Active Living Research

This commentary reviews the role that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has played since 1964 in moving science, policy, and practice from exercise and fitness to physical activity and health.

Objective. The objective of this commentary is to demonstrate the growing interest of state legislatures in adopting policies that promote physical activity in schools and communities through partnerships with school districts and local governments.

Local and state health departments are well-positioned to serve as catalysts for the institutional and community changes needed to increase physical activity across the population. Efforts should focus on evidence-based strategies, including promotion of high-quality physical education in schools, social support networks and structured programs for physical activity in communities, and organizational practices, policies, and programs that promote physical activity in the workplace. Health departments must also focus on land use and transportation practices and policies in communities where the built environment creates major impediments to physical activity, particularly in economically disadvantaged communities disproportionately burdened by chronic disease.

Despite rapid growth in resources devoted to physical activity promotion, the public health capacity to address physical inactivity is insufficient. Too few public health practitioners have the necessary skills to implement and evaluate evidence-based physical activity interventions, and schools of public health typically do not have adequate course content in physical activity. This commentary discusses the types of initiatives needed to improve the education and training of physical activity practitioners and researchers to effectively address one of the 21st century's greatest health problems—an inactive lifestyle.

We provide suggestions for advancing opportunities for effective and sustainable strategies for increasing physical activity in racial/ethnic minority populations.

Behavioral economics is a relatively new field of economics that uses experimental techniques to produce insights about human decision-making. One of its key findings is that people's preferences for actions are not absolute, but rather relative to some anchor point, and can therefore be influenced by changing the anchor. Anchor points can be social norms, habits acquired in childhood, or a cultural frame—whether physical activity is presented as fun or as drudgery. Physical activity promotion can benefit by intervening on these anchors, but doing so is most effective when it is undertaken for society as a whole. Behavioral economics accordingly suggests that physical activity promotion should incorporate attempts at a cultural shift to support individual health-promotion efforts.

This commentary highlights the importance of regular physical activity to the nation’s health and discusses some of the major challenges and opportunities currently facing the field.

Objective. Better understanding of the relationships between body composition and insulin resistance.

This manuscript presents a brief summary of the substantial data supporting an inverse relationship between the amount of habitual physical activity performed and a variety of negative health outcomes throughout the lifespan. It points out that despite these data a large segment of the US population remain insufficiently active resulting in a high population attributable risk for chronic disease due to inactivity. The accumulated data support the need for more comprehensive health promoting physical activity policies and programs, especially for the economically and socially disadvantaged and medically underserved.