Who knows where I can find out how much exercise the average British child does per day?

[ViciousSquirrelSpotter]

Please please please I need to know urgent

So urgently that I can't be bothered with fripperies like grammar

And also the rate of childhood obesity

,

Oh someone must know

have been googling frantically and can only find 10 years out of date stuff

not sure there are any exercise figures, VSS: what age of child?
I have the obesity stuff at home (am at work now). How urgent is urgent?

In the meantime, how about this...

"We have entered the 21st century in the knowledge that more and more children in the UK are becoming overweight or obese. Data from a number of UK studies have indicated that there has been a marked increase, particularly since the 1980s. Data on 4?11-year-olds, from three independent cross-sectional surveys published in the British Medical Journal, showed that from 1984 to 1994 the percentage classified as overweight increased from 5.4% to 9% in English boys, and from 9.3% to 13.5% in English girls.1 Data from the Health Survey for England indicate that in 2001 approximately 8.5% of 6- year-olds and 15% of 15-year-olds were obese. Information collected by the European Association for the study of Obesity (EASO) Childhood Obesity Taskforce also showed that the UK has one of the highest prevalence rates of overweight children in Europe...."
For more, google National Obesity Forum...

also (same source):
"In addition, much physical activity has been removed from the daily lives of children. The time spent in active play has been replaced by more sedentary pursuits, such as watching television and playing computer games.

The number of primary school children who walk to and from school has fallen from 62% in 1989/91 to 56% today
Participation in school sport (>2 hours per week) decreased from 46% in 1994 to 33% in 1999
Watching television is the most popular sedentary activity for children of all ages, with over a quarter of 11?16-year-olds watching more than 4 hours a day
Activity levels for teenage girls are particularly low with 64% of 15-year-old girls being classified as ?inactive?"

Ooh marvellous, I am doing a presentation, tomorrow would do, it's first thing Friday AM

Try a search on www.bmj.com, should come up with studies of childhood obesity prevalence and exercise interventions.

Try ringing Canterbury Uni they have those body pods and are doing a (for want of a better word) project on childhood obesity, they came to DS school five times last summer with the bod pod, and we all had to write down our kids diet and exercise for a month at the beginning and end. Sorry I know thats prob not much help.

OK VSS, here we go:

CHILDHOOD OBESITY: one in three British kids is overweight and one in seven is obese (these are Govt stats).

EXERCISE: most studies are from US. But Scottish study in Lancet in 2004 found average 3-year-old is active for only 20 minutes a day (!).
See the other stats I posted earlier for older kids.

HTH

a useful site for all kind of facts and figures is the uk statistics office

will have a quick gander and let you know if i find anything...

this would be more useful if it had more recent data

but a few links to other data on that page

this is alittle more recent

Oh thank you thank you thank you for all this

1 in 6 dc obese sounds like an awful lot, yet I rarely see overweight dc (mind you I'm in Germany but I don't think it's much different here). I haven't seen any dc in dd's school who strike me as overweight.

vss, did you click through from the national stats site to this data from the nhs?

(that nat stats site fabulous resource - used to plunder it regularly at work for various facts and figures)