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Carlton Reid
to being 10 years younger. (That may confuse 11 year olds, not wanting to be one again). Forty percent of the deaths in England from coronary heart disease, stroke and colon cancer, among over 16 year olds, can be attributed to a lack of regular physical exercise. This equates to 60,000 deaths a year. And the rising levels of childhood obesity – a subject rarely off the TV news – can be countered by cycling. Biking burns blubber. Only one in forty 11-year-olds meets the national target of an hour of physical exercise a day. A University of Bath study of 5,595 children found that 95 percent of boys, and 99.6 percent of girls, didn’t exercise for an hour or more per day. The children were fitted with small exercise monitoring devices for a week. Children in the study averaged just 17 minutes of moderate exercise, and two minutes of vigorous exercise, each day. Steve Shaffelberg of the British Heart Foundation said: “We are all becoming expert at engineering physical activity out of our daily lives. In the last 20 years, school car journeys have more than doubled, with just 1 percent cycling. The killer combination of far too little physical activity, blended with a diet heavy with soft drinks and snacks, is driving rising rates of obesity among British children, and threatening their health.” We’re living in a society where, for the first time in history, parents are expected to outlive their children. That’s the obesity time bomb. If it’s not diffused our kids don’t have a very long future. Shocking, but fixable. Cycling isn’t a panacea, but it’s one part of the fix, especially for the school journey. Kids who cycle to school are more likely to cycle at the weekends and on into adulthood, more likely to be healthy in other ways, too, adding years to their lives. Cycling to school rather than being driven (sometimes pitifully short distances) makes it safer for other kids. It cuts down on the double parking and driver frustration now commonplace outside British schools.