Mary Collins

AMERICAN IDLE: A Journey Through Our Sedentary Culture, currently being considered for publication by several publishers.

Mary Collins gets beyond the headlines and looks at far more than just the physical consequences of a sedentary life in her new book. She visits a hunter-gatherer site in the Midwest, for example, to get a better feel for the movement patterns of humans 10,000 years ago and how they compare to our patterns today. She visits the director of the U.S. Olympic Center in Colorado to talk about the growing divide between the average American and the professional athlete. She visits workers on factory floors, looks at movement and stillness in animals at the zoo, talks with an expert on body intelligence and morality, and a Salk Institute scientist who studies how exercise influences brain development in aging adults. She argues that with some smart and relatively simple systemic changes in American culture, all of us could integrate movement into our daily lives and reap the social, cultural, physical and even moral benefits.