Posts Tagged ‘exercise’

Behaviors matter for helping people reduce health risks, perhaps more than weight outcomes. This rule of thumb is useful, because people have more direct control over their behaviors than they have over their weight. Good news from the REGARDS study is that they’ve found three behaviors that indeed matter more than weight in preventing another […]

Imaginary pets to reduce childhood obesity bring a new meaning to healthy imaginations. A group of researchers from the University of Georgia have just published a controlled study showing that virtual pets can help promote physical activity in children compared to a control group of children who received all of the same types of interventions, […]

Active couch potatoes — people who sit for hours daily, but still get enough exercise — are living a common lifestyle that puts them at risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and death. Dale Bond opened the annual Weight Management Symposium of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics in St Louis yesterday with a compelling […]

Finding the steps that count for keeping excess weight off have been depressingly elusive. Anyone who has struggled with obesity can tell you that they’ve lost hundreds of pounds over the years, only to see them come back later. They’ll tell you that the real challenge for defeating obesity is to find a strategy for […]

Women with obesity only get one hour of exercise per year! That’s the sensational headline that some ordinarily respectable media outlets plucked from an obscure statistic in a methods study this week. Examiner.com gets credit for calling the foul. In fact, the study at the center of these sensational headlines was designed to validate a […]

Sitting and other sedentary behaviors are becoming more and more clearly associated with serious health risks. A new study published this week found that the odds of a disability in adults 60 and older goes up by almost half for each hour spent daily in sedentary activities. Dorothy Dunlop and colleagues used data from 2286 […]

Injuries and obesity are intertwined in three ways that recent research illustrates. Obesity increases the risk of injuries. Multiple studies have recently documented a significantly increased risk of injuries for people with obesity. Risk of occupational injuries were shown to be 20% higher in one recent study. Although elevated risks for many types of injuries […]

A growing body of research shows that being inactive as well as being active affects your brain in profound ways. Here are three effects worth noting. Promoting Cognitive Function in Youth. In children and adolescents, physical activity appears to promote better thinking abilities and better performance in school. A new study in Psychoneuroendocrinology adds to […]

Physical activity is a subject that can stir up a civilized conflict among obesity researchers and the current issue of the International Journal of Epidemiology has done just that. With a provocative analysis of physical activity’s role in obesity, Amy Luke and Richard Cooper inspired five more commentaries from distinguished experts on the subject. Here’s […]

Urban sprawl has repeatedly been linked to obesity, but the link to causation remains tenuous. An article of faith in obesity prevention is that the physical, built environment is a key tool for reversing the obesity epidemic. The Institute of Medicine captured this thinking in Strategy 1-1 of their landmark 2012 report, Accelerating Progress in […]