Comments on Suburban Sprawl?

I used to live in Federal Way for two years in the late 1990's and I put on 20 pounds while there. Then I moved into town and lost all the extra weight. Simple reason, you end up driving everywhere since there are not many transit options and walking is not much of an option. (Not many sidewalks) And all the restaurants and food is the hyper-processed crap.

I lost 95 pounds when I moved from outside of Olympia to Seattle 6 years ago and am now hipster-thin. I still eat like a pig, it's 100% lifestyle changes and food choices.

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

What about Los Angeles?

I bet Greg Nickels is the fattest mayor in the state of Washington.

This is why Parisians aren't fat. Even their suburbanites end up walking most of the time.

LA has its share of overweight people, it's just the thin ones that get their pictures published.

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.

Yes, and this happens for one simple reason: suburbanites drive everywhere. No physical effort is put into getting around. Metabolism and energy goes down, body fat and weight goes up.

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.

Bingo, Gomez.

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.

Correlation doesn't necessarily mean one thing causes the other. The study in this link found that suburbs don't necessarily make people overweight, but that overweight people choose the suburbs.

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."

Skinny urban smugfest!!!

Dan evidently slept through the 100-level stats class where they distinguish between causality and correlation.

Mr. X, do you not instead mean to say that the researchers covered in the article are the ones who presumably failed said statistics course?

..and I will also say that city life usually presents much more opportunity for even a modicum amount of physical activity versus life in the suburbs and exurbs. Even if you are a car commuter, just walking a block or two to your car is more exercise than most garage-bound folks will exert in a day. Plus, save for one-off trips to Costco or Home Despot, most of your basic life needs can be met by ambulation alone.

Ohmygod! Warn a person before you show a picture of Webb!Scary!

Laterite,

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

Oh, and take this quote

"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.

These people are suburbanites by choice, and their choices have led to their obesity. It's not that suburbs cause obesity - rather, the suburbs attract obese people...people who don't want to walk everywhere, don't want to eat at uber-trendy ethnic eateries, don't want to take public transit. For these people, the suburban lifestyle of driving everywhere and stopping at drive-thrus once or twice a day is ideal.

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