Researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health are studying the link between the urban environment and how it might contribute to the cause or origins of obesity.
Working with various city departments, Andrew Rundle, DrPH, assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Mailman School, and his research team, are gathering data on neighborhood features such as land use, density of bus and subway stops, availability of nutritious food, the location and quality of parks and recreation facilities -- even the number of trees on a street and the number of buildings with elevators -- that affect a person's diet and activity levels.
Upon completion of the research, Dr. Rundle expects to have a large base of evidence linking the built environment to body size.
In some preliminary results, Dr. Rundle found that people who live in neighborhoods that have a mixture of residential and commercial uses have lower levels of obesity than people who live in neighborhoods that are closer to being 100 percent residential.
"Mixing supports walking, it supports incidental activity and it makes you independent of an automobile."
The data also indicates that as the density of bus and subway stops increases in a neighborhood, the body size of residents goes down.
With Americans in the grip of an obesity epidemic since 1975, Dr. Rundle hopes his research findings will bring a discussion of health to urban planning decisions in New York City -- and across North America, at the close of his four-year study.
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