KidFit Online

Teenagers who drink a lot of soda have now been documented As being more prone to bone fractures and osteoporosis than thosewho do not drink much soda.

A questionnaire was given to 460 girls in the 9th and 10th grades, asking them about their diet and exercise habits, along with any History of fractures. The study’s results showed that girls who drank soft drinks were more than THREE TIMES MORE LIKELY to have a bone fracture. And physically active girls who drank Cola were nearly FIVE TIMES MORE LIKELY to have had a bone fracture.

Studies have linked mineral loss before to Cola consumption, but finally someone thought to check out teenager’s consumption and how it might affect them.

Between 40% to 60% of peak bone mass is built during the teenage years. Consumption of soft drinks affects both boys and girls. The acidic nature of the phosphoric acid in the drink causes the body to pull calcium out of the bones to buffer the acid.

Many teenagers are very active in sports. Note how much more likely drinkers of the soft drinks were likely to have a bone fracture? Thirty to fifty percent!! Is your teenager in sports and drinking soft drinks? Colas? I offer Nutritional work ups and mineral assays, using hair analysis. Teenagers I see in my practice today, more than ever before, are not eating many fruits and vegetables. These are needed to provide the minerals to build strong bones. To add to this the consumption of soft drinks and these teenagers are setting themselves up for conditions such as osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is a disease in which the bones have become more porous and therefore more fragile and prone to breaking. It is thought to be a problem for older people, however this study shows that teenagers may be the newest group to suffer.

How does your teenager score in soft drink consumption? How does (s)he score in eating plenty of green vegetables? Or other food choices such as yogurt, small amounts of cheese, Beans, Salmon and other things with high calcium/mineral content? And how much water is (s)he drinking? Your teenager may not like water after drinking all the flavored and sugared drinks. However water consumption is vitally important for health and electrical conductivity of the body. As a health practitioner, I suggest one quart of water for every 50 pounds of weight. So if your teenager weighs one hundred pounds, (s)he would need to drink two quarts of water a day. As an added incentive, tell them it will help clear up many bad skin problems.

Educate yourself and your teenager about the use of soft drinks and the consequences. Remember, Prevention is the best measure! Help them to understand the importance of eating their fruits and vegetables and drinking purified water.

Jeannie Crabtree C.Ac. has worked with both people and pet’s nutrition for the last 20 years. As a Health Practitioner she shares secrets about what to do about health challenges today. Solutions, Tips, Research, Nutrition and products discussed in the Newsletter Healthy Solutions. To Subscribe visit http://www.health-doc.com

Fit families are healthy families who have an active lifestyle. Frequently, they enjoy the things they do together, and the things they do together foster better communication and closer relationships than watching TV does.

Family fitness takes some parental commitment, leadership, and imagination, and you may have to listen to a lot of grousing and whining to start with, but the entire family will benefit as a result. Five factors that affect your family fitness plan are cost, convenience, family-friendly environment, fun, and success.

Cost

Family fitness doesn’t have to be expensive. Sure, you can drop a couple of hundred dollars or more taking the family skiing. But you can find a slope and sled down it on plastic trash bags for free. Most communities have free or low-cost family activities at community centers or parks. Check your local newspaper or parks and recreation department, and use your imagination to come up with activities your family can do together that don’t break the bank.

Convenience

Families are busy, and convenience is essential to a family fitness plan. If you have to go through a lot of hassle or travel a long way on a regular basis, you won’t follow through. Plan activities that you can do in your own backyard or neighborhood, like play Frisbee. You can also stay home to rake up leaves and jump in them, or make snow angels in the winter months. If you join a club or team, make it one that’s convenient to get to, and one the entire family can be a part of. Joining a bowling league is a great way to keep the family involved.

Family-Friendly Environment

When you join a club or plan an activity, make sure your whole family is welcome. It’s not much fun to look forward to an outing, and then discover that your kids are the only ones there. You want an appropriate environment for young children, too, where they will be safe and not exposed to “adult” language or behavior.

Fun

Fun is the key to successful family fitness. If everybody has fun, you’ll all want to do it again. Ask the kids what kind of activities they enjoy. You could even let them choose some family activities and help with the planning. Have a family meeting, and come up with a list of activities your family wants to try.

In addition to making sure your family fitness activities are fun, you can make sure your family fun activities center around fitness. Take everybody miniature golfing for a birthday instead of having a cake-and-ice-cream party. Celebrate Independence Day by going on a 10K walk together (which you’ll have to train for together). Walk around your neighborhood at Christmas and enjoy the lights, or sing carols. Bring fun and activity together as often as you can, and you and your kids will begin to associate an active lifestyle with having fun.

Success

Every member of your family needs to feel successful at whatever activities your family chooses. They don’t all have to be good at the activity as long as they enjoy it and feel good about themselves doing it. Family fitness can become an unhealthy competition that leaves less athletic family members feeling like failures, and that can defeat the purpose. Choose activities that everybody can participate in and enjoy at least moderate success at.

When our families pursue fitness together, we benefit in other ways, too. Your kids will remember and treasure family camping trips, going swimming together, and having family snowball fights. You’re building good health habits and good childhood memories at the same time, and the whole family is having fun doing it.

About the Author:
Denise Nero invites you to visit http://www.fitnessandkids.com for more great fitness articles, sign up for a free newsletter and receive a free recipe e-book.

Copyright © 2005 by Fitness and Kids. All content of this article is owned by Fitness and Kids. You must obtain permission to reproduce the article in whole or in part. To request permission, contact www.fitnessandkids.com

Are you concerned about the lack of exercise your child is getting?

Would you like to see them up and moving instead of sitting around so much?

Dance Dance revolution is the latest dance craze that is a fun and addictive way to help your child get get up and move without realizes they are even exercising.

Our kids health and fitness is more important today than ever before since video games, TV and computers are turning our kids into couch potatoes.

This new dance craze called Dance Dance revolution is a video game played on a gaming system but it is not your typical video game. This fun and exciting Dance pad is hooked up to any play station or Xbox then the player chooses one of  their favorite songs  from the DDR video game.

This fast paced game will surely get your child’s  heart pumping and their feet moving!  The player  chooses their song and they move their feet to the pattern of the arrows on the dance pad while keeping the beat to the flashing arrows that are moving side to side and up and down. As your child gets more practice on this engaging game, you will move to higher and higher levels which will progressively turn the game into a fun and challenging workout.

There are many kids today that do not like the typical physical activities that sports provide but once they try Dance Dance Revolution they are usually hooked.

There are many levels from beginner to advanced even the youngest of children can play Dance Dance Revolution.

What better way to get your children involved in exercise than by doing something they love.

If you have a gaming system such as a Play station or Xbox you can own Dance revolution, just connect the DDR Pad to any of these systems.  If you want your kids up off the couch doing something that is good for them while they are having fun I highly recommend DDR.  What better gift can you give them? Next time your child asks for a play station or Xbox game buy them the DDR pad and game.

Make sure your child keeps his water bottle close by, he’s going to need it after this workout.

Weight Loss and Dance revolution 

Dance Dance Revolution games offer a specific “Workout Mode” in which players can choose a song, and play accordingly using either the normal step routine, or a modified step routine designed to provided a workout. The workout mode also allows players to track their progress, not in the standard step scores, but by calories burned, minutes played, and distance traveled. The game also calculates the equivalent of DDR dancing to common exercise activities, and can keep track of a player’s weight as well. 

The built-in workout features have inspired many DDR fans to make playing DDR their primary source of exercise, and some have built entire weight-loss regimens around the game. However, as with all new diet or exercise plans, it is recommended that one discusses the changes with their doctor

There are many different types of DDR pad you can purchase.  You will need a gaming system such as a Play station  or an Xbox and of course the DDR pads and DDR games

So if you are interested in an extremely fun way to get in shape go ahead and give Dance Dance Revolution a try!  

Hear what others are saying about DDR:

Natalie, 14, was drawn to the pulsing techno songs, and didn’t realize she had slimmed down until she went clothes shopping.

“I went to go buy pants and the 14s were too big. The more I played, I gradually had to get smaller size pants,” said Natalie, who now buys size 8 baggy.

Zachary 13,  I did not even realize that I was exercising until my mom said something to me one day about losing weight.  I realized that Dance revolution was not only fun but I was getting a great workout!

Copyright © 2005 by Fitness and Kids. All content of this article is owned by Fitness and Kids. You must obtain permission to reproduce the article in whole or in part. To request permission, contact www.fitnessandkids.com

by Janet McConnaughey

Associated Press

One in three U.S. children born in 2000 will become diabetic unless many more people start eating less and exercising more, a scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns.

The odds are worse for black and Hispanic children: nearly half of them are likely to develop the disease, said Dr. K.M. Venkat Narayan, a diabetes epidemiologist at the CDC.

“I think the fact that the diabetes epidemic has been raging has been well known to us for several years. But looking at the risk in these terms was very shocking to us,” Narayan said.

The 33 percent lifetime risk is about triple the American Diabetes Association’s current estimate.

The implications are frightening. Diabetes leads to a host of problems, including blindness, kidney failure, amputation and heart disease, and diabetics are getting younger and younger.

Including undiagnosed cases, authorities believe about 17 million Americans, nearly 6 percent of the U.S. population, have diabetes today.

If the CDC predictions are accurate, some 45 million to 50 million U.S. residents could have diabetes by 2050, said Dr. Kevin McKinney, director of the adult clinical endocrinological unit at the University of Texas Medical Center in Galveston.

“There is no way that the medical community could keep up with that,” he said.

McKinney, who was not part of the study, said Narayan’s procedures are valid and the estimates, being presented Saturday to the American Diabetes Association, are probably all too likely.

Diabetes, a disease caused largely by obesity and lack of exercise, has been an increasing worry for decades. From the mid-1960s to the mid-’90s, the number of cases tripled.

The number of diagnosed cases rose by nearly half in just the past 10 years, hitting 11 million in 2000, and is expected to rise an additional 165 percent by 2050, to 29 million, an earlier CDC study by Narayan and others found.

“These estimates I am giving you now are probably quite conservative,” Narayan said in an interview before the diabetes association’s annual scientific meeting here.

Narayan said it would be difficult to say whether undiagnosed cases would rise at the same rate. If they did, that could push the 2050 figure to 40 million or more.

Doctors had known for some time that Type 2 diabetes – what used to be called adult-onset diabetes because it typically showed up in middle-aged people – is on the rise, and that patients are getting younger.

Nobody else had crunched the numbers to look at current odds of getting the disease, Narayan said.

Overall, he said, 39 percent of the girls who now are healthy 2 1/2- to 3-year-olds and 33 percent of the boys are likely to develop diabetes, he said.

For Hispanic children, the odds are closer to one in two: 53 percent of the girls and 45 percent of the boys. The numbers are about 49 percent and 40 percent for black girls and boys, and 31 percent and 27 percent for white girls and boys.

To reach his estimates, Narayan used data from the annual National Health Interview Survey of about 360,000 people from 1984-2000, from the U.S. Census Bureau and from a previous study of diabetes as a cause of death.

Globally, the World Health Organization has estimated that by 2025, the number of people with diabetes worldwide will more than double, from 140 million to 300 million.

“They estimated that by 2025, there would be close to 60 million people with diabetes in India alone. That’s about the size of Great Britain or France,” Narayan said.

It doesn’t have to happen.

Type 2 diabetes can be prevented or delayed by losing weight, exercising and following a sensible diet.

A study two years ago found that walking 30 minutes a day most days of the week and losing a little weight helped the people most likely to get it cut their risk 58 percent.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services used that information last fall in its “Small Steps, Big Rewards” campaign against diabetes.

Our spring-inspired recipes incorporate fresher and lighter ingredients for the season. The colorful dishes capture the renewal of spring and replenish a hungry appetite for flavorful dining. This month’s recipes include Baked Pears with Vanilla Yogurt and Granola, a Quick Turkey Wrap Sandwich Lunch, A Roasted Tomato and Cheese Tart with Spring Salad and Two-Cheese Meditteranean Stuffed Chicken.
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Spring is here at last, and after those long cold winter months your kids will be itching to get out of the house as fast as their feet will carry them. While this fine weather will afford them a chance for what is probably some much needed physical activity, make sure your kids know some basic safety rules before running off for the playground.

1. Make sure they tell you where they go. It is important to know where your child will be playing, whether it’s in your own backyard, down the street or at a friend’s house. This way if an emergency comes up, you know where to find them.
2. Teach your child to use playground equipment properly. Make sure your kids know not to get off a seesaw too quickly, or walk in front of a moving swing. They should also take turns using the equipment when the playground is crowded to prevent accidents.
3. Tell your child to never play in the street or in parking lots. Even if you live on a generally quiet street, it is important that your kids stick to yards or sidewalks. Someone backing out of their driveway may not see a child run out behind them. They should always remember to look both ways before crossing the street, as well.
4. Teach your children to never talk to strangers. Tell your kids about the different ways strangers try to lure them, like offering them candy or asking for help, so that they are not taken in by such tricks.

For a free class on staying safe and injury free with spring sports call 215-355-5003

Mr. Brenner

Author Black Belt Parenting

Master Instructor, Action Karate

• Plan ahead now to prepare for the next soggy day outside; so whenever the rain puts a damper on your kids’ mood and cabin fever begins to drive everyone crazy, you’ll be ready to snap into action with some quick ideas to keep your children occupied and having fun for hours. Here are some suggestions:  A game of Twister, turning your home into an indoor obstacle course, dancing, and puppet shows!
• Make sure everyone in your family is fully equipped with the proper rain gear – rain coat, rain boots and umbrella – since we don’t want anyone catching colds, especially right into the spring season!
• When beginning to plant your beautiful garden this spring, why not have your kids join you? Gardening can be a great way to get the whole family active.
• Rainy days make for a great time to review all of your children’s school work and can bring everything back on track for you when you feel you’ve lost your ground. If they have a quiz or test approaching, quiz them and make a game out of it including flash crads and the rest of the family.
• Start a family tradition this spring with a ‘Family Spring Clean-Up’. Have you and your children clean out their closet and old toys to remove clutter and get organized. Donate items in good condition to local charity.