Driving while fat is extra dangerous, study shows

GlobalPost

Driving while fat can kill you a new study shows.

Researchers found that obese drivers were more likely to die in car crashes than their thinner counterparts.

Fat women were more at risk than others, the Daily Mail said.

The study from the Emergency Medicine Journal said that heavy people were 80 percent more likely to die despite extra padding than people at normal weight levels.

The risk is double (100 percent more) for obese women.

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It turns out that fat does not protect you but actually fools your seat belt into thinking you're not there.

The Telegraph said that fat people tend to be propelled more violently because their soft tissue does not allow the seat belt to tighten on their bones fast enough.

"The ability of passenger vehicles to protect overweight or obese occupants may have increasingly important public health implications, given the continuing obesity epidemic in the USA," the authors wrote, said Medical News Today.

"It may be the case that passenger vehicles are well designed to protect normal weight vehicle occupants but are deficient in protecting overweight or obese occupants."

To get their findings, researchers used data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS).

The database collects information on all fatalities from road collisions around the US.

The study used nearly 60,000 collisions to make its conclusion.

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