I wouldn't doubt that living in the suburbs is the real #1 preventable cause of early death.

And of course it's probably a simultaneous accurence since the age of settling down/starting a family/career or whatever it is that brought you to (or kept you in) the 'burbs overlaps the age in which you being sedentary will really catch up with you.

Plus, infrastructure that forces you to drive 3 blocks to the store or risk your life walking the shoulder... Ever been a pedestrian on the east side? People in cars look at you like you're a dog that fell out of someone pickup bed.

Urbanites will walk at least sometimes, if not all the time, and if they work or live in dense areas, they commute on foot to some extent everyday.

Walking and stress is what keeps New Yorkers thin--think how insane we'd be if we all drove cars--but make no mistake, there are plenty of people dealing with obesity. Diabetes is rampant here in NYC.

http://www.hhs.oregonstate.edu/faculty-staff/getfilefromdb.php?type=vitae&id=267

"Economists Andrew Plantinga from OSU's Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Stephanie Bernell from OSU's Department of Public Health expanded previous studies that showed that people living in areas of urban sprawl tend to have higher body mass indices. Their analysis suggests that the relationship between obesity and urban sprawl may be due to personal preferences when choosing a home location rather than to direct impacts of the suburban environment on physical activity and weight."

Try looking at obesity rates in cities in the South (say, Memphis and Atlanta) and get back to me on that.

"the people most at the mercy of sprawl, Ewing suggests, are those who have limited access to healthy foods and who don't recognize the importance of fitness."

This is just plain BS if one looks at inner-city eating habits/rich vs. poor eating habits/etc. Poor folks eat a lot of fast food, and are often concentrated in inner cities. Conversely, I would never use this mildly useful factoid to try and establish a causal relationship.