Parents waiting to know if the Wii Games are a good investment for getting kids moving can find the answer in last week's release of the British Medical Journal.
Put simply. The Wii Games result in a wee amount of physical activity.
Parents are fooling themselves if they hope Nintendo's Wii active games console, which uses a wireless hand held controller to replicate athletic movement, will stop their youngster becoming obese, a study says.
Researchers in sport science at Liverpool John Moores University in northwestern. England recruited six boys and five girls aged 13-15 years and fitted them with a monitoring device to calculate energy expenditure
The three other games were sports bowling, tennis and boxing, played on Wii Sports, with a five-minute rest between sports.
The total number of extra energy units burned using Wii amounted to only 60 calories per hour, or about a quarter of a Mars bar.
"In a typical week of computer play for these participants, active gaming rather than passive gaming would increase total energy expenditure by less than two percent," says the study. Even so, nothing is a substitute for getting out of the home and doing sport itself.
"The energy used when playing Wii Sports games was not of high enough intensity to contribute towards the recommended daily amount of exercise in children," say the authors.
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