It's official: "Housework makes you fat"

[dutchman]

New research debunks idea that housework is a worthwhile contribution towards recommended physical activity

Anyone who thinks that washing the dishes, doing a spot of cleaning or pushing a vacuum cleaner around counts as exercise should stop reading now.

Official health advice that said household chores help keep you active has been debunked by research, which shows that the people who do the most housework are also the most overweight.

The findings challenge Public Health England and the World Health Organisation's endorsement of household chores as a worthwhile contribution towards a recommended target of 150 minutes of physical activity a week.

A study of the physical activity habits of 4,563 adults, carried out by Professor Marie Murphy and her colleagues at the University of Ulster, found that women and older people were particularly likely to list "domestic physical activity [as] a significant proportion of [their] moderate to vigorous physical activity".

But the study found that those who said they did the most were also the largest.

Murphy said: "We found housework was inversely related to leanness, which suggests that either people are overestimating the amount of moderate-intensity physical activity they do through housework or are eating too much to compensate for the amount of activity undertaken."