Where we live may be to blame for rising obesity

Because he was going to graduate school, retired environmental researcher John Holtzclaw left San Jose and a job that had him driving 25,000 miles a year. His bicycle became his primary form of transportation. After graduation, he settled in an apartment in the Russian Hill-Chinatown area and gave up his car altogether. During those middle years when most of us gain girth, Holtzclaw lost 30 pounds bicycling and walking up the steep hills.

Two years ago, Mary Lanosa moved to Pleasant Hill from San Francisco and noticed a change for the worse in her well-being and her weight. Although the length of her commute remained the same, in San Francisco she had used public transportation. “In Pleasant Hill, you have to drive everywhere. Their public transit is lousy,” she wrote in an e-mail. “I always felt healthier in the city as I had more opportunities to walk places.”


We’ve all heard the tales of urbanites who quit their crime-ridden, inner-city neighborhoods for the safer suburbs. Or affluent retirees who move to bucolic estates in the country. Or working-class and middle-class families who move from one area to another just to find affordable housing or better schools. But moving for health? Isn’t health based on genes, diet and the will to use a StairMaster?

Blame your addiction to Haagen-Dazs and your couch-potato personality — and by all means blame your parents. But come on, who ever heard of blaming their muffin tops, love handles and lazy ways on the place they live?

Yet that’s precisely the theory posited by a growing body of researchers in public health, urban planning, epidemiology and economics. Ever since two studies linked sprawl and obesity in 2003, study upon study has been published suggesting that our environment — marked by car-oriented, isolated, unwalkable neighborhoods — is having a deleterious influence on our health. In other words, sprawl is making us unhealthy, unhappy and fat.

San Francisco Chronicle