Lose Weight, Save Fuel
As if you needed more incentives to lose weight, here is another: You'll be doing something good for the environment. In a recently published paper, Prof. Sheldon H. Jacobson and a graduate student at the University of Illinois calculated that cars use a billion extra gallons of gasoline a year to transport Americans who have grown markedly fatter. This comes after a similar calculation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that, based on the 10 pounds the average American gained in the 1990s, airlines require 350 million extra gallons of fuel. That translates into an additional 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide, the main culprit in global warming.
This story appears in the December 25, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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