Question: Why do you want to find this out????

Sally Fenton answered on 14 Jun 2010:

Well… I am sure you are aware that at the minute people all over the world are becoming more unhealthy and the levels of people who are either overweight or obese are getting bigger and bigger each year. There are so many health problems associated with being overweight or obese such as diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure…etc.

Now if you have these problems in childhood your health will not be affected to badly..but the problem is..if you are overweight or obese as a child then you are 80% likely to be overweight/obese as an adult and thats when we start to see the health problems kick in. You will most likely develop things like diabetes, and coronary artery disease which means you are at extremly high risk of having a heart attack.

So..if we can find out ways effective ways to stop people becoming overweight/obese during the early parts of their life then we can a) reduce the obesity problem we are seeing and b) save lifves!

Looking at football as a way to do this makes sense as it is a sport that is played by so many people and it is available to everyone…all you need is a football! The work we are doing is aiming to increase the amount of people playing football as well as looking at health benefits as football participation for young people also has a whole lot of psychological benefits and helps people to improve their mood and feel good about themselves!

So in a nutshell…we are doing this work to try and find effective ways to keep young people active enough so that they do not become overweight or obese and develop problems associated with this as a adult. Once we have find out how effectivfe participation in football is at doing this we can apply it to other sports young people play like cricket, hockey, netball and rugcy etc. Most people do not enjoy going to the gym to stay fit and healthy….but a lot of people do enjoy playing games like this…so why not kill 2 birds with one stone!