Jo-Anne Smetherham
The poorer the child, the less likely he is to do exercise - and the fatter and weaker his body will be as a result.
These are the latest findings and deductions from Birth to Twenty, Africa's longest-running study of child health and development, based at the university of the Witwatersrand.
Called Mandela's Children, the study began in 1990 and is investigating the same 3 200 Johannesburg and Soweto children and their families from the time of the children's births until they are 20 years old.
Its most recent research findings are that:
Children from the poorest backgrounds, those from single parent families and those with mothers with a school qualification of matric or a lower grade, do less exercise than others.
White children spent an average of two hours and ten minutes weekly playing sport, and 55% of black children participated in no sport whatsoever. The average time spent on sport was 29 minutes weekly.
White children spent an average of four hours and 31 minutes weekly watching television, while black children spent almost double this, at a weekly average of 71/2 hours.
Children who were the most active were almost three centimetres taller than children in the lowest activity group. The highly active children also weighed almost 2kg more than the inactive children.
Further analysis still needs to be completed, but the study raises many questions from the present-day lack of sportsmen from previously disadvantaged backgrounds to how close South Africa has really come since 1994 to closing the gaps, says the study's website.
The findings had important implications, said project manager Shane Norris, because poor children were more likely to become obese and suffer ill health as a result.
Over 100 scientific documents have been presented at conferences and published about the Birth to Twenty Study.
Previous findings included children's experiences of smoking at five and seven years of age, which contributed to tobacco control legislation passed in 2000, and a policy brief on the consequences of high rates of lead in the blood of Johannesburg children.
A book about the study, called Mandela's Children: Growing up in post-Apartheid South Africa, was published in 2001.
Some of the issues the project is currently researching are whether children are becoming sexually mature at a younger age, what proportion of the study's children will become infected with HIV and whether our population is becoming increasingly sedentary and eating more fattening foods.(The Cape Times, 9 July, 2003).
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