Driving car every day may be related to weight gain

NEW YORK - Reuters

People driving to work are more likely to gain weight than those who do not.

People driving to work every day are packing on more pounds than their colleagues on trains, buses and bikes, according to a new study. “Even if you are efficiently active during leisure time, if you use a car for commuting daily then that has an impact on weight gain,” lead author Takemi Sugiyama of the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne told Reuters Health.

Among people in the study who got at least two and a half hours of weekly exercise, car commuters gained an average of four pounds over four years - one pound more than people who got to work another way or worked from home.

Of 822 study participants, only those who got enough weekly exercise and never drove to work managed to stave off any weight gain over the course of the study.

Participants who didn’t get enough weekly exercise also gained weight, but how much they gained wasn’t tied to their mode of getting to work, according to results published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

“Simply achieving the amount of moderate physical activity otherwise recommended won’t provide enough compensation to overcome the effect of commuting for a long period of time,” said Lawrence Frank of the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

“People who have longer commutes tend to purchase a lot of their food and run a lot of errands on their way to and from work,” which could influence weight gain, Frank told Reuters Health.