(Continued from previous page)

Suburbs Ponder Weighty Matter
By Lori Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 21, 2001

After succumbing for 20 years to the drive-through convenience of suburban living, Linda Koulakjian had grown a little plump. So the mother of three donned T-shirt and shorts one sunny day and set out to get some exercise.

But in the cul-de-sacs of suburban Germantown, polite society does not often, well, walk. Koulakjian was powering down a deserted sidewalk about five blocks from home when one neighbor and then another pulled their minivans to the curb, lowered their windows and asked if she needed help.

"They said, 'What's wrong? What are you doing here? Do you need a ride?'‚" Koulakjian recalled. "Frankly, I was embarrassed. I didn't want to walk any more after that."

In some communities on the fringes of America's cities, walking has become as old-fashioned as shoeing horses and crank-starting the car. The suburbs have long been blamed for fostering social isolation and epic traffic jams. Now they stand accused of another sin: By making walking impossible, some say, suburban sprawl is making America fat.

Alarmed by the rapid rise of obesity in recent years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is trying to develop a research program to test the theory that suburban design plays a significant role in America's spreading paunch. Among the latest projects: a plan to map obesity data so researchers can study the nation's beefiest locales. And an Atlanta project that will outfit 800 people with satellite packs so researchers can study where, when, why and how much they walk.

"We are coming to the conclusion that land use, urban design and the built environment are much larger factors in public health than people have really appreciated," said Dr. Richard J. Jackson, director of the CDC's National Center for Environmental Health.

"When we were kids, most kids walked or biked to school. Now it's 10 percent. How do we deal with the obesity epidemic when our kids don't get even that fundamental level of exercise?"

The CDC is not alone. Over the past few years, a growing number of academics and health researchers has blamed suburban sprawl for contributing to a variety of modern ills, from sharp increases in childhood asthma to a growing adult dependency on anti-stress drugs like Zoloft.

But the nation's skyrocketing obesity rate has drawn the most intense focus. Obesity is spreading so far and so fast in America that alarmed health professionals compare it to an infectious disease epidemic.

Over the past decade, obesity among American adults has increased by nearly 60 percent. Today, the CDC says, one in five American adults is obese, loosely defined as being about 30 percent above the ideal weight for a person's height.

Children, too, are gaining weight at prodigious rates. The CDC estimates that 11 percent of American kids are dramatically overweight, a figure that has nearly doubled over the past two decades.

What makes the fat epidemic so worrisome is that it has no clear cause. For children, researchers have established a direct link between excessive television viewing and extra pounds. But adults are consuming only about 100 calories more per day than they were 20 years ago, surveys show, and their use of leisure time for exercise has remained fairly stable. Yet obesity has gone through the roof.

What changed?

"Our world has just gotten a lot easier to live in," said Dr. Tom Schmid, who directs the Active Community Environment Workgroup within the CDC's Division of Nutrition and Physical Activity. "We sit in cars, we don't walk to the store on the corner, we don't walk to the park."

Not long ago, such moderate forms of exercise were considered irrelevant to good health. But recent studies have shown that as little as 40 minutes of walking per day - even split into 10-minute increments - can provide significant health benefits.

Hence the new focus on suburbia, where large-lot homes, congested roads, megamalls and acres of free parking make a stroll to the store about as practical and attractive as a bike lane on the Capital Beltway.

There are no hard data showing that people who live in places like Burke or Bowie are fatter than their counterparts on the pedestrian-friendly streets of the District or Old Town Alexandria. But at a packed post-holiday Weight Watchers meeting in Gaithersburg, dieters were furious about local barriers to exercise.

One woman, an avid walker, spontaneously decided to walk the 4.5 miles from her house to the meeting, held in a spacious strip-mall conference room one flight down from an Einstein's Bagels shop. It was not a pleasant journey, she said.

(Continued on next page)

GO TO Pedestrian Issues index page

GO TO Bassett Boynton On the Web home page
Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1