Weighty Americans are big drag for airlines
The obesity epidemic in the United States is weighing heavily on the country’s airlines, according to a government study.
Enlarged waistlines cause extra drag, meaning aircraft must burn more fuel, pushing up the cost of flights.
Through the 1990s, the average weight of Americans increased by 10lbs (4.5 kilograms), according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
The extra weight caused airlines to burn 350 million more gallons of fuel in 2000, costing an extra €224.8m, the federal agency estimated in a recent issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
“The obesity epidemic has unexpected consequences beyond direct health effects,” said Dr Deron Burton of the CDC. “Our goal was to highlight one area that had not been looked at before.”
The extra fuel burned also had an environmental impact, as an estimated 3.8 million extra tons of carbon dioxide were released into the air, according to the study.
The agency said its calculations are rough estimates, issued to highlight previously undocumented consequences of the ongoing obesity epidemic.
The estimates were calculated by determining how much fuel the 10 extra pounds of weight per passenger represented in Department of Transportation airline statistics, Burton said.
Obesity is a life-or-death struggle in the United States, the underlying cause of 400,000 deaths in 2000, a 33% jump from 1990.
If current trends persist, it will become the nation’s No 1 cause of preventable death, the CDC said earlier this year.
Some 56% of U.S. adults were overweight or obese in the early 1990s, according to a CDC survey. That rose to 65% in a similar survey done from 1999 to 2002.
Although the Air Transport Association of America has not yet validated the CDC data, spokesman Jack Evans said the health agency’s appraisal “does not sound out of the realm of reality”.
