Dallas-Fort Worth area is 47th ? out of 50 ? in survey of community ...

The American College of Sports Medicine has issued its 2012 American Fitness Index, a comprehensive look at health and fitness in the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas.

Dallas comes wheezing in at No. 47 ? down from 39th a year ago.

(Technically, it?s the ?Dallas?Fort Worth?Arlington Metropolitan Statistical Area,? a term used by the U.S. Census Bureau to describe the 12-county region consisting of Dallas County; Tarrant County; the eight counties that touch one or both of them; plus Hunt and Delta counties to the east.)

No. 1 in the survey, for the second year in a row, was the Minneapolis-St.Paul area.

At the bottom of the pile, for the second year in a row, was Oklahoma City.

Austin was the healthiest Texas city, ranked No. 10 in the United States.

San Antonio (42) and Houston (45) both fared slightly better than the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

The full 128-page report can be dowloaded here. I?ve pulled the summary pages for the Dallas area and included them below.

The survey examined dozens of ?personal? and ?community? health indicators, including diet, exercise, smoking, chronic disease rates, availability of parks and athletic fields, school policies regarding physical education, access to health care ? even the percentage of residents who bike or walk to work. (The D-FW region, predictably, fared extremely poorly in that category.)

Here?s a full explanation of the methodology, which the American College of Sports Medicine developed in conjunction with the?Indiana University School of Family Medicine.

The video at the end of this posting is from the American College of Sports Medicine. It discusses the survey and what communities can do to improve the health and fitness of their residents.

The survey was paid for with a grant from the WellPoint Foundation, the philanthropic arm of WellPoint Inc., a provider of health-care coverage affiliated with the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.

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Dallas Health and Fitness Index

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