A New Prescription from Doctors May Delight Children: They Need to Play More for a Healthy Body. European experts say recent research provides the most compelling evidence of the benefits of children becoming active.
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| Children need to play more, not just eat healthily (Image: dorsetforyou) |
Research indicates that children aged 5 to 16 should engage in play for 1.5 hours each day. For some parents, this can be achieved quite easily by simply letting the children play outside.
“Just ensuring that children play outside will double their physical activity,” said Dr. Lars Bo Andersen, the head of the research team, in a publication in the medical journal Lancet.
Experts state that the research does not imply that children need to run on treadmills or join soccer leagues—they just need to run around and be active, even during short bursts of excitement.
Andersen and colleagues examined the relationship between children’s physical activity and risk factors such as heart disease and diabetes. They studied over 1,700 children aged 9 and 15 from Denmark, Estonia, and Portugal. Their activity levels were monitored for four consecutive days by attaching small tracking devices to their hips.
The results showed that despite differences in the three countries, the benefits of physical activity remained consistent. The more active the children were, the more favorable their blood pressure, cholesterol, and insulin levels were.
“This is much stronger evidence than we previously had,” said Nick Cavill, a public health expert at the University of Oxford who did not take part in the research.
While much attention has been focused on negative dietary habits leading to childhood obesity, Andersen’s study calls for equivalent focus on physical activity.
“It would be a mistake to view this solely as an obesity issue,” he stated. “Many children have metabolic problems without being overweight… The issue here is that they need to play more and reduce sedentary time.”
However, perhaps the most significant factor in promoting children’s physical activity is the parents themselves. “It’s not just that children should play more, but the whole family should be active. Parents should lead by example,” experts noted.
T. An
