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Outdoor Play Fights Obesity
by Bryan Hoch, MLB.com,WASHINGTON -- As much as his million-dollar smile and his impressive combination of speed and power, new Yankees outfielder Curtis Granderson is known for his active involvement in the community.
So it was no surprise when Commissioner Bud Selig said he "can think of no better MLB representative" to have been at the White House on Tuesday morning.
The reason for his latest visit to Washington, D.C.: Granderson joined first lady Michelle Obama to support the new White House Anti-Obesity Program, yet another venture that has Granderson's full support.
The 28-year-old, a native of Illinois, was the son of a physical-education teacher, so the idea of getting kids active is especially important to Granderson.
by Lee Ferran
ABC News
February 9, 2010
Michelle Obama is formally announcing today what she called a "very ambitious" program to end the American plague of childhood obesity in a single generation.
"We want to eliminate this problem of childhood obesity in a generation. We want to get that done," the first lady told "Good Morning America's" Robin Roberts in an exclusive morning television interview. "We want our kids to face a different and more optimistic future in terms of their lifespan."
The far-reaching, nationwide campaign called "Let's Move" calls for myriad initiatives that target what Obama calls four key pillars: Getting parents more informed about nutrition and exercise, improving the quality of food in schools, making healthy foods more affordable and accessible for families, and focusing more on physical education.
NEW YORK -- July 6, 2009 -- Health experts are sounding the alarm over the possible effects on young athletes of popular energy drinks such as Red Bull, the leading brand in a growing market.
Even limited strength training can have positive effects on young exercisers, according to a new report in the May/June issue of Sports Health: A Multidisciplinary Approach (www.sportshealthjournal.org).
Co-authors Katherine Stabenow Dahab and Teri Metcalf McCambridge, both physicians at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, contend that participation in a strength training program lasting as little as eight to 12 weeks during childhood and especially during adolescence can increase strength by 30 to 50 percent, while improving bone mineral density, body composition, balance, blood lipid profiles and self-esteem. They then recommend an individualized program based on age, maturity and personal goals of the young athlete.
A comprehensive youth strength training routine should incorporate:
Paul Steinbach
May 13, 2009
© 2009 Athletic Business Magazine
A generation ago we spent far more time playing outside than watching tv. While my parents look back that their childhood summers and remember playing in the neighboorhood, my children will likely look back and remember what was on TV at 3PM.
They’re full of caffeine and can pack a punch. Last week, energy drinks were the topic of a public standing committee hearing.And what’s being said about the high-caffeine drinks should serve as a wake-up call to parents who allow their children to consume these beverages.
According to the president of the P.E.I. Medical Society, the drinks could potentially cause death and should be banned.
“In some energy drinks there’s more caffeine in a single can than the daily recommended amount for even an adult, never mind a 12-year-old child,” Dr. Bill Scantlebury told the Standing Committee on Social Development.
The Journal Pioneer
03/09/09
DONNA COTNAM
The health of our children has become a growing concern.
More and more children are opting for fast food, the TV remote and video games over healthy eating and physical activity.
How do we fix this? How do we get kids to embrace physical activity and not see it as work?
We have many systems in place.
We have an army of volunteers working with a variety of clubs and local sports groups to promote healthy living.
Top to bottom, these groups work hard to provide our youth with the opportunity to 'participate'.
Most groups have programs for kids of all ages and levels.
They have executives in place to co-ordinate the ongoing operations of their organizations.
They have coaches and trainers, people who groom the trails and line the fields.
Copyright 2009 The Free Lance-Star Publishing Co
BY JIM HALL
12/16/2008
Local schools and fitness clubs have learned that they can get kids moving and combat childhood obesity by combining vigorous exercise with a generous helping of gaming technology.
Attach a video game to an exercise bicycle, for example, and kids will pedal in order to play.
Install an arcade version of Dance Dance Revolution, or DDR, and kids will tap their toes.
As Garrett Heflin, 7, said this week as he worked out at the Rappahannock Area YMCA in Stafford County: "You have exercise and you learn to dance."
The YMCA and other local gyms, such as American Family Fitness in Spotsylvania County, have discovered "exergames," the interactive fitness machines for kids.
In Stafford County, more than a dozen of its schools have joined the movement with everything from the popular DDR dance game to Wii Fit programs and exercise videos by Billy Blanks and Christy Lane.
Copyright 2008 The Ledger-Enquirer
KATIE HOLLAND
Jan. 04, 2009
-Children enjoy social as well as physical aspects of the sport
It is widely accepted that soccer is the most popular sport in the world — except, that is, in the United States, where football, baseball and basketball prevail. But with the growing popularity of youth soccer clubs, that just might change. Bubba Hunt, the general manager of the Columbus Youth Soccer Club (CYSC), thinks that this generation of soccer players is the one to do it, too. In 1996, six years into Hunt’s youth soccer career, he noticed an increase in the number of kids playing in clubs. Hunt attributes this to the inclusion of soccer units in elementary school physical education programs. The U.S. Youth Soccer League, the largest youth sports organization in the United States, has noted a dramatic rise since it was established over 30 years ago: from 100,000 registered players in 1974 to 3.2 million registered players today.
Copyright © 2008 Allure Media.
Hannah Tennant-Moore
December 16, 2008
And it's official (again): overweight kids face a substantially greater risk for health problems than their average-weight counterparts.
This time, the health risk involves car crashes. A new study has found that overweight or obese children between the ages of 9 and 15 are two-and-a-half times more likely to suffer a severe injury to their limbs in a car accident. (They are not at greater risk for overall injury or death.) With car crashes being the leading cause of death for this age group and one in three American kids being overweight, this six-year study of more than 3,200 kids is certainly worth paying attention to.
Still, I can't help but wonder how many times, in how many different ways, researchers will prove that childhood obesity is a serious health problem before any comprehensive solutions are proposed. The persistence of childhood obesity in the USA and Australia speaks to a deeply rooted cultural problem--to put it broadly, the devaluing of healthy lifestyles--and it seems to me that there is little hope for real change until we address this health threat not just scientifically, but socially and anthropologically.
© 2008 Environment Report
Shawn Allee
December 8, 2008
Kids in big cities often live close to school, so you'd think walking to school would be an easy solution to cutting childhood obesity. But some parents worry about traffic, abduction, or gangs so much, they stuff their kids in the car instead. Shawn Allee met some groups who want parents to overcome that fear and let kids burn more calories:
“I’m going to walk you through what Safe Routes To School is and we’ll talk about how it works in a place like Chicago.”
This is Melody Geraci.
She’s with the Active Transportation Alliance, a Chicago group that promotes walking and biking.
For Geraci, there’s plain-jane walking to school where you toss your kid a lunch bucket and wave goodbye - and there’s organized walking.
In some parts of Chicago and other big cities – parents don’t trust the plain-jane kind.
“When we ask parents, why does your child not walk or bike to school, a lot of parents will say ‘distance’ – it’s too far. That’s not the case in Chicago. Most kids live close enough to their neighborhood school to get there by foot, right? But then they say traffic. People are driving crazy. The streets are hard to cross, not enough crossing guards, all that stuff.”
Geraci says organized school walking is a remedy: put kids together, and put adults in the mix.
“There’s this phenomenon called safety in numbers. So if you have fifteen people at an intersection at a light, they’re much easier to see than just one person trying to navigate it all by themselves and nobody’s seen what happened.”
Geraci says this safety in numbers idea goes a long way in fighting traffic problems.
It can also work on fear over gangs or abduction.
“When fewer people are outside, walking places, biking places, just being out in their environment, what happens? Things happen. Crime. There are fewer people watching.”
Geraci’s message resonates with Carmen Scott-Boria.
Scott-Boria recommends walking to school as a solution to childhood obesity.
But she hesitated at first, because of her experience as a kid.
“The same time that I walked to school, that was also a prime gang-recruiting time after school, so I definitely was intrigued by the gangs and got involved with gangs because I walked to school.”
Scott-Boria says she’s not trying to scare parents – she just wants them to know what they’re up against - and how organized they need to be.
To get an idea of what organized school walking can look like, I head to one of Chicago’s elementary schools.
Victoria Arredondo and Remedios Salinas are near the school’s back entrance.
They run a walking school bus.
Every day, Arredondo and Salinas walk kids on a fixed route between school and home.
It’s like a bus, with no wheels – and no air pollution.
Copyright Examiner.com
Jimmy Moore
December 3
If you were like me and tens of millions of other Americans on Thanksgiving last week, then your eyes were glued to the television set all day watching the Dallas Cowboys, Detroit Lions, and all the rest of the teams playing that day entertain us from noon until night. It’s a tradition that has become so ingrained in our culture that advertisers EXPECT to have a large television audience that day. And the National Football League (NFL) which brings such joy and happiness to football fans from coast to coast know this, too, which is why they proudly rolled out a new public service announcement for their NFL PLAY 60 program.
Did you see these commercials on Thanksgiving and then again during the Sunday NFL games? You couldn’t help but notice them blaring across the screen in all these spots about NFL PLAY 60:
“Childhood obesity affect 1 out of 3 children in the U.S.” a graphic reads.
Then they show video of NFL football players like Super Bowl champion Eli Manning from the New York Giants in their hometowns encouraging kids to just get out there and play for 60 minutes a day. Launched in October 2007, NFL PLAY 60 is a national youth health and fitness campaign designed to encouraged kids to beat back childhood obesity by increasing their activity level. In this generation of video games, computers, and other such activities that barely give children any exercise at all, this seems like a great idea, right?
Weeeeeeelllll, yes and no.
Let me start by praising the NFL for coming up with this program. Their stated goal is to help kids today become “the most active and healthy generation” in American history and to “reverse the childhood obesity trend by 2012.” A daunting task to say the least, but one that I am sure the NFL would be proud to say they played a part in bringing about. Certainly getting kids to wiggle and move a lot more than they do isn’t such a bad thing. I wish I did more of it when I was a child and maybe I wouldn’t have been as fat as I was as a kid.
But obesity is not just about exercise–I have become more and more convinced that you really have to begin with the right diet. This point was really driven home for me during my spin class this week when the super-fit instructor started ranting about how it doesn’t really matter how you eat as long as you get in your exercise each day. She bragged about eating whatever she wanted on Thanksgiving Day and will be proudly eating a slice of birthday cake at her daughter’s party this weekend. On and on she went talking about how diets stink and you don’t really need to worry about what you eat–just simply exercise it all off!
Oh, if only it were that easy for most of us. I don’t know about you, but if I consumed as many carbohydrates as the typical American does in a day and especially on Thanksgiving, then I would be so sick and tired and hungry that I couldn’t stop eating. What this fitness instructor at my gym and the people behind NFL PLAY 60 fail to realize is that the kinds of food these kids put in their mouths to fuel their exercise will determine their ability to manage their weight and health properly or not.
Jimmy Moore
December 18
Whenever most people hear about the subject of childhood obesity, they tend to get pessimistic about it because they feel the next generation is too far gone to do anything about it. It reminds me of what has happened in high schools over the past couple of decades where they now openly pass out condoms because “they’re gonna have sex anyway” so why not let it be safe? This is exactly the WRONG kind of thinking as it relates to not just teen sex, but our overweight children, too.
If we simply give up on trying to help educate kids about making healthier choices in their diet, then what do you think they’ll eat all day? Hamburgers, pizza, candy bars, sugary soda, M&M’s, potato chips, and anything else they can get their grubby hands on. Why? Because they think that’s real food and how they are supposed to eat based on what they’ve been allowed to do for so long.
But what would happen if adults actually took back control of the schools where the parents, administrators, principals, teachers, and educational staff decided to lay down the law and set rules that the kids would have to abide by in terms of their diet? For example, what if one of the mandates was to ban all sugary, processed, junk food from being served on campus? Well, we don’t have to wonder about that because it’s being happening at an elementary school in Lithonia, Georgia since 1998.
This CNN story details the remarkable work that is happening at Browns Mill Elementary School where the children do not participate in any school fundraiser bake sales, do not celebrate birthdays of their classmates with cupcakes, never get served cookies or ice cream in the cafeteria–why? SUGAR IS NOT ALLOWED AT THE SCHOOL!
That’s right, Browns Mill Elementary School is what they call “a Sugar Free Zone.” All soda and junk food vending machines have been long removed from the campus and the cafeteria only serves real food like broccoli (the most popular veggie) and peaches for dessert. This cutting-edge concept was the brainchild of the school’s principal Dr. Yvonne Sanders-Butler.
Read on...
December 23, 2008
CHICAGO — Cartons of milk still anchor school lunches, but the milk inside them is changing as concerns mount about childhood obesity and nutrition.
Some schools are adding to the selection of sweetened varieties in an effort to boost students’ calcium intake, while other schools ban flavored milks. Chicago Public Schools stopped offering whole milk out of concern for the added calories and fat. Organic milk is edging into some lunch lines, while others now offer soy milk.
“If there doesn’t seem to be a set standard, it’s because there is none. School wellness policies are individual to districts,” said registered dietitian Melissa Joy Dobbins of the Midwest Dairy Council. But when it comes to what kind of milk schools should offer these days, she said, “There’s a lot of chatter.”
The focus on milk follows other recent efforts to improve school nutrition, including banning soda, limiting transfats in lunches, purging junk food from vending machines and banishing cupcakes from parties.
The milk debate comes amid concerns that dairy consumption is waning among older children who have more beverage choices, from flavored water to energy drinks. Nine of 10 preteen girls fall short of the federally recommended three calcium servings a day, according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. For boys, the estimate is seven of 10.
This is troubling because bone density peaks during adolescence. Calcium is vital to bone strength. So the shift away from milk — the main calcium source for 80 percent of children, according to the American Dietetic Association —could portend future health problems.
© Copyright 1996-2008 The Washington Post Company
December 18, 2008
Childhood obesity may alter the structure and function of the thyroid gland, an organ in the neck that releases hormones crucial to metabolism.
Studies have found that thyroid disorders can lead to obesity, but a new Italian study suggests that obesity may cause thyroid dysfunction in some cases.
"Our study shows that alterations in thyroid function and structure are common in obese children, and we may have uncovered the link," study author Dr. Giorgio Radetti, of the Regional Hospital of Bolzano, said in an Endocrine Society news release. "We found an association between body mass and thyroid hormone levels, which suggests that fat excess may have a role in thyroid tissue modification."
Radetti and his colleagues evaluated 186 overweight and obese children for nearly three years. The children's thyroid hormone levels and thyroid antibodies were measured, and they underwent a thyroid ultrasound. Thyroid antibodies are present in people with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, an autoimmune disease of the thyroid in which immune system T-cells attack the thyroid. Ultrasound results from 73 of the children were suggestive of Hashimoto's disease, but none of them showed thyroid antibodies.
Copyright © 2008 CITIZEN-TIMES.com
December 23, 2008
One of the most serious charges that can be leveled in any decent society is to accuse someone of taking food out of the mouths of children.
While that's not what is happening in North Carolina's schools, the punchy economy is offering up a – no pun intended – potentially unsavory alternative.
After a drumbeat of reports regarding the nation's childhood obesity epidemic, school districts in the state switched over to healthier fare for our kids. Fryers were put away as whole grains, vegetables and fruits were offered, and sugary snacks and drinks fell out of fashion.
And then the economy more or less folded like a $2 tent.
And the appeal of those forbidden cookies and snacks and sugary beverages came roaring back: They're revenue generators.
It presents a classic scenario of grabbing some cash now and paying for it later, unless the General Assembly acts. Its track record so far is not encouraging.
The GA mandated proper nutrition standards in 2005 – although they've since postponed the deadline for implementation – but 95 percent of the state's elementary schools rose to the challenge and adopted the standards. Problem is, the Legislature didn't provide funding to meet the standards. And as they're scrambling to meet funding needs this year, the outlook that funding will arrive is dim.
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