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."

Comments

This may all be true, but...

[tuxlove]

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.

Re:This may all be true, but...

[arivanov]

Not correct for the subject in hand. The subject is UK schools .

This morning I dropped of junior at school and I noticed a big sign: No play in the playground allowed, dangerous BIG holes in the playground. There were two holes, both 1-2 inch wide, 1 inch deep. For the reference the school is Queens Edith Primary in Cambridge UK.

The way UK schools (based on observations from the same school) understand physical education is - you put kids in class, tell one to do an exercise, the rest watch. There is a variation on this when you show the exercise and they do it. There is no warmup whatsoever. If a child decides to warm up by doing a run around for 5 minutes he is penalized and chastized as a troublemaker. Compared to that on the continent they make them all run for at least 200m in the under 10 age group, going to 600+ for the older ones at the beginning of the lesson. As a result the exercise value in the UK is minimal and it is actually hazardous from a health and safety perspective as the children have had no warmup.

In addition to that in the UK all other obesity related factors are obscured by one other - vitamin D defficiency past the nursery age. 95% of the kids show bone deformations characteristic for that - X legs, rachitic skull, the lot. The primary reason for this is the anti-sun + suncream obscession which leads to most kids getting less than the essential doze of sun for activating vitamin D to the required degree (30min daily average unhindered summer sun at UK lattittude for an average white caucasian, going up to 1h+ in spring, autumn and winter, with the numbers for darker skin colour being bigger than that). Add to that the fact that kids are ferried around in buggies restrained with minimal movement till the age of 4 and the picture is mostly complete (mine refused to get into it from the age of 2 and I agreed with him).

From there on kids are bound to be obese. Until these factors are eliminated any study in the UK will be bogus as a large sample of the juvenile population is already highly susceptible to obesity and no physical education or sport can help them in that. Nothing to see people, move along. Another study which concentrates on everything but the two root causes for UK:

• The rabid propaganda by the UK cancer research soscieties about skin cancer will kill by an order of magnitude more people from vitamin D defficiency related causes like bone problems and obesityt, than it will save.
• The UK pram obscession is the other main reason for obesity. Get the kids out, they are not a damn toy doll to ferry around.

Stating either of these is too unpopular so people do studies on everything but these.

Maybe sports in school takes fun out of exercise

[Latent Heat]

Perhaps some gym class/athletic programs/sports in school manage to promote sports elite and take the fun out of such activities for the majority of the other kids.

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.

Re:I'm skeptical...

[Nite_Hawk]

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