Take it easy on the Big Gulps, Sugar Pants.

What you might not expect, however, are the findings of a recently published report that has many experts around the US “baffled” as it claims that although the price of gas should be a deterrent to inactivity and force Americans to engage in the “filthy arts,” (as some may call them) i.e. walking, running, jogging, bicycling, and that weird fast-walk thing that some people do as a way to get around without having to pony-up at the pump, the expected healthy side-effects of such nonsensical activities are non-existent.

In fact, as the price of gas is going through the roof, American waist sizes are inexplicably exploding out the side of the house. Dr. Peter Barksdale of the American Obesity Institute (now sponsored by Subway®), says that when he and his colleagues first decided to look for a correlation between American fatness and gas prices, they “fully expected a much different outcome.”

“I must say that we were blown away by the findings of our study. We assumed that as the price of gasoline increased and Americans began to feel the monetary pressures associated with it, they would revert to ways of getting around that, sadly to say, most young kids today probably don’t even know exist-- things like walking to the corner market or riding a bike across town. We thought that consumers would try to conserve gas, and in doing so, improve their health at the same time. Boy were we wrong. It defies logic. In the two hundred chubby Americans that we studied (all of whom listed gas prices as a major burden), a full-figured 193 of them actually gained weight over the course of the study. Some of them as much as twenty pounds…then, not only did they complain about the gas prices, but also about getting fatter. There is no scientific reason for this. A few doctor friends of mine say that they’re thinking about quitting the profession, and I’m half-tempted to join them. It takes a lot of dedication to laziness to refuse to forgo car travel for every distance you need to traverse. I doubt these people think they should even have to walk out of their houses to get to their cars…they should sleep in the garage so they can just roll out of bed and into their cars, and off to the gas station to pay three bucks for a gallon of gas and sixty-nine cents for a gallon of soda pop. Maybe if the pop was three bucks we’d see some improvement.”

Luckily for us, radical changes in the way we fuel our comings and goings are only a few short decades away so we’ll be able to not only keep ourselves plump and giggly, but our wallets too.