May 11 2009
Couches Not to Blame for Obesity In U.S.
It seems that couches may not create the human potatoes that sit on them. The search for the reason why humans in the U.S. are getting heavier has led to many proposed causal factors, a sedentary lifestyle being one of them. With technological advance has come many very cool leisure time activities we can enjoy while sitting on our butts. Video games, DVDs and DVR programs, a World Wide Web with a vast and tremendously varied content and ways to interact. Etc.
Yet new research strongly suggests that the rise in obesity can be entirely explained by — surprise, surprise — increased food intake. Who’d a hunk that simply eating and drinking more calories without changing your activity level would cause weight gain?!
Yes, the new research is statistical in nature. Still, merely by looking at the calories of food and drink produced and consumed in this country over the decades researchers actually predicted more weight gain than actually occurred. As the lead author tells it:
“For adults, we predicted that they would be 10.8 kg heavier, but in fact they were 8.6 kg heavier. That suggests that excess food intake still explains the weight gain, but that there may have been increases in physical activity over the 30 years that have blunted what would otherwise have been a higher weight gain,” Swinburn said.
Interesting. Should we take couches and desk chairs out of the line-up of suspects of causal agents in the recent rise in obesity? Maybe. Of course, the furniture we rest upon are accomplices at best. It’s the average American’s lifestyle that should stand before a camera and hold a placard. And a lifestyle consists of many factors.
