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Sport Is Unrelated To Obesity In Children
xiox writes "The UK government is planning to stop funding a study to understand obesity in children. The study fits children with accelerometers to measure how much energy each child uses in a day by moving. The results are surprising. Those children who do sports at school do not burn more calories than those who don't. Furthermore there is no correlation between body mass index and the number of calories used! The results are very interesting, suggesting that genetics and diet are the main reasons for childhood obesity, not sport. The UK government is trying to increase the amount of sport in schools."
Body fat isn't magic. It comes from food you eat. If you are exercising more and still have more weight, it means you are eating too much. People need to stop looking for excuses.
And yes, BMI sucks.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
While this may show interesting correlations, the fact remains that if more calories are burnt than are consumed, the body will lose weight.
When kids exercise more, they also eat more, and the body tries to retain the same reserves while burning off more calories. Eating no more, or just a little more, will be fine and the subject will still lose weight.
It's when the eating leads to significantly ore eating that there is a problem.
So, exercise and diet are required. But that isn't news. We've known this for quite some time.
Have you read my journal today?
People who engage in sports and are in all other ways have the same activity of your average couch potato do burn more calories. You can't magically cheat the system. A person that participates in an organized sport for an hour a day will burn more calories than someone that sits on their duff for that hour. The real question is, does being in a sport make you more disciplined about matching your caloric intake to your actual need. For many sports the answer is likely no, so the jock just ups his burger intake and keeps pace with the couch potato, fat-wise.
For sports with weight classes or any highly competitive sport where BMI is relevant (wrestling, bodybuilding, most track events, you bet your fat ass there will be a difference. The successful atheletes will be leaner, burn more calories, and eat more calories. Way more. Anyone that has been through high school or college and seen one of these teams eat and train knows this obvious fact without commissioning an expensive study.
More wasted dollars.
No, you misread the article (or summary at least)... it doesn't say that exercising and sports didn't result in calories being burned. You must consider that other things besides "exercise" result in calories being burned... walking or riding a bike to school, or even simply having restless legs. My legs are almost always moving - I can't keep them still. I eat about 3500 calories a day, I am 5'7" and I weight ~125 lbs and I've never had a gym membership. I also typically ride a bike 6 miles a day during the work week.
Lifestyle and habits have more to do with weight than going to the gym or playing sports.
And in reverse, lack of obesity doesn't mean you're healthy. You can be skinny all your life but still have high cholesterol and whatnot.
We have here a "scientific study" that shows that conservation of energy doesn't apply to children. It makes me wonder what other spurious crap we accept as truth because a "study" was done.
If this study is true, then I would like to build a car powered by children on excercise wheels. It seems clear to me that they don't require any extra energy to excercise so, hey, free energy.
Actually, what the study found was that those who did sports were less active after school. So the non-sport doing kids did stuff outside of sports and thus burnt their share that way. So I assume those with good genes and diet were better off than those doing sports but but failed on the other parts.
The comment was well hidden deep inside the article... As usual.
- These characters were randomly selected.
There has been a lot of backlash over the growth hormones in meat and milk. It's why so many "organic" products are hitting the shelves. It does make a difference.
I just don't buy it that people's genetic makeup has changed that much in just a few decades that we are now turning out little fat farm children. It's too convenient of an excuse. Exercise and diet are two big factors that also govern obesity. As others pointed out, sedentary sweet-eating children become sedentary sweet-eating and fat teenagers and adults.
But a factor not so many know about are all the hormones injected into animals and added to their food so they get nice, fat, and juicy faster and on less food. Humans also respond to a lot of those hormones. Just the way the animals do.
I suggest everyone tag this with a "BS" tag.
Since when do accelerometers measure the amount of calories you burn? I could quite easily sit on a weight machine all day pumping iron, with an accelerometer sitting on my waist saying I'm doing no exercise.
Unless these kids have found some sort of way to violate the conservation of energy, the kids that run around, instead of, say, sitting in one place, will have burned more calories than the other.
I've worked with programs that do athletics with kids in afterschool settings, and believe me, they make a big difference in terms of childhood obesity. They aren't just exercise programs, but teach nutrition, healthy lifestyle choices, etc.
Horseshit. When I was in school 20 or so years ago, you could count the number of fat kids (in a school of 2300 students) on your fingers, and a child who would be considered obese by today's standards was virtually unheard of. At my kids' schools, it's easier to count the kids who aren't fat than the ones who are, and there's at least one obese kid in any group larger than about ten.
I know it's all the rage to pretend that whatever problems our society causes itself don't actually exist, but this one is pretty easy to nail down. Anybody who says we don't have a serious problem with kids and their poor eating habits and lack of activity is either an idiot or a liar.
Being someone who works with an organization that promotes mass participation physical activities for children I can say that you have touched on a key issue. Physical activity with the pairing of the benefits of a healthy diet should be promoted and not the concept of sport that pits child against child and team against team. Sport is good but encouraging everyone to engage in a general healthy lifestyle which should include moderate to vigorous physical activity is key. And on a final note before I took up my job at this organization I was a "physical education" teacher (we prefer that over gym teacher, we are teaching a subject not a room) and I wasn't a frustrated former athlete and though there is a percentage of former athletes who become PE teachers, its not as high as you think.
End of line
Even if sports don't help children keep slim, it is proven that it helps adults (in addition to genetics and diet, of course). People who start out as active young children are probably more likely to stay active into adulthood, at least moreso than less active kids. So in that sense, by teaching kids to exercise and be fit, you will potentially increase adult fitness. This alone justifies fitness programs in school.
For a dumpy, awkward kid like myself, a school fitness program is an excellent way to guarantee a lifelong loathing of any kind of organized athletics. I guess if you're already fit, well-coordinated and into sports that it may be fun and motivating. For people like me gym class meant an hour of pain humiliation, ridicule and bullying - and that's just from the (no doubt) well-meaning teachers.
Kids that like athletics and take to it mostly would do sports by themselves anyhow. For kids that don't, school sports is a good way to ensure they never will.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Physical Education is just that Physical Education. I'm not an athlete, I'm a computer geek, but I fully support phys ed in school:
1) Phys Ed gives kids activity to expend energy. Studies show exercise helps not just the body but the mind.
2) Phys Ed encourages physical activity which is important as an Adult. Exercise may not help childhood obesity (which is still questionable, you know how these quack studies pop up on slashdot regularly just to drum up hits), but it definitely helps as you are an adult.
3) What's wrong with learning about Baseball, Basketball, Hockey, Football, Lacrosse, Archery, Wrestling, track, tennis, softball, volleyball, bowling, or Badminton? If we shouldn't learn about these activities, then we shouldn't anything past the 6th grade. If this isn't important, then Shakespeare, Calculus, world history, and Chemistry aren't important.
As for Atkins, that's a half assed answer to health for kids. You don't just try diets to get a kids weight down. That's poor education. If you keep a kid active, regulate how much they eat and they are still obese, take them to a doctor and get it looked at. Otherwise don't obsess about their weight, and don't go crazy. Some kids will be fat, others won't. Teach them to feel good about themselves, don't teach them to go nuts about their weight and start getting them on ties as some kind of experiment.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
This is the most inane story I've seen in a while. Playing sports DOES burn more calories than watching TV all day. Doing physical labor DOES burn more calories than sitting in a cube in front of a computer. Therefore, their testing must be flawed or they count some useless amount of time doing "sports" as exercise.
Running 20 minutes on a treadmill probably does nothing, but running 5-10 miles a day for 30-60 minutes burns a whole heck of a lot of calories and will waste you away to nothing.
Also the type of sports has a huge difference. My normal weight is 175lbs. When I ran long distance in high school (17-19 yrs old) I weighed 145-155. When I played rugby in college (19-22) I weighed 180-185 lbs. Running burns so many calories your muscles drop down to their bare minimum. Rugby builds mass and weight. I was equally fit in either sport.
Well children burn calories like mad even at rest. If for nothing else, they're always growing and that takes significant energy.
/. comments yet, I hope we do not damn the study simply because the results were not what we expected. That's the whole reason we're supposed to be doing studies in the first place. Rubber stamping desired outcomes is what corporate sponsored studies are for.
While I have not read all the
-- Posted from my parent's basement
but every school I've encountered recently (via my children) goes to great extremes to eliminate competition and anything else that might damage the self-esteem of the precious little emperors.
It's ridiculous. Trophies for everybody! And it's not like the kids don't realize that the trophies are worthless, either.
They do the same thing in business-based athletics; I went to a martial arts competition where they subdivided the children into so many categories that everyone was guaranteed to finish in the "top 3".
What does it say to someone to give them a 2nd place trophy, when they know that there were only two kids in their classification?
It meant far more to my son that he beat me 5 points to 4 in a sparring match than it did when he came in "2nd" at the region martial arts championships.
Clear, Dark Skies
I know this will be blasphemy on this site, but Mountain Dew contains "brominated vegetable oil"
I'm not that afraid of bromine or vegetables. But a can of the stuff is 170 Calories. That's about 1/12th of what most people need in a day to not gain weight. 2 cans of the stuff, and an adult is well on its way to gaining a couple ounces that day.
But mostly I blame fruit juice for kid obesity. It's just as fattening as soda, which is hugely fattening, but somebody convinced parents it's good for you. 160 Calories per cup of a liquid (that barely satisfies any kind of hunger in most people) is not at all good for you. I was a fatty-fat as a kid, and my parents took me off soda and put me on juice. Not a lot of results from that one. I know a girl that is worried about her kid's weight but feeds him 100 Calorie juice boxes at every meal because it's healthy and won't grasp that the Vitamin C won't help him when he dies of a heart attack at 38. Switch that with water, your kid will lose a pound every 12 days. Absolutely guaranteed. Drop 1 juice box a day, and he'll lose a pound a month. Or at least gain a pound less. That stuff is evil.
Not that I think it should be illegal to sell the stuff or anything, but if the government spent a few of those research bucks on running commercials with graphs of how (Calorie input - Calorie output) / 3500 ALWAYS* equals weight change (get the guy from the Oxy-Clean commercials to yell the "ALWAYS" part), we'd be a lot better off. Of course, it would put all the many profitable, tax-paying voodoo diets out of business. Not that I think there's a conspiracy, I don't, but a lot of people would get mad if we were all skinny.
* Plus or minus a tiny, tiny bit that evens out to 0 over the long term and discounting (the very small) changes in metabolism resulting from lowered food intake. Metabolic conditions also (possibly) excepted. This part doesn't need to go in the commercial. This is just hear to discourage nitpicking on the obvious stuff.
Read the Fing Grandparent.
He didn't say that sports made you lose weight. He said that aerobic activity (like running a lot) led to a leaner state of fitness than anaerobic activity (like Rugby training), and thus that BODY MASS was not a good indicator of overall FITNESS.
paintball
My family was poor when I grew up, so we never had video games, and my parents always cooked. My best friend's family at hot-dogs, cheese burgers, and pizza most nights of the week and sat around all day playing video games (it was lots of fun to go over there and hang out :-).
Anywho, they were all fat, except for one of my buddy's sisters, who took up jogging every day when we were in high school. I've known lots of fat/chubby people and they all live off of fast food and/or eat cheese and mayonnaise sandwiches every day for lunch. Of course there are a few people w/ disorders that make them fat, but that doesn't explain most of the population.
People completely overestimate the effect of exercise on weight loss.
A grown man jogging (fast) burns around 100 kcal per 10 minutes. I'm assuming it's less for kids (because they're smaller).
Now compare this with the calories in a 65g Mars bar = 294 kcal.
Or in a Big Mac = 492kcal.
So let me sum it up: kids aren't fat because they're not getting exercise... they're fat because they eat CRAP all the time.
Yes, food is the problem. It is a problem in U.S. The best way to notice is to move there from a part of the world that still cooks their meals at home and don't have a McFatolds at any corner. I grew up in Eastern Europe. Growing up my mother prepared a large array of home foods, all kinds. I have always loved fruits (like apples and peaches) and vegetables and legumes (like tomatoes, garlic and beans). Everything was prepared at home by my mother from raw ingridients, we didn't even eat out because we couldn't afford it.
When I came to U.S. all my peers liked to eat hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, mac and cheese and of course, fries. They all hated vegetables! I thought "how sad", the chain resturants have gotten these kids addicted to crap. Now I am married to an american and my wife still gets excited a lot more about pizza, fries and mac and cheese even though she rationally knows that grilled chicken with a light tomato sauce, or a salad with olive oil and vinegar is much better -- that doesn't matter. The emotional response for her is that "junk foods are somehow FUN!" and "veggies are BORING!".
Perception makes a huge difference. I see a pot of beans and I get excited -- "Woo, beans and toast!" she sees it and thinks "Yuk, but I guess I have to eat cause it's supposed to be better than a McFatburger".
My theory is that children here are just not exposed to good food. Just look at what babies and toddlers start eating here -- cerial, high carb, high fructose corn syrup + carbs kind of foods. Have you ever seen a "children's" menu in U.S.? -It is the "happy heart-attack by the time you are 30 in a shiny box" -- fries, corndogs, pizza and hamburgers. All these children grow up and do we really expect them to one day say "Hmm, I think I'll have some caviar or a grilled chicken breast with basil and olive oil?" No, they will still eat the same crap they grewu up eating. Everyone is obsessed about the calories they eat, I think they should be obsessing more about the quality of the food, not just pure calories.
Can this thread possibly see any more stereotypes, cliches and broad generalisations?
But fat children also tend to be more muscular than thin ones. They often excel in excercises which require a certain amount of power like throwing a ball or shotput. If you calculate the amount of energy they burn on a normal track you will be amazed.
I guess that the BMI was just a nameplate for "tendence to obesity", for the normal folks to understand what they were actually studying without just talking about "fat children". And then there is surely a correlation between the BMI and the percentage of body fat one has. There are fully trained athlets whose musculature increases the BMI into obesity levels without being obese. But those are not normal people. Most people with a high BMI are really fat, and if you do a statistic you probably wont find a 1 as correlation factor, but something very high in the 0.9. Those few heavy lifters don't exonerage a whole fat population from being obese.
In the end: The children's activity level and fat level don't seem to corrolate enough to put "increased school exercise" on the list of successful weapons against obesity.
Wrong. "Smartness" is no more subjective than athletic superiority. Although not everyone is smart enough to understand that. Yes, their are different areas of intellectual expertise. Some people will be superior with mathematics, and others with vocabulary. This doesn't change the fact that they are superior in their field, and some people are intellectually superior across the board compared to others. This is no different than seeing an athlete that can bench press 500 pounds compared to a sprinter.
Of course as the previous poster pointed out... We are supposed to be humble about our intellect, and are actively attacked for taking pride in it. Your comment is just another attempt to try to convince the intelligent that they are not really smarter than the stupid. It is unfortunate that this kind of attitude is very prevalent in our schools, as it actively discourages kids from trying to excel. Why would students bother trying to excel intellectually when the best they can hope for is to be told that "smartness is subjective", so no matter how hard they try, they will never be smarter than the football player that can barely keep up with the mentally retarded kids. At worst, their very safety can be in danger.
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There also appears to be a cultural momentum that needs overturning. i don't know how it evolved but my guess is that back in the mid 20th century when sweets, chocolate and such were considered rare treats you got them whenever you could reasonably afford to. This attitude has stuck and now whenever we visit or host older relatives (aunties, parents etc.) they produce .... sweets and chocolate to feed to our not-even-two year old daughter. Who to be perfectly honest would be very happy to munch on a small punnet of grapes instead (themselves considered a rare, expensive treat earlier in history, at least in colder northern climates). I was secretley pleased when she tried a fruit pastle, stuck it to the window and continued to munch on some raisins.
:-)
Once she'd gone to be we, er, "permenantly confiscated" said sweets and chocolate, naturally
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
In a nutshell:
TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED THE 1930's 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's !!
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we
rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.
As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and
NO ONE actually died from this.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank koolade made with sugar, but we weren't overweight because,
WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING !
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day.
And we were O.K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes.
After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD's, no surround-sound or CD's, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or chat rooms.......
WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth
AND
there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.
Imagine that!!
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.
They actually sided with the law!
---
About sums it up.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
I don't think it's the problem of the kids eating habits but the problem is the parents feeding habits. It's about time the parents take responsibility for their kids and stop blaming video games/TV/society for their mistakes.
While you're right that junk food packs on the calories faster than exercise can burn them, don't completely count out exercise. You don't just burn the calories during the exercise - it boosts your metabolism so that you're burning more calories all the time. Again, not to the point where you'll burn off a candy bar just by watching TV, but exercising AND cutting out excess junk will definitely result in more weight loss than cutting out the junk alone. It may only be a pound or two more a month, but over the course of a year that can make a big difference.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
As someone who works in a gait lab (in the other half of my life) and presents at the Gait and Clinical Motion Analysis Society Conference, I am highly skeptical of any claims that accelerometer data can be correlated with energy expenditure. As an example of a small study that showed no correlation between the two, see here. Essentially, there are too many other variables involved in energy expenditure, the most prominent of which is lean body mass. Accelerometers are blunt instruments compared to the gold standard of oxygen uptake (we use the Cosmed K4).
In other words, the defunding of the study is not surprising as other studies have been unable to show relationships between energy expenditure and activity counts. If on the other hand, the UK government wished to defund physical education, that would be a very different thing.
You can be thin and still be the same weight as someone who's fat.
Yep. Look at how much bodybuilders weigh. BMI certainly doesn't apply there.
BMI is bad math from start to finish. Ask any tall/short people where they lie on the chart, they're either clinically obese (tall) or anorexic (short). The math only works if you're average height.
Clue: People are three dimensional but the BMI math only has a power of two in it.
No sig today...
"I hope we do not damn the study simply because the results were not what we expected."
Sure, and we should also accept patents for perpetual motion machines, engines which run on Brown's Gas, etc.
Or not. There's this little thing called "thermodynamics" which tends to get in the way.
The only diet book you'll ever need: http://www.google.com/search?q=hackers+diet
No sig today...
Well said. It always makes me laugh when people try to say that they want to loose weight to look better. I know for a fact that the most stupid way to think that you are healthy is to weight yourself and compare with a table on the internet which says that a 6' guy should have 80 KG.
The actual thing is that weight has very little to do with being more healthy or well shaped. You look fat when you have more fat than muscles. Doing activities DO NOT reduces your weight. It only reduces the fat level but at the same time increases the muscle size resulting in the same and in some cases increase in weight. This doesn't mean that the exercise isn't working. It only means that you don't understand the whole concept.
My tenth-grade PE teacher got it. When we played things like badminton or pickleball (things that didn't have the whole class involved in one game), she would have us self-select into one of three groups: competitive, semi-competitive, and non-competitive. That really let those of us who weren't very athletically inclined just play without worrying about all the competitive stuff while also letting the athletic types play competitively.
On rainy days when everyone (several classes worth of students) had to play basketball in the gym, she would let my best friend and me walk up and down under the overhang outside the gym instead. (We actually probably got more exercise that way - we would walk and talk for the whole hour while everyone else had to cycle in and out of games.) She always told me that it was important for me to find something I liked doing that I could make a part of my life - quite a different attitude from that of most PE teachers I had!
he main culprit is evolution. We've got millions of years of evolution in our genes telling us to eat high-calorie, high-sugar, high-fat foods, eat as much as we can of them, and eat them now, because winter is coming and there won't be any food to eat. Combine this with a society that, unprecedented in human history, has such an abundance of food that virtually everyone can overeat if they want to, and you've got an obesity problem.
I disagree. This was the case 30-50 years ago. People in the U.S., at least, had plenty of food and while maybe there was more obesity than previously, there was absolutely NOTHING like the rampant obesity going on now. 20 years ago, when I was in high school, obesity was pretty uncommon in my high school. Today, the kids that go to that same high school probably weigh, on average, 10-20lbs more than the kids of my generation. That's not a change in food availability. That's a change in what people are eating.
Are you insane? Since when is running hours around unreasonable? There is nothing unreasonable about sending your kids outside to run around playing tag/riding bikes/playing kickball/etc... for 3 - 5 hours a day. I live with two friends that are both divorced and have kids. When the kids are over for the weekend I run them around outside doing all sorts of active things for easily 3 - 5 hours, and they enjoy it. Usually they show up wanting to get outside because when they stay with their mom's they aren't allowed to go outside and run around. If all parents let their children, or even better, encouraged their children to go play tag with friends, or took their kids on bike rides for a couple hours a day, children would be a lot less overweight. The problem is most parents view their responsibility as keeping an eye on their children all the time, and because the parent is overweight and inactive, they don't want to entertain their children in the great outdoors.