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When the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently announced the name of The Unhealthiest City in America, I cringed. It was my hometown in Appalachia, from which I moved when I left for college years ago. I felt saddened – but not entirely surprised. When I leave snoburbia, and go back home, I am always taken aback by the number of obese people, and especially by the many fat children and smokers.
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When I was growing up there, people were not fat. Kids played for hours outside every day. There were physically-demanding factory jobs for those high school graduates not going on to college. Those jobs are gone (and 35,000 people with them) since I moved away, and in their place are two hospitals that have tripled in size as their patients have, taking over more and more real estate.
The CDC’s finding shouldn’t tarnish a wonderful town, with its university and mini-snoburbia of its own, where residents send their kids to ballet and soccer and attend classical concerts at the excellent art museum. My hometown has a world-class, WPA-era park. Its popular running path is lined with towering oak trees, stone arches and bridges. And, as in any gym in the snoburbs, the big YMCA there has lines for its treadmills and stairmasters. The city now has a marathon.
But exercise is something mostly done by the educated upper classes. For most people there, exercise seems out of reach, and they go for the familiarity and ease of their cars and the heart-attack-on-a-biscuit drive-through joint.
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