More Canadians should get tax-incentive to start exercising

If we look at the numbers according to Obesity Canada, a network of health care professionals, as many as 25% of all teens and 50% of all adults in Canada are overweight.

A staggering 10%-12% of adult Canadians are classified as obese, putting them at serious risk of heart attack, stroke and diabetes, to name but a few of the threats they are exposed to.
The leading factors in the 'obesity epidemic' are a poor diet and inactive lifestyles.

Therefore, a New Year's resolution of the Harper government should be to get more Canadians off their couches and start exercising.
In 2007, the Tories already made a great step in the good direction with the introduction of the Children's Fitness Tax Credit, which allows parents to claim on their income tax a portion of the fees they pay to enroll their kids in sports.

The government really needs to expand the program now and include everyone over the age of 16.
Rewarding people for joining health clubs or signing up for recreational sports programs is a simple, yet effective way to get more Canadians active in our increasingly sedentary society.

Over the years, governments leaned toward using the 'stick-approach' to improving our health, but shaming and hectoring people through nagging awareness campaigns, food labelling, tobacco-use restrictions and the like will only go so far.

Now it's time to start offering rewards to people for making healthy choices.

Allowing people to claim only a portion of activity fees on their taxes will be a safeguard against abusers simply buying a gym membership as a tax write-off and then never showing up, but it will still reward people genuinely trying to get healthier.

In the long run, all Canadians will benefit.
More people leading healthy lifestyles will ease pressure on our overburdened health care system.

Source: Winnipeg Sun

Electronic personal health instructor calls: "Get your but off the couch!"

Fitness research done in Berkeley, CA in the US proofs that when a recorded voice tells them, even people who hardly get any exercise can be convinced to get off the couch and have a workout.

Researchers at Stanford University, who studied inactive people for a year, discovered that an automated exercise reminder phone call had about the same get-up-and-go power as calls from human motivators.

"The recording had a very nice, kind of cheerleader voice. It sounded very natural," said study participant Rita Horiguchi, who was initially disappointed to be assigned to get computer calls. "She would say things like, 'That's very good. I think you can go a little farther next week. So I would do a little bit more".

Horiguchi was one of 218 adults over 55 in the San Francisco Bay area who took part in the study, known as Community Health Advice by Telephone, or Chat. The goal was to get them out walking at a brisk pace for 30 minutes most days, or engage in some other medium-intense activity, for a total of about 150 minutes a week.

The group was divided into three: people who got no calls, people who were called by trained health educators and people who got computer calls.

The automated calls were interactive —for instance, asking participants to press "1" if they reached their goals in the previous week — and participants got prerecorded advice on how to overcome challenges.

Exercise levels were measured with devices that estimate physical activity and intensity.

After a year, both of the called groups were topping 150 minutes of exercise a week. Those who got computer calls averaged 157 minute while human-called participants logged an average 178 minutes. The no-call group averaged only 118 minutes.

Results of the study, funded by the US National Institute on Aging, are in the current issue of the journal Health Psychology.

MSNBC