The distance of the nearest gym from your house may be directly proportional to your waist size.
It may not sound like sound scientific wisdom but a study published in the The Lancet Public Health has found that people living within a kilometre of physical activity facilities, such as gyms, swimming pools and playing fields, have smaller waist circumferences, lower BMI and lower body fat percentages than people who have no nearby exercise facilities. The findings suggest that increasing access to physical activity facilities, and reducing access to fast food shops in residential areas may have the potential to reduce obesity, but may be more effective for some groups of people than others.
“Policy makers should consider interventions aimed at tackling unhealthy built environments. Around the world, urbanisation is recognised as a key driver of obesity, and certain features of neighbourhoods are likely to add to this, including a prevalence of fast food outlets and whether we have access to physical activity facilities. These aspects are often unequally distributed and might partly explain persistent social and geographical inequalities in obesity,” says lead author Kate Mason, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK.
With rapid urbanisation and changing lifestyles, India is grappling with malnutrition at both extremes, obesity on the one hand and undernutrition on the other. A Lancet study earlier this year pointed out that India has among the largest increases in obese children with the obesity incidence being in the 1-2% range.
The present study included used data from UK Biobank from people aged 40-70 years old from around the UK, and included waist measurements from 401917 people, BMI from 401435 people, and body fat percentages from 395640 people. It used data from 2006 to 2010, and assessed whether the number of physical activity facilities near an individual’s home and proximity to fast-food outlets were associated with a person’s waist circumference, BMI and body fat percentage. The researchers accounted for a person’s demographic, socioeconomic status, and local area characteristics in these associations, and also looked at whether they varied by sex or household income.
India has among the largest increases in obese children with the obesity incidence being in the 1-2% range.
Physical activity facilities included indoor and outdoor facilities for sports or leisure activities (such as gyms, swimming pools and playing fields), but not public parks, or cycling and walking paths. On an average, there was just one physical activity facility within one kilometre of people’s homes, but a third of participants (31.2%) had no facilities within this distance. The average distance to a fast food outlet was 1.1 kilometres, and nearly a fifth of participants (18.5%) lived within 0.5 kilometres of a fast food outlet.
People who had better access to physical activity facilities were less overweight than those who had access to fewer facilities – with those with at least six facilities nearby having a 1.22cm smaller waist circumference, a BMI 0.57 points lower, and a body fat percentage that was 0.81% lower, on average. This effect was stronger among women and people from higher-income backgrounds.
The authors also noted that the association between weight and proximity to fast food outlets is relatively weak, and may be weaker than expected due to some limitations to the data, such as some fast food outlets not being included in the database, some being misclassified as restaurants rather than fast-food outlets, and not being able to take into account whether or not there were also healthy food outlets in people’s neighbourhoods.
