No, not seriously. What they really reported on was a study out of the British Columbia Children's Hospital in Vancouver regarding elementary school physical education. As it turns out, P.E. had a number of benefits for the 18,000 youngsters studied, including lowered blood pressure and increased bone and muscle mass. However, it had no effect on their body mass index.
In other words, gym class didn't make kids less fat.
From an anecdotal perspective, I'm not surprised. My middle school gym teacher, Mr. Mann, used to lecture us for 30-minutes each class about the benefits of isometrics and then make us hug ourselves for two minutes. To this day, I have no idea how that was supposed to benefit us, but I don't think this is indicative of the Canadian grade school gym experience. I think the real problem lies in where the kids go immediately following class:
A kid can play dodgeball until he swells into a roadmap of angry rubber-ball slap welts and he's still not going to trim up if he's eating junk, so let's focus on that instead. Okay, eh?
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