Wednesday, November 2, 2022
7:00 – 7:45 pm ADT
Point Sainte-Anne A+B
Back to the Future: moving forward by looking back
Consistent with Dr. John Sutton’s adventure-seeking and iconoclastic abilities and personality, this presentation will chronicle my quest to understand temporal trends in movement behaviours through a variety of time-travel techniques. This presentation will take us on an anthropological journey to try and understand the catalysts, enablers and accelerators of lifestyle transitions that have culminated in modern living. We will visit Old Order Amish and Mennonites, sub-Saharan Africa, countries from around the world, and sci-fi simulations.
Our changing world is changing us, in few ways more evident than how we move. Globally, immigration and urbanization movements are transforming people’s lives. The electronic revolution has fundamentally transformed our movement patterns by changing where and how we live, learn, work, play and travel, progressively isolating people indoors (e.g., houses, schools, workplaces, vehicles) most often in chairs. At an individual level, we are sleeping less, sitting more, walking infrequently, driving regularly and getting less physical activity. We are moving from one country to another, from rural to urban areas, from outdoors to indoors, from standing to sitting, from walking to driving, from active play to digital play, from three dimensional to two dimensional interactions, and at a macro-level countries are moving through epidemiologic and economic transitions at varying rates. These exposomal changes in our macro-, meso- and micro-movement behaviours, patterns and contexts may have profound though poorly understood impacts on human health. How such impact varies spatially, temporally, culturally, or by indices of country human development can provide fascinating insights and provide a model for time-travel – essentially moving forward by looking back.
Global patterns of disease are transitioning from predominantly communicable diseases to non-communicable diseases (NCDs) commensurate with the epidemiologic transition. The influence of the exposome on this global shift in morbidity and mortality has prompted rethinking of terminology and it has been recommended that NCDs be more appropriately termed socially transmitted conditions (STCs – that bind NCDs together using their common upstream drivers). Movement characteristics at macro-, meso-, and micro-levels feature prominently in the etiology of STCs, consistent with both research evidence and intuition. For example, physical inactivity is the fourth leading risk factor for death worldwide. Transitions and evolutions (e.g., across strata of human development, geospatial shifts, community design, automation, mechanization, digitization) unintentionally conspire to transform our movement behaviours, adversely impacting our habitual sleep, sedentary and physical activity behaviours. This reality threatens progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as outlined in the Bangkok Declaration on Physical Activity for Global Health and Sustainable Development, the World Health Organization’s Global Action Plan on Physical Activity, and Canada’s Common Vision for Increasing Physical Activity and Reducing Sedentary Living.
Globally, physical inactivity is associated with 5.3 million deaths a year, and $53.8 B in health care costs. A greater understanding of the societal forces and individual behaviours, determinants and intrinsic factors that are associated with large-scale shifts in human movement patterns will help identify intervention strategies at the macro-, meso-, micro-levels that can address this significant, expanding and progressing public health burden. The field of movement behaviour epidemiology (physical activity, sedentary behaviour, sleep, combined compositional analyses) is in its relative infancy but may be the key to get back to the future. Fasten your seatbelts for 1.21 Gigawatts of adventure!
Speakers:
- Mark Tremblay – Back to the Future: moving forward by looking back
