Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis…Sounds NEAT October 1, 2007

A really great new concept has come out to help keep us senior folk a little bit fitter and a bit sharper upstairs. Now, I know not everybody has the time or energy to drag their buttocks to the gym a few times a week, but I’ve just read about a nifty little gizmo that helps you get fit by keeping track of exercise challenges you set for yourself.

The games encourage small lifestyle changes and are completely customizable. Basically, this new program works with your Palm Pilot or some other fancy-dancy PDA your son bought you (that you only use for the tip calculator). Have a look at this press release over at medicalnewstoday. It gives you most of the details, but because I’m a nice guy, I’ll save you the trouble and just explain it here.

The technology was developed by a research team at the University of Houston (a fine institution if I do say so myself, go cougars!). Essentially, you wear a small monitoring device during the course of your day and it tracks walking, running, bending over and even little things like toe-tapping. The fancy doctor name for all of this is Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. Your movements over the course of the day make a video game character on your PDA perform specific functions and you can compete against your friends as well.

To be honest, I think a lot of seniors would really get a kick out of something like this. Imagine playing a game of golf, but simultaneously having a race to see who could actually walk the furthest while they played? Probably me because my ball spends more time under water than many species of fish. What I really think this would be great for though is ending this chorus of fat children I see every time I leave  my condo. What do they feed children today? Honestly, when you go to a restaurant and you see a parent order food for their kid and they order more food for the child than they do for themselves; does it not occur to you that there’s a huge problem. How has somebody not mentioned that yet? Children are too fat these days. Too much pie. Too much v’deo games.

Maybe the way to get kids to start exercising these days is to incorporate video games into their exercise routine. Maybe thats what it is going to take. Well, I tell you what, this is something I would use and something I could give to that grandson of mine who really needs a sharp kick in the behind if you ask me. Listening to that rap music and such. I guess if it takes video games to make him exercise, that’s what its gonna be. I bet I’d still walk further in a day than him, that’s for sure.

NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE STUDY REVEALS THAT OBESITY WORKS LIKE A SOCIAL NETWORK August 6, 2007

A recent study from the good folks at the New England Journal of Medicine has revealed that the spread of obesity functions much like an online social network. An article in last week’s New York Times has amplified both the size and scope of the NEJM study. Seemingly every medical professional with a blog has been weighing in with an opinion of their own.

Jon Barron’s health blog reported some of the more surprising details contained in the journals conclusions. Essentially, if you have a network of friends who are either obese or are in the process of becoming significantly overweight you are extremely likely to follow suit. For instance, “If your spouse becomes obese your chances of weight gain increase by 37%, but if your friends become obese your chances of doing the same increase by an astounding 171%.”

GetFitSource, a blog specializing in healthy lifestyles, noted that this is a natural tendency among humans and that, basically, this is a case of monkey see- monkey do. The post noted that “For example, if a close friend or sibling returns from a European vacation, we are likely to follow.” Obviously, they agreed that this type of peer motivation was an integral part of your overall odds in regards to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. “If close friends or siblings become fat, well, gradually our norms for what is acceptable weight-wise may loosen and we are probably less resistant to gaining weight.”

Having a look at the New York Times article showed me an aspect of the study that I hadn’t initially thought of, but completely made sense upon realization- unhealthy eating habits are just like society’s other chief bad habit-smoking. The NYT article said “obesity was just the start… They have already begun asking about other health-related issues. Smoking, for example — have smokers become more isolated over time?” Think about how smokers hang around together and in any environment you work in, the smokers always tend to band together. So much time spent outside coughing together is probably good for fostering togetherness.

“After all, networks evolve, and if smoking becomes unacceptable, smokers might be expected to cluster in their own little orbits, cut off from the mainstream. That, Dr. Fowler said, is exactly what happened. The Framingham data from the 1970s show smokers embedded in social networks just like everyone else. But by the 1990s, smokers began to be shunted to the side, their links to nonsmokers breaking.”

The Framingham data was an integral part in laying the base for the study referenced in the NEJM. Effectively, the Framingham Study (named for the Massachusetts town where it has been going on for several decades) is to observe how an interconnected group of people influences each others behavior over time. The NYT article noted that “as part of the study, participants named friends who could help locate them if researchers lost contact. That link was just what was needed to construct a social network and watch it evolve over decades — a web of friends and friends of friends along with family members.”

The conclusions of the Framingham study are considerable. “The striking feature of networks… Is that they amplify whatever effect they are propagating. One person catches a cold and spreads it to 10 friends, each of whom spreads it to 10 more friends.”

Furthermore, the exact same thing seemed to happen with individuals who had become obese.

“Dr. Christakis and his colleague James H. Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, say they do not know how it happened, but the dynamic was clear — when one person became obese, that person’s friends were more likely to become obese and so were their friends and their friends’ friends.”

One of the things that I am left wondering is whether it would be possible to integrate people into social networks and increase the effectiveness of a weightloss program or a common diet that is shared between the group. If friends influencing friends is the #1 thing that leads to obesity (aside from eating all of the time, obviously) it can definitely be harnessed to aid weight loss and more importantly to help keep the weight off. Since you see so many young people (and senior citizens as well in some cases) documenting their lives online, why not have us all put our health data right out there for a select group of people to see or better yet- the entire world.