Replacing school and out-of-school sedentary behaviors with physical activity and its associations with adiposity in children and adolescents: a compositional isotemporal substitution analysis

BACKGROUND: Little is known on how context-specific sedentary behaviors (SB) affect adiposity. This study aimed to investigate compositional associations between context-specific SB and adiposity and estimate the differences in adiposity associated with replacing school and out-of-school SB with physical activity (PA). METHODS: This study included 336 children and adolescents. Time spent in SB and PA was estimated using multi-day 24-hour raw accelerometer data. SB and PA were specified for school and out-of-school times. Fat mass percentage (FM%) and fat mass index (FMI) were used as adiposity indicators. A compositional isotemporal substitution model was used to estimate differences in adiposity associated with one-to-one reallocations of time from context-specific SB to PA. RESULTS: Participants spent approximately two thirds of their school and out-of-school time being sedentary. Relative to the remaining 24-h movement behaviors, significant associations between out-of-school SB and adiposity were found in both boys (β(ilr1) = 0.63, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.03–1.22 for FM%; β(ilr1) = 0.76, 95% CI = 0.03–1.49 for FMI) and girls (β(ilr1) = 0.62, 95% CI = 0.25–0.98 for FM%; β(ilr1) = 0.80, 95% CI = 0.28–1.32 for FMI). Replacing 30 min/day of out-of-school SB with out-of-school light PA decreased FM% by 10.1% (95% CI = 3.3–17.9) and FMI by 14% (95% CI = 2.7–24) in girls. No significant associations were found for school SB. CONCLUSIONS: A reduction of out-of-school SB in favor of light PA should be advocated as an appropriate target for interventions and strategies to prevent childhood obesity. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12199-021-00932-6.