This news may be of interest to the fairer sex. The study which was conducted at the U-M instate for Social Research (ISR) discovered that in spite of the supposed increase of public health concerns about obesity and constant social pressures stating that slim is beautiful, young women in their 20s are seen to be exercising lesser than young men. And young black women apparently showed a considerable decline in exercise between 1984 and 2004 as per the study of University of Michigan.
This study is one of the first to look into the long-term patterns in weight-related activities. It also examined as to how these patterns differ by gender, race and ethnicity and socioeconomic status.
According to Philippa Clarke, lead author of the study and a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) is of the opinion that the inconsistencies in health behavior are constant with disparities in the frequency of obesity especially among women.
The trends over a 23-year-period in six different health behaviors were looked in to by the experts for the study. They calculated as to how frequently the participants accounted for eating breakfast or some green vegetables and fruits. They saw how many times they exercised vigorously like jogging, swimming or calisthenics. Did they at least get 7 hours of sleep or in week, in an average how much television they watched?
Clarke and co-authors Patrick O’Malley, Lloyd Johnston, John Schulenberg and Paula Lantz, at ISR commented “Agreement is growing that the source of the obesity epidemic lies in an environment that produces an energy gap, where energy intake exceeds energy expenditure even by as little as 100 excess calories per day.”
Differences in energy expenditure could play a part in gender disparities with regards to obesity and overweight, are claimed by the findings that young women consistently exercised less than young men.
The regularity of eating fruits and vegetables remained somewhat stable among young adult women but among young men it declined drastically. Even breakfast was also supposedly eaten less by young men than young women.
There was apparently a steady reduction in the frequency of getting at least seven hours of sleep in both men and women. The experts discovered that the amount of time that is spent watching TV by both men and women are comparatively stable despite the notion of television viewing as a significant determinant for obesity.
Some major differences were supposedly found when the experts compared the behaviors of diverse racial and ethnic groups. For Instance, even though white women demonstrated a steady rise in the regularity of eating breakfast, the path for non-Hispanic black women declined until 1996 and only started to increase in the year 2000.
In any given year, the consumption of fruits and vegetables were claimed to be consistently lower among black and Hispanic men and women. But the consumption did not change much amongst young adults in general.
The frequency of exercising apparently steadily declined amongst black women. But the frequency of exercise stayed relatively stable among young adult women in general. Adding to it, when it comes to the frequency of getting seven hours of sleep at night, black and Hispanic women supposedly showed higher decline than white women. They were apparently also less expected than white women to account for eating breakfast and also fruits and vegetables.
Men from lower socioeconomic backgrounds accounted for a drastic decline in sleep, after adjusting for race or ethnicity. Television viewing also was seen apparently more in minority racial groups and women from lower socioeconomic groups than whites and women who are from more affluent backgrounds.
This study is going to appear in the October issue of the American Journal of Public Health.