Communities can improve population health by design

By Ross Balding

Many Americans know that they should be leading more active lifestyles, but that doesn’t mean they make an effort to change that. Public health and transportation consultant Mark Fenton knows telling people they should be more active isn’t enough, and the most effective way to change peoples lifestyles is to change their environment and the policy dictating it.

Fenton, also an adjunct professor at Tufts University, came to campus as a guest of the College of Health Sciences to lecture on his work and how community design relates to health and chronic disease. Fenton studied biomechanics at MIT and has worked in places such as the Olympic Training Center’s Sports Science Laboratory in Colorado and Reebok’s Human Performance Laboratory.

Fenton began his talk by asking the audience to recall their first memories of being physically active, what they were doing, where they were doing it and who it was with. “The purpose of this is to recognize the differences in people’s memories based on age,” said Fenton.

The results were consistent with what Fenton has seen in the past. The younger people in the audience tend to have memories of activities that were more structured, such as organized sports. Older audience members have more memories of unstructured playing with neighborhood friends without adult supervision.

Fenton frequently referred to “free-range kids,” the benefits of which he argues are being forgotten. Parents no longer feel safe sending their kids out to play by themselves, and opportunities for physical activity are limited to supervised trips to designated areas like playgrounds or structured activities like team sports. Changing our environment on the community level so parents feel their kids will be safer when they go out on their own is crucial, Fenton said. But the key to making a real tangible change in getting kids to be active is to go one step further and change policy.

“If we don’t change policy, nothing else will stick,” Fenton said.

While being a consultant for public health, planning and transportation, Fenton has experienced parents reservations to let their kids do certain things. For example, he said many parents don’t think their kids should or would bike to school even if they had bike lanes. However, they would be exponentially more inclined to allow their kids to bike to school if that was the norm among the population. Community planning like creating bike lanes is important, but must be accompanied by policy changes, such as limiting car traffic in urban areas, installing traffic-calming devices and encouraging the community to become more tolerant of alternative modes of transportation.

“There are over 365,000 estimated annual deaths in America due to physical inactivity and the chronic diseases caused by it,” said Fenton. “And the only way we can get that number to go down is by making changes at the individual, group, institutional, community and policy levels.”

Ross Balding is a senior journalism major and intern with the Academic Health Collaborative.