Thank you. I'd love to.
When the guidelines were leaked in early January by some media, there was kind of a big headline that the recommendations, in terms of the amounts of physical activity, were less than the old guidelines. That's not really the case. That was a misinterpretation of some...not really leaked, but gathered information that was not correct.
The main point we want to make about these new guidelines is...as president of our society, I am so proud of these guidelines, because it was a four-year effort, a systematic review of the evidence. Thousands and thousands of research articles were reviewed to come up with these recommendations.
As Kelly alluded to, the research that went into the guidelines has been used by the World Health Organization for their global recommendations on physical activity, by the U.K. and Australia. We should be proud of our Canadian scientists for the work they did in developing the science behind the guidelines.
What happened was, yes, we had a four-year process of evaluating the scientific evidence. That evidence was then synthesized and evaluated by an expert consensus panel and thousands of stakeholders to come up with the recommendations for the so-called minimum amounts of physical activity needed for health benefits.
We did it for three age categories: children and youth, adults, and older adults, recognizing that it's not just children and youth who are important.
We have these new guidelines. We should be tremendously proud. We got a little bit frustrated toward the end of the process, I'm going to be honest with you, because of the dried-up funding. We kind of got the wind taken out of our sails in terms of being able to push the project to completion. We were so proud that we were able to do it and that we got partners like ParticipACTION behind us. We're really excited about the product.
In terms of your question about putting the fun back into physical activity, that was always our goal as well. We didn't want these guidelines to be so prescriptive that people would read them and say, “I can't follow these guidelines because I don't live close to a gym”, or “We don't have the money for our kids to do this, this or this.”
That's what was so important when we went through the messaging of our physical activity recommendations. The research told us what the minimum amounts needed were. We then went on and gathered together some behavioural scientists to see how we could message this appropriately, so that it could be taken up by Canadians in a way that they could say, “Yes, we can do this. This isn't going to be hard. Anybody can do it.”