Prevention. Operation in the Low-Rhine against the overweight of the teenagers.
Colleges with the mode play of the sparrowhawk and passes to ten
By Thomas CALINON
Saturday January 08, 2005 (Release - 06:00)
Strasbourg of our correspondent
" Oh, I screwed myself the iep ouam!" Charlotte, 14 years, has badly with the foot. Then it renâcle to join his/her comrades of a class of fourth of the college Freppel d' Obernai (the Low-Rhine), who benefit from one off-peak hour between two courses for défouler on the sports ground of the establishment. The weather is cold. The pupils run and shout, exhaling large vapor plumes. Framed by two organizers, Christine Di Vita and Stéphane Puchol, they play sparrowhawk to warm up, then pass to a play without name, between basketball and passes to ten. With the end, Charlotte has the breath runs and "the heart which beats to 100 per hour". The objective is achieved: Charlotte and her friends practised a physical activity apart from their obligatory courses of EPS (physical and sporting education), thus reducing their risks of overweight.
Since September 2002, the college Freppel d' Obernai is one of the eight drawn bas-rhinois establishments to the fate for the study Icaps (Intervention near the schoolboys centered on the physical activity and sedentariness), undertaken over four years by three laboratories of the Louis-Pasteur university of Strasbourg. With the base of this experiment, the double report that, in France, 40% of the teenagers do not practise a sport apart from the courses of EPS and that 15 to 20% present an excess of weight. These figures are still higher in the Alsatian colleges retained for the study.
According to the investigation established in 2002 near the thousand pupils of sixth having agreed to take part in the Icaps study, 46% do not have a regular physical activity and nearly a quarter an overweight presents. The proportion climbs to 28% for those of the banked-up beds which pass more than 2 hours per day in front of the tele one. To explain this disaffection, the pupils advance the lack of time and money, but especially the little of taste for the competition (48%).
Misant on the concept of pleasure, Icaps tries to modify the attitudes and the motivation of the banked-up beds with respect to the physical activity. The pupils are encouraged to go to the school to foot or à.vélo, and a team of sporting organizers, coordinated by Christine Di Vita, regularly visits the four colleges "action" of the operation the four others serve as "witnesses", the whole of the pupils being submitted to the same annual medical examination (weight, size, fatty mass, blood pressure) to frame the play activities suggested between 12 hours and 14 hours, or at the end of the courses. With the menu: hip-hop, canes and stick, skipping rope, ball sitting, badminton... Charlotte, which stopped the gymnastics because it could not pay the licence any more, was put this year at the modern jazz.
"With Icaps, one never speaks about weight and food. It is probably single in the world because the studies target usually the teenagers in overweight, explains professor Chantal Simon, of the group of studies in nutrition of the Faculty of Medicine of Strasbourg. Here, one works with all the teenagers. One is really in the primary prevention."
Obviously, it goes. At the autumn, the team of researchers had encouraging intermediate results. In two years, the proportion of schoolboys in overweight in the colleges "action" decreased by 21% compared to the "pilot" colleges and they are now 87% to have a regular physical activity apart from the courses of EPS (62% in the "pilot" colleges). The fatty mass, the blood pressure and the sedentary behaviors, in particular the time spent in front of television, also decreased.