4 ms·

People who live in older, walkable neighborhoods have better health

38 points by ksvs 17y ago

tjic 17y ago
There may be more to the methodology than presented, but from what I read, it stinks. They merely looked at height, weight, and location without controlling for income. 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.
- GHFigs 17y ago
  You merely read a blog post about the study. The study itself is linked in the second paragraph. Here:http://www.ajpm-online.net/webfiles/images/journals/amepre/AMEPRE2271.pdf http://www.ajpm-online.net/webfiles/images/journals/amepre/A...
- lutorm 17y ago
  Poor people become obese because cost of food does not depend on calories, or rather is inversely related to calories. The cheapest foods tend to be the most processed, less nutricious, but very calorie laden. 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.
  - njm 17y ago
    While this is true in general, it is still possible to eat a balanced, healthy diet for very little money. That said, it requires a lot of discipline and a somewhat sophisticated understanding of nutrition. Still, my wife and I managed to get by on $20-30/week for combined groceries for about a year (we're in AZ, and being vegetarian helps keep costs down), but still managed to eat well.
    - 9oliYQjP 17y ago
      Holy crap. Do you mind giving us a rundown of what you ate in a typical week? I'm really curious.
      - eru 17y ago
        Some cheap and healthy things: Oat meal, beans, tea / water, fruits of the season, yoghurt, rice, pasta, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbage. 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.
      - njm 17y ago
        eru nailed it. We lived off bulk everything -- oatmeal, rice, beans. For fresh food, we got cheap veggies with lots of nutrition; greens tend to be the best bang for the buck, but also bags of carrots, beets, and such. For protein, it was all about tofu, eggs, milk, yogurt and nuts (mostly peanuts, soy nuts or pepitas, which are much cheaper than tree nuts). For beverages, bulk tea is absolutely the way to go, at just a few cents per cup. 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.
  - jonknee 17y ago
    It's just laziness, rice and beans are still cheap and work fine for huge parts of the world. Being poor in America is no excuse to be fat.
    - whacked_new 17y ago
      Laziness? Is that based on opinion or data? This is an unbiased question. I am further interested in how widespread this sentiment is. 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. Also see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=643999 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=643999
      - jonknee 17y ago
        I don't know of a study that makes the claim, but I can go to the grocery store and buy really cheap food that's not bad for me. It takes more work to prepare than hitting a preset on the microwave or going to a drive-thru, but it's cheap and will keep you healthy. (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.)
        graywh 17y ago
        Perhaps you should read "Why it's expensive to be poor." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619110 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619110
    - whacked_new 17y ago
      I recently learned the great utility of beans and I asked why they aren't pouring over the streets. Apparently: culture, agriculture, and subsidies. A culmination of broken links.
- psyklic 17y ago
  I live in a very walkable city -- in fact, finding parking is quite inconvenient. It's actually much easier (and healthier) for me to walk a mile to wherever I need to go. In this situation (as I'm sure is true with any downtown area), it is not hard to imagine that the conclusions of the study are sound. Of course, causality is always impossible to establish in sociological studies like this.
- stephenjudkins 17y ago
  The study is linked to in the second paragraph. It appeared in what seems to be a reputable, peer-reviewed journal and controls for socioeconomic status. 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.
  - anigbrowl 17y ago
    In passing, while playing with Google Trends, there seems to be a long term inverse correlation between media coverage and search volume for terms such as 'study' and 'research', as well as for the term 'statistics'. http://www.google.com/trends?q=statistics,+study,+research&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=statistics,+study,+research&#... The annual cycle seems to correlate strongly with college schedules :)
  - lacker 17y ago
    I have to disagree with both of you. The original criticism was incorrect, because this study does control for income and other socioeconomic stuff. But "correlation isn't causation" is still a valid criticism of this study. To prove causation you would have to have some random effect controlling where people live. 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.
- jimboyoungblood 17y ago
  If you had bothered to click on the link to the original study, you would have seen this in the second paragraph (the "Methods" section): "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."
- niels_olson 17y ago
  From the article > 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/AMEPRE2271.pdf http://www.ajpm-online.net/webfiles/images/journals/amepre/A...
gtufano 17y ago
I don't know about US. But, here in Europe, this is so true to not being a notice. If you live in "Suburbia" you walk less, if you live nearer to the center you walk more. Who walks more is healthier... As an added bonus, in the center of european city there are no (or very few) cars... believe me or not, this also help to be healthier... The notice, for me, is that that earns a NYT article and a front page in HN...
- tokenadult 17y ago
  It has been the same in east Asia (everywhere) for most of my lifetime. People walk more and stay slimmer and more healthy. Today in Taiwan there is much use of motor scooters or motorcycles (which are ubiquitous) and considerable use of cars, even for short trips, so many young people now are flabby and obese. 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.
  - whacked_new 17y ago
    There is a negative feedback loop in crowded cities. It is polluted outside so walking is actually bad for your health, and then, you want to spend as little time as possible outside so you use whatever is fastest. 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).
    - ryanwaggoner 17y ago
      I'd like to see a study exploring the net health effect of exercising outside in a polluted city. Also, if it's polluted outside, isn't it polluted inside too? Do these cities all have buildings with air purifiers?
      - whacked_new 17y ago
jimboyoungblood 17y ago
Somewhat related: http://www.walkscore.com/rankings/ http://www.walkscore.com/rankings/ The data is sorta flawed- it ranks SF #1 since their methodology doesn't take into account steepness of terrain- but nevertheless, pretty interesting.
- carbon8 17y ago
  Yeah, I want to like that since I'm a fan of the idea, but there are other problems, such as not including major surrounding cities/suburbs that are more walkable than the main cities themselves and not accounting for crime.
quizbiz 17y ago
I may be mistaken but I am pretty sure that according to The Millionaire's Mind, they also tend to be wealthier.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

38 points by ksvs 17y ago

tjic 17y ago

There may be more to the methodology than presented, but from what I read, it stinks. They merely looked at height, weight, and location without controlling for income. 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.

GHFigs 17y ago
You merely read a blog post about the study. The study itself is linked in the second paragraph. Here:http://www.ajpm-online.net/webfiles/images/journals/amepre/AMEPRE2271.pdf http://www.ajpm-online.net/webfiles/images/journals/amepre/A...
lutorm 17y ago
Poor people become obese because cost of food does not depend on calories, or rather is inversely related to calories. The cheapest foods tend to be the most processed, less nutricious, but very calorie laden. 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.
- njm 17y ago
  While this is true in general, it is still possible to eat a balanced, healthy diet for very little money. That said, it requires a lot of discipline and a somewhat sophisticated understanding of nutrition. Still, my wife and I managed to get by on $20-30/week for combined groceries for about a year (we're in AZ, and being vegetarian helps keep costs down), but still managed to eat well.
  - 9oliYQjP 17y ago
    Holy crap. Do you mind giving us a rundown of what you ate in a typical week? I'm really curious.
    - eru 17y ago
      Some cheap and healthy things: Oat meal, beans, tea / water, fruits of the season, yoghurt, rice, pasta, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbage. 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.
    - njm 17y ago
      eru nailed it. We lived off bulk everything -- oatmeal, rice, beans. For fresh food, we got cheap veggies with lots of nutrition; greens tend to be the best bang for the buck, but also bags of carrots, beets, and such. For protein, it was all about tofu, eggs, milk, yogurt and nuts (mostly peanuts, soy nuts or pepitas, which are much cheaper than tree nuts). For beverages, bulk tea is absolutely the way to go, at just a few cents per cup. 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.
- jonknee 17y ago
  It's just laziness, rice and beans are still cheap and work fine for huge parts of the world. Being poor in America is no excuse to be fat.
  - whacked_new 17y ago
    Laziness? Is that based on opinion or data? This is an unbiased question. I am further interested in how widespread this sentiment is. 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. Also see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=643999 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=643999
    - jonknee 17y ago
      I don't know of a study that makes the claim, but I can go to the grocery store and buy really cheap food that's not bad for me. It takes more work to prepare than hitting a preset on the microwave or going to a drive-thru, but it's cheap and will keep you healthy. (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.)
      - graywh 17y ago
        Perhaps you should read "Why it's expensive to be poor." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619110 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619110
  - whacked_new 17y ago
    I recently learned the great utility of beans and I asked why they aren't pouring over the streets. Apparently: culture, agriculture, and subsidies. A culmination of broken links.
psyklic 17y ago
I live in a very walkable city -- in fact, finding parking is quite inconvenient. It's actually much easier (and healthier) for me to walk a mile to wherever I need to go. In this situation (as I'm sure is true with any downtown area), it is not hard to imagine that the conclusions of the study are sound. Of course, causality is always impossible to establish in sociological studies like this.
stephenjudkins 17y ago
The study is linked to in the second paragraph. It appeared in what seems to be a reputable, peer-reviewed journal and controls for socioeconomic status. 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.
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  In passing, while playing with Google Trends, there seems to be a long term inverse correlation between media coverage and search volume for terms such as 'study' and 'research', as well as for the term 'statistics'. http://www.google.com/trends?q=statistics,+study,+research&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=statistics,+study,+research&#... The annual cycle seems to correlate strongly with college schedules :)
- lacker 17y ago
  I have to disagree with both of you. The original criticism was incorrect, because this study does control for income and other socioeconomic stuff. But "correlation isn't causation" is still a valid criticism of this study. To prove causation you would have to have some random effect controlling where people live. 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.
jimboyoungblood 17y ago
If you had bothered to click on the link to the original study, you would have seen this in the second paragraph (the "Methods" section): "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."
niels_olson 17y ago
From the article > 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/AMEPRE2271.pdf http://www.ajpm-online.net/webfiles/images/journals/amepre/A...

gtufano 17y ago

I don't know about US. But, here in Europe, this is so true to not being a notice. If you live in "Suburbia" you walk less, if you live nearer to the center you walk more. Who walks more is healthier... As an added bonus, in the center of european city there are no (or very few) cars... believe me or not, this also help to be healthier... The notice, for me, is that that earns a NYT article and a front page in HN...

tokenadult 17y ago
It has been the same in east Asia (everywhere) for most of my lifetime. People walk more and stay slimmer and more healthy. Today in Taiwan there is much use of motor scooters or motorcycles (which are ubiquitous) and considerable use of cars, even for short trips, so many young people now are flabby and obese. 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.
- whacked_new 17y ago
  There is a negative feedback loop in crowded cities. It is polluted outside so walking is actually bad for your health, and then, you want to spend as little time as possible outside so you use whatever is fastest. 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).
  - ryanwaggoner 17y ago
    I'd like to see a study exploring the net health effect of exercising outside in a polluted city. Also, if it's polluted outside, isn't it polluted inside too? Do these cities all have buildings with air purifiers?
    - whacked_new 17y ago

jimboyoungblood 17y ago

Somewhat related: http://www.walkscore.com/rankings/ http://www.walkscore.com/rankings/ The data is sorta flawed- it ranks SF #1 since their methodology doesn't take into account steepness of terrain- but nevertheless, pretty interesting.

carbon8 17y ago
Yeah, I want to like that since I'm a fan of the idea, but there are other problems, such as not including major surrounding cities/suburbs that are more walkable than the main cities themselves and not accounting for crime.

quizbiz 17y ago

I may be mistaken but I am pretty sure that according to The Millionaire's Mind, they also tend to be wealthier.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]