Kids Pedal to Pay for View
Parents may have a way to budge their chip-chomping, TV-watching kids from the sofa: a bicycle hooked up electrically to the set. To see their favorite shows, couch potatoes have to pedal.
An obesity researcher who came up with the “TVcycle” says early tryouts helped youngsters shed fat and discouraged TV viewing.
David Allison of St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York knows parents are not going to race to rewire TV sets and cautions that his findings are preliminary.
But he says his small study of a few overweight New York children is important because it suggests tinkering with the technology that makes life more comfortable--but also more sedentary and fattening--could help trim Americans’ expanding waistlines.
“I am not naive enough to think we’re going to solve the world’s obesity problems with TVs hooked to bicycles,” Allison said. “But there are other things we could do . . . that are limited only by our imaginations.”
The National Institutes of Health says about 55% of American adults are overweight or obese, up from 43% in 1960. Studies also suggest more than 13% of youngsters ages 6 through 17 are overweight.
Lack of exercise is a main cause.
Research shows TV is a major culprit for kids, mesmerizing children who otherwise might burn calories by playing.
Formal exercise programs do not help much because it is hard to get to a gym or playground regularly, particularly for young children with busy parents, so scientists are hunting for home-based tricks to get kids moving, Allison said.
For his experiment, an engineer rewired TV sets to work only while the viewer was pedaling an attached bicycle. The TVcycles, which are back in Allison’s office as he hunts money for a larger study, are not for sale.
With NIH funding, Allison delivered the TVcycles to six overweight TV fans, ages 8 to 12, and put standard exercise bikes in front of televisions for four similar children.
Ten weeks later, the four kids who watched television while lolling on the couch saw 20 hours a week and bicycled only 8 minutes a week, Allison said in an interview Friday before presenting his results at a biology conference Sunday in Washington. The six TVcycle kids watched an hour a week and pedaled an hour a week.
The pedaling kids finished the study with 2 percentage points less total body fat and 3 percentage points less fat on their legs than the other children.
