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Sport Is Unrelated To Obesity In Children
xiox writes "The UK government is planning to stop funding a study to understand obesity in children. The study fits children with accelerometers to measure how much energy each child uses in a day by moving. The results are surprising. Those children who do sports at school do not burn more calories than those who don't. Furthermore there is no correlation between body mass index and the number of calories used! The results are very interesting, suggesting that genetics and diet are the main reasons for childhood obesity, not sport. The UK government is trying to increase the amount of sport in schools."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
Horseshit. When I was in school 20 or so years ago, you could count the number of fat kids (in a school of 2300 students) on your fingers, and a child who would be considered obese by today's standards was virtually unheard of. At my kids' schools, it's easier to count the kids who aren't fat than the ones who are, and there's at least one obese kid in any group larger than about ten.
I know it's all the rage to pretend that whatever problems our society causes itself don't actually exist, but this one is pretty easy to nail down. Anybody who says we don't have a serious problem with kids and their poor eating habits and lack of activity is either an idiot or a liar.
Not only that but the taste of soda made with HFCS is vastly inferior to that made with sugar.
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"
excellent article, thanks for linking it. Seems I never have mod points when I want/need them. I started by cutting hydrogenated oils out of my diet, I'm working on high fructose corn syrup. I'm not 100% on either one, but I'm making conscious choices to cut back on both. I know this will be blasphemy on this site, but Mountain Dew contains "brominated vegetable oil". Gatorade, a "health" drink contains "glycerol ester of wood rosin". Tell me honestly, is there any way you would put that in your body if it wasn't hidden in some mile long ingredient list?
Watching my 10 year old niece grow up, I can say with some certainty, that obesity is at least in part, a learned behavior. She has been fed a steady diet of fast food and sweets, and is essentially instructed to "sit in front of the TV while Mommy does something else". Watching her morbidly obese mother sneak food and gorge herself to find solace has only reinforced negative eating habits. My wife and I took her skiing last weekend and she lied to me about her weight. 10 years old and she is ashamed of how heavy she is. She was almost in tears when my wife and I explained to her that for her own safety, she had to tell us what she weighed so her ski bindings could be set properly.
breaks my heart.....
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
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
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
Any post correcting someone's formatting, grammar or spelling will be hopelessly riddled with formatting, grammar and spelling errors.
Clear, Dark Skies
I know this will be blasphemy on this site, but Mountain Dew contains "brominated vegetable oil"
I'm not that afraid of bromine or vegetables. But a can of the stuff is 170 Calories. That's about 1/12th of what most people need in a day to not gain weight. 2 cans of the stuff, and an adult is well on its way to gaining a couple ounces that day.
But mostly I blame fruit juice for kid obesity. It's just as fattening as soda, which is hugely fattening, but somebody convinced parents it's good for you. 160 Calories per cup of a liquid (that barely satisfies any kind of hunger in most people) is not at all good for you. I was a fatty-fat as a kid, and my parents took me off soda and put me on juice. Not a lot of results from that one. I know a girl that is worried about her kid's weight but feeds him 100 Calorie juice boxes at every meal because it's healthy and won't grasp that the Vitamin C won't help him when he dies of a heart attack at 38. Switch that with water, your kid will lose a pound every 12 days. Absolutely guaranteed. Drop 1 juice box a day, and he'll lose a pound a month. Or at least gain a pound less. That stuff is evil.
Not that I think it should be illegal to sell the stuff or anything, but if the government spent a few of those research bucks on running commercials with graphs of how (Calorie input - Calorie output) / 3500 ALWAYS* equals weight change (get the guy from the Oxy-Clean commercials to yell the "ALWAYS" part), we'd be a lot better off. Of course, it would put all the many profitable, tax-paying voodoo diets out of business. Not that I think there's a conspiracy, I don't, but a lot of people would get mad if we were all skinny.
* Plus or minus a tiny, tiny bit that evens out to 0 over the long term and discounting (the very small) changes in metabolism resulting from lowered food intake. Metabolic conditions also (possibly) excepted. This part doesn't need to go in the commercial. This is just hear to discourage nitpicking on the obvious stuff.
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
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.
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.
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.