By IANS
Jaipur : It seems that doctors who advise people to stay fit through exercise and balanced diet don't keep very fit themselves – not in Jaipur at least, says a new study.
The study conducted on 50 Jaipur paediatricians aged 40-58 years discovered that a majority of them had low fitness levels.
"Three variables were used to assess fitness – VO2 max, resting heart rate (RHR) and body mass index (BMI)," said Ashok Gupta, president of the Indian Academy of Sports and Fitness Medicine, which carried out the study.
VO2 max is the maximum amount of oxygen a person can use in one minute per kg of body weight. Those who are fit have higher VO2 max values and can exercise more intensively than those who have lower values.
The VO2 max value for a healthy individual should be 30 ml/kg/min. Researchers said this value among doctors varied in the range of 2.2 to 12.92 ml/kg/min -significantly less than expected of a healthy adult.
RHR is the number of times a person's heart beats per minute while at complete rest, and the lower the RHR, the better is the cardiac reserve.
While in a healthy individual the RHR should be below 70 beats/minute, it varied between 64-88 beats/minute in the study group. Only 30 percent of the participants had a normal RHR.
Both VO2 max values and RHR indicate a person's cardio-respiratory fitness.
The BMI is a measure of one's weight and obesity. A healthy individual's BMI should be less than 25 and anything over 30 indicates obesity.
A whopping 70 percent of the doctors studied had a BMI of less than 25 and the rest were between 25-30, showing that none of them were obese.
But this finding highlighted that weight control, especially through dietary measures, does not translate into cardio respiratory fitness.
"Maintaining one's weight and the absence of obesity are important but it should not be the only measure for fitness," Gupta told IANS.
He also stressed that an individual's physique depends on the body type one inherits and is not an indicator of fitness.
"One can very well imagine that if doctors themselves are not fully fit, then what would be the level of fitness among common people? It seems as though we are moving towards a physically unfit society," Gupta remarked.