Steppin' Up Public Health

Interesting article in New York Magazine, which has touted new city health commissioner Thomas Farley's plans to use city public health policy as a key means of improving the health of NYC residents and thus do their part to enact health reform. It's quite smart, actually. While much attention has been placed in terms of the cost of treatment, why not find ways to encourage (if not mandate) good fitness which can play a large part in keeping people from getting sick in the first place?

The article focuses on Farley's plan to get residents to walk the stairs more either by encouraging stairs from an aesthetic perspective, even providing some incentives through tax credits or zoning bonuses or perhaps have skip-stop elevators which only stop on every third floor. The benefits seem to be compelling:

• Two additional minutes of stair-climbing per day (approximately three floors) can burn more than enough calories to eliminate the average adult’s annual weight gain.
• The mortality rates between men who climbed more than 55 flights of stairs a week are 33% lower than those who didn’t.

At my workplace, I actually do a bit of stair-climbing, largely due to the fact that my office is on the 8th floor, and the people who I'm working with currently are largely on the 3rd floor, to which there is no direct elevator route (I'd have to take the elevator down the the 2nd floor and walk up on floor or take the elevator down the the lobby and take a different elevator up to the 2nd floor). The inclination to take the stairs is also aided by two of our eight elevators (at a time) being services in the past eight months, making waiting for a elevator long and agonizing - it's just faster to take the stairs.

Does it seem right, as Farley says, that “If we engineered physicality out of our lives, we can engineer it right back in”? Probably, but surely there are a lot of people, especially those who don't like walking stairs, that will resent government-enforced compulsion of a healthier lifestyle.