Nursefriendly.com: Physical Inactivity

Sunday, February 20, 2011

By Kristina Fiore, Staff Writer, MedPage Today
Published: February 20, 2011

Southerners and folks from Appalachia appear to be the biggest couch potatoes in the U.S., according to a CDC report.

In the majority of counties in those regions, more than 29% of adults reported getting no exercise other than physical activity performed for their regular job. When compared with existing maps of other CDC data, counties with the lowest levels of physical activity also had the greatest prevalence of obesity and diabetes.

The new exercise data come from the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) from 2004-2008, which used self-reported data from state-based adult telephone surveys and 2007 census information. The BRFSS survey asks participants if they do any physical activity or exercise outside the workplace.

However, the agency wanted to paint a larger picture of physical activity in the U.S., and synthesized the survey response numbers with stats and maps showing patterns of obesity and diabetes -- which can be found on a special page on the CDC's website.

via medpagetoday.com

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Thursday, January 13, 2011

Inactivity Is Harmful, Even With Trips to the Gym - NYTimes.com

Many of us sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, and then go home and head for the couch to surf the Web or watch television, exchanging one seat and screen for another. Even if we try to squeeze in an hour at the gym, is it enough to counteract all that motionless sitting?

A mounting body of evidence suggests not.

Increasingly, research is focusing not on how much exercise people get, but how much of their time is spent in sedentary activity, and the harm that does.

The latest findings, published this week in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, indicate that the amount of leisure time spent sitting in front of a screen can have such an overwhelming, seemingly irreparable impact on one’s health that physical activity doesn’t produce much benefit.

The study followed 4,512 middle-aged Scottish men for a little more than four years on average. It found that those who said they spent two or more leisure hours a day sitting in front of a screen were at double the risk of a heart attack or other cardiac event compared with those who watched less. Those who spent four or more hours of recreational time in front of a screen were 50 percent more likely to die of any cause. It didn’t matter whether the men were physically active for several hours a week — exercise didn’t mitigate the risk associated with the high amount of sedentary screen time.

via well.blogs.nytimes.com

Click on the nytimes.com link to read the full article.