Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

by Jeff Speck

In any meaningful discussion about American health (and health care), obesity has to be front and center.■ In the mid-1970s, only about one in ten Americans was obese, which put us where much of Europe is right now. What has happened in the intervening thirty years is astonishing: by 2007, that rate had risen to one in three,8 with a second third of the population “clearly overweight.”9 The childhood obesity rate has almost tripled since 1980 and the rate for adolescents has more than quadrupled.10 According to the rules of the U.S. military, 25 percent of young men and 40 percent of young women are too fat to enlist.● As recently as 1991, no states had adult obesity rates over 20 percent. By 2007, only one state, Colorado, was under 20 percent.