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Neighborhoods
That Encourage
People to Exercise
Inviting, tree-lined sidewalks. Speed
bumps that make roads safe for bikers. Zoning laws that inspire
people to walk to work.
This kind of community might actually
end the nation's obesity epidemic, and all the attendant diseases
that come with it.
That's what experts in a variety
of fields are beginning to think, and they're joining forces to
try and create places to live that are also good for your health.
"There's a new subfield, a marriage
of urban planning and public health," says Reid Ewing, a research
professor at the National Center for Smart Growth at the University
of Maryland. In the past five years, experts have begun to realize
that one's physical environment may be directly linked to one's
level of physical activity, he explains.
That connection may become critical
as Americans grapple with a collective weight problem that many
now believe rivals smoking as a major public health issue. As
a matter of fact, more Americans are expected to die from obesity-related
causes than from smoking by the end of the decade, according to
the American Journal of Health Promotion.
This crisis didn't happen overnight.
The sprawling cities of the second
half of this century have slowly but surely led to a world where
it's almost impossible to get anywhere without a car. Walking
and biking have become something people save for the weekends,
not a daily activity that would consistently burn precious calories
and keep pounds off. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention estimates that a difference of 100 calories of exercise
per person per day -- a 20-minute walk -- could eliminate the
obesity epidemic.
That's where urban planning initiatives
might make a difference, and cities and towns across the country
are beginning to apply for grants to make their communities more
pedestrian-friendly and bring daily physical activity back into
peoples' lives.
The war on smoking is serving as
a model for the current push to change environments. Instead of
educating individuals, strategists are turning their attention
to changing how communities are designed. As policies such as
cigarette taxes have succeeded with smoking, perhaps efforts to
change the character of where people live and work will succeed
when it comes to excess weight and its associated ills, which
include diabetes and heart disease.
Given that the National Institutes
of Health has found nearly two-thirds of Americans are overweight
and almost a third are obese (with roughly 300,000 adult deaths
in the United States each year attributable to bad diet and sedentary
behavior), the task is daunting. That's not to mention the 18.2
million people in the United States who have diabetes, 5.2 million
of whom don't know it. Then there's heart disease: 61.8 million
had it in 2000, according to the American Heart Association. And
with 945,836 people dying from cardiovascular disease in that
same year, it is this country's leading killer.
However, there's good reason to
try to reverse this frightening trend.
A study conducted by Ewing that
appeared in the September issue of the American Journal of
Health Promotion found a relationship between urban sprawl,
inactivity, obesity and, most important, morbidity. People who
call the suburbs home weigh an average of 6 pounds more than those
living in compact areas, and they were also more likely to be
obese.
One likely explanation for this
phenomenon is that people in sprawling areas tend to drive more
than those in compact areas, where they tend to walk. "We realized
that the way we build communities may be a major contributor,"
Ewing says. "We're building for automobiles as opposed to pedestrians."
Adds John Pucher, a professor of
urban planning and transportation at Rutgers University: "Currently,
we make automobile use extremely easy, convenient and cheap. A
car becomes such an irresistible temptation even for those short
trips. That's one of the issues."
So, one of the main thrusts of
planners has been to make suburbs resemble small towns at the
turn of the 19th century, which is to say places where people
want to walk.
Improving the sidewalks is a strong
first step. Pucher cites the example of Old Pasadena, Calif.,
which one Web site now describes as "L.A.'s premier pedestrian
neighborhood." The town installed parking meters and used all
the revenues to beautify the streets, including benches, planters,
palm trees and twice-monthly steam cleanings.
"You can't even recognize it,"
Pucher says. "There's no question that we can much, much improve
the quality of our sidewalks by making the sidewalk portion cleaner,
replacing sidewalks that are old, uneven or have holes, putting
in a few trees, benches, putting in more pedestrian-level kind
of lighting. That's not rocket science, and it's not even that
expensive."
Traffic calming is another inexpensive
and relatively simple enhancement. This includes speed bumps and
curves that slow down cars and make a neighborhood safer for pedestrians
and cyclists. Bike lanes and bike paths, and even auto-free zones,
are other initiatives that are being considered and implemented
in different regions.
But it has to go beyond that, experts
say.
"It's not enough to just build
sidewalks or bike paths. Land-use patterns have to be supportive
of walking and biking," Ewing says.
Zoning codes need to allow a more
innovative mix of uses, Pucher says. An obvious example is to
combine shopping and residential districts so people can walk
or cycle to work. "That's being worked on right now," he says.
"It's not a huge tidal wave, but it's promising."
Mortgage breaks are another incentive.
The Location Efficient Mortgage, for instance, increases borrowing
power for people who chose to buy a home in an urban community.
The net effect: People buy houses in neighborhoods where they
can walk to stores, schools, parks and public transportation.
The program is currently available in Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles,
San Francisco and Orange County, Calif.
Having an environment in place
that encourages exercise is only part of the equation: "People
need to get the message that it is really dangerous for their
health not getting that exercise," Pucher says.
"Eventually, the evidence may accumulate
to the point where in several years just about everyone thinks
there's a connection between community design and health," Ewing
adds.
More information
Learn more about connecting health
and community design at Active
Living By Design.
Reference
Source 101
For more information on how to prevent other diseases, use
PreventDisease.com's "Quick
Prevention Resources".
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