THE RELATION BETWEEN PHYSICAL EDUCATION CURRICULUM TIME ALLOCATION AND OBESITY IN 6-10 YEARS OLD CHILDREN: A CROSS SECTIONAL STUDY

Abstract

Introduction: Overweight and obesity are major problems in our society, because it’s prevalence among children and adolescents aged 5-19 has risen dramatically from just 4% in 1975 to just over 18% in 2016. The rise has occurred similarly among both boys and girls: in 2016 18% of girls and 19% of boys were overweight. While just under 1% of children and adolescents aged 5-19 were obese in 1975, more 124 million children and adolescents (6% of girls and 8% of boys) were obese in 2016 (WHO, 2021). Objectives: The aim of our research is to examine the relationship between the time allocated to physical education at school and overweight/obesity in 6-10 year old children on a global and continental level. Methods: Our study is a cross-sectional, population-based descriptive study. We used the data from the World-wide Survey of School Physical Education report published by UNESCO in 2013. We used BMI for the age group 6-10 years from the database published by the Global Burden of Disease Collaborative Network. The GDP data for the countries was taken from the database of the United Nations Economic Commissions for Europe. Results: In our study, we analyze data from 145 countries on six continents. The average time devoted to physical education in these countries is 95.6±35.0 minutes per week. The minimum is 30 minutes and the maximum is 225 minutes. The 90 minutes occurs with the highest frequency, 26 times. The median also shows the 90-minute value. Examining the results by continent, it is revealed that significantly more time is devoted to school physical education in Europe than in Africa (p=0.020) and Asia (p=0.022), but there is no significant difference between the average of the other three continents and Europe. A Spearman’s rank-order correlation was run to assess the relationship between GDP and physical education time allocation. One hundred forty states were included in the analysis. There was a weak positive statistically significant correlation between GDP and physical education time allocation, rs(128) = .298, p < .001. Conclusions: The amount of time devoted to physical education at school shows a wide variation from state to state. The time allocated to physical education at school is 95.6 minutes on average. Europe and Australia/Oceania are the two continents where the most time (about 110 minutes) is devoted to physical education per week. We did not find a relationship between the time devoted to physical education at school and the frequency of obesity or overweight.

Keywords

• obesity, overweight, physical education, time allocation.