Here's some wit from one of the two Lisas on Houston's "fat":
(from Lisa Gray of the Chron)
Why are Houstonians heftier than people in other cities? A few years ago the culprit seemed obvious. Urban sprawl, the argument went, packed on our pounds.
Several much-quoted studies found a correlation between obesity and spread-out, car-loving cities like ours. People who live in tight-packed metropolises tended to be thinner than people like us, whose suburban-style lives involve freeways and parking lots.
Researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Rand Corporation argued that living in a car-hostile city where walking is part of daily life naturally keeps people lean.
The difference between living in Manhattan or a spread-out, car-dependent suburb of Cleveland? For an average adult, it's six pounds, according to the University of Maryland's National Center for Smart Growth.
Sprawl was blamed for Americans' soaring obesity rates. And it seemed only natural that Houston, one of the most car-besotted places in the universe, was also one of the country's fattest. Here, only the intrepid dare to journey on foot to the corner store. In a loose-packed city like ours, places of interest often lie miles apart. Our streets, designed for drivers, leave pedestrians with daunting choices: slog across muddy sidewalk-less private yards or dodge SUVs in the road. It seemed no wonder that roughly two-thirds of Houstonians are either overweight or obese.
The researchers' arguments made intuitive sense, and the message seemed obvious. To avoid becoming XXXL tubs o' lard, we'd better move to Manhattan. Or make Houston more like it.
(snip)
Lately, a new round of research has raised objections to the original sprawl-makes-you-fat studies. Suburban sprawl, they point out, was around for decades before the obesity epidemic started. But in the '50s, '60s and '70s, Americans were much thinner than we are now.
Some academics say that the sprawl researchers' methods were flawed, that it makes little sense, for example, to compare whole counties to one another.
The University of Illinois' more specific ZIP-code analysis of Chicago found that race, education and income had much more to do with obesity than a neighborhood's density. In fact, that study found, the leanest Chicagoans lived in the city's near-in suburbs — places where residents tended to be white, wealthy and well-educated.
In typical Chron fashion Ms. Gray touches lightly on the corners of the obesity issue, flanks it, and then oversimplifies it.
She does get ONE thing right however and deserves kudos for that:
Matthew Turner, one of those researchers, argues that it's not where you live, it's who you are. A fit person who likes to walk naturally gravitates toward places where walking is a pleasant part of daily life — but will tend to exercise anyway, even if it's inconvenient.
An obese person, for whom walking is miserable, will prefer life with an SUV — but is unlikely to grow much thinner even if having to sometimes schlep groceries from the corner store.
Being fit and healthy are personal choices. They take effort and sacrifice like the young lady attending fat camp is being conditioned to make:
Isabel woke before counselors began their round of knocks on campers' doors.
"This is going to be a heck of a day," she thought, her feet sliding to the tile floor of the dorm room. Her sleeping roommate, a shy teenager from Wharton, had hung posters of boy bands next to her bed. Beside Isabel's, a Tinkerbell nightlight glowed.
It was the first full day at weight-loss camp.
"All right, do we have those pedos everybody? — Pedos?" counselor Katie Barthelmes asked before the morning stretch. "Great, you don't want to miss these steps. Trust me."
The campers stretched in brand-new sneakers and sagging backpacks, their pedometers — or pedos — clipped to belts or shoes. Filtering onto the trail, they formed a straggling line on their nearly 3-mile walk, soon to be one of many routines of their summer days.
Isabel caught up with two girls, Riley Bird and Alicia Stone, from her assigned team, "Blanco," a group of 10 teenage girls. The day before, counselors had weighed and measured each of them. Isabel logged in at 179 pounds and 5-foot-1.
There's no amount of development (smart or otherwise), Government intervention or planning that's going to change this.