Walk the dog, it’s good for you both
News and notes about science
Walking a dog can be fine exercise. But many people do not have access to a dog, and many of those who do choose not to walk them.
Two small new studies, however, may offer novel ways to promote dog walking and its myriad benefits, even to people without dogs. But the results also indicate that there can be substantial barriers to using a pet to improve your health.
Anyone who owns a dog, which includes me, knows that most of them yearn to go on walks, whatever the time or weather. If I skip our usual morning jog, my dogs flop onto the floor, disconsolate and reproachful.
The walk would be good for all of us. According to recent studies, adults who often walk a dog are more likely than those who do not to meet the standard exercise recommendation of about 150 minutes a week of moderate physical activity. Well-exercised dogs also tend to be leaner and better behaved than sedentary canines.
But nearly 40 percent of dog owners almost never walk their dogs, other studies show.
Concerned by that statistic, Katie Becofsky, a dog owner and professor of kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, began to wonder recently whether it might be possible and worthwhile to essentially trick people into walking their dogs more often.
So for one of the new studies, which was presented in June at the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine in Minneapolis, she and her colleagues invited a group of about 30 local dog owners who reported rarely walking their dogs to join a special dog obedience class.
The owners were told that the program was designed to improve their dogs’ behavior while leashed, but the surreptitious goal was to see if the classes could also increase the owners’ dog walking and physical activity after the instruction had ended.
To that end, half of the group began six weeks of instruction while others were wait-listed as a control group. The participants attended classes with their dogs several times a week, kept a log about extracurricular dog walks and wore an activity monitor, ostensibly to record those walks. The researchers asked them to continue to record any walks and wear the activity monitor occasionally for an additional six weeks after the classes ended.
The logs and monitors showed that people in the class did start to walk their dogs for a few minutes more each week than the control group, both during and after the six weeks of classes. Surprisingly, though, those minutes did not increase the owners’ overall weekly exercise totals.
Becofsky might have been disappointed with the results, she said, but suspects that one factor was that the program collided with a particularly intractable East Coast obstacle: the weather. The study took place during a prolonged period of rain and cold in the area, she said, so the increase in participants’ dog-walking time, while small, was notable.
More important, she said, most of the class participants reported feeling closer to their dogs and happier with their behavior afterward.
“We know from other research that the best predictor of dog walking is feeling a strong bond with your dog,” she said.
She plans to conduct a larger study, she said, again featuring obedience classes but this time being open about the program’s intent to increase owners’ physical activity. She is also planning separately to study dogs’ self-chosen movement patterns, on a leash and off, using activity monitors made for dogs.
“Dog walking has so much potential to inspire more physical activity,” she said.
That possibility extends even to people who do not own dogs, according to the other new study, which looked at dogs and pedestrianism. Also presented at the American College of Sports Medicine’s annual meeting, it involved college students, a group notorious for their inactivity. Many collegians exercise seldom, if ever, studies show, often blaming time constraints and academic demands.
To bypass those barriers, researchers at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., created a for-credit physical education class centered on dog walking. Students who enrolled in the class visited the local animal shelter twice a week for 50 minutes and walked one of the shelter dogs in a nearby park while wearing a pedometer.
The gadgets’ data showed that the students were averaging around 4,500 steps, or about 2.25 miles of walking, during each session with a dog.
“Most of them were surprised that they were walking so much,” said Melanie Sartore-baldwin, a professor at ECU who led the study.
“They said that the time had gone quickly and they hadn’t really felt as if they were exercising,” she said.
Many also reported side benefits. “They told us that the dogs had seemed so happy about the walks, which had made them feel better about themselves and the whole experience,” Sartore-baldwin said.
There were complaints, of course, she adds. The class began at 9 a.m., which the students considered punishingly early, and were required to continue whatever the weather.
But few students skipped any sessions, and the class currently has an enrollment waiting list, she said. She also is working with other universities that are looking to incorporate dog walking into their PE programs.
“There’s something very appealing about spending time with a dog who is so delighted to see you,” she said, “and getting in an easy 4,500 steps before 10 a.m.”
— Gretchen Reynolds
45-hour workweek increases diabetes risk in women
Women who work long hours may be at increased risk for diabetes, a new study has found.
Canadian researchers studied 7,065 workers, following their working hours and health over an average of 12 years. They recorded diabetes diagnoses beginning two years after the subjects enrolled in the study.
They found that compared with women who worked 35-40 hours a week, those who worked 45 hours or more had a 51 percent increased risk of diabetes. But there was no effect of working hours on diabetes in men.
The study, in BMJ Open Diabetes Research & Care, controlled for many other health and behavioral factors that could affect the development of diabetes, including age, ethnicity, body mass index, high blood pressure and extended sitting.
The lead author, Mahée Gilbert-ouimet, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Work & Health in Toronto, said women probably worked more hours than men, if all household chores and family responsibilities were taken into account.
“It’s not easy to reduce working hours, and sometimes it’s impossible,” she said. “But women should know that this is a factor that may be important, especially if they have other risk factors for diabetes.”
— Nicholas Bakalar
The neutrino trappers
Just over the border from Georgia, in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, lies a small town called Neytrino. For the past half-century, its main business has been the study of the tiniest insubstantial bit of matter in the universe, an ephemeral fly-by-night subatomic particle called the neutrino.
This is the home of the Baksan Neutrino Observatory, a warren of tunnels and laboratories burrowed 2 miles into a mountain, sheltered from the outside universe and cosmic rays underneath 12,000 feet of rock. There, vats of liquid wait to record the flight of neutrinos from the center of the sun, from exploding stars, atomic reactors and the Big Bang itself, carrying messages through time.
Neutrinos are the ghost riders of the cosmos, mostly impervious to the forces, like electromagnetism, with which other denizens of nature interact. Neutrinos cruise unmolested through rocks, the earth and even our bodies. In the words of a famous poem by John Updike, they “insult the stallion in his stall.”
The most delicate measurements so far indicate that an individual neutrino weighs less than 1 millionth what an electron weighs. Baksan is not the only place dedicated to their surreal pursuit.
The men and women of Neytrino share an underground union with scientists scattered around the world in equally deep places: the Sanford Underground Research Facility in the former Homestake gold mine in Lead, S.D.; the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, beneath the mountain of that name in Italy; the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario, Canada; the Super-kamiokande, deep within Mount Ikeno, Japan; and Icecube, an array of detectors buried in ice at the South Pole.
All of them are trying to listen to quantum whispers about the nature of reality.
One of Baksan’s biggest claims to fame to date was to catch neutrinos emitted by thermonuclear reactions in the center of the sun in nearly 60 tons of liquid gallium. The experiment, called SAGE, for Soviet-american Gallium Experiment, proved that scientists actually do know what powers our favorite star, source of our life and light.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the scientists in Baksan have had to fend off both thieves and the Russian government to keep their gallium, an element that goes for some $500 a kilogram.
Physicists know that neutrinos come in at least three flavors, known as electron, muon and tau neutrinos, depending on their subatomic origin. To add to the confusion, neutrinos have a kind of quantum superpower: They can molt from one type to another, sort of like a jail escapee changing clothes as he flees. An electron neutrino, say, can emerge from a nuclear reactor in one place and appear in a detector somewhere else as a muon neutrino. This complicates the cosmic accounting of these creatures.
Physicists are arguing intensely these days over whether there is evidence for a fourth type, called sterile neutrinos. That is the object of a new experiment called BEST, for Baksan Experiment on Sterile Transitions, now underway in the rusty Baksan tunnels.
Although neutrinos are the lightest and flimsiest and perhaps most fickle particles of the universe, they are also the most numerous, outnumbering the protons and electrons that make up us and ordinary matter by 1 billion to 1. And so neutrinos contribute about as much mass to the universe as the visible stars.
An extra population of neutrinos discovered by scientists in a cave in the Caucasus would affect basic calculations of the expansion of the universe.
The discovery this month of a high-energy neutrino from a far distant galaxy passing through the Icecube detector at the South Pole elicited headlines around the world.
Meanwhile, unaware that they are being harassed by extraterrestrial visitors, horses graze outside Baksan, and life goes on, whether we understand it or not.
— Dennis Overbye