A leading children's health expert has attacked the government's strategies for tackling childhood obesity, claiming they put too much emphasis on PE lessons and not enough on the importance of daily exercise.
Neil Armstrong, pro-vice chancellor of Exeter University, also accuses the government of neglecting Britain's obesity epidemic by failing to commission any significant research on the subject.
Prof Armstrong, who is professor of paediatric physiology at Exeter as well as director of the Children's Health and Exercise Research Centre at the university, said: "We have known about the likelihood of an obesity epidemic for 15 years. I'm very disappointed and frustrated that so little has been done in that time."
The focus of government policy, said Prof Armstrong, should be on everyday exercise, rather than school sport and regular PE lessons and diet. He said his own research had shown that school PE lessons do not necessarily produce active children.
In an exclusive interview he explained how initiatives were being rolled out with no background of hard research to support them. "We published research over 15 years ago, in the British Medical Journal in 1990. We looked at how inactive children were and how that became worse as they went through their teens. It drew a great deal of publicity at the time. I had meetings in Westminster with ministers, but it disappeared off the agenda."
Prof Armstrong also said that recent changes to school canteens would not stop children getting fatter. "Obesity is about the balance between energy intake and energy expenditure. We need to get children active as part of their normal lifestyle."
Most recent government figures show that 13.3% of the 5.3m children aged two to 10 are obese. The Department of Health will shortly publish the results of research into the relationship between children's activity levels and obesity.
A DfES spokesman claimed that the government's national school sport strategy was having an effect on children's activity levels. He said that the latest survey of schools in sports partnerships showed 69% of children participating in at least two hours of sport each week. However, not all schools are in sports partnerships and the two hours a week figure falls well short of the chief medical officer's recommendation that people of all ages should exercise for between 30 minutes and an hour at least five times a week.
