Abstract
BackgroundVariations in physical activity (PA) across nations may be driven by socioeconomic position. As national incomes increase, car ownership becomes within reach of more individuals. This report characterizes associations between car ownership and PA in African-origin populations across 5 sites at different levels of economic development and with different transportation infrastructures: US, Seychelles, Jamaica, South Africa, and Ghana.MethodsTwenty-five hundred adults, ages 25–45, were enrolled in the study. A total of 2,101 subjects had valid accelerometer-based PA measures (reported as average daily duration of moderate to vigorous PA, MVPA) and complete socioeconomic information. Our primary exposure of interest was whether the household owned a car. We adjusted for socioeconomic position using household income and ownership of common goods.ResultsOverall, PA levels did not vary largely between sites, with highest levels in South Africa, lowest in the US. Across all sites, greater PA was consistently associated with male gender, fewer years of education, manual occupations, lower income, and owning fewer material goods. We found heterogeneity across sites in car ownership: after adjustment for confounders, car owners in the US had 24.3 fewer minutes of MVPA compared to non-car owners in the US (20.7 vs. 45.1 minutes/day of MVPA); in the non-US sites, car-owners had an average of 9.7 fewer minutes of MVPA than non-car owners (24.9 vs. 34.6 minutes/day of MVPA).ConclusionsPA levels are similar across all study sites except Jamaica, despite very different levels of socioeconomic development. Not owning a car in the US is associated with especially high levels of MVPA. As car ownership becomes prevalent in the developing world, strategies to promote alternative forms of active transit may become important.
Highlights
Variations in physical activity (PA) across nations may be driven by socioeconomic position
PA may be reduced in developing nations, if workers engaged in agriculture, construction, and other manual occupations do not engage in leisure-time physical activity, spend less time in active commuting to and from work, or otherwise reduce workload due to high ambient air temperature
We report here socioeconomic findings for the 5 international African-origin cohorts that have been recruited for the Modeling the Epidemiologic Transition Study (METS) [13]
Summary
Variations in physical activity (PA) across nations may be driven by socioeconomic position. Reduced PA has been hypothesized to result from technological advances associated with economic development in transport, labor, housekeeping, meal preparation and leisure-time pursuits, socioeconomic. While the opposite could be true (e.g., people actively commute longer distances in the developing world due to poor transportation infrastructure), there is very little global research on physical activity. This is especially true for car ownership, which has been primarily researched in high-income contexts, but apart from a handful of studies, rarely in the developing world [11,12]
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