Suppose that there was a medical intervention that would reduce the risk of getting dementia by 50%, of developing type 2 diabetes by 58%, produce a 41% reduction in hip fractures in post-menopausal women, reduce anxiety by 48%, depression by 30%, reduce your chances of premature death by 23%, would be the number one treatment for fatigue, dramatically ameliorate the health risks of being obese and have major impacts on cardio- vascular disease and bowel cancer, then you'd think that health services and governments around the world would leap at the opportunity to promote it.
What's the intervention?
Half an hour of purposeful walking per day. The sort of walking that slightly lifts your heart rate and gets you breathing just that little bit faster.
Now it isn't hard to find this stuff out and I'm sure that most of our policy makers have encountered these facts if not really taken them in. So the question becomes why haven't they been acted upon? Why don't they seem to be informing public decision making in anything like the way they should?
For what it's worth I've got a few hypotheses. Taken together they may contain an explanation.
The first is quite simple. There isn't any money in it. If there was a pill that had these effects we'd be jumping over ourselves to give money to the big pharmaceutical companies, but there isn't.
The second is that it represents an implicit challenge to car culture. What's the point of having a car if you're going to leave it at home when you go to the shops? Where's the opportunity for the public display of wealth and status if you're on foot and indistinguishable from poor people who are doing it through necessity rather than choice?
The third is that it in electoral terms walking is seen as trivial and attempts to encourage people it would get categorised under the heading of "nanny state makes us feel guilty about our lifestyles and then tells us what to do".
In what sometimes feels like a previous lifetime I used to teach a course called Science in Society and would make use of a lot of video materials. Amongst these videos, captured from ordinary broadcast television, I remember one that included a discussion among 14 year old girls about the relative benefits of smoking and exercise. As far as they were concerned both of these activities carried a financial cost. For the price of a packet of fags you could have a session at the gym. Their conclusion was that it was better to spend the money on cigarettes rather than down at the gym because you could share the cigarettes with your friends.
A friend, who is now a Professor of Medicine, and well aware of my frustration in attempting to push this particular issue, sent me a link to a short video lecture. If you've got ten minutes it's well worth a look.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUaInS6HIGo&app=desktop
Hi Andrew, the answer is very easy. When you swallow a pill it takes a second and even during that time you consume. Walking half an hour prevents the people from consuming. Imagine the economic damage of not consuming during that time? That's the real background why politicians don't foster walking or cycling.
ReplyDeleteNice to hear from you Sven. That's an interesting argument, though I suppose we could now be busily consuming electronic media as we walk and indeed that's what many young people seem to be doing. Of course, the overall consumption of high energy goods and services, such as fuel for cars, might well be reduced. So you have got a point.
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