One study found that children who watched more than five hours of TV a day had a five-times greater chance of being overweight than those who watched two hours or less. The American Academy of Pediatrics encourages parents to take control and limit their children's television to no more than one to two hours a day. Parents also play an important role as they demonstrate a healthy activity level in their own lives. Instead of sending their kids out to play, they can take them out and play together. If parent-child leisure activity revolves around eating and watching entertainment or sports events, something needs to change.
Parents can involve kids in planning family hikes, bike rides, sports, or outings to the park.
Most studies tend to show that the amount of physical activity has a greater effect on a child's weight than nutrition. But surely it doesn't help if children come home and eat bags of snack foods low in nutrition and high in calories. Providing more nutritious snacks like fruit or whole-grain cereal, and limiting soft drinks are reasonable steps to promote kids' health. Lack of physical activity and poor eating habits are problems for lots of people. AICR's 1997 landmark report called for changes that decrease the toll cancer takes on our population.