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Thursday, September 05, 2002"It is a crisis. It is the new challenge in public health in the United States," said Sue Y.S. Kimm, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who headed the Growth and Health Study run by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. When I read statements like that I thank God we live in a free country. Imagine if Dr. Kimm were the health officer in a totalitarian state. We would have exercise police forcing teenage girls to march around the block or play softball. It’s not clear why Dr. Kimm thinks this is a crisis. Both her study and the other one in the Washington Post article on exercise in older women are poorly written. Neither reveal their raw data, only ratios and percentages, so it’s difficult to say exactly how many girls in Dr. Kimm’s study exercised regularly and how many didn’t - and by how much those numbers declined over the years. Dr. Kimm made the same sort of overstatement in the article, saying that the results should “sound an alarm, given the current epidemic of obesity.” But is obesity truly an “epidemic”? Even by the end of the study when the girls were their least active their body mass index averaged 25.9 for blacks and 23.1 for whites. To be obese, it has to be over 30. What’s truly alarming about the study is that 50% of the black girls live in poverty (household income <$20,000) and 22% had been pregnant by the time they were 17. Those two problems are more worthy of public attention and resources than whether or not girls exercise every day. posted by Sydney on 9/05/2002 07:15:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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