Over the last decade, US kids and teenagers have started getting slightly more exercise and reduced their television watching, a new study suggests.
Using surveys conducted in middle and high schools, researchers also found increases in the number of days youth reported having breakfast each week and in how often they ate fruits and vegetables. Those trends have corresponded to a leveling off in obesity rates, but not a decline, the study showed.
“I would like to believe that all the public health efforts focusing on increasing physical activity and increasing fruit and vegetable consumption are having an effect, because that seems to be a pattern,” Ronald Iannotti, the lead author on the study from the University of Massachusetts Boston, said.
“The fact that (obesity) is leveling off, that’s a surprise and a major change from the steady increase that we’ve seen over time,” Iannotti, who worked on the study while at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland, said. “This is great news.”
He and co-author Jing Wang analyzed surveys given to a nationally-representative sample of students in sixth through tenth grades in 2001-2002, 2005-2006 and 2009-2010 as part of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study. Each survey period included responses from between 9,000 and 15,000 adolescents.
The researchers found “encouraging” trends on measures of most diet and lifestyle habits.
For example, the number of days each week that kids reported being physically active for at least 60 minutes increased from 4.3 in 2001-2002 to 4.5 in 2009-2010, with similar trends among boys and girls. Likewise, youth reported eating breakfast on three school days each week on the first survey and 3.3 days on the last.
The average number of hours students spent watching TV each day fell from 3.1 to 2.4, with drops in both weekday and weekend viewing.