8 Ways The Health and Fitness Industry Can Combat Climate Change
The health and fitness industry needs to see that the health of our planet and the people on it are linked.
Our the last 150 years, we have continued to damage the health of our planet.
We’ve put trillions of tons of carbon dioxide and other fossil fuels into the air.
We’ve contaminated our oceans, rivers, and other marine life that are crucial for all life.
We’ve destroyed the quality of our soil.
All of these come at the consequence not just of the long-term health of our planet, but of us.
Whether that’s the higher rates of asthma near highways, the sedentary lifestyles car dependency creates, or the abundance of unhealthy food from soil-destroying cash crops, damaging our planet has also damaged us.
The Health of People and The Planet Are Inseparable
That’s why I believe the health and fitness industry is well-positioned to lead by example in the fight to restore the health of the planet.
We’re obsessed with talking about the importance of movement, of healthy nutrition, yet very rarely do I see our industry making these more accessible to the masses, let alone incorporating “health” to a global scale.
And, we need these changes to be big. Some of these I’ve already written about in my article on 5 Big Ideas to Fight Climate Change.
Here are some questions I’m interested in:
How can we adjust our infrastructure to encourage more movement and less sitting? (Hint: dense, urban fabric where our needs can be met by walking.)
How can we make healthy food more abundant and less expensive? (Hint: by both growing our own food and reshaping our agricultural systems.)
It Requires The Health and Fitness Industry To Think About How Everything is Connected
It requires us to see that the type of housing we live in, how we move from place to place, and where and how we buy food are among the biggest factors in shaping our health.
It’s no coincidence that those who live in places where everything is walkable tend to have better health outcomes. Same for those with more access to fresh food.
In this article, I want to empower everyone in and out of the health and fitness industry to work on solutions where our health and the planet’s intersect.
1) Regenerative Farming
In a sentence, regenerative farming is changing our farming practices to promote soil and ecosystem health.
Currently, the majority of farmland in the US is reserved for massive cash crops like corn and soy. These crops are the base of so much of that packaged garbage that the health and fitness industry (rightly) vilifies.
Yet, while the industry has focused on helping individuals steer clear of processed foods, it rarely discusses how to change the system. Regenerative farming is one such way to help us grow healthier food at bigger scales.
With regenerative farming, we can grow more varied crops, healthier crops, and even involve lifestock all in a sustainable way.
One of the big challenges in popularizing regenerative farming will be changing the way we subsidize food.
You see, farmers already get paid by the government to grow huge amounts of certain crops. Notably, corn and soybeans. I’m not against getting rid of subsidies. We need to support our farmers who feed us all.
However, we should tilt the balance of these subsidies towards healthier fruits and vegetables and regenerative farming practices.
This could mean that the price of salads and other healthy foods could go down, and its production could go up. This would make healthy food a less expensive and easier choice for everyone.
With regards to fighting climate change, regenerative farming puts carbon back into the soil. With all the talk of fancy technologies for “carbon sequestration,” nature has already figured it out.
It employs techniques like crop rotation, no-till farming, and organic methods to promote a sustainable and balanced environment.
Additionally, it enhances soil resilience against extreme weather, helping to mitigate the impacts of climate-related events on food production.
For some of the health benefits of regenerative farming, I really enjoyed this video from LEVELS.
2) Grow Our Own Food + Eat More Local Food
This one also comes from my article on big ideas to fight climate change.
Want to eat more fruits and vegetables? Grow them yourself. For your health, this has obvious benefits.
Growing up in Vermont, where we love our “farm-to-table” meals, eating food that we picked with our own hands felt rewarding and gave me an appreciation for the power of nature.
If you don’t want to do this, join a local CSA, where you get a fresh basket of produce each week.
Decrease Our “Food Miles”
Eating local food means your “food miles” will be close to zero. This is in huge contrast to what we buy at the grocery store, where often what we eat travels hundreds or thousands of miles to get to our plate, accumulating carbon emissions along its route.
3) Build Walkable Infrastructure
In the United States, cities often have a reputation as being worse for our health. But the data bear out the exact opposite. Those who live in cities tend to move more, have better access to better healthcare, and have more access to social connections.
All of these are key indicators of health.
Whether in a city or in more rural areas, we need to start building our infrastructure for people, not for cars.
There are so many interventions for this.
Dense, Mixed-Use Housing
It begins with housing. We need dense, mixed-use housing. What is mixed-use? Well, it means there are multiple uses on the same block. It should have residents, daytime activities, and nighttime activities. A mix of uses.
Wider Sidewalks, Narrower Roads
Pedestrians don’t want to cross eight-lane boulevards. I’ve done this, and in places like California, you often have to sit and wait for 5 minutes just to cross.
Plus, the cars speed by you, and because they’re not used to pedestrians, tend to have less respect for their safety.
Nor do pedestrians want to shoulder kiss the other pedestrians. Make the sidewalks wider and the roads narrower.
Parks Nearby These Walkable Areas
The question of what makes a park useful or not depends A LOT on what’s around it, as Jane Jacobs covers in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. While outside the scope here, intelligently placed and designed parks obviously have health benefits for the whole community.
It also means more green space which can help reduce the risk of flooding (since soil can absorb water.) While key for climate disasters, this is also key to preventing overflowing city sewer systems. In New York, when it rains too much, the city has to discharge untreated sewage (your poop) into the waterways. This is obviously terrible for the health of the waterways. More soil and less concrete mitigate this.
4) Build Bikaeble Infrastructure
While we’re making the roads narrower, let’s replace them with protected bike lanes. Between infrastructure built for walking and options for biking, more people will be more active just as a consequence of their daily activities.
5) Investing in Mass Transit Instead of Highways
Highways themselves also have disastrous effects. I’ve quoted this study in three articles, now, but the rates of Asthma around the Cross Bronx Expressway are drastically higher.
Breathing in fumes is bad too, there’s no question about that. While we’re talking about cars, they’re also the #1 killer of adolescents in America.
While bike lanes and walking are great, we still need transit for longer distances, which is why a divestment in highways should go along with an investment in mass transit.
6) Growing Plants in Our Cities
When I visited Medellín, one of my favorite parts of the city was the amount of plants within the city.
This BBC article sums up the efforts. Over the last few years, the city has planted over 2.5 million plants.
The effect of this has to be to decrease the city temperature by 2 degrees Celsius. As temperatures rise due to climate change, efforts like this should become more popular.
These plants also improve the air quality.
To be honest, many of the traffic-packed areas of Medellín still have really bad air quality. Bad enough to make me want to not walk in many places. So I can’t imagine how it was before they added 2.5 million plants.
7) Growing Bivalves in Our Waterways
The marine equivalent of more plants is the bivalve.
Think of bivalves (like mussels, oysters, and clams) as living water filter machines.
When I lived in New York, I volunteered with a group called The Billion Oyster Project, which works to put oysters back into the New York City waterways.
This is a key initiative to help clean the waters.
An abundance of bivalves in coastal cities can also act as a natural sea wall during storm surges, as explained nicely in this New Yorker piece: The Seas Are Rising. Could Oysters Help?
Reviving oysters and other bivalves all over the world also means they can be a nutritious, inexpensive food source like they once were in New York (although the water is so dirty this will probably take time.
8) Reducing The Use of Plastics
Microplastics in our environment are a huge problem.
Of course, it’s bad for us to consume them, but the real problem is that they infect our oceans.
Once it’s in the ocean, it will damage the health of the beginning of our food chain. Once it’s in, it’s extremely challenging to take it out.
Again, the fitness industry has advocated for the downfalls of plastics due to their health effects. The next step is to take this advocacy to our systems at large and support the reduction of plastic.
Why Don’t You Hear About This on Fitness Instagram and TikTok?
At its core, the state of the health and fitness industry is a reflection of the state of our culture at large. That’s a culture where the health of individuals and the health of both the collective and the planet are separate.
If “health and fitness” meant the health and fitness of everyone, that would include looking more closely at how we grow our food, how we move in our everyday lives, and how we’re fundamentally involved with nature, both on land and in the sea.
It would include conversations about systems and scale.
Right now, the vast majority of the health and fitness industry focuses on how they can help the small number of people who can spend a lot of money to work with them. This excludes the vast majority of humanity.
Participating in the mainstream “health and fitness” culture, like buying gym memberships, supplements, and expensive fresh produce requires an amount of wealth only available to a small percentage of people.
I don’t have answers today to shift the financial incentives of the industry or our society at large.
Today, my call to action is, if you’re in the health and fitness industry and you’re motivated to help us all live healthier, to ponder on this a bit more.
Use your own expertise to brainstorm more climate and health solutions. Consider volunteering some of your time to support these initiatives, or even just start talking to friends and colleagues about how the health of the planet and individuals intersect. That’s exactly what I’m doing here.
Saturdays Are For The Planet
In my newsletter earlier this year, I talked about my “Saturdays Are For The Planet” idea. I’ve been dedicating each of my Saturday mornings to reading and writing about climate change.
I view it as a small sacrifice I can make to help improve the health of our planet, and all its incredible creatures (including humans!)
Maybe this Saturday, set aside a few minutes to read an article, research a topic of interest, or text a friend about something that will help the planet.
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