As childhood obesity continues to become a rising epidemic, schools all over the country are employing the Fitness Gram, a fitness assessment test. The New York City Department of Education proctors the test here on Staten Island, at all public schools, grades K-12. For the past four years, this annual test has informed students of where they stand, health-wise, and what they can do to improve their health. While this test may be raising the awareness of children and teens of their physical fitness, I feel it may be doing more harm than good.
The Fitness Gram is divided into three parts: Body Mass Index (BMI), Aerobic Fitness and Muscle Strength, Endurance and Flexibility.
What is BMI?
BMI is the comparison of one’s height to weight. The next part, Aerobic Fitness, is tested using The Pacer, or a test of how many laps can be run in a specific amount of time. The last section, Muscle Strength, Endurance, and Flexibility, is comprised of four exercises: curl-ups, trunk lifts, push-ups, and a reaching activity.
When the time comes to take the Fitness Gram, students must complete all of these activities. The results are recorded and processed before being returned to the students in June. In theory, the program sounds progressive and proactive in raising the awareness of health in public schools. The problem, however, is in the resulting scores.
When the results come in, each child receives two identical letters:
one addressed to his or her parents, and the other addressed to himself or herself.
The results are divided into three parts. Why are the results separated?
Instead of providing students with three separate and confusing results, there should be one overall score. There’s no accumulation of the activities of any sort. The student is aware of his height and weight, the amount of laps he can run, and the amount of curl-ups and push-ups he can accomplish. The result sheet is only a reproduction of these numbers. The Fitness Gram should incorporate every aspect of the test into one final evaluation. If a
student can run a healthy number of 60 laps, but can only do 10 curl-ups, the results should be balanced accordingly.
I also think the results are inaccurate. BMI is a crude comparison of height to weight. After multiplying one’s weight by 703 and then dividing that number by one's height, in inches, squared, a person is left with his or her BMI. If the number is within 18.5-25, the body mass is considered “normal.”
BMI, however, does not take age or gender into account. Not only that, but BMI does not take body fat into account. This is a major discrepancy. A lean, muscular 200-pound, six-foot-tall football player can have the same BMI as an overweight, 200-pound, six-foot-tall inactive teen. The first teen’s weight can be attributed to muscle mass, while the second
teen’s weight can be attributed to body fat. According to BMI, however, both students would be considered overweight.
The FitnessGram warns “overweight” students on the results sheet of future health risks, when in reality, not all of the students are truly overweight. I feel it would be smarter, and more accurate, to measure students’ body fat. This would pinpoint the problem areas, and would correctly measure how healthy students truly are.
Concerns about eating disorders
Along with the outbreak of childhood obesity, an even more harrowing epidemic is eating disorders among teens, young women especially. Not only are teens constantly comparing their shape and size to their peers' shape and size, but they are also haunted by the media about being “skinny.” To measure a teen’s BMI and reproduce the results without taking body fat or muscle weight into account can be absolutely detrimental to a teen’s psyche.
Dr. Carl Ramsay, associate chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, said he understands the amount mental distress that the Fitness Gram can induce, yet he feels that such testing is absolutely necessary.
“While I understand the sensitivities related to the potential psychosocial aspects of being told that one needs to lose weight, the facts are in: there is overwhelming evidence that increased BMI as a single factor increases the risk for many disease states as well as earlier death," he explains. "The earlier in one’s life they can be warned of potential long term effects of this factual reality, the more opportunity to identify / improve / reverse their individual road to ideal health.”
I feel that the threat of eating disorders, however, is equally destructive.
The company behind the Fitness Gram confronts the topic of eating disorders on its Web site, claiming that “Avoiding the use of body composition assessment does nothing to counter the perceived cultural pressure to be thin or the tendency of many children to become obese as adults.”
To put a stop to the Fitness Gram wouldn’t be the right move. While the test has an immense amount of room to improve, it can be successful. First, BMI testing should be eliminated. A test to measure body fat would be a wiser choice. All of the exercises being used
throughout the Fitness Gram are certainly appropriate, but the results should be incorporated into a cumulative score instead of being merely reproduced on the sheet. If they were to enact these simple changes, the test would be in much better taste.