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.
This is an article I found from digg that was very enlightening.
... And a quote from a nutritionist I know: "The childhood obesity epidemic is an epidemic of news stories, not a problem itself."
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
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
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
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.
Well, you just covered all the possibilities in a single sentence, and effectively said nothing.
I'd like to see accellerometers fitted to adults in the same way as with children. Then we can make a real comparison.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Ok in growing children, physical activity doesn't have as much direct effect as I would have assumed. But I made that assumtion based on the direct effect that physical activity has on the health of adults. If school is there to help prepare our youth to be highly functional adults, learning to value physical fitness and activity is still an important thing to instill in the kiddies, not just for health but for general succes in life. "No woman or guy wakes up beautiful in the morning. The beautiful is a result of smart life choices, smart shopping choices, smart diet choices, smart makeup choices, smart outfit and accessories choices and even smart chair-stylist choices." "It is not just politicians whom we prefer to be beautiful. A number of studies, many involving American economist Daniel Hamermesh, have found that "ugly" people earn less in many walks of life, from advertising to law. The beauty premium seems to apply even in professions where there is no reason to expect that beauty counts."
Both quotes from:http://www.slate.com/id/2161615/
We are all just people.
Startling--this is apparently the next wave of human evolution--a breed of child that can expend energy without depleting any of its energy reserves.
It is only a matter of time before this unlicensed borrowing from the aether bears grave repercussions for the laws of physics.
In the meanwhile, however, I suggest rigging up these children to some sort of power collection device. We can retard global warming by moving away from fossil fuels to infinite-energy-children fuels, and thereby ensure a safe future for our mutant underlords!
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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.
It's entirely possible to be fat and healthy. As long as you exercise and eat right, it doesn't matter too much how much you weigh to a certain point. I know people in excess of 300 pounds who are way healthier than I am at 130 pounds. Also, why do the British pluralize "math," yet singularize "sports?" The -ize's in the previous sentence are intentional and inflammatory, by the way.
I would like to say that bicycle commuting to and from work do help in reducing obesity.
I have embarked on a daily program of commuting by bicycle 10 miles
round trip and a weekly ride of 50 miles round trip since August of
2006 and I have notice a big difference.
I have lost at least three to four inches on my waist and I have been
feeling a lot better overall.
Lately, I have increased my riding so that I do the 50 mile round trip two
to three times per week. A goal is to average three to four days per week
where I do the 50 mile round trip. That trip by the way also includes a
900 foot hill each way.
My manager at work has told me that he's seen a big difference as early as
October (2 months after I started this program).
One complaint that I do have is that my childhood shcool did not let us ride
our bikes to school. I hope that this policy is changed.
Perhaps if we let (or insist) that our kide ride bicycles to and from school,
this might help. It may also eliminate the guzzling and belching shcool
busses.
Hugs and peace
Cleara
2. If other diets haven't worked, try putting Little Tubby on Atkins. No, it won't necessarily work for everyone. It depends on the type of metabolism you have. But if you've tried low-fat and it doesn't work, Atkins (or another carb-restrictive diet) might.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
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.
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.
It's in alot more then soda and it is even now being put into bread that you probably were buying before it was added.
cheap by-product sweetner that adds as much a 1/3" to your triglicerid count (translates into fat)
You can drop your weight by simply removing it from your diet. I lost 30 pounds in less then three months that way and others I've told have lost weight for removing it from their diet.
And don't forget an olde English favorite - the donut toss... ;-)
...how much these kids eat and how fat they are?
I always figured there was a reason they called them the "laws" of thermodynamics.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that families that are sports oriented don't have enough time to cook healthy meals and as a result, eat out more often. There's a reason why they feature the stereotypical soccer mom in commercials advertising fast (often microwaveable) food.
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.
I'm amazed there are indeed thin people here on slashdot making their usual comments about their theories on why fat people are fat.
Seriously though all the study showed was that fat kids tend to move around about as much as thin kids. That really has little to do with how in shape they are or how many calories they burn siting still due to having more muscle etc etc. Plus the human body can use vastly different methods to convert energy and all of them have different efficiency values.
For example did the overweight kid stop running as soon as his body switched over to aerobic energy conversion because his lungs started hurting from breathing harder than usual? Theres no way the device can know something crucial like that unless it monitors more than mere movement.
I'm not saying the study isn't valid, but it reeks of bad science like the smoking "studies" that found smoking doesn't cause lung cancer.
The fact of the matter is that, although metabolism is biochemistry, not magic, we still know very little about the actual mechanism of it. A normal person, joule for joule eats MUCH more energy than they need to expend. Why isn't everyone obese? Most of this gets excreted as waste products, some people's metabolism is more efficient in burning off excess energy, some people are more efficient at building muscle, repairing tissue, etc.
The equation of obesity is not as simple as 3500kcal = 1lb. There are MANY factors that even for an underfed individual can cause them to gain weight...Just ask anyone who has ever been on prednisone. . .
The following are just a few more examples of the things that are making us fat:
Thyroid --- yup... it is possible that up to 10% of women have some amount of thyroid dysfunction. This is the metabolism center of your body... hmmm. Why so many? Might it be due to the flouride in most peoples water system that is known to damage the thyroid? It's curious that the "epidemic" began around the same time as water flouidation was introduced. Curiously, one of the first signs of hypothyroidism (that goes away with treatment) is an elevated blood pressure and cholesterol.
Insulin --- All that high fructose corn syrup confuses the insulin cycle in your body and may cause it to store fat. Interestingly, the satiation that regular cane sugar delivers is due to part of the insulin cycle that does not react the same with HFCS and causes one to eat more.
Cortisol --- Steroids, natural, environmental, or introduced drugs will all cause weight gain and hormonal problems. A friend of mine with lupus, who was having chemo as well as taking prednisone (cortisone) gained 50 lbs even though she vomited everything she ate for 2 months. Think stress. Interestingly, cortisol increases cholesterol and heart problems.
Hormones --- everyone knows the birth control pill makes you gain weight. What you didn't know is that in many of the plastics we eat off of, drink out of, or have our food packaged in contain chemicals that mimica sex hormones, and can cause symptoms of increased testosterone or estrogen such as weight gain, hirutism, baldness, gynocomastia, sexual dysfunction, and depression.
Monosodium Glutimate --- Before this salt became one of the most ubiquitous flavorings in pre-packaged foods, it was used in laboratories to create obese mice and rats. Yup... researchers found that adding MSG to the rodent's food not only caused them to eat more, but also increased (non-lean) body mass for mice on a regulated diet. A "safe" level of MSG has never been determined, and in many countries this additive is banned from food. In america, almost everything contains MSG. The food manufacturer's response: it will help the elderly eat more and gain weight. Yeah, but what is it doing to our children?
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Careful what you take away from this and all three of the above can be progressively more misleading.
The total energy expenditure (TEE) of the human body is determined by the following equation:
TEE = BMR + PA + TEF
BMR = Basal metabolic rate
This is proportional to the lean body mass, not the BMI (which is a really bad measure of obesity). This is typically 60 - 70% of your TEE
PA = Energy expended during physical activity
This consists of around 20% of your energy expenditure
TEF = Thermic effect of food
This is the energy expended to digest food, typically 10% of kcal's consumed. This really doesn't really come into play in weight gain since eating more food still gives you excess calories (albeit at 90%) and eating less is still fewer calories.
In other words, the majority of your energy expenditure is determined by your basal metabolic rate by a ratio of around 3.5 to 1. This is especially true in children whose BMR's are naturally higher than most adults'. This is not to say that exercise isn't useful. BMR is determined by lean body mass, which is determined by your muscle mass, which is determined by genetics and exercise. Exercise does help you lose weight, but it takes a lot longer than diet. Exercise also has independent benefits on cardiovascular health and a host of other health measures.
So all those people who tell you that losing weight is 80% diet and 20% exercise aren't lying. That's simply the science.
"The UK government is trying to increase the amount of sport in schools."
That's why they let so many State schools sell off their sports fields to property developers!
I don't know why the summary of this article said this points to genetics or diet that is causing towards child obesity. I think the article points towards diet and says nothing about genetics. I highly doubt that the epidemic of child obesity is being caused by some rapid change in our child's genes over the past 50 years; however, our diets have changed dramatically over the past 50 years.
I'm a huge proponent of eating nutritious foods. I've convinced some of my obese friends to try my diet high in vegetables, whole grains, fruits, and a few low fat proteins; specifically avoiding oils, fats, and processed sugars. Everyone I've convinced to try this diet has lost weight without being hungry. Unfortunately I'm the only one I know who's stayed on this diet. In the modern world it's hard to eat healthy because most restaurant food or processed foods have oils/sugars added. Many Americans get 30% of their totally calories from added sugars. That's 30% of their calories are completely void of any nutritional value.
I've seen multiple studies that seem to indicate that eating the average America diet is actually more likely to kill you than smoking. This is something the food industries are trying to hide. I strongly recommend getting a good book on nutrition and reading more on this subject. If you have the discipline to follow fairly rigorous diets there are studies with lab animals that show you should be able to extend your maximum age by 50%. Diet is the only known way to improve your maximum age (exercise improves your average age). If you're interested in this subject start by looking for some books by Roy Walford.
Hobby Robotics
It is well known that skinny people have large healthy fibre filled bowel movments. Fat people on the other hand excrete, (after considerable effort) hard, tarry, small deer pellets.
Even though the skinny children and the fat children both consume nearly identical quantities of food, the skinny children excrete it all, while the fat kids retain a little more of each meal. This unexpelled waste builds up and causes weight gain and bloat.
This is not a problem caused by lack of excercise. No, this is a problem caused by lack of laxatives. The husky child needs more laxative to make him get up and go.
There's always that fat kid on the sidelines. Quite an astounding streak of coincidences.
What's trollish about that? Hasn't this been known since the 70s? It's like saying hypoxia causes diminished brain function. DNA rules. It should be as obvious as the color of the sky.
What?
First off, the average male adult will probably need about 2500 calories per day to maintain weight. To lose one pound, you need to subtract 3500 calories from your maintenance weight. That's right: 3500 calories is about equal to a pound. Now, figure that if you go run ONE MILE, you have just burnt 100 calories. Thus, if you run 4 miles a day EVERY STINKING DAY (speaking from experience) you will need about nine days of this to lose one pound. 36 MILES is only ONE FREAKIN' POUND. Say you're a mere 20 pounds overweight. Then we're talking about 6 months of non-stop daily four mile runs and no cheating on your regular 2500 calorie per day diet to shed those 20 pounds. Any personal project that requires 6 months of daily effort with no extra pay and a small, gradual reward is almost impossible to achieve. The bottom line is, if you are relying on exercise alone, it is very difficult to lose weight. That is why diet and exercise are always mentioned together. By dieting, you can, for example, reasonably cut 600 calories per day with very little pain. That's a pound a week with NO exercise. And that's the basis behind weight watchers and nurtisystem, where they provide the food in calorie-measured portions. And if you are the slashdotter who thinks anyone can eat 300 calories per day and gain weight, well, I can practically guarantee you will benefit by studying these numbers a little. Metabolism is not a wishy washy thing. This is an idea that seems to comfort the obese, but it's not true. Your cells are the same as mine and the next guy's. Your DNA is almost identical to mine. Give or take a fraction of a percent at the most. And your calorie requirements are basically the same.
I ran track and cross country for 2 years.
My diet doubled, and I never gained a single pound, except for 10 lbs muscle gained during track season's weight-training, and which I would burn off during the next cross country season. Everyone in the sport was skinny as a rail, and had ultra-lean, and extraordinarily enduring muscles.
It is also true that I don't normally gain weight outside of that sport, but as I said, while I was running my caloric intake doubled.
It is with that observation that I declare their study was pure bunk.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Try RTFA. The point of the article is that those kids who engage in school-related sports are less active at other times. This means that school sports has almost nothing to do with activity level in kids.
Since there is no corelation between school sports and exercise, then of course there will be no corelation between school sports and calories burned and BMI.
The whole point of the article was that the assumption that you made is not the case. Kids in school sports do not in other ways have the same activity level as their non-sports classmates.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
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"
The growth and milk production hormones in milk and milk products have been linked to earlier menstruation and earlier breast development in girls. Growth hormones in milk and meat have been linked to obesity in the people that consume them.
There is a reason people are turning away from hormone-pumped animal products - it's because they are bad for you.
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
Like most slashdotters, I was never athletically gifted in school. However, I was always involved in sports regardless of how many times I got my ass kicked. The difference was that my parents, if I was truly interested in something, would not allow me to quit. They always made me strive to be the best that I possibly could, even if that wasn't that great.
The idea that we should allow our kids to avoid athletics because they are focused on competition and winning is absurd. Guess what, that's the real world. I owe a lot about myself to the fact that I was picked last in dodgeball, repeatedly bashed in the head and continued to get back up to try harder.
I do agree that gym teachers suck, that's why parents should encourage their kids to catch that dogeball and give the biggest kid on the floor a Spalding tatoo.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
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"
You're all assuming that a certain mass of body fat will hold a certain number of calories, so eating few calories -> burning up reserves -> weight loss.
.01
That's dumb: we all know that water = 0 cal, fat = lotsa cals.
So if the way a person stores energy changes from very fatty body mass to very watery body mass, of course one can at the same time eat up one's calory reserves AND gain weight by stocking up on water.
Myu
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I realized I wanted to say more...
Another reason governments have shy'ed away from the food industry is due to most people's feeling that they have the right to choose what they want to eat. I mean, think about it, there would be an uproar if we could no longer put salt on our food. Or can not use butter on a piece of bread. Or make a flourless chocolate cake. Or, etc., etc., etc... People simply won't stand for it. What you can do is educate people on how to properly eat. Try and have resturaunts serve healthier portions (hard to do...). Educate is really the best way, but the problem with that is that it will take years for it to really take effect. Look how long it is taking to effect smoking? It has been 40-50 years now that we have known for a fact that smoking will cause lung cancer and kill you. And it is only in the last 10-15 years that it is finally starting to take hold on the general public. It will be 40-50 plus years for us to educate the general public on proper healthy eating, and even then it will still be a problem to for many.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
There were no 'wasted dollars' here, and that's not just because it's a British study not an American one. The Early Bird study referred to was on children with a mean age of 4.9 years, so calling BS while referring to "wrestling" and "bodybuilding" is hardly worth an 'insightful' mod!
The study discovered that children who don't participate in organised sport do the same amount of exercise through unorganised 'play' as those who do.
Basically, it seems that if you force a child to play soccer for an hour at school, they will probably slump infront of the TV for the rest of the afternoon, but if you make them slump at a desk in class for that hour, they will probably go and play soccer of their own accord after schoool.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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.
"Documented". Was she in a secure area and observed / supervised 24 hours a day?
As a recovering food-aholic myself (the scientific term is fatass) I can tell you that not only did I lie to other people about my intake, I managed to convince myself that I wasn't overeating as well.I'm now consuming 1800-2000 calories a day and guess what? I'm losing 2 -2.5 lbs per week. But more importantly I've lost 2 inches on my waist in the last month.
Limited intake & excercise.
Like the shirt says "Science. It works, Bitches"
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
Yes extreme body-builders and TV fake wrestlers may have BMIs that naïvely label them as obese, but I doubt you have a body like that.
Let me make sure I understand this. Your evidence that sports make you lose weight is that you weighed less when you were 17 than you did when you were 22.
I hope you aren't an engineer.
Clear, Dark Skies
"The idea that we should allow our kids to avoid athletics because they are focused on competition and winning is absurd. Guess what, that's the real world. I owe a lot about myself to the fact that I was picked last in dodgeball, repeatedly bashed in the head and continued to get back up to try harder."
I think your problem may have been that you required being bashed on the head several times to motivate you to try harder.
Not all children learn best by being bludgeoned repeatedly.
Personally I find the over emphasis on the importance of sports to the educational process is just one of many reasons our American Educational system is such an absolute joke.
That's just my opinion though, I've never been part of the educational systems of any other countries, so I can't really say whether or not they put their sports team's funding before the funding of their classrooms.
Yeah, Teach them to hurt the other kids as badly as possible. Physical pain is necessary to teach kids how to compete. After all, teaching kids to compete intellectually is evil. We don't want schools telling kids that the smartest kids are the best. It's the ones that can inflict the most damage that should be set above.
No. It did not say or imply this. Please go re-RTFA.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
You didn't RTFA. The study in no way contradicts your experience. What it contradicts is the assumption that kids who engage in school sports get more exercise.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
"The most important thing (was) if you added the in-school activity to the out-of-school activity, they were exactly the same."
According to the study, fitness programs DOES NOT increase activity in children. If that is true, why should it increases activity in adults? It seems you are just assuming it could "potentially" be a good thing.
Don't get me wrong, I think sports is good and am not convinced by the article at all. For one, they seem to call everything 'activity' - no difference between hard workout and long rests, as opposed to many small movements.
However, maybe any money spent on a fitness program could be equally well spent on a food program. Is there a lot of focus on "eating right" in UK schools? How about american schools?
I lost my sig.
The results are very interesting, suggesting that genetics and diet are the main reasons for childhood obesity, not sport.
Genetics is a maybe, but diet is a definite. This isn't "interesting" at all. What is interesting is NOT that diet is a factor, but that sport (exercise, activity, etc) is not significant.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
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
Competition may be frustrating for people who continuously lose, but getting rid of it makes the games boring for everyone. The trick is to segregate them into groups of equivalent skill without singling out anyone into the "loser's league."
Perhaps by having non-conventional or out-of-season sports run concurrently with the vanilla sports. The better athletes seem to prefer the regular events, while the less skilled could simply choose something else if frustrated, always with the excuse, "well I like dodgeball, pickleball, badminton, or curling more than basketball, baseball, football, or boring football (a.k.a soccer)."
Any sports not practiced at home will even the playing field as well, so there's no reason to restrict anyone to any strata.
Anyone who says dodgeball is stupid better not play FPSs.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The parameters are flawed. By only fitting a kid with an accelerometer, they're essentially saying that running ten miles is equivalent to bobbing gently for an hour. Surely all fatty's spirited waddles to the fridge are messing with the data.
I remember reading about one study where they took "naturally thin" people and boosted their caloric intake by an extra 1000 calories per day. The subjects all became much more "twitchy" - they paced, fiddled, shifted, etc.. during their normal day.
The upshot was that after a few months they were predicted to gain 20-30 pounds but gained only 10 pounds on average.
Clear, Dark Skies
Any post correcting someone's formatting, grammar or spelling will be hopelessly riddled with formatting, grammar and spelling errors.
Clear, Dark Skies
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
A visit to my son's high school felt like a visit to Junior Weight Watcher's Anonymous. The average kid there was as heavy as I was in high school - and I knew I was heavy, even then.
Fortunately, my son inherited his mother's metabolism. So far, he looks like he's growing up thin. My daughter might be leaning my way, though - she's got good eating habits and she's active, so my fingers are crossed.
I'm also constantly pointing out to them how I have to struggle with my weight and how they don't want to end up like me. Too many people are too damn proud of being fat.
Clear, Dark Skies
There's nothing more encouraging than doing a couple more sit-ups than you ever did before.
There's nothing more discouraging than watching some shmuck knock off a couple of dozen more than you could ever dream of doing.
Clear, Dark Skies
I was going to say something similar. The law of conservation of energy doesn't take a nap because it's suddenly about your tubby little kids.
The maths I've seen seem to indicate that your mass will 'seek' towards a value for which the food energy consumed is equal to the energy dissipated. It's a simple integrating process, and it's one which only humans can control. Studies have shown that simply increasing physical activity causes a proportional increase in appetite, so at some point you need to either work out far far more than you could possibly eat, or get some willpower and set your energy input at a sane level.
It's been a long time.
Of COURSE there's no relation between activity levels and BMI - Body Mass Index is almost entirely useless for determining obesity, except in the cases of morbidly obese people. It's just a ratio of height to weight, and doesn't actually measure fat levels at all. So, two people, one who plays sports with a lot of muscle, and another who sits around eating cheetos, could easily have the same BMI, because one has muscle weight, and another has fat weight. When you factor in that muscle weighs much MUCH more than fat does, this study means exactly squat.
If they had actually measured body fat percentage instead of BMI, then I would actually care about their findings.
They're also neglecting caloric intake, as mentioned by many others, which also screws up their semblance of credibility.
Well, I hope they don't really mean that burning calories doesn't have an effect on fat kids. Because it does. But how do they know the other kids not playing "sports" weren't out climbing trees, running through the woods having dirt-clod fights, chasing their dog, etc. WhenMaybe strapping silly sensors on kids isn't the answer. Maybe just getting them off the couch from behind the xbox, and less mcdonald's would help?
That eat about 8,000 calories a day and run their asses off and are completely fit. Whether they live to be 100 or their internals are actually as sound as their external fitness is irrelevant.
I'm waiting for the next major study to refute this study.
Another thing this study missed is that BMI is BODY-MASS-INDEX. Weight divided by height, NOT *FAT* divided by height.
People who exercise reduce fat, but ALSO gain muscle. This is probably especially true in kids.
paintball
Here is a model of how the human body works with respect to fat gain and fat loss. This is my summary of my understanding of the material in a book called Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle by a pro bodybuilder named Tom Venuto.
Your body is designed to keep you alive, even in hard times when it's difficult to get enough food. Thus, if you simply cut your calories back (say, to 1200 kCal per day) your body will store fat at every chance it gets. If you are really only eating 1200 kCal per day, yet burning more than that, you must burn fat (and perhaps some good stuff like muscle) so you will lose weight. However, your body will store fat any chance it can, so if you eat extra you can gain fat, and once you stop the 1200 kCal per day regimen you are almost certain to gain fat. Worse, it is likely you lost muscle during the 1200 kCal per day regimen.
So, the goal is for you to lose fat, without your keep-you-alive tricks kicking in and making your body stubbornly try to store fat. BFFM recommends multiple, smaller meals each day, rather than a few big ones. If you are eating every 3 hours, how can you be starving to death? Everything must be okay, so your body will let go of the fat. Also you need to get enough sleep, and try to avoid stress in general; stress is a signal that you are in hard times.
Muscle is your friend for fat loss. Muscle burns calories 24/7, so having more muscle means your daily base calorie burn goes up. This paragraph is important, so feel free to read it again.
The primary way to lose fat is through "cardio" exercise, aka aerobic exercise: running, bicycling, swimming, various gym machines like the elliptical or the stair climber, etc.
Another good thing is to eat a diet that fires up your metabolism. Imagine for a second that you had an entire mouthful of glucose, and you swallowed it all. That will pass straight out of your stomach and go straight into your blood as blood sugar, so it's just about 100% efficient as a food. For fat loss, this is a bad thing. How about a mouth full of vegetable oil? Pretty darn easy to digest, and it will be easily stored as fat since it's fat to start out. Imagine instead you have a mouthful of lean protein (skinless chicken breast, if you eat meat; non-fat cottage cheese if you are vegetarian, say). First of all you will expend some effort chewing, and then your digestive system has to work very hard to tear apart the proteins and turn them into something that can pass into the blood stream. If I recall correctly, you can burn about 30% of the calories in a serving of lean protein, just in the effort it takes to digest it. So the bottom line rule here is: complex carbs, high fiber, and lean protein are much better than simple carbs, low fiber, and high fat foods. Corollary: if you want seconds of anything, let it be lean protein.
So, BFFM tells you how to calculate a good portion size, so you don't eat too much. (If my instincts were good and I naturally took a good portion size, I'd probably not need a book like BFFM.) BFFM encourages multiple, smaller meals, with a high proportion of lean protein, and as much natural whole foods as possible (eat apples, not apple pie). BFFM encourages working out to increase lean muscle mass, plus cardio exercise to actively burn fat. If you do everything in the book, you will lose fat, unless you are one of the fraction-of-a-percent people who have a medical condition that keeps them fat all the time. (And if you are, you have probably figured that out by now.)
Tom Venuto has nothing good to say about BMI. He points out that bodybuilders with less than six percent body fat might still have a high BMI, because muscle is heavy. Body fat percentage is the best indicator, and it's not that hard to get a useful measurement.
He also has nothing good to say about Atkins. Carbs aren't your enemy; you need some. And the idea that you can eat as much fat as you want is just insane. You don't need t
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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
Why can't it be both?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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
All you high school kids, pay attention, because I'm about to impart a valuable life lesson upon you.
Jocks don't hate you because you suck at sports. Jocks hate you because you're smarter than them.
That's why you're never going to get jocks to like you by getting better at sports. Even if you succeed, then you'll just be someone who is smarter than them AND is good at sports, and they'll just hate you more.
paintball
Even if there are no direct benefits, there are plenty of indirect benefits.
Being in a sport can motivate kids to eat healthier so they do better. Trying to run after eating only three cheeseburgers the night before isn't fun. It's a lot easier if you eat a balanced meal.
This is definately something that VERY true these days. Anyone who's flipped up a school yearbook over the years (some schools keep them on hand and will let alumni look through them) will notice how amazingly thin students looked compared to their modern counterparts. Obesity among children is a very new and concerning issue. (How concerning is debatable given our ultra-healthy yet exercise deprived lifestyles. I also say among children because cases of excessive obesity can be very easily found among the rich in the early 1900's (robber barons anyone?))
Or you could play soccer. Or golf or tennis or swimming ir track or gymnastics.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Well sport(s) may not make your BMI decrease, it sure does make you smarter. That's why jocks on sports teams always get straight A's.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
Look - Obesity is more dependent on diet than activity levels. This is very well known. You can see this yourself by doing some simple calculations (Slashdotters may like this). First, take a look at how many calories your favorite snack is (maybe a piece of chocolate cake or a Whopper or a whole bag of Doritos). Then, check any site that estimates your calorie consumption by doing some physical activity for a certain period of time. Calculate how long it takes you to excercise enough to burn off that extra snack. Then come back here and read the next paragraph.
What you will have found is that it takes a LOT of physical activity to make up for what most of us consider to be a moderate snack. This is why the AMOUNT OF FOOD that you eat has more bearing on obesity than ACTIVITY LEVELS. However, diet alone doesn't determine your overall health, although it does have a HUGE impact (pun unintentional). Excercise also determines a lot of your health. To be really healthy, you should avoid overeating AND get lots of excercise, just like everyone knows you should. Sure, there are some fat people who are "healthier" than some skinny people. And sure, there are some couch potatoes who are "healthier" than some athletes. But these EXCUSES do not mean that you are justified in either sitting on your lazy butt or eating that cheesecake - people try to twist results like this all the time to say that they're doing perfectly fine the way they are. The take home message for YOU is this:
If I eat better and maintain a reasonable weight, will I be healthier? YES
If I excercise more and maintain cardiovascular fitness and weight-bearing strength, will I be healthier? YES
Don't try to make excuses. Note that we are talking about HEALTH benefits here. I'm not addressing the complications of appearance and self-esteem. That's a whole other can of worms.
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.
I know you were kidding, but you're on to something uncomfortable. Athletic superiority is okay to have, even to be proud of, but academic superiority is something we have to be humble about. If you have a decent vocabulary you get "You think you're so smart!" but no one ever confronts the sprinting champion with "You think you're so fast!"
Jocks don't hate you because you suck at sports. Jocks hate you because you're smarter than them.
They're also afraid that their penises are too small. This also explains the correlation between jocks and PCVs (Penis Compensation Vehicles).
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
Well first of all, losing weight and losing fat can be two different things. Through exercise you might be dumping fat, but gaining bulk (muscle). In that case you might gain weight, or break even, for a long period of time.
Overall, more muscle = more energy burn (so long as you use those muscles, they need fuel, and that needs to come from somewhere). Diets themselves can actually lead to weight gain, depending on how they are done quite often a body might react in a "shit, I'm getting a lot less food less frequently, better store some for emergencies"
The best combination is not so much dieting as healthy lifestyle, which is healthy exercise + healthy eating. For the record I've found that a not overly large amount of weight-lifting keeps my upper-body in decent enough condition (enough to trade possible mantits for some muscle, anyhow), and walking/biking etc seems to take care of most the rest.
Perhaps it's the obesity virus that's causing the problem?
u s.ap/index.htmlt /290/1/R190?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMA T=&author1=whigham&andorexactfulltext=and&searchid =1138723430984_644&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance &resourcetype=1i rus-could-obesity-be-contagious
Anyone knowledgeable about this?
From the CBC:
It's a contentious idea, but Dr. Leah Whigham is not the first to suggest that a virus could make us fat. In her latest study, the associate scientist from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has studied the effect of some human adenoviruses on chickens. She found that one such virus, Ad-37, seems to cause obesity in the birds. Her finding builds on other studies that show that two related viruses also cause obesity in animals. Dr. Whigham admits that more research is needed to determine if viruses play a role in obesity, and indeed, developing a vaccine is still a long way off. She plans to study other adenoviruses to see if they, too, have the same fat-making effect in animals.
Related Links:
http://www.the-aps.org/press/journal/06/4.htm
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/07/28/fat.vir
http://ajpregu.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstrac
http://www.webmd.aol.com/diet/news/20040805/fat-v
Possibly because "smartness" is subjective, whereas athletic superiority can be objectively and quantifiably measured?
I've never been of a competition fan. I've been with the boyscouts for over 12 years (and in Holland the boyscouts are not the pussies they are in the USA). You how to work together and to organise stuff, which helps a lot more in real life when you start working in the real world.
And you also learn to work together with people that are on an other intellectual level.
As for sports, after scouting, I started with Aikido and kobudo. Both are quite effective martial arts, that don't have competitions and strive to improve yourself. Physically and intellectually.
So any jock asking me if "I'm so smart" and wants to intimidate me can get that aggressive attitude right back to him.
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.
you can eat burgers all day long, as long as you remove the bun and the lettuce first (ok, maybe not big macs - real meat)
the mars bar, on the other hand, will kill you: with all that sugar (fructose!), the fat gets instantly stored, you get no nutritional energy and after the short, addictive sugar high you feel hungry again - time for another? how about washing it down with a high-fructose soda?
Competitive sports at school == pointless drama, encouragement of intellectual deficiency, deterioration of social environment, and discouragement of healthy physical activity. Just look at the US schools.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Every year the children are fitted with accelerometers, which record activity over the course of a week.
That is not the only surprise. Professor Wilkin said children's activity levels had no bearing on their body mass index - their risk of obesity.
True I suppose you could say that all the study showed was that they couldn't find any correlation between the two.
The fact remains though that the ONLY thing the study tested was what an accelerometer can tell you. Anyone who knows anything about exercise will tell you that an accelerometer can't really tell you much about actual energy usage.
Fits in perfectly with the current trend among dieticians to wave away the whole concept of exercise. Overheard one saying on TV the other night, that 'it takes two hours of rowing just to burn a banana'. That is, this person had probably burned a banana in her lab and compared it with the power needed to push a small boat forward. Not entirely representative as a) energy transfer in the human body is efficient, but not 100% efficient, b) the rowing movement is inefficient to say the least, c) we do a lot more when we row than just rowing (carrying our own weight, keeping the body warm, panting, repairs, etc.). I don't think that when you take a person who's just about to faint, give them a banana, have them row for two hours and expect to find them in the state they were in before they took the banana. Plus, what they refuse to mention: excercise is healthy.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
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.
The article did imply that they did have some other data-gathering other than the accelerometers - they compared activity level to their BMI. You can't measure a BMI with an accelerometer.
That said, there is no way to know from the article if any of this 'other' data was used in any way to calibrate the activity levels from the accelerometers, not to mention how accurate the calibration method was. They could have, they should have, but did they? Their actual research papers might say, but the article sure didn't.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
I was at school in the 1980s when the British educational establishment was firmly in the grip of people who believed everyone was equal and that competition was a bad thing.
Consequently sport at school during this time was a joke, more often than not the teachers were on strike anyway and when they were around all they did was teach the bare minimum, they never encouraged anyone who showed an interest in any particular sport to take it any further and on the odd occasion when schools did get over their hatred of competition and arrange athletics meets, swimming galas or rugby/cricket/football matches they would basically announce that the competition was happening and tell anyone who was interested in taking part to put their name down. They would then choose the team/participants from whoever put their names down first and expect the pupils to make their own way to the event.
Thanks to these policies I once attended a swimming gala with 3 other people who basically couldn't swim despite there being other people in the school who could. None of the teaching staff from the school had turned up and they had told us the wrong time so we could only enter the relays. In the freestyle relay by the time they'd finished doggy paddling the first 3 lengths we were way way behind and came second last at which point we discovered no one but me could swim anything other than doggy paddle very well and they were so disheartened from the first relay no one wanted to even bother with the medley relay so we went home and that was the one and only swimming competition we had at school.
I also went to an athletics meet which had been organised by a teacher who was nothing to do with the PE department where they had picked me to run the mile race despite the fact that I was easily beaten each week in the PE lessons by another lad who spent most of his evenings at a running club. The PE teachers didn't think he deserved to take part in school sports events ( because he wasn't exactly an attentive pupil academically ) so I lost a race which I'm pretty sure he could have won.
Competition is good and in sport it's absolutely essential because otherwise it just becomes a more or less pointless excercise in which everyone loses interest.
The reason more and more children are obese nowdays, is becuase they eat MORE and exercise LESS. There's no trickery about it, people will lose weight, when they begin to exercise MORE and eat LESS.
They do this because the Americans have somehow made it socailly acceptable to be fat. It isn't.
We've got it worse however. Eating out, is part of the American culture, food in restaurants is cheap over there, and a great many Americans eat out on a daily basis.
Over here, a halfway decent restaurant is VERY expensive, as a result, we (in that way we do) have taken on the eating out culture (Where we'd normally stay home and cook), but your average UK person is going to go to McDonalds, KFC, whatever, simply becuase its good food and the price isn't a piss take. Sadly its stuffed with calories and all those lovely things that make little kids FAT. If better quality food was available for better prices, we'd see a population with an anerage weight more like France, who share the eating out culture, but with "better" food.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
That's just sick - Now I'll never eat again. Thanks for that, jerk.
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
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.
Of course as a grownup you certainly burn more calories when doing something intensive. In children it is possible that similar amount energy is always spent, just differently balanced (metabolism & growth vs. just mechanical movement). Otherwise you also can't explain how some children (but also even adults) can't gain weight no matter how much they eat.
I can only speak introspectively on this issue, but I agree with you a lot. I've always been relatively geeky, but I played quite a lot of sport before I started High School in the early 1990s. (Particularly cricket and soccer, which are pretty common in New Zealand.) Since I left, I took up more sports, including Ultimate Frisbee and a lot of hiking and backpacking every weekend, plus walking for an hour or two every day irrespective of weather.)
The school itself has a good academic record, and even has a couple of token celebrations each year to congratulate students for academic achievement. On the other hand, it also has a huge sporting tradition, and congratulates sports-people as one of the main events every week.
What stopped me getting involved in sports, or any extra-curricular activity at school, had nothing to do with the physical activity itself, or wanting to spend time being a computer geek. It was entirely because of the types of people at the school who promoted and also engaged in sport. I did try to sign up for a sports team in my first year, and I hated it. The other people involved were all the sorts of people who I could I could never get on with, and at about 13 years old they were at the height of their immaturity.
It wasn't just the other students, either; a lot of the teachers were deeply involved, saw the whole competition thing as very important. Some teachers, who should have known better, even mocked and derided students who weren't involved in extra-curricular activities. It just made me want to get involved even less. (The irony was that I was doing plenty of other things completely outside of school at the time -- I just didn't want to spend any more time associated with the school than I needed to.)
Overall, I think the whole culture of trying to push competition and a need for achievement down people's throats can have quite a negative effect on at least some people.
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...
There are several other sports like that but not too many as the emphasis is always on those mind-numbingly stupid and brutish 'team' sports. Like I always say: if a dog is stupid enough to play with a ball, maybe a human shouldn't.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
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.
I definately agree with this post. All through Elementary School I was considered very unathletic and overweight. I always sat on the benches/sidelines during sports. My parents encouraged me, but didn't force me to do anything I didn't want to do. (e.g. my Dad loved Baseball and coached Baseball, but I hated the sport). I started running everymorning in 5th or 6th grade, because I wanted to have one of the fastest 1-miles in my class and by Junior High I was one of the best on my team in Soccer. In Junior High, however, I wanted to start playing Football as well. Naturally with no experience I was not very good. And during 9th Grade I was held back to play on the JV team with the 8th Graders. I was devastated but I didn't quit, I kept trying harder and working harder until by my Junior Year of High School I was starting on the High School Varsity Team. My Senior Year my team went undefeated 9-0 and it was one of the best experiences in my life.
My point is that the high level of competition is what made me successful. I wasn't born athletic, I had to work for it, and I certainly don't have the genetic predisposition for it. I still have to work out 5 days a week to keep myself from qualifying as 'obese'. Keep the 'everybody plays' attitude for younger kids, we have to teach people to grow up and work for what they want eventually. Once they get their feet wet, its our responsibility to teach them how to persist when the going get tough.
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
This is the most insightful post I read on Slashdot since I first came here. MOD PARENT UP!
That's the thing - for those of us that don't have a competitive streak and that do not find innate enjoyment in painful muscles, doing one sit-up is pointless...
No, it's not. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing you're less likely to die before your daughter is grown, for example. I don't exercise because I like it, I exercise because I have to, and I've found the least awful way of doing it.
Clear, Dark Skies
I did the same thing, losing about 40 pounds over the summer break between my junior and senior years of high school. I got up to a total of almost 65 pounds lost during the school year, and weighed only 167 pounds at graduation. Lifting was the biggest part of this routine, but diet was also a very significant factor.
Your diet must support the new muscle growth. A typical baseline training diet will be 40/30/30, by calories. This means that 30% of your calories must come from protein, a FAR cry from the government's published "typical" diet. If you're consuming only 2000 calories a day, you'll need 150 grams of protein to match the ratio, and chances are that since those 600 protein calories are going into your muscles, you will need more than that (or will drop weight dangerously quickly). A typical day's food when I was 17 might be 16oz of orange juice with protein powder for breakfast, a pouch of peanuts from the school's vending machine as a snack, a Whopper or tacos for lunch with my buddies, and a tub of cottage cheese with a bit of raspberry preserves for dinner while I was at work.
If you do Atkins, which works stunningly for me personally, you don't even have to worry about the ratio -- Your body will burn fat for energy, ignoring carbs for the most part, and you don't have to keep that razor-thin balance between the fats your body must have to function and the fats that insulin will banish to your stored fat reserves. In the absence of (excess) insulin, it is just as easy to burn that fat back off as it is to put on, and you'll find that your blood-energy levels are far more stable, resulting in some of the fats never being absorbed to begin with. Vitamins, however, are essential.
My father gave me some apparently good advice, that (at least for our genes) adding significant amounts of muscle mass before turning 18 was a much better idea than putting it on later. I tend to think that sooner is better for everyone, but his argument was that muscle added when I was a teenager would be much easier to pack on at that age and wouldn't be as easily reabsorbed later if I lapsed in my routine. If there are any overweight youngsters here, I would definitely recommend that you start lifting and work up to a good routine as soon as possible.
My workout history has been horrible over the past ten years, but the weight, for the most part, has stayed off, and the muscle has stayed on. In the second year of my marriage, through poor eating habits (white rice every day, sweets and breads) I got all the way up to 230 pounds -- still two pounds short of my record -- and felt absolutely wiped out, depressed, and moody. But, fixing my diet and working out for 30 minutes three times a week, 20 pounds came back off within six weeks. Having plenty of muscle mass on your body will be an asset for a long time, so don't underestimate it. Not to mention that it will help your self-esteem and appearance...
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
I weigh much the same when I've been training hard for months and when I've been "recuperating" for months. My weight doesn't alter so much, but my physical size does. When I'm training, I'm physically much smaller, look at the difference in density between muscle and fat and you'll see why.
You can be thin and still be the same weight as someone who's fat.
Deleted
This is probably too late for this discussion but anyway.
I got down to 14 stone/196lbs/. I'm 6ft tall. It was dead easy. I stopped eating crap, my diet consisted of a kilo of fruit for breakfast, a baked potato at lunch and a cup of Miso soup in the evening. I stopped drinking booze completely and drank lots of water and little else. I also went to the gym 6 days a week where, initially I walked for 10 minutes, rowed for 10 minutes, did a stepper for 5 but as I got fitter I upped the intensity and time, I still only exercise maybe 40 minutes a day. After I got to about 19 stone, I estimated my VO2 by doing four different tests and taking the average, you would not believe how hard it is to find somewhere to do a gas aspiration test in the UK, I'm still looking. I punched in the VO2 into my heart rate monitor and it would estimate, using my weight, height, VO2 and heart the burnt calories. I burnt Around 500 per day. In 9 months since I started observing my HR, I lost 36 kilos, bang on a kilo per month.
I then stopped, I carried on the diet but the exercise stopped. My weight loss plateaued. I kept a weekly record of my weight (for over a year). For me, the exercise was the difference between losing weight, and staying the same.
I know, from experiance that I lost weight when exercising and didn't when I wasn't exercising. Physics, has alot to do with this.
In terms of weight loss effectiveness, exercise is nearly useless in comparison with diet. This is no secret, although it no doubt takes millions of dollars in government studies to uncover this exoteric fact.
All my fat geek and roleplayer friends (including the one who's become a fatty over the last few years) have the same problem: They've come to eat over their appetite at every meal.
... People who excercise vent their frustration by doing it and thus eat less out of frustration. As a rule of thumb you should see that your 'exercise' has a little more to it than pure sport. Breakdance and Parcour are also considers sort-of forms of art. Surfers and Climbers have strong ties to nature, a good thing aswell.
10 years ago I was study and performing expressive stage dance. 5 hrs a day dancing. The only people with less body fat than me where ballet dancers and kung-fu masters. I was so happy pumping my metabolisim and my body everyday that I once literally forgot to eat for two days. To illustrate: Of all 10th grade classmates that made an untrained 1km sprint/run without stopping I was the second last. 5 years later I was the fastest in sprint and long-distance. I sprinted against a good friend of mine in the early twenties. Once he was the sprinting king of our class, now he was becoming a genuine fatso. It was allmost sad the way I outran him.
I've moved to IT since - dancing doesn't pay the bills if you aren't top 10. I do Aikido twice a week and it's the best thing I can think of for a geek. For half a year now I'm doing a german GED and have no time for training. It sucks big time. I have to watch the general habbit of compensating stress with overeating. As soon as my jeans start pinching I go in fasting mode and stick to veggie-juice and a spoon of honey a day to prevent the shakies. The Jojo says hello.
My advice: If you're a fatso it's 95% the case because you've gotten accustomed to eating to much! Probably by using eating as a substitute for excercise and a compensation/'reward' for stress. That's the simple truth. Get of your ass and get excercise. That will have you feel better *without* eating and you'll find it easyer to eat less.
That doesn't have to be boring. Climbing, Hiking, Cross-Country Biking (the pedal kind, not the motor kind), Cross-Country Running (adds geek factor with map and compass!), Swiming (with diving), Martial Arts, Breakdance, Parcour, Surfing (the ocean, not the web)
The only other alternative to excercise I know of is smoking as a substitute for overeating. You can lose weight that way aswell. But it's very unhealthy.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Did you RTFA at all? It states that the children who do not play sports at school expend energy elsewhere, with the net result that having sport in school or not makes no difference to child obesity. The article does NOT state that playing sport does not use energy.
The processed foods that many of us eat appears to be the culprit for many of our current ills, including obesity and diabetes. And overloading our bodies with too much protein is simply doing all kinds of damage in the long run. We simply do not need that much protein, and we get an adequate amount of it from plant-based foods.
Dairy is bad news as well, and should be avoided.
As a father of a vegetarian household, where we've been vegetarian for over 12 years, I must say my kids are healthy as oxes. And it just amazes me how misinformed most people are about diet and nutrition. One of my daughters keeps getting weird questions like, "so where do you get your protein?" Well, duh, every living thing has protein in it!!!!!
All I can say is read the book. This is not a fad book, but a serious scientific study. It does touch on the politics of meat as well, and I happen to agree with some of Campbell's conclusions. But seriously folks! The science is hard to deny.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
If we're getting rid of sports that encourage competition, then we should also get rid of all academic competition. No more spelling bees, no more science fairs, no more grades. And when these kids get out of school and into the real world, we can start them out in the office day care with the other babies. Not all people are created equal. Competition allows people to rise to the top. Eliminating it would hinder growth. There's things to be learned from failure, especially our own limitations. It really sounds like you have been jaded by some bad childhood memories of sports and competition. I imagine eliminating things you were good at as a child would seem unreasonable to you. I imagine computer programming competitions and math challenges are okay in your book, but this is only because it was something you excelled at.
For a good time call www.sawkie.com
Practically every "study" I've read about the underlying causes of obesity or other health problems marginalizes the contribution of genetics. We've been collectively brainwashed by well-intended propaganda suggesting that humans are all essentially genetic equals. Therefore, the tacit assumption (bias) in all research is that environment is the predominant factor in any health or behavior observations.
This is not my area of scientific expertise, but the data I've accumulated by personal experience is highly suggestive of major genetic drivers, OR very complex interactions of multiple environment factors that could easily defy simple research methodologies. I'm sure that everyone knows the perfectly fit and healthy person that dies of a cardiac arrest in their '40's and the chain smoking alcoholic that lives to be 90.
The truth is obviously somewhere in the middle, but I think research such as this should at least start out free of the assumption that it must be diet OR exercise and entertain the idea that genetic factors may well be the fundamental determinant.
Glucose based food, which are the BASIC form of food, is the LEAST calorie foodstuff at all, in any given portion size.
Starch, is a polymer of glucose variations - hence in any given measure, it contains more energy than glucose.
Fat, is much more high calorie than starch.
Protein, is the most energy giving food of all for any given measure, and hence its the last to be used in body.
The order body burns energy is as follows :
First to go is glucose that is found directly in the cell, and then taken from bloodstream.
Second, when glucose is low in blood, fat starts being used. Gives much energy.
Third and lastly, if there isnt enough fat left, protein (from muscles) starts to be burned, by the cells themselves. This is actually when muscle development happens - the burned protein is replaced there more than it was there before.
So, in order to prepare an efficient eating policy, you have to decrease the amount of meat you are taking in everyday - it is just like taking a small nuclear reactor in, and not being able to use up all its energy.
Read radical news here
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...
It's obviously muscle mass. You would gain more muscle playing a physical sport rather than just running.
I keep hearing all this stuff about obesity being genetic. People having a genetic tendency towards obesity, blah blah blah... I'll be the first to admit, some people are more prone to it than others. But all these studies are ridiculous. Why are people getting fat? Because they're drinking 32 and 64oz sodas once or more a day. They're getting double-quarter pounders super-sized. I mean, Christ, this isn't rocket science.
Obesity is a problem that's really become epidemic in the past 30 years. That didn't happen by evolution and genetics. That happened when fast food places started super-sizing meals, soda companies stopped using sugar and started using high fructose corn syrup, and people stopped having family meals.
Growing up, I ate A LOT. I should have probably been fat, but despite the huge portions I ate, I ate well. My mother made dinner every night growing up. My weight peaked at about 195lb (88kg for you metric folks). I'm 5'10" (177cm). I was eating a lot crap at the time, including more soda than I should have. Fast food is now something I do maybe once every month or two and I've cut out sodas (even diet) and don't eat processed foods. I don't eat piles of vegetables, but I do eat them. I still eat a lot, but my weight is now 145lb (66kg).
I don't exercise a lot. I probably walk a couple miles a day now out of necessity to get to the places I need to go, but the weight started dropping when I fixed the way I ate. This isn't some diet I read in a book. I just avoid processed foods, particularly manufactured sugars and fats. I still get plenty of sugar (in the form of starches from breads and pasta) and fat (animal and dairy) in my diet. It's just natural stuff instead of man-made stuff. I'm not saying that'll fix everyone, but there's no question in my mind that obesity is the result of the crap we've been eating and drinking for the past 30 years because if you look at how this stuff has all evolved, it goes hand-in-hand with both the sudden rise in obesity and diabetes int his country.
I've never been of a competition fan. I've been with the boyscouts for over 12 years (and in Holland the boyscouts are not the pussies they are in the USA).
Good thing you're not competitive. You might stoop to verbally belittling your competition if you were.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
As a former college athelete and High School coach, let me chime in.
One of the most satisfying parts of my athletic career (which was more successful than most) was knowing that I was not among the most physically gifted. My sport catered to tall people and at 6 feet even, I was at a disadvantage. So my challenge was to find a way to beat the more gifted individuals using other skills or abilities. That specific part of athletics is what appealed to me. I knew that if I was going to be playing, it was because I had earned it through effort, not superior ability or genetics.
As a coach I looked for the same thing. Winning is not a matter of picking the most gifted, and the insinuation that sports teams in school are profit driven (unless we're talking football, or in some rare cases basketball) is simply wrong. The girl's volleyball team loses money. The boy's cross country team loses money. Virtually every team of every kind in every sport in school loses money. You are simply wrong on that point.
Ultimately, competition in school and sports in general is not about winning a game, it's about achieving a goal that is important to you. If that is to make the team (a very commonly held goal) or to win a state championship, or get a scholarship, these goals are no different than those in non-athletic pursuits. It saddens me that you're so jaded that you believe what you claim in your post.
Frankly, it seems you are just regurgitating the same long held biases that I heard from people when I was in school.
Why are so many posts with factual errors modded up?
I really believe it's better to put on muscle when you're a teenager. My friend started lifting about then and even when he totally drops exercise for months at a time, he keeps that mass. Me, I didn't get started until he goaded me into it last year (at age 31). I was going 3 times a week for an hour a time for 9 months and barely added to my lifting weight in all that time. I did get a little mass, but it disappeared in the 3 months after that that I just couldn't go because of a crunch at work. I started again a couple weeks ago, but found that I was back at square one, and looking small and squishy again. He was back to buff in a week. Maybe genetics, maybe not, but I have to say the 19yr-olds in the gym just seem to pile the weight on and go up each time I see them. I can't help but think that that is when I should have been doing this.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=p ubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=168 54220&query_hl=12&itool=pubmed_docsum
Dietary and physical activity behaviors among adults successful at weight loss maintenance.
Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act. 2006 Jul 19;3:17.
Exercising more than 30 minutes a day and adding physical activity to daily life were significantly higher among successful versus unsuccessful weight losers.
Individuals who were successful at weight loss and maintenance were less likely to use over-the-counter diet products than those who were unsuccessful at weight loss.
Significantly more successful versus unsuccessful weight losers reported that on most days of the week they planned meals (35.9% vs. 24.9%), tracked calories (17.7% vs. 8.8%), tracked fat (16.4% vs. 6.6%), and measured food on plate (15.9% vs. 6.7%).
Successful losers were also more likely to weigh themselves daily.
There were a significantly higher proportion of successful losers who reported lifting weights
The odds of being a successful weight loser were 48%-76% lower for those reporting exercise weight control barriers were influencing factors (e.g., no time, too tired to exercise, no one to exercise with, too hard to maintain exercise routine)
Conclusion: Self-monitoring strategies such as weighing oneself, planning meals, tracking fat and calories, exercising 30 or more minutes daily, and/or adding physical activity to daily routine may be important in successful weight loss maintenance. Leisure-time activities such as lifting weights or cooking/baking for fun are common strategies reported by those who were successful weight losers.
RTFA.
They're suggesting that if you make a kid do more exercise during the day, they'll just be more lazy at night. The idea put forward is that each child is pre-disposed to doing a particular amount of exercise, whether it's forced on them at school or optional after school, and will balance out their overall activity to reach that level.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I played rugby for exactly 10 seconds in my life and woke up on the stretcher after hearing the coach say 'stop him'. Soccer is even worse (hands only good for punching), and don't get me started about waving a stick at a stone-hard ball like a caveman.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
You're obviously not that familiar with the MO of the Blair government.
They (and really I mean he) think they already know what the solution is to any given problem, but heave heard somewhere that in a modern democracy there have to be "consultations" and "studies" - so they rig them. It is decreed that there shall be more sports facilities, and to justifiy this we shall have a study proving that more sports results in slimmer kids (obesity being the panic du jour). What? Your study is showing that access to sports facilities has little effect on obesity? Then I cut your funding, and will instead hold a consultation with a group made up entirely of gym teachers to prove that more sports facilities is indeed what the nation wants.
See also: the infamous dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
There are actually several studies that disagree with the conclusions in TFA. However, that wasn't the point of this post.
You have to great things working for you when you are a child or young adult:
1. More active satellite cells
2. More active glial cells.
The satellite cells will help you induce hyperplasia in the muscle tissue which does not happen nearly as easily as an adult, except in the presence of exogenous hormones. You are also carrying quite a lot more serum testosterone which will prime your body for hypertrophy.
The glial cells are still numerous and active into young adulthood. They are (theoretically) responsible for the learning/programming process of the neural network in your headspace. Program the skills and the neural drive early in your life and you'll get more out of weightlifting later in life as you'll be able to engage more of the muscle in a more coherent fashion.
anyhow, stick with it as you are. Try many brief high rep routines until you have a trained the movements into your body's vocabulary. Then add a little weight and speed up the lifting. Work one or two movements per day concentrating on bar speed. Finally, if you want to get very strong, devote two or three days to maximal weights (but do your own research beforehand).
Have fun!
captcha: amplify
And this is not the only thing that this works for. Force us to wear seatbelts and we increase the level of risk taking that we take while driving. Why? Because the enforced reduction of risk through seatbelts allows us to feel relatively safe. And feeling safe, we will take risks elsewhere.
IMHO, this is a perfect example of the hubris of government. And I find it ironic that at the end of the article, it suggests repeating that hubris by regulating the food industry. If we are forced out of bad but convenient food that we freely choose, what consequence will it have? What choice will we make to increase our convenience? Will we choose not to eat at those restaurants because we don't like the taste of the new regulated foods that are available? Will that increase unemployment? Will that result in increased poverty levels? Good grief, these people need to study economics before they start making policy recommendations!
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
While "participation in sports" and excercise is a clearly good thing, the interesting thing this research shows is that teaching sports in school does not actually increase the amount of exercise children get. It shows that if you cut in-school sporting activity, children will naturally compensate by being more active out of school, and vice-versa.
This totally debunks your so called "logical conclusion" that a sports "regimine" is beneficial to these children. As you would know if you read and understood the article, it seems that if you teach your fat lethargic kid sports in school, that kid will simply become more lethargic out of school to compensate.
The logical concluion of this is actually that the "habit of lethargy" out of school is the fault of sports teaching, and when that child leaves school and is no longer forced to do sports they will end up fatter and unhealthier because the sports training has removed their natural propensity to exercise.
How you managed to both draw the exact opposite conclusion and get the currency wrong if indeed you had read the article is beyond me.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
The results are misinterpreted!
"Those children who do sports at school do not burn more calories than those who don't."
If slim children that do sports not burn more calories, it means that fat children burn the same or higher amount of calories. The question is where does these calories come from. If you do nothing like coach potato and watch tv, you will burn lots of calories coming from sugars. If you exercise intensively 30 to 50% of burned calories will come from the fat. See the difference???
First off...when I am jogging, I am burning around 150 cal, per 10 minutes.
Now, traditional wisdom states to lose a pound you must burn 3500 calories. That means about 4 hours of running.
That sounds like a lot, but if you think about if, if you ran for a half hour, everyday, that means you would lose a pound a week...or allow you to eat an extra 3500 calories a week. Now, for one week, does this make any difference? Not really...but if you do it for a year, that's a lot of extra calories spent.
Do I think kids are fat because they don't get enough exercise? Yes. When I was a kid, the only thing to do inside was watch one of three TV stations, or, if you knew a rich kid, play atari 2600. So you went outside and ran around. Now, there is so much entertainment without moving, that they are less inclined to exercise.
Are they fat because they eat too much crap? Definitely. Deep fried everything and High fructose corn syrup are a few good reasons too. Busy parents that buy takeout food instead of home cooking don't help either.
True - the real challenge here is to figure out WHY some people eat more than they burn. Some people will eat more that they burn through sports, as sports tend to increase appetite.
The truth of it is, that you can't fight obesity with sports and exercise, as the amount of kilojoule used is negligent compared to the amount eaten.
Exercise is extremely healthy though, but on so many different accounts that it's next to impossible to put hard numbers on it.
An obese person (say 100 kg, 170 cm, woman) burns 10000 kJ/day working at an office (8000 kj/day lying in he bed all day, 12000/day working at a warehouse, hauling wares).
This person would have to run 5 km every day to burn enough kJ to loose weight through exercise alone without changing her diet. Now ask yourself: would a fat little woman, who never in her life ever ran more than after the bus, be able to run 5 km every single day for a prolonged period?
Also, those 5 km is the same amount of energy found in the 100g chocolate bar she'll eat afterwards as a reward... Better just to leave out the regular chocolate bar she eats every day anyway and then NOT forcing her to run. Change of diet is the most efficient way, combined with daily walks, work in the garden, purchase of a dog that has to be walked etc. Exercise is worth nothing weight-wise, if not combined with change in diet, and change in diet is usually enough. Why torture yourself with the pain of running, when you can just exchange regular coke with light coke?
Have you tried talking to them about it? Grandparents were created to spoil kids, so if you give them other suggestions for what your kid considers a treat, they just might listen. For instance, when my oldest was a baby, she absolutely went crazy for raspberries.
All the grandparents want to do is make your kid super-happy. As long as what you tell them to do works (elicits the intended happy dance or other reaction), they should be fine with it.
Incidentally, I've never heard of people giving a child food without asking the parents first. Allergies what they are these days, that's a risky proposition.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
The problem with competition isn't that it's competition. Competition is good. The problem is an over-emphasis on the end goal rather than the journey to get there.
Winning is everything. The idea that one can have fun by losing is completely squashed in the way competition is presented to children, and they learn fast. Everything that happens in the game is secondary to the result. It affects academics to, with the grade being more important than learning.
In America this appears to be a cultural phenomena.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
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.
You're obviously not a mother or a father (even Slashdot dating jokes aside). The parents of any teenager will cheerfully agree that their children are obviously from an alternate universe, and the parents of any small child will assure you that a typical toddler and a typical perpetual motion machine can only be distinguished in that the toddler never stops accelerating .
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
The article makes no mention of strenuous sports. It's just talking about PE in school.
All it's saying is that those kids who are active in school (like in PE) are less active outside of school.
Those who do strenuous sports, as I did in high school, are going to be in great shape. How many morbidly obese people do you see wearing high school letter jackets? None.
When I was in high school, I ate about 3500-4500 calories per day and weighed 125. I'd come home from school and eat a pizza (not a slice of pizza, an entire large pizza) for a snack. That's just how many calories I was burning. If I ate that much now, I'd weigh 300.
But this study was on all kids, not just athletes. They do PE in school? Then they sit at home and eat cheese-its after school. No activity in school? Then they burn off a little energy after school by running around a bit.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I'd like to discuss your work via email. Please contact me (seth[AT]austinpublicskatepark.org).
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
A friend of mine in high school was pretty seriously stocky in his freshman year (5'6, 230#, BMI=37). He got fed up with being picked on for it, and started serious weight training and some flavor of martial arts (no, not sumo, but it wasn't karate). Be senior year, he was... just slightly taller, and just slightly heavier (5'8", 250#, BMI=38). He had a little bit of "baby fat" in his cheeks, but the rest had shifted from fat to muscle.
Genetics and diet largely determine BMI; exercise helps shift body fat ratios.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Anyone who says dodgeball is stupid better not play FPSs.
Um, dodgeball hurts. FPS doesn't. Therefore Dodgeball is stupid.
Why are people fat? It completely kills me when I hear this question. It isn't a mystery. As others have mentioned, it's plain physics/chemistry. Your body turns excess calories into fat. If you don't have enough calories to maintain your expenditure, some of this fat will be used (along with some protein from your
.63 of a pound if it were all to be converted to fat. Most people maintain their weight at this level. So if you had a magical metabolism where you burned *no* energy, the most you could put on in a year is about 230 pounds. As we might imagine, nobody gains that much weight on such a diet (phew, the laws of thermodynamics are upheld again).
/. and is overweight has no excuse. All the numbers are available on the internet. You just have to crunch them (what more can a geek ask for).
muscles). Crazy diets are just not necessary.
You add up the calories that go into your mouth, you subtract the calories that you burn during the day. If the result is positive, you make fat. If the result is negative, you burn fat.
Metabolism is a stupidly ridiculous argument. Do some people have a "higher metabolism" than others? In other words, do some people burn more energy (are more inefficient) when they are resting than others? Probably. But it's clearly not enough to really make any difference at all.
Let's say the average male adult eats 2200 calories per day. That corresponds to
I know several obese people. Honestly, they don't gain weight all that quickly. But let's say someone was gaining 100 lbs per year (really crazy). This corresponds to about 960 calories per day. Let's say that the person had a completely *normal* metabolism. This would mean that they were eating 3160 calories per day.
1 can of coke is 136 calories. 1 doughnut is 250 calories. 1 50g bad (small bag) of Dorritos is 262 calories. A 58g serving of ice cream is 125 calories. 1 large order of fries at Macdonald's is 573 calories.
So let's say you have a perfectly good diet, but you supplement it with a can of coke and a doughnut at 10 o'clock. You have a Macdonald's lunch -- just the burger would be a decent sized lunch for an average person, but you get a large fries and a coke with it. You have a bag of dorritos at 3:00. You have a small serving of ice cream for desert.
Grand total of extra calories: 1482 calories. Woah... by this, if you had an *average* metabolism, you'd be gaining about 150 lbs per year. And I've seen people eat waaaaay more than this on a daily basis. They think their metabolism is "slow", but in reality it's going a mile a minute.
Personally, I'm not a "calorie counting" kind of guy. When I notice that I'm gaining some weight, I just cut back on the obvious stuff (fat has 3 times the calories per weight than carbs -- hence the crazy numbers on the fries). And I up my excercise. Running 3 miles a day burns *at least* 300 calories a day (probably closer to 500 since your body has to repair the damage you did to it). And if you really *do* have a "slow" metabolism, running 3 miles a day (less than half an hour) improves your metabolism by about *25%*. Managing the rest with diet is easy (actually, when I'm running that much I have to work to just maintain my weight).
Anybody who is on
I'm surprised that nobody has examined this angle of it: Say an adult who weighs 150 pounds burns 476 running 5 mph for an hour. Thats a significant number of calories. Now say you're a 50 lbs kid. That 476 calories turns into 158 calories, and thats from running 5 miles in an hour (which by my sedentary lifestyle standard is a lot of activity). The smaller the child, the smaller the calorie burn from exercise; the smaller the calorie burn from exercise, the more profound the effect food has on weight compared to the effect exercise has. I don't see why their conclusion is any surprise. All it takes is 1 soda, or 1 treat and a cup of juice to offset 1 hour of activity. A number of cups of juice or snacks later, even with that hour of exercise you aren't much better off. Sure, this is true for adults, but it is doubly so for children. To treat the problem through exercise would probably involve hours of running around, which just seems unreasonable.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
Try this one on for size: since women's lib in the 60s, most families are dual-income. When both mommy and daddy are working, no one has time to cook so the entire family eats garbage (fast food, Kraft mac 'n cheese, "TV dinners" (highly-processed foods), Pizza Hut, takeout, etc.). My wife and I both work, but we refuse to eat garbage, so we make the time to cook. No one in the family is overweight--not even the dog. Also, everyone in the family either was, or is, required to take PE. So we are also convenient counterexamples to your idiotic conclusion that PE makes people fat.Please, please do not put a child on the Atkins diet. It is unhealthy enough for adults--do not malnourish your child's developing body. If your child (or you) are fat, please do the following:
- Drastically curtail refined sugars and flour from your diet by doing such things as:
- Switch from sodas and fruit "punch" to water. Be sure to drink enough water.
- Switch to whole-grain breads with no "enriched" flour.
- Don't eat low-fat foods. Low fat means high refined sugars. The taste has to come from somewhere, and what tastes good to humans are fats and sugars.
- Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. The reason your body keeps telling you it's hungry is because you aren't giving it the nutrition it needs. There is no nutritional content in wonderbread.
- Don't eat highly-processed foods. All of them have way too many refined ingredients.
- Don't eat out so much. You have no idea what's in that food, and the portions are enormous!
- Don't eat hydrogenated oils. Your body is not evolved to process them.
- Go on family hikes, bike rides, etc. Even if you don't enjoy sports, that doesn't mean a kid should be sedentary. Walk around the city and go to museums if you want an outing that stimulates your mind and body.
If you do things like this, you will have better nutrition and will lose weight. You'll be eating more nutrition and less food (so fewer calories).If you eat an unbalanced diet like Atkins, you aren't getting the nutrients you need to develop, and it's hard on the kidneys. For adults, it's a calculated risk. For kids, it's just folly.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I think you are on the right track. I also agree with others who don't think the solution is taking the competitiveness out of organized sports. I think the real issue is that, at least in the US, most kids lives are over scheduled and organized. This is particularly true about sports. Kids are taken from one organized activity to another, and they never learn to play sports just for fun.
I know from my own experience (and I'm not all that old) that I did not like organized sports much. Not only did I have my athletic ability to contend with (which wasn't all that bad, but wasn't good enough to keep up with the best), but I really didn't get along with a lot of kids. (I'm sure many of the geeks on Slashdot can relate). The reality is, a large number of kids aren't going to be interested in organized sports no matter what you do. They'd rather play with their own friends then be forced to play with a group they don't necessarily get along with, (and may also have very different abilities).
For me this wasn't a problem. I liked sports, just not organized ones, and I had enough friends that I usually had someone to play with. So, we'd play tennis, frisbee, two on two football/basketball, or even the occaasional large self organized baseball game. Today though, I don't know if kids have the time, or the freedom to do this.
I think in our race to be good parents, and insure our kids get exercise, we've made things worse. We've forced them into athletics that they may be unsuited for, and removed the alternative. We are also so paranoid about their safety, that we don't let them play outside on their own enough.
I'm sure TV and videogames have also had some negative effects. Half the reason I played sports with my friends was there wasn't much else to do. On the ther hand, I certainly had videogames and TV as a kid (just not as many games or channels), and I know most parents would kick us outside if we spent to much time with them.
In the usual sort of parent-teacher conferences, without any particular input from my part, my mother wondered out loud to the gym teacher whether I could be given a little bit more playing time. Mom was always anxious to keep her kids physically active while Dad was a lot more indifferent to whether we participated in sports or not.
The Gym teacher, attempted to justify the status quo with, "Your child will probably enter a professional career just like his father; whether your child succeeds in sports probably won't make any difference in the long term anyway" to which my father responded, "Yes, and how many of these other children are going to make it into sports as a career?"
On the flip side of this, my younger brother, while not that different in his physical characteristics, was perhaps more in tune with the social benefits of team sports and participated in the town softball league. In this very trendy-PC community, there was one of these meetings about the "needs of our children" and "all of the pressures and threats to the 'self-esteem' of our children." My mom, always the town gadfly, chimed up "Oh yeah, what about posting the kid's batting averages in the local hardware store window? I suppose that doesn't contribute to any of the pressure our kids are under." One of the coaches came up to her privately and proposed, "Hey lady, if it means that much to you, we could work something out to get your son more times at bat."
You may have a more enlightened attitude, and I may be regurgitating long-held biases about the role of competitive team sports in physical education. But some biases have a factual basis, although any attempt to ask for some reform of the system is met with the usual responses that competition is the fun part of physical activity, Gym class is already evicerated with PC, and the kids not benefiting from the system are at fault for not trying hard enough. But one is also naive to think that there are not those in Phy Ed who lose sight the purposes of the whole enterprise.
I just needed to take some prejudice away, about boy scouts in general.
The majority here comes from the US and the boy scouts of America look like nothing we have over here. Even at the world Jamboree in 1995 they had a separate camp for the boys and girls. Whereas most other countries had mixed camps.
And they're not competition. I never see them over here and we don't have competitions. Maybe if I did see some other boy scouts from the US, I might take a chance to meet them.
How about we bash this for being a bad generalization of a poorly operationalized study?
TFA is BBC, not the science report, but it is clear that the study has some huge flaws. First, they tie kids up for one week to an accelerometer and measure their activity for that week. This has two fundamental issues: research participants change their behavior when asked to wear obvious monitors, and the one week time frame is not large enough of a sample to really see how activity is pursued.
Measuring a weeks activity and saying that exercise doesn't do anything is like exercising for two days and saying you aren't loosing weight. I know it is supposed to rest on ideals of statistical randomness, but this is a quasi-experiment with human subjects who are aware of the study. The researchers need to consider other ways to increase validity.
Speaking of validity, the use of the accelerometer to measure calories burned is a far stretch as well - any motion is considered exercise. So, fidgeting back and forth in front of your PS3 is the same as running a mile. All motion does not burn the same calories, and all motion is not exercise.
This is a sad example of policy makers reading journalists and trying to understand science. Ugh.
Buttom line is, that exercise remains very healthy, but in real life settings it's difficult to use as a weapon against obesity. Or so, at least, says the statistics, we are tought at med-school :-D. If a person works out and eats less, they loose weight and gain fitness. But almost every obese person will view it as impossible to work out and keep a diet, to such an extend. That's were motivational psychology comes in, and we have to suggest the simplest but most effective dietary regulations, walks in the park, etc. Suggesting to a fat man that he should start running, will only keep him away from the "that stupid doctor"...
The study considers all activity to be equal, which I'm not sure is the case. Bouncing around while you brush your teeth or watch TV is different than running, swimming, etc. The latter activities raise your heart rate and get you breathing fast. I'm not a doctor, but I'd assume that those activities burn more calories than bouncing around in front of the TV. More importantly, anyone who's been on a track or a swim team knows that your body will adjust to to improve at such activity. I imagine that this would correspond with an increased metabolism, so that an hour of sports practice will cause people to burn more calories even when they're not doing anything active.
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
Actually, what the study found was that children who did sports had the same effect on an acceleromter as those who did not.
I am curious about how good a proxy acceleration is for total power dissipation. After all, you don't accelerate much on a bike (except when turning, which requires little power.) If you attached an accelerometer to Lance Armstrong working at threshold, it would register next to nil as he poured 500W into his cranks and dissipated another 1500W or so as heat.
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
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!
1. Your brain is connected to something--that something is the rest of your body. There are numerous studies that show a direct correlation between physical activity and health of the brain, not to mention psychological well-being.
/. when it comes to PE but there it is.
:-)
The specter of "competition with China" is like begging us to please think of the children--a meaningless appeal to emotion. We compete with China just fine. And speaking of competition, do you really expect me to believe that academic or business competition is great and good, but athletic competition is evil somehow?? Competition is competition, if you want to keep up it's going to take work and it's not always going to be pleasant. Not everything about education needs to be about protecting self-esteem. Probably an unpopular view on
For what it's worth I went to one of the top public magnet high schools in the nation and we had PE through junior year, plus numerous intramural sports, plus a full raft of varsity teams. It obviously has not impacted the academic success there. There's even a bumper sticker that says "I came for the sports."
2. Atkins is a good crash diet for adults to drop weight quickly--when combined with exercise. Without increased exercise it is just a recipe for circulatory problems later in life. It's probably not a good idea for kids. Better to let their health be controlled by exercise and balanced dietary moderation...and medical advice if needed.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Hey! I am an engineer. I resent that. I weighed more back when I was 17 as I was living out of mom and dad's fridge, had time to exercise, worked a good hard labour job to get cash for school. Enter school, up goes beer intake, stress, down goes physical activity, sleep per day, and my man hands disappeared into slim calculator punching nerd hands. It was kind of sad. Now that my undergrad is nice and over I'm going about fixing the ravishes an engineering degree does to you --hitting the gym, jogging, sleeping properly as I'm not up till 3am finishing assignments, etc.
Cheers.
So, it can't just taste better to me? It has to be an "addiction" or some "emotional response"? Sorry, that's just nonsense.
Why are so many posts with factual errors modded up?
Exercise makes you tired and your muscles hurt. FPS doesn't... wait....
Please read TFA. The programme director said that more activity in school was balanced by less activity out of school, so there was no net increase. It's a little surprising but doesn't break any laws of physics.
For example if you have never had eggplant salad, how do you expect one day to just wake-up one day and say "I think I want some eggplant salad today!". No, if you have only eaten hot dogs, pizza and McDonalds hamburgers that is the only thing you'll want. There might be really good healthy food there but you just won't know about it.
So yes, on individual level it seems kind of silly to say that people are "addicted" to food, but at the global scale certain pattern emerge. Also, just "tastes better" is not enough of an explanation, you need to ask "why does it taste better?". You see people do have an emotional response to a product's brand name. If you give someone a Coca-cola cup but put Pepsi-cola in it, they will prefer that even though in a trial with un-labeled cups they'll choose Pepsi because it is a little sweeter. (Not that any of those are good for you, I was just describing an experiment performed by a team of neuroscientists...) So people respond very much so to "brands" and that cannot possible have anything to do with tasting it but it is rather an emotional response.
I did my weight loss strictly through diet - reduced quantity and elimination of sugars, starches, and white flour. Exercise never came into play.
"Stuff tastes better to you because that is the only thing you ate since you were 4!"
No, it's not. On top of the fact that my mother wouldn't let me eat it much, I was an athlete so I ate well. You're way off here.
"You will not know what healthy food tastes because you have never tried it (your taste buds and your brain have never seen it, so you'll never crave it and it take a very long time to acquire a taste).
For example if you have never had eggplant salad, how do you expect one day to just wake-up one day and say "I think I want some eggplant salad today!". No, if you have only eaten hot dogs, pizza and McDonalds hamburgers that is the only thing you'll want. There might be really good healthy food there but you just won't know about it. "
And what if I've had all that, eat healthy all the time and still like the way some unhealthy food tastes? I have, and nothing beats McD's fries with just the right amount of salt. So now what?
Lastly, please stop trying to hide your cultural elitism behind the facade of behavioral psychology.
Why are so many posts with factual errors modded up?
We use "blue" to describe the color of the sky. Your perception of blue may be entirely different from mine, but we'll use the word blue. But I get your point.
What?
the emphasis is on winning rather than having a rotation to keep as many kids involved
This is generally true, but the rules of some sports do encourage participation. Swimming is a sport I participated in in H.S. where this was true. There are about 30 events, and each individual can only swim in 4 events. Each team can have atleast 3 people in an event, so you need about 60 swimmers to have the max people in each event. It's a team competition and you get points for the team based upon your position at the end of the race. Points are awarded for the first 5 finishers (everyone but last). But most high schools don't have enough people to fill every event, so lots of times just participating in an event will guarantee a 4th or 5th place finish, and therefore some points to help the team out.
I'm not sure how this could be applied to other sports, but this shows atleast one example where increasing participation increases your chance of winning.
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
Your results are atypical. Every day children get together for a game of kickball or baseball or football and no one gets beat up. I cannot recall a single instance of some kid getting beaten up due to performance in a game. Sports teach us more then just physical lessons. They teach us the importance of fair play, working as a team, the limits of our own physical abilities, and a lot about proper attitude. Success and failure are both powerful learning tools. The also get us out and moving. Regular exercise early in life helps maintaining that exercise into adulthood, where it definitely becomes important.
You say you are not bad at sports, but your experiences tell differently. You are just not bad at all sports. Don't worry, this is typical. No one is good at all sports. You just happened to find a sport you were good at (rock climbing). You learned from your experience in rugby that maybe that sport and similar sports weren't for you. I personally play hockey and Aussie football. It turns out I'm pretty good at those, but would probably kill myself climbing mountains.
Get it out of your head that sport and competition are things we should be evolved past. Competition is a driving force of evolution, and sport provides a method of competing. And remember, your results are not typical, they are uniquely yours. You get to pick the way it shapes you. Learn from your atypical experiences, and move on. Looking back on it and stewing is a lot like rocking in a rocking chair. Sure, it gives you something to do, but you ain't getting anywhere.
For a good time call www.sawkie.com
Lastly, please stop trying to hide your cultural elitism behind the facade of behavioral psychology.
I am not a cultural elitist by any means, unless you consider advocating eating healthy being the same as advocating "cultural elitism". The fact that a light salad is better for you than french fries is pretty much a fact if you ask any nutrionist.
I have lived in America for 15 years now and this is my culture too, that is why I want _us_ to be healthier, I don't want people to go listen to opera and eat fine French cusine, I just want them to eat better. Our country not only is falling behind as far as academic standards are concerned, we are falling behind as far as health is concerned because we are overweight.
Yeah, you may be onto something. It seems that in Asian, academic excellence is the greatest possible achievement for the youth. Anything less than perfection is not good enough(97? Why didn't you get 100?), and perfection indicates that the measurement was too low and the child needs to find harder challenges.
It sounds like a negative environment because it's so foreign, but from a different perspective, the question isn't "Why are they so hard on their kids", it's "Why are those other kids allowed to be mediocre?"
Answering a question in class means everybody stops and stares at you because you chose to step out of line and identify yourself as the one with the answer. This makes you stand out as being different. Asking a question works the same way. The class goal isn't a race to the top, it's just about making it the end.
A good education correlates pretty well with more money, being athletic isn't a good indicator for future earnings.
Which view is better is going to depend on who's asking the question. Is earning potential the end goal? Or happiness? Some blend of the two?
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the Shangri-La diet.
http://www.sethroberts.net/
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
When I was in the Boy Scouts, we did monthly overnight backpacking trips, and a few longer ones a year. They weren't anything too terribly difficult, usually in the 15-20 miles range over two days, though some of the several-day trips were tougher because you'd be carrying so much stuff. The guys in our troop ranged from 12-17, and were generally pretty active academically and athletically. Are the age groups worldwide the same? I'm not sure how having separate camps at jamborees would make the American scouts "pussies". I'd guess it has more to do with attitudes on sex being a lot less liberal in America than Europe than anything else.
The competitive group was all popular boys, and a few gay girls.
The semi-competitive were the girls who liked sports, and boys who liked sports well enough without really needing to prove anything.
The non-competitive groups were the girls who didn't want to play sports, and a few gay boys.
I might have preferred being in the noncompetitive group, and spend my all time running or weightlifting. But even a social idiot like myself could see that it was utter suicide to go into the girls-only group. Similarly, a competitive girl couldn't realistically be in the competetive group for the same reason.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
he obviously has not read the Adkins books and doesn't understand why fat is not such an issue with them.
He has read them, he understands them, read his book.
I stand by the statement that it is insane to eat as much fat as you want.
BFFM recommends eating no more than 15% to 20% of your calories from fat, and recommends quality fats (flax oil is better for you than Crisco).
Read the book.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Studies that try to locate patterns in amounts of personal data often fail because they fail to consider complexity of human being in its entirety. There is no way to predict who will get fat, based on eviromental factors. Genetic predisposition(re: see family tree) is strongest of the factors. Thats why when you go to chinese restraunts, you notice that chinese in general are less obese then the other races visiting, and they can eat twice as much. Talking of development and functionality in terms of weight is useless, rather I'd hope people to see the energy factor. If you are able to maintain energy at most times of the day, except before the bed time, most likely you burn most of what you eat.
... as long as its not every day.
To maintain energy you'd need to balance many things, like exercise, diet, oxygen level intake(walks outside), social setting etc. Imagine keeping a ball in a center of a flat plate, plate which can bend and tilt in any direction. Overdoing anything is bad, eating little junk food is not necessary, but you can do that, especially in company of friends
Being overweight, is just like being sick - symptom of deeper problems. Given there are people who would be slightly overweight, and they look better that way. Slightly meaning not more then being 15-20% off your target weight.
2c
He never gives you carte blanche to eat as much fat as you want.
This is not what I have heard from people I know who have tried Atkins. They told me that the theory is: fat makes you feel full, so you will self-regulate; you can eat as much fat as you want, because you won't want too much. I know someone who bought a deep-fryer to make Atkins recipes.
These people also talked about their attempts to reach ketosis and stay there for, say, a whole weekend. I haven't read the book, but my understanding is that the Atkins plan does not require ketosis but doesn't discourage the idea.
The takeaway point of Atkins is reduce carbs and sugar and increase protein.
This statement is sensible. The BFFM book will tell you how to calculate your ideal portion size for carbs, protein, and fat.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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.
Do you think you can cook healthy 99% of the time and then give them hotdogs 1% of the time? You know sort of like how a normal, healthy person might eat? The second they a SINGLE hotdog, they will swear off entire categories of other food. Our four year old almost never eats dinner because we don't pander to his tastes. Let's say we serve hot dogs once a month. This means, he will eat dinner about once a month. The rest of the time just he will drink his milk and ignore everything else.
We've been putting various vegetables on his plate EVERY SINGLE DAY for his entire life, as soon as he was able to pick up food. I can assure you it it is not lack of exposure.
We don't eat in chain restaurants, can't blame that.
Kids don't watch commercials (ReplayTV), can't blame that.
Well, hell, what is it then? I think it's something hard-wired. Fat tastes good. Given the availablity of fat anywhere, and it doesn't have to be in your house, they will naturally graviate towards that. All you can do is try to hold back the tide.
I would suspect that you acquired and set all your eating habits in a time or place where such food was just unavailable. If you had grown up here and how, you would be different.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
There's at least some genetic effect (hardly surprising, really...). IIRC, there's a gene which provides a way to detect a poison in small quantities in, amongst other things, broccoli. If you have two copies it tastes very bitter (I imagine I have two copies, broccoli is absolutely disgusting to me). If you have none, it doesn't (and one, in between).
See, eg: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/0609
Heh,
Yeah, cue the self-righteous "exercise more, eat less" zealots in 3. . . 2. . . 1. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
And this, my friends, is why we have the preview button. >.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
I disagree. If only that a competetive ranking on more individual sports (i.e. tennis, etc) allows more even pairings. Thus everyone has a chance to win, but winning isn't just a hollow victory.
With enough variety of sports, there should be something that everyone can be the champion of, without gimping anything.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I think you've nailed it there. That demonstrates why companies like McDonalds focus on the experience rather than the food in their advertising, and it's working.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
You're right - and I really need to find some way to get back into it soon; are you doing something aerobic between sets, running in place, that sort of thing?
Clear, Dark Skies
Ok, as everyone here should know, energy from food in the USA is measured in Calories (big C), which are the same as 1,000 calories (little c).
Now, according to wikipedia,
* The small calorie or gram calorie approximates the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 C. This is about 4.184 Joules, and exactly 0.001 large calories.
* The large Calorie or kilogram calorie approximates the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 C. This is about 4.184 kJ, and exactly 1000 small calories.
So, human body temperature is roughly 37.0 degrees celcius. 1 kg of water is 1 liter. Now, according again to wikipedia,
Most freezers operate around -18 C (0 F)
Now, the temperature of the water can't be lowered below 0 degrees without it freezing. This does not mean, however, that you can't drink water with crushed ice in. I am going to go out on a limb and say that you can approximate the amount of calories to raise one liter of ice water to body temperature with 50 (it isn't going to be as cold as in the freezer, but you have to melt the ice as well, which should counteract this). Now, the buzzword people say you should drink 8 cups of water a day. That's a gallon, or roughly 2 liters. So drinking the reccomended amound of ice water each day should make you burn 100 calories.
So the real problem we need to solve in this "obesity epidemic" is getting better freezers.
You're on the right track about the protein. I can't remember the exact figures (and people seem to disagree on them) but it's something like 1.2g/kg body mass/day to maintain muscles and 1.7-2g/kg body mass/day to maintain hypertrophy in conjunction with lifting. The ideal diet is 50% protein, 50% carbohydrates - pasta with a lean mince and vegetable sauce is ideal. If you're going to get into a competition or want to look really cut for something then you cut back the carbs a couple of weeks beforehand and step up the reps to burn off the fat and tone up.
It really pays to keep track of the content of what you're eating (and to try and eat 6 to 8 times day to speed up metabolism). After a couple of weeks of monitoring the protein content of my diet I found that I needed to up my intake. I tried to eat more but it was hard so I got onto a protein supplement that I take after working out.
RTFA.
This is slashdot. GTFO.
It's been a long time.
Well, it's really that simple.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
They should have also studied if the appetite of the subjects was influenced by aerobic activities... I know it happened to me when I started doing intensive aerobic activity. I felt full with much less food than usual. Less calories in, less fat!
"If we're getting rid of sports that encourage competition, then we should also get rid of all academic competition. No more spelling bees, no more science fairs, no more grades. "
No, you can keep the grades and keep the science fairs. It's the graded curves and the first place ribbons that you can get rid of.
Having been educated both in France and in the United States, I can actually confirm some of what the original poster was saying. France has actually a very tough Physical Education program with tough benchmarks to achieve, but those benchmarks are actually for everyone to achieve -- not the top few. There are no bench warmers in France. Your graduation to the next grade, and your graduation out of high school, depends on it. In France, one out of four students will repeat an entire grade, some will repeat a year more than once. I've repeated a year. And although Physical Education doesn't have a very high weighted coefficient compared to the other types of classes, it's enough for students to take Physical Education seriously enough. Also, this model of benchmarks and this model of minimum proficiency mimics the working world more closely in my opinion. In the real world, it's your final qualifications that matter, not the number of tries it actually took you to get there.
That being said, I am only praising the Physical Education system in France, not the other subjects. The other subjects are taught pretty competitively. For instance, only a few of the students are meant to get to the top of the Math and Science pyramid. And everyone else who doesn't get to the top of that particular Math and Science pyramid in high school is basically doomed to study/work at the bottom of the French pyramid for the rest of his/her life (that is, unless he moves out of the country like I did).
"If you have a decent vocabulary you get "You think you're so smart!" but no one ever confronts the sprinting champion with "You think you're so fast!" "
It depends. If you're the type of guy to say "Hey, look at me! Look at me! I'm so fast. I'm so strong." Then, that's going to get you in trouble.
Hopefully, that wasn't the case with your vocabulary.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Ba du ba ba bah...I wanna strangle my nephews when that comes out of their mouths.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
I've never had a exercise/training routine before. Do you have any recommendations/websites that would help me design an exercise/weight training routine for a relative beginner? Wikipedia isn't that much help and there are so many sites out there are littered with nurtient supplements and such things that I don't know what to trust.
Thank you for demonstrating one of the fundamental problems of making kids compete: when you are obsessed with winning, and can't do so by your own merit, dismerit the competition so you'll look better in comparison.
Children, being not legally responsible for their actions (for example libel) and facing huge pressure to succeed at any cost from the very people - their parents - they know perfectly well they are utterly dependent on, are especially vulnerable to the temptation of using such tactics, but it can overcome adults as well, especially if they've been taught as kids that they have to be best or that being mediocre is insufficient and shameful - a ridiculous claim, since "mediocre" simply means "ordinary", but one that has come up on this thread already.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Perhaps if you were in the French army, you'd be able to get your hands up far enough to catch the joke as it flies over your head.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."