Sport Is Unrelated To Obesity In Children 594
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."
Bicycle commuting does help! Personal testimony (Score:5, Informative)
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
Crappy writeup by xiox (Score:5, Informative)
1. Eliminate PE 2. But Little tubs on Atkins (Score:5, Informative)
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.
High Frutose corn syrup (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Crappy writeup by xiox (Score:5, Informative)
Not Magic? (Score:4, Informative)
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?
Re:This may all be true, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe you meant nutritional deficiencies will cause weight gain?
Maybe you meant to say weight loss?What does fattening up animals on a high energy diet (the feedlot diet) have to do with malnutrition?
Re:After TFA, read this too (Score:5, Informative)
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.....
Try reading the article (Score:3, Informative)
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.
The model, from BFFM (Score:5, Informative)
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
Nerds are so... dumb. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:I'm skeptical... (Score:5, Informative)
I am a physicist, and what you are claiming is highly implausible to the point of being what we men of science term utter bullshit. Allow me to explain:
1. In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
2. Let's say she really is eating only 300 Calories a day (54,000 Cal in 6 months), and that she gained 35 pounds in six months. Normally, a pound of body fat contains about 3,500 Calories (pure fat is 9 Cal / g, but some of that pound is water). 35 lb X 3,500 Cal / lb = 122,500 Cal, which is 68,500 Calories more than she ate! (Never mind that a person typically burns somewhat over a thousand Calories a day at rest.)
3. This leaves a few possibilities:
a. The weight she gained was mostly water. Possible, but retaining water isn't true obesity.
b. She has a freak mutation that allows her to perform photosynthesis.
c. She has a freak mutation that has caused her body to grow a Stirling engine inside of her, and she was in thermal contact with hot and cold reservoirs with which the Stirling engine could exchange energy, thus allowing her to convert atmospheric CO2 and water into sugars, etc.
d. Some of the most fundamental and firmly held laws of physics are wrong.
e. You're wrong.
Those are the facts. The fact that you do not like those facts does not change reality.
Re:Everyone knows (Score:4, Informative)
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?
Re:Ridiculous (Score:2, Informative)
For one, the findings mentioned in the article claim that the kids have about the same overall activity during a day. The group that did sports didn't do much when they came home, whilst the group that did not do sports was a lot more active when they came home. Resulting in about the same overall amount of activity. If you missed this, you didn't read the FA.
Given this claim, and assuming the scientists know more about it than me, it seems reasonable that the remaining factor is the main factor. Which means DIET. Personally, I'm blaming the sugar industry. At least here in Europe, yogurt contains as much sugar as Coca Cola, about 10%. You will be hard pressed to find food without added sugar. And sugar wasn't really introduced like this into our food until 'recently', historically speaking.
The interesting thing is how studies find that in most cases, people prefer the taste of the food without added sugar. Problem is that those ingredients are more expensive than sugar.. Perhaps some of you with better bookmarks can dig those studies up again.
So, with this finding that *kids* have about the same activity level and *still* get obese, I claim bullshit on the whole "active kids will be less fat" theory.
Now, go spend some energy on opposing the sugar industry. And good luck with that.
"weight loss" is a red herring (Score:3, Informative)
You can be thin and still be the same weight as someone who's fat.
Re:Everyone knows (Score:4, Informative)