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Notes -
When I lived in Eugene for a few months in 2008, it certainly didn't seem to be particularly fatter than any comparable European city, save that there were slightly more of morbidly obese megafatties going around.
When the left talks about fatness being caused by society rather than the individual, well, one of the things is what the society might be able to do to try to get people be more athletic, such as the cities maintaining bike trails, hiking trails, running trails, parks and climbing gyms. They don't just spring out from thin air, after all - I guess that there would be a possibiliy for private ones, too (climbing gyms, certainly), but the others are a pretty classic case of things that localities do on public money.
When the right bangs on about private responsibility, it is, on one hand, just phrasing something that is self-evident and, on the other hand, does not seem to have the required effect; you just get fatties who recognize they're fundamentally at fault for their fatness, and then... just keep on being fat, as a group (obviously there are numerous individual cases where getting some tough love helps make life choices).
Which is why I think, inasmuch as we aren't going to eliminate deductions and go to a flat tax, we should have tax deductions for fitness and sporting expenses and equipment. For the simple reason that these are good things that we want to encourage.
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They were intended as an example of one of the healthy cities, not the fat cities! And yeah, those fit cities still have the weird morphology of Amerifats that simply doesn't exist in Europe to any appreciable degree. The median is just much more similar to a normal European city and the athletic and fit tail of the distribution is both wide and long.
I certainly prefer the Blue environments in terms of the buildout, that's why I selected one to live in. If I had my druthers, my city would continue to improve multiuse paths and cycling infrastructure while implementing more and more traffic-calming to slow the speed of vehicles. At the end of the day, I prefer the Blue policy solutions to obesity and the Red messaging on obesity.
Just to be clear, I didn't try to imply it was a fat city - just commented on the basis of my own experience.
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