February 24, 2023 — The headlines make us dizzy. “For a longer life, afternoon exercise may be best,” says the Washington Post. “Morning Workouts May Lower Your Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke,” according to Verywell Health. However, BBC offers yet another view with a headline saying, “Best exercise time may differ for men and women.” Despite the wild variations […]
February 17, 2023 — NAFLD – the accumulation of fat in the liver without excessive alcohol use – is one of the key reasons that obesity is a real and chronic disease. It is one of the common complications of obesity, and it is rising in parallel with obesity – most disturbingly in children. Of course, losing weight is […]
January 14, 2023 — What exactly is a healthy lifestyle? If you dig into a certain corner of public health research, you are likely to come up with healthy patterns of eating, physical activity, sleep, and stress management as the answer. But Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of Fit Nation, has a different answer for you. Fitness culture defines a […]
December 22, 2022 — More 50 years ago, John Cleese ran the Ministry of Silly Walks for a skit on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. He interviewed a grant applicant who had a silly walk and told Cleese that “with government backing I could make it very silly.” Now this little exercise has made it from the Ministry of Silly […]
December 17, 2022 — Do angels dancing on the head of a pin get good exercise? We’ll have to get back to you on that one. But we can say that thinking about the value of exercise for overcoming obesity is worthwhile. In the International Journal of Obesity over the last few weeks an excellent conversation about this has […]
December 9, 2022 — We have four levels in our home – three sets of stairs to climb. So this new study in Nature Medicine yesterday definitely has our attention. Digging into observational activity monitor data from the UK Biobank, Emmanuel Stamatakis and colleagues from all over the world found that short bursts of vigorous activity – like quickly […]
November 30, 2022 — Some of the questions we encounter here come with a lot of ambiguity, but this is not one of them. The U.S. is killing more people who are physically active – pedestrians and cyclists – than any other wealthy country. Clearly, this is not good. Without a doubt, this gives the U.S. a failing grade […]
November 28, 2022 — How important is the social dimension of physical activity? Recent modeling research published in PLOS One suggests that it’s critical. Ensela Mema and colleagues developed a mathematical model to estimate both social and non-social influences on physical activity across the population. They found that social influences were critical for maintaining physical activity or reducing sedentary […]
October 19, 2022 — The second day of the epic meeting on obesity causes at the Royal Society in London came round to the subject that preoccupies almost everyone – food and physical activity. One thing is certain. This is a pair of subjects that evokes strong passions, but the strength of the data often does not match the […]
October 12, 2022 — In a typical day, most people really don’t move around that much. The simplest way of quantifying this is by counting steps and the average for an American adult is between three and four thousand per day. The default goal for improving on this became 10,000 steps – probably because an early pedometer called the […]
