|
Children need more exercise. |
|
A paper in The Lancet recommends children do at least 90 minutes of exercise per day.
The current guidelines in the UK regarding childhood exercise recommend that children should have 1 hour of moderate exercise per day. However, Andersen et al. writing in The Lancet recommend at least 90 minutes per day. They did a cross-sectional study of 1732 children aged 9 - 15 years and assessed exercise levels using accelerometry. They also assessed cardiovascular risk factors such as blood pressure, triglyceride, total cholesterol/HDL ratio, insulin resistance, and skin-fold thickeness. They derived a composite risk score and found that the risk score decreased with increasing levels of exercise. However, the current 1 hour exercise recommendation did not appear to be sufficient to prevent clustering of cardiovascular risk factors. |
