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."
This may all be true, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Incomplete Story (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a bit misleading and I hope it doesn't discourage the efforts to get kids to excercise more.
After TFA, read this too (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm confused (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This may all be true, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have no argument with the studies but I thought throwing a few more facts in the soup might be interesting.
Normally animals and for that matter people given unlimited diets will only have a few individuals get fat. As a general rule diet and for that matter exercise just have little or no effect. We do know several things that to cause weight gain. It is known for example that deliberate malnutrition will cause weight gain. (anybody heard of a feed lot? Thats what it does. ) Genetic engineering of late has been producing the same effect as the feed lot diet.There are a lot of other factors like loss of sleep. Maybe our society and lifestyle really are a disease. We tend to get an arrogant disregard for sleep in our society and we also get a disregard of the quality of our food having food sellers pushing foods that are grown in conditions that don't exactly produce the best balanced nutrition.
Other long term effects (Score:3, Interesting)
Both quotes from:http://www.slate.com/id/2161615/ [slate.com]
Maybe sports in school takes fun out of exercise (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Wow who knew there were thin people on slashdot. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Simple to unconfuse you... everone has a limit... (Score:5, Interesting)
Also... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Maybe sports in school takes fun out of exercis (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:I'm skeptical... (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, you claim a gain of 35lbs over 6 months. That's ~183 days. According to wikipedia, 1lb of fat gain is roughly equal to an excess intake of 3500 calories, meaning that 122,500 calories of fat were gained over the 183 day period.
122,500 calories gained in fat / ~183 days = ~669 calories gained in fat per day. You are claiming a daily intake of only 400 calories from ramen. Clearly, your scenario violates the laws of physics.
Nite_Hawk
I disagree. (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Maybe sports in school takes fun out of exercis (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:1. Eliminate PE 2. But Little tubs on Atkins (Score:4, Interesting)
Follow these food intake guidelines:
By Proportion:
* 45% Fat.
* 28% Protein.
* 27% Carbohydrates.
By Calorie:
* 55% Animal Products
* 45% Plant Products.
By Weight:
* 2/3 Plant products
* 1/3 Animal products.
Preferred Carbohydrate Sources:
* Foods with low glycemic load.
* Unprocessed plant products.
* Foods with a low glycemic index.
Non-Preferred Food Items & Ingredients:
* High glycemic index foods.
* Rice, primarily processed white rices.
* Patatos.
* Foods derived from highly processed grains.
* If you can't see the grains don't eat it.
* Mono/Di saccharides (Sugar, Corn syrup,
* Hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils, fats, and lipids.
* Shortening.
"Always read food labels and choose foods without trans fats. Or - if partially hydrogenated vegetable oil or shortening is on the label - choose foods that have them near the end of the ingredient list (labels list ingredients from most to least). Starting in 2006, FDA has required that all "Nutrition Facts" labels on food list trans fat content. If partially hydrogenated oil is on the label, the food is not trans fat free." http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/pr/pr083-05.shtm
Re:Bicycle commuting does help! Personal testimony (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Everyone knows (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Nobody RTFA! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:This may all be true, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Peckishness. I just want to chew something. Having a box of sugar-free gum handy really helps with this.
2) Vitamin deficiency. When I first encountered this, I wandered into the kitchen looking for cheese. Man, I just wanted cheese. I felt like a pregnant woman, seriously. I had been cutting out milk, and was probably calcium-deficient. Also, when you eat less, you just get less vitamins. I take a multivitamin with calcium to counteract this kind of hunger, and that works really well.
3) Energy hunger. When it's bad, my head spins and I get really cranky. The weird thing is, this kind of hunger has nothing to do with how many calories you need: it's about rhythms (how long since you ate) and whether your stomach feels empty.
For #3, I look for foods with very low energy density. Happily, many of them tend to be fruits and vegetables, which helps with #2. For example, you can have a huge salad at only 200 kcal with the right dressing, and there are a lot of fantastic vinaigrettes out there. (Kraft's Sun Dried Tomato and Roasted Red Pepper Italian come to mind.) Sprinkle some real crumbled bacon and shredded cheese on it for extra taste. Make it easy on yourself: buy everything pre-packaged.
I watch what I drink, mostly just avoiding milk and soda pop. Water is great. Crystal Light (or a knock-off) and Diet Coke are wonderful when you need something sweet. I guzzle something before eating to feel more full with less.
You can do it no matter how cranky you tend to get, if you know some tricks.
This is known to be the case in adults too. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:This may all be true, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not correct for the subject in hand. The subject is UK schools .
This morning I dropped of junior at school and I noticed a big sign: No play in the playground allowed, dangerous BIG holes in the playground. There were two holes, both 1-2 inch wide, 1 inch deep. For the reference the school is Queens Edith Primary in Cambridge UK.
The way UK schools (based on observations from the same school) understand physical education is - you put kids in class, tell one to do an exercise, the rest watch. There is a variation on this when you show the exercise and they do it. There is no warmup whatsoever. If a child decides to warm up by doing a run around for 5 minutes he is penalized and chastized as a troublemaker. Compared to that on the continent they make them all run for at least 200m in the under 10 age group, going to 600+ for the older ones at the beginning of the lesson. As a result the exercise value in the UK is minimal and it is actually hazardous from a health and safety perspective as the children have had no warmup.
In addition to that in the UK all other obesity related factors are obscured by one other - vitamin D defficiency past the nursery age. 95% of the kids show bone deformations characteristic for that - X legs, rachitic skull, the lot. The primary reason for this is the anti-sun + suncream obscession which leads to most kids getting less than the essential doze of sun for activating vitamin D to the required degree (30min daily average unhindered summer sun at UK lattittude for an average white caucasian, going up to 1h+ in spring, autumn and winter, with the numbers for darker skin colour being bigger than that). Add to that the fact that kids are ferried around in buggies restrained with minimal movement till the age of 4 and the picture is mostly complete (mine refused to get into it from the age of 2 and I agreed with him).
From there on kids are bound to be obese. Until these factors are eliminated any study in the UK will be bogus as a large sample of the juvenile population is already highly susceptible to obesity and no physical education or sport can help them in that. Nothing to see people, move along. Another study which concentrates on everything but the two root causes for UK:
Re:This may all be true, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
To clarify the content of various foods contains a ratio of various items. I don't want to go into exactly which ones -- too much to say if I did. The ratio determines the nutritional value of the foods similar to the air/fuel ratio in a gasoline engine but more complex. If you stuff in all kinds of one item such as protein or fat or carbohydrate and don't match them with the proper vitamins and minerals the situation gets out of hand. Your body will demand more stuff to fill in the ratio. Or it will store the excess to reduce the ratio.
To be fair, I don't think there is any "ONE" solution because people vary in genetic makeup as well in habits and history and they also have illness states etc.
A diet isn't a ratio malnutrition it is reduced intake unless it in some way alters the ratios. One problem people get with diets is that often they have long standing habits that the diet often is unsuited to them. Another is that there really is something to the rate at which various compounds are metabolized. Our diet science if you can call it that really stinks. It is really bad science. It was arrived at for reasons that have nothing to do with control of weight. It measures molecular weight and not bio-availability. It is as stupid as assuming Road Tar and Gasoline are the same thing. It completely disregards the complex metabolic issues or genetic makeup variations.
I used to weigh 22 stone/310lbs/140kilos (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Please RTFA (Score:3, Interesting)
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
The China Study (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
The Hubris of Government (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:The model, from BFFM (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Cardio exercise is a good way to lose weight, but it's very easy to deceive yourself because the exercise itself often burns off mostly water weight. Believe me, it's fun to get on the scale after a summer run and see you've lost 2 lbs, but it's not something you can do day after day, especially if you don't turn around and hydrate yourself immediately. When doing mild to medium cardio, you actually enter a fat burning phase about 40 minutes into the exercise. If you consume some lightweight carbs during this time (a *bit* of dried fruit, sports drink), you will assist your body in burning the fat. The longer you can hold your body in this phase, the more fat you will burn...i.e. a 90 minute workout will burn more fat than two 45 minute ones.
Also, there are many goals to exercise: burning fat, building muscle, building aerobic and anaerobic capacity, endurance, power, developing/retaining flexibility, improving reflexes, etc. so there are obviously many ways to achieve these goals, so saying "cardio burns fat" is clearly a generalization that overlooks many of the other benefits you could be giving yourself.
In my own experience, I believe that a lot of things have to go just right (diet, heart rate, having plenty of time to spend in "the fat burning zone") to burn lots of fat via cardio, unless you're obese and just walking a few hours a day will do the trick (assuming you correctly cut your caloric intake). On the other hand, strength conditioning, i.e. weight training, will break down muscle fibers that take *loads* of energy to repair and renew. As the OP stated, muscle burns more calories at rest, as well.
There are plenty of reasons to do some basic weight training though: after age 40, your body naturally loses 5% of its muscle mass every ten years (a mass about the size of your bicep). A couple of studies have found that, ignoring ALL other factors (heart disease, weight, etc.), stronger people live longer. Of course, it's usually an indication that they lead a healthy lifestyle, but one study I read suggested that of two men, aged 70+, with the same bp, bmi, weight range, etc., the one that is physically stronger is expected to outlive the other by several years. Sure, that's a wild set of factors to nail down in a proper research study, but it's telling nonetheless. Maybe the stronger ones have better reflexes, so they won't fall as easily, or if they do hit the deck, their bones are harder, and they are much less likely to break a hip, etc.
Personally I've found that since I started *properly* weight training - NOT the bodybuilding sort that's in vogue (complex/compound lifts, no body part targeting...but that's another post entirely) - in addition to the expected benefits, I have been practically injury free across all the sports I do, and that in itself is no small accomplishment for an athlete.
One point about body fat percentage - I think most electrode scales are total crap. They can be highly affected by the hydration of your body, and I don't know anyone that sweats and drinks the same amount every day. Also, on the "athletic" setting it tells me I have 13% (I would be thrilled if that were true at my age and athletic effort) and on the "normal" setting it says 19% or so, which is equally off base. Fact is, I'm somewhere in that range, and I'd like the scale to be able to tell me exactly where I am, not the other way around. A couple glasses of water either way and I can jive the readings for the day. For me, it comes down to eyeballing my love handles - a crude caliper method if you will - and that's a lot more telling on a personal level.