Diet and Exercise Might Not Overcome Too Much Sitting

Eat healthy and get your exercise. It is a straightforward framework for dealing with obesity. But that simple prescription of diet and exercise for preventing obesity overlooks a critical factor – the prolonged sitting time very often required by work and school.

A recent study of data from young adult twins showed that sitting time has a distinct effect on BMI and cardiometabolic health that diet and exercise alone may not fully overcome.

Multiple Factors at Work

Ryan Bruellman is a doctoral candidate at UC Riverside and lead author of this study in PLOS One. He explains:

“Though unhealthy diet and smoking play a major role in increasing BMI, the full-point jump we saw in the data was just due to sitting alone.

“People don’t often think about how much time they spend sitting, especially in their 20s and 30s, but it matters.”

In short, these factors do not work in isolation and all of them are important. In their paper, Bruellman et al explain that multiple factors are important and they interact with each other in ways that require further research:

“Healthy eating remains an important lifestyle factor in conjunction with exercise, as decades of health science have shown. How diet may interact and influence sitting behaviors will require future investigation.”

Diet-Related Disease?

Too often we see that simplistic label of a “diet-related disease” applied to obesity. While the label is not completely false, it is definitely misleading. Food does not explain the whole problem and food will not fix it. When a self-serving politician says “giving good food, three meals a day to every man, woman and child in our country, could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemic overnight,” they are flatly wrong.

Food, physical activity of all kinds, technology, endocrine-disrupting chemicals and drugs, trauma, and stress are all important factors that contribute to obesity. Neglecting any of them by labeling obesity as a “diet-related disease” is a serious mistake.

Treatment Requires More Than Diet and Exercise

For decades now, people have been chasing better diets as a total solution for overweight and obesity. While there is no doubt that a healthy diet is important for good health, it does not, by itself, cure obesity in very many people. In Medscape recently, obesity medicine physician Yoni Freedhoff explained succinctly that treating obesity requires more than just diet and exercise:

“No, diet and exercise are not better than drugs for obesity.

“They’re literally not better. Idealistically, sure, but literally not. And there’s really no debate. Meaning there’s never been a reproducible diet and exercise intervention that has led to anywhere near the average weight lost by those taking obesity medications.

“Furthermore, when it comes to the durability of weight lost, the gulf between outcomes with diet and exercise vs obesity medications is even more dramatic.”

Maybe it is time to let go of the simplistic prescription of diet and exercise to cure all our ills from obesity.

Click here for the study by Bruellman et al and here for further reporting on it.

Backlit Keyboard, photograph by Colin, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

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December 9, 2024