National Physical Activity Alliance (NPAA)

Australia’s sitting time bomb

npaa — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 23:00:09 +0000

If you’re an older, unmarried male who is educated and works full time with a high income, chances are a significant proportion of your day revolves around a chair or a seat – at considerable risk to your long term health.

The call for men of this demographic – along with other population profiles at risk – to stand up and take notice of this latest research will be made this week at Sports Medicine Australia’s be active 2014 conference, as part of a series of presentations addressing Australia’s increasing physical inactivity levels.

Professor Ronald Plotnikoff, Priority Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition, University of Newcastle, found living in non-urban regions, being obese and having a severe physical limitation are all factors also associated with prolonged periods of sitting and a consequent greater risk of chronic disease and poor mental health.

However in good news for this cohort of at risk Australians, research presented by Associate Professor Emmanuel Stamatakis, Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, revealed that replacing each hour of daily sitting with equal amounts of standing is linked to a substantial reduction in mortality risk of up to 5 per cent per hour of sitting replaced.

“Based on our statistical modelling, this means that replacing a realistic amount of daily sitting time – such as 3 hours per day – with equivalent amounts of even very light physical activity could result in considerable important health benefits,” Dr Stamatakis said.

“Replacing sitting with walking and other moderate to vigorous physical activity resulted in a much larger reduction in mortality risk of 12 to 14 per cent per hour of sitting replacement.”

Dr Stamatakis urged office based employers to take action to address the extent of sitting time in the workplace and promote opportunities for their employees to move more during work hours.

“It is absolutely imperative to find ways to incorporate some sort of movement into the daily office routine, even if only of a light intensity,” Dr Stamatakis said.

“I believe in twenty to thirty years we will look back and be horrified that we imposed so many hours of sitting on our workers, just so that they can make a living.”

Leading international sedentary behaviour expert and be active 2014 keynote speaker Professor Stuart Biddle, Institute of Sport, Exercise & Active Living at Victoria University, called for a complete re-think of how we approach the challenge of sedentary behaviour.

“It’s no longer sufficient for public health and behaviour change initiatives to focus just on the small 6 – 7 per cent of each day that a minority of people spend undertaking moderate to vigorous physical activity,” Professor Biddle said.

“Instead we need to take action to address the 50 per cent of the day we currently spend being sedentary, and create a larger proportion of the day in at least light physical activity.

“We need to break these ‘habits’ by seeking to change our surroundings and making active behaviours easier to do. Small changes to the environment (e.g. fewer chairs or standing desks) can work well.

“Public health gains will be far greater if we focus on getting those who do little to do something rather than thinking the answer to active living lies with sport and high intensity exercise.”

For more information on be active 2014 (15 – 18 October, Canberra): www.beactive2014.org

Australia vying to be world champion of inactivity

npaa — Sun, 21 Sep 2014 20:42:12 +0000

If we could go back 100 years in a time machine, what would kids be like? They’d be shorter, leaner, probably dirtier and less well-fed — but would they be fitter?

It turns out we actually have a beautiful window on the past. In 1919, a young woman named E.M. Bedale started postgraduate research at University College London, an uncommon undertaking for a woman at that time. Her studies focused on energy balance in children, which led her to spend several years at a serendipitously eponymous school called Bedales in rural Hampshire.

During her two years at Bedales, Miss Bedale measured the energy expenditure and intake of the school’s students, using methods that are still considered to be gold standards today.

Her data provide a startling contrast to our time. Children from almost 100 years ago were 50% more active than kids today. They accumulated over four hours more of physical activity and sat for three hours less than today’s kids – every day.

Clearly, we’re now in the grip of an inactivity epidemic.

A shrinking world

Consider, the global decline in kids walking or cycling to school. In 1970, almost 70% of Australian kids walked or cycled to school. Today, this proportion is barely 25%. The trend is similar in the United Kingdom, Brazil, Switzerland, the United States and Canada.

In some ways, sports participation is going the same way. While overall yearly participation in sport is increasing, kids are playing fewer different kinds of sports. In 1985, 40% of Australian children played three or more sports every year. By 2000, only 11% of children reported playing this number of sports within the same period.

Free play — climbing trees in the backyard, mucking around in parks or bushland, informal ball games — is also declining.

In 1957, 12 to 14-year-old kids were asked to nominate their favourite play spaces. Four out of five boys and three out of five girls nominated outdoor spaces (parks, backyards, the local creek). When the survey was repeated in 2000, only 35% listed outdoor spaces.

In the 1960s, 83% of kids were allowed to play unsupervised in the neighbourhood. When those kids from the 1960s grew up and became parents, only 25% allowed their own children to play unsupervised in the neighbourhood.

Not just kids

Australia is not alone. There are other signs of a global collapse in physical activity too. Worldwide, children’s fitness has been declining at the rate of 3% to 5% per decade since 1970. And Australian kids are now in the bottom third of the world in fitness.

Australia finished second last in the Global Report Card on Kids’ Physical Activity released earlier this year, which showed data from 15 countries. (Thank goodness for the Scots, who finished last.)

We’re third worst in terms of screen time – television, computers and videogames. And it’s not just kids.

In the 1960s, half the jobs in private industry in the United States required at least moderate-intensity physical activity, compared to less than 20% today.

Work in factories and farms has given way to office work, and that has amounted to over 400 kilojoules less each day that adults expend at work. This difference alone results in a weight increase of about 13 kilograms over 50 years, which pretty closely matches actual changes in weight. The situation is similar here.

It’s not that we don’t have the opportunity or the facilities or the climate for physical activity. Global Report Card data show Australia tops the world for physical activity-friendly built environments, and is third on school facilities. It seems that we built it but they didn’t come.

In the 1960s, 83% of kids were allowed to play unsupervised in the neighbourhood. When those kids from the 1960s grew up and became parents, only 25% allowed their own children to play unsupervised in the neighbourhood.

Post-industrial malaise

The roots of inactivity go deep into the cultural and socioeconomic logic of post-industrial societies. In many ways, the whole ethos of ease now saturates our society, and efficiency is the hallmark of modernity.

Think about it this way – nobody is in the market for a labour-creating device. Sit-on mowers, leaf blowers, self-opening doors and automatic car windows, robot vacuum cleaners, sensor lighting, dishwashers and microwaves all yield daily microsavings in energy expenditure that add up to hundreds of kilojoules.

In 1900, the average American housewife spent an estimated 40 hours every week in food preparation. Today, that time is barely four hours — and it appears to have reached an absolute minimum.

What can be done about it? We’re not going to wind back time to the days of kids playing cricket in the street, families driving the Vauxhall Viva with wind-down windows, dads pushing hand mowers and mums using wringers.

The challenge is to fashion spaces where alternative forms of active leisure can be pursued. And we’ve already started: the gymnasium is such a space, internalising the lost world of manual labour. Exergaming (think Wii), which transposes outdoor play spaces into virtual worlds, is similar.

We all need to re-imagine physical activity if we’re to overcome this malaise of post-industrial society.

Good health, bad health habits—at a cost

npaa — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:00:22 +0000

Australia has much to be proud of in many areas of health, but lifestyle-related chronic diseases are taking an increasing toll-and so is the bill, according to the latest 2-yearly national health report card from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).

The Institute’s report, Australia’s health 2014, was released in Canberra today by federal Health Minister Peter Dutton.

AIHW Director and CEO David Kalisch said, ‘On the positive side our report shows that we have increasingly longer life expectancy, lower death rates for cancer and many other diseases, and a health system that people say they are mostly happy with.

‘On the “room for improvement” side, we see that Australians are increasingly living with ongoing or “chronic” diseases and their risk factors-which are related to our ageing population as well as to lifestyles and health habits.

‘Chronic diseases are the leading cause of illness, disability and death in Australia, accounting for 90% of all deaths in 2011.

‘Chronic diseases have often been called “Australia’s greatest health challenge” – and while not solely related to behavioural factors in all cases, can be heavily linked to smoking, physical inactivity, poor nutrition and the harmful use of alcohol. This can lead to obesity, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol, which in turn can lead to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and mental health issues.’

Mr Kalisch said that, in Australia, as was happening in many developed nations, the costs of health care kept rising.

‘They have risen faster than inflation and the economy as a whole for many years, and in recent years have outpaced government revenues from taxation and other sources.

‘We find that health spending is taking up a greater proportion of government revenue than it used to-26% in 2011-12, or 6 percentage points higher than before the Global Financial Crisis.’

Life expectancy, the ‘universal health indicator’, places Australia among the top nations in the world-sixth for men and seventh for women-but very close to the first-placed nations in 2011 (Iceland for males, Japan for females).We are living 25 years longer on average than a century ago, so that a boy born today can expect to live to 79.9 years, and a girl to 84.

‘An extra piece of good news is that almost all of the extra 4 years gained since the late 1990s have been disability-free years,’ Mr Kalisch said.

Most Australians also rate themselves highly in the health stakes. In 2011-12, 85% of people aged 15 and over considered themselves to be in good to excellent health. This perception did not reduce much with age, with an estimated 67%-76% of people aged 65 and over considering themselves to have good to excellent health.

Other positive news includes:

– smoking rates continuing to fall (16% smoking daily in 2010, 43% in 1964)-quitting can result in a life expectancy increase of 10 years. And from 2001- 2011, the proportion of students aged 12-15 who had never smoked rose from 53% to 77%

– increased vaccination rates among 5-year-olds (92% in 2012, 79% in 2008)

– improving cancer survival. Five-year survival from cancers was 66% in 2006-2010, compared with 47% in the mid-1980s. Among people surviving 5 years in 2006-2010, the chance of surviving at least another 5 years was 91%

– a 20% fall in heart attack rates between 2007 and 2011, and stroke event rates fell 25% between 1997 and 2009

– falls in injury death rates of about 3%-5% each year for causes such as transport injury, thermal injury (exposure to fire, heat, smoke and hot substances), drowning, suicide and homicide.

‘We find that health spending is taking up a greater proportion of government revenue than it used to-26% in 2011-12, or 6 percentage points higher than before the Global Financial Crisis.’

‘In addition to our successes we also have health worries,’ Mr Kalisch said. ‘The rise of chronic diseases is the most pervasive.

‘We know that across all ages, changes in health behaviours can reduce the impact of chronic diseases-the World Health Organization estimates that, worldwide, up to 80% of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes, and up to one-third of cancers, could be prevented by eliminating smoking, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity and the harmful use of alcohol.

‘Although daily smoking rates are low by world standards, at 16% for adults, in some areas of Australia (principally high socioeconomic status areas) the rate is 10%, meaning that further improvements are possible,’ Mr Kalisch said.

In Australia over 3 in 5 adults (63%) are overweight or obese. Nearly 3 in 5 (57%) do not exercise enough for good health, and in 2011-12 only 8% of adults were eating enough vegetables and 49% were eating enough fruit for optimum nutrition.

Among young adults, between 2007 and 2010 almost 1 in 2 were at risk from harm (drinking 4 standard drinks or more) from a single drinking occasion at least monthly.

Australia’s health 2014 highlights health issues at various life stages, with findings such as:

Cancer survival 5 years after diagnosis for 0-14 year olds improved from 68% to 81% between 1983-1989 and 2004-2010.

Mental health disorders affect an estimated 26% of young people aged 16-24. Around one-third of people in this age group are overweight or obese.

For 25-44 year olds, the top 2 causes of death for men in 2011 were suicide and accidental poisoning, and for women, suicide and breast cancer. For 45-64 year olds, the top 2 causes of death for
men were coronary heart disease and lung cancer, and for women, breast cancer and lung cancer.

The most common long-term health conditions afflicting older Australians (65 and over) are arthritis, high blood pressure and hearing loss.

Indigenous health improvements in recent years have included lower death rates from circulatory and respiratory diseases, falling infant mortality rates and reductions in smoking. But Indigenous Australians have 7 times the rate of end-stage kidney disease compared to non-Indigenous Australians, 3.3 times the rate of diabetes, 3 times the hospitalisation rates for respiratory conditions, 1.5 times the cancer death rate, and 1.5 times the obesity rate.

Mr Kalisch said there was potential to improve national health data to better understand chronic diseases, factors affecting life expectancy, the health effects of major life events, and the efficiency and effectiveness of health services.

National Physical Activity Alliance (NPAA)

Australia’s sitting time bomb

“Replacing sitting with walking and other moderate to vigorous physical activity resulted in a much larger reduction in mortality risk of 12 to 14 per cent per hour of sitting replacement.”

Australia vying to be world champion of inactivity

A shrinking world

Not just kids

In the 1960s, 83% of kids were allowed to play unsupervised in the neighbourhood. When those kids from the 1960s grew up and became parents, only 25% allowed their own children to play unsupervised in the neighbourhood.

Post-industrial malaise

Good health, bad health habits—at a cost

‘We find that health spending is taking up a greater proportion of government revenue than it used to-26% in 2011­-12, or 6 percentage points higher than before the Global Financial Crisis.’

‘We find that health spending is taking up a greater proportion of government revenue than it used to-26% in 2011-12, or 6 percentage points higher than before the Global Financial Crisis.’