Friday, October 23, 2009

Inactivity Not the Main Cause of Obesity


Image by irum

Well, there goes my primary excuse for chubbiness.

Dang.

I have had the mother of all excuses for schlepping around in elastic waist pants for the past six years - autoimmune fatigue. I don't want to spend all of my energy resources on the treadmill. And, as everyone knows, lack of exercise is the major cause of overweight issues, right?

This study presented at the 2009 European Congress on Obesity states otherwise. You can read this excerpt and more, here, on Medscape.
The amount of food Americans eat has been increasing since the 1970s, and that alone is the cause of the obesity epidemic in the US today [1]. Physical activity--or the lack thereof--has played virtually no role in the rising number of expanding American waistlines, according to research presented at the 2009 European Congress on Obesity in Amsterdam last week.... "Americans have been eating more; the USDA data clearly show this. But US epidemiological data shows that physical-activity levels haven't really changed all that much. So I think we have to be much more focused on the energy-intake side of the energy-balance equation in understanding what the drivers of obesity are and also in working out what the solutions are," Swinburn commented. "We still need to continue to promote increases in physical activity, because exercise has a lot of positive physiologic benefits, but our level of expectation about the impact of physical activity on weight gain has to be a bit more tempered."

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