Exercise helps kids avoid obesity, researchers find
New research shows that vigorous exercise may be an especially good way to help kids stay lean, but sitting around doesn’t appear to have a major role in making them fat.
However, there are still plenty of reasons kids should avoid too much sedentary “screen time,” Dr. Ulf Ekelund of the MRC Epidemiology Unit in Cambridge, UK and colleagues say, given potential negatives including “violence and aggressive behavior, poor academic performance, and poor body image.”
Ekelund and his team looked at 1,862 children 9 to 10 years old, 23 percent of whom were overweight or obese. In the study, researchers looked for associations between this activity and children’s waist size, amount of body fat, and body mass index (BMI). Kids also reported how much time they spent watching TV or using a computer.
Sixty-nine percent of the children were getting at least an hour of moderate physical activity a day, while 58 percent reported having less than two hours of screen time daily.
While children who spent more time not moving had bigger waists and a larger percentage of body fat, much of this relationship could be attributed to the fact that they spent less time engaging in moderate physical activity.
But the time children spent engaging in vigorous activity, and their combined moderate activity-vigorous activity time, had the strongest ties to waist circumference and fat mass.
For instance, every 6.5 minutes a child spent doing vigorous activity like playing ball, bicycling, or running around outside was associated with a 1.32-centimeter reduction in waist size, the researchers found. But 13.6 minutes of moderate physical activity only reduced waist size by half a centimeter.
Based on the findings, the researchers say, children should still be encouraged to limit their sedentary time, but this alone won’t be enough to tackle childhood obesity.
“Interventions may therefore need to incorporate higher intensity-based activities to curb the growing obesity epidemic,” they conclude.