Fat, Crazy and Lazy

By Amy Fernandez

So here we are midsummer and maybe the pandemic is winding down…or maybe it’s just revving up for real business. Very disconcerting. We definitely need to hang onto the stuff we know for sure. And for many of us–me included–it’s an absolute certainty that the past six months have made us fat, crazy and lazy. Even if your local gym is reopening, you’re probably debating the possible risks of returning.

Don’t despair, that’s why we have dogs (although I suspect they would vote for permanently implementing this routine). There’s already plenty of research showing their measurably beneficial impact on emotional stability and cognitive function.

There have also been numerous small scale studies suggesting that dog ownership has a positive effect on physical fitness. Well, here’s a new one, and from my perspective it comes at precisely the moment when we need this kind of good news.

Recently, the University of Liverpool conducted a study to nail down the validity of past studies which have consistently revealed a correlation between fitness and dog ownership. Unlike previous efforts, this one didn’t rely on self-reporting, which is notoriously inaccurate. How many calories did you consume today?? It also narrowed its focus to residents of one specific British community, an approach that ruled out environmental factors that might skew the results. It also surveyed an equal number of men and women, another data glitch that mars the results in many studies. And it included 70 children although they were not the primary focus.

The baseline was the current activity guideline to maintain good health. In case you didn’t know, it recommends a minimum of 150 minutes of walking each week. The results, published in Scientific Reports, were startling. It was immediately clear that dog owners not only walked much more, but they walked more frequently than non-dog owners, generally, clocking in at least 300 minutes per week, about 200 more than non-dog owners.

More interestingly, most of them not only exceeded that walking quota, they were also far more likely to engage in other healthy activities such as recreational sports, yard work, etc. Those findings applied equally to their children; even though they represented a small portion of the study, and they were gauged on activities such as playing with dogs.

The report closed by de-emphasizing any direct cause and effect conclusion that dog ownership actually causes people to move around more.

Trust me on that one. They do.

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Posted by admin on Jul 26 2020. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.