Another day another three or four stories about how out of shape we are…and another three or four fingers to point blame…First a study from the University of North Carolina that adds to the list of societal ills we can blame on Wal-Mart. The basic thrust of the study was that when Wal-Mart comes to town…the town gets chubbier. A study released by Stats Can shows that Canadians simply aren’t moving enough to be healthy. According to the Canadian Health Measures Survey only 15 per cent of adults moved enough to benefit from being healthy. Only seven per cent of 5 to 17-year olds were active enough to be healthy. On average, the amount of time spent inactive was 9.5 hours a day for adults and 8.6 hours a day for children and youth. However, the average amount of time increased among youth aged 15 to 19 to nine hours a day, or about 65 per cent of their waking hours.
The upshot here? Kids are lazy.  Darn kids…its not like when we were young.  Of course it is.  The only difference between teens today and teen’s years ago is the technology.  If we had video games, ipads and laptops when we were in school our lives would have been just as sedentary as the lives of the average 16 year old today. Don’t kid yourself.  That’s the great hypocrisy in this sudden realization that our children are overweight and over stimulated.  Who gave them the gadgets in the first place? The average teen can’t afford an iphone and a pvr.  Those come from the parents…just like our parents bought us TVs and VCRs and then complained that we spent all day in the house instead of spending the days outside like our parents did…or so they say.  But I’ll bet ya if they had been able to buy all the time wasting, highly addictive hardware that our kids have they would have reacted the same way.  So whose fault is it after all?  Walmart of course….