Better infrastructure is needed to ensure our citizens can stay active in order to reduce reliance on public health services, a Cork GP and councillor has said.<\/p>\n
It comes as a new report from the Irish Climate and Health Alliance, which is made up of more than 30 medical, health and social care professional organisations, has estimated that physical inactivity costs Ireland \u20ac1.13bn a year in healthcare.<\/p>\n
Cork city GP and Fianna F\u00e1il councillor John Sheehan told The Echo: \u201cPhysical activity is, other than not smoking, the biggest thing we can do to benefit our health.<\/p>\n
Evidence<\/p>\n
\u201cAll the evidence shows that it helps in terms of falls, diabetes, blood pressure, mental health \u2014 it all improves with getting active.<\/p>\n
\n \u201cThe biggest benefit comes from that shift from doing very little to doing something, like going from driving all the time to walking 30 minutes or more. Further walking or jogging will add more value, but the biggest benefit is that first shift.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
Dr Sheehan explained that this factored into both his medical profession and his position as a councillor. \u201cWe have to be able to facilitate people to exercise, that means more greenways, walkways, cycleways \u2014 we need to make it much more conducive to get people out of the car and active.<\/p>\n
\n \u201cIt\u2019s very easy to tell people to exercise more, but if they have no safe place to do it then they can\u2019t. We need to make public and active travel the default option rather than cars.\n <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are very used to our cars, but it\u2019s not sustainable environmentally or in terms of health, the city centre reached max traffic capacity five or six years ago so we need to look at different ways to get around.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Better infrastructure is needed to ensure our citizens can stay active in order to reduce reliance on public…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":170228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[781,79,42863,18,19,17,42864],"class_list":{"0":"post-170227","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-cork-news","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-cork-health","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-keeping-cork-healthy"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115515674008763086","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}