastes. For every pound gasoline you get from ag wastes, you need only 2-5lbs of ag waste to get gas. For algae its one pound of gas from 1-2 pounds of algae. Catch is nobody has quite figured out how to make the small scale lab experiments scale up to large scale industrial processes. This was already taken care of with corn grain ethanol because its a nearly identical process to making whiskey. Problem here is that there are fewer people growing hay, processing ag wastes, or growing algae than there are farmers who farm corn.
Ever wonder why Iowa is the first in the primaries? Gov't subsidies for farming are a big reason why. Sugar is also another prime example of gov't subsidies run a muck, but thats not the purpose of this forum.
*MODERATOR NOTE*
I'm not trying to start a political debate, only wanting to inform about why ethanol produced from corn is causing feed prices to rise. Please moderate as needed to meet THR's mission.