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Playgrounds and Athletic Facilities - Untapped Resource in Fight Against Childhood Obesity |
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RAND: A RAND Corporation study issued today says school playgrounds and athletic facilities can be important tools in the fight against childhood obesity, but many are locked and inaccessible to children on weekends -- especially in poor and minority neighborhoods. The study is a new analysis of data from a national research study called the Trial of Activity for Adolescent Girls. The data deals with the physical activity of 1,556 girls in the sixth grade in six metropolitan areas: Washington, D.C./Baltimore, Md.; Columbia, S.C.; Minneapolis, Minn.; New Orleans, La.; Tucson, Ariz.; and San Diego, Calif. Researchers visited all the schools and parks within a half-mile radius of the homes of the girls on Saturdays in the spring of 2003 for the original study. The 407 schools represented 44 percent of potential neighborhood sites for physical activity. "Girls who lived near locked schools tended to be heavier, and neighborhoods with locked schools were disproportionately poor and had larger minority populations," said Molly M. Scott, lead author of the study and research analyst with RAND, a nonprofit research organization. Although the RAND Health study didn't find a relationship between school accessibility and increased weekend physical activity rates, the number of locked schools was associated with significantly higher body mass index for the girls. Hispanic and African-American girls had 7.2 percent and 7.8 percent higher BMIs respectively than whites, and non-white girls recorded less physical activity than their white counterparts. "Studies consistently find that people of different races have different BMIs, but the policy implications of that are often unclear," Scott said.
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