Your kids are still fat and active Wii games won’t help

wiikids

According to a study of 78 kids in Texas, playing “active” video games didn’t help them burn more calories than if they were just sitting on their chubby little asses.

For the study, researchers at the Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston attached an accelerometer to the kids legs while they played Wii games so they could see how many calories the kids would burn.  Turns out the answer is not many.  The results of the kids who played Wii Sports were comparable to the results of the kids who played Mario Kart.  Of course, the results didn’t take into account what the kids were doing when they weren’t playing these games.  Something that should have been factored in:  How many beers did they have between each song in Dance Dance Revolution?  Because I know whenever I’m playing one of these “active” games it’s usually intermittently and I’m usually sitting on a friend’s couch eating handfuls of chips and drinking.

I’ve always been a firm believer that video games should be played sitting on your butt, but I have to admit that as an American I had always been kind of excited at the prospect of our obese children actually standing upright and playing a video game.  I suppose there’s still hope that our children won’t waddle and wheeze their way through the gaming life since during the study the accelerometer was placed on the kids legs and not the arms, which do probably 90% of any of the work in active games.  I’m not saying that was a stupid idea on the part of the researchers, but that was a stupid idea on the part of the researchers.  Everyone knows that most of these games can successfully be played actually sitting down if you maneuver the wand juuuuust right while your other hand shovels a bite of cake into your mouth. 

 

Source: The Escapist


About the Author: (@Badpie24) Writer & Editor

Jen lives in Seattle and likes to play games and then write about them. Her all time favorite games include the Mass Effect series, Dragon Age: Origins, The Witcher, World of Warcraft, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. She likes coffee and wine and tacos, but not all together because that would be gross. Cats are awesome.

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