HE ED221 Lecture 11: Minimizing sedentary behaviour

• School: University of Alberta
• Department: Health Education
• Course: HE ED221
• Professor: Valerie Carson

Document Summary

This lecture also focuses on sedentary behavior and how to minimize the health risks of this behavior. It has been shown that breaking up sedentary behavior with breaks will improve health outcomes. In addition, an experimental study looked at overweight and obese adults engaging in 3 conditions: uninterrupted sitting, sitting and light intensity activity breaks, and sitting plus moderate intensity activity breaks. The results of this study found that there were higher elevations of post-meal glucose in those that took less breaks (24% difference). Another study also measured post-meal glucose in those that engaged in prolonged sitting and those engaged in prolonged sitting and standing. The results show that those who were engaged in prolonged sitting had elevated levels of glucose up to 11%. The future of sedentary behavior is to create guidelines for adults and screen-time recommendations, however, there currently are none. In a 20-country comparison, canada sits in the middle of the spectrum.