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Image: Fitness for Weight Loss

Happy Bike to Work Week, everybody! It’s a great time to give a gentle nudge to someone who you think would benefit from biking. In that vein, personal trainer and fitness coach Stephanie Averkamp of San Diego posted this infographic to her personal health website. She says she especially hopes to convince overweight and obese people to bike more.

“Biking’s a great exercise because it supports 50 to 70 percent of their body weight,” Averkamp told me. “It’s not like running. It’s something they can do without the extra weight and impact on their joints.” She said biking is a great way to get exercise outside of a gym, which can be intimidating and unpleasant.

She encourages people to start by biking halfway to work. “That counts!” she says.

Infographic after the jump.
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Going to the gym may not be enough to keep off the pounds if you drive to work. That’s the result of a study published recently in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Bike commuters gain less weight than car commuters, an Australian study found. Image: Bikes Belong

According to an Australian research team, active commuting is an effective defense against gaining weight. Among a sample of 822 Australian adults tracked over four years, people who walked or biked to work gained about two pounds less, on average, than daily car commuters.

Lead researcher Takemi Sugiyama, a behavioral epidemiologist at Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, said it may be difficult for people who drive to work to find the extra time to devote to exercise.

“In order to achieve the level of physical activity needed to prevent weight gain, it may be more realistic to accumulate physical activity through active transport, rather than adding exercise to weekly leisure-time routines,” she told the Health Behavior News Service, part of the Center for Advancing Health.

The study found that engaging in “sufficient leisure-time physical activity” also helped people avoid weight gain, but that car commuters who exercised regularly in their free time still put on more pounds than active commuters.

Street conditions, of course, will have to improve to make active commuting a viable option for more people in the U.S. “For most Americans, it is challenging to find a safe route to work or shopping due to factors such as traffic concerns, lack of sidewalks, or protected bike paths,” said Penny Gordon-Larsen, a public health expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told the Health Behavior News Service.

Hat tip to Jay Walljasper at Bikes Belong for bringing this to our attention.

Living near transit can help you stay trim and healthy. That’s the result of a study published last year in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine. This study is a little old — it was published in August 2011 — but we just came across it in the Reconnecting America resource center and the results are too interesting not to share.

Transit riders in Charlotte North Carolina are 81 percent less likely to be obese than those who drive to work. Photo: Forbes

A team of social scientists and public health experts examined the health effects of Charlotte, North Carolina’s Lynx light rail line, which was installed in 2007. The study was designed to avoid a common problem in studies of transit’s impact on health: selection bias. People who are already active may choose urban, transit-accessible neighborhoods to suit their preexisting lifestyles. In this study, however, the researchers only looked at those who lived along the Lynx route both before and after light rail arrived.

The light rail riders’ Body Mass Index, the researchers found, fell by an average of 1.18 points compared to those who didn’t ride the system. That translates into a loss of about six and a half pounds for a person who is 5-feet, 5-inches tall. In addition, light rail users were 81 percent less likely to become obese over time.

The results were weighted to control for education, age, race gender, distance to work, neighborhood features and other factors that might skew the results.

Researchers said the weight loss reported by subjects was consistent with adding as much as 1.2 miles walking to a person’s daily routine. All the subjects lived within one mile of the light rail corridor, which has surpassed ridership expectations.

“The results of this study suggest that improving neighborhood environments and increasing the public’s use of LRT systems could provide improvements in health outcomes for millions of individuals,” the authors concluded. “Public policy investments in transit should consider potential increases in physical activity as part of the broader set of cost–benefit calculations of transit systems.”

Check out these two maps, the first showing obesity rates (by county) in the United States and the second showing the percentage of commuters who travel by car (via Planetizen).

Obesity rates are highest in Appalachia and the Southeast United States. Image: Planetizen

A map showing the percentage of car commuters shows a strikingly similar pattern.

Researchers Anne Price and Ariel Godwin at Planetizen caution readers not to conflate correlation and causation. However, when comparing other economic and demographic characteristics (unemployment, educational attainment, income), no other maps displayed such striking similarities.

Furthermore, when the research team created a scatterplot comparing obesity rates in U.S. counties with commuting patterns, a “strong relationship” emerged.

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