By RICHARD  BERMAN

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Berman On Offense

(Jan. 07, 2008) The term “risky behavior” usually conjures images of skydiving, rock climbing and maybe even blind dating. However, a study from the University of Missouri-Columbia has added a surprising new activity to that list: sitting.

Researchers studied the effects of sitting at the office, using computers, watching TV and other seated activities. Their findings were shocking: Getting off your duff could potentially save your life.

The researchers called for media campaigns—similar to anti-smoking announcements—to advocate limits on sitting time. But few take them seriously.

References to sitting and our sedentary lifestyle are regularly drowned out by attacks on junk food as the culprit behind burgeoning behinds. Endlessly revising the guilt-food du jour, campaigns target cupcakes one day and chow mein the next. This food-focused hype keeps dietary issues in the limelight and lately in the legislature.

In the early 1990s, activists pushed the government to mandate nutrition information on grocery items. Not surprisingly, food choices didn’t change. Since then they have lobbied for fast-food zoning, Twinkie taxes, and outright food bans. Now the food cops are lobbying for even more intervention—mandating laundry lists of nutritional warnings for every item on restaurant menus.

While these dinner plate debates have yet to affect our weight, they have succeeded in distracting us from the couch-potato culture that has become the norm.

At home, in the office, and on the road, technology’s influence on our waistlines is undeniable. But the food-only focus adopted by health officials and nutrition activists distracts the public from our ever more comfortable high-tech lifestyle.

The latest report from the Center for Consumer Freedom, titled “Small Choices, Big Bodies,” puts the obesity debate back into perspective. Smoking cessation, household appliances, “power everything,” and thousand-channel cable packages: These factors all contribute to our weight gain in their own way.

Car travel already is considered one of the biggest contributors to weight gain, but the car itself—not just the trips—also adds to the problem. Power steering, power windows and other modern technologies have made driving even more sedentary than it used to be. These little 5-calorie energy saving differences don’t sound like a lot, but over time they lead to serious weight gain. One study found that every additional hour spent sitting in the car increases a person’s risk of obesity by 6 percent.

And that’s not the only place where we are taking this weighty issue sitting down.

Gifts, movies and even groceries are available online. Though physically browsing the DVD selection at a local rental store doesn’t demand a ton of energy, updating your Netflix.com “queue” takes even less. It may sound trivial. Yet, even small conveniences that keep us from burning 50 calories each day—like e-mailing a co-worker instead of walking to her office—can tack on more than five pounds annually.

Not only is inactivity making us fat, it’s deadly too. According to researchers at the University of Missouri, people who exercise live 3.5 years longer than sedentary people. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association also found that being out of shape increased risk of death more than weight. In fact, even obese subjects who are fit are at a lower risk than unfit, lean individuals.

We have a growing epidemic of physical inactivity and reduced energy expenditure. Its related diseases have become such a significant problem that U.S. doctors coined a new term: Sedentary Death Syndrome. As the third-leading cause of death, it claims the lives of 250,000 Americans each year. Basically, your couch is more likely to kill you than either a stroke or an accident.

Food may not be the right target, but it’s the only one the public hears.

From moving sidewalks to power lawn mowers, the way we live impacts our well-being just as much as if not more than the way we eat. But if the facts were all that mattered, John Deere would be fending off mower labels that cautioned more about weight gain than physical activity.

Until that day comes, the hospitality industry must work to remind the public of the bigger picture for our health. As newly appointed executive director of the nation’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, Brian Wansink put it, “So much of the answer lies not in counting calories, not in legislating, but in the middle range of what we can do by changing some of our own habits.”

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This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors and management at Nation’s Restaurant News.

Richard Berman is president of Berman & Co., a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm specializing in research, communications and advertising.