When we read the weather reports, noticed that the air quality in Cluj-Napoca was going down. Then we read a blog for a Romanian travel expert who confirmed our fears.
For obesity, we haven’t observed the data as much. Rather, an article written by Tia Sîrca for Făclia de Cluj told us that “in Romania about four million adults are affected by obesity.”
These are not just Romanian trends. It seems a cloud of poor to dangerous air quality is forming around a line from Bucharest up to Amsterdam.
Places with unhealthy air quality include – Athens, Bucharest, Sofia (Bulgaria), Berlin, Amsterdam!, Belgrade, Bratislava
Other places in Europe with Poor air quality – Budapest, Vienna, Riga (but, with Vilnius, just on the border of poor, almost fair), Cluj Napoca, (57, 43, 25) , Prague (worse than Cluj), Munich, London, Moscow
Places in Europe with Fair or better air quality – Tallinn, Madrid, Rome, Paris, Brussels, Oslo, Warsaw (reaching poor at around 10 am with numbers like 54, 26, 21), Dublin, Kiev, Stockholm, Ljubljana
So, we can see there are places in Europe with better air quality than Cluj, and there are also places with worse.
What causes obesity and pollution at the same time? There are several factors.
If you actually want to be morbidly obese and surrounded by unbreathable air, perhaps suffocating to death like they do in a third world country, there are a few things you can do.
One, eating plastic packaged processed foods.
The more processed foods are, the worse they tend to be for you. This includes fast food, food at many restaurants, and packaged food found at supermarkets. Most people know it includes the packaged food at supermarkets, but don’t stop to think that restaurant food is also processed and made of processed ingredients.
White pasta? Pizza dough? Hamburgers? While the elements might grow on trees or be raised on farms, none of these slightly resemble the original items. The ingredients are bleached, stored, salted, sweetened, and go through all kinds of other processes before they reach your plate. The restaurant edition is seldom made of whole ingredients, instead it is often made of processed stuff that is easier to transport and store than the ingredients you would use if you were cooking for yourself at home.
Also, many of these foods (and packaging) are bad for the environment, and contribute to poor air quality.
Two, driving instead of walking
I don’t blame people for driving on days when the ice makes it slippery to walk. But we do see people who drive very short distances. I even heard a teacher once recommed going for drives as a chance to connect with children. Why not walks?
People who talk about driving like it is a good thing are more likely to be obese than those who walk to the shop or take the bus to work.
That doesn’t mean everyone needs to stop driving, but we can limit the amount of time we drive it will be better for the environment and for our health. (And it will speed up traffic for those times when it does make sense to drive.)
Illegal burning of trash
This directly poisons the environment (obviously making air quality worse), and it also makes the air smell so bad that people tend not to leave their homes (contributing to obesity). Getting sick from bad air contributes to obesity.
I think most people have tried burning plastic once in their lives, but transporting trash from one country to another just to have it disposed of illegally contributes to the cloud that hurts us all. I mean, if Dutch trash is burnt in Romania, it comes back to them. They might as well spend more money processing it in Holland (perhaps there could be a trash exception to Schengen and freedom of movement of goods, where trash and antique cultural items still have to pass through customs.)
Four, get fat by using artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence burns fewer calories than talking to real people or doing your own research. It is usually done at home. Using the brain uses calories, that is why so many chess players are thin despite eating normally. Doing work at home, on your phone, burns fewer calories than driving to the library and lifting heavy books, right? You might think, well, buring fewer calories means less carbon… not entirely. It means the carbon is burnt by computers instead of humans, by far away databases instead of at home. It also, of course, means more obesity.
Well, the actual factories where the databases are housed are in most cases terrible for the envirnoment. If you want to know more, it is glossed over at a documentary that showed at TIFF in 2025 (In The Belly of AI, Henri Poulain), and they are also documented on the Youtube Channel More Perfect Union.
Five, if you want to be really unhealthy, blindly follow the advice of artificial intelligence…
Okay, Artificial Intelligence searches the internet and finds the best advice, right? Not always, It’s political advice tends to be bad for the environment. It’s health advice tends to be uninformed. And by using it instead of using common sense and your own research, your brain weakens, and you tend to believe things that hurt you and make you sick.