Ottawa promoting proper diet, activity to nation’s youth
Andrew Mitchell
Not that anecdotal evidence counts for much, but when I was a kid, you had to travel to five different schoolyards before you could find an open basketball hoop or baseball diamond.
Now when I go home to visit, the schoolyards are empty. Maybe a few adults will be out there playing some two and two, but you can tell that the same question is on their minds – where are all the kids?
According to the Canadian government, they’re at home watching television, surfing the Web and playing video games. They’re eating junk food, and they’re gradually getting heavier.
While the government has known for some time that kids were getting heavier, it wasn’t until April that they decided to start a nationwide campaign to reverse this trend.
On April 5, Minister of Health Anne McLellan launched Canada’s first-ever-Physical Activity Guides for Children and Youth.
"We all have a role to play in encouraging children and youth to lead healthier, more active lives," said Minister McLellan.
"The goal of the Guides is to provide parents, educators, physicians and community leaders with the information they need to help increase physical activity levels in children and youth, and lay the groundwork for healthy growth and development."
The research on the topic is staggering.
According to a recent poll, Canadian children aren’t even active enough to promote optimal growth and development. Between 1981 and 1996 the number of overweight children doubled, and instances of obesity tripled for boys and girls.
The Guides were developed in a partnership between the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology and are supported by the Canadian Paediatric Society and the College of Family Physicians in Canada.
Among the basic recommendations within the guide, Health Canada is recommending inactive children and youth increase the amount of time they currently spend being physically active by at least 30 minutes per day.
The Guides will be available on the Health Canada Web site starting in May at www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hppb/paguide/youth.html .
There are Guides for both children and youth.
The children’s guide includes a five-month program for increasing moderate and vigorous physical activity, while gradually decreasing the amount of non-active time a child gets. It stresses the benefits of regular physical activity, including better overall health and fitness, healthy growth, good posture and balance, better flexibility, longer endurance, more relaxation time – a plus for every parent – and greater strength and self-esteem.
The children’s guide also recommends different activities to do with your young children to improve their physical fitness.
Youth are a more difficult problem.
CBC Radio One in Vancouver hosted a series of call-in shows on the problem, asking parents what it would take to pry kids out the door.
Not only are they left on their own a lot more, the emphasis on structured physical education at the school and clubs decreases as they get older.
They also have more freedom to decide what they want to do with their free time. If they want to be active, they have to take on that responsibility themselves, and experience has shown that kids aren’t really up to the task. Ever try to get a teenager, even a healthy one, out of bed in the morning? Naturally, they are at a point in their physical development where they really need their sleep and relaxation.
Teens are also at the stage where they try things like smoking, eat a lot of junk foods, learn to drive, give up sports, focus on their studies, and get caught up in doing what the rest of their peer group is doing.
They’re also less trusting of their parents, get into the kinds of activities that involve staring at screens, and they are cynical of programs like the Guides.
The youth guide makes it clear that the responsibility for health is really up to the individual, but suggests that it’s not as difficult as it might seem.
Like the children’s guide, the youth guide includes a five-month program for increasing physical activity and decreasing couch potato time. As for the reasons to "Tune into physical activity" – governments are always about five years behind the lingo of the day – reasons number one and two are to "Meet new friends" and "Improve physical self-esteem". If that doesn’t touch a nerve among our youth, nothing will.
It would be naïve to think that any government program is going to reverse a trend that is well into its third decade. The world has changed. The food has changed, the entertainment has changed, schools have changed, and sports have changed.
During the CBC Radio One phone-in series on child obesity, callers suggested it’s more complicated than it sounds.
One elementary school teacher suggested that parents are driving their kids two blocks to school because it’s not safe to let them walk. That would also explain the empty schoolyards.
Parents noticed that they can barely find the time to be active themselves in today’s world – both parents are working to afford the middle class lifestyle, and work-days are getting longer. They can’t lead by example.
Others suggested that the schools should take a greater role, but with financial cutbacks, most schools can’t even afford to keep grass on their playing fields. And academics are more competitive than they used to be as youths vie for university spots upon graduation.
It’s an entire culture, which is breeding overweight children.
Studies show that children spend 23 hours a week, on average, just watching television. That doesn’t include computer or video game time. That’s more than three hours a day.
The Canadian Paediatric Society believes one of the keys to more active children is for parents to take a more active role in the use of the television and other home entertainment systems.
They recommend limiting TV viewing to one hour for preschoolers and two hours for school-age children per day.
They recommend watching television with your children, and making sure you never use the set as a baby-sitter.
Turn it off during meals, when visitors arrive and during study time.
Studies have shown that most parents would like to regulate the amount of sitting time that children get.
On April 5, Environics released a poll that found 78 per cent of Canadians believe children and teenagers spend too much time watching television and playing with electronics. Sixty-three per cent said Canadian children aren’t active enough. Ninety-six per cent said they believe physical activity is as important or more important than nutrition.
For the most part, they’re right. About 62 per cent of girls are inactive, as are 52 per cent of boys. Only 36 per cent of Canadians under the age of 19 are active enough to maintain basic cardiovascular health.
Home life is only part of the equation.
Schools are getting more involved with nutrition programs, and by attempting to resurrect physical education to its previous status. A minimum of 40 minutes of exercise at school is being recommended by physicians, and there is talk of bring back the National Fitness Program, which awards kids for performing basic exercises like the shuttle run, 1,000 metre run, and flexed-arm hang to an accepted standard.
In the U.S., which has a similar problem, teachers are starting to send home health reports to go along with report cards to let parents know if their kids need help, and where to get it.
A number of Web sites addressing the problem have also popped up recently, such as KeepKidsHealthy.com and BlubberBusters.com.
The entire Western world is also taking notice, because it’s not just about self-esteem and appearances, the number of overweight people is creating a serious health epidemic. Obesity recently replaced malnutrition on the World Health Organization’s priority chart.
According to the WHO, obesity alone – not including people who are just overweight – kills 30,000 people every year and costs more than $5 billion in health care. Obesity is linked to diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, some cancers, gastrointestinal diseases and even arthritis.
Before we look at kids, maybe we should look at ourselves. More than 61 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women were overweight in 1998, and I don’t think things have changed a whole lot in the past four years. We’re not exactly setting a good example.
When you consider the potential economic strain that all of these overweight and obese kids could put on our already faltering health care system, it’s no wonder the government is getting involved.
Whistler kids are the most active that I’ve ever encountered, and the mountain playground and the example of local parents has a lot do with the fact that the epidemic hasn’t taken root here like it has everywhere else.
But while we may be immune to the epidemic, we’re not immune to the costs.
This is everybody’s problem – governments, schools, parents and children – and it’s going to take a lot more than a few guides to correct it.
