Today's children are less fit than they were in the 1960s, raising fears that young people could suffer heart disease and other chronic illnesses at a much younger age. Most children today are slower at running than their parents – and can’t run as far - according to new research by the American Heart Association into childhood fitness. VoR's Hywel Davies reports.
In a report presented before the American Heart Association (AHA), it was revealed that fitness in children globally has dropped significantly since the 1960’s. That’s raised fears that young people could suffer heart disease and other chronic illnesses at a much younger age than previous generations. Internationally, children today score 15 per cent lower on measures of cardiovascular fitness than their parents. Tam Fry, a spokesman for the National Obesity Forum, a pressure group, says it’s a global problem, caused by modern life styles and poor diets. “It’s a terrible disease, if you will, that’s affected worldkind in the last 15-20 years, mainly generated by sedentary behaviour and also the proliferation of food that is heavy in energy dense ingredients.” But perhaps most shocking is how much the health of children has declined. Grant Tomkinson of the University of South Australia presented his research before the AHA this week, looking at fifty studies of fitness in children over the last fifty years. Dr Tomkinson says if you took an average child from 1975 and they raced a contemporary child over four laps of an Olympic track, today’s children would finish almost a lap behind the child from the 1970’s. Tam Fry says modern children are simply not getting enough exercise. “We have a situation whereby TV and computer games and other sedentary activities are beginning to rule the roost. We have an appalling number of children who just do not fulfil the prescribed one hour of exercise a day.” And it’s not just speed modern children lack – they’re also falling behind in how long they can run. Average endurance performance has fallen by six per cent per decade between 1970 and 2000. Not surprisingly a lack of cardiovascular fitness means children are more at risk of heart problems. Britain is one of the countries that are worst affected by childhood obesity, with fitness levels declining more quickly than the average. That’s despite hopes that when London was awarded the Olympics in 2005, it could serve as springboard to greater activity among children. But Dr John Ashton of the Faculty of Public Health, a body set up by the three Royal Colleges of Physicians, says we’ve failed to take school sports seriously enough for decades, meaning the Games will have only a limited effect, “The thing about something like the Olympics is that it can be inspirational as a short-term lift or motivation but it needs to be followed through with the investment in infrastructure but also in Physical Education in schools, which has never really recovered since the stand-off between teachers and the Thatcher administration in the 1980s.” Dr Ashton argues that fundamentally most countries have failed to adapt to our office-based, sedentary lifestyles. But some steps can be taken to improve our built environment, he says, so we are encouraged to drive less and take more exercise, like cycling: But both Dr Ashton and Tam Fry are pessimistic about any major changes to fitness levels in British children anytime soon. More than a third of boys and girls in England aged between two and fifteen are either overweight or obese. And funding for public health initiatives aimed at either adults or children, they say, is limited. That means the allure of video games and fast food outlets is likely to remain stronger for most children than the appeal of the running track or the football pitch. (Voice of Russia) Source: Voice of Russia - UK Edition
