Meeting Your Weekly Nature Quota
For awhile scientist have continued to explore how time in and around nature improves our health and to what extent.
However, up until this point the evidence pointing to the benefits of nature has primarily been seen in populations in high income and largely urbanized societies. Essentially meaning that if you took a group of high income city dwellers and separate them into two groups. Group A that spent lots of time in nature and Group B, who hardly spent any time in nature. Group A was healthier across the board, but overall Group B and Group A were pretty similar and healthy so how much of the benefits was from being in nature and how much of the benefits were from just being in the category of high income individuals in a highly urbanized environment?
For these individuals who spent more time in nature it actually equalled lower chance of cardiovascular diseases, like stroke and heart attack, and lower chances of obesity, diabetes, hospitalization from asthma, mental distress, and overall mortality. So basically the majority of the top causes of death in American society.
With that conclusion being found though the questions still remains will the same be seen in a more representative group?
On to what they looked at in this study!
In this study researchers wanted to look at the relationship between time spent in nature every week and how people felt about their health and well-being. This research sought out to specifically find if their was a dose-dependent response of being in nature. Basically meaning is their a minimum amount of time in nature we can spend in nature each week to experience benefits and is their a cut-off where spending over a certain amount of time in nature doesn’t benefit us anymore.
Then maybe most importantly a sample was used that was meant to be representative of the entire nation. Then the researchers were able to separate the health effects of the benefit of nature and the health effects of certain socio-demographic characteristics. The reason this is such an important part is because in previous studies age, gender, ethnicity, and proximity to nature played a role in the effect nature had on an individual. Essentially meaning that previous studies that have looked at the benefits of being in nature have also found benefits of certain socio-demographic characteristics. So yes previous studies have found health benefits of being in nature but it was difficult to differentiate between how much health benefits came from certain socio-demographic characteristics and how much came from being in nature.
Before we dive into what they found let’s go over a little of what they measured.
First was exposure to nature. How many minutes each day did you spend in natural environments for recreation in the last seven days. Then self-reported health and subjective well-being was included as well.
Here is what they found:
“…individuals who spent between 1 and 119 mins in nature in the last week were no more likely to report good health or high well-being than those who reported 0 mins.”
"…individuals who reported spending ≥120 mins in nature last week had consistently higher levels of both health and well-being than those who reported no exposure.”
“We tentatively suggest, therefore, that 120 mins contact with nature per week may reflect a kind of “threshold”, below which there is insufficient contact to produce significant benefits to health and well-being, but above which such benefits become manifest.”
Basically individuals exposed to nature for more than 2 hours a week had higher levels of both self-reported health and well-being. However, the benefits seemed to plateau after the 120 minute mark and the benefits weren’t seen until you reach the 2 hour mark.
Essentially, the benefits of being outdoors in nature for 2 hours a week was similar to the benefits seen from:
Living in an area of low vs high deprivation
Being employed in a high vs. low social grade occupation
Achieving vs not achieving recommended levels of physical activity in the last week
Overall based off these similar health related benefits the authors of this research believe that spending 2 hours in nature each week can have meaningful impacts on individual health and overall health of the country.
If it means anything to you. I agree. This isn’t the first study looking at the benefits of nature on health and I would almost guarantee it won’t be the last. We have a lot more to learn about the”“how” and “why” of the health benefits of being in nature but studies have repeatedly shown there is a positive effect on our health from spending time in nature.
My biggest takeaways from this study.
Being in nature has again shown to be beneficial for our health.
AND
You don’t have to spend one 2 hour chunk of time in nature every week and you don’t have to split up your time in nature to be equally spaced out over the week. The benefits come after being in nature for 2 hours over the course of the week and it doesn’t matter how that time is spaced out.
Lastly…
Priorities. This is another study that has shown that being an active, keyword, “active” participant in our health can help improve our health. In order to improve our health we have to be an active participants in trying to improve it.
I hope you enjoyed this blog and as always if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me at drcoffman@optimizecolumbus.com
References
White, M.P., Alcock, I., Grellier, J. et al. Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing. Sci Rep 9, 7730 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44097-3