From "Learning to Breathe Fire": People are fat, but firefighters are fatter, so if a building goes up in flames, we are all fucked. Excerpt: As the people trapped in burning buildings get fatter and fatter, the job of carrying them out becomes more and more taxing. It requires more oxygen and more strength. But the cruel irony of an obese society is that the firefighters faced with these escalating metabolic demands are increasingly obese themselves. While the Firefighter Combat Challenge gets airplay on television, the reality is that the obesity rate among firefighters is higher than it is in the general public. Between 73% and 88% of American firefighters are either overweight or obese, 5 and less than 40% of them meet the minimal standards of physical fitness. 6 The leading cause of on-the-job death for firefighters isn’t heroic battle against a fatal blaze. It’s heart attacks, which account for about half of all firefighter deaths each year, double the on-the-job heart attack rate for police (22%), other emergency medical service providers (11%), and on-the-job deaths for all occupations (15%). 7