ARCHIVED - Research About - Obesity

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The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) is the Government of Canada's agency for health research. CIHR's mission is to create new scientific knowledge and to catalyze its translation into improved health, more effective health services and products, and a strengthened Canadian health-care system. Composed of 13 Institutes, CIHR provides leadership and support to nearly 12,000 health researchers and trainees across Canada. Through CIHR, the Government of Canada invested approximately $26.6 million in 2007-08 in obesity-related research across Canada.

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The Facts

• According to the Canadian Community Health Survey, four million people aged 18 and over were obese in 2007, while another eight million were overweight. Combined, this represented about 40% of the adult population.

• The percentage of overweight or obese Canadians has stabilized after dramatic increases between 1985 and 1995. Rates of both overweight and obesity generally changed very little between 2005 and 2007.

• In 2007, rates of overweight and obesity were lowest among Canadians aged 18 to 24. Obesity rates were generally highest among individuals aged 45 to 64.

• Saskatchewan, Alberta and Atlantic Canada had the highest rates of obesity in 2007, ranging from 18% in Alberta to a high of 22% in Newfoundland and Labrador. The lowest rate was in British Columbia, where only 11% of adults were obese.

• A Statistics Canada study found that men and women who spend at least 21 hours a week watching television are almost twice as likely to be obese as those who watch five hours or less each week.

(Source: Statistics Canada Canadian Community Health Survey for 2007)

Finding Solutions

Game on! Interactive video can make you fitter

In what comes as welcome news to gamers everywhere, researchers at the University of British Columbia have found that interactive video games can actually help people exercise more and get more out of it. The study, led by Dr. Darren Warburton, a CIHR New Investigator, compared college-aged males who trained using GameBike -- which allows a rider to cycle through video game terrain -- with those who trained using an ordinary exercise bike. The GameBike cyclists trained more often and showed more improvement in blood pressure and VO₂ max (the ability to process oxygen during exercise).

Study links ancestry and belly fat

A team of CIHR-funded researchers has found that ethnicity matters when it comes to where the human body stores fat. The study found that Canadians of Chinese and South Asian descent had higher amounts of "visceral adipose tissue" -- the deeper layer of fat that cushions the abdominal organs -- than Canadians with European or Aboriginal heritage. The study, led by Simon Fraser University's Dr. Scott A. Lear, provides evidence that Chinese and South Asians may be at greater risk of developing diabetes and heart disease than their Aboriginal and European contemporaries of the same weight and stomach size.

More children showing signs of liver disease

Obesity not only puts children at risk of developing type 2 diabetes and hypertension, it can also lead to liver disease. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), a disorder identified in adults in the 1970s and first reported in children in the early 1980s, is rapidly becoming "one of the most important chronic liver diseases," according to research by CIHR-supported researcher Dr. Eve Roberts of The Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute. Dr. Roberts published her findings in a Journal of Hepatology review. Dr. Roberts says that tracking the origin and development of pediatric NAFLD will enhance our understanding of how it affects all age groups and may help to identify new treatment opportunities.

The Researchers

Dr. Geoff Ball - Overweight kid? Talk to the parents

When parents concerned about their overweight child arrive at Dr. Geoff Ball's pediatric weight management clinic, they're often desperate. They've tried a variety of ways to get their child to lose weight -- but the fat's still there.

"Parents often arrive with the belief that 'There's something wrong with my kid, please fix it'," says Dr. Ball, director of the Pediatric Centre for Weight and Health at Edmonton's Stollery Children's Hospital. "But the approach we take is that the child is the product of the environment that the parents create. We don't work with the child, we work primarily with the parents."

His team's Parents as Agents of Change program, a project supported in partnership by CIHR, is now in its second year. It involves parents in a 16-week program that's as much about changing communication as counting calories.

"We've combined two things that we think will really help families make healthy changes. We focus on moms and dads as the creators of the home environment. And we use cognitive behaviour therapy to help parents understand what they do and why, and how they could do things differently to get a more positive result," says Dr. Ball.

Rather than being fed nutritional facts, parents in Dr. Ball's program take part in weekly group education and counselling sessions. Parents reflect on and discuss their family cultures, share experiences and set goals.

How will the program ultimately measure success? "It's not just about measuring changes in the child's BMI (Body Mass Index)," says Dr. Ball. Along with monitoring changes in family food and exercise habits, the program is also assessing changes in quality of life issues ranging from the amount of time parents and kids spend together, to individual stress levels and within-family communication.

If the program proves successful, it's a model that could itself become a heavyweight in treating the epidemic of childhood obesity.

For more information, go to www.impact.cihr-irsc.gc.ca.