A Sound Mind in a Sound Bod

TO THE EDITOR: In the August issue of this journal, the article titled “Changing the school environment to increase physical activity in children,” Lanningham-Foster and coworkers (1) addressed the issue of the physical activity practices at school. They innovated by testing spontaneous movements in an activity-permissive school setting. Under this condition, it was found that children significantly increased their activity level up to the participation observed under summer vacation conditions. More importantly, this increase in spontaneous physical activity was manifested as a preference over educational technologies that might have been suspected as being of primary interest for students. This finding is of particular interest for our research team which concomitantly published a paper documenting the biological impact of computer-related activities (2). As shown in Table 1, computer-related activities represent a particular type of sedentary activities which are stressful and biologically demanding. In our opinion, this type of activity has nothing that could be considered as a restful activity and deserves to be counterbalanced by an adequate physical activity regimen. In this regard, we totally agree with the conclusions presented by these authors who proposed that “re-designing the school itself” might be essential to promote the optimal development of children. With respect to obesity prevention, the fact that computer-related activities favor an increase in ad libitum energy intake (2,3) also reinforces this view point. Finally, this is also in agreement with the observations that regular physical activity participation is related to higher cognitive performance and brain function (4) as well as improvement in academic success in many cases (5). After all, it is important to maintain a sound mind in a sound body. The authors declared no conflict of interest.