According to the Los Angeles Times’ "Booster Shots" blog ("Oddities, Musings and News from the Health World"), a soon-to-be-published study by University of Virginia researchers and Autoliv, Inc. finds that obese people do not necessarily have an advantage in car accidents.
The study was conducted to disprove the notion that "extra padding [helps] to protect people against severe trauma." In fact, obese test subjects reportedly "had greater maximum forward pitch," and ran the risk of experiencing greater damage to their ribs and lungs.
Findings weren’t limited to crash simulations. While conducting the study, researchers also learned that there’s no such thing as an obese crash test dummy. Instead, obese cadavers were used.
