A terrible curse of tornados and bad weather have been the most visible threats to Oklahoma as of late. But a new study cites preventable health issues as a hidden danger to residents of Oklahoma City.
The American College of Sports Medicine has crowned Oklahoma City as the “least fit metro area in the United States.”
The association’s fitness ranking shows 50 metro areas in the United States, with Oklahoma City taking dead last.
Fitness-minded cities with good public transportation options and lots of well-maintained public parks and recreation facilities — including Minneapolis, Washington D.C., Portland, San Francisco, and Denver — filled the top five slots.
But we wanted to know about the bottom, where Oklahoma City has languished in last place from the time the index was created in 2008. Is this the new, literal “Fat City USA?”
Digging into the story, we found that Oklahoma City faces a lot of “Improvement Priority Areas,” as the American College of Sports Medicine calls them. Among areas of concern are high percentages of diabetes, obesity, angina, coronary heart disease and asthma.
Low percentages of people in very good or excellent health, low per-capita spending on parks, and a shortage of alternative transportation and recreational facilities also contributed to the poor score.
For example, just 2.6 percent of Oklahoma City residents walk, bike or take public transportation to work. In top-ranked Minneapolis, that number is 7.6 percent.
The goal of the ACSM Fitness Index is to help officials, policy makers, health educators and other professionals understand how their city and its residents stack up against other cities, and what action they can take to help residents lead healthier lives.
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