{"id":8355,"date":"2009-07-30T21:30:13","date_gmt":"2009-07-31T04:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=8355"},"modified":"2009-07-30T21:30:13","modified_gmt":"2009-07-31T04:30:13","slug":"it-may-be-self-evident-that-exercise-reduces-obesity-but-that-doesnt-make-it-true","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=8355","title":{"rendered":"It may be self-evident that exercise reduces obesity, but that doesn't make it true"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at The Economist blog, it is written<\/a>:<\/p>\n

It seems self-evident to suggest that if schools that have eliminated physical education and recess reinstituted them, there would be fewer obese adolescents in America.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Evidence suggests adding phys ed isn’t the cure for fatkiditis the Economist imagines. Quoting Gina Kolata ((If my last name was “Kolata,” I don’t think I’d name my child anything that rhymes with “Pina.” Just saying.)) in the New York Times<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

In the 1990’s, the National Institutes of Health sponsored two large, rigorous studies asking whether weight gain in children could be prevented by doing everything that obesity fighters say should be done in schools \u2014 greatly expand physical education, make cafeteria meals more nutritious and less fattening, teach students about proper nutrition and the need to exercise, and involve the parents. One study, an eight-year, $20 million project sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, followed 1,704 third graders in 41 elementary schools in the Southwest, where students were mostly Native Americans, a group that is at high risk for obesity. The schools were randomly divided into two groups, one subject to intensive intervention, the other left alone. Researchers determined, beginning at grade five, if the children in the intervention schools were thinner than those in the schools that served as a control group.<\/p>\n

They were not. The students could, however, recite chapter and verse on the importance of activity and proper nutrition. They also ate less fat, going from 34 percent to 27 percent fat in their total diet. Alas, said the study’s principal investigator, Benjamin Caballero, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “it was not enough to change body weight.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What I’d really like to know — but this article doesn’t say — is if the kids were healthier<\/em>, as measured by blood pressure, cholesterol levels, ability to walk on a treadmill and so on. There’s an unfortunate attitude that an intervention that doesn’t lead to thinness is necessarily a failure, which leads us to ignore many important indicators of health. ((Somewhat related, from the same Times article: “Nearly 49,000 women were randomly assigned to follow a low fat diet or their regular diet for eight years while researchers kept track of their rates of breast cancer, colon cancer and heart disease. Not only did the diets have no effect on these diseases, they also had no effect on the women’s weights.”))<\/p>\n

So why does “it seem self-evident” that we can make thinner kids by adding gym and stirring, when the evidence says otherwise? Well, part of the reason is that “self-evident,” in this case, means that the blogger is reciting conventional wisdom. And conventional wisdom is selective:<\/p>\n

The paper appeared in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition<\/em> in 2003 to no acclaim, Dr. Caballero said. No press release, no media coverage, no invitations to speak about the results at scientific meetings. On the journal’s Web page, a search of articles that refer to the study comes up empty. It has not been cited anywhere. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at The Economist blog, it is written: It seems self-evident to suggest that if schools that have eliminated physical education and recess reinstituted them, there would be fewer obese adolescents in America. Evidence suggests adding phys ed isn’t the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fat-fat-and-more-fat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}