The environment around us directly affects the physical activity choices that we make.

The built environment is the physical environment of communities.  It includes:

• land use patterns (how land is used)
• large and small built and natural features - architecture, quality of landscape, sidewalks, parks
• transportation system (including trails and roads)

Together these elements shape access to opportunities for physical activity.

Recent US data on childhood obesity link how we design and invest in our physical environment (roads, sidewalks, parks, public spaces) with unhealthy body weights.

Gopal Singh, an epidemiologist with the US Health Resources and Services Administration, "found that a child living in a neighborhood with unsafe surroundings, poor housing and no access to sidewalks, parks and recreation centers had 20 to 60 percent higher odds of being obese or overweight.

"Experts blame the rise in childhood obesity on fast food, neighborhoods without sidewalks, television, video games, schools neglecting physical education and a host of other societal changes", said Dr. Joe Thompson, director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center to Prevent Childhood Obesity.

Read the Heart & Stroke Foundation Statement on the built environment, heart disease & stroke.