Post #100! Physical Activity as Medicine, U of T Symposium
16:29Whitney Hills
I was upset to miss a recent symposium at the University of Toronto called Extreme Environments, Extraordinary Feats: How far can we push ourselves. It was recently made available online, and while I was waiting for it to be put up on the website I decided to check out some older symposiums. One that caught my eye was called Physical Activity-The Best Medicine? It is from 2011, but the research is still relevant. It is a long watch so I thought I would do a bit of a summary. It shows where we are as Canadians in regard to getting enough exercise, and how exercise improves health
- Physical Activity guidelines for youth: 60 mins of activity each day. 70% of youth get 30 mins of activity 3 days a week. Only 40% get 60 minutes 3 times a week. Only 9% of boys and 4% of girls meet the 60 minute a day guideline.
- Youth spend 8.5 hours a day sitting and being sedentary, European youth are much more active than North American youth.
- A brisk walk or active play would qualify as activity
- Adult physical activity guidelines are 150 minutes a week, which is 2.5 hours. Only 15% of adults meet this requirement.
- 9.5 waking hours are spent sedentary, about 70% of the day
- #1 excuse is not enough time, yet they report 2-3 hours of other activity like being online or watching tv
- Exercise is definitely a great way to improve health. Getting people to exercise is much harder.
- It is a cheap form of medicine, highly effective in improving vascular and cardiac health and reducing stress
- Everyone profits when you exercise...reduce burden on health care system, highly effective health response
- Exercise reduces risk of chronic disease by 20-60%
- It has been shown that combining resistance training with aerobic exercise lowers risk of cardiac mortality in cardiac patients
- For those concerned about risk, in 1 sudden death from jogging occurs in 1.83 million people
- Adults only need to walk 150 minutes each week to see health benefits, or burn about 1,200-2,000 calories to see health benefits and reduced risk of disease
- More activity benefits athletes and improves performance but will not reduce risk anymore
- Most people that take part in studies around exercise and see benefits will stop exercise after the study (60% of ppl)
- Sweat is one of the best antidepressants
- We live in a world that promotes obesity and excess intake
- We don't often get the urge to exercise, but inactivity is rewarding
- Our culture is one of chronic mental demand and adrenaline "seepage" from chronic stress
- Inactive people are at a higher risk of depression, even when other factors such as income and age are controlled for
- 1000 seniors over 65 were studied for 6 years. The less active seniors had higher levels of psychiatric distress, the more active had lower reports of psychiatric distress
- Exercise is comparable to medication in terms of antidepressant effect, but with less side effects
This is getting lengthy so I will continue next time with some information on the struggle to get active and the politics of health!
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