The NYC Weight Loss Fad!

[clubBR]

Subway May Make One Slimmer

By ELIZABETH SOLOMONT (http://www.nysun.com/authors/Elizabeth+Solomont)
Special to the Sun
February 22, 2007

Apartment hunters have long been aware of the convenience of homes close to public transportation, but a new study shows that New Yorkers who live near bus stops and subway stations also weigh less.
"At it's simplest, if you walk to the corner store to buy your quart of milk, you are expending energy," an author of the study, Andrew Rundle (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Andrew+Rundle), said. "If you have to drive to the supermarket, you are not really expending any energy."
He said that in terms of proximity to public transportation, "the idea is, if you have access to public transportation, you can be independent of your own personal car. You're going to walk to the bus stop."
In a comparison of 13,102 city residents, researchers from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Mailman+School+of+Public+ Health) found that those with the lowest body mass index levels lived close to buses and subways, in densely populated areas, and in neighborhoods with mixed residential and commercial uses.
In fact, they reported, there was an 0.86-unit difference in BMI levels — a measurement that takes into account a person's height and weight — between individuals living in the most and the least densely populated areas, according to the study, which will appear in the March/April issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion. If all New Yorkers subtracted half a unit from their BMI level, it would average out that 10% of overweight people would be normal weight, researchers said.
The findings confirmed what nutritionists and other health experts have been saying for years, several said yesterday. "It endorses what I've been telling my patients, that it's always best to walk and that walking can help them to maintain a healthier weight," the president-elect of the New York State Dietetic Association (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=New+York+State+Dietetic+A ssociation+Inc.), Keri Gans (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Keri+Gans), said. She said a 140-pound woman is able to burn 100 calories by walking briskly for 15 minutes.
Still, skeptics initially questioned whether those who live closer to public transportation are less likely to walk very far to catch their buses and trains.
"Generally, transportation promotes being overweight," a professor of nutrition at New York University (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=New+York+University), Sharron Dalton (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Sharron+Dalton), said. "As a subway rider every day, there are a lot of big people on the subway. I notice that all the time, because I fit into the seats and a lot of people don't."
Still, she said, "Maybe in a crowded city, it's a sign that to use public transportation you have to walk a little to use it."
Others agreed. "It encourages that little bit of activity, even if you are going up and down the subway stairs a few times a day," a registered dietician in Manhattan (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Manhattan), Elisa Zied (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Elisa+Zied), said. "That adds up to calories burned," Ms. Zied, author of "Feed Your Family Right!," said.
Still, she cautioned, "New York (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=New+York) is not typical of America (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=United+States), and you have other extremes, as well … I think people have a heightened awareness of themselves in New York and probably don't succumb to the temptations the way other people might."

http://www.nysun.com/article/49052?page_no=2

[Ninjahedge]

Load of crap.

I know what they are saying, but it is just plain harder to get around NYC in general if you are heavy.

Up and down stairs, narrow doors/hallways, etc.

I do not think you will lose a hell of a lot of weight walking a half block to the grocery on the corner.

It DOES, however, make a correct connection with the fact that the easier it is to keep and use a car, the more you will use it. And that, in combination with other factors, leads to teh increased rate of obesity in areas outside the city.

But saying it is because they live close to teh Subway is like associating BMI with proximity to hot dog carts and newsstands.

[Stern]

The study is right. It also has a lot to do why the average resident in NYC lives longer than people outside of NYC and I can tell you that has nothing to do with the air quality. Exercise is something that that takes work, but when straphangers are forced to do it, it doesn’t become such a chore to walk 10 blocks to meet a friend. Living away from the city lifestyle for the first time I can attest to this first hand, first all I see is overweight people now, but it has to do with the lifestyle they live, they jump in their car to go to work, school, party, basically everything, if someone needs to get a bottle of milk, they’ll jump in their car, also with this lifestyle they’ll buy food on the road, and that is fast food, they’ll gobble down a Big-Mac on the way to the supermarket for instance. It’s an all around unhealthy lifestyle that the real straphanger is above.

[Schadenfrau]

Pet rocks are a fad, this is a lifestyle.

[Ninjahedge]

Pet rocks are a fad, this is a lifestyle.

I agree.

This is not just one thing or another, but a whole host of things all associated with living in an Urban environment.

Have they done any studies on LA or SF? Are the numbers the same? SF seemed pretty skinny to me, and there is no real subway to speak of (CAli Mass transit is, ironically, one of the worst in the nation for such an urbanized state!).

[lofter1]

SF has a very widely used and extensive bus / trolley system. Plus walking around SF gives you a good work out -- even if you only go a few blocks. All those hills, you know.

btw: One of those SF hills (in North Beach) gave way last night: LANDSLIDE (http://www.ktvu.com/news/11123426/detail.html)

[Ninjahedge]

SF being a betetr example, but people still drive there MUCH more than here.

And LA? I know they are an anamoly to begin with, but still.....:D

[lofter1]

Let's not even try to make sense of LA :cool:

[Ninjahedge]

Let's not even try to make sense of LA :cool:

You can only make $$$s

[Ed007Toronto]

Don't get too complacent about New York. A long article. Here's a short excerpt.

An estimated 800,000 adult New Yorkers -- more than one in every eight -- now have diabetes, and city health officials describe the problem as a bona fide epidemic. Diabetes is the only major disease in the city that is growing, both in the number of new cases and the number of people it kills. And it is growing quickly, even as other scourges like heart disease and cancers are stable or in decline.

Already, diabetes has swept through families, entire neighborhoods in the Bronx and broad slices of Brooklyn, where it is such a fact of life that people describe it casually, almost comfortably, as ''getting the sugar'' or having ''the sweet blood.''

But as alarmed as health officials are about the present, they worry more about what is to come.

Within a generation or so, doctors fear, a huge wave of new cases could overwhelm the public health system and engulf growing numbers of the young, creating a city where hospitals are swamped by the disease's handiwork, schools scramble for resources as they accommodate diabetic children, and the work force abounds with the blind and the halt.

The prospect is frightening, but it has gone largely unnoticed outside public health circles. As epidemics go, diabetes has been a quiet one, provoking little of the fear or the prevention efforts inspired by AIDS or lung cancer.

In its most common form, diabetes, which allows excess sugar to build up in the blood and exact ferocious damage throughout the body, retains an outdated reputation as a relatively benign sickness of the old. Those who get it do not usually suffer any symptoms for years, and many have a hard time believing that they are truly ill.

Yet a close look at its surge in New York offers a disturbing glimpse of where the city, and the rest of the world, may be headed if diabetes remains unchecked.

The percentage of diabetics in the city is nearly a third higher than in the nation. New cases have been cropping up close to twice as fast as cases nationally. And of adults believed to have the illness, health officials estimate, nearly one-third do not know it.

Diabetes and Its Awful Toll Quietly Emerge as a Crisis

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9907E2DA1F30F93AA35752C0A9609C8B 63&sec=health&spon=&pagewanted=1