A new study by researchers from Liverpool John Moores University in northwestern England recruited six boys and five girls aged 13-15 years and fitted them with a monitoring device to calculate energy expenditure. Now like any other research this wanted to be fair to all so both the Wii which emphasizes the use of an action to cause an effect & the traditional console button interface, in this case the Xbox360. Personally why would someone become thin playing only pokeman type cartoony games surely beats me, how long can one play the same type of games.

The teens played four games for 15 minutes. One of the four games was Project Gotham Racing 3, played on Microsoft's more sedentary Xbox 360.The three other games were bowling, tennis and boxing in Wii Sports , with a five-minute rest between sports. In all, the children played on the consoles for one hour. Energy expenditure using Wii was "significantly greater" — 51 per cent — than on the Xbox, the scientists found. But this figure alone is misleading, as the total number of extra energy units burned using Wii amounted to only 60 calories per hour, or about a quarter of a Mars bar. Even so, nothing is a substitute for getting out of the home and doing sport itself. "The energy used when playing Wii Sports games was not of high enough intensity to contribute towards the recommended daily amount of exercise in children," say the authors. The study is released on Friday by the weekly British Medical Journal, which carries it in its Saturday edition.

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