by BeFitt

Exergames: Not Just Another Health Craze!

Active video games otherwise known as Exergames are being touted as the ultimate cure for obesity. Refreshing, since everyone is still looking for that magic diet pill!

In contrast to traditional video games, this “active entertainment gaming system allows players to experience various activities such as bowling, fishing, tennis and golf in a virtual world” or “even take a walk or run along streets facing obstacles.” In exergaming, hand controllers are eliminated and the body is used to power the game. One of the first exergames was Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), which was released in 1998.

Obesity is a global epidemic. In 2004 the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies announced that “approximately 9 million children in the US are overweight”. This figure is at least double of that three decades ago. The trend observed for children is similar in adults and internationally, in both developed and developing countries. The National Health Survey England carried out between 1993 and 2006 revealed that “the number of overweight and obese teenagers in the UK has trebled in the last two decades, with nearly one in five 15 year olds now classed as obese”.

Obesity is indeed a serious public health problem. A combination of many factors are responsible for this, such as environmental setups and family pressures that either or both decrease access to sports and traditional physical activities and encourage the consumption of convenience foods which are usually high in calories.

2003 statistics in England showed that the percentage of adults meeting the recommendations for physical activity declined with age for both sexes. Since the early 1990s there has been a steady increase in the use of cars and a decrease in walking and cycling to school or to work. Among children aged five to ten, the proportion who walked to school fell from 61 per cent in 1992-94 to 52 per cent in 2002-03. For adults aged 17 and over, the proportion of journeys to work where the main mode of travel was by car rose from 66 per cent in 1989-91 to 71 per cent in 2002-03. During the same interval journeys that were mainly on foot fell from 13 to 10 per cent.”

Nielsen Wire reports that “the average American watches approximately 153 hours of TV every month at home, a 1.2% increase from last year. In addition, the 131 million Americans who watch video on the Internet watch on average about 3 hours of video online each month at home and work. The 13.4 million Americans who watch video on mobile phones watch on average about 3

More Exergames Articles

Related Posts:

• Short Term Memory Loss: Alcohol Use
• Five Easy Ways to Improve Your Memory and Retain It

{ 0 comments }