Benefits - Obesity and Physical Activity: The Foundation Position - Part One

Failure to address the development of regular exercise behaviors and good nutrition at an early age has major health and economic consequences:

• 300,000 deaths a year caused by obesity(cigarette smoking is 400,000)
• $117 billion in 2000—health costs attributed to obesity

(The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity, 2001)

In addition to premature death and disability and health care costs, the negative impacts of obesity manifest in lost productivity and social stigmatization.

Most experts believe that physical inactivity is responsible for excessive caloric intake and the ensuing prevalence of overweight and obesity.

• 40 percent of adults—no exercise
• 33 percent of adults meet thirty minutes a day—five days a week exercise standard
• 35 percent of adolescents report twenty minutes a day— three days a week exercise but no national data on Federal recommendation of sixty minutes a day— six days a week exercise standard (The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity, 2001)
• Only one state, Illinois, mandates daily physical education for school children K-twelve (AAHPERD, 1997).
• Daily enrollment in physical education classes dropped from 42 percent to 25 percent among high school students between 1991 and 1995 (Physical Activity and Health: A Report of the Surgeon General, 1996)

The result, according to the Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity (December, 2001):

• 1999:
  -61 percent of U.S. adults are overweight
  -13 percent of children aged six to eleven are overweight
  -14 percent of adolescents aged twelve to nineteen are overweight

• during last twenty years the percent of children overweight has doubled (7 to 13 percent)
   percent of adolescents overweight has tripled (5 to 14 percent)
• overweight and obesity higher in females, racial and ethnic minority populations
• women of lower socioeconomic status are about 50 percent more likely to be obese than better-off counterparts.

Why an exercise approach to obesity?

• Most experts agree that changing behaviors related to food consumption is extraordinarily difficult because of family, cultural, socio-economic, and environmental factors and emotion-laden relationships to food.