physical activity
cmonforton | November 3, 2016Kim Krisberg and I were in Denver this week at APHA’s 2016 Annual Meeting and Exposition — the year’s largest gathering of public health professionals. In our blog posts from earlier this week (here, here, here) we recapped just a few of the scientific sessions and events from the week. Below are some highlights from the final day at the meeting. You can read many more courtesy of the APHA Annual Meeting Blog.
Public health in the headlines: How does news coverage impact health?: Media. It’s everywhere these days. So, it’s not surprising that it impacts our health and behaviors as well as our…
dr. dolittle | August 5, 2016I am very excited to report that the American Physiological Society in partnership with the The Physiological Society held a joint meeting from July 29-31 in Dublin, Ireland. The keynote lectures were given by Dr. Jerry Friedman from Rockefeller University and Dr. W Jon Lederer from the University of Maryland.
Dr. Friedman spoke about his research on obesity and how genetic factors might play a role. In fact, his team was responsible for discovering the obesity (ob) gene in mice in 1994 and identifying the similar gene in humans. The gene encodes the now iconic hormone leptin, which is…
cmonforton | November 3, 2015Kim Krisberg and I are with our public health colleagues this week at the 143rd annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA). Thousands of researchers, practitioners, and advocates from across the U.S. and the globe have gathered in Chicago to swap best practices, share new science and organize for healthier communities. Here are some highlights from yesterday’s events courtesy of the APHA Annual Meeting Blog.
The tipping point: On our way to reducing gun violence: Public health advocates can agree that shootings are a huge health issue for the more than 33,000 victims of…
kkrisberg | June 2, 2015Family-friendly policies in the workplace are a good thing, but as Claire Cain Miller writes in The New York Times, there’s also a risk that such policies end up hurting the very workers they’re intended to help.
Miller starts off her piece with international examples of family-friendly policies, such as a law in Chile that requires employers provide child care for working mothers and a policy in Spain that gives the parents of young children the option of working part time. The unintended results of each example? All women — whether they have children or not — get paid less and face fewer…
kkrisberg | February 6, 2015It’s a persistent conundrum in the field of public health — how can we open people’s minds to positively receiving and acting on health information? Previous research has found that combining health tips with messages of self-affirmation may be a particularly effective strategy, but researchers weren’t entirely sure how self-affirmation worked at the neurological level. Now, a new study has found that self-affirmation’s effects on a particular region of the brain may be a major key to behavior change.
In even simpler terms, researchers involved this new study — which examined how self-…
kkrisberg | January 30, 2015It’s not unusual for studies on community walkability to face the perplexing question of self-selection. In other words, people who already like to walk end up moving to walkable communities and so those communities naturally have higher physical activity rates. In even simpler terms, it’s about the person, not the environment. However, a new study finds that walkable community design does influence healthy behavior — even among people with no preference for walking in the first place.
Published in December in a supplement of the Preventive Medicine journal, the study examined changes in…
lborkowski | January 28, 2015Evidence has been accumulating about the toll of prolonged sitting, and a new systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows just how harmful sedentary habits can be. University of Toronto researcher Aviroop Biswas and colleagues performed a quantitative meta-analyses on 41 studies that measured adults’ sedentary time and reported health outcomes directly associated with death, disease, or use of healthcare services.
Their findings won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been following this research. “Greater sedentary time was found to be positively…
kkrisberg | September 4, 2014During the past year, not one state experienced a decrease in adult obesity rates and, in fact, six states are home to even higher rates than before, according to a new report released today.
This morning, Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) released “The State of Obesity: Better Policies for a Healthier America,” finding that adult obesity rates rose in Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, New Jersey, Tennessee and Wyoming. Mississippi and West Virginia tied to take the unenviable top spot, both with an adult obesity rate of 35.1 percent, while Colorado is…
kkrisberg | June 20, 2014Building safe ways for children to bike and walk to school is more than just a way of encouraging kids to go outside and get active. According to a new study, it’s also an investment that reaps millions of dollars in societal gains. In other words, smart walking and biking infrastructures for kids make good economic sense.
Published in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health, the study examined the cost-effectiveness of Safe Routes to School (SRTS) infrastructure in just one city — New York City. SRTS was initially enacted in 2005 as part of a massive federal transportation…
kkrisberg | April 4, 2014When Brian Castrucci sees signs up at local retailers offering discounts to police officers and firefighters, he thinks: Why not public health too?
“How do we better brand ourselves as those who protect and serve,” asks Castrucci, chief program and strategy officer at the de Beaumont Foundation, which supports a variety of projects aimed at strengthening the nation’s public health system. “I’ve never been a victim of crime, but I still value the police. I’ve never had a fire in my home, but I still value the fire department. …I want people to value prevention. I want people to know (public…
kkrisberg | March 28, 2014This year’s County Health Rankings once again illustrate why geography and good health go hand-in-hand. They’re also a poignant reminder that there may be no better way to improve health for all than by focusing on the social determinants of health.
Released earlier this week, the 2014 County Health Rankings compare each state’s counties on 29 factors that impact health, from tobacco use to high school graduation rates to access to healthy food choices. In examining the differences between counties, the report found that the least healthy counties were home to twice the premature death rate,…
cmonforton | March 10, 2014It started with a yawn. Then a conversation about whether daylight savings time (DST) begins too early in the year. "On Monday, kids will be going to school in the dark and with one hour less sleep," said my mom. My brother remarked: “There are more accidents in the days immediately following the time change.” I was skeptical about his car accident remark, but didn’t want to open my mouth without some facts. Here’s some of what I learned with just a minute of searching on PubMed.
Researchers with Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences assembled data from U.S. fatal automobile…
cmonforton | February 11, 2014Alpine skiiers Heidi Kloser, 21, (US); Rok Perko, 28, (Slovenia); Brice Roger, 23, (France); and Maggie Voisin, 15, (US), are some of the athletes whose dreams of an Olympic medal have come to an end. All suffered serious injuries during training or qualifying runs, which will prevent them from competing for medals. Kloser, Perko, Roger, and Voisin have something else in common. Their injuries are now part of the 2014 Olympic’s official injury and illness surveillance system.
The International Olympic Committee initially established the system for the 2004 summer games in Athens. It was…
lborkowski | June 21, 2013by Kim Krisberg
When most of us pass by a new high-rise or drive down a new road, we rarely think: Did the builders and planners consider my health? However, a new report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency offers evidence that certain types of land use and transportation decisions can indeed limit the human health and environmental impacts of development.
Released in mid-June, the publication is a revised and updated version of an EPA report initially published in 2001. Agency officials said the report was particularly timely as the nation's built environments are quickly changing…
cmonforton | November 28, 2012It's no secret that the U.S. has a weight problem. Nearly 36% of U.S. adults are obese and another 33% are overweight, with respective body mass indices of 30 or higher and 25 to 29.9. Strategies to address this public health problem rely heavily on individuals' changing their behavior, such as increasing physical activity and reducing calorie intake. These interventions are easier said than done, and may not be making a dent in the U.S. obesity epidemic. A result analysis suggests that by 2030, 51% of the U.S. population will be obese.
A new report explores the potential links between…
lborkowski | June 7, 2012Via Ezra Klein, here's a striking infographic from the Bipartisan Policy Center comparing what makes us healthy to how we as a nation spend our health dollars:
Infographic from the Bipartisan Policy Center
As it illustrates, behaviors are major contributors to our health status, but a tiny fraction of US health spending goes to encouraging healthy behaviors like physical activity.
The Bipartisan Policy Center report Lots to Lose: How America's Health and Obesity Crisis Threatens our Economic Future offers several recommendations for improving nutrition and physical activity in the US. In…
lborkowski | May 9, 2012The Institute of Medicine has released a new report, Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention: Solving the Weight of the Nation. The committee behind it assessed nearly 800 recommendations that had been previously published, and prioritized those that could have a big impact when undertaken together. They identified five critical areas for change:
environments for physical activity
food and beverage environments
message environments
health care and work environments
school environments
Their goals and corresponding recommendations focus on these environments:
Goal 1: Make physical activity…
lborkowski | May 2, 2012I've written before (here and here) about some of the research that's been demonstrating the importance of avoiding long stretches of sedentary time. (The Sedentary Behavior Research Network has proposed that "sedentary" refer to waking time spent sitting or lying down and expending little energy, while "inactive" refer to people with low levels of overall activity, and I'm using those definitions.) Some of us may feel virtuous for meeting CDC's physical activity guidelines through regular workout sessions, but bouts of aerobic exercise can't completely offset the toll of too much time spent…
lborkowski | April 10, 2012Slate has just started a new series by Tom Vanderbilt called "The Crisis in American Walking: How we got off the pedestrian path." Vanderbilt observes that it's odd to see things like "Campaign to Get America Walking" when ambulation is one of the most natural activities for our species. Reliance on cars seems to be the main culprit in the United States' sad distinction as being the industrialized country where people walk the least. And that's a shame, Vanderbilt explains, because walking has many health benefits:
Here are just some of the benefits, physical, cognitive and otherwise, that it…
lborkowski | October 18, 2011by Kim Krisberg
Mark Martin isn't inclined to sit down and shut up -- well, unless it's on the seat of a bicycle."More people need joy in their lives and there's a real simple way to get it: ride a bicycle," Martin told me. "It's a joyous thing to ride a bike."
The Baton Rouge, La., bicyclist hasn't owned a car in 20 years -- "I just love my bike," he said. In fact, he loves biking so much that he said he was driving people crazy talking about the need for better biking and pedestrian infrastructure in his community. Somebody ought to do something about it, he thought, and so he did.…