Recently, the Daily Mail reported that ‘Women have to work harder than men to lose weight and get fit’, and in order to get the same benefits to their wellbeing, as well as their weight loss, women have to do around 20% more exercise than their male counterparts. However, this article has received much criticism from wellness experts, as it misleadingly and confusingly reports on an extremely small, experimental study.
The study was carried out by researchers from the University of Missouri and other institutions in the US and was funded by the National Institutes of Health. It was published in the peer-reviewed journal Metabolism and only consisted of 10 men and 12 women with type 2 diabetes and obesity, who were called on to perform handgrip tests and have their blood pressure, heart rate and other body measures taken before and after taking part in a 16-week aerobic exercise programme. This involved walking four days a week, whether outside or on a treadmill.
The results were that after the handgrip test, the blood pressure of women took longer to ‘recover’ or fall back to normal levels that it did in men, both before and after the exercise programme. The team of researchers surmised that this could be because of the differences between men and women in the ‘automatic’ response of your blood vessels.
However, it was unclear as to what practical implications these slight variations in blood pressure levels would have on real-world health outcomes, such as diabetes. Yet it was clear that neither the fat mass nor body mass index (BMI) of either gender was affected by the 16-week exercise programme, which is why the Daily Mail’s report, suggesting that women find it harder to lose weight, has caused so much confusion to its readers and critics. There were also no differences between men and women in age or fasting blood-sugar or insulin levels.
Further, the Mail somewhat confusingly reported that that the study included just under 75 people, but only 22 people’s results were analysed in Metabolism, though it could be the case that the Daily Mail read a press release reporting 75 people rather than looking at any individual peer-reviewed evidence.
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