Apps For Healthy Kids — Where PC Meets PCs 186
theodp writes "Put the Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and Madden away, kids! Over at Apps for Healthy Kids, First Lady Michelle Obama has a whole new slate of games for you to play with! Voting on entries in the White House-backed game development competition has begun, and you'll find exciting titles like Balanced Meal (6 votes), Blubber Blaster (9 votes), Calorie Quest (10 votes), and Count Peas (7 votes) — and that's just for starters."
Re:Just feed them less (Score:5, Informative)
There is a certain problem with 'get out and play' if your outside is a ghetto ridden with gangs, drug dealers and gun violence. Better to stay inside then.
Re:Just feed them less (Score:4, Informative)
"Diets" don't work. In particular crash diets that just send your body into starvation/storage mode leaving with zero energy. Increase the quality of your food (no pre-prepared food and stop eating out) and pay attention to the calorie totals. Eating less more often and earlier in the day helps too. The magic ingredient is to start getting some exercise to increase your metabolism and burn more calories. If you're well over 200lbs, you can burn up to 200 calories fast walking a mile. Don't expect huge changes in weight. A slow steady and _lasting_ improvement takes time.
Re:What the hell???!!! (Score:2, Informative)
Even Hitler knew this.
Yes well, so did a great many people before him.
Not the same thing obviously
So why bother bringing it up? Wasn't there some kind of law [wikipedia.org] against that?
Re:Just feed them less (Score:3, Informative)
As Gary Taubes, author of "Good Calories, Bad Calories" says, workout out makes you hungry. Everyone has heard about "Working up an appetite" but for some strange reason forgets it when they talk about exercise. If you just eat based on hunger, working out will do nothing to lower your weight. It will of course help cardiovascular health, and weight lifting helps keep your metabolism and good hormones up, your stress hormones down, helps your mental health and staves off the debilitating weakness of ageing.
As Mr. Taubes says in the book, it's not all about the calories though. A huge part of the problem these days is the massive consumption of carbohydrates. Carbohydrates raise blood sugar, which raises insulin levels, which promotes fat storage, inhibits release of energy from fat tissue and promotes inflammation, associated with next to all our "western diseases" like heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, fibromyalgia and so on. If you eat bread/pasta/rice/etc. 5 times a day because many small, supposedly healthy meals will help you loose weight, your insulin levels will be chronically high and it will be exceedingly hard to burn off any fat.
Re:Surely the healthiest option (Score:3, Informative)
Surely the healthiest option Would be to not let "Kids" near a PC.
1) Please stop putting the first part of your sentence in the subject line without replicating it in your comment. It's bad form in any medium.
2) Yes, surely it will be healthy to keep children ignorant of computers so they can grow up disadvantaged unlike an acquaintance's two year old who is plugging and unplugging USB devices (and not just for fun, but when necessary) and is able to start and use programs. What a brilliant idea in education you have stumbled upon!
Re:1) (Score:1, Informative)
No, it's accepted in this particular medium.
No it isn't. People only do it because they're retarded.
Re:You're right. Mod is ignoramous. (Score:3, Informative)
Umm, isn't suburbia the place with all those lawns? There's a lot more (and bigger) backyards to run around in when you're out in the suburbs compared to the city. It's not the lack of space, it's the rampant paranoia that the precious darlings can't be left to their own. <getoffmylawn>When I was a kid, we'd disappear after school--we'd all meet at somebody's backyard and play without parental control. I could bike around the neighborhood on my own; wander up to the playground, maybe play a pickup game of kickball; even go to a local shop and spend my meager allowance.</getoffmylawn> It's today's fear culture that's keeping kids indoors.
Re:What the hell???!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Now the government wants to start influencing our kids at the gaming level? Eeeewwwwwww! How creepy is that?
About as creepy as The Oregon Trail. [wikipedia.org]
1971. Still in print after 39 years. The Oregon Trail [amazon.com]
Re:1) (Score:3, Informative)
No, it's accepted in this particular medium.
No, it isn't. You only think it is because you have poor netiquette.
2) A "Kid" is a young goat & should definitely be kept away from a PC.
"Your honor, we all agree that my client ran this lady down with an Impala. But I believe that I can show that it was actually a quadruped, one Aepyceros melampus." Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. Go back to first grade with these masterful debating tactics.
Re:You're right. Mod is ignoramous. (Score:3, Informative)
I live in an inner city area with lots of blocks of flats, surrounded by grass and with various small parks and playgrounds.
The young children play outside all the time. Dusk is very late in summer in the UK, I expect I'll still hear a few children playing outside at 9-10pm.
But, I don't see many teenagers outside. They're obviously not being kept inside. I expect they're either sitting in the corner of a park somewhere, or at someone's house playing computer games and watching TV.
My parents were early adopters of the "you may not leave the house" thing, so I only have a vague idea of what most 14 year olds were doing 10 years ago, when I was 14. They had a big garden, but it was boring "playing" there with only my sister for company.
Re:1) (Score:1, Informative)
Incorrect. It's annoying.
Incorrect. You have an extra period above one of your commas, making it a semicolon.
Funny though.