Study: Sedentary Lifestyles, Not Food, Responsible for Obesity

On Tuesday, the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) attacked the stance of those whom it calls "nutrition zealots" and their claims that the food we eat is killing us through a new report showing forth that lifestyle, not diet, is the main cause of obesity.

The release of the CCF's report comes in the wake of two recent studies appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), both of which back CCF's assertion that sedentary lifestyles and not food are the true biggest threat to health.

In its study, the CCF points out several new developments in our society over the last few decades that have led Americans to becoming more and more a nation of spectators and have led us away from the physical side of our culture.

The CCF report notes that televisions now outnumber human beings in American households; children on average are much more involved in sitting and playing video games instead of using their bodies to play outside; people use power tools like leaf blowers and machines such as riding mowers far more than rakes or push mowers; and that women have taken on non-physically-oriented jobs in the workplace in record numbers as examples of what is spearheading the obesity and heart disease epidemics.

"Health activists...single out 'junk food' as the culprit behind our ballooning behinds...[T]hese activists lobby for highly restrictive yet ineffective public health policies including product bans, fast-food zoning restrictions, and so-called Twinkie' taxes'...These misguided policy initiatives ignore not only the recent changes in American lifestyles, but also personal responsibility," says Trice Whitefield, a Research Analyst at the Center for Consumer Freedom.

Last year, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a study in which it asserted that the combination of sedentary lifestyles and quick-and-easy fast food are a deadly combination in American society which, together, lead to a range of health problems including obesity, high blood pressure, heart attacks, and increased susceptibility to stress-related conditions.

Other health experts have previously pointed to studies that concluded that sedentary lifestyles cause more deaths each year than smoking does.

It has long been the assertion of sports enthusiasts who actually take part in sports and other people who work out intensely on a regular basis that, for the most part, if a person is physically active, he can eat whatever he feels like eating without worrying about becoming overweight or obese. Intense physical exercise causes the body to burn away stores of fat, leaving behind lean muscle that efficiently uses the food the body takes in to rebuild and sustain itself.

The physically active largely insist that the trick to eating right is listening to one's body instead of eating according to a rote habit or over-eating for emotional reasons.

This is the reason why, for example, cross-country running coaches typically have little hesitation about stopping by a McDonald's after a meet. The runners have trained their metabolisms to such a high level that the fatty, salty fast food does them no harm and actually serves to restore their depleted but needed fat reserves.

Other backers of the importance of exercise over food regulation have pointed to the movie "Supersize Me", in which autobiographical documentary maker Morgan Spurlock not only switched himself to an unbalanced, all-McDonald's diet for 30 days, but when he did so he ceased and desisted from his former regular workout regimen at the same time. Critics of his movie, which Spurlock used to lambaste the fast food industry, say that the big culprit behind his quick deterioration of health was his suddenly sedentary lifestyle.

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