Calories and exercise have been in the news recently. One of the curious things about both is how much every one talks about them but how little most people know about them. The most intriguing thing about calories is how few calories we actually need to ingest on a daily basis and how many calories there are in the common foods and drinks that we give to our children. The most intriguing thing about exercise is how much you have to exercise to lose calories. A one-year-old child needs about 1,000 calories a day. But a two-year-old only needs 100 calories more-1,100 a day. Maybe if people knew this they would not be so concerned about how much their two-year-old eats in comparison with the same child at one year of age. They just do not need as much food because their growth has slowed down considerably. A three-year-old needs 1,200 calories. A four-year-old another 100 calories or 1,300, and so on. Just add on an extra 100 calories a year until puberty, when the child will start eating everything in the house. This is very satisfying for most parents since there are fewer happier sights for a father or mother than seeing their child eating well. By the time the child is old enough to leave your house, an age that varies from society to society, but which appears to be nearer to 40 than 30 in Trinidad, the young adult is consuming some 2,500 calories a day, give or take a couple hundred calories depending on sex and physical activity.
A quick look at the table accompanying this article will surprise you when you see just how many calories there are in some of the common drinks that children like in T&T. A sweet drink has 100 calories. A sweetened orange juice, 130 calories. There are four-year-olds who drink three to four of these monstrosities a day, ie, four to 500 calories. Four-year-olds need about 1,300 calories to grow and thrive. They get almost half their daily calories from sugar water fla-voured with orange extract. By the time they eat the little packets of sweet biscuits and corn curls that their parents put in their lunch boxes, they have no room for anything else. No wonder they have little appetites. The position with the flavoured milks is even worse. Quite apart from the amount of gas and belly pain that they can produce, each little box gives the child over 200 calories, and in the case of one particular brand, an incredible 280 calories. It is simply not possible for a child to be drinking these products and be slender and healthy, unless he is being incredibly active and also eating properly. To give you an example of how much exercise has to be done to lose the calories ingested, think about this. You have to run one mile in ten minutes to lose 100 calories. A child would have to be in a formal exercise programme for several hours a day to achieve this loss of calories and we know that formal exercise programmes are not good for children. They need free play. Formal exercise locks children into a system which develops one skill. Parents love it because their child becomes proficient at something.
They can win prizes which is good for the parents' ego. The occasional exceptional child might go on to become a world-beater. The average child, and no one wants to believe that their child is average, finds formal exercise boring and stultifying. Overuse of a particular muscle group causes muscle damage and may result in permanent disability. The worst thing is that it locks the brain into a particular pattern of behaviour, of habit movement, from which it is difficult to escape. Free play develops all the muscles, all sorts of movements and encourages the child's brain to develop holistically and outside of the box. The caloric requirements of children are unchangeable. Exercise as a means of losing weight is difficult. It helps but only if you eat properly. Giving children empty calories in the form of sweetened flavoured drinks or juices or sweetened milky concoctions is not eating properly. These drinks should be used as treats, given on special occasions. Children should be taught from birth to drink lots of water, a glass of fresh juice a day or traditional beverages like coconut water, mauby or one of the many other bush teas that our culture recommends. That and the opportunity to run free are what children need to become lean and healthy. Eat well and keep moving; good for adults too.
