Forty percent of children 5 to 8 years old exhibit at least one risk factor for heart disease, the American Academy of Pediatrics reports. The physical state of the nation`s youth is poor enough that the academy has issued a call for schools to improve physical-fitness programs by making them more frequent and less oriented to traditional sports.
The doctors` group says football and baseball should be de-emphasized in school instruction. These sports require speed, endurance and flexibility, the academy acknowledges, but they don`t help much in other vital areas of fitness: body-fat composition and cardio-respiratory endurance.
What the academy hopes to see introduced are school physical-education programs that teach activities children will carry into adulthood: swimming, bicycling, jogging, speed-walking, aerobics and tennis.
But before any change of emphasis can occur, the academy says, school administrators must renew a commitment to physical education in any form. Barely more than one-third of students in Grades 5 through 12 attend daily physical-education classes. Illinois is the only state with a law requiring students in all grades to take physical education every school day.
As children get older, the situation worsens, according to the academy. Just 12 percent of the country`s high schools mandate gym, and hardly half of them require only one year of physical education. The upshot is that high school juniors and seniors have the lowest physical-education enrollments of any group of students.
Eight states-Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming-have no mandatory pupil-fitness programs of any kind, the academy says.
As a result of all this, we are in danger of becoming a nation of
``wienies.`` Every year 18 million kids take the Presidential Fitness Test, a combination of chin-ups, sit-ups, a flexibility stretch, a mile run/walk and a shuttle run. In 1984, the latest year for which statistics are available, only 2 percent met standards in all events.
Men and women are less likely to interrupt conversations with a person of the same gender, says Kathryn Dindia, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Dindia paired 60 college students, asked them to talk to each other for half an hour and recorded the number of interruptions in each conversation.
Interruptions occurred an average of 11 times in woman-to-woman and man-to-man conversations. When men talked to women, the number of interruptions rose to 21. Women, it seems, are just as likely as men to break in on a mixed- gender discussion, proving that in the arena of chitchat, there is sex equity.