Sprawling neighborhoods not linked to obesity, study finds

TORONTO (Reuters Life!) - Using urban planning to fight the obesity epidemic will probably not work because people's weight does not change when they move to the suburbs, researchers said on Wednesday.

Earlier studies had suggested a link between rising rates of obesity and sprawling neighborhoods. Some researchers have proposed using city planning as a way to combat the battle of the bulge.

But an international team of researchers said they found no evidence that neighborhood characteristics have a causal effect on weight.

"There's a lot of talk about redesigning cities and the expectation that they will affect people's health and weight in particular, but what these results tell us is that those expectations are probably incorrect," said Professor Matthew Turner of the University of Toronto and a co-author of the study.

Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Turner and scientists in Britain and Spain tracked nearly 6,000 people in their late 20s and early 30s living in neighborhoods throughout the United States.

In research published in the Journal of Urban Economics they said they found that people's weight did not change as they moved from one neighborhood to another. Rather, people who are inclined to be heavy are choosing to live in particular types of neighborhoods because they can more easily move around by car for example.

"What we did is say well, if you really think that landscape is causing people to gain weight then it had better be true that when people move from one type of landscape to another, their weight changes," Turner explained.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, obesity is a chronic condition with serious health implications that affects approximately a third of American adults.

"It's really hard and really expensive to build your cities differently," Turner said. "So we want to see public health people to start directing their efforts in other ways because as far as combating the obesity epidemic, urban planning is probably a dead end."

(Reporting by Natasha Elkington; editing by Patricia Reaney)