Amish kids counter diet with activity

Published 5:00 am Thursday, March 29, 2007

The nation’s growing childhood obesity crisis has left many wondering whether technology is to blame. A new study offering the closest thing to a time machine may offer the answers.

Researchers studying the activity levels of Amish children living in southern Ontario in Canada have found much lower rates of overweight and obesity, despite a high-calorie diet. Dr. David Bassett, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, tracked the numbers of steps taken by 139 Amish children and adolescents over seven days using pedometers.

He found that the Amish boys averaged 19,400 steps per weekday, while girls averaged 15,300 steps. U.S. elementary school children average about 12,000 steps per day.

Only 7.2 percent of the Amish children were overweight, and only 1.4 percent were obese. About a quarter of American children are overweight and between 7 percent and 12 percent are obese.

”This Old Order Amish community provides a glimpse at what may be possible, even required, if physical activity were not engineered out of so many daily tasks,” Bassett says. ”Based on our results, it’s fair to say that advances in modern technology are contributing to the current obesity epidemic. Although it would be impractical to mimic the Amish lifestyle, this study suggests that increased levels of physical activity could mitigate some of the health problems caused by sedentary habits.”

In their activity logs, the Amish children reported daily chores including milking, gardening, feeding farm animals and carrying wood. Most of the kids walked to school, even in inclement weather. Their school day included two scheduled recesses and an hourlong lunch outdoors.

”The high levels of physical activity and low prevalence of overweight and obesity in these Amish youth are striking,” Bassett says. ”From that perspective, modern conveniences in contemporary society may contribute to health problems down the road.”

Old Order Amish shun modern technology, so their children don’t spend any time watching television, playing video games or surfing the Internet.

In a study of activity levels among adults, Bassett observed that the Amish diet is typically high in calories, fat and refined sugar. Their meals normally include meat, potatoes, gravy, eggs, vegetables, bread, pies and cakes.

The findings are part of a growing recognition that physical activity, rather than merely caloric restriction, may be the answer to rapidly expanding waistlines among American youth.

Another study published this month by the online journal PLoS Medicine found that low levels of physical activity, particularly of moderate and vigorous activity, are highly correlated with obesity. Researchers from the University of Bristol in the U.K. wanted to parse out which factor – eating too much or moving too little – is most responsible for weight gain among kids.

Calculating activity and obesity in kids is not as simple as it might seem. Unlike adults who tend to exercise in finite blocks of times, children’s activity levels tend to be more sporadic and harder to capture accurately by simply asking. Meanwhile, levels of overweight and obesity have typically been gauged by body mass index, a ratio of total weight to height. However, that index doesn’t distinguish between fat and muscle mass.

To overcome those hurdles, the Bristol researchers turn to high-tech devices. They used an electronic-motion sensor, known as an accelerometer, to measure activity levels. And they used a high-tech X-ray scanner to measure fat mass. The study, involving 5,500 children, consistently found the lower the activity levels the higher fat mass, with the effect being much stronger in boys than in girls.

The researchers also found that a modest increase in moderate or vigorous physical activity, about 15 minutes per day, lowered the odds of obesity by more than 50 percent in boys and nearly 40 percent in girls.