IT IS pointless for the Government to increase school PE lessons, according to the latest research on child obesity.

A study into children’s natural activity patterns has come to a surprising conclusion: the more exercise they do in school, the less they do at home, and vice-versa.

It even showed that girls at a private preparatory school, who had nine hours a week of time-tabled exercise, were less active overall than girls at an inner city state school who had less than two hours a week of school sports.

The findings suggest that for young children bad diet, rather than lack of exercise, is to blame for weight gain.

Terry Wilkin, a professor of endocrinology and metabolism at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth, said that the research made the Government’s approach questionable at best.

“I don’t know how much they expect to get out of socially engineering children’s environment by imposing activity levels, because I’m doubtful,” Professor Wilkin said.

“Our research shows that you can lead a child to water, but you can’t make it exercise,” he said. “It is very important in this debate to look at the science and not just at popular belief.”

Scientists are clear on one thing: children are getting fatter. A study in the British Medical Journal showed that there was little change in children’s weight between 1974 and 1984, but between 1984 and 1994 the proportion of overweight boys in England increased from 5.4 per cent to 9 per cent, and from 9.3 per cent to 13.5 per cent for girls.

The common belief is that the cause is clear: children spend too much time slumped in front of the television or computer screen.

But Professor Wilkin’s team, who are part of EarlyBird, a 12-year study into childhood obesity, are the first to employ accurate exercise monitors worn by children in all their waking hours.

They found that there was no correlation between the hours that are spent watching television and activity levels, possibly because children are still playing while the television is on.

“Do we do less now than we did in the past? We don’t know, because we didn’t have a way of recording it with any precision,” the professor said.

“But everyone has this image of the halcyon days of a postwar childhood, when children played outside from dawn until dusk. “These are the wisdoms that have become rather set in the fabric of popular belief.”

Professor Wilkin’s team then set about comparing the activity levels of 160 children at three primary schools. One of the schools was set in “100 acres of beautiful playing fields”, one was a village school and the third was “inner city, with not a blade of grass to be seen”.

Children at the first school exercised twice as much as those at the inner-city school during school time, according to the results published in the British Medical Journal, even though they had more than four times as much PE. This could be because many PE lessons involve a lot of standing around.

Children at the second and third schools made up for any deficiences there at home. In fact, boys at the village school exercised the most in total, and girls at the inner-city school exercised the most.

This suggests that children have an inbuilt, genetically set level of activity, but does not explain why their obesity levels have increased.

“Either that level (of activity) has fallen down the generations, although I don’t see why it should,” Professor Wilkin said. “Or we need to look more at the food side of the equation and less at the exercise side of the equation.”

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Swine flu vaccine for all as drug rushed through
• Artificial sperm and the race to build a baby
• BBC jets out stars to tout for prizes