Inactivity & Obesity - Chicken or Egg?

(My Original Blog Post: http://mikeroussell.com/inactivity-obesity-chicken-or-egg/)

In health and fitness there are so many polarizing opinions:

• Are All Calories Equal?


• Need to Lose Weight - Diet or Exercise?


• Do Types of Carbs Matter?

I could go on and on....

Yesterday I read an interesting article on childhood obesity. As you know it is a problem. Kids are getting fatter (let's not forget that their parents are as well) and fatter at younger and younger ages. This next part may or may not be surprising to you...exercise doesn't help.Numerous studies have shown that exercise interventions don't impact weight loss. It is just too easy to out eat the calories you burn from exercise. As a nutritionist, this warms my heart - diet is king (or queen). These were some of the conclusion in a paper published from the EarlyBird Diabetes study.

It is well known that less active children are fatter, but that does not mean -- as most people assume it does -- that inactivity leads to fatness. It could equally well be the other way round: that obesity leads to inactivity.

The interesting part is that the researchers from the EarlyBird study also found that while being inactive didn't impact weight loss, being fat lead to more activity. This is a circular argument if I ever saw one.

Here is the conclusion from the paper :

Physical inactivity appears to be the result of fatness rather than its cause. This reverse causality may explain why attempts to tackle childhood obesity by promoting PA [physical activity] have been largely unsuccessful.

What do you think? Is being inactive a side effect of being fat?

Inactivity 'No Contributor' to Childhood Obesity Epidemic, New Report Suggests [Science Daily]

Fatness leads to inactivity, but inactivity does not lead to fatness [Archives of Disease in Childhood]