Posted 03.08.2006 at 4:25 pm
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As this story on CNN notes, since 2003, 46 people have died in accidents—one airplane, two boat—partially attributed to overweight Americans. It seems that the standards used by regulators to determine how many people can occupy a vessel are based on an average passenger's weight from 1942: 140 pounds. When the Lady D water taxi sank in Baltimore's Inner Harbor in 2004, killing five people, "the average weight among the 25 passengers when the accident happened was 168 pounds, making it 700 pounds overweight, investigators said."
It would be nice if our corrective action was to get our national average weight back down to 140 pounds to match up with the standards—and get more people onto boats and airplanes. Instead, of course, regulators are simply going to adjust the weight estimates to match our appalling girth. —Eric Adams
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your all big jerks hahahaha well guess what im over weight and i need help
The idea that 140lbs is a good goal for the national average does not take into account the increase in average height between 1940 and 1950. Then there is the outlier denoted by the increase in sports participation, sports training, and effectiveness of sports training for the population as a whole. Just because the country’s weight went up doesn’t mean the entire populous got fat.