Let’s move!
Via Free Beacon:
The federal government is spending more than $1.5 million to research how “bicycle trains” and “walking school buses” can help obese children lose weight.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is currently funding two studies to a researcher at Seattle Children’s Hospital, both of which aim to get more children to stop riding the school bus.
Dr. Jason Mendoza has received $405,835 for a pilot study on “bicycle trains,” or a group of kids who bike to school with adult chaperons. The project is billed as a “low-cost, practical program to reduce risk of obesity for at-risk children.”
The study, which just got underway in two Seattle elementary schools, is focusing on “low-income and ethnic minority children,” who are at the highest risk for obesity, according to the grant.
The project first received funding in February 2013, and will continue until next January. Mendoza, a pediatrician and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, is following 80 fourth and fifth graders for the “pilot cluster.”