Comments for Good for the Planet, Good for Us at http://www.carectomy.com , comment 0 to 3 out of 3 comments http://www.carectomy.com Wed, 07 Jan 2009 13:00:44 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.carectomy.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=212&Itemid=9#pc_619 You could equally conclude that obesity causes people to not walk as far (which certainly seems more plausible :). But I agree with the conclusion (obviously for other reasons), that the most effective diet plan is to sell your car. The way to test causation is to introduce 'interventions', whereby you change the believed cause and see whether it has an effect. So, for example, if you can find a city where people have switched from cars to PT/bikes in a short period of time and show that health has improved, you could make a stronger claim, or alternatively, a plce where health went down the tubes as a result of a large mode-shift away from PT. I do not know of any strong examples of the former, but perhaps shanghai is a good example of the latter? Even better if you have a comparable experiment in the opposite direction: a place where obesity increased for other reasons, and a mode shift occurred. Perhaps Samoans, whose weight is a sign of social standing (sitting?) have changed their mode in the last 100 years, but not had a change in average BMI. - njh Sat, 17 May 2008 17:15:09 +0100 http://www.carectomy.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=212&Itemid=9#pc_188 The relationship is linear, you're just looking at the data wrong. Look at it as % walk, cycle, public transport vs. %obesity: http://theheards.org/stephen/images/obesity.png and you can linearly graph the data with a R-squared value of 77%, which is really good for real world data. - Stephen Sat, 19 Jan 2008 16:58:35 +0100 http://www.carectomy.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=212&Itemid=9#pc_185 Just because there's a correlation, it doesn't necessarily mean there's a fact; I could draw a graph of pirates against global temperatures, and use it to "prove" that a decline in the pirate population is the cause of global warming. Having said that though, I agree with what you've said. Keep up the good work! :) - saxsux Sat, 19 Jan 2008 09:54:20 +0100