Belly Fat and Your Child's Brain

When you were a kid how much time did you spend sitting looking at a screen? If you didn’t have a smartphone, iPad or video game what did you do with all the time you didn’t spend watching? Was any of that time spent running around, playing ball, jumping rope, riding your bike or other activity? Although you didn’t realize it at the time, not only were you improving your physical fitness you were enhancing your cognitive functioning. If your child is watching instead of moving he or she may be deprived of the cognitive benefits that fitness can provide.

The health benefits of physical activity are well established. Although it’s unlikely that adults can lose significant weight by increasing exercise (even Biggest Loser contestants regained most of their weight loss) increased activity is necessary for maintaining weight loss following dieting, weight-loss medications, or surgery. As a fringe benefit, physical activity reduces depression and improves mood and self-concept. For children there may be an additional benefit, they could lose visceral (belly) fat and improve their grades.

Recent research has demonstrated that lower fitness has been related to decreased functioning for tasks involving perception, memory and cognitive control as well as being associated with lower academic achievement. A new study conducted by researchers from Northeastern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suggests a possible mechanism that could account for the negative relationship between fitness and brain function.

The researchers studied 8 – 10-year-old obese and non-obese children. They found that kids playing tag and other active games for about an hour after school had less visceral fat compared with kids who were less active. The active overweight kids in the nine-month study were still overweight even though they had less belly fat. The after-school activity resulted in improvements in measures of paying attention, processing information and impulse control for both obese and non-obese kids. There was a relationship between the amount of visceral fat loss and the improvements in cognitive functioning. The obese kids in the non-exercise control group gained substantially more visceral fat over the nine-month period. The relationship of visceral fat to cognitive function is not well understood but the researchers think that abdominal fat contributes to inflammation that is unhealthy for the brain.

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation Study, children spend an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes a day viewing their screens. How much time does your child spend sitting and watching? If more of this time was spent being physically active kids could lose belly fat and might improve their school performance even if they didn’t lose weight. My book, It's NOT Just Baby Fat! has some practical suggestions for helping your child become more active.