It’s no secret that in Baton Rouge, we like to eat.
As 225 dishes in its October cover story, Southern cuisine is a critical component of our lifestyle. Spring is synonymous with crawfish boils. Small south Louisiana towns within driving distance host food festivals nearly every weekend.
Visit LSU’s campus on a fall Saturday and you’ll see hundreds of tailgates with grills, smokers and pots producing the salty, fatty meals that make Southern cooking so desirable. We love our food. Maybe a little too much.
Baton Rouge’s 36% obesity rate made headlines earlier this year, when Gallup-Healthways ranked it the fattest city in the nation. Obesity costs Louisiana $3 billion dollars annually, and roughly half of the state’s children are obese or overweight.
But there’s more to it than our love of jambalaya.
Experts say the heat and the lack of pedestrian-friendly infrastructure and established wellness policies are part of the problem, too.
“It should be emphasized that Baton Rouge isn’t the only city struggling with obesity—there are many other cities with similarly high rates,” says Dr. Owen Carmichael, director of biomedical imaging at Pennington Biomedical Research Center.
That said, he points to the factors driving Baton Rouge toward higher obesity rates.
“Baton Rouge is an older city that grew organically over time. Unlike many Western cities, it did not have the luxury of building large amounts of its infrastructure from scratch in recent decades,” he says.
That has made it tougher for the city to build modern infrastructure that would encourage physical activity—think separated bike lanes on major commute corridors, pedestrian walkways and jogging paths. Combine that with Baton Rouge’s infamous traffic, and summer heat that none of us want to run around in, and, well, there’s your recipe for sedentary living, he says.
So how do we change things? First, start young. And for those who have already established poor eating and exercise habits, you’re going to need to make some lifestyle changes. The good news is, there’s plenty of help.
Read the full 225 cover story. Send your comments to editor@225batonrouge.com.
