Children still skip rope and play pickup ballgames, but today's parents also organize playdates, fitness lessons and gym classes to keep their kids active and safe. Almost 17 percent of U.S. children and adolescents were obese in 2009-10, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many adults willingly suffer to banish love handles, but children insist on having a good time. So making fitness fun is key, experts say, along with starting early.
"We used to simply play outside," said Dr. Avery Faigenbaum, a pediatric exercise scientist, professor and researcher at the College of New Jersey. "Some parks and playgrounds are too unsafe. We need programs but we need to be sure they're developmentally appropriate."
Just as learning a language is easier when it is started as a child, the same is true for movement, according to Faigenbaum.
Total body movements, as in dance and martial arts are ideally suited to young children, he added, especially when performed under the guidance of an instructor who can connect with children.
"Those are skills children can carry over for life," he said.
Jodi B. Komitor, a former elementary school teacher and the founder of "Next Generation Yoga," teaches yoga to children starting at 18 months.
"Children learn through movement and yoga is a movement-based science that's been around for over 5,000 years," said Komitor.
"A lot of parents tell us their kids start doing downward dog naturally," she added, referring to the yoga pose.
Komitor designed her first studio for kids' yoga, in New York, after the Wizard of Oz. Unlike adult yoga sessions, which cultivate quietness, her children's classes are often noisy and always age-specific. Classes have a foundation of yoga poses and incorporate playfulness and self-expression.
HIDING THE MEDICINE IN THE CANDY
Much as Zumba, the Latin-based dance/fitness craze, purported to hide the fitness in the party, Zumba CEO Alberto Perlman likes to say that Zumbatomic, the dance classes designed for kids ages four to 12, hides the medicine in the candy.
"With younger kids class is not only about fitness but also about developing motor skills," said Perlman. Ashley Walters runs the Kid Action program at Streb in Brooklyn, New York. The program, based on the choreography of founder Elizabeth Streb, intertwines dance, athletics, boxing, rodeo and circus skills.
"For five-to-seven-year-olds we teach a lot of beginner gymnastic skills. Kids love slamming and falling and we teach them how to fall," said Walters, adding they tumble onto thick mats. "Kids are always trying to do things like this on their beds."
Faigenbaum believes that movement training should begin at the preschool level. At seven or eight the child is usually ready for sport and some strength conditioning.
He added that research shows that children who have developed their motor skills, such as throwing, running, kicking, hopping, twisting, are more likely to be remain active as adults. "The obese child is likely to become the obese adolescent," he added.
Although children may not want to follow mom and dad to the gym, experts say youngsters still need at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity a day, every day.
"TV is nothing more than an obesity machine," said Faigenbaum. "The best treatment is prevention. As soon as a child can walk we should engage them in activity breaks - 10 to 15 minutes when they are up and moving." He urged parents to take an activity history of their child.
"Ask them every day: how active were you today? Were you breathing hard?" he said. "Anyone can make a child tired. What's challenging is to keep them engaged, teach them something new."
Despite many studies linking higher blood levels of vitamin D to
fewer heart attacks and deaths, a new trial found giving older women
daily D supplements didn't cut their heart-related risks.The women's cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar was no lower after a year of taking one of two doses of vitamin D, compared to those who took vitamin-free placebo pills.
So-called observational studies - which measure vitamin D in people's blood and then follow them over time - have tended to find a link between vitamin levels and heart health.
"There is a tremendous amount of epidemiological data showing a relationship between low vitamin D levels and increased risk of cardiovascular events," said Dr. Michel Chonchol, who has studied that association at the University of Colorado Denver but wasn't involved in the new research.
But those types of trials can't prove cause-and-effect because it's impossible to take into account all the possible diet and lifestyle differences between people with lower and higher vitamin D levels.
Randomized controlled trials, considered the "gold standard" of medical studies, aim to get around that hurdle. By randomly dividing a group of people and giving some but not others a particular treatment, researchers can better hone in on its specific effects.
For the new trial, Adrian Wood from the University of Aberdeen in the UK and colleagues split 305 women in their sixties into three groups. Each morning for one year, the women took either 400 international units (IU) or 1000 IU of vitamin D or a placebo.
The participants returned to the lab every two months for a panel of heart-related tests.
At the start of the study, women in each group were similar on most of those health measures. Women in the placebo group, for example, had an average weight of 152 pounds, a blood pressure of 128/78 and total cholesterol of 238.
Over the next year, cholesterol and blood pressure varied by season - but not based on whether women were taking extra vitamin D.
In the end, there was no clear difference between the three groups in changes among any of the heart-related markers, Wood's team reported in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
The study didn't look far enough out, or have enough women, to determine whether vitamin D might affect heart attacks or deaths.
Food sources of vitamin D include cod liver oil and other fish as well as fortified juice and dairy products.
The Institute of Medicine recommends that most adults get 600 IU of vitamin D per day. In a 2010 report it concluded there is strong evidence connecting both vitamin D and calcium to better bone health but that other proposed benefits, including for blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, are shakier.
Still, some researchers believe taking extra vitamin D - especially for people who have very low levels to begin with - may help prevent body-wide inflammation and play a role in regulating blood sugar levels.
Since the juice on your supermarket's shelves may not have that PAC level, the researchers say their findings are not an endorsement of any product.But the results, published in the Journal of Urology, do give support to cranberry as a UTI fighter, according to a pediatric urologist not connected to the study.
PACs are the compounds thought to give cranberries their bacteria-fighting potential. Women have long turned to cranberry juice and supplements to help prevent recurrent urinary tract infections (UTIs) - though studies have been mixed on whether they work.
There has been little research on kids, even though UTIs are relatively common in children. Girls have about an 8 percent chance of contracting the infection at some point in childhood; boys have a 2 percent chance.Besides being uncomfortable, recurrent UTIs can eventually damage the kidneys in some children. So doctors may prescribe antibiotics to help prevent them.
But antibiotics can have side effects, and using them long-term can breed-resistant bacteria. So researchers are looking at whether cranberry products can be a good alternative.For the new study, doctors at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, recruited 40 children who'd had at least two UTIs in the past year. They randomly assigned the kids to drink one of two juices made for the study: a cranberry juice rich in PACs or a juice free of all "cranberry products."
Over the next year, kids who drank cranberry juice had UTIs at a rate of 0.4 per child, compared with 1.15 in the comparison group. The power of cranberries against UTIs "was initially regarded as an old wives' tale," said Dr. Hiep Nguyen of Boston Children's Hospital, who was not involved in the study.But Nguyen said he now often recommends cranberry - either juice or supplements - when kids have recurrent UTIs.
"It can be a great alternative to prophylactic (preventive) antibiotics," Nguyen said.
That doesn't mean cranberry is the cure-all. If a child has frequent UTIs, Nguyen said, antibiotics may be necessary to "break the cycle." On top of that, many children's UTIs are related to less-than-ideal bathroom habits - like "holding it in," rather than going when they need to.
Drinking enough fluids, going to the bathroom regularly, and - if needed - tackling constipation problems are all considered important in warding off kids' UTIs. So Nguyen cautioned parents against simply running to the grocery store for cranberry juice. "They still should see a doctor, so they can try to address the underlying problem," Nguyen said.
What's more, there's no guarantee that the cranberry juice you buy would have the PAC content that the juice in this study did.
"The findings of this study should not be construed as an endorsement of any commercially available cranberry products," write the researchers, led by Dr. Kourosh Afshar. (Afshar could not be reached for comment.)
Nguyen agreed that juice can be tricky. "Pure cranberry juice often doesn't taste so good," he noted. So manufacturers often mix it with something more palatable, like apple juice, or add a lot of sugar.
Cranberry juice mixed with other juices would likely have lower PAC levels. If there's added sugar, that means calories; drinking a lot of sugary juice can also cause diarrhea in kids.
"We do worry about the sugar content," Nguyen said.
So it would be important, he noted, not to overdo cranberry juice. In this study, the daily dose prescribed to each child was based on body weight.
Cranberry tablets are the other option. But no one knows the exact dose needed to prevent any one child's UTIs. Right now, it's basically a matter of following the product's labeling, according to Nguyen.
Six kids in each group of the study dropped out before they had completed it. The top reasons were the parents' belief that the juice wasn't working, and kids just refusing to drink it.Getting children to drink cranberry juice can be a challenge, Nguyen noted - especially the pure variety without a ton of sugar.
Ocean Spray provided both juices used in the study. The work was funded by the Lions Gate Healthcare Research Foundation.
But lighting up a cigarette or remaining chained to your desk rather than getting out to do some exercise is far more damaging for your heart health, researchers said.
A study of nearly 200,000 people from seven European countries found around 3.4 percent of heart attacks can be attributed to job strain - a significant proportion, but far less than the 36 percent attributable to smoking and 12 percent put down to lack of exercise.
For the study, which was published online in The Lancet medical journal, researchers analyzed job strain in employees who had no previous coronary heart disease (CHD).
Participants completed questionnaires about their job demands, workload, the level of time-pressure demands and their freedom to make decisions.
"Our findings indicate that job strain is associated with a small, but consistent, increased risk of experiencing a first CHD event such as a heart attack," said Mika Kivimaki from University College London, who led the research.
Peter Weissberg, medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said the findings confirmed that being under stress at work and being unable to change the situation could increase the risk of developing heart disease.
But he noted they also showed the negative effects of workplace strain are much smaller than the damage caused by smoking or lack of exercise.
"Though stresses at work may be unavoidable, how you deal with these pressures is important, and lighting up a cigarette is bad news for your heart," he said in an emailed comment.
"Eating a balanced diet, taking regular exercise and quitting smoking will more than offset any risk associated with your job."
