As American waistlines have expanded since 1960, so has their consumption of gasoline, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Virginia Commonwealth University say.
Americans are now pumping 938 million gallons of fuel more annually than they were in 1960 as a result of extra weight in vehicles. And when gas prices average $3 a gallon, the tab for overweight people in a vehicle amounts to $7.7 million a day, or $2.8 billion a year.
The numbers are added costs linked directly to the extra drain of body weight on fuel economy. In a paper to appear in the October-December issue of the journal The Engineering Economist, the scientists conclude that each extra pound of body weight in all of today’s vehicles results in the need for more than 39 million gallons of extra gasoline usage each year.
“The reason we looked at this issue was that gas prices hit an average exceeding $3 per gallon in September 2005,” said Sheldon H. Jacobson, a professor of computer science and director of the simulation and optimization laboratory at Illinois.
“This was the highest recorded level in the United States. We thought there must be some way that we could determine how to quantify the effect of being overweight on fuel consumption. We felt that beyond public health, being overweight has many other
socio-economic implications.”
Jacobson presented the challenge to Laura A. McLay, who was a doctoral student in his laboratory at that time and is now on the faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University, and they pursued the issue through his funding with the National Science Foundation.
Their conclusions are based on mathematical computations drawn from publicly available data on U.S. weight gain from 1960 to 2002, a period in which the weight of the average American has increased by more than 24 pounds, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
By 2002, 62 percent of adults were overweight with a body mass index of between 25 and 30; more than 30 percent were considered obese with a BMI exceeding 30.
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