Obesity takes heavy toll at funerals

Kudos, fatsos.

"THE traditional sight of the pall bearer at a funeral will soon be replaced by mechanical trolleys as the nation's obesity crisis takes its toll beyond the grave.

Funeral directors are being forced to take drastic action when it comes to burying the dead and are introducing machines that lift and lower coffins containing the bodies of obese people.

The rising levels of obesity mean many directors are now installing lifting devices in their morgues and using trolleys to wheel the dead into church instead of lifting them.

Our ever-increasing girths mean an increasing number of dead are too fat to fit into a normal coffin.

The Funeral Directors' Association of NSW executive secretary Ken Chapman said that it was 'quite frequent now' for funeral directors to have to order in oversized coffins.

'The average person can (still fit into a normal-sized coffin) but there are quite a lot of people now who are fairly grossly overweight when they die and they can't be contained in a standard-sized coffin,' Mr Chapman said.

A standard coffin is 1.8m long by 50cm wide at the shoulder.

The over-sized coffins go up in 5cm increments in width and also get deeper to take the body's bulk."

Will have to start burying the fatsos 7 or more feet under.