Can Your Neighborhood Make You Fat?

New research suggests that it might for those who live in neighborhoods designed more for cars than foot traffic.
In general, newer neighborhoods offered fewer opportunities for walking.
Neighborhoods built before 1950 tended to have sidewalks and other characteristics that made them more accessible to pedestrians, including being more densely populated and having restaurants and other businesses nearby, lead researcher Ken R. Smith, PhD, told WebMD.
In a study appearing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, people who lived in the most walkable neighborhoods weighed an average of 8 pounds less than people who lived in the least walkable areas.
“We aren’t saying the move from older to newer neighborhoods is the cause of the obesity epidemic, but it may be a factor,” Smith said.
In an effort to test the theory, Smith and colleagues calculated the body mass index (BMI) of 453,927 residents of Salt Lake County, Utah, using height and weight data from their driver’s license applications. Adults between the ages of 25 and 64 were included in the analysis. The researchers also reviewed census data that included information about the neighborhoods where the residents lived.
In general, the research suggested that the more walkable a neighborhood was, the less likely its residents were to become overweight or obese. Smith says the growing emphasis on designing pedestrian-friendly places for people to live, work, and play could have a large, positive impact on health in the future.
He cites a recent report from the Brookings Institution predicting that by the year 2030 half the buildings in the United States will have been built since 2000, which
represents a huge opportunity to think about how we are building our communities and to make them better places, both from a health and an environmental standpoint.