Maggie Koerth-Baker explores the ins-and-outs of the teen sex scene over at Boing Boing. Like us, she's pretty sick of hearing about slutty teens and their dangerous behavior, but a study published in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health suggests that people who have casual sex are just as happy and healthy as those who have sex within a committed relationship. The study, which surveyed 1,300 Minnesotans in their late teens and early 20s, also found that most young people were having sex within a committed relationship, yet many of them had, at some point or another, engaged in casual sex.

According to the University of Minnesota study, only 8% of respondents reported their last sexual partner as being of the "casual" type, and just 12% who were having sex in a non-exclusive relationship. Is this shocking? Not exactly. As an early-twenty something person myself, this sounds just about right. American teens, and twenty-somethings, have always dated, and hooked up, and the members of the older generations have always had some curmudgeon-y phrases to describe the slow decline of morality among the youth. However, Koerth-Baker points out that the media often makes it sound like teens today are going wild with hormones, rampantly humping each other and spreading STDs all over the place. This is partially because questions phrased "have you ever..." on a survey often get misinterpreted, reported as though a single incident were the norm, not the exception. Koerth-Baker spoke with several experts on teen sex, who generally agreed that the teen-sex panic is vastly overblown:

"I think people stereotype teenagers sometimes," said John Santelli, M.D., a pediatrician and adolescent health specialist who chairs the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. "I don't think hookup situations are the norm for young people. Serial monogamy is very common among youth. The 20% in this study who weren't in committed relationships, I'd be willing to bet that many were between relationships, or in the process of forming one."

So, to recap, most teens aren't having loads of random hook ups, but the kids that have engaged in casual sex are generally pretty normal. Well, just as long as you're of a certain age. Sexually active teens between the ages of 14-17 are more likely to engage in other risky behavior, but this probably isn't caused by sex:

"Young people who are risk takers, more non-conventional, or challenging of social norms, they're more likely to have sex between the ages of 14 and 17. They're also more likely to smoke cigarettes, try alcohol, use drugs, be less attached to school, drop out, etc.," [adolescent sexuality researcher Dr. Douglas Kirby] said. "Again, it's not the case that sex leads to all those things. It's that these people who are less connected to family and school are engaging in a wide variety of risk-taking behaviors and sex is just a part of that."

Stop the presses: casual sex doesn't cause kids to turn to drugs or alcohol, nor does it make them particularly depressed! It's easy to blame everything on sexual activity, but for many teens, sex is just part of a much larger picture. The emphasis we place on sex has turned it - wrongly - into a barometer for everything that is wrong with a person, or even within a relationship. Sexual habits and proclivities may be part of our identities, but it is in no way the most meaningful piece, and this is true for both adults and teens. The youth of Generation Y are much like that of Generation X, some are risk takers, some are purity-vow makers, but despite widespread panic, most of them are doing just fine.

Sex, Science, And Statistics [Boing Boing]

Researchers from the UK have found that some people actually feel physical pain in response to viewing images of other people's suffering. British psychologist Dr. Stuart Derbyshire showed 123 university students videos and pictures of athletes in painful situations. The videos included clips of a soccer player breaking his leg, a tennis player twisting his ankle, and a patient getting an injection in their hand. While every student reported feeling an emotional response to the videos, a third of the participants said they actually felt twinges of pain in their own bodies.

The video that elicited the most painful responses showed a man running on a racetrack with a clearly broken leg. Students reported anything from tingling to a harsh, stabbing pain, usually in the corresponding region of the body. 10 of the "hypersensitive" students were then asked to view similar images while undergoing a functional MRI. When compared with scans from students who reported just emotional pain, only the "responder" brain scans showed activity in the region associated with handling pain. "We think this confirms that at least some people have an actual physical reaction when observing others being injured or expressing pain," Derbyshire said.

The twinges of phantom pain experienced by a third of Derbyshire's subjects could be the most primal version of empathy. According to the Daily Mail, some scientists believe the ability to feel another person's pain evolved millions of years ago as a way to help bond and "encourage our prehistoric ancestors [to] work more closely with each other."

People Who Say They "Feel Your Pain" Really Do [Daily Mail]
The Brain May Feel Other People's Pain [Reuters]

Shane Ryan, creator of classics like Amateur Porn Star Killer and Sex, Kids, Party, says that the film will handle her story with care: "We're trying to figure out a way to do that so it's not exploitative." • Prosecutors have decided that a 59-year-old man from the UK probably did murder his wife in her sleep, as his defense has claimed. Brian Thomas dreamt that his wife was an intruder, and strangled her to death. Prosecutors, persuaded by expert testimony about automatism and sleep disorders, are now arguing for a ruling of not guilty by reason of mental insanity - the alternative being a "simple verdict of not guilty." • Back in June, New York State decided to allow researchers to pay women for their eggs for stem cell research. But many fear that this policy will take advantage of underprivileged women, since donating eggs is not without risks. • The March of Dimes' Premature Birth Card has graded the U.S. a "D" when it comes to preterm birth rate. Not a single state was awarded an A, and only Vermont was given a B. • Government researchers report black women are twice as likely as white or Hispanic women to suffer a stillbirth, partly due to higher pregnancy rates and because African-American women are more at risk for high blood pressure, diabetes, and pregnancy complications like uterine bleeding and premature rupture of the sac surrounding the fetus. The racial gap is even wider between more-educated women. Higher education is linked to a 30 percent reduction in stillbirths among white women, but no reduction in risk among African-Americans. • An interesting new study from the University of Pennsylvania found that children who are insensitive to fear are more likely to grow up to be criminals. Researchers examined toddlers, measuring their sweat output to determine fear. Years later they pulled the records of participants, and found that toddlers who did not sweat in response to a loud noise were more likely to have a criminal record. •  A government watchdog group has asked the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate whether Michele Bachmann violated house rules by organizing the November 5th Tea Party rally. • Wanda Eileen Barzee, the woman accused of helping her then-husband kidnap Elizabeth Smart, has plead guilty to charges of kidnapping and unlawful transportation of a minor. The terms of her plea agreement have not yet been made public. • According to a children's charity, Britain lacks the resources to protect thousands of young girls vulnerable to being forced into sexual slavery. Only 20% of local authorities have the specialist sources to intervene, said the chief executive of Bernardo. • A 21-year-old Army mom may face criminal charges after she skipped a deployment flight to Afghanistan in order to stay home and care for her infant son. Alexis Hutchinson's attorney says her superiors ordered her to place the child in foster care and resume service. •  Several organizations are trying to get more British girls to ride bikes, but the campaigns focus too much on looking good while cycling, according to an editorial in The Guardian. One site called Bike Belles actually advises girls to, "Use waterproof mascara when it's raining on your bike, and take a powder compact for a quick refresher on arrival." • Burkittsville, Maryland, the town where The Blair Witch Project was filmed, had to design new welcome signs because people keep stealing the ones that were shown in the movie. • Hooters Las Vegas lost millions of dollars this year and now the company has received a notice of default from its lenders. The company is trying to restructure, but maybe frat boys just don't have as much money to throw around these days? • A New Jersey high school student is suing her school because administrators wouldn't let her participate in the Pro Life Day of Silent Solidarity, an annual worldwide protest. She wanted to remain silent on October 20, except when called on in class, wear an armband with the word "life" on it, and hand out anti-abortion pamphlets. "The school district basically held that there is no religion allowed in school, which violates the students' First Amendment rights," said her lawyer. • On Saturday, a French woman was allowed to marry the father of her two children nearly a year after his death in a car accident. She stood next to his picture while she recited her vows. "I'm not really in the mood to celebrate," she said afterwards. "We're going to drink a cup of coffee and I will thank those who have supported me." •

Interesting item in Newsweek: Sharon Begley discusses new findings (discussed in Scientific American]that strive to determine if there's any evolutionary benefit to what we consider clinical depression, a subject much on the minds of certain brain researchers. The questions: is a little depression not just natural, but healthy? In scientific terms, is there some reason for the Black Dog? This implies a fundamentally different way of considering what's been termed a mental illness. Say the study's authors, "There is another possibility: that, in most instances, depression should not be thought of as a disorder at all. " Here's how Begley describes it:

Writing in the journal Psychological Review, postdoctoral fellow Paul Andrews of Virginia Commonwealth University and psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson Jr. of the University of Virginia present research suggesting that depression is present in the species, and in individuals, for a purpose, and we're playing with fire if we try to eradicate it. In evolution-speak, depression is an "adaptation," they argue. That is, it evolved because it made individuals who experienced it fitter, under natural selection, than individuals who did not experience it. Andrews and Thomson-who is best known for research on the psychology of religious belief, and who has also studied whether antidepressants threaten love and fidelity-offer as evidence the presence of a molecule in the brain called the 5HT1A receptor. This serves as a docking port for the neurochemical serotonin, which the Prozac/Zoloft/Paxil class of antidepressants targets. Human brains are not the only ones with the 5HT1A receptor. Rats also have it.

And said receptor's important to recognizing and dealing with stress and threat, rather than leaving us (and rats) in a perpetual state of unwary bliss. "In other words, losing the receptor that promotes depression in response to stress is something evolution thought would be a very bad move. Ergo: depression is not something to be thrown out lightly." Indeed, it's suggested that depression can lead to analysis and solutions, focused thinking, and even "negative" depressive traits - such as self-isolation or loss of libido, ie the reason we take Paxil - that may serve an adaptive function.

There are some really interesting points in here: are we overmedicated? Probably - and a little sadness, as the author says, should not be the bogeyman it's become in our times. But clinical depression - either human or rat - is a dicier issue altogether. As these researchers would surely be the very first to point out, even if depression can be proven to have en evolutionary purpose, as we all know, what's good for us as humans isn't necessarily good for us as people. Then too, it seems pretty logical that plenty of modern stimuli - to say nothing of pharmaceuticals, diet, chemicals, environment - could have a hand in that depression that Mother Nature had absolutely nothing to do with. Then there's the other elephant in the room: depression can lead to suicide - which, in the small scheme, isn't helping anyone's progress. It's both fascinating and reassuring to know that there may be an evolutionary rationale for what can feel like an unfair genetic curse, and with any luck, if true, this will be of substantial use to researchers. But as it stands, I'm not canceling that Lexapro prescription any time soon.

Depression's Evolutionary Roots [Scientific American]

The Upside Of Feeling Down [Newsweek]
The Bright Side Of Being Blue [APA]

Reports the Telegraph,

For married parents, each child makes them progressively happier, Dr. Luis Angeles, an economist at Glasgow University, found. Writing in the Journal of Happiness Studies, he concluded that "raising kids makes married people happier", and that "the more they have, the happier they are". By contrast those who are single, separated or living together are more likely to have negative feelings about parenthood.

Earlier studies had, apparently, suggested something quite different: as EurekAlert explains, "Previous research suggests that increasing numbers of children do not make people any happier, and in some cases the more children people have, the less satisfied they are with their lives. Rather bleakly, this has been attributed to the fact that raising children involves a lot of hard work for only a few occasional rewards."

By contrast, Angeles concluded that the "happiness" seemed to be a direct result of whether the kids were planned, more common in marriages. And there's an obvious correlation between said planning and financial security, and schedule flexibility - the same things that can make child-rearing most stressful.

What can we take away from this? Apparently, that there is a Journal of Happiness Studies. And that Michelle Duggar is the happiest woman in the world. And Angelina Jolie, very rich.

Children 'Make Married Parents Happier' [Telegraph]
Married With Children The Key To Happiness? [EurekAlert]

While, as Angier puts it, "observers of human mating customs have long contended that serial monogamy is really just a socially sanctioned version of harem-building," in fact, she suggests, perhaps women are, by nature, also inclined to live polygymously.

In a report published in the summer issue of the journal Human Nature, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of the University of California, Davis, presents compelling evidence that at least in some non-Western cultures where conditions are harsh and mothers must fight to keep their children alive, serial monogamy is by no means a man's game, finessed by him and foisted on her. To the contrary, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, among the Pimbwe people of Tanzania, whose lives and loves she has been following for about 15 years, serial monogamy looks less like polygyny than like a strategic beast that some evolutionary psychologists dismiss as quasi-fantastical: polyandry, one woman making the most of multiple mates... "We're so wedded to the model that men will benefit from multiple marriages and women won't, that women are victims of the game," Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said. "But what my data suggest is that Pimbwe women are strategically choosing men, abandoning men and remarrying men as their economic situation goes up and down."

In addition, the researcher found, these multiple-marriers are not deemed the flighty "bolters" of Western perception, but, rather, "considered high-quality mates, the hardest working, the most reliable, with scant taste for the strong maize beer the Pimbwe famously brew." While this is obviously a specific study of a certain group's practices, as Salon's Judy Berman puts it, these are "Darwinian extremes," and as such it's tempting to extrapolate about a society not mired in our constructs. I'm wary of this, as a rule; because a society doesn't have our mores doesn't mean it can't have its own, surely equally entrenched and capable of altering a society's shape? To suggest anything else seems both reductive and patronizing. But let's say we take the argument to this far-fetched extreme and start the perennially-popular par;or game of "what-if." What if this says something about basic human nature? What do we learn? That women are security-minded? Angier's circumspect, saying only, "the results underscore the importance of avoiding the breezy generalities of what might be called Evolution Lite, an enterprise too often devoted to proclaiming universal truths about deep human nature based on how college students respond to their professors' questionnaires." I'm inclined to concur: if we choose to regard this as some kind of triumph for evolutionary equality, the results lead themselves equally open to far-flung "gold-digger" interpretations. The best conclusion to draw, to my mind, is what I'll call the creationist's paradox: you can use loosely-interpreted evolutionary arguments to back up as many arguments as a Bible-thumper can find Good Book justification for his.

If we need proof, keep in mind that the "husband-snatcher!" furor is still going strong. A rather cavalier piece in the Houston Chronicle sports the same sort of reductive headline that's been snaring views since the rather more complicated Journal of Experimental Social Psychology results came out. In short, she reports that "mate poaching" is real, and that it says a lot of bad stuff about women. Then readers, who also haven't read the research and are drawing their own conclusions based on this rather sketchy pop-summary, say things like, "fellas if your wife has hot looking girlfriends, leave the house, cause those b—-h's are cheating to. ladies, if your husband has hot looking friends, chances are they are cheating with your hot looking girlfriends." And "THE ALPHA MALE, just like the lion of the jungle his role is to get as many lioness's pregnant." Does a moron need "facts" to bolster his grandstanding? No - but he'll use them.

"Facts" as we know can be dangerous things. It's not, obviously, an exactly analogous situation, but I thought of this earlier while reading a piece about Marriage Works USA, a campaign of the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative that promotes marriage by using statistics on its ads like "married people earn and save more money" and "married people enjoy better health." As Christopher Wanjek sagely points out on LiveScience, these stats derive, universally, from studies and surveys whose results are, unsurprisingly, far more complicated and less neatly reductive than the campaign would suggest, and as such, misleading. I'm not saying people who want to shouldn't get married (and be able to) but the decision shouldn't be dictated by pop sociology, and if that marriage ends, let's not invoke evolutionary imperatives, either. Sure, facts and studies are great. But a fact, noun, doesn't in itself bolster an argument, also noun. These various studies are fascinating, enrich the discussion and, when used as intended, can teach us a lot. But we've eschewed plenty of "evolutionary imperatives" to live as we do, and as a result have pretty much forfeited the privilege of using it as an excuse. Apologies to THE ALPHA MALE.

Skipping Spouse To Spouse Isn't Just A Man's Game [NY Times]
The First Husbands Club [Salon]
Are You Or Do You Know A "Mate Poacher"? [Houston Chronicle]
Marriage Works: An Exaggerated Message [LiveScience]

The latter portion, and my favorite, was devoted to music. The music room was upstairs, sunny and bright. We sat in circles and sang, songs about our names and the moon and animals. I loved to sing and I wasn't shy. And I loved the songbook, illustrated with Kate Greenaway pictures of children in long dresses and bonnets, that we used every day. I have no very clear recollection of the teacher, save that I loved her, was pretty sure it was mutual, and that she had short hair. What I do remember clearly is, one day, coming upon her canvas tote bag in the corner of the big music room seeing the songbook, with its distinctive cover illustration of children gamboling around a maypole, sitting there in plain sight, its edges peeking out of the bag. I thought, oh, she's forgotten the songbook! We need it! I'll bring it to her.

I probably expected accolades; instead I got the sharpest rebuke I'd ever experienced in my short, charmed life, a lecture that to this day has left me a conscientious respector of others' space and privacy, to the exclusion even of a medicine cabinet or a boyfriend's open email account. I do know I could never look her in the eye again, and that I began to sit as far from her as I could, never singing loudly enough to be heard. Nothing had ever felt as bad as that sudden, arbitrary loss of approbation, that sense that the world was a thing out of my control, and the realization that good intentions, in this life, count for very little. The fact that I remember it 25 years later, after experiencing actual bad things and doing worse, says a lot for the value of formative experience, and the impressionable nature of a child's psyche.

So I couldn't help but feel alarm when I read about the "guilt studies" being conducted at the University of Iowa (detailed in John Tierney's "Findings" column today) in which a toddler is put in the position of breaking a "valuable" toy, so that researchers can assess their reactions. The study was designed

to isolate the effects of two distinct mechanisms that help children become considerate, conscientious adults. One mechanism, measured in other experiments testing toddlers' ability to resist temptations, is called effortful self-control - how well you can think ahead and deliberately suppress impulsive behavior that hurts yourself and others. The other mechanism is less rational and is especially valuable for children and adults with poor self-control. It's the feeling measured in that broken-toy experiment: guilt, or what children diagnose as a "sinking feeling in the tummy."

It's not as sadistic as it sounds - the findings are important, and the children are apparently reassured at the end that they've done nothing wrong. But, young as they are, I wonder if this won't stay with some of them as a sign of the very arbitrary nature of the adult world. It's funny that one's guilt should be strongest when one has the least control or power over the world, and indeed, the least ability to cause injury. By the time moms are laying it on you, it's lost a lot of power to shame. But as anyone who's raised or spent time with children knows, responsibility can weigh on them heavily. (I once heard a medical professional describe guilt as "a manufactured emotion." Tell that to a 2-year-old.) And I don't know that you even need to experiment with young children to figure this out: the number of adults who carry similarly indelible memories of shame could probably provide conclusive proof!

Guilt And Atonement On The Path To Adulthood [NY Times]

Queries New Scientist,

Is smart sexy? Our knee-jerk reaction – reinforced by cultural stereotypes of Star Trek-convention attending geeks and a seeming obsession with ditzy, pretty starlets – would argue otherwise. Nerds are, well, nerds...But consider Peter Orszag. As director of the US Office of Management and Budget, he is the nation's most powerful pencil-pusher. Yet Orszag was recently named one of the hunks of Washington DC . "He's made nerdy sexy," Barack Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said of the 40-year-old, glasses-wearing son of a maths professor.

This sort of thing irritates me as a woman, a dater of smart men, a glasses-wearer and an English major. First: I resent the careless lumping -together of the words "nerd," "smart," and "geek." These are all different words that don't mean the same thing. Second: who is it who has these knee-jerk reactions? Cartoon cheerleaders? 80's movie jocks? Because I think we need to learn to acknowledge when a stereotype has evolved.

The piece - most of which is perfectly reasonable and fact-based, I should add - is based on new findings that "linked a male's cognitive performance to his luck with the ladies." According to one behavioural ecologist, male (birds) with better "problem-solving" skills, unsuprisingly, do better in the wild. Another study asked women to watch videos of guys demonstrating feats of cognitive and athletic prowess, and rate their desirability; the good problem-solvers were perceived as attractive. There's genetic basis for this, too, most likely, since some tests have found that more intelligent men have better health, more robust sperm.

Every couple of years, we're informed that geeks are "chic" or something, because Seth Rogen wears glasses or a tech multimillionaire has a hot girlfriend. The "nerds" in question generally resemble Superman incognito. "Dating trend" stories are, as a rule, ludicrous anyway, attempting as they do to codify the emotional and sexual habits of entire populations. Did aggressive glasses frames become de rigueur in the last decade? Sure. Did the beginnings of silicon valley probably see an increase of tech dudes with "trophy girlfriends?" I wouldn't be surprised. But most of us don't need studies or hints of superior genetic function to find an intelligent man attractive: that's what smart women are drawn to. It's not a phase or a trend: that's what we do. And this brings me to my other point: world, do please stop equating "nerd" and "smart." "Nerd" may not be an insult, but it's also a specific description that generally implies superior intelligence but suggests any number of other characteristics, as well, and shouldn't be tossed around and diluted. Yes, in high school, the two are classically conflated by philistines; this doesn't mean we should perpetuate the lazy misconception.

Also, Rahm: Peter Orszag, recently named may be brilliant. He may be competent. He may be a wonderful person. But "sexy" he most certainly is not. Sure, we take Politico's list in the spirit it was intended (Hitchens is on there, people.) But tet's watch our diction here.

Why Geeks Get The Girls [New Scientist]
The hunks Of Washington
[Politico]
Nerds Rejoice: Braininess Boosts Likelihood Of Sex [New Scientist]

Intelligent 'Have Better Sperm' [BBC]

Writes Marcus Jokela, the study's author,

Having your study publicized by the media is nice. Having your study misrepresented and misinterpreted in the process is not. The media coverage of my paper on physical attractiveness and having children had a bad start and even worse follow-up. The origin of the problem: Times Online news article sexing up the finding a bit too much (I wasn't interviewed for this article at all and heard about it only after it had been published). Then things got worse with other journalists copying & slightly modifying the Times Online piece...The main point of the study was to see whether attractiveness predicts fertility in a contemporary American population, not whether people are becoming more or less attractive over time.

And, he says, any larger evolutionary truths people derived from this were mere extrapolations. What's more, certain details were glossed over: that it was actually the second-most attractive women who scored highest, and that the study wasn't limited to women - attractive guys also had more kids, according to the finding. God, these scientists! So factual! Overall, Jokela's response is a pretty handy takedown of the media's handling of the findings scientists approach so precisely, and of the absurdity of that snowball. This should serve as a good reminder to all of us - yes, us too! - to take the time to read the source material and pay these researchers the compliment, at least, of reporting what they say accurately - even if it's not as fun. (Writes Jokela: "And please, do not refer to me as the "Ann Coulter-loving scientist", I hadn't even heard about the lady before the headline." Okay.)

‘Women Are Getting More Beautiful' - Getting The Story Right [Markus Jokela]
Put Away Your Sneakers, Ladies. "Beauty Race" Is A Myth [Salon]
"‘Women Are Getting More Beautiful' – Getting The Story Right" [Feminist Law Professors]

Related: Ann Coulter-Loving Scientist Says Women Are Getting Hotter

As Time's John Cloud writes:

The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

Cloud cites a study from the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE (PLoS is the nonprofit Public Library of Science). The study, supervised by a colleague of Ravussin's, Dr. Timothy Church, chair in health wisdom at LSU, randomly assigned into four groups 464 overweight women who didn't regularly exercise. Women in three of the groups were asked to work out with a personal trainer for six months; women in the fourth group were the control and were told to maintain their usual routines. The results?

On average, the women in all the groups, even the control group, lost weight, but the women who exercised - sweating it out with a trainer several days a week for six months - did not lose significantly more weight than the control subjects did.

Cloud supposes, jokingly (?) "The control-group women may have lost weight because they were filling out those regular health forms, which may have prompted them to consume fewer doughnuts."

Of course, exercise has its benefits: Enhancing heart and circulatory health, helping prevent disease, improving mental health and cognitive ability. Cloud points to a study released by the University of Alberta a few weeks ago which found that people with chronic back pain who exercise four days a week have 36% less disability than those who exercise only two or three days a week.

But weight loss is a different issue. As is self-control. Cloud explains:

Many people assume that weight is mostly a matter of willpower - that we can learn both to exercise and to avoid muffins and Gatorade. A few of us can, but evolution did not build us to do this for very long. In 2000 the journal Psychological Bulletin published a paper by psychologists Mark Muraven and Roy Baumeister in which they observed that self-control is like a muscle: it weakens each day after you use it. If you force yourself to jog for an hour, your self-regulatory capacity is proportionately enfeebled. Rather than lunching on a salad, you'll be more likely to opt for pizza.

This strikes me as somewhat questionable, as I — and most people I know — tend to be quite loathe to "undo" any work put in at the gym with high-calorie snacks. But this working-out-makes-you-eat movement even has conspiracy theorists!

Steven Gortmaker, head of Harvard's Prevention Research Center on Nutrition and Physical Activity says, "If you're more physically active, you're going to get hungry and eat more." He's suspicious of the playgrounds at fast-food restaurants. "Why would they build those? I know it sounds kind of like conspiracy theory, but you have to think, if a kid plays five minutes and burns 50 calories, he might then go inside and consume 500 calories or even 1,000."

In any case, the key seems to be not to be total sloth and a lead a sedentary lifestyle but just to keep on moving. Cloud writes:

Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity - the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented - may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat. "You cannot sit still all day long and then have 30 minutes of exercise without producing stress on the muscles," says Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, a neurobiologist at LSU's Pennington Biomedical Research Center who has studied nutrition for 20 years. "The muscles will ache, and you may not want to move after. But to burn calories, the muscle movements don't have to be extreme. It would be better to distribute the movements throughout the day."

Of course, since none of this is conducive to working a desk job (blogging for a living included) we're gonna add: Good luck with that.

Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin [Time]

Earlier: Does Exercise Make You Hungry Instead Of Thin?

Researchers at the University of Missouri divided a group of 8,000 children into those who were overweight from kindergarten through third grade, those who only became overweight as third graders, and those who were never overweight, reports Reuters. The children filled out questionnaires about their feelings and teachers answered questions about how they perceived their students.

Children who were consistently overweight reported feelings of depression, anxiety, and loneliness that got worse as they grew older. Those who were overweight at any point saw themselves as having worse interpersonal skills, lower social standing, and worse peer relationships than the children who were never overweight.

According to EurekAlert, lead researcher Dr. Sara Gable said:

"Overweight is widely considered a stigmatizing condition and overweight individuals are typically blamed for their situation. The experience of being stigmatized often leads to negative feelings, even in children."

Gable found boys experienced more negative feelings about their weight than expected. "I think there's a tendency to believe that boys don't experience those consequences until later," she said. However, teachers reported that overweight girls still had more problems than their male counterparts: The boys' weight didn't influence how teachers perceived their social and self-control skills, and teachers actually felt they acted out less and were less aggressive than the children who were not overweight.

As for the girls, teachers perceived even those who were only nearing the overweight classification as being less well behaved. Gable said:

"Girls who were consistently overweight, from kindergarten through third grade, and girls who were approaching being overweight were viewed less favorably than girls who were never overweight... Teachers reported that these girls had less positive social relations and displayed less self-control and more acting out than never-overweight girls."

It's possible that the teachers' prejudices made them see the overweight girls as more out of control, while the heavy boys were viewed as more amiable and easy-going. But if the teachers' observations about their students were accurate, girls are starting to experience negative emotions about themselves because of their weight before they're even "officially" overweight.

With USA Today reporting that the number of children hospitalized for obesity-related illnesses nearly doubled from 1999 to 2005, it's obviously important for children to maintain a healthy weight for their physical well being. But it's disturbing to see that in addition to the health problems overweight kids may face, their weight starts having a negative psychological effect on them when they're still in elementary school.

Weight Affects How Littlest Kids See Themselves [Reuters]
Overweight Kids Experience More Loneliness, Anxiety, MU Study Finds [EurekAlert]
Study: Hospitalizations Related To Childhood Obesity Nearly Double [USA Today]