Delicious reading: "The Suburbs Made Us Fat."

Fat, but broke; Floyd County's skint again. Tell you what, Jim -- how 'bout us city folks keep paying double so you don't have to mention the "T" word to the tea drinkers?

Meanwhile ...

(thanks to K for the link)

The Suburbs Made Us Fat, by James Hamblin (Atlantic)

People in dense cities are thinner and have healthier hearts than people in sprawling subdivisions. New research says the secret is in the patterns of the streets.

... 68 percent of Americans are overweight or obese, which means that someone you know is overweight or obese. Most people don’t get the CDC’s minimum recommended amount of physical activity. Americans spend more time driving every year. So it is logical to conclude, as Garrick and Marshall do in their paper, “The role of the street network and how we put together the bones of our communities should not be overlooked as a potential contributing factor to health outcomes.”

They also found that wide streets with many lanes are associated with high rates of obesity and diabetes. That’s most likely indicative of, as Garrick and Marshall put it, “an inferior pedestrian environment.” Similarly, so-called “big box” stores in a neighborhood indicate poor walkability and are associated with 24.9 percent higher rates of diabetes and 13.7 percent higher rates of obesity.

Dense cities promote walking and biking, so the push for healthier cities fits with the vogue push for active lifestyles—as opposed to gym routines smattered across an indolent existence. Physical activity is not just concerted exercise time and deliberate recreation. It’s about ways of life. For some people, that’s best accomplished by making things inevitably more difficult on themselves in everyday life.