A study of BMI-defined obesity among children and adolescents in the general English population did its best to measure activity levels by questionnaire and, where it could, by acceleromtery (Coombs & Stamatakis, 2015).
The study found that television viewing, and not other forms of objectively measured or questionnaire-based sedentary time, was associated with obesity in children and adolescents.
Another woe of the overweight, as warned by the chief medical officer, is hypertension. Although the 1946 and 1958 British birth cohorts show an increase in obesity, they also show an overall drop in diastolic blood pressure (Li et al., 2015).
References
Coombs, N.A. & Stamatakis, E. (2015) Associations between Objectively Assessed and Questionnaire-based Sedentary Behaviour with BMI-defined Obesity among General Population Children and Adolescents living in England. BMJ Open 2015;5:e007172, doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2014-007172.
Li, L., Hardy, R., Kuh, D. & Power, C. (2015) Life-course Body Mass Index Trajectories and Blood Pressure in Mid Life in two British Birth Cohorts: Stronger Associations in the Later-born Generation. International Journal of Epidemiology. doi: 10.1093/ije/dyv106. First published online: June 14, 2015.
