Word: rurals
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Even without this so-called thrifty gene, you'd face an uphill battle to stay trim. Like many Americans in rural areas, the poorer Oglala Sioux have far less access to fresh fruits and vegetables than those in more connected settlements. This means you're likely to be filling up on high-calorie, processed foods, especially since fatty foods are cheaper than healthy ones, and your family--like more than half the families on the reservation--is probably poor. What's more, the calories you consume stick around, since you're not doing much to burn them off. Your school...
...discriminates, perhaps most tellingly, by geography, with 16.5% of rural kids qualifying as obese, compared with 14.4% of urban kids, according to the 2003 National Survey of Children's Health. The poorest states of the South and Appalachia--Arkansas, West Virginia, Mississippi and Kentucky--have the heaviest children. Adult obesity levels triple when you cross north of 96th Street in Manhattan, leaving the mostly white and well-off Upper East Side for the predominantly minority, poorer neighborhood of Spanish Harlem. Even in trim Colorado, there are obesity hot zones...
...inner cities are only part of the problem. Despite the image we might have of the abundance and open spaces of the countryside, Americans living in isolated rural communities also tend to have few places to walk and play and few convenient options for decent food. "You have to drive miles and miles to find a grocery store," says Jan Probst, who directs the South Carolina Rural Health Research Center at the University of South Carolina. Indian reservations are often the most extreme example of this rural nutritional isolation. The Pine Ridge reservation is nearly...
...think rural kids at least spend more time outside, working off the extra calories they consume every day, think again. Country life isn't what it looked like on Lassie. "You say rural, and you think kids are on the farm, lifting hay bales," says Probst. "But they don't do that anymore." What they do is the same thing other kids do, which is to say they spend more and more time inside, in front of a screen--even more so since their homes are a lot likelier than those of suburban kids to lie next to a four...
...eliminated junk-food vending machines in all elementary schools--a policy that's becoming more common around the U.S.--and added half an hour of daily physical education to the school curriculum. The plan has had its critics, but Thompson knows that without help, children in Arkansas--poor, relatively rural--face a lifetime struggle against obesity...