Is suburban life making people overweight? Or could it be that overweight people tend to choose the suburban life?
In a study recently published in the Journal of Regional Science, researchers from Oregon State University found that the relationship between obesity and urban sprawl may be a two-way street.
Economists Andrew Plantinga from OSU's Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Stephanie Bernell from OSU's Department of Public Health expanded previous studies that showed that people living in areas of urban sprawl tend to have higher body mass indices. Their analysis suggests that the relationship between obesity and urban sprawl may be due to personal preferences when choosing a home location rather than to direct impacts of the suburban environment on physical activity and weight.
Location, location, location. Research by Plantinga and Bernell suggests that an individual's body weight is a factor determining the desirability of a residential location. They found the relationship between obesity and urban sprawl can be explained by the way people sort themselves by personal preference.
In a follow-up study, Plantinga and Bernell used a national data set to test whether body mass index influences the decisions of adults to locate in counties with a high or low degree of sprawl. To measure body weight, the researchers used data from the U.S. Department of Labor's National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which has tracked statistics on thousands of individuals since their youth in 1979. The researchers examined many factors, among them ethnicity, gender, age, income, education, marital status and body weight.
"Among people who moved recently, we find that in addition to a high body mass index, being female, younger, and married increases the probability of choosing to reside in a sprawling county," Bernell said.