Paying too much for gas? Try losing weight

Here's another thing to blame on Americans' expanding waistlines: Overweight people use more gasoline.

A new study says Americans are burning nearly 1 billion more gallons of gasoline a year than in 1960 because of weight they've added.

In 1960, the average adult male weighed 166 pounds and the average female tipped the scale at 140. In 2002, those averages were 191 and 164, according to National Center for Health Statistics.

Americans could save enough gas to fuel 1.7 million vehicles for an entire year simply by shedding enough pounds to be as svelte as the Americans of 1960, according to the study by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Our nation's hunger for food and our nation's hunger for oil are not independent," said computer-science professor Sheldon Jacobson, who co-wrote the study, which will appear in the October-December issue of The Engineering Economist, a peer-reviewed journal.

So losing weight could promote fuel conservation and help the environment, as well as bring the more familiar benefits of better health.

"What we have here is a socioeconomic implication of obesity," said Jacobson, who has done numerous studies of how engineering principles can be applied to health issues. "If people decide as a nation to get healthier and lose weight and be fitter, not only will we have a healthier country but we're actually going to reduce our dependence on foreign oil very covertly, simply because we're going to be using less."

Using recent gas prices of $2.20 a gallon, the extra weight translates to about $2.2 billion more spent on gas each year in the U.S.

"If a person reduces the weight in their car, either by removing excess baggage, carrying around less weight in their trunk, or yes, even losing weight, they will indeed see a drop in their fuel consumption," Jacobson said.

The analysis says nothing about the improvements in fuel economy in vehicles since 1960, Jacobson said. It merely looks at how fuel consumption would be different in today's vehicles if today's drivers weighed less.

"We took today's cars and driving habits, and substituted people of average weight in 1960," said co-author Laura McLay, who was a doctoral student working with Jacobson and now is an assistant professor of statistical science at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The gas study's estimates "are probably pretty reliable," said Larry Chavis, an economist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. "I don't know if it's going to encourage anybody to go out and lose weight to save gasoline, but even for individual families, it could have an effect on their budget."

Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, former CDC director and chairman of an Institute of Medicine report on obesity, said the findings are almost beside the point.

"The wrong fuel is being focused on," said Koplan, now at Emory University. "If you're heavier, the most important fuel you use more of is food."

Eating less, driving less and choosing more active means of transportation would reduce gas consumption, and also help reverse rising obesity rates, he said.

Any savings from simply losing weight wouldn't be significant, said John Felmy, chief economist for the American Petroleum Institute. "It's an interesting calculation," Felmy said. "But we use about 140 billion gallons a year. The savings would be less than 1 percent."

A representative of the Southern California Automobile Club, which has long preached that changes in driving habits can dramatically reduce gas consumption, said the human weight factor is far overshadowed by others.

"The difference between someone who diets and someone who doesn't is not much," said the club's chief automotive engineer, Steve Mazor, "compared to the golf clubs you put in the trunk."

Compiled from The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post