Why the food and exercise police are unsuccessful

The human body is an amazing thing. Amazing! As every dieter knows, if you cut back on its fuel one day, you'll feel hungrier the next as your body tries to compensate. Turns out the same model applies when it comes to physical activity. If you give kids more gym time, more time spent running around, they become less active when they're not in school.

At least, that what a new study done in the Netherlands shows. The study results, presented last week at the European Congress on Obesity, demonstrated yet again why trying to manipulate kids' eating habits and weight through "interventions" is ineffective. Researchers looked at kids from three schools, who got 9.2, 2.4, or 1.7 hours of scheduled phys ed time in a school week, and found that kids' activity levels averaged out to be exactly the same no matter how much gym they got in school. Those who didn't get much PE time at school became more active at home, while those who got a lot of PE in school did less at home.

"We believe the range of activity among children, from the slothful to the hyperactive, reflects not the range in environmental opportunities, but the range of individual activity set-points in the brains of children," said Alissa Frémaux, a biostatistician (I didn't even know there was such a thing! very cool) who analyzed the study.

I think more PE time in schools is a great thing, especially when there are big gaps in the socioeconomic status of kids. While some kids get carted around to ballet and soccer, too many kids have no opportunities outside of school to move, be active, exercise, and have physical fun. So I'm all for piling it on at school.

Just don't expect more gym time to equal thinner children. And don't think that lowering the fat content of school lunches will translate into thinner kids, either.*



*I am deliberately leaving aside the notion of whether these are desirable outcomes. The plain truth is that they're not achievable. Constant readers know what I think anyway.


**Thanks, as usual, to Jane for pointing me toward this research.

This is the way we legitimize fat prejudice

My local paper, the Syracuse Post-Standard, is really pretty good, especially for a small city paper. Like many small papers these days, it picks up a lot of stories from wire services. Today's post concerns one of those wire stories,which ran in the feature section as "10 simple things you can do today to improve your life."

Number 3 on the list is "Put one foot in front of the other." It's a plug for exercise, specifically for walking, which I am in favor of, and advocates getting a pedometer to measure your steps. We're all supposed to walk 10,000 steps a day. I'm good with that. But halfway through the item I came to this sentence:

Those in the obese range usually take between 4,600 and 6,000 steps a day, overweight people walk 6,000 to 7,000 steps a day, and those of normal weight tally 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day.

Where to begin: With the idea that anyone who's not overweight is "of normal weight"? (Since when is being underweight normal?) Or with the random declaration that obese people walk no more than 6,000 steps a day?

I've worn a pedometer, and I've typically taken between 7500 and 9,000 steps a day. I have to make a conscious effort to reach 10,000 steps a day, it's true, but according to this article, since my BMI is in the obese category, I should be more of a couch potato.

It's just another example of how silly these kinds of "health" stories can be. And as a member of the media myself, I really shouldn't get exercised (pun intended) about ridiculous things like this. But I do. Because every one of these stories underlines, subtly or overtly, our cultural attitudes and assumptions about fat people, and so leads to more fat prejudice and stereotyping.

And there's already plenty of that to go around.