Spending a few minutes for regular exercise can be helpful to keep children fit and fine and to avoid any diabetes risks.
A team of researchers from Georgia Health Sciences University found following a short exercise routine of 20 minutes or 40 minutes daily cutting down the children's risks of developing diabetics and helping them to reduce their weight.
The recommendations come at a time when the country is struggling hard to tackle childhood obesity. According to the CDC, the number of obese children has gone up considerably during the past few years.
It's important to prevent the occurrence as obese children are more vulnerable to develop a wide range of cardiovascular diseases like high blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol and also social and psychological problems like stigmatization and poor self-esteem.
"If exercise is good for you, then more exercise ought to be better for you and that is what we found for most of our outcomes," Dr. Catherine Davis, clinical health psychologist at the Institute of Public and Preventive Health at Georgia Health Sciences University, said in a news release.
The researchers included 222 overweight children, aged between seven and 11 years, to examine the effectiveness of exercise in making children healthy.
For the analysis, all the participants were divided into three groups - one group following their normal life, second group following a 20-minute aerobic training apart from school exercise routine and the last group following a 40-mintues exercise schedule after school.
At the end of the study, the investigators found children who spend more time for work out, 40 minutes a day having a 22 percent reduction in insulin resistance compared to the 20-mintues work out group (18 percent). Children who exercised more also showed losing more total body fat and visceral fat without compensating their diet.
"Obesity is a growing public health crisis that is affecting youth throughout the United States, and we know that obesity can contribute to the development of type 2 diabetes," said Dr. Michael Lauer, Director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute Division of Cardiovascular Sciences of the National Institute of Health.
"This research adds to the body of evidence that physical activity improves children's health, that longer periods of exercise provide a greater benefit and that increased physical activity among overweight and obese children could stave off the onset of type 2 diabetes."
Results of the study have been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
