People who live in older, walkable neighborhoods have better health
well.blogs.nytimes.com
well.blogs.nytimes.com
The neighborhood I live in in a United States outer-ring suburb has a city trail system. We use the trail to walk to the library (about a 2.6 mile round trip), shopping (similar distance in a slightly different direction), and to soccer practices (a bit farther). We don't like to burn gasoline, and use a handcart to move groceries on foot.
Thought experiment: suppose you are dictator, what would you do?
I might first propose a walk-only zones in certain times of week (a la hokousha tengoku).
Also, if it's polluted outside, isn't it polluted inside too? Do these cities all have buildings with air purifiers?
Also, particulate matter is much more volatile outdoors, because it's outdoors.
And, the downmods, two in a row, make zero sense. Else, explain it please.
I am surprised that something as everyday as these gets suggested as an outlandish experiment. ;o)
I don't know that it would really (it doesn't in Japan), but it seemed like a potential catch.
Wealthier people are in better shape and weigh less (for the first time in history we live in a society in which poor people still earn enough money to become obese!).
More walkable areas may be more desirable, and may therefore have higher prices, and may therefore only be available to wealthier (and thinner) people.
The article doesn't establish causality at all.
So it's not exactly that they "still earn enough money" to become obese, it's that somehow the food supply has been inverted so everyone can afford calories but not so many can afford healthy food.
Besides that, as a counter argument to your hypothesis, wouldn't inner city neighborhoods be old and walkable? In that case, your argument that they are more healthy because they are inhabited by richer people doesn't seem to fly.
I can easily imagine eating for around 2 Euro a day or even less. It just would not be as much fun. So I get around with 5 to 7 Euro, that allows me to add delicious ham and some other meat to my diet in small portions.
Food prices have really shot up since 2006 though; in particular, bulk beans have almost doubled. Still, I think it would be possible to eat the same diet today for around $35/week for a couple.
I heard a story about a McDonald's closing in a poor area. There are at least two effects of this, the second of which was quite surprising: 1. McD, a source of high-fat food, leaves the area, and subsequently people need to find alternative food; 2. McD, a source of cheap food, leaves the area, and subsequently people have trouble affording food.
Apparently McD's distribution chain is so efficient, that their presence resulted in wider access to food. I say nothing about nutrition, jobs, or anything else. Just food that fills your stomach. It seems like nothing is that simple enough to summarize in a single sentence. Doing so is likely overestimating of your grasp of the situation. But perhaps it is indeed just laziness.
(I say this as I'm about to re-heat some left over spanish rice that I made last night. It cost almost nothing to make.)
Anyway, beans don't need a subsidy.
My point is that no one can honestly say that they are fat because they can't afford good food. There are tons of excuses, but it comes down to personal responsibility.
I see this all the time online: a study is published, and a chorus of commenters echo "correlation isn't causation" without actually reading the study and seeing that these other factors have been accounted for.
There are plenty of things wrong with science reporting, but when many readers are apparently too lazy to exert the minimal effort to verify that their misgivings were indeed addressed by the researchers, one can't exclusively fault the media.
The annual cycle seems to correlate strongly with college schedules :)
Just because it's peer-reviewed doesn't mean the article proves what it claims to. Unless you have a natural experiment it's hard to prove causation in situations like these. So you get a lot of published research that just proves correlation.
"Linear regressions of BMI and logistic regressions of overweight and obesity include controls for individual-level age and neighborhood-level racial/ethnic composition, median age of residents, and median family income."
> Sociodemographic Measures > Driver license data provide individual-level age and gender. Additional block-group census variables include neighborhood racial/ethnic composition (the proportion of the block group that is Hispanic, African American, Hawaiian/ Pacific Islander, and Asian); median family income; and the median age of individuals in the block group.
....
> Our conclusions are tempered by several study limitations. First, self-reported BMI was used, which can underestimate true BMI. Second, few individual measures were available, thus excluding other potential controls (e.g., number of years in the neighborhood, individual racial/ethnic status, commute distance). Third, the sample is based on one (albeit large) county. Finally, because the analysis is cross-sectional, it is possible that those who value healthy weight may move to walkable neighborhoods. One study of longitudinal data on adolescent BMI demonstrates that cross-sectional relationships similar to those found in the present study did not translate into longitudinal ones.45 Accordingly, future work should assess potential selection effects using longitudinal data on adults.
http://www.ajpm-online.net/webfiles/images/journals/amepre/A...
The data is sorta flawed- it ranks SF #1 since their methodology doesn't take into account steepness of terrain- but nevertheless, pretty interesting.