People who live in older, walkable neighborhoods have better health

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/this-old-healthy-house/

by ksvs • 17 years ago

38 34 17 years ago

well.blogs.nytimes.com

tjic• 17 years 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.

GHFigs3• 17 years 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/A...

lutorm• 17 years 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.

njm3• 17 years 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.

jonknee3• 17 years 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.

psyklic• 17 years 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• 17 years 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• 17 years 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&#...

The annual cycle seems to correlate strongly with college schedules :)

lacker• 17 years 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.

jimboyoungblood2• 17 years 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• 17 years 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/A...

gtufano• 17 years 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• 17 years 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_new4• 17 years 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).

jimboyoungblood2• 17 years ago

Somewhat related: 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• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

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

People who live in older, walkable neighborhoods have better health

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