Study Says Increased Exercise in Schools Won’t Help Overweight Students

The answer to childhood’s health obesity is not extra exercise in schools, says new research conducted on more than 200 children ages eight to ten over a two-year period. According to the findings, all children expend nearly equal amounts of energy whether during school or after, suggesting that an internal meter ultimately retains control over the amount of the expenditure.

The research team, led by Terry Wilkin, professor of endocrinology and metabolism at Peninsula Medical School, followed children at three different Plymouth (UK) schools with as much as a 40% difference in activity levels, varied activities, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The subjects wore acclerometers, which recorded their movements up to 600 times per minute. Subjects wore the devices all day for one week during four consecutive school terms. Data from the acclerometers was supplemented with blood samples and weight and BMI measurements.

At the end of the study, the subjects’ data was analyzed by Alissa Fremeaux, a biostatistician at the Peninsula Medical School, who wrote, “We discovered that the children who go a lot of PE time at school were compensating by doing less at home, while those who got very little PE time compensated by cranking up their activity at home, so that over the week they all accumulated the same amount.”

The takeaway from the study, according to Wilkin, is that intervention with children is ineffective. He said that children who are forced to obtain more exercise at school will end up reassuming sedentary habits. “That is absolutely characteristic of a biological control system,” he told the AP.

However, not everyone agrees with the research, which was presented to the European Congress on Obesity. One dissenting voice is that of Tim Lobstein, director of the International Association for the Study of Obesity’s childhood obesity program. Lobstein told the AP that the study is not broad enough and is too socially constructed to be conclusive. He maintained that physical activity in schools is important to set the foundation for an active lifestyle later on.