UQ research has found links between a lack of exercise and childhood and adolescent obesity.
Senior Research Fellow in Physical Activity and Health at the School of Human Movement Studies Dr Stewart Trost is advancing the understanding of how physical inactivity affects the development and maintenance of obesity in children.
Dr Trost has successfully tested a program devised as an alternative to hospital based exercise.
Dr Trost said he worked with 20 obese children in Brisbane to increase the amount of exercise they were doing.
“These children were taking around 9,000 steps per day; an active child would take around 16,000. “At the end of the program they would do 14,000 steps a day,” he said.
The program was carried out over a 10 week period with children referred to Dr Trost by paediatricians. A pedometer was used to count the number of steps taken by each child per day and then goals were set to gradually increase the number of steps by around 40 percent.
“The results have shown that a home-based activity program can be implemented successfully. “It is an alterative to these children going to hospital and being watched over as they are exercising,” he said.
A National Health and Medical Research Council internal UQ grant provided the funding for this research.
Dr Trost has been working on several research projects related to obesity prevention in children and adolescents. He has received funding for two other research projects he has been working on which focus on family links to childhood and adolescent obesity.
He currently has a paper in review that considers whether preschool aged children from families in which the parents are overweight, do the same amount of exercise as other children. Dr Trost has also researched the role of parental support and obesity in children.
His findings suggest that children with obese parents are at an increased risk of being overweight and obese because of low levels of physical activity during the preschool day.
He said that a lack of exercise was definitely one of the reasons for the increase in childhood obesity. “It is difficult for kids to walk or ride to school. “Television watching and computer games have also increased,” he said.
“There is too much energy going in and not enough energy coming out,” he said.
Dr Trost said he was currently seeking to extend his research by carrying out national surveys of physical exercise in children.
For more information, contact Dr Stewart Trost on (telephone 07 3365 6112, email: strost@hms.uq.edu.au) or UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 3367, email: communications@uq.edu.au).
