Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Recent studies also show that overweight people who excercise are less likely to suffer heart disease, diabetes, and other ailments than people of 'normal' weight who do not excercise.
This is a bit misleading and I hope it doesn't discourage the efforts to get kids to excercise more.
So are these scientists claiming that children don't expend energy while exercising? Don't the laws of conservation apply to children as well, or are they from an alternate universe? The UK should be careful publishing these results, lest some nut starts enslaving children to build his perpetual motion device.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
If the emphasis is on competition and winning, the vast majority of school children don't belong to the few that are advanced a few months in maturation and have the muscle strength to dominate in these competitions and thereby most warm the bench. At all levels from the gym class through the "revenue sports" of high school football (yes, they charge money to watch these kids play football), the emphasis is on winning rather than having a rotation to keep as many kids involved, or even providing any degree of remedial sports training to offer any degree of encouragement or extra support for the kids who don't dominate their sports teams.
There may be some cultural or social reasons for the less athletically gifted to try out for sports teams and be part of the team even if they play a minor supporting role, but the whole sports culture is a kind of primate dominance hierarchy thing rather than focused on keeping as many people physically fit.
Also, I don't know if the Latin teacher is a frustrated Classics scholar, the English teacher is a frustrated attorney, or if the Math teacher is a frustrated research engineer (although the Physics teacher, if you had that subject, was always a little beyond the fringe), but the Gym teacher is most likely a frustrated athlete given the very broad pyramid of people attempting to make a career out of sports with a chosen few at the very tippy top.
Basically it is saying that every child has a total limit on the activity they do in a day/week. And those limits are all about the same. So if the child is more active during school doing things like sports, they are less active out of school because they are tired. The children who were less active in school sports were more active outside of school doing other things, playing, riding bikes, running around outside, etc., etc... The end result is that it doesn't seem to matter if you promote activity in school since the net total activity is approximitely the same between people active in school verses not active in school. Which means that the problem is not that people are not as active as they have been in the past, it is the food and portions of food they are eating along with their genetic disposition to the kinds of food. Activity level is not a part of the problem of childhood obesity according to this research as it appears that the activity level at least between people who are over-weight and those who are not is not statistically linked. Further study may be able to prove that activity level is not linked to being over-weight. The problem with this conclusion is the fact that it means the food is the problem. And governments have not been very keen on attacking the food industry. Only a few places have done that, and it is usually at the local level, as at the national level, the food industry has too much lobby'ing power in most democratic governments.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I was curious and happened to have an old package of "maruchan" ramen in my pantry. One package is 400 calories with 16g of fat, 8 of which are saturated fat. (FYI it is also 60% of your daily sodium intake!)
Anyway, you claim a gain of 35lbs over 6 months. That's ~183 days. According to wikipedia, 1lb of fat gain is roughly equal to an excess intake of 3500 calories, meaning that 122,500 calories of fat were gained over the 183 day period.
122,500 calories gained in fat / ~183 days = ~669 calories gained in fat per day. You are claiming a daily intake of only 400 calories from ramen. Clearly, your scenario violates the laws of physics.
Nite_Hawk
I once managed to lose 95 pounds. Kept it off for several years. For me, the trick that broke the barrier was weight lifting. Diet by itself just made me weaker - I kept the fat and lost muscle. Aerobics boosted my energy levels but didn't burn weight. (Of course, I was so heavy that "aerobics" was barely a mile run).
Weight lifting forced my body to add muscle mass which boosted how many calories I burned during a day. The big problem I have now is that I'm getting older and, frankly, lifting and I don't get along as well as we used to...
Clear, Dark Skies
Excellent, well done. The answer to many of the problems faced by a modern urban society is sitting there, quietly gathering dust in the garage.
The article says the study reached two conclusions:
1) (And most relevant to the politics) Access to sporting facilities had negligible effect on the activity of children. Children with access to sporting facilities used them, got tired, and were not very active when they got home. Children without access got home and, not having had a chance ot do sporting stuff at school, were more active outside of school. So, basically, the body is wired to get X amount of activity a day, and if it doesn't get it at sporting facilities paid for by the state, will get it after school anyway. Ergo, spending money on sporting facilities doesn't help kids get more excercise.
2) (And this is a specious conclusion) Amount of activity has no bearing on the child's Body Mass Index. They try and make this say that therefore, activity has nothing to do with obesity, but BMI is a body-mass index, not an obesity index. If you have fat, and you exercise, you may very well lose fat and get thinner and not lose any weight, because you also tend to gain muscle when you exercise. so kids who exercise may way the same as kids who don't, but are still probably much less fat.
Now, if the study measured how much FAT the kids had and didn't notice a difference with excercise, then they might be on to something, but they didn't, so they're not.
paintball