It’s lifestyle: Americans lead the world in both obesity and car centric lifestyles, and we have a ton of reinforcing factors – suburbs designed around cars are unpleasant/unsafe to be active in, people eat unhealthy food because it’s cheap (cars and suburbs are both more expensive) and something they can eat in the car or pickup on the way home, kids are prevented from exercising because there are few safe places in their neighborhoods, etc.

Americans who live in walkable settings are healthier on average but it’s not like they aren’t exposed to the same chemicals as their suburban counterparts.

What proof do you have that it's lifestyle? My opinion is loosely based on http://achemicalhunger.com/, specifically the papers that found wild animals are getting fat, and the timing.

The things you say are all true, but they were also true to a lesser extent in the 60s, when Americans were much less obese than they are now. They're also not true for wild animals.

> What proof do you have that it's lifestyle

International comparison. Countries with just as bad chemical/microplastic/PFAS contamination, be it France or China or Japan have far fewer obese people. Coincidentally they also have less car-centric lifestyles.

> The things you say are all true, but they were also true to a lesser extent in the 60s, when Americans were much less obese than they are now.

You're talking about movements over time — it's not like everyone moved out to the suburbs in 1955, and in the 1960s you still had a lot of people living in more urban walkable environments (the riots in the 60s and crime in the 70s really ramped up suburban flight). American leaders were already talking about an obesity crisis by the 1960s (the flawed dietary guidelines in the 1970s were a “we don't have time to wait!” response to decades of that trend) but it just kept getting worse over time, which seems to track with an increasingly car-dominant lifecycle.

That site doesn't have a good reputation and I would especially be careful about drawing conclusions from a single study of one type of animal. There's an especially big confound that many “wild” animals have still had significant habitat disruption from humans and it's not clear whether those macaques have access to human food, crops, etc. which would not otherwise have been the case.

It's nice that the suburb you lived in is enjoyable to walk in, but that's not what the word "walkable" means in the context of a neighborhood. Walkable means you can accomplish daily tasks by using walking as a mode of transportation, not just a form of leisure.

To address your main point, many US suburbs are not safe to walk in. Many suburbs lack things like sidewalks, crosswalks, and traffic signals for pedestrians because pedestrians are a complete afterthought. Other places have a sidewalk but no shade, or are by roads with loud high-speed traffic so they're not pleasant to walk in. I've lived in all of these kinds of places and it really affects your willingness to walk anywhere.

That's too bad. In the area around where I live I have yet to encounter a suburb that doesn't have sidewalks!

I understand what you meant by "walkability". I also don't think it's fun or practical. I tend to visit a lot of different stores, not just one or two. But I only go out shopping once a week or two, not daily. That sounds exhausting.

I also hate super dense living being packed in like sardines with everyone else. It's nice having a house with a decent sized yard and 10+ trees. Plenty of space and isolation, but at the same time close enough to friendly neighbors to socialize with. More Americans should give small to mid size cities a chance. They have a lot to offer. Far cheaper too, our neighborhood definitely isn't wealthy.

> That's too bad. In the area around where I live I have yet to encounter a suburb that doesn't have sidewalks!

It’s often linked to ugly history: when we were shopping around here in the DC area, there were tons of suburban houses with no sidewalks and transit-hostile road design which were built right after the major civil rights wins, when the thinking was that most black people couldn’t afford cars.

> I understand what you meant by "walkability". I also don't think it's fun or practical.

My thinking is that it’s less about fun than barriers to activity and car-centricity. If exercise is something which requires traveling elsewhere or you have to do on will-power an awful lot of people won’t do it very much, especially over time (maybe they walk the exercise trail when they first move in but lose interest over time because there’s only one route and that gets monotonous, etc.). Having kids is eye-opening that way when you’re seeing where they can go safely and under their own power, not to mention parents realizing how long they’ll be playing chauffeur.

The car centric point I mentioned is related: cars are expensive ($11k/year on average in 2019) so when your household has purchased one per adult you typically end up treating them as your default mode of transportation, which over time degrades your body and conditions you to think of being outside of air conditioning as outliers, and cars are dangerous which further reduces your options. Kids are driven to parks 3 blocks away because their parents are worried they’ll get hit by a car; pedestrian routes are hot, noisy, and extra long; etc.

Obviously they’re useful too but I don’t think it’s coincidence that obesity has been going up as an increasingly large fraction of people live in environments designed to be used while sitting sedentary in a machine.

City living isn’t without its own problems but when you get 10k steps without even making an effort to exercise it helps.

> But I only go out shopping once a week or two, not daily. That sounds exhausting.

It's not exhausting when it's just a couple of blocks away. I live about 5 a minute walk from our local grocery store, so it can be a nice break to pop over there for a couple things multiple times a week. There's no ceremony to it at all since there's no hassle of parking and it's easy to go when the store isn't crowded. An added benefit is that I can plan less and also waste less food, because I go to the store more often and get exactly what I need.

Exhausting in the time sense. I don't have much free time and the little I do I value a lot. Even if it is a few blocks that's a 30 minute trip each day.

Sure it can be fun occasionally, but I'd hate to do it regularly.

It's fairly obvious when you travel to places with high obesity that the problem is environmental, but microplastics aren't even going to be in the top 20 reasons for that. The food culture in those places is just completely busted. You can sense it even in layovers at US airports.