According to a study by the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, extended sedentary behaviour such as sitting for six consecutive hours without exercise can damage cardiorespiratory fitness the same amount that an hour of exercise can benefit it. In fact, any sedentary behavior, such as driving, Internet surfing and reading for over two hours is harmful in terms of fitness levels.

“Previous studies have reported that sedentary behaviour was associated with an increased risk for cardiovascular outcomes,” says Dr. Jarett Berry, assistant professor of internal medicine and clinical science and senior author of the study. “However, the mechanisms through which this occurs are not completely understood.”

The research was done with the help of 2,223 participants of the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES),  within the ages of 12 and 49 with no history of heart disease, asthma or stroke. Their fitness levels were measured with a treadmill test and taken into consideration.

“When sitting for prolonged periods of time, any movement is good movement, and was also associated with better fitness,” says Dr. Jacquelyn Kulinski, a recent graduate from the UT Southwestern Cardiology Fellowship Training Program and first author of the paper. “So if you are stuck at your desk for a while, shift positions frequently, get up and stretch in the middle of a thought, pace while on a phone call, or even fidget.”

Mobile e-commerce is set to reach $50 billion by the end of the year, according to a new study.

The poll, conducted by Custora E-Commerce Plus, consisted of over 70 million consumers and 100 online retailers. The company reports that mobile e-commerce grew from $2 billion in 2010 to $43 billion in 2013. In the first quarter of this year alone, mobile e-commerce was at $12 billion.

Further results found that the occurrence of mobile shopping is on the rise. The study reports that 37 per cent of online shoppers used mobile devices to do their shopping, up from three per cent in 2010. However, desktop computers still rule online shopping, with 76 per cent of consumers using them exclusively, while 12 per cent combine device types to do their shopping.

Meanwhile, email marketing seems to be a successful way to lure shoppers, garnering 27 per cent of sales. Further, the day of the week seemed to effect sales, with the most mobile sales made on weekends.

Fewer than half of Canadian pharmacies follow prescription-labeling guidelines created to make reading dosage instructions easier, according to a recent study published in the Canadian Pharmacist Journal.

Over one million patients in the U.S. experience adverse drug effects, even after using the instructions on the label. In order to combat this, the study mentions US Pharmacopeia standards, which are rules designed to ensure labels are intelligible. The standards include organizing label information in a way that helps patients understand it, and include minimum font sizes to improve legibility.

Coming up, the USP has a proposal in the works for new standards that will address pharmacy labels for visually impaired patients.

Retailers are investing in online grocery operations despite the cost in order to get more consumers to shop online. There is a lot of complexity surrounding selling food online due to important details like keeping the food fresh, frozen or warm. Another aspect is impulse buys that occur in the store that often don’t translate to online shopping. However, North American and European retailers are investing more and more in offering food online. Amazon.com is said to offer more fresh foods to compete with its non-food sales.

“They are trying to hook customers up to brands for their grocery shop and hope they will spend on non-food which is lower headache and higher margin, which will drive profitability,” says Sophie Albizua from retail consultancy eNova Partnership. “It is notoriously difficult to make money selling groceries online. The reason that people do it and need to do it have nothing to do with profit and nothing to do with groceries.”

In Britain, e-commerce already accounts for five per cent of the food sales, with other countries like France catching up. In 2013, retail giant Tesco made $216 million on online grocery sales, with a five per cent margin. Studies showed that Tesco customers who shop for online groceries spend twice as much as customers who don’t shop for groceries online. Tesco offers one-hour delivery hours for online grocery orders during the entire week.

Due to the growing popularity of organic foods, it is no surprise that in addition to Internet domains like .bar, .rest and .cafe, .organic will be coming to a computer near you soon, in a move to gather vendors and producers of organic products online.

The specific domains were created to help consumers quickly group and find businesses within a domain. The .organic domain was created by Afilias, and according to the company, businesses who wish to be associated with the .organic domain will need to meet certain unspecified criteria.

“Given the popularity of the term ‘organic,’ websites for many products and services now include this term, regardless of whether or not they are actually organic,” says Roland LaPlante, Afilias senior vice-president in a statement. “A .organic address enables Internet users to more quickly identify true organic goods and services.”

Critics disagree with these domains, as they say there are not enough safeguards in place to protect legitimate vendors.

SavingStar, a digital coupon and promotion program, will now be available at 30,000 more stores including Walmart, Target, Walgreens, Dollar General and Familly Dollar. The service has been available at these stores since July 7.

SavingStar launched over two years ago with 5 million members shopping with it today. The service links to retailers’ loyalty databases and scanners to track purchases of customers. With the expansion, SavingStar will now be available at 58,000 stores in total, including many retailers that don’t offer a loyalty cards system. SavingStar is offering an app to scan receipts via smartphones, so that loyalty cards aren’t needed. Customers will be able to track their purchases across multiple retailers, with specific deals offered. Some leaders in the industry see receipt scanning as impractical, such as Ahalogy CEO Michael Wohlschlaeger. Walmart is following a similar agenda to SavingStar with their receipt-based Savings Catcher program.

Mark Ayer was appointed Vice President of field sales for Kraft Canada, starting August 18. Ayer will be responsible for leading Kraft’s customer and retail business team.

Ayer is no stranger to Kraft, as he began working for the brand over 20 years ago in the sales department; moving his way up and working as VP of sales. After entering the company in 1989, Ayer joined Gilette Canada as VP of sales in 2004. He was recently VP of customer business development at Procter & Gamble.

Target will be offering a campaign in preparation for the back-to-school season and promotion of its Up & Up brand, which is a brand that includes everyday items such as sunscreen, tissues and diapers. A back-to-school campaign is a first for the retail giant, which will give away an Up & Up school supply product to a student need for every Up & Up school product that is sold between July 13 and August 2.

The goal is to raise $25 million worth of school supplies for the Kids In Need Foundation, a charity founded in 1995 that donates school supplies to kids in need. The progress with this goal, which is the largest donation goal for Target to date, will be traced and shared with the customers throughout the campaign via social media as milestones are reached. A Target spokesperson says that this campaign was inspired by Target exclusive school supplies brand Yoobi, which has a similar campaign in collaboration with the Kids In Need Foundation. “It’s giving us more pulse points to connect with guests in a way that’s authentic,” she says. “It gives us something outside of just deals that we can talk about with our guests.”

Advertisements for the campaign on TV and in print have been making the rounds, including six TV spots and seven back-to-school ads in print as well as Spanish versions by LatinWorks. The gline for the campaign is “Every Little Thing Is a Really Big Deal.”

Sobeys will sell its milk, yogurt and ice cream manufacturing operations to Quebec-based dairy co-operative Agropur. The dairy plants located in Western Canada include two in Edmonton, one in Winnipeg, and one in Burnaby, B.C. They will be sold for $356 million to Agropur.

The manufacturing operations have 281 workers all together, and process over 169 million litres of milk every year. They generate $400 million of annual revenue. Agropur will license the Lucerne trademark from Sobeys and supply Sobeys stores among others with the dairy products produced.

“This agreement maximizes the value for these assets while securing long-term supply agreements that create synergies for our entire Canadian business,” says Marc Poulin, president and CEO of Sobeys. “It also ensures that these facilities will continue to produce the very popular Lucerne dairy brand, which will not only remain available in our Safeway banner stores, but will be expanded to our network of Sobeys and IGA stores throughout the West.”

Loblaw workers on strike were met with disappointment when they visited the company headquarters last week in order to start some negotiations. The picketers, consisting of 40 staff members, began walking 600 kilometres from Northern Quebec to Brampton, Ontario on June 15. Upon their arrival to picket the company headquarters on Wednesday, they weren’t able to get a hold of any Loblaw officials, according to the Montreal Gazette. While most left the scene, about four of them reportedly stayed to picket for the weeks to come.

“We have tabled our final offer in all three cases, including competitive increases consistent with dozens of other collective agreements we’ve recently concluded in the province of Québec and consistent with the agreements in the Québec market at large,” says a Loblaw spokesperson. “We do not expect any talks to take place upon their arrival in Brampton.”

The reason for the strike dates back to August 2012 when 190 employees of a Maxi store in Rouyn-Noranda were locked out, followed by a Rouyn store closure in June 2013 and another case of workers being locked out in December 2012, at a Provigo store in Temiscaming.