I knew it: the reason airfares have gone up is because there’s too much junk food out there

As if there weren’t enough reasons to promote healthy eating and proper exercise, here’s another: staying with a sensible diet will reduce the cost of flying and cut back on fuel emissions.

From the IHT today:

[A] report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine … said that "an obesity epidemic" among Americans has had "unexpected consequences beyond direct health effects." Throughout the 1990s, the average weight of Americans increased by 10 pounds, or 4.5 kilograms, causing airlines to spend $275 million on an extra 350 million gallons of fuel just to carry the extra weight, the agency says. The extra fuel burned caused an estimated 3.8 [million] tons of carbon dioxide to be released into the air.

[UPDATE: The numbers are editorially corrected by me thanks to the very clever reader who did the math and determined that the IHT article had missed the word "million" in the transcription.]