I find this surprising, to say the least. Bummer the UK government is shutting it down for political reasons... Cliff notes summary: It's diet and genetics, not physical activity that appears to prevent obesity. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6442293.stm Obesity study 'needs more funds' By Adam Brimelow BBC News, health correspondent Campaigners want ministers to back a groundbreaking study into childhood obesity which is on the brink of collapse through lack of funding. The EarlyBird programme in Plymouth has won acclaim after tracking the development of hundreds of children. Its findings fundamentally challenge the government's strategy to prevent obesity by raising activity levels. Ministers say there has never been a commitment to long-term funding, as the research budget is stretched. Researchers taking part in the study, based at Derriford Hospital, are painstakingly mapping the development of more than 300 children from across the social spectrum. The aim is to find out more about what lies behind diabetes and obesity. Every year the children are fitted with accelerometers, which record activity over the course of a week. They are worn around the waist like pedometers, measuring movement ten times a second. Findings 'startling' This gives the researchers a comprehensive picture of just how energetic they are - from the moment they get up until time for bed. The findings are startling. Take two children on the study - both healthy. Stephanie Chapman, 11, loves long-distance running at a local track with her friends. She said: "I think it's really good because you can really come on, you've got to do it. "You can hear them in the distance and when you come back again they're going well done Stephanie! It's really like Wow! I can do this!" But Chloe Harris, nine, is much more into singing than sports. "After a while my legs always begin to hurt, and so do my arms, and things, and also they tire me out and I lose my breath quite a lot." But the researchers have found that when you look at overall activity levels across the week, Chloe does more than Stephanie. Professor Terence Wilkin, the programme director, said the amount of exercise children get was genetically set, and had nothing to do with access to sports facilities. School sport Genes may control how active a child is "Those children who had little opportunity at school to undertake activity were bouncing around after school whereas those who'd had a lot of opportunity during the course of the school day settled down, and did relatively little," he said. "The most important thing (was) if you added the in-school activity to the out-of-school activity, they were exactly the same." That is not the only surprise. Professor Wilkin said children's activity levels had no bearing on their body mass index - their risk of obesity. "Even looking over a period of years, because we repeat these measures year by year in these children, we have been unable to show any relationship between the physical activity that a child undertakes and his BMI." Food industry If true, these findings cast serious doubts on the government's strategy to halt the increase in childhood obesity by the end of the decade, largely by encouraging physical activity. Professor Wilkin said it was based on unproven prejudice - that today's children do not exercise as much as previous generations. His work is widely respected and has produced more than 30 papers in peer-reviewed journals. But despite local donations and private backing the study is in financial crisis, and his team say ministers have refused to meet them. Professor Philip James, from the International Obesity Task Force, said it was much easier for the government to concentrate on promoting sport rather than taking on the food industry. "This is the biggest manufacturing sector in the whole of Europe. It's bigger than the defence industry. "It has enormous political and strategic power. Government would very much like to focus on physical activity, don't you think?" Budget pressures Professor James says it is vital that the EarlyBird Study continues its work as the children move on through adolescence. In a statement the Public Health Minister Caroline Flint said: "Given the immediacy of the target to reduce obesity, the Department's Obesity Programme team is under pressure to identify effective interventions to tackle the problem, and cannot commit its resources to supporting longitudinal studies such as EarlyBird, which lends itself to long-term research funding from a suitable funding body. "There are huge demands on a finite research and development budget, and most work is funded through competitive tendering exercises."
sometimes I think researchers try too hard to look smart and revolutionary. EDIT: actually, now that I think about it, I was extremely skinny as a child in China but gained weight at an alarming weight during my first few years in America. My doctor said it was because my body was not accustomed or built for metabolizing American food. Hopefully they continue with the study...
i really can't f*ckin' believe that money is actually spent on this type of crappy research. on top of that, how the hell could it get something this so freakin' wrong. ARE YOU KIDDING ME???? edit: upon further reading and better comprehension, i understand their point a bit clearer. america's diet is pretty crappy. but physical activity has a great bearing on whether your obese or not. if i maintain the calories i consume now on a regular basis and don't exercise, i'd balloon.
I have believed this for a long time. For the average person who is 30-40 lbs overweight, 95% of the problem is diet and NOT exercise. I lost 40 lbs by changing my eating habits without one minute of exercise and have seen other people do the same thing. I haven't met one person who exercised, didn't not change their diet and lost weight. If a person wants to trim 1000 calories/day, it can be done be changing eating habits (ex: change from 3200 calories/day to 2200). To burn 1000 calories/day from exercise for an extended period of time is nearly impossible for the average person. People that start exercising that also lose weight lose the weight because the exercise causes them to eat differently. Some people who start exercising after work usually end up eating much less during the evening, which is why they lose weight. But if you ask them why the weight was lost, the give exercise all the credit. For cardiovascular health, exercise is extremely important. For the singular purpose of losing weight, diet is all that is necessary for 99% of people. If you talk to a doctor and pin them in a corner with the right questions, they will admit this. hotballa, it isn't just you. A co-coworker of mine from South Africa gained 40 lbs her first 4 months in the U.S. and has steadily gained more since then. She did not exercise before she came here. They only difference was her calories intake increased dramatically because of the American diet.
I lost around 25 pounds and about 6-8 inches off my waist strictly on exercise. If anything I ate more because I was so frigging hungry afterwards. lol I did a combination of anarobic and areobic training. yeah, it's serisouly unhealthy the amount of crap they throw in some things. I blame the school breakfast and lunches. My mom's rice congee never had anythign in it except water and salt (unfortuantely)
So it's genetic just like homosexuality? If so, we need to sue all those airlines for not accommodating fat people with wider seats.
This is a very interesting study and its too bad they can't keep it going. A couple of things stick out though about the study. What it looks like they were measuring was activity and said that the girl who didn't like to exercise she was still more active so while organized exercise might not be the key overall activity. The next issue is that children have very high metabolism anyway so activity level might not have that much bearing on BMI but that might not be the same thing for adults.
I think this is a mixture of genetics and environment. If it was all genetics then obesity would've always been a societal problem rather than just being a problem that has cropped up in the past 30 years. While there have always been fat people there doesn't seem to have been as many fat people. There have always been homosexuals but it doesn't seem like there are more than before.
I would probably be considered the most athletic person in my family's history. I've played soccer for going on 27 years, along with working out and playing softball. My family is typically large. I've had 3 relatives have gastric bypass surgery. My mother had kidney failure and adult-onset diabetes due to her weight. I am not by any means fat or obese, but I do have a bit of a gut. However, no matter how well I try to control my diet and with as much as I am active, I cannot seem to drop below where I currently am. Genetics seem to play a huge role in my body type. There is no study that can accurately say that physical activity has no bearing on weight. It's just one factor that contributes along with genetics and eating habits. Everyone is different. Individually, you have to figure out what is going to keep you at a safe weight and healthy.
my parents immigrated here. no one in the family from my parents on up were overweight. but, me and my 3 sisters are very big. all three are overweight and one is actually diabetic type 2. a lot of it is their american diet. i used to be fat as a kid too. we moved when i was about 15 and i started playing chase every night in the neighborhood. diet didn't change but i started to lose weight. so, in my family's situation there were really no genetics involved. my sisters and i seemed to have caught the fat gene here.
I don't think it's totally independent. I think if you both put the cookie down and exercise, not only do you stop gaining the fat, you tone your muscles and it's easier to, say, walk down the street and up stairs after you do both. I don't understand why they say it's independent completely. It's NOT .
If you want to lose weight, then yeah you need to focus more on a healthy diet...if you want to maintain your weight, then exercise should be your focus. But neither should be done independent of the other. Because if you want to live a blanced, healthy lifestyle, exercise and a healthy diet are keys. Scientists can go round and round and come up with new revlutionary methods to losing weight, but really it always has and always will come down to exercise and eating healthy. That's it.
one can be healthy and not "fit", as it were, without exercising. but for most people, in this day and age (everywhere we go we sit, and we're bombarded with food all day long), its damn near impossible to eat healthy. i call BS on genetics. (that's right, Donny is callin' out science, where you at, fool?)
I too don't really put much into genetics as the culprit. Diet is the biggie. I just always thought that excersize was a bigger player than this study suggests.
If you read closely you will realize this study is for kids and not adult. Kids bodies don't seem to be affected by exercise not adults.
