Top Highlights

• the average commute was only about fifteen minutes each way – were 40 per cent less likely to have died over the study period than those who did not, from any cause.18
• When the results arrived, they were striking. Separate surveys have calculated that the average Canadian adult walks just over 4,800 steps per day. In contrast, the Amish men averaged almost 18,500. Even the community’s women, who traditionally spend most of their time in domestic and child-rearing activities rather than farming, managed well over ...
• James Skinner, a now-retired professor of exercise science at Arizona State University, who once wrote, wisely: ‘As a general rule, people overestimate what they do, and underestimate what they eat.’ Skinner cited a US study in which people were asked to name which sports they took part in. Even
• The academics calculated that on current trends, by 2030 the average American will, over an average week, expend only about 15 per cent more total bodily energy than someone who spent the entire seven days in bed.17 If that sounds worrying, it should be.
• In the 2008 Pixar film WALL·E, while the eponymous solitary robot endlessly cleans up a rubbish-ruined Earth, the people of the twenty-ninth century are portrayed as space-dwelling, corpulent, jumpsuit-dressed adult-babies, who spend their lives on mobile reclining chairs, a screen permanently at hand. It can be difficult to read