Teenage boys can really eat!

Posted by: Curt | Under: General Fitness | (0) Comments

Most people know this from experience, but a new study confirms that teenage boys can really pack it away. Given the chance to eat as much as they wanted for lunch, they averaged about 2000 calories. That is the recommended intake for a whole day for older adults. I do wonder if there are other variables such as whether they ate breakfast that morning and how much exercise they got. Still, 2000 calories is a lot of food at one sitting. But then again, I remember my teenage years and even as a skinny 135 lb boy, I could eat huge quantities. The authors did note that boys that are overweight should cut back on their diet since bad eating habits generally follow us into adulthood and it is very obvious that we have a severe weight problem in our culture.

So if you have boys, let them eat as long as they are not overweight but try to guide their eating habits as much as you can since a diet of fast food will come back to haunt them…

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But in a lunch-buffet experiment involving 204 kids ages 8 to 17, researchers found boys routinely ate more compared than girls their own age and boys in their mid-teens were the most ravenous — downing an average of nearly 2,000 lunch calories.

Researcher Dr. Jack A. Yanovski said the pattern made sense, given that boys usually hit their growth spurt — putting on height and muscle mass — in late puberty.

“There’s a lot of folk wisdom that says boys can eat prodigious amounts, but we haven’t had much data,” Yanovski told Reuters Health as his study was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/ajcn.2010.29383v1).