A Beijing study of 937 people found that those who won the lottery to buy a car cut their daily walking and cycling by about 24 minutes. People over 50 gained an average of 23 pounds after getting a car. TJ Walker argues car ownership reduces incidental exercise, raising obesity risk especially for older adults.
Questions this video answers
937 people.
180 people.
About 24 minutes per day (walked and cycled combined).
An average of 23 pounds.
Around 14%.
Chapters
So our big topic for topic A in this segment is the health impact of having a car. Now again, if you live in the United States or rural parts of Canada, or rural parts of almost anywhere in the world, it can seem implausible not to have a car. But when it comes to living in urban areas, this is where it gets interesting. A new major study coming out of Beijing shows the dramatic health changes to a human being just for getting a car. Now, I was sharing some of them, but for the people 50 years old and older, you know, the really old people like me, as soon as they got a car, weight gain, the last thing most people want, and it's defined here in this study as considerable weight gain. So, so that's the big problem. So please keep this in mind. Now, there were 937 people in the sampling. 180 won the permit to buy an automobile. And almost all of them, as soon as they won the permit, went ahead and bought the permit to get a car and then did in fact buy a car. So here's what they found. The individuals walked and cycled an average of 24 minutes per per day. For people under 50, no significant weight gain was associated with owning a car. But for those over the age of 50, here's the interesting thing. An average of 23 pounds was gained. 23 pounds. I mean, that's the difference between for a lot of people being perfectly healthy weight or within a healthy range to going not just overweight, but even clinically obese just for purchasing a car. Now weight gain, of course, is sometimes associated with aging, but not 23 pounds. Absolutely dramatic. Now China's obesity rate is around 14%. That's basically nothing compared to the United States where we are at a 40% obesity rate. But if more and more people have cars, it looks like they might be catching up. I did notice when I was in China last year that there were obese people there. Definitely fewer than the United States. But you could see people lined up at the Kentucky fried chicken, the McDonald's, all the American style fast food places with lots of grease, fat, lots of salt, lots of sugar, lots of processed foods, processed carbohydrates. I was pointing out yet another KFC I was looking at to my tour guide in Beijing last year. She said, oh yes, that's kfc, very popular here. It stands for Keep Fat Coming. That's what they, they call it in China. So keep that in mind. Do you really want a car if you don't have a car? It sounds preposterous. It sounds like, of course I want a car. Everybody wants a car. Be careful what you wish for, be careful what you ask for. Because it's human nature to say, well, I've got the car, let me just hop in and do it. And in many areas where I happen to live, there's literally no store I can walk to and there's not really a park I can walk to. So I am somewhat car dependent. I don't feel great about that, but I still spend at least an hour a day going for a lengthy walk in the neighborhood. I'm not getting anywhere. I'm just getting out and walking and not using a car to get around. I'm going out specifically for the exercise. If you have a car, you've got to sometimes work even harder to exercise. It's so easy to just say, let me go that quarter of a mile to go get milk, when you. It could be a lovely 10 minute walk to go to a local convenience store and get milk. Plus there's all the frustration of being in traffic and maybe you have to walk 10 minutes to a subway or a train station. Take public transit. Once you get to a station, your final destination, another 10 minutes. So be careful about the automobile use because it can just suck you in. And before you know it. I've seen friends and family and neighbors drive their car just down their driveway to take their kids to the street because they're too lazy to walk down their driveway and they want to take their kids to where the bus meets them. I mean, that's genuinely absurd and it's basically asking for a heart attack and to become obese. But it's that allure of, hey, I have a car, I might as well use it. The car is there to help you, you're not there to help the car.
