Graeme Klass
20 January 2009
Great programme that brings together video gaming and fitness.
One evening last week, [Mike] Walker [City of Brooksville parks and recreation director] invited community members and the center’s after-school program enrollees to see firsthand the newest addition to the center’s activity list: the Fit-N-Fun 4 Kids program.
With a $2,500 grant from the Community Foundation of Hernando County, Walker and his team invested in two GameBikes and a few PlayStation 2 video games. They have also developed a program that gets kids ages 6 to 13 moving and shaking.
The Fit-N-Fun 4 Kids program begins with jumping jacks, stretching and jogging in place. For the participants last week, it seemed this moderate exercise worked like an elixir.
Read on.
It will be interesting if participation rates are maintained… good luck to them!
Graeme Klass
10 April 2008
It’s great to have a treadmill at home - sets a good example for the kids (provided it is actually used). Anyway, be careful:
SMALL children are getting their hands caught and their skin ripped off by home fitness treadmills
Graeme Klass
9 April 2008
Patrick Basham and John Luik, co-authors of Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade, responds to International Obesity Task Force (IOTF) plans to to ban television advertising between 6am and 9pm for foods high in fat, sugar and salt; to completely ban internet and new media advertising; and to prohibit the use of celebrities or cartoon characters, competitions and free gifts to promote ‘junk food’. An excerpt:
If you peek behind the regulatory curtain, however, the claims about the causal influences of food advertising on children’s diets and weight share a central and definitive flaw in their understanding of what counts as demonstrating causality. In order to establish an evidence-based case for food advertising as a cause of childhood overweight and obesity, one would have to demonstrate that such advertising had an independent effect on children’s weight. This, in turn, would require a research study design that controlled for the multiple other risk factors (by some estimates dozens) connected with childhood obesity.
However, none of the studies purporting to demonstrate that food advertising causes childhood obesity control for more than a handful of these other risk factors. These studies therefore cannot establish an evidence-based case about the connection between food advertising and children’s weight.
If food advertising caused children’s weight gain and obesity, wouldn’t you expect to find an increase in advertising that parallels the increase in obesity? This is not the case. UK food and drink ad spending has been falling in real terms since 1999 and is now roughly at 1982 levels, even while rates of overweight and obesity have been rising. Consider, too, that in 1982 food ads constituted 34 per cent of total television advertising, whereas in 2002 they made up only 18 per cent.
Read the whole argument. My opinion is that, generally speaking, bans insult our intelligence and undermines the value of parents role in raising their children. In particular, if there is no evidence of a direct influence of junk foods ads in the increase in childhood obesity, then why bother with bans in the first place?
Graeme Klass
29 November 2007
Council planners vs kid planners:
adventure playgrounds are places where children can create and modify their own environments, rather than relying on rigid equipment that only serves a limit set of programmed purposes: “In a sense, you and I have always played in ‘adventure playgrounds.’ We created a fort in the kitchen cabinets, jumped from couch to couch across oceans; we snuck out through a hole in the fence to a new world. We climbed trees and hid in bushes. We played in the mud and the rain. We chased each other, made secret worlds …”
Click here for pics.
Graeme Klass
3 November 2007
An interesting approach by HEAL (Healthy Eating, Active Living), a new community program based in Nashua:
The 5-2-1-0 program, implemented in the schools this year, teaches children to eat five vegetables and fruits a day, to limit screen time in front of a TV or computer to two hours or less, to participate in one hour of moderate to vigorous exercise and to drink no soda or sugar-sweetened sports and fruit drinks.
UPDATE: Some 5-2-1-0 resources here (under “Office Tools”)
Graeme Klass
2 November 2007
Sometimes good intentions can get you caught out:
Australian shopping centre operator Westfield has pledged to help fight childhood obesity in its Californian malls. Maybe Halloween was the wrong time to start: “What happens when a childhood obesity prevention program faces down Halloween? Halloween wins. The shopping center conglomerate Westfield pledged Tuesday to help fight childhood obesity in its 23 California malls, forging a new partnership with state health officials to educate kids about healthy eating. But someone at Valley Fair in San Jose apparently didn’t get the memo in time, because 50 stores at the Westfield-owned mall will be handing out Halloween candy to about 6,000 children tonight. It’s the same story at Oakridge Mall in San Jose, where 30 stores will offer sugary treats to shoppers, and other Westfield malls around the state.”
(Thanks Justin via Dateline Media)
Graeme Klass
27 October 2007
Graeme Klass
16 October 2007
Gordon Brown jumps on the bandwagon:
Speaking on a visit to a school in south London, the prime minister said that although the government has invested £2.3bn in physical education over the last 10 years, more needs to be done.
Brown announced an extra £100m this year to try to broaden the range of sports available to children as a new survey revealed a worrying predicted rise in levels of obesity in the UK.
It suggested that 86 per cent of men will be obese in 15 years’ time, and 70 per cent of women will be obese in 20 years’ time.
The prime minister said more needed to be done on food labelling to help parents make the right decisions for their children.
“I want to see a young nation growing up that’s healthy and fit.
“Sometimes if you don’t deal with the problem quickly… then it just grows and grows and grows and gets worse,” he said.
On obesity the prime minister added: “It’s a huge problem and we’ve got to deal with it in a number of different ways.
“There are more school playing fields now. There is a wider range of sport in schools. Girls might be more interested in netball and yoga. It’s one of the answers to childhood obesity.
“When I was at school, one child in the class was very fat and it was a problem for them. Now there are four or five in the class and it’s a big problem for them.”
It will be interesting to track the long-term effects of these kinds of policy to ensure that it actually makes a difference to the rates of childhood obesity.
Graeme Klass
15 October 2007
This surprised me:
As experts have been observing for a while, childhood obesity is growing alarming fast among affluent kids, especially in India’s metros. And as Anoop Mishra, a WHO obesity expert warns, the effects are long lasting, often stretching well into adulthood.
It was to tackle this that Swashrit, a non-government organisation (NGO), is promoting its Get Active campaign in schools to encourage children to be more active. “Sedentary lifestyle is a major killer,” says Bhavna Barmi, a senior clinical psychologist. The campaign, which was launched about two years ago, has a team of doctors, nutritionists, psychologists and lifestyle experts working with member schools to provide healthy and active alternatives to the children.
I believe we will see more of these types of announcements from the developing BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries in the next few years as their middle class populace continues to grow.
