Obesity Panacea

Travis’ Note: This morning the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology released the first official national guidelines for sedentary behaviour and physical activity for pre-school aged children (0-4 years old).  Below we have a post by one of the authors of the new guidelines papers, Allana Leblanc (more on Allana can be found at the bottom of the post).  This post describes the physical activity guidelines – for a similar post outlining the sedentary behaviour guidelines please visit the Sedentary Behaviour Research Network.

The full text of the guidelines papers can be accessed for free via the Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism website (the sedentary behaviour paper is here, while the physical activity paper is here).  Additional information can also be found on the CSEP website at www.csep.ca/guidelines.

Background

Until recently, only one set of physical activity guidelines was available for children under the age of 5 years (National Association for Sport and Physical Education, 2009). These guidelines were useful recommendations for parents and caregivers with advice on healthy living, but were informed largely on expert consensus and not by the rigor of a systematic review.  Last year, Australia and the United Kingdom (UK) were the first to release evidence-based guidelines and recommend that preschoolers be physically active for at least 180 minutes per day (Department of Health and Ageing, Australia 2011; Start Active, Stay Active, United Kingdom, 2011). The full guidelines can be found here and here. However, a systematic review was still not publicly available to inform the development Canadian guidelines for this age group.
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