PEA RIDGE — In the latest information to date, it seems that Oklahoma and Arkansas are statistically tied for the eighth spot on the national top 10.
No, I’m not talking baseball, football, basketball or any other sports that are followed by us Arkansawyers. We are tied with Oklahoma for being the states with the eighth most obese children in the United States of America.
I recently read an article by Paul Stasos, a man who started a youth fitness drive several years ago in Montana. He was motivated to get involved with what has become an evergrowing national blight on the health and future of America’s children. Hisfitness drive eventually led to the formation of PACE, Promoting Active Children Everywhere.
Just who are the fattest kids and where are they?
They reside in Mississippi but they are barely worse than West Virginia whoholds the second spot. The healthiest children in the land are located in Colorado, a place of cool weather and thin air. The other top four fittest states in America are Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Montana.
I have written articles about children’s health over my 30-year span as a sports writer/columnist.
Each and every time a report is released on the state of American children, the news is always bad and getting worse. I have read than perhaps 20 percent of American children have become severely obese.
According to a national survey, 80 percent of American parents think their kids are physically fit, quite a shocking beliefwhen only about 22 percent of American children can be said to actually be fit. Of course, perhaps the parents ought to be asked, “compared to what?”
In 1970, statistics bore out that American children drank twice as much milk a year as they did soda pop.
The most recent survey found that children are now drinking three times as much soda pop as they are milk. That’s a big part of the problem, a problem that is now leading to a premature death of over 300,000 Americans every year.
It’s no surprise, given the national marketing campaign run by soda pop makers. How many restaurants have all-you-can drink soda pop available and how many have allyou-can drink milk? Instead of the old six-ounce soda bottles I drank back in the ’60s, we now have 20-ounce bottles or two- or three-liter giant bottles.
I was surprised to learnthat the body has about 5,000 miles of additional blood vessels for every 25 pounds of fat that a person carries around. That’s a lot more mileage for your body’s most important motor, your heart. With your heart being a muscle, it will not be any stronger than the other 650 muscles in the human body.
Being heavy and overweight limits children in the things they can or cannot do. The less exercise children have, the smaller their muscles will grow. The less strength overweight children have, the less active they are inclined to be active. It’s a vicious cycle that has been dragging a lot childrendown for the past 40 years.
Muscles are made up of tiny fibers that are smaller than a human hair. They can support weights that are approximately 1,000 times larger than the weight of the muscle fiber.
Muscles are wondrous things, but they can onlybe as useful as each of us makes them.
Most muscle growth occurs from birth to the age of 19. Muscle growth can occur after that, but not nearly as easily. Most folks’ fitness starts to decline not long after high school. The people who are already bad off just get worse off, usually. There are those that realize their problem and act to correct it before its too late, but those people are not at all common.
Not too long ago, one of the Disney movies to make the silver screen was “Wall-E” had a population of people who had developed a lifestyle that was so sedentary that they could no longer even walk. Evensitting up was a chore.
What are we to do? Well, it would be a good idea for families to start to keep track of what they consume each week in the way of food, including all the junk that comes between each meal. It would also be a good idea for everyoneknew what their ideal body weight ought to be.
Everyone needs to exercise more (myself especially included). Walking is one of the easiest forms of exercising and it can be quite helpful unless it only consists of walking to the refrigerator and back.
To the problem of children fitness, I am currently working on a running/walking program for kids that I will publish next week. It will be a free program that will include lessons on proper running, walking, breathing and other related topics. Not only free, it will also be fun, something any youth activity will have to be to be truly successful.
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Editor’s note: John McGee is the art teacher at Pea Ridge elementary schools, coaches elementary track and writes a regular sports column for The Times. He can be contacted through The Times at prtnews@ nwaonline.com.
Sports, Pages 10 on 04/04/2012