Chances are you spent a great deal of time looking for the right place to live. You checked out the schools, the crime rate, the property taxes. Maybe you even visited the property at different times of the day or week, as the experts tell you to do.

However, there is one thing that most people don't check, and that is whether or not the neighborhood they are picking promotes a healthy lifestyle.

This is not something that can be measured by a simply walking around the neighborhood and observing. Rather, it's a cluster of data points that shows, in ways we couldn't previously measure, just how much your town, neighborhood or street affects your overall health and longevity.

And now, an increasing number of health and planning experts say that too many of our neighborhoods are making us sick, contributing to ADD, high blood pressure, cancer, heart disease, lung disease and diabetes.

The No. 1 reason is because these neighborhoods hinder physical activity and force us to drive everywhere.

In 1986, the average 5-foot-4 Illinoisan was less than 10 percent overweight. In 2007, that same average was 20 to 24 percent overweight. Nationwide, one in five children are now obese.

Can't we just blame video games, television and high fructose corn syrup? Possibly, but you may have to add your neighborhood to the mix, particularly if you live in a new subdivision.

Most older neighborhoods have intersecting streets that lead to useful destinations like schools, church, parks or shopping. You can leave your house on foot or on a bike and get where you need to go.

But newer neighborhoods have spaghetti-like twists of streets that go nowhere except back to the starting point. They don't have connecting side streets because conventional wisdom says that would cause too much cut-through traffic. New neighborhoods are isolated pods feeding out onto wide, fast-moving streets that are dangerous for bicyclists and pedestrians.

It all sounded like a good idea at the time they were built, but decades into this new lifestyle, said presenters at a Kane County Board workshop, "Smart Growth is Healthy Living," we are seeing the negative effects on our health.

Here's a telling set of questions, suggested one presenter, Dr. Richard Jackson, chairman of the environmental Health Sciences Department at UCLA and co-author of Urban Sprawl and Public Health (2004, Island Press): When you were a child, how did you get to school? Probably, you walked. Now that you are a parent yourself, how does your child get to school? Statistically, your child gets a ride.

Today's suburban children get a ride everywhere -- to music lessons and scouts, to school, to church, to a friend's house. A generation ago, children got themselves to those events and played outside in the neighborhood. Today they are more likely to be bored because they are waiting for someone to drive them to a play date.

Millennium families are afraid to let their children go anywhere under their own steam. We are fearful of bad guys, traffic and the weather, and if none of those things is a problem, we think we don't have enough time to walk.

Let me describe a neighborhood in my town. It was built in the 1990s and features the usual upscale homes with cedar siding and three-car garages. One side of the neighborhood backs onto a busy street. Across that street are lots of destinations -- a 7-11, a Burger King, a library, a high school and a YMCA. If you had a good arm, you could throw a baseball from the backyards to any one of those places. Yet every single resident of that neighborhood will get in a car and drive across the street to access them.

Why? Well for one thing, they probably would not survive a walk across the street. There is no stoplight, pedestrian bump-out or marked crosswalk. And there is a lot of traffic because, frankly, the residents in this part of town don't walk anywhere. They drive, even to a destination 200 feet away. And they complain about the traffic.

They're hardly alone. Compared to 1969, today's Americans drive 88 percent farther to shop, says Jackson, and 137 percent more for errands. "And the average mother today drives 75 minutes a day chauffeuring her children."

The more time we spend in a car the fatter we are, Jackson says. "We think obesity is a personal decision without realizing how much of it is out of our hands."

Even if you are not obese, the lack of activity is not good for your health. A 2004 study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine indicates that even slim women were 55 percent more likely to die young if they were sedentary rather than active.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has gotten involved in the healthy community movement. Children need safe neighborhoods, communities and buildings that promote physical activity every day, the association says, and schools, families and after-school care should all promote healthy activity and food choices.

But what can you do? It's tough to retro-fit a place that was built more for cars than for people, but here are a few actions to help you take back your neighborhood, lower your blood pressure and have happier, healthier children:

••Streets too wide and full of fast-moving cars? Get your neighbors organized, or coordinate with your homeowners association, and start parking cars along the street. Narrowed streets have slower traffic.

••Do you believe your streets are dangerous for bicycling? Add one of those long-poled flags to the back of your bike -- and wear a helmet. Meanwhile, lobby your community leaders for marked bike lanes.

••Pick one destination that is within a mile and walk it. No time? Plan ahead. Then make it a habit.

••Talk to your alderman or a community official about adding pedestrian islands in the middle of busy streets. They make crossing wide lanes of traffic a lot safer.