Want to Live Longer? Move to ... New York City!?

New Yorkers striding down their sidewalks aren't just intimidating tourists -- they're staying healthy. According to some researchers, that's why NYC residents live longer than the U.S. average.

Contrary to what you might expect, urban residents are now in better health than comparable suburban and rural residents -- a reversal of the historic "urban health penalty."

In the latest issue of New York magazine, Clive Thompson provides support for the idea that one of the city's signature characteristics -- the high speed pedestrian freeway that is a New York sidewalk -- is a de facto health club:

Scientists who study urban health argue that it’s not just that we walk more—it’s the way we walk that has a surprising spillover effect on life spans. Researchers have long known that people here walked fast—far faster than anyone else in the country. ...

... Eleanor Simonsick, a Baltimore-based epidemiologist, knew that regular walking is a powerful way to maintain your health. But she began to wonder, a question very germane to us in New York: Does the speed at which you walk also affect your health?

She decided to conduct an experiment to find out. She and a group of scientists assembled 3,075 seniors in their seventies and asked them to traverse a 400-meter course, walking as fast as they could. They monitored their subjects’ health over the next six years, during which time 430 of the geriatrics died and many more fell ill. When Simonsick crunched the data, she found that the ones who were dying and getting sick were the ones who walked the slowest. For every minute longer it took someone to complete the 400-meter walk, he had a 29 percent higher chance of mortality and a 52 percent greater chance of being disabled. People who walk faster live longer—and enjoy better health in their later years.

“Walking speed absolutely reflects health status,” Simonsick says. So when you irritatedly blow past a trio of ambling visitors from Ohio or Iowa on the subway platform, you’re not just being an obnoxious New Yorker. You’re demonstrating that you’re going to outlive them—and enjoy better health while they slowly degrade.

And you're not imagining that people walk faster in New York: "... our social contract dictates that you should move your ass when you’re on the sidewalk, so as not to annoy your fellow walkers. (A recent ranking of cities found that New York has the fastest pedestrians in the country.)"

In contrast, suburban sprawl doesn't just apply to housing -- it applies to waistlines as well. One researcher found that suburban men weighed ten pounds more than their demographically comparable city counterparts. The hypothesis is that while the suburbanite is driving from garage to work to supermarket, their New York equivalent is walking thousands of steps, including stairs, to do the same things.

But is all this confusing correlation (people who live in cities also are in better health) with causation? One researcher, Matthew Turner of the University of Toronto, isn't buying the "cities make you healthier" argument. He looked at people who moved from suburbia to a city, and vice versa, and found that they didn't change weight. Perhaps, he says, it's that healthier people who want to walk and live in an urban environment choose to live in a city.

(Here in Los Angeles we get the worst of both worlds. We get in our cars to go places, then sit in traffic for hours).

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H/t: The Wall Street Journal's "The Informed Reader"