|
 Couples tend to share unhealthy behaviors, but this is the first
time researchers looked at a large population to see if people are
more likely to change when they change together, said senior author
Jane Wardle of University College London.
Collaborating might make healthy behaviors easier to adopt, and
having a partner who does not join in might make it harder, she told
Reuters Health by email.
“Of course we weren’t studying ‘why,’ only ‘whether’, but I would
speculate that social support and sharing the problem would be
good,” Wardle said. “Maybe there might also be an element of
competition.”
More than 3,500 married or cohabiting couples over age 50 in England
first completed health behavior questionnaires around the year 2000
and have been followed up with subsequent questionnaires and nurse
visits.
For smoking couples, only eight percent of men whose partners kept
smoking were able to quit. But when partners also gave up smoking,
48 percent of men were successful in their own attempt. The numbers
were similar for female smokers.
Almost 70 percent of men increased their physical activity levels
when their partners joined them, compared to 26 percent of men whose
partners did not.
For weight loss, 15 percent of women managed to lose at least 5
percent of their body weight while their partner did not lose
weight, but 36 percent lost their weight if their partners did too.
Odds of success were highest if partners made a change and became
newly healthy, rather than if partners were healthy to start with.
However, smokers coupled with nonsmokers were still more likely to
quit, and physically inactive people paired with an active person
were more likely to get moving, compared to those who were paired
with people more similar to themselves, the researchers found.
For people who were overweight, having a healthy-weight partner did
not increase their odds of losing weight. But if one overweight
partner started to lose weight, the other’s odds of losing weight
tripled.
[to top of second column] |
“The partner merely being slim didn’t seem to promote change,”
Wardle said. “Perhaps couples can more easily ignore (or accept)
differences in weight without feeling any pressure to change;
perhaps weight differences aren’t as readily expressed as visible
differences in food intake.”
“In contrast, if your husband is a non-smoker (for example) he
probably expresses his preference that you don’t smoke, and if he
goes exercising he might encourage you to come too,” she said.
“While the paper shows a relationship between couple behaviors, it
can’t really isolate why,” Jennifer Roberts said in an email to
Reuters Health. Roberts wasn’t involved with the new study but has
studied spousal correlations in obesity at the University of
Sheffield in the U.K.
Wardle said the results likely apply to same-sex couples as well,
but the number included in the current study was too small to test.
“I would certainly recommend doctors to enquire if their patient’s
partner ought to be quitting smoking, getting more active, or losing
some weight, and if so talk to the patient about whether the two of
them might take the change up together,” she said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1yAIkvL
JAMA Internal Medicine, online January 19, 2015.
[© 2014 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2014 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
