Changing the Concept of Health: Researchers Look at Weight Gain Prevention Techniques

Maintaining a healthy weight can be difficult running two and from work with a mostly sedentary life and eating food that may not always be healthy. Add exercise and a nutritional diet is an important part of keeping weight off and holding on to a healthy image.

Yet study author Kristina Lindvall, a dietitian and doctoral candidate at the Unit for Epidemiology and Global health, suggest that part of this process involves society spreading educational information globally as a treatment method.

"That is why I chose to focus on primary weight maintenance in my research, i.e, the possibility of preventing weight gain among normal weight and overweight individuals," she states, via a press release.

Study authors looked a participants who were 30 to 65 years old and were recruited on the basis that they had twice participated in Västerbotten Intervention Programme (VIP), which is carried out in Västerbotten, Sweden, or in the Upstate Health and Wellness Study, in New York State in the US.

Their thesis shows that of all VIP-participants who were of normal weight or overweight and took part in the study in 1990 to 2004, only about a third did not gain any weight. Other results showed that younger individuals of normal weight that did not have type-2 diabetes and no factors were cardiovascular disease were the least likely to maintain weight.

"This means that interventions and programs aiming at prevention of overweight and obesity may need to be broadened to also include these groups that are normally regarded as being at low risk for weight gain," Kristina Lindvall said, via the release.

The researchers used a questionnaire in order to identify attitudes and behaviors that were of importance for weight maintenance in various subgroups, including age, gender and body-mass index (BMI), which showed that there were major differences in terms of various factors and how healthy an individual was.

"This further emphasizes the importance of tailoring interventions based on an individual's demographic (age, sex and baseline BMI) when aiming at primary weight maintenance in a population," Lindvall adds.

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