Why every child needs a GPS cell phone

Computerworld - The root of America's health crisis is bad habits formed in childhood. To protect children from harm, parents are keeping kids indoors, where they get sick, watch TV and form lifelong habits of screen addiction, inactivity and junk-food overeating.

It's time to tag and release the children. We have the technology.

Shocking news about children's health

Seventy percent of American children don't get enough vitamin D, according to a recent study published in the journal Pediatrics. Vitamin D deficiency contributes to high blood pressure and heart disease, diabetes and obesity, bone disease, rickets and other major diseases.

Vitamin D isn't a vitamin, but a hormone produced by the body when skin is exposed to sunshine. You can supplement the diet with pills and fortified foods, but scientists say sunshine is best.

Another recent study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine found another common behavior damaging children's health: watching TV.

For the first time ever, researchers are finding high blood pressure in children between the ages of 3 and 8, which they attribute to kids sitting around staring at screens. Kids studied spent an average of 5 hours a day doing "sedentary activities," mainly watching TV. The correlation is direct: The more TV time, the higher the blood pressure.

One researcher associated with the study said also that "TV viewing often comes with unhealthy snacking behavior, and also can lead to stress responses that disrupt sleep."

The study focused on the lack of activity associated with TV. But what are kids watching? The majority of children's TV advertising is for junk food. American kids see thousands of ads per year that convince them to want fatty, salty, sugary, and artificially colored junk foods.

Video games, the other sedentary activity of today's youth, don't program them with junk food ads, but may lead to behavioral problems in some kids.

A Harris Poll survey of 1,178 U.S. youths found that 8.5 percent of kids age 8 to 18 are what they call "pathological gamers" who are "addicted" to video games. They found a correlation between game addiction and Attention Deficit Disorder, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

The bottom line: Kids are sitting around for hours every day staring at screens, getting sick from lack of sunshine and exercise, all the while being programmed for poor diets and bad behavior.

Why is this happening?

One reason kids are spending more time indoors is that technology has made electronic entertainment far more interesting. Giant flat-screen TVs show high-defintion (HD) children's programming. DVD and Blu-ray movies beckon, and, of course, console video games are incredibly fun to play.