Western Canada’s farm families are growing more than beef, barley, pork and pulse crops. They’re also growing larger waistlines, says a Calgary doctor who studies obesity.
David Lau, an endocinologist and president of Obesity Canada, said Canada’s farm families do less physical labour than they did a generation ago and rely more on mechanization.
The results are higher obesity rates and more overweight farmers, a scenario that challenges the image of physically fit farm families living a healthy, rural lifestyle.
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“Rural Canadians are bigger than urban Canadians,” said Lau.
“They inherited the same patterns of eating (as) their parents and ancestors but now they’re riding in tractors and riding in combines,” said Lau.
“In essence, what we’ve done is engineered the activity out of our daily lifestyles.”
Lau said numerous studies have shown that the proportion of overweight or obese adults in rural areas is higher than it is in cities.
Rural residents, particularly adults, depend heavily on machinery to do their work and they routinely use cars, trucks and ATVs to get around, even if the distance to be travelled is just a few hundred metres.
Rural eating habits are also different.
“Rural (people) tend to eat more protein and protein tends to come from animal sources, which means they have more fat and more cholesterol and more calories,” Lau said.
Unlike adults, there is no data to suggest that weight problems are more common in rural children than they are in urban children, he said.
But obesity rates in all Canadian children are dangerously high.
Bruce Reeder, a doctor at the University of Saskatchewan who specializes in cardiovascular problems and nutritional intervention programs, has studied rural-urban differences in obesity.
In a six-year study completed in the 1990s, Reeder concluded that the mean body mass index of rural men and women (26.1 and 25.3 respectively) was not significantly different than that of urban men and women (25.7 and 24.8 respectively).
Similarly, obesity was as prevalent in rural men (37 percent) and women (30 percent) as it was in urban men (34 percent) and urban women (28 percent).
Reeder’s study, which involved more than 27,000 Canadians in nine provinces, found a significant difference in Western Canada.
In the West, 41 percent of rural men were obese, compared with 34 percent of urban men.
Obesity rates among rural women were also higher at 41 percent, compared to 34 percent in urban areas.
Among western Canadian men, the difference in obesity was most evident in the 25-to 64-year-old age group.
A fuller understanding of the underlying behavioural determinants of these differences is needed, the study concluded.
“We are living in a whole different generation now,” said Lau.
“Food is abundant. We tend to overeat and we have no idea what the proper serving size is.”
Lau said the solution to Canada’s growing weight problem lies in public policy and personal lifestyle changes.
“In rural and urban areas, we have to be more mindful of our eating habits and we have to get fit.”
