Everytime I read something about childhood obesity I cant help but think about how much time kids spend in front of the telly and their gaming stations.

I actually feel really proud of the level of activity that kids do while they are running around at Run M Ragged and feel like we have provided a positive, fun and nurturing environment where kids can really use up some energy.

This is also the reason that Tony and I decided before we opened Run M Ragged 4 and 1/2 years ago that we would not have computers or gaming stations at Run M Ragged Indoor Play Centre & Gourmet Cafe.  We know a lot of Indoor Play Centre do have them but we wanted to provide a place where the emphasis was on physical activity.  Lets face it, almost all kids have a Wii or an X-Box or something like that at home but you dont get to have a massive play structure at home!

We also wanted to make it affordable and easily accessable to all families to play in our indoor play centre & cafe  regardless of how many kids you have.  Thats why we set up our VIP Passes so that you could pay a small weekly fee and get unlimited entry for the whole family.  So regardless of whether you are looking for kids activites on hot days (we have air-conditioning) or if you are looking for a family friendly activity on a rainy day, for a small weekly fee the whole family can afford to come and play.

The following article is from the Age Newspaper and well worth a read.

Fat chance

Good habits start early

The numbers are extraordinary and deeply worrying: among Victorian two-year-olds, one in every six is overweight or obese — and for children aged 3 the proportion is almost one in five.

Startling as these figures are, they reflect the state of Australian adults, with more than two-thirds of men and more than half the women overweight or obese.

Once established, obesity can be difficult to reverse. On current trends, the proportion of children who are overweight or obese is expected to double in the next 30 years, when 60 per cent of those aged seven to 15 are likely to be excessively plump.

Fortunately, researchers at Deakin University have shown that a community-wide healthy eating and active play program for preschool children can reverse the obesity trend and make long-lasting improvements in their eating and drinking habits.

If the preschool scheme tested in Geelong were coupled with other programs in primary and secondary schools, and extended across the state, it could lay the foundations for a healthier adulthood for tens of thousands of youngsters.

“We found that the children in our study ate more vegetables and less packaged snacks than those elsewhere in Victoria, drank more water and milk and less fruit juice,” says Dr Andrea de Silva-Sanigorski, project leader of the Deakin team. “These are important changes to promote good general health and also good dental health.”

Dr de Silva-Sanigorski and her colleagues provided support, training and evaluation for the scheme. Called “Romp and Chomp”, the Geelong-based program for preschoolers resulted in a 15 per cent fall in the proportion of two-year-olds who were obese or overweight and an 18 per cent drop among those aged 3.

“The impact the program has had on the children is extraordinary,” she says. “That it proved so successful is testimony to the power a community has to improve young children’s health.”

The program was aimed at all children aged under five years and their families in the Geelong community. The intervention was primarily implemented by Barwon Health and focused on creating environments for the children that promoted healthy eating and physical activity consistently across the community.

Activities were conducted in preschools, long-day-care centres, the family day-care service, the maternal child health service, regional immunisation services, dental health services, local government and community health services.

“The kindergartens, child-care centres and family day-care providers who were involved actively implemented policies to promote the program’s messages,” Dr de Silva-Sanigorski says.

She says consistent promotion of healthy eating and physical activity for young children included banning sweet drinks in the various centres while parents were encouraged to adhere to healthy eating guidelines. There was also “reduced use of unhealthy fund-raising activities”.

A key result of the project, as Dr de Silva-Sanigorski says, is its potential to affect children’s health in the long term: “It is possible that it will set up the children for a lifetime of good health by establishing healthy eating and activity behaviours early. But it is also important that similar programs are run in primary schools so this good work is not undone when the children reach school.”

She says the Romp and Chomp project is Australia’s first successful community-based obesity prevention intervention in early childhood. It shows that taking the right sort of action to prevent childhood obesity does have an effect.

“But this requires long-term, committed partnerships with a range of children’s health, education and care settings across a whole community.”

The evaluation of Romp and Chomp was conducted as a repeat cross-sectional study with data collected from about 1000 children in 2004 and follow-up data collected in 2007 after the program had been operating for three years.

Questionnaires were used to collect policy, socio-cultural and physical environmental data in the long-day-care centres, family day-care service and kindergartens. A short eating and physical activity questionnaire was used to obtain behavioural data on children’s eating and activity from parents when they attended for their child health checks.

Each child’s weight, height, age, gender and socio-economic status were obtained from the universal maternal health child data in 2004 and 2007 for Geelong as well as from a Victorian state sample for comparison. The comparison sample included local government areas matched for socio-economic status and population size with the Geelong sample.

The data collected at the maternal health centres was used to determine the children’s body mass index, standardised body mass index and weight status (classified as healthy weight, overweight or obese) for those children who had undergone health checks at two and 3.5 years.

Dr de Silva-Sanigorski says the evaluation was complex and involved comparisons between the two groups of children at the two stages and with the state sample that acted as a control.

The results revealed a statistically significant reduction in weight issues and obesity among the two-year-olds involved in the Romp and Chomp project and an even larger reduction among the children aged 3.

A higher proportion of children in the intervention sample also had a “healthier weight” than the comparison group and were less overweight or obese. Dr de Silva-Sanigorski says the same effects would most likely occur if the Romp and Chomp program were repeated elsewhere across Australia, provided other states had a similar structure of early childhood settings.

“The success factors are about the consistency of message across the entire community within the different centres so families received the same messages in each early childhood setting. We did not measure family-level impact but kindergarten teachers told us that parents complained their children kept saying when they were out shopping, ‘Oh no, you can’t buy that, that’s not healthy,’ so the kids became the police . . .”

Source:  The Age