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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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"
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
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"
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.
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
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.
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?!
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
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.
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
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
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!"
People completely overestimate the effect of exercise on weight loss.
A grown man jogging (fast) burns around 100 kcal per 10 minutes. I'm assuming it's less for kids (because they're smaller).
Now compare this with the calories in a 65g Mars bar = 294 kcal.
Or in a Big Mac = 492kcal.
So let me sum it up: kids aren't fat because they're not getting exercise... they're fat because they eat CRAP all the time.
Yes, food is the problem. It is a problem in U.S. The best way to notice is to move there from a part of the world that still cooks their meals at home and don't have a McFatolds at any corner. I grew up in Eastern Europe. Growing up my mother prepared a large array of home foods, all kinds. I have always loved fruits (like apples and peaches) and vegetables and legumes (like tomatoes, garlic and beans). Everything was prepared at home by my mother from raw ingridients, we didn't even eat out because we couldn't afford it.
When I came to U.S. all my peers liked to eat hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, mac and cheese and of course, fries. They all hated vegetables! I thought "how sad", the chain resturants have gotten these kids addicted to crap. Now I am married to an american and my wife still gets excited a lot more about pizza, fries and mac and cheese even though she rationally knows that grilled chicken with a light tomato sauce, or a salad with olive oil and vinegar is much better -- that doesn't matter. The emotional response for her is that "junk foods are somehow FUN!" and "veggies are BORING!".
Perception makes a huge difference. I see a pot of beans and I get excited -- "Woo, beans and toast!" she sees it and thinks "Yuk, but I guess I have to eat cause it's supposed to be better than a McFatburger".
My theory is that children here are just not exposed to good food. Just look at what babies and toddlers start eating here -- cerial, high carb, high fructose corn syrup + carbs kind of foods. Have you ever seen a "children's" menu in U.S.? -It is the "happy heart-attack by the time you are 30 in a shiny box" -- fries, corndogs, pizza and hamburgers. All these children grow up and do we really expect them to one day say "Hmm, I think I'll have some caviar or a grilled chicken breast with basil and olive oil?" No, they will still eat the same crap they grewu up eating. Everyone is obsessed about the calories they eat, I think they should be obsessing more about the quality of the food, not just pure calories.
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?
Can this thread possibly see any more stereotypes, cliches and broad generalisations?
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.
There also appears to be a cultural momentum that needs overturning. i don't know how it evolved but my guess is that back in the mid 20th century when sweets, chocolate and such were considered rare treats you got them whenever you could reasonably afford to. This attitude has stuck and now whenever we visit or host older relatives (aunties, parents etc.) they produce .... sweets and chocolate to feed to our not-even-two year old daughter. Who to be perfectly honest would be very happy to munch on a small punnet of grapes instead (themselves considered a rare, expensive treat earlier in history, at least in colder northern climates). I was secretley pleased when she tried a fruit pastle, stuck it to the window and continued to munch on some raisins.
:-)
Once she'd gone to be we, er, "permenantly confiscated" said sweets and chocolate, naturally
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
In a nutshell:
TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED THE 1930's 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's !!
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we
rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.
As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and
NO ONE actually died from this.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank koolade made with sugar, but we weren't overweight because,
WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING !
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day.
And we were O.K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes.
After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD's, no surround-sound or CD's, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or chat rooms.......
WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth
AND
there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.
Imagine that!!
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.
They actually sided with the law!
---
About sums it up.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
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 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.
I was eating twice the normal amount of food and running 12 miles a day. In other words, I did get more exercise. I could have run a marathon. You're telling me that the person next door was in the same shape as I was? Well, no, they weren't. Nobody in the entire school was, really, except the other runners. Back then, I would run a couple miles without even breaking a sweat.
If they aren't working their kids hard enough to get anything extra from the school's sports programs, that might be due to creampuff sports programs, but there is such a thing as exceeding the statistical norm, and most people are capable of doing it if they're given proper encouragement. [and the first step in that process is NOT to tell the class that they're going to be in the same shape, regardless of whether they do the prescribed exercises.]
That is why I make the bold assertion that their conclusion is pure bunk. Perhaps it was stated more accurately in the actual report, but the description of the conclusion in TA is negated by my own life's experience.
I'm appalled that they would even venture to call that a study; they should have looked much more carefully at specific sports. Baseball, for instance, is mainly about sprinting, weight training, pitching, catching, bat swinging. That's a sport that might not require that the players be in very good shape, but if cross country runners, triathaletes, long distance swimmers, etc, were seperated from linebackers, sumo wrestlers, volleyball players, baseball players and ping pong
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
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
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...
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.
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.
Oh, come off your high horse. You anti-stereotypers are all the same.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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!
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.
I did my weight loss strictly through diet - reduced quantity and elimination of sugars, starches, and white flour. Exercise never came into play.
he main culprit is evolution. We've got millions of years of evolution in our genes telling us to eat high-calorie, high-sugar, high-fat foods, eat as much as we can of them, and eat them now, because winter is coming and there won't be any food to eat. Combine this with a society that, unprecedented in human history, has such an abundance of food that virtually everyone can overeat if they want to, and you've got an obesity problem.
I disagree. This was the case 30-50 years ago. People in the U.S., at least, had plenty of food and while maybe there was more obesity than previously, there was absolutely NOTHING like the rampant obesity going on now. 20 years ago, when I was in high school, obesity was pretty uncommon in my high school. Today, the kids that go to that same high school probably weigh, on average, 10-20lbs more than the kids of my generation. That's not a change in food availability. That's a change in what people are eating.
Are you insane? Since when is running hours around unreasonable? There is nothing unreasonable about sending your kids outside to run around playing tag/riding bikes/playing kickball/etc... for 3 - 5 hours a day. I live with two friends that are both divorced and have kids. When the kids are over for the weekend I run them around outside doing all sorts of active things for easily 3 - 5 hours, and they enjoy it. Usually they show up wanting to get outside because when they stay with their mom's they aren't allowed to go outside and run around. If all parents let their children, or even better, encouraged their children to go play tag with friends, or took their kids on bike rides for a couple hours a day, children would be a lot less overweight. The problem is most parents view their responsibility as keeping an eye on their children all the time, and because the parent is overweight and inactive, they don't want to entertain their children in the great outdoors.