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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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AMERICA THE ‘LAND OF PLENTY’ – AND FAT PEOPLE ! American adults are 24 pounds heavier today than their counterparts of the 1960s. Moreover, they are posing a huge health impact on our economy and medical facilities as the overweight “Baby Boomers” begin to retire. They face serious health issues, including diabetes, heart disease, other malfunctioning organs and more operations for hips and knee replacements to carry the “morbidly obese” fat. Heavier passengers pose risk on tour boats. There have been two disasters on small passenger boats – the capsizing of the Baltimore harbor ferry Lady D in 2004, when five passengers died, and last year’s loss of the tour boat Ethan Allen and 20 lives on Lake George, New York. Americans are getting bigger, and the U.S. Coast Guard says operators of small passenger vessels should take that into account in estimating how many people a boat can carry safely. The average adult passenger today weighs 185 pounds, instead of the old standard of 160 pounds 45 years ago. That’s a lot of displacement of water for any sized vessel. Boats built since the late 20 th Century carry plates showing their approved weight and passenger capacity limits. Since the 1960s, the Coast Guard had used 140 pounds as the average weight per person for setting stability ratings on boats used in protected waters. Offshore, the average weight was set at 160 pounds. Following the Baltimore accident, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommended adopting the per-person weight allowance of 174 pounds set for all travel by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Reviewers considered data from the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that tract nutritional and weight trends among Americans. One of those findings reported that on average, adult men and women are 24 pounds heavier than their counterparts were in the 1960s. From that, CDC officials calculate that adult Americans as a group – men and women between the ages of 20 and 74 – weigh an average of 177.7 pounds without clothes on, according to the federal Register notice describing the Coast Guard rule process. The newly recommended per-person average of 185 pounds comes from combining the CDC weight average and a federal aviation standard of 7.5 pounds for clothing and shoes per airline passenger, the Register notice said. According to a study by the Harvard School of Public Health, obesity levels in the United States have been “grossly underestimated” when you factor in the common human behavior of tending to lie about one’s weight and height. Women typically under-report their weight, while men younger than 45 exaggerate their height. Such vanity can skew health survey results. The Harvard weight study compared discrepancies in national weight trends among more than 1.3 million respondents who reported their weight by telephone during CDC surveys. Among men in Texas, 31 percent were rated as obese, while in Mississippi, 30 percent were in the obese category. Among women, Alabama, the District of Columbia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, the study found that 37 percent were classified as obese. In South Carolina, the obese rate for women was 36 percent. These were some of the states that had the highest levels of obesity. I personally experienced the consequences of super-fat people. My wife and I were flying home from a vacation on a Continental jet plane. We always sit next to each other, my wife at the window, with me in the middle seat. After sitting down, I was confronted by a woman who wanted to occupy the aisle seat next to me. She leaned over and asked me to push down the arm separating my seat from her seat. I didn’t understand what she was doing until she started to sit down on her aisle seat. She occupied her seat, plus half of my space. I pushed myself against my wife, who weighs 125 pounds at 5-feet, 8-inches, which is “thin” by any standard. Finally, I told the obese woman I had to get up and go to the bathroom. She looked like she weighed at least 300 pounds. I’m six feet tall and weigh around 190 pounds with a 34-inch waist. Once out in the aisle, I pursued one of the flight attendants and asked her if she could help me. I told her to walk down the aisle until she could see a woman whose body protruded out into the aisle and into the seat next to her, which was my seat. The attendant returned to the back of plane where I was standing, awaiting her response. She told me I could sit on one of the attendant’s pull-down seats in the back of the plane. It was a hard seat, but better than being enveloped with excess poundage. I wrote a letter to the chairman of Continental and explained my plight on one of his modern jets. I was given a free pass for my next Continental flight. That was five years ago. Continental’s policy now is if you need two seats to sit down, you pay for two seats, not one. (Gordon Bishop is a national award-winning author, historian and syndicated columnist.)
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