Health warnings printed on flights of stairs, encouraging people to walk rather than take the elevator, could prove a potent weapon in the battle against obesity, researchers say.
Over the course of a six-week study researchers monitored the behaviour of 82,000 pedestrians.
Messages like 鈥渢ake the stairs鈥� and 鈥渟even minutes of stair climbing daily protects your heart鈥� were printed on stair risers in a UK shopping centre. This led to a 190% increase in the number of people passing up the stairs each day.
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Simply decorating the risers with attractive patterns made no significant difference to the number of people using the stairs, suggesting that the increase was entirely due to the healthy messages.
The messages also seemed to have a knock-on effect, increasing the number of people who took nearby flights of stairs by more than half, even though these stairs did not carry health messages.
Encouraging signs
The researchers behind the study, Oliver Webb of the University of Kingston and Frank Eves of the University of Birmingham, both in the UK, even found an increase of 25% in people walking down the staircase 鈥� although the messages are not visible from the top of the stairs. Webb and Eves say this suggests that stair messages would encourage people to develop the habit of taking the stairs.
Beckie Lang of the in the UK welcomes the study. 鈥淚t鈥檚 great that it makes people think about what they are doing.鈥�
But she also suggests complementing the positive message on stairs with negative ones in lifts: 鈥淵ou would have a reinforcing effect if you get the message in both places, and catch people who don鈥檛 want to feel lazy.鈥�
Four day鈥檚 food
According to the World Health Organisation, one billion adults are overweight, and 300 million of those are obese. About 22% of British adults and about 30% of American adults are obese, according to the US .
Webb and Eves estimate that an 80-kilogram man walking up a flight of stairs eight times a day for a year would burn off the equivalent of four days鈥� intake of food.
鈥淓ven small changes can make big differences,鈥� says Lang. 鈥淧eople often think they have to make drastic changes, but that isn鈥檛 really the case.鈥�
Lang also argues that the design of buildings often encourages obesity: 鈥淲e want to make the healthy option the most attractive option, the default option, rather than the most difficult.鈥�
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