Modeling the effect of sedentary behaviour on the prevention of population obesity using the system dynamics approach

Obesity is a medical condition where an individual has an excessive amount of body fat.There are many factors contributing to obesity and one of them is the sedentary behavior.Rapid development in industrialization and urbanization has brought changes to Malaysia’s socioeconomic, especially the lifestyles of Malaysians.With this lifestyle transition, one of the impact is on weight and obesity. How does sedentary behavior have an impact on the growth of Malaysian population’s weight and obesity? What is the most effective sedentary behavior preventing strategy to obesity? Is it through reduction in duration or frequency of sedentary behavior? Thus, the aim of this paper is to design an intervention to analyse the effect of decreasing duration and frequency of sedentary behavior on the population reversion trends of average weight (AW), average body mass index (ABMI), and prevalence of overweight and obesity (POVB). This study combines the different strands of sub-models comprised of nutrition, physical activity and body metabolism, and then synthesis these knowledge into a system dynamics of weight behavior model, namely SIMULObese. Findings from this study revealed that Malaysian’s adults spend a lot of time engaged in sedentary behavior and this resulted in weight gain and obesity. Comparing between frequency and duration of sedentary behavior, this study reported that reduced in duration or time spend in sedentary behavior is a better preventing strategy to obesity compared to duration. As a summary, this study highlighted the importance of decreasing the frequency and duration of sedentary behavior in developing guidelines to prevent obesity