The Daily Mile

There's been a lot of coverage in the news recently of The Daily Mile - a scheme for primary school children started by Elaine Wyllie, a head teacher in Stirling, Scotland in February 2012. The premise is very simple: at some point during the school day, all of the children go outside for 15 minutes of running around a pre-marked course (e.g. laps of the playground), aiming to jog or run a mile. The website claims that after 4 weeks, most children are able to run the full distance, and there are anecdotal reports of improvements in behaviour, concentration and sleep. In many ways, it sounds fun to be able to take a quick break between classes to blow off steam and stretch your legs; as for all of us, long periods of sitting are uncomfortable and stifling and it's hard to argue with introducing a short movement break into the children's day.

But there's a more disturbing side to the scheme that is going missing in the enthusiastic reporting: the direct linking of the Daily Mile with anti-obesity agendas. The stated aim of the scheme is "to improve the physical, social and mental health and well-being of our children - regardless of age, ability or personal circumstances", but it is obesity that is singled out as the crisis that needs to be addressed; the programme's letter to teachers, for example, states that "UK children are now the most overweight in Europe, and activity levels are worryingly low". The other anticipated benefits figure as collateral to the core aim, which Elaine Wyllie articulates as, "to help tackle our growing childhood obesity and physical activity crisis". This anti-obesity focus is demonstrated in the recent publication of research measuring the effects of the Daily Mile, in a BMC Medicine paper entitled: "The Daily Mile make primary children more active, less sedentary and improves their body composition: a quasi-experimental pilot study".  Using data from pedometers, BMI, skin fold tests and a shuttle run exercise, the study concluded that the results show a relative decrease of 18.2 mins / day in sedentary time; a relative increase of 9.1 mins / day in Moderate-Vigorous Intensity Physical Activity (MVPA); an increase in 39.1 metres in the shuttle run test; and a decrease of 1.4mm in the skin fold test. It hardly seem surprising that the introduction of an additional daily physical activity both increased activity rates and lessened sedentary time broadly in line with the time allocated to the activity; nor is it particularly surprising that children practising running get better at a test that measures running ability - a set of findings that seem relatively benign (although the definition of 'fitness' based on how far and fast you can run is very narrow).

But the skin fold test (which was conducted alongside height-weight measures) is more disturbing, given the assumption that a decrease in skin folds equates to 'improved' body composition - a non-too-subtle coding for the familiar coding of body fat as problematic - which in turn functions as a proxy for 'health'. There is no information on the Daily Mile website about how the scheme is pitched to the children, but those taking part in this study can have been under no illusions that a primary goal of the Daily Mile scheme was to get rid of undesirable fat through athletic performance as they were weighed and measured. The website also reveals the neoliberal discourses of personal responsibility into which the children are being inculcated through the scheme. The website's section on Health and Wellbeing, for example, argues that "children become more aware of their health and the need to take responsibility for it"; and the section on introducing the scheme into early learning and childcare settings describes it as "the opportunity to develop their 'physical literacy' and improve body composition for the rest of their lives". It's never too early to learn that the fat body can never be a 'good' body, and that we are individually responsible for our bodily condition. The aim that the scheme is for all children "regardless of age, ability or personal circumstance" is admirably inclusive, but at the same time flattens out the social factors that constitute health outcomes beyond the reach of 'individual responsibility'.

I had other questions. If one of the goals is to inculcate exercise habits that they will carry forward into their adult lives, is making them run outside whatever the weather really the best plan? And how, for example, is the experience of the Daily Mile gendered? In particular, girls often have to wear skirts that will cling to / wrap around legs restricting movement; they might also be wearing tights, the crotch of which every girl and woman knows will slide down her legs as soon as she moves around; and girls' shoes are notoriously flimsy and unsupportive compared to boys', as we can see in this promotional shot from the Daily Mile website:

And this leads me to my final question: does it have to be running? I can see that the singular focus on running is central to the scheme's commitment to making the intervention as simple, practical and unobtrusive into the school day as possible, but it also ties one particular mode of exercise (and one easily coded as 'healthy') to positive outcomes in ways that exclude others and cement the normative link between exercise and anti-obesity. What results would we see if children enjoyed a 15 minute break to sing songs, dance, go outside to see how many different birds or insects they can spot, or learn to juggle....? I suspect that busy teachers everywhere are now rolling their eyes at the prospect of such potentially complicated interventions into their already over-stuffed days, and they're right of course (although this is more an argument for changing the appalling working conditions of teachers in this country than one for sticking with running for simplicity's sake). But it is important to separate out what might be the benefits of a break from studying, and what is specific to running. And following on from that, what about those children for whom this is a nightmare? The website highlights the enthusiasm with which the scheme has been greeted by children, and I don't doubt that for many, it is joyful and invigorating, but what about those children whose bodies are most obviously the targets of this intervention (and who are already identified by other children as such)? Or those who just don't like to run, or can't' run?

I suspect that all of this makes me seem like a bit of a grouch. But the tethering of this potentially fun and positive activity for kids to the forceful prejudices of anti-obesity casts a dark shadow over its possibilities. What if we were to encourage playful exercise and activity without ever mentioning body size (or 'composition') or using it as code for 'health'? What if all children's bodies were already good enough and not subject to demands for 'improvement' in order to be counted as good citizens? The clinging of the scheme to anti-obesity goals makes it a terrible opportunity lost to think about bodies differently.

As the Daily Mile story circulated online and through social media, a few people posted on Twitter that it would be great to introduce this into our workplaces, and all I could think was that collective running in unsuitable clothing at my place of work in order to 'improve my body composition' was a vision of hell. Children are not adults and their school lives are very different to adult work lives, but I did find myself wondering how many feel the same way and what long term effects this might have. What memories and practices will those children whose bodies don't fit the narrative of self-mastery and 'improvement' carry into their adulthood? This seems like a much more pressing question than how many millimetres of fat they have lost.

Poverty and obesity

The Conversation recently published a piece by Martin Cohen, visiting research fellow in Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, entitled: It's poverty, not individual choice, that is driving extraordinary obesity levels. The article is headed with the familiar visual trope of fat stomach, ready to burst its shirt buttons - a lazy, fat-phobic suggestion (albeit probably picked by editors rather than the author himself) of the barely contained threat obesity is perceived to pose, and a reminder that sites of fat accumulation offer a direct means through which flaws and failings of fat bodies can be known.

Contra recent high profile campaigns by celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, Cohen argues that "finger wagging at sugary treats" doesn't even come close to addressing the 'problem' of obesity, which he argues is "a product of social inequality and requires a collective response". In doing so, he rejects the prevailing focus on individual choice and responsibility, drawing instead an analogy with nineteenth century public sanitation programmes to tackle typhoid and cholera. He doubles down on this analogy in his concluding sentence that "we need to collectively tackle the places where obesity germs breed - in stressed communities characterised by insecure and erratic employment, inadequate education, stress, depression and a lack of social cohesion". Although I doubt that Cohen intends us to think literally of 'obesity germs', the phrase is unfortunate, gesturing towards the rhetorics of 'epidemics' and contagion in ways which feed the already overwhelming stigma and fear that fatness ignites. This feeding of fear is the overall thrust of the piece - that the "obesity epidemic" needs more attention and more intervention, rather than less, and particularly in those areas, and in relation to those people, where poverty and obesity have coalesced.

In my previous posts, I have repeatedly reiterated my frustrations at the ways in which the attack on sugar, and by extension, on obesity, overlooks the social, economic and environmental contexts within which sugar is consumed and within which demands to cut back on sugar are made. However, I am categorically not arguing, as Cohen does, that we need to take social inequalities into account in order to effectively tackle obesity. The proper response to the correlation between poverty and obesity is not to ask "what social or collective interventions would be required to stop poor people being fat?", but rather, "what can we do to stop socially disadvantaged people being socially disadvantaged?" The measure of success for interventions driven by this second question wouldn't be something as facile as how fewer litres of pop were sold in local shops, or how many people lost weight, but instead would focus on access to education, respectful health care, employment, safe living environments and food security as social goods in their own right. The linking of poverty alleviation with anti-obesity campaigns and interventions elevates obesity as the over-determining problem, and at the same time constructs a frame whereby fat bodies are always bodies-out-of-place; the eradication of fat bodies is the only possible measure of success for anti-obesity campaigns, whether focused on sugary treats or social inequality. As such, they will always be campaigns of social exclusion, rather than inclusion.

More sugar in the news....

A couple of months ago, I posted the first, very preliminary breakdown of my dataset of sugar articles in the news which showed how the newspaper coverage of sugar had ballooned from 2013. I've been working away on this over the last few months, classifying each of the articles with a single keyword reflecting the core theme of the piece, and then coding the newspaper text across multiple emerging themes. And here are some preliminary findings.

Firstly, this chart breaks down the annual article headcount into months, revealing key moments in the contemporary UK story of sugar:

Apologies if the detail doesn't come out too clearly, but what you can see in this is some clear spikes of media interest which map on to key events that then require further exploration. For example, the spike in January 2014 marks the launch of Action on Sugar - an influential anti-sugar voice with a sustained media presence since its inauguration; the highest spike (in October 2015) reflects the delayed release of the Public Health England report Sugar Reduction: the Evidence for Action; and the second highest spike reflects George Osborne's March 2016 budget announcement of plans to introduce a tax on sugary drinks. I'm developing a more detailed timeline of events, publications and announcements that sits alongside this chart, with all of the associated documents being incorporated into the dataset.

My next question was ask to which newspaper are reporting sugar:

The Guardian comes out a clear winner here, perhaps reflecting the classed nature of concerns about sugar and the threat that it is perceived to pose (and by whom). 

And following on from this, we need to know what aspects of sugar are being reported on; what is it about sugar that is grabbing media attention: 

I need to explain this one. I attributed a key word to each newspaper article in an attempt to capture its overarching theme - the top 8 of these are shown in blue here. As you can see, questions of regulation, including taxation, prevail; second in line is the category 'hidden', which refers to the familiar "hidden sugar shock" stories which highlight the invisibility of sugar in everyday foods. But beyond the overarching theme, a number of these key words recur in multiple articles, and these were coded as themes as shown in the red columns here. So, for example, while almost 150 articles were attributed the keyword 'regulation', almost 300 discussed regulation in their content; and while fewer than 50 took 'health' as their main theme, over 250 made reference to health concerns in the content. The recurrence of these themes across content, regardless of the overarching theme of the article, highlights the discursive repertoires available to the media in their reporting of sugar.

This prompts a further question about whether different newspapers are reporting different aspects of sugar's story. The short answer is that they are, and I have a breakdown of the key words attributed to the articles from different newspapers, but I am struggling to find a way to visualise that effectively. This is a work in progress, but for now, I can say that while issues of regulation take primacy across the board, tabloid coverage includes far more 'hidden sugar shock', 'health' and 'giving up' stories, often pairing 'real people' with expert commentary to offer dietary guidance; conversely, broadsheet coverage is heavily weighted towards 'regulation' stories, particularly in relation to taxation. Part of the ongoing analysis is to explore the different ways in which the newspapers reported key events as a means of exploring the vocabularies of sugar.

There's so much more to do beyond these fairly simple acts of quantification, which are really only a means of ordering the data as a springboard for closer textual analysis. In particular, in addition to pairing up reporting with key events and documents for analysis, I'm also beginning much more detailed critical discourse analysis of the key themes, working my way through all of the data coded to those themes in search of patterns, contradictions and insights into the ways in which sugar is being made meaningful. I've started with "addiction", which is an excellent example of a theme that was only rarely taken as the overarching focus of an article, but which is invoked repeatedly and in diverse (and often taken-for-granted) ways in the body of the articles - a below-the-radar presence that speaks to a set of assumptions about our embodied relations with sugar.

In the mean time, it's hard not to be distracted by the coming into effect on April 6th of the sugar tax; there's been a torrent of media commentary, including new campaigns to include sugary sweets and snacks within the remit of the tax. In my imagination, there will be a book from this project, and an analysis of 2018 will definitely be included. But for now, I'm sticking with 2013-17, not least because I suspect that this is a story that will run and run without an obvious stopping point and I've got more than enough to be getting on with (although I do have a blog coming out shortly on another site about the sugar tax launch that I'll also post here).