Longer Commutes Are Bad For You! Imagine That!

Unlike my classmates, I didn't get my driver's license until the 2nd half of my senior year in high school.  Then I went to college in Southern California, Riverside to be precise, and discovered a whole new culture that worshipped cars.  Being freed from parental oversight, I drove to numerous places on a whim and a lark, just to get out of studying (small wonder that I graduated!).  I then entered the workforce and joined the hundreds of thousands of drivers on the roads of LA commuting an hour or two to work and then back again 5 days/week. Back in those days, I religiously changed the oil in my car every 3,000 miles since that was the prevailing mantra.  What I didn't understand at the time was that changing the oil every month was a bit frequent as I drove 36,000 miles that first year out and topped 100,000 miles after 3 years.

What's really incredible is that I thought that this much driving was normal behavior and that there wasn't another option to this lifestyle in which I spent upwards of 3-4 hours daily in my car rather than being physically active, eg engaged in exercise.  It wasn't until I went to medical school and found an apartment on the other side of the city all of 10-15min away from the hospital that I understood how crazy my prior life had been.  This was confirmed when my new classmates asked how could I live so far away from the school!  

Only now has it truly dawned on me that I probably wasn't doing myself a lot of good spending that much time commuting, sitting still in LA's notorious traffic.  This was confirmed in a cross-sectional study published earlier this month in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in which the authors concluded, not surprisingly, that commuting distance was associated w/less physical activity, worse cardiorespiratory fitness, and increase waist circumference along w/metabolic syndrome risk, after studying for 7 years 4,297 adults avg 47yo four fifths of whom were men.  Longest commutes (defined as greater than 20 miles from home to work) compared to shortest ones (less than 5 miles between residence & employment) were associated w/less weekly METs (metabolic equivalents), lower cardiorespiratory fitness, greater body mass index + waist circumference, and higher diastolic blood pressure.

And in case you're wondering, this study wasn't a fluke.  A similar cross-sectional population-based study of 21,088 Swedes published last November in BMC Public Health associated longer commute times w/poorer health outcomes, eg perceived sleep quality, everyday stress, exhaustion, mental health, self-rated health & sickness absences.  The implication of these studies is that we need to look at city planning in an attempt to improve our public health.  We need to give our citizens more time at home (and thus for physical activity) and less time in the car/bus/train.  No one ever said that this would be an easy task.  

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