Political "progressives" suffer an inordinate amount of anguish.   They look out upon the world and see nothing but inequity, injustice, and misery.   Why are so many African children starving to death?   Why are poor minorities in the US not being educated better?   Why is there so much "poverty?"   Why doesn't anyone care as much as I do about the plight of all these people living in substandard conditions?   It must be something we, as s society, are doing or not doing.   It must be something we can change.   If only everybody else were as smart and sensitive as I am, we could start to make a dent in all this misery.   If that overweight person over there would give up 1,000 calories a day, a child, perhaps two, could be saved.   If that family living in 3,000 square feet of home could make do with half, or less, some other family, maybe two, could have a reasonable home instead of that awful shack they now occupy.   They feel compelled to just do something to improve the lot of others.   Their anguish gets the better of them and they lose sight of reality.

There is a list of hot button issues "progressives" grab hold of in order to achieve their aims.   One of these is the "obesity epidemic" myth and another is the "McMansion" or "suburban sprawl" myth.   When more than one perceived inequity can be woven together to build a behavior changing argument, so much the better.   Such is the case in a story published yesterday entitled "Suburban sprawl may create heavier kids."   This story involves a study in which "using data from a national health survey, researchers found that teenagers living in sprawling suburbs were more than twice as likely to be overweight as teens in more compact urban areas."   Two issues addressed for the price of one.   Two fallacies rolled together, poorly analyzed, and illogically extrapolated to prove an invalid point.

Let's ignore the fact that this "researcher" didn't do any original work.   Let's forget that the only items of interest were A) BMI and B) living conditions.   Let's not consider that mere coexistence was the focus, that causality wasn't examined.   Let's just take the quick and dirty study and extrapolate it to change everyone's behavior!

The researchers in this "study" used data previously collected by a national health survey from a few years ago.   They couldn't be bothered doing any actual work.   They just used other information, crunched numbers and published the results.   That's what is typically called lazy.   But we'll let it slide since their motives, of course, were pure and good.

The basis of all obesity concerns in this country involve measurement of body mass index (BMI).   You know that one, don't you?   That's the gauge which compares height and weight to determine whether people are thin, just right, overweight or obese.   When that standard was used to examine professional athletes in the National Football League, the findings were an overweight rate of 97% and obesity of 56%.   That measure determined that among the overweight dudes running the gridiron were Terrell Owens and Tom Brady.   It is one thing to claim ex-Chicago Bear defensive lineman "Refrigerator" Perry is obese and quite another to say speedy T.O. is overweight.   But other "studies" using the same indicia of obesity found overweight and obese conditions in Olympic swimmers, thin baseball players, even "supermen" NBA stars like LeBron James.   Obviously the measure is flawed.   But let's ignore that.

The concern is people living in "sprawling" conditions, like your typical American suburb, just don't get enough exercise.   They use those global warming SUVs to get their chores done.   Urban dwellers - those with 1,200 or less square feet of living space - on the other hand, are forced to do more stuff everyday and that's why they aren't obese!   Let's ignore that far greater proportions of the nation's poorest citizens live in rural and urban settings.   Let's not examine the fact that those living in suburban conditions are far more likely to give academic achievement the highest priority and, therefore, fill their children's time with reading and other inside-the-home academic experiences than they are to allow them to roam the neighborhoods shooting hoops or playing manhunt.   Let's forget that these achievement-oriented suburban schools don't even provide recess any longer because they can't afford the time away from academics.

City kids may be able to graduate high school without being able to read at third grade level but the same isn't true in affluent suburbs.   I remember in college sitting next to the class valedictorian of a somewhat prestigious private inner city school.   The girl was as dumb as a stone and had great difficulty even passing our philosophy class.   She had extremely poor study habits and told me that in all her high school years she never had more than a half hour of homework.   She laughed when I told her I, attending your average suburban public school, often had to stay up until midnight just to finish the bare minimum.   I suppose she had plenty of time to play out in the streets.   I know I didn't.

If a kid goes to a public suburban school and isn't attending at least one advanced placement class, at least in my neck of the woods, that's called failure.   And if a kid's grades aren't quite up to snuff, private remediation is the norm, taking even more "play time" away from these "overweight" kids.   The other day a parent approached me about her troubled daughter.   We were at the school's annual spelling bee but this "troubled youth" was having trouble in her math classes.   I spoke for about ten minutes with the mother, telling her about the virtues of the Kumon math program which aims to put their average kid just two grades above the school grade.   The woman bought what I told her and has since enrolled her kid in the program to get her underachiever back into the fold.   Oh, and by the way, this kid is no academic slouch.   She won the spelling bee!   Now, on top of studying for the sectional spelling bee, she'll also be doing an extra fifteen minutes to half hour of mathematics each day, including weekends.

But let's pretend BMI is a valid measurement of being overweight and that my anecdotal observations are invalid - kids in the burbs get just as much play time as kids in the hood.   Even considering these points, this study did nothing to find causality.   Its findings were merely about coexistence.   The only thing it found was a higher percentage of kids in the suburbs fell into overweight and obese categories of BMI than did urban kids.   This was no controlled experiment.   No actual causality was examined.   Still, a host of illogical conclusions were drawn.

The article discussing the study claimed, among other things:

"The researchers believe the same factors may be driving the link between suburban living and teenagers' weight -- the major one being reliance on cars."

"People in cities are often forced to be active in their daily lives -- walking to stores and public transportation, carrying groceries up the stairs to their fifth-floor walk-up apartment."

"Those cars have become "de facto snack shops" for many adults and kids, with the food often being fast food. In many spread-out suburbs in the U.S., fast food is the predominant dining option."

The article went on to suggest parents make a greater effort to get their kids into sports and "a more drastic alternative is to move."   Move?   Pick up from the high academic-achieving suburbs and move into the inner city so your kids can walk to the bus or subway, graduate high school with an inferior education, yet have plenty of opportunities to walk up five flights of stairs and avoid fast food?   What rubbish is this?

We cannot formulate current national public policy on lazy number crunching studies, using old data, which find mere coexistence of conditions based upon flawed indices of weight which classify world-class athletes as obese and link obesity with too few opportunities to be inconvenienced.   I suppose if I believed everything this study suggests, I should move out of the suburbs and be content with having thin stupid children!