Scientists at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center have found that playing active video games can be as effective for children as moderate exercise. The findings appear this week in the journal Pediatrics from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

A report published on the Lancet medical journal's Online First website draws attention to a substantial rise in incidence of type 1 diabetes in children. Type 1 diabetes is also known as insulin-dependant diabetes. Parents of these children have the task of giving their children or babies insulin injections several times a day.

School children as young as 11 can benefit from a daily exercise programme in reducing their levels of several known risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

Only one of the 100 cereals checked, Nestlé's Shredded Wheat, was low in both salt and sugar. Breakfast cereals are marketed as healthy, but almost all those targeted at children are not healthy.

The UK Department of Health has been wasting taxpayers' money on ridiculous advertisements that imply home-cooked fairy cakes may lead to childhood obesity and early death.

Family-based lifestyle interventions that not only modify diet and physical activity but also include behaviour therapy programs can help obese children lose weight and maintain that loss for at least six months. This Cochrane Review also found that in adolescents the effect lasts for at least 12 months.

School-based health and exercise programs have positive outcomes despite having little effect on children's weight or the amount of exercise they do outside of school, say Cochrane Researchers who carried out a systematic review of studies on physical activity programs in schools.

Despite recent widespread media attention given to studies that have indicated one-third of American children have a weight problem, a new study shows just one-third of children who are overweight or obese actually receive that diagnosis by a pediatrician.

Immigrant children have a greater risk of suffering from overweight and obesity. This is the result of a study from Augsburg with 2306 children examined on starting school. Elisabeth Weber and her coauthors present the results in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International.

Regular exercise seems to reduce anger expression in overweight but otherwise healthy children, researchers said.

In the first study to look at the effect of neighborhood greenness on inner city children's weight over time, researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and the University of Washington report that higher neighborhood greenness is associated with slower increases in children's body mass over a two year period, regardless of residential density.

More than four in 10 parents with underweight and overweight children mistakenly believe their children are in the average weight range, according to University of Melbourne research.