Minneapolis-St. Paul, blessed with abundant parkland, has banned smoking, increased its number of farmers' markets and spent several million dollars on preventing chronic diseases.I wish the media would stop publishing these bogus listings which are always based on flawed methodology. Here they looked at such thing as amount of parkland, smoking ban (we have one already in Indy that covers 90% of businesses), number of farmers; markets and how much money is spent on certain programs,to conclude whether an entire metropolitan area is "fit."
It's no wonder it rose to the top of a national "fit city" ranking, while the Indianapolis-Carmel metropolitan area slipped for the third year in a row.
The 10-county area dropped one position to 45th among the top 50 most populous U.S. areas in the American College of Sports Medicine's American Fitness Index. Last year, it tumbled to 44th, from 36th.
The area's ranking is low for many reasons: higher-than-average levels of smoking, physical inactivity, obesity, asthma, cardiovascular disease and poverty, and lower numbers of parks, playgrounds, recreation centers and people using public transportation or bicycling to work.
These listings are all about promoting more taxpayer spending on projects that the authors of the study deem important. The listings are not about gauging the health of a community. If they were doing that they'd do look at weight, blood pressure, life expectancies, diabetes and cancer rates, etc. But hey are facts really important when you have a political agenda to support through bogus ratings that the media will always report without question?