Original articleAssociations Between Active Commuting to School, Body Fat, and Mental Well-being: Population-Based, Cross-Sectional Study in China
Section snippets
Participants
This research is framed within a multicentered National Puberty Research Collaboration in September 2010, cooperated with 8 research centers across China. Those 8 research sites are representative of China, Eastern (Shenyang and Shanghai), Central (Hefei, Wuhan, and Zhengzhou), Western (Chongqing and Kunming), and Southern (Guangzhou) of China. Detailed information on the study and its sampling methodology is reported elsewhere [15].
Students of Han ethnicity from grade 1 to grade 12 in selected
Results
Totally, 44.1% of boys and 44.3% of girls travel to school by passive transport modes, 37.5% of boys and 41.7% of girls reported walking as their main school travel mode, and 18.4% of boys and 14.0% of girls cycled to school. Significant differences were found in mean BMI, PBF, WHtR, and WC, with boys higher than girls except PBF. More girls reported no VPA and MPA per week than that of boys, while boys reported higher rate of weekday ST >2 hours.
Characteristics of children with different
Discussion
To our knowledge, this study was the first to find that ACS was independently associated not only with physical health but also with mental well-being among children and adolescents, using a large, nationally representative data set.
It found that, about half of Chinese children and adolescent commute to school through walking or cycling was the most common form. This is consistent with results from Canada [25], United States [26]. But lower than results from Child Heart and Health Study in
Acknowledgments
The authors express their sincere gratitude to the adolescents who participated in this study and thank the entire team members of China Puberty Research Collaboration for their dedication to the project.
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Conflict of Interest: The authors have indicated they have no potential conflicts of interest to disclose.