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Dan Rodricks: Americans still taking walks as they did during the pandemic. Good for us. | STAFF COMMENTARY

When asked, most people probably lie — a little or a lot — about how often they eat leafy green vegetables or drink water or exercise. And if it’s not outright lying, there’s probably some self-delusion at play, an inflated sense of the healthiness of our personal habits.

Maybe researchers for the National Center for Health Statistics allowed for exaggeration when, in 2022, they interviewed people across the country about how often they took a walk. I checked the survey’s methodology and found that “linear and quadratic trends by age group, family income and education were evaluated using orthogonal polynomials,” but still could not tell if self-delusion was taken into account.

Pardon my skepticism, but I found the results of the walking survey recently reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hard to believe.

It said nearly 60% of Americans claimed to have taken a leisurely walk within the previous week.

Why do I find this hard to believe? Call it skepticism based on daily observation of my fellow Americans; we have a tendency to drive everywhere and watch a lot of television. Many of us live in suburban communities that do not even have sidewalks.

According to the survey, “walking for leisure” could mean walking “for fun, relaxation, exercise, or to walk the dog.”

That’s a wide range of reasons, and only one would constitute what your doctor might call a “health walk,” which is what I thought this survey was all about, seeing how it came from our national public health agency.

But, even if the survey was about walking in general, and not just “health walking,” I remain skeptical.

Six out of 10 Americans take a walk each week — and not just to the cars in their driveways?

Hey, if it’s true, it’s great.

It could mean that something sustainably healthy came out of the pandemic, when homebound and restless Americans took up walking like crazy.

I asked Shima Hamidi what she made of the survey results. She’s an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies how transportation and urban-suburban planning affect our lives. The first thing that came up in our conversation was all that pandemic walking we did.

“The survey is not exactly for the time of the [pandemic] lockdown, it’s for a few months after that, but still people kept the habit,” Hamidi said. “With jobs now remote, people have more time and they are at home. They tend to walk more for leisure. So the number is higher than what you would expect. That could explain the situation.”

About 16% of the people in the survey said they primarily walked to get to transportation, a bus or subway. “Black adults had a lower likelihood of leisure walking than Asian, White, multiple-race and Hispanic adults,” the survey found. “White and Hispanic adults were less likely to walk for transportation than multiple-race, Asian and Black adults. The percentage of adults who walked for leisure increased as levels of family income and education increased. Walking for transportation was highest for adults with the lowest family incomes.”

Where people live figures into how much walking they do, says Hamidi.

“If you are living in a neighborhood where you have access to parks, green spaces, and a nice trail that you see in suburban areas, you are more likely to walk for leisure,” she says. “If you live in a neighborhood that doesn’t have those amenities but has good access to daily destinations, like coffee shops, restaurants and grocery stores, and access to a transit stop that connects you to jobs, then you are more likely to walk for transportation, which happens in city neighborhoods.”

Without those things, either suburban or urban, walking falls off, along with health.

Hamidi’s research covers suburban sprawl and smart-growth planning. Both are related to health.

She noted that two of the leading causes of death in the U.S., accidents and obesity, were related to suburban life. According to the CDC, heart disease continues to be the nation’s leading cause of death, and the number of cardiac deaths related to obesity tripled between 1999 and 2022. Accidents were the third leading cause of death in 2022, according to the CDC.

“In sprawling areas, compared to more compact neighborhoods, you are three times more likely to be involved in a fatal car crash,” she says. “In a sprawl area, you drive more. You spend more time in traffic congestion. If you spend more time traveling for work, you have less opportunities for physical activity, less access to healthy food, and more likely to have fast food options around you.

“If you look at all of this together, you will see that it makes a huge difference, on average, of three and a half years in life expectancy. It is not something that most people think about. But I’ve spent years looking at sprawl and health impacts, and it’s truly significant. If you add all of them up together, you will see that it makes a difference in terms of the life expectancy but also the quality of life.”

That might explain why there’s more walking going on — a conscious effort to counter, in the simplest way, the negative aspects of modern life.

In case you’re wondering: The CDC recommends at least 150 minutes a week of “moderate-intensity aerobic activity,” achievable with 22 minutes of brisk walking a day, no matter where you live.