I am on a diet, to the delight of my impossibly chic wife, who has no problem at all eating cake and pasta in front of me while I consume bland chicken.

I had assumed that my increasing weight was due to eating too much and no exercise but a new Université de Montréal study says it is my job doing it to me.  Whew.  I dodged a bullet there.

Regardless, in two weeks I will be back where I want and if it is true that workplace related obesity is real, my job took four years to make me a weight I did not want so four weeks is not so bad to suffer.

But is there anything to a workplace making people fat?  In their Preventive Medicine article, researchers note that eat Canadians eat healthier(1) - measured as calories consumed by adults between 1972 and 2004 - than in the past and exercise more (statistics: 1981-2000) but obesity has still spiked in Canada, with the prevalence of overweight and obese people (combined) between 1978 and 2004 up 10%, from 49.2% to 59.1%.    Their analysis of those Statistics Canada databases (17-132,000 respondents) lead them to speculate that the lack of physical activity during office hours explains the weight increase. 

They mapped trends in leisure, transportation and work-related physical activity and concluded the culprit isn't more driving, says lead author Carl-Étienne Juneau.   "As a result of urban sprawl we expected to see more car-dependant people.   Yet, both men and women increasingly adopted healthy behaviours such as walking and biking, which is definitely good news."

Only activity levels at work were lower (by just over 5%) than the generation past, results which applied to both men and women.   

Their recommendation is more awareness programs, etc., but the benefit of those is negligible.  Simple things like taking the steps instead of an elevator or a walk during the break make sense, but we have to consider that most people who will take the stairs are already exercising and therefore in the non-50% overweight range.

Obviously work conditions may be much different than 30 years ago - everyone made the case that white collar office workers made more money and more people should do it, and that has happened.   

More white collar workers makes the most sense, and certainly sitting in an office watching "Farscape" and eating pizza while we write Science 2.0 stuff isn't what I was doing even 20 years ago - that's why I am on a diet.   I won't get back to the weight of those days of yore but I am not exactly Jabba The Hutt either.    So on some level weight has to be an individual responsibility and not something blamed on sitting in an air conditioned office instead of digging ditches.

Citation: Carl-Etienne Juneau, Louise Potvin, 'Trends in leisure-, transport-, and work-related physical activity in Canada 1994–2005', Preventive Medicine, In Press, Corrected Proof

NOTE:

(1) I dispute that.   History will show that the war on animal fat and corn syrup since will end up being regarded as quaintly yet derisively as trepanation for headaches is to current experts.