I used to use a small laptop with a 12 inch screen. On a transatlantic flight the teenage girl in the seat in front reclined the seat so violently it was pure luck the screen didn't get trapped and broken. The recline mechanism really needs a damper in it to limit the speed at which it can recline (and on transatlantic flights, reclining is pretty necessary).

For domestic flights, easyJet has the best idea - their seats don't recline at all.

The obesity epidemic also correlates with the increase in amount of food eaten and the decrease in the amount of exercise taken.

Who claims fructose is a non-digestable sweetner? Fructose is half of what's in normal sugar (sucrose) and is extremely easy to digest. Fructose is the sugar in US non-diet Coke.

Calorie restriction may increase lifespan more than exercise, but exercise will make it more probable that the achieved lifespan has good quality closer to the end. It's no good boosting your lifespan 10 years if it's going to be 10 years of very poor health and low quality of life caused by chronic conditions caused by chronic lack of exercise.

Just to give you an idea (and why it is move more AND AND AND eat less), I have a hilly bicycle commute. To and from work is 24 miles. Assuming I average 120 watts power output and it takes 50 minutes each way, that's only 720 kilojoules burned exercising (that's only 171 kcal, or about three quarters of a Mars bar).

(Sure I'll burn more than 171kcal in total but most of that will be energy required just to live, which would be burned even if I were sitting at my computer, so the additional energy burned by 24 miles of cycling is only about 171kcal. Even if we add some inefficiency factors to this for energy lost by muscles, it won't work out much more than a Mars bar's worth of calories).

But the real benefit of this exercise is that it's (a) extremely cheap transport and (b) I feel so much better than during an inactive period.

Portion size. I've not been to Japan, but in my native country, portion size is generally less than half of what it is in the USA. We eat a hell of a lot less.

I spend less than an hour on cooking and less than an hour on cleaning up to make a family meal. If it takes you that long to make a healthy meal you're doing it wrong. If I cook just for myself the entire process of cooking and cleaning up is usually under 20 minutes, and the cooking time doesn't require 100% attention (I can often do other things during the heating phase).

Rubbish. I know lots of people over 30 and most of them have fully working bodies (myself included). The difference between over 30s with fully working bodies and the ones without are the ones with fully working bodies have had a long term active lifestyle.

Michael Phelps is a bad example in this case, the overwhelming majority of people cannot dedicate their entire life to fitness like a professional athlete does.

In reality most people don't even do the 2.5 hrs a week of exercise which is the bare minimum, let alone the 5 hours a week that is recommended for good long term health (Phelps probably gets 5 hours *a day*). In reality most people need to both move more AND eat less AND eat better.

So the Russian military allows their soldiers to go on leave in a tank?

Why? In my country not only is it legal to do so but it's expected that motorcyclists will lane split (we call it "filtering" here).

China is our off shored CO2 producer. China only produces this much because of Western demand for their goods.

If the US and Europe were to reduce carbon output to post civil war levels (i.e. effectively go back to some sort of agrarian lifestyle), China and India certainly wouldn't be using more coal and oil. It is the US and Europe which is driving the demand for fuel in China. It's not Chinese peasants buying all the stuff China puts out, it's generally the West that's fuelling China's increasing demand.

Try a bicycle. It's a marvellous machine, probably the most efficient machine that anyone can go out and buy. When you ride a bicycle for utility you're not just riding to get exercise for the sake of exercise, you're getting useful transport out of it, too. In many urban settings, riding a bicycle for transportation is no slower than any other method of transport and is considerably less expensive and considerably less dangerous once you consider the risks of chronic diseases brought on by lack of exercise you'll avoid.

Even where I live (which is very uncongested traffic wise) where cycling has a time cost, I effectively get two minutes exercise for the price of one minute for every two minutes I ride since driving to work still takes half as long as cycling to work, and not only do I get great health benefits from it, I spend far less on my car by not using it all the time.

Speeding up by a given amount and slowing down by the same amount takes exactly the same amount of energy! Also, it doesn't matter where you stop if you're trying to avoid the errant driver who blew a red light, what matters is that the change you make prevents you from trying to occupy the same piece of space at the same time as him. Also if you brake then if the collision does occur, there is significantly less energy to dissipate afterwards than if you try to accelerate and the collision occurs.

You *want* the ABS to kick in. Unless you're super driver then ABS will stop you quicker, it's what it's there for. Even a reasonably high performance car will decelerate twice as quickly as it can accelerate.

A summary of some calculations given in a reply to someone else, in the case of both cars approaching at 40mph (18 m/s) with a best case time decision for when you can say the other vehicle is going to just blow on through the red light: with the best case acceleration in a reasonably high performance car (say, a Focus ST with a sub 7 second 0-60 time) will mean you miss the collision by about 1 meter. Mashing the brakes and letting the ABS do the work will mean you miss the collision by around 16 meters. Even in the pouring rain and halving braking performance, if you brake you'll avoid the collision by nearly 10m. In a normal car, for instance a normal Honda Civic, accelerating will not avoid the collision but instead worsen it as you now have more energy to dissipate after the offending red light runner clips the rear corner of the car. Accelerating to avoid colliding with a red light jumper only makes sense if you're in a Bugatti Veyron or a Lambo or a Ferrari, or a performance motorcycle. But even so braking will be safer since these vehicles have very good brakes and tires.