Kids Do Not Have Enough Exercise

A University of Bath study found that 95% of boys and 99.6% of girls did not meet the national target of one hour a day of exercise. This finding led the Archives of Disease in Childhood to issue a warning for the NHS to do more to combat obesity.

This is the way they conducted the study. The researchers examined the physical activity levels of more than 5500 11-year-olds in the South West of England for seven successive days from January 2003 to January 2005. They were interested in the level of physical activity these kids were doing every day. They also observed the amount of moderate and vigorous exercise these kids were doing.

Libby Dowling, Care Advisor at Diabetes UK said that it's disturbing to find that children and young people live a more and more inactive lifestyle. This sedentary lifestyle along with diets that are high in fat, sugar and salt is linked with increasing statistics on obesity and consequently the rise of type 2 diabetes in young people.

If this is not addressed accordingly to stress exercise and healthy lifestyle, young people are in for a life of bad health. That is why weight is important to prevent diabetes. Likewise, it is important to diabetes treatment. So use the arithmetic of energy balance for they are now pointing out the link between exercise and diabetes.

What is this arithmetic all about? It's simple. When the energy that comes in goes over the energy that goes out, we gain weight. It's that simple. When we consume more calories than we use up, we of course gain weight. And this extra energy is stored as fat.

One important use of energy is physical activity. So each time the child moves his arms and legs he uses the energy to provide power to the muscles. Even a simple activity as walking consumes some form of energy. The more strenuous the activity, the more energy is consumed.

So now that the children use the computer more often and play games on it, the energy consumed is less than the energy intake. The result? Weight gain of course. With the aforementioned study finding out that kids do not have enough exercise, what can we expect?