Is adherence to the Canadian 24-Hour Movement Behaviour Guidelines for Children and Youth associated with improved indicators of physical, mental, and social health?

The Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines for Children and Youth were released in 2016. These guidelines contained recommendations for moderate to vigorous physical activity, screen time, and sleep duration. The objectives of this study were to determine (i) if achieving the individual recommendations and combinations of the recommendations within the guidelines is associated with indicators of physical, mental, and social health within children and youth; (ii) if meeting the recommendation for a specific movement behaviour is associated with larger differences in physical, mental, and social health indicators compared with meeting the recommendations for the other specific movement behaviours; and (iii) if physical, mental, and social health indicators differ according to different combinations of the guideline recommendations achieved. To address these objectives, we studied a representative sample of over 17 000 Canadians aged 10-17 years. The findings indicated that participants achieving any given recommendation had preferable scores for the health outcomes compared with participants who did not meet the recommendations. There was a dose-response pattern between the number of recommendations achieved and the health outcomes, indicating that the health outcomes improved as more recommendations were achieved. When the number of recommendations achieved was the same, there were no differences in the health outcomes. For instance, health indicators scores were not different in the group who achieved the sleep and screen time recommendations, the group who achieved sleep and moderate to vigorous physical activity recommendations, and the group who achieved screen time and moderate to vigorous physical activity recommendations.