Posts Tagged ‘exercise’

Much work remains to understand what happens when we just sit for extended periods of time. The association between sitting time and health risk has been studied and published many times. A new study published in Obesity provides a reminder that we know little about causality. Pedisic et al analyzed a cohort of more than 30,000 Australians to sort […]

The interaction between gut bacteria, obesity, diet, and physical activity just keeps getting more interesting and complex. New research suggests that physical activity may interact with diet to promote more diverse gut bacteria in athletes, compared to less active controls. Unfortunately, the reporting on this research glossed over the complexity of this three-way interaction. Headlines went […]

The folks at Coke have a new ad on the Web to tell us that it takes 23 minutes on a bike to burn the calories in a can of Coke. It’s not at all clear that they’re helping themselves with this one. We asked a representative sample of adults how the message of this […]

Conventional wisdom gives us an ample supply of mistaken answers to obesity. Roland Sturm, a senior economist with Rand, provides an outstanding accounting of some of these flawed presumptions in a CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. Here are some that he highlights: Disparities Cause Obesity. Some researchers have suggested that rising social and economic […]

A fascinating new study indicates that wild mice were born to run — on an exercise wheel — just for the pure joy of it. Johanna Meijer and Yuri Robbers showed that running on an exercise wheel appeals to mice in the wild just as much as it does to lab mice in a cage. […]

Diabetes after pregnancy is a very real risk for new mothers who have had gestational diabetes. In a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, Wei Bao and colleagues found that after pregnancy, sufficient physical activity can cut the risk of progressing to type 2 diabetes by almost half. As part of the ongoing Diabetes and […]

The list of potential obesity causes seems to grow like kudzu. Why? Well, obesity develops slowly and improves slowly, if at all. Epidemiological studies provide ever more information about associations and some of these analyses are repeated so often that otherwise smart people start equating the link to a causal relationship. Familiarity bias exerts even […]

Exercise treats — short bits of intense physical activity — before meals may help with glycemic control in patients with insulin resistance, a condition that can lead to type 2 diabetes. A small, elegant randomized crossover control study just published online in Diabetologia points to a potentially promising strategy for maximizing the benefit of exercise for people with […]

The USPSTF (Unites States Preventative Services Task Force) has published yet another recommendation for obesity treatment — in draft form. The recommendation is behavioral counseling for people with heart disease risk and excess weight or obesity. Dietitians and other weight management professionals, take note. This will create yet more opportunities to help people with excess weight […]

Some surprising benefits of physical activity fall outside of the steady stream of publications about its impact on obesity, strokes, and heart attacks. Here are three benefits that are quite important on a personal level. Yet they’re often overlooked. Better Skin. Researchers from McMaster University conducted a series of studies on the benefits of physical activity […]