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Reply to T Wilkin

International Journal of Obesity volume 32, page 578 (2008)Cite this article

We are grateful to Terence Wilkin for raising points from our recent paper.1 We accept that had we measured total weekly activity and school physical education (PE) by objective accelerometry, we may well have found only a weak association. In that case, we would have to consider some other quality of secondary school PE to account for its negative relationship with increase in waist circumference. The role of the educational aspect of school PE on the amount and nature of pupils' activity both in and out of school could be relevant. Given the potential of the school context to promote physical activity, it is likely that both experimental and observational data will be needed to tease out school-level effects while separating out the effects of confounding variables.

The skewness of the occurrence in our study of different amounts of school PE for the boys, which is referred to by Dr Wilkin, is not in fact a problem for our results, because school PE is analysed as a categorical independent variable and the numbers of boys are adequate in all three categories.

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References

  1. Wardle J, Brodersen NH, Boniface D . School-based physical activity and changes in adiposity. Int J Obes 2007; 31: 1464–1468.

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  1. Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Health Behaviour Unit, University College London, London, UK

    D Boniface & J Wardle

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  1. D Boniface
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  2. J Wardle
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Correspondence to J Wardle.

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Boniface, D., Wardle, J. Reply to T Wilkin. Int J Obes 32, 578 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.ijo.0803775

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