Exercising And Preparing Your Own Meals Not As Healthy As You Think

We all know regular exercise is part of responsible adulthood, and cooking your own meals is almost always healthier than dining out. But a new study shows that people who regularly do both healthy behaviors are likely spending more time on one at the expense of the other.

"As the amount of time men and women spend on food preparation increases, the likelihood that those same people will exercise more decreases," said Rachel Tumin, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in epidemiology in The Ohio State University's College of Public Health. "The data suggest that one behavior substitutes for the other."

She used data from the American Time Use Survey, a U.S. Census Bureau assessment of how people spend their time. Turmin and colleagues analyzed a sample of 112,037 adults who provided responses between 2003 and 2010. The sample encompassed married and single men and women, as well as parents and couples with no children. When it came to the time people have to prepare their meals and exercise, the two behaviors tended to substitute for one another in terms of time. This finding held across both single and married men and women, regardless of the presence of children.

"There's only so much time in a day. As people try to meet their health goals, there's a possibility that spending time on one healthy behavior is going to come at the expense of the other," she said in a press statement. "I think this highlights the need to always consider the trade-off between ideal and feasible time use for positive health behaviors."

Turmin, who presented the findings in New Orleans on Friday at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, said her findings suggest that public health recommendations should not be made in isolation of one another; rather they should take into account the time available to devote to healthy behaviors in a given day.

"For time-intensive behaviors, public health officials may need to triage their recommendations by how much total time they think people have to spend on these activities each day," Tumin and her colleagues concluded. "If adults have a set time budget to devote to healthy behaviors, then recommendations should be tailored to make efficient use of that time budget."

Turmin did acknowledge that since the national survey data she analyzed only captured one day of data, her analysis cannot determine if people were devoting one day in the week to extensive meal planning to free up time on other days for exercise.