Guilderland High School hosted John Underwood, a fitness guru, this month to talk to students about developing a healthy lifestyle. “The goal is for kids to think it’s cool to do the right thing,” said Superintendent Marie Wiles, “to lead others with positive peer pressure — not letting your team down, mentally and physically doing your best.”

These are all good things and we commend the school district for its efforts.

But we believe Underwood was preaching to the choir. Most of the 800 students who listened to his 90-minute talk looked to be athletes. The students who most need to work towards a healthy lifestyle probably weren’t in the gym that day.

We’ve been concerned for a long time now about the obesity epidemic among our youth. According to the state’s Department of Health, more than a third — 33.8 percent — of public school students are overweight or obese, with 17.6 percent considered obese.

The costs are enormous. According to a report released in 2012 by Thomas DiNapoli, the state comptroller, obesity-related health-care costs for young people were estimated at $327 million in 2011 and were rising. The costs increase with age, and were estimated at $11.8 billion for all New Yorkers in 2011.

Such costs are unsustainable. And, beyond the tally in dollars and cents, are the costs in a child’s sense of self-worth. 

Nationwide, childhood obesity has tripled since 1980 and the trend shows no sign of abating as the habits learned in youth are often carried out through a lifetime.

New York sets minimal requirements for physical education in schools: 120 minutes per calendar week. And yet, schools we cover have failed to meet even these meager requirements.

We understand as pressures build, for teachers and students alike, to meet new standards and perform well on written tests that physical fitness tends to be pushed aside.

But the truth is that physical fitness is good for mental fitness.  A shining example can be found in the Naperville school district in Illinois.

Naperville Central High School outlines its vision with these words: “Students will be provided with the foundation for making informed decisions that will empower them to achieve and maintain a healthy lifestyle...Physical education is a lifelong process, which is the primary responsibility of the student, shared by home, district, and community.”

We like the prioritizing in that vision: A student has to be in charge but her parents, her school, and the rest of us have to offer the needed support. We’ll all benefit.

In the 1990s, Phil Lawler started what was then a radical program at Naperville. Every student from sixth through 12th grade had to attend physical education class every day. A baseline fitness level was established for each student, so each could improve according to his own baseline.

This was a departure from the team-focused gym classes of old where certain students regularly excelled and others felt left out. The kids in Naperville wore heart monitors so their teachers could see how far each pushed himself, regardless of the outcome. For example, winning a race wasn’t important, rather, what mattered was how hard a student tried.

The students at Naperville are to maintain a rate of 160 to 190 beats per minute for 25 minutes.

The program worked, according to physical measurements. In 2001-03, just 3 percent of Naperville Central High School freshmen were overweight, compared to many, many times that nationally.

But, of equal importance, academic performance improved markedly. In 1999, eighth-graders at Naperville took a test given in 38 countries around the world and scored in the top 10 percent.

In 2013, John Ratey, at Harvard Medical School, published “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain,” which assembles findings from biomedical, educational, and neuroscientific research, correlating exercise with a wide range of brain-related benefits, such as reducing stress and anxiety; improving attention; fighting off unhealthy addictions such as to nicotine, caffeine, or alcohol; and reducing cognitive decline in old age.

Ratey writes that, across the country, only 6 percent of schools offer physical education five days a week; in New York State, the requirement for fourth through 12th graders is “not less than three times a week,” but, again, many schools are not meeting even that minimum.

At the same time, Ratey states, kids spend 5.5 hours a day in front of a screen, whether a cell phone, computer, iPad, or television.

Ratey is not alone in his conclusions. In an article in the Journal of Sports & Exercise, Charles Hillman, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, writes, based on a study of third- and fifth-graders from four Illinois elementary schools, that students who got good grades for aerobic fitness and body-mass index had higher scores on state exams in reading and math than those with lower fitness scores. The relationship held true regardless of their gender or their family’s income.

A study from August, Georgia, published in the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, studied children randomly assigned to 20 minutes or 40 minutes of exercise after school. Those who made the most cognitive progress and scored best on standardized tests were in the 40-minute group; the gains by the 20-minute group were half as large.

How precisely does exercise help the brain? Ratey writes that exercise triggers the production of more receptors for insulin — having more receptors means better use of blood glucose and stronger cells; the receptors stay there, which means the newfound efficiency gets built in.

In mice and humans, exercise causes the brain to produce brain-derived neurotrophic factor, known as BDNF, which Ratey terms “Miracle-Gro for the brain.” Exercise encourages brain cells to grow synapses, forming the connections the brain needs to learn.

We believe the Naperville model is one that our schools should emulate. It teaches all students, not just the athletes who excel at sports, the value of exercise — a lesson that can last a lifetime.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer