Chris Boardman: get kids on bikes to solve childhood obesity

For once I think that CB has missed the mark slightly here if we are to take the story at face value (he's been miss-qoted before I seem to remember). I agree that bikeability should be taught at every school but I wouldn't cite obesity rates as a motivator for this. It's true that any sort of active travel will burn calories and I've always felt that being active leads to better dietry choices due to changes in emotional and hormonal state but the real reasons we should be gettig kids on bikes is to improve their safety, independance, overall health and confidence and to generally make our towns and cities nicer places to live.

The problem with all of this is that parents do not feel that cycling is sufficiently safe to let their children do it, especially unsupervised. Normalising cycling by teaching it in all schools would go some way to changing opinions but it would take some time before the results were visible on the streets.

The point that Chris was actually making is that councils are no longer providing Bikeability Training. Sadly due to austerity measures councils will only be able to provide the most basic services required by law. If you don't work in local government you might not realise just how bad things have got.

Sadly even the school crossing patrols (Lollypop Ladies/Gents) are disappearing from our streets as they are not a statutory function. Even if funding becomes available from outside sources to run Bikeability courses these courses can't be run as everyone that once worked in council road safety teams will have retired or been made redundant.

If you watch the excellent movie 'Fed Up', you'll realise that CB is slightly barking up the wrong tree.
Diet, more precisely sugar addiction, is the big problem. As stated above, you can't outrun a bad diet.

Chris Boardman is right. You only need to look to the Netherlands to see how active transport affects obesity rates.

Percentage of schoolchildren aged 7-11 obese or overweight
Netherlands 11%
England 27%

The Dutch rate is among the lowest in Europe, the English rate among the highest.

Percentage of schoolchildren aged 13-17 obese or overweight
Netherlands 9%
England 25%

Again the Dutch rate is among the lowest in Europe, the English rate among the highest.

The Netherlands (together with Denmark, which also sees much lower childhood obesity rates than the UK) has the highest rates of active transport among European kids. In other words, they cycle a lot.

In the Netherlands, 49% of primary schoolchildren (age 5-11) go to school by bike. In the UK, only about 2% actually do, although 48% would like to.

That high uptake of cycling also means Dutch and Danish kids have a much higher degree of independence than those in the UK. They're more likely to use their bikes for trips other than to school, while British kids tend more than ever to be driven everywhere. Other surveys regularly rank Dutch kids the happiest in the world.

I don't believe Dutch children go to gyms more than UK kids, or go on diets more than UK kids. Could it be their parents don't feed them the crap British parents feed theirs? Perhaps. Anyway, there is clearly a very strong correlation between a high uptake of active transport and reduced obesity in children.

And we could get cycling levels up in the UK, if the political will was there to enable it to happen. In London alone, TfL research has identified a total of 4.3 million trips per average day are potentially cyclable, equivalent to 23 per cent of trips by all modes and 35 per cent of trips by mechanised modes. Of those 4.3 million potentially cyclable trips, 3.5 million would take less than 20 minutes for most people to cycle.

It is the first responsibility of the parents to encourage their offspring to take up physical activity of any kind. This may seem obvious, but in reality it doesn't happen anywhere near as much as it should. I look at the families around me and out of six with young children/teens, only one set of parents offered their two girls a range of activities designed to get them away from the TV, computer and smartphone clone brigade.
The sad truth was that neither girl chose to make cycling a part of their lives despite joining the SKY rides, and going out with two uncles, both keen and experienced riders. One chose gymnastics and the other turned her back on physical activity completely and started learning how to play the piano. Both are doing well in their chosen activities. Any form of compulsion for cycling alone will fail.

I think cake for pudding on the school menu has more to do with obesity than riding a bike.

I do think that Bikeability ought to be on the curriculum though. If nothing else it teaches the basic rules of the road and bike awareness that potentially can be applied when the kids go up and buy a car.

Misguided Boardman at it again.

Weight = Diet
Fitness = Exercise

They say you can't outrun a bad diet and it's true. Trust me - I really tried to prove them wrong back when I was running 6 - 10 miles six days a week.

Any form of compulsion and involving teachers would drive out any joy that children may get from cycling it would turn them off in droves.

It would be more effective to ban parking within say 1 mile of schools, but that would be unenforceable.

Trying to develop more safe routes is the answer, but this is also fraught with difficulty. It is currently impossible for ordinary people (families, children) to travel any distance by bike simply because most places are cut off by a ring of steel. Great, I now feel thoroughly depressed.

Someone give Chris Boardman more power so he can carry out his ideas rather than spend his time talking to the people who should be, but don;'t seem to want to, do all the things he suggests should be done...

A few kids take bikes to my son's school, but I am the only parent that cycles there. I ride with him along an NCN route getting blocked and abused 'you should have a bell'>

Western society based on the American dream is fucked. It's the food companies and supermarkets that target young kids and thick parents to buy crap processed food. Anyone with half brain can't but fail to have seen all the programmes on TV or news items warning of and showing the obese. It is depressing being a thin healthy person to be surrounded by so many fat fuckers. If you go to France it is striking to see how fewer obese people there are although there are fat people but nothing on the scale of the UK or the US.

Time for privatised health care here and doing away with benefits. I'm sick of paying for the sloth of these fat lazy fuckers who cost the country billions in their greed and ignorance of basic healthy nutrition. Never Seen A Salad.

Good on Chris. He was probably a lot more restrained in getting his point across than I would have been.

how about stopping the 200 yard Chelsea Tractor runs ( there are 2 moms who take their kids to the car, spend 25mins strapping them into child seats(as it should be), drive 200 yards to the school around the corner, spend 10 mins blocking the road with all the car doors open getting the kids out, then perform a (illegal) 301 point turn( due to all the other moms double parking in mandatory cycle lanes) and drive back) shurly this would be a 10 min job if ya walked em, and they would work off some of the high fat, high sugar, high crap breakfast mush before spending 6 hours sat infront of a smartboard.

I totally agree. However. You're more likely to be criticised as a parent for allowing your children out on bikes all day like we were allowed to. This would now be called uncaring neglect. Whereas feeding them pizza while they play on the play station Well that's the fault of Sony for making play stations and the media for promoting them, and the kids and their damn pester power, and the supermarkets for selling food and food companies for putting calories in Pizza and the government for not stopping it all.

But it's not their fault the kids are fat and anyway health care is free at the point of use in the UK so might as well get your money's worth eh?

Mind you, if all the tubby kids get out on bikes without helmets, like Saint CB, they may all die even earlier from head injuries. Or by those murders behind the wheel.

It's a conundrum, isn't it?

(oh, and what Peowpeowpeowlasers said!)

Perhaps if parents allowed their children to play out, as my generation did, most of these kids wouldn't be fat. There were a few fat children while I was at school, but only 5-10 from a year of 150.

Parents who allow their children to become obese are, frankly, abusers.

Obesity is a two sided problem, and Chris is really only in a position to fix one of the issues. Yes, diet might play a bigger role in obesity, but to wait until that is ironed out before tackling the issue of physical activity would be absurd.

Cycling is the most natural way of incorporating physical activity into a child's life that I can think of. It's something the child can go on to take ownership of, and can be a real taste of freedom. Certainly more freeing than being yelled at in a sports hall.

I'm sure I've benefitted much more from gaining confidence on a bicycle than from being able to light a fire, at any rate. In fact, I think my proficiency at conjuring sparks from flint has all but vanished... ‧º·(˚ ˃̣̣̥⌓˂̣̣̥ )‧º·˚

Diet is a much bigger factor in childhood obesity, but yeah, more cycling would be a positive thing.

I love CB... A true living legend, but that is a very naive statement and will do more damage than good if you force obese children/adults to do anything, there are mental health issues that are strongly linked to obesity as well as the obvious nutritional issues, that's where you start, nutritional education, not making them do a physical activity in front of their peers that could compound their issues. Parents need targeting too, no point giving nutritional & physical education to a 9yr old who weighs more than their age and then sending them back home to an adult sized takeaway portion.
And just like everything in life, not everyone loves cycling like We do, so forcing anyone to do it will make matters worse, do you remember PE in your pants?
Also the government need to concentrate more on the wider issues that link into this, such the kids who are malnourished and there are plenty, people seem to make the distinction between fat & thin, one good one bad and that is a serious misjudgement.

And to be honest... Cycling is not a vital life skill: swimming-cooking-lighting a fire, being able to tie a shoe lace, language, social interaction, reading writing arithmetic these are vital, not riding a bike. Sorry CB IMO you have made youself look a little silly with this. Great cause, but led more by passion than thought through.

For me this is no different to when celebrities offer their opinions for the injured military personel charities without having any expierience in the matters. It can often come across as condescending and naive.

CB should stick to pushing for a better cycling infrastructure.