Availability of and access to physical activity opportunities and links with health behaviours and obesity among adults

健康专家越来越关注越来越多的人肥胖或超重。肥胖会损害健康，它会导致糖尿病、某些癌症、心脏病和许多其他健康问题。导致肥胖的因素之一是缺乏足够的运动。研究人员认为，人们生活的环境类型可能会产生影响。例如，一些地区可能没有足够的娱乐设施，如游泳池、体育中心或公园，人们可以去散步或慢跑。此外，如果不这样做，一些人可能会更难以前往设施。我有车还是没有？没有去那里的公共交通工具。尽管专家们认为这些事情可能很重要，但事实并非如此。没有任何研究在全国城市和农村地区研究过这个问题。因此，一组研究人员将汇集从其他研究中收集到的信息，并以一种新的方式来帮助回答这个问题。研究人员将绘制出苏格兰大陆所有娱乐设施的位置图，并观察到达那里的容易程度以及不同交通方式的费用。然后，他们将继续研究是否住得离健身设施近，或者去健身设施有多容易，会影响人们的运动量或肥胖的可能性。研究人员还将研究娱乐和交通设施的可用性是否对某些人的身体活动和肥胖水平比其他人更重要，例如女性或男性、老年人、低收入者或生活在农村地区的人。这项研究的结果将有助于负责卫生、娱乐和交通的政府规划人员和决策者更有效和公平地规划其服务。

Health experts are increasingly concerned about the rising number of people who are obese or overweight. Being obese damages health, it can lead to diabetes, certain cancers, heart disease and a number of other health problems. One of the factors that can lead to being obese is not taking enough exercise. Researchers think that the type of environment people live in might make a difference. For example, some areas might not have enough recreation facilities such as swimming pools, sports centres or parks where people could go for a walk or jog. Also, it might be more difficult for some people to travel to facilities if they don?t have a car or there isn?t any public transport that goes there. Although experts think that these things might be important, there isn?t any research that has looked at this question across the country in urban and rural areas. So a team of researchers is going to bring together the information that has been collected in other studies and use this in a new way to help answer this question. The researchers will map the locations of recreation facilities across all mainland Scotland, and look to see how easy it is to get there and how much it costs by different forms of transport. They will then go on to look at whether living close to facilities or how easy it is to get to them, makes a difference to how much exercise people take or how likely there are to be obese. The researchers will also examine whether the availability of recreation and transport facilities matters more for the physical activity and obesity levels of some people than others e.g. women or men, the elderly, people on low incomes or people living in rural areas.The results of this study will help government planners and policy makers responsible for health, recreation and transport to plan their services more effectively and fairly.