Are the burbs to blame for obesity?

Studies suggest there may be a link between living in the suburbs and being overweight. Maybe. Sort of. Or, you know, maybe not. So if you're looking for a reason for Houstonians' weight problem ... uh ... well, don't look here.

The questionable link between urban sprawl and bodily sprawl is the result of at least three studies that came to contradictory conclusions. In 2003, Reid Ewing looked at 448 counties in 83 metro areas across the country and found that urban sprawl had a small but significant connection with obesity, high blood pressure and body mass index. For example, residents of New York weigh 6.3 pounds less than people in Geauga County, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. (Most urban/suburban differences were much smaller.) Another researcher, Lawrence Frank, polled 11,000 Atlanta-area residents in 2004 and found people living in mixed-use urban neighborhoods were likely to be slimmer than their suburban counterparts.

But a University of Illinois at Chicago study released earlier this year contradicts that: Researchers looked at vital statistics from 7 million Chicago-area driver's licenses and found that residents of the inner city and outer suburbs were fatter than people living in the inner suburbs. In short, how you live — education and income — has more effect on obesity than where you live.

Even so, it stands to reason that people who live in walkable urban environments have a better chance at fitness than suburbanites who likely have long commutes every day and drive most places in their neighborhoods. The problem with that in Houston, of course, is that everyone drives everywhere. So where does that leave us?