IHPRA Newsletter
April 2003
It's called Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World. The Author is Greg Critser. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 2003.
"Fat Land highlights the groundbreaking research that implicates cheap fats and sugars as the alarming new metabolic factors making our calories stick, and shows how and why children are too often the chief metabolic victims of such foods. No one else writing on obesity in America takes as hard a line as Critser on the institutionalized lies we've been telling ourselves about how much we can eat and how little we can exercise."
Chapter 4 takes a close and brutally
candid look at physical educators, physical fitness experts
and others like them who shape our notions of exercise.
"If the 1980s saw the traditional custodians of caloric intake--parents, school, church and society--go on an extended vacation, the period also witnessed another change. This one took place among those charged with stimulating the nation's physical culture--those whose job it is to promulgate caloric expenditure. The reasons were, as the experts liked to say, "multifactorial," ranging from taxpayer parsimony to denial to outright political dogma. One thing was certain. Increasingly, when it came to public physical fitness--the kind of venture the JFK so successfully advocated in the early 1960s--the nation was (often literally) out to lunch. Physical Fitness? That was an individual pursuit, hardly something on which to waste scarce public resources, let alone actually promote."
Here is a link to the Iowa Administrative Code Health and Physical Education content requirements.
Physical Fitness Keeps Older Minds Sharp: Report
Run, Don't Walk to Stave Off Heart Death: UK Study
Here is a link to the International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sport.
Potato chips and cola. School cafeterias are killing our children. . .
And our children might be even more overweight than recent data suggests.
And some research links chronic obesity to behavior problems in kids.
And some obese kids may be as unhappy as those with cancer
And obese children and teens have poorer quality of life.
Not many years ago, many experts denounced weight and strength training for adults.
Now it is even good for children.
Here is an ACSM statement concerning youth strength training.
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Off-the-ground training was once an integral part of physical education in the United States. It fell victim to the "Battle of the Systems" in the early 1900s, and has never recovered. The window ladder was one of the innovations we once employed. First developed by the Swedes, it is still used by the British.