Wondering what you can do as part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move program to stop the super-sizing of our kids? If you have preschoolers, you can do three things according to a study to be published in the March Pediatrics.
- Eat dinner as a family (at the table, not on TV trays assembled in front of the “Family Guy”).
- Make sure your preschooler gets at least 10.5 hours of sleep a night.
- Don’t let them have more than two hours of screen time a day.
According to a survey of parents of 8,550 4-year-olds, kids who adhered to the above three practices were 40 percent less likely to be obese than their slacker counterparts who sucked down their mac & cheese in front of a dusk-to-dawn Dora marathon.
“One of the things that’s potentially useful about recommending these routines, if they’re suggested as part of obesity-prevention counseling, is that they may have other benefits, too,” says the study’s lead author, Sarah Anderson, an assistant professor of epidemiology in the College of Public Health at Ohio State University in Columbus. “We don’t know if it’s the routines per se, or if it’s the parenting associated with these routines or something else correlated with these routines, but we do know these routines are associated with a lower incidence of obesity.”
That could mean instead of fast food in front of the TV, the tots are eating home-cooked (and presumably healthier) meals at the table, they’re off wearing themselves out at the playground rather than being babysat by cable, and instead of staying up late wired by too much TV and chemical-laden food, they’re passed out from a day on the jungle gym.
Read more about the study here.