Mon, Oct-19-09, 06:53
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Plan: LC Maintenance
Stats: 215/147/150
BF:
Progress: 105%
Location: UK
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Exercise? A fat lot of good that is for weight loss
I know this has been posted about here before, but I thought that I'd post the latest findings on the subject in the UK:
Quote:
From The Times October 19, 2009
Exercise? A fat lot of good that is for weight loss
In the fight against obesity, we’re urged to get off the couch. Yet new research claims that diet is what counts
In 1932, Russell Wilder, one of the leading obesity experts, lectured the American College of Physicians, saying that his patients lost more weight on bed rest than an exercise regime.
It’s one of those ha-ha moments of medical history, along with doctors prescribing cigarettes to patients to “clear the lungs”. Now we all know that exercise is the best way to lose weight, in the same way that we all know that our obesity epidemic is a result of Western sloths sitting on our ever fatter bottoms. It’s why chubby will be the new norm, with 90 per cent of today’s children predicted to be overweight or obese adults by 2050, costing UK taxpayers £50 billion. It’s why the most insistent plank of the Government’s anti-obesity drive is exercise. It’s why we look at our pudgy kids and cry “To the playing fields!”, and prescribe them ever more PE. It’s why, every new year, we sigh at our expanding muffin top and resolve to Power Plate it away.
That exercise is the key to losing our collective weight is something that we know so deep in our cultural guts that to question it would be ridiculous.
Except that is what the most cutting-edge obesity researchers are now doing. The recent studies show that the benefits of exercise for weight loss have been overstated. This idea is shocking. It goes so far against the orthodoxy that it is not something many can accept. And certainly for governments and the food industry that places them under so much pressure, it is too much to swallow.
But, as Professor Boyd Swinburn, director of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention, says: “This is provocative in many ways . . . but my concern is that if we put the emphasis on exercise we are unlikely to tackle the obesity problem as we are not driving at the root cause.”
The idea that exercise will help to shed pounds is fairly recent — emerging at the same time that obesity began to boom in the 1980s. Of the simple “eat less, move more” equation, many found the idea of moving more (while watching Jane Fonda in a leotard) infinitely more appealing than forgoing another slice of cake. In the intervening years, doctors have discovered that exercise reduces depression, heart disease, some cancers, diabetes, and dementia, to name but a few of its benefits. It has become obvious that as a species we live longer and healthier when we move around. One doctor told me: “Aside from not smoking, there is nothing better you can do for yourself than exercise.”
This has made doctors even more reluctant to reveal that exercise has proved a poor route to weight loss. A review of recent research by the respected Mayo Clinic in America concluded that “most studies have demonstrated no or modest weight loss with exercise alone . . . patients should have realistic expectations, an exercise regimen . . . is unlikely to result in short-term weight loss beyond what is achieved with dietary change.” (Although, it is important to note, few people can stop themselves getting fatter over time unless they are active.) Two separate studies, one by the Physical Activity and Weight Management Research Centre at the University of Pittsburgh, another by Timothy Church, director of the Laboratory of Preventive Medicine at the Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in Louisiana, came to the same conclusion. Both took groups of hundreds of sedentary women, and randomly assigned them different amounts of exercise for a year. In both studies the results were surprising. The women lost similar amounts of weight, no matter which group they were assigned to. In the latter study, even the group assigned no exercise lost a similar amount of weight to the exercisers. Weight, by the way, is still a good guide to fat loss in non-athletes. Church says: “As you get older it is hard to add significant amounts of muscle.”
What’s going on here? First, people have been shown to overestimate how many calories they are burning off in a workout — typically doubling the true figure. Anyone who “earns” a muffin with a jog has probably taken on more calories than they’ve just burnt. Second, exercise makes people eat more. “I don’t think they’re hungry, I think it’s a reward issue,” Church says.
The combination of those two effects can be disastrous. A study in the International Journal of Obesity last year followed 538 11-year-olds for 18 months, and found that if they started watching an extra hour of TV a day, they consumed an extra 100 calories. But it also found that if they spent an extra hour doing exercise, they consumed an extra 292 calories, on average. If the exercise was really vigorous, the children could still lose weight, but if it was moderate, it probably had the same effect on weight to the children who watched TV. The researchers, from the Harvard School of Public Health, concluded: “Watching TV is an activity associated with a daily energy surplus. Although physical activity is thought of as an energy deficit activity, our estimates do not support this hypothesis.”
A review of 18 studies of new school exercise programmes, published in March in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, found that in none of them did increasing PE reduce the children’s weight.
For Church, it’s too early to draw conclusions. “The whole obesity epidemic happened so fast, we don’t have a clue what is driving it. All we can say is if you want to lose weight, you’ve got to be careful what you eat too.”
But Terry Wilkin goes farther. He is a professor of metabolism at Derriford Hospital, Plymouth, and also leader of the EarlyBird study into childhood obesity. This is the one world experts have their eye on, as for the first time it has used accelerometers to measure accurately activity levels over the course of a lifetime. People’s — or parents’ — reports of their exercise or diet are notoriously unreliable. These 300 Devon children may unlock the key to our obesity crisis. And eight years into the programme, the results have been so provocative that the Government has taken absolutely no notice. First, Wilkin discovered, to his amazement, that increasing exercise levels at school made no difference, as the children simply did less at home. And vice versa. They appeared to have an in-built activity level, that they would make up through the day. Secondly, in results soon to be published, he found that although fat kids were less active, it was obesity that made them less active, rather than sluggishness that made them obese. Lying on the sofa does not necessarily make you fat, but if you’re fat, you’re more likely to lie on the sofa.
“Everyone knows that there is a relationship between body mass and activity. It’s common sense. And any number of studies will see it and draw the conclusion that lack of activity leads to obesity. Everyone keeps on repeating this mantra that underactivity causes excesss weight. But there is no way you can infer causality.
“We were quite struck by our results; they are quite clear. It is obesity that is leading to inactivity in children, and not the other way around. This is fundamentally important. Even if you could change the physical activity of a child, and there is no intervention study in the literature that shows you can, it may not lead them to lose weight.”
All Wilkin’s work shows that it is diet rather than exercise that holds the key — and aggressive intervention is needed to stop children eating too much, from babyhood. This is hardly reflected in Change4Life, the Government’s latest campaign to combat obesity, and its companion Play4Life, about active children. In its advertising and website, exercise is still given prominence, a message Wilkin states is pointless. “The Government’s health strategy for the past 15 years has been very much focused on physical activity. But there should be a shift to diet.”
The Department of Health denied this, saying that it had made efforts on diet, especially in school lunches. It pointed out that the Change4Life campaign does include “tips and information to help families reduce their intake of sugar and fat and eat the correct portion size at meal times”.
But has the Government really listened? Well, just as we adults find it easier to feed our craving for doughnuts by promising a trip to the gym, so parents find it easier to get their kids to ride a bike than deny them food. No one wants to be the bad guy who says “no”, and this applies especially to politicians. Not only do they not want to get tough on their voters, they don’t want to get tough on the food industry either, says Wilkin. When President Obama said the incontrovertible this summer, “There’s no doubt that our kids drink way too much soda,” he was effectively knocking the heavily subsidised sugar industry. It felt like a radical act.
“Rather like the tobacco industry, there is tremendous power in the food industry. It is much easier for politicians to talk about physical activity, which is politically fairly neutral,” Wilkin says. This summer Professor Boyd Swinburn presented a paper to the European Congress on Obesity in Amsterdam that amazed the crowd. His team assessed how many calories it took to maintain normal weight. Then, using national food supply data from the US, he calculated how much more food Americans actually consumed from 1970 to the early 2000s. They predicted how much weight the average American would gain, given the increase in calories alone. When they compared this with the real weight gain, their predictions were almost spot-on, suggesting that changes in physical activity have had little impact on the rise in obesity. US children had grown on average 9lb heavier — for them to return to leaner 1970s levels they would have to cut their intake by about 350 calories a day. That’s equal to cutting out a Mars bar and a Ribena — or, alternatively, they would have to walk an exhaustive extra two and a half hours a day.
“I wasn’t surprised that energy intake dominated the increase in obesity, but I was surprised that it explained virtually all of it,” Swinburn says. “Yet physical activity always comes up as the No 1 message from governments. They like to accentuate the positive, and leave food to the marketplace.
“The whole economic system is built around consumption, we’ve responded, we have overconsumed, and we’ve got an obesity and environmental crisis to prove it.”
Treats can defeat the object of exercise
14 minutes lifting weights equals one cappuccino (108 calories)
55 minutes of stretching equals a 50gram energy bar (185 calories)
17 minutes of the stairclimber at 3mph, resistance setting 12, equals one strawberry and banana smoothie (138 calories)
45 minutes running on treadmill at 7mph equals one blueberry muffin (420 calories)
16 minutes on indoor rower equals a KitKat (106 calories)
19 minutes on elliptical trainer equals a banana (105 calories)
21 minutes of aerobics equals a small pack of raisins (123 calories)
10 minutes on exercise bike equals low-fat fruit yoghurt (55 calories)
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http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/...icle6878496.ece |
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