Vegetation and plant-based shouldn’t just be our diets, it should be something we are immersed with including our cities. There is no shortage of evidence that providing more REAL plants (not that fake plastic decoration garbage everyone seems to be using) in our environment is good for our health.

According to Boston researchers from Boston University found that increasing vegetation in large, metropolitan areas could have prevented somewhere between 34,000 to 38,000 deaths between 2000 to 2019.

Coming to this conclusion, the researchers utilized US census data, mortality data from the CDC, and greenness data from NASA. Using this data, they conducted a health impact study on the effect of increasing vegetation on all-cause mortality among adults older than 65 year old over 35 large US metropolitan areas.

They also found that many cities, particularly in the southern US, has increased their greenness by 2.86% in 2000-2010 and 11.11% from 2010-2019.

Adding more vegetation should be an embedded objective in any sort of land/urban or architectural development. It shouldn’t just be some luxury or aesthetics. When we build things, we need to think about the people and community we developing this for and as such, increasing or maximizing vegetation should be included in all plans.

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health.

P Brochu et al. Benefits of increasing greenness on all-cause mortality in the largest metropolitan areas of the United States within the past two decades. Frontiers in Public Health. DOI:10.3389/fpubh.2022.841936