The way we’ve chosen to build our cities is making our children fatter and sicker. More specifically, says a report in the June issue of Pediatrics, “A child’s life is affected by the environment in which he or she lives.”

Parks and open space, location of schools, traffic patterns, crime and safety are all part of the “built environment” which affects health in diverse ways, including physical inactivity. This, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, is at least part of the reason nearly one-third of American children are overweight. “By working with community partners, (we) can participate in establishing communities designed for activity and health.”

Solid evidence and sound advice, right?

And yet… a quick scroll through reader comments at the end of this Houston Chronicle piece says that even a detailed report, from an expert source, with a mountain of research behind it, and a long list of recommendations tied to nothing less than our children’s health, isn’t enough to convince us to re-consider the way we design our communities. Among the comments:

What if we spend billions redesigning infrastructure and people remain fat? Now it is the fault of city planners, builders and architects that we have a bunch of fatsos?

Laws are needed to encourage physical activities. This article lost all credibility with that statement.

How about the evidence that weight has a nearly unmeasurable impact on health within reasonable bounds?

This will never happen. Most people around here are afraid of their own shadow and would never, ever consider letting their kids walk and/or bike to school. It’s way too scary.

The main cause of the decrease in outdoor activity isn’t the lack of parks or the advent of TV and the internet. The cause is the real pandemic, the epidemic of fear that has swept across our planet. It’s not the parks, it’s the people.

More elitism for the good of us commoner morons.

And so when readers push back on the cause or the evidence or the approach, it seems to me that this is not just skepticism. It’s because we want something more than research reports and expert advice.

“This is not the age of information,” writes poet David Whyte, “People are hungry, and one good word is bread for a thousand.” And that, we think, comes only when people participate in discovering for themselves what they really care about.