You’re fat because your legs have nothing to do. Some machine is doing that for you.
At least that is the conclusion of an Stanford University School of Medicine study by Dr. Uri Ladabaum as reported by NPR.
Ladabaum looked at data collected by the federal NHANES program in 1988 and compared it to 2010 expecting to find that we have really started pigging out.
Nope. Caloric intake remained about the same. What was different, however, was that physical activity was a lot less. In the ’80s, 80 to 90 percent of people did at least some activity during their leisure time. About half say the same thing today.
For white and African-Americans — men and women — between 18 and 39 the number of those getting no activity more than tripled. For Mexican Americans, it doubled.
Dr. Tim Church, a professor of preventative medicine at Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University said that in 1960 about half of Americans had jobs that had a lot of physical activity. Today it’s about 1 in 10. He said that American men were burning 140 fewer calories during the day while women were burning about 120 fewer calories daily.
As a pound is usually considered equal to 3,500 calories that is more than a pound a month not being burned off.
Blame the internet.
Anyway, here’s the soundtrack for the story that we were sure you were waiting for:
