Humans were not designed to sit for long. We didn’t develop bi-pedal ambulation to sit. We didn’t develop a massive fancy appendage to our brain called the cerebellum—which coordinates our steps and provides an intricate balance system—just to sit much of the day. If the human cerebellum suffers even a minor stroke, most people suffer from uncontrollable vertigo and difficulty walking. We were designed to do one thing better than all other beings. To walk on two feet.
We do a lot of sitting instead of walking, however. For 8 hours a day, most Americans sit on their buttocks in school or in an office building, then sit on their rears on a school bus or car to go home and to go to the grocery store, then sit on their backsides doing homework, playing video games or watching TV the rest of the evening. Even for a trip to the store or school down the street, we choose to sit in a two-ton metal object that lumbers us along on our cushy thrones.
All of this sitting has health consequences. Americans are the fattest industrialized people on the planet (I am disregarding small island populations who have had their normal diets pulvarized by cheap American refined carbohydrates). We stand alone for rates of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome amongst our peers. With these illnesses comes morbidity—sickness. We get heart attacks, strokes (to the cerebellum as well, ironically), diabetic foot ulcers and amputations, and kidney failure. We get depression from inactivity and therefore sit more on our buttocks and have missed work days and lost productivity.
Our healthcare costs have skyrocketed. The average heart attack costs $38,000 (not counting lost productivity due to dead heart muscle in the patient’s future endeavors). The total estimated annual cost of strokes in the US is $38 billion according to the CDC. And Kidney failure requires dialysis; The ANNUAL cost for one patient on three-times-weekly hemodialysis costs $90,000 in the US. Yet we wonder why our healthcare expenditure is 2x more than the average of other developed countries. The graphic below demonstrates the average annual cost in the US vs the following countries:
Yet, we have WORSE healthcare outcomes than these other countries that spend a fraction of what we do on healthcare. Why is it? Are our doctors lesser trained and unable to provide good healthcare? Is our air worse? Are our medicines worse? The primary answer is activity, and the lack of it in most parts of our country. (Of course, diet and stress are other pillars of health Americans have not mastered, but those are other topics we will discuss later.)
What are the healthiest societies in the world doing to avoid these chronic conditions? What do they ALL have in common? They all walk miles and miles a day. Like seven to eight miles (10-12km) daily. Every day. They don’t do what we do—that is, sit on one’s buttocks all day for 7 days a week and then have three really intensive cardio workouts weekly to lose weight. They don’t hit the gym after a long day at the office to bulk up and “sweat out the stress”. These healthy people don’t do anything extreme; they don’t run marathons or chase antelope or bears, and they don’t climb mountains to forage for mushrooms. They walk.
These walking societies have been studied and observed independently by many different groups. The so-called Blue Zones have been described as some of the healthiest societies in the world with the highest rates of centenarians. They have been described to have a number of attributes including villagers having CONSTANT MODERATE PHYSICAL ACTIVITY. So have Amazonian tribes studied by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. The Europeans. They are all vastly healthier and generally report much higher life satisfaction. They live their lives until the end generally much healthier and without disability. They might meet an untimely end due to a snakebite or fall from a cliff, but they don’t spend years bedridden on dialysis from a preventable chronic condition.
Now that we’ve established that Americans sit vastly more than other societies, and that there are certain health consequences of this, the question is why. WHY do so many Americans, despite many having some knowledge of the downsides of sedentarianism, continue to practice this lifestyle? Do they want to be obese, ill, depressed, and in a steady free-fall of health? When they were children imagining what their future held, did they wish they would have partial foot amputations and they would be bound to a dialysis machine Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays of every week? Of course not.
We choose not to walk because most aspects of American society are specifically DESIGNED FOR DRIVING. Our cities and suburbs have been designed for the automobile to the detriment of the pedestrian. We have 8 lane boulevards ripping through our neighborhoods (3-4 lanes on each side with a turn lane), with 45mph speed limits in most new American suburbs. And then, we place a sidewalk as an afterthough immediately adjacent to this concrete and metal speedway with massive metal objects hurtling within feet of a pedestrian’s head. This innately does not make me as a pedestrian feel safe and relaxed. And it’s not just limited to the placement of roads and sidewalks–the actual places we go to have been developed contrary to ease as well.
The way we have laid out our cities and suburbs—that is our homes, shops, and workplace, our places of worship—is absolutely detrimental to pedestrianism. Most American development from 1940s onward has been known as “Single Use Development,” as advocated by Oscar Niemeyer and others, as a panacea to the dirty and messy (albeit bustling) cities that existed. You see, the mixed haphazard development up to the early 1900s was organic. The blood of meat factories flowed into the streets adjacent to apartments, which were adjacent to the rubber factory, where fumes wafted to the next-door grocery store. It was messy. Single use development was seen as a way to “clean up” city development and keep people isolated from the mess of factories and production. However, it went to the extreme. We separated people successfully from factories, but also from the fabric of their lives. Massive housing developments with hundreds of houses (with cul-de-sacs and cleared plots of land known as “parks”) were crammed together and developed several miles away from grocery stores, churches, and schools. You could only develop houses in one area. You can only develop a church or school two miles away in another area. And the grocery store is 3 miles over there. And the factory where dad works? That’s way on the other side of town.
So what is the solution to these vast distances of newly established sprawl? Cars, the new-found American “freedom” which would soon hold ransom our health and well being. Cars became so central to American life—to get to work, school, church, and the store—roads were designed to be conducive to their ease over all else. Believe it or not, America did have roads before cars! During early American development and even up to the 1940s, narrow roads existed that were designed for horses, people, bicycles, and streetcars. However, when cars became desired and bought en masse for the ever-growing distances required to live our lives, the aforementioned 8 lane boulevards started their ascent. Massive parking lots were planted in front of our schools, churches, and stores to house all of these cars, which make distances to travel on foot even further and more treacherous (have you tried walking across a parking lot?).
Seeing a massive business opportunity in automobiles—a virgin market with massive growth—Standard Oil, Firestone Tire, General Motors and others formed a conglomerate to push their products of oil consumption, rubber use, and automobiles. They lobbied cities to build ever-wider and faster streets for vehicle speed and “pedestrian safety.” Places where they couldn’t lobby cities to remove public transportation, as was the case for private street cars, the conglomerate outright bought them, tore the rails from the ground, and gave the right of way to the city much to the city’s delight. This occurred in at least 25 American cities.
As an aside, not only was this venture bad for people who lost the built in muscle-toning, cardiovascular promoting, and depression lifting effects of walking, but it was terrible for the planet. These new roads and parking lots require massive amounts of concrete, whose production directly releases tons of CO2 in its production (concrete is believed to be the most produced human substance on earth) as well as more locally, the huge influx of water runoff that could no longer be absorbed into the soil, leading to the overflow, contamination, and erosion of creeks and rivers. The 1970s Cleveland river fire is one extreme example of the level of contamination rivers were facing, with a layer of oil sludge on the water famously burning during the “Cuyahoga River Fires.”
Now we’ve established that walking is innate, crucial, and necessary for human well-being. We’ve explored that modern society (in many places, notably suburban American sprawl) have made this BASIC FUNCTION difficult, if not impossible in many neighborhoods. We’ve seen why neighborhoods were developed so poorly–capitalism run amok.
So what do we do? We walk. Go to the park and walk–daily. Walk to the grocery store if you can. If you drive to the store, park your car further from the store entrance. Get up from your seat at work and take frequent water breaks. Speak out to city leaders about the walking movement and its health benefits. And finally, move to a neighborhood or city that values walking. An area that supports pedestrianism with proper city (re)design with crosswalks, public transportation including buses and street cars, and slow street speeds with aware and cordial drivers. Walk now, walk tomorrow, and walk hopefully well into your 100s.
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