The controversy thing seems to be working out for me, so I’m going to try another hot-button issue.
There is something peculiar about our family. Okay, there are many peculiar things about our family, but I’m going to focus on this: not one of the three of us is overweight, or even close to it.
Why is this peculiar?
* We eat whatever we want with almost no regard to healthy-eating recommendations. We do eat a lot of vegetables, because we like them, but also plenty of red meat, butter, cheese, eggs, and sweets.
* Obesity runs in both of our families.
* We don’t follow any kind of exercise program.
* Our income is below the Seattle median. (Higher income is associated with less chance of obesity, though the association is growing weaker over time.)
There are also several factors working in our favor:
* Age. Laurie and I are in our early thirties. Iris is in her early single-digits. Younger people are much less likely to be overweight or obese than people over, say, 50.
* Education. We’re both reasonably highly educated, and this has a strong negative correlation with obesity. A person with a college degree is about half as likely to be obese as one who didn’t finish high school.
* Race. We’re white, which gives us an unfair advantage in this as in basically everything else.
* Factor X, which I will describe below.
Incidentally, the [American Obesity Association](http://www.obesity.org/) is a fount of statistics on this issue.
Here’s the question I’d like to answer: if you could do just one thing to improve your own and your children’s chances of maintaining a healthy weight, what is your best bet?
It’s not dieting. The failure rate of weight-reduction diets is so appalling (in the realm of 95 percent over five years) that they should probably be considered in the category of things you would have to be crazy to think you can succeed at, like winning at roulette or changing your sexual orientation.
Starting an exercise program is a better call. Here’s a 2003 study done at Duke. It randomly assigned subjects to three different exercise programs (light, moderate, and intense) for a nine-month trial. Six months after the trial, a majority of the subjects–none of whom were exercising regularly before the experiment–were still exercising, with those in the light and moderate groups most likely (about 70 percent) to continue. Furthermore, participants who had been in the light group were now exercising at an intensity more like the moderate group.
The study didn’t look at weight loss, but you can’t exercise at these levels without either losing weight or swapping body fat for muscle, which is just as good. I’m curious to know how many of the study participants are still exercising today, three years later, and whether they’ve lost weight. And, of course, outside of long-term studies like this, the majority of people who start exercise programs don’t stick with them very long. The abandonment rate is hard to measure definitively but is definitely better than the rate for dieting, probably because exercise makes you feel good in a way dieting doesn’t.
Which brings us to Factor X: the type of neighborhood you live in.
See, I sort of lied when I said that we don’t have a regular exercise program. In fact, I think we get more exercise than most Americans. That’s because we don’t own a car and run most of our errands on foot. The difference between this and a gym membership is that unless we move, we can’t opt out of this exercise. Even if we bought a car, the arrangement of our neighborhood would make it extremely inconvenient to use it for our typical errands.
Last year, Laurie brought home a free pedometer she’d been given at work. Naturally, since this was a new gadget coming into the house, I immediately confiscated it for my own use. A bit of Googling indicated that 5000 steps per day or less was defined as “sedentary,” and over 10,000 steps per day “active.” So I got up the next morning and clipped on the pedometer.
It was a pretty typical day. I went for a walk with Iris on Broadway. In the afternoon we all went down to the late Red Line for some steamed milk and cookies. (The cookies weren’t steamed.) At the end of the day I looked at the pedometer. I’d racked up over 16,000 steps. I have no idea where the pedometer is now, but I’d bet I’ve made close to 5000 steps already today, just on the way to this cafe.
This sounds like a just-so story, the kind of pure anecdote that would tend to make me want to throw the newspaper across the room if I didn’t read the newspaper online. Does your neighborhood style actually have any meaningful correlation with your weight?
It does. Larry Frank, a professor at the University of British Columbia, has conducted multiple studies on the topic. Here’s one he did in Atlanta which found that “people who live in neighborhoods with a mix of shops and businesses within easy walking distance are 7 percent less likely to be obese, lowering their relative risk of obesity by 35 percent.” Frank has also studied my own county, King County, WA, and found smaller but still significant correlations. The studies controlled for education, age, income, race, and sex.
This is not experimental data. It’s quite possible that there is some other confounding variable causing the correlation, something Frank didn’t think of. But I, for one, plan to continue eating like a food writer, so we’re not moving.
