"There are about 300 million Americans who consume about 1,500 calories per day."
Fail. When surveyed, the average American claims to eat around 2,000 calories a day, and studies have shown that people greatly underestimate that. Also, over 3,800 food calories per person disappear daily. Even if you consider that much of it is waste, the average number of calories eaten per day is well above 2,500.
Of course, he's trolling in response to similar behavior from the authors of the Lancet article.
The authors propose solving a health problem with economics, giving climate change as a motivation. Levitt is pointing out climate change is a poor motivation for what they are trying to accomplish, and, if you follow their reasoning to its logical conclusion, it will actually encourage worse health problems.
I would argue that in the context of his blog it's not trollish. I think satire is a lost art, certainly the works of Swift could be seen as trollish in some context as well.
Now, does it belong on the front page of hacker news? No, probably not, but that's a different issue.
I believe that the Good Lord gave us a finite number of heartbeats and I'm damned if I'm going to use up mine running up and down a street. -- Neil Armstrong
Using his logic, if exercising increases you pulse rate from 70 to 140 beats per minute for 30 minutes per day and decreases your pulse rate from 70 to 60 beats per minute the other 23 1/2 hours per day, how much longer would you live after 50 years of this?
Altheles may have a genetic predisposition to be more healthy. Regular exercise may reduce risk of clotting but it may not have much influence on the upper bound of your lifespan. A search for '"twin study" resting heart rate' found that a few genes significantly affect resting heart rate ( http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2350/7/17 ) and that environment significantly affects active heart rate ( http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/94/8/1864 ).
Also, for the next Earth Hour [1], we should consider the first minute to be 'Earth Minute', and all hold our breaths in the dark against global warming.
Fail. When surveyed, the average American claims to eat around 2,000 calories a day, and studies have shown that people greatly underestimate that. Also, over 3,800 food calories per person disappear daily. Even if you consider that much of it is waste, the average number of calories eaten per day is well above 2,500.
Guess who just read "In Defense of Food"?