Posts Tagged ‘physical activity’

We wait for it every day. That magic moment when our fitness band goes nuts with good vibrations to tell us that we’ve crossed the magic threshold of 10,000 steps for the day. But if you dig into it, you can easily learn that the 10,000 step benchmark is more arbitrary than magic. And new […]

Can we please retire the mantra of making the healthy choice the easy choice? It’s a great concept. Maybe it’s even a good marketing tagline…if you’re a food marketer. But for reducing obesity, it seems more and more like Eat-Less-Move-More version 2.0. Rather than pointing fingers at people for making “unhealthy choices,” we’ve moved to […]

Isn’t dealing with excess weight already hard enough? Now, researchers from Japan want us to walk and chew gum and lose weight all at once. In a randomized controlled trial, Susumu Kanno and colleagues recently showed that walking and chewing gum causes people to burn more fat than just walking without the gum. The authors […]

Another solution to obesity popped up in the headlines today. “Student Loses 115 Lbs. by Walking to High School Every Day,” says People magazine. That headline happened to coincide with the release of a new study in BMC Public Health. A press release from the University of Cambridge tells us: Children who regularly walk or […]

The prospect of losing your mental edge is scary enough to make people open their wallets for scams. The Luminosity brain training scam earned its marketers a $50-million judgment for false advertising. Right now, FTC is going after scammers selling a jellyfish supplement to keep your brain sharp. But we don’t need the scams to […]

It’s basic physiology and it’s the bane of obesity care – weight regain. When a person loses weight, homeostasis kicks in. The body protects itself by working really hard to restore its reserves of energy in fat tissue. But the lore of weight loss holds that a person can fight that off with physical activity […]

In case you missed it, the World Health Organization just came out with a bold new recommendation. Kids should sit less and play more. Glowing rectangles? Before they’re two, kids simply don’t need them. Over two, more than an hour per day is too much and less is best. Kids need plenty of time for […]

Killer traffic. It’s a hyperbolic complaint. Or then again, maybe not. Consider these two factoids. One, the WHO tells us that road accidents are now the biggest killers of young people around the world. And two, new research presented at the 26th European Congress on Obesity tells us that the risk of death is a […]

The consumer market for activity trackers is shrinking. Smartwatches have put a dent in the sales trend for Fitbit’s old bread and butter product – the fitness tracker. Of course, the company has responded with a pretty good smartwatch to compete with Apple. But a big part of its strategy is to make a buck by helping […]

As the prevalence of obesity has grown, so has our fixation on programmed physical activity. If you’ve got the money and the time, odds are your kids are participating in youth sports. But are organized sports enough to ensure childhood fitness? A Study in Homeschooled Youth A new study of homeschooled youth suggests that organized […]