RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—With more and more people looking for work these days, moving to a large city, with its gas-saving public transportation, densely populated working centers, and overall convenience, is becoming an attractive alternative. According to a January report from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Smart Growth program, residential construction is growing by double-digit percentages in large urban areas.
THE DETAILS: It’s not just happening in the biggest coastal cities like New York and Los Angeles. Large metropolitan areas from Chicago and Milwaukee to Atlanta and Salt Lake City are seeing a rise in suburbanites moving into center-city areas. Whether this trend will outlast the current economic downturn is hard to say, says John Thomas, a policy analyst with the Smart Growth Program and author of the report. Residential building permits started to decline in 2007, he notes, but didn’t fall off as rapidly as they did in suburbs and other areas farther away from city centers.
Their allure notwithstanding, big cities bring health problems that most people may not consider until they’re happily ensconced in their new digs. Noise pollution, virtually unavoidable in most big cities, can lead to hypertension and heart disease, according to the World Health Organization. And the buildings and street lamps that are continuously lit may interfere with your sleep, studies show, possibly because light pollution interferes with the body’s production of the body-clock hormone melatonin. Finally, whether you’re dealing with ground-level ozone, particulate pollution from gasoline or diesel exhaust, or just the general crud stirred up by millions of people moving about on a daily basis, all kinds of urban air pollution can lead to heart attacks, strokes, asthma, and a host of other health problems.
WHAT IT MEANS: Exercise is good medicine for mitigating the effects of all the health problems associated with urban living in one fell swoop. It lowers your stress levels, blood pressure, and risk for heart problems, and it’s been found to prevent breast cancer and lower your risk of other types of cancer. But when you’re living in the city, exercising outdoors could expose you to more air pollution. And gym memberships can be expensive.
Here are some tips for keeping up a healthy exercise regimen without putting your lungs at risk:
• Rise and shine to sweat. Exercise early in the morning when air pollution levels are lowest.
• Find a green space. Parks and trails have cleaner air, thanks to all the trees and oxygen-producing plant life. Not only that, studies have found that exposure to nature is a natural stress reliever.
• Stick to the inside lane. If your urban home doesn’t afford you ready access to a park, run or walk along the inside of the sidewalk as far away from traffic as you can get. Studies have shown that people who walk alongside the innermost portion of a sidewalk are exposed to much lower levels of airborne ultrafine particulates (which can lead to stroke) than people who walk close to the road.
• Invest in good sleep. It’s hard to get up and exercise if you’ve been tossing and turning all night, so do what you can to get restful sleep every night. You may have little control over how noisy your street or neighborhood is, but sleeping with earplugs can muffle the noise. Light-blocking curtains will keep out the illumination that can interfere with your body’s sleep cycles.