Velveth is one beneficiary of a remarkable attempt to tackle obesity. For Oklahoma City has declared war on fat. First the mayor – realising he had become clinically obese just as his hometown was identified by a magazine as one of America’s most overweight cities – challenged his citizens to collectively lose a million pounds. But hitting that target was just the start: this veteran Republican politician then took on the car culture that shaped his nation and asked citizens to back a tax rise to fund a redesign of the state capital around people.
This unleashed an incredible range of initiatives, including the creation of parks, sidewalks, bike lanes and landscaped walking trails across the city. Every school is getting a gym. With the new emphasis on exercise, city officials spent $100 million creating the world’s finest rowing and kayaking centre in a Midwest town with no tradition of the sport beforehand. Overweight people are targeted at home and at work to alter their lifestyles, while data are used to discover the districts with the worst health outcomes so that resources can be poured in to change behaviour.
The experiment is unusual in terms of its ambition, breadth and cost, all of which take it beyond anything being attempted by other American cities in the fight against fat. The battle is being done with, rather than against, the fast food industry and soft drinks manufacturers, relying largely on persuasion instead of coercion through soda bans and sugar taxes. The city has been dubbed “a laboratory for healthy living”. Yet what makes the experiment quite so extraordinary is that it is being attempted in Oklahoma.
