Health promoting community design: a new paradigm to promote healthy and active communities.

Richard Killingsworth explains that we have engineered routine forms of physical activity out of our daily lives, and that this is an important contributor to the obesity epidemic which claims at least 200,000 lives each year in the United States alone. A new field of study is emerging to address this problem, and the American Journal of Health Promotion has launched a new editorial section called "Health Promoting Community Design" to provide a forum to disseminate research in this new area.