The news is not good. "Heart disease begins in childhood,” reports the National Institutes of Health. A recent examination of 360 randomly selected youngsters, ages 7 to 12, revealed that 98 percent of the children already had two or more risk factors for heart disease.
But we keep hearing that people are getting healthier! It's mainly the grown-ups and especially business leaders who are exercising, losing weight, quitting tobacco and martinis and becoming more health conscious. But it’s a different story for kids. “Since the early 1970s, the general health of adolescents has declined,” says the American Academy of Pediatrics. “And this decline has been escalating over the last 45 years. Today’s kids are flabby. They don’t have the proper cardiovascular tone. And they are physically unfit.”
Too much television? Television certainly has had an impact. And so have video games, cell phones and computers. Time spent sitting in front of these screens is time taken away from body building, calorie-burning physical activities, such as climbing trees, running, bicycling, basketball playing, canoeing, or skiing and skating. That sets the stage for excessive weight gain which by itself is a risk factor for high cholesterol, blood pressure, and heart disease.
Exercise physiologist Kate O’Shea warns that “the junior couch potato of today is the fat farm candidate of tomorrow.”
Don’t school physical education programs help?
Only a few schools require students to take physical education in all grades. In an era of tight budgets and teacher shortages, health and physical fitness programs are often among the first to go.
What about children’s eating habits?
With nine of 10 Saturday morning food advertisements on the networks hawking processed foods, high in sugar, fat, and salt, television significantly influences the food preferences of children from the earliest years. Home-cooked-sitting-down-around-the-table meals are now the exception in most American homes. These meals have been largely replaced by fast foods and engineered foods. And then don’t overlook the school lunch program, where the US Department of Agriculture offers surplus commodity foods at bargain prices to the schools. And these school “kitchens” rarely resemble an adequate and well stocked kitchen to actually prepare and cook real food. Instead, it has largely become a place where delivered foods are fried or just dunked into hot oil to get them ready for consumption. That’s where you find chips and nachos, chicken nuggets and string cheese, or burgers with fries, and cookies with chocolate milk. In addition, many of today’s high school kids head off to the to the snack and vending machines on campus or to those fast-food outlets cleverly located close to the campus.