Fleeing the crowded, polluted city to the bucolic suburbs was supposed to be good for your health. New research is showing that’s not necessarily true. According to studies from the United States to Belgium, a major factor contributing to the worldwide obesity epidemic is a lack of natural exercise–i.e., walking–which has been exacerbated as populations spread out from city centers. Suburbs, it seems, can make you swell.
Call it the sprawl effect. A strip mall here, a housing development there, an industrial park yonder, all connected by roads, leave little room for pedestrians. In the September issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion, Reid Ewing, a researcher at the University of Maryland, surveyed 448 counties in the United States and found that rates of hypertension and obesity were proportional to the “sprawl index”–a measurement that takes into account population density, number of highways and distances between homes and businesses. In Burnside, for instance, wide suburban houses are built on cul-de-sacs, and the absence of local shops rules out what experts call “purposeful walking.” “Movement has been engineered out of our lives,” says Ewing.
At the same time, heightened fears about safety have led many parents to keep their kids from playing in the streets, restricting them to the backyard. At the same time, houses have gotten bigger, and backyards smaller. Jo Salmon at Deakin University in Melbourne interviewed children and their parents, asking them to rate their yard size as small, medium or large. Her findings: the smaller the backyard, the fatter the kids, which means less space to burn off calories. Says Dr. Billie Giles-Corti of the School of Public Health at the University of Western Australia in Perth: “We’re building obesogenic environments.”
The effects are pronounced. In Britain and Australia, which have followed the American lead in homeownership and suburban flight, obesity rates have tripled since 1980, according to the World Health Organization. Urban planners are only beginning to address the fat problem. The new urbanist movement in architecture focuses on designs that encourage movement, combining neighborhoods and things like traffic “calm zones,” where cars have to go slow, thus encouraging walking. Britain’s Prince Charles is building an experimental suburban town in Poundbury, southwest of London, that’s designed to get people out of their cul-de-sacs and their cars. Cars are kept on the periphery, or slowed to a crawl on the main road, while kids and pedestrians have free rein to walk among office buildings, schools, homes and parks. “At the core, it’s more than just bike paths and sidewalks,” says Rick Bernhardt, head of city planning for Nashville, Tennessee.
Karen Gatt didn’t wait for the architects to figure out a solution. She started eating more healthfully and increased her exercise, first by walking back and forth in her backyard, holding a clothesline for support. Gatt, now a slim 70 kilograms, is author of “The Clothesline Diet” and runs a support group for women from the suburbs. “You have to work out what will work for you,” she says. “You can’t let not having a footpath be your excuse.” Although suburbs may not be healthful, suburbanites still can be, if they’re willing to make the effort.
