Youth Obesity, Fitness Research Now Monitoring 3,000
Contact: Bob Lehnhard, (207) 581-2480; Steve Butterfield, (207) 581-2469
ORONO — University of Maine youth obesity and fitness research that began several years ago with one Maine public school and a couple of hundred students, has expanded to over 20 schools and now includes more than 3,000 students.
While it is almost universally known that the nation has a worsening obesity problem, says co-researcher Steve Butterfield, professor of kinesiology and physical education, the current study will “establish the first longitudinal youth fitness database with this age group in the country. We think it’s pretty unique.”
Obesity is predicted to lead to billions of dollars of increased healthcare costs primarily due to diabetes and cardiovascular related afflictions.
“The ultimate purpose of what we’re doing is to develop a more collaborative and comprehensive curriculum in the public schools that will address not only the obesity issue, but our children’s health overall,” says Lehnhard, co-researcher and professor of exercise science.
“Right now, we’re profiling the exact extent of the problem,” adds graduate student Tim Martinson. “One of our questions is, how does the rate of obesity compare across age groups?”
Identifying as many specifics as possible about the problem is the first step. “Then we can begin to think about solutions,” Lehnhard says.
To aid in the monitoring of various health and fitness indicators in public school children, Lehnhard, Butterfield, Martinson and Craig Mason, director of the Center for Educational Research in the College of Education and Human Development, recently supplied physical education teachers across the state with iPad touch devices.
The technology has expedited data collection to a central software-processing program, allowing the interpretation and dissemination of what’s happening in schools to occur very quickly, they say. Measures such as body mass index (BMI), cardiovascular endurance and participation in after-school sports are collected at regular intervals throughout the school year by the public school teachers and studied for trends by UMaine researchers.
In broad terms, the problem is simple, Lehnhard says. Children have too much access to too much food – calories — and too much leisure time to eat it. But, the underlying reasons for a caloric imbalance are not so simple.
“It’s not just the physical realm — the body — that needs to be addressed; there’s a lot going on in our children’s heads as well, and to try and treat one separately from the other doesn’t make a lick of sense,” he says. “Any solution to the obesity problem has to be comprehensive in nature. That means it’s going to require collaboration between different professional disciplines with different points of view.”
That would be a healthy occurrence in and of itself, he says. “If we are going to help these kids develop healthy behaviors and lifestyles, that development cannot rest on the physical education teacher’s shoulders alone.”
Classroom teachers, coaches, school administrators, and especially parents, must all carry the same message.
Participation in the project continues to grow, and it could very well expand beyond Maine to serve other states, and even the nation as a whole, the researchers say.
“Our research is designed to take action on this national public health issue and develop effective interventions for our schoolchildren,” according to Butterfield.
The project is supported with funding from the Betterment Fund and internal sources at UMaine. Other external sources of funding are being pursued so the number of participating schools and children can be expanded. The researchers will present and publish their findings annually.