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Background Regular physical activity decreases the risk for numerous non-communicable diseases. The World Health Organization has suggested physical activity (PA) guidelines that, based on previous research, would provide health benefits to those who comply. The first guideline for health benefits suggests 150 min of moderate PA or equivalent per week. The guideline for additional health benefits suggests 300 min of PA or equivalent per week. The objective of this paper is to analyze to what extent these two WHO PA guidelines for adults are met in the Belgian region of Flanders. Furthermore, we are interested to see which groups are more or less likely to meet the PA guidelines. Methods Crosstables and logistic regressions are used on a sample of 3028 adults in the Belgian region of Flanders. All respondents filled in a 7-day time-diary in which they continuously recorded all their activities. Results Firstly, men are more likely than women to comply to both PA guidelines. Secondly, living with a partner increases the odds to comply to the guidelines. For men, this is the case for both guidelines, while for women, this only applies to the first guideline. Thirdly, women with a young child have lower odds to comply to the guidelines, while having a young child doesn’t have an effect for men. Conclusion Previous research on meeting PA guidelines in Flanders shows diverging results. Time-diary data allows researchers to strictly follow the WHO definition when operationalizing compliance to PA guidelines. There is a need for future research that combines time-diaries with a PA questionnaire and accelerometer data to gain more insights on the benefits and pitfalls of both methodologies. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s13690-019-0341-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Background Globally, the International Classification of Activities for Time-Use Statistics (ICATUS) is one of the most widely used time-use classifications to identify time spent in various activities. Comprehensive 24-h activities that can be extracted from ICATUS provide possible implications for the use of time-use data in relation to activity-health associations; however, these activities are not classified in a way that makes such analysis feasible. This study, therefore, aimed to develop criteria for classifying ICATUS activities into sleep, sedentary behaviour (SB), light physical activity (LPA), and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), based on expert assessment. Method We classified activities from the Trial ICATUS 2005 and final ICATUS 2016. One author assigned METs and codes for wakefulness status and posture, to all subclass activities in the Trial ICATUS 2005. Once coded, one author matched the most detailed level of activities from the ICATUS 2016 with the corresponding activities in the Trial ICATUS 2005, where applicable. The assessment and harmonisation of each ICATUS activity were reviewed independently and anonymously by four experts, as part of a Delphi process. Given a large number of ICATUS activities, four separate Delphi panels were formed for this purpose. A series of Delphi survey rounds were repeated until a consensus among all experts was reached. Results Consensus about harmonisation and classification of ICATUS activities was reached by the third round of the Delphi survey in all four panels. A total of 542 activities were classified into sleep, SB, LPA, and MVPA categories. Of these, 390 activities were from the Trial ICATUS 2005 and 152 activities were from the final ICATUS 2016. The majority of ICATUS 2016 activities were harmonised into the ICATUS activity groups (n = 143). Conclusions Based on expert consensus, we developed a classification system that enables ICATUS-based time-use data to be classified into sleep, SB, LPA, and MVPA categories. Adoption and consistent use of this classification system will facilitate standardisation of time-use data processing for the purpose of sleep, SB and physical activity research, and improve between-study comparability. Future studies should test the applicability of the classification system by applying it to empirical data.

Additional file 2. 2005 ICATUS Assignment Table. Metabolic equivalent (MET) values, summary codes and movement categories assigned to 2005 International Classification of Activities for Time-Use Statistics (ICATUS) activities.

Shows our an extended version of Table 4 and Table 6, including the effects of our control variables 'month of the year' and 'self-reported health'. (PDF 255 kb)

In psychiatry, the social zeitgeber theory argues that social life provides important social cues that entrain circadian rhythms. Disturbance of these social cues might lead do dis-entrainment of circadian rhythms and evoke somatic symptoms that increase the risk of mood disorders. In preventing and treating patients with bipolar disorders, the Interpersonal and Social Rhythm Therapy (IPSRT) relies on the Social Rhythm Metric (SRM) to (re)establish patients’ social cues and an re-entrain circadian rhythms. Since the SRM quantifies social rhythms that are derived from a patient’s interaction with a social environment, this contribution (a) calculates the SRM of the social environment of a representative healthy population study (n = 1249), (b) evaluates the robustness of the SRM as a quantifier of social rhythms by matching the scores of the pilot study, revealing the near absence of variance across population characteristics and investigation months—circadian rhythms need to be entrained for every month and for everyone—and (c) examines its use in IPSRT by relating high SRM-scores to lower psychological distress (p = 0.004) and low SRM-scores to higher social and emotional dysfunction (p = 0.018).

During the French Revolution and inspired by the Enlightenment, an attempt was made to replace the Gregorian calendar (which was based on ‘irrational’ overlapping cycles linked to religious celebrations) by the Republican calendar (which was based on ‘rational’ clearly nested cycles in accordance with the metric system). Although the starting point was an ideological and aesthetic expression of rationalism, this calendar also had to fulfill a coordinating and integrating function. Thus the calendric reform faced a tremendous challenge: re-creating a socio-temporal order. One of the crucial socio-temporal frameworks that guide daily behavior in Western societies is the 7-day cycle of the week. In the new calendar, the week was to be replaced by the 10-day cycle or the décade , which turned out the greatest stumbling block for calendar-reformation. Theoretically this is explained by the social nature of time and the ‘second nature’ of time reckoning, but the unawareness of a socially established weekly rhythm in our daily behavior is hard to illustrate. Today, however, society is full of traces of so-called ‘big data’ that humans leave behind. This paper uses ‘big data’ on re-charges of electronic keys to show that even though a 10-day re-charging cycle is proposed, a 7-day re-charging cycle will surface.

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One of the most fundamental, but also controversial, food trends of the past years is convenience food. This article investigates the underexplored relationship between the heterogeneity in (convenience) food consumption (a feature of a food culture's cuisine) and meal patterns (characteristics of a food culture's structure). This study hopes to illustrate that convenience food can be interpreted both as a means to maintain a food culture's structure and as a means to overturn it. Latent Class Cluster Analysis is performed using data from the HBS 2005 survey on families' food expenditures to conceptualize convenience-orientation and to examine the relationships with families' meal behaviors. Whereas outsourcing cooking is most prevalent among single-person households; two-or more-person households are most likely to buy unprocessed and natural foods and to spend most time cooking and eating in. A higher consumption of convenience food is also more likely to affect individuals' kitchen than table habits.

This technical report describes the process of data gathering, coding, cleaning and valorisation of TOR13, an online time-use survey conducted by the Research Group TOR in 2013. TOR13 is based on a seven-day diary registration method with a pre- and a postquestionnaire. The fieldwork of TOR13 started in January 2013 and ended in February 2014. Unlike TOR99 and TOR04, TOR13 made no use of paper and pencil diaries; the whole diary registration happened through a flexible online platform. This report will guide the reader through the whole procedure of data collection. First of all, we introduce the research instruments. Hereafter we will go deeper in the sample design and the fieldwork, which will be followed by further elaboration on response rates, the data cleaning and the weighing of the dataset. The report ends with a detailed description of the final database. Besides technical specifications this report will also explain the online tool to gather time-use data and compare the data of TOR13 with earliertime-use data collected by the Research Group TOR and with time-use data collected by Statistics Belgium.