Thursday, April 07, 2005

Obesity in Winnipeg (Sprawl Kills)

There was an article in section A or the Free Press today, entitled "Winnipeg women high on obesity scale".
 
Turns out we have the one of the highest rate of overweight people (men and women) in Canada, according to a 2003 study.
 
The first factor attributed to this is in paragraph four, by Dr. David Jenkins of Toronto:  
"When it comes to places like Winnipeg, it's not really a downtown-oriented place, so everyone drives around in their cars."  
 Later on, the article says this:
"Many of the urban centres that reported high levels of obesity are also commuter towns, he said, where men and women drive in from the suburbs and rarely walk from one place to another."
 And to top it all off...
"There's nothing we don't do that isn't full of sloth and gluttony," said Dr. Jenkins.
  
I couldn't help but laugh when I read this. Looking out my living room window down the street to rush hour Maryland, stuffed with single-occupied cars crawling along, didn't help either.
 
I guess this means we're going to have to build more gravel walking paths around the man-made ponds that go nowhere in our new suburbs, eh? Another good idea would be to start building better recreation facilities that we can waste the time we already don't have driving across town for, wouldn't it?