| The Bad, the Ugly, and the Good
Last month in addressing the obesity crisis, I suggested that the status of children’s health was in fact far worse than most people think. Figures of 16% obesity merely represented a nationwide average. Locally, and especially among low socioeconomic groups and black and Hispanic populations, far higher youth obesity rates are evident.
With no obvious solution in sight, and knowing that today’s adults (about 66% of whom are reportedly either overweight or obese) were less overweight as children than today’s youth, the health picture 20 years from now is alarming. It will affect all of us. Health problems will derail careers. Family life will suffer because of sick parents. And all of us will struggle to meet spiraling health care costs. Within the next two decades, it’s not just going to be children who are left behind!
Today’s health crisis is a multidimensional problem that is too often being addressed by well-meaning, but uncoordinated efforts. Regardless of best intentions by individuals or groups, single-track efforts will not be enough to significantly impact the obesity crisis. What needs to happen to solve the obesity crisis is clear. To maintain a healthy weight people need to balance their diet with their activity level. People who are overweight need to consume fewer calories than they burn. They can do this by eating less, becoming more active, or a combination of both. For most people it’s that simple. But what we don’t know is how to make it happen within a largely unsupportive environment.
Today’s physical activity recommendations call for children ages 5-12 to accumulate at least 30 to 60 minutes of age appropriate, and developmentally appropriate physical activity from a variety of activities on all, or most, days of the week. An accumulation of more than 60 minutes, and up to several hours per day, of age appropriate and developmentally appropriate activity is encouraged. Adolescents should be physically active daily, or nearly every day and engage in three or more sessions per week of activities that last 20 minutes or more at a time, and that require moderate to vigorous levels of exertion.
Sadly, even if all of our students followed these guidelines it wouldn’t significantly reduce youth obesity. Thirty minutes of daily physical activity is simply not enough to counter 6-7 hours of mostly sitting in the classroom. So let’s improve the situation. How about if we added before-school activity programs, required recess (no more withholding to finish work!), and integrated physical activity into classroom instruction to raise activity levels to average 1 hour a day. Would this increase be enough to counter the mostly sedentary activity of the school day, plus the remaining perhaps 6 plus hours of sedentary activity within the average home? Think about it. One hour of activity versus 12 hours of inactivity. What’s your conclusion?
A similarly depressing scenario faces us with nutrition. Assuming that school lunches are nutritious, and knowing that a high proportion of today’s students qualify for free and reduced lunches, we know that many students have the opportunity to eat at least one nutritious meal a day. But if a high proportion of these same students eat calorie rich and nutritionally deficient meals for the remainder of the day, how will this impact their weight?
We know that many will snack after school on junk food. We know that classroom teachers persist in rewarding students with junk food treats, and hosting birthday cake celebrations throughout the school year. And we know that no healthy school meals are available to students on weekends or during vacations. The impact of junk food is clear. For most students, walking for 30 minutes burns about 100 calories. Drinking a can of sugared pop or fruit juice adds about 150 calories to a student’s diet. And how many of our overweight students drink the equivalent of only one soda daily or limit their snack choices to fruit and vegetables?
So what can be done? As noted earlier, the solution is simple to state, but daunting to implement. We need to promote habitual physical activity and good eating from birth. We need to find ways to increase our children’s daily physical activity and balance, or if already overweight decrease caloric intake. To do this we must find ways to address all behaviors that can positively or negatively impact these two related goals throughout the student’s day: a day that begins when they wake up and ends at bedtime.
Children who wake up to television or video games and don’t eat a nutritious breakfast begin disadvantaged. Children who are transported by parents from home to the school gates lose opportunities for physical activity. Children who don’t spend time on the playground before school miss out again. Classroom teachers who fail to take activity breaks with their students, withhold recess, and don’t integrate activity into instruction assure their students of more sedentary hours.
By early afternoon, the majority of our school-aged students will have accumulated up to 8 hours of inactivity. If, as in many elementary schools they receive physical education twice a week for 30 minutes at a time, even on a PE day that’s still only about 1/16 of their day. But it gets worse. Most children are now transported home, or to daycare on buses and in cars, where they will immediately snack before starting into the 4-6 hours of free time before bed. What do they do? On average, young people aged 2–18 spend over 4 hours a day watching television, watching videotapes, playing video games, or using a computer.
The situation is bad and likely to get ugly. So where you wonder is the good? Here it is. In this desperate situation who is doing the most to help our children? Who ensures that all children that attend public schools are physically active for at least part of the school week? Who is responsible for making sure that all children receive instruction in the kinds of movement skills needed to participate in recreational and competitive sports, games, and physical activities? Who gives children the knowledge they need to stay healthy, and tries to motivate children to eat better and choose to become physically active? Public school physical educators are doing more than any other group - including parents - to get America’s youth moving towards a healthier lifestyle.
While it’s easy for us to be despondent at how little we can do to change the direction of the obesity epidemic, we have good reason to celebrate the fact that we are not just doing something, but rather that America’s physical educators are on the frontline of efforts to combat the health crisis facing our nation’s children and youth.
Steve Jefferies, Publisher
PELINKS4U
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