The (Harrisburg, Pa.,) Patriot-News
wanted to know why so many high school football players are so large
these days. The paper points out that if the famed Chicago Bears
football player William "The Refrigerator" Perry played high school
football now, he would not be the biggest player on many teams.
Harrisburg High's defensive line has two Perry-sized players --
senior Shane Ross at 5-foot-10, 320 pounds, and senior Brandon Ware at
6-5 and 340.
The Mechanicsburg Wildcats have Travis Polillo, 6 feet and 290 pounds. East Pennsboro has senior John Baer, 18, at 6-2 and 300.
"It is staggering, the increase in size,'' said John R. Wawrzyniak,
an athletic trainer and physical therapist at the Penn State Milton S.
Hershey Medical Center who works with student athletes and the Hershey
Bears hockey team.
How much bigger are today's players?
On
average, about 11 pounds, based on a Patriot-News survey of 800
football players from eight randomly selected midstate high schools.
The newspaper compared the height and weight of 325 players from 1988
and 475 from 2006, and calculated a body-mass index for each.
The numbers reveal growth in player weight, but no appreciable change in height. The survey showed:
• The number of 230-plus-pound players more than tripled.
• The average weight of linemen jumped 19 pounds, double the rate of players at other positions.
•
Eighteen percent of 2006 players had a body mass index of 30 or more,
twice the 1988 rate. Among linemen such as Polillo and Baer, the rate
tripled. A BMI of 30 is the benchmark for obesity in adults.
Why are these teens so much bigger? Are they fitter or fatter?
Wawrzyniak
said it's probably a little of both. Better nutrition and moving to
year-round training have helped increase the size and strength of many
players, he said. Others have gotten fat, and those kids will be at risk of serious health problems in adulthood if they don't correct their weight.
"When
they are done playing, they can't keep consuming the same number of
calories they did when they were playing,'' Wawrzyniak said. "If they
do, they will become obese.''
Why Do More Kids Have Food Allergies?
Newsweek goes looking for answers:
There was a time when food allergies were of little concern to the
medical community. Today about 11 million Americans suffer from them,
and many scientists agree the numbers are climbing. Most significantly,
peanut allergies -- among the most dire -- doubled between 1997 and 2002 in
children under 5. "Clearly, the number has increased in the younger
population," says
Dr. Hugh Sampson,
a food-allergy pioneer at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in N.Y. "We
suspect that [in the future], the numbers in general are going to
increase." Allergists say they're now seeing more children with
multiple allergies than ever before, not just to 1950s staples such as
milk and wheat—but to global foods we have adopted since, like sesame
and kiwi. And allergies many kids outgrow -- like those to eggs -- seem to be
lingering longer than they did in the past.
Parents of
very young children now worry over the introduction of each new food,
on alert for the first signs of trouble, such as rashes, diarrhea and
vomiting. Deaths are rare, but the most-sensitive kids' throats may
swell and completely close up if they're exposed to the wrong foods.
Even if your school-age child is allergy-free, you still have to be
concerned about inadvertently triggering an allergic reaction in one of
your kid's friends or classmates. Dairy-free birthday cakes are de
rigueur these days, as are no-peanut Halloween parties.
But why do allergies appear to be on the rise? One of the most
intriguing theories, dubbed the "hygiene hypothesis," is that we've all
become too clean. The immune system is designed to battle dangerous
foreign invaders like parasites and viruses and infections. But clean
water, antibiotics and vaccines have eliminated some of our most toxic
challenges. Intriguing research even posits that kids born by Caesarean
section, which have risen 40 percent in the last decade, could be at
higher risk for allergies, perhaps because they were never exposed to
healthy bacteria in their mothers' birth canals. Without hard-core
adversaries, the theory goes, the immune system starts battling the
innocuous -- egg or wheat -- instead.
Congress Cuts Back
Congress has failed to pass a budget or confirm an attorney general nominee. House members this year cast 1,000 roll-call votes but produced only 106 bills that became law, and half of them were for things like renaming post offices. At the same time, even President Bush has
a higher approval rating than Congress -- so what are House Democrats going to do about that? This week the House majority leader, Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland,
announced that members would be cutting back on their workweek; no votes will be held on Fridays next year so our elected ones can go home or raise money or whatever. I can't figure out if it is good news or bad news that they won't be voting.
Turn Your Still Camera into Wi-Fi
Check out this cool idea. Using a gadget called an "Eye-Fi," you can snap pics and upload them in real time from a still camera as long as you are in range of your router. Claims to load better-quality photos than cell phone pics.
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's Note: Al's Morning
Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other
materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and
analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it
will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The
column is fact-checked, but depends on the accuracy and integrity of
the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be
corrected.
What surprises me about this story is that it only...
