Environmental and social influences on physical activity

在美国和其他发达国家，儿童和成人的肥胖正变得越来越普遍。虽然确切的原因尚不清楚，但有证据表明，即使是体力活动的微小变化也有助于扭转这种有害的趋势。体育锻炼还能降低患心脏病、糖尿病、骨质疏松症甚至某些癌症的风险。不幸的是，成人的活动水平似乎在下降，儿童也可能如此，尽管可以证实这一点的信息少得惊人。增加运动量的方法，比如家庭医生开的运动处方，收效甚微。关于人们不爱运动的原因以及如何鼓励运动，人们提出了很多原因。这些建议涵盖了许多不同的领域，如政府有关交通的政策、学校操场的可用性、体育设施和宜人的社区。有些人比其他人更容易改变。在提出可能毫无帮助且代价高昂的建议之前，我们有必要了解久坐的成年人和儿童的实际情况，以及哪些因素（心理、文化、环境等）与缺乏运动最密切相关。因此，针对这些因素中的一些因素来增加活动是合乎逻辑的。我们建议通过问卷调查来测量成年志愿者的身体活动，通过问卷调查来测量9-10岁的小学生的身体活动，也可以使用一个火柴盒大小的装置，叫做加速度计，戴在腰上，像计步器一样测量运动。问卷还将评估志愿者的一系列特征，这些特征被认为与活动有关，包括对环境的感知。此外，我们会利用直接观察和地理信息系统来评估建成环境，例如学校和社区，该系统包含街道照明、花园大小和交通水平等因素的数据。这将使每个志愿者的身体活动测量和环境评估能够联系起来。然后，我们计划采访家庭，以确定促进体育活动的障碍和机会。最后，我们将把结果提交给对健康、儿童和环境负有责任的相关团体，如学校管理者、校长、诺福克儿童？此外还有剑桥地平线、地方当局和东英格兰发展署，他们负责到2016年在剑桥附近提供近5万套新住房和22亿英镑的支持基础设施。

Obesity in both children and adults is becoming increasingly common in this and other developed countries. Although the precise causes remain unclear, evidence suggests that even fairly small changes in physical activity could help to reverse this damaging trend. Physical activity also reduces risks of heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and even some cancers. Unfortunately, levels of activity appear to be decreasing in adults and may also be in children, although there is surprisingly little information available to confirm this. Approaches to increase activity, for example exercise prescriptions from the family doctor, have had limited success. There are many reasons put forward as to why people are inactive and what could be done to encourage activity. These cover such diverse areas as government policy concerning transport through to availability of school playing fields, sports facilities and a pleasant neighbourhood. Some are more easily altered than others. Before making potentially unhelpful and expensive recommendations it is useful to know how sedentary adults and children actually are and which factors (psychological, cultural, environmental and so on) are most strongly associated with inactivity. It would then be logical to target some of these factors in an effort to increase activity.We propose to measure physical activity in adult volunteers by questionnaire and in 9-10 year old school children by questionnaire and also by using a matchbox sized device called an accelerometer worn on the waist which measures movement rather like a pedometer. The questionnaires will also assess a range of volunteer characteristics thought to be associated with activity including perceptions of the environment. In addition we will assess the built environment eg school and neighbourhood using both direct observation and a geographical information system that contains data on factors such as street lighting, garden size and traffic levels. This will enable the measures of physical activity and the assessment of the environment to be linked for each volunteer. We then plan to interview families to identify the barriers and opportunities to promoting physical activity. Finally we will present the results to interested groups with responsibility for health, children and the environment such as school governors, head teachers, Norfolk Children?s Services and also Cambridge Horizons, Local Authorities and the East of England Development Agency who are responsible for delivering nearly 50,000 new homes and #2.2billion of support infrastructure in the wider vicinity of Cambridge by 2016.