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Home » Lose Weight Safely » Study: Kids should eat better because exercise ‘is a terrible tool for losing weight’ – National Post

How active a kid is doesnt have that much of an influence on his or her weight, a new study has found. Instead, its the amount of food the child eats that can lead to them being overweight or obese.

American scientists took the calorie expenditure of kids from the Shuar tribe a group that mainly forages, and farms a little bit, in the Amazon and compared it to the expenditure of kids in America and U.K. While the Shuar children were more active than the kids in industrialized areas, and had better immune systems meaning their bodies spent energy in keeping them healthy from the open environment and exposures to bacteria the less active kids in the West still burned the same number of calories.

Its a trade-off, the new studys co-author Herman Pontzer told the National Post.

Even if a kid spends a lot of time running around, and, in the Shuar case, looking for food, theyll be expending a lot of energy for that activity, he explained. However, that doesnt mean the kid will spend calories at the same rate later. Instead, the body will use less energy for activities performed later on in the day.

Theres already been much research into how adults metabolisms operate, which shows that they too have a set amount of calories that their body will burn, regardless of activity level. Now the research conducted by Pontzer, the anthropologist Samuel Urlacher and their team has found that the same rings true for children.

Their findings could give us a better idea on how to handle childhood obesity; in this country, the obesity rate has nearly tripled in the last 30 years, according to Health Canada.

Obesity is an issue of energy imbalance. Youre eating more calories than you burn off, Pontzer said. The way you deal with obesity is you try to focus on the energy thats coming in, on diet.

Pontzer also heavily emphasized that the results dont mean that you dont need to exercise.

Exercise is a great tool, an essential tool, for keeping your body healthy and your immune system healthy. But for managing your weight, you want to focus on diet. Diet for weight and exercise for health.

And so, he pointed out, the common understanding that exercising more to earn that donut wont actually make a person lose weight. Even the World Health Organization encourages exercise to shed the kilos.

The idea (has been) that exercise is a good tool for losing weight and its not. Its a terrible tool for losing weight, Pontzer said. Exercise and diet have been given equal weighting when it comes to dropping pounds. That just gets the physiology wrong.

Simply put, a person cant out-exercise a bad diet.

Link:
Study: Kids should eat better because exercise 'is a terrible tool for losing weight' - National Post

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Home » Lose Weight Safely » Study: Kids should eat better because exercise ‘is a terrible tool for losing weight’ – National Post