Aussies once "bronzed"..

"from bronzed aussies to couch potatoes in one generation", anyone seen this ad? If u haven't seen it, can have a look here..

http://www.letsgetstarted.com.au/

I'm certain that this doesnt concern anyone on this forum, but i was quite shocked how fast aussies transversed from one to the other. Do u think that the stats are realistic? There's also quite a few other stats mentioned as well which i thought were alarming. I once considered close to "overweight", I'm now relieved that i got my fitness and dieting on track and feeling a lot better!

Started decades ago...running games got banned from the playground (in my primary years) because there was a risk someone could get hurt.

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i remember those rules, "No hat, no play" lol. But i think thats the downfall of this generation. parents prefer their children sitting indoors and pigging out on junk food, rather than wandering outdoors (unsafe). i think healthy eating when your young is very important.

Yes, and the canteens became profit making shops selling lollies, cakes, softdrinks and chips.

That's probably one of the single most useful things that public schools have done from a preventative health perspective. Skin cancer kills more young people than any other easily preventable cancer, and the number one risk factor is sun exposure. Heart disease and stroke usually kill you later on.

In my experience, schools generally don't like getting involved in health initiatives because they don't see it as their core business (although that view seems to be changing however slowly). Neither is attending to children who've been hurt running around, since any adverse outcome is an opportunity for a lawsuit against the Dept. of Education these days.

IMHO, a big part of the problem is that many people do not take responsibility for their own health (for instance, you must be living under a very big rock if you don't know that not exercising, and excessive sun exposure are bad for you.)

When something does go wrong, people expect that in a wealthy first world country such as Australia, you can fix absolutely anything. The reality of modern healthcare is that most disease is not well understood, and the failure to engage in preventative health because of complacency only ever causes harm to the individual.

Alrighty - rant mode off.

n

I totally agree, but our weather is what makes us a great sporting nation as well, e.g cricket and swimming. Which is also a wonder why we are considered so overweight.

The ad brought up a good point, stating that we spend something like 20 billion a year on obesity. Where does the money go into?

+1.

Junk food

what does "no hat no play" mean?

like a regular ball cap? for girls also? i guess we don't have enough sun here in the midwest to make that a real problem.

Australian children wear broad-brimmed floppy hats by regulation whenever outdoors at school. It is my understanding that American-style baseball caps would not be accepted - most schools have a hat as a set part of the uniform.

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"All that we see and seem is but a dream, within a dream..."

That's right. It's because baseball caps don't afford coverage for the neck. Other than the broad brimmed hats I'm sure I've seen the baseball style caps being worn but only those with a sun shade attached to the back of it. Kind of reminds me of the French Legionnaires cap.

Incidentally, they're called "Legionnaire's hats".

n

Ummm, okay, if you insist.......

The French Foreign Legion call their hats a 'Kepi'.

I have a school-aged kid. The rule is definitely no hat no play, and their uniform is a broad-brimmed floppy hat or legionnaire's style hat.

However, he has a habit of wearing his cricket cap or anything but his school uniform hat... which is about to change.

The UV is very much worse down here in Oz than most of the northern hemisphere for three reasons.
1: Most of your population is more distant from the equator than most of ours. For example, Miami Florida roughly equates to the latitude of Sydney and Perth.
2: The hole in the ozone layer has, according to some reports, brushed the southern tip of Tasmania in the past. Given that we're talking about a gas here and the layer's thickness tapers down to nothing rather than maintaining a uniform thickness and then suddenly stopping, our UV protection is less over much of the country.
3: This is the weird one, and (speculating) may be linked to why the hole is not as evident at the north pole. The earth's orbit around the sun is elliptic. It is closer to the sun during the southern summer.

A few years ago I was in Paris on business. The project finished early, and I spend a couple of days looking around. It was the Bastille Day long weekend, everythign was shut and I couldn't get sunscreen anywhere and I had no hat. It was very warm and I was expecting to get thoroughly sunburnt. I was completely amazed to have acquired nothing more than a very light tan. This wouldn't happen in Australia.