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September 21, 2010 in Features
Study correlates walking, cycling and obesity levels
Two cyclists make their way along morning traffic from Fort Lee, N.J., via the George Washington Bridge and into New York City.
(Full-size photo)
A transportation expert says the United States could solve part of its obesity problem by making it easier for people to bike or walk where they need to go.
John Pucher of Rutgers University analyzed data from 15 countries, 50 states and 47 of the nation’s largest cities for a relationship between “active travel” – the kind that doesn’t rely upon motorized vehicles – and health.
Not surprisingly, he found that communities where people cycle and walk more in daily life have less obesity and diabetes than those where people rely on cars to get around.
That was true at all three geographic levels, he says in a new study he co-authored called “Walking and Cycling to Health: A Comparative Analysis of City, State and International Data.”
The study focused on travel to work and to do errands, not recreational bike-riding or walking. In some European countries, such nonrecreational trips are three to five times more common than they are in the United States, the study found.
In the Netherlands, Switzerland and Spain, for example, people bike, walk or use mass transit for nearly half of all their trips.
“Women and men, old and young, men in suits, they’re all biking,” said Pucher. “They even deliver the mail by bike.”
They also have the lowest rates of obesity – just 8 percent in each of those three countries.
In the United States, on the other hand, Americans cycle, walk or use mass transit for 11 percent of trips, and in many states far less than that. (Mass-transit use is considered “active travel” because 95 percent of such trips involve walking or biking to or from the station.)
And obesity rates in the U.S. average 26 percent, more than three times higher than in the European countries studied.
Among the 50 states, Pucher said, “The very highest levels of obesity are found in exactly those states that have the lowest level of biking, walking and public-transit use.”
Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee lead the nation in obesity, at 31 to 33 percent, and lag in walking and cycling, at 1.4 to 2.3 percent of all trips.
And the single biggest trend in American travel behavior over the past decade, he notes, is the sharp decline in the number of children walking and biking to school, which has occurred at a time when obesity rates among children have skyrocketed.
Proving cause and effect is impossible, “but you have this interesting relationship,” said Pucher, a professor at Rutgers’ Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy.
The key to promoting cycling and walking as a daily part of the routine is to make it safe, convenient and attractive, concluded the study, to be published in October in the American Journal of Public Health.
The rate of pedestrian and cyclist death and injury in the United States is many times higher than it is in European countries, with 33.5 cyclists and 13.7 pedestrians injured per 100 million kilometers traveled in the United States, compared with 1.6 and 1.3 in the Netherlands.
Women are especially concerned about safety, Pucher said, and their reluctance to bike to work reflects that. More than 85 percent of the bike commutes in New Jersey, for example, are by men.
Reducing car speeds and using street design to calm traffic, as well as additional restrictions on car use and parking, would encourage more active travel, the study said.
Portland, Ore., is the American city with the highest portion of trips made by bike, Pucher found. The city quadrupled the miles of public bikeways between 1990 and 2008, and saw a fivefold increase in bike trips, to 6.2 percent of the total.
Using a bike to get around is trendy there, a sign of belonging to a certain culture.
Portland’s transformation makes him optimistic, Pucher says: “Even in cities that are very car-oriented and have absolutely no history of biking, you can – through changes of public policy – produce a big increase in cycling.”
Pucher lives his research: He doesn’t own a car. A resident of Highland Park, he commutes across the Albany Street bridge to the Rutgers campus in New Brunswick by bike five months of the year and on foot the rest of the time.
“Yes, even in Central Jersey it is possible to be car-free,” he said. “But it’s not easy!”
Horoscope 
soccermomsusie on September 21 at 7:45 a.m.
Oh no, here come the socialist social engineers! Everybody is soooo fat in the USA and everyone is soooo healthy and skinny in Europe! Let’s make everyone put on Mao Tse Tung suits and ride bikes! Let’s punish the fatties by taxing pop and candy!
I say show me a skinny person and you’ve shown me a socialist. Obama - Exhibit B. On the other end of the fat freedom vs. skinny socialist spectrum, I give you Doug Clark - Exhibit A.
Our nation’s future greatness lies not in fascist bike lanes, but in an industry devoted to coping with our growing personal magnitude. Remember the movie Dune, where the evil, corpulent baron has a device which allows him to float? There’s an invention waiting to happen! How about more mundane stuff waiting to be invented? Think of all of the patriots whose stomachs are chafed daily with every turn of the steering wheel. A steering wheel lubricant would be an easy invention. How about bacon-flavored hand sanitizer?
Come on America! Your greatness will be diminished if we all diminish our greatness!
The only thing worse than a recyclist is a bicyclist.
Sustainability is a UN plot to control Spokane!!!!
HEAR OUR VOICE!!!
de3 on September 21 at 12:59 p.m.
If it were so simple…
I just went to pubmed.gov, the online search-able database of health science research and searched for “exercise increase hunger”.
I quickly found recent papers suggesting exercise makes one hungry and, by itself, does not lead to weight loss. I also found recent papers that said the opposite - that exercise led to weight loss in their test subjects.
Another found that exercise did not lead to “burning fat” when carbohydrate rich food was consumed 2 hours before exercise; but fat burn did occur if a protein rich food was consumed 2 hours prior. And another that said we mostly burn blood sugar with short duration exercise, possibly leading to making us hungry.
Exercise can have many benefits but exercise - by itself - may not lead to weight loss. Exercise can also lead to other problems including sports injuries, degenerative injuries (like knees, from running), and serious injuries caused by such things as bike crashes.
We need to be careful about making society wide health prescriptions - without looking at the individual patient.
Ryban on September 21 at 1:11 p.m.
I’m trying to figure out if Soccermomsusie is for real, or some type of performance art.
de3 on September 21 at 1:12 p.m.
In many communities, 1% to 2% of the population commutes by bicycle (and depending on the year and the city that included me). In Spokane and other northerly cities, bicycling is a seasonal activity for most participants and very few ride when snow and ice is on the ground. (Having done so myself, I know it is not safe and fairly stupid to ride in such situations.)
Unfortunately, bicycling is a high injury activity. A quick look online finds that the CDC estimated $3 billion in the treatment of bicycle related head injuries ONLY (no other types of injuries) back in 1991.
I found lots of data on the topic of injuries and deaths related to cycling. Pretty scary. Bicycling is the 2nd highest risk activity in sports and recreation according to a journal article in American Family Physician. Please see http://www.aafp.org/afp/2001/0515/p2007.html
My fear is that without understanding this, increasing the number of participants in what is documented as an unfortunate high injury activity (again, I ride a bike too, and I’ve had serious injuries myself) will have unplanned for consequences including more injuries, fatalities and money spent on health bills.
The news report, above, presents a simplified picture that distorts what we need to know.
BarbChamberlain on September 26 at 3:05 p.m.
No one has mentioned the fact that there are people who cannot drive for whatever reason (youth/age, disability, loss of driver’s license) and who need to be able to move around the city safely whether they walk, bike or take transit. Making the city safer for all forms of transportation makes it safer for drivers, too.
The head injury data cited in one of the comments lists several of the risk factors for cycling-related head injuries specifically in sport/recreational use in an article written for physicians treating injuries—not an analysis of the relative safety of various forms of transportation.
Boys 9-15 who are mountain biking as a sport—three of the risk factors noted—are not the same demographic as adults riding bikes for transportation. You may as well compare race car driving (by children) and regular driving.
The CDC information on traumatic brain injuries http://www.cdc.gov/traumaticbraininjury/causes.html lists motor vehicle impacts as the #2 cause of head injuries.
Some of these no doubt involve cyclists but the vast majority of crashes and injuries involve people in cars, not on bikes, as you can see from the data on traffic fatalities compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx.
I agree with de3 that cyclists need to have plenty of information before they get on the road so they conduct themselves safely and pay attention to drivers (because we’ll always lose in those encounters).
Back to the AAFP article—if you dig into the contributing factors cited in this data there are a number of things cyclists can do to lower the risk of being hit by a driver. Most of them have to do with following the rules of the road, being visible and being predictable.
According to that NHTSA data, in 2008 there were 718 cyclist deaths, 34,172 deaths of people in vehicles.
The CDC has come out with transportation policy recommendations calling for MORE biking, not less. As the nation’s #1 source of data on risks to our health and longevity, they’re a pretty good place to start. http://www.cdc.gov/transportation/. They have people analyzing the data with far greater understanding than I could develop in a quick scan of what is a huge body of research.
I took soccermomsusie’s comment as pure satire, possibly inspired by the movie WALL-e (they had the floating chairs too).
@BarbChamberlain
Bike commuter, transit rider, walker, occasional driver