High school football players overweight, 1 in 10 obese (@cnn.com)
My wife and I were watching the championship playoffs (Colts finally go to the Superbowl!) and couldn’t help but remark how it seems football players are getting larger and larger. Apparently, it’s not just us noticing; furthermore, apparently it’s not just NFL players that are getting bigger.
There’s some pretty staggering statistics about high school football players in a study printed in Journal of the American Medical Association:
Of the players analyzed, 28 percent were deemed at risk of being overweight and 45 percent fit the standards for being overweight, including 9 percent who met adult severe obesity standards.
9% met adult severe obesity standards. We’re talking about 16-year-olds here.
This follows another controversial study, also printed in JAMA, on NFL football players:
Almost all the players qualified as overweight, and 56 percent had BMIs of at least 30 — what doctors consider obese. For example, a 6-foot-2 man weighing 235 has a BMI of just over 30. Nearly half of the obese players were in the severely obese range, with a BMI of at least 35, and a small percentage were morbidly obese with a BMI of at least 40. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7052481/)
I’m usually pretty skeptical when it comes to statistics; in this case, the numbers themselves aren’t the real story, it’s the trend. Granted, BMI isn’t the most accurate way to measure a person’s body fat, but it’s a pretty good ballpark of your health due to your overall weight – even being too bulky can be hard on the body. Plus, since most high schoolers won’t play football for the NFL, or even in college, that muscle has a good chance of turning to fat.
This year, there’s a pretty good chance we’ll see an Iphone commercial, the much-touted GoDaddy commercial, a new CareerJobs commercial, and other witty multi-million-dollar corporate spots. It would be nice if just one spot could be donated to our teens’ role models broadcast to our nation the dangers of obesity. It would be ten seconds of public service announcement versus 4 hours of watching behemoths battle on the field of war, but it would be a good start.
