It’s official: sitting at your desk all day is making you fat, according to a new Canadian study.
Researchers at the University of Montreal compared eating and exercise habits of people in 2004 to behaviour in the 1970s and found that despite eating more healthily and exercising more these days, we are still getting larger.
“People eat better and exercise more today than they did in the 1970s, yet obesity rates continue to rise,” lead researcher Carl-Étienne Juneau said in a media release.
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Juneau and his team wrote in the journal Preventive Medicine that one of the big changes in the last 30 years is that we have become less active in our work and that this, at least in part, is responsible for the rise in obesity, MyHealthNewsDaily reported.
As a rise in leisure-time physical activities has not curbed weight gain, the researchers suggested several ways to incorporate more physical activity into the working day.
These include:
taking a walk during a work break;
taking the stairs instead of the lift; and
participating in group exercise to increase motivation.
The researchers studied health information from hundreds of thousands of Canadians. They found that obesity rates increased nearly 10 percentage points between 1978 and 2004.
Their findings support a 2005 study published in the journal Science, which found that obese people typically sit for two hours more a day than slimmer people.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 61 percent of Australians are overweight or obese.
Your say: What do you think of this study? What do you think are the main factors contributing to people being overweight? Share you thought below.
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