According to a new report by scientists at the University of Bristol, additional daylight savings could have public health benefits. The study looked at daylight savings increases as a possible public health intervention, and found evidence that an increase would increase physical activity among children.
“This study provides the strongest evidence to date that, in Europe and Australia, evening daylight plays a role in increasing physical activity in the late afternoon and early evening – the ‘critical hours’ for children’s outdoor play. Introducing additional daylight savings measures would affect each and every child in the country, every day of the year, giving it a far greater reach than most other potential policy initiatives to improve public health,” said Dr. Anna Goodman, Lecturer at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine at the University of Bristol and one of the researchers on the project.
The study, “Daylight saving time as a potential public health intervention: an observational study of evening daylight and objectively measured physical activity among 23,000 children from 9 countries,” was authored by the University of Bristol’s Anna Goodman, Angie S Page and Ashley R Coope, and was published in the International Journal of Behavioural Nutrition and Physical Activity. The study was funded by the UK National Prevention Research Initiative, and Anna Goodman’s contribution was funded by the National Institute for Health Research.
In the research, over 23,000 children aged 5-16 years were studied in nine countries (England, Australia, USA, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Switzerland, Brazil and Madeira, and Portugal). The scientists looked at physical activity data before and after the clocks changed. The data was matched to the time of sunset, as well as daily precipitation, humidity, wind speed, temperature and other weather characteristics.
Independent of weather factors, longer evening daylight was found to be associated with a modest but not insignificant increase in daily physical activity. The associations were consistently observed in five European, four English and two Australian samples, where children added two minutes of physical activity per day as a result of longer evening sunlight.
Although two minutes may at first seem a small amount of time, two minutes per child in a large population can amount to millions of minutes of extra physical activity per day, the researchers noted.
“We therefore conclude that, by shifting the physical activity mean of the entire population, the introduction of additional daylight saving measures could yield worthwhile public health benefits,” the researchers wrote.
“While the introduction of further daylight savings measures certainly wouldn’t solve the problem of low physical activity, we believe they are a step in the right direction,” said senior author Ashley Cooper, Professor of Physical Activity and Public Health at the University of Bristol.
By Heidi Woolf