Study: Spend Less Time on the Couch and You’ll Eat Less Junk Food
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iStockphoto/Thinkstock(CHICAGO) — Getting off of the couch will mean less time eating junk food, according to a new study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Researchers from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine randomly assigned 204 adults one of four different lifestyle treatments. The treatments included increasing fruit and vegetable intake and exercise; decreasing fat and sedentary leisure; decreasing fat and increasing exercise as well as increasing fruit and vegetable intake; and decreasing sedentary behavior.
When patients were asked to change one lifestyle behavior, it was easier for them to change others, as well, creating a snowball effect, according to the findings.
“The key take-away is that people can change their unhealthy eating and activity behaviors, contrary to what many health professionals believe. By focusing on just two targets (increasing fruits/vegetables and cutting down leisure screen time) people were able to make large changes in those behaviors rapidly and they also reduced saturated fat intake without even trying,” Bonnie Spring, a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and lead author of the study, told ABC News.
It is important to note that this was not a weight loss study. Only about 60 percent of participants were overweight or obese. However, 100 percent had all of four unhealthy diet and activity behaviors that characterize most Americans: not eating enough fruits/vegetables, eating too much saturated fat, not getting enough moderate physical activity, and watching too much TV.
Spring said these unhealthy lifestyle behaviors are very important behavior change targets in and of themselves, because they all have long-term adverse effects on health, independent of any effects on weight.
For the first three weeks, study participants were paid $175 to stick to the lifestyle changes and report their progress. When that phase was completed, patients no longer had to maintain the lifestyle changes in order to be paid, but the researchers found that 86 percent of people reported trying to keep with the changes once they were made.
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio