Grant: Operating Grant

Children can be highly active and highly sedentary on the same day! For instance, a child can spend a couple of hours playing hockey, and then spend the rest of the day in front of a TV. Thus, we will have to focus on both physical activity (PA) and sedentary behaviour (SED) in curbing childhood obesity. Moreover, today, more than ever before, we depend on technology to get our work done, which makes us more sedentary and in turn more obese than ever before. As we have engineered obesity into our lives, to reverse this epidemic, we need to engineer it out of our lives. To achieve this, we need to understand where within a city are children active or sedentary in all seasons. The idea is to relay this evidence to policy makers so that our environment could be modified to increase PA and decrease SED throughout the year. The objective of this study is to understand the role played by urban environment in children's PA and SED. To do this, we will identify and map locations and patterns of PA and SED accumulation in children in all seasons of Saskatoon. We will recruit 800 children from different neighbourhoods of Saskatoon and measure their PA and SED using GPS equipped accelerometers in four different seasons. Extensive weather and built environment data of Saskatoon, and household data of children will be collectively used to understand children's locations and patterns of PA and SED accumulation. This approach will help us understand the influence of urban environment on children's activity, thus paving the way to modify urban spaces to increase PA and decrease SED in children in all seasons. Lack of PA and rising SED is associated with rising childhood obesity, and childhood obesity in turn is linked to chronic conditions like heart disease and stroke. Thus, by conducting this study, we are taking a proactive approach to facilitate the modification of children's behaviour at an early age, leading to healthy, active lifestyles in adulthood.