THE ORIGINAL AND MOST NOTED SPEAKERS' CORNER is located in the north-east corner of Hyde Park in London, England. It is, simply, where
public speaking is allowed. In our reformatted WELL newsletter, we
want to give you, our readers, the opportunity to contribute to the
body of knowledge concerning health. We want people to share our
newsletter with friends and we want you and your friends to share with
us, thereby, sharing with each other. Please keep your thoughts under
750 words, if at all possible, include your name and city and email it
all to peter@speakwell.com ».
YOU NEED MORE PROOF that we're not going to put a dent in childhood obesity with exercise?
Fine.
Published ahead of print in the Archives of Diseases of Childhood is a simple study that looked at 300 children from 54 different schools in the city of Plymouth in the UK.
Dr. Brad Metcalf et al. followed the children for 4 years (from the age of 5 to 8) and looked for associations between the variables of physical activity, body mass index, body fat percentage and some metabolic blood parameters.
Guess what?
There was no association found between the amount the children exercised and their body mass indices or body-fat percentages over time despite the fact that amongst the children there was a ten fold difference in the amount of physical activity that did not in fact change over the course of the study.
That finding is so powerful I'm going to rewrite it big and bold: Despite the fact that some kids were ten times more active than their peers, their 4 year long, ten-fold increase in exercise did not help them maintain healthier body weights or body fat percentages!
The exercise wasn't all for naught however as metabolic parameters were in fact better in the exercisers.
I wonder how many more studies need to come out before it becomes mainstream to know that exercise as a component of obesity is minor at best?
IT IS THE MIDDLE OF OCTOBER, the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, and the morning is warm and the ocean flat. Perched on a small rock at the water's edge is a Blue Herron, waiting patiently for breakfast to swim past. A little further out is a Loon that occasionally breaks the silence with its distinctive call.
It is hard not to sit in awe and wonder at this majestic scene in front of me; hard to force myself to sit and write instead of exploring the shore. What I miss this time around I will look at the next time I come to Yellow Point Lodge. My wife and I come here every year. It is a time for us relax, to turn off the phones and the computer and leave behind the hurried pace of home. At Yellow Point we catch up on reading, we eat slowly, we visit with friends and we allow ourselves time to be well. In short, we fill up our 'wellness tanks'.
Thinking about the future, we know that a yearly return to Yellow Point is a must. It is not the only place we top up the tank, but it is certainly one of the most enjoyable.
Would be developers of Yellow Point Lodge used to pester owner Richard Hill about selling his waterfront property. In the past Richard used to answer them by saying the price tag was "a dollar more than you've got". The question of preserving Yellow Point and its uniqueness for future generations was laid to rest this spring when Richard signed a conservation covenant. Through the covenant, a three-way partnership with the Land Conservancy of British Columbia and the Nanaimo and Area Land Trust, Richard dedicated 68 acres of coastal old growth forest (Douglas Fir/Arbutus) to be protected from any kind of future logging or development.
Iona Campagnolo said, "This is an ethic we don't see enough of in this world."
Dr. Jane Goodall in a letter to Richard said, "This is a good example of high environmental standards that all businesses should be striving to achieve. Your grandchildren and their grandchildren will be truly thankful."
Richard, like his father Gerry who first owned the property, feels he is simply the custodian of Yellow Point, preserving it for future generations. Richard said, "Often
people lose sight of the value of land like this and see only the money to be made through development and logging. But they're missing out on the bigger picture and the true value of the land. Far beyond any of our short little lives, this will be a retreat forever."
Thank you Richard. Thank you for preserving this gem and not caving in to the pressures of development or the lure of money. Sure, you could have sold Yellow Point and become a multi-millionaire, but with all of your new found money where in the world would you go, what place could you find that would do as much for your soul and well-being as your own beautiful property with its laid back, welcoming and friendly atmosphere?
Good on ya, Richard! You know what it means to live well. May others follow your lead.
EXERCISE HAS LONG BEEN VIEWED as one of the primary solutions to our growing obesity problem. And while there's no doubt that physical activity boosts calorie burn, you need to do more than work out a couple times a week to keep the weight off.
Before you start to worry that I'm going to up the exercise ante, relax. There's another way to boost calorie burn, and it doesn't require squeezing into Lycra or joining a gym.
James Levine, professor of medicine from the Mayo Clinic, claims the calories we burn when we're not working up a sweat are an important part of the weight-loss equation. He has even coined a phrase that describes the type of activity he's talking about: non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT).
Simply put, NEAT refers to the calories we burn through every day by walking,
working, playing and fidgeting, which in the last 150 years has dropped by 2,000
calories a day.
Take a memo, Ms. Jones?
What's caused this drop? Technology for one. Everything from the labour-saving
washing machine to snow blowers, leaf blowers and, of course, television and
computers have turned us into a society that moves less to achieve more. Add a
shift from growing, harvesting and canning our own food to driving to the local
grocery store for sustenance and you can see how far our daily activity has
plummeted.
By contrast, take a look at the Amish, who perform most of their daily tasks
without modern-day electrical gadgets designed to make life easier. A 2004 study
of an Ontario Amish community reported that the men took an average of 18,425
steps a day and the women 14,196 steps, which is significantly greater than the
3,000-5,000 daily step tally recorded by the average North American.
According to Levine, low NEAT can result in obesity, which has prompted his
advocacy of creating a culture of movers vs. sitters. Levine promotes changing our
lifestyle to encourage more natural physical activity — a strategy that he says will
have a profound impact on the health and weight of a society filled with cubicle
workers who, when they're not sitting at their desk, are lounging in front of the
television with their remote at the ready.
Studies of the obese suggest they sit 2½ hours per day more than their leaner, but still sedentary, counterparts.
"To reverse obesity, we need to develop individual strategies to promote standing
and ambulating time by 2½ hours per day and also re-engineer our work, school
and home environments to render active living the option of choice," Levine
commented in a 2006 article titled "Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis: The
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon of Societal Weight Gain."
Levine said that increasing the activity level required to perform everyday work,
school and family duties requires a huge shift in the way we structure our daily
lives and it's a shift he seems to have made. While being interviewed, Levine was
walking on a treadmill in his office dressed in a suit and street shoes, pumping out
email and talking on the phone. For him, walking and working has become second
nature.
"I'm on a $300 treadmill that I got at Sears," he explained. "I've been using it for
four hours a day since I got it three or four years ago."
The simplest and most effective way to increase NEAT is walking more — even if
you don't have the luxury of a treadmill in your office. Walking at one mile an hour
doubles the energy expenditure it takes to sit, an interesting statistic to remember
the next time you take the bus instead of walking short to medium distances to and
from work or school.
To find out just how much time we spend walking, Levine monitored the walking
habits of 22 healthy individuals of varied weights. What he discovered is that the
study subjects took an average of 47 walks a day, 85% of which lasted less than
15 minutes and 88% of which were done at less than two miles an hour.
"A lot of the walking we do is not striding, but just pottering around," said Levine,
who estimates the average speed of these typical walks to be no greater than 1.7
km per hour.
How do you incorporate more walking and pottering into your day? Levine
encourages walking meetings, which can be done indoors or out. He also advocates
the use of treadmill-powered household appliances and the practice of school buses
dropping kids off a kilometre from school so they can walk the rest of the way.
And while it's easy to shake your head at these seemingly wild ideas, in many
societies individuals walk long distances with little thought of doing otherwise.
Levine noted that in some countries children walk up to two hours to get to school,
a ritual North American children have long given up.
Consider Levine's research a wake-up call to prompt change. Little bits of activity
do add up, so start putting some of Levine's strategies into practice. Wipe the dust
off that old stationary bike and start pedalling while watching TV. And don't be shy
to suggest going for a walk with a colleague to discuss work issues. Who knows,
maybe you'll start a shift in culture that'll get the rest of the office up and out of
their chairs.
"If CEOs took their meetings walking, you'd be amazed how soon everyone else did
it," Levine said.
EVER HEAR OF KEVIN TRUDEAU? He's the author of many fantastical books that purport the medical establishment is hiding cures from the general public. He purports the same to be true about weight management and wrote a book entitled, "The Weight Loss Cure They Don't Want You to Know About".
Apparently what we don't want you to know is that the cure includes weekly injections of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) which certainly to date has never been demonstrated to be either safe or effective for weight loss in any well designed randomized trial.
Oh, and there's also a complicated diet plan to follow.
His infomercials certainly make it seem effortless but the Federal Trade Commission, shockingly, felt differently. So much differently in fact that they fined Kevin over $5 million and have banned him from making infomercials for 3 years.
20/20 had a kick at Kevin a while back and thanks to Youtube, here's their piece on his remarkable "cures":
LAST WEEK, the Supreme Court of Canada passed a ruling that would entitle severely handicapped individuals to be accommodated on airlines and specifically extended this ruling to include individuals, who were severely handicapped because of excess weight. This ruling resulted in a flood of raves and rants on why the Supreme Court would promote obesity by accommodating rather than punishing obese people for their laziness and indulgence. The Globe & Mail commentator went as far as to imply that by extending the ruling to obese individuals, the Supreme Court was in fact undermining the case for people with “real disabilities”.
In light of this ridiculous and discriminating accusation, I could not help but write the following letter to the Globe & Mail:
AS MEDICAL DIRECTOR of one of the largest medical obesity programs in the country, I am appalled at the notion that including obesity in the recent Supreme Court judgement on accommodation of disabled people on airline flights, should be considered by the Globe & Mail commentator as anything but fair. To be clear, this ruling does not provide free rides for anyone with a few pounds excess weight this ruling is specific in that it addresses the issues of individuals, who suffer from a condition so disabling that they require help with even the most basic functions. The idea that someone with such severe disabling obesity, has gained that amount of weight (often several hundred excess pounds) simply by lack of willpower or sheer laziness rather than some underlying genetic, mental heath or medical issue is not only naïve but also reflects the prevailing negative stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination toward obese individuals, that appears to be perfectly acceptable even to otherwise compassionate and reflective individuals. But that is not even the point.
The point is that the Globe & Mail commentator, unlike the Supreme Court, uses causality as a criterium for judging which disability is deserving of special accommodation and which is not. By those standards, it would be fair to ask if the person claiming disability due to a spinal cord or brain injury from a motor vehicle accident was in fact observing the speed limit at the time of the accident or if the person who suffered a disabling stroke always religiously took her blood pressure medications and passed on the salt. Singling out individuals disabled by severe obesity as the only group undeserving of special accommodation is blatant discrimination and belies even a remote understanding of the complex and heterogeneous nature of this unfortunate condition that today befalls so many in our society. Individuals disabled by severe obesity are neither more nor less deserving of accommodation than are folks who loose their eyesight to diabetes, their limbs to smoking, their kidneys to analgesic abuse or their mobility to a reckless sporting injury.
Arya M. Sharma, MD
Professor of Medicine and Medical Director of the Alberta Health Services (Edmonton Area) Weight Wise Program, Edmonton Alberta.
Obviously, I have no idea whether or not the G&M will chose to print or respond to this letter.
For anyone interested in the issue of Weight Bias, this is the topic of a whole supplement to this month’s issue of OBESITY, which includes 14 research articles on the “New Science of Weight Bias: a Significant Social Problem”.
By contrast, take a look at the Amish, who perform most of their daily tasks
without modern-day electrical gadgets designed to make life easier. A 2004 study
of an Ontario Amish community reported that the men took an average of 18,425
steps a day and the women 14,196 steps, which is significantly greater than the
3,000-5,000 daily step tally recorded by the average North American.
"I'm on a $300 treadmill that I got at Sears," he explained. "I've been using it for
four hours a day since I got it three or four years ago."
The simplest and most effective way to increase NEAT is walking more — even if
you don't have the luxury of a treadmill in your office. Walking at one mile an hour
doubles the energy expenditure it takes to sit, an interesting statistic to remember
the next time you take the bus instead of walking short to medium distances to and
from work or school.
