(Press-News.org) By Ann Kellett, Texas A&M University School of Public Health
Health practitioners and fitness buffs have long known that regular physical activity offers numerous health benefits, including the prevention of chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, some cancers and osteoporosis.
In addition, exercise enhances immune function and pain control, reduces fall risk and extends life expectancy. Mental health benefits include improved mood, reduced anxiety and decreased risk of dementia and depression.
Despite all these benefits, more than three out of four adults in the United States get far less exercise than the recommended 150 to 300 minutes a week of moderate physical activity or 75 to 150 minutes a week of vigorous physical activity.
Studies have also found that outdoor places such as parks and trails are effective settings for physical activity. The COVID-19 pandemic made this especially clear. Moreover, being in nature provides physical and mental health benefits similar to those of physical activity.
To date, little has been known about any potential additive benefits of engaging in physical activity in natural settings. Could being outdoors increase the effects of exercise while also encouraging more people to exercise? And if so, how could health professionals promote this behavior?
To answer these questions and more, Jay Maddock, Regents Professor with the School of Public Health at Texas A&M University and director of the university-led, collaborative Center for Health & Nature, along with Howard Frumkin, Hagler Fellow and senior vice president and director of the Land and People Lab, assessed the current scientific evidence regarding physical activity in natural settings and developed strategies for promoting these activities.
Their study, published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, identified several factors that affect how often people visit parks and natural settings, the extent to which they engage in physical activities once there and the benefits they get from this activity.
Maddock and Frumkin found that research suggests exercising in a park or other natural setting is more beneficial than exercising indoors. These studies focused on short-term outcomes of less than one year, however, and whether these benefits occur over the long term remains to be seen.
“Despite this, the research is clear that natural settings could be an effective venue for promoting physical activity,” Maddock said. “People generally enjoy being outdoors, with parks, trails and community gardens being the most popular venues.”
Factors that make these venues more attractive to visitors include physical features such as community centers, playgrounds, lighting and clear signage, as well natural features such as tree canopy and bodies of water that are well maintained. Activities such as classes and festivals also contribute to their popularity, as do a welcoming environment, a perception of safety, and visitors’ strong feeling of connectedness to nature and belief that spending time in these spaces is important.
“Parks and trails are particularly important due to their accessibility and widespread availability, but access varies significantly by geography, and rural areas often have less access to natural spaces because they have more privately held land,” Maddock said. “For example, nearly 98 percent of Illinois residents live within half a mile of a park, compared to only 29 percent in Mississippi.”
Maddock and Frumkin also found that use of parks and greenspaces for physical activity varies across demographic groups, with men more likely than women to use these spaces for physical activity. In addition, a study of parks in Los Angeles found that Black adults are less likely than white adults to engage in physical activity in parks, while English-speaking Latinos are equally likely and Asian/Pacific Islanders are more likely.
“Some groups — Black, Indigenous, and other people of color and immigrant and refugee populations, for example — often have experienced historic or current discrimination that hinders their use of natural spaces, and they routinely have less access to high-quality parks,” Frumkin said. “In addition, children, the elderly and people with disabilities face challenges in accessing natural spaces. Ensuring that these spaces are safe and easy to navigate, with appropriate programming, could help increase their use of parks and other natural settings.”
With these complexities in mind, Maddock and Frumkin offer four options that health care professionals could implement to encourage the use of parks and other natural settings by their patients.
One is simply to “prescribe” nature contact to patients.
“Recommending that patients spend more time in these settings is known as nature prescriptions or ‘ParkRx,’ and while more research is needed, the studies to date suggest that this approach is effective,” Maddock said.
Another is for health professionals to model this behavior by engaging in it themselves. This modeling has been found to be effective in promoting healthy behaviors while also enhancing the well-being of the health professionals.
A third approach is for health professionals to engage in community efforts that promote the use of outdoor spaces, such as Houston’s Be Well Communities initiative, which is supported by the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
Finally, health professionals could help create and maintain parks and greenspaces by steering funds into these efforts through Community Health Needs Assessments, Medicaid funds and funds from health care conversion foundations.
“It is clear that the use of parks and natural settings for physical activities could be a potentially powerful tool for promoting two important health behaviors simultaneously,” Maddock said. “This could be especially important given that the majority of Americans do not get enough exercise or spend enough time outdoors.”
END
Does exercise in greenspace boost the individual health benefits of each?
A review of the research leads to new insights and strategies that could help Americans become more physically and mentally fit
2024-06-13
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
New insights into the brain regions involved in paranoia
2024-06-13
New Haven, Conn. — The capacity to adjust beliefs about one’s actions and their consequences in a constantly changing environment is a defining characteristic of advanced cognition. Disruptions to this ability, however, can negatively affect cognition and behavior, leading to such states of mind as paranoia, or the belief that others intend to harm us.
In a new study, Yale scientists uncover how one specific region of the brain might causally provoke these feelings of paranoia.
Their novel approach — which involved aligning data collected from monkeys with human data — also offers ...
Privacy-enhancing browser extensions fail to meet user needs, new NYU Tandon School of Engineering study finds
2024-06-13
Popular web browser extensions designed to protect user privacy and block online ads are falling short, according to NYU Tandon School of Engineering researchers, who are proposing new measurement methodologies to better uncover and quantify these shortcomings.
Led by Rachel Greenstadt, professor in the NYU Tandon Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department, the team will present its study at the 19th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security, taking place July 1–5, 2024 in Singapore.
Through ...
Sweaty cattle may boost food security in a warming world
2024-06-13
Sweaty cows may not sound like the most exciting company, but in a warming world, researchers can’t get enough of them.
When cattle are too hot, they tend to stop eating, said Raluca Mateescu, University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) professor in the department of animal science. This affects the cattle’s health and growth and threatens the longevity of the food supply coming from that herd.
Climate change is making it more difficult to raise cattle – growth and reproduction are affected by heat – so ...
Researchers issue ‘call to action’ for data on more diverse range of dog owners
2024-06-13
Virginia Tech’s Audrey Ruple and Courtney Sexton, already deeply involved in data collection and analysis for dog health and connections to humans through the Dog Aging Project, are imploring fellow scientists to cast the net even wider for data on the shared environments of humans and dogs in a perspective piece that appears this month in the journal Science.
“Human environments and the impacts of environmental factors can vary substantially, and this variation should be captured by future studies of dogs to more accurately assess exposure risks for different and vulnerable populations,” ...
UTA awards more than $130,000 to spark new research
2024-06-13
The Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation at The University of Texas at Arlington has granted 10 Research Enhancement Program (REP) awards valued at more than $130,000 to support new research initiatives.
The REP grant serves as seed funding for launching new research, providing a foundation for recipients to pursue future research and funding from external sources.
“UTA is committed to fostering a culture of innovation and research discoveries for our community of scholars,” said Kate C. Miller, vice ...
The Protein Society announces its Protein Science 2023 Best Paper recipients
2024-06-13
LOS ANGELES, CA
The Protein Society is proud to announce that the winners of the 2023 Protein Science Best Paper awards are Evan T. Liechty from the University of Colorado, USA, and Sophie Rizzo, from Lehigh University, USA.
Evan T. Liechty
Protein Science 2023 August;32(8):e4719.doi:10.1002/pro.4719
Analysis of neutral mutational drift in an allosteric enzyme
Evan T. Liechty1, Andrew Hren1, Levi Kramer1, Gregory Donovan1, Anika J. Friedman1, Michael R. Shirts1, Jerome M. Fox1
1Department of Chemical and ...
A conservation market could incentivize global ocean protection
2024-06-13
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — The countries of the world agreed: Our planet needs more protection from human activity. And with the globe facing an assortment of environmental crises, they realized the plan needed to be ambitious. Thirty-by-thirty was their proposal: protect 30% of the planet by 2030. But while conservation is popular in principle, the costs of actually enacting it often stall even the most earnest efforts.
Three researchers at UC Santa Barbara have proposed a market-based approach to achieving the 30x30 targets in the ocean. They tested whether a system that allowed countries to trade conservation ...
New fabric makes urban heat islands more bearable
2024-06-13
This year has already seen massive heatwaves around the globe, with cities in Mexico, India, Pakistan and Oman hitting temperatures near or past 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit).
As global temperatures and urban populations rise, the world’s cities have become “urban heat islands,” with tight-packed conditions and thermal radiation emitting from pavement and skyscraper trapping and magnifying these temperatures. With 68 percent of all people predicted to live in cities by 2050, this is a growing, ...
Public more confident connecting increasing heat, wildfires with climate change than other extreme weather events, study finds
2024-06-13
Oregon State University researchers found that U.S. adults are fairly confident in linking wildfires and heat to climate change, but less confident when it comes to other extreme weather events like hurricanes, flooding or tornadoes.
The recent study found that politics and personal experience played significant roles in people’s responses: Self-identified Republicans were less likely than Democrats to attribute extreme weather events to climate change, though Republicans who had personally experienced negative impacts from extreme weather events were more likely to link them to climate change than those who hadn’t.
Looking at ...
Marine heatwaves devastate red gorgonians in the Medes Islands
2024-06-13
The increase in the frequency and intensity of marine heatwaves in recent decades is one of the effects of global climate change. A study by the University of Barcelona, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, shows that the extreme heatwave of 2022 caused an “unprecedented” increase in mortality of the red gorgonian Paramuricea clavata, affecting 70% of the colonies located in the Montgrí Natural Park, the Medes Islands and the Baix Ter. According to the researchers, these results are “alarming ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
Underserved youth less likely to visit emergency department for concussion in Ontario, study finds
‘Molecular shield’ placed in the nose may soon treat common hay fever trigger
Beetles under climate stress lay larger male eggs: Wolbachia infection drives adaptive reproduction strategy in response to rising temperature and CO₂
Groundbreaking quantum study puts wave-particle duality to work
Weekly injection could be life changing for Parkinson’s patients
Toxic metals linked to impaired growth in infants in Guatemala
Being consistently physically active in adulthood linked to 30–40% lower risk of death
Nerve pain drug gabapentin linked to increased dementia, cognitive impairment risks
Children’s social care involvement common to nearly third of UK mums who died during perinatal period
‘Support, not judgement’: Study explores links between children’s social care involvement and maternal deaths
Ethnic minority and poorer children more likely to die in intensive care
Major progress in fertility preservation after treatment for cancer of the lymphatic system
Fewer complications after additional ultrasound in pregnant women who feel less fetal movement
Environmental impact of common pesticides seriously underestimated
The Milky Way could be teeming with more satellite galaxies than previously thought
New study reveals surprising reproductive secrets of a cricket-hunting parasitoid fly
Media Tip Sheet: Symposia at ESA2025
NSF CAREER Award will power UVA engineer’s research to improve drug purification
Tiny parasitoid flies show how early-life competition shapes adult success
New coating for glass promises energy-saving windows
Green spaces boost children’s cognitive skills and strengthen family well-being
Ancient trees dying faster than expected in Eastern Oregon
Study findings help hone precision of proven CVD risk tool
Most patients with advanced melanoma who received pre-surgical immunotherapy remain alive and disease free four years later
Introducing BioEmu: A generative AI Model that enables high-speed and accurate prediction of protein structural ensembles
Replacing mutated microglia with healthy microglia halts progression of genetic neurological disease in mice and humans
New research shows how tropical plants manage rival insect tenants by giving them separate ‘flats’
Condo-style living helps keep the peace inside these ant plants
Climate change action could dramatically limit rising UK heatwave deaths
Annual heat-related deaths projected to increase significantly due to climate and population change
[Press-News.org] Does exercise in greenspace boost the individual health benefits of each?A review of the research leads to new insights and strategies that could help Americans become more physically and mentally fit