Abstract des Autors

An obesity epidemic is spreading throughout the industrialised world, with its negative health effects and sizeable health care expenditures. An obesity conducive environment is the culprit, particularly physical inactivity and overnutrition. Of these two offenders, it is now apparent that declines in physical lifestyle activity have made the major contribution to the worldwide obesity epidemic. A viable public health strategy to impede the progression of the obesity epidemic is therefore to reduce sedentary behaviour by encouraging participation in greater amounts of self selected physical activities that are accumulated throughout the day termed "lifestyle physical activity". Preliminary evidence indicates that this approach is associated with cardiometabolic health gains even in the absence of sizeable weight loss. Indeed, lifestyle physical activity programmes accumulating energy expenditures that exceed 10465 kJ/week combined with dietary interventions appear to be as effective as more traditional structured programmes in long term weight loss maintenance and improvements in cardiometabolic health among overweight and obese persons. Although prevention of obesity is the ideal goal, we live in a world in which obesity is rapidly replacing infectious disease and undernutrition as the most serious health threat. At this time it seems prudent to advocate increases in daily energy expenditure through a lifestyle physical activity approach to achieve healthier body weights for the treatment of overweight and obesity. Verf.-Referat