A survey presented at the 2013 Walking Summit in Washington, D.C. stated that 94 percent of those polled acknowledged that walking is good for their health and 79 percent admitted they should walk more, yet one third don’t walk for 10 minutes at a time over the course of a week. How many minutes do…
What in the world is a doctor doing writing a prescription for Nature? With our nation’s current epidemic of obesity, asthma, ADHD, and now Nature Deficit Disorder, it’s time that we doctors prescribe time outside, in Nature, for all our patients. I have worked for the last 12 years as a primary care pediatrician at…
Trying to quantify your aerobic fitness is a daunting task. It usually requires access to an exercise-physiology lab. But researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim have developed a remarkably low-tech means of precisely assessing aerobic fitness and estimating your “fitness age,” or how well your body functions physically, relative to…
Everyone knows walking is good exercise, but it has another benefit: a daily 20-minute walk can also cut the risk of dementia by 40 percent, studies show. Taking those findings a step further, neurologists at Jacksonville’s Mayo Clinic are studying whether getting patients immobilized by disease to walk can also help stave off mental decline….
The number of injury collisions involving vehicles and pedestrians is on the rise, as San Francisco strives to become the most walkable city in North America. Last year, according to Police Department data, there was a 12-year high of 948 such injury collisions. From 2000 to 2012, the lowest number was 734 in 2009 –…
My twin grandsons, now 13, walk nearly a mile to and from school and play basketball in the schoolyard for an hour or more most afternoons, when weather and music lessons permit. The boys, like their father, are lean, strong and healthy. Their parents chose to live in New York, where their legs and public…
Quality Communities at the University of Oklahoma recently dug through the latest Census metrics on how Americans commute to work, a dataset locally notable for the fact that Tulsa and Oklahoma City don’t compare all that well. Relative to the 60 largest cities in America, Oklahoma City ranks last in the share of commuters –…
Whether you’re in San Francisco or New York or a small town, get out of the office and use your city’s sidewalks as a meeting space. You’d be surprised how productive it is. For the past 3 years, I’ve been conducting walk-n-talks with every employee in AnswerLab. As my CEO role brought me further and…
It may come as a surprise to riders on Metro’s Orange Line in Arlington, Va., just outside Washington, D.C., but the area sets the bar for suburban transit. That’s because a risky, expensive decision by local planners in the 1960s as the Washington subway system was about to be built helped this once-sleepy community come…
“Wherever you live in this world, basically . . . you are alone. Even if [we] have support systems, we’re really alone.” Those words, shorn of sentimentality, are offered—and received—as motherly balm in the documentary When I Walk. Filmmaker Jason DaSilva, having turned his camera on himself to capture the ravaging effects of multiple sclerosis on…