Pittsburgh Post Gazette, PA
01-31-07
Extra pounds threaten health of teen football players
By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Can you eat your way to fame and fortune? Many high school football players
appear to think so.
Two Iowa State university researchers found that 9 percent of 251 linemen on
Iowa high school teams they studied were obese.
Overall, 45 percent of the high school linemen were overweight, and another 28
percent were at risk for being overweight. A national survey of boys aged 12-19
found just 18.3 percent to be overweight.
The study, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical
Association, was a followup to a 2005 study at the University of North Carolina
that found that 56 percent of NFL football players could be considered obese by
the most commonly used medical standard.
"Adolescent and teenage athletes are trying to emulate the bodies of NFL and
college linemen," said Dr. Joseph Colella, a bariatric surgeon at Allegheny
General Hospital.
"We don't know if they're big because of their desire to play football, or because
of their lifestyle habits," said Kelly Laurson, lead researcher of the Iowa State
study, of the high school linemen he studied.
"We obviously suspect these linemen are being pressured by coaches to gain
weight or may want to gain weight because when you watch the NFL, you see
these big linemen," said Mr. Laurson, himself a former high school football
player.
The standard typically used in medicine to measure obesity is body mass index,
and it often is misleading where athletes are concerned.
BMI is body mass divided by the square of height. If you're an ordinary person,
and you have a BMI over 30, you are severely obese. If you have a BMI over 40,
you are morbidly obese, and in serious trouble.
"It's an inadequate judge, but it's easy," said Dr. Edward Snell, director of sports
medicine at Allegheny General Hospital and team physician for the Pittsburgh
Pirates.
BMI can be misleading for athletes who do a lot of strength training, as football
players do, because BMI does not distinguish between muscle and fat. To
determine whether a football player is obese, he must also be tested to
determine what percentage of his body weight is fat (anything over 25 percent is
not good).
A study by the Scripps Howard news service indicated seriously overweight NFL
players are more than twice as likely to die before age 50 than are their trimmer
teammates.
The average weight of NFL linemen has grown from 281 pounds 20 years ago to
318 pounds today, the Scripps Howard study said.
Even players whose extra weight is mostly muscle are at greater risk, said
Charles Yesalis, a professor of health policy and sport science at Penn State
University.
"When you get that big -- regardless of whether your body is muscle or fat -- your
heart is stressed," Mr. Yesalis said.
And when football players stop playing football, that muscle can quickly turn to
fat.
"Our greatest concern is for those who have gained massive amounts of weight
and are unable to control it once their careers are over," Dr. Colella said.
However bad excessive weight is for adults, it's worse for adolescents, Dr.
Colella said.
"Adolescent obesity persists into adult obesity," he said. "Adult obesity is
essentially incurable without surgical intervention."
The obese have much higher incidences of cardiovascular disease and diabetes
than do people of normal weight.
"In a very frightening way, we are seeing pre-diabetic conditions in adolescents
who are classified as either severe or morbidly obese," Dr. Colella said.
In addition, the extra weight places more stress on the growing bones of
adolescents than it does on those of fully grown adults, increasing the likelihood
of injury.
Bone plates are areas of growing tissue on the ends of long bones of children
and adolescents. If an adolescent is obese, his bone growth will be stunted, and
his bones will be at risk for early degeneration, Dr. Snell said.
"The greater the weight, the greater the stress [on the bone plates]," he said.
Just warning adolescents of the health risks of excessive weight is unlikely to be
much of a deterrent to young people who have visions of a free college education
or a multimillion-dollar pro contract, Dr. Colella said.
"Until there is a weight limit imposed on those athletes, there will be no stopping
anybody," he said. "It's like steroids, until they were banned, everybody used
them."
Mr. Yesalis thinks a weight limit of 275 pounds should be set for NFL players.
"It would reduce injuries and have a positive effect on the short- and long-term
health of these men," he told Scripps Howard.
Dr. Colella wouldn't go that far, but he thinks the physicals all high school football
players must take should include testing for pre-diabetic conditions and other
ailments related to obesity.