Category: Obesity

The western world is getting fatter.  It’s hard to ignore the spiralling rates of obesity in developed countries such as the UK and US, where more than one in four of us is now clinically obese.  But perhaps even more alarming is the speed at which our children are becoming dangerously fat.  More than one-third of children in the UK are now either obese or overweight and in the US the rate of childhood obesity has more than tripled in the last 30 years.  Being an obese child doesn’t just mean you might get picked on at school, it also significantly increases your likelihood of developing heart disease, diabetes and having a stroke when you are older.

There is an ongoing discussion among academics as to the exact causes of this very real obesity crisis.  This includes the usual argument of how much nature versus nurture creates childhood obesity.  Now a new study has shown that living in a walkable neighbourhood has an important effect on whether a child is obese or not. 

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A healthy city is a walking city. Western cities in Britain and the US are haemorrhaging cash because of a lack of physical activity. Our automated lives have led to an obesity crisis which is costing us billions of pounds a year in health care costs. For instance the estimated cost of physical inactivity and obesity in England is over £10 billion a year (that’s 10% of the entire NHS budget!).

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