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Pitch

Intense yoga practitioners consume food only once a day while moderate practitioners consume twice. Low consumption also leads to wellbeing.


Description

Summary

Problem (Environment Social Governance risk) :- Overeating leads of Obesity and deterioration in human capital.

Desired Social & Economic impact (Individual behavior)

The basic fact is that intense practitioners of yoga consume food only once a day while moderate practitioners of yoga consume food twice a day. With the normal consumption being around three times on a given day, the economic benefit or the reduction in food consumption due to yoga practice is two meals per person per day for intense practitioner and the same would be one meal per person per day for moderate practitioner. In addition, the benefits include increase in well-being & consciousness, and decrease in cost of non-communicable diseases.

Group behavior - America
Reduction of one meal or two meal/person may look trivial and it also takes years of yoga practice to reduce the food consumption to one meal a day.  However I would like to point out to two facts.

  • If all the world's 7 billion people consumed as much as average American, it would take the resources of over five earths to sustainably support all of them.
  • Percentage of Yoga practitioners in America has shot up to 8.7% of the total population by 2012.

The savings in food consumption could be well over 1% of national food consumption together with phenomenal development in human capital.  This percentage of 8.7% in USA was achieved due to decades of hard work of yoga teachers while people in India have started undergoing bariatric surgery.

Yoga is considered to be a religious practice.   Now it is being practiced by all religions including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism etc.  It is considered as sport in many countries including Britain, Iran and America. 


Category of the action

Reducing consumption


What actions do you propose?


Who will take these actions?

  1. UN & University research teams have to recognise the existence of clean development mechanism for food energy.  
  2. Governments will work with Policy and finance options.
  3. Intitutions in Ecosystem services and food security.
  4. Institutes for global heath governance have to simplify the food taxes.

 


Where will these actions be taken?

Developed and Developing courtries.


How much will emissions be reduced or sequestered vs. business as usual levels?


What are other key benefits?

Low food consumption may reduce cost of obesity.  Cost of Obesity for america is estimated at 190 billion dollars.

Developing countries like India & China (with 2.5 billion people) are on the path of high food consumption.  A clean tecnology practice may reduce the increasing food consumption and the cost of Non communicable diseases.


What are the proposal’s costs?

The proposal is liked by Food ethics council.  An Initiative is to be set up to execute the comple work.  So no cost estimation is available at the present stage.


Time line

Idea in incubation stage.  Time estimate not provided.


Related proposals

Related Proposal include proposal to simplify food taxes and creation of human development incentive out of the tax collections.


References

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2010984