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It's cool to be car-free |
Get fit, not fat
If you are a man who owns a car you are 70% more likely to be fat than if you don't own a car. If you are a woman the odds are even higher - you are 85% more likely to be fat. As the UK's Department for Health, points out, obesity can lead to increased risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some cancers. Although the rise in obesity is due to many factors, the root cause is the imbalance between energy in (through the food choices we make) and energy out (mainly through physical activity). A lot of attention has been paid to the types of food we are eating, but data shows that average energy intake has actually been declining. This suggests that physical activity must have been declining even faster. And walking has been declining the most. Because of cars. Walk, don't drive As car ownership increases, many journeys that would once have been made on foot are being replaced by car travel. This has been going on ever since mass car ownership got under way in the 1960s. Each year, a greater proportion of the time spent travelling is by car, and the distance travelled on foot declines. According to a study published in August 2007, main car drivers walk only half the distance and for half the time of adults in non-car owning households. This equates to a deficit of 56 minutes of walking every week for these drivers, relative to adults in non-car households. As the authors of the study say, "Over a decade we calculate that this could lead to a weight gain of more than 2 stones...for most obese adults their weight gain has accumulated over many years. Small energy imbalances on a daily basis can lead to major weight gain over a decade and more, and our calculations indicate that this decline in walking is in itself enough to account for much if not all of the recently observed upsurge in obesity." Source: Adrian Davis, Michael Fergusson & Carolina Valsecchi, Unfit for Purpose: How car use fuels climate change and obesity ( © GiveUpYourCar.com - all rights reserved. |