Researchers have used Google Street View to study hundreds of elements of the built environment, including buildings, green spaces, pavements and roads, and how these elements relate to each other and influence coronary artery disease in people living in these neighborhoods.
“Well, fair enough, but we already know the miasma caused by fetid odors is what causes illness, not to mention the spontaneous generation causing all sorts of parasites to rise from the dust” -some guy in 1256
I’m not trying to be mean to you, but this type of subject and analysis is just at a different kind of “level” of research than the very basic cause-> effect observational type of science. We can isolate out factors you’ve mentioned (such as air quality, diet, etc) and still look around at purely built environment factors and see how much it impacts health. “We’ve run the numbers and determined that having a sidewalk outside of your house lowers your lifetime health expenditures by $1230, and we can extrapolate that data to give to cities so they can make better decisions on how they plan housing areas” is a pretty huge ability to have. And that’s an “obvious” kind of result! Maybe they find a correlation between having a biodeverse lawn and longevity/health! We simply do not know, and this tech lets us get a bit closer.