Posts Tagged ‘exercise’

After setting new records for attendance at the YWM2014 national convention in September, the Obesity Action Coalition scored another first in Boston Sunday. Reaching out at ObesityWeek 2014, OAC presented its first local event to an audience of more than a hundred people affected by obesity in Boston with a faculty of top experts in obesity. OAC Chairman […]

Who’s going to complain about Daylight Saving Time when we fall back and get an extra hour of sleep? We won’t. But that doesn’t stop researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine from suggesting that the extra hour of sleep might be a missed opportunity for better public health. How’s that? Well, […]

The read and ride program — started five years ago at Ward Elementary School in Winston-Salem, NC — is boasting some impressive results. After filling up some classrooms with recycled exercise bikes where students can read and ride, the school sees students who participate scoring much higher in reading proficiency than those who don’t. And […]

Standing desks are hot. A new study shows that elementary school children with standing desks were burning more calories than children with seated desks. It’s a well controlled study. So the headlines say ”Standing Desks Effective in the Fight against Childhood Obesity.” Why not? After all, we know that “Your Chair Is Killing You.” Does […]

Opening the second day of YWM2014, James Levine declared, “Your chair is killing you.” He got our attention. He continued with an entertaining and highly understandable review of his research on non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). We learned about his unplanned career as an underwear designer — to provide tools to track NEAT. And we learned about […]

Good intentions for obesity prevention don’t always translate into good outcomes. It’s hard and uncertain work to dig out of the mess of excess obesity we have. That’s why it’s critically important to distinguish between a good idea and a proven intervention for obesity prevention. A new study in Preventive Medicine illustrates this issue quite well. The […]

Does public transit have one more benefit you can add to an already significant list? A new study in The BMJ finds that people who commute to work on public transit have a significantly lower BMI and less body fat than people who drive. This difference — a bit shy of a full BMI point — can’t be […]

A new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine brings out some dangerous generalizations about people who are rich or poor, fit or fat. It starts with generalizations by the investigators that their data can’t really support. Then The Atlantic amplifies it with a provocative headline that straddles a line between condescending and offensive: Rich People Exercise, Poor […]

What does it mean that the world has such an excess of obesity? Is it the consequence of too much food? The wrong kind of food? Too little movement? These questions have no definitive answers. But one more analysis this week attempts to answer them anyway. Published in the American Journal of Medicine, this study examined data […]

While Apple is promising to make your chicken fat go away, some really smart researchers at Brown University have shown that their B-MOBILE smartphone app can work to reduce sedentary time. The current study is the first of its kind to show that a phone application can be an effective intervention to reduce sedentary time. […]