Dancing is a good activity to beat obesity

Dancing provides an individual with “just about the right level of activity” to help beat the bulge, one expert has said.

The claim was made be the National Obesity Forum, which was established by medical practitioners in May 2000 to raise awareness of the growing health impact that being overweight or obese was having on patients and the National Health Service.

The comments follow an announcement on February 24th 2009 by the Aldridge Foundation of the beginning of the Essentially Dance programme - a pilot scheme to improve children's fitness and self-esteem.

Essentially Dance will train school teachers how to deliver ballroom and Latin dance to children as part of their Physical Education lessons and will be evaluated by Roehampton University.

There are plans to make the training resource available to all schools later this year and Darren Bennett and Lilia Kopylova from the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing show will be teaching 300 children aged five-16 from six primary and secondary schools in Brighton how to jive and cha cha cha as part of Essentially Dance.

The thinking behind the scheme is that dance cannot only raise a person’s self-esteem but also lose weight, with the inference that the two factors may be connected.

Dr David Haslam, chair of the National Obesity Forum, said: "I think more physical activities should be part of the curriculum […] because we know the more physical activity kids get at school, the better their concentration for the academic lessons and the better the results.

"I think we should certainly be pushing more physical activity both with lessons and out-of-hours clubs, but I don't think it should be specified what the activity is, just guidelines on to what is an appropriate activity, among which dancing should be on the list."

In December 2008, Department of Health published the key findings from the Government's National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) for 2007/08.

It has shown that of those children surveyed aged between four and five years almost one in four of the children measured were either overweight or obese.

Of those children surveyed aged between ten and 11 years almost one in two were either overweight or obese.

Dr David Haslam concluded that dancing could be a brilliant solution to this problem.

He explained: “I think dancing is just about the right level of activity: it's brisk but not too vigorous, it's cardiovascular, rather than muscle-building, and as I said, it is enjoyable.

"Also it is a good skill to learn, it's popular these days, you don't have to be a fantastic athlete …It's a skill for life [and it involves] communication skills and social skills.”