Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Sitting and obesity

It's one of the more difficult epidemiology questions to answer: why is obesity rising so quickly?

This is a very hard question to answer decisively, there is some reason that Americans have gotten over-weight in the past 30-40 years. It's not pure food abundance as we have had that for a long time. It's not genetic in the sense of the population genetics changing as there has not been enough time (genetic susceptibility is another matter).

So the idea that more time spent sitting leads to obesity is a very interesting hypothesis. I wonder how feasible it would be to design a cluster randomized trial for workplace interventions (like standing to use the computer).

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