Will Living In A "Healthy City" Somehow Make You Healthy?

According to the latest scientific proof in the form of a magazine list feature, San Francisco is the nation’s healthiest city. Women’s Health surveyed a hundred American cities and ranked them according to life expectancy, obesity, access to health care, incidence of cancer, nutrition, and probably how much money everybody has. How did a wealthy and beautiful city with its own universal health care plan and a population of attractive people who walk everywhere end up at the top of the list? (SELF magazine put out a similar list last month, with San Jose at No. 1 and San Francisco in third place.)

Also, why did Men’s Health put out nearly the same list, but with San Francisco in second place to Boise? More importantly, why is New York nowhere to be found in the Top Ten? Because of winter, probably? Those four or five months when people spend most days inside under blankets with a box of donuts and a case of “winter ale,” that might be taking a toll.

At the very tragic bottom of the list, there’s the usual Deep South town — in this year’s list, it’s Birmingham, Alabama, but it could just as easily be Jackson, Mississippi, which is at 94th place on this list. And the grim poverty and crushed hope of rust belt cities like Detroit (#90), Toledo (#98) and Cleveland (#96) is definitely not making people any healthier, it turns out! The good news is that we will all eventually die, except for Ray Kurzweil, who moved to the Bay Area just to rub it in.

Photo by Eric Molina.