America’s Great Fitness Divide | Hacker News Reader

America’s Great Fitness Divide

citylab.com

24 pointsbootload17 comments

Years ago, I used to work as a labourer on building sites, before getting a 'proper' job as a programmer.

When I physically worked hard all day, I ate a ton of crap. Burger King for lunch, a loaf of bread a day, hardly any veggies but massive amounts of cheap carbs and meat. I was technically overweight, because I put on so much muscle and I'm not a tall guy. Obviously I did no gym-type exercise. No-one, looking at my diet, body-mass, or lifestyle data would think I was fit, but I was all muscle and in the best shape I've ever been.

The older guys I worked with could lift more than me, for longer, with less visible effort. You'd never look at them and think they were fit, and they ate like pigs too. Again, if you looked at their data they'd be a huge diabetes risk. But they were fitter in their 40's than I was in my 20's, and I was pretty fit back then.

Now, 20 years later, after spending most of those 20 years sitting on my arse pushing little buttons, I'm going to the gym and eating well (diabetes is an effective motivator!). Look at my data now and I'm a bit overweight, but with a good diet and exercise regime.

But compare me with my good diet and exercise regime to those older guys who spent their working lives doing physical labour and eating like crap, and I'm a weak, blubbery mess.

Either the "fitness" they're measuring isn't what we understand to mean by the word "fitness", or they're not measuring actual fitness.

Keep in mind that a lifetime of manual labor often leads to chronic injuries and pain. How many of those old timers had back problems? I grew up working on fishing boats in Alaska, I know the drill pretty well. I don't have a vise-like grip anymore, but I also don't have tendonitis.

Not to say that manual labor won't get you fit, just that if you have the opportunity to sit at a desk and go to the gym and eat a proper diet, it's not really comparable to that kind of fitness (and it's generally far healthier for you).

"but I also don't have tendonitis"

How about carpal tunnels? :)

Good point! Though I am quite good at resting my hands and haven't developed RSI over the last fifteen years or so. I would still place a heavy bet that workplace injuries are more common amongst labor-heavy jobs ;)

The conflation of fitness and strength is common and completely useless. Like the other commenter mentioned, how many have permanent injuries? How many have guts as their activity stalls?

Also I think most people looking at your lifestyle data would assume you were reasonably muscular and thin. You work out for nearly a third of every day.

I do agree that how they've quantified fitness is absurd. Having lived in Atlanta, it's a horribly unfit city riddled with obesity. Having a park near your house doesn't mean anything if you don't use it, and buying vegetables means nothing if you're using half a bottle of dressing to eat them.

yeah, but how many fitness freaks have shin splints or herniated disks, or whatever that horrifying thing that happens occasionally to Crossfit junkies is called...

It wasn't just strength; these guys could work hard all day, every day, with less visible effort. If that's not what people mean when they say fitness then (to quote) "I don't think that that word means what you think it means" - there's definitely a confusion happening here.

I don't know how you would quantify fitness on this kind of scale with this kind of data. It's an interesting problem. But I guess my point is that I would certainly factor for people who do hard physical graft all day, and if they eat tons of cheap carbs and have a high bmi doesn't mean they're fat or unfit.

90% of the world's in-shape bodies are concentrated among the top 1% of people who exercise. It's fitness inequality, and I won't stand up for it.

That's mass media messing with your availability heuristic. Stop reading/watching that crap, you'll feel better!

(Seriously though, the longer I live the more I think our "free media" is a hugely negative force in society. It's not information junk-food, it's information asbestos dipped in benzene, with nuclear waste as a side dish.)

I agree. I think morning news shows might be some of the worst of it. I try to stay away from most media as much as possible. It just rots your brain.

Amusingly, they did not bother to measure the actual results of fitness in these populations. Do these areas demonstrate a marked reduction in cardiovascular disease, type-2 diabetes rates, etc?

Any sane medical professional will tell you exercise is good for you. This has been proven time and time again, and could be treated almost as an axiom of health research.

No doubt, but that is not what is measured in this study. It is the environmental influences that may result in exercise, but not the actual adoption and expected resulting health improvements.

It is important to measure the actual results rather than the intentions of policies or the accidents of environment.

The article presents a lot of correlations, but it'd be good to see a little more investigation into which are actually explanatory.

Fitness is associated both with income per capita and the share of adults holding a college degree, but income is strongly related to education already. If you control for education, does increased wealth still correlate with fitness? From reading TFA, it doesn't look like the study author tried to figure that out.

Yes, exactly. The article seems to want you to believe that fitness is caused by high education levels and high income, but all they've done is point out a correlation. In fact I suspect that all three share some of the same underlying causes.

Interestingly, what I see is a divide between North and South, more than East and West. The exceptions being Detroit and Columbus in the North and Atlanta and San Diego in the South.

Perhaps this has more to do with urban planning? I just got back from Dallas (Plano, actually) and I've never experienced such relatively dense development be so actively hostile to pedestrians ... sidewalks would just stop for a quarter mile and then start again for no apparent reason.

They may need a new index. I've lived all over the country. I'm pretty sure San Diego is healthier than any place else I've lived or even visited.

Here’s their list:

   1  Minneapolis, MN     77.2
   2  Washington, DC      76.8
   3  Boston, MA          69.1
   4  Portland, OR        67.7
   5  Denver, CO          67.6
   6  San Francisco, CA   66.8
   7  Hartford, CT        66.8
   8  Seattle, WA         66.5
   9  Virginia Beach, VA  65.8
  10  Sacramento, CA      65.3
  11  San Jose, CA        65.2
  12  Richmond, VA        64.2
  13  San Diego, CA       63.3
  ...
  50  Oklahoma City, OK   24.6

“The AFI reflects a composite of preventive health behaviors, levels of chronic disease conditions, health care access, as well as community resources and policies that support physical activity. In addition, demographic diversity, economic diversity and violent crime levels are included for each metropolitan area to illustrate the unique attributes of each city. Communities with the highest AFI scores are considered to have strong community fitness, a concept analogous to individuals having strong personal fitness.”

http://www.americanfitnessindex.org/docs/reports/2011_afi_re...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com