A health behaviour pandemic: The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the physical activity, sleep, and sedentary behaviour of already-struggling Canadians
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives The Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines (24HMG) provide evidence-based recommendations for health behaviours, including light physical activity, moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), sedentary behaviour (SB), sleep, and muscle strengthening activities. These behaviours likely changed as a result of public health measures implemented throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We aimed to understand how Canadians' health behaviours changed during the pandemic. Methods We conducted a nationwide survey asking Canadians aged 18–64 to report their health behaviours according to the 24HMG at three timepoints: 1) immediately prior to the pandemic, 2) the most restricted timepoint of the pandemic, and 3) more recently, in March 2022. Results We received 494 eligible responses from across Canada. Prior to the pandemic, only 7.7% of respondents were able to meet all 24HMG, which reduced to 3.8% during the most restricted phase of the pandemic (p < 0.01). During this timepoint, self-reported MVPA decreased by −21.9 ± 55.6 weekly minutes, muscle strengthening decreased by −0.34 ± 0.94 weekly sessions, and SB increased by 0.88 ± 2.04 daily hours (p < 0.00001 for all), with nonsignificant increases in nightly sleep. At the more recent March 2022 timepoint, mild recoveries were observed in all health behaviours, however remained significantly lower than baseline levels, with the exception of sleep, which decreased significantly (−0.18 ± 1.42 nightly hours, p = 0.005). Conclusions Unfavourable health behaviour changes among Canadians were observed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, which increases the risk for acute and long-term health conditions. Improved education, infrastructure, and support from public and private sectors can reverse the negative risk factors that arise from these health behaviour changes, and can improve the culture of proactive health behaviours in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".