Americans Are Not Getting the Message About Exercising More and Sitting Less

Doctors and public health officials have been urging Americans to get more active and try to exercise at least 150 minutes per week at a moderate level, or 75 minutes weekly at a vigorous level. Even if you can’t fit in that much activity, studies show that any exercise is better than none when it comes to health benefits like lowering risk of diabetes, heart disease and obesity. But have all of these messages had an effect? That’s what researchers led by Dr. Wei Bao , an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa, wanted to find out in a recent study. The first guidance for how much exercise adults should be doing for better health came in 2008 with the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. Those guidelines recommended that people exercise 150 minutes each week, and were updated a decade later in 2018. “We were curious about whether the guidelines released in 2008 led to an increase in physical activity over time,” says Bao. Bao and his team analyzed data from a representative sample of more than 27,000 adults in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, an ongoing annual assessment of American’s health, nutrition and exercise status. The resulting paper, published in JAMA Network Open, finds that rates of physical activity rates did not change much between 2007 and 2016. In the 2007-2008 survey, 63% of the participants engaged in the recommended amount of aerobic physical activity, and that share was about...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized embargoed study health sedentary Sitting Source Type: news