Stemming the tide: Will compulsory physical education classes have any effect on childhood obesity?

Abstract

The body weight of New Zealand children continues to increase unabated, resulting in a high prevalence of obesity in our young people ranging from 10% in boys to 11% in girls. These figures are even worse for Maori (17%) and Pacific children (23%). Obesity is associated with a number of health problems in adults but also in children. Because of the overall reach schools have in most children’s lives, schools and in particular physical education within schools, have been suggested as an ideal place to influence children’s physical activity and thereby energy expenditure levels. Such interventions are particularly relevant in New Zealand primary schools which, since 1987, have removed the directive statements within the school curriculum requiring compulsory time allocation for physical education. We hypothesized that the re-introduction of compulsory 30 min physical education classes given 3 times per week would help to increase energy expenditure sufficiently to reduce the energy imbalance gap and consequently reduce body mass gains in children. In this presentation we will mathematically model the latest available data to test this hypothesis.