Survey to help curb obesity
Nicolette Burke and Kate Jones
19apr06
VICTORIAN schoolchildren should be weighed and surveyed on what they eat and how much they exercise to try to curb childhood obesity.
This call comes from the state's peak health promotion body, VicHealth, which claims more needs to be done to trim kids' waistlines.
VicHealth chief executive Rob Moodie said yesterday that monitoring childhood health was instrumental in fighting the obesity epidemic.
"If you don't measure something you don't know how to manage it, and that's how this whole epidemic sneaked up on us in the first place," Dr Moodie said.
The call came as the ACT Government announced a plan to weigh schoolchildren as young as five every three years.
ACT Health Minister Simon Corbell said the Physical Activity and Nutrition Survey would help direct spending on campaigns to get children more active.
About 1200 primary students will hit the scales in 35 schools, and be asked key details, such as their diets and activity levels, to chart the factors leading to children's expanding waistlines.
"The Physical Activity and Nutrition Survey will be conducted across the ACT, in public and non-government schools sectors. It will involve the collection of height and weight information on those kids, and involve a questionnaire that will try to get information on their level of physical activity, nutrition and a range of other factors to do with health and wellbeing."
The students will be selected in kindergartens and also weighed in grades 3 and 6.
Figures show about 17 per cent of Australian children are overweight, and 6 per cent obese.
Ben Hart, a spokesman for state Health Minister Bronwyn Pike, said the Government was already aware of the obesity epidemic and did not need more studies.
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