Obesity a health worry for parents, plus no biking in Britain and the fitness mess in Texas
Junior’s favorite sport is wheezing? Could be time to worry
It looks like a significant number of America’s parents are finally starting to take notice that their beloved offspring are beginning to resemble sacks of feed and, indeed, threaten to become little more than sacks of fast food with arms, legs, and computer games.
The evidence of this comes from a recent survey asking American adults to rank the 20 top health issues confronting children today.
The most frequently listed issue was childhood obesity, which probably would not have cracked the top ten just a few years ago. Cited by 35 percent of those polled, obesity nosed out the two traditional chart toppers on the Parents’ Greatest Worries list: drug abuse at 33 percent and smoking or other tobacco use at 32 percent.
Incidentally, or perhaps not so incidentally, fourth place went to another issue that was strictly back burner not long ago: bullying, noted by 28 percent. The question comes to mind whether there may be some overlap between the obesity and bullying data. Specifically, it would be interesting to see someone in academia run the numbers to determine if overweight or obese children are statistically over-represented among the bullied — or for that matter, among the bullies. Sociologists of America, a grant surely awaits you.
UK kids’ downward cycle
Meanwhile, across the pond, childhood obesity similarly becomes an ever greater issue in the UK, where fingers of blame are being pointed in all directions. One current candidate is parental paranoia where the bicycle is concerned.
British youth are being called “a lost generation of cyclists,” with over 80 percent of British kids being prohibited from even riding their bikes to school by their parents — fully 35 percent of whom rode their bikes to school as kids.
The sad reality is that the vast majority of British youth do little or no cycling for any serious distance, but are confined to their own street or immediate neighborhood, the result being that they derive the bare minimum of exercise value from their two-wheelers.
Don’t mess with Texas…you’ll exhaust it
Meanwhile, back in the States, Texas recently conducted a thorough and massive study of the physical health of its school kids. Some 2.6 million students overall, ranging in age from third to twelfth graders, were put through a series of fitness tests in six general areas, including strength, flexibility, stamina, and body composition.
The kids were asked to do push ups, curls, shoulder stretches, a mile run and so forth. Based on the results, it would seem that the average American youth is only slightly more physically fit than someone in a coma.
Only around 28 percent of boys in the third grade could meet such fitness standards as running a mile in 11.5 minutes, doing seven push ups, a dozen curls, and the like — and that was the high point. The numbers went downhill from there, with fewer than 10 percent of 12th graders meeting the “fit” standard for their age.
In one school district, less than 6 percent of 18-year-olds passed the cardiovascular test, and over half of all 11-year-old boys had unhealthy BMIs.
And these results, as one Houston athletic director noted with shock, were in one of the most sports-obsessed states on the face of the earth, where entire towns turn out to cheer high school athletes. Do we even want to know the numbers in, say, Maryland?
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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