Big news today – Canada and Australia just released the world’s first 24-hour movement guidelines for pre-school aged kids.  The Open Access journal BMC Public Health has a full special issue devoted to the guidelines. These guidelines integrate guidelines for physical activity, sedentary behaviour, and sleep.  These were previously covered by separate guidelines (e.g. Canada had one set of PA guidelines, and another set of SB guidelines), which is a bit artificial – imagine if…

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Today’s article comes from Dr Stephanie Prince Ware.  More information on Dr Prince Ware can be found at the bottom of this post.  Her recent paper on correlates of sedentary behaviour in adults can be found at the following link: Prince SA, Reed JL, McFetridge C, Tremblay MS, Reid RD. Correlates of sedentary behaviour in adults: a systematic review. Obes Rev 2017;18(8):915-935. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28524615 Background As adults, we spend far too much time being sedentary; in…

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Last week I came across a fascinating paper by my friend and colleague Dr Richard Larouche. Richard used the Canadian Health Measures Survey (a large, nationally representative survey) to look at the relationship between outdoor play and physical activity in Canadian kids aged 7-14 years.  From the paper: Each additional hour spent outdoors per day was associated with 7.0 more minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, 762 more steps, and 13 fewer minutes of sedentary time.…

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Today’s post comes from Dr Jennifer Copeland, and Dr Shilpa Dogra.  More information on the authors can be found at the bottom of this post. We often hear about the health consequences of excessive screen time in children, and too much sitting among adults working in office settings. But what about older adults? People over the age of 60 face unique health challenges, such as age-associated declines in physical and cognitive function; prolonged periods of…

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To date, countless epidemiological studies have shown that as you move from a normal weight (BMI = 18.5-24.9 kg/m2) towards overweight (BMI = 25-29.9kg/m2) and obesity (BMI ≥ 30 kg/m2) the risk of many diseases increases exponentially. Does this imply that every individual carrying excess weight is guaranteed to develop diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, or some other disease? Although this belief prevails, the cumulative research suggests the answer to the above question is a resounding…

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This summer I saw an explosion of discussion on Twitter concerning an article on the website Mom.me, titled “To the Parents Who Give Their Kids iPads in Restaurants“.  The article was a letter from author Amy Freeman to the parents she had seen letting their kids use iPads in a restaurant. To the couple seated beside me at that bistro last week: I nearly stopped to talk to you as I left the restaurant but…

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Travis’ Note: Today’s post comes from colleague and frequent contributor Dr Allana LeBlanc.  You can find more on Allana at the bottom of this post. If you’re not familiar with current definitions for sedentary time, or screen time, have a look at the consensus project by the Sedentary Behaviour Research Network here. Sedentary behavior (especially screen time) has been compared to everything from cigarettes to serial killers and in the world of health fads, it’s…

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Tell me if this scenario is familiar to you: Its 6:30pm and you and your significant other just came home, both tired and famished. You check the fridge to realize you don’t really have the ingredients to make a decent and relatively quick meal. Yes, you know you should have thought of this before, but laundry took precedence over groceries the night before. So you schlep over to the local grocer to pick up a few…

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Today’s post comes from Drs Annemarie Koster and Julianne van der Berg.  For more information on their work, please see the bottom of this post. Doing desk work, watching TV, commute. In daily life sitting is the most common behaviour. Unfortunately, sitting has been indicated as the new smoking, meaning that the current sedentary lifestyle has a highly negative impact on health. For example, we previously showed that more time spend in a sedentary position was…

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Today’s post comes from Dr Katrien Wijndaele, University of Cambridge, UK. More information on Dr Wijndaele can be found at the bottom of this post. Excessive leisure screen time, including TV viewing, is highly prevalent in a large proportion of adults on a daily basis, without signs of decline (3, 6). It is also the type of sedentary behaviour most strongly and consistently associated with the development of chronic disease and premature mortality (4, 8). Reducing…

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