Adolescents who engage in frequent school-based or extracurricular physical activity–especially Rollerblading, skateboarding, and bicycling–are up to 48% less likely to become overweight or obese in early adulthood, Dr. David Menschik and his colleagues reported.
These wheeled sports also helped those who were overweight to slim down as they entered early adulthood, the researchers wrote (Arch. Pediatr. Adolesc. Med. 2008;162:29–33).
“Overweight adolescents who participated [in wheeled activities] three to four times per week were 85% more likely to become normal-weight adults than [were] overweight adolescents not participating,” wrote Dr. Menschik, who was with the preventive medicine residency at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and his coauthors. Dr. Menschik is now at the Food and Drug Administration.
Team sports and swimming also were beneficial to both normal- and overweight teens, but the study did not find a correlation between jogging or walking and achieving a normal adult weight.
The researchers drew their data from 3,345 subjects who were included in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.
“In view of an obesity epidemic costing the United States an estimated $117 billion annually, policy makers now have evidence that a relatively low-cost strategy may offer a long-lasting solution,” Dr. Menschik and his colleagues concluded.